The flea market was mostly deserted, as Lenny had predicted. But I thought I liked it better this way, the two of us wandering along an empty street of open-air stalls in the shadow of a tsar’s wooden fortress painted like Disneyland. Lenny picked up a porcelain panda, then set it down again. I caught him checking his watch. “Help me pick a gift for your mother,” I suggested.
“How about this?” He held up a green rubber gas mask.
“It’ll be from you, not from me,” I warned.
I wanted Lenny to catch my treasure-hunting fever, but it was true that we’d missed our chance. Only a fraction of the shops were open, and those that were did their business in the most touristy gimmicks: Yeltsin matryoshka dolls and military paraphernalia. My eyes were still gritty from my lack of sleep, but I felt an enlivening rush knowing Lenny wasn’t due for trouble anytime soon.
“Mom hates this kind of shlock,” Lenny informed me as we walked into a stall full of books and posters.
“That isn’t entirely true,” I said. “She can appreciate a good piece of kitsch as much as anybody.” By way of example I approached the vendor, a fellow with a stringy beard and a long face that resembled those on the religious icons (of dubious origin) that lined the back wall of his stall. “Do you have any anti-capitalist art?” I said.
The man knitted his brow as though I’d just asked him to drop his pants. “Cho?” he said.
“Posters,” I clarified, “with fat capitalists—you know, in top hats, puffing on cigars.”
“What kind of store do people think this is?” he said, offended. Lenny and I exchanged looks. Amid the literature spread out on the tables around us was a catalogue of paintings by Marc Chagall, an Almanac of Mushrooms, Lenin’s The Emancipation of Women (penned by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya), an illustrated pamphlet of the Protocols of Zion, an Estonian album of Forbidden Erotica, and the autobiography of Bill Clinton. “I have absolutely no idea,” I said.
“LET’S GET SOMETHING TO eat,” I suggested, interrupting Lenny’s reading of an American serviceman’s phrase book dated from 1962 (the same year, I noted with curiosity, as the Cuban Missile Crisis). He lifted his eyes and gazed out toward the Disneyfied Izmailovo fortress. “I used to really hate coming to places like this,” he said suddenly.
“You did?”
“Yeah, they made me think of her.”
I knew right away whom he meant. “Irochka.”
He gave me a smirking smile.
I hadn’t meant to be coy. That was simply what I’d always called her—the daughter of my old friends, and later, of course, Lenny’s ex-wife. Not Irina, but our Irochka was what all of us had called her, first tenderly, then with an edge of irony and malice that could never quite negate the original tenderness.
“That first summer I came back here,” he said, “it was ’96, she’d take me around the city. All these pensioners selling their heirlooms laid out neatly on newspapers. Their lifetime collections of little pins or porcelain cups, or crystal bowls.”
“They still do that.”
“No, not like then. The inflation was out of control. They were selling off anything just to eat. It was so fucking depressing, and here I was with my wallet stuffed full of American dollars.”
“And you wanted to spend it on Irina.”
“Well, that’s the thing. There was this old guy, I remember, trying to sell an antique silver tea set for maybe twenty bucks. I could see he wasn’t one of these professional hawkers, just a desperate old pensioner. She bargained him down to nothing—eight dollars, maybe. I would have been happy to pay twenty. But it was like…I was afraid she’d think I was a sucker.”
“Life isn’t meant for you to squeeze every last drop out of a stone,” I offered.
He looked at me dubiously. “But you always liked how practical Irina was. How tough. You used to say I could learn a lot from her.”
“Did I?”
“You’d say, ‘Here’s one girl who doesn’t forget to check the weather report.’ ”
I said nothing. Whatever errors of mine he’d logged, whatever critical implications about himself—I couldn’t repair them now with a petition for a proper audit. The past could never be remedied like that. Looking at him, I knew that.
“Do you still think about her?” I said. I was still cautious, but now I realized I was no longer afraid that our conversation might head in the wrong direction—toward some place of misunderstanding, or blame, or fractiousness.
“Not really. I should have seen it coming.”
“Come on. You were twenty-three, blinded by love. Happens to the best of us.”
“You know what she used to say to me by the end, when we were living together in that apartment she couldn’t stand? She’d joke about how I wasn’t a full muzhchina. She’d say: ‘Muzh ti muzh, da china nyet.’ ”
He laughed, imitating Ira’s drawling Moscow accent as he repeated her cruel little pun on muzhchina, the word for “man.” I’d never before paused to consider how it was made of two shorter words: muzh, which meant “husband,” and cheen, the word for “rank,” or “title.” A husband you are, but no title. I wondered to myself if Irina had made it up. I’d never been surprised by her cleverness, though I was now surprised that she could have been so casually cruel.
“For years I wondered what would have happened if our family had stayed here, you know? Never emigrated? Maybe I would have grown up tougher, not so soft and guilty all the time. But the thing is, I’m not one of them. I’m not like Irina, or like Sasha Zaparotnik. I’m…”
“American,” I said.
“Yeah.” He and I had never talked like this. Now I wished we had.
“So you wanted to try out the alternative?”
He looked at me. “It sounds crazy, right?”
“It doesn’t.” How many times had I wondered who I would have been had I grown up in America, the son of a mother who’d never left? “Look, you haven’t had it easy,” I said. “I faced some stern blows in my life, but when I failed I always had an ennobling excuse: The system was rigged. I had the Soviets to blame. It gives you a less critical view of yourself.”
I’d never exactly recognized this before, but now, saying it, I thought about how it might be true. In my own circumscribed youth, I—and so many of us—had been allowed to retain a sufficient sense of our own virtue, even if the constrictions we faced couldn’t be overcome—especially if they couldn’t. “The thing America doesn’t tell you about a life of freedom,” I said, “is that sooner or later you’re bound to feel like your problems are all your own fault. Even if maybe you just got unlucky.”
“They should put that on the warning label,” Lenny offered.
I remembered Valentina’s words on the road back to the dacha: I had warned Lenny, but failed to prepare him. Could I honestly claim she was wrong? What I’d up to now failed to see was that, in issuing all my warnings, I had struck a devil’s bargain against his success. Standing on the sidelines of his struggle, my arms crossed, I had been waiting all these years for the moment when he would fall on his face. So that when he got up again, humbled by his defeats, he would at last be ready to be converted to my fatherly wisdom.
But if this was the path that I’d imagined for my son, what place was there in it for me? By attributing his problems to his stubbornness, I had released myself from a greater responsibility to stand by his side.
We passed a kiosk of toys for sale. Lenny picked up one of the stuffed animals and said, “You know those toy bunnies with long arms and Velcro paws that hug each other? That was how Ira and I were when we were six. We’d run into the bathroom and hide under the sink when you and Mom were getting ready to leave the Ostrovskys’ apartment. We’d hide in the bathroom like that, hugging each other so you couldn’t separate us.”
“First love,” I said.
“But it was more than that. She really knew me. I didn’t need to be cool or cynical or anything with her. I could be who I was. And, yeah, on some level I knew she was using me to come to New York, but I didn’t think it would end like that. With her coming home at midnight smelling of Calvin Klein while I stayed awake on the couch playing video games. She was screwing her boss right under my nose and I didn’t have the guts to let go of her. It’s like I knew I couldn’t walk away from that with anything, not even two percent of my self-worth. So I just held on.”
He gazed out at the mostly vacant shops again. “I always do that.”
“Do what?” I said.
“Hold on to whatever it is, past the expiration date. Even with all the distress signals, I stay in that boat to the bitter end. I know that sounds very fatalistic to you.” He gave me a brief scoffing smile.
I was tempted to smile back. That had long been my own estimation of his predicament, the root of so many of his struggles. Even so, I was happy that he was coming to his own conclusion about it, and that I had done nothing to prompt it except to listen.