Waiting For America: A Story of Emigration

3Rome, Open City

52 3 Rome, Open City My parents and I sometimes laugh about it the way one laughs about surviving a shipwreck in trepid, alien waters. I still don’t know for sure why they fought during our stay in Rome. It’s been almost twenty years, and I’m still afraid to ask. Instead, I get up from my desk, walk across the striped carpet to my “Russian” bookcases, and pick up Isaac Babel’s Works. I bought this two-volume set in Moscow during my first trip back, in the summer of 1993. Edited by Babel’s Moscow wife Antonina Pirozhkova, it was published in 1992, the first post-Soviet year. The monumentalist cover design and flimsy binding are typical of the cheap newsprint editions of my childhood and youth. The set shows a print run of one hundred thousand copies. One of the simpler ironies: Babel, finally collected in the post-Soviet years, yet published after the fashion of Soviet-era mass editions. I open the first volume to the section “Stories, 1925–1938.” Here they are, my most cherished Babels. The childhood stories. On page three of “The Story of My Dovecote,” I read this: “In our shop a peasant customer sat, full of doubt, scratching himself. When father saw me, he abandoned the peasant and instantly believed my story. He yelled to the assistant to close the shop and rushed to Cathedral Street to buy me a peaked cap with a badge. My poor mother was barely able to rip me away from that deranged man. Mother was pale in that moment and was testing fate. She stroked me while also pushing me away in disgust. She said the newspaper would print the list of names of those accepted to the Gymnasium , and that God would punish us and people would laugh at us, if we purchased the uniform too soon. Mother was pale, she was divining fate in my eyes and looking at me with morbid pity, as if I were a little cripple, because she alone knew how misfortunate our whole family was.” Rome, Open City 53 As I read this passage in my house in Chestnut Hill, just a few blocks from the Boston city line, I sob very quietly, holding back the tears—as if I were made of dry ice. It’s springtime outside, and the workers digging an underground train station in my neighbors’ back yard stare at me across the fence as they take their ten o’clock smoke break. My desk faces the windows, and the yard-diggers like to watch me at work. They probably assume I laugh at something I’m reading. But I’m not laughing. If Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel were alive, I would tell him I think of him often as I write about leaving the Soviet Union and coming to the West. Actually, it would be better if I could just tell him this story . . . it was our fourth day in rome, our thirteenth in the West. And quite a day it turned out to be. It started with a pauper’s breakfast that the refugees from the USSR took in a refectory run by a grinning proprietor in dark glasses who looked like a mafioso parody. The crowded refectory occupied an entire floor of a building adjacent to our hotel in a sordid neighborhood near Termini. Outside the refectory , from the middle of the stairwell and all the way up the stairs to the heavy double doors, a line of refugees was waiting to get in. While waiting in the line, the refugees told each other about scorching political events, such as an explosion at a train station in Paris, and shared information about apartment rentals in the coastal town of Ladispoli where the JIAS expected us to move after about a week in Rome. People talked about job and college prospects in America or Canada and argued with panache about the advantages of Boston over New York or San Diego over San Francisco. My body exploding with hormones, I followed with hungry eyes the young Polish waitresses as they navigated through the narrow straits between the islands and archipelagoes of hastily breakfasting refugees. The waitresses, whom I would get to know by the end of our Roman holiday, were students from Kraków who had come to Italy as tourists and were working illegally. They spoke passable Russian, having been forced to study it in Poland, and the greedy Italian proprietor...