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Prologue
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xv Prologue “We just got a ca l l from the Office of Visas . . . ,” said my mother’s voice. And then it stopped, choking on the unpronounceable words. “I can’t. . . .” The black receiver of the street payphone felt cold and heavy in my hands. On my left, Moscow’s midday traffic flowed down Leninsky Prospect , one side of it forging ahead to the city center, the other moving in the direction of the city’s southwestern outskirts. On my right, a tall wroughtiron fence marked the western boundary of the Moscow University campus . Such ominous iron fences typically surrounded Soviet institutions, giving their workers, students, and patients the feeling of enclosure. “Mama, what’s wrong?” “They said they would be ‘granting our request,’” my mother’s voice laughed and sobbed into the heavy black receiver. I sometimes telephoned my mother when I was about to leave the campus. I had been a student there for two and a half years, and unless it was bitterly cold outside, I liked calling from the street, the same pay phone outside the high wrought-iron fence, before turning right, toward the University Metro station. (Once as a freshmen, on a wager, I phoned my mother from a wood-paneled elevator going up to the top of the main university building, already past the thirtieth floor, and the clarity of sound was such that I wondered if instead of the bugged phone lines, some benevolent angeloids weren’t carrying the signal in their cupped hands across the skies of the Soviet capital.) On a sunny day—and the day in the middle of April when our family’s “emigration request” was granted was a sunny and breezy day—one attained a great view of the environs from xvi | Prol o gue where I was standing. Behind my back, inside the campus perimeter, the tower of the main university building dominated and dwarfed the surroundings : a magisterial product of Stalin’s architects or simply a distant and imperfect echo of the Empire State Building. On the opposite side of Leninsky Prospect were the New Moscow Circus and the Children’s Music Theater. As an impressionable Jewish preteen, how I relished the magic of Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird, a staple of this theater’s repertoire. On stage household objects, bread, fire, and water, turned into otherworldly beings who could vanquish the quotidian. Beyond the buildings of the Circus and the Musical Theater, the eye met grayish and brownish blocks of solid apartment buildings in what was one of Moscow’s more desirable residential areas. In the ground floor of a Stalinist stone-laid apartment building was the Moscow University bookshop, which I frequented after classes. Books in general, and translations from Western languages in particular, were in tremendous demand, but every once in a while I would strike gold. Straight ahead was the marble puck of the University Metro station girded by various stalls and kiosks. My ride home took about an hour, with one or two transfers, depending on the route I chose. During the morning and especially the late afternoon rush hours, the train cars would be stuffed with people, like sausages are stuffed with meat, fat, and fennel seeds. Overcrowded subway cars usually carried at least one colonel, in the colder months clad in a thick greatcoat and a tall astrakhan with a cockade, or sometimes a general with a double red stripe running down his breeches. These were some of the coordinates of my Soviet youth: campus, bookstore , circus, and theater; Jewish luck; specter of the military service; brief escapes and forbidding wrought-iron fences. I pictured my mother as her voice broke out of the black receiver, punctuating the transience of our Soviet living. Mother possesses the joyfully melancholic beauty of the Early Renaissance, a confluence of music and mystique, that sometimes expresses itself most completely in Ashkenazi women. It’s as though centuries of her Jewish ancestors’ wonderings across Europe, from Italy through Germany into the West Slavic lands, Lithuania, Ukraine, and finally into Russia, had endowed my mother with a quintessence of daintily timid and therefore ever more enchanting femininity. [3.236.219.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:35 GMT) Prol o gue | xvii “Come home as soon as you can,” mother’s voice said. “I’ll catch a cab, mamochka, I’ll be there soon. . . . Is papa still at the clinic . . . ?” We would be leaving, at long last, after nine years, I was thinking as...