Midnight in Moscow
"Moonlight and vodka take me away.
Midnight in Moscow is lunchtime in LA..."
The words of the silly 80's hit keep rolling through my head as I give up on falling asleep at two in the morning in the apartment that had seen me as a newborn being brought home from the hospital, red-faced and scrawny, tightly swaddled against the late November chill, and later on as a round-faced toddler struggling to maintain precarious balance on two chubby unstable legs. Here, in this miniscule living space that somehow seemed adequate when inhabited by a family of four, and that now appears too small even though two of the original four are no longer here, my family gathered for suppers and hearty Sunday breakfasts of blinis or fried eggs. Here we laughed together and watched, transfixed, figure skating championships and football matches, often with neighbors who joined our cozy and chatty circle for company. Here we cried, unconsolable, when the phone rang one cool September morning, almost 30 years ago, to inform us in a very indifferent disembodied voice that my Grandma had passed away. Here I dreamed. Here I defied my parents for the first time in the name of love. Here I threatened suicide. Here I despaired because I could not make him (whoever he was at the time) love me. Here I wrote my first clumsy poems when I was supposed to be doing my homework, or doodled mindlessly on the back pages of my school notebooks. Here I was punished and cuddled, scolded and always loved. In this very room where I now lay sleepless but strangely at peace beside my little daughter who is snoring contentedly, I saw my father alive for the last time, not knowing it. His eyes, so much like my own in color and in shape, were distant and fixed on something unreachable, something that brought an expression of gentle resigned sadness onto his face. And as I was rushing around the apartment, victim to the usual morning frenzy, getting ready for work, I said good-bye to him casually, carelessly, taking his existence in that very moment for granted. I had not known he would be gone from us within hours. Even after I was told that he had died, the realization of the horrible and irreversible finality of death did not assualt me until an unknown man drove my dad’s car home that evening and parked it in its usual spot outside our windows. And there it stood - useless, pathetic, somehow morbid and terrifying in its empty uselessness - for weeks, a constant reminder to me that I was now a fatherless child, bereft.
I do not live in this apartment any longer. My home is far away. It is not large but it is comfortable for my family. It is light and airy, sparsely furnished, surrounded by my unskilled attempts at a flower garden. It is very different from the place I grew up in. Still, every time I come back to Moscow, every time I set foot in this tiny first-floor apartment that in its glory never had a locked door so that neighbors and friends could always come in as they pleased and have a seat at our family table, or in an arm chair, I feel a part of me restored, brought back to the surface. It is something raw and painfully vulnerable, yet precious to me, that I successfully hide deep inside my soul the minute the plane, west-bound, leaves the tarmac. Like contraband, I bring that pulsating vulnerability back to the States and stow it away until next time my soul is bared again, its protective gloss of feigned indifference stripped away by Moscow’s intimate reality.
The walls speak to me. They whisper softly. If I could peel away the layers of the various wallpapers covering them, I could retell my family’s life. There once was green wallpaper on the hallway walls that my brother claimed I “blended with” - so pale and scrawny I was as a pre-teen. Here we used to fight our battles, he and I; battles that were doomed from the onset, for how could an eight-year-old timid girl ever stand a chance against a robust and athletic fifteen-year-old lad. I see him vividly now, twenty years old, my mom’s golden boy, her first-born, her pride and joy, sitting at the kitchen table with a gigantic mug of tea and an enormous stack of sandwiches. An open book before him. The sandwiches disappearing in a very methodic way. He's not looking at me. He is engrossed in his book, in his infinitely more illustrous life, hurrying to live up its brutally limited expanse.
Gone. Everything is gone now, never to be relived or replicated again. Different wallpaper is covering the walls. Another man had sat in my father's place at the dinner table and tinkered afternoons away in the garage built by my Grandfather. Countless dogs called this domain their own, and their faint ghostly barking could still be heard among the whispers. Different times have come, different people now constitute my family. My American child is playing with my old toys, sitting in the corner of the sofa where my father used to spend his days and where I would often snuggle up to him to sit quietly beside him, silent both us, for we did not need to say much; our souls were too alike to need words. If only he could see his little granddaughter now, language barrier or not, theirs would have been love from the first sight, fierce and instant. I see the room from his perspective, how he had seen it day after day. I look at the front door and wait for it to open. I can almost imagine the expression on my brother’s face, that of sheer amusement, with a sideway grin, a slight crinkle to his eyes, a cocked eyebrow, a joke already forming behind his lips; his coolly sardonic, self-depreciating sense of humor making it seem like nothing was out of place, nothing extraordinary was happening. But the door is locked now, always. The locks and keys are now protecting the one precious soul living within - my mom, the keeper of my past, the custodian of what had once been.
Moscow is restless even at this hour. The night is never completely dark. The silvery twilight lingers and then dissolves into the early glow of dawn. There is no moonlight and no vodka to chase away the long hours of the sleepless night. Just memories…
Midnight in Moscow is lunchtime in LA..."
The words of the silly 80's hit keep rolling through my head as I give up on falling asleep at two in the morning in the apartment that had seen me as a newborn being brought home from the hospital, red-faced and scrawny, tightly swaddled against the late November chill, and later on as a round-faced toddler struggling to maintain precarious balance on two chubby unstable legs. Here, in this miniscule living space that somehow seemed adequate when inhabited by a family of four, and that now appears too small even though two of the original four are no longer here, my family gathered for suppers and hearty Sunday breakfasts of blinis or fried eggs. Here we laughed together and watched, transfixed, figure skating championships and football matches, often with neighbors who joined our cozy and chatty circle for company. Here we cried, unconsolable, when the phone rang one cool September morning, almost 30 years ago, to inform us in a very indifferent disembodied voice that my Grandma had passed away. Here I dreamed. Here I defied my parents for the first time in the name of love. Here I threatened suicide. Here I despaired because I could not make him (whoever he was at the time) love me. Here I wrote my first clumsy poems when I was supposed to be doing my homework, or doodled mindlessly on the back pages of my school notebooks. Here I was punished and cuddled, scolded and always loved. In this very room where I now lay sleepless but strangely at peace beside my little daughter who is snoring contentedly, I saw my father alive for the last time, not knowing it. His eyes, so much like my own in color and in shape, were distant and fixed on something unreachable, something that brought an expression of gentle resigned sadness onto his face. And as I was rushing around the apartment, victim to the usual morning frenzy, getting ready for work, I said good-bye to him casually, carelessly, taking his existence in that very moment for granted. I had not known he would be gone from us within hours. Even after I was told that he had died, the realization of the horrible and irreversible finality of death did not assualt me until an unknown man drove my dad’s car home that evening and parked it in its usual spot outside our windows. And there it stood - useless, pathetic, somehow morbid and terrifying in its empty uselessness - for weeks, a constant reminder to me that I was now a fatherless child, bereft.
I do not live in this apartment any longer. My home is far away. It is not large but it is comfortable for my family. It is light and airy, sparsely furnished, surrounded by my unskilled attempts at a flower garden. It is very different from the place I grew up in. Still, every time I come back to Moscow, every time I set foot in this tiny first-floor apartment that in its glory never had a locked door so that neighbors and friends could always come in as they pleased and have a seat at our family table, or in an arm chair, I feel a part of me restored, brought back to the surface. It is something raw and painfully vulnerable, yet precious to me, that I successfully hide deep inside my soul the minute the plane, west-bound, leaves the tarmac. Like contraband, I bring that pulsating vulnerability back to the States and stow it away until next time my soul is bared again, its protective gloss of feigned indifference stripped away by Moscow’s intimate reality.
The walls speak to me. They whisper softly. If I could peel away the layers of the various wallpapers covering them, I could retell my family’s life. There once was green wallpaper on the hallway walls that my brother claimed I “blended with” - so pale and scrawny I was as a pre-teen. Here we used to fight our battles, he and I; battles that were doomed from the onset, for how could an eight-year-old timid girl ever stand a chance against a robust and athletic fifteen-year-old lad. I see him vividly now, twenty years old, my mom’s golden boy, her first-born, her pride and joy, sitting at the kitchen table with a gigantic mug of tea and an enormous stack of sandwiches. An open book before him. The sandwiches disappearing in a very methodic way. He's not looking at me. He is engrossed in his book, in his infinitely more illustrous life, hurrying to live up its brutally limited expanse.
Gone. Everything is gone now, never to be relived or replicated again. Different wallpaper is covering the walls. Another man had sat in my father's place at the dinner table and tinkered afternoons away in the garage built by my Grandfather. Countless dogs called this domain their own, and their faint ghostly barking could still be heard among the whispers. Different times have come, different people now constitute my family. My American child is playing with my old toys, sitting in the corner of the sofa where my father used to spend his days and where I would often snuggle up to him to sit quietly beside him, silent both us, for we did not need to say much; our souls were too alike to need words. If only he could see his little granddaughter now, language barrier or not, theirs would have been love from the first sight, fierce and instant. I see the room from his perspective, how he had seen it day after day. I look at the front door and wait for it to open. I can almost imagine the expression on my brother’s face, that of sheer amusement, with a sideway grin, a slight crinkle to his eyes, a cocked eyebrow, a joke already forming behind his lips; his coolly sardonic, self-depreciating sense of humor making it seem like nothing was out of place, nothing extraordinary was happening. But the door is locked now, always. The locks and keys are now protecting the one precious soul living within - my mom, the keeper of my past, the custodian of what had once been.
Moscow is restless even at this hour. The night is never completely dark. The silvery twilight lingers and then dissolves into the early glow of dawn. There is no moonlight and no vodka to chase away the long hours of the sleepless night. Just memories…