Waiting for America
Excerpt from "Wienerwald"
"Where you going, pal?" a leery customs lieutenant asked me as he strangled my blue backpack into submission. "Down south or to the States?"
I didn't answer and looked down at my new shiny black wingtips, pretending that I wasn't sure what the lieutenant was asking. Of course I knew that "down south" referred to Israel and was meant to provoke me.
I was a different person back then, in June of 1987, when I was leaving Russia for good. I was braver, more brazen, more desperate, but also less sensitive, less tolerant, and much more judgmental. I was accustomed to finding antisemitic behavior everywhere and was ready to defend my honor with fists. I sincerely believed Ronald Reagan was good because he fiercely opposed the "evil" Soviet Empire. I was thinner and looked lankier with a full head of hair that I cut short and wore straight down over the brow, à la jejune Pasternak. I was also generously self-absorbed.
"What's in your pockets?" the customs lieutenant asked, growing impatient with my defiant silence. One by one, I emptied onto the counter the contents of all the pockets of my new glen plaid suit. They included a small leather-bound notebook where I jotted down lines for future poems, a tape measurer, two handkerchiefs, a treasured roll of color film, and a chocolate bar someone had just given me at the airport. My nice suit was a present that my father's Uncle Pinya had mailed from Israel. Mother, father, and I were dressed in our finest clothes and wanted to look our best as we entered a new life.
After we had passed through customs and then through the turnstile of Soviet passport control, we lingered and marched in place, taking one more and yet another glance at the small crowd of friends and relatives who were seeing us off. There they were, my dear friends, a magic circle broken: Misha Zaychik, growing his first sandstone beard; Tanya Apraksina, with her stupendous legs and ballerina posture; Alik Frayerman, a Levantine livewire under normal circumstances, but now frozen with stupor; Lenochka Borisova, with mascara bleeding along her Slavic cheekbones; the phlegmatic aristocrat Fedya Bogolepov, fishing for a handkerchief in the fathoms of his corduroy jacket; Lana Bernshteyn, with her Jugendstil haircut, perfectly chiseled nose, and refined hands. No girlfriend was seeing me off; at the time we didn't have girlfriends or boyfriends in the American sense of the word, only girls or boys we dated now and then. Lana Bernshteyn had been my first love, never my "girlfriend." Some of my dearest people were now standing on that side of the turnstile, waving. Will I ever see them again? I thought as an Aeroflot steward escorted us to the empty First Class lounge.