Waiting for America
Excerpt from "Wienerwald"
We were flying First Class because it had been much easier to get the tickets, and after nine years of living in refuseniks' limbo, we didn't want to stay in Russia even for an extra day. In English, the term refusenik corresponds to the Russian word otkaznik and means "the one who was refused, denied permission" to leave the Soviet Union. But in its English rendition, the term has acquired an ambiguity, whose irony was hardly intentional: The Soviet authorities, not the Jews, were refusing. The only thing refuseniks themselves had refused was a ticket to Soviet paradise.
While we waited in the First Class lounge for our drinks and a tray with black caviar canapés, my mother and father hugged me feverishly. My mother sipped her tonic and shivered, fighting back tears.
"Are you cold? Do you want my jacket?" my father asked her.
"Wait, I can't speak," mother whispered, resting her head on my father's shoulder and fumbling for a cigarette and matches in her suede purse.
At forty-seven, my mother had ash-gold hair; later, from unremembering the Soviet past, her hair would succumb to quicksilver. In summer, my mother's straight, thick hair would grow wavy and pale, almost blonde, and her large blue eyes, piercingly perceptive, ever ready to laugh and humor and subvert, would be saturated with aquamarine blueness-a miracle of water, salt, and sun. But the salt in her eyes now came from withheld tears, and the luster was from sleeplessness and the fluorescent lights of the first class lounge.
"We got you out, son. Finally we got you out," said my father. A strange mixture of shrewdness, ferocity, distrust, and naiveté lurked in his bloodshot, gray-green eyes, framed by his rectangular tortoise-shell glasses. Father couldn't sleep the night before we left Moscow and walked around our neighborhood until dawn, saying goodbye. And with breakfast father had had some cognac with his good friend, the poet G. S., who came over to bid us farewell.
My long-limbed father, a former athlete, was fifty-one at the time. An American TV journalist who had interviewed my parents in Moscow and later stayed in touch told me many years later that my father looked younger at sixty-one than at fifty-one. Over a year before our leaving father had suffered a heart attack from two months of being hunted by the KGB-after a novel of his had come out abroad. The wounds of his heart had healed, but the memories were healing more slowly.