Mother Tongue Read online

  Home

  1 The Day of Knowledge

  2 He Who Saves One Man

  3 Be Careful What You Wish For

  4 What Follows After Tea?

  5 Learn How to Howl

  6 Wild Dances

  7 Shall I Be Mother?

  8 Wet Hens

  9 Wash My Bones

  10 If I Were a Bird

  11 A Fisherman Knows a Fisherman

  12 Lyubov

  13 An Extra Finger

  14 This Sinking Ship

  15 Nothing to Do but Move Forward

  16 Throw Away the Key

  Moscow

  17 Who’s Your Little Friend?

  18 Not My Horse

  19 Once Upon a Time

  20 Quiet Pools

  21 Ta-Da!

  22 Hearts Within Hearts

  23 Oh, Dark Eyes

  24 Inside a Bear

  Home

  25 The Church Is Near

  An Afterword

  Russian Terms

  A Note on Russian Names

  Acknowledgments and References

  I’m going to speak to you in Russian. If I speak in English, I won’t know enough words. In the language of home, I know too many.

  I got up early that day — neither light nor dawn. Word had spread the night before that the Day of Knowledge ceremony would begin one hour earlier than expected. I took the call. Everyone knew to speak to me and not Mama. They had forgotten that I was Nika’s sister. Afterward, they remembered. Afterward, it was an important distinction. I became a child again then, not a mother, so what would I know about pain?

  My alarm went off, and the moment that it did, Nika was jumping on my bed. We shared a room. In that way we were like sisters. On one side: Nika’s Barbie dolls, an alphabet poster, a mug of colored pens. On my side: stacks of Elle Girl and Oops! magazine, a basket of stubby makeup. I had my latest collection of books from Yelena across the hall, not yet explored. I was hoping for more tales of romance but could see at least one dystopia in the pile. Nika stopped jumping — dropped the whole weight of her warm body on top of me. I pulled her close, squeezed a breath from her, then let her go. Today, I thought, in one small sense, is the day I can let her go.

  Nika and I had been looking forward to the first day of school all summer. For different reasons. Nika said hers out loud; mine were kept wrapped in paper. I was her protector, and that meant saving her from the ugliest of my thoughts too. I am drowning, Nika, my mind cried. I am so desperate for someone to share the weight of you. I was ready for that day, you understand. My little sister had been my responsibility for a long time. But, please, also understand that I loved her with all my heart. I loved her more than anything else in the world. More than my brothers. More than Papa. More than Mama. But when she started school, I would have some time to myself during the day. Time to work out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. The thing we did agree on, the thing that we could both say aloud, was that July and August needed to hurry up and end. Those months were there only to infuriate us and keep September out of reach.

  Nika was giggling, chattering, full of energy. She kept saying that she had woken up “bigger.”

  “I am older today,” she said, as if someone had cast a spell overnight. Or removed one, perhaps. I knew that this could happen, because it had happened already. To me. When newborn Nika came home from the hospital but Mama stayed — abracadabra! A fizz and a poof! — I became older.

  But there was no change in Nika that I could see: long black hair, a buttery scent to her skin, a tilt to her head that meant one of her beautiful eyes was always ready to pin you down and make you do what she asked. Still a baby girl, though. She had Zaychik in her hand as she bounced around on my mattress that morning. That little bunny had come home with her from the hospital in lieu of Mama. It had been there from the start. Patches of its fur were worn away with love.

  We went barefoot into the kitchen, Nika and I, across the cool, powder-dry tiles of the hall onto the sticky blisters of the kitchen linoleum. One of Nika’s fingers was casually linked with one of mine. I’m glad I have memorized things like that, those physical sensations. Papa was standing by the stove in the kitchen, a stout gray brick in his work shirt and trousers. The smell of the zharkoye that I had made the night before still hung in the air — musky garlic, sharp celery. Papa was scraping a large, gloopy helping of the leftovers into a tin box to take to the factory. The beef always tasted better after a night of wallowing. I hoped he had left enough to put on the tray for Mama at lunchtime. Enough for me too. Papa turned as we came in and lurched toward us, making a grab for Nika’s waist.

  I would read a whole book today, I thought, my first day of small freedom. Three hundred pages without interruption.

  Papa swung Nika around while I tipped kasha into a pan. He was saying, “Who is this grown-up girl in my kitchen? Who can this be?” Nika was laughing and laughing — a glass bubble of noise. He spun her around and around, up high in the air, then low, low down.

  I wouldn’t care if it was a dystopia or a romance; I would disappear into it and start thinking about the future only after finishing that last page.

  Then Nika’s toe caught the top of Papa’s lunch tin and sent it crashing onto the floor.

  KLATZ!

  We all stopped what we were doing. Froze.

  The lid of the tin was shut tight; we weren’t worried about it spilling. We were only scared of waking the house spirit, our very own Kikimora. We listened for movement above the weary shudders of our fridge, something distinct from the cotton-batting voices that throbbed through the walls from neighboring apartments. Papa stroked the black wire of his mustache, and we watched his fingers do their work, waiting for his nod to say that all was safe. As soon as he was sure, he sprang back, playing the fool again, covering Nika’s face with noisy kisses. He hoisted her high up into the air. Nika lifted her knees. Papa plopped her down onto one of the red padded chairs, with their cracks and splits and runaway stuffing. I twirled over to the stove and clanged down the kasha pan, then twirled away again to place a spoon in front of Nika. A little comedy routine. Everything would be all right!

  But then Papa picked up his dropped tin and moved toward the door. I stopped spinning.

  “You’re not coming?”

  “I have to be at the factory.” He shrugged.

  Nika hummed a tune, made her spoon dance.

  It was going to be just me. Papa had taken the morning off for my first day. He had done it for Boris. And Igor. But Nika . . .

  “Tell me about it tonight.” He slipped out of the kitchen with a hushed “See you later.” I looked at the spot where he’d stood spooning out his serving of stew. He’d left splatters on the yellow flowers of the wall tiles.

  No one ever said it out loud — mistake — but you could see the word buzzing around her crib. I was only eleven years old when Nika arrived, but still I understood. I made it my job to swat that word away. When Papa’s brother Misha visited from Balakovo not long after Nika was born, when Mama had just finished her long stretch in the hospital, he and Papa looked down at Nika sleeping in a basket, and Papa said, “I thought that moving here had solved all our problems. . . .”

  Misha shook his shaggy hair and tut-tutted at fate.

  “But she is beautiful,” I announced. “Don’t you think, Dyadya Misha?”

  I said this for Mama too, who was in the armchair, stunned. She had come home from the hospital with something terrifyingly missing, or else something had joined her, a dark thing that kept her in silent conversation. She took to her bed after that.

  “She really is beautiful,” I said, over and over. This was how mothers talked about their babies, wasn’t it? Or would I only be attracting the evil eye?
I didn’t know for sure, but I kept going, kept saying it, until someone agreed out loud.

  There would be no Papa at Nika’s Ceremony of the First Bell. So I made a decision: I would wake the spirit. I had tried to do this before. On my twelfth birthday — the first after Nika was born. Mama would rise, like a miracle — this is what I had believed. She would tug on my ears and ask what dreams I’d had the night before, the ones that would tell my fortune. But that time, Papa pulled me away from her door, told me to leave her be. He sang the birthday song from the crocodile cartoon, something that Mama always did better, and guided me back to the kitchen table, where a present was waiting.

  And I’ll play on my accordion, in sight of all passing near.

  How unlucky that a birthday only comes once a year!

  The present was a doll that I was too old for. The song had never sounded so sad.

  Nika’s Day of Knowledge would be the thing to rouse Mama from her bed, I was sure. I had a vivid memory of her from Igor’s first day, Papa’s arm around her as they sang along to the old songs, the tail of her bright head scarf dancing in the wind. If a spell could be lifted from Nika overnight, why not from her too? We could all be set free. I left Nika eating kasha.

  I paused by the closed door of the living room, where the boys were still asleep on their camp beds. They hadn’t heard about the start of school being moved forward an hour. They’d been out on their bikes when the call came. But I didn’t knock to wake them. Something stopped me. I find myself going back to that moment in my head quite often. Me, standing there at that door, not knocking, just listening, the sound of Nika gabbling in the kitchen, the same two lines of a poem she was going to say later at the Ceremony of the First Bell.

  Goodbye to play and summer days,

  We welcome in our future, bright and new.

  Boris had turned sixteen that year and shed his soft, boyish skin in a monstrous transformation. He had grown wide and solid like Papa, but already he was taller. His eyebrows had thickened; his top lip was spiky. To distract us all from this new unsightliness, or perhaps to complement it, he had begun to play the fool. I think we were supposed to find it amusing, the dim-wittedness. I wanted the old Boris back. The sweet one I had mothered a little, even though he was only two years younger. He was a man now, Papa kept telling him, and the idea scared both Boris and me. I retreated, left Boris to his manly things, whatever they were. Igor, meanwhile, at just fourteen, was still smooth-faced, trophy-eared, and lean — but he looked to Boris for how to behave. He always had, ever since he was first able to walk. If Boris crashed his toy car into the sofa leg, Igor crashed his too. If Boris spent the evening out by the back of the apartments, chain-smoking Winstons, then so did my littlest brother. The boys relied on each other. They grunted as one.

  I didn’t want them to come. That’s why I didn’t knock. The morning’s ceremony was going to be special, but even more special without Boris and Igor acting like fools. So I let them sleep in, having no sense then of the consequences.

  I moved on to the next door, rapped gently, pushed it open. I could see a thin shape under the blankets. She had her back to me, but I could tell that her eyes were open. Don’t ask me how I knew this for sure. The tune of the crocodile song was running through my head all of a sudden. She would leap up and sing it, pull my ears extra hard to make up for all those birthdays missed.

  “It’s Nika’s first day,” I whispered.

  Any moment, any moment she would move. . . .

  “Are you going to come?”

  She was awake; I knew that she was awake. Papa getting up would have made her stir. There was a shaft of sunlight coming through the blinds, zigzagging over the floor and across the blankets. We were idiots, all three of us, if we believed that the crashing tin hadn’t woken her up.

  “Mama?”

  There was the sound of her conscious breath, but still she did not move.

  “Mama?”

  Later she would accuse me of not waking her.

  “Mama?”

  Later, she said that if she had been there instead of me, it would have turned out differently. Maybe this is true. I had only been guessing at what it took to be a mother. She was the one with experience. She was supposed to pass it all on to me so I would know what to do for my own children one day. But we had skipped that part.

  I gave up. I closed the door. I didn’t want Nika to come down the hall and see me asking and getting no answer. We finished our breakfast, Nika talking the whole time through milky mouthfuls about what kind of balloons she wanted; me batting back her high hopes, saying we’d have to wait and see what they had at the store, that you can’t always get what you want. I got up to wash my bowl, and when I’d finished, I clapped my hands together twice, really loud. A hurry-up sound. Nika jumped. She turned in her chair, that tilt of her head accusing now, eyes afraid.

  “What?” I said. “What? Soap yourself! Move your behind!” She leaped up, leaving her bowl on the table. That bowl remained in the same position for more than two weeks, an abandoned boat on a sea of blue-marbled melamine.

  I wore a summer dress with small pink flowers and an apron front and a cross of fabric at the back that left my shoulder blades bare. The heat from August was still lingering. We had sweated and turned pink in the harsh sun last May for my Ceremony of the Last Bell. One girl had fainted. Only four months ago, I had been a schoolgirl too. What was I now? If anyone asked, I couldn’t say. So instead I concentrated on making myself look good. A brilliant distraction. I had to be better, more attractive, than Nadya and Olya, Galka, and Sonja. The four of them were going to university. They would get to move away, not far, but far enough for them to not be here. They might live together. They might talk their way through the nights, play music loud, fall in love. I knew what they were thinking: But you were so much better than us at all that grammar and symbolism, Dasha! Yet here you are, staying put! So not fair! I hadn’t passed my exams. I had missed some of them. I was looking after Nika and couldn’t always get to school. I read all the time, though — the books Yelena got from her teacher friend but rarely read herself. Stories sometimes, novels, plays — all those different roles for you to be. But it had not been enough.

  Nika wore her beautiful new uniform: a blue pinafore dress with an embroidered white collar. This was a new thing. There were no uniforms when I started school. On my Day of Knowledge, Mama put me in a red dress she had made herself. I stood out like a prick of blood in the gray. I felt like a prinsessa. We had recently moved to the area so Papa could take the job at the factory. They chose me to sit on the shoulders of one of the oldest boys and ring the first bell, an honor to welcome me to town. But as I was hoisted up, my skirts arranged by Mama, I overheard one mother ask, “Why her?” There were plenty of local girls who could have done it, girls who deserved it more. Those words sliced into me and stayed there. They changed the way I grew.

  Nika’s uniform had been hanging on the back of our bedroom door, wrapped in clear plastic, for weeks. Every so often, we would lift its protective cover and touch the fabric, chattering out our excitement about September 1st. I had sewn white flowers onto black ponytail bands, and that morning I made Nika sit in front of the mirror so I could brush her hair into two neat bunches. As I did, I watched her mouth repeat the same pattern over and over, those two lines of a poem. Such concentration in her eyes.

  Goodbye to play and summer days,

  We welcome in our future, bright and new.

  I took a pair of scissors and cut a small tuft of her hair to put in my locket. My hands were shaking with anticipation, and I lopped off a little more than I’d planned. I looked at her crooked bangs in the mirror and wanted to cry, but Nika burst into the most infectious laugh.

  “I only did it so that I’d be with you all day,” I said, snapping the locket shut, sealing in the memory of her laugh along with the strands of hair.

  “So I’ll be with you,” she said, correcting me.

  Our apartment ove
rlooked the school. We lived on the fourth floor and you could see the playground and the roof of the gym from our kitchen balcony. We left early, just after 8:15 a.m., because we needed to make a detour to the shop. Other children and their relatives were there already, lining up to use the canister of helium. Filled balloons bounced against the ceiling, tethered to little wrists. There were girls with lace collars, boys in bow ties and waistcoats, grandmothers in church best. Nika had said at breakfast that she wanted a heart-shaped balloon, and I was surprised to find they had them — left over from Valentine’s or Women’s Day, I supposed. Now it seems too painful a coincidence that they had exactly what she wanted. As a final gift, was a balloon enough? In the crocodile song, a magician in a helicopter flies down with free movies and five hundred ice-cream cones. And that’s only for a birthday, something that comes along every year.

  Nika chose four round blue balloons and one pink heart. Papa had given me enough money to cover the cost, and also to buy flowers for the teacher. We had not accounted for chocolates, which the other mothers in the line had under their arms. I took out the housekeeping money I had salvaged for train fare to the city. I thought I might go there during the week while Nika was at school and see about secretarial exams. I could picture myself behind a desk in a good blouse, my hair tied back and my lipstick neat. I’d have a small glass pot with sharpened pencils and a nail file. I’d spend the money I earned on new books with uncracked spines, dresses bought from the more expensive section of the catalog. My boots would have heels. I’d eat dinner with the other office girls, and they’d tell me about the boys they might marry, and we would sigh wearily if we ever mentioned girls who still studied, because they did not understand what life was about at all.

  I chose a tray of Babaevsky pralines for Nika’s teacher so my little sister would be the same as all the others. I could save that money again, I told myself. I had only one chance to make Nika fit in with the crowd.

  When we got to the school, we went to her classroom to prepare for the procession. The room smelled of fresh paint. Of promise. I chatted with some of the mothers I knew from our apartment building and whose husbands worked with my father. Nadya and Olya were in the corner, fussing around a small boy with an accordion who must have been a nephew or a cousin. They had not dressed up at all. Instead they wore cutoff jeans and tank tops. I pretended to be too engrossed in a conversation with Yelena from across the hall to notice them. She was there with her daughter Polin’ka, a good friend of Nika’s already.