Emily Rubin - Stalina

My confrontation with Amalia was not pretty.

“I thought you hated Nadia; that’s why I never told you I saw her,” she said when I exposed her betrayal.

“Didn’t you think our paths would cross at some point?” I asked.

“Well, did the surprise of seeing her soften your anger?” Amalia responded. Her logic became more and more twisted.

“I did not hate her; I was sad about my dog. You stealing my bras makes me angry. Seeing Nadia again has changed my life.”

“For the better?”

“The motel is mine to run,” I said.

“She always hated me because of this mark on my face.”

“She doesn’t hate you. She was just jealous of your makeup.”

Amalia was twisting a long strand of her hair and passing it through her mouth. She’s done that since she was a little girl.

“I can’t believe you stole my bras and sold one to her,” I said.

“I did not take your brassieres,” she claimed.

“I sold only one, and it wasn’t to Nadia,” I retorted.

As we continued to argue, Alexi came into the kitchen.

“Alexi, not now please. Stalina and I are having a discussion,” Amalia said.

“What’s up, ladies? Trouble on the home front?” he said arrogantly and opened the refrigerator.

“Alexi, get your snack and leave,” his mother said.

“Are you two fighting about those stupid bras?” he said.

Amalia slapped him on the side of the head.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “Let him speak.”

“Hey, yeah, Mom, stop it. You told me it was OK to take those bras.”

Amalia took an empty pot off the stove and threw it across the kitchen. It struck the side of a wooden chair and chipped off a piece of blue paint. The pot rattled as it spun around before coming to rest on the pink and green linoleum floor. Shosta and Kovich, who had been watching us from the top of the refrigerator, leapt and slid across the kitchen table. We stood motionless as the cats fled the chaos of the kitchen to the safety of the living room and cowered in the four inches between the couch and the wall.

Alexi broke the silence. “She said you brought those bras for us to sell.”

“How could you lie to him like that, Amalia? You made your son an accomplice?” I said. “I should call the police.”

“What about your citizenship test, Stalina? You don’t want anything messy to interfere with becoming an American.”

My citizenship hearing was soon. I wanted to be an American. Amalia hated me for this. She was like my mother and held tightly to her nostalgia for “Mother Russia.” I was furious, but I still felt sorry for all she had been through.

This line from one of my father’s poems came to mind. I understood and could almost forgive my complicated friend, Amalia. In any case, I needed a place of my own; as roommates our time had come to a close.

“And those porcelain cats of yours…” She stopped and spit into the sink.

“What about them?”

“Don’t worry, I would never touch those ugly babies of bourgeois indulgence.”

“Bourgeois? What about all your glass miniatures?” I said.

“You can see through glass; there is nothing hidden. It is open and honest, like a peasant. Porcelain is for pigs,” she replied. “You are such a traitor.”

“The porcelain is beautiful and lifelike, and those brassieres were my last month’s salary from the lab.”

Alexi had started to back out of the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Stalina. She told me you brought those bras to help us pay the bills.”

Soon he would have to start shaving. His mustache had started to grow. It was just a scraggly line of hairs along his upper lip. It looked as if someone had cut off a bit of frayed rug fringe and stuck it up there.

“I don’t blame you, Alexi.”

Amalia sat down.

“I am moving out,” I told Amalia after Alexi had left and I heard the door to the basement slam shut.

“Where will you go, Princess America?”

“I’ll live at the motel.”

“Ungrateful capitalist!”

“Better to be a thief?” I asked.

“Those are Soviet bras; they belong to us all. By the way, I spoke with Olga this afternoon. She said to call her.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You did not give me a chance; you were so upset about your silly bras.”

“Those are my bras. The money is mine.”

“Get out of my house.”

I opened my pink wallet and pulled out three twenty-dollar bills.

“Here, take some Andrew Jacksons, seventh president of the United States, my adoptive country.”

“He killed a man in a duel for saying something nasty about his wife.”

“You studied for the exam?”

“The test is stupid. They ask you if you have ever committed a crime for which you were not arrested.”

“It’s a trick question,” I said.

“I take survival very seriously,” she added.

“And what about stealing? That’s a crime.”

“I guess I would have to lie to pass your American citizen test. I’d trust a liar less than a thief. Call Comrade Olga.”

I took a breath and remembered that Amalia was also a child of the siege, only she stayed in Leningrad with her parents when I was sent away to Camp Flora. Many people perished around her. For the duration, she did not wear her makeup. Face powder was used to fatten up scraps of wallpaper to make gruel. People would stare at the mark on her face, and that’s when she would steal a watch or a ring. The black market was stronger than ever during those nine hundred days.

“A diamond ring could get you a loaf of bread,” she once told me.

“What’s the sixty dollars for?” she asked.

“Partial rent—it’s only the first week of the month. Take it.”

I went to pack my bag. The stairs creaked as I climbed, and my sneakers sounded like a hungry baby bird as they hit linoleum. Shoes with rubberized soles are a wonderful invention. With them on, even when I am feeling low, my feet are up.

My room, my terem , had a single cot and a bedside table with a lamp with a monkey eating a banana on the base topped with a yellow and white striped shade. When I first moved in it made me laugh. Everything in the house was oddly thrown together. The cuckoo clock. The one wooden blue chair in the kitchen. Nothing matched. Could it be that everything in the house was stolen? Many of the things I needed to pack were on a set of shelves Amalia made for me. The shelves were separated and propped up with various objects: a cement cupid figurine, a broken stereo speaker, and several flowerpots. I slid my suitcase out from under the cot and opened it. It was empty except for one of the bras that Alexi had left untouched. Size 85D—in America that’s a 44D. A good-sized brassiere. He’d removed the porcelain cats from the cups of the bras and tucked them into the side pockets. I was glad they were safe. I wouldn’t sell this bra. I might use it for decoration in one of the rooms at the motel. A “Lingerie Fantasy Room” would be very enticing, I thought. My nose tingled. There was a tickling remaining scent of home—Petersburg—lingering in the shadows of the suitcase.

I began removing things from the shelves. On top was the photograph of my mother and father on the porch from when I was thirteen. The glass in the frame was covered with a thin film of dust. I drew circles in it revealing my mother’s hands, then her face, under the dust. A tear fell from the corner of my right eye and landed on my father’s face. I passed my thumb through the droplet to clean the rest of the glass. I had never noticed before that my mother’s right index finger was bandaged, and there was blood seeping through the gauze. I don’t remember my mother cutting her finger, but it was probably still throbbing when the picture was taken. She made a cherry pie the day the photograph was taken. Maxim visited and ate pie with us. Amalia and I played cards. My father read his leather-bound copy of Julius Caesar , the same one I was packing from c shelves. As Maxim walked up the steps of the porch, my father read a quote from the play, never lifting his eyes off the page.