Emily Rubin - Stalina

“They always liked you better,” she said when she brought them by the motel before leaving.

I would miss my old friend. It was hard to hold a grudge after so long, and her referrals from the Majik Cleaning Agency were always very helpful at the motel. We talked about the bras and everything else.

“The past is the past,” I told her. “Both the good and the bad.”

“I am sorry, Stalina, it was a time when I had much confusion. And little money.”

“You are a survivor, Amalia; we both are. I have many reasons to be grateful to you. Go to your mother; she needs you. I can promise you your cats will have a good life here at my motel.”

Shosta and Kovich are that special breed of cat born and bred in Leningrad. Not many cats survived the siege, but the ones that did produced a very hardy strain of felines. These tough cats are a big part of the city’s post-Soviet economy. The babushkas rescue the kittens from back alleys, sewers, and roofs and then sell them on bridges and corners near metro stations. Shosta and Kovich have become fat and lazy here in America, but occasionally they show their “Leningrad” side. They hunt with Svetlana, who learned everything from her surrogate mother, Zarzamora. The only photograph I took of Svetlana and the crow sits along here with the rest of my photo collection. I believe Shosta and Kovich were jealous of ZZ and her relationship with Svetlana. One day the cats chased the crow across the driveway, and she was struck and killed by a car leaving the motel. Svetlana was shaken, as was I. She did not eat for days and just sat under the pine trees where we buried the poor crow.

All in all, this place is not for the faint of heart. Overdoses and fires. Panty hose stretched, ripped, and tied around pillowcases, cigarettes burning on the edge of the toilet. Once a set of false teeth were found in the cup by the bathroom sink. How could someone forget those? It can all make for a very long day. As I recline in the heart-shaped tub, the photographs are my confidants, and with a glass or two of chilled vodka, my words flow freely. Nostrovya!

Thip!

Today, dear friends, marks my tenth anniversary here at the Liberty Motel in 2001. I am now Citizen Stalina, no longer Comrade Stalina. Giving up on my country was like severing ties with a lover. Like a haunting, sometimes I still catch a smell or see a shadow from a streetlamp that could only be Russia. Carmela and I call each other “comrade.” It keeps our spirits up.

To my friends and family pictured before me, I say, “I offer you these blunt portraits to shed light on how the last ten years have been. Please pardon me this indulgence, as I drink in honor of this anniversary and my recent citizenship. Apeeteeta! ”

Thiip!

Mmm, cold, thick vodka, like a fresh pillow against my face.

A toast to Nadia, my ex-boss and autocratic friend, who left five years ago to take her parents back to Petersburg to die. Without her I would not have the Liberty Motel. The other motels she put in the hands of her black suit boys. I am proud to say that our short-stay empire is thriving along Windsor Avenue here in Berlin, Connecticut. The city is still dying, and lucky for us, because as the city continues in a spiral down its sinkhole of recession, our short-stay motels continue to flourish.

To short stays and long sips! Spaseeba! Nadia!

Thiip!

I made Carmela my business partner. She knows beauty well and has used her love of the land when decorating our special rooms. She was inspired to complete the Caribbean Room, and she was thoughtful enough to incorporate my idea for the “cabana-bed” into the design, which pleased me very much. My most loyal customers, Joanie and Harry, waited with great anticipation for the completion of that room. Ten years after the “roller coaster” incident, they are still conducting their affair “on the side,” as they put it. Neither one wants to give up the other, so they accept their situation with dignity and are pleased to have a place like the Liberty to come to.

A toast to inspired romantic settings and Strauss and Sons Hardware, the local store where we buy everything to decorate the rooms! They always have everything I need, no matter how big or small.

Thiip!

The vodka when chilled correctly is so very smooth.

Carmela molded the blue carpet in the Caribbean Sunset Room into a theater of waves surrounding the cabana-bed, which stands on stilts and has a thatched roof. When the door opens, sounds of the ocean begin to play over and over. She is very, very clever. Harry likes the wraparound sunset mural painted on three walls.

“You see it from all sides when you are lying in the cabana-bed,” Harry says. “It’s all very intoxicating.”

Joanie told me soon after the room was finished, “Harry got me some fancy-schmancy jasmine perfume for our ‘Caribbean’ time. Maybe someday we’ll go to the real Caribbean. Until then, your rooms will have to do, Stalina.”

That was six years ago. They have yet to visit the “real” Caribbean.

“Ginger and coconut are other scents you might want to try. I hear they can be very enticing,” I told her one day when she was returning the key.

After she tried the new scents, she reported back to me. “The coconut made Harry sneeze, and the ginger made him itch where his thumb is missing.”

That’s when Joanie told me the story of how Harry lost his thumb.

“Harry used to run away when he was a boy from his home in Brooklyn. His father fought in World War II, was very strict, and wanted to punish him after he found him hitchhiking onto the BQE for the fifth time. Can you imagine? It’s amazing Harry survived; he was only twelve years old. His father set the dog after him. The dog grabbed his hand, and as Harry tried to slip away, the dog’s jaw locked down on his thumb. Harry’s mother ran away with him from the hospital in the middle of the night. She left Brooklyn and moved here to Berlin and got a job in an umbrella factory. They heard later his father put his head in the oven in their apartment in Canarsie. The neighbors smelled gas and called the police. His father was still alive but unconscious. They revived him, but he was like a three-year-old. When his mother died, Harry went to the nursing home where his father lived. He took a gun and a bottle of arsenic, but he could not kill him. The drooling, rocking, and loud cartoons got to Harry. He told me the story when we were in high school. That’s when I fell in love with him. He’s a real mensch.”

A toast to your love, Harry and Joanie, my most loyal customers.

Thiiip!

Mmm, peppery, this vodka is.

Nadia wrote after her parents passed away within a month of each other.

Dear Stalina,

My parents are gone. Putin gave them special honors. They were mentors to young “Vladi” in his early KGB days. Did you know it is illegal to spread human ashes in Russia? I had no idea. I put their remains together in a Chinese urn my mother kept on her mantel in Brooklyn. You may have seen it when you visited them. She brought it with her when they left Brighton Beach. They sold many of their things at a flea market at the beach before they left. I wish they had kept some of their photographs from Russia. My father had a photo taken with Stalin. You can get good money for that sort of Soviet memorabilia. But the urn my mother refused to sell. It was a very valuable antique that my father purchased on one of his trips to China. I keep it by my bedside. I miss them very much. Petersburg is more beautiful than ever. Much is happening here for the three-hundred-year celebration, and of course the mafia still runs the city, so everything functions very well. Why don’t you come visit for the festivities?