Emily Rubin - Stalina

Excited and nervous, I wanted to do a little dance, but I managed to control my enthusiasm. I was in America and had to get to Port Authority. Port—I had some port once, and I enjoyed it very much. Authority—in the Soviet Union, it always made me suspicious. All the English words swimming before my eyes gave me vertigo. I tilted my head down between my knees to stop the spinning, and when I stood up and opened my eyes, in front of me was a bus with the name of my destination written on a sign across the top of its window. It was my first “lucky break” in America. I found a seat, and when the motor started rumbling, the diesel fumes reminded me of home. I clutched my precious valise on my lap. There were roads being built and many hotels along the route to Port Authority. The traffic was moving toward a skyline I had only seen in pictures. The man sitting next to me had a leg that twitched, and his suit smelled of oranges. He held his leg to stop it from bouncing up and down. He smiled at me, but I could not find a smile on my face yet—I was too nervous. I kept thinking of my song:

“Breathe, Stalina, breathe,” my father’s voice whispered to me from sometime long ago. I missed him and started to relax.

Once at Port Authority, I had two hours before the next bus was leaving for Hartford, Connecticut. Out of the bus I touched the concrete and felt the ground shaking. I stood frozen, holding tightly to my bag. The bus driver was helping people get their luggage. He saw my hesitation to move.

“Don’t worry, ma’am, it’s the subway you’re feeling. The Eighth Avenue IND runs right under our feet.”

“In Russia our metro is deep, deep underground.”

“Go right through that door, ma’am. You have arrived in New York City.”

The bus terminal was very different from the airport. It was as if nothing was moving. Many people were wearing dark clothes and were slumped in corners and against the walls. I made my way quickly past staring eyes to get outdoors to breathe some air. Breathe, Stalina, breathe. The smell of this place was not sweet, and it was rather harsh on my newly arrived senses. I found the stairway up. It was one of those that should move—an escalator. This one did not move. I stepped over a gentleman to begin my climb up to the street. Overhead there were beams with words printed on them. Each beam had another word. A poem on a beam. On the first beam it said OVERSLEPT , then the next had WORN-OUT , and then seven more to complete the unhappy reprise:

The Port Authority had a sadness to it that was strangely comforting. It was not just in Russia that people had hard times. I was being shown the real America. Clutching my valise, I went through the glass doors to a very noisy avenue. The street in front of the building was torn apart, and a deep hole made the traffic stop. It sounded as if every horn was sounding from every car. There were workers in the hole, and I could see the tops of their yellow hard hats bobbing as they threw dirt over their shoulders with shovels. I turned the corner and practically tripped over the spike-heeled shoes of a very tall woman with bony legs in fishnet tights and a skirt that came up to my nose. Her black hair stuck straight into the air like the sharp tips on barbed wire. It was obviously a wig.

I pulled back and said, “Pardon me.”

She did not say a word as she crossed her long leg behind her and leaned against the wall. Another woman wearing a tight-fitting dress made of bright green satin tapped her shoulder and asked for a cigarette. Prostitutes. Again I see America is much like Russia. Only our ladies of the street are not so old and hard. As I cleared away from their sidewalk space and stepped toward the curb, I saw the Christ Almighty Savior Church on Forty-second Street. The angels over the arched doorway were like those on top of St. Isaac’s. Next door to the church was a storefront with “Rosalinda the Psychic” painted across the window. I crossed the street to get a closer look.

The palm reader, a blond, looked like an old woman as she sat, tired and slumped in a chair. As I stood in front of the window, she beckoned me to come inside. Her hands were smooth with no wrinkles. I saw she was younger than me, perhaps forty or even younger, but even this age she wore with a heavy burden. I did not hesitate to go inside. With the streets busy and crowded, I was glad for the special attention. She stood and showed me to a white plastic chair next to a table with a crystal ball cradled in the claw of an eagle. A travel poster of a cathedral in Madrid was on the wall above where she wanted me to sit. As she turned and motioned to the chair, she moved like a dancer of flamenco. There was a curtain closing off the back, and from behind I could smell onions being cooked in oil. She sat and leaned her head down to arrange the cards and figurines on the table. She clearly needed to color her hair. The black roots at her scalp would have offended Olga, who despised very much incompetent dye jobs.

“Please relax; you look tired. My name is Frederica; my mother was Rosalinda,” she explained before I asked. She took my hand.

“I am Sta—”

She stopped me. “No, don’t tell me. Please show me the photographs you are carrying in your purse.”

I was impressed by her clairvoyance. How could she have known I always carry family pictures? She looked through them.

“Tell me about the people in this picture.”

She was asking about the photograph taken on the porch of our dacha outside Leningrad, taken in the days after the Great Patriotic War (or if you are not Russian, World War II).

“That is Amalia and me. We were childhood friends, and now I have come here to stay with her in Connecticut, USA.”

“Tell me more.”

I told Frederica how when we were growing up, of all my friends, Amalia had the most fascinating look. I loved how her front teeth came forward with a slight overbite, and I was full of awe because of the red birthmark that covered half her face. The makeup she applied to conceal the mark was the color of red clay and made her look very exotic. With her hair pulled back, she reminded me of the Indians riding horses in the Westerns we saw at the cinema on Saturdays when we were eleven years old. Every morning she applied makeup to her face, but by the time the sun was going down, it would fade, and the redness would be like a half mask across the left side of her face. In the summer evenings, Amalia and I would sit with my grandparents on the porch playing cards. When the sun had gone behind the house, my grandfather would light the lantern, and we would keep playing until my mother called us in for baths and bed. In the attic room where we slept, we would talk until all hours about movie stars and how we would style our hair for school in the fall. In the morning Amalia always got up first. I would hear her in the bathroom putting on her foundation and powder like her mother had taught her. I pretended to sleep until she finished and then met her downstairs. We would be the only ones awake.

“Do you want to hear all about this?” I asked Frederica.

“She is connected to your future. I want to hear everything.”

I continued to tell her how in the morning Amalia would prepare two bowls of fresh plums and cream, our favorite secret breakfast together. Amalia taught me how to kiss on those mornings. Frederica shifted my palm in her warm, chubby hands with rings on every finger.