For What It’s Worth

I’m wanting to jump past this part of my book. It’s not very political? It’s irrelevant, supposedly political and yet decidedly apolitical?

My Own Identity Politics? Within this highly charged—downright electric—landscape in which nations were literally emerging, a writer-like person was hiding out too: and yet, I’d persist haplessly in a foreign terrain. I was a lost cause, a writer already undercover, pretending in politics.

It’s my summer in the Soviet Union. Yes, that Soviet Union.

My part of the Soviet Union was as you might imagine it to be: colorless high rises and patches of weeds stretching throughout haunting projects, a grayish pallor over a city crisscrossed with tram wires overhead and situated on top of a metro system that reeked of infinity and unhappiness and industry and dank urbanity, trousers with holes on sad men, ripped stockings not worthy of being called nylons on women with unfashionable purses, Orwellian grocery stores with nothing on the shelves, crazy old ladies yelling random Russian shit at our brazen American streetwalking, so many serious faces—on children even. Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was a cosmopolitan disaster: punctuated by beautiful churches with onion-bulb tops, gold-plaited estates once occupied by Czars, and the Hermitage with its trove of world art hung in slapdash splendor across palatial walls papered in thick red velvet—the very site at which the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution happened and the royal family was led to a bloody slaughter except for, maybe, Anastasia. 

I don’t really know where Putin was just yet. Doing KGB stuff, perhaps. I actually think we were both at the same university at the same time, but—right then, in 1990—Gorbachev was in power, and he was a good guy! Glasnost and perestroika were the buzzwords: openness and reconstruction. It was almost all over for the U.S.S.R.; the Iron Curtain was coming down. Boris Yeltsin was making waves, and people were talking. The Eastern European Bloc had fallen apart, mostly in 1989. The Berlin Wall was in shards. Plus, Iraq was on the verge of attacking Kuwait.

And I was just a college girl studying political science.

            And Russian.

            Because I wanted to be a diplomat/U2 ambassador/world-traveler.

            Because of Cold War thinking.

            Because of a boy who also took Russian.

            So, yeah, I think I ended up taking three years of the language, two years of Russian Humanities, and a Soviet Politics class.

Do not speak to me in Russian.

Do. Not. Do. It.

            Madonna posters adorned Helsinki, where we landed and walked around for a few hours in the bedazzling glories of European capitalism, replete with chiseled cheekbones and Nordic good cheer. We took a train into Leningrad—a scary sleeper train straight out of Anna Karenina (and you know how that ended) which rattled along old tracks leading from Finish Grandeur into Dictatorial Hell. We were, the group of college kids and the professors from Arizona, fearful of Commies and of anal probes because we didn’t have the right papers.

            In the summer of 1990, I went on a Russian Language program to Leningrad for four weeks (with a fifth week in Moscow). After the academic program, I met friends and we spent the rest of the summer in Europe.

I look at the snapshots.

They’re all that’s left.

I’ve lost my language skills completely.

Man and Woman on Red Square, Moscow (July 1990)

            Walter is in his early thirties, so he’s old. I’m twenty, and though I wish I could say my hair is brassy or sun-drenched, it’s bozo-red. I’m in travel mode: wearing glasses, a tie-dye top, a vicious pink fanny pack.

            Walter is Canadian and possibly a business management professor at Harvard. I’m not sure. He’s dapper-ish, maintaining a level of attractiveness that eluded me. I’m not into him, because my affections are elsewhere, but we do tend to move in the same Russian Language Emersion Program circles.

            Actually, he’s had a fling with one of the pretty girls on our program, even though he’s in a relationship at home in Canada or Harvard.

            I say to him one time when we’re alone, “But you have a girlfriend?”

            Walter gives me some line, like, What happens in the Soviet Union stays in the Soviet Union.

            Oh.

            But we are in Moscow now, and the trip is almost over. He will return to Canada or Harvard, and I will move on to Europe. Walter says to a group of us standing on Red Square, “I’m not going to pretend we’re keeping in touch, because we won’t.” He looks at all of us, students before the Kremlin. “So don’t write.”

The fling girl is older than I, cute, worldly, not torn apart or anything by his indifference.

On Nevsky Prospect, back in Leningrad, she had shared an ice cream cone that was dripping from both ends with this other American kid on the program. Walter and I had watched. A seductive, titillating sight. He had not cared, either.

            The Twenty-Eighth Communist Party Congress is about to begin. Dan Rather is somewhere around. Lenin’s Tomb is still there.

During the past month, I’ve eaten a hairball baked into my breakfast, attended the world-famous Bolshoi Ballet sans Barishnikov who’s probably home in Manhattan, and eaten at the brand new McDonald’s in Moscow. I’ve attended the circus with my professor—it was utterly devoid of weirdness (why the hell not?). I’ve gone to Peter the Great’s glamour-pad palace on the outskirts of Leningrad, and I’ve shadowed Dostoyevsky on imagined Russian paths. Pushkin, Gogol, and Checkov whisper constantly in our ears—and though I am officially in Soviet territory on political business, I am secretly a writer taking notes. I’m just watching people, a voyeur, a literary pornographer.

            In the middle of Red Square, Walter—Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm—looks in my direction and says to me, an unglamorous girl with a hot pink fanny pack around her waist, “Out of all the people on this trip, you’re the one I’d like to know what happens to.”

            You’re the one I’d like to know what happens to.

            Grammatically awkward, utterly unprecedented.

            His comment is devoid of sexual intrigue, ulterior motive, monetary possibility.

            It is like the storming of my own Winter Palace.

            And so I went to Europe, and I never saw Walter again.

            Since then, there have been college degrees in unrelated fields. I’ve abandoned careers and towns. Intellectual snobbery is my mink stole I’ve worn to parties that I truly dread. Irresponsible debt gave me a good education. I waited for heartbreaks to kill me, and they didn’t. My passport is stunning—stamped and suggestive. Drag shows in Harlem, dinners at the Waldorf-Astoria, nights on dung floors in Africa, holding babies in Shanghai orphanages, walks through Roman ruins, hiding Cuban art in my suitcase when flying out of Havana. I worked in Disneyland. I worked at Amnesty International, where I stole Harrison Ford’s address from the P.R. person’s rolodex. I followed an elephant through the Swazi bush.

There’s been a coma and rehab and the death of a parent. For a full year, I did nothing. There are people in my life who have disappeared completely. I wrote a poem once that mentioned Dan Rather. It was very bad.

Walter, I’m this other woman now.

I’ve published two books, had two kids, lost two breasts, and suffered from insomnia.

I’ve married and been separated. I once visited the apartment my husband was staying in while we were apart and I moved through his rooms, looked in his fridge, wondered at his life, saw it as a foreign country, contemplated renewing that visa.

I’ve stayed state-side.

            My hair is still brassy, sun-drenched, bozo-red. But underneath the stain, it’s fully gray.

            Walter, where are you now?

            Walter, what has become of you?

            Have you headed into middle-age with thinning hair and wrinkled skin?

            Walter, you are the Prufrock of my Soviet Summer.

            Remember when we spoke of Michelangelo?

            If you saw me now, if we were to meet at the Kremlin or at St. Basil’s, if we happened upon each other on a flight out of Scandinavia: would you recognize me today? Would you know who I am? Could you see past the skin damage, my flesh now in ruins?

            All of our maps have changed, Walter.

            Our globe has shifted in unrecognizable ways, Walter.

            Where are you now, Walter?

            I like to picture us in Antwerp or Brugge. We’d sit in a dark bar and show each other pictures of our kids.

            Walter, I’d say. Talk to me. Tell me things.

My lost Walter.

            If we met today, in Portugal or Beijing, in New Delhi or San Salvador, would I have to do all of the talking?

            When you’d throw your eyes over me as if I were naked and needed covering, when you saw how time had elapsed on my face, when you tried to ignore the visible scars on my body that hinted at a disaster far more serious than a hot pink fanny pack—when you saw these things—after so many years, would you be disappointed?

            Would I disappoint you?

            My Long-Gone Walter.

            Are you disappointed?