Sasha,” Anna said.
“Of course. It’s not like I didn’t expect this to happen. But when it does happen it’s a different story.”
“You know she was a great woman with a wonderful heart.”
“I know. But she’s gone. Absolutely gone. Fifty-one years of my life she was this undeniable presence. Now that space, everything about it, it’s not empty, but it’s not the same. It’s not, I don’t know, glowing like it did. Shit, I know I must be feeling bad. I’m speaking in metaphors. Who does that except the depressed or overbearing?”
“She was really a mother to me, too.”
We were walking in Vilas Park, a short distance from my mother’s bungalow. Bruce was on the phone arranging every detail imaginable, leaving nothing for anyone else to do. Even the head of the funeral home was left mostly idle. Bruce had looked at the casket his father and I had picked out and given it thumbs-down because of its excessive gleam. “Too Vegas,” he said. “My aunt was not that kind of woman.”
Bruce was having a casket shipped from Chicago that had been inspected by a friend. The flowers were being driven in from Chicago as well. At his father’s behest, Bruce was also taking over organizing the governor’s planned memorial service at the end of the month. Bruce adored my mother. He, in fact, had lived in our home for a year when I was already grown and living in Tuscaloosa.
Bruce would not be the only child to occupy that room after me. My mother was in the habit of picking up strays of all kinds, dogs, cats, birds, and, for brief periods, even the occasional wayward child.
Of course, there was Pascha the parrot, an African gray. She had been sitting on her perch in the kitchen ever since I went to high school in Chicago. All these decades and this bird was still living, fastidiously cleaning its feathers, and occasionally chattering in the high Polish of my mother’s youth. My mother had a gift for nurturing those she deemed worthy.
Perhaps her greatest nurturing project of all was Anna, who, on the face of it, needed little care. She was a grown woman of twenty-one when she defected. Like my mother and many others, she had been picked by the Soviet system at an early age to use her talent for the glory of Russia. The Soviets were exemplary at finding and nurturing this 0.001 percent of the population with artistic and intellectual skills. Sadly they also sent a stream of the grown ones to prison and sometimes death for no reason, except, of course, extreme paranoia.
For decades they were on the phone frequently, my mother and Anna. My mother dispensed advice, only some of which was heeded. “You spend too much time worrying about men, Anna. They are all alike. Pretty boring, really. Just pick one and keep him,” she said to her more than once.
Anna was born not in Russia but in Uzbekistan, and was orphaned at the age of three. Usually, people like this never thought of defecting. Stalin and the Soviet system were their parents, good parents who had brought them up with pride and discipline. They gave them a sweet life in Moscow far afield from the destitution of their youth. But Anna was different.
I could sense her will, her inability to go with the flow, early on when she lived with us that first summer. Russian men came to us from Chicago and the East Coast with sincere efforts to chart her course in the artistic world of the United States. Their eyes gleamed with the expectation of something intimate in exchange. She swatted them away without any pretense of being polite. If they persisted, she’d roll out the insults. “
Da poshel ty na kher so svoim utiugom
[Get the hell out of here and don’t forget to take your dick with you].”
She was going to make her own way in this new world. Born in 1941, she had never known who her father was, but her blue eyes indicated clearly that he was not an Uzbek. Her silhouette, wiry, also told anyone who paid attention to such things that she was partly of
“Of course. It’s not like I didn’t expect this to happen. But when it does happen it’s a different story.”
“You know she was a great woman with a wonderful heart.”
“I know. But she’s gone. Absolutely gone. Fifty-one years of my life she was this undeniable presence. Now that space, everything about it, it’s not empty, but it’s not the same. It’s not, I don’t know, glowing like it did. Shit, I know I must be feeling bad. I’m speaking in metaphors. Who does that except the depressed or overbearing?”
“She was really a mother to me, too.”
We were walking in Vilas Park, a short distance from my mother’s bungalow. Bruce was on the phone arranging every detail imaginable, leaving nothing for anyone else to do. Even the head of the funeral home was left mostly idle. Bruce had looked at the casket his father and I had picked out and given it thumbs-down because of its excessive gleam. “Too Vegas,” he said. “My aunt was not that kind of woman.”
Bruce was having a casket shipped from Chicago that had been inspected by a friend. The flowers were being driven in from Chicago as well. At his father’s behest, Bruce was also taking over organizing the governor’s planned memorial service at the end of the month. Bruce adored my mother. He, in fact, had lived in our home for a year when I was already grown and living in Tuscaloosa.
Bruce would not be the only child to occupy that room after me. My mother was in the habit of picking up strays of all kinds, dogs, cats, birds, and, for brief periods, even the occasional wayward child.
Of course, there was Pascha the parrot, an African gray. She had been sitting on her perch in the kitchen ever since I went to high school in Chicago. All these decades and this bird was still living, fastidiously cleaning its feathers, and occasionally chattering in the high Polish of my mother’s youth. My mother had a gift for nurturing those she deemed worthy.
Perhaps her greatest nurturing project of all was Anna, who, on the face of it, needed little care. She was a grown woman of twenty-one when she defected. Like my mother and many others, she had been picked by the Soviet system at an early age to use her talent for the glory of Russia. The Soviets were exemplary at finding and nurturing this 0.001 percent of the population with artistic and intellectual skills. Sadly they also sent a stream of the grown ones to prison and sometimes death for no reason, except, of course, extreme paranoia.
For decades they were on the phone frequently, my mother and Anna. My mother dispensed advice, only some of which was heeded. “You spend too much time worrying about men, Anna. They are all alike. Pretty boring, really. Just pick one and keep him,” she said to her more than once.
Anna was born not in Russia but in Uzbekistan, and was orphaned at the age of three. Usually, people like this never thought of defecting. Stalin and the Soviet system were their parents, good parents who had brought them up with pride and discipline. They gave them a sweet life in Moscow far afield from the destitution of their youth. But Anna was different.
I could sense her will, her inability to go with the flow, early on when she lived with us that first summer. Russian men came to us from Chicago and the East Coast with sincere efforts to chart her course in the artistic world of the United States. Their eyes gleamed with the expectation of something intimate in exchange. She swatted them away without any pretense of being polite. If they persisted, she’d roll out the insults. “
Da poshel ty na kher so svoim utiugom
[Get the hell out of here and don’t forget to take your dick with you].”
She was going to make her own way in this new world. Born in 1941, she had never known who her father was, but her blue eyes indicated clearly that he was not an Uzbek. Her silhouette, wiry, also told anyone who paid attention to such things that she was partly of
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