by George Osol
After the short transoceanic flight and a handful of drinks, Alex Cooper felt tired and off. He couldn’t sleep on airplanes and had medicated himself with the only available sedative that was, blessedly, still free on international flights. The jet quivered as it broke through a dense cloud cover.Below, a wintry urban landscape came into view. Even though it was only a few minutes past two on December 24th, Christmas Eve, Moscow looked dull and grey, as if on the edge of night.
Alex leaned his forehead against the window and closed his eyes, thinking again about the last time he had seen his mother. 1941. Nearly forty years ago. He remembered her in the doorway of their apartment, crying, as she blessed him with the sign of the cross. His father stood behind her with his arms crossed, silent and grim.
Hitler’s troops had reached the outskirts of Moscow and, inspired by the patriotic fervor of the military parade in Red Square the week before, Alex had enlisted the very next day – his seventeenth birthday – and went off to the front. Captured shortly thereafter, he spent the rest of the war cutting granite in a POW labor camp on the outskirts of Frankfurt and slowly losing weight.
Once the war ended, Alex queued up for repatriation. The filtration process was plodding, as most everything was under the Communists. They loved their paperwork and they took their time. The letter from his mother arrived a few months later. Reading between the lines, he understood that she was telling him to not come home.
It was just as well. Had he gone back, he would have spent the rest of his life in a Siberian gulag. Although Stalin was a paranoiac, he was nothing if not decisive: Russian soldiers captured by the Germans were, in his mind, losers at best and potential traitors at worst, so off with them.
The stifling, isolationist grip of Communism had finally eased enough under Brezhnev to allow him to return without fear, and he decided to visit her over the holidays. Business was slow and although he always enjoyed Christmas with his family, it was the most opportune time to close the machine shop for two weeks.
Touchdown.
Some passengers clapped and a few whooped. Oh, the Russian soul, he mused. Thoughts tinged with worry, and actions with excess. Although he didn’t like it, he had to admit that the same spirit – a paradoxical blend of melancholy and ebullience – dwelled within him as well. It was just one more persistent little contrast between himself and his American friends. He found that American people were much more optimistic and carefree, but also emotionally more reserved. The ethos of family was stronger than the ethos of friendship in the States, while in Russia it was often the reverse.
Although he thought of himself as being equally American and Russian, he spoke with a light accent and still thought mostly in Russian. His name, Alexandr Kuprinski, had been Americanized to Alex Cooper, although his friends called him by the more affectionate and familiar Sasha.
Carry-on in hand, Sasha Kuprinski hunched his shoulders as he walked across the tarmac, feeling the cold drizzle on the back of his neck. At that time, Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport was far below Western standards and, as he entered the terminal, he noticed the shreds of insulation hanging down around the recessed light fixtures, some dark with burned out bulbs. The drab, institutional-green walls were unadorned and, as he made his way to passport control, he wrinkled his nose at the boiled cabbage smell of body odor that hung in the stale and overheated air.
After waiting in line for longer than he should have had to (or so it seemed), the uniformed official, a woman, signaled him in. He approached and slid his passport and customs declaration under the thick glass partition.
“Billet?”
It took Sasha a moment to realize that “billet” meant ticket in Russian. He fished for the paperwork in his jacket pockets. Not there.
“One minute,” he explained, smiling at her. “I can’t seem to find it.” She glowered in a peremptory silence as he rechecked his pockets for the plane ticket. Put off by her animus, he knelt down, unzipped his carry-on and fumbled through his belongings. Ah, there it was!
The official took it and began transcribing the information into a thick ledger by hand. Sasha noticed that she was actually quite attractive, although the severe uniform and virtual absence of personality detracted. A small brass nameplate on her chest read Oksana in Cyrillic.
Transcription completed, she slid his passport and ticket under the glass and motioned the next person in line to step forward.
“Good?” he asked, irritated that she didn’t look up at him or even give him a perfunctory nod of dismissal, but she either did not hear or pretended not to.
Sasha picked up his luggage and, heart thumping, walked along the plywood-clad corridor that led to the arrivals area. People were scattered in small groups – some hugging and talking excitedly, clearly just reunited, others peering expectantly, waiting for their passenger to emerge.
Sasha scanned the crowd, eyes darting back and forth, but his mother was nowhere to be seen. Disappointed, he glanced at his watch. 3:30 p.m., right on time. He set down his bags and took another look around.
Not there.
Feeling a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, Sasha wondered what to do next and realized that there wasn’t much he could do except wait. Was she caught in traffic? Had she gotten off to a late start? Since she didn’t drive, he had assumed that she would take a cab to the airport or have a neighbor bring her. She’d said that she would be there to meet him, and he had taken her words at face value. He should have paid closer attention. She was 87 after all.
He found a good vantage point and put down his bags. Fifteen minutes passed, then thirty. The crowd thinned. An only child, Sasha had no brothers or sisters to call, and his father had died in 1956.
He gave it another quarter of an hour before deciding to give her a call. Exchanging dollars for rubles, then figuring out how to work the pay phones ate up another twenty minutes. After repeated unsuccessful attempts, he realized that the first phone was broken but hungry, since none of his rubles could be retrieved. The second yielded a suspicious-sounding busy signal, so he hung up and tried a third. This one worked fine, or appeared to, but there was no answer and he hung up after the tenth ring.
Sasha began to wonder if something was wrong, but consoled himself with a saying that he was fond of – worry is a dividend paid to disaster – and decided that there was no real reason for alarm. After all, it could be any of a number of things: an accident snarling up traffic, a breakdown, or even a mix-up. Perhaps she was off by a day. God knows, at her age one could easily have gotten confused.
What was really troubling him, he realized, was that he had no contingency plan. He tried calling again before sitting back down on his suitcase and cradling his head in his hands. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour. The area had emptied completely and was now beginning to fill up again ahead of another arriving flight. Feeling the worry growing inside him, in spite of his attempts to reason it away and tired of waiting, he decided to regain the initiative and take a cab to his mother’s apartment.
Settled in the backseat of a black Gigly sedan, the cab made its way down the broad Leninsky Prospekt that led into the heart of the city. Sasha gazed dully at the urban landscape of light industry and blockish Soviet-style housing. An endless array of telephone poles flanked the road, bundles of wires crisscrossing haphazardly overhead in the gathering darkness. From time to time, he could make out the spare lettering of a Communist slogan hung on banners from the rooftops proclaiming that Workers are our future or Socialism sustains.
What drivel, he thought. Does anyone really believe it?
Although it was Christmas Eve, there were no signs of Christmas. Alexandr was not surprised since the Soviet Union was an atheistic society; moreover, the Russian Orthodox church celebrated Christmas on January 7th, according to the Julian calendar. Here, it was just another Friday afternoon in late December.
They passed the mini-Arc de Triomphe commemorating the line of Napoleon’s retreat in 1812, and the sculpture of three red anti-tank jacks marking the nearest approach of the Germans in 1942. Twenty minutes later, the onion domes of the Kremlin topped with orthodox crosses came into view, the gold leaf gleaming in contrast to the otherwise monochromatic city.
It occurred to Sasha that one of the reasons for the drabness was the complete absence of advertising. The simple black-on-white lettered signs above storefronts were dimly lit with incandescent lighting. It was the same at the Moscow airport – every plane on the tarmac was an Aeroflot. This uniformity conferred a visual monotony that was in stark contrast to Heathrow or Kennedy, where every airline had its own unique brand and design that conveyed a sense of worldliness, of the exciting promise of travel to a new and distant land.
He caught a glimpse of St. Basil’s Cathedral to the right. Flanking the east end of Red Square, its multicolored Byzantine domes – twelve, with no two alike – made it one of the most iconic churches in the world. Sasha remembered his mother writing to him years ago about some lunatics suggesting that it be torn down because its beauty would distract the mourners exiting Lenin’s nearby mausoleum and disrupt their meditations on the patron saint of Communism. Stalin – as hard-headed and hard-hearted an apparatchik as anyone – dismissed the argument as being silly and the domes remained.
Lost in his memories, Sasha smiled as he remembered the story of a new hotel design that had been submitted to Stalin by two different architects. The man of steel had mistakenly signed the construction approval forms for both. Fearing the consequences of pointing out his error, they disregarded the incongruity and built each wing in its own respective style. It now stood as a sad monument to human nature or, more accurately, to the interplay between authority and the individual instinct for self-preservation.
What a long and tragic past. Poor Mother Russia. There was just no other country like it in terms of its long and unrelenting history of suffering.
“Here we are” said the driver, interrupting his musings. “You did say 17 Ulitza Dorogomilovskaya?”
“Da,” affirmed Sasha, fishing for his wallet. “Spasibo.”
He paid the cabbie and carried his luggage to the entrance of his mother’s apartment building. Although the rain had stopped, the air was noticeably colder, and it felt like snow. His momentum was arrested by a grey metal door. It was locked and there was no register of tenants and no buzzers. Now what? He could look around for a phone and call again but, frankly, there were no phones in sight and there would probably still be no answer. He could find a hotel room. Or he could just wait. It was getting close to dinnertime. Surely, someone would be by soon enough.
And so, Alex Cooper, or Sasha Kuprinski, or whomever in the hell he was right now, slumped down on the coarse concrete steps. God, he was tired! A headache had sprawled itself across the back of his head, and his vision quivered with every thump of his heart. He felt a wave of nausea and thought of his wife 6,000 miles away. Sandy would be watching Carson, or already be asleep. Wait, he thought, it’s Christmas Eve! She is probably at her parents house and not home at all. The thought saddened him. It was their first Christmas apart in almost thirty years.
His moment of self-pity was interrupted by the sound of a child’s voice just as the metal door before him swung open. A woman emerged with a little girl mittened and bundled in tow. Seeing her braids, Sasha had a momentary phantasm of familiarity from his own days as a young Pioneer, of marching in May Day parades where the girls always had their hair plaited above their white blouses and red kerchiefs. He jumped forward and caught the door with his foot before it had a chance to close, reached back for his baggage, and stepped inside.
The lobby, harshly lit by two bare bulbs in what had once been an ornate fixture, was unheated and smelled of urine or garbage or both. The absence of communal pride struck him as odd in a society that so prized the collective spirit, but he remembered that there was no individual ownership. The lobby was just a transit point between one’s own private world and the world outside – a pass-through, not a place to linger. It was a far cry from the building he remembered from his youth. Although it was never fancy, it was at least clean and well-kept.
Sasha walked across the lobby to a small elevator and, once inside, pressed the button for the 10th floor. His mother lived in apartment 1007. The elevator rattled its way up the shaft and finally came to a screechy stop. He slid the folding gate open and, holding his foot against it, moved his luggage out into the corridor.
Yes, there was 1002 directly across the hallway, with 1004 off to the right. He walked along the narrow corridor until he came to 1007, set down his bags, and pressed the call button. Inside, a buzzer buzzed. He stood and listened, but there was no other sound and the door did not open.
He rang again and pounded the door with his fist, then with his palm. Nothing. She probably was at the airport and had no way of reaching him. Idiot! He should have waited longer.
Frustrated, Sasha pounded the door again, and listened for the sound of footsteps knowing full well that there would not be any. Somehow, he knew – he could feel – that the place was empty.
The door of the neighboring apartment swung open and a woman peered out. Seeing him, she exclaimed, “Alexandr Genadyev?” using the customary patronymic.
He nodded, relieved. She must have figured out who he was and maybe had a message from his mother?
“I am Ilona Fyodorvna,” said the old woman. “How nice to meet you! Your mother told me you were coming.” She smiled at him, and he saw that most of her remaining teeth were gold-capped. She had a well-lined, but kindly and welcoming face, and looked to be his mother’s age.
Had she seen his mother today?
“I heard her go out a few hours ago,” she replied. “She was going to meet you at the airport. You didn’t run into her?”
“No,” he answered. “I waited and―”
“Your mother sometimes forgets her keys,” interrupted Ilona Fyodorovna, “so she gave me an extra set. Wait, I’ll let you in.” She glanced at him and shook her head. “You must be exhausted! Are you hungry? I just made some soup and cutlets.”
“No,” he said. “I’m ok, but thank you anyway. If you could let me in, that would be wonderful.”
She brought the cutlets anyway and, together, they opened the door to apartment 1007. It was warm inside and smelled of fried onions and something else, something intimately familiar and almost forgotten. Sasha took a deep breath and swayed on his feet as a new wave of fatigue swept over him.
He remembered that it was a small place – only three rooms – but it now seemed downright tiny. Over-decorated by American standards, the walls were a mélange of wooden block prints, photographs and paintings, and the furniture was bulky and well-worn. But everything appeared to be in order.
He glanced at his watch. Almost six.
“She must have just missed you! Why don’t you rest, you poor dear,” fretted Ilona Fyodorvna. “I’m sure Tatiana Borisovna will be back soon. She’ll check with the authorities to see that you arrived and take a cab back here. It might be a while with the evening traffic. It’s terrible these days.” She paused, then said, “America is so far away. I’ve never been.”
“Yes,” he said pensively. “You’re quite right. America is a world away.”
He suddenly wanted to be left alone. The warmth of the apartment was making him drowsy and his head was throbbing.
Sasha smiled at the neighbor. “Thank you for letting me in.” He held up the small plate covered with aluminum foil. “And for this. It’s good to be here at last.”
Shutting the door behind him, he took a more careful look around the place before opening the door to his mother’s bedroom. There was that scent again, only stronger now, more distinct. It was something he had not experienced in how many years? No, he thought, not years. Decades. And yet he knew it so well. Molecules have their mysteries and time its own bag of tricks.
An icon of the Holy Mother cradling the Christ child hung near the ceiling in one corner of the room. Lit by a small electric bulb, it caught Sasha’s eye, and he remembered again that it was – maybe not here, but in much of the world – Christmas Eve. A strange, sad feeling came over him; a mixture of loneliness and familiarity, of here and there, of now and then.
Several framed pictures stood on her dresser – one of his father, and another of him in uniform. He looked like a dressed-up child pretending to be a soldier. And there was his parents’ wedding picture from ages ago, 1921; his mother blonde and young in her wedding gown and his father erect and rather dashing in his dark suit, a wave of black hair splashed across his forehead. Sasha unconsciously ran his fingers through his own hair and smiled.
A small photo tucked into the frame of the mirror over the dresser caught his eye. Sepia-toned, it was a picture taken by the Black Sea, where they had summered when he was a child. He picked it up and turned it over. “Lev, Tanya and Sasha. Odessa, August 1929″ was inked on the back in his mother’s familiar scrawl. It showed a large boulder in the foreground, with his parents on either side. Little Sasha – fair hair cropped short, ribs showing – stood on top, grinning mischievously and making a muscle. His father was touching his little bicep, mouthing an ooh! while his mother stood on the other side, young and slim in a one-piece bathing suit. She was smiling at the camera with both hands extended toward him, as if making an introduction. Taken during that not-so-quiet interlude between the great wars, it captured a family in the prime of life.
You’ve come a long way, Alyusha, he thought, using the name his mother called him in affectionate moments, and his eyes moistened. The various permutations of his name that the Russian language allowed – Aleksandr, Aleksei, Alek, Alyusha, Sasha – came back to him. Whether playful, flirtatious or stern, each had its own connotation, something that was missing in English, where he was mostly just Alex or, rarely, Alexander. He tucked the picture back in its place and returned to the small kitchen.
Disregarding his instincts, he drank two glasses of tap water. It was lukewarm but tasted fine. Rummaging around, he discovered a half bottle of vodka in one of the cabinets. Coated with a fine layer of dust, the label was yellowed and peeling. As far as he knew, his mother was a teetotaler, so it was likely untouched since his father’s death twenty-five years ago. He wondered when his father took his last drink and what kind of mood he was in at the time.
Sasha opened the vodka, poured two fingers worth into a glass and tossed the liquor down in one swallow, feeling its warmth spread through his chest. To Mama and Papa, he thought, and to all that have come and gone. He saw his own life as a scroll of years receding back in time, the War a bloody gash through its middle.
Sasha walked over to the kitchen window and pulled aside the off-white lacy curtain. A fine snow had started, dusting the sill and the tops of the lampposts below. As he surveyed the patchwork of yellow windows in the apartment building across the street, a movement in one caught his eye. It was a woman. She was old and stooped, stirring something on the stove. Sasha could see the steam rising from the pot and the kerchief atop her bent head. An old man came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. Startled, she looked up and smiled. He smiled back and kissed the back of her neck before walking away.
Sasha stood for another minute or two, transfixed by the cones of falling snow set off by the light from the streetlamps. He looked left, then right, but there was nothing more to see, so he re-drew the curtain and settled into the living room couch to listen for the sound of his mother’s key in the lock. A moment later he was fast asleep.
George Osol (he/him), a resident of Bellingham, WA, has authored over one hundred scientific articles, a textbook on human pregnancy, and a romantic thriller titled Caveat (2019) that was published by Onion River Press (VT) and is available on Amazon. He is currently working on a book of short stories and a second novel.