Exiles in America(39)

only half here.”

She wore no makeup today, but she was still beautiful. Zack had forgotten

her odd beauty, like a silent movie star, with her hawklike nose and droopy

eyelids—Ross had compared her to Anouk Aimée, but Zack realized with a

start that the star she reminded him of was young Buster Keaton. She regis-

tered more strongly today than she had a month ago, but Zack had more rea-

sons to notice her.

8 8

C h r i s t o p h e r B r a m

“A new country must be very hard,” he said.

“But at least it is not Tehran. I hate Tehran.”

She only wants to get to know you better, he told himself. That’s why she’s

here. Zack wanted to know her better, too.

“You and Abbas lived in Iran for a while?”

“Oh no. Only visits. Twice. An impossible country for women. The

chador. You know?” She mimed cloth spilling over her face. “I despise it. I

hear some women love the anonymity, but I am anonymous already. And they

are so hot and smelly. And dishonest. You go about in public dressed like a

ghost, then go indoors, throw it off, and you are wearing designer jeans and

scarlet lipstick. What kind of lesson is that? The entire country is a school for

hypocrites.”

“Let’s go to the kitchen,” Zack suggested. “Would you like coffee?” The

fact of the office was turning their chat into a session.

She followed him, pausing by the door to the basement, ostensibly to lis-

ten to the washing machine. She sat at the kitchen table while Zack set up the

coffeemaker.

“But this is nice. This is homey. You and Daniel? You are happy in Vir-

ginia?”

“Very,” said Zack. “We have our work. We have our friends.” He sat

across from her while the coffeemaker began to spit. “It’s quieter here. But I

don’t miss New York.”

“I miss Leningrad,” she confessed. “Now named Petersburg. I spent my

youth working to escape Tashkent, my hometown, a big nowhere city in the

sticks. The name is exotic, but it was all ugly new buildings built after the

1966 earthquake. A baking, cement city of parks without people. I burned to

go to the university in Leningrad. And I did, and I was happy, but I lost it.”

“When the Soviet union   fell apart?”

“Oh no. Long before. When they kicked me out.”

“Kicked you out of where?”

“The Soviet union  . First they sent me to prison, then they kicked me out.”

Zack hesitated. “You were in prison?”

“For politics. For poetry.” She cracked a crooked smile. “I was a zek. Can

you believe it?” She chuckled through her nose. “Me? A zaklyuchenny. A pris-

E x i l e s i n A m e r i c a

8 9

oner. A zek. Three months. The sentence was four years, but Gorbachev de-

clared glasnost and the politicals were let go. Some were advised to leave the

country. I took the hint and went to Berlin. And there I met Abbas and lived

happily ever after.”

Zack could not immediately process it all. She said it so briskly, with such

bitter humor, only nothing about it was funny. “You were sent to prison for

writing protest poetry?”

She pursed her lips in a plump smirk. “Oh yes. A fine Russian tradition. I

wrote a poem about Sakharov. Not a good poem. I was twenty-four. What did

I know? The KGB read it, and they are tough critics. They cured me of polit-

ical poetry. Now I write only about nature. Nature poems and love poems and

poems about my children.”

Zack was touched, impressed, and a little worried. What would being im-

prisoned for poetry do to a person’s sense of reality?

“I was lucky it was only three months,” Elena continued. “A woman’s



prison. I liked the women very much. Especially the prostitutes. The guards

were pigs, but the other prisoners were—genteel? No, gentle. And it was

summer, not winter, so we didn’t freeze. But it was filthy. It stank. Like a dog

kennel. I swore I would always be clean afterwards. So I went straight to

Berlin when they exiled me, the clean city. Not so clean as Switzerland, but

clean enough. And I wrote my little poems and had my little affairs and lived

my little life. Until I met Abbas. Who was a beautiful man, a wonderful

painter. We were two refugees from Central Asia, two Caspian cousins come

to the West to make our fortune. A countryless man and countryless woman.

We hitched our wagons to each other’s stars. Poets never make big money, but

painters can. Only painters do not know how to sell their goods, but poets

have the gift of gab. Better still when one can do the polyglottal gab, like me.”

She smiled and shrugged. “He will fuck anything, you know. Man, woman,