Snow in May. Kseniya Melnik
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palm: “239.”
The woman’s cheekbones were beautifully pronounced, convex like the bowls of soupspoons. “And where are you from?” she asked Tanya in a soft, friendly voice.
Too nice for a Muscovite.
“From Vladivostok,” Tanya lied.
Magadan was famous for having been the entry point to the cruelest of Stalin’s network of camps. People might think her parents had sat there; and if they were arrested, then there must’ve been a reason. Now people were paid good money to live in the northeast. It wasn’t a good idea to advertise either.
“And you?”
“Odessa. I’m buying the snowsuit for my relatives in Arkhangelsk.”
While they chatted about children and tricks for procuring this or that defitsit item, the line crawled up the stairs. The woman’s name was Zina. Tanya also made friends with a man behind her, Denis from Sverdlovsk, and asked him to hold her place. In the shoe department on the third floor, she was lucky to happen upon some Yugoslavian winter boots. She got two pairs, two sizes too big for the boys to grow into. For now, she’d sew a little pouch of wool inside the toe.
The line for Finnish snowsuits climbed to the second landing. Denis gave Tanya a nod of cooperation, and she dashed to the fourth floor, where she stood in two lines for a pencil box, a stack of notebooks, and a yellow backpack with cars printed on the flap. Others held Tanya’s place in the toy line on the ground level, while she held places for Zina and Denis in the snowsuits. The store was stuffy; in the thick of the lines it reeked of sweat and cologne. She ran downstairs and prized out a microscope for Borya, lettered blocks for Pavlik, and a box of toy soldiers for her friend’s son.
Tanya returned to the snowsuits line, which had finally scaled the second floor, and waited for another hour. She could already see the big brown box out of which fluttered the puffy aquamarine snowsuits. After a few more minutes of waiting she heard screams at the front of the line. A wave of people threw her back, and immediately she knew: They’d run out. They’d run out of Finnish snowsuits!
At first Tanya bobbed in the whirlpool of other anguished shoppers—elbows out, bags in—all hoping for a miracle. Her throat prickled with tears, and eventually she gave up. She knew that the clerks had stashed away extra pairs, but they would distribute them through their network of relatives and friends. There was no use begging.
She staggered out to the street. She didn’t have time to waste, yet she couldn’t bear leaving the store. She still had so much to find. When she returned home, Anton wouldn’t go out of his way to praise her exertions. There was nothing heroic or special about these shopping expeditions, a common burden shared by hundreds of millions of her fellow grazhdanki. It seemed unbelievable that just a few hours before, Luciano had invited her to a hotel. What was he doing now? Training on a soccer field or sightseeing the best, cleanest, approved-for-foreigners parts of Moscow with the voluptuous Intourist spies?
Tfoo, princessa. Her mother and Auntie Roza had lived through the famine and war, and here she was—too good for lines. She looked at the Lubyanka building, where so many of Magadan’s prisoners had started their journeys.
A babushka, her face yellow and wrinkled like a spoiled apple, pulled Tanya down the street and around the corner. From prior shopping adventures, Tanya knew that the pensioners who lived close to the big stores often got up early to stockpile the most coveted items and resell them at a profit. As the babushka unzipped the suitcase with her knobby hands, Tanya prayed for the snowsuit.
“Bought something for my granddaughter, dearie, and it turned out the wrong size,” the babushka said, twisting her head, on the lookout for the police.
She held up a pink rabbit coat with fur balls on the ends of the zippers.
“I have a son,” Tanya said. Disappointment settled acridly in her stomach.
The toothless babushka proved to be a real shark when it came to persuasion, and in the end Tanya bought the coat. She could try to exchange it for something else in Magadan, although in all likelihood Pavlik would end up wearing it. Luckily, he was still too young to be teased.
At the National Department Store on Red Square, Tanya secured a lacy East German bra, which was so much more delicate than the gray, industrial Soviet make, built for sturdy kolkhoz girls. Also: a box of Polish toothpaste and lotion, stockings, and three Czechoslovakian shirts and a quality photo album for Anton. He would be so happy. A tube of French lipstick was passed to her over the heads of others in exchange for money. Its color was a mystery.
In a shopping frenzy, Tanya snapped up the last Yugoslavian silk dress without trying it on. Although its limited availability was its most important quality, she later discovered that it was also beautiful: the color of a lily pad with contours of large-petaled flowers embroidered in white thread at the shoulders and side seams. The neckline plunged bravely deep. She didn’t know where she’d wear it: the dress was too light for Magadan, even in the summer. To a house party, maybe, with a shawl.
Tanya set out for her last shopping destination, the House of the Book on Arbat, stopping every twenty steps to rub her reddened palms and switch around the heavy bags. She imagined the headline in tomorrow’s newspapers: “Woman Found Drowned in Moskva River, Still Clutching Bags.”
She walked and thought. Despite the official State philosophy that the USSR was the best country in the world, Russians were always on the hunt for importny things. The best you could get was from the Warsaw Pact countries—especially Yugoslavia, which was almost half capitalist and bordered with Italy. Polish cosmetics were good but not comparable to French. Those you could get only in Moscow, only at the National Department Store. The appearance of Italian shoes was an event. People from the Eastern bloc looked better, too, and people from the capitalist West seemed to be made from higher-quality material altogether: whiter teeth, broader shoulders, happier faces.
Luciano had grown up surrounded by beauty. Tanya knew from studying art and from the travel programs on television that Italy was full of well-preserved palazzos and facades decorated with paintings and stone cupids. Hundreds of nude sculptures sunbathed in the piazzas and cooled off in street fountains. Maybe Luciano’s eyes were simply better trained to see a woman’s beauty?
Why couldn’t Anton see it? After all, he could appreciate a pair of three-hour-line shoes for their ordinary, magnificent shoeness. Had she succumbed to him too easily? They had dated during their last year of university, and Tanya didn’t want to be the last unmarried girl at the graduation.
Auntie Roza opened the door and took some of the bags off Tanya’s numb hands. One naked lightbulb in a row of five burned furiously in the hallway. Pea Soup’s slouchy husband was smoking by the communal telephone. His hair was a violent red—a comical contrast to his straw-yellow eyebrows and eyelashes—as though his fiery crown had drawn out all the pigment from below. His sons (their hair the same Red Banner hue) rattled back and forth down the hallway, the elder on his indestructible bicycle and the younger, about Borya’s age, with a saucepan helmet and a soccer ball. The Ivanovs’ baby wailed. The poodle barked behind Sergeich’s door. The hallway smelled of old cigarettes, fried meat, stewed cabbage, more pea soup, and something putrid—perhaps the dog’s revenge on its neighbors.
“I’m just waiting for an intercity call. Do you need the phone? It should come any moment now,” Pea Soup’s husband muttered.
“Relax, Lyosha. I’m not your wife,” Auntie Roza said. “Please tell your boys not to ride over the shoes.”
When they reached the haven of Auntie Roza’s room, Auntie Roza said, “Shto, got lucky?”
“Oh, yes. Now the shower.”
“Not the best time, Tanechka. Everyone’s cooking dinner, you see. We only have one heater between the kitchen and the washroom.”
“You said it would be your turn in the evening.”