Glasnost

For Penelope Krouse

Elizabeth is seventeen, and an exchange student in the Soviet Union.   She has never been away from Orange County, California without her parents.   By the end of the year, Soviet Communism will fall, and Elizabeth will leave for college, never to return to her parents’ world again except for short-lived visits that will leave her inexplicably gloomy and noisily independent, examining things like student loan payment plans and doing things like crying aloud during blockbuster movies that aren’t particularly sad.   But, for now, Elizabeth and the Soviet Union lack sovereignty. Soon, Boris Yeltsin will replace Mikhail Gorbachev with high drama; Russia will be re-born, re-surging in fine Russian-novel fashion; and Elizabeth will move to Irvine, California, less gloriously but very well-organized.

For now, though, she is a girl abroad.   This sounds like a misspoken or misused pun, an oxymoron.   She is pretty but unmemorable, a girl abroad the summer before she goes away to the University of California in Irvine, where she will major in Russian and Soviet Studies.   In Leningrad, soon-to-be St. Petersburg (again) and in Moscow, Gorbachev talks about perestroika and glasnost.   Restructuring and openness.  

It’s late-night in Leningrad, the strange gray haziness of the White Nights enveloping a city already muted—made dull gray by passing centuries and utopian decay despite its one-time garish color, and she is going home from the wild Soviet circus, having said good-bye to the seven other summer language students at the metro station, the five Americans and two Danish girls.   Her home is somewhere in the Projects'”she couldn’t tell you where (she only travels underground, possessing no visual of the city’s layout)—in a hotel called “The Chaika,” which she thinks means The Seagull.   Wherever The Chaika is, the Projects seem endless, monolithic, and hopeless.   Soviet apartment buildings, ashy in color, patches of grass, shards of glass, garbage bins tipped'”none of the hidden grandeur of the inner city’s baroque past, its high-society-dinner-party days:   For Leningrad was obviously, ostentatiously, once beautiful and its beauty haunts everything.

Elizabeth rides the subway, the metro, staring at Russian people who ride trains at night.   She doesn’t hide her overt interest in their business.   While the trapeze and the tamed tigers and flashy sequins leave a powdery filmic dust in her mind and a buzzy sound in her ears, she is quickly mired in her immediate surroundings.   She looks from face to face, contemplates the clothes of Russians, the eyes of women and men.  The train empties gradually.

Elizabeth scrutinizes people, a habit she has only just begun but one that will persist until her death some sixty years later in New Haven, Connecticut.   On the one hand, Elizabeth will be called perceptive, which she’ll quickly learn isn’t the same as being called intelligent.   On the other hand, Elizabeth will be called presumptuous and arrogant.   But, gift or vice, Elizabeth Francis spends a lot of time trying to read the nuances of faces, the subtleties of gesture, the punctuation of silence, the layers of unspoken and spoken word, and the terrain of vocal pitch.

The questions are these:   Who can read the face?   And how open is it to being read?

And here it is, so clearly seen in the hazy gray of the White Nights in Leningrad, on the cusp of democratic revolution:   Elizabeth’s analogous Achilles’ Tendon, her weakness in the midst of strength, her hair like Samson waiting to be cut by the likes of a Delilah.   While she believes it wrong to judge the hearts of others, to second-guess motives and intentions, she is also aware of the aesthetic beauty and alarming—yes, alarming—majesty of noticing what is beneath the surface of things.   Elizabeth Francis will become a successful playwright because of this possibly reckless observation skill—her plays will be both profound and funny, smart and popular.   Some critics will rave; others will call her unabashedly vain.

That she would write for the theater is utterly unknown at this time, though.

The train stops, the doors open, and two middle-aged men with bulbous features and soft bodies stumble in, falling together on a seat already occupied by a youngish woman in a drab dress, once pink.   The bodies in her drab-dress lap startle her.   Hadn’t they seen that someone was sitting in this spot?   The movements stand out starkly in the overcast bleakness, like the minimalist tableau of an episode of “The Honeymooners” on black and white TV.   The men pay no attention to her presence and she pushes away as if assaulted or maybe goosed, jumping to her feet in surprise.   The woman is up and gone, banished to another corner of the train, and Elizabeth is wide-eyed and beguiled.   Elizabeth turns her eyes back to the two men and quickly forgets the woman.   She watches the two men.

Who are drunk.   They huddle together and one of them is crying.   Their attention is so fixed, so privatized, that anyone can safely stare at them and they don’t notice, which is good for voyeurs like Elizabeth.   Over and over again, one of them says in Russian, “Son of a bitch, son of a bitch.”   He is weeping and the other man has his arm around him.   They notice nothing.   The one holds the other.   The world around them is not present while one consoles, and the other weeps.     The intimacy between them is staggering, and Elizabeth finds herself holding her breath.

“Son of a bitch, son of a bitch.”   A whisper throughout the train.

She is transfixed.   Elizabeth is mesmerized by the solitude they have forged out in a metro on a hazy gray night.   Their huddling over one another’s bodies, wrapping themselves around the thing that makes the one cry.   The act of comforting.   The fierceness with which the one without tears attacks the angst of the one with them.

The brakes squeal and Elizabeth has to transfer to another train.   She doesn’t want to, but it’s late and she’s alone.   She stands, walks through the doors, and watches the train take off with the two men in each other’s arms.   They are gone.

Elizabeth will marry an intellectual, a thinker.   He will teach mathematics, understand thermodynamics, be a better cook than she ever will be.   Unlike her future husband, she is an average student and a weak debater.   She measures emotion.   He will be able to determine trends in human history, analyze philosophical arguments, and pull apart faulty assumptions.   She will decipher hidden agendas, predict human responses, and choose friends wisely.   Her husband will find this to be her single-most attractive feature, because—finally—here is a woman who understands a man.   But, for now, she is mere voyeur.

So Elizabeth stands, waiting for a train in the underground station, her mind working quickly in habitual perception, passing over holes in nylons and wrinkles around eyes.   She only waits on the platform for a few seconds.   When the door to her train opens, she steps in and sits across from a couple in their late thirties.   The three of them are the only ones in the car.   The couple doesn’t even glance at Elizabeth, who can pass through crowds without anyone noticing her at all.   Maybe another virtue; maybe, a vice.   People often don’t remember meeting her.   When she walks into department stores, she has to search for help.

The couple is quiet.   They sit next to each other, their bodies pressed together in serene silence.   A pastoral painting.   The woman has her eyes closed and she leans her head back against the window.   Her face is peaceful, and there is a hint of a smile across her thin bare lips.   The man looks at his calloused hands in his lap, turning them over quietly.  Man hands.   They look the way Russians look when they dress up and have no money.   The flowered dress and the brown overcoat, paupers, Russian Pygmalions, high cheekbones and clear complexions, his sharp jaw and her colorless hair'”passive and wounded beauty.   Elizabeth wonders if they are lovers, knowing they are.

The train stops, the doors open, a pause, the doors close, the train rolls forward.   The rhythmic movement disrupted by the jarring screech of brakes, of gears, of doors.   The woman keeps her eyes shut, maybe counting stops in her head.   The man continues looking at his man hands.   At maybe the seventh or eighth stop, the man quickly rises to his feet, dashes out the door, turns around suddenly, and stands there on the platform looking at the woman, who finally opens her eyes.   She stares at her lover—her face in suspended animation, a figure in intaglio relief.   The doors are about to close; everyone knows it.   The woman lifts her eyebrows and her face is still serene even in surprise.

Elizabeth again holds her breath.   The doors begin to close, the woman’s lips part as if she’ll speak.   The doors slowly glide together, and then, then, then just before they shut completely, the man steps back onto the train.   Behind him, the doors close triumphantly.   He smiles.   He doesn’t take his eyes off the woman.   He moves to a corner, leans against the wall, and stares at her serene face.

Elizabeth burns red.   She is embarrassed by her presence; she trembles because it’s so romantic, so lovely, so quiet, so noir.

The woman covers her mouth with her hands, reminding Elizabeth of a child, a little girl—and she begins to giggle.   Then the woman removes her hands from her face and throws her head back against the glass and laughs aloud.   A laughter that transforms her, abandoning the innocence of the concealed mouth, embracing vivaciousness and sexuality too.   She suddenly stands and walks over to the man in the corner and Elizabeth tries not to look.

But she can’t help it.

The couple embraces.   They kiss.   And Elizabeth just watches, pretending not to see.

The train stops and the man releases the woman.   His hands trail after him, towards her body, as he exits.   A touch of Degas.   This time, the doors come together and he’s gone.   The woman takes her seat again, closes her eyes, and smiles.

Elizabeth flushes.

A night at the circus.

Having just graduated from high school, Elizabeth speaks conversational Russian.   This gets her pretty far in her travels, but mostly she is still voyeur rather than eavesdropper.   It’s fine, because she’s far more interested in what isn’t said as opposed to what is.

When couples ride escalators in Russia, they face each other.   The man will step on first, the woman will follow, and then the man will turn around.   The escalators go down, and the couple is immobilized—locked in their own moment.   Children too.   A child will often sit on his mother’s lap stone-faced in some public place and then, without any warning, he’ll reach for his mother’s face and hold her cheeks in his hands with a crushing, unanticipated tenderness.   There is, at times, this virtual explosion of intimacy—intimacy between lovers, intimacy between parent and child.

Elizabeth, just a girl, will eventually have one child of her own.   Also a girl.   One thing that will strike her, slay her actually, is that when her little girl is three, she will want Elizabeth to rehearse aloud the details of her infancy.   Her daughter will say, “When I was a baby, did I cry for my mommy?   When I was a baby, did I wear pajamas with feet?   When I was a baby, did I want to sleep in bed with mommy and daddy?”   Elizabeth will answer each question till, at last, her daughter will move into her arms to be held like the baby she still will be.

Elizabeth has been in the Soviet Union for almost a month and she’s about to leave.   Her perceptions have not yet run dry, but—it’s true—one needs something by which to interpret them.   Still a voyeur, but a little wearied by her own inexperienced gaze.

So at the end of her trip, she wears shorts—which are taboo.     She feels like asserting her independence of taboos.   She’s only seventeen.

Elizabeth walks along Nevsky Prospect.   She heads over to Pushkin Theater, passing old men who fought in World War Two and still wear rusty old metals pinned onto jacket lapels.   She pushes through widows, soft bodies like babushka cliches.   The streets swell with impassive soldiers and young women with bad hair-dye jobs and crazy-colored stockings with seams down the back of legs, sexy and sad at the same time.   Leningrad is a tangle of tram wires overhead, elaborate architecture blanketed in brown haze and people who look exhausted.   Orange, blue, and yellow buildings crumble, hinting at the past splendor.   It’s a world of longing.

People stare at Elizabeth.   It’s the shorts.   Everyone stares at her shaved legs, too.

Elizabeth walks past the icon merchants, t-shirt sellers, and trinket peddlers.   She doesn’t really want to buy anything, but she asks how much things are, anyway.

A kid approaches her.   When he sees her pick up an icon, a wooden Mary, he steps in front of her.   In English, he asks, “Do you like it?”   His eyes do sparkle, despite his dusty countenance.

“Da,” she answers.   She puts it down and moves onto something else.

“You are American?”   The kid wears brown pants, a blue- and white-striped shirt.   He’s thirteen or fourteen.

“Da.”   She is American, and she feels American.   Though nondescript, plainly even, she’s a billboard here—all legs and white teeth.   A flare gun in her head:   Elizabeth is, however transitory, a romantic figure.

He steps in front of her, and then he walks backwards facing her.   “Why are you in Leningrad?”   He gives up on English and speaks in Russian.

“I’m studying at the University.   I’m leaving soon.”   She enjoys the attention, despite the annoying way he jumps around in front of her, getting in her way.

He holds a finger in the air, indicating she should wait for him for a second.   He runs off.   Gone.   She looks around, confused.   Then, in a flash, he returns with the icon she had been looking at.

“A present for you,” he says, opening up his hand as if he held a precious jewel.

“No,” she says.   “No,” she protests.   “I can’t take this.”   He pushes it towards her and she resists but it becomes very silly, so she takes it.   They walk together and she refuses to stop and examine anything, afraid he’ll give it to her.   He watches her carefully, calling out to old Russian men as they go, “She’s my American girlfriend.”   He turns to her, “I want to get you something else.”

“Nyet,” she says.   “I don’t want anything.”   She shakes her head, her hair whipping around her shoulders seductively and luxuriantly; she is suddenly rendered beautiful by the host of Russian male eyes.

Twice, he disappears.   He brings her a t-shirt, a Pepsi.   She begs him not to buy her anything.   Old men laugh as the kid dances before the American girl with shaved legs.

“How old are you?”   Elizabeth drinks the Pepsi.

“Sixteen.”   Not possible.

“What do you study in school?”

“Business.”

“Where did you get the money to buy me such nice things?”

“Business.”   The boy winks at her.   Then he says something with such rapidity that Elizabeth can’t catch it.   It’s either licentious or criminal.   He snickers, and Elizabeth snaps his picture.

They approach the area where the portrait artists congregate.   All at once, there’s a crowd of men surrounding Elizabeth and the boy; the artists are eager to paint her portrait.   She has hard currency and denim shorts.

“She’s my American girlfriend,” says the boy, possessively.

“I want to draw you,” one artist pleads.

“No, I’ll draw better,” says another, holding her hand.

“I’ll draw you and you don’t have to pay.”   This one looks straight into Elizabeth’s eyes.   He’s ruddy.   She notices.   He’s wearing a t-shirt with indecipherable English words written on it and dirty blue jeans.   He has sandy blonde hair and a few lines on his face.   A big smile.   “Please,” he says, softly.   He opens his palm to her, as if helping her out of a carriage.   She is Cinderella, Snow White.

It’s a strange moment, unaccompanied by any of the wry cynicism Elizabeth will eventually have.   Instead, she is charmed by his please, seduced by the lines on his face.   And he’s an artist!

Elizabeth knows she’ll have to pay.   The boy stands protectively at her side.   The artist and the woman stare into each other’s eyes, examining each other’s faces.   The boy is like a puppy at their heels.

While they are like a couple on an escalator.

“Please,” the man repeats.

Please.

So, Elizabeth—flattered, really—sits down on a chair and the man sits on a stool before his easel and begins to sketch.   She is a woman who can easily slip in and out of crowds, self-conscious under his eyes.   He smiles a lot.   He stares at her face—reading her, interpreting her, figuring her out.

The questions are these:   Who can read the face?   And how open is it to being read?

Elizabeth’s own future profession still obscure, she finds herself doing the same thing to him that he’s doing to her—reading, interpreting, figuring things out.   There is no paintbrush or palette in her hand, no pen or paper.   She is mere voyeur, mired in romanticism.

The boy stands behind the artist and gives her a thumbs-up when she looks at him.   The artist finishes, and Elizabeth is abruptly faced with his version.   It doesn’t look a thing like her.   There is no resemblance whatsoever.   She gives him a five-dollar bill anyway and he says, “I’m Roman.”

“I’m Elizabeth.”   They shake hands, and he holds onto hers.

“Come back in an hour and I’ll take you for dinner.”

Elizabeth smiles.   She hesitates.   A street artist named Roman is proposing dinner in a foreign land and this is a desired thing.

Roman smiles at her and again says, “Please.”

Elizabeth wonders what it would be like.   “Okay,” she says.   “In an hour.”

“In an hour,” he repeats.

Elizabeth turns to leave.   The boy runs after her.   “I’ll buy you ice-cream,” he says.

“Okay.”   She smiles down at him, amused.

As they eat ice cream in a dirty ice-cream parlor, an old man walks by and points his cane at her legs and delivers an angry speech.   The boy shoos him away.

“What did the man say?” Elizabeth asks, ignoring the cat that runs past with a rat in its mouth.

“Nothing,” says the boy, shaking his head.   Neechivo.

“Tell me.”   She squints at him.

“No,” he says, shaking his head some more.   “He didn’t say anything.”

It occurs to her that the old man called her a whore.

She eats her Soviet ice cream cone.   A vanilla ice cream with a chocolate exterior and a little yellow flower on top, which tastes of sweet cream.   Then, with the boy at her side, she goes to meet Roman, the street artist.

Who says, “I want to stop by my apartment.”   He packs up his stuff.

Elizabeth, Roman, and the boy hop in a cab together.   “Can’t you ask him to leave?”   Roman whispers to Elizabeth, as they squeeze into the backseat of the Soviet taxi.

“I’ve tried to get rid of him,” she lies, speaking softly.   “But he won’t go.’   And, turning to the boy, while Roman talks to the driver, she whispers, “Don’t go.”

In the cab, the artist and the boy speak rapidly to each other in Russian.   It sounds like arguing.   Roman doesn’t look at the boy; rather, he stares out the window.

To Elizabeth, he says, “You’re very pretty.”

“Thank you.”   She is a picture of demure naivete, even as her mind reels.

They arrive at his apartment and Roman turns to the boy.   “You wait here.”

They climb a narrow staircase in a decrepit building, somewhere.   She doesn’t know where.   On the second floor, Roman inserts his key and Elizabeth enters the apartment.   She’s uncomfortable, but she does it anyway.   She’ll force it, try it.   Others do it, do this.

When they enter the apartment, there’s an old woman in the kitchen.   She looks at Elizabeth the same way the old man at the ice cream parlor did.

“I rent a room from her,” Roman says.

She thinks I’m a whore, Elizabeth thinks.

Then, they enter Roman’s room.   He locks the door behind them.

Paintings and sketches cover the walls and Elizabeth pours over them.   He tells her he’s twenty-four, and he studied art at the University and he’s going to Florence, where he has friends.   Elizabeth looks at his room in the old lady’s house.   She looks at the drawings on the walls and the unmade bed with its linens strewn across the mattress.   He points to his sketches and her eyes linger on them and she looks back to the room.   It’s Raskalnikov’s room, she thinks.   The woman is probably a pawnbroker.

“They’re very good,” she says, referring to the sketches, but they aren’t.   They don’t really interest her.   She doesn’t even wish they did.   Now, she knows:   I can’t do it, she thinks.   She has to get out of here.   Romanticism run wild, perceptions just impressions, meanings made clear:   I can’t do this.

She walks to the window.   The boy is waiting for them across the street, looking up at the window with unwavering patience.

“The boy is waiting for us downstairs,” she says with little inflection in her voice.

“You don’t want to talk to kids like him,” he says, with surprise vehemence.   “He’s no good.   You can’t trust him.   I know kids like him.”   He mutters something else and Elizabeth catches the word thief.

“But he’s waiting for us,” as if that’s all that matters.

“We can tell him to leave.”

“We can do that,” she says, saying words and not meaning them.   Elizabeth’s eyes shift around the room.   She’s uneasy.   That old woman in the kitchen.   That locked door.   She can’t make love with a struggling artist.   She just can’t do it.

“We’ll tell him to leave—“   Roman heads towards the door.   He’s going to unlock it.

“Okay.”   She obediently follows him, no longer scrutinizing her surroundings.   She is bent on escape.

It seems like they gallop down the stairs.   Wild horses.   They exit the decrepit building and cross the street to the boy who keeps his eyes fixed on the second floor window, even as they approach him.   The man and the boy exchange harsh words.   The man wants the kid to leave.   The tension between them escalates.

“I have to go—“ Elizabeth interrupts.

The man and the boy stop.   They turn to Elizabeth.   They stare at her.

“There’s something I’ve forgotten to do—“ she says, looking confused.   “I just remembered—”   She steps back.   “I’m sorry.   I have to go.”

In an instant, she’s heading towards the metro.   Any metro will do.   She knows what’s beneath the ground, even if she’s not sure from up above, from this perspective.   The man and the boy follow.   All three of them move quickly, pushing through soldiers and widows.

“We’ll walk you to the metro,” says Roman.   “Let me give you my phone number.”   The boy at their heels.   “I can show you beautiful parts of Leningrad.   You won’t be sorry.”

“I’ll take you all the way to your metro station—” says the boy.

“I’ll pay for a taxi,” says Roman.   “I can meet you somewhere tomorrow.”

“No.   It’s all right.”   Elizabeth, moving down the street.   Roman, buying cherries from a vendor.   Elizabeth, refusing them.   The man and the boy eating the cherries together.

All three head into the metro station.   They head down the escalator.   Roman gets on the step below hers and turns to face her.   The boy is next to them.

Elizabeth stands face to face with this man.   His rugged face and his dirty blonde hair.   He smiles broadly.   In her arms, she holds a t-shirt, an icon, a portrait, and some cherries.   Their faces are so close.   Are they reading each other?

They ride as far as her station.   With her gifts cradled to her chest, she steps off the metro and turns to the artist and the boy.   They stand before her, waiting for the doors to close.   Their eyes are bright and expectant.   Elizabeth, possessing an unmemorable presence, says to the two of them, quickly, “Good-bye.”

What Elizabeth doesn’t know: She doesn’t know why the two men on the metro that circus night were so drunk, what drove them to drunken myopia.   In truth, the one had turned to the other after his child, his only child, had died of influenza.   She doesn’t know who the lovers on the train were, or what would become of them.   In truth, their relationship was illicit, though they eventually married.   They would, however, each have additional affairs—cheating on one another, as they had once done to previous spouses.   She doesn’t know why an artist named Roman would want to paint the likes of her, a seventeen-year-old girl given to gaping.   In truth, he wanted to paint Elizabeth because he thought her exceptionally beautiful.  He eventually did move to Florence to paint, but his art really wasn’t very good.

She doesn’t know, additionally, that she too will be regarded as an artist, at once called perceptive and presumptuous, forever begging questions.   Who can read the face?   And how open is it to being read?