Read Online Russian Tattoo by Elena Gorokhova - Free Book Online Page A

supportive wife. Which role should I now play? Since Robert wasn’t in my class in the Leningrad Russian Program, I don’t even know how good his Russian reading is. But then I don’t know most things about Robert.
    He turns the pages and stops at a scene in Act 2. “This work is without poetry, without thought,” he reads Irina’s words. “My dear God, I dream of Moscow every night; I’ve almost lost my mind.”
    â€œI’ve almost lost my mind,” I repeat to accentuate the palatalized consonants but also to add the drama and urgency missing from his voice. “We will be in Moscow,” I continue, jumping to the next scene.
    â€œIn Moscow,” repeats Robert, trying to flatten his tongue against the roof of his mouth, as Nina taught him last summer in her phonetics class.
    â€œSofter,” I say, “softer. And the stress is on the end, like in the word toska ,” a word I think of but don’t translate for him.
    This is what gnaws at the three sisters all the time, even when their cheerful military friends come calling with stories about their past, cherished life in Moscow. The sisters wallow in toska , wearing black dresses, loving inappropriately, and cowering before a new sister-in-law who blossoms from a shy philistine to a full-fledged bully by the time the sisters realize that there is no escape. How could the provincial town where they live, a place with one school and one post office and no one to talk to, compare to the culture and splendor of the city they left behind?
    Toska , I say so that Robert hears how the o sounds like an a because the stress falls on the end of the word.
    â€œDefinition of toska ?” Robert asks, ready to file the meaning into a compartment of his scientific brain.
    If I could recite the definition of toska , in English or Russian, there would probably be no Chekhov or The Three Sisters, or the entire pantheon of Russian literature Robert is so keen on deciphering. It is a paradox, really: for him to understand Russian literature, he needs to know the definition of toska , while it is precisely trying to shoehorn toska into a definition that guarantees the failure of that understanding.
    Toska is a combination of melancholy and longing, I say. It’s a deep sadness and the awareness that something has been lost. It’s what you find in every Russian book published before 1917, I explain, the year when melancholy and sadness were outlawed in favor of general optimism and enthusiasm for our bright future. But there are also other ingredients in toska for which I don’t have words, things submerged deeply under the layers of silt on the soft bottom of the Russian soul.
    What does Robert think of me? I can’t read much behind his thick-lens glasses, behind his all-day absence at the university doing research that is as dark to me as the cosmic matter he is studying. Should I sit in on a freshman class he teaches and try to understand his personality along with the basics of college math? Or maybe I should buy some real beer, catch Sagar off guard one evening, and ask him for any insight on his roommate he can offer?
    I know one thing about Robert: he doesn’t seem to need people. He spent a year in Afghanistan on his own, without human contact, if you don’t count a local doctor who wanted to inject him with a rusty syringe when he was bitten by a scorpion. Robert seems to treat people the same way he wants to be treated himself: he leaves them alone. In our first week in Princeton, he invited two high school friends to his mother’s house, a small gathering Millie and I planned together. Half an hour after they arrived Robert disappeared—a grave offense at any Russian party, leaving before the guests get tipsy enough to forget about the host. I went up and down the stairs, looking in every room of the house, until I found him on the third floor sitting under the rafters in a rocking chair,