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

thinking. I don’t remember what I said—what could I possibly say, still in a fog of jet lag and culture shock? He just sat there, rocking slightly, legs crossed, glasses in his lap. I thought frantically of what I was going to tell his friends downstairs. I thought that if I were in their place I would leave and never see him again.
    I probably said something like “Your friends are downstairs to see you. Why are you here, in the attic?”
    â€œBecause they bore me,” Robert probably answered.
    â€œBut you invited them,” I said, and he simply shrugged, going back inside his head, where more exciting things were happening.

    Back in Leningrad, Robert had seemed as mysterious as the world he came from. He was a writer with a published novel, a violin player, a lover of the Russian language. He was also a physicist who understood cosmic laws, which made him as enigmatic as the world he had invented on the page. Robert had met Sakharov on his previous trip to Moscow. He’d read more Russian classics in the original than any neighbor I knew in our apartment building. But my knees had never gone weak when I looked at him. So I felt guilty when, a week after I tutored him in Chekhov, he tried to resuscitate our nonexisting chemistry by filling a bathtub with pine-smelling, bubbly water and inviting me to join him. The whole room smelled of spruce, and it made me think of our New Year in Leningrad—a white sheet of fake snow under a three-foot scrawny tree, a bottle of sweet champagne called Sovietskoye, and the midnight glow of a television that softened my mother’s face and made everything seem right. The Austin tub was too small for two people, Robert and I splashing awkwardly, soaking the bathroom mat with water.
    I thought of my gut melting when Boris from Kiev rolled up a blanket and we climbed into the mountains in the Crimea during one month we spent on a remote Black Sea beach. Boris’s eyes were so blue that a silly smile stretched across my lips every time he looked in my direction. He had a cinnamon tan and hair bleached by the sun to peroxide white, and I felt happy standing on a cliff, watching his body through the green prism of water shimmering along the rocks as he hunted for crabs. It was simple being with Boris, as uncomplicated as elbowing in line for tomatoes at a local store, as basic as living on the beach.
    I thought of Robert’s former girlfriend’s apartment in Manhattan, where we spent a night just a month ago. The former girlfriend and her husband both worked for some American corporations, so we saw them only late that night, when we came back after walking up and down the city. Robert and I slept on the living room floor, turned away from each other, pretending we didn’t hear the former girlfriend and her husband’s lovemaking behind a thin wall only ten feet away.
    I felt guilty for not being more attracted to Robert, for not loving him with every nerve ending of my body, the same way I loved Boris. By the time the water in the bathtub cooled, I felt guilty for saying farewell to Boris on a slushy Leningrad street, for abandoning my mother and sister, for leaving behind the curved façades and lace ironwork of Leningrad. I felt guilty for leaving my father lying in the cemetery on the other side of the Neva under the snow and rain, with Baltic winds slowly erasing his picture from the headstone. By the time I climbed out and dried off, I felt so guilty that the only right thing to do seemed to be to pack my sundress and my sandals and get on the first flight back home.
    The truth was I didn’t even know what awaited me back home if I decided to return. What if Boris had been right when he tried, just before my scheduled wedding with Robert, to convince me not to leave the country? He ignored his Kiev engineering duties and rushed all the way to Leningrad to tell me I was making a terrible mistake. “You’d be marked,” he