And maybe she did, but knowing that does not make it any easier.

All I can think of is how I resented all the small things I had to do in the last few years – take her to never ending doctors’ appointments, cut her hair, cook buckwheat with onions, a taste from the kitchens of her two earlier lives, and watch her deteriorate before my eyes.  Her legs refused to walk, she would lament, her ears refused to hear.  How I resented that my husband and I couldn’t jump in the car and spend a weekend with friends in Shelter Island, that every trip had to be planned and thought through. Things that seem so small and ludicrously unimportant now seemed so monumental then.

She stoically endured my inattention, my total immersion into my own life, filling her days with reading mysteries, chopping vegetables for salad, and watching figure skating on a television channel from Moscow.  Orderly and determined to survive, she plodded on, just as she did in Ivanovo, just as she did in Leningrad.  She was always a survivor and she kept on living, as she used to say, for her two brothers killed in the war  – the one who died in their Ivanovo house in 1942, the other whose body had been plowed into the warm earth of western Russia when German tanks crossed the Soviet border with Poland in June of 1941.  She survived 98 years – thanks to her tenacity, my grandparents’ genes and good American medicine.  She was fortunate to have lived three lives, the last of which turned out to be my responsibility and my privilege.  I only hope she was happy.

“You can go to graduate school and get a Doctorate,” says Alan, and I think of the Russian Doctoral Degree, which I would never even dream of, which marked the top spot on the Olympus of Russian academia accessible only to the heads of major university departments, those professors whose office doors were never opened to reveal a live human being inside.

“With the amount of credits you took,” Alan adds, “you may already have a Doctorate.”  The other day he pored over the translated copy of my university diploma, five typed pages of the courses I took for six years after work, four times a week, two classes a night.  “I can’t believe the amount of hours you studied English,” he says.  “No wonder you can speak it.”  I’m not always sure I can speak or write it, but Alan’s voice is so tender and sincere, so loving that I decide to believe him.

I tell Alan of walking along the Neva embankment with my university friend Nina when classes ended at ten, of the gold cupola of St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the dark facades of the Admiralty and the Hermitage on the other side, grim and unglamorous at that hour of the night.  We walked over the Palace Bridge – the river strapped under the armor of ice for five months – leaning into the wind, talking about banned books, Tarkovsky’s films, and those who’d left the country.  “Anywhere out of here,” Nina said.  “I’d go anywhere.  Even to Patagonia.”  In our tight friendship, she was the one with the Jewish husband and hopes for immigrating to the West.  I had no such far-reaching plans: my biggest wish was to reunite with Boris from Kiev whom I met in the Crimea.  Four times a week, Nina and I walked and talked, trying to glimpse into the future – not the bright future that glared from the front page of Pravda but the real life lurking ahead of us, as impenetrable as a winter night in Leningrad.  So isn’t it ironic, I ask Alan, that she is still in Leningrad, huddling in one room with her husband and her son, and I’m the one molding my past into a job resume on the other side of the Atlantic?

It was the last day of the semester; I had thirty students to advise and register.  When I reached the hospital around 3 in the afternoon, my mother was just being admitted to the cardio unit.  “Congestive heart failure and probably a touch of pneumonia,” said Dr. Sharma, a soft-spoken woman in her 30s, whose badge identified her as a hospitalist.

My mother smiled when she saw me, relieved.  She looked small in the middle of the tangle of tubes, her gnarled fingers over the cover, like a small bird’s claws.  When did this all happen?  Did I miss the obvious signs of illness, the inevitable cues of aging?  Did I ignore her complaints of dizziness, her frequent refrain that her legs refused to walk?  Or was the deterioration so gradual, so insidiously slow that I simply did not notice it, like you don’t notice a rotting tooth until one day the pain stabs through your gum and the dentist tells you she has to pull the tooth because it is too late to save it.

Or maybe it was much more simple and ordinary.  I lived my life – teaching ESL classes, making soups, checking my daughter’s homework, walking the dog – a life where my mother, living downstairs in the basement apartment of my house, was nothing but a parenthesis.  In the morning I heard a vent go on in her bathroom; in the afternoon I heard a knife drumming on the cutting board as she chopped vegetables for salad.  Her Russian TV programs used to boom all the way up to my kitchen, until we bought her a pair of headphones.  Then I barely heard her at all.  As years passed, I talked to her less and less frequently.  Back in Leningrad, I used to have heated arguments with my mother, needing to defend my ground; here, with our roles reversed – with her living with me and not the other way around – I no longer had to assert myself.  In essence, I stopped talking to her about anything but the most trivial things: dinners, television news, birthday cards from our Russian family.

I come back home from the hospital and go down to the basement where a packed suitcase is still sitting on her bed.  What needs to happen to push us out of the rut, to break through our apathy?  What is the final crisis that makes people take to the streets to protest as they recently did in Moscow?  My mother, a mirror image of my far-away Motherland, makes me wonder if it is at all possible to slow down in order to notice important little things, if we are capable of gaining even a shred of insight into the fragility and impermanence of life.

Russians shamed me in their comments. My Motherland gave me a happy childhood and a good education, and now, by writing this essay, I’ve betrayed my country all over again.  This made me think of my Leningrad University Dean, the Communist leader of the University party cell, who used the same words to admonish me for marrying an American back in 1980.  One correspondent offered this explanation: “They are simply writhing at the idea that Russia is rising, and the U.S., in front of the entire world, is turning into shit.”  Another comment suggested that Putin’s lying isn’t really lying.  It is exactly the same as George W. Bush clearing underbrush at his Texas ranch.

As much as I detest watching George W. Bush, I have to say that it is not exactly the same.  U.S. journalists who uncover illegal actions by the government publish articles and books that unravel government officials’ careers.  Russian reporters who expose state corruption and fraud get harassed and murdered.

In their indignation, my former compatriots failed to see that my essay is not about Putin’s staged athletic feats.  It is about the sad state of democracy in Russia.  It is about President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin swapping posts in March in what will be called an election.  It is about soon-to-be-President-all-over-again-Putin’s fundamental lie, which seems to be condoned by many Russians and which is much more dangerous than “finding” an ancient jug in 6 feet of water.

Please check out my essay in the New York Times Magazine:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/magazine/from-russia-with-lies.html

After peering into the windows of several stores on a shopping street near the university, I finally see sneakers displayed on the wall in orderly rows.  The store is small, and a man behind the counter looks bored.  He springs into action when I ask him for sneakers, size seven and a half, vanishing into the back of the store, then reappearing with the pair I’ve selected.  He is cheerful and enthusiastic, his balding head gleaming under the neon light.  I don’t know why I chose sneakers with white and green stripes made of what looks like suede; maybe they reminded me of the shoes I once glimpsed in a magazine called England left open on my boss’s desk at the Leningrad House of Friendship and Peace.

The salesman points to a stool for me to sit and kneels, a sneaker in his palm like an offering.  Please, I plead silently, don’t try to put these shoes on my feet.  I’m not ready for this, having just arrived from a land that had no shoes at all.  Twenty-four years of nothing have warped me, and now I’m stupefied by all these choices, all this enthusiasm and kneeling.

The man takes hold of my foot and slides on the shoe.

I walk around the store, supple suede enveloping my feet.

“They look great!” exclaims the man, watching me turn in front of a store mirror.

I think so, too, but how do I ask him about the price?  When do customers ask salespeople here how much a product costs?  Should I have asked before he knelt in front of me, thus possibly preventing all this cheerful prancing around?

As soon as I take off the white and green sneakers, the man scoops them up and puts them back in the box.  “Terrific,” he cries out, another word I don’t know.  “So we’re all set here,” he says and heads toward the cash register.

I can no longer delay the agony.  “How much are they?” I ask.

He looks at the box label.  “Forty-four ninety-five.”

I open my Russian wallet, not big enough for dollar bills, and examine its contents.  One twenty, three fives, and a couple of singles.  I pour the bills onto the counter where the man is already writing out a receipt.  “This is all I have,” I force myself to utter.

The man stops writing and looks at me as if I’ve suddenly turned into Grishka, a drunk with a battered face who used to sleep under my Leningrad courtyard archway.  He picks up the bills and counts them, already knowing that it is eight dollars less than the amount on the box.  There is annoyance in his eyes, but also suspicion.

“Don’t you have a credit card?” he asks curtly.

I don’t know what he’s talking about.

“Visa?” he says and peers from above his glasses.

“I have a visa,” I assure him.  “I am a resident alien,” I say and pull out my green card.

The man throws up his hands in frustration, probably lamenting the moment he kneeled before me, his balding head glistening with drops of sweat.  I feel guilty for entering this place, for sauntering before a mirror in sneakers I couldn’t afford.

“Take them,” sputters the man, nodding toward the box.  “And go,” he adds and waves me out of his store.

The Festival has attracted stellar talent, which seems so plentiful in Ireland.  Every reader and workshop leader has so many gifts that anyone born elsewhere feels instantly inferior.  Pauline McLynn, who has appeared in numerous film, television and stage roles, has also written several novels.  Peter Sheridan, a writer and playwright, is also an actor and director, whose short film, The Breakfast, won several European awards.  Conor O’Clery, a reporter for the Irish Times for over 30 years, is the author of several books and was Journalist of the Year in Ireland twice.  They read from Joyce and Beckett and their own many books, their versatile talents making me feel tiny among them.

The Festival’s extraordinary program was put together by Denyse Woods, herself the author of five novels.  For the seven days of the Festival, she rushed and directed and forgot to eat meals, crunching on chips at midnight when entertaining yet another evening speaker at a pub.  Denyse brought together a constellation of names whom we should know better on this side of the pond: Hisham Matar, whose first novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize; Gillian Slovo, President of English PEN and the author of twelve novels and a best-selling memoir; David Mitchell, the recipient of every possible prize, it seems, although he looks way too young for so many awards; Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse; Lynn Truss, who wrote Eats, Shoots and Leaves; Michael Holroyd, an outstanding memoirist and biographer who is also president of the Royal Society of Literature, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, “one of the truly mythical heroes of travel writing,” according to the Irish Times – the names that don’t even begin to paint the whole picture of the artistic heft of this festival.  And, of course, there is Jeremy Irons, or rather, his castle, which dominates the southwestern bay coast: a tall tower painted peach (restored to its original color) erected in the Middle Ages, surrounded by a stone wall with a massive gate.

On the day of our departure, the clouds parted and the sun shone through the waters of the bay, making them turquoise, illuminating the seaweed on the bottom several meters deep.  We drove to Cork airport past herds of milk cows and the wooly balls of unfleeced sheep, past tiny towns with row houses painted in red, purple and yellow, dominated by churches and pubs.  It started to drizzle, the typical soft Irish rain that fell several times every day – a good sign for a departure, as if someone above were sad that we were leaving.

In the evening, we sit in the kitchen and drink sweet cocktails called toasted almond.  Millie likes sweets as much as I do, as much as any Russian does, and she beams with pride when I say that she’s Russian at heart.  “My grandparents were Russian, you know,” she says and toasts me with her glass.  The drink is thick and delicious; it is made with heavy cream and two liqueurs I’d only seen once in a foreign-currency store in Leningrad when I worked as a tour guide, Amaretto and Kalua.

We don’t talk about Robert.  Just as with my mother, I don’t discuss Robert with my mother-in-law.  I tell her about life in Russia, so different from life here that there is never a dry spell in our conversation.  Kalua and Amaretto?  They are not available.  Heavy cream?  I saw it once in a café in Moscow.  Drinking?  Not the way we’re sipping a cocktail here.  Half a liter of vodka for every two guests; if you open a bottle, you must finish it; pickle marinade in the morning for the hangover – those unwritten rules we all learned from childhood.  Marriage?  At twenty four a woman is considered old, a spinster.  Men?  On March 8, International Women’s Day, men bring flowers, then watch television all night as women whip up holiday dinner in the kitchen between serving them drinks.  Children?  Most couples don’t have more than one; food lines, full-time jobs and misogynist husbands vaccinate women against motherhood.  The only available contraceptive is abortion performed without an anesthetic; you have to bribe the doctor to get one.  Millie shakes her head, and I know she thinks I’m making this up to entertain her.  Women’s rights?  She asks and now I’m the one shaking my head because I’m not sure if I don’t know the answer or simply don’t understand the question.

After my daughter was born, my mother retired from teaching anatomy and moved to New Jersey where I took her to my doctor, Dr. K.  He didn’t think that being in her 70s was a good enough reason to write her off the roster of life.  He has been treating my mother for 23 years, bringing her blood pressure down to 120/70, better than mine.  A few days ago, when we were driving to her monthly appointment, the office called my cell to warn us that the elevator was out of order.  “We can reschedule and come back next week,” I said, looking for a place to make a U-turn.  “No,” said my mother in her old, resolute voice – the voice that made her students quiver, the voice that didn’t usually put me in touch with pleasant memories.  “Ya podnimus’ – I’ll walk up.”

It was the 3^rd floor, not the 5^th, but she climbed the stairs just as she did back in Leningrad 25 years earlier, slowly but deliberately, resting on the landings.  Her blood pressure, when the nurse checked it, was 136/80.  A few minutes later Dr K. came and stooped over the report of her echocardiogram he’d ordered a month earlier because he’d heard a faint heart murmur.

“Left valve weakness consistent with atrial fibrillation,” he read, pinching his glasses up his nose, “moderate aortic blockage.  65 percent heart efficiency, which is excellent for someone her age.”  Her age now was 97, decades older than any of her siblings or friends back in Russia.  Her younger brother died of stroke 15 years ago; her medical school colleagues all lay in cemeteries, with Baltic snow and wind slowly erasing their pictures from their headstones.  Her former students – those still alive – rarely left their apartments, terrified of icy roads or ankle-deep puddles, counting the rubles to buy half a kilo of buckwheat with what was left of their state pension, losing teeth and memory.  We’ve seen Dr. K. age, too, his hair retreating, his sons graduating from business schools and already, according to his stories, earning more than their father.  Our doctor liked to tell stories.  We knew about his trip to a small town in the Ukraine to meet the cousin he’d never seen before; about yellow fever in 19^th century New Orleans; about the young Dr. K dropping a bag with bones from his medical school onto a Buffalo sidewalk half a century ago, then flunking his first anatomy exam.  From my mother’s narrowed eyes I knew she didn’t like that story.  Had he been her student, she would have failed him too for such inexcusable carelessness.

He stood by the counter with my mother’s weighty chart, tall and graying, and recited the findings as if we were a medical symposium ready to offer our position on the treatment.  “I think she should see a cardiologist,” he said finally.  “I’d like to hear his opinion.”

Over the past 23 years my mother has seen a cardiologist, Dr. Sorvino, several times.  He has tapped on her chest, pressed the stethoscope to her ribs, made her blow into a cone, and performed every possible cardiology test, big and small.  I imagined taking my mother to his office again, an everlasting patient with few words of English, sporting new accoutrements of dentures and a cane.  I tried to imagine Dr. Sorvino now: a snowy helmet of hair, an efficient shuffle, age spots dotting his hands.  What could he possibly recommend?  A heart surgery at 97 to correct the left-valve deficiency?

I looked at my mother sitting in a chair, a mother who’d survived three husbands, two wars, and a psychopathic motherland – cruel, self-aggrandizing and unremorseful.  Her body has shriveled to 112 pounds, her face was a sea of wrinkles, but her eyes still gleamed like blue gems out of folds of loose skin.

“She just climbed up three flights of stairs,” I said.  “Does she really need to see a cardiologist?”

Silent for a moment, Dr. K. tapped his pen on the echogram report.  I knew he wanted to be safe; he was an internist, not a cardiologist.  I knew he’d lengthened my mother’s life by decades by treating her free of charge before she became a U.S. citizen, by arranging her breast cancer surgery with a fellow physician who owed him a favor, by putting her on hypertension medication not available in Russia.  I knew I would do whatever Dr. K. thought was necessary.

He stopped tapping his pen and turned to my mother.  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Goot,” said my mother, who still remembered a little German from the time when she was a surgeon at a front-line hospital during the war and who now mixed it with the little English she has been able to learn.  “Feeling goot,” she said and smiled.

Even in this country, where freedom of speech is written into the Constitution, several correspondents expressed their concern about stealth censorship when “libraries and schools bow to small activist groups and second-guess themselves.”  This kind of censorship is often done under the guise of protection – from the offensive language, controversial ideas, or unsettling themes.  We’ve been repeatedly protected from the works of Mark Twain, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and most recently, Mark Twain again.

One comment came from Russia.  “Probably it is the censors who should be blamed for the lack of moral scruples in Russia today,” the correspondent wrote.  “People were deprived of the words of truth, of the insights of artists, of the talent…  This is what censorship is about.”  What a fascinating and frightening thought: 70 years of totalitarian oppression – of censorship – has changed the people’s mindset and, as a result, the moral face of the entire nation.  It is true: the Russia of today is an immoral place.  Corruption and graft have sprouted through every level of the government, reaching down to each individual, like the tendrils of a poisonous plant.  As J.M. Coetzee observed, “People do not become better human beings by being degraded and oppressed.”  For 70 years, Soviet censors degraded and oppressed us, and this tragic legacy will forever stamp their guilt on the soul of our country.