impressions of an expat

not any more

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 10:58:00 +0000

The store is not open yet. A truck is parked on the sidewalk outside. Men with armloads of flowers are shoving through the doors, half-sliding across the muddy tiles. I jump in between them and stand with my hands in my pockets. The room stinks of roses and lilies, like cheap perfume. Women in sweaters wear long faces. I try to get their attention. They ignore me, walking in and out of little rooms, their hands empty.

At one point, an old woman wearing half-glasses asks me what I want. I point at some yellow flowers that are not peonies, but something like peonies. Then some purple ones. Four and three, I say. She wraps them in silence, in simple paper. I pay her and she gives me the wrong change - too much. I give it back and her eyebrows are raised. Her face lights up a little. I tell her it will be a long day. I tell her it smells wonderful in the little store.

Walking through the frozen park, passing playgrounds submerged in dirty snow I think of Misha's gift, the crystal plate for chocolate cakes. I think of my friends in jackets in my old kitchen on 1st Street, throwing back shots of cognac before nine in the morning and then taking the cab down to city hall.

No, that was someone else's life.

I am not the man that got married on Valentine's Day. Not any more.

Inside, I pull my boots off quietly. I slide into bed next to N, kiss her ears.

She moves.

"Happy Valentine's Day." I whisper to her.

She smiles, her eyes still closed.

The paper rustles.

She reaches, squeezing the little bouquet.

Somehow it falls off the side of the bed.

"Oy!" She says, suddenly awake, reaching for them, pulling them carefully back to her pillow.

I make some home fries, scrambled eggs. The patter of the shower, and N brushing her teeth are the only sounds. The flowers are in a vase now, in the center of the kitchen table.

The day passes in silence. I work without listening to music, taking breaks to cube some fresh pumpkin and start it roasting slowly in the oven. Squeezing fresh lemons and blood oranges, I cook down half of the juice with some Russian honey. Mixing them together, they go into the freezer in a metal bowl. It will be sorbet in a few hours. I make a mound of semolina flour on the kitchen table, crack eggs in the center, add a splash of good olive oil and knead the dough. The house smells warm.

I get E from school. She has a message scribbled on a heart to show me. We sit at the kitchen table, as I roll out the pasta into crooked sheets, cutting them into squares. She drops tiny spoonfuls of the pumpkin in their centers, sticking her finger in her mouth to taste them. A plate fills with the tortellini, their points looking like funny hats.

This is what I will remember next year.

(we are all) mothers of invention

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:55:00 +0000

A mother by invention, I took care of N for a week, then E after they both got sick. It felt comfortable, natural. The rhythm of bowls of soup and tissues, finding a new movie to watch, an extra blanket during a nap. It is dead cold out there, -32C today. Waking up in the hard air, I remember moments from my childhood on the farm. The downstairs toilet was always frozen over, and we would pee in it, trying to melt the layer of ice at the bottom. Under ski masks, inside metallic snowsuits we plodded down the driveway for a quarter of a mile to wait for the school bus in the dim light. We were the first ones on, and the last ones off.

Coming home from school, I would lay down in one of the fields, dry stalks of wheat poking through the heavy snow. I would build tiny amusement parks for the mice to play in. A slide. A go-kart track. A swimming pool.

I am working on a book that touches on some of this. The story about building worlds in the snow, Wild Asparagus is deeply personal. At the end, I jump from the dinner table and run outside, convinced someone is calling my name but no one is there. Just the mountains, an empty tire swing and the dogs. I crouch down in that tall grass and hide. I don't want to go back inside.

In the beginning, I thought being a writer was a bit like playing god - deciding people's fates, orchestrating each path, making it rain, making them fight. I watch E spending an entire day coming up with names for the girls in her stories. This is the initial thrill, the exhilaration of being able to control something. Eventually, we learn that humility is the final destination. Listening to the characters, instead of telling them what to do. It sounds so simple now, but it took me years to embrace.

Somehow, I had to surrender to the stories.

Every time I pass a garbage can that is on fire here, every time I open a box of eggs in the market to find half of them broken I have a choice to make. No one is watching. No one seems to care. It all adds up to a moment of surrender, or choosing - inventing. There is no controlling anything here. There is no fresh pen, no empty piece of paper. It may read like a story, but it isn't one.

No, we have to invent our happiness.

papina dochka

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:21:00 +0000

A fat little lady breathes very loud. Her nose a long hook, her sweater ill-fit she stares at our documents, flipping the edges of pages with a yellow fingernail. There are ones in English, photocopied and notarized translations, a forest of papers spread across her little desk. E is squeezed next to me. N is explaining things, shushing me when I try to interject. I am not helping. At one point the woman shrugs her shoulders and stalks off.

We are ushered into a large office, then sit at a long table. Two more women are there, their long blonde hair in elaborate upsweeps. Costume jewelry, brightly colored sweaters, ballpoint pens resting next to books with tiny notes on them they ask E questions like her birthday, or counting to ten. They ask her a subtraction question that she gets wrong, then right. I try to breathe. I stare at the blank yellow walls, smell the musty textbooks.

They are happy to accept her. In a few moments they understand everything about her mother and our situation. Smiling blandly at me, I see they sympathize enough to accept the bizarre pile of documents we offered. They could be difficult, but chose not to be. The profound absence of her Russian mother, the overt love of papers with the right stamp on them, the orders to wait in lines for additional pages and stamps has evaporated. Today we dodged a bullet.

This is where E will start school next year. There are mosaics on the walls, clusters of noisy children, tall windows that look out onto a snow-covered playground. E looks up at me after she answers each question.
"Papina dotchka." One of the women says.
Literally, father's daughter, a little girl raised by a single dad.

Outside we jump around on the icy sidewalk. It is -25 celsius and we half-run to the car. Sitting inside, we try to decide what to do. It is almost three in the afternoon. There is a wall of traffic on Kutuzovsky. I say if we go to rinok for five minutes I can buy everything we need for a shrimp risotto. E claps her her hands. N smiles.

We tromp through the slippery lanes, all holding hands. We buy arborio rice from three dark-haired men who keep asking if I am Turkish. I am sure they are overcharging us. We buy extra things like fresh goat's cheese from my favorite lady. Her gold teeth shine in the dim light as I greet her, boasting about my little entourage. We buy fresh bread and pastries. E is already eating hers as we leave.

Driving home with the radio on, the music splashing around the tiny car I begin to relax. E is in the best school we could find in the district. It may be a lion's den. It may be a haven. There is no way to know until next September, but at least we chose it.

the honey badger and the hare krishnas

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 11:51:00 +0000

The afternoon sun bangs off the frozen river. E is with her mother now, for a handful of hours.

She cried before she left, her half-built lego restaurant on the coffee table. E stood up, her movements stiff and awkward. Walking like a tiny robot, she came to my chair and pulled herself onto my lap. I was still waking up, a cold cup of coffee next to my hands. She slumped against me.

"I don't want to go to Mom's house." She tells me under her breath.

"I know." I say, instinctively.

She lets out a long sigh.

"But it's only for part of one day a week now." I tell her.

She nods, her chin trembling.

"And you need to go and take care of the cats." I add. "They miss you."

She looks up at me.

"You have to teach them English." I say.

She cries some more.

I hold her for some time, watching two plumes of smoke curling into the cold sky.

"Life." She says. "Life is a thing."

"Yes it is, kiddo," I tell her. "Yes it is."

We take the elevator downstairs, and she is jumpy. Two nights before she had a terrible dream that we were separated. She was in an elevator. Before I could follow her inside, the doors closed and she never saw me again. She woke up at three, and it took almost two hours to get her back to sleep. She clung to my arms long after she began to snore. Even in sleep, she would not let go easily.

It is bitter cold. My breath freezes inside my mouth. I walk fast, my hands curled up, shoved deep in my pockets. I cross a bridge and the frozen river. I think of E's life, and how she wakes up each day wondering where she will sleep, and who will take her from school. I think of how her mother constantly lies to her, fabricating elaborate excuses for living half a mile from us and leaving her with me after she plans to take her for three nights, then two, then one, then none. She does not call for days, pretending it is all so normal.

The cobblestones are noisy under my heels. Old Arbat is a tourist alley where no cars can drive. It reminds me of Astor Place with the graffitied bricks, with the students laughing and jumping around in sloppy groups. It has been overrun with coffee chains and sneaker stores just like my old neighborhood in New York, a new one every few weeks it seems.

In the distance, a line of people are dancing. I hear a harmonium, and finger cymbals. It is the Hare Krishnas, twisting in a ragged unison. Their faces are painted. They wear white sheets over jackets and sweatpants. The song is beautiful, slicing into the cold air.

I stand for a moment as they pass. The music is soaring, their voices raised, hands held high. My eyes are wet from blinking. I feel myself crying for almost a minute, the last look on E's face behind the car window swelling up inside me. I think of when she was born, and how she has grown to be so very brave.

The music is fading. I dry my face with the edge of a scarf N bought for me. I need to go buy a music book for E's guitar class.

I am almost there.

nice to meet you (and the vinegar kick)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:00:00 +0000

One and one has become two. Two years. Two people. One life. One bed. One kitchen. Four guitars. Bags of mismatched socks. Plates of foreign coins. A tiny pair of wooden shoes hanging from a nail in the wall. A jar of wine corks.

There are three toothbrushes next to the bathroom sink.

Staring down the lens of memory, the chain of events is still impossible. Me, sitting on a plane to New York to get a new visa. The woman next to me with a hawkish nose and a pile of magazines says nothing for the first nine hours of the flight. Before we land, they hand out immigration forms. She is nervous, and asks my help. In broken English and my terrible Russian I talk her through the questions, suggesting the safest answers. She is thanking me, asking me where she should eat, where her French boyfriend should take her. I give a few names, places that hold countless memories for me. The Italian place I ate lunch at every day of the Fellini festival when it was clear he was going to die.

She takes my information, sees E's picture on my phone. This was back when I was too scared and embarrassed to tell the truth of our situation. She has a daughter too, a bit older. I explain things in crude sentences. She stares at me, suddenly knowing everything before I say it.

A month later, I am living in a two room apartment with a kitten. The chance of keeping E overnight is rare, the blackmailing and police calls are only getting started. The woman contacts me, thanks me for sending them to such great places. She asks about E, about everything.

She tells me there is someone she wants me to meet, an old friend that speaks excellent English. I have very little money, but the thought of entertaining, of cooking for a stranger and a new friend with children running around is overwhelming. We agree on the day - Saturday, January 23. I clean the house, the little cat chasing me from room to room. E helps me, soaking the savoiardi in a dish of espresso. All at once the phone rings and she is asking for directions, and I do not realize her English is suddenly better, and that it is her friend on the phone. I am speaking fast, my hands caked with flour, describing landmarks to turn at. There are never signs here.

And then the they are ringing the doorbell, and I have no place to hang their coats. There is a forest of boots in the entrance. And N is standing, fixing a belt, adjusting her black sweater, instinctually moving her hair around even if there is no mirror. And she sees me, in an old pair of jeans, barefoot, unshaved. I am wiping my hands on a dishtowel. I take hers, shaking it gently.

"Ochin priadna." I tell her.
"Nice to meet you." She replies, her eyes as big as quarters.

I made us some eggs a few days ago, a mess of homefries and bacon. I splashed tabasco on my side of the dish.
N looks at me, twisting her mouth.
"What." I say, sipping coffee.
She tastes my side.
"Mmm." She says. "Why don't you give me some tabasco?"
I am lost.
"I thought you don't like things that are so spicy." I say.
"It's not so spicy." She replies.
She makes that little smile, that half-sigh, half-laugh.
"So now you like tabasco?" I ask.
"I always did." She says.
I roll my eyes. I look at this beautiful woman in her loose bathrobe, her hand on her knee, her foot resting against my ankle. I close my eyes, breathing in the scent of cold juice, the salt, the vinegar kick. That's what the good times smell like, I tell myself.

the taste of falling ice

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 09:40:00 +0000

"Translate!" She orders E, who cowers in her chair.
E mumbles something to me, saying she will just tell me later.
Mothers and children stare at us, as I sigh slowly, loudly. This foul-smelling, fat little woman is piling up insults and accusations that I almost understand. After she turned her music theory class into a grabby, lukewarm school play for a month I stopped bringing E. This woman made her cry too much.

After the holidays trickle into the empty, cold weeks of January I decide to come back one last time. I believe she will really teach E something, that somehow the rough edges will be worn down by a few weeks absence, that we will be welcomed back with jokes and smiles.

I stare at the back of E's head, and the crooked ponytail I twisted her long hair into. I can't listen to this woman any more. I remember last Spring and how a family of cockroaches were crawling across the walls of this same room. They would advance past the old posters on the walls, and then drop - one right on my head. I swat it away. No one says anything. E jumps in her chair. The teacher does not say a thing. A minute later, another one falls - right on my head again. The class is half over, but I stand up with E in one movement, her workbooks and pencils and flash cards a mess in my arms. The teacher raises an eyebrow, as if we are being foolish.
"Tarakan." I say, as we leave. "Ochin mnoga tarakan."
I close the door a bit louder than I intended.
E looks up at me in the dark corridor.
"Just tell me I said there are a lot of cockroaches in there." I say.
She nods yes.

I argue with myself. This is a conservatory, not a playground. They take things very seriously here. This is not playtime. I think back to college, and the electric crackle of art school. There were endless critiques and evaluations. Quadruple secret probation for some. It was exciting because it was difficult, yet remotely possible to do something, to make something. Each teacher was tougher than the next, but they all cared in some way. They all wanted you to succeed. They were not cruel for the sake of cruelty, or some sort of masochism. They were tough to the edge of damage, and then they sent you home with a sense of accomplishment - that you had done your absolute best.

I wonder if this is something a six year old can benefit from. With guitar, it works fine. But that is a different teacher. She plays until her fingers hurt, for herself, for him.

That's not playtime.

The teacher is laying into E now, while the other children pick their noses and rest their heads on the tables about to fall asleep. She criticizes E's pencil, her eraser, the bent corners of the pages in her workbook. She is trying to get the children to write down the notes she is playing on the piano - their first lesson in dictation. E is right as far as the first two notes. I see her making a mistake with the next ones. I rest my hand on her shoulder, and tell her to think again about them. The teacher is jumping from her chair, spit flying from her mouth.
"Don't tell her the answer." She says.
"Nyet." I reply, calmly. "Tolka gavarit ne pravilna." (No, I only told her she was mistaken.)
The mothers in the room are drinking it all in. I see them constantly whispering answers to their children, competing vicariously to get perfect marks from the teacher's red pen.
The teacher is stabbing at E's notebook, tearing through the page with the eraser.
"Wrong." She tells her. "This is what happens when you miss class for a month."

I stare at her, angrily. There is a terrible taste in my mouth, like when I know something is going to happen no matter how much I try to avoid it. I think to remind her that messy rehearsals for a pathetic little play are not music dictation. I think to tell her that E already had a play in her kindergarden, that she sang loud and beautifully, that she danced, that she laughed.

E is shrinking into her chair.
A tear slides down one cheek.
"Stop crying." The teacher barks at her.
I know this is exactly what E's mother does when she cries - this Soviet answer to behavior, to reject it. Of course E does not stop. The teacher launches into her. I breathe in and let the breath out as loud as possible - the air whistling past my lips. I shake my head to myself. Of course, my impulse is to grab E and slip out the door like last Spring. But that would be like an admission of guilt, a confusing message of surrender. I am caught between protecting my child, saving face as an American and setting an example for seeing things through.

I try to teach E that we are not quitters.

The teacher goes into one of her fifteen minute stories about how some special child became a professional musician. No one listens. Children are drawing pictures on the corners of their pages. Mothers are resting their cheeks on the cold desks. One is even snoring. I close E's books, organize the flash cards. I want her to know class is over, and the worst part is behind us. Her story ends with some kind of parable. No one cares. Books are slapped closed. Everyone leaves.

In the hallway, I try to talk to one mother - a dancer with pockmarked skin. I tell her in crude phrases that this teacher thinks she is helping by being so cruel, but it just makes E sad. She tells me to ignore this woman, to see things abstractly. I tell her E cries in the class not because she is right or wrong, but because this teacher talks like E's mother - triggering something in her personal life that has nothing to do with chords and intervals. The ballerina mother nods, understanding. This rarely happens to me here - being understood by an acquaintance. If this teacher listened to me and understood her mother says "don't cry" on the rare night when E is in her house, then sends her to bed with no dinner, she would not say such things in the class. I have tried to explain all of this to her, but she brushes me away. She will not listen to anyone criticize a Russian, especially a mother. Even a mother she has never met.

We walk slowly in the street. The cars are thundering past us, spritzing the parked cars with handfuls of dirty slush. I smell something terrible - like dishwashing liquid that has been lit on fire. E squeezes my hand as we creep across the icy sidewalk. She tells me something but I cannot hear her. I lead us to the the string of courtyards that run behind the buildings. We will walk behind them on the way back to kindergarden.

Navigating between the brackish mud puddles and slush, we hear a massive thud. Workers are freeing giant sheets of ice from the roof. It falls in massive pieces. A cluster of Tajiks in orange jumpsuits wave at us to stop. I am not in the mood to stand with ice dropping from hundreds of feet above us. I lead E across the courtyard through mounds of fresh snow, weaving between a half-hidden playground and a low fence. I lift her over it, and we make our way back to the warm entrance of the kindergarden. Before we go inside, I kneel down and bring my face close to hers.
"I want you to have a lot of fun this afternoon, ok?" I say quietly.
She nods.
"I want you to forget all of that bullshit with Ludmilla. She is an idiot, and you are never going to see her again - ok, maybe in the hallway but that's it. She is no longer your teacher."
"Good." E says, setting her chin straight.
"It's her loss, kiddo." I tell her. "And she is never going to play psychologist with you again."
E smiles a little.
"We'll try the other teacher, ok?" I say. "I heard she is worse, but who knows."
She holds out her pinky to me. I lock mine against hers. This is our promise ritual.
"I love you." I tell her, then ring the doorbell and bring her inside.

As she climbs the stairs her snowpants make funny noises against each other.

Outside, the sun is banging off the car windshields.
The ice is still dropping like thunder.
I suddenly feel very alone.
In the market I buy two sweet potatoes for $8.
The beggars hands are shaking in the underpass.
I know I am lucky.

I am going home to work, and to put a chicken in the oven.
I know we are lucky.
I know we are lucky.

the emperor's new clothes (are away)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 11:31:00 +0000

Every night brings nightmares. Better they are mine, not E's is my first thought. Better they are not N's, my second. A headache surfaces each dim morning. Coffee is sipped that turns cold from the wind slipping past the window cracks. The images, the situations of these dreams are like a poison.

They tell stories that are so black, so ugly, grotesque and thankless I cannot repeat them to anyone.

The city is empty.

Anyplace else would feel sleepy and intimate. I could feel a freedom on the empty sidewalks and parking lots. But no, this is Moscow. Its facade is so shallow, so paper-thin that it grows transparent in these quiet days. There is nothing here but money and the absence of money. Centuries of history mean nothing.

The people mean nothing.

There is no future, no past. Just potatoes and mud. Desperate sellers of withering flowers. The old growing older. Fake news. Fake companies. Fake reviews of restaurants that are already closed. Fake cheese. Fake wine. Fake shoes.

An expression turns in my mind. "It's not a lie if you believe it." Told as a bitter, funny anecdote it used to make me grin.

We are in the supermarket to buy bread and milk. A handful of young men stand in silence waving their hands. They whip the air with gestures. Quiet grunts punctuate the stale Christmas songs playing on the PA system.

They are deaf.

They are arguing about how many bottles of vodka to buy with an operatic level of sign language. I smell that intense body odor produced by so many people here. Like raw onions and rotting liver, it coats the roof of your mouth if you try to breathe with it open.

As I write, E stands at the edge of my bedroom door. She hovers in the dark corridor, a hand resting on the wall. I ask if she is hungry. Her head shakes no.

She stays there.

All at once she is next to me, arms stretched long and upwards. I hug her. Her arms are tight around my neck. She cries quietly. I run through a list of reasons. She says it is none of them.

"I just don't want to be here." She whispers at one point.
"Me too, kiddo." I whisper back. "Me too."

hard water

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:02:00 +0000

We are all together, celebrating deep into the night. E is chirping like a little bird, at one moment plinking the keys of a piano, the next swapping the costumes on a small army of dolls. N is chewing on dried persimmons, talking to an endless stream of relatives on her phone, all wishing great things for us this year. I slurp down champagne after champagne, not the slightest bit drunk.

I see everything with a cold eye. It has started to snow. A woman's lipstick is smeared. A bored teenage boy is about to fall asleep. There is a perfect handprint mark of flour on my jeans from the dinner I cooked earlier, in our apartment.

My thoughts run to the minutes just after midnight, driving to pick up E. She emerges from behind that door. She tells me her mother will leave her with us for the entire week. The madwoman claims to have fallen in the bathtub and her brain has been hurt, that she will soon go to the hospital and will only be better on Saturday. E winces at the transparency, the half-baked lie. It saddens her, but not as much as she feels good to spend a week off with us.

The dim light in the sky tells us nothing about the hour. The streets are silent. E is hungry for an egg sandwich. N will sleep for another few hours, her perfumed shoulders a warm mound above the blankets that I sneak in to kiss, wondering when she will rise.

And then after picking through the leftovers, after some board games and E has gone to sleep, we watch films late into the night.

The house is clean. The dishes are washed. There is nothing to do, for once. There is nothing to wake up early for.

A cautious optimism fills the hours. So many battles behind us. So many won. I see a march to progress in E's face, and in the drawings she makes. We are like water, eroding the hard edges of rocks. We bend, but never stop. We are wearing the monster down, molecule by molecule.

(a concert for) the saints in our pockets

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 10:31:00 +0000

It all comes back to me, like pulling a suit jacket from the closet and finding forgotten momentos in the pockets. The stub of a ticket or a few dollars, a shopping list, some folded directions.

It was two years ago and I had just moved out. Forced to enter the apartment to take E to school, always unready. Her bed in the living room is empty. No, I must go into the bedroom, where she was dragged into her mother's bed. Both of them are naked. Me, pulling E from the covers and trying to find her clothes in the chaos. The madwoman rising, shouts and insults bubbling out of her, sneering and spitting on me as I grasp into the closets looking for the shirt E wore the day before. Her naked wanting so badly for me to look at her and my eyes are lowered, my eyes will never look up. The manipulations piling up, using my habit of getting E to school on time against me. Everything I am, used against me. But now I do not live here. I do not sleep on the floor here anymore. It brings me a sense of relief, but at the same time I do not wake up with E. I cannot protect her as well. I had to save myself, but traded this for overwhelming fear.

There was very little money in my pocket, but some saints and lucky coins. That was long before the magic wolf rock E gave me.

That was two years ago and everyone said it would never happen. On the first night out of that house I spread some sheets on a tiny bed for E. We went out for sushi and then back upstairs. She rolled around on the floor of the new place. Everyone said it would be impossible. Absolutely impossible.

Then it was just a year ago, almost to the day. She was held prisoner, forced to lie when I could get her on the phone. Forced to tell me she didn't want to see me. It went on for almost a week, as I called every single person I knew in a messy search for leverage, for reason, for a slim edge to pry things open. I was stabbing into darkness, taking leaps into a revolving unknown.

It ended in a quiet puff of surrender, and she came back to me.

Now, she is older. She is running around the apartment and I am dressing her in a new white shirt, black pants, looking for the silver shoes that I pray still fit her. Her guitar is wrapped in a blanket, then its case. She is all nerves. Her first recital. There will be judges that give her a grade. She would be fine, except her mother has announced she is coming. E asked her not to, but it doesn't matter.

The madwoman will do whatever she feels like.

She can scream at me over the phone, write bloodthirsty emails about how the guitar is an instrument of the devil, that I have single-handledly destroyed E's life by letting her study it. She can condemn me to to seven hells for this.

And then three months later, she can invite herself to E's guitar recital because she is so proud of her, even though she has never heard her play. Even though she has never set foot in the school, or payed a penny for her classes. Even though she tries to keep her on Sunday nights sometimes, and I say, "But she needs to practice guitar for her Monday class" and she replies, "Fuck her guitar classes. I could give a shit."

We are on time, and the schedule is running late. We find a practice room, already a tiny circus of the students who will perform in her group. The boy's tie is crooked, loose and unfurling beneath his fresh collar. The girl's pants are twisted around, her hair pulled back into a tight bun. E looks up at me, and sits on my knees. I comb her hair, pull the two hair clips into place. She is so very tiny sometimes.

I help her take some deep breaths. She is hoping her mother decides not to come. I have given her two tiny saints, one for each pocket. She presses her fingers against them, asks me their names. I tell her they will protect her, and keep anything bad from happening. She nods once, those big eyes needing to believe.

The teacher comes in, inspects everyone, tunes the guitars, directs brief run-throughs of the songs, reminds them to bow their heads once when they go on and again when they finish. He is nervous and excited. He wears some heavy cologne. There is a shaving cut on his chin. I like him.

E plays games with the other students, jumping from chairs, hiding and shouting and laughing. Her mother arrives, all oohs and ahs and uncomfortable kisses. She tries to weasel into the children's games and conversations but they ignore her. At one point she leaves the room, then comes back, then leaves again.

I sit with E's guitar, playing little progressions, quiet melodies. It keeps me from saying anything. E is nervous already. She feels like her mother is here to undermine her, to throw her delicate balancing act off center. This is how the illness works. The mother full of resentment and imagined betrayals, full of anger, is always lacking attention. She takes this out on the man who will not leave, on the child she is jealous of. She is miserable, and must make everyone as miserable as she is so they can appreciate how she feels. It is all about her, and nothing more. She can take and give anything she likes to, and never has to answer for it. She makes the rules for us and follows none. She does not apologize. She does not admit mistakes. She never says thank you. A long time ago, she was an angry neglected little girl, abandoned by her parents to grow up with relatives. She wishes the same for her own child now, as a sort of satisfying punishment on the universe.

I just stick to E's guitar, keeping it warm under my arms. I don't say a word. That was the hardest lesson to learn, to finally embrace the truth. Disagreeing, speaking from reason, or morality or compassion means nothing to this person. It is noise and nothing more. I said these things, my voice choking in my throat so many times, thinking they would wear down the armor, dissolve the madness into a foul stinking puddle that could we washed away. They never did. They just made screaming. They made a little girl put her hands over her ears, then reach out to me asking to be held, thinking this would stop the fighting. I would hold her, her tiny fingers tight on my collar, and the fighting would still go on, doors slamming, books thrown at us, glasses thrown, sometimes the phone, or a knife. Sometimes me going out into the hallway with her, walking up and down the stairs.

The hour arrives.

E is first, and I sit in the front row. Her mother lurks somewhere in the corner of the room. E forgets to bow and sits on the chair, pulling the footrest to a better position. She stares into me for a brief moment. I taught her to press her fingers together as a sort of a reminder and meditation, a little trick to find herself before performing. She does the little motion, and launches into the first song. I breathe deeply, let it out slowly. The room is musty, a decadent hall used once every month or so. She makes one small mistake, but nails the ending, slowing down and hitting the last notes with a grace and sensibility beyond her years. The next song is easy for her, and she plucks with a sort of fierce precision. The last, a bit cumbersome to spread those fingers of her left hand across the frets but she manages. It is over as quickly as it started. She remembers to bow then glides offstage and down the stairs, the guitar as big as her it seems. She sits next to the boy with the crooked tie. She cracks a giant smile at me across the room.

We have won.

The recital over, her mother hovers behind the judges, tries to smother E with a display of affection. E recoils from her, clinging to my leg. Her mother goes on and on about how proud she is of her, and how wonderful she is with the guitar. I want to play back a recording now, of her saying the guitar is for idiots. I would like to spit on her face for all of the pain she has caused, for us sneaking around the city to buy E the right instrument, secretly going to classes. All a magnificent waste of energy now. Now she is telling everyone E is great because of her.

I smile. E holds my hand tight. I don't need to say anything now. All of the pissing and moaning has played itself out. The vinegar is gone. Nothing but the madwoman's bloom remains, stale and desperate in the hallway.

We are going home in a minute, maybe get an ice cream on the way. We need to make some banana bread to leave for Santa who is coming tomorrow.

girls can be pirates

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:45:00 +0000

The woolen itch of winter has arrived. Wet and cold, whipping against skin and through cloth it fingers deep into the earth. The sky will hang low and grey for months now. We will wake in darkness, take children to school under a black sky, and by the time they are ready to be taken, black again.

The surrender is complete.

No more flurries. No more dry sidewalks and soft ground. The leftover grass is stiff now. The smell of diesel is thick, a cloud from the train station that hums with electricity and orange light.

The Russian winter with all of its fame and brutality has returned. To many, romantic. To me, as unwelcome as broken eggs.

E is suffering. Her mother takes her one day a week, dragging her to the office of a friend masquerading as a child psychologist. There E is bombarded with messages, constantly telling her that her father is a very bad man that tricks everyone, that it is impossible for a man to cook tasty food, that New York is some kind of hell she was saved from, that her father is a homosexual, a liar, a criminal, that soon her father will abandon her and go back to New York. She is told girls should only wear dresses, specifically pink ones. She is told she should not be capricious, that eating meat is bad for her, that playing guitar is extremely bad for her, that she will never ever get married or be happy unless she learns the piano and braids her hair. She is told rock and roll is terrible, especially for girls. She is told that her heroes are not real, that she believes in fantasies. She is told black is a terrible color, especially for a doll. She is told that her mother is some kind of saint, a wonderful person who cares for her deeply, a woman who has dedicated her life to E's happiness.

She knows full well it is some desperate attempt to influence her, to squeeze the Brooklyn out of her.

She refuses and argues every time. She says, "Girls can be pirates and boys can be cooks." They tell her she is wrong.

She tells them that Sasha is her favorite doll. Yes, with dark brown skin and missing one arm. She sits there, her own arms crossed, her mouth fierce, waiting for the hour to be over.

We have come to call this malicious woman "the fake doctor". I ask E how she pretends to know so much about me, and has never met me, or been outside of Russia. How can she know anything about New York, or her father?

E is split between a sort of passive resistance and pure anger. This woman who claims authority knows nothing, and E knows it. It is all a half-baked plot her mother is executing - some sort of last resort at manipulation. When E was younger, it was much more effective. It scared the hell out of me.

Now, it brings E closer and closer to everything outside that office and her mother's house. It drives her away, all the way across the ocean.

Every Sunday, I reclaim her at two, her face a blank and empty mess. Her voice a low monotone, acting defeated, acting cautiously. Then we talk, her hand squeezing mine as we shop for an elaborate dinner, buy some ice cream, visit the rabbits in the pet store, making faces through the glass at them. I spout private joke after private joke, until she laughs full and heavy, a cascade of shouts and snorts that make strangers look at us for some time.

She decompresses. She breathes. She puts it all in perspective.

By the time we are home, untwisting our scarves and kicking off muddy boots the world has reversed. That hour of torture, of terrorism and lies has been absorbed into the noisy city. We can go back to practicing guitar, making jokes about mustard, cooking together, drawing together, being a tiny family.

(pictures of) an Exile on Main Street

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:58:00 +0000

I have been to this place many times, but always when I am away. In my imagination the island is expanded, twisted into impossible locations and structures that are all too real to me. Somewhere around 125th street, there is a great rise, a spaghetti tangle of rusting train tracks. I can ride all the way down Broadway on a single car, sparks flying, shrieking wheels calling out for some axle grease. From this great height I can see all the way to the tip of land that juts into the ocean, the dark water sloshing against the pier. I know full well I am dreaming. I know this is not New York, but some parallel one I have fabricated. I know there is no roller coaster that brings you through the vein of Broadway. The dream is in Kodachrome. The skin of my hands is bright red. The shadows dark blue and green. The orange rust flakes on my jeans are glowing in the midday sun. The clouds are motionless behind Grand Central Terminal. I smell burning salt from pretzel stands. I smell pizza by the slice.

The train car idles to a messy stop in a swamp somewhere below Canal street. No one is here. The ground is soft and foul. There are clusters of old buildings crumbling behind some willow trees. I know this empty spot will give way to Wall Street if I follow my nose. There is just a dirt road here, no signs. The sky has grown dark. I think to curl up in a shed, and stay the night here with the stars staring down at me.

I resurface, in a cloud of steam on Chambers Street. I am hungry.

I wake up late in the morning. N's arm is draped across my forehead. The moon is still out, stuck in the grey Moscow sky. I make coffee, try to be quiet. I watch her sleeping for a little while.

Later, after breakfast she takes over the kitchen to make cookies for a birthday party. I put The Rolling Stones on, Exile on Main Street. She jokes around, saying I never take her picture any more. I tell her she is too private, and that I am not supposed to write anything about her, not even show a picture of her foot.

I do get the camera, standing on the chairs as I look, and see her long fingers, her strong shoulders, her earrings swinging around she as rolls out the dough. She reads from a red notebook, the recipe handwritten in precise letters, like a bit of school homework. Her face is serious, concentrating on teaspoons and how cold the butter is, on asking me to take down the big mixing bowl from the top of the cabinet.

She leaves after they have cooled, and packed carefully. I am waiting for E to be dropped off. I wander the rooms, restless. The sky is dark already.

She has left two cookies on the kitchen table. They sit on a plate, one of her perfect and simple gestures. A message to me that I am loved, that I am understood.

I make a cup of black tea, chew on them slowly - the sugar, the ground walnuts and chewy raisins turning around in my mouth.

I think of the protests in the streets. I smell the air of change, but do not want to be seduced by it. I need something real to hold on to.

I am happy the world is not flying and I am happy it is back to great

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 06:37:00 +0000

The room is big and white, unlike the cramped shoeboxes we usually study in. A grand piano sits on a small platform. Adults are scattered across rows of fancy chairs. I am the only father. E stands in the back row, her arms locked behind her, rocking from side to side as the boys jump as far as they can, landing on their knees and sliding across the slick floorboards. The mothers are chirping back and forth with the teacher, a round woman with short hair and big glasses. She stinks.

I wrote an article about this music school a year ago, about how I did not like the approach so much but approved of the results. A conservatory for children as young as four, all about memorization, about training and testing, about pushing and pushing, and competition. Every time I saw E learning, I felt it was a good test for her, maybe a preview of what real school will be like in this upside-down world. As parents are required to sit in the class and follow along in order to train the children at home, I knew she would not be alone in this harsh and unforgiving classroom. I asked her again and again if she liked it. She said yes a lot of the time, mostly because it was something we did together, something we shared. I would whisper to her in English during lessons, translating vis mushkie into eighth note. I know the teacher resents us. She dismisses my questions with the back of her hand as she struts out of the room. There are no men here, only nannies and mothers. They are respectful and do not ask questions except "what is the homework."

That article won a little award. The summer came, with no lessons and then we started the year by adding individual guitar classes. The teacher they found us is a man. Not young, not old. Serious. A bit like William Shatner in his zippered boots, his fitted trousers, checking his hair in the mirror. He is strict, but kind. He pushes her, and she rises to the challenges. He laughs with her. She loves his class.

Sitting in the big white room, a sadness turns in my stomach. I see E given a solo. She sings quietly but correctly. The children are acting wild, shoving and laughing as their mothers smile blandly and say nothing. The solo is given to a little boy instead. He sings very loud, but off key. They say E sings so beautifully, and will sing in the next song. She stares at me, mouth sewn shut as the room turns into a playground.

The next song comes, and she sings barely louder but still on key. The fat teacher scolds her, saying louder, louder. E does not rise to the challenge. She surrenders. She retreats, as a tiny girl steals her part, fiercely out of tune. Everyone coos, smiles at her pigtails, her mouth wide open. E's face turns red. She is going to cry in a minute. Now she is invisible, as she often is in this class, even when she answers correctly. This is the petty machine of Russia, the piece of shit we stepped in today. Everything is reduced to nothing so a handful of simple minds can prevail, take a picture and pretend they have done oh so well.

I have always thought that conservatory education is a bit brutal, but the idea of dumping a child in the deep end to get them to swim is a way to get them past their fears. In E's case, it is a good way to make her fold up like a wet newspaper. I push her all the time, but never past this point.

Everyone is singing, and she is lost. She stares at me. I open my mouth, mime to her that maybe she could sing along with them. Her lips pursed, she stares at me with those big eyes. The months of humiliation have added up to this moment. Every time she did well and the teacher ignored her. Every time the four year old boy in her group got the answer right and the teacher sang his praises, asking and re-asking how old he was then staring at the rest of the children with a raised eyebrow, going "hmph". The months of mothers asking me in broken English what certain things were taught that day, all saying "but you are a musician", and that is why E is so good. Once, I shook my head and told them when I was E's age, I studied music alone in school, with a very different kind of teacher. My entire family is practically tone deaf, so there was no one to teach me. You don't need a musician in your family to learn music.

You just need to enjoy it.

We are outside, her tears hot on her cheeks. I take her for an eclair. I sip an espresso. We talk it though. We will stop this group class for now, and concentrate on guitar. We will sing at home, do lessons from the workbook at home. She stares up me, and says thanks, Poppa.

A few days later, she improvises a song in the street. I record it as soon as we get home.

all the pretty little horses (put your hand in mine)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:57:00 +0000

She wakes in darkness, tapping on my door. Silhouetted in the hallway she tells me she has had another nightmare, her voice hushed, defeated. I ask if she wants a cracker, maybe a glass of water. She shakes her head no, just holding her arms up to me.

We shuffle around the house, her chin digging into my shoulder as I carry her from room to room. I hum a melody for her, an old cowboy song.

When you wake,
you shall have,
all the pretty little horses.
Blacks and bays,
dapples and greys,
go to sleep
you little baby.

The sky still black, the streets are wet with rain and it is time to make that first coffee, to get her ready for school. She stares up at me, hands crossed on her chest, blankets pulled up to her chin.

"Pop." She says quietly.
"Yes." I whisper, stepping on some legos that crunch under my bare feet.
"Mom said you should die." She says.
"What do you mean?" I ask.
"She says you should just be dead." She says, sighing and staring right through me.
"I don't know what to tell you kiddo." I say.
"Is it true?" She asks.
I shake my head no.
"What did you dream?" I ask, changing the subject.
"We were in a train station." She begins. "And then I got lost from you."
"Aha." I say, brushing the hair from her eyes. "It was just a dream kiddo, just a dream."
I pinch her nose, kiss her forehead.
"Pop." She says. "Can I have some crunchy cereal now?"

I go to the kitchen, splashing some in a bowl. The sky is empty. A low wind whistles through the windows we leave barely open. I imagine her dreams, the thoughts in her head when she is forced to listen to such madness. I imagine her sitting quietly, nodding her head because she is small and what else can she do, alone with such a mastermind?

Then I imagine her fighting back, arguing, refuting. But that is me, and my way - not hers. That is my struggle, my way. She is much wiser than me, choosing the path of least resistance. She can roll with punches, knowing she will be back here soon enough, to lick her wounds, to eat and laugh, to be kissed goodnight, to wake up with a full day ahead of her.

Snow pants on, hat and sweater and hood all strapped into place we go downstairs and outside. The sidewalk is slick, smelling of rotting leaves and car exhaust. She holds my hand tight, as we navigate around the puddles.

"Pop." She says at one point.
"Yes?" I say.
"When I am at mom's house, even for some hours." She says. "I just hide in a place in my mind until you come and get me."
"I know." I tell her. "You told me before."
"Ok." She says, and falls quiet.

Our walk is silent, as faces flash past us in the dim light. There are no words now, just a playground that stands empty, a traffic light that counts out the seconds we have to cross a busy street. Her hand in mine, holding fiercely. The underpass, our footsteps echoing in the wet corridor. And then inside the school, dressing her quietly. I almost forget a doll she shoved in my pocket before we left the house.

She smiles up at me.

the old wound

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 05:39:00 +0000

The old wound reopens. The dread I feel single every time E is supposed to be dropped off, or when I should pick her up - it is true this time. A thousand promises broken now, and I am still caught off guard. Her mother is playing the usual bait-and-switch, the screaming manipulation, the violent ultimatum, the turning off of the phones, me left furious staring out a window at the black sky, already late for the party, half-dressed suddenly disgusted, thinking to just stay home instead. There is a war of text messages. She tells me I am making my daughter cry. She tells me I will soon get cancer as a God's punishment for my behavior.

I call N, talk the situation through, examine the implications, explore angles. It is not going to happen today, but it will buy us something for tomorrow. E is sitting in that lonely apartment now, her nose bubbling with snot, her tears dripping in splotches on her tshirt. She knows that I am making the right choice, a strategic one. She wants to go to the party of course. She just wants out of there as early as possible.

At one point, E gets a phone turned on and I catch her. I know her mother has put it on speaker and is listening to every word I say. E is there now, just breathing loud, then asking me "are we going?". I tell her what has happened, simplify things. I ask her what she would do if she was me. "I don't know." She replies, her voice trailing off.

I will take her at the normal time the next day. The schedule will remain. No special exceptions. No generosity. No trade-offs. No party for E to go to, where there are two beautiful dogs, a roomful of kind foreigners, exotic dishes to sample. No, she will sit in that lonely place but know I am coming tomorrow even though I negotiated all of this days ago.

I try to call her later, to tell her the names of the dogs, to wish her good night but the phone is turned off again.

Standing in the hallway, counting the old tiles one more time as I wait for the sound of the door unlocking and in a breath her arms are around my neck and she is squeezing me like a tiny python in a big furry coat. She kisses my cheek, making a face from the stubble there. All at once we are outside, buying fragrant yellow turnips and a box of blueberries. I have two extra johnny cakes from breakfast that I wrapped in plastic. She eats them in the street, crumbs collecting in her scarf, giving me a big thumbs-up, her mouth full and smiling.

We are at rinock, waiting in line to buy one of those fabulous chickens, then coffee beans and some chocolates. Fresh bread from the oven, a chunk of goat's cheese, then the smokey air from the Uzbek restaurant by the entrance. The air cold, the sky hard and blue, the clouds moving fast we laugh and run, my giant bag sliding off my shoulder. Now bags of onions and green feijoa that are so sour and smooth. Now turning the keys and home, as she tells me she is hungry again, so we make little balls from leftover pumpkin risotto and roll them in flour, saute them in olive oil and eat them right there our fingers yellow as we lick the last bits from them.

She will stand with her eyes squeezed closed as I trim her bangs, get her to take a bath, practice some guitar. All at once she is tired, telling me a story and falling asleep mid-sentence. I surround her with animals to squeeze in the middle of the night. I turn off the light.

Yes, the old wound reopened. The pain and embarrassment never fade. The fresh taste of blood inside my mouth is there, the flush of humiliation, then the healing.

the night of the impossible

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 06:14:00 +0000

It was on an August night ten years ago that I saw the moon caught behind clouds, perfectly close to an ornate tower of red brick. Standing on a bridge with the silhouette of Red Square behind me, stuck in some sort of fairy tale, I tried to relight the cigar in my hand. I had no idea what I was doing, swept up in the moment and the prospect of a real Cuban to tell everyone about back in New York. It burned my throat, and I did not draw on it correctly.

Pulling my coat around me, I went back to the Rossiya, where $50 a night got you a simple room draped in aging pink velvet. They say the radios set into the walls were actually intercoms that could be used to eavesdrop on guests. In the elevator two girls were pressing their hands inside the jacket of a drunken man, all laughing in slow motion, the grotesque light of the tiny space etching their bad skin and the frayed edges of their jackets. I exit on the third floor, the corridors dim and narrow, a labyrinth of old wood and worn carpets. The same old woman sits at her desk. I give her my passport as she hands me my room key. She says nothing. I turn back, pulling 50 rubles from my pocket to buy a beer from her tiny refrigerator.

The halls are full of prostitutes. Tall, thin, wearing nothing but leopard spot lingerie and heels, with some kind of robe or coat draped across their shoulders. I stare at my feet and try to avoid their eyes, the corridor a gauntlet of perfume, naked thighs, whispers of broken English. It takes me some time to find my room this way, but I fumble inside, sipping at once from the beer, cracking the windows open. That moon is still there, bright and pale behind the storm clouds. I struggle with the cigar a bit more, enough to slump into the lumpy armchair by the window and gaze out at the rooftops, to sip some warm, soapy Soviet beer, to stare at the torn threads and warped poles around the window.

The phone rings, as it does every time I return to the room. I let it ring for a while.

"Do you want massage?" A woman asks in a flat voice.

"No thanks." I say.

She breathes for a moment, and does not hang up.

"Wish I could order another beer." I say.

She clears her throat, then hangs up.

The room feels very quiet now, as I place the receiver back in its cradle.

I give up on the cigar that has gone out again. It feels fat and damp in my hand.

There is a messy pile of pages on the bed that I will edit tonight long after the moon has passed out of sight. My precious first novel sits in fragments that cannot be sewn back together it seems.

I sat on a boat landing on the edge of the river a few days ago, a line of yellow buildings stretching past me into the distance. In the roar of traffic, I had an epiphany, scribbling as pages flipped in the dust and wind. I don't know if the ending will work better now, after the solution has had some time to be absorbed. Something about an ant crawling across the carpet of a cheap motel room, something about a chance run-in with an old love.

It all seems so impossible.

The snow kicks up, turning the air thick and white. You cannot see out the windows as it tumbles down, then drifts back up in cartwheels that make E jump and shout. It looks like night outside, a strange white night.

She asks if we can make a snowman. I dress her warmly, wrapping a giant scarf twice around her tiny neck. We go outside, our feet making perfect prints on the sidewalk.

I look out at the river, and a set of stairs that lead down to a landing.

of cosmonauts and blind saints

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 08:27:00 +0000

We are driving to Taganka to visit an icon, Matrona of Moscow. E has been with her mother for two days, and I am restless, unable to enjoy the three day weekend very much. N taps her hands on the steering wheel to some new music playing on the stereo. She runs a hand across the stubble on my chin, squeezes my arm for a moment.

"There may be very long lines." She says at one point.

I click pictures of random landmarks as we make our way across the city.

The convent is a sprawling collection of buildings behind a red brick wall. As we park a gypsy approaches us, a child in her arms. She accosts us with strange insults, then begs in a stream of crude Russian that I can barely understand. I see her hostile eyes, the way her mouth pokes out in a sort of snarl.

There are countless people in wheelchairs, hands outstretched.

I see rubles on the ground, not kopeks. They shine in the late afternoon sun and no one picks them up.

People stand in hushed groups, arm in arm against the cold. The lines curl around the walkways, along fences and then disappear. The rumble of a chainsaw is the only sound, a strange intrusion. Some take holy water from a glass-enclosed cistern. Some wander with handfuls of white flowers, giant lilies that are starting to freeze in the November air.

The icon is outside. People approach it one at a time, kissing the glass, kneeling, praying, crossing themselves again and again. There is no chaos here, no jumble of order, no VIP section. There are people who are sick, wounded, blind. There are people praying for their relatives who cannot leave the house. This is a place of last resorts, when medicine has failed.

She was born with empty eye sockets, lids covering nothing. Intended for the orphanage, her mother Natalia had a dream that a white bird with the same blindness visited her. She took this as a divine message and Matrona was not abandoned.

The icon is large, her habit a deep and calm shade of blue. One hand stands in the air, frozen in a state of forgiveness. We stand for a little while, drinking it all in. My hands are pulled into fists in my pockets trying to get warm. N looks at me, her face asking if we will join one of the lines. I gesture with my chin to just walk around a bit.

A heavy thud echoes through the convent. The chainsaw stops. The carcass of a tree rests on a bed of dry leaves.

I look at the faces around me, drinking in their pilgrimage, the hours of waiting that lead to a golden moment of attention, the focusing of energy and desire in the open air. Then the return home on the metro, of life dissolved back to the simple patterns of cooking dinner, brushing teeth, taking out garbage.

Back at the car, there are more gypsies now. That woman is carving the air with insults, waving her hands around, her child staring at us with wide eyes. We are in the car and they bang on the windows, palms slapping against the glass next to our faces. I think of the rubles on the sidewalk and see they are still there.

The street is thick with nervous, lurching traffic as the gypsy woman crosses it, the child dangling from her elbow, weaving around the cars.

I close my eyes. I cannot watch.

We drive as night falls. There is nothing obvious to do but fill the hours somehow. I feel a dark hand touching me as I try to call E and the phones are turned off. I see her being interrogated by her mother. I see her going to sleep without dinner, in a dark room with nothing but a few cats to keep her company.

We end up watching a film at home after sipping cups of strong black tea. N rests her head on my shoulder. There is a scene in the film when a young woman tells a story about a Russian astronaut on some solo mission. There is a constant tapping sound in the tiny spacecraft. He rips up the controls, trying to find the source of the sound. He cannot find it. Alone in space for days, the sound starts to drive him mad. He cannot sleep.

At one point he comes to an understanding. He must fall in love with this sound instead of hating it. He must drink it in, allow it to become some kind of music.

He does this somehow, and the sound is suddenly gone.

I am haunted by the story of the cosmonaut. I try to find out who it was based on, wondering if Gagarin is the hero once again. The story is a powerful one, one I want to live up to. I grow drunk with a hazy optimism, seeing a road to take.

I learn that the story is a just a fable, a wise and calculated fabrication. It is a tasty bit of filmmaking and nothing more. I have spent hours meditating on this transformation, the turning of pain and ugliness into beauty. I have coaxed myself to accept it is possible, convinced myself I can accomplish the same.

And now I understand how hard it is. Possible in fiction, maybe not in life.

In the light of morning, I watch N sleeping. There is one rose next to her from a bouquet I gave her weeks ago. She has saved one flower that has dried perfectly, frozen in gesture and life. I wonder why she keeps it with water and in a glass.

Maybe this is why I love her so much.

blindness and insight

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:34:00 +0000

It is dark outside and the traffic is trickling along the river. She knocks on the thick glass of my bedroom door. Her lower lip hangs loose. She is crying. I am awake in a breath, carry her around the house, her chin digging into my shoulder.

I ask if she had another nightmare.

"No." She says. "I don't want to go to school tomorrow."

My heart falls.

It took months to organize documents and navigate through old rules and new ones to find a school that would be good for her. The children are gentle, the teachers thoughtful, the class is small, it is a few minutes walk from us.

I ask her what happened.

"Nooooooothing." She says.

I am suddenly brought back to last year when she cried like this every night - about the old detskie sad with its intrigues, the barking Soviet system of child education that taught her nothing, the cruelty of the children around her, the scandals, the chaos and the labyrinth of rules. I grew to understand what kind of grotesque place it was over time. It was very difficult to grasp what brand of overpriced madness was really going on there once I left her. I also did not have a choice, as her mother had enrolled her and I could not imagine how I would be able to change her school as a foreigner with no official status.

Walking around the halls of the apartment in the middle of the night, turning and taking tiny steps she rests her face against me. I remember the struggle to dress her, to leave her there. Once she threw up in the street, hysterical, terrified. I thought this was behind us. Maybe she is manipulating me, I ask myself. Maybe a page from her mother's book, or her own. Maybe she knows how to get what she wants from me with some well placed tears. Maybe she is a normal kid who just wants to stay at home surrounded by her toys, next to her father I tell myself.

These are familiar tripping stones, these questions. Raising a child alone is difficult in the moment when you hunger for the reality check, the guiding hand, the reflection of your fears processed and smoothed out. The easy decision is an agreement between two people steadying the course, not a shot in the dark by an exhausted and disappointed solo pilot.

This is the bubble.

She falls to sleep and I slide her back into bed. Her mouth turns as she grasps for a favorite animal, clutching it to her chest.

I think of my favorite book from college, its simple robin's egg blue cover making me peaceful just seeing the spine on the shelf. How many times was I reduced to a few milk crates of possessions, with this as one of them? Blindness and Insight by Paul deMan. How I warped a book of critical modern literary theory by a mercurial author into parenting advice is no mystery to me. He had a single idea that explained quite a lot of life to me, much more than the trick of being a good reader. When we are very close to something - a story, a child - the details are overwhelming. We get lost in the space between the words, the nuance of every playground. When we get some distance, say when we have closed the book and absorbed it for some time, or when the child has been away for a few hours we gain perspective, even become detached. Both positions offer intense experiences for some, but leave you lost, half-baked and incomplete. The only solution is to dance between the two, between blindness and insight to find some kind of useful truth.

Things get very very simple.

We have a quiet talk at seven. I sit at her level, looking her right in the eye. I explain what it is to be six and a half. I explain why she needs to be around kids, not just me and her legos. I explain how there are things to be learned beyond the alphabet when she is in the new school. She stares at me the whole time without blinking. She is already nodding, understanding, coming to terms with what we will do.

We walk in silence, the joy sucked out of our usual morning walk. He lower lip hangs from her face, eyes giant and staring up at me. I wonder, maybe she is fooling herself and doesn't even realize it. I bring her inside, dress her in the summer clothes they wear within the warm thick walls of this place.

I promise to take her early, to buy her a cupcake or an eclair or anything she likes.

Pulling her wild hair into a ponytail, I rest my hands on her shoulders and guide her into the room. The children are poking their heads from the door in anticipation. They cheer when she enters the room. I know this was the right decision, the right place to be now.

She looks back once at me, not even moving her hand to wave. Her face is apologizing in a way, saying thank you, saying she is scared, lonely, full of doubt, but that she will be fine.

On the way home I feel awkward, alone.

The house is silent, dark. The breakfast plates stare back at me.

Outside I see a tree shaking wildly. A worker is whacking it with a long stick, forcing the leaves to fall as he rakes them up. I find this profoundly disturbing, assuming it to be an extreme act of laziness.

Let the leaves fall all by themselves, I want to tell him.

A lie (running to go nowhere)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 10:42:00 +0000

Her tiny guitar thumps around in the oversize case as we make our way back down Kutuzovsky. The cars are thundering across the wet pavement, and I cannot hear a word she says. Passing the cat circus, and the wedding chapels we come to a side street. Two cars are standing in the middle of the intersection, doors open. A handful of broken plastic is spread across the asphalt. They must wait for the police to come, which can take hours. There is no mandatory insurance here, no exchanging of information and driving away after even the most minor accident. This is the system - wait, and pay.

The side view mirror from one of the cars dangles like a loose tooth about to give way from the last bit of nerve holding it in place. The owners stand in the wet air, shouting. I squeeze E's hand and cross more quickly.

All at once, one driver goes to the side view mirror and kicks it from the car, directly at us just a few feet away from them. The mirror and plastic shatter and I feel the pieces hitting my arms, my legs. E is hugging my side as we pass. I feel the wind go out of me from sheer surprise. The man was looking right at us when he did this. A part of me wants to turn around and give him the finger and ask why he puts a child in danger. A part of me knows he will ignore anything I say. He may have a gun on him, I remind myself.

"Why did he do that?" E asks me, a few yards later as we step around a giant puddle that fills the sidewalk.

I sigh, trying to form a responsible answer, the kind of answer a good parent gives, not a resentful angry one. My thoughts run to the traffic in New York, and how it is chaotic, fast, and how accidents happen all of the time there. A part of me jumps to find the differences and exploit them, to say one place is good and one a sort of hell hole. I feel guilty, knowing things are not that simple. They never are, no matter how disgusted and shocked I am. But my daughter is looking up at me, trying to understand why a stranger kicked broken glass into her face a minute earlier and I am at a loss. I know that in New York, people express themselves constantly - opinions flying from all directions like a fire hose of emotion. People may get angry, but then they cough it up right then and there. They scream, shout, spit flying from their lips, eyes insane in their heads. They gesture with wild flapping arms, birdlike in the gutter. Passers-by may watch, laugh, take sides, snap pictures on their phones. And then, quite often they drive off, relieved. Everything has been said. They may stop and do the same dance an hour later. In Moscow, everything seems repressed. People do not talk about what is right and wrong very much. The drivers pass wildly on the right, on the left, yanking their cars in front of another halfway into an intersection to gain a few inches, to gain a half second as everyone sits in an eternal traffic so thick, so pointless that cars pull on to the trolley tracks sometimes, wheeling off as the trolley car rumbles behind them, a car that would not stop. This is a culture that represses until things boil over. I wonder where these cars are going with such urgency, in a city where waiting in pointless lines for pointless documents is quite close to breathing. Running to go nowhere, I always say to myself.

E squeezes my hand.

She needs an explanation.

"Sometimes people get so mad." I start to tell her. "And then they are in their car, and they are not thinking and do something silly."

She nods, with me so far.

"And then they bump somebody's car, or maybe somebody bumps their car." I continue. "And then they are not thinking, they are just angry - like a cat when it is hungry. It just jumps."

"Like Julia." E says. "She goes crazy until I feed her."

"Right. So, suddenly he jumps and then he can't even see anything." I say.

"So he didn't see us." She says, relieved.

I nod, lying to her.

A corridor of old women are in front of us, handfuls of their dirty vegetables displayed on cardboard boxes going soft in the rain. There are tiny beets, jars of preserves, loose carrots and celery roots, papery garlic bulbs, sorrel, parsley. And there, we see a pumpkin. Small but round and lopsided, the autumn rain is washing it clean. It smiles up at us and I buy it right there, sliding it into the bag with her solfeggio workbook.

We will carve it later, maybe after lunch.

That night, I struggle with a familiar anxiety after E falls asleep, her stomach full of black beans and rice. I drink a glass of wine that tastes more of grape juice and grain alcohol than anything else. If I was a smoker, I would be sucking hard on something unfiltered as I look out the kitchen windows at the glass and steel buildings in the distance. Seven more years of this madness, I remind myself.

It is easy to see every fat old woman in the street with a cigarette dangling from her lips as disgusting. The same woman in New York would be charming somehow. I know this way of thinking is poisonous. But having glass kicked into my daughter's face a half mile from the White House with no recourse but to skulk down a side street and lie to my child is a lot to absorb. Every sponge has its limit.

I have nightmares. Something about being underwater. E wakes me. She is having them too, but will not give me any details. I carry her back to bed, turn on the first film I can find on her computer, Tinkerbell.

E squeezes her eyes shut.
"Pop. I'm going to watch with my eyes closed." She tells me.
I stroke the hair from her forehead, hold her hand in mine.
I check my watch. It is after three.
"Pop." She says, quietly. "Do you know how a fairy is born?"
I am too tired to come up with anything smart.
"I know." She says.
"How? " I ask.
"Every time a baby laughs for the first time." She whispers.

coins, keys, clouds

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:46:00 +0000

We find two coins on the ground, both tails up. E presses them into her pocket and we agree to toss them into the fountain close to her mother's house. There is a statue there, not of a war hero or an artist - a larger-than-life statue of an ordinary man. As we approach I wonder if the water is turned off already. Yesterday it snowed for an hour. Tiny cold specks danced on the car windshield.

The water is not splashing from the rocks down into the pool, but it is still wet.

I toss mine first. E goes overhand, missing the pool entirely. She runs into the grass to retrieve it, her arms straight by her sides in that odd rigid posture she has found.

E throws the coin more carefully.

Later we find a tiny key on the sidewalk. She pockets it as well.
"Pop." She tells me in the noisy street. "I know how to make right wishes."
"What makes a right wish?" I ask her.
"Well, I wish for animals because I care a lot about animals." She says, her mouth twisting around. "And I wish for right things, like living in Brooklyn, or for Spongebob being my friend forever."
"Ah." I say.
"And about chocolate." She adds, quickly.

We walk in silence, as dead leaves twist in the afternoon sky.

At home she will practice guitar while I make dinner. She will read a book, her legs twisted impossibly as she tells me what each page might say. She is making it up as she goes along.
There is a massive thumping and grinding sound from the apartment below ours. She presses her hands to her ears, running around the house. It has been going on for days. I imagine someone is building something and then breaking it down over and over again.

She brushes her teeth. We stand on the dark balcony looking at the traffic trickling along the river. Her mouth moves in silence.

"I was just wishing again." She says after she is done. "You can wish on clouds or balconies if you are very very quiet."
I nod, making no sound.

After she has gone to sleep, with furry dolls clutched tight to her chest I go back to the balcony and do the same.

like children

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:45:00 +0000

Pouring rain on a Tuesday morning, and the traffic is thick. I pry E and N out of bed earlier than early. The clinic will close at ten, and we need to file documents, get stamps on forms, find a room on the third floor, maybe the second floor. I have a plastic container in my bag. In this box is E's precious stool sample that must be inspected for worms before she will be allowed into a new kindergarden.

There is construction going on so we must wander around the entire hulk of a building before we can find an entrance. Jackets are checked. We wait in lines, where ultimately old women mumble behind tiny windows being difficult in any number of ways. N is not amused. E is already getting bored. I am just hoping to make some progress.

The doctor is out, and will not be back for three days. All of the other rooms are working but will not accept our half-slip of paper. N holds a finger up in the air. She makes a phone call, and turns fast on her tiny feet.

We stomp out through the puddles and the broken pavement. I smell smoke, like burning garbage.

Later, we park in front of a paid clinic. It is modern, quiet. There is no line. I pay about $15 and they take the sample for testing. We look at each other laughing. It could have been this easy, if we only knew. The mistake was following hundreds of people making themselves miserable to save $15. They are not poor. I saw their Porsches and Range Rovers parked in the lot. It's just some bizarre principle that drives them there.

It is late morning. The rain is still splatting down on us. I have the rest of the stool sample in my bag. It seems more than foolish now to be carrying it. In awkwardness, I did not think to throw it away inside. I look at E. She cracks a sideways grin. N shakes her head no. She doesn't want it in her car a minute longer.

In a strangely inspired moment I stroll over to a tiny garbage can in front of a furniture store. I rest the paper bag and the container inside gently on the ground. E squeezes my hand. Her eyebrows raise slowly.

"What are we doing Pop?" She asks, nervously.

"We're leaving your kaka!" I shout, and we run back down the sidewalk.

E is overcome with laughter, her knees kicking high in the air. N glances back at us, unsurprised.

"We gotta get outta here!" I say, pretending we just robbed a bank.

"We're from Brooklyn!" E shouts at the cars whipping past us."Don't mess us around!"

Inside, she is out of breath and smiling as I buckle her seatbelt.

N eyes us both.

"Three criminals on the run." She says under her breath.

"International incident." I say, and touch her shoulder as she pulls back into the wet traffic.

I wonder if this is something E will remember, and how it will be filtered by time.

The weeks finishes out, E with us practically every day even though her mother is in town. She comes back, face upside-down, her arms slack at her sides. We plan a little dinner party for some of N's relatives. E will help me in the kitchen, and make fresh lemonade at the table.

I feel like celebrating in some vague way, without any obvious excuse. The menu kicks around in my head, eventually offering two paths, one Asian, one a dance between Southern France, Western Italy and Spain. There are beautiful figs in the market, and hard green tomatoes. I decide to listen instead of talk. The boxes of vegetables have made the decision for me.

First, the country pate, a smooth and yielding rectangle of chicken liver and ground pork, spiked with cognac, flecked with fresh sage and thyme, a stripe of sweet apple down the center. I test a little piece in a pan to see if it needs more salt, if I have pureed it smooth enough. I pop the coin-sized sample in my mouth and it yields, juicy and sweet, salty enough. It sings past the roof of my mouth right into to the top of my head.

It cooks for two hours in a second pan, a bath of water keeping it all moist and even. Late into the night we peel back the foil and eat little slivers. N nods quietly, her eyes giant in the dark kitchen. E is snoring in her bed.

We drink black tea, talking quietly.

The next morning I make the green tomato pickles, splashing just a soup spoon of apple vinegar into the pot with water and sea salt, with fragrant black pepper corns and crushed cardamon seeds, with a giant Chinese dried chile, with strands of red onion, the peeled skin from one lemon, mint, crushed garlic. It cooks down a bit. There are no containers left but for a squarish vase from Ikea. I cram the green tomatoes in, cool the liquid and pour it over them, adding more mint. It stands in the window all day, a plate over the top.

Then, the sorbet. Six red grapefruits are halved and squeezed by hand across the strainer. I love to feel them mashing up between my fingers like I am some powerful giant. Half of the juice is set aside, the rest simmered with a handful of cloves and a heavy dollop of dark Russian honey. E wanders in, with dolls to play with on the kitchen table. I dip a spoon in, ask her to taste. She nods yes after a moment.

I combine the cooked liquid with the raw juice and it somehow fits in the freezer after I force and shove my way around. N will stir it every hour or so, and taste it each time.

The windows are open. E was picked up again, but will be back later. Her mother is putting on a show again, dragging E to a fancy store to watch her shop for herself. Quiet music fills the room now, Tom Waits, Lanois, old Dylan. I peel shrimp and start the broth for the risotto from their skins. I roast peppers and almonds, garlic and little cubes of bread for the Romesco that will pool under the risotto.

N builds piles of dishes in the bedroom for each course, a napkin separating each one. She spreads candles artfully around the apartment, little clusters on tiny plates.

I pull the ten pound hunk of veal from the refrigerator. I need to remove the silver layer, to french the bones, yank a giant tendon from the center without knocking everything to the floor. The meat is pink and luminous. I grind sea salt and pepper, dot it with more of that fresh sage and thyme. It will absorb the salt and and I will add more in a few minutes. It rests on the kitchen table like some kind of trophy from the Flinstones, a dinosaur sized slab of meat and bone. N wanders in, saying "wahhaaa".

Two kilos of red plum tomatoes and fifteen figs are halved and salted, splashed with a little vinegar and olive oil. They roast at the top of the oven, a roof of sweet and salty vegetable flesh that perfumes the kitchen. The meat glistens below it. I splash a tiny bit of white wine over it at one point and it sizzles as it drips to the pan below. I make a little steam bath under it to keep the meat moist as things roast and develop for the next five hours.

E's mother is calling on the phone, screaming and making threats by seven. I have showered, pulled on a clean shirt. I hang up the phone, getting my mis-en-place organized as dinner will be served in less than two hours. She wants to fight right now, and have E call me in tears. She wants to make us all suffer, to feel what she feels. It is the most selfish of acts.

My phone rings many times. Text messages are sent. Threats are made. E is sobbing. She is scared she will not be back for the party. I close my eyes, try not to yell. N stands close to me, a hand on my shoulder sometimes. She gives me calm words in between the rings. She tells me I know what to do.

I keep cooking.

E offers some kind of story to her mother that is somehow acceptable. One last text is sent, asking me to make a promise. I reply in typical fashion "I can only do my best. This is Russia."

It works.

E arrives fifteen minutes later, her cheeks red from roughly wiped tears. N helps her pick out a dress. We wash her face, her dirty hands, pull a comb through her long wild hair.

And then the guests are splashing into the house, examining guitars and toys. The wine corks are popping, making that magic little sound. The seats are agreed to, then juggled and the giant round plate is lowered to the center of the tiny table. Slabs of pate, thin slices of warm ciabatta, and those madcap pickled green tomatoes. They eat it all, making toast after toast. E sits on my lap, then between two of the women who joke around with her as she asks me for lemon slices and the sugar bowl, as she makes lemonade for everyone.

The risotto is is rich and soft, the acid of the sherry vinegar in the Romesco beneath it cutting through the sweet tender shrimp. There are some crisp pieces of chorizo on top. E calls them Spanish bacon. N smiles her secret smile as her relatives ooh and ahh. She told them nothing about our menu, or what happens in our kitchen. They thought I was going to boil some pasta, maybe roast a big chicken or something.

E eats her shrimp, sucking out the meat from the tail then dropping them systematically in a tiny bowl. The guests are getting full, their speech slowing down, eyes glazing just a little. We clear the plates, sip more wine. E stands up on the bench and waves her hands around. She tells everyone to be quiet, and tells the story of how we left the kaka in the bag in front of the furniture store. The room erupts in laughter.

The women are done eating, and I will not make soft polenta to rest the meat on. It will just be those roasted tomatoes and figs, dark and crusty at the edges, soft and salty sweet inside. The meat is the same, as I slice off each rib and try to place it on the plate without making a complete mess.

We finish off half of the roast and make it to the third bottle of wine, a Georgian blend that is fresh and acidic. It warms my throat, and rests perfectly on my belly. E is getting tired. N is making jokes about how she can never lose weight with me cooking like this all the time.

The table now empty we set out the last set of dishes. I crush a great bowl of pomegranate seeds with the bottom of a cup, pouring the juice out. It splashes like some kind of sweet warm blood into the white bowls. N pulls the grapefruit sorbet from the freezer that did firm up by some miracle. I spoon it in, serving it quickly and they are skipping the spoons just slurping it all down and grinning like children.

vertigo (look back in anger)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:38:00 +0000

Paranoia is common in expats, starting with the sideways glances, the wide-eyed locals who stare at you, the schoolgirls in the foul air of the metro snickering at your shoes. You do not fit and they can spot you a mile away. You pay double, or triple price. At home you were savvy. Here you are a sucker. The militia and police seem to bristle as you pass them, guns swaying across their chests.

You are often humiliated. They use confusion as an excuse to fool you, when the whole time they know exactly what they are doing. You will never get that money. You will never get that favor. You will never get that phone call.

Between the knowing and the not knowing I feel a sort of vertigo. Every sound in the night is an alarm. Ever creak is E waking up crying, padding across the floor of the dark hallway, tapping on my bedroom door. All too often this is the case. The sound of the other shoe dropping is something I anticipate now, something to expect.

Dodging bullets until you go down, I think to myself in the middle of the night as I read a book to her, as she squeezes her eyes closed searching for sleep.

Looking back I am terrified. Perspective, and room to breath allows me to see what we went through. We spent years living from moment to moment, working our way up a ladder one rung at a time, focussed on the next payment, the next meal, the next visa. It is only when the soldier returns from the war when they realize what they did to stay alive. This is the aftershock no one is prepared for. To go home or to create a new one makes us think we have put the past behind us. "Now, life can go on." We whisper to ourselves.

Looking down makes me restless, a cascade of memories and anniversaries at every turn. I see the death of a marriage ill-fated and stillborn. I look back in anger at how I spent six years trying to resuscitate it.

I turn in the night.

Faces, streets, sky all play out like a roll of paper being twirled far in front of me. A play that cannot be real. I do not hear anything. This is the slow march of depression and I know it.

The face in the mirror across from me is foreign.

A life in exile, some days even separated from my own hands, voice. Every expat faces a loss of self sometimes. But I am not Orpheus or Narcissus. On a bad day I am Sisyphus. By grace and luck, by that tiny golden kernel in my brain I rise. Better to attempt at being the child of the Phoenix.

Eggs will help, and strong coffee. The bacon is crisp, now dolls on the kitchen table with names I must remember. The indulgence must end. There are clothes and dishes to wash, play dates to schedule, phone calls, meetings, stamps, documents.

It is time to get out of the house somehow, E's hand tight in mine. Time to look forward, not back. Sentiment breeds contempt, I remind myself. It sours the milk.

People get poisoned. Some survive. Some look back in anger.

the age of discovery (every rose loses its bloom)

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 10:13:00 +0000

It is a confusing time, more than the question of when to leave the windows open and what hat to squeeze on my daughter's head. The leaves turn and die. The wind slams doors shut like an angry ghost. September, and you can see your breath hang in the air at night sometimes.

I am not ready.

Children are back at school, but not E. We are waiting for a seat to open, a bed to sleep in at nap time. We are waiting for a phone call telling us one child left and she can take their place.

The living room is a forest of toys. Me, working all hours of the night making up for that lost week in New York. Soon the rent is due. Soon the snow will fall in tiny hard flakes.

A beautiful chunk of fresh cheese I bought has turned sour. It will be a plain egg omelette for breakfast today. N smiles anyway, dabbing her skin with tiny bits of cream at the kitchen table, putting her contacts in, pulsing a little perfume on her sweater. I have no idea how she learned such grace. I wish she could teach me how to hover instead of plod along, how to skim across and enjoy.

Maybe she does, and I am a slow learner.

After the rain, I am walking down Kutuzovsky with E. We pass a wedding party. I remember when she would shout from the stroller as we passed them, "Papa, etta princessa! Etta princessa!" Now, she just calls them brides. That stroller gave out one icy February afternoon and we left it there, wheels broken off, torn plastic flipping around in the wind as I hoisted her up and carried her home. Now, she picks up the hearts on the sidewalk by herself.

She pockets a few and gives me the rest to tuck into my wallet.

We will have her first guitar lesson today. The tiny instrument will be ferried along in one of my big cases. It is a Yamaha, like my first saxophone. We bought it on Saturday when the sky was full of clouds and the sun was shining. We wandered inside the dark store, as E ran her fingers along pink stratocasters, as we gazed on cases of shiny harmonicas.

Later she asked for chicken soup for lunch, and rested. The guitar stood across the room waiting for her.

I am restless. I have work to do before I can indulge. I am exhausted. There is a book to finish before I can dig into the new one. So long between the spark and the completion. I am always a different person by the time it is all over, a foreigner to the life that inspired that first page. Every rose loses its bloom. Every book feels like one mitten lost in the snow, half useless.

I pull my old guitar to my knee. The Gretsch. For every songwriter, there is the one you write on - that invisible instrument, the one no one hears but you. When it is time to record, another steps in. No, this is your secret sound, kind and forgiving. This is that myth about the strong woman behind the man. This is an old friend that knows you better than you know yourself. Tobacco stain as beautiful as ever, a crack growing under the bridge, it yields to me. This is the guitar I play for E when she takes a bath. This is the guitar I played softly in the kitchen for N when we met, with a few tiny candles showing me where to find the chords.

Maybe I do see the way now.

yes, I am home

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 07:47:00 +0000

The avenues open up to me, sidewalks allowing a path towards Rector Street, then Duane. New boots clicking beneath me, sweat sticking the shirt to my back and a wad of cash burning a hole in my pocket, New York is my favorite pair of jeans. I walk up and down the island for six days without a thought of policemen, without a thought of how to find an address. I can do it all with my eyes closed.

Yes, the Mars Bar is finally gone. Like a cockroach, I thought it could outlive any apocalypse - but no, not this one. Maryann is still around, laughing hard on St. Marks Place. We eat good food that was not here a few years ago, grabbing each other's hands and arms as we talk. She is well, this woman who taught me so much - more than how to make gnocchi. A new last name, a new haircut but beneath it all the same heart that bleeds, the same raw accent chewing through the words. She is Brooklyn. She is unstoppable. I imagine the day she can meet E and share her Flatbush wisdom with my child - maybe tell her what I was like in my 30's, when I was the Mayor of East 1st Street.

I call every morning as soon as I am awake, talking E through the day's events as she sits in that apartment waiting for someone to take her outside. They never do. She makes things work, teaching the cats to dance, finding lost dolls in the bottom of a closet.

We speak across the computer, our faces soft and distorted - light, shadow, color - night in one place, day in another. Her eyes are red. I ask if she is getting sick.
"No." She says. "I just cried a lot last night."
"Did something happen?" I ask.
She pauses, sighs deeply.
"No." She says quietly.
I will be home in four days.
"Nobody kisses me goodnight here." She says.
"Ever?" I ask.
"Ever." She whispers, as if she cannot speak anymore.
I tell her to get under the covers. I send her a kiss across the ocean. We count how long it should take to travel to her - maybe thirty seconds. I see her face change. A tiny smile is creeping across her mouth.

The tacos are magnificent, juices dripping down my arm as I suck lime and salt and pork from my fingertips. I will slug thick coffees. I will spoon into strudel. I will throw back glasses of fine wine. There will be egg sandwiches on homemade English muffins. There will be a walking dog from Katz's, the dry mustard smacking against the snap of the meat, the fragrant kraut seeping into the soft bun all gone in a matter of steps as I lick the mustard from the corner of my mouth.

There will be tiny cucumbers that look like dollhouse watermelons. I will cook duck, pasta and risotto. I will make shrimp quenelles, and chickpea blini. There will be caviar and compote. There will be a lemon mousseline and more. Friends will crack open bottles of prosecco, the corks making that magic burst. I will feed them, coaxing flavors from the bags of mushrooms I buy. Roasting, sauteing, steeping, reducing. I will see faces shining in candlelight, glasses bumping in toasts, plates wiped clean until we are full, sitting way back back in our chairs breathing in the night air that surrounds us.

They ask about N, about how we met. I describe it all, the impossible chain of events. I think to call her now, to wake her up in the middle of the night. But no, I will wait until it is morning. Morning and I am coming home with bags swollen at the edges, stuffed with winter coats and French perfume, with a tiny umbrella that looks like a cloud, with a small tin of smoked paprika.

And all at once the airport is solved, the lines running long as I shove a last hamburger into my face, running to the gate with a new guitar thumping against my side. It is raining.

Geneva, and more running to catch the connecting flight.

And N is there as I turn the corner, bags sliding off the cart about to topple to the floor. We kiss in the great hall, and I do not let go of her for some time. She is laughing at my new hat. As usual, she takes it and wears it. She has khachapuri for me, and a cold coke in the car. We will be home in an hour, where I dig her presents out of the chaos of my bags. We will sip strong tea and she will try on the Italian lingerie I bought her, and then it will all come off and we will be together, the way lovers do when they have been apart.

Now time to get E, after a flurry of text messages and negotiations. I will still stand in the hallway for thirty minutes until she emerges, raincoat on, a stray doll dangling from her hand. She is chirping like a little bird.

I will make her an egg sandwich when we get home, before the living room is lost in boxes and bags that explode from the suitcases. She gallops around the house in new pyjamas. She brushes her teeth for the first time in a week, as I make pasta. It is time for amatriciana, to kiss E goodnight as she squeezes her eyes closed, as N twirls linguine around her fork.

We all sleep that narcotic sleep, knowing we are together again.

3AM - the Devil plays guitar

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 11:24:00 +0000

3AM, and the airport coffee tastes especially weak. The thick layer of stale cinnamon I did not ask for floats on the top, adding nothing. A man and a woman approach slowly and sit at the table next to mine. She is in red, from head to toe. A waitress appears, drops menus in front of them. He opens a plastic box meant for leftovers. It is full of eggs.

He begins to peel one. The woman sighs, and does not open the menu. The waitress returns, her hands jumping into the air. Her voice cuts across the empty space.

He offers the egg to her, half surprised there is a problem. The woman stands up, her chair squeaking across the floor. I smell her perfume, thick and floral - powdery. He finishes peeling the egg, salts it then holds it gingerly between his fingers, half-standing up to follow her.

The man sits back down, and eats it in three sloppy bites.

The rain is heavy, like giant soft pancakes. I am flying on September 11th, by choice. Yawning, searching for oxygen I rub my eyes and stand on one foot then the other, trying to stay awake. The plane will board at five. I want to enjoy this trip, to wrestle with a pile of papers in my bag - the last story for my new book. I will thrust a fresh cartridge in the Montegrappa, mark a few points in juicy red ink that soaks through the cheap paper.

I will ignore the threats piled up on my phone, the text messages and emails from a madwoman. E will be ok, even if she keeps us from talking for seven days. She knows I am coming back with giant boxes of gifts, with Hello Kitty rain boots, with harmonicas.

The latest scandal is about music school. E wants to learn the guitar, and the conservatory happily assigned a teacher to us. Piano, violin, recorder - all of no interest to her. Her mother babbles and screams over the phone at me. She says I am the Devil if I destroy E's life by letting her learn the guitar. It is an instrument for idiots, she says. No, E must play the piano like she does (or pretends to). This, or I will never see my daughter again. The typical threat. The typical madcap ultimatum. I have a personal terrorist, one thorn, one bag of salt to run into every wound. She is tireless, and wise. She is reckless and sloppy.

She should be ignored, but there is always a moment when I look over my shoulder, when the hair on my arm prickles as the police pass close to me.

Ten years ago I was as innocent as E. The brutality of the world was a story told to me, defused in its translation. Vicious acts were the stuff of movies, of video clips from faraway lands.

Not any more.

snapshots of an alphabet

noreply@blogger.com (Marco North) — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 06:36:00 +0000

I make egg sandwiches with the yellowest of butters slathered across the white toast. We eat quickly, me checking the cold air drifting in the windows as we decide what she will wear today. Then outside, we feel the late summer sun and are stripping off layers of sweatshirts, wiping a quick sweat from our foreheads. E is calm, as this is not her first trip to the recording studio. The first time she was all nerves and excitement, jumping around the escalators in the metro. That was almost a year ago. She plays the result for everyone on our Ipad, over and over. Her voice bursts from the tiny speakers, all crackle and humor, sincere, surprised, utterly specific. I remember that day, as she sat on the tiny stool in the booth that I have recorded in so many times now. Her pigtails poking from her head, the headphones giant on her ears, me inside with her - reading, prepping, directing her.

And now we are back, and she is taller. She does not want to wear the headphones this time - just wants to hear my voice, then take a breath and do her own version. Sometimes she impersonates me. Sometimes she impersonates herself. The words roll off her tongue - mustache so long and the crunch of the "shhhhhhh" hangs in the air. Zebra, so happy, bouncing off the glass window, all "eeeeee". Nest, and I ask her to close to her eyes, to imagine tiny birds and then to say the word. She does, smiling first, that child's Mona Lisa smile. Flower, and she almost breaks it into two words, flow-wer. The work seems effortless until she stumbles, and then I work with her suddenly caught up in the moment, showing her how closing her mouth finishes a word. She looks up at me with those big brown eyes, satisfied and proud. I am waving my hands around, almost knock over the microphone a few times. This is great fun for both of us.

Not the typical Monday.

She rests, listening to herself. It is time for a box of juice, maybe a cracker. The engineer checks the selected takes. The producer is beaming, making small talk with us. E is a sort of celebrity here. I am her entourage.

And then back to the metro, to buy Legos and dolls with her earnings. The rush, the midday slogs of people in the metro absorbs us. The session is already behind us, done, old news. The day is about other things already.

A manager in the sushi place gives her a little pink doll with a giant head of hair. The food arrives randomly. She squeezes slices of lemon into her water glass, cooking lemonade for imaginary friends.

We sit back in our chairs, our bellies full, our glasses empty. She rests an elbow on the collection of new Legos, the promise of fascinating days ahead of her. I look at the other people eating, scouting the floor for our waitress who has completely disappeared.

We will walk home now, across the river, the cars roaring on the bridge. We will stop at the playground. There is a birthday party there, a sheep tied to a tree for some reason. Bags of red balloons that will drift up into the sky. E will run over to me, making sure I guard her new toys. She will trot across the dirt and dust, singing to herself. She will wave at me when she is on the swing, showing me what she can do all by herself.