Free Russian Tattoo by Elena Gorokhova

warned, as we were sitting in a Georgian restaurant on Nevsky Prospekt, gulping champagne, then cognac. “Nobody would want to be around you. Even your closest friends.” The dizzier I got from the cognac the more eerie his words felt, until I saw myself as vrag naroda , enemy of the people. I’ll be just like my mother’s uncle Volya, who was arrested in 1937 and never heard from again, I thought, as we staggered out into the icy wind of Nevsky Prospekt. I’ll be a person with a dubious past and certainly one without a future.

Ten
    S oon after my employment agency fiasco, I find work in a small sandwich shop owned by a young man from Vietnam. He is my age, or a few years older, perhaps, and he has probably also been damaged by his communist motherland. Yet his smile is open and his movements unstrained, and he walks around his just-about-to-be-opened eatery as if he has never heard of a state factory cafeteria or a five-year plan. His name is Truong, but he tells everyone he is Terry. Terry is easier, he says, for Americans.
    Maybe Terry is right and I should also tweak my name and introduce myself as Helen, or Elaine, or Ellen, which is easier for Americans. And what about my patronymic of Ilyinichna, written into documents as my middle name, as unpronounceable as Goro-khova?
    Terry and I get the place ready: he composes the menu and brings loads of paper products, and I mop the floor. His older sister, whose name is Fuoc, comes to help, introducing herself as Fanny.
    â€œNice to meet you,” I say to her, proud to use the phrase I have just learned.
    Fanny smiles and tells me to go clean the toilet because she just inspected it and found some rust stains. She says something in Vietnamese, pointing at the dining area, and Terry obediently walks around the counter where he was drawing pictures of his sandwiches on a billboard and starts moving the tables closer together. I don’t know what Fanny did when she was Fuoc, but I imagine her in the Leningrad House of Friendship and Peace, where I worked at eighteen, giving orders to everyone below her in rank, just like Tatiana Vasilievna, the coordinator of the English-speaking countries and thus of the entire civilized world. Every morning, Tatiana Vasilievna sailed into the reception area, where I sat behind a desk, and handed thick batches of paper to the typist and reams of unneeded advice to everyone who happened to be there.
    I go to the bathroom to scrub the toilet. I am on my knees, leaning on the sponge because the rust stains don’t want to disappear. The more I rub the lower my spirits plunge until they can’t plunge any lower.
    â€œHow you doing?” asks Fanny. I look up at her where she stands, framed by the bathroom doorway, with the dining room lights bright behind her, as though posing for a portrait.
    For a moment, I consider letting Fanny know exactly how I’m doing and what it feels like to kneel in front of a rusty toilet bowl, being ordered around by a Tatiana Vasilievna from Vietnam. But then I think of my previous job searches and say that I’m doing fine.
    A few days later, Terry and I stand behind the glass counter and take orders. The pictures of his sandwiches, along with their descriptions, are on the wall behind us, drawn meticulously by Terry’s artistic hand. I am grateful that the sandwiches are numbered; I still don’t understand American pronunciation, so different from what I heard on my university tapes recorded by British professors.
    For a week, there is a line to our counter at lunchtime. Terry whistles unfamiliar tunes when he smokes in the back and asks me if Americans eat sandwiches for dinner. Should I stay open till ten? he wonders.
    I don’t know if Americans eat sandwiches for dinner. Until a week ago, I didn’t even know they ate sandwiches for lunch. I know that Terry is ignoring the fact that I am not an American and he couldn’t have found a more uninformed