Little Shadows

They all stared at her — all momentous, plaster faces of great Russian writers — looking down from their man-made pedestals high above the doorway. Solemn faces. Faces covered in yellow-white bird droppings. Faces of judges and of parents...

She pulled the heavy leather-coated door towards herself. Her head was pounding.

Was she nervous? She had no reason to be. She knew it would go perfect.

Inside, she was struck by the familiar smell of sweat and dirt, and inhaled it with the happiness of a child, thrilled at coming home after a long trip.

She took a few steps forward.

Yes, it was all the same, all as it had been just four years ago, when she had left. All the same rusty metal racks for coats and shoe-bags. All the same colors and placards with "Take care of your school, as if it were your own home." It was all so familiar and yet all so foreign. She didn't belong here any more. But if not here, where did she belong?

The school was the first place she went to visit, having dropped her bags off at the hotel. The sight of Moscow after four years in a large, two-story villa overlooking the San Francisco bay, roused her senses.

The city looked beautiful to her. Maybe it was muddy and dirty, and the asphalt was cracked in many places, and maybe she should have been disappointed just like everyone told her she would be, but her heart sang within her breast and she wanted to run around in the puddles barefoot, like she used to do when she was a child.

The school was the first place she'd gone to because that was where everyone was. She hoped she'd still recognize her classmates, her classmates who were but children when she had left.

In her rented, two door Mercedes, so popular in Russia for some reason, she had driven up to the front of the school. As she turned off the ignition, she paused and looked about in the awe of sweet reminiscence.

Everything, everything smelled and tasted of spring. On her tongue she could feel the fresh taste of sour early-spring apples, the tingly taste, that made her want to bite in, greedily, licking her full wet lips.

She hadn't seen snow since she had left, she realized. She had never imagined she might miss the snow. But there wasn't very much to see anymore. Most of the streets were covered in large puddles, puddles that stretched for many feet in every direction and looked like small brown lakes, with last fall's dry leaves and pieces of wood, floating in them like ships. The birds sang all around, and the buds on the trees were slowly turning into tiny green leaves, baby leaves, beautiful and innocent, like all nature with the coming of spring. There were still small patches of snow. Here and there, small white and gray islands — remnants of the winter's late luxury.

She got out of the car, and firmly walked up the school steps, where she stopped again, her heart beating rapidly.

Inside there was a musty thickness to the air. She felt as though she were stepping into a mortuary. A mortuary of her memories, perhaps. Perhaps a mortuary of the time long gone. Running her fingers over the rough cream walls, she walked slowly down the corridor, towards the stairs. She savored every moment, every second... The texture, the sounds, the smell...

A first-grader ran by her. Oh how small he looked. She knew he was a first grader because he didn't have a little red star, attached to the left breast of his dark blue uniform. And she remembered herself, just such a first-grader, running down this same hall years and years ago, with Nastya and maybe Katya and maybe Anya the Kitty. It was too bad Anya didn't go here anymore. Yes, Nastya had written her earlier that she had been expelled for poor grades.

They used to stand around in the halls. Anya was always wearing a sky blue sweater over her uniform. She must have been very cold — that was why. She was slight in figure and had the most adorable sweet face. She also had long blond hair that she used to wear in two braids parted in the middle, and they all liked to take out the braids and play barber with her petite beautiful head. She was too sweet to ever say anything. Nastya, who at the time used to be in love with cats, always called her Kitty and begged her to say "Meow." Nastya told a lot of people to say "Meow" then, but no one ever cared to, or maybe no one could ever do it as well as Anya, for making her purr was Nastya's favorite pastime during those five-minute breaks between classes in first grade, when they all used to stand around in the halls — she, Nastya, Katya, and Anya the Kitty.

And now. What would it be like now, she wondered, as though she didn't yet know. She ran up the steep stairs, to the second floor, where Nastya's class was.

She remembered Nastya as she last saw her — a thin, sleepy girl, wrapped up in a big shawl to stay warm. They were outside, by the car, and they were saying good-bye. They didn't know whether they were ever to see one another again, and that was the most awful part of it all. They didn't know... Nastya had insisted on coming out there that morning at two. It didn't seem like such a big deal then, but through the years it had become a symbol of their friendship, a symbol of the end of their childhood together — that Nastya should come out in the middle of the night, just to give her a farewell card, just to hug her one last time.

A tear came down her cheek.

This was the classroom. Though still outside, she knew that they were all listening to the audio chapter on traveling. It was English class — her favorite class of them all.

She walked in boldly, or so she thought, her tight jeans and a body-suit making her stand-out sharply against the blue and brown boys and girls in uniforms. She was beautiful in their eyes. Beautiful, independent, rich. She was everything they ever aspired to be and she saw that in the momentary glance that she caught of the surprised class. There was dead silence. The teacher had turned off the tape.

Suddenly she thought of something. Yes, it had already been prearranged.

She was at the door to the classroom again. Everyone already knew she was coming. They all knew she was coming... as an American exchange student, and no one knew who she really was. It would be all the better that way.

She re-entered the classroom. Her loose jeans starting at the hips and a tight V-neck sweater, along with her bold walk and up-held head made the class fill up with whispers and approving nods.

As she stood at the front of the classroom, she felt happy, truly happy as she hadn't been in years. Everyone was smiling at her, with sly envious smiles, but they liked her and that was important. They liked her and they thought she was great. They thought she was great and they didn't even know her yet.

Natalya Vladimirovna's very eyes smiled as she looked at her and introduced her to the class: "We are going to have an exchange student, visiting us for a while. Her name is Judy Rosen and she is from the United States. Remember, I've told you about her? She is in her last year at school there, just like you. Will someone volunteer to translate for her? She speaks no Russian."

Oh what a great sensation it was knowing that no one, not even her own teacher, should recognize her, while she knew and remembered them all.

Judy's lips curled into a knowing smile, another wonderfully entertaining thought having struck her. And so it should be, and so it was.

"Yes, thank you," said Natalya Vladimirovna unexpectedly, "Nastya will volunteer. Thank you Nastya."

Taken aback Nastya looked wide-eyed at her. "But... why me? Do I have to? I didn't do anything..."

"Yes, Nastya," the teacher said firmly, "you have to. But it is an honor, of course. Please, do tell our guest so yourself."

Only now did Judy remember that the conversation was taking place in Russian and that she should act as though she didn't understand a word. That was alright though — no one had so far noticed. She gave her friend a wide Californian smile, and turned to the teacher, saying in her perfect American English, "Everything's alright?"

"Exactly, it's all took care of," said Natalya Vladimirovna, struggling through words. Judy wondered that at one time she used to think this woman was an English language expert. In a way, she owed her easy adjustment in America to this woman's efforts. In particular she remembered one lesson well.

"In ten minutes," had said Natalya Vladimirovna some seven years back "you will have to come up front and give a season report. Describe the vegetation, describe the weather, whatever you like. You use one Russian word and you get an automatic fail."

There had been hustling about and nervous whispering and loud complaints, but everyone had frantically begun to compile their reports. How do you say this, how do you say that, Natalya Vladimirovna, rang from all sides. At first she would say. "Trava is grass. No, not growls, but grass. Listya is leaves. Shhh. I can't hear what Vladimir is asking. Oh, listiki? There is not such thing in English. Just use leaves..." But the questions kept coming and so she lost patience. "If you don't know a word," she had said "just use another word that you do know or use a lot of words to describe the word that you don't know, but I won't tell you how to say any more words."

Judy was one of the people who didn't get her question answered then and she was angry. She got a 5 all the same of course, but she was angry. When she came to America, yes, only then, did she realize how much good it had done her. Her first day in an American school has proved it so. "Where is that thing that will make my pencil be ... more pointed?" No one was there to tell her pencil-sharpener or sharper, but the teacher understood her all the same and that was enough.

Judy looked gratefully now at Natalya Vladimirovna and took a seat next to Nastya, who was still wide-eyed from the shock. "It's okay," Judy felt the need to soothe her. "I speak nemnozhko Russian."

Nastya smiled back at her, her green cat-like eyes squinting happily. "That's not too bad," she said. "Do you learn Russian in your school?"

Yes, exactly. That would be exactly what Nastya would say.

"No," Judy said with a coquettish half smile. "I just have a friend who goes to my school, who is Russian, and she taught me."

"Who? I mean, what's her name?"

"It's Natasha. She came to America just about four or five years ago."

"Natasha?! To what school do you go?"

"Yes, it is the same Natasha that you are thinking about. She used to go to your school before she moved. That's partly why I decided to visit this school."

She enjoyed the expression on Nastya's face. It was full of surprise, full of excitement, full of inexplicable happiness. She would have to tell her sometime, sometime soon, but not just yet. It was too exciting, pretending to be someone else, pretending to be someone else and getting away with it so easily.

* * *

A sharp and demanding sound pierced the air. The bell maybe? Maybe it was just time to go on to the next class. But no, it wasn't the bell. It was the phone. Almost immediately the light went on in the kitchen, and I could hear my mother's voice, loud and sharp in the silence of the late hour, "Allo?"

The sofa-bed squeaked as I turned over onto another side, to avoid the light in my eyes. Same old uncomfortable sofa-bed that my relatives got for free from the Jewish Community Center before we arrived so we would have some furniture in our small one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. Same old bare living-room walls that imprisoned me like a jail cell. Same old burgundy divan with coffee and only God knows what other stains on it, smelling of places long dead and forgotten, making me think of dampness, cold, and misery, facing my own bed, and dividing the living room into two parts — the "bedroom" and the "study room."

My mother looked in my direction, and I closed my eyes, slowing down my breathing, just enough, to confuse her in the dimness of the room.

"Natasha? No, Natasha is asleep. Call tomorrow."

I turned over again. If I concentrate I can go back, I thought. If I concentrate I can go back to that wonderful spacious room with yellow wall paper on the walls, my very own room, a room in a twelve-story building, only a few blocks away from that gray cement box — the school, where I can be with my friends. Maybe I could go back to that classroom, where I traveled incognito in my wonderful sweet fantasy, and where I could invite Nastya to join me for dinner at one of the best restaurants in Moscow.

But instead, all I could concentrate on was that Asian boy with a disfigured face in my Advanced ESL class, who, in broken English, had told me to go back to where I came from. A boy, who always tried to trip me when I entered the classroom, running a few seconds late from my PE class. All I could think of was his ugly face so full of hatred and scorn. "Go back!" he screamed in my face. "Go back, we don't want any of you here!"

The shadows in the room seemed to thicken. The patched up brown chair by the big metal desk looked like a monster with the sleeves of my shirt, hanging over its back, looking like deadly claws. It was a shirt I had found in my closet when I first opened it two months before while exploring this smelly apartment with its dirty-yellow carpet and small windows facing the windows of another house.

I felt a loose spring pierce my back and shrieked in pain.

"I don't speak any Russian," had said Sveta, a Russian girl in my ESL class, who was asked to help me out until I adjusted to the new language and the new school.

"If you don't speak any Russian," I asked, "how is it that you always speak Russian to Boris?"

"Shut up," she said. Those were her favorite two words in the world — shut up. I did. She and Boris were the only two Russian people in my class, and they both refused to talk to me.

The light in the kitchen went out and I heard heavy footsteps in the direction of the bedroom. Then came a loud thump, as my mother lay down, and all was quiet again.

* * *

To the school dance Judy wore a short black dress that flattered her tall and slender figure. All the boys, all the cute and wonderful boys she had known since she was seven years old, wanted to dance with her because they thought she was beautiful and because she was from America.

She had confided in Nastya by then, told her it was she, her childhood friend, her friend who had thought a lot about her in the past years and who was now so happy to see her again. She had never seen such an outpouring of joy and happiness and laughter. They sat in Nastya's room in her apartment, an inverse copy of Judy's own when she used to live there. Judy marveled at the shine in her best friend's eyes, at the impulsive hug that she threw her once she understood, once she knew.

And they sat there for hours, talking of the past. Talking of the time when they called people from Nastya's phone, and asked to please talk to an idiot. The challenge had been to stay on the line the longest and not chicken out. "No? No idiots living here? Well, that's odd. What about you?" It had seemed incredibly funny then, and now too, they rolled around on the bed, recalling those innocent pranks.

They remembered, too, the time at Julia's, when they tied an eraser to a long, thick string, and hung it out the back of the balcony. They lowered it so it was just at the window level of the floor below, and swung it around, like a pendulum, to the annoyment of their elderly neighbor. The woman, finally unable to take it any longer, tried to catch the soft white chunk, floating before her window, with a mop, much to their amusement, and much to her own embarrassment as she was unsuccessful even as she recruited the help of her voiceless husband.

"Or what about that time when we stood on the road and said 'Hello' to everyone to psyche them out?" Judy had read in a book that a boy did that — said 'hello' to strangers walking down the road, and observed their responses. She had shared her incredible find with Nastya and they entertained themselves just so for the next few days, until they had grown tired of it.

Aaaah, that was funny. I smiled in my dream, the shadows drawing back. Judy laughed uncontrollably, she and Nastya holding hands as they once had done in merriment.

"Do you know," Judy said, "people in America can say 'hello' to you on the street even if they don't know you and that's absolutely normal!"

"Yeah right! You lie." Nastya was choking with laughter, as she was rolling around on the big bed, holding her stomach. "They just come up to you and say 'hello'?"

"That's right they do."

They were still together, together at the dance, and later at the movies, still together walking around their favorite park, throwing crumbs of dried bread to the adorable hungry ducklings, when the alarm clock went off.

I opened my eyes, squinting from the sun coming in from the window. Stretching my arms and finding my soft slippers under the bed, I got up and walked towards the beckoning glow. Between the two buildings facing our house I saw a triangle of a cloudless blue sky. Below it lay the tiny houses, snuggled up close to one another for warmth and comfort in that cold, windy city. And down on the ground I saw two little figures — ah but they did seem so little from that second story window — two little girls, walking hand in hand. Walking and laughing, and squinting at the sun. Their dark straight hair hung from their shoulders, and they pulled it playfully, talking about something in Chinese. Maybe they were telling each other stories about their friends, or maybe — remembering the good times they'd had when they were even smaller.

And I smiled at the two little girls — at their happiness and friendship. And when they passed, so I could no longer see them, I just stood there, by the window, smiling at the two little shadows, going off into the glowing sunrise, at the two little shadows who were Nastya and I, holding hands and laughing, and the beautiful morning sun.