Bittersweet Scheherezade by Susanna Zaraysky (read ebook pdf txt) 📕

and didn’t want to lose her.
The couple faced a long waiting period for housing and had to live in a small two bedroom apartment with Kostya’s parents and grandmother who were always yelling. Kostya’s grandmother was mostly deaf due to a bomb explosion in World War II that had ruined her hearing. When Kostya was talking or playing music, he noticed that Larisa seemed distant. The constant screaming deafened Larisa and she didn’t realize how she was sinking into her own world. Despite her lapses of auditory isolation, she heard Kostya’s mother and grandmother constantly berating her for being childless. When Larisa felt like she couldn’t withstand her living situation anymore, she made Kostya come with her to the housing office to see if they could qualify for their own private quarters. The response from the housing clerk was always the same: they couldn’t move because they did not have any children or older parents who would move with them.
Until a new anti-Semetic administrator in the Ministry of Culture restricted Jewish musicians from traveling, Larisa’s nationwide concerts and Kostya’s tours around Eastern Europe were their main ways of escaping the misery of their housing situation. Under the new policies, Larisa and Kostya were demoted to giving music lessons to children in a mediocre music school. Larisa couldn’t stand being around small children and could barely force herself to go to work. When the children tried to play their harmonicas, the dissonant notes turned into a cacophonous horror that triggered Larisa’s chronic migraine headaches.


In the late 1970s, many of their musician friends gathered for music parties and talked about emigration to Israel or the US. Some of their friends and acquaintances who had already left for the US, didn’t find work as musicians and made a living as babysitters or cleaners. Nevertheless, Larisa and Kostya applied to emigrate and had to quit their jobs and give private music lessons to earn money while they awaited their exit visas.
Before the Moscow Summer Olympics in 1980, when many Soviet Jews emigrated, Larisa and Kostya left the Soviet Union, saying their final farewells to their family and friends. They boarded an Aeroflot flight to Vienna, where they spent two weeks interviewing with Jewish aid agencies and the Sohnut, the Israeli migration agency. After their Austrian fortnight, they traveled with the other Soviet families to Rome in a special train wagon protected by armed soldiers. In Rome, they waited a month for their US visas and then moved to California, where their friends were waiting for them in San José.
Shortly after Larisa and Kostya arrived in San José, the couple was preparing to audition in the nearby opera, ballet, and symphony orchestras and re-start their careers. In the meantime, Larisa gave piano lessons to Russian and Taiwanese immigrant children in the evening, and Kostya repaired instruments in a music store. Larisa had to constantly train herself not to think about her child when she taught her students.
Soon they saw that they couldn’t live on their incomes. Their neighbor Natasha, who had been working at Costco for a year, said that she got good food discounts and the job wasn’t that bad. Even though standing at a table with a plastic hairnet and handing out samples of food didn’t appeal to her, Larisa needed a job to fill her mornings and early afternoons to be free to give lessons in the evenings.
On her first day on the job, Larisa, wearing a blue apron, hairnet, and Latex gloves, handed out samples of Jello. She was disgusted as she cut out pieces of the red gelatin made from artificial ingredients. In order to keep her sanity, she hummed classical melodies to herself while preparing samples of the fluorescent pseudo-food. Customers with bellies hanging out from their shorts stood in line, eagerly awaiting their portions of peculiarly colored and flavored gelatin. Larisa looked in dismay at the American families wearing tennis shoes and t-shirts, pushing big shopping carts filled with oversized packages.
After a week, Larisa moved to another part of the big store, where she gave out samples of peanut trail mix. Nearby, she saw player pianos, stereos, TVs, and the VCR players. It was her first time to see a player piano. She thought that Americans were so lazy that they had to buy a piano that played classical and Broadway music on its own. At least in Soviet Russia, music schools were free, classical music was highly valued, and people wanted to play the piano themselves.
With Fly me to the Moon playing in the background, Larisa opened the fifteenth bag of trail mix. With a large plastic spoon, she scooped out the samples in small Dixie cups and was surprised to see a few almonds with the peanuts, raisins, and M&M chocolates. Maybe the factory had accidentally put almonds in this trail mix. Larisa realized that she was alone so she quickly pulled all of the almonds out and slipped them into her pocket. When no one was around, she ate the almonds one by one, savoring their crunchiness. She stopped abruptly when she heard the player piano playing a simplified version of the main theme of Scheherezade. A line formed for the peanut trail mix, but she stood frozen listening to the music rise to a crescendo. She forgot that she was supposed to be handing out samples. All she could think about was that day on the canal with Petya.
Unruly children and acne scarred teenagers were nagging their parents in line and complaining that they wanted to eat the peanut trail mix. The parents just looked at Larisa and could not understand what was going on. After a while, some customers seized the trail mix bag and served themselves. Larisa remained paralyzed when the music changed to Duke Ellington’s Don’t Get around much anymore. She didn’t hear the transition, her mind kept on replaying Scheherezade. Startled by the loud Filipina woman across the aisle, who was yelling “Come try our bagels and cream cheese,” every time a new customer walked by, Larisa came out of her trance. She looked at her watch and saw that her shift was over. Leaving many empty bags of trail mix on the table, she walked to the player piano to fiddle with the programming to replay the Scheherezade piece. The index of songs didn’t include any Rimsky-Korsakov scores. Confused, she went to the staff room and changed her clothes.
She exited through the staff room and walked around the parking lot crying. Trying to gather herself, she sat down by a tree on the side of the building, far from the customer parking lot. Glancing at her watch, she figured that if she wanted to leave before Natasha got off duty, she had to hurry home. She knew that her piano student was ill and she would have the afternoon to herself. Weeping during the bus ride, Larisa’s eyes reddened and tears slowly fell down her neck to her shirt. At home, she took a nap and a shower before Kostya returned from work.
That evening, Natasha’s husband Boris drove all of them to Rimma and Isak’s party in his donated beat up red Ford Taurus. Closing her eyes in frustration, Larisa struggled to recall the name of the composer of the familiar classical music tune on the radio. Her husband was busy talking to Natasha and Boris about the Moscow Olympics and she didn’t want to interrupt them to ask about the music.
Rimma had prepared a typical Russian spread with zakuski appetizers that included: caviar sandwiches, salmon, potato salad, marinated tomatoes, pickles, and blinchiki, a specialty of pancakes with meat. Rimma and Isak’s oldest daughter Asya played Russian folk and children’s songs on the piano with her eight-year-old sister Susan and Kostya singing along with her. Asya already was excelling at the piano and was, by chance, exactly the age of Larisa’s aborted child. Larisa looked at how happy Kostya was with the girls and wondered what kind of father he could have been and who her child would have become.

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Publication Date: 02-05-2009

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