"Phone Home" by Natasha Lvovich

“‘I dream, but I do not call the figures phantoms that come to me in dreams.’ ‘What are they then?’ ‘They are memories, memories of my waking hours, broken and mingled and altered.’ ‘And are they real?’ ‘As real, or as little real, as the memories themselves.’” J.M. Coetzee, Foe

First, in complete silence, the yellow wall in my room cracks, spreading its spider web threads as quickly and as slowly as is possible only in a dream. Chills are crawling down my spine; hot flashes throb into my head. This is panic, fear, terror—a preverbal, pre-Russian sensation that as yet has no name. I am regressing into preconsciousness, into pure physiology: the adrenaline, the serotonin, the chemical reactions in my brain,until I start to discern colors and images for words— my synesthesia—thin vertical scarlet and sticky yellow кошмар (horror, nightmare), then chestnut ремонт (renovations) turning into smooth orange.

Inside, my room is spacious, comfortable, and light, with my French books and Georges Brassens with his guitar, looking at me from the poster with his usual smirk. On my desk, there are volumes of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, and Blok, my notebooks and sheets with notes, drafts, and translations. From the window of my childhood Moscow home, shaped like the Russian letter Π, I see the other wing of the building blowing up noiselessly into the sky, with tongues of fire streaming through it and a soaring black twister of smoke. From the smoke, in the same unbearable silence, debris and bodies plummet to the ground; white paper sheets slowly swirl down; computer monitors, desks, and chairs crash, bursting out, like a TV commercial with the sound off. With horrific recognition, I hear a male voice somewhere in the background say distinctly, in English, “My God! Look! There’s another plane!” and I know with prophetic certainty that soon the whole structure, the building, the world will melt down into a familiar pile of apocalyptic gray powder, with the boney skeleton of metal and concrete lonely poking in the thick smoke-filled air.

The building is shaking. Run, run, it will explode any minute now. . . My chest is burning; my head is spinning; my thoughts are racing in an irrational marathon: I must get out of the house! What do I take? From a shoe rack, I pull out shoes, one pair after another—but none of them fit! I am sweating and telling myself to hurry with a short French vite, vite! But I can’t put them on for the life of me, as if I just got out of the water.

I know death is near, horror is coming, but absurdly, I am sitting on my childhood bed, covered with an old curtain (washed out blue, yellow, and orange). I am on the phone with a man, a nice attentive man, probably a dentist, whom I finally found for my daughter, Julia. What an ordeal, she has a needle phobia. I am anxious to tell him about my disarray, about the explosion, the fear, and I realize that I am relieved to talk to him. If only I could get through to him, to make him understand! If only we could speak the same language!

But something is not right, it must be the connection… How frustrating and, yet, how comforting! His voice is my father’s voice, not a dentist’s anymore. I desperately want, I absolutely need to keep this lost connection going, and I ask for his phone number. Surprisingly, I write the numbers down without hearing them: green, aqua, green, aqua again, navy, and a colorless blank: 272, 277, 2790? Then I realize that these colors translate into my Moscow phone number: 272-20- 19. Phone home?

I RUSH OUT of the classroom as I hear a piercing cry, then a roar, and we spill out in the hallways, where TV screens show an incredible scene from a Hollywood dystopia, some Bruce Willis or Will Smith horror sci-fi movie. An international gang stealing nuclear weapons? Aliens from Mars destroying the human civilization? Luthor Corp, a.k.a. the Joker, taking over the world? In the smoke enveloping the Twin Towers, in the streaming tongues of fire, debris and bodies plummet to the ground through a white paper snowstorm and a tornado of computer monitors, desks, and chairs. Is the TV sound off? The second plane hits the second tower like a toy smashing into cardboard, and the crowds standing around me, together with voices on TV, exhale a long cinematic shriek, Aaah! It is war, I think to myself, and I say that out loud to a colleague next to me, and we hold each other, in grief. Yes, it is war, she says.

All classes are spontaneously canceled, and crowds of students roam the campus with solemn, staggered faces. Groups form sporadically around chunks of overheard conversations—from bits of information, from the need to connect and touch. Strangers that all of a sudden share a home. Individuals joining a collective. Beyond the windows, from the beautiful campus shore, above the water, a ribbon of black smoke from Manhattan covers our gray, heavy, no longer blue and peaceful sky.

I must make sure that my children are safe. I must have them next to me. I call the school; Julia is OK, waiting to be picked up. I have to go outside, beyond the college gates with a familiar American flag that, for some reason, startles me every single day—because it is American, or because it is mine? In my experience, flags are incompatible with home.

Pauline walks into the office, and I hug her and pull her close, as close as I can, to make us a twosome. Mom, I’m O.K. Don’t go away, kotik (kitten), let’s stay together. Please. Ashes on her jacket look like black snow. She woke up late, went outside, and smelled the smoke in the air, then saw the ashes falling from the sky. What is going on? And someone said, Where have you been, young lady? Terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center. . .

I call my mother—no answer—and then I remember that she had an appointment in the city, but I don’t know where. My stomach is pierced with a sharp sucking pain. She is nowhere to be found. We have to wait.

At home, all four of us, including my children’s father, who is welcome to be with us today, are glued to the only working TV station; it shows over and over again the clip with the planes hitting the towers, the plummeting bodies, the papers swirling to the ground, and Mayor Giuliani speaking, crying, reassuring, and commanding. We weep, hold, and hug each other, and we repeat the words, the English words broadcast from the screen, uttered by reporters, by the Mayor, by the President, by Tony Blair, as if language could save us from fear: terrorists, Osama Bin Laden, hijacking, Al Qaeda, Muslim fundamentalists, solidarity, together we stand.

Friends and relatives from other cities, from Russia, France, England, and Israel, call to make sure we are safe, and everybody worries about my mother. By the evening, she finally calls, out of breath, halfalive, but not too frightened. On her way to Manhattan, the train was stopped, but nobody explained what happened. Cell phones did not work; people started to panic; there was no air. After a long while, they were released right where they were, in the middle of a tunnel, and they walked to the nearest exit, then all the way to Brooklyn. An older, asthmatic Russian woman with aching feet fleeing from a chaotic, intimidated city—was it a familiar experience, a déjà-vu from her war childhood?

We run to the apartment of our neighbor, Maya, a young woman from Kiev, a successful computer analyst who, I know, works in Lower Manhattan. We find her half-lying on the couch in torn-up clothes, terrified, ashes covering her face and hands. She had to run for her life, hid in a basement, helped an injured colleague get out, and then walked all the way back home to South Brooklyn in one shoe. At night, Maya and I take the children to our local corner supermarket, where an improvised memorial or “altar” has been created, just a building wall at the street corner with candles, flowers, and notes covered with words of grief, anger, love, and support. We light our candles, and we cry our hearts out. I feel, I feel it. Maya says, I am American!

I concur. For a few weeks, I drive around with an American flag attached to my car antenna—a new version of the флажок (little flag) that I carried at the October Revolution rally as a child. From now on my world, the “world of ideas,” includes a real world that is not only bookish, containing the outside world, politics, events, and analysis. My Soviet political apathy is gone. I want to know, I want to choose, I want to make a difference. On or around September 15, I subscribe to a home delivery of the New York Times, and I read it every single day, complementing it with daily PBS and NPR programs.

It takes weeks for the smoke and ashes to leave my terrace, the college campus, and Brooklyn. There is tragic emptiness in our view of Manhattan, where on a clear sunny day the twin towers could be seen. One of my Muslim students came to class bruised from a hate fight, and my students and I talked about Islam, religions, diversity, and the new New York, with its new economy, tensions, its politics of fear, and the changing American Dream.

In the park across the street (a heaven for Russian dogs, kids, and grandparents), there is a corner with a few benches, flower beds, decorative bushes, and a weeping willow; in the center is a cozy home for a new memorial, dedicated to 9/11 victims from the neighborhood. There are quite a few Russian names there, mostly Jewish, but who knows anymore? They are engraved in English. These young and successful overachievers, by making it to the WTC, fulfilled their (and their parents’) American dreams. They represented American power. And here we are again, another generation paying a price for our inherent and inherited ambition, for social and professional mobility, for life in the empires, and for the grit inscribed in immigrant genes.

No longer at a supermarket or a cemetery, the modest memorial is in harmony with a green community park, a place where children play, grandmothers sit on the benches, and dogs run after squirrels. On every 9/11 anniversary, families and friends gather here for a solemn commemorating ceremony; they light candles, bring flowers, and make short speeches, in two languages. A few orphaned parents regularly come to the park to clean up the granite plaque and the pavement, to plant new bushes and grass, to work on the watering system, to dig in the rich American soil—and to be alone with their children. This is a nightmare, the кошмар of their lives, but it is their home.