![]() Soviet tanks have just rolled into Prague, my dad has abandoned us recently, and we’ve moved here from a Kafkaesque communal apartment near the Kremlin where 18 families shared one kitchen. We’re in our minuscule flat in a shoddy Khrushchev-issue stained-concrete prefab on the outskirts of Moscow. Here she is, skinny, short-haired, tiptoeing into my bedroom as I awake to the hopeless darkness of a Soviet socialist winter. Whereupon she gorges on cream puffs.īut it’s one dream of hers from long ago, one I remember her telling me of many times, that’s most emblematic. ![]() In this dream’s Technicolor finale, an orange balloon rescues Mom from her labyrinth and deposits her at the museum’s sumptuous café. Deep, for example, in a mazelike, art-filled palace, one much resembling the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, having retired as a schoolteacher, she works as a docent. In a nod, I suppose, to her Iron Curtain past, Mother gets trapped in a lot of her dreams-although now, at 79 years of age and after nearly four American decades, she tends to get trapped in pretty cool places. ![]() ![]() So rich and intense is Mom’s dream life, she’s given to cataloging and historicizing it: brooding black-and-white visions from her Stalinist childhood sleek cold war thrillers laced with KGB spooks melodramas starring duty-crushed lovers. Whenever my mother and I cook together, she tells me her dreams. ![]()
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