Twice a year, I ease myself into a peppermint-fresh recliner, wriggle reluctantly up to the headrest, and expose my shame to my favorite recovering socialist.
Her name is Tatiana, and she’s every bit as fierce as you’d expect of a dental hygienist who grew up on the mean streets of Leningrad.
In the eight years I’ve been seeing her, our sessions have developed a certain rhythm. As she studies my chart and makes a few preliminary notes, Tatiana will ask me about my family, and how the writing’s going; I’ll ask after her mother and her nieces; and then we’ll get down to business. She’ll snap on a pair of latex gloves with the enthusiasm of a KGB interrogator, and start her examination.
It’s never pretty.
“So,” she’ll say, in her inimitable Russian accent, “what happened to the flossing? I see plenty of plaque. Quite a bit of tartar.”
She gooses the word “tartar” so that it sounds suspiciously like “Tatar,” as in, the Tatar horde that I’ve allowed to invade my mouth and lay waste to my gum line.
“Mm-hrm,” I mumble, as she seizes my tongue and pulls it aside. She’s not really interested in answers. Her questions — at least, the ones pertaining to my lackluster flossing — are rhetorical. You don’t cultivate great conversation by cramming your fingers into someone’s mouth. But I always feel a certain responsibility to defend myself. Probably because of how helpless I feel in that slippery chair.
She’ll brush aside my excuses as if I’ve just tried to bribe my way to the head of the queue to buy toilet paper.
“Mahs-yew,” she’ll say, shaking her head as she makes mincemeat of my first name, “flossing is what civilized people do.”
We talk a lot about civilization, Tatiana and I. She’s a first-generation immigrant, which makes her automatically interesting to me; the fact that she grew up in the former Soviet Union is just icing on the cake.
Immigrants have a leg up on us homebodies when it comes to social criticism. It’s one thing to know your country as a jaded insider; something else entirely to see it with the dewy eyes of a new recruit.
Of course, the dew tends to burn off pretty quickly when faced with the realities of life here. Like most immigrants, Tatiana hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it.
For instance, she was a full-fledged dentist in her home country; unfortunately, a Russian degree in dentistry isn’t a credential that allows her to practice in the United States. She considered going back to dental school and starting over, but there were barriers: an unfamiliar language; the astronomical cost of post-graduate education; and the pressing need to provide for her mother and sister, who also settled here.
So instead of being the highly paid dentist, breezing into the examination room for a few chipper minutes at the end of an appointment, Tatiana spends her days in the trenches, scraping, x-raying, and polishing.
Not that she complains about it. Complaining isn’t in her DNA. In fact, you get the feeling that children who complained in Mother Russia were sent to the kindergarten gulag or hosed down with borsht.
In fact, Tatiana probably earns more — and under more pleasant conditions — as a dental hygienist in the U.S. than she would as a full-blown dentist in Russia.
But giving up the prestige of her profession was just one of the sacrifices she was willing to make in order to live here.
She’s built a secure life for herself and her family, but there are moments when nostalgia gets the better of her.
For instance, the time I mentioned that a friend of mine had just spent a week in St. Petersburg — formerly grim Leningrad — and had had the time of his life. This friend has traveled the world on Microsoft’s dime, and has seen plenty of beautiful cities from the perspective of a luxury hotel, but he just couldn’t stop gushing about Peter the Great’s city on the Neva River. “Imagine a beautiful, but run-down, capital,” he said, “that gets billions and billions of dollars pumped into it, year after year, for like fifteen years. No expense is spared in restoring its former glory. That’s St. Petersburg.”
In other words, a stark contrast to the city I experienced as a recent high school graduate in 1984, at the height of the Cold War: a gray place, highly surveilled, with tedious Soviet museums and execrable food.
When I told Tatiana about my friend’s glowing report, she winced. “Oh, no, Mahs-yew,” she said. “For the rich, maybe. But once you get outside the tourist places, you see buildings that are falling down. The country is only for the rich now, the friends of Putin. The old people have all been moved to the suburbs. Shoved under the rug!”
As she turned her attention to my molars, I thought about the changes her childhood city has seen, its transformation from Soviet showcase to haven of crony capitalism. The nostalgia that Tatiana felt for her homeland wasn’t in its military might, its palaces, or its monuments to empire, but in its idealism: the promise of caring for all its citizens, even the weakest. “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.”
That beautiful sentiment, perverted so horribly by eighty years of brutal totalitarian regimes, still had a place in her heart.
I wanted to ask her what she thought of the growing disparity between rich and poor in this country, but she was finished with me, and the next patient was waiting.
As we said goodbye, she gave me her report on my teeth, which might just as well have been a review of her immigrant experience. “Well,” she said, grudgingly, “I suppose it could have been a lot worse. All in all, pretty good.”
This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 11 October 2012
For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com
