In which I try to break into a building

because longing makes you behave in strange ways

Photo by Maick Maciel on Unsplash

A week ago, I was in Rome with my parents. Now I’m back in the Bay Area. But I can just as truthfully say that a week ago I was back in Rome, because Rome was where my parents and I lived in the fall of 1977 after we emigrated from Soviet Russia. Four months, from early October to early February, which was how long it took our application for political asylum in the United States to be processed. In the meantime, we had four suitcases, no citizenship, and no permanent address.

We did, however, have an address: an apartment in a large stone house near the Vatican, in which my parents and I rented a room and two other Soviet-Jewish families rented two other rooms. The remaining bedroom was occupied by the landlady, a permanently aggrieved older woman named Maria who policed the usage of the gas stove with the fervor of Eve Polastri in hot pursuit of Villanelle.

I know exactly where the apartment is because when we emigrated, my father brought with him a sm…