The Nesting Dolls

by Alina Adams

And, oh, how Natasha had resented her daughter for it.

  All these years, Natasha told herself she was angry over how much Julia took after Boris instead of Dima. But in reality, what she really hated was seeing so much of herself in the girl.

  Dima was a hero, a risk taker. Which meant Julia’s cowardice had to have come from her mother. The one who’d stood and watched while her comrades were beaten, bloodied, and dragged off. The one who’d faked illness rather than show up at the designated airfield. The one who’d been afraid, for over fifteen years, to admit that the real hero in their home was Boris. Boris had been the one who’d risked everything for her. He’d been the one who’d risked loving her.

  Even the heroic Dima hadn’t been able to do that.

  Book III

  Zoe

  2019

  Chapter 34

  “Love is not a potato,” Zoe’s great-grandmother Alyssa has been telling her since before Zoe was old enough to know for certain what either word meant.

  “What Balissa means”—Mama’s lips flatten and purse—“is there’s nothing more important than choosing the right person to spend your life with.”

  “She is right.” Zoe’s Baba Natasha has never encountered a topic on which she doesn’t have a strong opinion. This one’s a favorite. Ironic, considering that, as the family struggles to plan her and Deda’s forty-fifth-anniversary party, Baba is giving every indication of having done anything but.

  Zoe waves goodbye and grabs her bag off the peg near the door. Mama asks, “Are you taking the long way home?”

  Zoe knows what she means. Zoe knows what she’s asking. Zoe nods.

  Mama reaches for her sun hat, which is hanging next to Zoe’s bag, and affixes it atop her head. “I’ll come with.”

  There’s only about a two-mile distance between the Brighton Beach and the Manhattan Beach bus stops. The aesthetic difference, though, is enormous. Brighton is a combination of housing projects, private apartment buildings of varying heights and varying degrees of maintenance, and old-age homes that Baba refers to as “old-people prisons”—as in, “Don’t you dare think of locking me up in one of those old-people prisons.” Shadowy, exhaust-filled streets run crammed beneath elevated subway lines; the streets are jam-packed with produce displays spilling out of crowded minimarkets that smell of fruit a few days past peak ripeness. Gold-toothed vendors sit atop wooden crates hawking garishly colored plastic toys, beach paraphernalia, and bootleg Russian-language DVDs.

  Manhattan Beach, on the other hand, once you make your final right turn onto Oriental Boulevard, is suburban heaven.

  “Like the difference between Moldavanka filth and our chic opera house,” Baba says. Zoe has seen pictures of both in colorful coffee-table books and grainy black-and-white family snapshots, but she’s never been. Even after the USSR collapsed and refugees were allowed to return for a visit, or to stay—Russia’s President Putin made a speech welcoming those who’d fled any Soviet republic to come “home” (along with their American money)—Baba refused. The chance to show off for old friends and the jealous anti-Semitic teacher wasn’t enough to convince her. “There is no one for me in Odessa,” Baba pronounced. “I have nothing left to look forward to, save death.”

  Balissa went. To Siberia. To tend to her family’s graves.

  “I will be the first one buried in America,” she said upon her return.

  Cheery!

  Zoe suspects their dour attitudes stem from living in Brighton, not Manhattan Beach, with its fecund trees, tidy cul-de-sacs, and ocean breezes blowing in off the water, cutting the humidity. Plus the McMansions. So many McMansions. This one has roaring lions sitting before a gold-plated gate decorated with an explosion of curlicues. That one looks like it has three battleship turrets rising from the roof. Another has no windows, like a terra-cotta Egyptian pyramid.

  But when Mama asks Zoe if she’s taking the long way home, she knows that’s not the house Zoe is detouring to see. The one Zoe’s been stalking since middle school is a unique monstrosity. Its first level boasts more columns than Gone with the Wind’s Tara. Its second level looks like someone swooped up Hansel and Gretel’s gingerbread cottage and positioned it on top. But Zoe doesn’t come visiting due to its dubious aesthetic value. She comes because it’s her father’s house.

  It would be unfair to say Zoe never laid eyes on the man. She’s seen the posters he plasters across Brighton, advertising his medical practice. She’s watched, like the coward she is, from behind a lamppost, as he comes and goes in his Porsche Panamera or Honda Odyssey minivan.

  When Zoe was growing up, Mama would say only that she and Eugene had married too young, too quickly. She didn’t get the chance to know him adequately, and it didn’t work out. On the rare occasion the subject came up, Deda would inevitably add that Mama did the right thing; she stayed true to herself. Baba would then observe that it must be nice, going through life thinking solely of yourself; such a shame some people never have the option.

  At twelve, Zoe looked up her dad’s name on the Internet and got his address—it was that easy. She blew off her high-school-entrance-exam prep course at the Shorefront Y, and walked over to take a look for herself.

  She didn’t know what she expected to find. Which was good, because she didn’t find anything. But she kept on coming. It became such a regular thing that, one day, she found Mama there, waiting for her.

  Mama didn’t look mad. She didn’t look curious. She looked like she knew exactly why Zoe was there. Which put her one step ahead of Zoe, who still has no idea.

  “Did you love him?” Zoe asks Mama for the first time now. Watching Baba and Deda go through the motions of planning an unwanted anniversary party has made her curious about relationships in a way she’s never been before.

  “Oh yes,” Mama says without hesitation. “I thought he was wonderful. A doctor, already! I couldn’t imagine what he saw in an eighteen-year-old baby like me!”

  “You must have been a heck of a bookkeeper,” Zoe teases.

  “Yes, I was good at my job . . . I was not so good at other things, unfortunately. All my life, I tried to be a courteous girl, to do what everyone wanted of me, to not upset anybody. Did you know I got into Cornell for university? An Ivy League!”

  “Baba told me.” Multiple times.

  “Of course she did.” Mama laughs. “She was so angry when I turned it down for Brooklyn College. I thought it was important to stay close to home, save money. I didn’t want them going into debt for me.”

  Zoe tells herself that wasn’t a dig at her own choice to take out student loans to pay for NYU. Her family teases her about being so American, moving out when she had a perfectly fine room at home. “If I had apartment this size, I never would have left USSR,” Balissa chortles. Baba rolls her eyes when she hears Zoe is diligently paying those loans back. True Americans, Baba claims, welsh without a second thought!

  Something else that makes Zoe’s grandmother roll her eyes is reading how stressed and anxious modern college students are, the most stressed and anxious ever!

  “Ha!” Baba mocks. “How hard their life is! Place to live, three meals a day—plus snacks! A little homework and written exam at the end, maybe with open book! Try sharing room with parents and grandparents, standing in line for food and to take bath; then oral exams, with special questions for Jews. Some do it with husband, maybe pregnant, maybe with baby. But Americans, they say, university tuition is free in USSR, how lucky you are, how easy it was for you. One American, he say this to me, you immigrants, you luckier than poor us, you come already with college degree, no debt. We worse off than you! Your mama, she finish school divorced, with little Zoya to take care of alone. When she complain, I tell her, at least you are not in Soviet Union. Having babies in America is like vacation!”

  “You didn’t quit college to get married, like some people do,” Zoe offers to Mama. “That must’ve made Baba happy.”

  “Your baba liked Eugene. She thought he was smart, dynamic, ambiti
ous. I believed I would make her happy by marrying him, yes. But, you know your baba, no one has any idea what makes her happy!”

  This is true. It’s easier to predict what might make her unhappy.

  That would be everything.

  “Then, when we didn’t work out, I thought, well, my divorcing him will make her happy.” No word about how or why that divorce came about, and in less than two years yet. “But wouldn’t you know it, that somehow made her even angrier! I can never win with her.” Mama sounds so sad when she says that, so confused.

  “But you keep trying.” That’s the most amazing thing about Zoe’s mom. Responsible little Julia is still trying to please. Zoe finds it both admirable and frustrating. She wishes she were less like her. “Why do you keep trying, Mama?”

  “Baba is an unhappy person,” Natasha and Boris’s daughter sighs, avoiding the question. “Life disappointed her early on.”

  Yes, yes, Zoe knows about the gold medal and the Jewish problems, the forced labor in the countryside and the dead-end job teaching brain-dead children. “That’s still no excuse for her to take it out on you!” And Deda, Zoe doesn’t add.

  Mama smiles, part in gratitude, part in condemnation, part in resignation. “I’ve disappointed her.” Mama strokes Zoe’s hair. “I’ve disappointed you, as well.” She makes a vague gesture in the direction of Dr. Venakovsky’s McMansion. “But you, my Zoyenka, you will not disappoint your baba. You will never disappoint any of us. Your expensive school, your important career, and soon, a nice boy, yes? A nice Jewish boy, even from Brighton, maybe, who understands Russian so it isn’t too difficult for us. Who is successful and smart. The right man to spend your life with. You will be the one to achieve all of Baba’s dreams that she left the Soviet Union for. You will make her happy, this I am sure of.”

  Mama has been drilling this into Zoe since the day Julia realized she was never going to get the job done herself. Though it’s not the reason Zoe took out those loans for her expensive school or embarked on her questionably important career. How pathetic would it be if every decision Zoe made in the present was somehow connected to a past that isn’t even hers?

  To drive that point home, she corrects, “It’s not Zoya, Mama, it’s Zoe.”

  “Yes, yes,” Mama laughs guiltily. “I remember. Zoe. My perfect American.”

  To advance her important career, Mama’s perfect American has a new project. Her biggest yet. Zoe should be thrilled. Except she’s certain the reason her boss picked her for it was not her stellar work up to this point, but because the founder and CEO of Nuance Translation Software for the Multicultural Century is one Alex Zagarodny. Alex Zagarodny was born in Brighton Beach to Russian-speaking parents who emigrated from the USSR in the 1970s. Zoe’s boss assumes that makes Alex and Zoe twinsies.

  It would be futile to tell him how much time Zoe devotes to making sure no one can tell that by looking at her. She doesn’t have an accent. She doesn’t dye her hair neon blond or a shade of red not found in nature. She owns no leopard-print clothing. She’s not collecting welfare while earning cash under the table. In other words, Zoe is doing everything she can to distance herself from the Little Odessa ghetto, while her boss—an Upper East Sider whose sons wear tiny blue blazers and ties to first grade, for Pete’s sake—is shoving Zoe back in like those snakes in fake peanut cans her deda thinks are so funny.

  As far as Zoe is concerned, Alex Zagarodny may headquarter his company in Silicon Alley, but he’s Brighton Beach all the way. Software development? All the guys Zoe grew up with who were not smart enough for business or law school, and too squeamish for med school, are learning to code and promising their worshipful mamachkas they’re going to be the next Bill Gates or, better yet, Mark Zuckerberg. (At least he’s Jewish, despite the unfortunate shiksa wife, but, as per Baba, if that flat-chested Oriental was clever enough to snag the billionaire first, America’s Jewish spinsters have no one to blame but themselves.) Every bum in Brooklyn who ever downloaded App Developer onto his smartphone thinks he’s hatching the next Big Thing. Alex Zagarodny claims his software won’t just translate words between languages, it will “equate idioms, decipher tone, and incorporate cultural nuance in order to facilitate better business and personal conversation around the globe.”TM All he needs is a couple million dollars to make it happen.

  That’s where Zoe comes in. Not that she has a couple million dollars to give anyone. Her important career is researching businesses in which her boss might want to invest his couple million dollars. Assignments are supposed to be distributed randomly. Zoe refuses to believe there was anything random about her drawing this one. They might as well have sent her to assess an artisanal balalaika boutique while wearing a headscarf.

  “Zoya?” Alex is waiting at the glass doors to his office suite when she arrives.

  “It’s Zoe,” she corrects.

  “Zoe,” he instantly agrees. “Welcome to Nuance Translation!”

  Alex Zagarodny looks the way Zoe expected. Brown hair, moist eyes to match, a nose their Long Island brethren might have taken to a plastic surgeon, plus a smattering of freckles not just across his face but also along his forearms, suggesting he began life as a redhead—a gift to Eastern European Jews from long-ago Vikings. He’s a head taller than Zoe, standing sentry straight, which keeps you from realizing how short he actually is. He offers a strong, executive handshake. He looks you in the eye when he talks. Although he doesn’t talk the way Zoe expected. No Russian accent, no Brooklyn accent, not even a New York City twang. Just that flat, mid-Atlantic inflection newscasters use to recount horrible catastrophes. He sounds like somebody who made an effort to teach himself to speak as generically as the folks on TV. It takes one to know one.

  “I’ll show you around.” Alex guides Zoe past the glass doors into an open floor space. Above cubicle dividers, she sees the tops of heads slouched over screens and keyboards. She counts a dozen employees, and an equal number of whiteboards covered in foreign phrases, along with their English translations, literal and idiomatic. Some are circled; some are crossed out. Some have smiley faces. Some have devil horns.

  “We’re not just another translation start-up,” Alex extols while they weave through a maze of cubicles as if he’s the solitary rat who knows where the good cheese is hidden. “Our software takes into account the regional, cultural, religious, and geopolitical implications of each word and phrase before offering a conversion.”

  He rests his elbow atop a divider. The woman working inside has been trained not to notice, though she does slip on a pair of headphones. “You know how your grandmother calls you a mamzer?”

  Zoe isn’t sure how he knows her grandmother or what Baba calls her, but, well, “Yes.”

  “Technically, it means bastard. If you go with the biblical definition, it means the child of a married woman and a man not her husband. But that’s not what your grandmother means. She’s using it as a term of affection.”

  “Some of the time.”

  “There are millions of colloquialisms like that, in every language and dialect. Imagine what a disaster it is when they are translated literally, especially in a business negotiation.” Alex declines to give Zoe the time to imagine anything as he pivots and escorts her by the elbow into the cubicle of an African American fellow about Alex’s age. “Gideon, my good man!”

  If Gideon is startled by the interruption, he, like the woman with the headphones, gives no sign of it. Blinking, he looks up from his keyboard, reaching to remove his glasses and revealing two wrists wrapped in black nylon braces to prevent carpal tunnel.

  “Gideon Johnson,” Alex announces with all the drama of And the winner is . . . “My chief engineer. Also my former tutor. Gideon pulled me through Caltech, like the Russians say, by the ears. He’s doing the same here. I couldn’t make any of this happen without him.”

  “Nice to meet—” Zoe begins, but there’s no time for introductions during a sales pitch.

  Alex continues his earlier thought. �
�Imagine what our app could do for diplomacy! Avoiding riots! Ending civil strife! Preventing nuclear war!”

  Zoe wonders if said app comes with built-in exclamation points to match its developer’s speaking style. Yet, even as sarcasm runs through her head, Zoe can’t help feeling impressed. With many of the Brighton contingent, the bravado is fake: little dogs yapping the loudest to cover up fearing they’re about to be smacked down. Insecurity, the knowledge that they’ll never belong, oozes from the pores of nearly everyone Zoe knows. They scurry, heads down, shoulders hunched, practically groveling along the ground. They can barely look you in the eye. Once again, it takes one to know one.

  But that’s not the case with Alex. The vibe Zoe gets is that his bluster is sincere. He really believes what he’s saying. He really believes he’s as great as he claims.

  Zoe tells Alex, “I’d like to see more.”

  Chapter 35

  The tour ends in Alex’s office, the cubicle in the farthest corner. Start-up workstations are typically disaster areas: electronic devices piled atop jumbles of printouts and fast-food containers, all covered in a light dusting of Post-its. Alex’s counter is clear, save for a desktop computer, a laptop zipped into a padded case, and several brands of cell phones on which to test his app. There’s no obvious way for him to keep an eye on his employees unless he makes a deliberate point of standing and walking several yards toward the main area.

  “I like the quiet,” Alex explains. “People think raising your voice conveys power. It’s the opposite.”

  That may be the most un-Russian thing anyone has ever said. Zoe wonders if Alex meant for it to sound as hot as she finds it.

  “That’s something else my app is going to do.”

  Evaluate phrases for hotness? Zoe most definitely doesn’t say.

  “Send a warning when you’re pissing someone off. The Japanese smile when they’re angry, get more polite, but Westerners might not realize it, so they keep doing what they’re doing. My app is going to pick up on changes of mood and let the user know before he does any more damage. It’s a way to let you in on what other people are thinking without their needing to come right out and tell you. They keep their pride—and their secrets, but you get what you need, too. Win-win.”