The Nesting Dolls

by Alina Adams

  You’ll let out a mighty cry.

  Hit you once, hit you twice

  You’ll learn to find it very nice.

  The crowd roars.

  The next tribute comes in song. An elderly couple share a microphone to warble an original composition that begins, “People sing a beautiful song of you, wise and dear . . .” They’ve taken the patriotic dirge and rewritten the lyrics, so that, instead of Stalin, it’s the happy couple who are being saluted. They’ve replaced Soviet landmarks with Brighton’s, so “mountain heights” become “B train heights” and “where eagles take flight” is “where JFK planes take flight.” When they get to the line about soldiers gearing up for one final battle, everyone hoots in Baba and Deda’s direction. Deda takes his ribbing in good-natured stride, ruefully shaking his head to agree that yes, yes, there have been some great battles between them.

  Then there’s another poem that the reciter thinks is hilarious for the occasion, Pushkin’s “I Am in Chains.” Fearing Gideon might be feeling a bit trapped himself, surrounded by a language he doesn’t understand, Zoe tries to include him, translating what’s being said, then offering, “Pushkin was black, you know. His great-grandfather was taken from Cameroon and given as a present to Peter the Great when he was a boy. Peter took a liking to the little guy and raised him in the Imperial Court as his godson. He sent him to France to learn math and engineering, then put him in charge of major government projects.”

  “A Russian using a black man for his engineering skills?” Gideon raises an eyebrow. “I can’t imagine such a thing.”

  Zoe doesn’t laugh until Gideon laughs. And not until after he whispers, “Relax, Zoe, I’m fine. This is really something.”

  That’s easy for him to say. He’s enjoying himself, as opposed to cringing at how lame it all is. Adults—old people!—acting like idiots, thinking they’re being clever with their rhymes and their puns and their references to songs from a time and place nobody cares about. Zoe watches through Gideon’s eyes, which makes the furniture even shabbier, the music even more Eurotrash, the food even more gluttonous, and the people even more cheap, tacky, and foreign. She regrets inviting him. If Alex were here, they could’ve made fun of the proceedings together. They could’ve rolled their eyes and muttered droll comments to prove how above this, how American they were. They’d be having an appropriately miserable time. As opposed to Gideon, who insists on having a blast, no matter how strenuously Zoe tries to make clear he shouldn’t—he’s even bobbing his head along to the atrocious music! It’s not fair. Gideon having a good time is making Zoe have a good time. And that wasn’t the plan.

  Neither was Alex showing up.

  He walks in like he was invited. Which he was. Technically. He blinks through the smoke, scanning the room. He spies Zoe and waves. He takes note of Gideon. He barely breaks his stride. Did Alex know Gideon was coming? Zoe never bothered to ask Gideon if he’d told Alex. No. Zoe deliberately never asked. Because she was too scared to find out. She didn’t want to know if Alex was upset by it. Or if he wasn’t.

  There’s a woman with Alex, a few years older, beautifully put together, tastefully dressed (nothing sparkling), her hair up in a classy chignon. Zoe wonders if Alex brought a date to her grandparents’ anniversary party.

  He’s guiding the woman over to Baba and Deda for an introduction. Zoe figures she should be part of that conversation, if only so Mama can whisper, “I told you so,” regarding Zoe letting Alex slip through her fingers. Gideon follows.

  But Alex isn’t content to present his new and improved girlfriend in private. He’d like to introduce her to the world. Alex pushes his way to the front of the tribute line, ignoring those already waiting—luckily, being ex-Soviets, they merely sigh resignedly. Alex takes the mic and introduces himself from the stage. He pauses, expectantly, for applause. This mob has been toasting for over a good hour now so, yeah, sure, they’ll applaud.

  “The forty-fifth wedding anniversary,” Alex intones, “is the sapphire wedding anniversary. Not as well known as the gold or silver, but, to this gathering, even more meaningful. The sapphire is a holy stone, first mentioned in the Bible, in the book of Exodus. Exodus,” Alex repeats. “What could be more meaningful to us than that?”

  Alex takes a breath, suggesting this isn’t close to being over, and goes on to lavishly praise the bravery of those first Jewish emigrants from the USSR, those daring groundbreakers of the 1970s, the ones who took a leap of faith before the trail was blazed, the ones who stepped into the abyss of their own Exodus and set a course to be followed by thousands of grateful others. The ones without whom people like him would have nothing.

  That is such a load of insincere, pandering crap and—Is Baba crying? When Lacy’s mother said the same thing, Baba couldn’t wait to make fun of her for being a naive romantic, one of Lenin’s useful idiots. But at Alex’s words, Baba is seriously crying?

  Gideon leans over to whisper, “Damn, he’s good.”

  Zoe nods in stunned agreement.

  “Of all the humiliations our people suffered in the USSR, which was the greatest one?” Alex barely pauses to offer a chance for guesses before elucidating, “Marriage! It was marriage!”

  The crowd, primed to applaud and agree, nod their collective heads sagely. Yup, marriage. Marriage was the greatest humiliation they suffered, that’s just what they were about to say, Alex simply didn’t give them the chance.

  “We’re celebrating forty-five years of marriage. But what sort of marriage was it?” Again, Alex answers his own question. “It was a Soviet marriage!”

  If he means a situation forced on you by outside powers that you initially struggled against then accepted in defeat, trudging through your gray days, resigned and hollow, because extracting yourself wasn’t an option, and, in the end, it was your sole source of food and shelter, then, yes, the marriage of Natalia Crystal and Boris Rozengurt was pretty darn Soviet.

  That’s not what Alex means. “It was a marriage sanctioned by Soviet authorities, because the true sanction, the holy sanction, a Jewish wedding ceremony, was forbidden. Such a shanda must not be allowed to stand. Especially not on this foremost anniversary, the sapphire anniversary, the Exodus anniversary.”

  Wow. Alex really burned up the Google search for this one.

  “This is my friend Rose.” Alex beckons his date forward. Zoe finally recognizes her as one of the cultural advisers Alex hired for his app, to translate idioms. “Rose is a rabbi.”

  Zoe feels the urge to throw herself over the roast pig. Just because Zoe judges her family doesn’t mean she wants anyone else doing it. Baba doesn’t deserve to be lectured condescendingly—or, worse, sympathetically—about how she’s doing Judaism wrong. Baba knows she’s doing Judaism wrong. She also knows she’s suffered more for her Judaism than some American-born rabbi whose idea of anti-Semitism is that time in college when the Upper East Side girl made a JAP joke. Just like Zoe itched to lecture Mama about her racism, she’s ready to fight for Baba’s honor. It’ll go a long way toward assuaging her own guilt.

  Alex explains, “I brought Rose here tonight so she could perform an authentic Jewish wedding ceremony and our guests of honor might finally be married in the eyes of God.”

  Once again, Alex pauses for his applause.

  During which time Baba leaps out of her seat, shaking her head, waving her arms, the napkin she used to dab at her eyes a few moments earlier still crumpled in her palm.

  “No,” she insists. “This is unnecessary. No.”

  “Don’t be shy,” Alex says.

  “I do not want this,” Baba reiterates. Then, remembering that it takes two to temper, she swats her hand in Deda’s direction. “We do not want this.”

  “But we do!” Alex includes himself in the watching audience. And then he starts a chant: “Gorko! Gorko!”

  The word itself means bitter. It’s a tradition to shout it when you want the bride and groom to kiss. To get rid of the bitterness.

  If the
re’s one thing a youth spent in the USSR conditioned this group to do it’s to pick up a rousing cry and keep repeating it until the only objective is to make sure you aren’t the first to stop. Overwhelmed by his friends’ fervor, Deda hefts himself from his chair, smiling awkwardly, like someone caught on a stadium kiss-cam during a blind date that’s going badly. He catches Baba’s wildly gesticulating hands in his and strains his neck to try to get her to look up at him, shouting something that gets lost in the din. She refuses to be appeased.

  Out of the blue, Gideon says, “Give her my gift.”

  He never got a chance to place it on the designated table. It was too crowded with guests jostling to make sure theirs was in primary position, its price tag hanging out casually, so Gideon has the box handy to thrust at Zoe. “It’ll calm her down, you’ll see.”

  Zoe trusts him. She can’t explain why, she just does. Zoe shoves her way toward the stage, through the cheering crowd. Balissa watches with a look suggesting that nothing surprises her anymore as Mama tries to play peacemaker and keep Baba from making more of a scene.

  “Open this.” Zoe inserts the present between her arguing grandparents.

  “What is it?” Alex asks, miffed at another unscheduled interruption to his grand gesture.

  Since she doesn’t know, and Baba, as is her custom, is in no mood to follow instructions, Zoe goes ahead and tears open the package herself. Inside is a sapphire-colored glass picture frame—Alex wasn’t the only one hitting Google. It surrounds a document of rich, fancy paper, inscribed with a bunch of calligraphic flourishes. In Hebrew.

  “It’s a ketubah,” Rabbi Rose says, delighted to spot something familiar.

  “It’s your ketubah,” Gideon arrives to tell Baba. “This proves you’re already married by Jewish law—you don’t have to do it again.”

  “Where’d you find this?” Alex asks the question everyone is thinking.

  Cries of “Gorko!” have died down, replaced by murmurs of confusion and splashes of vodka being poured.

  Alex demands, “How could you have gotten your hands on their Jewish wedding license?”

  “It was part of their immigration file,” Gideon says. “To prove they were Jewish, to prove they were married. I went online, did a little digging, a little backdooring, and I downloaded—”

  Baba’s night-long frown fades, replaced with bewilderment. Baba, who prides herself on remaining in control and on top no matter what the situation, suddenly looks helpless and lost.

  She turns to Zoe and whispers, “Why would you to do this?”

  Without waiting for an answer, right there, in front of all her guests, Baba raises the frame above her head and hurls it to the floor.

  Epilogue

  “Wait!” Gideon dives heroically and catches the framed ketubah that Baba is about to shatter. He scrambles to his feet and again offers his gift. “This is still your original marriage license—I just prettied it up. There are your names, and here is your wedding date, July 18, 1974. That’s almost exactly one year before you left the Soviet Union, right?”

  Baba stares at the ketubah as if everything on it is new to her. And then she does the most surprising thing of all. She grabs Gideon’s face in her hands. She kisses him—first one cheek, then the other. She pulls him into an embrace. She murmurs, “Thank you, thank you, you lovely boy.”

  This is definitely not how Zoe expected this night to go. Alex clearly didn’t, either. That was his “Thank you, you lovely boy” going astray. Zoe can’t figure out if Alex looks more pissed or confused. Everyone else looks befuddled.

  Baba takes a break from embracing Gideon to approach the microphone. A respectful hush falls over the room.

  “Life has never given me what I wanted,” Baba commences her version of an anniversary toast. Some people grin, waiting for the punch line. Deda shifts from foot to foot. He’s already heard it. “But it has, once in a while, given me what I needed.”

  Deda’s head bobs up, his eyes wide. This part is new.

  Baba looks over her shoulder at Balissa. “It’s been that way for all the women in my family. My grandmother, Daria.” The assembled titter, so Baba explains. “It was Dvora. Her mother made her change it. She thought it would make a difference.” Now the crowd really laughs. There’s a Russian expression: They don’t punch your passport; they punch your face. No name change could pass a Dvora off as a Daria. “Baba Daria didn’t want to be banished to Siberia. But it shielded her from the war. She left Odessa just in time. Baba Daria got what she needed, not, maybe, what she wanted, because of two men. My grandfather, Edward Gordon.” Baba says the name with meaning. After Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s exposure of his butchery, Edward Gordon was rehabilitated. His recordings were again available, and every Jewish child forced to suffer through piano lessons had been compelled to listen to them. “He’s one of us!” their parents touted. Edward’s name was returned to a place of honor at the conservatory where he’d trained, the metal plaque reinstated to the wall where it had once been ripped off by crowbar, his death date added after his birth date. The ballet school where he’d accompanied the dancers put up a plaque, too. According to Baba, Balissa attended the ceremony because she had been required to. But she never set foot in the school again and forbade her Natasha from taking lessons there.

  “Mama didn’t want her cherished papa to die.” Baba puts words in Balissa’s mouth, though the tears in Balissa’s eyes suggest Baba knows what she’s talking about. “But his sacrifice saved her life. His sacrifice, and the actions of her stepfather. Whom Mama certainly didn’t want. Whom Mama certainly didn’t like. But whom she needed, nonetheless. Not to mention, this stepfather, he gave Mama her beloved baby brother!”

  Baba waves to an elderly man standing off to the side, clutching the hand of his nurse—the one with the chatty relatives. Despite pushing eighty, and having shrunk some, he’s still the largest member of the family, not in height—Deda is tall, though slight—but in width. Plus, he has an amazing head of hair. White now, but they say it was a bright red in his youth.

  Uncle Igor waves back at Baba, playing along with her shout-out. But his eyes are not playful, they’re worried, and they’re not on her. His attention is focused on Balissa. She smiles sorrowfully over the guests’ heads, followed by a melancholy shrug in Uncle Igor’s direction. It confirms the verity of what Baba said about the man who whisked them from Odessa, and the man who made their departure possible. How much Balissa didn’t want it, despite needing it desperately.

  “It was the same for me,” Baba continues. “A man.” She points at Deda. “This man, my Boris, he showed me that life does eventually give you what you think you want. Except maybe not in the way that you think you want it.”

  Is that a compliment? No one is sure. Baba is not known for her compliments. Zoe hears a few whispers, a few tentative claps. A few raised glasses and murmurs of “Hear, hear!” Deda takes a step toward Baba, his lips puckered to kiss her, but whether it will be mouth, cheek, or air isn’t yet clear.

  She’s not done. Before Deda can zero in on his target, Baba abruptly turns to where Zoe is standing, between Alex and Gideon, one of whom understood her words, but seems eager for her to wrap it up already, and one who hasn’t understood a thing, but appears in no hurry to escape. “I hope my granddaughter learns from my example. I hope, when it comes to choosing the right man to spend her life with”—because any other option isn’t an option, obviously—“she will have what she wants and what she needs, both.” Baba hesitates for so long that some believe her speech over and start to clap. She cuts them off with a terse shake of the head. Quickly, before she changes her mind, Baba adds, “I hope she will be brave, also. You must be brave. So you can know truth about yourself. So you can to tell difference between the wanting and the needing, my Zoyenka.”

  Everyone is looking at Zoe now. A response is required. She can’t stay planted at the edge of the stage, blinking in confusion. So she reverts to propriety. Zoe finally unders
tands why Mama and Deda are committed to following rules. It makes coming to a decision in difficult situations simpler. Zoe does what is expected of her. She steps forward and kisses Baba, then Deda. Mama actually looks pleased. Finally, it would seem Zoe has done something right.

  The band begins playing again, prompted by the emcee, who knows an emotional cue when he hears one. At Baba’s stern urging, the dancing resumes, more frenzied than before. Mama rises to join the group hug. Everyone is happy.

  There is no way it can last.

  Zoe takes advantage of the fleeting truce to disentangle herself and make a run for it, Alex and Gideon following.

  They get far enough up the scarlet velvet stairs, past the mirrored walls and toward the front door, that they can hear each other without screaming and English is no longer a foreign language. Rabbi Rose sweeps by, barely calling goodbye to Alex and best wishes to Zoe and Gideon before she’s on the boardwalk, speed-walking toward Coney Island Avenue for a cab.

  Alex grumbles in Rose’s wake, “Your grandmother could have shown a little gratitude. I went through a lot of trouble to get Rose here.”

  “Nobody asked you to. Baba didn’t want a Jewish wedding. You blindsided her.”

  “Please. She was just doing that keep-saying-no-so-they’ll-keep-asking bit.”

  “Maybe instead of constantly talking about your app, you should use it to really listen to what people are saying. Or”—Zoe looks at Gideon, wondering if he remembers—“what they’re not saying.”

  Gideon smiles. He definitely remembers.

  And another thing. “What are you doing here, anyway, Alex?”

  “You invited me!”

  “You never accepted!”

  “I didn’t know until the last minute if I’d be available.”

  “You mean you didn’t know until the last minute if something better would come along.”

  “I tried to make it up to you. Why do you think I went through this nonsense?”

  “To show off.”