by Kalman Nadia
Milla
Back in her room, back in her sweatpants, Milla called her grandmother.
“Da, lyagushinka, little frog, what’s the matter?” Baba Byata said. She had nicknamed Milla, her favorite granddaughter, “little frog” on account of her long tongue, with which Milla was able to touch her nose. Her grandmother’s delight in this nickname, and in demonstrations of its origins, was a small, guilty reason that Milla had been a little bit relieved when she’d moved to Boston.
Milla told her grandmother everything and a bit more. She called Leonid Chaikin a capitalist pig and her grandmother said, “Da, I understand,” with only a slight bit of irony: she still believed in the ideals of Communism and the treacheries of money-lust.
“I showed him,” Milla said, and told a slightly exaggerated version of her Scrabble victory, which confused her grandmother, who had never played, and Milla had to explain about the values of letters, and it wasn’t as satisfying to tell this part of her story as she’d anticipated. She said, “Still, it’s very sad, to have your parents stand in the way of your true love.”
“Da, da.”
“I wish you were right here,” Milla said. Her grandmother was wearing, she knew, a polyester housecoat with cheerful, to Byata’s way of thinking, green flowers with orange stems. The housecoat was buttoned to the neck and scratched Milla’s forehead, not unpleasantly, all those times she’d cried into it. She invited her grandmother to Stamford.
Byata said, “It’s such a long trip, the train stinks…”
“But I’d cook for you. I just learned to make chicken a l’orange. That’s a French chicken recipe. Mom would be happy, too, she keeps talking about taking you shopping for supplements.”
“Yes, your mother’s very,” Byata took a breath, “activnaya.”
“So,” Milla said, hoping that her grandmother might, in sympathy for Milla’s plight, answer her question honestly, “did you move to Boston to get away from Mom? I would understand, totally.” She began to tell again about what Stalina had said about Malcolm, and how Stalina had probably set out to ruin their love, because she was jealous.
“You know, lyagushinka, in these modern times, you can just call that boy you like.”
A few minutes later, Milla took a deep breath and dialed the number she’d been trying to forget. “Am I interrupting?” She imagined a pyramid of beautiful girls in underpants, standing on one another’s shoulders to make the shape of a “Y,” for Yale, and for the questions of “why” he had ever bothered with someone like her, before tumbling down onto his bed.
Malcolm said no, he’d just come through the door. He’d been working on his thesis, listening to this amazing vocalist, Ori Shacktar, she’d been in the Israeli army, klezmer could be really raw, did Milla know that?
Milla told him about how rude she’d been to Leonid. “You dumped me, and he hates me, and now I have to marry him.”
“I — what?”
“You don’t understand my culture!” She sounded like Yana.
“Hey, hey, calm down. You always take what I say the wrong way.”
Milla tried to take the deep breaths — five counts in, five counts out — her father had taught her in her crybaby youth. She said, “I hardly ever cry, you know that.”
“Anyway, you don’t want to marry that other guy, you want to marry me.”
“I never said that, what makes you say that?”
“I want to marry you, okay? I think it would be fun to be married to you. I mean, this isn’t a proposal, I’m only twenty-three, it’s more — a proclamation. Yeah, a proclamation. Of love.”
Milla thought to look at herself in the mirror. It was her there, not a raw klezmer singer, not a model, but her own face, crazed with happiness.
Yana
Since I drank of the cup of love,
I shall love forever secretly.
“The roots of the modern-day ‘love discourse’ first appeared in medieval France, where troubadours such as Raimbaut d’Aurenga (cited above) found that both common and noble audiences preferred songs of heterosexual” — what? Strivings? Yana rose and strode about the room. She’d use her old favorite: “limning heterosexuality, and so decided to ‘produce’ these ballads in large quantities. Commercial considerations, then, have always been behind the perpetuation of the idea of romantic love.”
Yana sat back and looked at her paragraph. Was that a Marxist-feminist critique, or what? Her professor edited a journal of advanced studies. She imagined whispers following her across campus, “only undergraduate ever to publish…”
Or, was she being “tendentious, sophistic and repetitive” again? That was what the professor had written, in small, embarrassed letters, on the back of her last paper. She wished her parents could help her, that she had the kind of parents who’d been doled out to so many of her college classmates (although not to the few who’d agreed to be her friends), parents who read and debated their children’s papers over Thai, and contributed to progressive judges’ re-election campaigns, and paid psychiatrists to help their children figure out where their parenting had failed. Yana would have settled for parents who didn’t either laugh (Stalina) or become enraged (Osip) that she was trying to write like a Marxist. Instead, she was on her own, basically, and she had yet to answer the question: Why did audiences keep asking for love songs?
Milla bounced into the room, apparently in the manic stage of the bipolar disorder she’d acquired upon meeting Malcolm. “He’s going to marry me!”
So he’s going to do the honor of making you his domestic slave? So he’s generously agreed to depress you, to load you up with stress- and childbirth-related illnesses, to ensure you die approximately five years earlier? Milla waited, frozen into her smile. Yana imitated the freshman girls who’d stopped to eat the chocolate and caramel cookies at the Women’s Center table at orientation, before they’d realized what the cookies represented, but after Yana had begun telling them about an upcoming all-woman dance. “Uh-huh?” she said, and she probably gave the same pained smile the freshman girls had.
“It wasn’t a formal proposal, that’ll be later.” Milla found, almost with relief, several worries: sure, Malcolm wanted to marry her now, but what if something happened between now and the engagement? Had Yana ever heard of promise rings? Did she think Malcolm had heard of them? If he had, and wasn’t planning on buying Milla one, wasn’t that weird? Was that weird, or was she being too demanding?
Yana said, “You know, marriage as the fulfillment of romantic love is a nineteenth-century construct.”
Milla wound a curl around her finger. “That can’t be true.”
Yana found evidence on the Internet, but Milla just kept asking the same questions over and over again, until Yana surrendered. “You look good in white.”
Worrying about whether she’d be able to get to sleep, Milla returned to her room, and Yana opened her book to a lyric by Arnaut Daniel:
And when I see her blond hair,
her body lean and fresh
I love her more than I love one
who’d give me Luzerne.
A skinny blonde. Of course. Not that it was necessarily easy to be the ideal. Yana was sure it was difficult, sometimes. She had read about it.
She typed, “Troubadours put women on pedestals, where they stood in their restrictive skirts: lifeless statues, not equal partners. In idealizing their love objects, troubadours murdered them, basically.”
Yana began to pace again. Katya wasn’t back yet. How could their parents possibly believe she was still at the library at ten on a Sunday night? If the last few evenings were any indication, Katya would return at two, tumbling out of a car that barely stopped. She might be laughing, for a few seconds at least, slipping across the icy lawn, before making her way inside. Yana told herself again that it was all right to tell their parents about Katya’s lies, promised herself to tell them tomorrow, knew she wouldn’t.
Osip
Osip awoke from dreams of frying pota
toes with the great bard Galich. Stalina was hunched up with her rear in the air, mumbling something. Sometimes, she mumbled in her sleep; sometimes, she argued and bargained; sometimes, she screamed, “Get off him,” “Not yet.” Osip turned her onto her side and stroked her shoulder. It had to be her shoulder, not her arm, and only in one direction. “Nu, all right,” she muttered, and quieted.
He put on the tennis-racket bathrobe Stalina had bought for his last birthday and plodded to the kitchen, from which emitted some kind of music. Katya sat there, looking transfixed. (High? Had it finally happened?) “Katyenok,” he said. She jumped, and then slouched herself back into boredom.
“Hey.” Katya was still wearing her daytime clothes, and eating the top layer of the Polish chocolate wafer cake the Chaikins had brought over. The chocolate had been poured into curlicues and heraldic symbols, like you were being knighted for eating it. He reached for a piece, but the rackets stretching around his stomach made him pull his hand back.
“I had such strange dreams,” he said, stretching and smiling. He wanted things to be cozy between them, but they hadn’t been for a long time. “About Galich. No one understands my Galich,” he said in his joke voice. She looked interested, for once. “Should I play you some?” he said. She shrugged, but paused her music.
Osip rummaged through the cassettes Stalina had tried, more than once, to throw out, and had finally relegated to a giant ceramic pig.
He turned the tape on and they waited, but instead of Galich’s baritone, out came the reedy, hysterical voice of Osip’s brother Lev, speaking in his odd British and Russian-accented English about discriminatory university admissions in the USSR. “But vee, the Soviet Jewry, will not suckle at breast of oppressor…”
Katya smirked. Osip began to render his usual apologia: Lev had spent ten years in the Perm labor camp for saying those things she found so amusing, she should have seen him when they’d first immigrated, President Reagan himself… “We wouldn’t even have house without Uncle Lev.” Katya rested her head on her folded arms.
He replaced the cassette, and Galich began one of his untitled poems. Osip explained that the hundred-headed monster represented the Soviet government. “In Russia, only very hip people know what Galich is really saying.”
“Most people are so retarded,” Katya said in a rush. “Like, I like this band, Joy Division? But no one’s even heard of them. Just because they’re old, doesn’t mean they’re not good. Like that kid Roman today? He thinks the shit — sorry — on MTV is music.”
Osip liked the sound of this old Joy band. It had to be better than those Sex Pistols on her tee shirt. “Maybe you play them for me?”
“Okay,” Katya said, tapped the cake knife on the table through the rest of Galich’s song, and then shot upstairs. “You can download them, but I don’t think that’s fair,” she said, a little too loudly, on her way back down. She imitated Brezhnev, which she always did when she was in a good mood. “Exports from our petrochemical factories —”
Osip laughed, but worried that she might have woken Stalina or the other girls. Quietly, he said, “How you can do that, when you weren’t even born —”
Katya sat on the stairs with a thud, muttering. It was a strange way to end a joke. After a minute, she got up again, walking more slowly. “Okay, I’m going to play you, like, their most mainstream song, because if you don’t get it, you definitely won’t get anything else by them.” She put the tape in and a man spoke quietly over music, about love, and even though Osip couldn’t quite make out what the man was saying, he had a reasonable tone.
“Very good,” Osip said, nodding at Katya.
“Really? You’re not just saying that to seem young or whatever? Sorry.” She looked down and broke off another piece of wafer cake.
“What are words?”
“Okay.” Katya re-started the song and said the lyrics along with the man. They were about routines, and ambitions, both of which topics, come to think of it, were lyrically under-represented, even in the oeuvres of the bards. “Very interesting,” Osip said during the chorus. It was generous of her, quietly reciting this for him, in her voice that so often sounded as if it were being forced out of a can.
“So maybe we go to a concert of Joy? For your birthday?”
“Uh, the lead singer killed himself in like 1980.”
“But, Katyenok, you were not even born in 1980,” was the first thing he thought to say. Why would his daughter be listening to suicide music? He scooped up some cake crumbs with his fingers. “Even Galich didn’t kill himself, and you know how he suffered.”
“So?”
“Music should be” — he searched for an English word to make her understand — “motivational.” It was the wrong word, he knew as soon as he’d said it, a word from work.
“Now you sound like fu — like Yana, how she’s always pretending to love Joan Jett. You want me to pretend?”
He didn’t know where to start explaining and put on his joke voice again. “Just because you and sisters don’t like same music, doesn’t mean you can’t be friends.”
“I have friends,” she said, scraping the cake knife along the edge of the plate.
He took the knife from her hand and cut himself a giant slice. “Friends are not — you don’t want to be like Uncle Lev. You want to have a family.”
She leaned back, away from him. Russian made her defensive; he shouldn’t have used it. “That’s what you guys are always scaring us with.” The next song came on, someone screaming, in a nasal voice, some garbled, unintelligible phrase.
He said, “You want to just live by self? Sit in room and listen to death metal?” The chocolate tasted of gasoline.
“Oh my God, it’s not death metal.”
“It is. It has death, and metal. Death plus metal by simple equation is death metal.” His voice had gotten high.
Katya leaned forward, making one last attempt at explaining the hipness of her music. “He doesn’t sing about death. If you just listen —”
He couldn’t agree to this death-worship. “A little too much I am listen for tonight.”
“Whatever.” She turned off the CD player and stood.
“Are you meaning it?” he said.
“What?”
In a falsetto: “I don’t need my family, I don’t need anyone, I —” He broke off and stuffed another wafer into his mouth.
She sighed and shifted between her large, pink-slippered feet. “I’m always saying something spastic.”
He wanted to end on a funny note, so he held his hand out for her to shake. Her hand was warm and damp, like something just born. Who could know what she was thinking? After she went upstairs, he wrapped the cake in cellophane and wandered back to bed. He had a few more years with her, at least.
Stalina
“If you were in Russia…” Stalina’s Russian Soul, that blowsy whore, kept whispering, its moist nalivka breath coagulating on Stalina’s ear and keeping her from sleep.
Stalina hadn’t believed in souls, Russian or otherwise, until she was on the train to Italy. Finally, she’d gotten her family permission to immigrate; finally, Osip, Milla, and Yana were all asleep; finally, Stalina’s nausea had passed; finally, she could begin planning for their stay in Rome — would those matryoshka dolls they’d bought really sell? For good prices? Were Italians really that stupid?
As the train tunneled through woods, she heard an inane lisp: “Our last chance to gaze at our beloved birches.” She twisted in her seat: no one was awake except for some soldiers, skinny and gallant — they’d insisted on giving up their seats, were standing and smoking and almost mouthing their dirty jokes so as not to disturb the others. They seemed not have heard the voice. All the traitors to the motherland in their soiled going-abroad best (they hadn’t anticipated, although they should have, that they would be waiting eighteen hours in the boiling station): they slept so soundly, attached to one another through the shoulder or the ear, like paper dolls, leaning in synchrony through
the curves.
Perhaps someone was only faking sleep? That babushka in the fedora, maybe? Playing tricks with strings and mirrors? “What do you mean, Citizenka, harassing strangers like this?” Stalina said in a louder voice.
“‘Citizenka’ — ha! I am the Russian Soul, the firebird in the hearts of all Russians whose hearts still beat.” It was a hallucination, then. That made sense. She hadn’t had anything to drink since some brown water from the train station’s sink at one that afternoon.
“How quickly time alights from our grasp.” The lisp seemed to be coming from her purse, but that was impossible, although, if she were Osip, she would open the purse to make sure the KGB hadn’t planted a radio bomb. The voice began to recite Karamzin. Stalina opened the purse. Of course, there was nothing new inside: a comb, their visas, the sixty-seven American dollars of their savings they had been allowed to wrest from the Great Mother’s fist, and a piece of lace she’d taken from her wedding dress at the last minute, a lapse into sentimentality, which was already turning dingy. Stalina threw the lace in the window ashtray. The voice continued to declaim: “Gloomy nature captures your gentle glance/ It is as if she mourns along with you.” Only now, it seemed to be coming from the ashtray, where the rag was moving — not moving on its own, of course, just being joggled by the motion of the train. Stalina would sleep. If, that is, she wasn’t already sleeping. “Bid farewell to the birches, whispering of our ancestors, how their swords gleamed in the moonlight, how their horses’ hooves would echo —”
Whispering, so her sleeping husband and daughters wouldn’t hear, Stalina said, “On their way to pogrom my grandmother?” With an effort, she restrained herself from further speech: they hadn’t yet reached the border of the Capacious and Mighty shit-swamp, and also the voice was a dream. In frustration, she tried to pull apart the lace. It felt terrible to do that, almost as if she were betraying Osya…but he always said he didn’t care what she wore, as long as she eventually took it off. When he slept, he sometimes looked like a boy, and sometimes, like his grandmother Rufa. Tonight, exhausted, he looked just like Rufa. He stirred irritably at the sound of the lace tearing and muttered something about suspecting the cigarettes.