by Kalman Nadia
The lace rose from the ashtray and somehow reconstituted itself into an embroidered ladies’ handkerchief of the kind Stalina’s great-aunt had brought to funerals, and, upon returning, had opened, to show the family the damp evidence of her suffering. This handkerchief, perhaps a cousin of the great-aunt’s, asked whether there were any succor Stalina might offer to ease the suffering of her fellow exiles. Mightn’t she lead them in a song of comfort? Little Grey Wolf, perhaps? Stalina tried and tried to sleep, and finally slept, and it was wonderful, but when she awoke in the daylight, so did the handkerchief.
Ever since that night, Stalina could not think quietly for more than ten minutes without the Russian Soul romanticizing, moralizing, and, worst of all, attempting to awaken nostalgia for La Belle Russie, as if Stalina had ever lived in such a place. People called her hard and irritable, but it was the soul that had made her so. Now, she threw off the satin blanket, which looked better than it felt. Osya snored amiably beside her, also on his stomach, underneath the sheet (long ago they had agreed to split bed coverings thus), his face turned towards her, puffing clouds of innocently sour breath.
“If only you had remained true to the Motherland, she would have already brought forth a gallant groom for your daughter,” the soul said.
“Listen, napkin, we’re never going back to those anti-Semites, hear?” Stalina said.
But. If they were in Boston…Boston: the most European of all American cities, the center of Russian immigrant intelligentsia, home to Harvard and MIT, imagine the kinds of suitors for her daughters’ hands.
Also, Stalina’s mother, in a fit of senile willfulness, had relocated herself from Stamford to Boston the previous year. Now she was hosting vecherinkas every night: pensioners drinking, smoking, singing, and at times dancing to old Komsomol songs. If she were in Boston, Stalina could monitor these activities.
And Edward Nudel kept offering her a job in his Cambridge lab, paying more than twice what she now earned. So many hipovi Boston boutiques she’d be able to afford — she’d really teach her daughters how to dress then.
But Stalina had had a romance with Edward before meeting Osip, if by “romance,” one meant an affair with a stooped, finicky, married and frustrated biochemist, an affair as interminable and depressing as the post-Khrushchev era in which it had occurred, and Osip was jealous. You’re standing in the way of your daughters’ future happiness, she silently accused the hump.
“How dare you slander your lord and protector?” The handkerchief was guarding her virtue again. Stalina wouldn’t even bother to reply. She would go to sleep like a serious person.
She took deep breaths. What would be a nice school outfit for Katya? American children had no idea how lucky they were not to have to wear brown dresses every day. Katya would look her best in purple — a sweater? A jumpsuit?
Stalina turned, and turned again, like a body turning under a car. What kind of person is so morbid? she would have asked her daughters, if one of them had thought it.
Stalina’s family had been afraid, which had not been remarkable given the time and place. What was remarkable was the means they undertook to remove their reasons for fear. “Surely, Stalin would never arrest anyone named after himself. This name will be good for our entire family — if anyone ever questions us, we’ll just say, ‘Me? I love Stalin so much I named my daughter after him.’”
Despite this and other precautions, Stalina’s father, a chemist specializing in sugar, had been fired from his job the year she started first grade. She hadn’t been able to understand exactly why. Her first thought had been that perhaps he had been stealing the sugar: it was what she would have done, but it was not that. People wrote newspaper articles calling him a Cosmopolitan, but he was really an Internationalist, which was much better, her mother said. (Stalina wanted to bring these two advanced words in to her teacher, but her mother looked about to slap her when she voiced this gold-medal idea.)
“Chemistry belongs to all nations,” was the mock-pompous, hopeful sentence her father intoned at dinner, raising his glass of homemade dandelion wine, before getting on the train to Moscow, where he was going to speak to the boy who used to share a desk with him at school and was now a high-ranking official.
His old seatmate refused to see him. On his way back to the train station, he was hit by a bus. When he got out of the hospital, he couldn’t remember anything: not his reasons for going to Moscow, not the risk he now ran of being arrested, not the names of the co-workers and friends who never came to see him. That job was left to Stalina’s mother, who whispered, “He doesn’t even know to aim at the toilet anymore,” and, “He went out into the street yesterday, no underpants,” and “He called me a dirty devil.” He died in the hospital, screaming for his father to come and defend him from the hooligani, the pogromschiki, the nurses, the pigeons.
A few years later, Khrushchev made his secret speech and the children at school began to make fun of Stalina’s name. “Foreigner.” “I am not.” “You’re foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, aren’t you?”
Her mother said, “Just go by Lina, there are lots of Linas.”
Stalina refused. Stalin had been evil, but she couldn’t fault his choice of a name. He’d renamed himself “steel,” and then he’d taken over the Comintern. The name was something to be reckoned with.
And now, here was her husband, right next to her, a nice solid man, and there was her Russia, across the world, years in the past. There was their television, right in their bedroom, there was her Cubist figurine from the Boston Museum, luxuries unimaginable, and three daughters, almost all grown, none knowing how to fix a button or a bribe, nor needing to know.
How Milla had behaved tonight! She’d have to talk to her about how an educated young woman conducts herself in polite society, speaks with young men, grooms her eyebrows, serves the people sitting around her, memorizes anecdotes.…The handkerchief agreed, and added other suggestions of lessons, and with this long and satisfying list, Stalina finally soothed herself to sleep.
Lev
The open air makes the smell fly off me and the headache with it. The crows fly off the roof, which superstition says is a sign that either bad luck or money is departing, which brings us to the Jewish Question.
The Affair of the Cosmopolitans, the Affair of the Dictionary, the Affairs of the Doctors, the Engineers, the Theater Critics: Stalin’s whimsical purges. Remember the time he accused those Yiddish poets of spying for Israel? Have you guessed what happened to that merry band who traveled the world proclaiming the end of anti-Semitism?
When they weren’t trying to establish an American satellite in the Crimea (The Affair of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee), the Jews were pretending to be Soviets: Mendelsteins renaming themselves Molochniks! And many writers of the pastoral Ukrainian school of brooks and Masha: circumcised under their kaftans. What right did that Yitzhak so-called Goyko (really, Gavstein) have to sing about our Ukrainian maypoles, our Ukrainian cabbage soup? demanded the vigorous Fourth Estate.
Internationalism: once, the Bolsheviks said that all nations would be equal and welcome in the Soviet Union. Jews — and what greater proof of their effete Cosmopolitanism could there be? — believed them.
Stalina’s father, Josef (another lucky name) Kandel supervised the graduate work of an enterprising lazybones who told him to write her a nice dissertation. He refused. Instead of a dissertation, she wrote an editorial: How dare this Kandel boss around the real Ukrainian engineers? What right had he to study our Ukrainian sucrose? The local newspaper lived to disseminate the people’s intelligence.
Lev
We skip past the next two years like cats skipping roof to roof. False elections, massacres, poison letters: what is the point of immigration if we are doomed to the same conversations we had in Old Eastern Europe? Haven’t we all had enough of history, of the pathetic surprise on everyone’s face? (Yes, Petya, it’s really you they’re going to kill, you’ve exhausted your allotment of Peace.)
I treat history like my grandmother told me to treat dogs, wolves, inspectors, anti-Semites and bees: I don’t bother it, it doesn’t bother me. You would be happier if you did the same.
The Molochniks, condensed:
Osip’s Y2K team dissolved, and another round of layoffs spared him, but took his pension. Stalina got into a long feud with a shiftless sample provider and was deemed insufficiently nurturing by her laboratory director.
Katya ran away to California, because California was mellow and no one there would care about her voice.
Norwalk Technical College kicked Roman out for cheating. He hadn’t bothered to hide it: in Nizhny Tagil, everyone had done the same. None of the Chaikins were very surprised. Soon afterwards, Leonid received a promotion and a wonderful new haircut, memorialized by his mother in a dozen photographs.
Milla found a job, right out of college, right in Stamford. Her parents were as happy as she’d hoped, the happiest they’d been since Katya had left.
After many, many visa delays, Pratik Rehman, an exchange student from Bangladesh, arrived at the Molochnik household.
Yana said she was disenchanted with academia, and enrolled in graduate school for education.
In the wake of the events, anything was possible. Despite Pratik’s generous and repeated geography lessons, certain members of the Neighborhood Watch continued to ask him about Afghanistan. Katya finally called: she was fine, if they’d just stop looking, she would be fine. She was taking classes, she was doing so much better than she had in Stamford. If they’d just stop looking, she’d call again. Following the example of an influential trance musician who had just done the same, Malcolm proposed to Milla.
Stalina
Milla and Malcolm sat on the couch, looking at the fireplace, the lamps, everywhere but at Osip and Stalina, like coquettes in an Ostrovsky play. “I’ve been wondering,” Malcolm said, petting the stubble on his right cheek, “What’s going on with the statues?”
Stalina glanced at the Art Deco figurines arrayed on the bookshelf behind her. Perhaps Malcolm’s parents were able to afford more elaborate pieces, but she doubted they possessed her aesthetic courage. Some of her figurines danced in the nude. The Soul said, “This rogue is challenging you in your own home.”
“No, not those,” Malcolm said, laughing. “The ones outside. Yeah, like driving in today, I saw this girl in a leather jacket, right by the mall. But then, I looked, and she was a statue.”
“I told him they’re everywhere,” Milla said breathlessly.
“I do not know,” Stalina said. Malcolm hadn’t driven in to talk such irunda, nonsense.
“Dad? Do you know why they’re here?” Milla asked.
“I am hearing maybe something to do with developer’s son.” Osip, today, would not make a joke about property values: he understood the seriousness of the situation.
“She is as our fertile land after rainfall, or before appending Finland,” the Soul said. Today, it smelled of flowery perfume, the kind of perfume that some men would buy and drink. Was it possible that Milla, with all the excellent American birth control available, had still somehow managed to get herself pregnant?
“Okey-dokey,” Stalina said, bracing herself.
“We got engaged a week ago,” Milla said, glancing at Malcolm with every other word.
“And you are in the position?” Everyone, including Osip, looked at her strangely. She’s been trying to translate from Russian, to avoid having to use the only American way of saying it she remembered, a crude colloquialism: “You are sticking up?” Osip gave her a reproachful look.
“Mom, no,” Milla said, and then to Malcolm, “She means ‘up the stick.’” She and Malcolm giggled because it was very funny that she had such a stupid mother. As soon as she noticed the look on Stalina’s face, though, Milla stopped. She probably hadn’t meant anything by it, Stalina told herself, as her daughter unclasped her hands to show a tiny engagement ring. “See, Mom, and you thought he’d never want to get married, you said, ‘he’s not even on five-year plan.’” She was giddy at the thought of having pleased her parents.
Stalina tried to smile. Milla was trying to do the right thing, getting herself married when so many young people just wanted to be swinging in the trees with the other singles. Stalina, in turn, would make the sacrifice of not asking Malcolm whether he had a job, at least not in any obvious way.
Osip’s exchange student, Pratik, timidly opened the front door. “I have brought nuts.” He put a wax bag on the coffee table.
Stalina said, “So sit, Pratik, we’ll have nut party.”
“I need to study, unfortunately,” he said, heading upstairs. His maroon backpack hit him at every step — what, in Bangladesh they didn’t have adjustable straps? “Don’t let the Oriental distract you,” the handkerchief admonished.
Stalina said, “And so, you get married, it is very nice, and then…”
“I want to have kids, I want to have, like, five kids,” Malcolm said.
“Okay, big Jewish family, and in the morning you wake up, and eat balanced breakfast, and then…go to office, or just —” What was the slang? “Or hang?”
Malcolm looked about to laugh.
She said, “It is easy question about future.” The handkerchief disagreed: “It is never easy to divine what will meet us on life’s winding,” etc., and suggested they conjure upon a rooster.
Osip escaped to the liquor cabinet and stood staring at its not very voluminous contents: Malibu, vodka, Manischewitz, and a few bottles of red wine. He patted the bottles, as if to comfort them.
“Actually,” Malcolm said after a pause. He now looked as though Stalina’s question was exactly what he had been hoping she would ask. “I am trying to choose between these two careers I’ve been interested in for a long time: law and journalism. So on the law side, I’ve signed up for the LSAT, that’s the Law School —”
“I know,” Stalina said. “My girlfriend Alla has niece who’s lawyer.”
“Okay,” Malcolm said, leaning back. “I’ve also” — he seemed proud to be in possession of that also — “talked to a friend of my parents who’s going to give me an internship — he’s a civil rights lawyer. Should I open this?” He had Pratik’s bag of nuts in his hands.
“Excuse for a minute,” Osip said, returning with wine glasses. “What is it mean ‘internship’?”
Stalina answered in Russian: “Like Yana had, at the children’s club, voluntyorstva for no pay.” Osip sighed quietly.
“This one is really prestigious,” Milla said. “It’s more of a fellowship.”
“Anyway,” Malcolm said, picking out an almond, “journalism is another strong option. I don’t know if you guys remember, but sophomore year, I actually ran a newspaper —”
“Yes,” Stalina said, beginning to feel nauseated. A two-page tabloid for street people — how do you make money on something like that?
Malcolm nodded, drank some wine.
“Okey-dokey,” Stalina said. “But before you tell us you want to be mathematician.”
“Yeah, but that was before I took that class, and realized what math metamorphoses into after Calculus, it’s a hydra.” Malcolm laughed a how-silly-of-me laugh, the kind of laugh only very confident people could afford. If Stalina ever laughed like that at work, people would laugh along with her, thinking all the while: Of course, the woman with the accent made a mistake.
***
After the children left, Stalina sat in the kitchen and let Osip cook some liver for dinner.
“He’s a nice boy from a very good family,” she said.
Osip nodded.
“Of course, if we were in Boston, we could bring ten, twenty nice boys to the house for Milla to choose from. But you moved us here, where there’s nothing but Leonid and Malcolm. So she picked Malcolm, because he is better-looking. He has longer legs. They’ll have attractive children.”
Osip nodded.
“He wants to get married, he wants five children, even. That show
s he’s a serious boy. He will have to make money to support those children.”
Osip nodded.
“And you? Did a cat eat your tongue?” Why did she have to be the only one looking for optimistic things to say? “What, you think it’s better for her not to get married? To sleep with a lot of men, and after that, try to find someone?”
He stirred the liver as if he were not planning to reply. The Russian Soul counseled “women’s golden patience.” Why was it that she always had to be the one to face facts? Finally, he lifted the spatula and said, “I’ll teach Malcolm how to do more practical things, fix toilets, like that.” That was all he could come up with? What about Malcolm’s joblessness? Should they try to find him something themselves? Or would that anger his parents? Would he laugh? What would Milla say? She was a smart girl, an accountant, she had to understand…and there was Stalina, in the middle of an argument with her daughter, and Osip nowhere to be found.
For so long, Stalina had felt as if she were driving a troika and her daughters were the horses, and she was whipping them forward to what she knew would be a better place. And no one ever thought about how difficult it was for such a driver, how frightening. She said, “You think Malcolm Strauss wants to learn? To fix toilets? From you? Do you know what his family thinks of us?”
Osip’s shoulders hunched. Now, he had cause to ignore her, and that was what he would do. In a minute, he would finish the liver and take it to the TV room. He would call Pratik in there, too, and Stalina would wander alone through the rest of the house.