by Kalman Nadia
Osip himself had come up with only one idea, but it was a good one: the beach. At four this morning, he’d checked the weather on the computer — 87 American degrees — like someone saying, “Genius plan.” He had immediately left a message at work, taking a personal day. Unable to get back to sleep, he’d packed the car and waited for Stalina to wake so he could tell her, and then another three hours after that, in the kitchen, trying and failing to concentrate on a chronicle of Saddam Hussein’s rule in the National Review. When she’d come down at eleven-thirty, Katya had said “Okay.”
Driving to Shippan, he asked her whether she remembered their vacation at Amston Lake, the summer she was five. “The other girls would be up for beach, but not Katyenok. You liked too much to sleep. You remember how I wake you?”
Silence.
“All I have to say is ‘Katya — bool’k!’” He made the sound of someone jumping into the water. “You’d say, ‘Bool’k?’ and I’d say, ‘Yes, but first, bathing suit, brushing teeth…” Her cheek was pressed to the window and her eyes were closed. “Do you remember that? Do you remember how I would wake a Katyenok?”
“Okay.” She had Baba Rufa’s voice, that voice she’d had at the end of her cigarettes and hospitals.
He turned on the radio. Traffic was catastrophic, everywhere but there: “What you want to do is stay on —” the announcer cautioned. It smelled of seaweed inside the car, even though the windows were rolled up. Katya was too cold for open windows, even though it was 87 American degrees outside.
“Did I ever tell you I have other wife?” he said. She looked at him: that was something. “Yes, twenty years. She is very beautiful.” Katya nodded — had she already heard him say this? He finished anyway. “I drive Ford and only Ford for twenty years. Sometimes, other cars beat her a little.” Katya nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. “So I think, maybe Ford can make me their new commercial model? Foxy photo, me on car?”
“Okay,” she said, as he pulled into one of a plentitude of potential parking spaces — it was almost empty on weekdays this October. Americans thought if there was no lifeguard, they couldn’t swim. He handed Katya the towel he’d brought, the newest and best of the Molochnik towels, having come free with one of Stalina’s makeup purchases and featuring overlapping compasses and lips. She held it as though she didn’t know what it was for.
“Do you remember how we used to race to the little beach?” He was ready to grab his stomach in two hands and run if she’d agree.
She shrugged.
He said, “You want to race? You think you can beat up me now?”
Silence. She looked like that shivering, pale boy in the painting, Revelation of Christ to the People. What had been revealed, to make her look like that? “Look,” she said, “I know I’m kind of a heinous problem for you guys. If I go away, like suddenly, to get better —”
Osip dropped his visor hat. “What?”
“To get better.”
“Go away — where?” A fat seagull flew over them, a vulture.
“Maybe, like, to Russia? I think I wouldn’t be so weird there?”
She was joking, so he laughed.
She said, “I’m just telling you so you won’t be surprised.” She said it was all planned. She felt very positive about this idea. He dug his keys into his palm. The wind stirred up the twigs around their feet, twigs like minnows, he’d thought it would be a day of minnows.
He said, “Don’t even think about it.”
“You sound like the Commish.”
“I’ll lock house.”
“That never worked,” she said, gently, as red bombs floated in the bright periphery of his vision.
“To leave us again, to go back to that swamp, that whore, that old farter?” He kicked his car. “What I need this for, if you are run?” It didn’t dent: it was a Ford.
“Like, a lot of parents would be happy. Like, I’m going back to our roots.” Finally she had some energy in her voice. For this, she had energy.
“Our what? You know what they call us there? You know what they’ll do to a nice Jewish narcomanka like you?” He wanted to run away alone to the little beach, where no one ever went, to flop down and sleep on its twiggy, black-specked sand. If he ran, she wouldn’t follow him, or even stay here. He needed to keep his eyes on her. “You want to leave your mother again? You want her crazy? Tfu, tfu, tfu. Spit three times over your left shoulder.”
“What?” She took a step back.
“So the Evil Eye doesn’t hear you.”
“That’s just babushkas —”
“Now!” He hit the hood, burning his hand. She spit, or at least made a spitting noise, with her head turned away. His face was hot and wet. He told her to promise she wouldn’t leave.
“Don’t you think I’ve thought — ”
He banged on the car. “Promise, promise, promise.” His neck burned. She was shivering and he gave her his towel, and the sweatshirt he’d packed. After a long time, she said, “Okay.” Was that a promise? What did a promise from her mean? He wanted to ask.
Yana
Yana awoke to find Pratik still on his laptop. He said, “I happened upon a web site. May I read it to you? It would not disturb you?” His cheeks were the color of bricks. He was very angry, and in his anger, more selfish than usual — he began reading before she’d answered. “This gentleman Buford Spelling, a Bangladeshi name, no? He has interesting ideas about our floods which kill us.” Turning back around to his laptop, and putting on a kind of British accent, which perched atop his Bengali accent like a crow, he read, “To us Westerners, a house is something important, filled with all our precious belongings and symbols of accomplishment. But poor Bangladeshis have hardly any belongings at all. We must remember that these people have nothing to lose.”
Yana said, “What an imperialist.”
“It is not that he is an imperialist.”
“Sorry.”
Usually, Pratik would have now tried to make her feel better about whatever she’d done wrong. Tonight, he just went on. “It is that he is using the tactics of anti-imperialism to claim that we poor Bangladeshis — I am falling over in shock that he does not simply call us Pakis — we are not like the rest of the humanity, we are jolly monkeys in trees, we play with garbage.”
Yana tried to massage his shoulders, but they were too stiff. “Where’d you find this?”
“On a website linked to Cambridge University Department of International Studies. This Buford seems to have a connection. He is a chaired professor, for all we know.” The tendons at the back of his neck were trembling. “‘For the average native, a flood is not that big of a deal.’ This is sentence number one. Sentence numero two: ‘A 1991 cyclone and flood led to the deaths of over 100,000 people.’ No big deal, everything cool. Numero three: ‘Westerners should not be overly concerned about these events.’”
Yana said, “I’d beat his ass, if he weren’t in Cambridge.” Would that be of use? Pratik pulled her onto his lap. Yana hazarded, “Let’s see the flood cup as half full, you know? He has no power, he’s just writing. You — you’re doing things, like that great play…” which Pratik was writing, but he didn’t notice the contradiction.
“Oh, I told you about that?” He had, in detail, but she prepared to listen again to how rural schoolchildren would be singing and dancing about flood procedures. Yana kept her eyes looking into his to prevent herself from falling asleep, nodded, uh-huhed like an antediluvian sex-role-dominated sorority girl, and when he finished, they rolled into bed like two slugs and slept through the morning, undiscovered.
Stalina
The Russian Soul waged a campaign of glasnost’. “You must confess your sins to this tender sapling, or knock-kneed foal, which bends beneath their weight.”
The Russian Soul said, why give Katya cold paper, when Stalina could offer a mother’s bosom, a mother’s embrace? Stalina had recently found that, if she did not honor it with a reply, it drifted away, bored. However, in her head, she a
nswered that she knew her daughter, she knew how best to tell her, and whom had the handkerchief ever freed from the hold of opiates, that it could advise her?
First, Stalina put the letter in a bag of assorted chocolate mini-bars. What female does not like chocolate? The chocolates disappeared, but the letter endured. It was possible that Stalina had eaten the chocolates herself, during her twice-daily inspections.
Then she put the letter into Katya’s laundry basket, but Katya had no immediate plans to do laundry, going around all day in some old safety-pinned jeans and Yana’s Take a Bite Out of Shark Finning tee shirt. Finally, one morning, when everyone but the two of them had already left the house, Stalina taped an envelope with Katya’s name on it to the bathroom mirror.
Katya
The boy at the check-out desk, who wore a hemp tee shirt and pirate earrings and looked like someone she may have been friends with in high school, made the security guard go through Katya’s bag before allowing her to leave. Now she remembered why she’d hardly ever come to the library before.
Outside, a Mennonite girl in a head scarf — had Katya taken physical science with her at Stamford High? — gave Katya a pamphlet about divorce and hurricanes. Elderly, semi-addicted Vietnam War veterans lined the benches, dozily dealing, or arguing with the unseen, or chatting, or sleeping. She reminded herself that the Brezhnev voice hadn’t come back for a long time, and she reminded herself that was a good thing.
She’d looked too long. One of the men on the benches unfolded himself and began to limp towards her. Trying to ignore him, Katya took out the graph paper, covered with Byzantine script, which she’d found in the bathroom a week before. She could read Russian well enough to understand that it was addressed to her, and that it was most likely her mother’s signature at the bottom. She traced individual letters with her finger. The word “super,” in English, appeared once. Was her mother trying to boost her self-esteem again?
The man stood over her shoulder. “Where are you going, girly?” His breath was hungry and Katya knew what that was like. She wanted to tell him she knew, and buy him a sandwich at the Greek place, at the same time as she wanted to run. As was usual for her in such circumstances, she only stood in place. His hand was on Katya’s shoulder, like a boyfriend’s. “Up to Tittyland?” the man suggested.
“Leave her alone” — but leave was pronounced like leaf, a Russian accent — oh, no. It was Roman, the Chaikins’ nephew.
“Calm down, fuck off, horse shoe, duck luck,” the man said. Roman tore the man’s hand off her shoulder. The man lifted both his hands and smiled. “The hell you were.” He walked back to the bench. A few of the men on the bench whooped.
Katya shook, but not because of what this Roman, who was asking whether she was okay, may have thought. She had liked the hand. She shoved the letter in her pocket.
Roman’s jeans drooped over his white underwear, across the band of which was written Caldor, the name of the chintzy department store a few blocks away. Someone — perhaps he himself — had shaven a thunder-bolt through his hair. “You are okay?” he asked again.
“Yeah.” There was a silence. “How are you?” she added, loudly, lest Stalina hear of this encounter and suspect rudeness.
Instead of answering, he said, “And you do drugs or do not do?”
That was all any of her parents’ friends asked her. The Russians of Stamford were every one of them treatment counselors. Katya shook her head.
“Yeah?” He grinned and pulled an imaginary lever, and said, “Yes,” as if he’d just scored. Obviously, she wasn’t about to throw up on him right this second, so what was it with the massive relief? He said, “I am a straight-edge, is underground termin. You know?”
“No drugs, no drinking, no meat, no sex.”
He dimpled again. “But sex and meat are okay for me.”
She looked down.
He said, “Chaikins maybe throw me from house if I do not eat meat like Reagan and Schwarzenegger. Also!” he tapped her arm. “I am now DJ. I am wanting to tell you.”
To tell her? “That’s cool,” she said, although almost every guy she’d known in California had called himself a DJ. Roman nodded, as one who knows he has deserved a compliment. His shirt said “Football! Football! Football!” across the chest.
“Nice shirt,” she said, and found herself laughing convulsively. He tugged at his giant jeans. Her bus, like a chaperone, glided towards them down the street.
“Can I have digits?” he said.
The door of the bus sighed open and she vaulted up the steps, lurched towards the back, rested her head on the seat before her, and screwed her eyes shut.
Osip
Osip leaned back in his lawn chair, which Stalina called a director’s chair. Osip was, at the very least, the director of beer, and this Friday, he had gotten a Danish brand. Why not? They had saved their Jews. The beer itself was all right, if a bit pale and thin, like a Dane. Galich sang on the cassette player. Katya was safe at the library, living half her life there, just as she had when she was fourteen. She’d always been so serious, and yet, she’d had the worst grades of all his daughters.
Pratik came outside and pulled a chair next to his. “What are you drinking?” Osip said.
“Just lemonade.”
“Oh, yes. Sorry.” Muslims never drank, which Osip could not imagine. Jewish laws were reasonable, healthy. Who wanted to eat milk and meat together?
“Is that Galich, your favorite?” Pratik said. Osip nodded and corrected Pratik’s pronunciation.
“Yes, I can recognize him a little bit. What is he singing about now?” Unlike Osip’s daughters, Pratik was interested in the bards.
Osip said, “It is about how one hundred years from today some people will be bored after party and maybe put his cassette in. But cassettes are obsolete technology. Only I have his cassettes, most people, if they listen to him, buy CDs or pirate MP3. For all he was genius, he didn’t predict.”
“Still, we can hope. People still listen to Led Zeppelin.” They sat in silence a few moments, and then Pratik asked him how his work was going.
“It’s going,” Osip said, pinching a mosquito out of the crook of his arm. “Actually, it is going to India.” Osip hadn’t even told Stalina this yet. “I am being reassigned.” He took another drink of beer. “To genius work of subcontractor database.”
“Too bad.”
“No, it is Indians who are too bad, right?” Osip laughed to encourage Pratik. “Bangladeshis know.”
Pratik smiled and flattened a mosquito on his knee.
“How is school?” Osip said.
“One of my professors is having us design emergency procedures for hurricanes.” Pratik frowned at the clear, darkening sky.
“Oh, a praktika, very common in engineering school in Russia.” Osip was being kind. Designing an “emergency procedure” was hardly the same as designing a thermal waste disposal plant.
“Yes, and if it’s all right, I would like to give you my recommendations. I am designing specifically for coastal New England.”
Osip had another drink of his beer. “In Connecticut when we have hurricane it equals just rain, boring, not like in Bangladesh.” Sometimes, this boy made it hard to relax. Osip decided to steer the conversation towards more philosophical realms. “Mosquitoes,” he said, pointing to the bug-zapper, “How many you think die? Is it right that we kill them? If they could kill us, they would kill us. They are only too stupid.”
Pratik said, “Have you ever heard of the Long Island Express?”
Osip spread his hands. What now? “Of course I have heard.”
“The Long Island hurricane of 1938?”
Tomorrow, Osip had to go to work, face Call Me Evelyn and her operatically amplified constructive criticism. Some people, they could hide in their ivy towers, not he. “Long Island is not Stamford.”
Pratik smiled. “You’re right. I might be a bit of a control freak, Yana said so the other day.”
A mosqui
to of a thought hovered next to Osip’s forehead. “Yana?”
“Yes, she even wrote a song, to the tune of ‘Superfreak,’ by disco artist Rick James.” He laughed and tapped his sandaled foot: “‘He is very organized, his tasks completed like no other.’”
Osip said, “My daughter sings many songs for you?”
“No, no. You know Yana is very busy with school, we just bumped into each other in the kitchen, once.” He scratched his nose, which was a liar’s giveaway, Baba Rufa had always said.
Osip opened his second beer.
Pratik laughed, for some reason.
The Commish was often blindsided, but always recovered quickly. He was older than Osip, and still, he could run from a restaurant, a fried squid dangling from his lips, and apprehend an entire gang of drug thieves. If this Ali Baba had been romancing the Commish’s daughter, under his own roof, the Commish would use this time to extract information, subtly. “So, in Bangladesh, how many wives your father has?”
“Oh — he and my mother are actually in Belgium now.” Pratik took a gulp of lemonade.
“Oh, so for Belgium he has one wife only. But how many are awaiting him in Bangladesh?”
Pratik said, “It is not, actually, a part of our cultural tradition, polygamy.”
This was where the Commish would try a different line of questioning, catch him off guard. If only Pratik drank — but it was all right. Osip had twenty-five years and Soviet military experience on his side. “So, Pratik, my friend, after you learn how to be Muslim James Bond” — Pratik gave him a questioning look — “to resolve all emergencies, you will be moving to Washington to help Bush?”