by Kalman Nadia
“If it’s a girl, Isadora. If it’s a boy: Isidor.” She sounded peculiarly proud of her sissy boys’ name.
“Hmm…” Jean said.
“For Isidor Strauss, the Macy’s guy? Remember you said once that you were related? I looked on the Internet, and he was really heroic his whole life, not just on the Titanic.”
“Of course,” Jean said, “Yes. You should know it’s not really discussed in our family. We try to be more modest.” A silent minute later, she said, “I thought we’d start here,” opening the door of her favorite French textile boutique. “We can buy sheets for the crib — won’t that be fun?”
“Sure,” Milla said.
“This is the kind of store,” Jean went on, guiding Milla through the pillows, the rough silks, “where you tell them what you need, and they choose for you. Have you ever been in a store like that? We’ll just let them know you’re expecting — not that we really need to let them know. They can see you. And they’ll say — ‘Zees one here, for you,’ or ‘Zees one is horreebleh.’ All vite?” She’d somehow slipped into her mother’s Yiddish accent.
Milla said nothing.
“Is this fabulous?” Jean said, holding up the tiniest vine-patterned blanket. No blankies here, only blankets. “Or do you hate it? You hate it.” She replaced it in its cube.
“It’s — nice,” Milla said.
“You’re like a Hebrew slave in the lion’s den!” Milla looked up, startled, frightened, how else? She was a rabbit in a net, a lobster at the moment it sees the water boil. The saleswoman looked up, too, and Jean gave her a smoky June Allyson laugh.
“Jean?” Milla said, and Jean knew what was coming: Milla was eternally surprised, but incapable of ever surprising. When Milla pointed to her feet it was, of course, because her water had broken, and now it was up to Jean, again, everything hard was up to her: to apologize to the saleswoman, to hail a taxi, to yell at doctors, to call everyone and say, “Guess what the stork dragged in?”, up to her again, all of it.
Lev
Osip came with a prospectus of leaves: bronze, silver and gold. For our parents, he said, we will get gold. He’s looked at the others on the tree of life in the synagogue and our parents are the most heroic by far. The closest anyone comes is a Myron who loved the law. He wants his baby grandson to understand the grandeur of his history.
Osip’s parents were heroes of the Mongolian frontier, mine were enemies of the people. His marched off to defend our impregnable borders; mine also marched, before guns, to a prison camp. His could have appeared in a textbook, for a few years at least, before orders came to scissor them into the dustbin of history; mine were but two of the legions of enemies of the people. His surpassed mine, because his were my invention, in the years following their arrest.
The stirring tale of the death of Osip’s parents, Captain Solomon and his faithful nurse: The Mongolian hordes were climbing the walls of the field hospital, our parents threw inkwells on their heads! Then, I turned eight, and the inkwells turned to pistols they fired, two pistols to each parent, and yes, Osya, they safely evacuated all the patients before finally succumbing to a bomb, but don’t talk to Baba Rufa about all this, it will only upset her.
It was a wonder to see a Jewish boy who could still believe like that. “That boy lied about papa, let’s beat him up,” and, of course, the “let’s” was a joke: it would be me, sitting away the hours on the liar’s chest, while Osya worked up the courage to swat him across the cheek.
I later had the chance to learn what Gendela and Solomon must have been called in their last days: wicks. In Russian, fitliks. A quick, sharp name for what was left of them, a name to keep us from bothering with the gone.
What, Stalina, is the Point of Immigration, if not new stories?
Katya
Under her umbrella, Katya read the child-rearing book she’d gotten Milla from the library’s twenty-five cent rack. “When can I start taking my baby out of the house?” asked the top of a page. The answer was that you could do it immediately, as long as you completed all the items in a checklist that filled the following three pages. Milla would like the checklist, Katya thought; although, perplexingly, it was meant to have been written, or perhaps dictated, by a baby: “Fill ma tummy wif a light meal.” Giving Milla the book would also demonstrate Katya was fine, that she was thinking of others, making purchases like an adult, that Milla could stop calling now, especially since she would be so busy with the baby’s checklists. It thundered, as if in rebuke for Katya’s unsisterly thoughts, and began to rain harder — she closed the book, light flashed at her from all sides, and then Roman stood before her, his face shining.
He took her to the Greek restaurant behind the bus stop. “You look better,” he said, like a doctor. He didn’t ask her to explain what she’d said that night at her parents’ house. He gave her his pickle.
“You can read Russian, right?” Katya said. She put her mother’s letter on the table. Roman pushed his souvlaki over to one side, although he hadn’t yet finished it. She should have said, “No, finish,” but she couldn’t wait anymore. Her mother was a biologist. Perhaps she’d had an idea about how to make Katya normal. He began translating.
Do you know why we call you Katyenok, kitten? Your father used to say, girls crawled into my heart, like kittens into a bed, quoting one of his everlasting bards. Isn’t that a nice story? What I have left to tell you is not so nice.
“Maybe we should stop,” Katya said.
“For reals?”
She reminded herself that she barely knew this guy, she didn’t have to see him again.
“Have some of your Coke, at least,” she said.
“You are my mom now?” He grinned and sipped in a way that seemed grossly suggestive to Katya, and then, to her relief, resumed translating.
I thought you would grow out of it, like Milla grew out of her allergies, or that a doctor would help you. Remember those doctors I took you to? Back then, my English wasn’t good enough to explain the problem. We can go back. My English is “super” now.
The year before you were born, we’d been fired for trying to emigrate, which meant we could get arrested as parasites, and hardly anyone was being let out, and your father — nu, I told him we were too poor for his samizdat games, but his brother Lev was his big hero, Lev, who’d already gotten himself into Perm. I kept your father home during those not-so-secret meetings, refused to let him near a mimeograph, but he insisted on informing the authorities about their “multiple constitutional violations.”
Some friends of mine suggested I talk to this man who wrote speeches for Brezhnev, Vladimir, not a Jew, obviously, but sympathetic. “He’s ideologically pure,” my friends said, “so don’t go whining about repression. Talk about your children. Appeal to him as a woman.”
I appealed to him as a woman. He appealed to me as a man. Do you know what I mean?
Roman looked up. “You want to go hang at my house?”
He was different from everyone else, big and blonde, robust as a worker in a metro mural. His preposterous faith gave him a vigor no one else had. We were all exhausted from running in zigzags, and he was gliding past in a chauffeured car.
He liked to read to me from the speeches he was writing for Brezhnev. He said he needed to taste the words on his lips. Brezhnev was a famously dull speaker, and Vlad himself was a dull writer, but his faith prevented him from realizing that.
The USSR was the world’s strongest and most technologically advanced country; could its condoms be any less so? That was how he thought. Soviet condoms were so leaky, your father’s political friends thought they were a government plot to make more Soviets.
Side by side on the bus, Roman and Katya both laughed a little. Roman kept his eyes on the page and Katya stared out the window, at a woman walking behind a supermarket cart loaded with lumber.
I kept quiet. I was greedy, I wanted another baby.
Whatever is wrong with you is a result of my sin. Some people would say �
��sin” is too serious a word. Your father had some adventures of his own before we were married, you know. That I’m a good wife now, that I make so many good decisions for the family, does that make up for what I did? ‘No,’ you’ll say. ‘So,’ you’ll say.
Why did fate punish you for my sin? Katya, I would give my arms and legs for you to be cured. Your father would put me on the couch every morning, and I’d spend my days eating through a straw and smiling.
However, we live in a world of hard facts. After much thought, I’ve come to the conviction that our solution lies in carrot juice. I’ll squeeze it for you, like I did for your sisters back in Russia. You were born here, and the doctor said Gerber and I listened. (It sounded like a Jewish name.) The lack of carrot juice weakened you in your early years. We’ll work up to six glasses.
Roman lay on his bed in the Chaikins’ basement, his feet, in red socks, propped on the wall. Katya sat on a pillow on the floor. That she had actually hoped Stalina had concocted a cure in her lab only showed how out of touch she was.
Roman put the pages down and she felt him looking at her. Who wouldn’t be curious? She was grotesquely handicapped.
“You are alternative,” Roman said.
She laughed, but not really. The least she could do was get out of his house.
He got out of bed, turned his back to her and took off his shirt. He took off his jeans. He took off his red underpants. “Okay?” he said. He sat on the bed and patted the space next to him. It was just like a new immigrant to trust like that. She might have a knife, a camera, a bomb, fangs.
She sat. He touched her cheek.
She did what men liked, her one move, but it had served her well: she closed her eyes.
Yana
Yana drove past the statues she’d always connected with homecoming: a woman and a baby in a carriage, waiting complacently at an intersection where there’d been four accidents in the past two years. It made her think of Milla. For years now, Milla had been keeping something from her, but Yana still had no idea what it was. Nowadays, when Yana called her, Milla talked only of Izzy. It was as if she believed that the more boring baby stories she told, the better a mother she would be.
When Yana pulled in the driveway, Pratik ran out the back door, wearing her father’s barbecue apron, with the words Fire Chief across the chest. Or rather, the words would have been across the chest, but the apron was too large for Pratik and so they bestrode his narrow hips: “ire chi.” She almost laughed, but he looked very serious.
He rapped on her window like a traffic cop. “I have prepared a surprise feast for our dinner,” and then he ran ahead of her, back into the house.
“Kat?” she yelled upstairs, once she’d gotten inside, but Pratik told her Katya was at the library again.
“Sit,” he said, and his voice sounded like hers at the beginning of class, when she wasn’t sure whether the kids would obey. She wanted him to sit, too, so she could tell him about some revisions to the classroom gum policy she’d been considering, but apparently, this meal required all the china in the house. He flew back and forth from the kitchen. “Kheer is what we have for dessert on special occasions, but alas, or, happily! It is ready before the kalia. So. We will first have the dessert, and then have the meal, like Australians.”
“What’s this, pudding?” Yana said.
“Yes, it is exactly! It is rice pudding.” Pratik stirred his spoon through his bowl. Yana ate a few bites without speaking; it was very good. “Mmmm,” she managed, feeling suddenly exhausted, and hoped that would suffice. The pudding reminded her of bedclothes, of a beanbag in the corner of her classroom, she was so lucky that people had designed all these soft, yielding things in which to sleep.
Pratik’s mood was livelier. He jumped up every minute or so, apron flapping, to check on the kalia. “You’re acting like Jean Strauss,” Yana said.
“Ha, ha.” Pratik raced back to the kitchen, returned with the kalia in a fish-shaped dish the Molochniks used for gefilte fish. “Ta-da!”
“It looks good. Relax.” Yana dug in. He’d put a lot of peas into it, remembering they were her favorite vegetable. She looked up when she realized Pratik had had the same forkful of kalia suspended before his mouth for some time.
“What is it?” she said.
In the silence, she knew. He was breaking up with her. It had been a while, and she’d forgotten the signs. Given their situation, he couldn’t merely mumble that he needed his key back, as the professor had. He needed to live in this house with her and couldn’t afford to piss her off. So he was going to buy her off instead, with a meal. So he thought.
“Prepare to celebrate,” Pratik said. Very clever: he was taking a feminist approach. Perhaps he would quote Their Eyes Were Watching God. She pushed her plate away.
“Allow me to introduce you to the new Earthquake Preparedness Coordinator for Bang-Aid!” Pratik finally took a bite.
“Let me guess: you’re leaving town.”
“Yes,” Pratik said. He didn’t have to sound so exhilarated, but he probably no longer cared about her feelings, if he ever had. To think of all the time she’d wasted, blathering about him to Katya, when she should have been listening to her sister, helping her. She wasn’t really at the library today, Yana knew that, and had known on other days Katya had made the same excuse, but hadn’t bothered to learn more. She was probably back with her old friends. Pratik was talking on and on. “…feel I must return to my fatherland.”
“How patriarchal of you.” When she missed him later, she’d remind herself how empty and conventional he could be.
“You know they will not let me stay here, even if I want. I’ve applied to more than fifty companies, Yana, you know this, no one wants to give me a visa.”
“My dad was right. You should have studied real engineering, like him.”
Pratik’s chin retreated into his neck. “I am happy to return to Bangladesh. Bangladesh can be a wonderful place for a family.”
“Fatherhood in the fatherland.”
“What?” he said, but didn’t bother to find out. Instead, he began digging under his apron. He wouldn’t dare to ask her for a goodbye fuck, would he? He pulled out a brochure. “Here, for example, Chittagong.” When she wouldn’t take the brochure from his hand, he pushed it across the table.
Bending her head so he wouldn’t see her face, Yana read aloud: “‘This romantic city combines the busy hum of an active seaport with the shooting quiet of a charming hill town.’ That’s great. Shooting quiet. There’s nothing like a bullet to put the, the heart at ease.” She wasn’t being as funny as she wanted.
“English is not their language. Don’t worry about the language, just look at the picture and tell me what you are thinking.”
“I’m thinking. Water, boat, restaurant. You could probably live there until the next flood. Make sure your next girlfriend comes with a flotation device. Silicon — ”
“Oh, no, Dove, that is to say —” He jumped from his chair and knelt in front of her, the apron billowing around him like a tent, burrowed under the apron again, pulled out a small box, opened it — a ring. He was rocking back and forth, and the ring trembled on its cotton bed. Yana threw the chair out from under her and plopped to the floor next to him, partially under the table, which cast a shadow over both of them, and reminded her of being little. As a child, she’d longed to crawl underneath and surprise her elders, to grab a leg or untie a shoe, but Milla had been too well-behaved to join her, and Katya had been too small. She put a finger to his chapped lips. He stilled. They stayed that way until they heard Stalina’s car in the driveway, and then, Yana dropped the ring into her bra.
Osip
Stalina crossed her arms. Yana crossed her arms. They had only to bend their knees, and they’d be dancing the Kozachok.
Pratik took a seat next to Osip on the couch. He was pale and sweaty, which Osip appreciated. At least Pratik realized how unwelcome his proposal was: I am here to beg that your daughter’s hand travel
with me to the Third World, where it will be chopped off for committing an infraction of one of our many nonsensical laws.
“You want children Jewish or not Jewish?” Stalina said.
“We’re not going to say.” Yana squeezed her face into an imitation of Stalina’s frown and shook her finger, “‘You have to go to synagogue.’” When had Osip and Stalina ever forced the girls to go to synagogue? Only to mark the anniversaries of their grandparents’ deaths — did Yana begrudge those visits?
Pratik raised his hands. “We are just meaning we do not want to be like Ayatollah Khomeini, outlawing Baha’i. We will love our children even if they are Baha’i.”
“You hear that, Osya?”
“I hear it, what do you want me to say?”
“English,” Yana said.
“In English, your papa and me are Ayatollah.” She crushed her handkerchief in her fist, always a sign of trouble, and turned on Osip. “If we didn’t live here, v’ dikoi provinceeye, in the wild provinces, if you’d let us move to Boston, your daughter would have a chance to meet interesting boys. Now here she’s stuck with your Arab experiment.”
“Arab — ” Yana said, and Pratik looked up. She took a breath. “You wanted another Malcolm? Another rich New York lazy-ass?”
“Malcolm is from good Jewish family, and they have good Jewish baby Izzy.”
“Like that’s a big deal for us. Your dad was a Cosmopolitan, hello?”
Stalina stepped back and almost out of her left shoe. Her bird chest moved up and down. Osip stood. “Don’t ever,” she said. She stared into the blank television. “Your grandfather was Internationalist. He knew he was Jew. He was proud. He was a Cohen.” Stalina spread her fingers in a vee shape.
“Was he a Dr. Spock?” Yana said under her breath.
“Not all Jews can do this. He was dreaming his grandchildren are praying in Jerusalem, in temples where only Cohens allowed, not running to Bangladesh.”