by Kalman Nadia
Pratik embraced his family. “Good stuff,” his father said.
“In America,” Stalina said, placing a hand on Mr. Rehman’s arm, “we say, ‘good evening,’ not ‘good stuff.’”
Yana cast her eyes down, perhaps in keeping with some other custom she’d read about, perhaps to get a preliminary look at the Rehmans’ feet, shuffled forward, and introduced herself.
Pratik said, “Yana is very interested in Bangladeshi cooking.”
“Is that so?” his father said, smiling.
“Yes, she made some egg —”
“Haloa,” Yana said.
Katya leaned forward. “Yeah, for me and my, my friend Roman, and he said it was the best dessert he’d ever had, Russian, Georgian, American, any kind.” She was acting as if Roman were some King Solomon of food. Worry fluttered in Osip’s stomach.
The grandmother began to speak and point at the stairs. The other Rehmans frowned.
“What does she say?” Osip said.
“It’s nothing.” Mr. Rehman sat next to her. She spoke again.
“Come on,” Osip said.
“She is merely asking how many floors your house possesses.”
“Oh, oh,” Stalina said, positioning herself in front of the grandmother. “Our house has three floors” — she held up three fingers — “many houses in America very tall” — and she stood on her tiptoes.
The grandmother spread the fingers of one hand and said something else. The dentist cousins smiled at each other.
“Does she has other questions about house?” Stalina said.
“No,” Mr. Rehman said.
“What, then?”
He looked at the rug. “I’m not certain why she says this, but she wishes that I tell you she has five floors in her house, in Dhaka.”
“That’s right,” Yana said.
“Speaking of houses,” Osip said, “Maybe the Rehmans want to see rooms where they will stay.”
“But —” one of the cousins, the prettier girl, began to say.
“They’re not staying here, Mom,” Yana said.
Stalina said, “What, a hotel? Stamford Marriott is very crude.”
“I sent you an email,” Yana said.
Stalina leaned closer to the Rehmans. “Yana and her emails. One day — save homeless, next day, globe is too warm. I say, it is good for homeless to be warm.”
Yana sighed through her nose. “I wrote ‘major’ in the subject heading.”
“They’re staying with us, actually,” the male cousin said.
Stalina stared at her handkerchief, as she often did in times of difficulty. “But, you know, Russia has a rich and sweet tradition of gosti — hospitality —”
Osip put his arm around Stalina. “Our house is not tall enough for grandmother.” Stalina gave a false laugh. Why had he said that? After the Rehmans left, she’d wonder, aloud, for hours, whether the insufficient grandeur of their house was to blame.
“Speaking of culture,” Yana said, dropped to her knees before the couch, and tried to take hold of Mrs. Rehman’s brown-sandaled feet. Mrs. Rehman scurried her feet away in alarm, but Yana was faster, overtaking them as they sought refuge beneath the couch. The cousins stepped forward.
“It’s a contact lens,” Pratik said, in a voice quiet with despair.
“Oh, terrible luck,” Mr. Rehman said, and quickly translated.
Yana released Mrs. Rehman’s feet.
“I’ll help you.” Pratik knelt beside Yana, his shoulder touching hers. Because they needed it, Osip silently gave his blessing.
Roman
When he let himself in, Aunt Alla was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of iced water. He knew the lie she was about to tell. He didn’t need to sit down.
“She — a little too much, and went to a nameday and drank…” At least — in her sleep,” Alla waited for him to say . . . what?
Alla took his sleeve. “I’m remembering her in her bathing suit with the flowers, that summer before we left. Do you remember? In Feodosiya? Try to think of her like that, not —”
Outside, he had some trouble seeing but learned not to look up. People got out of his way. He found himself at Caldor. Of course. A necklace made of two gold ropes wound around one another. He wouldn’t wear it, he would sell it. He should have stolen jewelry from the beginning. He tried on the necklace. Oh, he was a real baller now, all right.
At the exit stood two officers, one white and fat and one black and thin. They told their walkie-talkies they had him. They took him to a small room in a Gulag movie and demanded his papers. The necklace fell to the table.
Like any Russian coward, Roman carried his passport and visa everywhere, wrapped in a handkerchief. He put the handkerchief on the table. It sprawled open. “All right, then,” they said. It was one of his mother’s handkerchiefs, cotton with some yellow embroidery. She’d bought it off an old woman on the street, who’d said “Please, matyushki, so I can go home.”
“You a student?” The black one looked like Tupac Shakur, who understood about mothers, and who was dead.
“Talk.”
“Hello?”
“Maybe we better call Homeland. Maybe he wanted to sell the necklace for a bomb.”
“Kid. We’re just playing.”
A door in the room opened onto the street. They lifted him outside. “Don’t show your ass.” The door closed into the stucco wall.
Yana
Just like a Bangladeshi girl, Yana put on all the jewelry she’d ever been given: a fake puzzle ring her parents had bought for her twelfth birthday, Navajo feather earrings, an amber necklace, a mood ring, gold bangles from Pratik’s parents, friendship bracelets from camp.
She stood in front of the mirror and wrapped her sari, just like she had practiced, and it wasn’t perfect, because before, her hands hadn’t held these electrical surges, but she thought Pratik might already be downstairs, and she ran to meet him.
Instead, she almost crashed into Leonid, who stood at the bottom with one arm resting on the banister.
“Where’s the dead man walking? Just kidding.”
“The bride and groom are forbidden from seeing each other,” Yana said, quoting directly from a website, and turned, and waded through the Russians, who pinched at her sari and made remarks, and the Bangladeshis, who inched away and stared, until she finally caught a glimpse of Pratik squeezed between cousins on the couch. The cousins faded into the party before Yana could say “Kamon Acho.”
Why hadn’t they stayed? It must be a cultural tradition, she told herself. She cast her eyes down, as per custom, and said, “Shouldn’t they be carrying us in on pillows or something?” “Elephants.”
“Monkeys.” Yana took out her mirror (the bride and groom were not supposed to look at one another, except through a mirror; nor were they expected to speak, but she couldn’t do everything). One of Pratik’s eyebrows seemed to have found a home at his hairline. “You look crazed.” He squeezed her hand, which she’d had henna-ed in Queens.
“Do you like the pattern?” she said.
“Why not?” That was not a satisfying answer. She took another glance through the mirror. Why hadn’t he brought a mirror of his own? Hadn’t he wanted to see her?
Yana heard, inside her head, the voice of an actress who’d played Sojourner Truth in a movie she’d shown her class: “What you think you’re getting up to now?” Women of genius said marriage was slavery. And yet, she had stuffed herself into silk. She had been a high school freshman only ten years ago. “You still think this a good idea, right?” Yana said.
“You cannot run in a sari.” Pratik gave a laugh resembling that of Yana’s borderline-autistic student. She had never before heard him laugh like that.
Stalina bore down on them. “Hello, young people. Pratik, it is an interesting smell your grandmother makes in kitchen. Yana, remove.” She pointed at her ear.
“The tradition is — ” Her mother held out her hand and Yana dumped the feathers into it.
Pratik’s grandmother said something. He said, “Yes, it’s her special recipe.”
So, despite everything, they were going to do that amazingly tender ceremony (as it had been described online), whereby women applied a skin-softening turmeric paste to the bride’s skin.
“The groom’s not allowed to be present,” she said.
“All right, all right.” Pratik wandered outside.
The silk scratched against the gold lamé as Yana sat on the couch. She said, “This just means so much.”
Moutushi handed her a Macy’s shopping bag. Yana looked inside: a fish stared back. She closed the bag and smiled and nodded.
Stalina peered in. “Is this funny joke time?”
“It’s a traditional gift. God.” Yana whispered.
“Did traditional God gift go six hours from Pennsylvania in a car?” Stalina took the bag to the kitchen.
Moutushi dipped her finger in the holud and gently spread it around Yana’s eyebrows. It felt invigorating, like the acne remedies she had tried in vain all through high school. Well, a little more invigorating than that.
Her hand began to rise to her forehead, but Pratik’s grandmother slapped it back down. The elder woman was right. So what if it felt as though Yana’s skin was coming off? That was marriage, wasn’t it? She was a marriage snake. Her new skin would grow in brown.
Katya
“We can leave, if you want,” Katya said to Roman.
As they passed Stalina’s figurine table, his fingers feathered out over it, as if he were testing the air, or deciding what to break. All he wanted, he said, was for her to write a list of the money he’d spent on her, because girlfriends cheat, but mothers are forever.
“Roma,” she said, “Roma, slow down, I’ll be forever.”
He halted in front of the wine. “What, you want to marry me now?”
“Of course I’d marry you if you wanted.”
He sat on the stairs. People ran around and past them. No one in their families stopped to talk. They were neither one of them a favorite.
Pratik
Pratik’s grandmother reached out her chicken-foot hand and pulled him into the Molochniks’ cupboard.
“Your shoes, they are still on the landing,” she said.
“Yes, dadi, I don’t think Milla’s sisters know all of our, our heritage.” His father, and even his mother, laughed at this ritualized shoe-burgling. “It’s my fault for not telling them.”
She snuffled into her inhaler. “All right, I forgive you, if will you now respect my suggestion?”
From outside, Pratik heard Osip, sounding as though he were asking a question. “Of course, dadi, as always,” he said.
“Your cousin Keka. Look at me. Why are you marrying this Jew giant when Keka could be yours?”
Pratik’s head reared back, knocking down a box of hot chocolate. The blonde girl on the package smiled up from the floor. “Could we open the door a bit?” he said.
“Keka is a good girl, a pretty girl. She’d be here now, but the American pigs at the airport said her name was the same as a terrorist’s. But it was a boy terrorist they were looking for. Ha! They could have killed her.”
“Dadi, you know I am to marry Yana,” he said. “But Keka is a wonderful girl, and I am rejoicing that she is still alive and not a terrorist.”
She pinched his hand. “No one in our family wants that smelly Jewess.”
“If Yana’s sisters steal my shoes, then may I still marry Yana?” Idiot. Had he really thought his family was coming to bless him? He should have taken Yana to an island somewhere, married her inside a hula hoop. “Dadi, I believe Allah himself has fated this marriage.”
“Ha! You think Allah wants your Mongoloid brats?”
The pantry door swung open to reveal Katya and Roman, limbs intertwined.
“Tell the monkey-pigs to run.” Pratik ran from the pantry, from the house, and came to rest on the lawn, where it was too cold for anyone except a few angrily smoking uncles. He could go on. He could cross the street to the gas station and buy a newspaper.
Milla
“How’s my skin now?” Yana said. At the combined suggestion of a dermatologist cousin of Pratik’s, who’d (prematurely, in Yana’s opinion) diagnosed an allergy, and their mother, she had finally agreed to rinse her face.
“Just a little pink,” Milla said, patting Izzy’s back.
“Sunburn pink or drunk pink?”
“Athletic pink,” Milla said. Yana smiled, and winced, as a gang of boys, whooping and banging yellow spoons of holud against bowls, chased screeching girls from one end of the room to the other. Why didn’t the girls escape outside?
Izzy gave a good burp as a boy named Igor ran past, chased by his Baba Mira, who was asking whether he wasn’t ashamed before the bride.
When Milla had gotten married, everyone had said she looked so serene. No one would be saying that to Yana, she thought, as her sister bolted away, sari skirt clenched in two raised fists, to find their mother’s bangles. Yet, underneath Yana’s nerves, happiness buzzed and stung, and her sister threw what she had no idea was a movie star smile over her shoulder.
Would Yana really leave her here alone? Their mother still thought she could convince her not to go, during the few months Yana was to remain in the U.S., finishing her year of teaching, before joining Pratik in what he kept calling his motherland. Could Stalina do it? A few years ago, Milla would have had no doubt.
She hugged Izzy to her chest. He looked proud, as he often did after urinating. “Do you need a diaper change? I forgot the powder. I’m sorry. I did bring the cream.” The garrulous baby in the book Katya had sent said, “I wuv to process language,” but it was as difficult to speak to Izzy, especially in public, as it was to speak, at Malcolm’s prompting, during sex.
Her Aunt Valentina threaded her way through the paths of running boys. “Diki ujac,” wild horror, she said, and then asked, like everyone else had, where Malcolm was. Milla explained that he had an important show.
“Nu, he’s an artist,” Valentina said, patting her purplish coiffure. “You have to be like Nadezhda Mandelstam.”
“Horosho,” okay. Milla smoothed Izzy’s hair.
“‘Horosho’ is not enough.”
Izzy — good boy — stirred and muttered. “I have to go change him,” Milla said. Her Russian had run out.
“Maybe you will change — husband with me?”
Milla smiled and walked towards the stairs, past Katya making out with that Roman, past Bangladeshi girls dressed in blue saris, moving their hips in synchronicity and counting softly in English. Why couldn’t she be one of those girls? She bumped into her mother outside the bathroom.
“Moy Americanetz,” Stalina said to Izzy, and then to Milla, “He, at least, inherited my cheekbones.” Every member of the Molochnik and Strauss families thought Izzy resembled him or her, except for Milla’s father, who thought he resembled Galich.
“He needs a change,” Milla said, as her mother bore him away.
In preparation for the wedding, Stalina had redecorated the bathroom: a tiger dispensed paper towels, and fuchsia fur sprouted from the toilet seat, which Milla closed and sat upon. She dialed Julie’s home number. She was in town, after all.
“Old married baba, how are you?” Julie sounded so enthusiastic. Milla’s call was a wonderful surprise, which brightened the usual weekend dullness?
Milla told about her job. She was a full accountant now.
Julie said she was still at the old place, but not for long. “I am almost old married baba, like you.”
Milla held the phone away from her ear. “Happy,” she said.
“He is old boyfriend I was girlfriend to in high school. Now is under-minister for waste on farms.”
The wedding would be in Poland; otherwise, Julie would have invited her. As Milla was forcing herself to ask whether there was a wedding website, or somewhere she could see photos, someone knocked on the door. “Lyagushinka,” Baba Byata said, “open up.” She took the opportunity of Milla’s silence to defy bourgeois proprieties, in English, no less, and ask whether she was “kaka.”
Stalina
Stalina waved at Mr. Rehman from the top of the stairs and lifted up Izzy for him to see. He looked properly impressed. Truly, Mr. Rehman was quite a man. He’d loved that documentary on Entebbe she’d lent him.
The handkerchief interrupted her thoughts. “Of course, our multifarious nation has always included some Asiatics, ‘so many countries, so many customs,’ it’s all very diverting. However, the essential Russianness must remain. Where is the essential Russianness?”
“I made vareniki.” Stalina saw now, through jaded eyes and handkerchief, that what she had considered her greatest victory — an agreement to have the wedding here, rather than in the wilds of Pennsylvania — had been pyrrhic. Look at these girls, lip-synching into her Modernist dining room table, treating it the same as they would a bathroom mirror in a train station.
“The Eastern hordes are overrunning these nuptials.”
“What could I do? It was the grandmother with her asthma. Anytime someone says no to her, she starts puffing.”
As she descended the stairs, someone caught her by the arm — Edward Nudel, with his wife Ella. “Guard your proudest adornment,” the Soul said, and then added, unnecessarily, “virtue.”
“Such a little punim, may I…?” Ella Nudel said, and held out her arms for Izzy. Babies loved Ella, Stalina remembered, as Izzy lolled open-mouthed on Ella’s rest hotel of a bosom.
Edward was wholly uninterested in Izzy, as he had always been wholly uninterested in anyone without at least a master’s degree in one of the physical sciences. With a certain air of obligation, he made the joke: “Bangladesh just formed.”