by Kalman Nadia
Stalina completed it: “Use baby oil and it’ll go away.” It was remarkable how many of her friends and relatives had remembered this grizzled bit of Soviet humor. What else did they remember — preschool praise songs to diversion dams? The favorite chocolates of long-dead district doctors?
Edward cleared his throat; he was usually only one joke away from his main point. “Stalinatchka, I must take at least ninety seconds of your time.”
“Are you going to try to seduce me into your lab again?” She’d chosen the wrong word, provoking an odd look from Ella and a whispered rebuke from the handkerchief. If they only knew: in his old age, Edward had become so fragile it was frightening to kiss his cheek, let alone anything else.
Edward said, “We are now fully equipped to conduct combinatorial chemistry at the highest levels, so you see, you have no choice but to join.”
“Edward thinks it’s all very interesting,” Ella said, rocking Izzy.
“What sorts of compounds…?” Stalina tried to sound casual.
“For shame,” the handkerchief said. It had no right to interfere — it had stopped bothering to accompany her to the dull hospital lab long ago.
Ella said, “Now, my dears, my new friend and I go in search of zakuskis and tea,” and bounced Izzy over to the buffet. Stalina couldn’t help a huge smile as Edward described his new Cellomics ArrayScan. The difference between her current lab and Edward’s was like the difference between cutting trees with handmade tools and cutting them on a tractor or with a chain saw or some such thing. She listened for almost an hour, stopping only when the handkerchief warned of her lord and protector’s approach.
Osip
The rabbi and imam were gone; everyone had their shoes back; Izzinka was napping; Milla was crying; the Russians were drunk, the Americans more so: what better time for a toast? Osip stood, briefly lost his balance and grabbed the side of the cabinet. Stalina’s figurines swayed, their yellows and navies and browns blurred together, it was beautiful — why couldn’t Stalinatchka see the beauty?
“Wedding friends,” he said. “I am losing daughter, but getting country. A small country, but, still, very nice.” A few small smiles were his only response. He was trying, he wanted to say, he was trying to be funny about this awful plan.
“So we are very happy, and — we love you.” The Russians applauded fervently, the Americans politely, the Bangladeshis warily. Yana and Pratik sat as they had since dinner, like electro-shock patients, with fingertips touching on the top of the table. Stalina asked Mr. Rehman to make a toast.
“I have prepared absolutely nothing.” Mr. Rehman stood and walked to the head of the table. “Perhaps, instead, I could simply translate Mr. Molochnik’s speech into Bengali?” but Stalina shook her head.
“Good luck,” Osip said.
“Thank you, I will certainly need it.” Mr. Rehman coughed and reddened.
“Yes, but you should say, ‘To the devil!’ That’s how we say in Russian.”
“We are speaking now English,” Stalina said. Osip sat down.
Mr. Rehman said, “I will begin with a quotation from the Koran, if you do not mind.”
“Of course we do not mind, we are open mind,” Stalina said, crossing her arms.
“All right, then, the Koran tells us that humans do not choose whom we love. Rather, the Lord Allah chooses, and when we listen to him, he blesses us.”
Now he translated into Bangladeshi, and even those guests who did not know the language looked upon him with respect. “As some of you know, my son Pratik has recently completed his dissertation on disaster preparation. Is not marriage itself a kind of disaster, in the very best sense of the word? Suddenly, another life is swept in to our shores, like silt in a flood.”
“Yana now is silt?” Osip said to Stalina, in what was not quite a whisper. Why couldn’t any of these groom-fathers simply say the bride was beautiful and sit down?
Mr. Rehman paused. “At first, we do not know what to do with this new gift. Sometimes, indeed, we rather wish the waters had never come, that our old life could continue apace.”
Lev
Osip said, why not have the leaf ceremony Labor Day weekend? Our parents were Soviet people, after all.
“Did you know my parents, winners of the Stalin medal?” he’d written, asking the readers of Russian-language newspapers with names idealistic (The New Russian Word), futuristic (Contact), Canadian (The Canadian Russian-Language Newspaper), im-perialistic (Our Texas), and diffident (By the Way). He hadn’t been sure whether or not to mention that they’d immediately given the medal to a Mongolian orphan, that he might exchange it for food. It was an unusual, and certainly memorable, deed — but our parents may have been too modest to tell anyone outside the family about it, so in the end, he’d left it out.
Someone had written back. Osya read aloud, “‘I knew a Solomon Molochnik in Kolyma, but he’d never been a captain. And —’” Osip showed me a black-and-white photograph of some men, not in military regalia, standing in front of a hut. Our father was furthest to the right.
I said, “Don’t you remember? He had much bigger ears than any of those men. Poor Russkie fogies, seeing a lost camp comrade in every newspaper ad.”
“Next year,” Osip said, “Maybe we can all travel to Mongolia and visit the hospital our parents saved.”
“They tore it down,” I said, bringing the tea to the table.
“What, just like that?”
“The Mongolians did so much damage it wasn’t worth fixing.”
Incompletely reassured, he joked, “I wish those Mongols would come to Yankee Surgical.”
I should have said something else, to tie together the sticks of that story. Osya would have pitched in, we could have raised that barn again.
He leaned forward. “Will you speak over the leaf?”
I told him, fine. Let him plan what he wants. Didn’t I once plan to break our parents out of Kolyma in a helicopter? Didn’t we brothers plan that if we ever got to the U.S., we would start a company together, become those monocle-wearing capitalists we’d only seen in cartoons?
Milla
Milla saw the scribbled notes on their bedside table:
Isidor’s Song
My father was made of cash
But you and I are built to last
Wanted to love her but didn’t (repeat)
Now my son is the one I love
You will always be good enough
When Malcolm returned from rehearsal, she looked up from nursing Izzy and said, “You’d love to love me, baby?” She’d meant it as a joke, a musical, pointed joke, harkening back to that disco era song, pointing forward to their future, when they’d laugh about how she’d misunderstood what he’d written. She now realized she had been too ambitious with the joke.
“You looked at my song?” Malcolm said.
“It was right there.” Izzy chewed on her nipple. When he was done, would her nipple be gone? Or would it stand proud, like a tattered flag after a battle? She wished she hadn’t started this problem with Malcolm and that they were making nipple jokes instead.
He paced and his shadow, too large for the room, climbed up and down the pink walls. “You never come to the gigs. And your body — shouldn’t you be weaning him by now? It’s like it’s some sponge of motherhood.”
“I’m a sponge?”
“No, I didn’t say that, I would never say you’re a sponge, I’m not such a horrible guy, see? What I meant, what I meant was” — he slapped himself on the head and Izzy stirred and unlatched — “what I meant was, you don’t see yourself as a, a sexual being anymore, you know?” Milla tried to reattach Izzy, which only woke him up further. “Like Jelani and Theandra, you know, they’ve been together longer than we have, and fine, they don’t have kids, so that helps, but they have this sexual adventurousness that I think I could have, too. We could have. I mean, you had my son. Do you know how special that is?”
Izzy kicked Milla in the crook of her elbow, beginn
ing his war dance. “Izz,” she couldn’t help almost shouting. Her right arm was covered in bruises. “Take him?”
“What — sure — what?”
“Can you sing to him or something?”
“Okay, in a sec, just let me finish. You wanted to know, so I’m telling you.”
“He’s going to start crying.” Milla petted Izzy’s warm, sweaty head. Once in ten times, this soothed him.
“Jelani said something, and even though I thought it was a good idea —” Izzy murmured. Malcolm turned to face the green mirror. “So I thought it was a good idea, but I didn’t even want to ask you, and I think that’s really kind of pathetic, that we can’t even talk about something like this.”
Izzy began to bawl. “I told you,” Milla said.
Malcolm took him. “Do you hear yourself? Do you hear how vindictive you sound?” He began singing “Dock of the Bay” in his deepest voice. Izzy quieted.
A moment later, Jean crept in, in a lacey white nightgown, to suggest “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” which had always gotten Malcolm to sleep.
Yana
The district director of social studies disliked Yana’s boots, so she’d borrowed the lowest of her mother’s absurd heels for work, and had gone straight to Central Park afterwards, skipping a war protest. Milla had been silent for the entire length of their walk to the reservoir. Yana wanted to tell her, “I don’t play,” like she’d heard another teacher say to his class.
Milla stopped before the railings. Izzy stared through the bars with an angry expression, like he was trying to scare someone straight. Finally, Milla said, “You know when you have a friend, but the friend gets really involved with stupid things, and then you have to let her go?”
“You mean like drugs, a gang?”
Milla sighed loudly through her nose. “I don’t know anyone in a gang, I’m a married accountant with a child.”
“Well, so-rry. You’re being really confusing, I thought maybe this was about me leaving. Like, a sisterhood ritual, maybe we’d light bark on fire and throw it in the water.”
“Are you crazy?”
“What? It’s a Native American tradition.” Yana wished she could remember which Native Americans — another chunk of her major lost.
Milla’s eyes were watering. “Don’t talk about leaving. I’m sorry, I can’t —”
“Okay, okay,” Yana said, patting her back, and making a goggle-eyed face at Izzy. She had wanted to explain to Milla why she was leaving sooner than planned. Their house had become unlivable: Katya and Roman sneaking around all the time, christening the bathroom and possibly Yana’s own bed (a tiger-striped condom in the wastebasket by her desk); Roman’s ghetto-speak, deeply offensive to someone who actually worked with children from what ignorant people called “the inner city”; Stalina and her daily commentary on Bangladesh, always pertaining to the size either of the country or of its inhabitants.
Milla took a tube of purple mascara out of her coat pocket. “This reminded me of my friend, it’s her favorite.”
“What friend?” Yana said, as a unicyclist passed.
Milla shook her head, dropped the mascara into the wild, gray water, stared. “Where are the ripples? There are supposed to be ripples, where the fuck are the ripples?”
The sight of Milla in her working-mom flowered dress, hanging over the edge of the railing and cursing, frightened Yana. “Mascara’s pretty heavy,” she said. “Paraben.” A couple of pretty Korean girls with cameras waited for the railing to become free. Izzy had fallen asleep, and she thought about poking him, so he would cry, so Milla would have to get down. She would give it one more minute, thirty more seconds.…
She pulled at Milla’s shoulders. “Come on. I have to get back.”
“I just fucking hate her. She tried to fuck things up with Malcolm.”
“What, she hit on him?” Some women had no respect. Pratik’s boss in Bangladesh had been making him lunch. Yana narrowed her eyes at the Korean girls. “He didn’t do anything?”
“Of course not. You know Malcolm.”
“So, there was no problem, really. You have a great marriage.” Telling Milla that usually calmed her down. “Should we start heading back?”
“You can go, if you want.”
Yana couldn’t bring herself to poke a child. She could, however, bring herself to remove a child’s hat, before replacing it so that the wool covered one eye. Izzy awoke, complaining. “Give him his paci,” Milla said.
“What’s a paci?” It worked. Milla climbed down. “Jesus Christ.”
“What? I’m fine.” Milla shaded her face from sight as she fixed Izzy’s hat.
“Milly —”
Again, her sister wouldn’t let her talk. As they walked back through the darkening park, Milla told her that Malcolm played Izzy songs on the piano, read aloud to her at night, called in the afternoons to see what kind of dinner she wanted to order. When she didn’t want to face his parents, he brought food to their room.
Osip
It was five in the morning, cold, damp. Osip remembered being in the army, patrolling on mornings like this, only a thin uniform covering his skinny ribs. Some boys would purposely skip breakfast, in order to faint and, with luck, spend the rest of the day in the slightly warmer infirmary. Osip patted the sleeves of his puffy jacket.
Yana opened the door, wearing the long green dress she’d worn to meet Pratik’s parents, and, over it, the yellow coat she’d had since high school. She really was leaving, then. After a short tug-of-war, she let him carry her suitcase down the steps.
He said, “You look a little like a plant in the dress.”
“Sari.”
Even though Osip remembered what the word meant, he said, “Sorry? You are one dressed like plant, I’m okay.”
“Is this so I don’t miss you?” She tuned the car radio to her liberal station, on which two girls and a rapper, a soft-spoken man who’d appeared a few times playing a by-the-books social worker on The Commish, compared the President to a rubber chicken. (Or a lover chicken? Incomprehensible, either way, but Yana laughed.)
They were still only a few blocks from home, and where, exactly, did Yana think she was going? She had decided, of her own volition, to go to a place where hundreds of thousands of girls her age had drowned. “Maybe you stay here after all? I can —” He would fry potatoes for their breakfast, hire an immigration lawyer for Pratik.
Without turning from the window, she said, “It won’t be easy there, like it is here, but don’t you think we’ve gotten too used to things being easy?”
It was the stupidest thing she had ever said. Osip was careful to keep his voice low. “I never heard my Baba Rufa complain that life was too easy.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Most of the world doesn’t live like us, most of the world lives like Baba Rufa.”
Osip stopped to let a fire truck pass. “What was wrong with Baba Rufa’s life? She provided for her family, she had her friends over to play cards. Her house was not floating away. When products came in, we had a line, a nice line, with people talking, not a riot.”
Yana seemed not to have heard. “All I’m saying is, most people don’t have four computers in their house.”
“Computers are for my work.”
“Do you know what I read last year? Americans are like people in limousines driving through the slum. But someday, the people in the slum are going to crawl out of their shacks and turn our limo over and set it on fire.” Where had she read that? What limo? He and Stalina had not been able to afford a dentist until 1987. Had Yana ever noticed how many silver teeth her mother wore? Did she think it was a gangster fashion? Yana said, “It’s okay if you don’t understand. This is my thing. Pratik’s and my thing.”
He tuned the radio to a traffic report. It was easier to drive when he was angry, although it may not have been easier for the other drivers, who shouted at him to pick a lane, etc.
A yellow van came dangerously close to their front windshiel
d. Osip honked. “Look,” Yana said, pointing to the Garfield doll suctioned to its back window. “A cat, crossing our path: we have to turn around.”
Who’d known Yana was so superstitious? Stalina had taught her well. The luck rising in his chest, Osip began to make his way into the right lane.
“Dad. I was kidding. Didn’t you hear anything I said before?”
She was silent the rest of the way, and he hummed Galich in order to sound happy. As he pulled onto the airport ramp, she said, “I already bought my ticket, I can’t not go.” A stupid reason. Osip was no materialist. He’d pay for her ticket, for ten tickets.
She scrambled out of the car. “Pop the trunk?” He wasn’t going to let her hoist luggage. His stomach hurt with the effort of removing the bags. “I got it,” Yana said. Osip held on to the handle of the largest suitcase — the dark green one that taken them to Grand Cayman. She wouldn’t be able to wrest it away from him; he’d won a few more minutes.
In the end, like any determined criminal, she escaped. “See you later, alligator,” he managed to say.
“Oh, because of the green?” Yana laughed: she was trying to make a nice memory for him.
She walked into a crowd of women dressed just like her, but half her size, so that she appeared, from the back, to be some kind of super Bangladeshi of the glorious future.
***
A few nights later, Osip lifted his wine glass. “So, as they say, Yana’s gone — let’s drink to Yana.” He didn’t want any, himself. It shouldn’t be, in this modern age, that husbands come like marauders to take daughters away: first Malcolm, then Pratik, and now this Roman had come to drink Osip’s wine and have his way. As soon as everyone finished clinking, Roman stretched an aggressively muscled arm past Osip to fetch mushrooms for Katya.