by Kalman Nadia
“Tell me one difference between the Bush administration and the Pakistani army.” The Pakistani army? Osip ran a red light, cars honked, Yana said, “Are you in your car? Drive to D.C. and protest.” She finally said goodbye; she had other people she had to call.
“You should have just hung up,” Katya said. He wondered about her: how easily, once she’d decided a person was not worthwhile, she carried out that decision. Even in her leaving Roman, which had been, without question, the right choice, Osip had been surprised by her lack of hesitation, how she’d mailed back the CDs Roman sent without bothering to listen even once.
They parked and Katya started for the house, carrying six bags of groceries. “Hey,” he said, squeezing her arm, “who has the muscles?” She would go into the house and unload like a robot, take exactly ten minutes for lunch, and return to caulking the downstairs bathroom. Periodically, she would walk through the kitchen, and he would feel her eyes as he tried to relax with the paper, and then they would caulk together through the afternoon.
It was dark inside, so Stalina had not yet returned from Lord & Taylor, which had been her second home since Katya began her improvements. It sounded like she’d left the radio on — soft static. He flipped the light switch, but it only flickered, and above it, the ceiling sagged, dripped steadily from many small points, the way he had thought a rain cloud worked when he was little. “Katya —” he turned to tell her to get out of the house, but she was already running upstairs.
He dropped his bags and followed, feet sinking into the swamp of the carpet. Water pulsed from the bottom of the bathroom door. “Locked,” Katya said.
Osip pushed her behind him, shouldered the door once, twice — metal crashed against tile, the shower curtain collapsed — a scream. Katya? She jumped past, clutched the shower curtain; no, something inside the curtain.
“Sorry,” a voice said, from beneath Alaska. Osip waded a step closer. It was Roman, yellow as a supermarket chicken, in churning pink water.
***
“It looks okay,” Stalina said a few hours later, uncertainly fingering the handle of her white paper shopping bag. She began to pick her way across the lawn. The neighbors were looking. Luckily, she didn’t seem to notice. She’d left the car door open.
Osip tried to think of something authoritative and reassuring to say, called after her, “Little to no exterior damage.”
“Half an hour,” a fireman said at the door.
Damp, trampled envelopes were scattered like leaves in the front hallway. The mailman had come to their house as if it were any other, as if they would continue to order cable and pajamas — one of the letters had Russian curlicued handwriting, and a return address from Novoe Russkaya Slovo — someone else remembered his parents, perhaps correctly this time — but Stalina was muttering in the kitchen, and he stuffed the mail in his pockets and ran to her.
She was shaking a dripping lamb leg over the sink. “We have to cook this up right now, just get me a —” He threw it in the trash, steered her towards the stairs. “Always rushing me, dyurgoet menya, my mother’s rugs —” She stopped at the door of their bedroom. Osip had carried Roman in there, put him on the bed as they waited for the ambulance.
“Come.” He pulled her into Yana’s room, which was almost all right, and sat her on the edge of the bed.
He filled a suitcase with Stalina’s clothing, putting the most cheerful colors on top — a sweater with a peacock, orange stretch pants — and went back downstairs to get her figurines. Only the leaping couple above the fireplace had broken beneath the weight of a chunk of ceiling plaster. When he came to tell her the good news, Stalina was kneeling on the floor of their room, going through the bedside table. She sprang up with two dark spots on her pantyhosed knees, threw open their dresser drawers and pulled out the remaining sweaters, nightgowns, socks, bras, piling them on the carpet, heedless of the damp. When she’d emptied all the drawers, she began pulling them from the bureau, upturning and shaking them. “Rot and die, then,” she finally said.
“Are you talking to me?” Osip tried to make a joke out of it. She let him bundle her out the door.
Roman
Katya knocked on the open door of his hospital room.
They were lucky: his roommate, a spry old man with a spider bite, slept inside his curtains. Now Roman could tell her everything he’d been thinking. But his mind caught on her, just her, her straight brows, her scratched hands. She’d been working without gloves again.
She said, “You don’t look too great. But, you should see our house.” A tiny smile: a joke. He laughed. It hurt.
He tried to sit up. “It was my bad, it was all my bad. Forgive, please —”
“Hey —”
Tears shot from his eyes. “I’m the sterva yobanaya, not you.”
She rubbed her arms. He wished he had a jacket to give her. “Do you feel bad at all?” she said.
“Hell to yes, I feel bad, I —”
“About the house.” She turned away, breathing hard. “That was supposed to be my parents’ last house. Did you have even one thought about the drywall? The shelving? My mom’s swan curtains, we made fun of them, but they were custom —”
Roman shook his head. “To keep it real: no. But now —”
“We’ll have to break out the ceiling.”
“I will fix —”
“You. Are you HVAC certified? As if. There’s mold, which we can’t afford, because the insurance doesn’t feel like paying, because, according to the insurance guy, you’re still in our family. Aren’t we so lucky? I feel like such a retard for screaming when we saw you. After a second, it was totally obvious you weren’t dead.”
No one could ever want to kill himself after hearing that scream.
“Kotletka, listen —”
“No, you listen. You listen.” He sat up in the posture of a perfect student. She slammed the door.
Lev
Leaf Day Morning. Osip’s car turned into the manor’s parking lot, skirting a glaring puddle. Osip came out and walked to the front. Osip came back. Osip and Katya came out, came back. Osip, Stalina, Milla, Izzy, Katya and Yana came out and disappeared under the lip of the roof. Osip’s head emerged at the top of the ladder.
Of course they found me, he said. Did I imagine that my neighbors, and even Katya, once, hadn’t seen me sneaking up here? If we left now, he said, we would still reach the rabbi in time for the ceremony. Didn’t I want to honor our parents? Didn’t I understand? Had I made myself into a complete defective? It was very hot. His head became reflective and he shielded himself with his hand. His mate and progeny came, one by one, or by two, and gathered themselves to him.
“He won’t come,” Osya said.
“Then let’s go, Izzinka’s getting dusty,” Stalina said.
“You won’t come, the least you can do is give your speech now,” he said. “Do our parents mean anything to you at all? Aren’t you proud of them?”
All I could think of was an old children’s song. It had been Milla’s favorite when they first immigrated.
“Mama flies a great big plane, that is very good
Mama makes a fruit compote, that is also good!”
His wife held him back from me, “Osya, you see how old he is.” He commanded his family and they disappeared down and away.
Yana
Yana sliced into her steak. They didn’t have steak like this in Bangladesh. Or, they had it, imported, for five hundred dollars, and people displayed it in their living rooms when you came over. Unfair, unfair. That was what Pratik called her. He hadn’t been angry. In fact, he had been trying to show her she shouldn’t be so angry “all the time.” Electricity went out and there was nothing to be done about it. Try to relax, try to walk with all the others in large circles in the grassy lot. And in fact, the times he’d gotten her outside on outage nights, she had liked the peace, the coconut trees and the cows, how it was too hot for good clothes and how teenagers, on those nights, were allowed to flirt.<
br />
Her mother was questioning Milla about her new friend Theandra. “Do you go out together and meet men? It’s easy for women together to fall into a pattern of just sitting at home and complaining.”
Katya ducked her head in a smile — what was so funny? When she raised it again, though, she had the same clenched expression she’d worn for most of Yana’s visit. A man — a boy, really, but still — had tried to kill himself over her. It was awful, it had wrecked their house, but if Yana had been Katya, she would have felt flattered. Sick. She took Katya’s cold hand. “You know it wasn’t your fault, right?” she said in an undertone.
Katya blinked and said, “Why would you even think — I wasn’t even there,” making Stalina halt mid-interrogation, and turn, and say, “Of course not, Katyenok. What kind of crazy person would think that?” Why wasn’t Stalina asking Yana anything? She was the one who’d been away. Would it cost too much to call Pratik on the hotel phone?
Stalina
After dinner with the girls in the hotel restaurant, Stalina released them back to their room so they could gossip about men. Hadn’t she always wanted them to be friends? Every time they laughed at something Stalina didn’t understand, it was a victory of motherhood. The handkerchief would have asked why the girls hadn’t “comforted their destitute matriarch,” so it was lucky Stalina hadn’t been able to find it earlier. It would probably follow in a day or two. It couldn’t have drowned.
Stalina’s room was so quiet, she felt as though her ears were filled with cotton. She almost couldn’t believe that she had ever had a house, and in it a collection of figurines, flocks of worries. She tried to make a list of what was lost. She tried to open a window. The Swiss bank building glimmered at her through the glass.
She turned on the television. The citizens of New Orleans begged for buses, trailed her through the channels. Why show these scenes, if there was nothing she could do? She called the Red Cross number on the screen and donated, but it wouldn’t be in time. She threw the polyester blanket off her legs. She turned the television off, then back on again. Why hadn’t they left before the storm? There was always a way, legal or illegal, if you really wanted to go —
Some time later, she realized she was lying in a ridiculous position, curled like a hedgehog, ruining her skirt. At least she had remembered to be silent. Her girls, in the room next door, couldn’t have heard.
By the time Osip returned from his meeting with the insurance agent, she was in her nightgown, brewing tea in the coffeemaker. He was sweating, his shirt was unbuttoned, the tie with the ducks she’d bought him spilled from his pocket, he looked like a cabdriver, he refused tea, he vibrated beside her in the bed until she closed her Ulitskaya novel and said, “Nu? He told you something new?”
“We’ll have enough.”
“Enough for what?”
He spoke so quickly, it took her a second to recognize the language as English. “Enough for most happy plan for my Stalinatchka.”
“Me?” She waved her hand. “I have no problem. We have never been materialistic people. What, I’m going to cry over my curtains? Over the rugs from Azerbaijan, where the people hate us now? This was not the Point of Immigration. We can live in an apartment, we —”
He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Will go to Boston.”
She pulled back. “What’s this nonsense now?”
“‘Oh, my mother’s in Boston, taking the wrong vitamins! Oh, Edward and his big, big lab in Boston!’” Osip said in a high voice.
“But you wouldn’t even let me —”
Osip rolled on top of her and patted a breast. “He is no match for my awesome love powers.”
She squeezed a corner of the blanket in her fist. “Your job? You are now hippie?”
“Yes. I am hippie. I take early retirement. I will golf.” He talked and talked, periodically rising for bouts of exuberant open-door urination. Didn’t Stalina know that Milla’s company had a branch in Boston? Izzy would meet so many children of the intelligentsia. Katyenok would come, of course; she loved the sea. He spread his arms across the pillows and smiled.
Leonid
Leonid Chaikin was not in the mood for this errand, and yet, here he was, activating his security system. He’d spent the day being trained not to act the way every single guy at his firm acted, all because some new hire — a secretary, at that — had ratted him out to HR. HR. What bullshit. He slammed the door. He should have bought a Mercedes, or even a Hummer; Porsches were too fragile. Some kids on bikes slowed to look at him and his car. He straightened, put on his jacket. You had to be a role model, no matter what was happening in your work slash personal life. He wished he’d brought a scarf. Damp brown leaves clung to his shoes.
Would there be a permanent mark on his record or not? Would the firm still send him to Switzerland? All he’d done was try to get a little something something going with Fiona. He hadn’t even yelled at her yet, and it was a hostile environment? He sneezed into his hand, and for a moment had a pleasant memory of lying in bed, drinking hot milk with honey, his mother reading to him from Iacocca’s autobiography. You couldn’t call in sick for a sexual harassment workshop, or you’d have to start all over again. Nor could you get out of an errand, not when you were Leonid, and your mother had asked you.
His mother had actually said, “It’s what Russians do.” Excuse Leonid, but hadn’t they emigrated to get away from Russians? Who but his mother had forbidden them to speak Russian in the house? Who had forced him through Little League, karate, ballroom dance, and yoga? She had raised him to be transnational, the General Electric of men (they needed him for Switzerland), and now, she didn’t like it?
No one answered the Molochniks’ door, so after a moment, he opened it. The living room was empty but for two orange folding chairs, and the floor was covered in some kind of plastic. He heard a man singing in Russian and followed the voice to the kitchen, where Katya Molochnik was standing on a ladder, doing something to the ceiling with a tool he didn’t recognize. He grabbed the front of the ladder. “You shouldn’t be —”
“Oh no, it’s safe,” she said. Even dirty and shabbily dressed, needing only a few others to form a huddled mass, she was not bad looking.
“So my mom sent me to check up on you,” he said.
“I’m okay.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Was she flirting? He could use a consolation fuck. Did girls like her get pedicures?
“Mind?” He poured himself some water from a plastic jug. “You’re really supposed to be using a paintbrush for that. Just saying.” He raised his hands.
“That’s after the plaster layer.”
“If you say so.” He smiled and shook his head. “What’re you listening to?” It sounded like one of those old guys his parents sometimes put on.
“Galich.” She sang along with a verse. “What is a soul? Last year’s snow.”
“That’s pretty hard-ass,” he said.
“Well, it’s the devil talking.”
“No, I like it.” He swigged the water and tasted plaster.
“How about you?” She pointed at his headphones, which he’d forgotten he was wearing.
“Floyd, The Wall,” he said, unlooping the headphones from his ears.
“I like that movie. Or I did in high school, anyway.”
“Yeah?” Throughout today’s workshop, he’d been thinking about the part where the giant, open flower swallowed the small, pointy-petaled one. He’d felt like the small, pointy-petaled one. “The parents are liking Boston, so I hear. How’s the rest of the fam?”
She brushed some hair back from her eyes, streaking it with white. Even when she got old, she’d still look good. “Yana’s back in Chittagong. Milla’s in Provincetown this week, with Izz and Theandra.”
“Thea —?”
“Her girlfriend. Theandra.” Katya narrowed her eyes, but he wasn’t about to say anything “inappropriate.” Why was he constantly under suspicion? All he’d been about to say was that he wasn’t surp
rised.
He said, “My mom wanted me to ask about Roman, too. She couldn’t have him back in the house, after…” he gestured towards the upstairs bathroom, “so we don’t know if he’s okay, or…”
“Roma,” she called. He was there? And being addressed in the diminutive?
Roman limped into the room. “Returning to the scene of the crime?” Leonid said.
Roman laughed in that immigrant way that showed he didn’t understand, and said, “How’s it hanging?”
Leonid replied in the usual manner. Katya hadn’t divorced Roman? Roman was squatting in the house he’d wrecked? Seriously?
“Check it.” Roman pulled a CD, jewel case and all, from the droopy back pocket of his jeans. “Romin Tha White Russian” was brandishing a hammer at a Winnebago in what looked like a used-car lot. “Money goes to New Orleans, for houses not trailers,” Roman said.
“All the vast amounts of money you’re making on this?” CDs were obsolete, hadn’t anyone told them that?
“He’s sold over forty already,” Katya said, with a challenge in the movement of her chin.
“More like my friend Chino has sold, in Iraq.” Roman put a hand on Leonid’s shoulder. “But how I am thinking is, we don’t need to live like Mafia to party like porn stars.”
“Huh.” They were far from partying like porn stars, from what Leonid could see. If Katya really wanted to party like a porn star, he could show her: amazing steaks, front-row Counting Crows seats. But that didn’t seem in the cards. The plaster dust was making his cold worse. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
Roman said, “Like now, I have dance party, Westhill High. Bro, want to bounce together?”
Leonid shook his head, smiling. “Work tomorrow. I’ve got to be a good boy.” How competitive could you get with a greenhorn cousin who misunderstood your insults and called you bro? And who was Leonid, if not a firm believer in family values?