by Lara Vapnyar
Alla sighed and picked up another snapshot.
“And here is Marinka, the young one. Pretty, right? Too pretty, if you ask me. She’s been hanging out with boys ever since she turned fifteen. All I want is for her to marry and settle down. But again, she would need a place to live.”
Alla put the snapshots down on the table and went to take a plastic container with sour cream out of the refrigerator. She then put two deep plates and two silver spoons on the two ends of the table and placed a wooden trivet in the middle.
Sergey brought the pictures closer to his eyes. Alla was right—Marinka was very pretty. Pert, muscular, with dark eyes and dark hair, her laughing face glowing with wild energy. She was the kind of girl with whom you’d want to wrestle in bed. Sergey had a quick image of himself grabbing her wrists, pinning her down, and her kicking and laughing. But Natasha was very pretty too, although her beauty seemed to be softer, less aggressive, less obvious from the first glance. She was the kind of girl you’d want to kiss while walking with her in a park. She didn’t resemble her sister at all, except for her long dark eyes, which looked exactly like Marinka’s and, Sergey noticed with surprise, like Alla’s.
“Your daughters are beautiful, and they both look like you,” Sergey said.
Alla looked at him from the stove and smiled, “Thank you, Serezha.”
And then the hot borscht was in their plates. Steaming, bursting with colors. All shades of red in perfect harmony with the faded purple of beets, the deep orange of fat rings, the white of sour cream in the middle, and the dark green of parsley bits.
“You know what?” Alla said, as they were about to plunge their spoons in. “We simply have to have some of Masha’s vodka now.”
She opened the freezer, and Sergey smiled at the bright collection of colorful, translucent liquids in half-liter bottles on the three upper shelves.
“Ash berry is the best one. Masha’s husband drove upstate specially to gather the berries.”
Sergey poured about a finger of faint amber liquid into each of two shot glasses.
“We have to make a toast,” Alla said, and looked into her glass. “For going home? No matter if they’re waiting for us or not?”
“For going home,” Sergey said, and they clinked their glasses.
He felt a chill on his tongue followed by a great immediate warmth spreading down his throat and chest. He took a big heavy spoonful of borscht and brought it to his mouth, holding a piece of bread under the spoon.
Puffed Rice and Meatballs
ONCE, in a hazy postcoital silence, Katya’s lover came back from a shower, dropped the towel to the floor, climbed into bed, and said, “Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about the horrors of communism.”
Katya sat hugging her knees so that her body resembled a triangle with her head as an apex. She had put on her bra and panties—she hated nakedness, how it turned into something sadly irrelevant after sex.
The request startled her. What exactly were the horrors of communism? Katya’s childhood coincided with the Stagnation Period. People weren’t killed or put in prisons as easily as before, there was plenty of space in mental hospitals, and—as for the freedoms of speech, residence, and such—what did little Katya need them for? Was having to wear a red tie horrible, or standing in a two-hour line to see Lenin’s body in his tomb, or standing in an even longer line to buy toilet paper? Katya didn’t think so. It was rather funny. Even nostalgic now. And why would a man with whom she’d gone on only a few dates and exchanged a few embraces be interested in something as intimate as her childhood?
She stared at her lover suspiciously.
He had propped up his head with his elbow. His expression was of calm anticipation. This man didn’t want to know her better. He was simply asking for entertainment—for an easy, amusing, and preferably sexy story about the exotic world to which his lover had once belonged. Katya’s shoulders relaxed.
After some mental probing she picked a story. She wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with communism, but she thought that with a few effective details she would be able to make the narrative exotic enough. She put her right cheek on her knee and turned to her lover.
“Do you want to hear about my first sexual encounter?”
“Gladly!”
“When I was little, I attended a day-long preschool, like most city kids. We were on a very strict schedule, similar to a prison or a labor camp. Every day, at one P.M., we had a nap. Our teacher—I remember only that she had red ears and a long lumpy nose—put us in two lines and led us to the bedroom, a gloomy room where the blinds were drawn at all times and the beds stood in tight rows, a girl’s bed alternating with a boy’s.”
“I see,” Katya’s lover noted with enthusiasm. “So you were sandwiched between two boys.”
“Not exactly. Between a boy and a wall, because my bed was the last in a row.
“We stripped to our underwear—boys and girls had identical white underpants and undershirts—climbed into the beds, pulled the blankets to our chins, and turned to the right side. We weren’t allowed to sleep on our backs or our left sides. As soon as we all were in bed, the teacher said, ‘I’m going now, but if I hear even a squeak from you, I’m coming back, and I’m coming back with the thing!’ Nobody knew what the thing was, and nobody wanted to find out.
“‘And if you go to the bathroom, it better be an emergency!’ she added before leaving for the dining room.
“I couldn’t sleep on my right side. I just lay there scared and bored, facing the back of the boy next to me, staring at his blanket’s ornament through the rectangular slit in the blanket cover.
“Delicious sounds coming from the dining room distracted me even more. I listened to the plates clatter and the persistent scraping of a serving spoon against a pot’s bottom. I knew that in a few minutes the teacher would open the entrance door and let in her sons, twin boys of about nine. She would seat them at our tables and feed them the food left over from our lunch. I saw them once, when I pleaded an emergency and ran through the dining room to the bathroom. Their plates were piled up with shrunken meatballs and pale mounds of mashed potatoes. Their knees were bent awkwardly under one of our little-kids’ tables. Their ears moved along with their jaws.
“I tossed in bed and thought about meatballs, which during naptime always seemed awfully tempting, even though I’d repeatedly refused them during lunch. ‘Want to be hungry? Fine,’ the teacher had said, hastily taking away my plate. ‘This school is no place for picky eaters.’”
Katya’s lover listened with a warm and amused expression, tinted with slight shadows of impatience. She didn’t know why she’d mentioned the teacher’s boys at all. She’d better hurry up and get to the sex part.
She continued her story. “A thin voice from the next bed interrupted my meatball fantasies. ‘Hey, are you asleep?’ The voice belonged to a chunky blue-eyed boy named Vova. He had turned toward me and lay blinking with his white eyelashes.
“‘Can’t you see that my eyes are open?’ I asked.
“‘Shh.’ He pointed in the dining room’s direction. The white eyelashes blinked some more. ‘I’ll show you my peesya if you show me yours.’
“I didn’t have any problems with that. We moved our blankets aside and pulled down our underpants. We craned our necks. We stared.
“‘Mine’s better,’ Vova said at last.
“I agreed. His was better. His looked like something you could play with.
“‘It’s so pretty and small,’ I said.
That was the only time I didn’t lie about a man’s size, Katya wanted to add, but then changed her mind.
“‘What do you do with it?’
“‘Not much, really.’ He shrugged, tucking his peesya into his underpants. ‘I pee with it; I pull on it sometimes. Not much.’
“‘Not much?’ I frowned. Such a pretty, fun toy. I would have known what to do with it! For one thing I would’ve dressed it in all the clothes from my tiny-dolls collection
. I would’ve tried little hats, socks, and dresses on it. Then I would’ve tried to feed it and put it into bed.”
“Classic case of penis envy,” Katya’s lover said, laughing. He was playing with her bra straps.
“Oh, no, not at all. I didn’t feel envy. It was rather a feeling of waste that such a promising thing wasn’t properly used.
“Anyway, I was excited, and I couldn’t wait to go home and tell my mother. In fact, I didn’t wait to go home. I told her on the way from school. I stopped in the middle of a dry summer sidewalk, let go of my mother’s hand, and said, ‘Mom, you won’t believe what I saw today!’
“Several hours of yelling, sobbing, and hysterical phone confessions to her friends followed. Then there was a lecture. My mother led me into a room that we shared—my little bed stood perpendicularly to her big one—sat me on a little chair in the corner, and walked to the middle of the room, her arms folded on her chest and her brows furrowed. I think I might have giggled, because I remember my mother suddenly yelling, ‘It’s not funny! It’s a very serious matter!’
“The lecture wasn’t long. I remember sitting patiently through the whole of it, and I couldn’t have possibly done that if the lecture lasted more than twenty minutes. At one point my mother began to sob in mid-sentence and ran to lock herself in the bathroom.”
“Oh, my God. It could’ve left you scarred for life.”
Katya stopped. Her lover looked mildly horrified. He’d even freed his fingers from under the straps of her bra.
It would be a bad idea to mention that she then had banged on the bathroom door, yelling, “Mommy, please, please forgive me!” It would be an even worse idea to add that she had dropped to her knees and tried to calm her mother by whispering through the slit under the door. The last thing Katya needed was to show her scars.
She continued in a lighter tone.
“After my mother had gone, I decided to go on with the lecture. Probably wanted to try on the role of an authority figure. I gathered all my dolls—some I had to pull from under the beds and bookcases—and sat them on little chairs from my toy furniture set. It was a peculiar group, with the dolls ranging from one inch to three feet high, a few with missing body parts. ‘Listen to me,’ I said, looming above them with my arms folded on my chest. ‘Listen hard, you bunch of stupid, irresponsible dolls. And don’t you giggle! Never ever show your little peesya to anyone. First of all, good dolls don’t do that. Second of all, you can go to prison for it.’”
Ruena paused before the punch line.
“And guess what? They never did.”
The punch line worked, lifting Ruena’s lover’s hands back to her bra straps and making him laugh.
“But you did. You did! You weren’t as obedient as your dolls.”
“No, I wasn’t,” Ruena agreed, and helped to unhook her bra.
The story was a success. It was certainly better than watching the news broadcast, as they did the last time. “You were great,” he had said, pulling on his socks afterward, but she wasn’t sure whether he referred to their lovemaking or her patience in watching the news.
IT WASN’T until much later, when Katya returned to her Brooklyn apartment, that the story started to bother her. It felt like the onset of a toothache, a vague gnawing sensation that would grow into real pain at any moment. Katya brewed some bitter dark tea right in the mug and opened a jar of walnut jam, which, having cost her a ridiculous $5.99, still didn’t taste like home. It was too sugary—wrong—just like her story. The very lightness of her carefully dispensed jokes made her shiver with disgust now. It’s not funny! she wanted to scream, like her mother had. Her mother, whom she’d just betrayed for a strange man’s entertainment.
Soon Katya was awash with shame: for herself, for her mother, but most of all for the hungry teacher’s boys who had to eat leftovers at the little kids’ tables.
At the bottom of her mug sat a small pile of tea leaves, the very stuff people used to read to tell fortunes. Years ago Katya did that with her best friend, Vera. They sat leaning over their mugs, the tip of Katya’s yellow braid touching the table. “I don’t see anything,” Vera complained. “I see a shape,” Katya said. “A shape of what? A man?” Katya shrugged. “A shape of something.”
She peered into the pile now and tried to read if she would ever meet a man who would understand her pity and her shame, to whom she’d tell her real stories, the ones that mattered, the ones that haunted her, without dressing them up with descriptions of labor-camp preschool, her red tie, or her family’s lack of bread and toilet paper.
“There were two things I craved as a child: imported clothes and imported junk food in crunchy bags.” That was how she would start her real story.
One day I came close to having them both.
It happened soon after I turned thirteen. I remember the year exactly, because it was the year when I developed breasts, and it was also the year when my aunt Marusya returned from West Germany and brought me a bunch of hip German clothes. “Here, dig in!” she said, handing me a tightly packed plastic bag.
I ran to my room and shook the bag’s contents right onto the floor. They made an impressive pile. I wanted to dive in and swim in that colorful sea of fabric. Instead, I sat in the middle of the pile and ran the clothes through my fingers, like somebody who’d opened a treasure box. I stretched stockings, I stroked fuzzy sweaters, I played with shiny metallic belts. I even kissed one nylon blouse that I particularly liked. Then I hurried to try everything on, afraid that if I waited, they might disappear. I pulled them on, one by one, admiring my reflection in the shiny glass shelves of the bookcase. The clothes, though obscured by book covers, looked divine, even more than divine—they looked just like the ones in the dog-eared J.C. Penney catalog I’d once seen at my best friend Vera’s place.
The last piece in the pile was a modest beige sweater with funny shoulder straps. Why would somebody sew shoulder straps to a sweater? I’d thought, when I first saw it. And why bother spending precious currency, when you could buy a simple thing like that here? But I was wrong, I was very wrong, and I saw it as soon as I tried the sweater on. That pale unimpressive piece of cloth could perform miracles. I didn’t know whether it was because of the shoulder straps or some other tailoring trick, but it made me appear as if I had breasts! I couldn’t believe my eyes. For several months I’d been staring into the bathroom mirror hoping to discover the much-desired swellings on my chest. I kneaded and pinched myself, but no matter how hard I tried, it didn’t work. My chest was as flat and as hard as my grandmother’s washboard. Drink more milk, my happier, breast-equipped girlfriends advised. I did. I drank six to eight glasses a day, fighting the spasms of nausea. It didn’t work.
And now here they were: two soft little knobs pushing against the beige fabric. They were my very real breasts. They were beautiful. The girl who blinked at me from the bookcase’s surface was beautiful. She was not just pretty or cute, as people mistakenly called her. She was strikingly, undeniably beautiful. Apparently, the beauty had always been there, but buried under the wrong clothes.
I had to show the world.
I dialed Vera’s number and asked her to meet me by the playground.
I threw on a new miniskirt and new tights and ran to the door, past my parents, who were getting drunk on foreign liquor and Aunt Marusya’s stories of foreign life.
Clomping down the steps of the littered staircase, I suddenly thought of my newfound beauty as a burden. Being beautiful couldn’t be easy. It could be troublesome and even embarrassing. People would stare at me now; I would produce some reaction in the outside world, make some change. And I would have to react. But how? How exactly did a beautiful person behave? What was I supposed to do when boys stared at me and at my breasts, which I was certain they would? I had a surge of titillating panic as I opened the entrance door and stopped, blinded by the orange rays of the setting sun.
I’d just keep my eyes down, I decided. I’d let them stare, but I’d keep my eyes
down.
Vera presented a bigger problem. Would it be possible to stay friends? Vera, with her flat square face and thick waist, wasn’t even pretty, let alone beautiful, and about eighty percent of our conversations had consisted of berating the stupid and boy-crazy pretty girls. Yet she’d been my best friend for years, and I didn’t want to lose her.
She loped toward me now, swinging a canvas bag in one hand and waving a wad of money with the other. Was she ungraceful! I slouched and messed up my hair, trying to make my beauty a little less obvious.
But when Vera drew near, I saw that my worries were in vain. Her forehead was covered with sweat and her eyes bulged with excitement; she clearly was oblivious to everything in the world, including the sudden beauty of her friend.
“Puffed…puffed…puffed rice,” she panted. “They are selling puffed rice in the Littlestore.” She clutched my sleeve and tried to catch a breath. “American puffed rice in crunchy bags! A friend of my mother’s hairdresser told us. We have to run because the line is getting bigger every second.”
“But I don’t have any money!”
“I’ll lend you some.”
And we loped in the store’s direction together.
We were two hundred fifty-sixth and two hundred fifty-seventh in the line. The reason we knew was that they scribbled the numbers in blue ink right on our palms. I had to keep my marked hand apart, so the number wouldn’t rub off accidentally, as happened to a woman who stood ahead of us. She kept showing her sweaty palm to everybody and asking if they could still read her number, when there wasn’t anything but a faded blue stain. I was sure they would turn her away from the counter. The subjects of clothes, boys, and beauty lost their importance somehow, or maybe it was just hard to think of such nonsense while guarding your marked hand.
The line moved slowly. Everybody shifted from one foot to the other, waiting to take a step forward. They were admitting people in batches of ten or twelve—as many as could fit into the narrow aisle of the store.