“It would’ve been good if you learned it,” he said.
“Yeah? Did you learn English?”
“I’m an old man.”
“Grandma Faina learned it.”
“Yes, when you bother only about yourself, you’ve got time to learn English.”
By now we were being fit around a bijou table by a waiter dressed better than we were. I knew we’d stepped in it—heavy white tablecloths, an expensive kind of quiet.
“Americans wouldn’t fit at this table,” he sniffed.
“Worry about yourself,” I said. He had a belly like a beach ball, though the rest of him was tidy and slim. He was pinned like an insect.
I tried to translate the menu in my head, then render it for him in Russian. “They take a pork chop and stuff an onion in there, and then lardons . . . like salami. And they’ve got these greens they serve only in season. With garlic.”
“The cigarette smoke!” he exclaimed, looking evilly at the other diners, who, for some reason, had failed to learn Russian to prepare for his visit and did not react. “Disgusting.”
“You smoked for thirty years,” I said.
“But I stopped.”
“What are you going to eat?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “What do they have?”
“I just told you what they have.”
I repeated the descriptions, then again, and again, the dishes gradually dwindling to the main proteins: pork, chicken, fish, just as on the plane. Finally I gave up and just chose for him.
“An American wouldn’t survive on these portions,” he declared when the entrées arrived. Why was it necessary to go out to eat a stingy sliver of salmon for seventeen euros when he could get salmon for five dollars a pound back home? The sliver was actually twenty-five euros; I’d lied.
“They eat differently here,” I said. “The portions are smaller, and they eat slowly. It’s the culture. Look—there’s not one fat person here.”
“It’s true, Americans are fat,” he said. He didn’t seem to mind the salmon itself—he was shoveling it into his mouth. I closed my eyes. I had no appetite.
“What’s with work?” he said, sticking a finger into his mouth to clear a wet chunk of fish.
“Nothing,” I said. “All the same. Trying.”
“A novel?” he said. He read only the first and last pages of books.
“It’s about you,” I said, so he would value it more.
“What about me?” he said. He looked both flattered and wary.
“Why, you have secrets?” I said.
“Me?” he said. “I’m an open book.”
“When Mama was filling out your Section 8 paperwork, I heard her say you were older than Grandma. But she’s eleven days earlier in December, same year. So how can you be older?”
“You misheard.”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“So you’re an open book?”
“With your degree, you could have done anything,” he said, scraping roasted potato loudly enough to be heard in the street. “At least you’re in Washington for this project. It’s important, right? You work for the Senate.”
“It’s not what I care about,” I said.
“They’re paying you, though,” he said.
“Yes, as I go.”
His fork stopped. “Why would you allow them to do that? What prevents them from taking your work once you’re done and just stiffing you?” He looked at me like I was an imbecile.
“My God—it’s the United States government.”
“Exactly—they can do whatever they want.”
When the check came, I grabbed it so he couldn’t see, but his gallantry wouldn’t allow me to pay, so I gave him a reduced number and then, pleading the bathroom, added my own euros once out of view. We stepped out into cold sunlight. The burn of having walked in without checking the prices—this is what happened when you let down your guard—was compounded by that other truism of spontaneous dining: If you’d tried just one storefront more, next door, you would’ve found one of those solid bistros with duck confit for half the tab.
He did like being photographed. At the Seine, the Arc de Triomphe, the Mona Lisa, Notre Dame. A thumb in the air, a somber look behind his tinted glasses.
“You choking?” I said. “Smile.”
“I didn’t know you were supposed to smile,” he said, and lit up like a lunatic.
Later, passing a store, he stopped me: They had a clown in the window. No, I said—it was huge. Porcelain. We had so much farther to go. But he was beyond reason, and we bought it.
By our last night, I couldn’t endure one more meal out. I took him to Le Bon Marché, and while he wandered the aisles in a daze, I bought things that seemed most like what he ate in Brooklyn, meaning what he ate in the Soviet Union. Country pâté, hard cheese, tomatoes, saucisson sec, cornichons, a baguette, éclairs, a small bottle of cognac. At reception, I mimed a request for an extra bedsheet, which I unfurled over the bed, the largest surface in the room. Then I set it all out, using the mini ironing board as a table. The bathroom drinking glasses sufficed for the cognac. The tomatoes and salami we ate without utensils, and the Cantal I contrived to peel with a fresh razor blade. I sat on the floor, he on the bed with his legs extended into the bathroom, a hand towel I’d tucked into his collar serving as a bib. Periodically, we toasted. I had never been drunk one-on-one with my grandfather. Blissfully, it was silent. When we finished, he stared off and said, “They do live differently here. We”—Soviet people—“were imprisoned.” Sometimes he surprised you like that. I was about to press him for more but stopped myself. No reason to ruin the moment.
French airport security wouldn’t believe the clown wasn’t for ferrying drugs and nearly broke it apart. “What drugs!” he shouted. “I’m an old man!” The guards contented themselves with a vibrator-size tube of toothpaste in his carry-on. I’d told him about the three-ounce rule many times before leaving home, but I should have known the home aide would have packed him, and she knew even less about American ubiquities than he did. It must have been in the checked luggage on the way over.
In Israel, he informed his old friends that he’d been to Paris, where he’d stayed in an enormous room, which was right by the Eiffel Tower, and had dined in the best places, and his grandson had arranged all of it. By the time we reached Eilat, on the Red Sea, the last stop, he was posing for photos in front of anything stationary. At the hotel, he corralled three young women dressed in fishnets, corsets, and feathered headpieces for some variety show, hoisted his thumbs, popped out a half-crazy smile, and waited while I searched for the camera. One morning, I awoke to the sight of him in wife-beater and briefs doing calisthenics, the sea shimmering outside. His hair was up like a wild plant, and he looked as focused as an Olympian. Phoo, he breathed out deeply with each jumping jack. So he took care of himself less vigilantly than Grandma Faina? But I decided to stay quiet, the slap of his feet on the floor the metronome to which I fell back asleep.
At my grandfather’s, my mother embraced me as if we hadn’t seen each other in years, not weeks.
“You stopped by Alana’s?” she said. “How is it with you two?”
“Everything’s great,” I said. I knew she would ask; I had practiced.
“She didn’t want to come?” she said.
“What? No, I told you. She’s with her family. I told you several times.”
“She’s probably embarrassed about the way we do it.”
“How many times have I said she doesn’t care how you do it? She wants people to choose for themselves. She doesn’t judge. How many times have I told you that? Why don’t you hear what I’m saying?”
I could have remembered all this was coming, too. But I was able to control myself for only so long. There was a wounded look in my mother’s eyes. Sometimes, I thought, she preferred to be hurt than deflected.
“Tell me about Washington,” she said tigh
tly.
“Marauding gangs,” I snapped. “And hunger. I haven’t eaten in weeks.”
Her look turned to anger. “How long are we going to hang for that?”
Eight years earlier, late in my first year of college, I’d been chosen to move to Washington for a summer internship—a U.S. senator was working on a book of historic political speeches. I’d never gone that far from home for that long—gone from home, period. It was exactly the type of gratuitous voyage of which my people kept clear. But I had been writing some guileless poems and stories. And I was transfixed by the guile of American politics. And though dread was always with me, sometimes it felt even more dreadful not to try to beat it back. I was expected to strive, achieve, conquer. How to do that without taking advantage of opportunities like this one?
When I got the news, my parents congratulated me with colorless faces and said all the things that, for some reason, I’d hoped they wouldn’t. Washington—that was far away. Where would I live? Where would I eat? I gave them a good lecture about their pathetic, embarrassing fears. Then I charged back upstairs, past two lacquered birch branches my parents had found in the local woods and brought back to remind them of all the birches in Belarus.
I was on hold with the senator’s office when the door to my little workroom swung open. It had been a closet until my father cleared it out and mounted waist-high shelving on the wall to make a kind of desk. He could build a desk, a chandelier, or a flying closet to hang off bicycle hooks in the ceiling because his son had been assigned to an eighty-square-foot double at school. But he didn’t want to turn this skill into a business. And he’d traded house painting for a spot as a doorman at a tony building on the Upper East Side. There he had the security and level of challenge he wanted. In the closet office’s little window, I could see the tree I’d planted with my grandmother after we moved to New Jersey. The sapling had been small enough to fit in the trunk of our battered blue Buick. Now it stood higher than a person, aflame with white and pink flowers.
The office door revealed my mother, her eyes on the floor. She slid a small slip of paper under my nose and fled. It said, for some reason in English, “Please don’t go.” I stared at the wall, halfway between numbness and tears. When the staffer finally got on the line, I apologized and said I wouldn’t be able to make it.
I was grateful, in a way: I’d yelled for my cause and given it up for my loved ones—an honorable discharge. It was now, eight years later, that I found myself filled with anger that wouldn’t go away—after the semester in Spain that unraveled, the Fulbright to Turkey I turned down, the relocation to Mexico that I swore would be the time I . . . but wasn’t. By then, they no longer had to mainline the apprehension into me, though they did anyway. And I kept trying to persuade them. I couldn’t manage to go without their blessing.
Eight years later, the Washington I’d finally gotten to see was taking me in in a way New York never had. New York felt like it had no need for people like me. There were thousands of freelance journalists there—disposable, and treated as such. Washington surely had its own version of that, but writers swam in a smaller sea. The committee staffers whose prose I’d been hired to edit for a government report on Hurricane Katrina seemed to like coming by to ask which paragraph should go where. And for all the secret savagery they must have dealt each other, these lawyers (lawyers!) went about the Katrina investigation with an earnestness that moved me as the apparent mores of New York journalism never had. I had arrived with a New Yorker’s condescension toward these supposedly square people, but I had come to feel admiration instead.
Earlier that spring, storm survivors had bused up from the South, dressed in the best Katrina had left them. The women in broad-brimmed hats and bright dresses reminded me of my grandmother Faina, now in Chicago with my uncle’s family. Everyone was black. My suit marked me out as a staffer, so people pulled on my sleeve and tried to tell me their stories. That was all they wanted—someone to hear what had happened.
Several junior colleagues and I started writing these stories down and asking for more names to call. The report would focus on systems—interagency coordination and so on—but the introduction had no official mandate and, perhaps because it was assumed it would consist mostly of fluff, was relatively safe from political interference. Back upstairs, our little bullpen came to resemble a backwater broadsheet come upon some kind of local malfeasance—all hands on deck. We called, interviewed, and transcribed—morgue operators, surgeons, coast guard rescuers, parish officials, survivors—until we had enough to weave a real-time account of what these people had gone through during and after the storm. In New York, I’d been writing brief actress profiles for Vogue. For the first time in nearly twenty years in the States, I felt a sense of community, purpose, and belonging. I was electric with excitement. I know this because I ate Subway four times a day and didn’t notice.
To this, at my grandfather’s, only my mother was willing to listen. Oksana was laying out silverware, my father was sautéing shrimp on the stove, and my grandfather was staring at the blaring television as Oksana periodically checked that he was well propped on pillows (they would ward off the prostate cancer caused by hard surfaces). My mother would listen until day became day once again. I felt guilty about answering her sharply before and tried to give her the real answer, the one about finding belonging. But I couldn’t explain my point very well.
Though she experienced her own lack of belonging with slashing bitterness all the time—her colleagues made fun of her accent, and she couldn’t work up the courage to ask them to stop—my complaints must have seemed strange. To her, belonging was like finally figuring out the fucking difference between “a” and “the”—a luxury for somebody else. And what did I expect, anyway, considering the kind of work I had chosen?
After I’d announced I was moving to Mexico, having discovered on a reporting trip there some things I lacked sorely at home, she was forced to admit that she couldn’t make sense of her son and made the first therapy appointment of her life. She couldn’t understand, she said to the woman, why I would want to do something so reckless. “But how do you know it’s reckless?” the therapist had said. “What if it goes well?” My mother sat there, stunned. Something as obvious as things turning out okay even if someone split from the pack had never occurred to her. Such a thing is obvious only to an American person—it had hardly occurred even to me. In arguing for Spain and Turkey and Mexico, I was trying to say how much I could use their support—not that I knew to put it that way—precisely because I was equally frightened of going. Her therapy session left her astounded and terrified both. She never went back.
The Passover table was set up under the portrait from which my grandmother squinted like a crazy person. All of us wanted it down, but, though the auteur who had produced it stopped by only once or twice a year, my grandfather didn’t dare offend him.
“Before we begin—” I said loudly. Everyone looked up. Hands were already on forks. My father’s shrimp was on the table, and Oksana was laying down appetizers—marinated peppers, smoked salmon, a salad of kidney beans and caramelized onions. Her repertoire was observing the holiday’s dietary restrictions more than his.
“It’s an actual holiday, right,” I said. I withdrew the Haggadah and waved it at them. “So we should do it the right way.”
My grandfather puckered his face as if to say Not necessarily. Oksana was the help—she’d go along with whatever. My father was squinting in a way that said Not for me, please. My mother was manufacturing an appearance of curiosity. “How interesting,” she said.
“Where did you get that?” my grandfather asked, as if I was holding a crack pipe.
“From a barber, actually,” I said. “Uzbek, down my block.”
He perked up. “What does he charge for a men’s?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I only get my watch batteries there.” Though it was on the Lower East Side, it was a true ex-Soviet shop: haircuts, batteries, orthopedic lo
afers, Haggadahs.
“This is our story—don’t you care?” I said.
They exchanged glances I wasn’t supposed to see. I pointed to the matzoh on the table: “Our ancestors ate unleavened bread”—I looked around; nothing—“because they were fleeing and didn’t have time to bake bread that would rise.” I looked at the slices of Borodinsky fanned around a wide dinner plate. Half was on its own, half slathered with butter and salmon roe.
“By the way, we recline,” I said, “because God led them out of Egypt. They weren’t slaves anymore. So they could relax.” I looked around. “So relax.”
My grandfather bent his head: “You want me to go to the couch?”
“No, just lean back and put your arm on the arm of your chair.”
“The chairs don’t have arms,” my mother pointed out apologetically.
“Okay, forget it,” I said. I began reading: “‘If the Holy One, blessed be He, had not taken our fathers from Egypt, then we, our children and our children’s children, would have remained enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt.’ Make you think of anything?”
“It was a very long time ago.” My grandfather shrugged.
“That synagogue in Vienna?” my mother offered helpfully.
My jaw clenched. “Of us, of us! We were enslaved! We got out!”
“Oh,” my mother said.
“The Torah speaks of four children,” I barreled on. “‘One is wise, one wicked, one simple, one that doesn’t know how to ask questions.’” I stopped. You could see their jaws clenched, too. My mother inhaled and exhaled. “Maybe one of you has a question,” I said.
“I do,” my father said. “When will the service be over?” He had his arms crossed at his chest, his eyes almost closed—he had the graveyard shift in his doorman job. He nodded at the shrimp. “You can’t eat cold food. There’s your commandment.” To enlarge my sense of guilt beyond family members—you could disrespect family members, but not outsiders—he added, “Oksana’s been cooking all day.”
“You can’t eat shrimp, period,” I said.
“Why don’t we grow sidelocks and beat our heads against the wall?” he said. “This is how we celebrate. All of us together. It’s the way we know. It’s good enough.”
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