Rock, Paper, Scissors

by Maxim Osipov

  “And thirdly, as they say: let he without sin . . .” here Betty lowers her voice slightly, not wanting to push it: in this country, guilt is thrust upon kids from kindergarten. “Look, the man never damaged Germany’s interests in any way. . .” That much Betty can guarantee—her father would never lie to her. “Let’s give him a chance, let him try to iron everything out, build bridges.”

  Now it seems like Betty’s getting somewhere: Elsa looks up from her photo. But she says nothing.

  “Needless to say,” Betty continues, “it’s too late to ask Anna for forgiveness, but . . .” Unsure what this “but” might be, she decides to change tack and pull on the heartstrings, “And fourthly, and fifthly, and one-hundred-and-twenty-fifthly, our father was serving his country. Whatever his orders were, he had to execute them. As for Anna . . .” Yes, that’s it, she can say he meant them no harm; it wasn’t directed at Elsa or her mother: “you know, as they say, nothing personal. It’s not like he left you because of another woman.”

  “Nothing personal,” Elsa repeats.

  Now Betty’s sure she’s done it: she’s snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, saved every last shot on goal. She checks the time again.

  “Look, I’ll tell you what: I’ll talk to Dad, I’ll get him to phone you. Then—if you want to, of course—we can go to Moscow together. We’ll cover everything—the visa, the tickets, you name it. I mean, you’ll have to visit anyway, now that you’re half Russian . . .”

  Elsa interrupts her: “No, I’ll tell you what: leave us alone.”

  Her gaze is fixed back on that photo. Us? Whom does she mean by us? Herself and Anna? All three of them? Her flat face gives Betty little to read. She just needs some time to think, some breathing space: different people react at different speeds. Betty steps away for a moment to go and pick out a pair of boots. Things are getting tight—if they want to catch the opera, they’d better be heading out, on the double.

  For some inexplicable reason, her dear old sister chooses that moment to lose it completely: “We don’t have any boots in your size.” Her voice is clear, almost vicious.

  Betty is already at the Tiffany shelf: the boots are right there. Besides, how could Elsa know what size she wears?

  “I said no!”

  All right, all right, why stress out? How about a hat then? Is Betty allowed to treat herself to a hat?

  “Take one, if you must! The till’s closed. Take any!” Elsa shouts, slamming the till shut with a crash. She picks up the phone and shouts down the line, “Taxi, please! Right away. Or else one lady,” that’s what she says, eine Dame, “will be late for the opera.”

  To hell with her, with her hat, with everything. There’s nothing Betty can do.

  “God grant you health,” Betty says. She had wanted to add, “And a sober husband,” but she resists; that half-witted big sis of hers wouldn’t appreciate the humor.

  She couldn’t possibly go to the opera alone. What—and have all those fascists leer at her? She’ll give the tickets to the taxi driver; what’s-his-name—Fritz, Hans, blah—can get some culture for a change.

  Betty will get the red-eye back to Moscow. The flight will make her feel herself again, somehow, and she’ll finish reading that story about love, although by the end she’ll like it much less.

  •

  When Betty arrives at Strogino and tells her father about the death of his first wife, and the fact that they are buried beside each other, he becomes unexpectedly uneasy. Then he pulls himself together. As for Elsa, he says: “So the girl ended up with some character. Who’d have guessed.” Then he waves his hand in the air. “By and large, I never really understood those Germans,” he says.

  He starts coughing for no reason; lately he’s started coughing quite heavily. The cancer can’t have spread to his lungs yet, can it? She gives him a few claps on the back. His cough abates.

  When he says goodbye, he tries to console her: “The Central Committee has handled more difficult issues, Lizchen. Israel has decent urologists, too.”

  March 2016

  Translated by Alex Fleming

  GOOD PEOPLE

  NO, THERE are no children here. They’re in a different part of the hospital.

  The stout gray-haired woman looks Bella straight in the eye. All Bella remembers is the woman’s surname and that she works for Compassion.ru. At the children’s hospital named after . . . Bella can’t remember the name. And the “.ru” is a total mystery to her. This Ordzhonikidze woman has the fixed gaze of someone obliged to tell the truth, no matter how difficult that truth may be. And her voice is low: “Reading to children—that’s nice. It’s a nice thing to do.” The i of nice is drawn out.

  Everything they do here, they do for the sake of the children. Does Bella have children of her own, grandchildren? No, no children of her own. Bella seems to recall having answered that question already.

  “So you’re all by yourself, then?” There’s a lingering hiss to Ordzhonikidze’s sibilants. “We don’t usually take on people undergoing a bereavement reaction, but since Angelina Andreyevna put in a good word for you . . .” Ordzhonikidze’s voice softens on “Angelina” and her upper lip rises in the semblance of a smile.

  Some of her words have gone right over Bella’s head: What kind of reaction?

  Ordzhonikidze gets up—that will do for today.

  “You’ll remember about the clinic, won’t you?”

  Bella apologizes: she’s been so scatterbrained lately. Yes, the TB screening—she promises to bring the records. And in that same instant she forgets her promise.

  •

  There’s no shortage of good people in this world, even in the world of the theater. The good people haven’t abandoned her. Her girlfriends—actresses, makeup artists, set painters—bring her food, cook, set the table.

  “Bella—our poor, sweet Bellochka.” They keep her informed: everyone’s ill, everyone’s got troubles. “We knew old age would be tough, but who could have guessed it would be so humiliating?”

  Bella listens but doesn’t hear them—and if she were to hear them, she wouldn’t think the words applied to her. She gazes around, peers at her guests.

  “My, my—you’re so forgetful these days. High time you got a checkup, Bellochka. Valentina”—doesn’t Bella remember her, the dramaturge’s assistant?—“well, she lost her husband too, may he rest in peace. We’ve got a good neurologist at the clinic. The man did wonders for her.”

  Bella’s in the kitchen, washing dishes. She can heat up her own food, doesn’t flood her downstairs neighbors, and is careful with the stove, the electricity. She can look after herself just fine, she thinks—she doesn’t need any help. Looks like it’s time to serve the tea. But Bella takes fright: so many people in the sitting room—people she doesn’t recognize.

  “What do you mean, Bellochka?” the women ask. “These are your friends—your and Lev’s friends. Don’t you worry, dear—just have a seat, have a seat.”

  They’d better order her a little bracelet with her address on it, just to be safe. So it goes . . . Someone can’t walk, needs a hip replacement—but at their age, the risk . . . Someone else has terrible hypertension . . .

  “And our Bella Yuryevna, well, her head’s gone soft. Like Lenin’s.” Petya, the lighting technician, must have hit the bottle a little too hard. He wanders into the kitchen. “Who’s our theater named after? You remember? Pushkin, Gogol, Stanislavsky?” Bella nods in confusion. Petya waves his hand: “It’s a lucky thing, I tell ya—she’s as good as brain-dead.” They cut him off, push him out the door, even threaten to slap him once he sobers up.

  The people at the theater like Bella, though at this point she’s really just a name on the payroll. She hasn’t actually gone onstage in a long time. It would be good to keep her busy, occupy her mind. Otherwise she’s a goner. Maybe Lina, dear Angelina, will stop by—she’s sure to come up with something. People really are good, Bella thinks. Lev says actors make terrible friends, but she doesn’t
agree. He says they’re always spying on you, looking to steal your emotions, which is why, when something goes wrong, they’re always the first on the scene.

  Oh, Lina’s here—our angel. She can only stay for a minute, but it’s so kind of her to drop in.

  “We knew she’d come up with something!”

  Lina’s a wonder. She takes on so much, and manages all of it so beautifully. She’s like a child, really—so natural, so direct. She wears almost no makeup. And she dresses so simply: everything’s small and elegant—why, her shoes are so tiny, they look like they came from the Children’s World department store. And that adorable, touching little backpack. Everything about Lina is touching, everything is good: her gestures, facial expressions, intonation, the look in her eyes—it all goes together perfectly.

  “Doing good for others, Bella Yuryevna, is the greatest pleasure of all.” Lina lowers her head and presses her right palm to her chest. “What a marvelous picture of Lev Grigorievich!” Lina would love to stay, but they’re waiting for her downstairs.

  Here’s something Bella can do: read to children. The foundation is called Compassion. It’s ten minutes away by trolley, and if the weather’s good, she could even walk. Fairy tales, stories, novels—Bella Yuryevna has a great reading voice. And she’ll be surrounded by all sorts of wonderful people. Lina smiles at Bella, and Bella returns her smile.

  •

  A thick notebook of quadrille ruled paper—the kind that used to cost forty-eight kopecks in the old days. The page on the left is blank, and on the right: Hello, little boy—a wavy vertical line—today—underlined—I’m going to tell you a story—a check mark, for breath. An actor of the old school will never work with printed text; everything has to be copied out into a notebook. Once upon a time there lived an old man and an old woman . . . A wavy vertical line indicates a brief pause; double underlining—special emphasis; two vertical lines—a longer pause. The intonation is marked by arrows pointing up or down. The left page is for commentary. Suddenly Bella remembers: the clinic. Was it a TB screening, vaccines? She gets lost in thought—she feels she’d met Ordzhonikidze before, long ago.

  At the offices of Compassion, Bella gets to know a bright, cheerful young woman named Natasha—whom everyone calls Tasha—and other girls, but she can’t get their names straight. Tasha promises to help her out with the paperwork. She says she can whip up a copy on the computer, make it look better than the real thing. Bella just has to be patient:

  “You know we’re expecting important guests, Bella Yuryevna.”

  Bella nods: yes, yes. Still, she’ll just go and find out when she can start.

  “No, not yet.” Tasha will give her a sign.

  Until she has the paperwork—TB and hepatitis screenings, drug and HIV tests—she won’t be allowed anywhere near the children. We’ll get it all sorted out, but today isn’t convenient. Ordzhonikidze just came from the Ministry of Public Health, Tasha says, and she’s fuming. The employee they assigned to deal with Compassion has just resigned, after promising to take care of everything. So now we’ve got to start from scratch. It’s not the first time the ministry has pulled that trick.

  “You think they give a damn about these kids? They could care less, believe me.” Tasha wants to lend a dramatic note to her words, but her eyes open wide and sparkle with glee.

  So what’s Bella planning to read, anyway?

  “Please, anything but the Brothers Grimm, with all those witches eating plump little boys and girls! The poor darlings have enough to worry about . . .”

  Each of Tasha’s nails is painted a different color, and she has little scars above her wrists—the same on both hands—filled in with some kind of brown substance. All the girls talk very quickly, swallowing their vowels; they don’t seem to open their mouths wide enough to get the words out.

  Tasha is chirping away about the little jackets she bought at Children’s World, and how the saleswoman playfully asked where the little boys were going to go, all dressed up, and how Tasha had upset the woman by saying that the jackets were going to be worn only once, on a very sad occasion, so there was no need to worry, the boys would never grow out of them, and how this had stunned all the salespeople. They even forgot to give her a receipt, so Tasha got an earful from Compassion’s bookkeeper.

  The girls had been crying all day, and Bella was also emotional, though she didn’t quite know why. There were more and more gaps in her mind, and the pathways and partitions between them were steadily narrowing, shrinking. She feared that the gaps would soon merge into one, and that there’d be nothing left in her head but . . . what do you call that whitish liquid that swims up when milk goes sour? Ah, yes, that’s it: whey.

  So what should she do? Go wash the cups, then find a place to sit. And whom are they expecting, anyway?

  “Guests. From high up.” Tasha cheered up again. “The guests are ‘from high up,’ but we were told to corral the shortest doctors we could find for the group photo—no taller than 1.7 meters. I mean, it sounds like the makings of a joke, doesn’t it?”

  •

  The days go by, the weather changes—it’s very warm now—and all Bella can do is listen to the girls chat, wash the cups, and remember. Some of the islands in her mind are safe, solid. One of them is her first meeting with Lev.

  It happened in winter, at a resort in the Vladimir region. How did Bella, a young actress, wind up at this far-flung resort? Doesn’t matter—she liked it: she’d never seen so much sky in all her days. But it wasn’t only the sky she was watching, it was the vacationers too. And because she was shortsighted and too shy to wear glasses, she watched them at close range, eyes open wide.

  Lev—stocky, dark-haired, with thick lips—had come up for a semiofficial mathematics seminar and was now standing in the lobby before the glass-encased “Rules of Conduct at the Kuibyshev Resort.” He noticed Bella’s reflection in the glass, caught her peering at him with what appeared to be intense, loving interest, and thought: This won’t be difficult. He invited her to share the pleasure of examining the rules, but Bella had already been there for several days; she had the rules by heart.

  “First,” she declaimed, turning her back to the display. “It is prohibited to store suitcases, food, and skis in one’s room.” She breathed with her diaphragm, as she was taught to do. “Second. Guests are required to keep their beds in order. Third. Moving from room to room without the express permission of the attendant on duty is strictly forbidden. Fourth . . .”

  Suddenly Bella realizes why Ordzhonikidze seems so familiar—she was the attendant on duty. She hasn’t changed a bit. But then an opaque fluid again envelops Bella’s mind, and she stops without finishing her thought.

  Lev knew how to relax the attendant’s vigilance, but Bella could only visit him for an hour or two at a time, while his roommates were busy at the seminar, and even then, they had to keep quiet. Bella had almost no romantic experience; she didn’t understand that their relationship stood little chance. In the first place, he lived in Leningrad and she in Moscow. In the second place, he expected to be put away for dissident activity. (He was probably exaggerating about that: they never did put him away, or even fire him.) And in the third place, Lev was married. Human beings are polygamous creatures, he explained. He had said as much to his wife, as well as to anyone and everyone who would listen, whatever their gender. And although Bella noticed no such inclinations in herself, she’d nod in agreement: Well, if we’re polygamous creatures, so be it.

  •

  Bella wanders around the empty hospital courtyard. It’s hot; she fans herself with her notebook and looks for a shady spot. She’s somehow managed to understand a thing or two: here, in this building, Compassion occupies several rooms—there is the office of the director, Ordzhonikidze; the bookkeeper’s room; and the big common area, where Tasha and the other girls bide their time. A sign by the door reads: “Patients and relatives are forbidden from entering the office building.” And a handwritten postscript: “Tha
nk you for your understanding.” Which means there are no children here—they’re in another building, across the courtyard.

  Several times throughout the day, a plump young man with a small beard appears in the courtyard, dressed all in red—or rather, crimson. A nasty fellow, people say, but a specialist like no other. Then again, where would he be if not for us, if not for the foundation?

  “Sasha, you’ve got to quit smoking,” Ordzhonikidze shouts down from her office, then slams the window shut so as to keep out the smoke.

  “If you’ve forgotten my full name, you can call me doctor,” Sasha snaps back, but Ordzhonikidze can no longer hear him. He turns to Bella: “A powerful dame, am I right? She ought to be minister of public health. Or heavy industry, like her Bolshevik namesake. She may get there yet.”

  For some reason, Bella trusts him. As for Ordzhonikidze, she looks like the attendant on duty. Bella likes how he laughs: so loudly, so sincerely! It’s the first time she’s managed to make anyone laugh in this place.

  Sasha had seen her onstage once, long ago, and he remembers liking her performance very much, though the role was small. When Sasha was in his teens, his mother and stepfather would take him to the theater almost every evening. His stepfather had taken charge of his sentimental education:

  “You were with . . . which theater?” he snaps his fingers, waiting for Bella to tell him the name, then quickly examines her face. “I’m sorry. It doesn’t matter.”

  •

  Nothing much happens. Days are filled with conversations, the meaning of which is never entirely clear to Bella, but it seems that everyone is used to seeing her sitting in the corner with her notebook or moving around the courtyard. They pay almost no attention to her. But their cups are now clean. And Bella has got used to them as well. She asks no questions. The theater teaches you to be patient: you don’t achieve success overnight—that’s what they say in these cases. Today—or was it the day before?—she ran into Ordzhonikidze, who looked over her head and simply said: “We’re waiting.”