Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  “Yuli, it’s Pyotr. You sound upset. Is this a bad time?”

  “No, Petya. How are you?” She hadn’t seen Pyotr since going to Dnipropetrovsk to photograph the teenage physicist who, according to Der Schmuggler, was designing the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

  “I have a new job. A wonderful new job.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I will. I am coming to Otvali tomorrow to see my parents before I leave. Let me take you to dinner, and I will tell you then.”

  Even if Michael weren’t arriving, Yuli would’ve been hesitant to go out with Pyotr on Saturday evening. The meal and conversation would be fine, but what he would want after dinner didn’t appeal to her. Pyotr was a sweet, smart boy who had been so good to her ever since they were at Mark Twain together. Still, although Yuli had been to bed with him, she felt nothing romantic toward Pyotr, no swaying in the dark to daydream music. All the same, he was her friend, and she disliked hurting him.

  “We will have a party,” Yuli said. “In the Malt Shop. At eight. Like we used to. I will call Sofia and Viktoriya and tell them to bring some people, and you invite anyone you want. Papka’s American cousin will be visiting. You can meet him. And I will make you a bird’s milk cake. Is that still your favorite?”

  “It is,” Pyotr said, and she felt guilty hearing his disappointment about dinner.

  Through the window, Yuli saw an olive-drab ZIL crossing the compound, a military truck that scared off the policemen who pulled over truckers on some pretext and detained them until they were given a sample of the cargo.

  Yuli said, “I have work to do. See you tomorrow?”

  “At eight.”

  “Good-bye, Petya.”

  “Do svidaniya, Yuli.”

  Yuli tugged on her tomato-red rubber boots, which were made in Finland and part of a shipment that came from a family of Russian smugglers living in Helsinki. The rain had stopped, and she walked through the mud past the cow and horse barns to the other side of the compound, where a few of the men employed by Der Schmuggler were unloading the ZIL and carrying boxes into one of the concrete-block warehouses.

  Consulting her inventory list, Yuli checked to make sure the goods were in the boxes—cartons of Marlboro cigarettes, bottles of Canoe Eau de Cologne, and stacks of Levi’s jeans. Der Schmuggler had arranged for these items through Taft Mifflin. Yuli was ignorant of the specifics. Papka thought it was safer for her not to know in the unlikely event that the authorities, in a fit of self-righteousness or an effort to increase their payoffs, summoned them for questioning. Smuggling American cigarettes and French cologne was forbidden, though the most serious offense would be the Levi’s dzhins, which sold for as high as two hundred rubles apiece, the average monthly pay for a worker. The price was less outrageous when you factored in that you could be imprisoned or executed for smuggling Levi’s. The Kremlin judged the dzhins to be a by-product of the moral rot foisted on civilization by the West, like their cacophonous jungle music and slithery pornographic dances, which threatened the younger generation’s dedication to the sacred principles of communism.

  When the driver had been paid and the shipment inventoried, Yuli went to her bedroom with bottles of Canoe for herself, Sofia, and Viktoriya. Young Soviet women preferred it to Red Moscow perfume, which had been around since the waning days of Tsarist Russia and had a cloying musky scent that, Sofia said, made her smell like her grandmother. For the next hour, in anticipation of meeting Michael, Yuli tried on clothes in front of a brass-edged floor mirror—Levi’s that she had tapered herself until the denim seemed inseparable from her skin and a Breton-striped shirt, a replica of the shirt Audrey Hepburn wore in Funny Face, that Yuli had bought at GUM in Moscow, waiting for hours in a line that extended from the department store all the way across Red Square; then a tight dove-gray skirt, also purchased at GUM, and a short, peach-colored cardigan that Yuli had knitted; and white pedal pushers with a black turtleneck, which she had seen on Marilyn Monroe in one of the magazines that Der Schmuggler brought her from a U.S. Army base in Munich.

  Unable to decide on an outfit, Yuli took the comb and brush off her dresser. Her pageboy had grown out so it spilled past her shoulders, and she parted it in the center, on the left, then on the right. None of the styles satisfied her, so she gave up and sat on her narrow steel-frame bed, looking at the collage that covered her walls: a copy of the famous painting of Lenin talking to Stalin on a veranda hanging next to a movie still of Abbott and Costello doing a gabby comedy routine, which Yuli had bought on the street in Kiev; record-album covers, ticket stubs from movies; photos of Anton Chekhov, Allen Ginsberg, and the American actress Shirley MacLaine rubbing Khrushchev’s bald head when the Soviet premier visited Hollywood; a Soviet poster celebrating the launch of Sputnik; and a tribute to her mother, a framed print of The Star by Edgar Degas, a lone ballerina in a white tutu dotted with red flowers, her arms out and left leg raised, standing center stage and on pointe in a splash of celestial light.

  Yuli had been covering her bedroom walls with images since she was a child, and gazing at this visual diary was a form of relaxation for her or, to be more precise, a method for blunting her anxiety. The years prior to Der Schmuggler’s finding her were like a fitful sleep broken by foggy memories of shivering with other children in a coal mine, hiking through woods and across the steppes of the Ukraine, the whine of German Stukas diving to drop their bombs, hiding in a root cellar in a dacha on the lakeshore, children crying, the yelling of German soldiers searching for them, machine-gun fire, the awful silence.

  Now Yuli went to study the Beach Boys album cover of Surfer Girl tacked above her dresser. The boys stand in a row on the sand and hold a yellow surfboard with blue and red stripes. They wear plaid shirts and khaki pants, and the foamy ripples of the Pacific touch their bare feet. They grin for the camera, appear so joyously robust and free from the tragic tides of history, five euphoric pagans existing only in the sun-laced purity of this California moment.

  Yuli wondered which boy Michael most resembled. Any of them would do, but she preferred the one on the far left, with a thick forelock falling in his eyes and a touch of irony in his grin.

  After a while she picked up her comb and brush again and went to work on her hair.

  18

  Der Schmuggler had a great burly man’s laugh, like a Jewish Santa Claus, though his beard was shorter, with more pepper in it than salt. During our train trip he laughed more than he spoke, preferring to bury his head in a book. The first night, in our private compartment, I did ask him his name, and he replied that around Otvali he was known by his Yiddish sobriquet, Der Schmuggler. Away from home, and especially on trains with border guards coming aboard to check papers and passports, he was simply referred to as Der.

  At the train station in Rostov-on-Don, one of his employees picked us up in a Soviet clunker painted a shade of yellowish-green that almost persuaded me a car could contract malaria. Forty miles of potholed roads later, we went through a double, iron-spike gate set into a high redbrick wall. The house looked like a two-tier concrete wedding cake with dark strawberry frosting, and my overall impression, as I carried my bags inside, was that the place could have withstood a nuclear warhead.

  We walked up a short flight of steps from the entryway to the kitchen, which was as fragrant as a bakery due to the tin sheets of rugelach a young woman with golden-brown hair was removing from the oven of a porcelain stove. The four-burner, with steel pots on top, was wedged against a white-stone wood-burning oven that took up half a wall, and adjacent to each other, they were a portrait of past and present. The woman set the braided pastries on the wooden counter next to the sink and moved gracefully across the plank floor to hug Der.

  For the first time since I’d met him in Munich, he smiled and, after letting her go, said, “Michael Daniels, this is Yulianna Kosoy—Yuli.”

  When Der Schmuggler had mentioned her on the train, I’d envisioned a Russian peasant girl from the pages
of National Geographic, stocky and thick-legged in a headscarf and caftan holding a milk pail in one hand and a balalaika in the other. That wasn’t even close to what I saw. Her clothing could have come from the closet of an American college coed—a black cashmere sweater, tapered Levi’s with rolled cuffs, and penny loafers. But at the same time there was something gloriously unusual about Yuli, her beauty both fragile and ferocious. She was small and lithe, so the generous swells and sharp curves of her body under the clingy cashmere and skintight denim appeared to belong to a different woman—earthier, far less ethereal. Her almond-shaped eyes were the same dark blue as the sky at winter dusk, and her mouth curved upward in the start of an impish grin.

  I couldn’t manage to spit out even the most perfunctory of greetings, because I’d never seen anyone that beautiful in person.

  Yuli said, “Does the Mad Russian only talk on the radio?”

  It was a moment before I realized she was speaking to me. “No.”

  “How very nice.” She stood up on her toes and gave me a triple kiss—left cheek, right cheek, and the left again. “There will be a party tonight. Perhaps you want rest. There will be food. You can eat then.”

  Her English was formal and sounded faintly British, but like my grandmother she rolled her r’s and fought against the Russian habit of transforming w’s into v’s, th’s into z’s, and elongating a’s and e’s.

  As if Der were teasing her, but with an unmistakable note of hurt, he said, “And me? Must I go to this party to eat?”

  Yuli patted his shoulder as though consoling a toddler. “I will heat you some of my zharkoe.” Yuli shifted her body toward me. “You know zharkoe?”

  The brusqueness of her tone made it sound like an exam question. “Beef stew. I used to help my grandmother make it.”

  Yuli was studying me, and I was studying the brass samovar on the counter because it was a challenge not to stare at her, and I didn’t want to be rude.

  “Papka, have a glass of tea, and I will show Michael where he sleeps.”

  Yuli led me out the other side of the kitchen, up a stairway and down a dim hall to a room lit by lamps with triangular mint-green glass shades. One lamp was on a night table next to a steel-frame bed no bigger than a cot, the other on a dresser lacquered a mintier green than the lampshades. I put my suitcases on the bed and opened a door to what I thought was a closet, but it was a closet-size bathroom—white ceramic tub, sink, and a toilet with the tank up on the wall behind the commode and a pull chain dangling from it.

  I was looking up at the chain when Yuli asked, “You know how to use?”

  That was the first time I smiled at her. “I’ve been toilet-trained since I was three.”

  And she smiled back. “I like when you make jokes. You are the Mad Russian again.”

  “I’ll remember that.”

  She hesitated, as if weighing her words. “Do—do you like my English?”

  I was tempted to reply that I especially liked it when she was speaking to me, but I didn’t want to scare her off. “I do.”

  “You will help me improve it?”

  “I’ll start now. American use contractions. Say, ‘You’ll help me.’ ”

  “You’ll help me?”

  “Yes, I’ll help you.”

  She let her eyes linger on me, and I felt as if she were having a discussion with herself and wished I could hear it.

  “Enjoy your rest,” Yuli said, and closed the door.

  19

  Frost sparkled on the paved road that ran through the compound as I walked past the manure-ripened barnyard and saw cars parked beside a building with light filling the circular windows.

  I had no idea what to wear to a Soviet party, and I’d been embarrassed to ask Yuli, who had gone to set up the Malt Shop while I was shaving, so I opted for semiformal: a blue button-down, a black knit tie, chinos, an olive corduroy sport coat, and Weejuns. Not that anyone noticed me when I got there. Cigarette smoke shrouded the fifty or sixty men and women, most of them decked out like American college students or bohemians in crazy patterns and loud colors that appeared crazier and louder under the glittering teardrop bulbs embedded in the black ceiling. A reel-to-reel tape recorder sat on a stool in a corner with wall speakers on either side of it, and some couples were dancing to Connie Francis’s “Where the Boys Are.” Along the wall were tables with bottles of red and white wine and Russkiy Standart vodka, platters of cookies and cake, and one stacked with plates and steaming steel pots, the aroma of the beef stew triumphing over the tobacco smoke.

  On the opposite side of the room, Yuli was standing in front of a mural of Red Army soldiers doing a frenzied Cossack dance by the blackened shell of a Nazi tank. She was talking to a redhead and a blonde in tight Levi’s and sweaters, and as I headed toward them, Yuli said something; they all began to laugh; and I wondered what it was about young women standing together laughing that could stop your heart.

  I said hello to Yuli, and she replied, “These are my friends, Viktoriya and Sofia.”

  Viktoriya was the blonde, Sofia the redhead. Neither one was as beautiful as Yuli, but that was no criticism. Both had porcelain skin, big eyes that were shades of gray and green and blue, like the ocean changing color depending on the angle of the sun.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” I said.

  The two women answered in English, saying it was a pleasure to meet me. I looked at the mural of the Russian soldiers and the ruined German tank on the wall, and Sofia said, “The three of us painted it from a photograph.”

  Turning to Yuli, Viktoriya said in Russian, “You were right. Your papka’s cousin is a handsome boy. If he would take off his jacket and shirt, it would be fun to paint a mural of him.”

  Viktoriya let out a devious chuckle, and Sofia joined her. They would have been less amused if, like Yuli, they knew that I’d understood every word. I welcomed the news that Yuli thought me good-looking, but she didn’t seem pleased that I was privy to that information. Her whipped-cream complexion reddened, and she attempted to explain her friends’ interest in physiology by saying, “Viktoriya and Sofi are going to be doctors.”

  I weighed a selection of banal responses, none of which I used, because just then a round-shouldered guy in a belted trench coat and black-frame sunglasses showed up, his platinum-blond hair combed in the more restrained style of Elvis in Viva Las Vegas. When Viktoriya and Sofia saw him, their faces lit up, like old pals meeting at a high school reunion, and he shoved his glasses in a coat pocket and exchanged cheek kisses with them. With Yuli, he took the proprietary approach of a boyfriend, putting his hands on the sides of her arms and bending to kiss her mouth. She glanced at me—uncomfortably, I thought—before shifting to the side so his kiss landed on her ear.

  Pulling away, Yuli introduced me as Michael Daniels, Papka’s American cousin, who was preparing to take classes in Russian at the university.

  “Pyotr Ananko,” he said, extending his hand to me.

  “Good to meet you.”

  We shook, with Pyotr studying me as though we had met before and he couldn’t recall my name.

  Yuli asked, “Petya, what is your new job?”

  He stood up straighter, obviously proud. “I am a foreign correspondent for Novosti.”

  Viktoriya, Sofia, and Yuli broke out in a burst of congratulations. For the majority of Soviet citizens, travel to the West was neither economically feasible nor permitted by the government. Der traveled to Germany and had been to Italy and Spain, but that was because officials either wanted the goods he brought back or were paid to overlook his smuggling. From the music and dancing and Levi’s and packs of Marlboros on display at the party, it was clear that younger Soviets—not just eccentrics like Dmitry—were enthralled by what was happening in the West.

  Viktoriya asked, “Where will you go?”

  “I will be writing about jazz, so Switzerland and Scandinavia, and perhaps the Netherlands and France. I will also review plays in London and New York. And I am going to
travel through the United States to write about the Negro situation.”

  Pyotr glowered at me as if I’d founded the Ku Klux Klan. Like Yuli, Viktoriya, and Sofia, he was a few years older than I was, but he had one of those pale smooth faces that never seemed to age, so that if he lived to be a hundred he could still pass for a schoolboy.

  He said, “Americans want Communist countries to become free and democratic, but that is not a condition they extend to all their own people.”

  Maybe Pyotr blamed me for Yuli sidestepping his lip lock or maybe he was a true Red commie, but with the three women looking at us, I wasn’t going to let him poke me without returning the favor. “We do that so Russians like you don’t feel bad about putting up the Berlin Wall or outlawing the Beatles.”

  Pyotr grimaced. “Are you joking or debating?”

  “Both.”

  He raised a forefinger, and I had the feeling that I was in for a lecture on the failings of America, but before it went any further, Yuli said, “Petya, you did not taste the bird’s milk cake I made for you. I am insulted. Go try a piece.”

  He hesitated, and more forcefully Yuli said, “Go,” and as he headed for the tables, Yuli grabbed the sleeve of my sport coat.

  “He’s your boyfriend?” I asked.

  She tugged me by the sleeve. “No need to speak of Petya. You and I will dance.”

  Yuli’s beauty was intimidating, but dancing was one of my strong suits. For a year before my bar mitzvah, my mother insisted that we take private weekly dance lessons so as a family we could impress the guests at the fancy shindig that followed the religious service. Our instructor, the ancient Mrs. Gallagher, was an erstwhile flapper in love with the sequined dresses of the Roaring Twenties, but she put me through my paces with all the disciplined good cheer of a Marine drill instructor with gas pains. Thus when Yuli and I faced each other and clasped hands and the tape rolled into Little Richard’s “Rip It Up,” I planned to impress her with my jitterbug.