“You mean military training in the schools?” said Genka.
“Among other things.”
“I get it. Zarnitsa war games. All that crap.”
“It’s not crap,” my father said, and he placed his glass on the table. “We have to raise the army’s prestige.”
“And what’s your rank?”
“Lieutenant colonel.”
“Not bad! Did you fight, too? Any hot spots? Afghanistan?”
My father looked at Genka, and his eyes almost narrowed.
“No, I never had to. I work in personnel.”
“I see. End of questions.”
“Here’s your vodka,” Marina said as she came into the kitchen. “You can drink to your hearts’ content.”
“No, thanks,” Genka said. “We’d better be on our way. There’s a lot of vodka anywhere else. And we have to be back in Moscow bright and early. We’re still going to give our all trying to find him. Have a nice day, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel. Now I understand why Kostya didn’t want to see you.”
In the hall, nearly to the door, Marina suddenly spoke up.
“But if you’re coming back to Moscow tomorrow, maybe Konstantin could stay here and spend the night. Why drive back and forth? We have a spare room.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I need to get to Podolsk. I have something important to attend to.”
Downstairs Genka got in the SUV and started the motor but for some reason was in no hurry to get going.
“Listen!” He turned to me at last. “You know what? Why don’t you stay? Why the fuck should we drive you to Podolsk? It means an extra hour and a half on the road. Tomorrow we’ll come by for you at eleven. He is your father. Come on, bro, clear out.”
“Here’s your room,” Marina said, letting me go ahead. “Make yourself comfortable. Meanwhile, Nikolai will bring the children home from school. It’s very close. Next door. Right in our courtyard.”
It felt a little strange, her calling my father Nikolai. My mother always called him by his last name. As if he were a classmate. Or a politician in the newspapers.
“I was the one who hung this here,” she said, noticing my glance. “I love Armenian painting. I don’t know who did it, of course, but the landscape is obviously Erevan. See, here you have the characteristic stormy tones, and here are the little houses climbing uphill. I spent my childhood in Erevan. It’s very beautiful there.”
“It’s an El Greco,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s a reproduction of a painting by El Greco. A Spanish artist. Of Greek descent. His real name was Dominico Theotocopuli. Not that it matters.”
She shifted her gaze toward me. There was surprise in her eyes.
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
I looked at her and thought, What did my mother lack to compete with her?
“Well, if you think so…”
Her voice held an abyss of doubt.
“I don’t think so. It’s an El Greco.”
She looked at me again and finally smiled.
“Fine. If it’s El Greco, it’s El Greco. What’s the difference really? You know, don’t be mad at your father. He has a very difficult situation at work right now. Maybe I can help you in some way.”
“You?”
“Yes. I have reporter friends who work the crime beat. They have great connections with the Moscow police.”
I was about to say that wouldn’t be bad, but right then the doorbell rang.
“Our family’s back,” she said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
The little girl wouldn’t even look at me. She whispered, “’Lo,” and slipped off to her room. My father had obviously warned them.
So they wouldn’t stare.
But the boy was very little. Chubby cheeks and round eyes. He stared at me, and his lips even parted slightly. He stopped unbuttoning his jacket.
My father said, “They were both let out early. They’ve been throwing snowballs outside for a whole hour.”
“Slavka, it’s not polite to stare at people,” Marina said behind my back. “Come say hello. This is your brother.”
I squatted in front of him and held out my hand.
“Nice to meet you, little brother. My name is Konstantin.”
His eyes got even bigger. He looked at me and then Marina. He held out his hand and finally said, “My ears froze hard as rocks. They don’t bend at all.”
“They’re so different,” Marina said when my father went to put the children to bed. “Slavka is very independent. He wants to figure everything out himself. And Natashka lives by his side like a little flower. Just so she gets a little sunlight. Though she’s three years older. Here, have some sugar.”
She paused for a second and smiled.
“I remember taking her to kindergarten and I was very late. We’d been putting an issue to bed, and I hadn’t slept all night. But along the way Natashka asked me to stop in at the market. She wanted to buy berries.”
She smiled again.
“We came running into the kindergarten very late, and the teacher started lecturing me and shouting at her. ‘Why do you come so late? All the children have assembled.’ You know, that strict kind of lady.”
She looked at me.
“Do you mind me using the familiar ‘you’?”
“That’s fine.”
“So. And Natashka looks and looks at her. Then she holds her hand out in front, opens it, and says, ‘Bird cherries.’ They had all smushed up in her fist. And she’s standing there smiling.”
She covered her eyes for a second.
“And this teacher is looking at her and doesn’t know what to say. I’ll probably remember that my whole life. Why don’t you have some candy? Are you just going to drink tea?”
“I’m fine. I don’t like sweets.”
“That’s because you like vodka. If you drink vodka you don’t eat sweets. And vice versa. For instance, I can’t stand the smell of it. It turns my stomach instantly. How you drink it I’ll never understand.”
“We drink it just fine. You just have to get used to it.”
“Oh, all right,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. I was starting to tell you about the children. You don’t mind me talking about them so much, do you?”
“That’s OK. I’m interested.”
“They are your brother and sister.”
“Yes, I understand.”
“So. But Slavka is completely different. He’s so little, but he’s already got a mind of his own. He’s learning a few English words. And the most important thing is, no one’s forcing him. He says, I need it for this computer game. It’s only in English. He’s also learned to play chess. Now he pesters Nikolai every day. He says he’ll be beating him in a year. He’s so stubborn.”
She smiled again.
“And Natashka repeats everything he does like a little monkey. Though she’s three years older. The other day she came up to me and asked, How does a knight go? Does the letter l take up two spaces or three? And of course I didn’t remember myself. We had to ask Slavka.”
Marina stood up and made sure the door was closed.
“True, they do fight sometimes. Rarely, but it does happen. The day before yesterday Slavka was retrieving a ball from under the bed while Natashka was walking around the room with her eyes closed. And she told him if she stepped on him it wasn’t her fault. Naturally, she stepped on him immediately.”
“Why have you shut yourselves in here?” my father said, peeking into the kitchen. “I thought you were watching television.”
“I was afraid we were talking too loud. Pour yourself tea. I’m telling Konstantin stories about the children. Are they asleep already?”
My father looked at me and smiled.
“Yes. You know what Slavka said to me? He said, ‘What incompetent boots I have. You should get me new ones.’ Imagine, ‘incompetent’!”
Marina laughed and fanned herself.
“A couple o
f years ago he woke up once and said, ‘How do you pronounce a number if first there’s a “one” and then an “eight”?’ I said, ‘Eighteen.’ Then he went on. ‘There are eighteen days until Christmas.’ I still can’t for the life of me figure out how he knew how many days were left if he couldn’t say the number. But there were exactly eighteen days left.”
“He was looking forward to presents,” my father said. “Think of yourself as a kid before Christmas.”
“Oh, that was so long ago.”
I watched my own father—pouring himself tea, adding sugar to it, sitting down at the table. I watched his wife, who was looking at him and laughing, at the kitchen table with the candies under the low-hanging pink lampshade, at my own dark blue cup and the cold tea in it, at the plastic gun Slavka had left at the other end of the table. I looked at all this and strange thoughts occurred to me. Or rather, not thoughts but one thought. Not even a thought but a simple question.
Why?
I looked at them and thought, Why have things worked out for me this way? Why do some burn up and others get carried out? Why did other children end up getting the father I had? Why did the man I wanted to have for a father abandon me and go somewhere on the Black Sea? Why did that jerk who now calls himself my father affect me in such a way that I haven’t had it in me to see my own mother for six whole months?
Actually, all this was probably too much for a single “why.” One question mark was obviously not going to cover it.
The next morning Genka arrived alone. He said Pashka had decided to take the train. I got in beside him and we set out. For the first ten minutes he didn’t say a word. This was not like Genka at all, but my mind was elsewhere. I was thinking about my new relatives.
“Damn it! Just toss it out!” He found his voice at last when he saw I had again picked up the little blue book I’d found in his car the day before.
I didn’t say anything for a while and then opened it again at random: “He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.”
“Hey,” I said. “Why are you wearing dark glasses? It’s not sunny.”
Genka turned his face toward me for a second but didn’t answer.
Pashka was standing by the entrance to the Metro looking straight at his feet. He was wearing dark glasses, too. As if he were blind. Except that he had on very big glasses. Like a fashion model. He might have borrowed them from his wife.
“Is this some kind of joke?” I said when he got into the SUV. “What the fuck are you wearing glasses for? It’s not sunny today.”
Pashka didn’t reply. Genka shifted gears and stepped on the pedal.
“Wait up,” I said. “Hold on. Stop the car.”
“Well, what is it?” He turned to face me again.
I reached out quickly and pulled off his glasses. He had a bruise under his left eye. A deep purple bruise.
“Have you gone stupid or something?” he said, grabbing his glasses out of my hands. “Have you flipped?”
Pashka turned toward the window and wouldn’t even look in my direction. No one said anything for a minute probably. Maybe even two.
“So who won?” I said finally, trying to speak softly. “Have you figured out who’s tougher?”
They looked straight ahead in silence. Neither one said a word.
“You put on glasses,” I continued. “You put on glasses so no one would see what you have on your faces. So everyone would think everything was fine with your face. It’s just your eyes hurt. Blinded by the bright sun. So what kind of glasses am I supposed to put on, damn it? Me, damn it! On this damn face of mine!”
I didn’t notice when I’d started shouting.
“What the fuck do you want with these glasses? What, are your children afraid of you? Do your wives hate looking at you? Are you the one your neighbors call in when their children don’t want to go to bed? Or maybe they took your skin off along with your vest. They cut it out piece by piece because the bitch had grown right into your body. Melted there like it belonged. If you knew how sick and tired I am of your money, your silence, your faces. How sick of you I am! I don’t understand what the fuck you need glasses for. What do you have to hide?”
I stopped talking. We sat there like that for about five minutes. Then Genka coughed and turned the key in the ignition.
“Well then, are we off?” he said. “What are we sitting around for? We have to look for Seryoga.”
When you’re a kid you fight with your friends all the time. You grapple with someone in the entryway and bang his head against a step, while upstairs the neighbors jingle their keys.
Not because you hate him but because he’s always there. That’s just how it is.
What do you really have left from your childhood? The dreams where you walk up to your first house and try to open the door, all the while knowing no one’s there? And you’re so small again and you can’t reach the handle? The smells?
Or that horror in kindergarten when everyone else has fallen asleep and you’ve spent the whole naptime sitting on your cot because you suddenly realized you were going to die someday? Forever. And the blanket cover got all balled up and sticky because of that. And later you threw up at snack time because you shouldn’t drink warm kefir after making discoveries like that. And the teacher’s aide said, Take this rag and clean it up. No one’s going to be wiping up after you here. Really, such a messy little boy. And you threw up again. Because you were only four. And that’s not the best age to meet a woman who doesn’t care about your death. But you cleaned it all up.
In short, it’s not entirely clear what you have left from your childhood.
The next day they didn’t come. Neither Genka nor Pashka. No one even called. I sat in a chair and started watching the children. Marina and my father left right after breakfast.
“Aren’t you going to work?” Slavka said.
“No,” I said. “I don’t have any work right now.”
“That’s good.” He shook his head very seriously. “Papa and Mama always have a lot of work and they don’t stay with us.”
“You don’t have to stay with me anymore,” Natashka said. “I’m going to figure skating soon.”
“You’re not holding the pencil right,” I told Slavka. “Let me show you how it’s done.”
“Do you know how?” He looked at me mistrustfully. “Anyway, we’re out of paper. Mama has a whole pack, but she gets mad. And Elena Viktorovna told everyone to bring a squirrel to class. Do you know how?”
There was hope in his voice. He stopped talking and stared at me.
“I don’t know. Let’s give it a try. Except it’s better to draw on the floor. I like drawing lying down.”
He readily climbed down from his chair.
“I like the floor, too. How do people draw lying down?”
“Like this,” I said. “You lie on your belly and draw. See?”
Natashka looked up from her homework and watched us.
“Like this. You lie down and then you draw.”
A minute later he snatched the paper from me, jumped up, and ran to his sister.
“Look, Natashka! Look how he drew!”
She got up from the table, came over to me, and dropped to the floor, too.
“Can you draw Barbie?”
“I want Pokemon!” Slavka exclaimed. “Draw Pokemon!”
I shrugged.
“I don’t know what Pokemon is.”
Natashka said, “Draw Barbie.”
Then they asked for the Snow Queen. Then a hedgehog. Then Britney Spears and the Ninja Turtles. After that we ran out of paper and Slavka rushed to Marina’s room. When he came back, he stopped for a second in the doorway, then ran toward me, holding out a whole stack of paper and a videotape, got up on tiptoe, shut his eyes, and in one exhale said, “I want the Pokemons. All of them!”
We watched cartoons and I drew. Natashka and Slavka kep
t running into the kitchen and bringing back chips, Coca-Cola, candy, and cheese. After a couple of hours the whole floor was littered with paper and food. When the cartoons ended, I just drew. The children watched my drawings and tried to guess what they would be. Slavka almost always guessed first.
“A hippopotamus!” he shouted, and Natashka sighed bitterly. “An ostrich! An egg! A submarine!”
So Natashka wouldn’t feel so bad, I started drawing what little girls like.
“That must be a poodle,” she said. “And that’s a Siamese cat. And this is a teacher because she has a pointer in her hand. This must be a stewardess. But I don’t know who this is. She’s wearing a strange little hat.”
“Who is it?” said Slavka when I finished the drawing. “We give up. Tell us, since no one can guess anyway.”
“It’s a surgical nurse,” I said. “Her name is Anna Nikolayevna.”
“What’s a surgical nurse?” Slavka asked, but at that moment the lock clicked in the hall and Marina appeared in the doorway.
Astonished, she surveyed the paper-strewn room, the remains of our food, and us sitting on the floor and looking up at her, and waited a few seconds before finally speaking.
“My meal feels neglected. Did anyone at least do their homework?”
After we’d tidied up a little, Marina said that Slavka had Happy Starts that day. But she had to run to the office because some American journalist had arrived.
“The New York Times. Do you know that paper? I absolutely must speak to him.”
I said I didn’t know it but I could take Slavka instead. Genka and Pashka hadn’t shown up anyway.
“It’s no big deal. Just tell me how to get there.”
While he was in drawing class, I sat on a bench by the school and watched people. After lunchtime the sun came out and the snow that had been falling for the last two days quickly melted. The people who were late for class ran right through the puddles. A few looked up and then noticed me. They would have been better off watching their feet. At least they wouldn’t catch it later at home for their boots.
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