Today’s quotation: “‘He was seldom playful, seldom even merry, but anyone could see at once, at a glance, that this was not from any kind of sullenness…’” Dostoyevsky looked up at Yasha, and then back down. He went on, “‘Maybe for that very reason he was never afraid of anyone…’” The man grinned and nodded broadly. Yasha handed him the sourdough.
“Thank you,” Yasha said.
“Thank you,” said the man, pushing his thick Brothers Karamazov back in with the miniature guitar. He met Yasha’s blank expression with a face-stretching smile that lasted longer than Yasha could bear. At last, he turned to leave. Yasha watched him go. Hard to say whether the man just loved Russian literature or had lost his mind. Dostoyevsky walked cheerfully out to the street. His sourdough banged against his set of chimes as he walked. Vassily laughed and turned on the commercial-sized mixer.
“Just because I am Russian doesn’t mean I am Alyosha, for fuck’s sake,” Yasha muttered.
Vassily laughed, then sneezed. “Yakov Vassiliovich,” he said, attempting ceremoniousness.
“Hm?”
Vassily inched toward the knife that lay over the envelope.
“You see,” Vassily began. Yasha turned to him brusquely, still irritated by Dostoyevsky’s quote. The windows that spread out behind Yasha were full of a gray mist. Yasha’s face was in shadow. Vassily’s shoulders sank, and he took a step back. “I am going to the bathroom,” Vassily said.
“Okay.” Yasha squinted and waited to hear the rest. “Is that all?”
Vassily didn’t answer. He walked into the back office and closed the door. Yasha turned on the television that was hidden in the crevice behind the front door. Brazil was playing Portugal. From behind the counter, he watched the tiny running shoes racing after the ball. Beside him, the mixer folded the flour into the eggs, and the large bowl buzzed against the wall. Brazil scored a goal. Now there was the bowl buzzing, the eggs smacking, and the roar of the crowd. The screen switched to instant replay. Without his glasses, all Yasha could see was the same old homework geometry—the kicker’s body was a vertical line, and his leg was horizontal, curving the trajectory of a small shooting sphere. Yasha followed the kicker’s outward leg line, through the ball and the blurred mesh of the goal, just off the screen, through the window, and out onto Oriental Boulevard, where there was a woman beside the mailbox. It was his mother. There was a commercial break.
Yasha did not doubt his identification. Nicknames for “Mother” in Russian flooded him. Her chin, lips, and eyes matched both his memory and the only two photographs he’d seen of her in the last ten years. Her hair was still red. She had come. His mind emptied for a moment. Then he thought: Let her look for me, good. Yasha turned to see if his father had come back, if he too had seen her. The door was still closed. When Yasha looked out again his mother was running, clumsily, in heels, away from the mailbox and toward the elevated subway tracks.
• • •
It was an ordinary Friday in Brighton Beach but now everyone was running. Even the man who was standing still on the curb seemed to be running backward at exactly Yasha’s pace. When Yasha came to the end of the block he leapt down too forcefully and was shin-shocked, the sting rushing up to his knee. The discomfort as he ran made him feel old, older than his mother, who, from the back, could very well have been the flutist from symphonic band.
Yasha wanted to stop, or did not know why he had started. If she hadn’t wanted to see him all these years, why had she come now? She kept on running, and he was close behind. She was thin and could twist between the street crowds. They were one window apart. Yasha saw his mother stop. They met in front of the chocolate store.
“Do not tell your father,” she said, smiling horridly, resting her hands on her knees. Yasha forgot all his languages.
Being with her, face-to-face, Yasha felt like a child. The rumbling of train tracks above made it impossible to hear anything. His mother looked around at all the Russian shop fronts. She had painted a black line fanning out from the corner of each eye, and wore a necklace of small pink pearls. She looked so happy to see him, Yasha almost fell into her arms. To keep from hugging her, he crossed his arms behind his back and stood up straight.
In spite of his posture, he wanted his mother to touch him, to take his face into her hands. She only looked up at him. He wondered how he looked. He wondered if he looked seven years old to her, or like a “man,” which was a stupid word that he hated having to think about. He hadn’t yet cared if he was a man or not, he had been taking it all as it came—his height, his torso as it grew—but now she must have been evaluating him on the whole. Did he look right, or old, or even recognizable? She turned away from him and examined the candies in the window. His brain offered up one definite memory: that his mother was fond of milk chocolate, that they had, on some warm-weather day, shared a long bar of milk chocolate shaped like Saint Basil’s Cathedral.
It started to rain. Everybody passing in the street seemed to be looking at her—she was wearing a bright blue knee-length short-sleeved dress that lifted in the wind. Her pearls were getting wet and extra shiny across her neck. She was smiling so ferociously, her arms were so thin, and her dress was so blue, that it was impossible not to look at her, to want to invite her inside.
His father must have been out of the bathroom by now. Yasha wondered if he was calling the neighbors, looking for him. Yasha had left the cash register and the door open. Why wasn’t she saying anything? The only thing she had said, before she began her rapturous survey of the neighborhood, was, Do not tell your father. Yasha wondered if she was, at bottom, cruel. He wanted to get her inside. He wanted to touch her, if she wasn’t going to touch him. It wasn’t impossible. For the first time in ten years, touching her wasn’t impossible. He placed his hand on her elbow and led her into the chocolate store.
His mother laughed.
“Sweets!” his mother said. The shopkeeper nodded her head and gave the blue dress a skeptical once-over.
“Don’t you need a paper towel?” the shopkeeper said, in Russian. Olyana walked up to the cash register and responded in low, animated Russian—something about an umbrella whose handle had snapped off. Her Russian was strange. At home, she had spoken to Yasha almost exclusively in English—in her old-fashioned, tutor-taught British accent. She’d demanded that he speak English every day, “for his future.” The kids at his Moscow primary school had nicknamed him Bill Clinton.
When she turned around from the counter she was already eating something—a single nonpareil.
“You live here,” she said, part statement, part question, looking past him and out the window. She uncurled her fist, revealing two more nonpareils.
Yasha turned to the window, to see what she was watching. It wasn’t pretty. Old men and women were buying tomatoes, and it was raining hard now, and the raised subway platform seemed to be dripping grit onto the street. Cars honked. Everything had gone gray with the clouds except two neon signs, one pink, one orange. They looked sickly and overcharged. His mother looked satisfied, and ran her now empty hand through her hair.
“You sent us here,” Yasha said, and for a first thing to say, he thought that wasn’t bad.
His mother’s face lit up, as if it were exactly what she had wanted to hear. “Yes!” she said, and clasped her hands, “and look!” She looked at him from his toes to his hair. Yasha wished that he had showered. His hair was stuck to his head with sweat and rain, and he was still wearing, to his horror, an apron. “You look marvelous,” she said, still not touching him. Perhaps, Yasha thought with some pleasure, she did not feel that she had permission to touch him, having so long ago given him up. Perhaps he wasn’t really hers anymore. Perhaps that was fine. Perhaps it would be better, after all, to shake her hand, get a good look at her, and leave.
He glanced at the doorknob.
“Your father—” She caught herself and shook her head fondly. “How is he? And the bakery? Selling millions and millions?”
&nbs
p; “It’s our tenth anniversary.” It wasn’t really the right thing to say. He pictured the cruller twist and the everything bagel, hanging week after week in the window, barely recognizable as a “10.” It hadn’t, now that he thought of it, done much to increase their business.
“Yes, well, that is why I wanted to talk to you, absolutely now,” his mother said. “I’ve been saying, ten years, good lord.”
I’ve been saying, Yasha thought. Who had she been saying this to?
“Only let’s take our time,” she said, “yes,” and turned completely around, flipping the bottom of her dress up into a high, floating ring. She tore a plastic bag from the dispenser and opened the bucket of gummy bears. She plunged the scoop as deep as it would go and came up with a heap of bears. After the gummy bears came the gummy worms, the sour cola bottles, the gummy raspberries and blackberries, the peanut toffees, the caramels, the Nerds, the Dots, and then one entire twelve-ounce brick of chocolate.
“It’s Friday,” his mother explained, in Russian, to the shopkeeper.
Their total was $35.50 and she paid with a fifty-dollar bill. She pulled it out of an orange leather wallet that was full of fifty-dollar bills. She carried no credit cards or identification. She put fifty cents in the tip jar.
Yasha’s mother held the door open and motioned for Yasha to exit. He couldn’t move. He was yearning himself desperately toward her and away from her simultaneously, making his stomach turn, and she was holding the door, and was he supposed to be holding the door?
Outside, the rain picked up right where it had left off, flattening his hair to his head. His mother didn’t seem bothered by the weather in the least. She led him briskly down Brighton Beach Avenue, as if she had lived there all her life. As if she had lived there, with them, for ten years, at the Gregoriov Bakery, as she had once said that she would.
“What are you doing?” Yasha asked, after a block, stopping abruptly.
“Don’t stop,” she said, not stopping, “you’ll get wetter. Let’s go.”
This made a certain, immediate sense. He walked, slightly behind her. The subway tracks above them veered north at Coney Island Avenue, revealing the sky again, such as it was, and Brighton Beach Avenue turned into Oriental Boulevard. They passed Joseph’s and Jerry’s, the twin pizza parlors—Yasha recalled his lunch, which he had eaten today, back when today had been the simplest possible Friday—and soon the chaos of the market dissipated, resolving into brick family houses, each with a healthy front yard.
“How sweet,” she said, touching the red hat of a sopping wet gnome and flicking a pinwheel, which was spinning hysterically next to a birdhouse. She kept the candy bag closed with a clenched fist, giving the bag a kind of neck, one that she was strangling.
Upon first sight of the entrance to Pat Perlato Playground, Olyana hung a sharp right. She beckoned Yasha on with her free hand, stopped short at the gate, and looked out, admiring the shore. Manhattan Beach, a name that had long confused Yasha, made Brooklyn’s thin barrier against the Atlantic Ocean.
“I’ve missed you,” Yasha said to the back of her head, hoping that she wouldn’t hear it through the wind.
“I’ve missed you terribly,” she said, opening the low gate to the playground, “so terribly I thought I would burst.”
She sat down, straddling a grasshopper that rocked back and forth on a giant spring. The only other place to sit near her was the adjacent dragonfly, which required a child to sit on top of the open wings, cross-legged.
Yasha was relieved that he did not have to say or think anything for the next forty seconds as he got himself onto the dragonfly. It was wet, and the wings were slippery. His legs were much too long, even when crossed. When he was finally seated, he looked like a mix of Aladdin on his carpet and Buddha on a windowsill.
“Did you ever play here?” his mother asked.
“It’s for babies.” Yasha looked out toward the shore. “Sometimes Papa and I used to build things down on the beach.”
“The beach,” she said, and offered him the bag. It was wide open, and she had rolled down the edges. The Nerds and Dots had blended and looked like confetti. He took a gummy worm.
“How extraordinary, to be on the water,” she said. Yasha thought about Moscow. Locked into its own country.
“We like it here. Papa says, ‘Brighton Beach, a Ton of Bright.’” His father had never said that. “Not that you picked such a good day—”
“Yes, I simply don’t know what was I thinking, standing by your window like that. Vassily could have seen me. I mean, Vassily could have seen me,” she said, biting into a caramel. “First you, Yakov. First you and me. Then, when we’re ready, your father.”
If he argued with her, Yasha feared she might disappear again. She was breaking the chocolate bar into chunks now, letting the pieces fall into the open bag. When it was all broken up, she handed the bag back to Yasha. The gesture reminded Yasha of kids at his high school, passing beers around the swing sets in Battery Park. She was so thin, and so strong, and so hungry; his father, in comparison, seemed barely alive.
“Papa’s heart is too thick,” Yasha said, hearing immediately how ridiculous he’d made the cardiomyopathy sound.
His mother, pouncing on his mistake, said, “You mean he doesn’t miss me?”
“I mean the walls between his ventricles are stiff, and he has to sit down a lot.”
She continued to pick through the candies. “He is older than I am.”
“He’s the one you should be seeing right now,” Yasha said. “I’m younger than both of you. You can see me later.”
“No, not right now, especially if he is ill. You know I am a great deal to handle,” his mother said, biting into a toffee and smiling with her cheeks while she chewed, smiling so convincingly that Yasha smiled back on instinct. He corrected his face. “It wouldn’t be wise to spring this whole thing on him just like that, dear,” his mother said. Yasha wanted to know what “this whole thing” was. It didn’t seem possible that anything could be larger or more terrible than the woman herself.
“Talk to Papa tomorrow, or I’ll tell him you’re here,” Yasha said, and it felt like negotiating with a terrorist.
Yasha’s mother slid off her grasshopper, shook the rain from her dress, and started walking toward the B train. Yasha followed.
“I’ll come tomorrow,” she said as she walked. Yasha had no means of guaranteeing the agreement. The only rules were her words, I’ll come, and Yasha began to understand how easily the last ten years had happened the way they had. There was a veil over her, a touch of the preternatural—the air out of which she appeared, and into which she disappeared again, could have been outer space.
She climbed up the long, switchbacked stairway to the platform, two steps at a time. Yasha stood on the street with his arms by his sides, looking up. He could see her panties for a moment each time she took a double step. All the blood in his body seemed to pause in his heart and then rush out again to his limbs. When she reached the top, she pulled out a MetroCard and turned onto the Manhattan-bound track. So she was staying in Manhattan, Yasha thought, before realizing that there was nowhere to go in the other direction, and that she could have been riding the train to just about anywhere. Nothing, in essence, had changed.
• • •
He came back to the bakery soaking wet. His father hadn’t called the neighbors, or the police, but looked bewildered. Yasha stood just inside the door. He looked at the space of the bakery. He wanted to thank his father for their house, their bakery, the food he had eaten for the past ten years, the Band-Aids and books, and for feeding the cat each time Yasha forgot. He looked at Vassily: middling height, gray hair, bulb nose, filthy pants. He wanted to say, You’ve done everything right. His father was about to become angry. Yasha said he’d forgotten his precalculus textbook at Joseph’s Pizza and had gone to look for it but hadn’t found it. He said he’d been all through the neighborhood. No one had seen it. He’d have to ask Mr. Usoroh for another one
. Vassily shook his head and said there had been dozens of children while Yasha was gone, all of them wanting black-and-white cookies. They closed up for the day. Both men were quiet and exhausted.
• • •
Saturday. Swarm of bagel customers, dearth of poppy seeds, Vassily’s pants drenched in a bowlful of spilled eggs, Yasha’s shoes untied, Yasha’s shoelaces dragging through the egg yolks, the cat licking the floor all morning, Vassily many times kicking the cat, Vassily apologizing, talking to the cat, frightening the customers. The customers, usual. The Danishes, a little sour. No mother, no mother, no mother.
• • •
“When I die,” Vassily said, sitting down after the rush, “put me with no people. Get me far away.” He looked out the window and toward the beach. “Do you remember, Yakov Vassiliovich, about the reindeer hunters?”
Yes, he remembered about the reindeer hunters. It was his father’s favorite story. He told it once a month.
“No,” said Yasha. “What reindeer hunters?”
“The Sami,” Vassily said. “They live at the top of the world.” He blew his nose. “My father’s hunting teacher was a Sami. Crossed the land bridge into Russia from Lapland. Not so many people there. Mostly ice.” Vassily yawned and smiled at the same time, showing Yasha all his small teeth. “His name was Ommot and he used to teach me how to shoot. I think, growing up, I loved Ommot best of anybody.”
“You know how to shoot?”
“I know how to shoot a reindeer.”
“Have you ever shot a reindeer?”
“No,” Vassily said cheerfully, “your father is a twiglet.” A twiglet? Yasha imagined branches being shot to splinters by reindeer-hunting guns. “I wanted to live Ommot’s life, the hunter’s life,” Vassily said, “but I didn’t have it in me. I had bialys in me.” Vassily’s smile widened, making his teeth look even smaller. “I didn’t live the life of peace. That was how Ommot lived, all those years, crossing Lapland, not so many people, mostly ice. He lived the life of peace. Peace.” Vassily squinted. “,” he translated. “The word used to ring in my ears before I went to sleep. I was a boy. Well”—he straightened his back—“I can live the death of peace, at least. I can look out at that ice my whole death long.”
The Sunlit Night Page 4