by Lev Raphael
He wanted to know more about Louie. He wanted to know if Louie had done things with other guys, and which guys, which things, for how long, what was it like. He wanted to know if his own feelings were a surprise too. If Louie had also never really thought about touching a guy so clearly until after he had already done it. But he didn’t want to annoy Louie, to act like an obnoxious puppy pawing at you, too eager to play. Louie was older, after all, and Stefan kept expecting him to suddenly turn around and call him a jerk, an idiot, a kid, and say he didn’t want to hang out together anymore. When he saw Louie with friends from George Washington, Stefan felt intimidated and shy. Even though Louie didn’t ignore him then, said “Hi!” and waved, Stefan felt excluded. In a group, Louie seemed alien and powerful. It was kind of like the museums at Audubon Terrace on 155th and Broadway. It was a superlong block that stretched down to Riverside Drive, formerly the estate of James Audubon, a teacher had told Stefan. Now, it was covered with big stone buildings that had red-tile roofs like in Italy. There was the National Geographic Society, the Hispanic Society, the Indian Museum, the Numismatic Society, and a bunch of statues in a sunken court at the center. The sidewalk was some kind of reddish stone or brick—and when he thought about it, it was very strange that all those buildings were there, looking so foreign and unknowable right in the middle of everything else. Yet Stefan had passed it all the time growing up. That was Louie too; he was already used to Louie, but when he kind of stepped back, Louie seemed a little mysterious and out of place.
Louie’s mother was full of questions about Stefan’s Christmas. “We had some Polish neighbors back years ago, the Sobieskis. They made vodka with peppercorns in it for Christmas, and put straw under the tablecloth for Christmas dinner.”
She waited, and Stefan said, “We don’t do that.”
“What’s the straw for?” Louie asked.
Stefan guessed, “The manger?”
“Of course!” Mrs. del Greco seemed as pleased as if Stefan were her own son and had passed some kind of test. “So that you’re eating with Joseph and Mary and Christ. Will your father come in from Michigan?” Mrs. del Greco went on, and when Stefan shrugged, her silence clearly indicated she disapproved of the curious arrangements in his family.
Once or twice his father had come back to New York at Christmas, but it was terrible and awkward. Like Stefan imagined it would be for an American ambassador finally going to Red China, recognizing that it existed. They did talk at the holiday, though. His father called to find out if his presents had come (they were always at least a week early), and to tell him about the snow in Michigan or something equally stupid. His father talked about cross-country skiing, and tried to make Michigan in winter sound as glamorous as Switzerland, but Stefan had never been convinced. On the map, the part of Michigan his father lived in, the lower peninsula, looked like a glove or mitten, and he could never picture that without imagining the glove closing, squeezing and crushing where his father lived in Ann Arbor. His father rattled on about what a terrific football team they had, and had even tried to get Stefan to come out for the Ohio State game—supposedly a nationally significant event. But Stefan always refused, despite Sasha’s disappointment, and even his mother’s “Are you sure?” He told his father that college football was boring. His father said, “Well, maybe next year.”
His father was apparently doing very well at the university, Sasha informed him, had gotten tenure and been promoted to full professor, was doing everything right, and Stefan hated his success.
“His work is getting attention,” Sasha said more than once. “He wrote a book.…”
“So what? Lots of people write books.”
His father had sent him a copy, inscribed: For my dear son. Stefan had ripped that page up and thrown it out, even thought of burning the book, but it was too thick, so he just tossed it into a pile of junk at the back of his closet.
He usually let Sasha decide what Christmas presents to buy for his father and mother; they signed the cards and gift tags together, though Stefan didn’t much care what Sasha bought. Sasha always got him new albums and sheet music; his mother bought him clothes, pretty nice clothes; his father sent lots of books—European classics—like the complete works of Jane Austen, stories by de Maupassant, Russian and French novels that Stefan read in a blur if he did read them at all, unable to disassociate the gift from the giver, but intrigued by books he knew from Sasha were important. And they were books Sasha and his parents had read before the War.
Louie asked Stefan which Christmas carols he could play.
“None? Then what good’s a big piano if you can’t use it?”
“I use it plenty,” Stefan said, forced into a lie.
“But you can’t play any carols. Or any songs, either, I bet.”
“Oh, like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’?”
“Don’t goof on Dylan—”
“He’s a jerk with a big nose and a shit voice.”
Louie seemed ready to pounce on Stefan, but perhaps because their wrestling always led to something else, he held back.
All Louie did was say, “You’re weird.”
Sasha had actually asked him more than once if he wanted to play any contemporary music, like anything from My Fair Lady or even the Beatles. But these questions were always somewhat careful, as if Sasha were afraid Stefan would say Yes!
To learn new music would have meant that playing was still as much a part of his life as it had always been. But it wasn’t. He still listened to classical music on the radio and on Sasha’s hi-fi—but his tastes had changed. He had come to like the cynicism and playfulness of Poulenc, who Sasha thought “shallow.” What they could share was Stefan’s love of Russian composers like Borodin, Khachaturian, Stravinsky. The wilder and more Orientalist, the better for Stefan, because it all took him to the Poland that was only in his imagination. Like whenever he heard the sleigh bells in Prokofiev’s “Lieutenant Kije Suite”—and imagined himself hurtling along a snowy street, reins tight in his hands, sitting there triumphant in a huge fur coat and hat. It was a picture inspired by watching Doctor Zhivago—a movie that Sasha had called “Dr. Quatsch.”
“What’s that?”
“Quatsch? Trash, sentimental junk.”
“In what language?”
“German.”
And Stefan remembered the trouble over Winter Eyes, how his father had said he hated Germans.
And while Sasha played and taught German music, he must have hated them too. Because he was always inspecting things they bought in stores—like clocks, knives, kitchen gadgets—to see where they were made. If the label or markings said “Made in Germany” or “Federal Republic of Germany,” Sasha didn’t buy it. And if he forgot to check, and found out afterwards, he always returned it without a qualm.
“I won’t support them,” he said simply. “Not after the War.”
In his slight reading about modern European history, and about World War II, Stefan had come to understand a little the hatred that Germany inspired not just in the Poles, but in many nations. Yet Sasha’s embargo on German goods struck him as something different, something more personal than history.
“You can come to midnight Mass with us,” Louie said about a week before Christmas. “It’s pretty cool. They close all the lights right before midnight, the choir comes in holding candles, then you hear the organ. It’s really cool—”
Stefan wondered what he could say that would hide his ignorance about churches and what went on inside of them.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked.
Louie thought a little. “Not like my mom and dad do. They’re serious.”
He wanted to go to church with Louie, to plunge into something joyful and holy, instead of treating Christmas like it was almost a punishment.
“Go,” Sasha said. “I can’t stop you.”
“You want to stop me?”
Sasha shook his head, as if already weary with the effort of explaining—but he had explained nothing.<
br />
“Maybe Mom would come.…” Stefan said aloud.
But he didn’t get a chance to ask her.
His father called the day after Louie suggested midnight Mass. Whenever he heard his father’s voice on the phone, he wanted to hang up, or smash the phone against the wall, or just hold it away from him, so that his father couldn’t come any closer.
“Are you okay?” his father asked. “Enjoying New York now? Have you been on Fifth Avenue yet?”
And Stefan briefly relaxed, remembering the years that he and his parents had gone to Fifth Avenue just to see how many people were there. It was a wall of faces and fur, wool and leather coats, punctuated by store shopping bags that seemed alive as they eddied in the constant surge of more and more people. They would buy those big hot salty pretzels from stands whose owners wore black gloves with half the fingers cut off. They would watch the skaters at Rockefeller Center, where the tree seemed more like a monument than something that had been alive—as heavy as Atlas nearby holding up the world.
“Not much,” he said, wondering how he could let his father know that he was recalling something pleasant, without seeming like he had forgiven his father for any of what had happened.
After some idle questions about school, Stefan said, “Should I get Sasha?”
“Not yet. I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“I’m sick. I had a heart attack, a small one, but the doctors think it’ll get worse.”
“Worse?” It felt good to grab one of his father’s words.
“Much worse.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe I should talk to Sasha.”
“Sure,” Stefan said, and called out for Sasha, who came in from the living room, face a little tight, since he had obviously been listening and knew who it was.
Stefan felt very cold, like he might start shaking. He went to his room, crawled under the covers without turning on the lights, and forced his mind to go blank, forced himself to sleep.
But Sasha woke him up not much later, just by sitting on the bed. Stefan felt the pressure, and rubbed at his eyes. “What?”
“We should go to Michigan.” Sasha’s face was hard to read now. “It’s heart trouble.”
Stefan looked away.
“He could die,” Sasha said, as if repeating himself.
“So what?”
Sasha stood, blinking furiously, hands clenched. “He is your father. No matter what.”
Sasha suddenly looked kind of old to Stefan, battered, heavy at the waist, his hair thinning and receding, old and defeated. But Stefan didn’t care about hurting even Sasha’s feelings. “You go,” he said. “I’m having Christmas with Louie’s family.”
Sasha just walked out.
They didn’t talk for a whole day, and it was much worse than Stefan could have imagined. While silence from his father or mother was something he welcomed, Sasha’s silence was cruel and unbearable.
“Why do I have to go?” he finally asked, sitting down next to Sasha at the piano the next evening.
“What if you never see him again? What if he dies and you always wish you did go, did see him? This could be your last chance.” He looked away. “You don’t always know when you’ll see someone again.”
And Stefan suddenly felt a peculiar surge of pleasure. It was almost as if the possibility of his father’s death was a gift, a sure thing. If he did go, he would never have to see his father again.
“What about Mom?”
“I called her this morning. She’s worried about you. But—”
“—she doesn’t care either.”
“No. That’s not true. She just can’t see him.”
And Stefan felt himself to be braver than his mother, as if she were a general in World War I avoiding even the sight of trenches, the mindless charges and bombardments, the land mines leaving bits of flesh on barbed wire. Instead, she was safe at headquarters, safe and warm. While he and Sasha were headed into the unknown.
“You’ll go?” Sasha asked, hands on his shoulders, looking into his eyes.
“I’ll go with you.”
It was snowing when their train left New York, and so Stefan passed through “America”—which Sasha had promised he’d see a little of—as if it were all just a painted backdrop in a movie. It didn’t matter if there were cities, fields, factories, hills. It didn’t matter that they passed through states he had never seen and never even thought much about. New Jersey? Pennsylvania? Ohio? Those were names from history books, names from the news or maps. It was all unreal and annoying.
“Your father is ill and you’re going to see him?” Mrs. del Greco had said. And she smiled tearfully, as if this were some longed-for fulfillment, as if Stefan and his father truly meant something to her. “I want you to take something with you.” And she gave Stefan several Christmas tins of brownies (dark chocolate and light), frosted cookies in the shape of Christmas trees, and Russian tea cakes.
Louie said, “You want your present now?” He had bought Stefan some James Bond books. Stefan shyly handed over his small package for Louie. He had blushed at the store buying the black shiny beads when the clerk asked if the “love beads” were for his girlfriend.
“Cool,” Louie said, carefully slipping them over his head onto his neck.
Louie was unemotional about the trip, but Stefan didn’t know if that was because his mother had embarrassed him by her extra baking and her tears. Before he left, he wanted to secure some kind of admission from Louie, a promise, an indication that he was important to Louie. But he couldn’t be sure what form that would take and he didn’t know how to ask Louie for comfort or advice.
“I hope your dad gets better,” Louie said.
“I hope he dies,” Stefan shot back, half because he did, half because he wanted to shock Louie. But it didn’t work.
“You are weird,” Louie said. And he didn’t even say anything about Stefan missing Christmas with them.
Right before he left, he tried writing Louie a poem, but he could only come up with four lines:
We wrestle and touch, so close are we
It’s been much less than a year
And between us friend is a mighty wall
That’s built up of our fear.
He wanted to say more, to move Louie, but he felt powerless to find the words that could describe what was going on inside of him. This wasn’t like the stupid little English assignments he never had any trouble with—this was something real, and he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t communicate, he could only feel miserable. He made a copy, then tore up the original, and tore up the copy too—though he knew he could write it down any time. How could he forget it?
On the crowded stifling train, he read a library book, or tried to. It was a novel called Another Country, all about black and white people, and sex, and racism, and music. It was very confusing to Stefan. He kept thinking he was just around the corner from understanding it, but he never exactly did. Yet he was excited, because for the first time, he was catching glimpses in a book of someone a little like him, someone who wanted to touch another guy. And there was something alive in the characters that made all the other books he had liked seem childish and dull. Sometimes he would stop and repeat a phrase or description softly, imagining that he had written the words.
“Isn’t that a little advanced for you?” Sasha frowned when he saw the title on the book spine.
Stefan shrugged. “I have a twelfth-grade reading level. And the writing’s very fine,” Stefan went on, echoing a phrase he had heard Sasha use once on the phone. Sasha nodded, almost smiled. That seemed to have distracted Sasha, though Stefan thought his uncle was probably upset by the rush to get tickets, and the smelly noisy uncomfortable train ride. Stefan had seen lots of movies set in England or France—mysteries, comedies—and the trains were always beautiful and romantic. But this train was just a dump on wheels, and he shut it out as best he could.
“That’s all you brought?” his father a
sked at the snowbound station, pointing to Stefan’s one suitcase. His father wore a heavy overcoat, thick boots and glasses, and a Russian-style hat.
“We’re not staying long,” Stefan said.
“Let’s get going,” Sasha said. “This is terrible.” The snow was whirling around them as if they were nothing more than figures in a snow globe. “Why are you here? You should be home. Why didn’t you let us take a cab?”
“I didn’t think you’d get one,” his father said, huddled over against the wind, looking smaller and frailer than Stefan remembered him. “In this weather.…”
Driving slowly through the snow as thick as fog, Stefan had a sense of a very small town, and he felt hemmed in.
“You told me they call this the Harvard of the Midwest,” Stefan said from the back seat of his father’s black Chrysler New Yorker.
“That’s the school, not Ann Arbor itself.”
Stefan had somehow expected Ann Arbor to be as big and impressive as Boston looked in pictures and films—but Ann Arbor struck him as pathetic, a frontier outpost that could be easily swept away, destroyed.
His father kept talking about different landmarks as they drove, and Sasha asked polite questions that made him sound like he was an explorer. He half expected Sasha to ask about chief minerals and major exports next.
His father’s house was up a long hill and in the middle of a circle of other small homes. It was all stone, with small many-paned windows, a smoking chimney. Like something in a fairy tale, Stefan thought: the witch’s house, hunched over, keeping its secrets.
They parked in the driveway and hurried inside, where it was almost too warm. His father was breathing hard, and stood with his coat on and hands at his side for a few minutes, as if surprised he had made it this far. Sasha took his coat, and Stefan wanted to sneer at his father’s clothes which looked like a parody of what a professor would wear: corduroy pants, turtleneck, loose cardigan with leather elbow patches.