The KGB agent clapped his hands and broke into what appeared to be a lopsided grin. His distended lips barely parted but parted enough to reveal white cotton gauze clamped between his teeth. When he spoke, it was through this gruesome leer, like a man with his jaw wired shut. My father tightened his grip on the back of my neck.
—Roman Abramovich, looks like you really did me a favor.
—She’s the dentist for my family. I go to her. My wife. My son. I swear she always does good work.
The agent’s jaw muscles twitched as he clamped tighter into his grin.
—Good work. Look at me. I couldn’t ask for better. She put in three crowns and a bridge.
—She’s a very generous woman.
—She knows how to treat a man. Anesthetic and a bottle of vodka. I left at four in the morning. A very generous woman. And beautiful. It was a wonderful night, you understand.
—I’m glad to hear you’re happy.
—Roman Abramovich, remember, you always have a friend in Moscow. Visit anytime.
Laughing at his joke, the agent turned, and we proceeded to the elevator and rode up to Sergei’s floor. In the elevator my father leaned against the wall and finally loosened his grip on my neck.
—Don’t ever forget. This is why we left. So you never have to know people like him.
We knocked on Sergei’s door, and after some shuffling, Sergei answered. He was in the middle of his push-ups when he let us into his room. He was wearing an undershirt and his arms were a bold relief of muscles, tendons, and veins. In Italy, during our six-month purgatory between Russia and Canada, I had seen statues with such arms. I understood that the statues were meant to reflect the real arms of real men, but except for Sergei I had never met anyone with arms like that.
As my father was in a hurry, he left me with Sergei as he rushed back out to the convention center. I waited while Sergei dressed.
—So where are you taking me today?
—Mama says we’ll go to the supermarket. She thinks you’ll like it.
—The supermarket.
—The good supermarket. They have every kind of food.
—And you know how to get there?
—Yes. First we take the subway and then the bus. By the subway and the bus I know how to go almost anywhere.
—How about California?
—The subway doesn’t go to California.
—Then maybe we should take a plane.
The way he said it I didn’t know if he was joking or serious until he laughed. I wanted to laugh too but I hadn’t understood the joke. I sensed that I wasn’t intended to understand it in the first place. I was hurt because I wanted very much to be Sergei’s equal, his friend, and I suspected that Sergei wasn’t laughing at his joke but rather at me.
Seeing that he had upset me, Sergei tried to make up for it by asking about the supermarket.
—We sometimes go to another one that isn’t as good. In the other one they don’t have the things they show on the television. But at the good supermarket you can find everything.
On the bus ride home I pointed out the landmarks that delineated our new life. To compensate for the drabness of the landscape I animated my hands and voice. I felt the tour guide’s responsibility to show Sergei something interesting. At the northern edge of the city, home to Russian immigrants, brown apartment buildings, and aging strip malls, there wasn’t much to show. I stressed our personal connection to each mundane thing, hoping in that way to justify its inclusion. There was the Canadian Tire store where I got my bicycle, the Russian Riviera banquet hall where my father celebrated his birthday, one delicatessen called Volga and another called Odessa, a convenience store where I played video games, my school, my hockey arena, my soccer fields. Sergei looked and nodded. I kept talking and talking even though I could tell that what I was showing and what he was seeing were not the same things.
When the bus pulled up near our apartment building I was relieved to stop talking. Sergei followed me into the lobby. I used my key and let us inside. Upstairs, my mother was waiting. For the first time in months she was wearing makeup and what appeared to be a new dress. In the dining room there was a vase with flowers. There was a bowl on the coffee table with yellow grapes. There was another bowl beside it containing assorted Russian bonbons: Karakum, Brown Squirrel, Clumsy Bear. When my mother saw Sergei, her face lit up with true happiness. Involuntarily, I looked away. After so many miserable months I was surprised by my reaction. I had been praying for her to get better, but there was something about the pitch of her happiness that made me feel strangely indecent. I had felt this way once before when I accidentally glimpsed her undressing through a doctor’s office door. Here as there, instinct proscribed against looking at my mother’s nakedness.
From our apartment my mother drove our green Pontiac to the good supermarket and then the mall where Sergei bought blue jeans for himself and for the woman he was dating. Also, on my recommendation, he bought some shirts with the Polo logo on them which were very popular at the time. Against my mother’s protestations he also insisted on buying a shirt for me and one for my father.
—Bellachka, don’t forget, you wake up in the morning, you get into your car, you go to a store, you can buy anything you want. In Riga people now line up just for permission to line up.
I was grateful when my mother didn’t say anything to contradict him, since both she and I knew that the only way we could afford fifty-dollar shirts was if Sergei paid for them.
When my father returned from the convention center that night he was exhilarated. He had witnessed two world records. One by a Soviet lifter he had known. He was energized by the proximity to his former life. He had seen old friends. People recognized him. He had also spent a few hours with Gregory Ziskin and they had been able to have a drink in Gregory’s hotel room. Gregory had filled him in on the Dynamo gossip. Colleagues who had received promotions, others who had retired. The politics with directors. New athletes on the rise. Gregory was proud that, including Sergei, the national team had three weightlifters from Riga Dynamo. There was a new young lifter named Krutov in Sergei’s weight class who showed considerable promise. He had been taking silver behind Sergei for the past year. Having the gold and silver medalists was doing wonders for Gregory’s profile with the ministry. He’d heard rumors of a transfer to Moscow and a permanent position with Red Army.
As a souvenir, my father surprised me with a poster signed by the Soviet national team. We, in turn, surprised him with his Polo shirt. In the living room, my father and I tried on our new shirts. My father said he couldn’t think of when he would wear it. He had plenty of shirts. I had plenty of shirts too, but I felt as though I had only one.
Along with the poster my father also secured tickets for me and my mother for the next day’s competition. My mother, anxious about preparing dinner, felt she couldn’t go. Even though she wanted very much to see Sergei compete. I had no obligations. The competition was on a Saturday. I had no school, no homework. Nothing that could keep me from watching Sergei perform.
At the convention center dozens of wooden risers had been joined together to create a stage. At one edge of the stage was a long table for the officials. My father had his place there along with the two other judges. A small black electrical box sat squarely in front of each judge. The box was connected by wires to a display board. On the box were two buttons, one button for a good lift, the second button for failure. Before the competition started my father allowed me to sit in his seat and press the buttons. As I sat there Gregory Ziskin approached. I had only faint memories of Gregory, who, unlike Sergei, hadn’t often come to the apartment. He was my father’s friend and business partner, but there was a quality to his demeanor that stressed the professional over the personal. He looked perpetually impatient.
At my father’s suggestion Gregory agreed to take me behind the stage so I could watch the lifters warming up. In Riga it was something my father had enjoyed doing. He always liked the energy of t
he warm-up room. But now, as a judge, it was unacceptable for him to give even the impression of bias or impropriety. Leaving my father to review papers, I followed Gregory through a heavy curtain toward the sounds of grunting and clanging iron.
Standing in the wings, I watched a scene I recognized as familiar only once I saw it. The warm-up room was very big, the size of a high school gymnasium. There was activity everywhere. In small groups, coaches and trainers attended to their athletes. Teams could be distinguished from one another by the colors of their Adidas training suits. Some of the lifters wore the suits, others had stripped down to their tights. In one corner I watched as trainers wrapped and taped knees, in another corner other trainers had set up massage tables. In the center of the room a large section of the floor had been covered with plywood. Several bars had been set up for the lifters. There were also chalk caddies. I looked on with fascination as the men went through their rituals of applying the chalk to their hands, arms, and shoulders. To handle the perfect white cakes of chalk seemed reason enough to become a weightlifter.
Gregory, who had important matters to attend to, left me with a plastic press pass and instructions not to get into any trouble. I could stick around as long as I liked, or at least until someone told me to leave. I watched him head over to the Soviet delegation, where Sergei was stretching beside a young blond weightlifter. From every corner came the sounds of exertion, of metal striking metal and metal striking wood. Nobody paid me any attention as I wandered around. I finally took up a position near the center of the room and watched men lift heavy things in preparation for lifting very heavy things.
The competition took hours. My father reserved me a seat in the front so that my view wouldn’t be obscured by the heads of adults. Sergei’s weight class was one of the last on the schedule. Until Sergei performed I spent most of my time watching my father. Up onstage with the other judges, he looked very much like his old picture in the IWF passport.
Sergei’s weight class competed in the afternoon. Very quickly it became clear that it was a competition between two men: Sergei and Krutov, the blond weightlifter. Their first lifts exceeded those of the rest of the competitors by several kilos. After that, from attempt to attempt, they performed only against each other. I watched first as Sergei eclipsed his world record in the snatch and then as Krutov matched it. Each one lifting fluidly, in one motion, almost twice his own weight.
When it came time for the clean and jerk Sergei declined the opening weight and watched as Krutov successfully approached and then matched Sergei’s world record. To catch Krutov, Sergei had three attempts. During Sergei’s lifts, Krutov waited silently in the wings. I sat on my hands and watched as Sergei failed on his first attempt, and then, minutes later, on his second. Both times, straining under the bar, he managed to get the weight up to his chest and no farther. Until Sergei’s final lift, it hadn’t occurred to me that he could lose. But as he chalked his hands in preparation for the lift, it not only occurred to me that he might lose, but, all at once, I knew he would. I looked at the people around me and sensed that they also knew it. Sergei seemed to know it too. He paced the stage almost until his time expired. I watched the seconds on the huge clock behind him tick away. Just to stay in the competition, he had to match his own world record. And when he failed to do it, when he was unable to steady the bar above his head, when all three judges’ lights—including my father’s—glowed red, I felt sick. As I watched Sergei embrace Krutov and then Krutov embrace Gregory, I tasted and then swallowed the eggs I had eaten for breakfast.
After the awards ceremony I followed my father over to Sergei. He was standing slightly apart from Gregory, Krutov, and the rest of the Soviet team. When he saw us he forced a smile. My father congratulated him and Sergei held up his silver medal. He took it off his neck and let me hold it. He kept the smile on his face.
—A silver medal. It’s not gold, but I guess you don’t find them lying in the street.
Sergei looked over to where Gregory was standing with his arm around Krutov.
—Don’t forget to congratulate Comrade Ziskin on another great day for Dynamo. Another one-two finish. What difference does it make to him if all of a sudden one is two and two is one?
At home, my mother had prepared a large and elaborate dinner. There were salads, a cold borscht, smoked pike, smoked whitefish, a veal roast, and tea, cake, and ice cream for dessert. She had set the table for five and used crystal glasses and her good china. I wore my clean new Polo shirt. My father told amusing stories about our immigration in Italy. He made an effort to reminisce with Gregory about their old bodybuilding students. The ones who remained in Riga, those who were now in Toronto, others who sometimes wrote letters from New York and Israel. My mother inquired after some of her girlfriends. People in the Jewish community whom Gregory would have known even though he and my mother were almost a generation apart. Even I talked about what my school was like, what sorts of cars my Hebrew school friends had. The only person who didn’t talk was Sergei. He listened to all the conversations and drank. My father had placed a bottle of vodka on the table, and after the requisite toasts, only Sergei continued to address the bottle. With the bottle almost gone, he suddenly turned on Gregory and accused him of plotting against him. He knew that Gregory planned to recommend that he be removed from the team.
—He wants to put me out to pasture. Soviet pasture. The rest of my life grazing in the dust. The only way he’ll get me back there is with a bullet through my head.
Sergei kept drinking, even though it looked like he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.
—Roman, you did the right thing. You got the hell out of that cemetery. Now you can look forward to a real life. And what do we look forward to? What kind of life, Gregory Davidovich, you KGB cocksucker!
After another drink Sergei’s head began to drift toward his plate and he accepted my father’s help and rose from the table. His arm draped over my father’s shoulder, Sergei stumbled into my bedroom and onto my single bed. My father closed the door and returned to the table. He lowered himself wearily into his chair. Submitting to gravity, he looked again like my old father.
As my mother served the tea Gregory confessed that Sergei was more right than wrong. But this was something my father knew as well as he did. A weightlifter’s career was five, maybe seven years. After that there was a nice arrangement. A position with Dynamo. A lucrative job with customs. Maybe a coaching placement, or moving papers from one corner of the desk to the other. Sergei would get what everyone else got. He’d keep his three-room apartment, he’d have his garage for his car, he’d never have to worry about a salary. That Russia was becoming a colossal piece of shit was a different story. That my father had proven himself a genius by leaving was undeniable. Dunking biscuits into his tea, Gregory admitted he should have left when he had the chance. Now it was too late.
My father looked at my mother before speaking.
—Don’t be fooled, Grisha. I often think of going back.
—Are you insane? Look at what you have. Take a walk outside. I saw beggars on the street wearing Levi’s jeans and Adidas running shoes.
—Three days out of five I’m afraid I’ll join them.
—Roma, come on, I’ve known you for thirty years. You don’t have to lie on my account.
—I’m not lying. Every day is a struggle.
—Look, I’m not blind. I see your car. I see your apartment. I see how you struggle. Believe me, your worst day is better than my best.
Leaving my parents and Gregory at the table, I went down the hall and into my bedroom. Even though I knew every step blind, I waited for my eyes to become accustomed to the dark. Sergei was stretched out on my single bed, his feet barely hanging over the edge. I went over and stood beside him. I listened to his breathing and considered his body through his suit jacket. Again, I was amazed at how small he was. I bent closer to examine his face. I didn’t mind that he was in my bed, although I wondered where I would sleep if h
e stayed. When he suddenly opened his eyes, I was startled.
—Well, boy, what do you see?
He raised himself to a sitting position and looked me over. He put his hands on my shoulders and my arms and gripped for a proper appraisal.
—How many push-ups can you do?
—Twenty-five.
—Only twenty-five?
—I think so.
—For a boy like you, anything less than fifty is a disgrace. He climbed off the bed and kneeled on the floor. He patted a spot beside him.
—Come on, come on.
When I hesitated his hand shot up and seized me by my new Polo shirt. I felt the fabric tear and heard two buttons strike the floor.
—Let’s go. You and me. Fifty push-ups.
At first I managed to keep up with him, but after a while he began to race ahead. I strained not to fall behind, afraid of what he might do to me. But he continued to do the exercise, counting to himself, not minding me at all. When he finished I finished as well.
—See, it feels good.
I nodded my head in agreement.
Sergei looked over at my alarm clock. It read past ten.
—Look at how late it is. Shouldn’t you be asleep?
Natasha and Other Stories Page 5