Summertime

by Elizabeth Rigbey

  Aunt Zoya leans forward, hanging her head, and I look behind her to Sasha. He looks back at me, expressionless.

  ‘What did they see, Aunt Zina?’

  ‘They saw Rita’s father beaten, beaten to his death.’

  I gasp, not so much at the information, which is shocking enough, but at its leaden delivery. ‘But… why?’

  ‘Oh, how can I tell? I don’t know the reason NKVD turned on Rita’s father. That’s what happens in a pack of wolves. That was life under Stalin. One minute you were popular and the next someone wanted your apartment and they informed against you, some manufactured charge, and you were dead. It occurred frequently, I’m not telling you anything remarkable. It’s just Tanya had the misfortune to see this and it would have been better for her if she had not.’

  ‘Who were the men?’

  She looks across at her sister. ‘Oh, I don’t know. Thugs.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ says Aunt Zoya, ‘they were supervised by Papa.’

  ‘Grandpa killed Rita’s father?’

  ‘Well of course he didn’t get blood on his hands.’

  ‘Grandpa killed his friend!’

  Sasha raises his eyebrows at my indignation. He says: ‘You weren’t there, you didn’t live in those times, you have no right to judge.’

  Mother said: ‘Why did you do it? Why did you hate him so much?’ Maybe the words came out of her childhood.

  ‘Even perhaps,’ Aunt Zoya is adding, ‘Rita’s father had done the same himself to many. And for Papa it was the last time and probably the reason he left.’

  ‘Unhappily,’ says Aunt Zina, ‘he and Mama paid a great price: the loss, in their escape, of their baby son.’

  I nod. ‘The baby on the train. Mother used to tell us that story in great detail but I’ve forgotten most of it now.’

  ‘God, Lucy.’ Sasha rolls his eyes. ‘You should have lived with us and you wouldn’t have been allowed to forget.’

  Aunt Zina ignores him. ‘It was terrible. He died in Mama’s arms. The man took him away and Mama was always haunted by the possibility that the body was simply thrown off the train.’

  ‘And,’ says Aunt Zoya, ‘she was probably right.’

  Once more I look at Sasha who looks back at me unblinkingly.

  ‘Did you catch the train right out of Moscow?’ I ask.

  ‘Certainly,’ Aunt Zina nods. ‘Certainly, it was a most bold exodus. Papa had been appointed head of a trade delegation to Latvia and it was supposed to be the train for Riga but somehow we boarded another.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘It was… complicated. A complicated and dangerous route.’ They look at each other.

  ‘But where did you sail from?’

  They exchange a few words in Russian. ‘Possibly Rotterdam,’ says Aunt Zoya at last. ‘We’re not sure…’

  She stands, slowly and stiffly.

  ‘Enough!’ Sasha jumps up. ‘Lucia has suffered enough today without such a trip through Andreyev history.’

  Aunt Zoya looks hurt. ‘We tell you all this, my dearest Lucia, not to make you unhappy, or to shock you, but to give you some small understanding of your mother’s pain. Some small explanation for her madness. Some small opportunity to forgive her.’

  ‘And remember…’ Aunt Zina says, ‘Tanya also lost a son, a suffering which you will understand.’

  I lean forward a little to look from face to face. I say: ‘Do you realize that we all lost baby sons? Grandma, Mother and me?’

  They look back at me. They seem to be waiting for me to say something more. When I am silent, Aunt Zina speaks at last.

  ‘Well of course,’ she says gently. ‘Of course, Lucia. Didn’t you know this before?’

  We drive north from Redbush clinic. We are expected at the home of Aunt Olya, just twenty minutes away, for a barbecue lunch. Aunt Katya and her husband will be there too and various cousins.

  ‘Are you ready for such an encounter or are you so melancholy, Lucia, that you would simply prefer to return home?’

  I would simply prefer to return home but I know this answer would disappoint them so I insist on continuing. We drive in silence. Involuntarily, I scan every truck we pass and once, when there is a tow truck on the opposite side of the highway, I am almost jolted from my seat, causing Sasha to turn to me in alarm. But it is some other tow truck and now I realize that the car is not silent but that in the back seat is the constant murmur, like the to and fro of the ocean’s waves, of my aunts speaking in Russian.

  After about ten minutes the traffic slows and soon we are stationary.

  ‘Construction?’ suggests Aunt Zina.

  ‘An accident?’ suggests Aunt Zoya. We inch our way forward, the aunts’ heads bobbing in the back seat as they speculate on the reason for the tailback.

  Eventually we see flashing lights ahead. A police car, siren wailing, passes us.

  ‘How terrible, how shocking,’ cry the aunts.

  When we reach the source of the delay it is clear that there has been a collision between a car and a truck. Both have swerved off the road in a last-minute attempt to avoid each other. Aunts Zina and Zoya revert in hushed tones to Russian, the language of tragedy.

  ‘There is no reason at all,’ points out Sasha as we finally accelerate away, ‘for such a tailback. The damaged vehicles, the police and the ambulances are off the blacktop in the field and the highway is in no way blocked.’

  ‘Ah, but everyone slows to look!’ says Aunt Zoya. ‘Despite one’s great reluctance, one is compelled to look at this horrible sight.’

  ‘We look,’ explains Aunt Zina, ‘thinking that the crushed car could have been ours. We remind ourselves of our vulnerability.’

  ‘Of our mortality,’ agrees Aunt Zoya.

  ‘Even now,’ adds Aunt Zina, ‘the traffic flows evenly and drivers sit at their wheels with less speed and more concentration. For a while at least, each driver has been reminded of his own death, and considers the consequences for his loved ones of such a catastrophe.’

  Joe Zacarro said: It’s a modern, industrialized nation sort of thing to ignore death and think it’s never going to happen to you. But if you remember that you’re going to die some day then you live your life in a different sort of a way. Not necessarily better, but probably better. Different, that’s for sure.

  I turn to Sasha but have no time to speak because Aunt Zina is shrieking: ‘Turn here, Sashinka, here!’

  The family greets me with kindness and condolences. On their arrival in America, the Andreyevs hoped to have a son, as if they could simply replace the boy who died on the train with another. Instead they had Katya and finally Olya. Katya is married to a second-generation Russian from outside the tight community in town. Olya, like Mother, married an American. Both sisters dress American and talk American. They could be mistaken for the daughters of their elder sisters. Only when they speak Russian do they change: their facial muscles, their gait, even their hair seems to rearrange itself around their other language and culture. I think of Mother’s place in this family. The middle sister, trapped between two worlds, rejecting the old but never fully embraced by the new.

  Aunts Zina and Zoya exchanged ill-concealed looks of disgust when they learned that there are hot dogs for lunch but they eat the hotdogs anyway, at first gingerly, then hungrily.

  ‘Did I cook them real well?’ teases one of my young cousins, a teenager hardly known to me except by name.

  ‘Oh, so you made them yourself?’ demands Aunt Zina.

  ‘Sure, on the barbecue.’

  ‘No, no,’ cries Aunt Zoya, ‘did you grind the meat and add onion and spices?’

  The girl shrugs with incomprehension. Her eye roves over the tidy yard with its basketball hoop on the garage and fat, contented dogs panting by the barbecue. To her two accented aunts she says awkwardly: ‘We bought them at the supermarket this morning.’

  ‘Then in our opinion…’ says Aunt Zina.

  ‘… You haven’t cooked anything. Me
rely you have heated them,’ finishes Aunt Zoya.

  Aunt Katya, who is passing, pauses to put an arm around her niece.

  ‘Just remember,’ she tells the girl, ‘that your older aunts are relics from another world. A world which isn’t there any more. Treat them with all the respect you would show an exhibit in a museum. Like, for example…’

  ‘A dinosaur bone,’ suggests Sasha. ‘Or why restrict ourselves simply to a bone? Imagine them as two living, breathing dinosaurs.’

  He is admonished by his mother in Russian. The niece listens to them curiously then turns away.

  ‘I fear,’ says Sasha to me when desserts are produced from the freezer, ‘that to such an all-American girl I must also seem like a relic from some other culture. The irony of my situation is that, when I travel to Moscow, that’s exactly how I am regarded by my Russian friends there.’

  I remember how Jane wounded him on the night of my arrival when, irritated by his refusal to supply his fingerprints, she briskly reminded him of his nationality.

  I say anxiously: ‘Oh, but you speak Russian and behave in a very Russian way.’

  He rolls his blue eyes at me.

  ‘I know so much about the Soviet life of our contemporaries that I feel I must have been there. In my dreams I revisit Young Pioneers camp, where I sport a red neckerchief and sing with enthusiasm Soviet songs while I help build campfires in the woods. These dreams are so real that my fingers can feel the cold iron of the camp cot. When I wake I have difficulty persuading myself that I have not been revisiting my own childhood but that of other people.’

  I am silent, remembering my own confused memories, how a few days ago I even thought I’d made Lindy Zacarro’s daydream real.

  ‘In fact, while our Russian contemporaries chanted slogans in their neckerchiefs, I was playing basketball in the park and, for a brief and ill-advised period, discovering soul music. But only when I visit Moscow am I reminded that I wasn’t there. I didn’t experience it, I didn’t even go until the iron curtain fell. And although my Russian friends love me, Sasha has not suffered enough to be truly one of them. For me, being Russian is an essential part of my identity. To them I am a fatcat, privileged American and an outsider.’

  29

  Monday is even hotter than yesterday. When I open Daddy’s front door I feel the heat jostling its way past me like an angry crowd. The atmosphere has intensified the house’s own smell of wood and oil. I drink two glasses of icy water before setting off through the yard for the Holler orchard.

  Our lot used to be four acres until Daddy sold two to the Hollers. I remember playing around the foundations of their house and then watching the bricks grow higher each day. Finally, the family arrived. Daddy and Mr Holler were neighbourly but they weren’t friends back then. The friendship must have come much later, when wives were dead or departed and the surviving children all grown.

  Like many houses around here, this one is built into the hillside, so it looks two storeys high when you drive in and three if you turn back and stare at it from the valley. When I was a child it felt clean and modern. There was no splintery old porch and instead of dark corners there were light, bright rooms.

  I ring the doorbell and, after a long wait, Adam Holler’s voice is heard over the speaker. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Lucy Schaffer.’

  ‘Lucy.’ It is a statement. There is no surprise. ‘I’m finishing my exercises, it’ll be a minute before I can get to the door.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I try to remember Mr Holler but can recall nothing more palpable than the sense of someone physically stiff and verbally correct. I know little about him except that he is a man who has had to live with the most hideous of mistakes, a guilt even his wife could not endure, because it was Adam Holler who had been installing the pool lights that day Jim Bob dived in and died.

  Bolts draw back and keys turn and Mr Holler stares at me from behind dark glasses. The other man who remembers death.

  ‘Good morning, Lucy,’ he says. At once I recall his whiteness: despite the shades and his hat, long sleeves, long pants, socks and shoes, wherever his flesh is exposed it flashes with the supernatural paleness of water.

  He holds out a dry-skinned hand to me. Shaking it is like scrunching old parchment.

  ‘I’d like to offer you my sincere sympathy on the death of your father. He was a man loved by many. There are numerous people in this area who can recount small acts of kindness on his part. For myself, I can also say that I will miss his company sorely. He had a rare energy and originality of thought.’

  Now I recall Mr Holler’s formality of tone. It masks an awkwardness, maybe a shyness which I always knew was there, even as a kid, from his stiff movements.

  I say: ‘Joe’s probably told you that the funeral’s on Tuesday.’

  He nods and gestures for me to come in. He bolts the door behind us.

  ‘I’m kind of slow,’ he apologizes, leading me through the hallway. ‘Arthritis. In the back. And in most places now. I’ve had it for years.’

  Arthritis. That was why the Hollers built their pool long before anyone else dreamed of breaking up the steep, rocky hillside into a square of expensive blue water. Because swimming was good for Mr Holler’s arthritis.

  As I follow him down the hallway I feel big, too big for this house now, as though I’ve grown so much I’ll crack my head on the ceiling or bang my elbows into the doors.

  ‘I turned on the air-conditioning yesterday,’ says Mr Holler. Air-conditioning was one of the things that made the Holler house seem modern. It was always cool. ‘It doesn’t normally go on in March but this is remarkable weather for spring and they say it’s going to get hotter. Sit down.’

  I look around me. Jim Bob was two years older than me and his brother two years older than Jane. Jane and Ed weren’t real friendly but there was a vacation when Jim Bob and I played together all the time when I was nine. The Hollers’ swimming-pool was newly installed and we played in it every day. Then the new semester started and Jim Bob suddenly seemed a lot older than me and we hardly spoke to each other again.

  The sitting-room hasn’t changed. It still has a glass wall which looks out across the valley and a complex system of shutters so you can close off the view or any part of it when it gets to be too much. Jim Bob and I were fascinated by the shutter system. We broke it in places without telling anyone and no one seemed to find out. I wonder if it’s ever been fixed.

  ‘Sit down,’ Adam Holler instructs me for a second time. But I am drawn to the window. One storey beneath it is the terrace. Beyond the terrace are steps which lead down to a glassy eye implanted on to the hillside. I stare into the blue iris of the pool.

  ‘How are you coping, Lucy?’ he asks but his voice is hard. I am remembering the summer I spent playing with Jim Bob. He was small for his age, his skin was brown and his blond hair crewcut. He was teaching himself how to dive. I just liked to jump in and make a splash and Mrs Holler, who watched over us, would shriek her complaints. But that summer Jim Bob started to dive, belly-flopping at first, then gaining in grace and confidence.

  ‘So, watch this, Lucy, Lucy I can do it, watch.’

  He ran up to the pool, paused, but barely, and then he was airborne, cutting through the nothingness in a perfect arc. A crash like shattering glass as his body sliced through the water, neat and swift as a lean, brown knife.

  You can love when you’re nine years old and I loved Jim Bob at that moment and I loved him when his head, drenched and dripping, bobbed to the surface and he looked right at me with wet, bright eyes asking for my approval.

  I danced around at the edge of the pool clapping my hands. ‘Fantabulous, Jim Bob!’

  That’s what we used to say, Jim Bob and I, because we were copying the kids in some TV show. Fantabulous. And is that how Jim Bob, years later, dived to his death? Fantabulously? With a grace and skill that were almost lyrical? I hope it was a good dive, his best dive.

  ‘Why won’t you sit down?�
� asks Adam Holler quietly and I hear a sort of fear in his voice. He knows I’m remembering Jim Bob. I’m remembering his great mistake.

  I say: ‘I haven’t been here since I was a child.’

  ‘Your whole family used to come over sometimes. We’d have half the neighbourhood here and Bunny cooked hamburgers.’

  ‘The whole family?’ I only remember swimming with Jim Bob day after day that long hot summer, until even Jane became sullen at my absences.

  ‘Sure. All you Schaffers and the Zacs and the Dimotos…’

  I try to remember the Schaffers, all four of us, at a pool party. The idea embarrasses me. Mother would certainly have felt awkward. Even when the clinic said she was well enough to be at home, she dealt badly with almost any social situation. She either tried too hard and laughed too much or she sat in still silence as though someone had glued her limbs together.

  ‘You don’t remember? You don’t remember how you nearly drowned in our pool once? Snorkelling?’

  ‘I remember that… but I thought it was at the public pool.’

  ‘It was here. You were snorkelling down at the deep end and you got into trouble. I’m not sure what happened. Possibly your mask filled with water. Possibly you tried to follow the other kids who were swimming deep and you took water in through the snorkel. I don’t know. No one noticed, not even the other kids in the pool, because you didn’t struggle, you just dropped your head and went limp. You didn’t fight it at all. Only your mother saw something was wrong and she dived right in with her clothes on and saved you.’

  I stare at his black, beetle eyes. ‘I remember nearly drowning, I remember being saved. But actually it was Jane who –’

  ‘No. Tanya saved you.’

  ‘But Mother never swam. She couldn’t.’

  ‘She dived in and pulled you right out. She laid you down by the side of the pool and that’s when Jane helped. Probably a few other people too but especially Jane. She rolled you on to your side like a rug and then she pulled you back again and sort of pumped at you until you threw up. She was calm and she was efficient. I don’t know how old she was, twelve maybe, but Bunny turned to your father and she said: Jane’s going to be a doctor, you wait and see.’