The Faces of Strangers

by Pia Padukone

  Nico swiveled toward him. “What is he talking about? What about your grandparents?”

  “It’s nothing. Guys, let’s just drop it. It’s a nice trip. Come on, be civil.”

  Nico pushed on. “What about Siberia, dude? Tell me.”

  Paavo sighed. “It’s not something we like to talk about. My father’s parents are Russian, as you know. They moved to Estonia during the Soviet occupation, when the Red Army was trying to get Russians to be the majority in the Baltic States. And my mother’s parents, well, they were Estonian nationals. And during the Communist times, during the culling, the NKVD tore into their home, arrested them and sent them to the work camps in Siberia. Where they died. I never met them. Luckily, Mama was visiting a cousin in Germany at the time. Otherwise, I would never be here.”

  Nico felt heat spreading across his face. He swallowed hard and put his hand on Paavo’s shoulder. “I didn’t know, man. I’m sorry.”

  “So, see? You aren’t the only ones that ever suffered.” Pyotr spit the words out.

  “There’s no need to be so harsh about it, Pyotr,” Paavo said. “Nico didn’t know. Aren’t we here to teach one another?”

  “There’s no need to protect him, Paavo,” Pyotr said. “Our entitled all-American hero could stand to learn a thing or two. After all, that’s what this whole experience is for.”

  Oh, irony of ironies, Nico thought to himself. If only Pyotr knew the truth about who was protecting whom. He took a breath and quelled the anger that was rising in the pit of his stomach. “Dude,” Nico said, measuredly, as he glanced toward Barbara. “Pyotr or Peter or whatever the hell your name is. I don’t know what you think you know about me, or what you’ve decided is true. I’m not entitled. My parents—both of them—work hard and pay taxes. They deserve the home they have built for us. Just because they haven’t had to fight in wars or flee the country doesn’t make them any less deserving citizens.”

  “It’s not your family who makes you entitled. It’s your country,” Pyotr said. He turned up the collar to his jacket, worn leather with deep creases and cracks running across it like arteries and veins. He moved away then, grumbling in Russian under his breath. Although the wind continued to whip through the slotted gate and blew litter in tidy little circles around their feet, Nico could sense the tension hovering over them like a rain cloud. He looked at Paavo and smiled tightly.

  * * *

  On the train ride home, the boys were silent as they sat shoulder to shoulder, swaying as the train car pitched and yawed. Just as Paavo’s drowsy eyes were about to succumb to the soothing rhythms, Nico spoke, his throat raw from being silent for so long.

  “Does the rest of the world feel like we got what was coming to us?”

  Paavo opened his eyes as if remembering suddenly where he was. “I won’t say 9/11 was justified. But your country doesn’t have a good history of being a nice guy on the campus.”

  “You mean we’re the big man on campus.”

  “Yes, of course, but also not so nice. There is much resentment toward your country, Nico, because your troops come in, do what they want, take what they want, no questions asked, no consequences. And after 9/11, all we hear from the US is revenge, revenge, revenge. 9/11 was a terrible day. I won’t contest this. But I am in agreement with Pyotr when he says that the United States conveniently ignores the fact that this sort of behavior has been going on each day, for decades, for centuries, in other countries. But from an American perspective, it’s new.”

  Nico nodded, chewing on his bottom lip.

  “I hope I haven’t offended you. I just want to be honest with you, and help you understand where Pyotr and a lot of the rest of the world is coming from.”

  “You haven’t offended me,” Nico said. “I’m feeling schooled. Enlightened. And incredibly embarrassed.”

  Nico would go home and begin fervent research on America’s foreign policies. Of course, all he’d learned in school had cast his country in a favorable light, but for the first time, the students in the Hallström program had made Nico understand that his country had a long way to go in order to make things right in the world. When he entered the political world in a few years, America’s public image and everything he wanted to do in order to right it would become one of his personal hot buttons on every campaign he would ever work on. But for now, it was time for him to make up for lost time and educate himself on how little he knew about the way the rest of the world viewed him.

  NORA

  New York City

  March 2003

  Nora had thought long and hard about how her best friend would view their friendship once she had made her decision. After hemming and mulling and hawing and stewing, Nora decided to attend Claire’s wedding as a regular guest instead of as a member of her wedding party. Claire had hugged Nora, and promised her that it didn’t change anything between them. Nora watched from an aisle seat as Claire’s sister stood at the altar, beaming in her promotion to maid of honor. Nora clutched her black notebook in her hand until it began to perspire and ink bled onto her palms. She put the notebook into her purse at that point; she couldn’t risk anything happening to it. She hadn’t allowed it out of her sight since Paavo had returned it to her. But as much of a disappointment as it had been to not participate in Claire’s wedding party, she had to admit that she’d come a long way. The support group had been great for her. She’d put her self-consciousness aside and asked her friends to start wearing things that might help her to identify them. She’d started to post some of her photo portraits online and had been receiving some positive feedback about her use of lighting and angles. And then she’d had a breakthrough.

  Nora had been attending the group for six months when she and her father made a trip to the grocery store together. The two walked down Twenty-Sixth Street in silence until Nora stopped to point at a bus stop movie poster.

  “Ugh,” she said. “He’s such a dirty old man, don’t you think?”

  “Nora—” Arthur stopped walking “—you recognize that actor?” Arthur was unabashedly ignorant of celebrity faces, names and gossip. He’d pawed through an issue or two of People while waiting at the dentist, but tossed the magazines aside when he didn’t know anyone in the photos, and more importantly, when he didn’t care.

  “Come on, Dad, you have to know Jack Nicholson.”

  “That’s not the point. You know him, Nora. That’s all that matters.”

  A quiet but fierce smile crept across Nora’s face as she recognized the importance of this potential truth, not allowing herself to fully believe it yet. Nora and Arthur picked up their pace as they neared the grocery store with its wide paneled windows plastered with neon posters for luminously colored fruit and triple-liter bottles of cola. Instead of grabbing a cart and consulting Stella’s list, they veered left toward the cashiers where Arthur grabbed a battered People magazine and flipped through its pages. He opened it at random and turned it around to face Nora, covering the type with his palm.

  “Who is that?” he demanded.

  “Ricky Martin.”

  Arthur moved his hand and nodded, his eyes flitting from the page to Nora’s face like fireflies. “And this?”

  “Britney Spears.”

  “That.”

  “Hillary Clinton.”

  It appeared that celebrities hadn’t been spliced from the recesses of Nora’s mind.

  “Nor, we can use this to help you,” Arthur said. His voice traveled up a scale as his excitement mounted. “You can use people that you recognize to remember other people. You know—I look like that hunk, that guy you and your pals are always going on about. That Brad Pitt fellow.”

  Nora let out what could only be described as a guffaw. The first guffaw in fact, since before her accident. “Hardly.”

  But he’d been right. Her father had been onto something. She
could use celebrities to help her place people; it could be her prop, which she’d been asked to identify at her first group session. The notebook that Nicholas had given her was filled with notes on bone structure, moles and facial hair. But this was easier, Nora realized, to liken people to celebrities. She rewrote her book, thinking long and hard about the people in her life and who they resembled. Her father couldn’t have been further from Brad Pitt; he was more like a young Sam Waterston, with his heavy brow and his patrician nose. Her mother was a perfect marriage of Elizabeth Taylor’s delicate elegance and Christiane Amanpour’s all-knowing onyx eyes. Nicholas was like that boy on the Campbell’s Soup commercials, the one who races home in the rain with his dog to be comforted with a steaming bowl of soup in his mother’s kitchen. Claire was, without a doubt, the epitome of the lead singer of Stardust, the teenage band that seemed to be overtaking MTV each time she turned it on.

  But when Nora met Paavo on the evening of his arrival, she was stumped. He wasn’t unattractive, but he wasn’t particularly memorable, either. He was toothy like a boyish Ted Kennedy, but almost as pale as Edward Scissorhands. She scribbled a few notes into her notebook and hoped they would suffice.

  When she’d misplaced her notebook, she’d felt completely lost and then completely embarrassed when Paavo returned it to her. But then she’d started talking to him. He just seemed to get it. The cool thing about Paavo was that he didn’t carry any emotion on his face. He neither smiled nor sneered. He was a blank slate, and she didn’t have to worry about being herself around him. She began to run into him on purpose, in the kitchen, in the living room. He began to seek her out after he’d returned home from school and finished his homework. She began to crave his strange little riddles because they were so silly and thoughtful and unique.

  A few weeks before Paavo was due to head back to Tallinn, Nora stuck her head in the doorway of the guest room, where he was sitting on the bed fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube.

  “Hit me,” she said.

  “I’ve been saving this one all day for you,” Paavo said, turning the grids of the cube. “I don’t have teeth, but I bite.”

  “A comb? No wait, that has teeth.” Nora came and sank down into the chair next to Paavo’s bed. “Okay, I give.”

  “The cold.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you why you like riddles so much.”

  “I don’t know,” Paavo said, looking down into his lap.

  “Yes you do. Tell me.”

  “I suppose because they make you think. They’re never really what they appear to be. When you think it’s one thing, it’s really another. When your brain can’t fathom that there could be an answer to a clue, there always is one. And when a riddle makes you feel completely useless, completely ridiculous, that this combination of words has baffled you, that the world is falling down around you, somehow the pieces of your mind come together like the plates of the earth under our feet, and you come up with this answer that makes total and complete sense and all is right again.”

  “That’s deep, Paavo,” Nora said. “You think differently than I do. Because try as I might, I’m not as quick as you are.”

  “You have to approach them from another angle, the one you don’t think of at first,” Paavo said. “It’s sort of how I think you should maybe approach your condition.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the prosopagnosia. You feel stifled and limited by it.”

  “Obviously. How else am I supposed to feel?” Nora stiffened, taking her legs out from underneath her and hugging herself.

  “That’s instinctual. I don’t blame you. But what if you conquered it? Like I have been doing with wrestling with Nico. What if you got to understand it from the inside out?”

  “How am I supposed to do that? I’m already going to this group and reading everything I possibly can about the subject, which, I’ve gotta tell you is difficult to find.”

  “So you have an opportunity to add to a missing dialogue. You can study it. You can take classes that help you understand, and you can write a memoir or a paper to help others that feel as lost as you do.”

  “I guess so...” Nora said, chewing on a fingernail.

  “Nora,” Paavo said. “It can become something you own instead of something that owns you.”

  “Well, what about you?” Nora asked.

  “What about me?”

  “What are you going to do about the neo-Nazis?”

  “How do you know about them?” Paavo asked. He leaned back against the headboard on his bed. Nora pulled her chair forward.

  “Nico. Don’t be mad at him. He’s worried about you. He just wants to help. And so do I.”

  “It’s just so embarrassing,” Paavo said, picking up the Rubik’s Cube again and rotating the sections around. “Like I’m some baby or something.”

  “Bullying has nothing to do with being babied,” Nora said. “Bullying is a cowardly thing to do, and ganging up on one person isn’t right or fair.”

  “Well, it’s a tough time in Estonia right now, identity-wise. Somehow these boys found out that my grandparents are Russian, so they’re making my life miserable. After years of oppression, once Estonia claimed its sovereignty, a lot of Russians ended up staying here. There’s still a huge divide. And the more conservative Estonians, like them, believe they should leave the country altogether. It’s a conflict we’ll be dealing with for years to come.”

  “But why should you have to deal with it? It’s not your cross to bear.”

  “It is, Nora,” Paavo said, flicking the last row of colors into place as he solved the Rubik’s Cube. He tossed it onto the bed, where Nora picked it up and turned it around in wonder. “I’m the next generation. And it’s turned me into this scared little person who stays inside all day long reading books on coding like a nerd. I’m such an STD.”

  Nora snorted. “You know what that means?”

  “Come on, it’s so obvious. Your whole family mumbles it whenever anyone else says anything remotely European-sounding.”

  “The Grands are pretty transparent,” Nora said, shrugging. “Why don’t you take your own advice?”

  “Which is?”

  “So you’re a self-proclaimed nerd now. But you like coding, right? You like computers?”

  “I do. They are like one big riddle.”

  “So what’s wrong with that? Go with it. Computers, coding, that can be your thing. Who says you have to play sports? It’s not a prerequisite for life.”

  “I just don’t want to be scared anymore.”

  “You don’t have to be. Do you know how intimidating that was just watching you solve that puzzle? Dive headfirst into what you love. Don’t let this situation own you. Own it yourself.”

  MARI

  Tallinn

  March 2003

  That winter, the silence had seemed to own Mari. In the lead-up to her departure for Moscow, it felt as if her career had come to a screeching halt. The calls had stopped. The stack of glossy magazines that Mari bought before her auditions lay stunted. Vera had considered going out to buy the latest issues, and clearing away the ones that she and Mari had read and reread until they’d memorized how to make an exfoliation mask from the contents of your fridge, or how to form a perfect French twist. But that felt disloyal to her daughter, who now ghosted about the house like a mirage, her face drawn and dismal.

  Estonian winter had seemed to mirror her demeanor; the sun rose glumly in the mornings to its apex in the frigid sky. Mari usually lived for the short daylight hours in the winter, spending as much time as possible outdoors. But she’d shrunk from the sun like a vampire, avoiding the elegant columns of light that filtered in through the windows as though they were sipping softly at her strength. She poured herself like a puddle in a chair and spent her time drinking tea and flipping t
hrough the same pile of magazines that seemed to taunt her.

  Vera tiptoed around her daughter as though she were an active volcano, behaving as though the slightest movement might set off cascading streams of molten lava. She replenished Mari’s teacups and made her sandwiches. She tried hiding the stack of magazines, but Mari discovered them and ferried them up to her room, at which point she began staying there throughout the day.

  When Leo had appeared at the table for lunch alone one day, Vera headed upstairs. She knocked softly at the door. “Lunchtime,” she called. There was a soft moan from the other side of the wood and Vera pushed the door in.

  Mari was lying on her side toward the wall, her face contorted in agony. Her fringe was plastered to her forehead and her blouse stuck to her back, slack with sweat. Vera sat beside her. “Are you ill? What’s happened?” Mari had a hand curled over her body while her other one signaled for her mother to leave the room.

  “I won’t go,” Vera retorted. “Tell me what’s the matter.” Mari pushed at her mother’s shoulder urgently, and Vera sprang up just in time to have Mari roll over onto her side and deposit a stream of clear liquid from deep within her body into her wastepaper basket.

  “You need to eat something,” Vera said. “Come downstairs and I’ll make you a light broth. It’s probably just a virus.”

  Mari shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. “I’m too tired,” she whispered.

  “Well, then, you’re going to the doctor,” Vera said, squeezing her shoulder. “Get your shoes.” Vera watched as Mari pushed herself off the bed in slow motion, her eyes sunken into her head, deep purple clouds of exhaustion puffing around the sockets. When she removed a piece of stray hair from her mouth, Vera saw her fingers, swollen and pink like the tiny blood sausages in the glass case at the market. Mari’s normally full lips were chapped and deflated. An alarming thought sprang into Vera’s mind but she flicked it away as though it were a tiresome gnat. She created a buttress of pillows and leaned her daughter against it.