The Faces of Strangers

by Pia Padukone

  “Know what, Mari?” Paavo could hear his voice climbing, and he willed it down, though he felt vulnerable and exposed.

  “It was his idea, Paavo. Papa suggested I leave Tallinn. He orchestrated my whole move to Moscow. He all but handed me the keys to our place in Petrovka.” Mari swirled her brandy and sipped it.

  “But why?” Paavo put his glass down and sat up straight.

  “He never said as much, but I think it was because he was hoping to join me. I think he was hoping that me being here would persuade Ema to move to Moscow. So he wouldn’t have to feel like an outsider in his own land, as he always said.”

  Paavo frowned. “But that doesn’t make any sense. As much as Papa grumbles, he’s happy in Tallinn, in Estonia, isn’t he? He’s lived there for more than half his life. He has his job, and Ema and Deda and Babu and us. I don’t understand why he would drive you away.”

  “He didn’t drive me away. When I knew I was pregnant, I made up my mind that I wanted to leave. It was a nearly immediate decision. I saw how my life was going in Tallinn. I’d have this baby, live with Papa and Ema and have some thankless job that I would soon learn to despise. This way, I could write my own future. I went to Papa and told him as much. He didn’t send me away. He helped me.” Mari watched Paavo as he picked up his brandy again and drank it steadily until the glass was empty.

  “Refill?”

  “Yes. I think I need one,” Paavo said.

  “Will you come back to see us while you’re in town? Claudia needs to get to know her Onu.” Mari reached over and grasped Paavo’s hand with an urgency she hadn’t seemed capable of all evening before letting go to refill his glass.

  * * *

  Paavo visited Mari and Claudia three more times that week. Each visit was like the careful peeling back of an onion; Paavo made sure to inquire delicately, lest he interrogate Mari into silence. Unlike her mother, Claudia presented herself to her uncle as an open book, inviting him back into her room to look at all her dolls, her books and her clothes. Claudia’s room, at least, had the trappings of a five-year-old. Multicolored crates held assorted toys, bookshelves were stocked and overflowing, and Paavo was grateful for the great bursts of color in Claudia’s domain, from the curtains to the rug to her bedclothes. Paavo loved every moment he spent with his niece, and he mentally documented each piece of information that he learned about her. Claudia loved colors. Claudia was fluent in four languages. Claudia’s favorite book was Pushkin’s Fairy Tales.

  On Paavo’s fourth evening at their home, Mari poked her head into the kitchen, where he and Claudia were immersed in the opposite pages of an underwater-themed coloring book. Claudia was shading the shell of a turtle in a light purple color as Paavo gave a blue hue to a coral reef.

  “Will it be all right if I run a few errands while you’re here? I won’t be long.” Paavo glanced at Mari as he reached for a turquoise crayon.

  “Of course. Take your time. We’ll be fine.”

  “Onu, I’ve never heard of blue coral before,” Claudia said, pointing to his side of the book.

  “Well, who has ever heard of a purple turtle?” he asked. “Onus can have an imagination, too.”

  “But you’re an adult.” Claudia cackled.

  “And so?” he asked, feigning shock. “I’m not allowed to be creative?”

  “Not as creative as me,” Claudia said.

  “Fair enough,” he said. “I will probably never be as creative as you, even if I tried.”

  “Onu, I want to be an artist,” Claudia said.

  “Very good,” Paavo said. “We will add that to the list. So now, you’ll be a model slash conductor slash inventor slash artist?” Claudia had ambition.

  Claudia nodded. “I like it,” Paavo said. “I think you’ll be the first of your kind.” He sat back and watched her. During the few days he’d spent with Mari and Claudia, he had almost forgotten himself and his desire to uncover the cloak-and-dagger operation that Mari had pulled off almost six years prior. That his father had colluded with Mari to send his only daughter and the grandchild inside her away had baffled him; he had returned to the hotel room and to work the following morning with his head in a cloud. He went through the motions of directing employees at the Moscow office of CallMe but could barely wrap his head around the recent developments. But when he returned to his sister’s apartment that evening, the haze in his head dissipated as he became enchanted with Claudia. He mused at how trusting children were when you gave them the slightest bit of attention; they were all yours whether or not you’d been a stranger mere hours before. Claudia melted into him, giving him her possessions at first, then herself slowly and then quickly and then all at once. He found himself falling in love with his newly recovered niece, this inquisitive, forthright, charming young girl, who was a likeness of Mari in each of her forms, both physical and behavioral. Claudia was so innocent yet simultaneously self-assured, so gracious in her acceptance of her new Onu into her life.

  Paavo watched as she exchanged the lavender crayon for an inky eggplant color. She was so sure of herself at such a young age; Paavo hadn’t carried himself with half as much poise until after he’d returned from New York with the skills and wrestling savvy he’d learned from the team, as well as the confident way the rest of Nico’s teammates had welcomed him into the fold, no questions asked. He watched as Claudia tilted her head to the side, the apex of her tongue sticking out of her mouth as she directed her full concentration to the page.

  “Onu, you have to sign your page,” Claudia said. “That’s how I’ll remember that you did that one. Like this.” He watched as she scribbled her name in the lower corner, below a rainbow-colored crab. Claudia was left-handed.

  Paavo remembered how teachers in grade school had always tried to correct the left-handed students, silently but constantly transferring pencils to their right hands as they completed math problems or wrote sentences. Even the words in Estonian, pahem meaning left and worse and parem meaning right and better, exacerbated the cultural preference. Even Nico’s nickname on the wrestling team—Lefty—called out his handedness.

  At first, the thought bypassed Paavo like a breeze. So many people are left-handed. But as he watched Claudia fill in an octopus’s arm with varying shades of red, he stared hard at her face. Claudia wasn’t a spitting image of Mari, not really. She had a ski-bump nose. She had stubby digits in contrast to Mari’s graceful piano fingers. She had a heart-shaped hairline. He did some quick math in his head. Claudia had been born exactly nine months after Nico left Tallinn. It couldn’t be. Could it?

  The questions nearly tumbled out of his mouth to Claudia, who wouldn’t have known the first place to begin. When had it happened? Where had Paavo been? Why, when Mari hadn’t shown the slightest interest toward Nico during his four months with the Sokolovs? Did Nico know? Did Claudia know?

  By the time Mari came in the door, Paavo had worked his brain into such a state that he was impressed with his ability to settle Claudia on the couch with a DVD and a snack without arousing her suspicions. The inner workings of his mind were frenetic with pulses, synapses firing rapidly one after the other in quick succession. He was pacing in the foyer as Mari came back in, holding several bags, her cheeks rosy from the chilled air.

  “How was it?” he asked. He couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. “Did you get everything you needed?”

  Mari looked taken aback. “Yes. Thank you for staying with her,” she said. “What’s with the attitude?”

  “Claudia. She’s left-handed.”

  “Yes, so?” Mari said, setting her bags down. “Don’t tell me you believe in all that handed mumbo jumbo.”

  “Nope. That’s not it at all,” Paavo said, continuing to pace back and forth across the perimeter of the foyer. “You know who else is left-handed? Do you?”

  “Well, lots of people, I’d imagine,�
�� Mari said. “What’s this about, Paavo? Stop pacing—you’re making me nervous.”

  “Nico.” Paavo stopped in front of her. “Nico Grand is left-handed. Who is Claudia’s father, Mari? Enough of this impossible secrecy.”

  Mari looked down at the floor, pushing her shoes off with her toes.

  “I thought I was the one who was obsessed with riddles. But I solved this one, didn’t I? What prize do I win?”

  “Okay, enough, Paavo. Yes. It’s him.”

  “Obviously, it’s him. Claudia has his nose, his fingers, his brow... Did you think I was stupid, the two of you? All those years ago just because I was so timid, you decided to parade around my back together and get, well, pregnant?”

  “It wasn’t like that, Paavo,” Mari said. “It’s a lot more complicated.” She reached her hands out toward Paavo but he shrugged away.

  “Please, Mari,” Paavo said, rolling his eyes. “I may be inexperienced with women, but I know how some things work. The crazy thing is, he was my exchange student. You barely showed the slightest interest in him while he was there. I can’t believe you hid this from me.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Mari said, looking down at the ground. “This is the whole reason I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “What, because I would get upset? Damned right I would. At the very least,” Paavo said. “Does she know?” He nodded toward the living room. Mari shook her head. “Are you going to tell her?”

  She put her hands on Paavo’s to calm him, but he shrugged them off. “Maybe someday I’ll tell her,” Mari said. “But right now, it isn’t relevant. We don’t need anyone else. We have each other.”

  “That’s so far beside the point, Mari,” Paavo said. “I feel like a complete moron. You’ve completely duped me. And Ema, Papa, and Nico—”

  “They know,” Mari interrupted. “But Nico doesn’t. You can’t tell him.”

  “What, Nico doesn’t know that he slept with my sister? Did you drug him? Was he unaware of having had sex with you?”

  “Paavo! No, of course not. I meant that he doesn’t know about Claudia.”

  Paavo shook his head. “This is too much. I can’t believe this, Mari. I can’t believe that had CallMe not sent me here, I’d never have seen you. I’d never have figured this out. What if Claudia hadn’t wanted to color? I’d still be left in the dark. I need to clear my head. I’ll see you later.” He pushed past Mari and walked out the door into the chilled night air.

  “Don’t go like this, Paavo. Claudia really loves you. And you’re my brother.”

  “Exactly my point.”

  Paavo stalked the five kilometers back to his hotel, muttering and exploding in anger every so often. By the time he let himself into his room, he had worked himself into such a state that he fell into the bed and fell fast asleep. He dreamed of little Claudia taking a position on a padded wrestling mat in a purple singlet, and Nico, stepping forward to show her how to take down an opponent.

  NICO

  St. Louis

  June 2009

  When Nico was in Buffalo, he dreamed of Mari for the first time in years. He hadn’t thought of her since college, when each night before a wrestling match, he would picture her face with its electric-blue eyes and tight lips and masturbate silently, his roommate asleep in the bed a few feet from his. The first time he’d done it, he’d felt so ashamed, staring at his reflection in the dorm room bathroom, his face flushed from the exertion. But it had helped him wrestle so well the following day, that it became his routine. His college coach had clapped him on the back after he had stepped off the mat and removed his headgear. “Grand—that was fantastic. Where did that come from?” Nico had shrugged humbly, but he knew the exact origin of his strength and focus and he’d grinned to himself. Conjuring Mari became his good luck charm, one that he would never share with his teammates because he was embarrassed, and because he felt proprietary over her, over his ability to perform because of her. It was a little pathetic; he knew that. But it worked. And at the end of the day, winners weren’t pathetic.

  On that first day on the campaign trail in St. Louis, he awoke in the middle of the night, his throat parched and his knees aching. He felt inadequate; as the youngest chief campaign advisor on any senatorial ticket, there were constant reminders of his youth and inexperience. It seemed that every other staffer was a campaign veteran who all seemed to start their conversations with, “Back on the Dukakis trail...” or “When we were working the Mondale polls...” It didn’t seem that Nico could ever catch up. But the congresswoman was using Nico’s speech in the morning, to address a convention hall filled with ironworkers who were losing faith in the ability of their union. Nico hoped that his words would renew and reinforce the bonds between unions and the congresswoman’s campaign, and had industriously peppered the speech with metaphors like “forging ties,” “welding us together,” “soldering our best parts to create a stronger union.” He felt sick; was there time to rewrite the whole speech? Nico flipped through channels and scrolled through his cell phone in an effort to distract himself. Just as he was about to call the front desk to see if he could score some NyQuil, Mari’s face flashed across the screen. There she was, stalking the runway, wearing oversize fluffy white wings and a barely there black lace bra and matching underwear. She walked on sky-high heels, moving forward with poise and ease, with the slightest smirk on her face. She’d made it across the Atlantic divide. There she was, on national television. Did that mean she’d made it here, as well? He felt momentarily betrayed. She’d promised to get in touch if her career brought her stateside. But perhaps the commercial had been filmed in Europe. As soon as she’d been there, she was gone.

  He quieted his indignation and focused on the task at hand. Muting the television, awash in the flickering lights of a late-night talk show, he performed his ritual and was asleep in no time. He knew it was shameful, imagining the woman who had taken his virginity six years ago.

  “It’s just this once,” he told himself that evening. But then the following night, after a treacherous Q-and-A session with a dozen degenerate journalists who poked holes in his responses and bullied him into near submission, he begged out of drinks with the rest of the staff and retreated to his hotel room, flipping channels for that ad again, and when he failed to find it, he Googled her. He’d had no idea she had hit it so big; there were pages and pages filled with her, scantily clad, or zoomed in to her perfect features. He clicked and scrolled for hours, reintroducing himself to her adult self. Her cheekbones had become more angular and her lips soft and pillowy. He remembered how she held her body erect, posture being of utmost importance above all, the slant of her tweezed eyebrows, her nervous habit of drumming her long fingers against her thighs.

  At breakfast each morning, where he disciplined himself to have two cups of black coffee, a banana and a small bowl of yogurt while on the campaign trail, his fellow staff members would eat warily, their faces down to their meals, but their eyes alert toward everything happening around them. Nico couldn’t help but smile into his coffee with each sip and think of all the goodness that Mari had brought him. He was sure she had no idea what that afternoon had meant to his life’s trajectory. Unknowingly, she had charged his confidence levels, increasing his ability to speak up for himself, and in turn, pushing him into the spotlight. Nico was no longer timid about what he wanted; he saw and went after it. And when he felt the slightest weakness or doubt, he would remember how strong he’d felt in those weeks after he’d returned from Tallinn, how capable and assured, helping him to ultimately retrain his eye on the prize.

  The days were getting longer and longer, each one feeling as though there were five or six of them packed into a single one. Nico wrote each speech as though he were delivering them. He sat in his hotel room, estranged and removed from the rest of the team, composing sentences and ideologies in his head before committing
them to paper. He imagined the roar of the crowd upon the oration of a paragraph, the tension and the voice mounting over and over again. The drama was what engaged him, the excitement of the enormous host of people looking over the room or the hall or the arena. Nico longed to be behind the podium for longer than just sound check. He wanted to feel the charge of it, but most of all, he wanted the people to know that they were his words. He’d thought that having his words aired and applauded might be enough, but instead, each speech made him increasingly bitter that someone else was passing off his own work. Watching the congresswoman deliver his work was proof that Nico could turn a phrase beautifully, that he was insightful and thoughtful. He knew he could bring a crowd to its feet, even if the intonation and the elocution weren’t his. His desire to conjure Mari each evening turned from a pure and simple need to a fulfillment of frustration. He knew he was getting complacent by imagining her each night, but by the sixth week on the trail, he had dug himself into a hole so deep, there was no getting out.

  The next morning’s speech was of the greatest magnitude; the teacher vote was the widest margin they had of that election year, and to be able to clinch them would mean a certain win for their team. The speech was to be given to a hall filled with educators, and the congresswoman was going to discuss her devotion and commitment to the future of education, to the sense of self that had been lost in the power of teaching young people recently. The idea was fueled by the one that all teachers should take a huge sense of pride in teaching because they were the ones that would be remembered above all else, above the lessons and the exams and the final papers. It would be their style, their voices, their presences that students would ultimately recall years later. Nico had written it as a lecture in a school hall, with audience participation, modeled after a TED talk, complete with slides and clicker that he would control as the congresswoman would stroll across the deep stage, offering Nico’s words, accepting Nico’s applause.