The Patriots

by Sana Krasikov

  I’m the first to arrive at the restaurant, a cheerily domestic, half-empty Armenian joint. A furry-browed waiter leads me in and hands me, inexplicably, a second menu in English.

  Lenny arrives, looking freshly shaved and ten pounds heavier than I remember. I point to the English menu. “What gave me away? I don’t look or sound any more foreign than the maître d’.”

  “Look around you,” says Lenny. “Who else asks to be seated in the nonsmoking section?”

  He’s right! We’re the only ones in our dungeony corner of the dining room. Which is probably for the best: At the other end of the hall is a noisy party of six trunk-necked gentlemen, their banquet table looking like it’s about to snap under the weight of a forest of bottles. Across the room I can hear one of them pursuing some pointless slurring story about a time he boxed a kangaroo.

  “You look good,” I tell my son, not entirely truthfully.

  “I’m trying to stay fit,” he says, to my surprise.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Been playing a little tennis.”

  I take his word for it, though he looks more like a tennis ball than a tennis pro. Also, he’s let his hair get too long at the neck, combing it back like a pimp’s. A shame. Lenny is a good-looking guy when he takes care of himself. “So what’s your plan for the week?” he says.

  I tell him: I’m here just until Monday, together with my boss, Tom, who’s arriving tomorrow. We’re reviewing bids for shipping contractors. “We’re looking for a charter company to pilot some shuttle tankers from the Nanatz coast to a terminal near Murmansk.” I’m surprised Lenny doesn’t remember. “It’s the joint venture I was telling you about, with L____ Petroleum.”

  He cocks his eyebrow. “L-Pet? You’re in business with them? Those guys are the Kremlin’s lapdog. They’re practically a branch of the FSB.”

  “We don’t get involved in their politics. This should be pretty straightforward.”

  Then, just to remind me how much better he knows this place than I do, he says, “Nothing here is straightforward.”

  There’s a vitreous crash at the other end of the dining room. “Now look what you’ve done, Sava,” says one of the bald gentlemen, a gorilla in a lavender shirt. The waiter is called in to clean up while poor Sava tries to finish his kangaroo story. He doesn’t have a chance. The lavender-clad gospodin announces he’s tired of the whole circus and tells the others to “clean him up.”

  “How is Katya?” I ask while Sava is dragged out of the room between sets of oak-sized arms.

  Lenny makes a sucking breath. “It’s over. More or less.”

  I try to do a good impression of looking upset by his news. Katya is a perfectly nice girl. I’ve even gotten used to the little baptismal cross she is never without, and her affection for interpreting dreams and reading the future in the dregs of her Turkish coffee. Ever since he’s moved to Moscow, I’ve given up on a woman of character for Lenny. But is it too much to ask for someone whose perspective on twentieth-century history is not that “the monstrosity of Soviet communism was a curse delivered on the Russian people for the crime of slaying their tsar”? Yes, my son is dating a monarchist.

  “So which is it?” I say. “More, or less? Has she moved out?”

  “No, but we’ve agreed to see other people.”

  “Now, how does that work? Does one of you take the couch while the other has a date?”

  He looks more upset by this joke than I think is called for. “She’ll move out as soon as I can help her get her own place.”

  “Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,” I say encouragingly. “It’s a big city. Plenty of apartments.”

  “You kidding? The rents here are worse than in New York.”

  I study his face for a moment. “Lenny, you haven’t told her that you’ll be paying her rent. Right?”

  He recites once more the story of how Katya “abandoned” her family and job in St. Petersburg to move to Moscow for him. She can’t afford to live on her own and can’t go back to Peter because her mother’s lover has recently moved into the family apartment. “Everything’s become very complicated.”

  “Complicated for her, not for you.”

  “You don’t understand how it’s done.”

  “Is there a protocol?” I inquire. “I mean, for paying the rent of a woman you don’t want to live with anymore? Are you a don who needs a goomah to shtup once a week? Even that I might understand. At least it’s logical. But what I’m hearing is you don’t want this person at all.”

  “Drop it, Pa,” he says. Only he doesn’t. Instead, he starts enumerating Katya’s myriad virtues—her kindness and gentleness and dedication to him. I dare not ask why anyone would want to leave such a saint. “You and I are different people,” he tells me stoically.

  I grin and bear this. “All right, Lenny,” I say, “but even decency has to be matched by means. Where are you going to get the funds to pay this alimony? Are you working right now?”

  The color leaves his face. He rakes his bitten fingers through his hair. “I knew it. Nobody in this family can keep their goddamn mouth shut.”

  “So your sister told us. So what? If you’re in trouble, we want to help.”

  “Did she tell you how Austin and the rest of my friends sold me down the river?”

  “At least now you know who your friends are. Druzhba druzhboi a tabachok vroz’.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not crying over it. I’ve already got some opportunities lined up.”

  I bite my lip. “Maybe you shouldn’t be rushing into something so soon. Take some time. Think about all your options.”

  He doesn’t answer right away. “What do you suggest?” he says at last in a tone mistakable for either despair or sarcasm.

  I seize my opportunity and remove the two GMAT tomes from my briefcase. Lenny winces as if he’s just watched me drop soiled underpants on the table. “Let me guess whose idea this was.”

  I smile. “I’ve got another two in my hotel room.”

  “Is this supposed to be some kind of bait?”

  “It’s a serious offer, Lenny. You come back home. Live with us for a few months, or as long as you want. Study. Once you get into business school, we can help pay for the first year.”

  “And Mama can bring cucumber-and-bologna sandwiches up to my room, right? I’m thirty-four, for chrissake, not sixteen.”

  Before I can bite my tongue, I say, “And what’s your plan? To stay here and compete with the homegrown phys-mat geniuses?”

  The hurt on his face is more immense than I expected.

  “You and Ma still think a framed degree is the answer to everything. It’s your fucking immigrant delusion.”

  “Come on, Lenny.” I try to smile.

  “And anyway, I’m too old to go back to school.”

  I see a chance to redeem myself. “You’re not too old. I was two years older than you when I left this country and started over.” But I can already hear my wife’s admonishments about talking about myself. According to her, all my advice to Lenny boils down to “how you’re a something and he’s a nothing.” I suspect some of this is the influence of our daughter, Masha, a champion of Freudian analysis, who likes to say that my upbringing by a single, psychologically “damaged” mother has made me “second-generation dysfunctional.”

  “Look,” I say, “you’ve been here—what—nine years? I happen to know that every seven years a man is released from all his obligations. He can wipe his hands, walk away, start clean. Take a look in the Torah if you don’t believe me. It’s called the Sabbatical Year.”

  He stares at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Since when have you been cracking the Torah?”

  I smile. “You don’t have to decide right now. Just—consider it.” I get up, beckoned by the men’s room, and leave Lenny to do just that.

  When I get to the toilets, I find my entry blocked by a tiny babushka with a short-handled broom. I step right. So does she. I make a move to the left, but she’s one step ahea
d of me, serenely determined not to let me pass. She flashes me an apologetic gold-toothed grin and points to the women’s room. I decide I’d rather hold it in. I turn around and rejoin Lenny at the table.

  We eat in silence for a while, the GMAT books between us like the Berlin Wall. Finally, he says, “What the hell is going on over there?” I look up. One of the stooges who’d dragged Sava to the men’s room is back. His hand seems to be bleeding. He plucks a cloth napkin from the table, wraps it tourniquet-style around his meaty palm, and upends half a bottle of vodka on the wound. Then, like nothing, he sits back down with the others and resumes drinking. The gentleman in lavender tosses some bills into the general chaos of the table and within a minute the rest of them take their cue and are heading for the door. I figure it’s as good a time as any to revisit the little boy’s room. To my relief, the babushka isn’t standing guard anymore. But when I swing open the door she’s right there, perched on a footstool and sponging the mirrors above the sinks. A clean arc of crimson spatter covers both of our reflections. I shut myself in the stall. From the neighboring stall issue retching sounds, punctuated by almost prim gasps of strangled respiration. As I leave I give a captain’s salute to the babushka sponging blood off the tiles.

  “All right, I’ll take the books,” he says when I come back. “If you promise to stop bugging me about coming home.”

  “I have my orders, Lenny.”

  He slides them back to me.

  “Please, just keep them. I can’t take them back to your mother.”

  He shakes his head. And then, as if on cue, drunken Sava is back. From the men’s room he weaves his way between the empty tables like a passenger swaying in the aisle of a train. His misbuttoned shirt is covered with unspeakable stains. A cloud of panicked disappointment steals over his face as he realizes his friends have all left him. Lenny and I trade glances as bruised, bloodied Sava staggers out through the glass doors, then pauses to look left and right, searching in vain for his friends and tormentors.

  A grin opens up in Lenny’s face. “Velkom home, Dad!” he says, opening his arms ceremoniously. “Velkom home.”

  My wife might be right when she says, in her moments of ire, that I make so many missteps in communicating with our grown son because I had no father to walk me through to manhood. But what she scornfully calls my “hands-off approach” isn’t a consequence of ignorance, as she believes, but of too much knowledge. What lessons there were to be fished from the black hole between my abruptly aborted childhood and my premature young adulthood were not the sorts of things I was eager to pass on to my own children. The little I learned that was worthwhile…well, I can’t say for certain it has any value in the world we all live in so innocently and publicly now.

  Whenever I tell anyone that I spent ages six to thirteen inside of public orphanages, they tend to arrange their face in a reaction I call the Purple Heart Ceremony. It’s as if they’ve discovered that my legs are actually prosthetics. They want to see the stumps but are careful to maintain eye contact. Their voices grow pious with sympathy.

  It’s to avoid all this that I usually don’t talk about those years. Once the fact is laid out, everything I say or don’t say about it grows heavy with heroic implication. And, in the end, the sound of my own voice irritates me even more than the delicate inquisitiveness of others. Mostly, though, I just don’t want to go through all the trouble of correcting their Dickensian notions of orphanhood. The persistent hunger, the heartless punishments—all those were part of my story, but they weren’t the only part. By grace or luck, I wound up in a home where we children were treated with civility, even affection.

  I was lucky for another reason: my tenure as an orphan happened to coincide with the period after the war, when the national sentiment was swinging in our favor. No longer were we the seeds of kulaks, criminals, and counterrevolutionaries. Our vagrancy, no more the mark of criminality, was a badge of patriotic sacrifice. All over the country, children’s homes were swelling with the war’s little victims, and it was among the dead heroes’ offspring that we—the littlest enemies—sought camouflage. Perhaps that’s how it started for me, my earliest lesson in keeping secrets.

  The postwar years were a time of rations and shortages, and yet the variety of food at the Memory of Krupskaya Children’s Home was remarkable: wheat bread, oatmeal, buckwheat, barley, honey, conserves, eggs, Dutch cheese, cottage cheese with raisins, compote, peas, cucumbers, cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, and on occasion even kielbasa and watermelon. How did we manage it? We had sponsors—the orphanage was patronized by the local kolkhoz as well as the trade union of a local factory. But the real secret was our director, Mark Pavlovich Guchkov, who was uncommonly deft at courting patronage of this sort.

  I picture him clearly, a week into my arrival at the Krupskaya Home. He stands before us in the assembly room, a kind of gymnasium with an old upright piano at one end of a small stage. He is young, no more than thirty-five or thirty-six, and already balding. His wispy brown hair is combed back from a tall forehead. He wears a pulpy brown suit that smells strongly of tobacco. The sleeve of his missing arm is not pinned up to his shoulder, as I’ve seen other war invalids do; it hangs down loosely, tucked into a pocket of his jacket. In his able-armed hand he holds up something small and white. “This is the kind of soap French women use,” he informs us, lifting it up higher so that all us children can see. “French women are ladies, with a high level of culture, measured by how they treat their things. They don’t let their soap sit in puddles of water. When they are done using it, they clean it off and leave it like this—completely dry.”

  I am there in that room, sitting in a row of other seven- and eight-year-olds, our heads cocked back, our mouths hanging open. All the boys have the same haircut: cropped close to the scalp to discourage lice, short fringes of bangs falling across our foreheads.

  Mark Pavlovich paces between the piano and the flagpole. Above him hangs a portrait of our Illustrious Leader and Teacher, the Gardener of Human Happiness, the one to whom we owe thanks for our happy childhoods. The room is filled with light—the bottom halves of the windows are not painted over, as they were in my last orphanage, to prevent us from looking out or others from looking in. The hall is filled with a fine bitter scent of September leaves, as if somewhere a door has been left open. None of this seems quite real to me yet. It all feels like part of a dream I recognize from some already fading, pre-institutional life. Guchkov speaks and the children repeat after him: “Because we are fortunate to receive it…and because we are not pigs, we will care for our soap like civilized people and not let it get covered with scum.” I mouth the words, entranced by the soap’s whiteness, so pure it too can almost be smelled at a distance.

  —

  AT THE FORMER CHILDREN’S HOME at which I’d been warehoused, we’d been scrubbed down with coarse ammoniac laundry soap that left our skin chafed and itching. Like a chain gang we were overseen by bullishly built wardens who didn’t fail to conceal their scorn. “Congratulations! So they’ve brought us another shipment of the little enemy bastards.” “These parasites suck our blood while we break our backs over their ilk.” In their own crude way, our minders were only repeating Marx’s Theory of Surplus Labor: they worked all day—changing, feeding, bathing us—while we produced nothing. The taunting from other children started soon thereafter.

  “How did your papa die?”

  “He was shot in the war.”

  “No, he wasn’t. He was shot like an enemy dog.”

  Nothing could be hidden from them. They’d been told and knew everything—that my father had never served in the war, and that my mama had been sent off to do penance for her treason with hard labor.

  I hadn’t quite completed the first grade when all this happened to me. From my first day I had loved school; I yielded easily to the classroom’s discipline, to the elevated diction of my teacher, Lydia Varlamovna, to the clearly laid-out path to achievement and reward. I craved distinction but instinc
tively understood the collective ethos, that I could not seek it out for myself—that its bestowing was the teacher’s privilege. I raised my hand often, but not excessively. I was helpful to the slower kids. I was on my way to becoming a master at pleasing grown-ups.

  None of this education served me in that first children’s home. In my first week I lent my one pair of extra underpants to a boy who’d soiled himself. The act was discovered and both the other boy and I were punished by being made to kneel on cracked dried peas. This turned out to be one of the less bizarre and more tepid punishments I would receive in the next six months.

  If I was given any academic instruction during this period, I don’t remember it. I remember only the physical-education component: military drills that both boys and girls had to perform together, without wearing our tops, even though a few of the girls were already beginning to develop breasts.

  We were hit for anything—for throwing up the rotten food we were fed, for whistling indoors, for forgetting ourselves and sucking our thumbs—for displaying any childlike frailty or need. Before my mother was arrested she’d promised to buy me new shoes; I’d started outgrowing my last pair of leather loafers. Nobody noticed this, of course, and during the shuffle when my old things were taken away and the new things handed out, I’d been too petrified to speak up. But within a week of my arrival, my feet were sore and blistering. The big toe on my right foot was developing an ingrown nail that caused me to squeeze my eyes shut against the pain of each step I took. Favoring my left foot, I developed a slight limp, of which I hoped the grown-ups around me might take sympathetic notice. Finally one of them did. She was one of the younger child minders, a skinny girl with limpid blue eyes and acne scars. She might have been raised in the orphanage herself—a “graduate.” If this was the case, her experience did not soften her toward us.