Immigrant City

by David Bezmozgis

  Ilya placed a hand on the obelisk, indicated the garage and said, “Well, here you have him.”

  Victor stepped past a door and looked into the garage. Looking back at him was a man in his sixties. He wore scuffed work pants, a sleeveless undershirt, and he had the hands and arms befitting a man who spent his days working with stone. He sat on a low stool with his legs splayed out before him. In one hand he held an abrasive cloth that he had been using to polish a granite tombstone propped up against a nearby wall. He blinked sullenly and looked very much like someone who hadn’t been happy to see anyone in years.

  “Shimon,” Ilya said, “I brought you your client.”

  Shimon blinked again and showed no indication that he had heard what Ilya said.

  Ilya gave the obelisk a firm shove, putting the weight in motion and eliciting squeals of protest from the winch.

  “Aren’t you even going to say thank you, you old goat?”

  “Go to the devil,” Shimon said, “and take him with you.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like that. He came all the way from America just to see you.”

  “All the worse for him.”

  Shimon glared from Victor to Ilya as though trying to determine which of them he despised more. For a moment Victor wondered if maybe the old man didn’t have him confused with someone else. He’d not yet said one word to the stonecutter—barely looked at him, done nothing more than show up—and yet the man seemed to loathe him in a personal way. Victor found it unsettling, like the opprobrium of a cripple or a religious person. However, it didn’t appear to bother Ilya, who responded to the stonecutter’s hatred with a patrician smugness.

  “Listen, if you don’t want the business, we’ll leave.”

  Shimon shrugged, hatred undiminished, but he was evidently not prepared to lose the business. Though, what business, Victor could not quite figure out. Seeing as how the money had been sent months ago and the work reportedly done.

  Shimon lifted his face to Victor.

  “Well, did you come from America to stand here like a mute? What is it you want from me?”

  It could only be, Victor thought, that the man had confused him with someone else. Either that or he suffered from a mental illness.

  “I spoke to you yesterday. We had an appointment for this morning. I waited for you for hours. We were supposed to discuss the gravestone for my grandfather’s grave. Work which I was told you had finished. Work for which you have already been paid. So, how exactly do you mean what do I want?”

  “Who told you it was finished?”

  “His father promised my father it would be finished. Money was wired. Are you saying it’s not finished?”

  “Ask your friend the parasite if it’s finished.”

  Shimon jerked his head toward Ilya, the parasite, who had allowed a shadow to fall over his smugness.

  “You see how he talks. You see what it’s like to deal with him. My father literally spent weeks trying to have a reasonable conversation with him. And though I saw the trouble he was having, my father refused to let me intervene. Now, you’ve seen the Latvian legal system. You have seen where I work. It’s nothing to be proud of. But, for what it’s worth, it gives me access to certain people. And, if absolutely necessary, I can complicate someone’s life.” Ilya frowned in the stonecutter’s direction. “Not that it’s something I enjoy. What’s to enjoy? Old men like him pass through the court every day. You’d have to be a sick person to enjoy making someone’s miserable life even more miserable. Right?”

  Ilya smiled philosophically at Victor, his eyes seeking confirmation, as though the question had not been rhetorical.

  Just to be clear, he repeated it. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “But what choice do I have with someone like him?”

  From the roof of his skull, Victor felt the spreading of a vaporous warmth. It filled him, like helium but not exactly, making him feel as though he were very light and very heavy all at once. It took him a second to identify this sensation as a powerful swell of fatigue. His legs felt like pillars, rooted into the ground, and yet he believed he might tip over.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a lumbering, slow-witted man. The man was Shimon’s son. He helped his father load and unload the heavy rocks. Victor turned to get a better look, but when he did he saw only Shimon sitting by himself in the garage. Victor turned back to Ilya.

  “What does any of this have to do with my grandfather’s gravestone?”

  Ilya wavered before him. For a second blurry and then immaculately sharp.

  “Let me explain it to you,” Ilya said. “Three weeks ago my father got on a bus to go and see this man. This man who could not be relied upon to keep an appointment or return a phone call. On a hot day, after working for eight hours, at five o’clock, when the buses are full, my father had to ride across town. Before he got here he had a heart attack. They had to stop the bus. We only received a phone call when he was already in the hospital. I, my daughter, my wife, none of us even had a chance to say goodbye. This is what it has to do with your grandfather’s gravestone. My father, who from the goodness of his heart agreed to help. My father, whom your father only pestered. Calling all the time. And then wanting to negotiate payment in installments. As if my father was a thief. And later sent him a contract.”

  Ilya spat the word contract out as if a more offensive word did not exist in the Russian language.

  “This is what it has to do with anything. That my father killed himself over this gravestone. This gravestone that nobody would ever even visit. And what did my father get in return? Never a thank you. Only a hundred lats for his trouble. A hundred lats that won’t even buy a stone a fifth as big for his memory. Now you tell me if that’s fair.”

  Through the murk of fatigue, Victor heard the things Ilya said, but his brain processed only the rudiments: my father, your father, my father, your father. If there was an argument here, Victor didn’t see how anyone could hope to win it. There was nothing to win. There was Sander, an old man suffering a heart attack on a cramped city bus: Ilya’s father, but an abstraction to Victor. And there was Leon, an abstraction to Ilya, but as real to Victor as if he were standing before him. There he was, stumbling around the apartment, feeling the walls. There he was, every morning, in his track suit, doing deep knee bends and other ludicrous Soviet calisthenics. There he was, injecting himself with insulin and fretting about one thing or another at the kitchen table. His father.

  “I thought I would give you a chance. If you would help,” Ilya said. “And even now, I give you a chance. You can buy yourself another gravestone. God knows you have the money. Give this old bastard the business he doesn’t deserve. And I’ll send you a photo to prove it gets done.”

  In a daze, Victor didn’t even quite remember refusing the arrangement. Because he was already picturing his cab ride and the blur of pine trees on the way to Jurmala. And he was already in his hotel room, lying in bed, asleep and having a dream in which Nathalie, the Irish bridesmaid, appeared to him either on the beach in Jurmala or on the beach in Los Angeles—maybe both—and in which she professed her undying love, had sex with him, became his wife and then—with the confounding logic of dreams—transformed into Salma, who, stranger still, did nothing to undermine the benign quality of the dream but rather, in some illicit way (like the wrongest dream involving a relative), only enhanced the sense of pleasure. And then he awoke and dialed and had a conversation with Leon. A conversation in which Leon asked him how everything went. If he met the stonecutter. If he saw the gravestone. If everything looked as it should. And he answered his father, saying yes about the stonecutter, yes about the gravestone. Yes about everything. He answered him and said that everything was perfect, just the way he imagined it.

  The Russian Riviera

  “SOME BUSINESSMEN” WAS HOW Skinny Zyama had described the two gangsters from New Jersey.

  “You want me there for a meeting with businessmen?” Kostya h
ad asked.

  “You have other plans on a Wednesday afternoon?”

  “No.”

  “Wear a jacket,” Zyama had said.

  Now, stationed as instructed beside Skinny Zyama’s mahogany desk, Kostya appraised the gangsters. Zyama had placed two leather armchairs in front of his desk, but only the smaller of the two had consented to sit. The larger one, the one doing all of the talking, had turned his chair sideways and perched himself on its arm. Instinctively, Kostya gauged both men’s weights. They were both wearing suits, but that made no difference. Kostya had proven many times that he could guess a man’s weight within one kilo even if he was dressed in heavy winter clothing. It was one of Kostya’s few demonstrable skills, which—like his other skills—had brought him little profit. In Siberia, his father would occasionally take him to the bar to amuse his friends and to wager a bottle of vodka with skeptical strangers.

  Conditioned by years at the gym, Kostya’s mind conjured a man’s weight and class, just as, seeing an apple, it conjured taste and smell. He’d barely considered the gangsters before his mind had announced: sixty-four kilos and eighty-five kilos—welterweight and cruiserweight. The larger gangster looked powerful through the back and shoulders, but he carried himself arrogantly, gestured excessively with his hands and punctuated his demands by thrusting out his chin. In contrast, the smaller one moved hardly at all. He kept his hands folded in his lap and followed the conversation with his eyes. His neck and his ankles were thin, and he was pale in the manner of someone who is either very sick or very spartan. Of the two, Kostya supposed the smaller man posed the greater danger, though, to be precise, the greatest danger was posed by neither of them. The greatest danger was posed by Skinny Zyama, who had assumed an obnoxious air of invulnerability.

  “These are competitive times. You could benefit from our help,” the larger gangster said.

  “The place is busy four nights a week. Impossible to get a table Friday or Saturday without a reservation. We have the best Vegas-style floor show in the city. Professional dancers trained in Russia. Where’s my competition?” Zyama asked.

  “There are other restaurants. They could become more successful.”

  “The other restaurants are run by imbeciles. Their customers are people who couldn’t get a table here.”

  “With the right guidance those restaurants could improve. With connections they could attract popular entertainers from New York and New Jersey.”

  “Listen, Alla Pugacheva and Arkady Raikin could perform every Saturday night for a month and those idiots would still find a way to lose money.”

  “There are also other possibilities. Something unfortunate could happen to your restaurant or to you.”

  Zyama, who had been reclining in his suede captain’s chair, tilted forward and made a production of looking the gangster in the eye. “You think you’re the first ones to come in here? Understand: I’m in business all these years not because I give money to every hoodlum with his hand out.”

  Kostya watched the larger gangster unbutton his jacket and slide his hand inside. Cursing Skinny Zyama, Kostya took a step in the gangster’s direction. If the man had a gun, there wasn’t much he could do about it, but he knew that if the gangster motioned toward his pocket, he was required to take a step forward. There was an understanding between everyone in the room that this was how it was supposed to be. The script had been written long ago and performed by other men in other rooms and in the movies.

  Seeing this, the gangster grinned. He proceeded to feel around inside his jacket and then he extended his hand. In place of a gun was a business card.

  “My gun, I keep down here,” he said, raising the cuff of his left trouser leg. Strapped above his ankle was a pistol in a black, padded holster. “You see, we are civilized businessmen. Before we reach for that, we reach for this.”

  He placed the card on Skinny’s desk.

  “We manage very respectable artists. We provide security. Many good Russian restaurants in New Jersey and Brooklyn are our customers. There is a phone number on the card. It is our mobile phone. Think about what we said and call. If we don’t hear from you, we’ll come Saturday night to see for ourselves how successful you are.”

  After the gangsters left, Skinny Zyama picked up the business card and flicked it into his wastebasket. He passed his hand along the surface of his desk and examined his fingertips for dust. “Small-timers. Nobodies. Who do they think they’re dealing with?”

  Kostya waited for a few moments to see if he would say anything else. Zyama rapped his knuckles on the edge of the desk. He spun the knob of his Rolodex. He reached into a drawer for a pack of cigarettes.

  “Is that it?” Kostya asked.

  “That one sits staring like a mummy. The other one with the gun on his leg. Think they can intimidate me in my own place. I shit on them from a tall bridge,” Zyama said.

  That was Zyama’s final word. He was Zyama Karp, no longer the grubby proprietor of the Pushkin Deli but the impresario of The Russian Riviera Restaurant. He was a man with influence. Not someone to be pushed around. And, after all, he also had Kostya, a Siberian boxing champion.

  “If they come back on Saturday, you take care of them,” Zyama said.

  * * *

  From The Russian Riviera, Kostya drove to the Prima Donna Ballet Academy to return a blouse that Ivetta had forgotten at his apartment. Ivetta frequently forgot things at his apartment only to discover that the thing she had forgotten was exactly the thing she could not live without. Kostya no longer resisted this; he had learned that it was best to simply return the item—a blouse, a pair of earrings, a lipstick—as soon as possible. He had also learned that once Ivetta resumed possession of these things, her need for them diminished.

  Ivetta was waiting for him at the entrance to the ballet school. She took a moment to confirm that he had brought the blouse and lifted herself into the van.

  “I have five minutes,” she said. “We should drive around the block.”

  As Kostya eased the van onto the street, Ivetta turned to look up at her mother’s office, on the second floor of the ballet academy.

  “I think I see her standing there,” Ivetta said.

  Kostya interpreted this as a signal to drive faster, but when he accelerated Ivetta told him to slow down. If her mother was watching, Ivetta didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of behaving furtively. Kostya didn’t completely understand the rules that governed Ivetta’s attitude toward her mother, but he knew that Luda Sorkina disapproved of him. Luda was a former ballerina. She was a cultured person. She was also a successful businesswoman. She had schooled her daughter in the fine arts, she had given her a university education, and she was grooming her to eventually take over the business. That such a woman would want more for her daughter than a failed boxer, a doorman and an illegal immigrant seemed to him perfectly reasonable. In fact, he could understand Luda’s logic much better than Ivetta’s. Why Ivetta should not want to be with him made much more sense than why she should. When Kostya had told her as much recently, she had led him from the bed to their reflection in his mirrored closet door.

  “We are beautiful together,” she said.

  Kostya supposed they looked good. He still went to the gym five days a week and was conscious of his physique. And Ivetta had the long, slender muscles of a trained dancer. At the restaurant and on the street, Kostya was aware that men looked at her.

  She was attractive in the usual ways, but Kostya’s eyes were always drawn to the intricate places where different parts of her joined: her shoulders, her collarbone, the backs of her knees, her ankles, her hands.

  “You could be beautiful together with someone else,” Kostya told her.

  “Then you don’t see what I see,” Ivetta said glumly, then moved away from him and hunched on the edge of the bed.

  That he didn’t see what Ivetta saw had been precisely the origin of the conversation, and so her answer did nothing to clarify things. Standing naked by the mi
rror, Ivetta’s glum reflection over his shoulder, Kostya considered pointing this out but knew that if he did it would only further irritate her.

  “You are honest and good,” Ivetta had finally declared from her desolation at the edge of the bed.

  And now, because he was honest and good, Ivetta wanted to protect him from Luda’s sneering condescension. For this reason Ivetta had asked that he find someone else to work his shift on Saturday night, when her mother was going to make a rare appearance at The Russian Riviera.

  “But I am a doorman,” Kostya said. “What do I care how she looks at me?”

  “I care,” Ivetta said.

  Most of her family would be there Saturday night, and she did not want to introduce him to them under those circumstances. If they were to meet him, then it would be done across a table, properly and with respect. Not with her family celebrating her grandfather’s birthday while Kostya was relegated to the door or the bar: separate, an employee.

  “Did you ask Ruslan?” Ivetta said.

  “I will see him today at the gym.”

  Up until that afternoon, Kostya had been prepared to do just that, but now he couldn’t imagine how it was possible. Ruslan was barely twenty and more eager to use his fists than his brains. Once or twice, when it had been absolutely unavoidable, Ruslan had substituted for Kostya at The Russian Riviera. On those occasions, Skinny Zyama had granted his permission, but he’d done so grudgingly. Zyama had expended considerable energy publicizing the fact that he had a Siberian boxing champion working his door—he’d oppose a change at the door even on a night without gangsters. And even if Zyama could be persuaded, Kostya’s conscience would not allow it. Which meant that, as alternatives went, Kostya had two: he could work or he could quit. And, seeing as how he had no status, he preferred to risk the possibility of gangsters against the certainty of unemployment.

  To Ivetta, of course, he could confess none of this. Her reaction would be predictable and extreme. She would go to Zyama or to the police. Both of which would mean the end of his job. Also, she would likely regard the situation as further evidence of their need to run off together and start a new life in another city, far away from her mother. She had urged him to do this before, to leave his demeaning job at The Russian Riviera, to escape somewhere, get married, go to school, start a business, buy a house, have children, live happily. The idea was tempting; Kostya had no attachment to the city or to The Russian Riviera, but, at thirty-four, he was also no longer a boy. If he quit his job, escaped with Ivetta and she grew tired of him—a man without an education, with few talents, deficient in English—he was afraid that he would find himself back at zero. He would lose even the few things he had managed to accomplish.