Something Unbelievable

by Maria Kuznetsova

  Uncle Pasha, now a crooked-nosed bachelor, completed his studies in Kharkov and worked for the Engineering Institute there, showing no interest in returning to live in Kiev, so he was rarely subjected to seeing his mother and sister, though he did love horsing around with me and Polya during his visits to our home. My family also tried to avoid my grandmother, but on special occasions my sister and I were shoehorned into our only starched dresses and shuttled to the Dimitrev half-home, which was twenty times the size of our communalka, plush with velvet divans and gold-tasseled curtains and vodka gleaming in crystal tumblers and excessive Frenchy foods I pretended not to prefer over the kasha and herring of home. My parents weathered these events with resignation, like patients enduring a rectal exam, and I followed suit. Of all of us, Papa suffered the most. He tolerated his mother, sister, and sister’s husband well enough, but he could hardly stand to look at his stepfather, Dimitrev senior, the man who had sent him away to the orphanage. He never forgave him for a second.

  Dimitrev senior was a tall, red-faced man who had gray hair and a silver mustache though he was not very old, perhaps not yet forty, a decade younger than my grandmother, at least. He would twist the handles of his mustache around his index finger, and the more he twisted them, the longer they grew. He had a menacing twinkle in his eye that suggested he was always internally laughing at a private joke told to him by the vodka tumbler in his hand. Talk about a strong alcoholic—perhaps his proclivity was the very reason Papa and his brother were never aficionados for drink like most of their compatriots. After several generous sips of this elixir, he would pinch my father by the ear, and poor Papa would bear it, but other than that, he left him alone. He was too busy fussing over my grandmother. How he loved to tease the old woman! She spent most of our visits splayed out on the divan with the back of her hand to her forehead like some long-suffering beauty—and she might have been a beauty once, but the dead husband and endless soufflés had made her into a stout, large-nosed, dark-haired matron.

  “I am exhausted!” she would declare, sighing loudly.

  “My darling,” her husband would say, indicating the cooks and maids milling about. “How could you possibly be exhausted? I cannot remember the last time you lifted a finger.”

  “Exactly!” she’d fire back. “Do you know how tiring it is, giving commands all day?”

  My parents and I tried not to laugh at this ridiculous woman. Giving commands! What I would have given to, just once, have someone iron a shirt or do a dish or brush a hair on my head for me, instead of having to be tough like my father wanted me and my sister to be. But anyone could see that his communalka convictions had no effect on my sister. Dear spoiled Polya found nothing humorous in the exchange about our grandmother and her supposed exhaustion. In fact, she took the woman quite seriously. My sister lived for these visits to my grandmother’s home.

  Darling Polya possessed the vapid beauty of a lobotomized swan. Her wild red hair coiffed about her head like the petals of a delicate flower. Her blue eyes, two shining jewels set in the center of her round, startled face, as pale as a porcelain toilet! Her lips, as lush as the banks of the Dnieper in spring. And her figure, as developed and buxom as a sixteen-year-old woman’s by her eleventh birthday. How I loathed her. Well! Like attracts like, so Babushka Tonya and Aunt Shura lavished their love on my sister, donning her with delicate garments and ivory hair clips and powdering her face until she resembled a china doll, and even, on occasion, taking her shopping.

  Dimitrev senior loved flirting with my baby sister, twirling her around and inviting her to sit on his lap, though she was far too old for it. The only time I saw my parents hold hands was when Dimitrev senior planted Polya on his lap and laughed, vodka sloshing in his mustache, because Mama was telling Papa to steel himself, that making the man back off would create more trouble than it was worth. Thankfully I was spared any affection from this mustachioed man. Men had a long history of preferring my sister over me. Was I jealous at eight, nine, ten years old, angry that I was a stern, reptilian version of my sister? No, no, not at all—my stark appearance forced me to have my wits about me. Why do you think I outlived my sister by more than half a century—and counting? But I am getting ahead of myself.

  During our visits, my grandmother and aunt even allowed my sister to wear a ruby necklace that belonged to my grandmother’s own grandmother, supposedly given to her by the Empress Maria herself. The rubies were shaped like enormous teardrops and were punctuated by diamonds. The necklace was such a beautiful thing that even I was not immune to it, though my pride kept me from wearing it the one time my grandmother offered it to me, which was perhaps when the gulf between her and me widened and was never again bridged.

  But I could not stop staring at the beguiling and borsch-colored string of rubies around my sister’s long neck, over the years. Just once, I touched the necklace, and my grandmother slapped my hand away.

  “Why, Larissa,” she said. “I did not think you cared for nice things.”

  “I don’t,” I said.

  “Whatever you say, dear sister,” Polina said with a sly smile that made me want to throttle her. I watched my smirking sister fluttering around with the necklace on and vowed to avenge this injustice one day. I can still feel my hand smarting from the assault.

  Once my sister was adorned with the jewels, my grandmother would put on the gramophone and pull out her second most coveted item—a white boa long enough to wrap around a New Year’s tree. She would take the feathery, wild thing and drape it around Aunt Shura and Polya and herself, and the three women would begin cavorting and writhing under the feathery monstrosity like dirty boudoir girls. The women laughed, the women shrieked, they would cry out and shimmy their fingers and kick up their feet in a primitive imitation of a can-can, it was something awful. Just once, Aunt Shura asked if Mama and I would like to join and Mama lifted her hand and shook her head. “Not for us, thank you,” she said, and that was that.

  During these unseemly cabarets, Dimitrev junior and my parents sullenly sipped their tea while Dimitrev senior sucked down his vodka and stared lustily at my sister and grandmother while I sat with crossed arms on the divan and counted down the minutes until the car would take us home. The worst part of it was the smug look on my sister’s face, like she belonged among those rich witches because they made her dance like a monkey and bought her dresses a few times a year. Only when I saw her with them, getting ideas about herself, did I see that Papa had a point about making us suffer in the communalka, a place designed to remind you of your place in the universe.

  The dreaded boudoir boa dances stopped my twelfth year. Life is strife, as they say—in the span of two years, all the inhabitants of the shiny apartment were dead except my dear grandmother. The brothers were purged, or perhaps one was purged and the other died in a sledding accident, who can remember? As for Aunt Shura, it was cancer that did her in, or perhaps it was gangrene of the foot. What difference did it make? Dead was dead, and the living were left to figure out the rest. Aunt Shura was the last to go, and my grandmother could not do so much as pour a cup of tea on her own, so my sister and Mama and I folded her clothes and stuffed what we could into three velvet suitcases that Papa hauled out of her palatial apartment. She arrived in the winter of 1940, which then seemed to be a time of extreme privation because Papa had to sneak home a bag of clementines from the Industrial Engineering Institute’s New Year’s party so we could have a small celebration of our own.

  My grandmother drifted into our communalka with dead eyes that were not offset by the ruby necklace and boa she insisted on wearing from that moment on—needless to say, she was already a bit cuckoo at that point—and I did not know how she would survive without her former splendor. My family shared one large room of a three-family communalka; ours was the most desirable because it had a balcony. Our apartment also contained three lovely items: two ivory cabinets with engravings of dancing elep
hants that the Dimitrev brothers gave my parents as a wedding gift, and a pink divan of unknown origin. Mama and Papa slept on a cot they folded out at night and Polya and I rested on two tiny mattresses behind a seamstress’s curtain Mama had fashioned to give us some privacy. Now Polya and I would have to share one tiny mattress and Baba would dominate the other. When Mama showed my grandmother her new sleeping arrangement, she looked like she had been backed up against a fence and shot.

  However, my grandmother’s arrival soon became a matter of secondary concern. By spring, I could feel the tension rising in our communalka and our streets. By eavesdropping on my parents and the occasional neighbor, I was gaining troubling intelligence: Hitler could be invading the Soviet Union, and Kiev, any day now. In June, Molotov’s voice shook over the radio when he confirmed it: the Germans had bombed us, and we were going to war.

  The next month, Uncle Pasha and his colleagues from the Kharkov factory evacuated to Shalya, a town to the west of the Ural Mountains, halfway to Siberia. In August, Uncle Konstantin called in the middle of the night to tell us to pack up our things to prepare to head into the vast nothingness, just as my uncle did. From now on, my father and the engineers who had erected practical structures like bridges and university buildings would have to put their minds to the nasty business of war, constructing tanks and other weapons. The next morning, the workers of the Industrial Engineering Institute and their families would evacuate to the remote town of Lower Turinsk, where we would stay until it was safe to go home.

  * * *

  —

  “And so the war begins at last,” says Stas from somewhere in the distance, approaching the screen, his face shiny with sweat from the outdoors. When did the homeless boy even return to the apartment? “With all due respect, Larissa Fyodorovna, I thought you’d never get there,” the impudent creature adds.

  “Every word I have said is necessary. And with all due respect to you, I did not invite you to listen to begin with.”

  “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Then my story must not be so dull after all.”

  He shrugs with a smile, tucking a greasy strand of hair behind his ear, rascal that he is. Natasha smacks the boy across the chest. “Don’t be rude.”

  He shakes his head and picks up Sharik, and mercifully disappears from view. This impudent long-haired homosexual—if only he could go back to where he came from and leave Natasha alone.

  My sun has gone down hours ago, but Natasha is a radiant wonder on the screen, having perked up from my opening salvo. Her unsightly daughter rudely slept through the entirety of my tale, and is only now waking up, grumbling and flailing her crooked limbs.

  “And what happened on the train?” Natasha says. “I remember there was a little girl who died.”

  “This has been more than enough for one day,” I say.

  She nods and moves her silly tot closer to the screen, as if her blighted face would compel me to keep talking. “Isn’t she a beauty?”

  The nearly bald, snot-covered girl scrunches up her face, preparing to unleash a torrent of cries. I scowl at the girl, yet her mother has the nerve to ask again if she is a beauty and then shoves her nipple into the girl’s mouth.

  “Her nature must make up for her looks,” I assure Natasha, and she shakes her head.

  “She’s your blood, Baba.”

  “Of course she is mine. You think I myself am some great beauty? Even in my heyday, I did not look much better than this rodent-child, though I made up for it in charm—and you should have seen your father. As hideous as the day was long! His rear was far superior to his face for quite a while. Until he was a university student, at least. But you, on the other hand—a beauty from the moment you were born.”

  How can I explain it? When I first held her tiny form, I knew Natasha was the child I was waiting for. After her father lowered her in my arms, she spit up all over my new blouse and broke into a devilish smile and I thought, Thank heavens, the girl has spirit! Her father was mild, considerate, and melancholy almost from birth—how he bored me! When Valentina forced the family to America—claiming she was discriminated against as a Jew, and perhaps she was, but was it worth the turmoil?—my heart crumpled, I couldn’t bear Natasha’s absence. I had to resign myself to a yearly visit to America and having the girl visit me at my seaside cottage for a few weeks every summer, I had to pour all of my happiness into those days like it was the fine Georgian wine Volodya Shoshenko, a charming Gogol scholar with a beguiling goatee, had once gently guided into my patiently waiting lips one evening on the patio of the cottage in question while Natasha was resting.

  Though I look forward to returning to my seaside home for good in a few weeks, I would give anything to be walking along that shore with Natasha again, as she danced by the water and recited Shakespeare. “ ‘O, wonder!’ ” the girl had cried as we maneuvered around the sunburned seaside flesh to stake out our own sandy territory. “ ‘How many goodly creatures there are here! How beauteous mankind is!’ ” Even as she grew up, I could not help but see her as the sharp, curious creature in my arms.

  “If only you could have seen yourself,” I tell her. “Your eyes were as big as moons. It was something unbelievable.”

  “They still are,” Yuri interjects, giving me a wave and a wide grin.

  Had he been there the whole time too? No, no, he has just walked in the door, it seems. He is a competent, handsome man with thick hair and a solid nose, a substantial patriarch compared to his wimpy friend. I love him as my own. He was the only man able to calm down my granddaughter during her wildest, darkest years, pacifying the frenetic girl at long last, and I will always treasure him for it.

  “You’re looking lovely, Larissa Fyodorovna,” he tells me.

  “Stop it, you rogue,” I say, waving him away.

  “I can’t help myself. How are you?”

  “Awaiting the grave with open arms, my boy.”

  “A lucky grave it will be, to have you all to itself.”

  “You butter me up, silly man,” I tell him, and he chuckles until Natasha pops the child off her breast and tells him to knock it off.

  “How’s the packing?” he asks.

  “You know how it is. Either I will finish it, or it will finish me.”

  “Enough of that,” Natasha says, burping her little nothing. “I’ll call you in a few days, Baba. You must be tired.”

  “Remember what I said. A few hours alone in the crib will only make her stronger—and you as well,” I tell her.

  “How could I forget?” she says, mustering a laugh as she hangs up.

  I feel uneasy after I say goodbye to the girl. Of course, delving into the war doesn’t do my spirit any favors, but my main concern lies in the present: how far gone is Natasha? Is she simply feeling the eternal mother blues, or is it something more? She does not look like a complete wreck like I was when my son was born, when I was hardly capable of changing the child without weeping, though then again our worthless cloth diapers were enough to undo the strongest of women. No, no, Natasha is faring far better than I did, or at least, not worse. I prepare for sleep, telling myself I have nothing to worry about.

  Natasha

  “You think you can afford me, Mr. Robertson? It is impossible. You can have me, for a price, but you can never truly afford me, you understand? Natasha—she is priceless,” I say in my best Russian accent. I give one little swivel of my hips and add, “Thank you.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Sterling,” the casting director says, nodding to say there’s nothing else he wants from me. He and his crew shuffle papers at their desk and whisper to one another, not giving me another look. I usually know at least someone in casting, but this time, they’re all strangers, which doesn’t help my case. I leave the cramped room with my back straight and head high, as if my heels aren’t killing my still-swollen feet, like I have places to be a
nd don’t care if I book the fucking gig or not, as if I can’t tell they were completely unimpressed.

  I walk down the too-bright hallway into a too-dark room filled with other hopeful would-be prostitutes-and-secret-spies who look like me, with long wavy hair and pale skin, five foot nine and one hundred and ten pounds—or that was my pre-pregnancy fighting weight anyway. Though the character in question is supposed to be in her thirties, they all look like twentysomethings trying to look older, brushing their hair and chatting nervously in a sea of hairspray and perfume.

  And these bitches have a right to be nervous, because this isn’t just another audition for one of the thousands of Russian prostitute parts all over the city but one for Pen & Sword, a real NBC political prime-time show people like my bland mother-in-law actually watch, a role as a series regular who wins the heart of Mr. Robertson, aka Greg Spade, played by Mark Sims, my childhood TV crush, and in fact, one of the first men I ever masturbated to at the probably-too-young-and-the-cause-of-so-many-of-my-man-problems delicate age of ten.