Something Unbelievable

by Maria Kuznetsova

  So far, she is still smiling, glowing from her success. And then Stas emerges from backstage, where he has been helping out, and is clapping for her, wildly. And once more, I am hit with another surprise. When the two of them look at each other, I feel as if I have been slammed over the head with a pot of Stroganoff. How did I not see it all along? Her gleaming eyes and enhanced makeup, his wild, desperately not-homosexual visage—how did I not see that these two were as entangled as me and Ivan Dolgorukov, a bureaucrat who visited me on the sea from time to time, always leaving me with another shiny bauble to remember him by, even if it would be indiscreet to wear it?

  First, the fact of her putting on a play based on my story—and now this. Too much for this old woman to bear.

  My cheeks burn with shame. Of course I have missed this, along with so many other things that were right in front of my nose. The fact that Licky was being fattened up for the slaughter for all those months. Bogdan’s nighttime affairs. And perhaps that I had once been the true object of his affections, though he told me so plainly. And what else? That my sister had needed me, and I had failed her. But what can I do about any of that now?

  I glance at Yuri, who continues to clap with an unreadable look. Is he excited for Natasha? Disappointed about the crowd? Or is his soul crushed by a much larger disappointment?

  Natasha grabs the microphone and I panic, thinking what, are they going to announce their mad love? But of course not, she thanks the audience and her husband for their support, introduces Stas and so on, though what happens next is almost as awful.

  “This may be a surprise,” she says. “But we have a special request. I wouldn’t have been able to tell this powerful story if it wasn’t for my grandmother, who graciously told us everything that happened to her before and during the Great War. Without my grandmother’s strength, well, I wouldn’t be standing here today. I wouldn’t be alive, let alone an actress. I wouldn’t be who I am. So please join me in welcoming her to the stage and give her a round of applause.”

  Utter humiliation! Natasha says my name, and then Yuri helps me trudge up to the too-bright stage. I stand up there squinting at the audience, and everyone cheers and claps so loudly that I think it will knock me over, but I remain where I am until the crowd begins to rustle out of their seats, approaching the stage with flowers. Natasha gives me a hug and then studies my face.

  “I hope—” she begins.

  “It was fine, darling. I am not angry with you, you naughty girl. It was shocking, but a nice surprise, a nice surprise,” I tell her.

  “Really? I was worried. I was going to tell you, but then I thought it would be fun to have you see it without knowing what to expect.”

  “No need to worry about me, dear. I thank you for the tribute—truly. And the show itself—it was quite good. Your best work by far.”

  “Thank you, Baba, thank you! That means so much.” I try to read her face—for what? To see if she is disappointed by the turnout? To see if she is madly in love with Stas? To confirm that I have failed to care for her after all?

  “You were dynamite,” Yuri tells her as he hands her his flowers and gives her a kiss on the cheek. But I am uneasy now around these three, and I watch Stas watching him and feel even more convinced that there is something going on between him and Natasha. Yuri looks at him warily, or perhaps I am inventing drama where none exists, but I can say that this would also explain why things had been so tense around the household. I had assumed Natasha was just exhausted from mothering and play-mothering, but there seems to be more at stake.

  “Thanks, babe,” she says to him, but she keeps her eyes locked on me. “You really didn’t hate it?”

  “Of course not, darling. You did well for yourself. I am proud. And you too, my boy,” I tell Stas, though it hurts even more than normal to look at the creature, who has been surprisingly kind to me since my arrival. “I heard you helped out.”

  “Only a bit,” he says with a bow.

  “I hope I did your story justice, Baba. I wasn’t sure what you’d think,” Natasha says.

  “As much as you could have,” I say. “You cut some of it out, didn’t you?”

  “I hope you didn’t mind,” Natasha says, looking at Stas carefully. But he will not look at her: he only looks from me to Yuri.

  “Not at all,” I say. “I thank you for it.”

  But the admirers have lined up, ready with flowers and lavish praise for my girl, and I want to give her time to enjoy this moment.

  Yuri and I return to the sidelines, sitting down again to watch the fans flattering Natasha, and only when I see her nervously tapping one of her heels do I understand that of course the girl is devastated, that she saw the half-empty seats in the audience, that she is waiting to be alone to give out an inhuman cry, to wonder what exactly she had worked for, and what unintended consequences it might have had. The poor darling! I may still be emotional over her play, and furious about her affair, but my heart still bleeds for her. Her face is glazed over in an expression I remember all too well from the summer after her mother died, when she and her father joined me in Sevastopol—how the girl joked around to lift her father’s spirits, though I was not oblivious to the makeup stains on her pillow every morning.

  The girls from her former theater troupe pull her aside, and they seem to be begrudgingly paying her compliments, which she even looks slightly pleased to hear, because this is better than nothing, and maybe she has made a small peace with the made-up girls. She is gorgeous under the blinding lights, even if her face is still half-covered in old-lady makeup.

  But her play’s reception, I remind myself, is not what is at stake here. I watch Yuri watching her and wonder: how much does he know? He puts his arm around me and continues to watch the stage with a bemused expression. Does he know he is in the thick of disaster?

  “I know Natasha and I make a strange pair,” he says. “I know she has a wild heart and desires I cannot help her attain. I married her knowing that, because she was special, not like the girls my mother set me up with, who were perfectly nice but never made me feel a thing. I loved Natasha right away because she was so different from those girls, and so different from me. But I knew my choice could lead to problems down the line,” he said. “I’m not blind.”

  “I never said she was a perfect girl,” I say. “But you have given her everything she has expected from you. And more. Do not be so hard on yourself. There have been many benefits for her, to be with someone like you instead of…” I trail off, gesturing at the undereducated aesthetes on the stage, making certain to avoid Stas with my gaze. But then Yuri sinks into his seat and returns to his standard tone. The man who had spoken moments ago has retreated.

  “I’m so proud of her,” Yuri says. “She was amazing up there. Of course I want this show to open up more possibilities for her. But I wish she could see that she already has so much to be grateful for. She has me, she has our daughter. I wish I could be more than a professor at a community college, that I could give her more. But if only she would see that we already have everything we need, when it comes down to what’s important.”

  “Of course she already sees that,” I say carefully. “She treasures her life with you, dear boy. Before you, she was so lost.”

  “You helped her too,” he says. “I hope you know how much she loves you. All those summers she spent with you were not lost on her. She has learned all of her strength from you. And her values. You’ve taught her how to live.”

  This makes me lurch back a bit. Is he speaking sincerely, or is there a tinge of accusation in his voice? Those summers indeed! Is it more than a tinge—a complete denouncement?

  “Nonsense,” I say. “She has done it all on her own. Do not give me so much credit.”

  * * *

  —

  I spend the last night of my visit on Natasha’s balcony with a glass of cognac and a cigar
ette long after Yuri has gone to bed. Natasha is still out at the bar, a loud, seizure-inducing faux-Russian place near the theater where I lasted all of twenty minutes, long enough to watch Natasha take three shots of vodka while Yuri and Stas had a somber conversation near the bathroom, and then Yuri drove me home with a tremendous pile of flowers in the backseat, to where Natasha’s former manager, Mel, was watching television while the baby slept. The flowers are in a pile by the door now, and I can smell them from where I sit.

  Now old Sharik and I regard the street below us, its narrow sidewalks and teeming plastic garbage bins, scraggly trees that fail to disguise the ugliness of the dirty streets, and the lights in the building across from us lit up like buttons on a switchboard, so many strangers out there in the large and confounding world. It is well past midnight, yet a few couples and a gaggle of young women wander down the streets in search of fun, and I can’t blame them for chasing after it while they can. The balcony can barely contain the three neglected potted plants and empty bird feeder and me and the cat, and yet it has been my refuge since I arrived. The cat brushes up against me, as if he knows I am leaving.

  “You will be lost without me, boy,” I tell him, and he brushes more furiously in response. He has been sleeping at my feet every night, and I will miss his warm and smelly presence in my sleeping quarters, even if he has some nasty habits. I put out my cigarette, drain my glass, and leave the balcony. Sharik follows me out and jumps on the couch as if to encourage me to rest along with him on the sad piece of furniture that is nearly as old and saggy as yours truly.

  Though Natasha and Yuri had insisted I take their bed, I took the couch so they would have some privacy in their tiny bedroom. Besides, the living room is quite cozy, with its lampshades draped in scarves, holiday lights framing the windows, coffee table adorned by the stubs of purple candles and glass bowls of rocks, with a photograph of my nasty grandmother lording over it all. Natasha has tried to give the little place some character, reminding me how few are the things that truly belong to us, no matter how we try to dress them up. This is the kind of life I had pictured for her all those years when I did not send along vast swathes of money, the same way my father did not spoil me. In some ways, her big, open living room reminds me of my childhood apartment. And yet, the girl has found a way to get in trouble without extravagance. A girl who I hope is on her way home now, to her husband, avoiding an interloper’s charms.

  The bedroom door is slightly open, practically beckoning me, and I approach, though I know it is a transgression. I rarely enter the room where Natasha, Yuri, and little Talia sleep, and it is neater in there than I expected, relatively spare compared to the cheerful chaos of the rest of their home. Talia’s crib is by the door, blocked off by a Japanese curtain as an attempt for some privacy for the happy couple. Yuri snores gently, a tempered man even in repose, one arm splayed out, as if to fill the gap where Natasha’s body should be. I lean over my great-granddaughter’s crib and stare at her sleeping form. Toward the end of Natasha’s pregnancy, she would cry out during our Skype sessions, her eyes large as she placed a hand on her belly, telling me how hard the girl was kicking her, and I was glad the child had some fight in her already. Though it should not seem like such a miracle at this point, the girl traveling from Natasha’s womb to this crib, it still fills me with wonder.

  The girl has come a long way from the rat-faced thing she was the first time I laid eyes on her over the computer screen. She has hair now, little brown-red ringlets, and her eyes are big like her mother’s, dare I say a bit like her great-grandmother’s, and she is gaining a semblance of silly personality, a mischief around the eyes, even when they are closed. Perhaps this was why I was so repulsed when I first laid eyes on her. I knew I would never see her grow into a young woman or find her way in the mystifying universe, so I decided not to bother. And then, out of nowhere, her eyes pop open—I am caught! I hold my breath and wait for her to cry and rat me out, but she does no such thing. She simply holds my gaze. We are co-conspirators.

  I reach into my pocket, pull out the velvet pouch, and, from that, the ruby necklace. I dangle it in front of the child. Imagine, a necklace belonging to the Empress Maria, passed on to my great-grandmother, in the reach of this American-born child, light-years ahead of the first known necklace owner, a serf-owning woman married to the second-to-last tsar of Russia, the mother of Nicholas, Russia’s final monarch. The baby girl I see is a universe away from serfs or tsars, and good riddance, and yet, her eyes light up as she reaches for the necklace. It is a heavy object, one that must have weighed down my grandmother considerably during the war, when her form shrunk from plumpness to skin and bones, and now it is the perfect bauble for a baby. The child’s face is flooded with so much delight I worry she might laugh.

  I know there will be no more visits, that this is the last time we will see each other. What will the world hold for this tiny creature after I am gone? What ties her to me? What will she take from her mother, and what has her mother taken from me? All of the wrong things, I am afraid, but it is too late to do anything about it. Oh, what difference does it make? Dust is a must. I have reached the edge of my grave and am gazing into the abyss with longing. The infant will have to fend for herself, just as I did. I stroke her delicate hair and take the necklace away, and then I sneak out of the room and prepare to rest.

  As I climb under my covers on the couch, next to Sharik, I picture Natasha onstage as my grandmother, feeling the silliness of seeing my life play out before my eyes. It was fine that she had changed the story, mind you, that she had simplified it, which is something I wish someone had done to my actual life. Though the story was even more complicated than I had let on—I had not told Natasha everything. She would not have known what to do with it. I did not want to overwhelm my poor granddaughter, or to make her think less of me.

  I see myself onstage again, before the gullible audience, except this time it is truly me, a young Lara, and instead of Babushka Natasha, I see long-dead Babushka Tonya, the genuine article. The audience fades, and so does the auditorium, the stage. We are back in the mountains.

  I have been seething ever since my grandmother not only failed to praise my father during his funeral but also had the gall to say that going to the orphanage was the best thing that ever happened to him. My anger reaches a fever pitch when she begins speaking to him during her mad rants, telling him he once had the rosiest cheeks. How could she dare to address my poor dead father as a boy—a boy she had treated so poorly? No, no—she had taken things too far. Once I hear her speak to him, I decide she needs to be punished.

  That night, I wait until my sister’s restless body settles above me, and I confirm that my grandmother is sound asleep as well. Then I slither out of bed. I hover over my grandmother, take a deep breath, and reach under her filthy boa to unclasp her necklace. Her thick, snakelike skin brushes against mine and nearly makes me leap—I have never truly touched her before. I stuff her necklace into my underwear. And then I sleep the sleep of the dead.

  In the morning, I wake up to my grandmother’s cries.

  “Where is it? Where is it?”

  I watch her go on with her wild accusations, watch her mind completely dissolve, watch Polya and Bogdan become as fused as the welded components of a steel bridge, watch Mama become even more immobilized by heartache. I keep the necklace in my underwear during the first day of the search and the next night, once everyone is asleep once again, I go outside to dig up the portrait of Papa and Mama and bury the necklace underneath it.

  “I know you never cared for riches, Papachka,” I say. “But I hope you can keep this safe.”

  I did not and do not believe in God or an afterlife, did not think Papa was prancing around with the angels while waving the ruby necklace in the air, or using it to buy himself endless Champagne and caviar, or that it made a lick of a difference, as if dead wasn’t dead. As if putting a portrait in the ground
meant any speck of my father resided there. No, he was but a corpse in the mountains in a place I would never see, a mean wind whistling above his cold bones. Still, taking the necklace away from my grandmother and giving it to Papa makes me feel better for a while.

  I do not feel sorry for my grandmother, not even when she starts wandering outside and babbling to her long-dead relatives, it only fills me with a sharp joy.

  But after a few weeks, even this pleasure fades, and I want to dig my claws in even more.

  I hear a rustling in the middle of the night and watch my grandmother rise in her nightgown and wander outside to where Papa is buried. I follow her, while Polya sleeps on. For a moment, I worry that she has discovered the location of the necklace, but once I hear her mad babbling addressed at her daughter, I realize the jewels are safe.

  “Shura,” she mutters under her breath when she reaches the grave, calling to her long-dead daughter. “Dear Shura. Why aren’t you here to save me?”

  This old, tired woman in a boa, babbling in her nightgown—I almost pity her, but I do not lose my resolve.

  “Maybe Papa could have saved you,” I say.

  “How’s that, my dear?” she says. She wipes her forehead with her coal-black boa. It takes a moment for her eyes to settle on me, for me to be certain she knows I am not Shura.

  “Papa could have saved you, maybe,” I say. “But you killed him.”