I imagine my great-great-grandmother standing on a platform over a century ago, with nothing to guide her but her intuition. What would she think of what became of my grandmother? What would she think of me? Baba and I both know that there’s a good chance this is it. She could certainly go on and live a few more years, maybe even to be a hundred, but she could also leave the world any day now, and who knows when we’ll have another visit. I want to tell her that she was everything to me, that those trips to Sevastopol were everything, that I didn’t judge her for having affairs, not really, that I never expected her to be perfect.
My grandmother sighs again. “Who is to say? I have lived my life the best I could live it, but not without my share of mistakes. You have made them, too, and will continue to make them. Most of them won’t kill you,” she says. She smiles and adds, “If what happened between me and the brothers is so important to you, then why did you cut them out of your story?”
I laugh. “The story wasn’t really about them.”
“I suppose not.”
She reaches into her pocket. She pulls out a pouch, and from that, a string of red jewels that it takes me a minute to understand is the ruby necklace she had been talking about all along. The one that had been stolen from her grandmother. The one that led the woman to go completely mad and end her life.
“But how did you…” I say, staring at her hand, the bright jewels in it that look cartoonishly lavish, sparkling like crazy. Before I finish asking the question, I realize I don’t want to know the answer. Or, rather, that I can figure out what happened without my grandmother telling me, without her confirming she had stolen the rubies from her grandmother out of spite. How can I blame her for hating the woman, after all she had done to her father? And as she herself had just said, who am I to judge?
At last I hear it, the train chugging toward the platform, and see it snaking around the bend in the distance.
“I have made my share of mistakes,” she says again. “At least this one was valuable. Please, take it. It can give you the freedom you seek.”
I slowly take the necklace out of her hand just as the train comes to a halt and opens its doors. It’s even heavier than it looks and it makes my hand tremble, either from the weight or the thought of touching something that my great-great-grandmother had worn for years like a second skin, something that the woman in the photograph on my wall had loved best of all.
“What should I do with it?” I say.
“Be careful with it,” my grandmother says, closing my hand around it and kissing my fist. “It is a very precious thing.”
And with that, she gives me a big hug, strokes my daughter’s cheeks, and disappears through the jaws of the train.
* * *
—
I give Tally a bottle after the train pulls away, and then we keep walking, walking, walking. The girl is smiling, cooing, staring at everything with her mouth open in unabashed wonder, like it seems impossible that all of these things can exist: the two red-haired children trailing their mother, the woman in the pink dress smoking a cigarette on the street corner, the leaves on the trees fluttering in the wind, the two tired men entering an Irish pub, the light hitting the store windows, the big garbage trucks and their loud, loud roar as they pummel down the street. As we wait to cross it, my girl looks so perfect sitting there in her little green jumper, the light in her reddish curls, that I bend down and take a picture of her, and capture her smile perfectly.
I open my Instagram but decide against posting it, and send the picture to Yuri instead. I wait a few seconds to see if he answers, but he does not; he’s probably too busy packing for his trip anyway. I scroll and see that I got more likes on my play post—I’m up to four hundred—and try to remind myself that I’m not going to get any validation or love from the Internet, that those likes didn’t translate into asses in seats. Fucking social media is like a bad boyfriend who won’t change his ways, no matter how much I beg him to, and the only real love I can try to get right now is from the sweet little lump in the stroller.
My phone dings with a text from my agent, not Yuri. He’s telling me I have been cast as the orphaned sister killer in L.A.—filming starts next week. I assumed I didn’t book it because I sent in the tape weeks ago and forgot all about it. I can’t help but laugh and laugh, which makes my girl smile hard. After being my grandmother and great-great-grandmother, do I really want to stoop to being a murderer, as Stas would put it? I straighten Talia’s little barrette and stroke her face. I do, I do, I do, I know that I do. Somehow, I—we—will do it. I can’t turn it down. And it may just be the break we need. And after that—what do I do? Return to life with Yuri? Ask Mel if I can pick up a few shifts at the Lair? See if I can enroll at the community college? Take Stas by the hand and ride off into the sunset? Pawn the necklace and leave them both for good?
When we stop at a streetlight, two women look down at Tally and coo, because having a baby is apparently an invitation for everyone to talk to you.
But then, from the confused smile on one of the women’s faces, I think she might recognize me.
“Tampon commercial?” I say to her. “You know, it’s as easy as—”
“That’s not it,” she says, cocking her head at me. “Russian prostitute?”
“Is there any other kind?”
“Good work. I loved Seeing Things.”
“Thank you so much,” I say. “Really.”
The other woman seems to have no idea who I am, but she’s interested in Tally.
“How old is this darling?”
“Almost six months.”
“They’re already a lot of fun at six months, aren’t they? Watch out, the next thing you know, she’ll be going off to college,” she says.
“You spend the early years being like, when will she walk, when will she talk? And then the next ten you just want them to sit down and shut up,” the other one says.
“I’ll try to slow down,” I tell them, and as I push Talia ahead of them, not even that annoyed by the assumption that everyone will go to college, I hear her say one more thing.
“Congratulations!”
I thank her and push on, past a father and his two sons. It’s been a while since I was congratulated for having a daughter. I thought she was too old for that, and it feels nice. Tally paid the woman no attention, or me, really, and continues to stare out with her mouth half-open. Over the last few months, my daughter has gotten more entranced by the outside world than by me, not as desperate for me to hold her anymore.
She’s becoming less like the baby I was, if Mama described me correctly. “Always wanting to be held,” Mama had said, shaking her head. “If I left the room for a moment, you would scream bloody murder! I don’t think I emptied my bladder until you were two. It was awful.” But I see now that she didn’t think it was awful at all, that maybe she even longed for a time when I needed her like that, or at all.
Talia does give me a smile, though, when we pass the dog park, probably more at the big shaggy gray dog than me, but it does melt me like they said it would, her smiles always melt me now even though there was a time when I didn’t think this would ever be possible, when I was convinced I must have been immune to her. How did it happen? As Baba would say, it’s something unbelievable. This sweet little girl, who just months ago felt like a gooey alien in my arms, became my favorite little person, the only one I can really talk to besides said grandmother, the only one whose eyes hide nothing and who understands me. I pull her little blanket up to her chest, mostly so she can suck on it more easily. Baba is probably boarding her plane by now. The sun is rising but it’s still pretty crisp, too crisp for early September, but I’m ready for the change, the summer has been endless.
“Endless summer, am I right, Tally?” I say. “Though I guess you’ve never known another season, have you? You have nothing to compare it to. Well, I pro
mise you’ll have some good summers ahead, but this one has just been weird.”
My daughter is staring out at the sunlight, the people passing by, the boats chugging down the river, the taxis honking, the surly girl at the overpriced vintage boutique on the corner arranging the mannequins in the windows to lure customers in. I never woke up before ten in the morning until my daughter was born, and never went to bed before two, but now, I have to say I like this schedule. There’s a hopefulness to the mornings, the day spread out before you like a cozy blanket, the sense that there’s plenty of time to do it all, to make some decisions. Time to start over, to unfuck everything you had fucked.
I don’t realize how far we’ve gone until I see the water, the Hudson gleaming in front of us. We’re miles from the apartment now, but it doesn’t matter, I could use a long walk home. I push her up to the rocks that overlook the dark-blue water, a few sailboats drifting along as the sun rises higher in the sky. It’s not swimming water, no, but a teenage couple kicks at it, their shoes piled up behind them. A big cargo ship passes by, covering one of the sailboats for a moment. Usually, when I take her this far out, my daughter gets tired and starts to fuss. But this time, she’s not complaining. This morning, as I push her toward the water, she likes it. She looks from my face to the sun and back at the water again.
“What do you think, darling?” I ask. And then I stop to watch her taking it all in.
* * *
—
After Mama’s first and only trip to the sea with me and my grandmother, we returned to Kiev to see my grandfather, but we got off to a rough start. When he picked us up at the station, he gave my grandmother a once-over and said, “That’s a lovely bracelet,” and she clamped a hand to her wrist like she had been burned, because she had forgotten to take off what was no doubt a gift from her latest suitor. “Just a silly thing I got from a stand by the water, it’s nothing,” she had said, charging ahead with her suitcase.
But that evening, after a stilted dinner in the formal dining room with the too-big chandelier instead of the cozy kitchen just to please my grandfather, he and I were alone on the gold-framed balcony while Mama and Baba cleaned up. I thought he must definitely know about Baba’s affairs and worried that he might even ask me about it. He was quiet for an interminable amount of time, watching the apartment buildings across the street and the Dnieper in the distance and the sky turning this beautiful pink and orange as the sun inched toward the horizon like he could do it until I was an old woman myself, while we heard the clanking of my grandmother and Mama clearing the plates on the other side of the glass door.
“Your mother loves you, Natasha. You must take care of her,” he said.
“How?” I said. “How exactly do I do that?”
“You do what anyone can in this situation,” he said with a shrug. “You do your best.”
A moment earlier I had felt sorry for my grandfather, but now I was angry. I thought of all of his thoughtful critiques of my acting, and expected him to tell me what to do in the same way. “More feeling at the end,” he could have said. “Give those tears everything you’ve got. But also, honor the complexity of your role.” But he came up empty this time.
“That’s it? That’s all the advice you have for me after, what, seventy years of living? Mama’s going to die, and all I can do is—my best?”
He winked at me and laughed. “If I live any longer, I’ll have even less advice to give.”
Now I laughed, too, forgiving him, feeling choked up all of a sudden. We looked over our shoulders to where my mom was throwing back her head and cracking up at something my grandmother said. Mama stopped in her tracks and looked right at me, her smile disappearing like she was caught doing something. Then she stuck her tongue out at me and laughed again. She was stunning with the dusky light falling on her wavy hair, her face suntanned and fresh from the sea, and I knew I would never be half as beautiful as she was, even if I spent my whole life trying. I turned back to my grandfather.
“One more thing,” he said, and I thought he’d come up with some profound advice at last, something meaningful about the eternal bond between children and their parents, but he didn’t say another word, he just pointed at the sky, where the sun was finally setting below the buildings, casting the river in its early summer evening glow. He opened the door and Mama and Baba stopped what they were doing to join us, and we all watched the sun dip down until we could only see a hint of its bright, burning light.
To all of my grandparents—the ones I knew,
the ones I didn’t, and the ones
I wished I knew better.
Acknowledgments
This novel wouldn’t have been written if my grandmother, Lana, hadn’t stoked my imagination with stories of her Soviet upbringing. After she passed away five years ago, her sister, Tanya, and niece, Natasha, continued to tell me stories that kept me going. My parents, Olga and Alex, read through several drafts of this book and gave thoughtful feedback about historical inaccuracies, and I am very grateful to them for this, and for raising me to be fascinated by the place we came from, and so much more. My brother, Andrew, supported me in countless ways as well.
I’d also like to thank everyone at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which made it possible for me to share a short version of this project in Ethan Canin’s Long Story Workshop. Ethan and my sharp classmates helped shape the project and made me see that it had potential to be a novel. My agent, Henry Dunow, read many drafts of this novel and put it in good hands, keeping me sane along the way, and Andrea Walker and Emma Caruso, my tireless editors, helped it find its final form. Emma was a superhero, particularly in the home stretch of this project. Jess Bonet and Carrie Neill were always there to answer my endless questions and helped in endless ways. Cindy Berman helped this book fall into place.
My husband, Danny, offered tremendous support to me as I plugged on with this project in ways that leave me speechless. And my daughter, Dasha, kept my spirits high as I wrote, both in utero and in this unbelievable world.
By Maria Kuznetsova
Oksana, Behave!
Something Unbelievable
About the Author
Maria Kuznetsova was born in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved to the United States as a child. Her first novel, Oksana, Behave!, was published in 2019. She lives in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and daughter, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Auburn University. She is also a fiction editor at The Bare Life Review, a journal of immigrant and refugee literature.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
Something Unbelievable Page 26