Mother Country

by Irina Reyn

  “Of course, that makes sense,” Yakov said, looking into his lap at the folded napkin. A glass was brought to him, a splash poured. He sloshed it between his teeth, then nodded.

  The women at the next table were rising, helping one another with their coats. They smelled of dry flowers and vegetable oil. If I get to be their age, I only want peace, Nadia thought with some envy. They had an unrushed posture of women who belonged nowhere else, who were expected nowhere else. Outside on the sidewalk, they orchestrated an elaborate round of farewells.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t narrow the geographic possibilities for Larisska,” Olga said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Not now, Olyechka,” Yasha interrupted. “Try the wine. Is it right? I can’t tell if it’s been corked.”

  “Oh Yash, you know I can’t tell the difference. All the wine here tastes sour to me. I like sweet wine, Georgian wine.”

  “But French wine is the best. Everyone says so.”

  “You’re welcome to listen to others if you like, count up as many stars as you like. You probably have one of your wine guides in your pocket. Me? I know what I like.”

  A cast-iron tureen of burbling orange was placed between them by the waitress in the strange corset layered over her blouse. They were each handed elongated silver forks with mahogany handles. The woman smiled, red everywhere, cheeks and lips and flared skirt.

  “What on earth is this? Yash?” Olga scrunched her nose.

  “I have no idea.” For a minute, a flash of the old Yakov appeared on his face, the panicked look of the diminished outsider.

  A bowl of white bread chunks was being passed around. They were clearly supposed to do something with the forks, the squares of bread, the enflamed soup of cheese in a cauldron.

  “It’s fondue.” Vivian demonstrated. She speared bread and submerged it in the cheese.

  “It’s fondue,” Yakov repeated, regaining his swagger, as if he was aware of the delicacy all along and it had been his pleasure to insert it into their lives. “As a matter of fact, I believe it is actually Swiss.”

  “Where’s the cow?” Olga wailed, not entirely joking. “I want my cow.”

  Nadia was following Vivian’s lead. What was not to like about this entire situation? The cheesy bread, Olga’s shock, poor Yakov’s swift cover-up. Where’s the cow? her sister was repeating. The day was finally looking up.

  Nadia started cheerfully plunging and rescuing the bread, her fork a powerful weapon. She pretended the first piece was Olga, she decided, and down her sister went into the cauldron. For some reason, she found the act of drowning her sister in cheese very pleasurable. Olga was immediately followed by Aneta. Regina deserved just a tiny dip in the cheese for her benign cluelessness, Sasha only when she was disobedient. Who else? Grisha for all those bad sexual innuendos, for being diagnosed with stomach cancer and refusing to do anything about it. Her girlfriends here for imagining themselves superior to her. The idiots for shelling one another at the Donetsk airport and then moving on to Kievsky, Kirovsky, and other residential neighborhoods. Chris from Staten Island, it was his turn. This would be his fate if he did not bring Larisska to her place for dinner every Sunday. In you go, Chris.

  The cheese was bubbling, spooling, the sides of the cauldron smeared with its drippings.

  “Can you pour me a little more of that delicious wine?” she asked Yakov, tucking her own smile out of sight as Olga sat there with an unused spoon, not realizing that she had long ago been devoured.

  * * *

  Now that early dinner was over, what was there to do on a New York afternoon that splattered snow in your face? After the bill was paid (“Let me get this too.” “Don’t be crazy, you got the museum.”), they had to decide what was next. Art gallery, said Olga. A crisp walk in the park, Yakov said, knowing he would never get his way. Shopping, Vivian chimed in. Nadia wanted to go home. Being anywhere but near the phone and in front of the television that was broadcasting from Donetsk was an act of treason. The Ukrainian forces might have regained the terminal, for all she knew.

  But it was agreed that shopping it was.

  At Bloomingdale’s while everyone else shopped, Nadia was scrolling down romantic prospects for Larissa on VKontakte. She had been afraid of dangerous creeps, but if the pictures were correct, the men merely suffered from an excess of optimism. All those innocent grins, light-calibrated backdrops of beaches and suburban expanses, those eager little eyes reflecting projections of Eastern European women. Larisska could easily slip into their musings. She photographed like an angel, the flash sparking the reddish streaks in her blond hair. What would she say about herself?

  As Olga and Vivian disappeared behind the racks in earnest, Nadia began to construct a profile for Larisska. Ukrainian beauty in her mid-twenties seeks New York–based American for serious commitment. Among the dresses, Olga was heard vetoing each of Vivian’s selections. “Too itchy.” “Dry clean only.” “Your mother will kill me.”

  Upon rereading her sentence, Nadia thought it odd and malformed. She tried again. You will not be disappointed! I am a very fun-loving but also domestic young lady looking for a man who wants to take care of a family. The phrasing reeked of prostitution or desperation. She clicked on some competition and her heart dropped. Larissa’s contemporaries were models, at least from the photos they submitted. They were sleek and seductive and wet-haired and allergic to clothes.

  “What do you think? Please tell her it looks good on me.” Vivian was standing before her in a scooped-neck cobalt dress. With her collarbone exposed, the girl looked like a store mannequin. Nadia guessed that was the point.

  “I think it’s pretty,” she offered.

  “You see?” Vivian turned back to her grandmother. “Tyotya Nadia says so.”

  Her daughter was smarter than this site, sharper than all these men. But she would never stick out among the pouting, plotting beauties. What man ever picked a woman from Ukraine for her brains? Her last chance was to appeal to a man’s protective instinct; the one that craved above all to be a hero. A piece of shrapnel is flying overhead as I write this, exploding the windows of my neighbors. Any day I go outside, I could die. At night, I sleep in an underground bunker with a single lamp for company. I long for America, for freedom. Save me.

  She uploaded Larissa’s photo, the same one she showed the man at the nightclub. In a certain light, from an angle, one could say she was beautiful. She certainly looked more natural than those artificial sex robots.

  Vivian appeared again, this time in Lycra: slinky, asymmetrical, red. “What do you think of this one?”

  “It looks great on you.”

  Olga came at her with a cashmere turtleneck in hand. “Have you lost your head? Is Vivian meant to be standing on the street corners of Pepper Pike?”

  “She’s a lovely young girl. It just doesn’t seem like the end of the world.”

  “Vivian is going to college soon. If we don’t set the right limits now, how is she going to turn out? I agree with her parents on this.” Olga stretched out her hand with the cashmere. “And this sweater is such a pretty color on you, Vivchik. And so soft.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Baba,” Vivian insisted, holding Nadia’s gaze for support. She had the lonely eyes of the misunderstood, someone never truly known or heard.

  Olga deflated, threw her coat down on the divan and collapsed into it. “Fine. Pick one. I will keep the receipt. Let your mother return it.”

  A howl of victory and Vivian shot off to the dressing room. Nadia glanced at her phone. A man had written back. She could see only the first sentence and she spelled out the words to see if she could make sense of them without a dictionary. I was mesmerized by your profile. Would it be. Under her layers, her body felt moist with agitation. Why hadn’t she thought of this option sooner? The visa could be filed as early as next month if the exchanges went smoothly. Once the paperwork was approved, everything happened fast, the act of emigration being nothing more diffi
cult than a trip to the Donetsk airport. Of course, now there was no Donetsk airport. Lugansk airport had been closed since June. Larisska would fly out of Kiev.

  Olga was talking. “What I was going to say at the restaurant is that I think we should start thinking about Larissa’s future here in this country. Her number could be up any day now.”

  Nadia looked up at her sister. “I had no idea you were so concerned. This is the first I’m hearing of it. I am working for my daughter’s arrival every day. What are you actively doing that you deserve an opinion?”

  Olga looked stiffly taken aback. “I’ve sponsored you, or did you already forget? She’s my niece.”

  This time, the blue eyes did not have the same intimidating power to mute her. “Have you been checking on her every day? To make sure she’s still alive, for example? Have you been talking to lawyers? Writing letters to senators? Have you been thinking of her day and night?”

  Her sister was still wearing the burgundy gloves. Yet it was so warm in here, the air artificial and cloying. To her surprise, Olga did not appear angry. She took her hand. “I actually spoke with Larisska the other day, right before coming here.”

  Nadia neither held the hand nor pushed it away. “So she deigned to Skype with you? I’m impressed. I can barely get her to say hello.”

  Olga nodded. “Nadyush. We need to work together on helping Larisska.”

  “What is all this about thinking and working together? I’ve been doing nothing but working since I got here. Thank you for sponsoring us, but if you’d done it sooner, Larisska would have been able to come with me.”

  Olga dyed her moustache. From this close, Nadia could see the gray roots of them, the silver tufts above the mouth. “That’s not fair. As soon as I got my bearings, I filed. Who knew it would take this long?”

  Vivian was storming toward them, the blue dress over one arm, her coat over the other.

  “I’ll say this quickly,” Olga said. “The truth is Larissa wants to live with us.”

  “What?” She heard a ringing sound, like an elevator stuck between floors. “What do you mean, she wants?”

  “We have a good university in town, and she wants to be a dental technician. It’s cheaper there, the cost of living is more reasonable, not like your crazy New York. You should come too. I never knew why you settled so far away from me.”

  “That’s insane. This is the first I’m hearing of this. Larissa actually told you those very words? That she wants to live with you?”

  Vivian was hovering over them. The dinging sound continued. As if a theater loudspeaker was alerting them to the dimming of the lights.

  Her sister’s blue eyes were unrelenting in their superiority. “Yes, she did. I will repeat exactly what she said, ‘Tyotya Olga, when I come to America, I want to live with you.’ Of course, we asked her if she was sure, if she wouldn’t prefer to be closer to her mother in New York. But you yourself must see how this is a better place to vacation than to live. For God’s sake, you can’t cross the street in decent shoes. There are crazy puppets attacking you at every corner. The museums cost a million dollars. People eat expensive melted cheese for no reason. It is a zoo here. We live in a peaceful, affordable place, have a car, a nice car that brings us directly to the front door of our nice house.”

  Yakov materialized, chinchilla hat in hand. It was amazing how puffed up he was by this new American ego. Back in Ukraine, he hovered at the periphery, that tremulous little voice wafting between the weeds of his black moustache. “Olyechka, maybe it is time,” or “I hate to interrupt, but…” Now he took Olga by the arm, pointed meaningfully at his watch. “It’s time to go. Our show is soon.” Good for you, Yasha, Nadia inwardly cheered.

  “Here, you should keep this, you probably need it.” She thrust the wax hand at Olga. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Now?” Olga said, eyebrows raised. A few shoppers paused to look back at what she was holding. “But we’re getting ready to go.”

  “My boyfriend is waiting for me.”

  “What boyfriend? You never mentioned any boyfriend. Can’t you wait just a few minutes and walk us out like a normal person?”

  The “normal person” protocol imprinted on her in childhood meant she had to escort visitors out the door, kiss each of them on the cheek, try to convince them to stay at her place for a few more days. Her sister was tormented by not being informed that she was dating. But she was also waiting for the fulfillment of the ritual, the usual exchange of deference and gratitude to the older sister. She might have even packed the family for a longer stay, had privately planned to transfer their bags from the hotel to Nadia’s apartment, to phone her daughter and explain Vivian’s delayed return home. (“She offered and how could I not spend a little more time with my poor little sister, all alone in New York?”) Deep in her soul, Nadia knew every single step of what was expected of her. But now it seemed pointless to be fossilized in time, in service to old-world rites of power and hierarchy. She had to hurry home, to drag out of Larisska what in the world she meant by saying she wanted to live in Cleveland with Olga.

  She stood. “His name is Boris. Yes, he is Jewish. Yes, it is serious. No, I can’t walk you out like a normal person. I will say good-bye right here.”

  Nadia delivered an efficient round of kisses, an especially grateful one to Vivian, and told them to have a safe trip home. It was so much lighter to walk to the bathroom without the hand. In the lounge area, a row of women reapplied makeup, pressing their lips together. There was the orchestral sound of toilets flushing. Glancing down, she realized the loudspeaker was in fact her phone pinging. A long string of messages. She could imagine man after man stretching his virile self into the void, expecting the batting, glistening eyes of rescued Ukrainian maidens. Thinking the exact same thing: Let me be the one to fight, to save you from this war. No sacrifice is too big as long as you will belong to me. As long as you love me. As long as you thank me.

  8

  March of the Immortal Regiment

  Moscow, May 2015

  The wood on the furniture was peeling, the television was completely broken, and there was no trace of either towels or toilet paper. The woman from the rental agency noted their grimaces of displeasure. What did they expect for the price—the Ritz Carlton on Red Square? For a decade now, she had been dealing with Moscow tourists just like them, returning émigrés from America. Why were they never, ever happy? She recommended lowering expectations and just enjoying their vacation. Wasn’t life too short for bottling up all that dissatisfaction?

  As Boris berated the lady (“I’m not bottling up shit. What kind of shady operation are you running without basic amenities? We’re going to tell the entire Russian community in New York City to avoid your company like the plague!”), Nadia rummaged in her suitcase for a stack of Grisha’s linens, brought in anticipation of exactly this shortage. They were all varying shades of tan like everything else in his apartment, but the scent of him still hovered just above the surface of the bleach. After he died, when VIP Senior Care was dumping out the contents of his apartment on behalf of the landlord, they let her take anything his son and his family didn’t want. Other than their mother’s jewelry, they had wanted nothing and the apartment remained exactly how he left it. Now the linen was turning out to be a good idea. She fastened her teeth to the fabric, and ripped them into frayed squares.

  “Vot, here’s our toilet paper,” she announced, holding up a taupe fitted sheet.

  “Very nice,” the Realtor approved. She was wearing a powder-pink pantsuit with matching pink earrings. “It’s nice to see you haven’t lost the old Soviet resilience living in America. Some of these people returning after twenty years, they’ve gone soft. They expect all sorts of indulgences. They ask about heat or, even more ridiculous, air-conditioning!”

  “I’ve only lived in America for less than seven years. I’m not American yet.”

  The Realtor looked pleased. “That explains it then. You seem like a good, ha
rdworking person. Are you in for Victory Day?”

  “We’re here meeting my daughter from Ukraine,” she said. It was an idea Nadia had after Olga’s visit. She became convinced that seeing her daughter was imperative. She could not afford to let any more time go by before she could ask her face-to-face what was going on with this ridiculous Cleveland plan. For years, she had allowed Larissa to elude her on the phone and Skype. Her daughter refusing to entertain the idea of meeting her in Moscow even if Nadia could scrape up the vast sums of money such a trip entailed. Then the war came. This time though, Nadia pressed her case firmly and Larissa, to her surprise, agreed to make the trip. It was looking like the Minsk agreement was not holding, and the occasional flare-up, the sudden sound of gunfire, was more than she could take. She was happy to get out.

  The Realtor swung open the door. “Ah, well. I’ve got no problems with Ukraine even if it is an ungrateful nation. I hope you take my advice and stop nitpicking, anyway. Enjoy Moscow, the most beautiful city in the world.” On the other side, a blur of suspicious faces peered at them from down the hallway.

  “We will,” she said, newly filled with excitement.

  “Nice work, Nadyen’ka.” Boris turned to her when the Realtor’s footsteps receded into the closed elevator. “You could have left out Ukraine.”

  “And you could have bought us a nice roll of toilet paper instead of yelling at her. Don’t forget she has keys to the place.”

  “And now she hates us because she knows you’re from Ukraine.”

  “It’s more likely she hates us because you’re a Jew.”

  Boris examined the contours of her entire face, from forehead to chin to the crown of hair exploded by a long airplane flight.

  “Sorry, dear,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said that.” That Boris didn’t profoundly listen to her, or at least failed to peek at the seamy underbelly beneath her words, irritated her. She could see the tuning out happening right in the middle of a point she was making, whether while strolling the boardwalk or over a meal, his irises losing their focus and gently turning inward.