Mother Country

by Irina Reyn

  “We’re both exhausted. Let’s just take a little rest, before we do anything else.” He was unpacking his suitcase and neatly folding shirts into dresser drawers. He was whistling a cheerful, unfamiliar tune.

  * * *

  Oh, how much she had looked forward to this trip! When the airplane crew launched into the landing instructions in Russian—Welcome to Moscow—she felt an immediate quiver that vibrated through her entire body. The tremor generated the particular peace of childhood, being softly nestled among those you understood intimately and who intimately understood you. The Cyrillic words, so dear, so voluptuous to her ears, made sense and required no translation on her part.

  But after that initial frisson, once she and Boris set foot on Russian soil, the burst of marvel began to contract. The airport was overflowing with Russians and foreigners traveling in for Victory Day. They could barely squeeze their luggage through the masses, the lines for visitor services stretched kilometers long, and even the air felt insufficient to circulate among all of them. Then at the currency exchange window, just as Nadia was enjoying the triumph of communicating, the woman behind the bars interrupted her by asking about the origin of her accent.

  “Are you from Moldova, or what?” she said in this unpleasant manner, her glasses perched far below the bridge of her nose. Nadia always prided herself on the purity of her Russian. Her Russian-language teacher in school had been a professor from Leningrad, and had awarded Nadia a medal for authentic Russian pronunciation three years in a row! She gave the woman a stern lecture about making assumptions about a stranger’s identity.

  “Why don’t you concentrate on doing your job,” Boris added, and the woman completed the exchange with a series of jerking counting motions. But as they turned to go, a stranger standing behind them tapped Boris on the shoulder and remarked that his skin was so swarthy he must hail from someplace foreign like Baku. Was he in Moscow from Uzbekistan for the parade?

  “Mind your own business, you dimwit,” Boris replied. The man backed away, but it was clear to Nadia that they were both jarred by these intrusions. They had become unaccustomed to the pushy Soviet manner, the unsolicited opinions from strangers. They were now used to the complex jumble of cultures, the benign indifference from New Yorkers.

  “Whatever you do, don’t say the word ‘Ukraine,’ please. Not here,” Boris said.

  “But I didn’t.”

  “Well, don’t.”

  “I won’t.”

  The airport was taking on an air of menace, solitary men in leather jackets waiting for something to happen, the chaos of luggage heaped into a pile before a solitary scanner. She imagined a major Moscow airport in this day and age would be gleaming and high-tech, but Sheremetyevo was decrepit, clogged with inefficiency. She held a protective hand over her purse as they flooded into the waiting area, the arrivals and departures crossing paths like exhausted soldiers.

  At the car rental desk, they used her name to hold the reservation but the tight-bunned babushka filling out paperwork asked her if she happened to be originally from Poland. Poland? That was just insulting. She knew a Polish accent and it sounded nothing like hers, not to mention that hers was a classic Russian name that meant “hope”!

  “Fuckers everywhere,” Boris said, scrawling madly across the form.

  The woman turned the contract around, scrutinized the print. Her lips were pursed in disapproval. “Is this really how you write your letters, sir? You should take handwriting lessons.”

  “Unbelievable.” Boris yanked the keys out of her hand and pulled Nadia away from the counter. “I might have to turn right around and go home to civilization.”

  “Calm down, dear,” she said, feeling wifely. The first hint of the codependence of marriage, the not entirely unpleasant aftertaste of need.

  Upon starting the car, they discovered the gas gauge pointing to empty. They inched toward the city, breaths held for the closest station. When its neon letters finally appeared beyond the massive billboards advertising cell phone services and soda and a chain of cafés, Nadia felt the air filter back into her lungs. She wished she were handling the situation alone. Watching Boris struggle with foreign powerlessness was worse than managing her own fears. Worse still: that Larissa wouldn’t be happy to see her, or that after seven years, Nadia might encounter an alien instead of a daughter. Maybe all children were essentially aliens to you if you thought too much about it.

  * * *

  If New York was a city that hid you, generously stirred you into a crowd like milk into coffee, then Moscow hid you, but reminded you of your inability to ever blend in. It was regal, haughty, and had no patience for your smallness. A statue of a famous poet here, a towering cupola there, wide avenues built for armies and their tanks. Archways high enough to shrink in. She was warned by Georgina not to gawk inside the metro with its marble walls, luxurious chandeliers, its glittering gold letters announcing the future stops. It was a favorite spot for pickpockets whose flinty eyes picked out the awed tourists and followed them until the opportunity—a crowded train, the confusion of a connecting station—arrived. Nadia kept her purse pressed against her belly, but her actual money was dispersed between a pouch lining the inside of her pants and a roll inside her socks.

  It was easy to understand why the place had such a sentimental hold over anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union, faces pointed toward Moscow and the centralized loyalties it represented. No wonder she read that former Donetsk separatists were resuming prosperous lives here now that the war was simmering down. It was a parent who gave the impression of taking care of you, who reminded you that he was located at the center of what life could be. In any case, it was the most pleasurable train ride of her life; you couldn’t compare this reliable smoothness of gliding from one subway station to another to the lurching subway experience in New York, the unpredictability of a train suddenly taking a new route with a mumbled, indecipherable message she never understood.

  When she was a little girl, she had once dreamed of moving to Moscow, of being a professional woman in the city of her dreams. Now she understood Rubizhne was sewn inside her. She came from a small city in a country that others have used, divided, abandoned, plundered. The faster she ripped her daughter out of their mother country, the better.

  * * *

  Her daughter! Coming toward her in an impossible tight lavender dress. She was walking with a new sway, a gait Nadia did not recognize. There was too much to take in at once but it was hard not to notice the inappropriate spandex, the top that stretched too tightly across her breasts. Who had bought her that outfit? She wanted to redirect her focus to the changes in her daughter’s face, the way it had filled out, grown at once proportional. But it was impossible to move beyond the shock of those clothes, those uncomfortable shoes. Her girl once in flowered blouses and high-waisted jeans and pleated pants was now dressing like all those tartlets on VKontakte. A rapid-fire assessment noticed a tattoo of a snowflake right below the clavicle and above the breast, a hoop piercing the cartilage at the top of her ear. She almost choked on her own disbelief.

  “That’s her? That’s your Larisska?” Boris asked. After all her flowery descriptions, even he seemed not to entirely believe it.

  “Baby, come here.”

  Larissa edged into her arms and Nadia held her close enough to feel the inner workings of her flapping organs, the heart valve, beat and blood and breath. The shape of her recalled some memory but too much was unfamiliar, from the scent, the hairstyle, the stooped posture. “Let me make sure you’re in one piece.”

  “You’re strangling me.” Larissa was squirming in her arms, trying to break free. Nadia would not let her, and eventually her daughter gave up the struggle.

  The idling train was making loud, unnecessary noise among the rushing of coats, the swell of the crowd jostling them. In a station with trains going in opposite directions, the air was damp with confusion. This embrace was blocking a path back into the station, but Nadia refused to move. Sev
en years of separation were being distilled into this one moment and she wanted to absorb every drop. She wanted to experience all the ages of her daughter, from baby to now, to assert her motherhood again. She couldn’t wait until they were back at the grimy apartment, Larisska out of the shower and smelling like herself. She would take care of all her girl’s immediate needs right away: a filling dinner, tea on the table, a plate of low-sugar cookies she brought from Brookyn. The murmur of their voices into the night.

  Around them, bodies stirred and buzzed in the panic of mistakenly boarding a train for Nizhny Novgorod or Ukraine, the search for nearby Chkalovskaya metro station.

  “Let go of me,” Larissa said. There was the coldness of the cheek, the stale smell of food and travel emanating from Larissa’s mouth. At one point, Nadia controlled everything Larissa ate, a careful balancing of sugar and carbohydrate. Up until the very day she left, she planned out all of her daughter’s meals. The very final plate, chilling in the refrigerator, of stuffed cabbage leaves and a sliced peach. A huge vat of chilled okroshka for after she was gone.

  She could feel Larissa pushing against her shoulders, the forced unclasping of her own fingers.

  A man stood separated from the crowd, watching them. He was young and attractive in a lopsided, disheveled way. A smattering of beard seemed to have not entirely committed to his face. He lingered next to them, short and scrawny and ill at ease in his brown leather jacket hunched over a football jersey. Just in case, Nadia swiveled Larisska’s purse closer to their bodies so she could keep her eye on it.

  “This is Slavik,” Larissa said, waving him over. “Slavik, this is Mama.”

  “Slavik,” she said, an unexpected word filling up her mouth. Larissa had said nothing about any Slavik and neither had her grandmother.

  “Mama, if I may,” he said, with a dapper bow, stretching out a veined hand she didn’t know how to grasp. But then he was pulling her in and he was hugging Boris too. Boris hugged back, game as always.

  It was all confusing. The men shook, neither properly identified. Nadia took Larissa’s arm by the elbow, hoisted her duffel bag over one shoulder, and guided her toward the exit.

  “Who is Slavik?”

  “You said you were bringing Boris.” Larissa shrugged. Her heels looked uniquely uncomfortable and Nadia saw a slash of red skin barely hidden by a fraying bandage.

  “Without Borya there would be no trip. But never mind that. I want to hear all about him and you.”

  “You’ll like him. Everyone likes him. He’s an entrepreneur,” Larissa said, and Nadia’s heart sank. An entrepreneur meant only one thing in post-Soviet parlance: loser. Even worse, a loser who can smell a future émigrée with all the promise she might provide. But you couldn’t tack a husband onto an immigration application. If Larissa got married to this Slavik, she would have to fill out a whole new application on his behalf, wait another seven or more years for him to come. Surely by then, Slavik would be history.

  And thanks to her niece Vivian, she corresponded with half a dozen men in the New York City area, but found herself drawn to a Dima who she thought would be perfect for Larissa. He was new to online dating, owned his own body shop in Sheepshead Bay. He did not fixate on Larissa’s looks, asking her questions about her interests and hobbies. He said he was not opposed to museums or books. Before she left, she pictured their first night in Moscow, her calling up the photograph of Dima on her phone and watching Larissa’s eyes glitter with her American future. Instead Larissa said, “He’s an entrepreneur,” which to Nadia meant she loved this shaggy, unpromising, even dangerous Slavik.

  “I’m sure I will like him if you like him,” she said. Better to keep your enemies close, unsuspecting.

  * * *

  As if on purpose, Slavik made sure there was no opportunity for her to be alone with Larisska. Even inside the fraying apartment, Slavik stood at her daughter’s side like a mushroom, rooted and unmoveable. His boasting stories filled up the room with their endless droning chatter directed mostly at Boris. A laundry list of accomplishments, money wagered, earned, and lost. Taking over his father’s sunflower refinery in the south was a bad move—who the hell cared about sunflower oil anymore?—but now during the gas impasse with Russia, he stumbled on a new idea. Nadia tried to peel Larissa away toward the couch but as soon as the separation was accomplished, Slavik followed them, slid right against Larisska.

  “So what is it you do then?”

  “A few of us guys supply sunflower husk pellets for heating. It’s a good business, especially after a winter like we just had.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You were smart to get out when you did but the war’s been good for business, and once it’s all over, it will be even better.”

  “Slavik is being modest,” Larissa said, which seemed like an exaggeration. “He can’t keep them in stock.”

  “I think of it as doing my part for the war effort. I’m bringing my country back together. Protesters, separatists. Everyone needs heat, right?”

  “Now that’s thinking on your feet,” Boris said. Off they launched about seed money and investors but their voices filled the entire room, and Nadia found herself busying with the transportation of food from kitchen to table, willing Larissa to follow. But her daughter stayed glued to Slavik’s side, her hand resting on his upper thigh.

  Then as if by some miracle, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. Without the stream of his talk, they were plunged into silence. “Larisska,” she began. She smoothed her daughter’s hair, pulling it away from a damp forehead. “How is the sugar? How are you feeling?”

  “Fine, I’m fine, Mama, no need to worry about me,” Larissa said firmly. “Taking care of myself just fine.”

  “I like your hair just like this, so we can see your face. You want me to try fixing it? I saw a pair of scissors in the kitchen.”

  Larissa returned her long bangs to their original location. “Actually, I think my hair’s perfect.”

  From inside the toilet, they could hear Slavik wailing. “Larisska! Larisska! There’s no toilet paper in here.”

  Nadia rushed over with squares of ripped-up sheet. They were neatly and uniformly cut. One would never know that Grisha’s suffering, dying body was once pressed against them. She placed the squares into her daughter’s hand.

  Larissa commanded, “Open, will you!” The door was pushed forward a centimeter or two and a hand slipped out. She took the pile of sheets and slid them through the opening to the outstretched fingers. The door slammed shut.

  Her daughter stood at the door until the toilet flushed, arms wrapped tightly around her middle. “You never think of bringing toilet paper to Moscow. We imagine they have everything here,” she said to no one in particular, her voice as far away as a train already departed.

  * * *

  The next morning, Nadia rose to find her daughter dolled up in a striped shimmying dress that seemed suctioned to her body. She was sitting at the breakfast table, scanning a tourist guide of Moscow, while applying nail polish to her toenails. An oval-shaped earphone was sticking out of each ear. She bopped her head in time to the mute music.

  “Did you already take your blood sugar?” Nadia asked.

  Larissa lowered one earphone. “I’ve been doing it by myself for a long time, Mama. Don’t you worry.”

  Nadia felt at a loss. The rhythm between them was off and she was eager to right it. “Of course I know that. Just asking. Are you listening to that Vera Brezhneva? I liked the song you sent me.” There was no response.

  Nadia poured water into the kettle. She inserted herself into Larissa’s field of vision. “So where should we go today? Tretiakov museum? Pushkin library? Lenin’s tomb? There’s no rush there. He’s still very much dead.”

  Larissa looked up. She was in full makeup, lids smothered in royal blue caked with glitter, lips rimmed in some pink, partially eaten away, color. Nadia was tempted to run a dish towel under warm soap and water, wipe the entire palette away. Exc
ept they had no dish towels. Last night, Boris tried to run to a nearby store for supplies but it was closed.

  “I actually did have a plan, speaking of graves. I want to see my father’s.”

  The kettle exploded. “What for? Really, Larisska? Calling him your father is an exaggeration by a large measure.”

  “That’s not true. He was my father, wasn’t he?”

  “He was nobody,” she said, searching the cabinets for tea. They were empty. “Just a technolog in the factory where I worked.”

  “Well, I want to see his grave.”

  This was ridiculous. This whole business of children wanting to know the men that provided them with nothing more than their sperm felt ironically American to her. She remembered Regina saying that some five-year-old classmate of Sasha’s was going to meet her “donor siblings,” that the sperm donor had actually agreed to write the children notes on their birthdays, that mothers actually encouraged these relationships. She could not understand it. The men did not give a thought to these children their entire lives, why should the reverse be any different?

  They could hear the sound of Slavik rolling out of bed. He was humming in a hoarse morning voice.

  “We spent some time together after you left. Before the war.”

  “You did?” Nadia needed a chair beneath her. This was news. The technolog and her daughter sharing a nice cup of tea at the café? The technolog and her daughter taking strolls past the common grave of the Soviet soldiers? As she toiled away in New York, he was taking her place? No wonder she looked like a prostitute with no one normal to watch over her.

  “How did you find him?”

  “He found me. I didn’t know at first, just thought he was a friend of yours checking in on me as the war started. But he kept calling, then visiting. Then he told me.”