by Irina Reyn
“How often? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Then one morning, he was killed. I found it on Odnoklassniki, some people in town reposting his wife. So that was over.”
“I’m shocked, Larisska. You should have said something.”
“He was a decent man, Mama. He said he wanted to be more involved but he sensed you didn’t want him meddling. He called you ‘proud’ and ‘independent.’ He said you needed nobody. It’s true. You probably don’t.”
Blinking furiously, Nadia said, “I suppose you think there’s something wrong with being independent from a man.” She felt the color rising. “Anyway, I don’t remember him clamoring to see you.”
Slavik peeked his head in. “Good morning, beautiful ladies.” He had a magazine rolled under his arm. “See you in twenty minutes.” He disappeared into the toilet room.
Nadia felt her polite smile dissolve. “And what kinds of things did you do together? I suppose his wife didn’t know who you were.”
“Mama, I want to live with Aunt Olga in Cleveland when my number’s up.” Larissa said this coolly. But how garish her face looked in the freshness of the sunlight. That unblemished skin once as spongy as just-baked ricotta cheese. Those arms that used to curl about her neck, the golden eyebrows that pressed against her collarbone when she was sleepy. Nadia felt a splintering inside, could feel each sharp point.
“We don’t have to decide now.”
“We should have some plan for the future,” Larissa said. “Slavik looked up Cleveland and said it has the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. That seems cool. Besides, New York is expensive and I need to save money.”
“But your own mother will be helping you. You will be saving money on rent.”
“I’m twenty-eight years old now. I can make my own decisions. I’m afraid if I live with you…” Larissa dipped the wand back into the nail polish but didn’t withdraw it.
Nadia felt the air exploding in her lungs. “If you live with me, what? Your so-called plan makes no sense at all. She’s your aunt. I’m your mother.”
“I know who you are, Mama.”
“Let’s take it one step at a time. First you come to New York and then…”
The toilet flushed. “Success!” Slavik called out.
Larissa sighed, raised her voice. “Congratulations, Comrade Slavik, but there’s no need to announce your toilet victories to everyone.”
Nadia felt a strange relief that Larisska had snapped at Slavik. Maybe, after all, there was a schism between the couple that would offer an advantage for Dima the mechanic and the life she had so carefully arranged for her daughter in New York. But then the kitchen flooded with the men and their talk overwhelmed everything, as usual.
* * *
How ordinary the technolog’s name looked on a headstone, she thought. A name simply carved with no preceding title, no memory of the kind of respect he used to command at the factory. His family had the bad taste of plastering a photograph of him on the stone and now she could look nowhere but at that unnaturally earnest gaze of his staring at her out of granite. This rock had nothing to do with the way the technolog could illuminate the room by his confident occupation of it. And there was no way to hear the exact tenor of his high-pitched whistle, the one that promised everything would turn out all right.
The other half of the headstone was blank, probably in anticipation of the wife. When she thought of her own burial, she imagined doing something similar. Stretching out the earth, making room for her daughter. But how nice it might have been to have a small space on limestone waiting to welcome you when the time came.
She allowed Larisska to set down the bouquet of cheerful carnations they bought at the entrance to the cemetery. Her daughter in that ridiculous dress was barely able to balance on those heels, an outfit completely unfit for the surroundings. But she appeared solemn. Her head bowed, eyes closed. She crossed herself, muttering snippets of prayers. This allowed Nadia to scan her entire profile, to freeze the sight, compare it against the fragments of her memories.
They were alone for the first time, the men wisely bowing out of the trip in favor of a visit to the KGB museum at Lubyanka—Slavik had greased the right palms to allow them access. It was all quite beautiful at the Khovanskoye Cemetery, the lanes wide, the flowers bright, the graves sheltered by a row of birches and firs.
She moved closer to Larisska and slipped an arm around her waist. “You can’t imagine how I’ve missed you. Every day I worry about you. The day you are safe in America will be my happiest day.”
“What’s so great about it?” Larissa looked up at her. “America? What makes it better than home?” Those familiar eyes were underlined with blue pencil. The mole she had forgotten about, a mole on her neck right below the left earlobe.
She didn’t know where to start. Images of Brooklyn flooded her at once. She began to talk. Sasha, Regina, Grisha, Aneta, Boris, and her friends. Stores that sold nothing useful whatsoever. The public bathrooms were free, so was the soap and paper towels. People who said “Watch your step” when you entered their establishment. When you got your blood drawn at the doctor’s, you didn’t have to bring your own alcohol or cotton. When you called an ambulance they didn’t ask for cash first. No one harassed you about your handwriting or accent. The world was designed for comfort.
“That sounds nice.” Larissa lingered at the grave with the bundle of carnations at its foot. This time Nadia allowed them both the time, a final look at the technolog. He had been nice to her daughter; she had been on his mind all along: Your daughter is my daughter.
She laced Larissa’s arm through hers and they walked like the old days. There had never been a point to conversation as long as they could walk in step in the same direction. But when she looked her daughter square in the face, she noticed that Larissa’s eyes were glistening.
“Stores that sell nothing useful,” she said, so quietly Nadia could barely make out the words. “When all this time, we were dying. Our banks are still closed, believe it or not. No one knows if it’s safe to leave the house.”
“Oh, kitten.” She began to cry.
An elderly man walking by them with his cane said, “Women shouldn’t cry in public, you know. It’s not attractive to look at.”
She’d had enough of these people. She could feel an ignited wick burning to the very bottom. “Shut up, old man. Who asked your opinion? Did I wonder out loud what you thought on the subject of crying women?” The man continued on, shaking his head.
“That’s not very feminine. That’s all I was saying.”
“Feminine? I’ll show you feminine, you cretin,” she called out to his back. He looked behind him a little fearfully, shaking his head.
When she returned to her daughter, Larissa was staring at her. Whether the look was of repulsion or admiration, Nadia couldn’t at first be sure. There was nothing to be done. Seven years was seven years. They had both changed. Why didn’t she think they would change before they came together again? Why did she assume time would be suspended while she was gone?
“Mama, I had no idea you were such a badass,” Larissa said, bursting into the first smile Nadia had seen since that awful day at the Kiev embassy, before everything crumbled for the two of them. “If you’d only stayed and had a few choice words for Poroshenko and Putin, the war would have ended sooner.”
“I would have said, ‘I’ll show you, separatists.’”
“Or, ‘I’ll show you, Yanukovich. You and your ridiculous palace. Your stupid Steinway piano, your personalized brandy, your cars and motorcycles, your enormous horse statues.’”
“My God, if you told me this was all a bad novel, I’d believe you.”
“I don’t remember you this assertive. Were you always like this?”
“You don’t remember? What about when you were twelve or thirteen years old, shadowed by that skinny, pimpled Artem kid you couldn’t stand but were too nice to reject? Remember how you whispered, ‘Help me get rid of him, Mama’? How I
managed to chase him away?”
“Oh my God, poor Artem! I never said that, you’re making it up. Didn’t you pull him aside and say something like, ‘You’re here so often your intentions must be to marry my daughter this afternoon. Shall I call for the priest and you invite your parents?’ He couldn’t get out the door fast enough.” And they both laughed so hard, her stomach felt like it might burst.
Had there ever been a happier place for Nadia than this cemetery right now? It was as though a heavy sentence was lifted and she saw sky for the first time in seven years. She wanted to carefully extract this moment and can it for the winter so she could take it down off the shelf and know that she now had the means to survive until springtime.
* * *
The next morning, she and Larissa were eating breakfast together when Slavik burst into the room holding an AK-47. It was long, the distance from his hip to foot, and it was casually slung under his armpit. “Good morning, everyone. I’m starved.”
Nadia covered Larisska with her body. “What are you doing? Put that thing down.”
Slavik looked confused. “Aren’t we going to the parade? I got us tickets to Lenin’s Tomb.”
“In Gorky Park,” Larissa said from behind Nadia’s back. They had been having such a lovely time until Slavik came along. Larissa was telling her stories of her grandmother’s unironic Putin figurine collection, and she had been describing Aneta in all her bunned glory. Larissa had even allowed her to administer an insulin shot the way she did every morning since Larissa was a little girl. She had been willing both the men to simply disappear. But here was Slavik, interfering as usual, but this time with a gun.
Reaching over, Larissa took the gun, slid it to the back of the counter. “Don’t mind him. He’s been looking forward to this for weeks, haven’t you, little bear?” Into a bowl, she ladled what remained of the oatmeal, added a splash of milk.
“But why do you need to bring a gun into Gorky Park?” Nadia wanted to know.
“He’s a huge Kalashnikov fan and they’ll be promoting their products for Victory Day,” Larissa said. “You know, men are boys. They want to take their pictures with their women and their guns.”
Nadia thought this was the most absurd thing she’d ever heard. Those very guns were responsible for the death of that neighbor who went out to drop off bread for his son and was shot by a nearby sniper. Her mother had described the scene in more detail than necessary, his wife dragging the body, trailing blood down the hallway. And what about the technolog? But now she could not allow herself to think of him dead, alone, on the street.
“It’s fine, Mama. Can you give me a little breathing room, please?” They had had such a lovely morning but now Larisska was drawing away and returning to her Slavik’s side.
Slavik shrugged. “You’ll see. It’s really a rocking time.” He buried a spoonful of oatmeal in his mouth.
* * *
This Victory Day was the largest yet, the seventieth anniversary of the Nazi defeat. Didn’t she know? Slavik was explaining as they walked from the apartment building to the metro, speaking to her as if he were her elder. He’d heard the presidents of Cuba, India, Vietnam were all going to be here. No United States here of course; they were still waiting for a president who would be a real friend to Putin. Or Germany or England or anyone else still grumpy over the Crimea business. As he spoke, Nadia only thought about how Slavik’s stature might have been a problem for him at school. Short Slavik, tiny Slavik, rearing up with his fists to fight anyone who disagreed with his cocky pronouncements.
“The Ukrainian junta will be defeated. I know you’re Americans now but with all due respect, surely you can see that we can’t just keep bowing to America, am I right or am I right? As it is, everything’s in dollars. But you know who doesn’t lick America’s feet? That’s right. Putin is master of his domain, unlike all these weak, goddamn presidents. He was completely right to take Crimea. What else could he do after the Maidan coup?”
Maidan coup? Nadia glanced nervously at Boris. Here was a man who had many opinions of his own, but now he was quietly listening to Slavik’s rantings. As they descended into the metro, he might have said, Akh, it’s a complicated situation, isn’t it? So much history. One side borders Europe, the other Russia. So many years of enmity, it was only a matter of time. But mostly he nodded his head, and it occurred to Nadia that he either did it for her, toward some kind of future between their families, or he was tuning Slavik out in the same efficient manner.
The metro was stuffed with the medallioned, the patriotic, the Soviet nostalgics. Kids in Octyabronok hats, old men in their former war uniforms. She didn’t like that Slavik pushed his way on the train first, not looking behind to check on Larissa’s safety. On the train, Larissa picked up the thread. “Junta, junta, you know how I hate that word. You saw those poor Ukrainian soldiers. They sent them out to our town with nothing. No uniform, no good shoes. Babushka lets a few of them shower at our place once a week.”
Slavik rolled his eyes as if in the direction of all the train’s men. Women, am I right? “I wasn’t talking about the soldiers, my dear.”
Nadia was nervous. “Please, let’s talk about something else,” until the train pushed into the station and they were being extracted with the throng.
At Lenin’s Tomb, soldiers were waving them into the line. “Show your tickets. No photography, no smoking, no talking, take off all your hats, open your bags for inspection.” They were being hustled along by armed guards, the line twisting around the mausoleum’s granite mouth. Slavik jumped out of line to buy a bouquet of chrysanthemums from a deluged babushka.
“Why are we here again?” she whispered to Boris. “We should be at a nice museum or something.”
“This could be your new son-in-law, Snegurochka.” Boris smiled. “You fight it, it only gets worse. Believe me, I know from experience. It ends how it ends with no interference from the mamasha.”
“Why is he buying flowers? For whom? Certainly not for Larisska.”
They were making her jittery, these armed men barking instructions at them as if at soldiers. The tourists from non-Russian-speaking countries, the innocent Italians and Chinese and Germans, didn’t seem bothered. That she understood what they were saying only made it more frightening, and she wished they’d gone to the Tretiakov or somewhere pleasant instead of this display of Russian might.
“It is colder than I expected,” she said, knotting her scarf tighter.
“We’ll be inside soon.” And Boris started to whistle.
They ducked inside the mausoleum, beneath the gold letters spelling LENIN, where Slavik and Larissa were clearly continuing their argument.
“You are a simplistic thinker,” she was saying. “You’re like that about everything. If you look a little closer, you’ll see things are not as easy as you’re making them out to be.”
Nadia was thrust into darkness and she held on to Boris’s firm hand guiding her toward a distant light. There he lay, Lenin, like a precious ring in a velvet box. His one fisted hand lying beside him, his face illuminated by a beam of light. She remembered reading somewhere that the embalmer bragged he had made Lenin look better after death. It was exactly like the wax museum in Times Square, except for the hush in the room, people gently placing plastic bouquets of flowers. Slavik moved forward too, adding two chrysanthemums from his bouquet to the pile, receiving smiles of complicity from the other flower-givers. Those were the good old days, weren’t they? The tourists simply looked confused, and who could blame them? She herself couldn’t be sure if the man should be receiving flowers when there were much worthier dead people sprinkled throughout cemeteries all over the former Soviet Union. There were certainly unmarked graves not too far from her hometown, men that might still be indirectly dying because of the embalmed man in front of her lying on his bed of granite.
“Keep walking. No stopping,” she heard the orders of the guards. Her stomach felt like it was turning inside out. When they exited into the
light, she felt like she might bring up the contents of her breakfast. But they were being directed toward the Necropolis, toward the tombs of Stalin, Dzerzhinsky, Brezhnev. Boris was snapping photographs of Stalin’s head, which blasted off from the top of the stone like a rocket. The blocks of Stalin’s tomb were heaped with long-stemmed roses and wreaths, many more than had been placed before Lenin. Slavik added the rest of his flowers to Stalin’s grave.
“Now that’s a man worthy of your mourning,” Larissa said sarcastically.
“What are you talking about? You don’t know anything. Stalin was good for Ukraine.” Slavik was poised. Nadia recognized that fire in his eyes, it was a warning, a prelude to action. She stepped between her daughter and Slavik though a part of her couldn’t help noticing Stalin’s tremendous face staring down at them all. Good for Ukraine, if you thought starving millions of people on purpose was good for a country, she thought. But there was a time and place for disagreeing and this was not it.
“Let’s all calm down here.”
Overhead an explosion rang out in the sky. It filled the air with a single terrifying bang. Everyone started, craned their necks upward to the origin of the sound. But Larissa cried out, tears streaming down her face. She was in Nadia’s arms now, her shoulders heaving with fright.
“There, there. It’s okay. We will be okay.”
“Mama,” she moaned. “What was that?”
“Okay, we are getting out of here.” Nadia was taut with a new clarity. She would cover her daughter’s body with her own and move to the sidelines, hide in the crowd and run to safety. She felt ready, as if she had been training for this moment. Another shot rang out, then more. She was surprised to find that no one was running.
“Fireworks, you silly girls,” Slavik said, pointing upward. “Some kids are just playing.”
“Fireworks,” she whispered into her daughter’s hair, running her hand up and down her spasming back. After so many years, it was here in her arms. It was not pulling away.