Mother Country

by Irina Reyn

  The local kids knew that there was such a thing as poisonous mushrooms masquerading as opiata. But poisonous mushrooms didn’t scare Nadia; she could tick off each type in her head. Only an out-of-towner couldn’t see the difference right away; the imposter mushroom had a thinner stem, was wan in color. She would never be able to describe what made it wrong except purely by sight and instinct. As a joke, she once placed a poisonous pretender into the basket of one of the local boys, but he got so angry when he was shaking out his spoils that he hit her shins with his foot. The pain was so excruciating she didn’t try the trick again.

  On the most successful expeditions, they emerged from the woods with baskets full of them. Then they ran back to their complex where her mother fried them all up with butter and salt and sometimes onion and they scooped up the sautéed mushrooms with their fingers. They were so textured, the taste too deep to call up in her imagination.

  When studies ramped up at school and her friends spent more time with their schoolwork, the groups tended to be younger kids in the building. They were dull competition, and often had to be watched so that nobody wandered off or she would catch hell from their mothers. But once her sister started university, she brought home her new friends, fresh hunters, and Nadia could surprise them with her prowess. She loved how impressed twenty-year-olds became when a thirteen-year-old beat them in under an hour. Her basket was almost always the fullest, because she had patience. She did not get distracted or bored. No matter what the task, Nadia could see it through. That was her talent.

  * * *

  To her surprise, the arriving kids did not seem awed by their transformed surroundings. They came trudging in with sleeping bags that were immediately dumped by the door. The adults separated themselves into the parents and nannies and they stood against the wall holding plastic cups of seltzer. The fathers drank beer. The owner of the place sprang into action and shepherded the kids toward the fake campfire in the middle of the room, rushed to disperse them among organized activities. She forgot about Sasha, who was sitting by herself next to a superimposed picture of a blinking deer.

  Nadia rushed over to crouch next to Sasha. “Join party,” she encouraged, but the girl’s arms were folded. Any perceived slight could tweak her mood these days. The kids were not paying sufficient attention to her, failing to acknowledge her as guest of honor. They were turning to explore the surroundings laid out for them, the ersatz campfire, the tents, the provisions.

  “Smile, say hello to friends,” Nadia suggested, even as she knew there was no use. Sasha was even less inclined to smile when the notion was suggested to her. Regina found the characteristic irritating but Nadia admired this about Sasha, that she allowed herself the intractable sense of being right as the injured party. By contrast, Nadia herself had been a pleaser as a child, always assuming any mishap was her fault.

  The owner of the place drew Regina closer, their heads bent over a tablet. The time promised on the invitation had barely arrived, but they were both checking their watches, eyeing the door.

  The room went dark and the ceiling exploded with stars. One little girl exclaimed, “Ooh,” and the rest were temporarily silenced at the surprise of it. The sudden cessation of seeing.

  * * *

  There were a few unfamiliar faces on this particular mushroom hunt, two boys and a girl from Olga’s university, but they all generously agreed that Nadia was welcome to tag along.

  “I’ll be quiet, I promise,” Nadia yelped. She had been facing one of those endless summer days when friends were indisposed, adults were distracted, and the world was blank of amusement.

  “Are you sure we want her underfoot?” Olga sighed to no one and everyone. “She doesn’t mind hanging out at home.” Nadia’s presence was an inconvenient grievance for her, and their mother’s insistence that she include her little sister if she lacked playmates only deepened the injustice.

  “You don’t have to do a thing. I’ll explain to everyone how to find them.” She dispersed the baskets and walking sticks to all four of them, eager to be seen as unobtrusively helpful.

  The two boys admitted they had never gone mushroom hunting before. “I grew up in the city, what do you expect?” one of them said as a basket was handed to him. His name was Andrei, the same name as the father she never knew, the father who died of lung cancer when she was a few months old. To Nadia, the upper body of this Andrei was disproportionately larger than his legs, but she could tell that her sister’s and friend’s energies were focused on him to the exclusion of the other boy. His face was squinty with an abundance of hair in the front and thick, puckish lips.

  “It’s not that hard. Avoid the red one with the dots. You’ll be fine,” Olga said in a way that exuded indifference that Nadia knew to be artificial.

  Olga was wearing the strawberry-red dress, the one worn only to special outings like birthday parties. It was a deep, shiny material their mother procured from a woman who returned from a business trip to Finland. In the right light, the color popped along the prism, turning pink and fuschia and magenta, and all her friends—forced to work with the same dreary material available in the state stores—envied her for it.

  With scissors and a needle, next to magazines open to models wearing similar styles, her mother constructed that dress for Olga. From the odds and ends of what remained, she presented Nadia with a pair of underwear she was too afraid to wear and ruin. In the dress, Olga looked like a masculine Marilyn Monroe, her wavy wood-colored hair curling under a wide boatneck that only accentuated the muscular width of her upper body. It was not a dress for the woods to Nadia’s eye but she decided that she would go ahead and wear her underwear too. Why should her underwear be stowed for special occasions when Olga put on her special dress for no good reason?

  “You can’t miss the red mukhamor,” she clarified in case Andrei thought her sister as unwelcoming as she did. “Whatever you do, don’t touch it.”

  “Don’t touch the one with the dots,” not-Andrei repeated. He was sitting on the couch with his legs spread wide, his jeans an unfashionably light blue streaked with white that rode too high on his hips. Nadia sympathized with this not-Andrei, with his tuft of hair above his lips, eyes slightly crooked over a too-small nose. She tried to signal this by leaving the best stick, the stick she usually employed, for him.

  “If you get sick we’ll make you drink water and stick a finger down your throat.” Olga directed this solely to Andrei, who was leaning against the wall with crossed arms. She walked back and forth in front of him with no clear purpose.

  “That doesn’t sound as disgusting as it should. I wouldn’t mind your finger down my throat,” Andrei said.

  For a while, they were all forced to watch Olga aligning her hair in the mirror, checking the boundaries of her lipstick. “You’re ridiculous,” she tossed back at him.

  “Am I?” he asked, in a weird way of not being a question. The friend and not-Andrei sat at opposite ends of the couch. When it was time to go, they rose and filed out, one behind the other.

  The woods began behind the apartment complex, at the end of a path that led from the playground. Despite it being a warm day, there was just a handful of children pushing one another on the rusted swings. Some were in crocheted hats, pulling themselves along the horizontal bars even though the equipment was long ago made crooked, one leg buried in the grass.

  They set out on the path for the woods, Olga and Andrei in the front and the other, lesser couple, Nadia guessed, following behind. From her view at the very rear, Nadia watched the bodies sway toward and away from each other. The second boy, the not-Andrei, seemed to say something unpleasant because after a while Olga’s friend abandoned her walking partner and joined the couple at the front. Their formation resembled a kite, clustered with color at the front, a long, lonely string trailing behind.

  They were walking too slowly, with not enough passion for the hunt. Nadia was growing impatient. These grown-ups didn’t have a chance against her. She knew every
inch of the woods here, every brook and branch. By the time they approached the task at hand with any serious attention, her basket would already be full with opiata. Maybe she would even glimpse the thick stem and cap of the white mushroom, the rarest and most desirable of them all.

  * * *

  As the birthday party started in earnest, circumscribed factions were forming: at the periphery, the nannies; by the table of food, the parents with siblings; and in the center, the kids. The kids were not allowed to fend for themselves for a minute, Nadia noticed. They were being guided with meticulous detail through one activity after the next. Marshmallow decorating was followed by some complicated woodsy craft project abandoned by half the boys in favor of flattening the tents with their feet. A man dressed in a bear suit sent them into peals of frightened screams: Russian bear! A hopping race inside sleeping bags made at least two girls fall over and cry. Sasha refused to take part in any game where she was not the player of honor, but she recovered when the cake arrived and when they all turned their faces toward her to sing “Happy Birthday.”

  Next to Nadia, the nannies talked easily with one another, a few of them greeting her with a friendly nod before diving back into some subject of mutual interest. The mothers were making a show of easy camaraderie, some rocking babies in pouches as they stood, others unwinding the arms of toddlers from around their calves. Nadia watched Regina among these women. She had no other children to occupy her and she was making an effort at circulating among all the mothers, touching them on the shoulder as she wove. They were asking her something about the crazy candidate running for the American presidency and his love for Putin. What did she think about that? Nadia couldn’t hear the answer, but the mothers nodded over their plates of pizza as if Regina was a special authority on the subject.

  At home, Regina seemed to her nothing less than fully American, and yet here, among these smiling, sophisticated women, Nadia understood for the first time that Regina was no native, no insider. Among them, she stuck out, her body tensed, her clothes matched too intentionally by color. The way she was unable to keep still, her own smile more strained at its edges. The other women occupied the space with effortlessness, in roomy shifts and open-toed wedge shoes and long, exposed necks. Even the velvet dress that had seemed so stylish to Nadia earlier that morning now appeared too dressy, inappropriate compared to what the others wore.

  The owner of the space clapped her hands. “At last, storytime, storytime.” The children were hustled into a circle and the lights were dimmed. Nadia knew that this was Regina’s proudest moment, her own personal stamp on the party. She rose before them like a professor at a podium and explained (presumably) that each of the kids were to provide a sentence toward a fairy tale. Then the Russian-themed story would be illustrated by Sasha, and each child would receive a copy as a gift for attending the party. Regina was very excited about this idea. It would be a group story, an insight into the minds of children at a particular point in their lives.

  Even a year ago, Nadia would have thought it all the usual Regina lunacy—just let the kids run around and stop torturing them with silly adult activities—but this time, she paused. She could tell that her brain was shifting in its thinking since talking to Larissa last week. She was starting to change, to snap into a new perspective. Maybe Regina was right, and this activity would be cherished, remembered.

  Last week, over Skype, Larissa happened to say that some journalist had approached her about telling her story of living through the war. She had her doubts at first, but the journalist promised it would be published in an American newspaper or magazine with her picture to accompany the story, and she decided the publicity might be a good thing for someone in her position. More public sympathy might expedite things, right? In any case, they promised to put it in her own words with minimal interference, just an oral history of the experience. She’d always wanted a picture of herself in a newspaper.

  “But what’s the point?” Nadia asked, anxious that Larissa was putting herself through yet another wave of trauma. “What happened is in the past now. Isn’t it better to just look forward to the future? You’ll be here soon, just focus on that.”

  But she went through with it anyway. “You know what, Mama? It wasn’t so bad and she was very nice and seemed really sympathetic. I kind of feel better now that it’s over. Who knows why? It is out of my head anyway.”

  Nadia was about to argue that it was the worst idea she’d ever heard. And what if the publicity did more harm than good? But in the same conversation, Larissa had also shyly announced that she decided she would come to New York instead of Cleveland after all. Her voice was softer, more open than it had been in seven years. No explanations were offered and Nadia was too afraid to ask. All she knew was that it was not the time to push back against any of her daughter’s ideas.

  Nadia said, “Of course, I can see that. It must have been a relief.”

  Her daughter’s face on the screen was blurry—could it have been an entire year since she saw her in Moscow?—but a mother’s mind was able to fill in every detail, from moles to misshapen bottom teeth in the front to the almond shape of the eyes.

  “I felt a huge weight off. I got it out of me, you know?”

  “Where can I read it?”

  It was inside some journal called Atlantic, and she was able to find it online without too much difficulty. There was Larissa’s photograph, taken just days ago. Her face was bare of makeup except for some mascara and she was in the middle of a sentence, her lips forming a perfect, horizontal O. Larissa’s account was translated with a dictionary over a period of several days, but she was able to read her daughter’s words online.

  She was afraid to confront the swirling horrors that had agitated inside her own mind. Would her daughter’s pain feel cheaper this way, exposed to the world, open to derision or, even worse, pity? But the words were in print, solid and unassailable.

  We wake up at four in the morning to explosions. Once the bombing begins, we might as well get up and start the day. The windows, fortified by tape, are rattling with enough force to shatter into a million pieces.

  To her surprise, her daughter’s ordeal felt even more true for being written down.

  * * *

  “And then she pooped in her pants,” a redheaded boy proudly announced.

  “And she peed in the sink,” his friend said, picking up the thread.

  “She pooped and peed in her bed,” a pigtailed girl added.

  A woman looked toward Regina. Would she let this continue? Regina intervened. “Let’s take the game seriously, guys.” She crawled among the children and tried to pick up the original line of the story. “Once upon a time a little Russian princess named Masha found herself in the middle of the dark, dark woods, and … what happened next, Skylar?”

  One father made some joke that involved the words “chill” and “drink.” The parents were watching Regina’s hard work on the floor with a mixture of sympathy and commiseration. Some were squinting at their watches in the dim light, deciding on a second beer.

  “She pooped and farted?” Skylar said.

  “No, let’s play seriously,” Regina insisted. “Let’s see if we can tell a whole story together. Then I write it down and we have a whole book. A book with your words, imagine that! For you to keep forever and ever. So here we are in the woods, and poor Masha is all alone. This is a dangerous situation. What happened next?”

  “She runs,” says a girl with pigtails and glasses rimmed with bright pink plastic. Nadia couldn’t understand the rest.

  * * *

  She could hear their voices echoing through the rustle of the trees. Once in a while, Olga or her girlfriend called out, “Found one!” “Hooray!” But those feeble pronouncements were nothing compared with the frequency and vigor of her own victories: “Got four.” “Found them.” “Opiata!”

  They would give up soon on a hot day like this. The region wasn’t known for hot days and big kids Olga’s age were limp in thi
s kind of heat. Like Olga herself, her contemporaries seemed listless and unmotivated, all too interested in school gossip and American movies and American fashion. But not Nadia. She was alert and swift and would earn high marks on a communal farm with her unrelenting, ceaseless production. Opiata grew around the stump of a tree and this is where she focused her attention, on trees that had been felled. She didn’t hear the boy appear around the fringes of her sightline, but bumped up right against him.

  “Hey, kid sister.”

  “We’re not supposed to follow each other,” she said, annoyed. “The person in front of you would just get all the goods and there’d be nothing for you.”

  “Come here.” Andrei gestured to her in the friendly way of equals. As though he wanted her diagnosis of a condition or some horticultural expertise. It was annoying the way Olga’s friends spoke to her, but then she was the one who gave them the permission by setting the tone.

  “You’re holding me up.”

  “It won’t take long, I promise.”

  “We don’t have much time, you know. We have to take advantage of daytime.” But her basket was almost full, opiata brimming out of the sides. They could be hunting for hours and she would still win. Olga’s friends rarely focused on the task at hand, too busy gossiping and dreaming.

  “Like I said, it won’t take long.” The reverberation of echoes made it seem as though her sister was just meters away, as though she would run in, raise a haughty eyebrow, a hand to the hip. How disappointed she would be that Andrei had chosen Nadia’s company. Her familiar grating voice was loose and distant, beyond the shadows of leaves, the sound of scattering animals across tree branches.

  * * *

  Poor Masha the princess was still stuck in the forest. Three wishes had been granted to her by a “fish witch” but now she was paralyzed with indecision. The kids were quickly losing interest even as Regina continued to prompt them, presumably to bring forth the flow of their imaginations. The door swung open and a willowy, handsome man walked in. He seemed unrushed, calm, nattily dressed in tight-fitting slacks, a button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled at the elbows. The only two fathers instantly greeted him, sliding a beer into his hand. Nadia knew this was Jake, but after four years of working for the family, she had met him just a handful of times. Regina attributed his absence to his demanding job, she described his employer as akin to Google and Facebook, but a company that did something with dogs and healthy meals. It entailed trips to Berlin and London and marked the apartment with the heaviness of his recent presence.