The Cosmopolitans (19 page)

Osip himself had come up with only one idea, but it was a good
one: the beach. At four this morning, he’d checked the weather on
the computer — 87 American degrees — like someone saying,
“Genius plan.” He had immediately left a message at work, taking
a personal day. Unable to get back to sleep, he’d packed the car and
waited for Stalina to wake so he could tell her, and then another three
hours after that, in the kitchen, trying and failing to concentrate on
a chronicle of Saddam Hussein’s rule in the
National Review
. When
she’d come down at eleven-thirty, Katya had said “Okay.”

Driving to Shippan, he asked her whether she remembered their
vacation at Amston Lake, the summer she was five. “The other girls
would be up for beach, but not Katyenok. You liked too much to
sleep. You remember how I wake you?”

Silence.

“All I have to say is ‘Katya —
bool’k
!’” He made the sound of
someone jumping into the water. “
You’d say, ‘Bool’k?’ and I’d say,
‘Yes, but first, bathing suit, brushing teeth…
” Her cheek was pressed
to the window and her eyes were closed. “
Do you remember that?
Do you remember how I would wake a Katyenok?
”

“Okay.” She had Baba Rufa’s voice, that voice she’d had at the
end of her cigarettes and hospitals.

He turned on the radio. Traffic was catastrophic, everywhere but
there: “What you want to do is stay on —” the announcer cautioned.
It smelled of seaweed inside the car, even though the windows were
rolled up. Katya was too cold for open windows, even though it was
87 American degrees outside.

“Did I ever tell you I have other wife?” he said. She looked at
him: that was something. “Yes, twenty years. She is very beautiful.”
Katya nodded — had she already heard him say this? He finished
anyway. “I drive Ford and only Ford for twenty years. Sometimes,
other cars beat her a little.” Katya nodded. “It’s okay,” he said. “So I
think, maybe Ford can make me their new commercial model? Foxy
photo, me on car?”

“Okay,” she said, as he pulled into one of a plentitude of potential
parking spaces — it was almost empty on weekdays this October.
Americans thought if there was no lifeguard, they couldn’t swim.
He handed Katya the towel he’d brought, the newest and best of the
Molochnik towels, having come free with one of Stalina’s makeup
purchases and featuring overlapping compasses and lips. She held it
as though she didn’t know what it was for.

“Do you remember how we used to race to the little beach?” He
was ready to grab his stomach in two hands and run if she’d agree.

She shrugged.

He said, “You want to race? You think you can beat up me
now?”

Silence. She looked like that shivering, pale boy in the painting,
Revelation of Christ to the People
. What had been revealed, to
make her look like that? “Look,” she said, “I know I’m kind of a
heinous problem for you guys. If I go away, like suddenly, to get
better —”

Osip dropped his visor hat. “What?”

“To get better.”

“Go away — where?” A fat seagull flew over them, a vulture.

“Maybe, like, to Russia? I think I wouldn’t be so weird there?”

She was joking, so he laughed.

She said, “I’m just telling you so you won’t be surprised.” She
said it was all planned. She felt very positive about this idea. He
dug his keys into his palm. The wind stirred up the twigs around
their feet, twigs like minnows, he’d thought it would be a day of
minnows.

He said, “Don’t even think about it.”

“You sound like the Commish.”

“I’ll lock house.”

“That never worked,” she said, gently, as red bombs floated in
the bright periphery of his vision.

“
To leave us again, to go back to that swamp, that whore, that
old farter?
” He kicked his car. “What I need this for, if you are run?”
It didn’t dent: it was a Ford.

“Like, a lot of parents would be happy. Like, I’m going back to
our roots.” Finally she had some energy in her voice. For this, she
had energy.

“
Our what? You know what they call us there? You know what
they’ll do to a nice Jewish narcomanka like you?
” He wanted to run
away alone to the little beach, where no one ever went, to flop down
and sleep on its twiggy, black-specked sand. If he ran, she wouldn’t
follow him, or even stay here. He needed to keep his eyes on her.
“
You want to leave your mother again? You want her crazy?
Tfu, tfu,
tfu
.
Spit three times over your left shoulder.
”

“What?” She took a step back.

“
So the Evil Eye doesn’t hear you.
”

“That’s just babushkas —”

“Now!” He hit the hood, burning his hand. She spit, or at least
made a spitting noise, with her head turned away. His face was hot
and wet. He told her to promise she wouldn’t leave.

“Don’t you think I’ve thought — ”

He banged on the car. “Promise, promise, promise.” His neck
burned. She was shivering and he gave her his towel, and the
sweatshirt he’d packed. After a long time, she said, “Okay.” Was
that a promise? What did a promise from her mean? He wanted to
ask.

Yana

Yana awoke to find Pratik still on his laptop. He said, “I
happened upon a web site. May I read it to you? It would not disturb
you?” His cheeks were the color of bricks. He was very angry, and
in his anger, more selfish than usual — he began reading before
she’d answered. “This gentleman Buford Spelling, a Bangladeshi
name, no? He has interesting ideas about our floods which kill us.”
Turning back around to his laptop, and putting on a kind of British
accent, which perched atop his Bengali accent like a crow, he read,
“To us Westerners, a house is something important, filled with all
our precious belongings and symbols of accomplishment. But poor
Bangladeshis have hardly any belongings at all. We must remember
that these people have nothing to lose.”

Yana said, “What an imperialist.”

“It is not that he is an imperialist.”

“Sorry.”

Usually, Pratik would have now tried to make her feel better
about whatever she’d done wrong. Tonight, he just went on. “It is
that he is using the tactics of anti-imperialism to claim that we poor
Bangladeshis — I am falling over in shock that he does not simply
call us Pakis — we are not like the rest of the humanity, we are jolly
monkeys in trees, we play with garbage.”

Yana tried to massage his shoulders, but they were too stiff.
“Where’d you find this?”

“On a website linked to Cambridge University Department of
International Studies. This Buford seems to have a connection. He
is a chaired professor, for all we know.” The tendons at the back of
his neck were trembling. “‘For the average native, a flood is not that
big of a deal.’ This is sentence number one. Sentence numero two:
‘A 1991 cyclone and flood led to the deaths of over 100,000 people.’
No big deal, everything cool. Numero three: ‘Westerners should not
be overly concerned about these events.’”

Yana said, “I’d beat his ass, if he weren’t in Cambridge.” Would
that be of use? Pratik pulled her onto his lap. Yana hazarded, “Let’s
see the flood cup as half full, you know? He has no power, he’s just
writing. You — you’re doing things, like that great play…” which
Pratik was writing, but he didn’t notice the contradiction.

“Oh, I told you about that?” He had, in detail, but she prepared
to listen again to how rural schoolchildren would be singing and
dancing about flood procedures. Yana kept her eyes looking into
his to prevent herself from falling asleep, nodded, uh-huhed like an
antediluvian sex-role-dominated sorority girl, and when he finished,
they rolled into bed like two slugs and slept through the morning,
undiscovered.

Stalina

The Russian Soul waged a campaign of glasnost’. “
You must
confess your sins to this tender sapling, or knock-kneed foal, which
bends beneath their weight
.”

The Russian Soul said, why give Katya cold paper, when Stalina
could offer a mother’s bosom, a mother’s embrace? Stalina had
recently found that, if she did not honor it with a reply, it drifted
away, bored. However, in her head, she answered that she knew
her daughter, she knew how best to tell her, and whom had the
handkerchief ever freed from the hold of opiates, that it could advise
her?

First, Stalina put the letter in a bag of assorted chocolate mini-bars. What female does not like chocolate? The chocolates disappeared, but the letter endured. It was possible that Stalina had eaten the chocolates herself, during her twice-daily inspections.

Then she put the letter into Katya’s laundry basket, but Katya had no immediate plans to do laundry, going around all day in some old safety-pinned jeans and Yana’s Take a Bite Out of Shark Finning tee shirt. Finally, one morning, when everyone but the two of them had already left the house, Stalina taped an envelope with Katya’s name on it to the bathroom mirror.

Katya

The boy at the check-out desk, who wore a hemp tee shirt and
pirate earrings and looked like someone she may have been friends
with in high school, made the security guard go through Katya’s bag
before allowing her to leave. Now she remembered why she’d hardly
ever come to the library before.