The Cosmopolitans (20 page)

Outside, a Mennonite girl in a head scarf — had Katya taken
physical science with her at Stamford High? — gave Katya a
pamphlet about divorce and hurricanes. Elderly, semi-addicted
Vietnam War veterans lined the benches, dozily dealing, or arguing
with the unseen, or chatting, or sleeping. She reminded herself that the
Brezhnev voice hadn’t come back for a long time, and she reminded
herself that was a good thing.

She’d looked too long. One of the men on the benches unfolded
himself and began to limp towards her. Trying to ignore him, Katya
took out the graph paper, covered with Byzantine script, which she’d
found in the bathroom a week before. She could read Russian well
enough to understand that it was addressed to her, and that it was most
likely her mother’s signature at the bottom. She traced individual
letters with her finger. The word “super,” in English, appeared once.
Was her mother trying to boost her self-esteem again?

The man stood over her shoulder. “Where are you going, girly?”
His breath was hungry and Katya knew what that was like. She
wanted to tell him she knew, and buy him a sandwich at the Greek
place, at the same time as she wanted to run. As was usual for her in
such circumstances, she only stood in place. His hand was on Katya’s
shoulder, like a boyfriend’s. “Up to Tittyland?” the man suggested.

“Leave her alone” — but
leave
was pronounced like
leaf
, a
Russian accent — oh, no. It was Roman, the Chaikins’ nephew.

“Calm down, fuck off, horse shoe, duck luck,” the man said.
Roman tore the man’s hand off her shoulder. The man lifted both his
hands and smiled. “The hell you were.” He walked back to the bench.
A few of the men on the bench whooped.

Katya shook, but not because of what this Roman, who was
asking whether she was okay, may have thought. She had liked the
hand. She shoved the letter in her pocket.

Roman’s jeans drooped over his white underwear, across the band
of which was written Caldor, the name of the chintzy department
store a few blocks away. Someone — perhaps he himself — had
shaven a thunder-bolt through his hair. “You are okay?” he asked
again.

“Yeah.” There was a silence. “How are you?” she added, loudly,
lest Stalina hear of this encounter and suspect rudeness.

Instead of answering, he said, “And you do drugs or do not
do?”

That was all any of her parents’ friends asked her. The Russians
of Stamford were every one of them treatment counselors. Katya
shook her head.

“Yeah?” He grinned and pulled an imaginary lever, and said,
“Yes,” as if he’d just scored. Obviously, she wasn’t about to throw up
on him right this second, so what was it with the massive relief? He
said, “I am a straight-edge, is underground
termin
. You know?”

“No drugs, no drinking, no meat, no sex.”

He dimpled again. “But sex and meat are okay for me.”

She looked down.

He said, “Chaikins maybe throw me from house if I do not eat
meat like Reagan and Schwarzenegger. Also!” he tapped her arm. “I
am now DJ. I am wanting to tell you.”

To tell her? “That’s cool,” she said, although almost every guy
she’d known in California had called himself a DJ. Roman nodded,
as one who knows he has deserved a compliment. His shirt said
“Football! Football! Football!” across the chest.

“Nice shirt,” she said, and found herself laughing convulsively.
He tugged at his giant jeans. Her bus, like a chaperone, glided towards
them down the street.

“Can I have digits?” he said.

The door of the bus sighed open and she vaulted up the steps,
lurched towards the back, rested her head on the seat before her, and
screwed her eyes shut.

Osip

Osip leaned back in his lawn chair, which Stalina called a
director’s chair. Osip was, at the very least, the director of beer,
and this Friday, he had gotten a Danish brand. Why not? They had
saved their Jews. The beer itself was all right, if a bit pale and thin,
like a Dane. Galich sang on the cassette player. Katya was safe at
the library, living half her life there, just as she had when she was
fourteen. She’d always been so serious, and yet, she’d had the worst
grades of all his daughters.

Pratik came outside and pulled a chair next to his. “What are
you drinking?” Osip said.

“Just lemonade.”

“Oh, yes. Sorry.” Muslims never drank, which Osip could not
imagine. Jewish laws were reasonable, healthy. Who wanted to eat
milk and meat together?

“Is that Galich, your favorite?” Pratik said. Osip nodded and
corrected Pratik’s pronunciation.

“Yes, I can recognize him a little bit. What is he singing about
now?” Unlike Osip’s daughters, Pratik was interested in the bards.

Osip said, “It is about how one hundred years from today some
people will be bored after party and maybe put his cassette in. But
cassettes are obsolete technology. Only I have his cassettes, most
people, if they listen to him, buy CDs or pirate MP3. For all he was
genius, he didn’t predict.”

“Still, we can hope. People still listen to Led Zeppelin.” They
sat in silence a few moments, and then Pratik asked him how his
work was going.

“It’s going,” Osip said, pinching a mosquito out of the crook
of his arm. “Actually, it is going to India.” Osip hadn’t even told
Stalina this yet. “I am being reassigned.” He took another drink of
beer. “To genius work of subcontractor database.”

“Too bad.”

“No, it is Indians who are too bad, right?” Osip laughed to
encourage Pratik. “Bangladeshis know.”

Pratik smiled and flattened a mosquito on his knee.

“How is school?” Osip said.

“One of my professors is having us design emergency procedures
for hurricanes.” Pratik frowned at the clear, darkening sky.

“Oh, a
praktika
, very common in engineering school in Russia.”
Osip was being kind. Designing an “emergency procedure” was
hardly the same as designing a thermal waste disposal plant.

“Yes, and if it’s all right, I would like to give you my
recommendations. I am designing specifically for coastal New
England.”

Osip had another drink of his beer. “In Connecticut when we
have hurricane it equals just rain, boring, not like in Bangladesh.”
Sometimes, this boy made it hard to relax. Osip decided to steer the
conversation towards more philosophical realms. “Mosquitoes,” he
said, pointing to the bug-zapper, “How many you think die? Is it
right that we kill them? If they could kill us, they would kill us. They
are only too stupid.”

Pratik said, “Have you ever heard of the Long Island Express?”

Osip spread his hands. What now? “Of course I have heard.”

“The Long Island hurricane of 1938?”

Tomorrow, Osip had to go to work, face Call Me Evelyn and
her operatically amplified constructive criticism. Some people,
they could hide in their ivy towers, not he. “Long Island is not
Stamford.”

Pratik smiled. “You’re right. I might be a bit of a control freak,
Yana said so the other day.”

A mosquito of a thought hovered next to Osip’s forehead.
“Yana?”

“Yes, she even wrote a song, to the tune of ‘Superfreak,’ by
disco artist Rick James.” He laughed and tapped his sandaled foot:
“‘He is very organized, his tasks completed like no other.’”

Osip said, “My daughter sings many songs for you?”

“No, no. You know Yana is very busy with school, we just
bumped into each other in the kitchen, once.” He scratched his nose,
which was a liar’s giveaway, Baba Rufa had always said.

Osip opened his second beer.

Pratik laughed, for some reason.

The Commish was often blindsided, but always recovered
quickly. He was older than Osip, and still, he could run from a
restaurant, a fried squid dangling from his lips, and apprehend an
entire gang of drug thieves. If this Ali Baba had been romancing the
Commish’s daughter, under his own roof, the Commish would use
this time to extract information, subtly. “So, in Bangladesh, how
many wives your father has?”

“Oh — he and my mother are actually in Belgium now.” Pratik
took a gulp of lemonade.

“Oh, so for Belgium he has one wife only. But how many are
awaiting him in Bangladesh?”

Pratik said, “It is not, actually, a part of our cultural tradition,
polygamy.”

This was where the Commish would try a different line of
questioning, catch him off guard. If only Pratik drank — but it was
all right. Osip had twenty-five years and Soviet military experience
on his side. “So, Pratik, my friend, after you learn how to be Muslim
James Bond” — Pratik gave him a questioning look — “to resolve
all emergencies, you will be moving to Washington to help Bush?”

“Ideally, I’d like to work to help people, especially in my
country, Bangladesh —”

“I know your country is Bangladesh.”

Pratik swiveled his head around. “Quite a few of these mosquitoes
about now, perhaps we —”

Osip held up one hand and lumbered over to the bug zapper,
flicked it on “high,” and returned to his director’s chair.

“In Bangladesh, your wives will sit at home, they cannot go
outside without you?”

“Mrs. Molochnik,” Pratik said into the screen door, “may I help
you with dinner?”

“She can’t hear you,” Osip said. “When cooking she talks to
herself. Women! They are crazy! It is stupid to let them have school,
yes?”

Pratik sat up straighter, huffed. Osip had finally managed to
anger him, probably by mentioning multiple wives, which had made
Pratik envious of his wealthier relatives and their harems.