The Cosmopolitans (23 page)

“You’re like a Hebrew slave in the lion’s den!” Milla looked up,
startled, frightened, how else? She was a rabbit in a net, a lobster at
the moment it sees the water boil. The saleswoman looked up, too,
and Jean gave her a smoky June Allyson laugh.

“Jean?” Milla said, and Jean knew what was coming: Milla was
eternally surprised, but incapable of ever surprising. When Milla
pointed to her feet it was, of course, because her water had broken,
and now it was up to Jean, again, everything hard was up to her: to
apologize to the saleswoman, to hail a taxi, to yell at doctors, to call
everyone and say, “Guess what the stork dragged in?”, up to her
again, all of it.

Lev

Osip came with a prospectus of leaves: bronze, silver and gold.
For our parents, he said, we will get gold. He’s looked at the others
on the tree of life in the synagogue and our parents are the most
heroic by far. The closest anyone comes is a Myron who loved the
law. He wants his baby grandson to understand the grandeur of his
history.

Osip’s parents were heroes of the Mongolian frontier, mine were
enemies of the people. His marched off to defend our impregnable
borders; mine also marched, before guns, to a prison camp. His
could have appeared in a textbook, for a few years at least, before
orders came to scissor them into the dustbin of history; mine were
but two of the legions of enemies of the people. His surpassed mine,
because his were my invention, in the years following their arrest.

The stirring tale of the death of Osip’s parents, Captain Solomon
and his faithful nurse: The Mongolian hordes were climbing the
walls of the field hospital, our parents threw inkwells on their heads!
Then, I turned eight, and the inkwells turned to pistols they fired,
two pistols to each parent, and yes, Osya, they safely evacuated all
the patients before finally succumbing to a bomb, but don’t talk to
Baba Rufa about all this, it will only upset her.

It was a wonder to see a Jewish boy who could still believe like
that. “
That boy lied about papa, let’s beat him up,
” and, of course,
the “
let’s
” was a joke: it would be me, sitting away the hours on the
liar’s chest, while Osya worked up the courage to swat him across
the cheek.

I later had the chance to learn what Gendela and Solomon must
have been called in their last days: wicks. In Russian,
fitliks
. A
quick, sharp name for what was left of them, a name to keep us from
bothering with the gone.

What, Stalina, is the Point of Immigration, if not new stories?

Katya

Under her umbrella, Katya read the child-rearing book she’d
gotten Milla from the library’s twenty-five cent rack. “When can I
start taking my baby out of the house?” asked the top of a page. The
answer was that you could do it immediately, as long as you completed
all the items in a checklist that filled the following three pages. Milla
would like the checklist, Katya thought; although, perplexingly, it
was meant to have been written, or perhaps dictated, by a baby:
“Fill ma tummy wif a light meal.” Giving Milla the book would also
demonstrate Katya was fine, that she was thinking of others, making
purchases like an adult, that Milla could stop calling now, especially
since she would be so busy with the baby’s checklists. It thundered,
as if in rebuke for Katya’s unsisterly thoughts, and began to rain
harder — she closed the book, light flashed at her from all sides, and
then Roman stood before her, his face shining.

He took her to the Greek restaurant behind the bus stop. “You
look better,” he said, like a doctor. He didn’t ask her to explain what
she’d said that night at her parents’ house. He gave her his pickle.

“You can read Russian, right?” Katya said. She put her mother’s
letter on the table. Roman pushed his souvlaki over to one side,
although he hadn’t yet finished it. She should have said, “No,
finish,” but she couldn’t wait anymore. Her mother was a biologist.
Perhaps she’d had an idea about how to make Katya normal. He
began translating.

Do
you know why we call you Katyenok, kitten? Your father used
to say, girls crawled into my heart, like kittens into a bed, quoting
one of his everlasting bards. Isn’t that a nice story? What I have left
to tell you is not so nice.

“Maybe we should stop,” Katya said.

“For reals?”

She reminded herself that she barely knew this guy, she didn’t
have to see him again.

“Have some of your Coke, at least,” she said.

“You are my mom now?” He grinned and sipped in a way that
seemed grossly suggestive to Katya, and then, to her relief, resumed
translating.

I thought you would grow out of it, like Milla grew out of her
allergies, or that a doctor would help you. Remember those doctors
I took you to? Back then, my English wasn’t good enough to explain
the problem. We can go back. My English is “
super”
now.

The year before you were born, we’d been fired for trying to
emigrate, which meant we could get arrested as parasites, and
hardly anyone was being let out, and your father — nu, I told him
we were too poor for his samizdat games, but his brother Lev was
his big hero, Lev, who’d already gotten himself into Perm. I kept
your father home during those not-so-secret meetings, refused to let
him near a mimeograph, but he insisted on informing the authorities
about their “multiple constitutional violations.”

Some friends of mine suggested I talk to this man who wrote
speeches for Brezhnev, Vladimir, not a Jew, obviously, but
sympathetic. “He’s ideologically pure,” my friends said, “so don’t
go whining about repression. Talk about your children. Appeal to
him as a woman.”

I appealed to him as a woman. He appealed to me as a man. Do
you know what I mean?

Roman looked up. “You want to go hang at my house?”

He was different from everyone else, big and blonde, robust as
a worker in a metro mural. His preposterous faith gave him a vigor
no one else had. We were all exhausted from running in zigzags, and
he was gliding past in a chauffeured car.

He liked to read to me from the speeches he was writing for
Brezhnev. He said he needed to taste the words on his lips. Brezhnev
was a famously dull speaker, and Vlad himself was a dull writer, but
his faith prevented him from realizing that.

The USSR was the world’s strongest and most technologically
advanced country; could its condoms be any less so? That was how
he thought. Soviet condoms were so leaky, your father’s political
friends thought they were a government plot to make more Soviets.

Side by side on the bus, Roman and Katya both laughed a little.
Roman kept his eyes on the page and Katya stared out the window,
at a woman walking behind a supermarket cart loaded with lumber.

I kept quiet. I was greedy, I wanted another baby.

Whatever is wrong with you is a result of my sin. Some people
would say “sin” is too serious a word. Your father had some
adventures of his own before we were married, you know. That I’m
a good wife now, that I make so many good decisions for the family,
does that make up for what I did? ‘
No
,’ you’ll say. ‘
So,
’ you’ll say.

Why did fate punish you for my sin? Katya, I would give my
arms and legs for you to be cured. Your father would put me on the
couch every morning, and I’d spend my days eating through a straw
and smiling.

However, we live in a world of hard facts. After much thought,
I’ve come to the conviction that our solution lies in carrot juice. I’ll
squeeze it for you, like I did for your sisters back in Russia. You were
born here, and the doctor said Gerber and I listened. (It sounded
like a Jewish name.) The lack of carrot juice weakened you in your
early years. We’ll work up to six glasses.

Roman lay on his bed in the Chaikins’ basement, his feet, in red
socks, propped on the wall. Katya sat on a pillow on the floor. That
she had actually hoped Stalina had concocted a cure in her lab only
showed how out of touch she was.

Roman put the pages down and she felt him looking at her. Who
wouldn’t be curious? She was grotesquely handicapped.

“You are alternative,” Roman said.

She laughed, but not really. The least she could do was get out
of his house.

He got out of bed, turned his back to her and took off his shirt.
He took off his jeans. He took off his red underpants. “Okay?” he
said. He sat on the bed and patted the space next to him. It was just
like a new immigrant to trust like that. She might have a knife, a
camera, a bomb, fangs.

She sat. He touched her cheek.

She did what men liked, her one move, but it had served her
well: she closed her eyes.

Yana

Yana drove past the statues she’d always connected with
homecoming: a woman and a baby in a carriage, waiting complacently
at an intersection where there’d been four accidents in the past two
years. It made her think of Milla. For years now, Milla had been
keeping something from her, but Yana still had no idea what it was.
Nowadays, when Yana called her, Milla talked only of Izzy. It was
as if she believed that the more boring baby stories she told, the
better a mother she would be.