The Cosmopolitans (28 page)

Her hand began to rise to her forehead, but Pratik’s grandmother
slapped it back down. The elder woman was right. So what if it felt
as though Yana’s skin was coming off? That was marriage, wasn’t
it? She was a marriage snake. Her new skin would grow in brown.

Katya

“We can leave, if you want,” Katya said to Roman.

As they passed Stalina’s figurine table, his fingers feathered out
over it, as if he were testing the air, or deciding what to break. All he
wanted, he said, was for her to write a list of the money he’d spent
on her, because girlfriends cheat, but mothers are forever.

“Roma,” she said, “Roma, slow down, I’ll be forever.”

He halted in front of the wine. “What, you want to marry me
now?”

“Of course I’d marry you if you wanted.”

He sat on the stairs. People ran around and past them. No one
in their families stopped to talk. They were neither one of them a
favorite.

Pratik

Pratik’s grandmother reached out her chicken-foot hand and
pulled him into the Molochniks’ cupboard.

“
Your shoes, they are still on the landing
,” she said.

“
Yes, dadi, I don’t think Milla’s sisters know all of our, our
heritage
.” His father, and even his mother, laughed at this ritualized
shoe-burgling. “
It’s my fault for not telling them
.”

She snuffled into her inhaler. “
All right, I forgive you, if will you
now respect my suggestion?
”

From outside, Pratik heard Osip, sounding as though he were
asking a question. “
Of course, dadi, as always
,” he said.

“
Your cousin Keka. Look at me. Why are you marrying this Jew
giant when Keka could be yours
?”

Pratik’s head reared back, knocking down a box of hot chocolate.
The blonde girl on the package smiled up from the floor. “
Could we
open the door a bit?
” he said.

“
Keka is a good girl, a pretty girl. She’d be here now, but the
American pigs at the airport said her name was the same as a
terrorist’s. But it was a boy terrorist they were looking for. Ha! They
could have killed her
.”

“
Dadi, you know I am to marry Yana
,” he said. “
But Keka is a
wonderful girl, and I am rejoicing that she is still alive and not a
terrorist
.”

She pinched his hand. “
No one in our family wants that smelly
Jewess
.”

“
If Yana’s sisters steal my shoes, then may I still marry Yana
?”
Idiot. Had he really thought his family was coming to bless him? He
should have taken Yana to an island somewhere, married her inside a
hula hoop. “
Dadi, I believe Allah himself has fated this marriage
.”

“
Ha! You think Allah wants your Mongoloid brats?
”

The pantry door swung open to reveal Katya and Roman, limbs
intertwined.

“
Tell the monkey-pigs to run
.” Pratik ran from the pantry, from
the house, and came to rest on the lawn, where it was too cold for
anyone except a few angrily smoking uncles. He could go on. He
could cross the street to the gas station and buy a newspaper.

Milla

“How’s my skin now?” Yana said. At the combined suggestion
of a dermatologist cousin of Pratik’s, who’d (prematurely, in
Yana’s opinion) diagnosed an allergy, and their mother, she had
finally agreed to rinse her face.

“Just a little pink,” Milla said, patting Izzy’s back.

“Sunburn pink or drunk pink?”

“Athletic pink,” Milla said. Yana smiled, and winced, as a gang
of boys, whooping and banging yellow spoons of holud against
bowls, chased screeching girls from one end of the room to the
other. Why didn’t the girls escape outside?

Izzy gave a good burp as a boy named Igor ran past, chased by
his Baba Mira, who was asking whether he wasn’t ashamed before
the bride.

When Milla had gotten married, everyone had said she looked
so serene. No one would be saying that to Yana, she thought, as
her sister bolted away, sari skirt clenched in two raised fists, to find
their mother’s bangles. Yet, underneath Yana’s nerves, happiness
buzzed and stung, and her sister threw what she had no idea was a
movie star smile over her shoulder.

Would Yana really leave her here alone? Their mother still
thought she could convince her not to go, during the few months
Yana was to remain in the U.S., finishing her year of teaching,
before joining Pratik in what he kept calling his motherland. Could
Stalina do it? A few years ago, Milla would have had no doubt.

She hugged Izzy to her chest. He looked proud, as he often did
after urinating. “Do you need a diaper change? I forgot the powder.
I’m sorry. I did bring the cream.” The garrulous baby in the book
Katya had sent said, “I wuv to process language,” but it was as
difficult to speak to Izzy, especially in public, as it was to speak, at
Malcolm’s prompting, during sex.

Her Aunt Valentina threaded her way through the paths of
running boys. “
Diki ujac
,” wild horror, she said, and then asked,
like everyone else had, where Malcolm was. Milla explained that
he had an important show.

“
Nu, he’s an artist
,” Valentina said, patting her purplish
coiffure. “
You have to be like Nadezhda Mandelstam
.”

“
Horosho
,” okay. Milla smoothed Izzy’s hair.

“‘
Horosho’ is not enough.
”

Izzy — good boy — stirred and muttered. “I have to go
change him,” Milla said. Her Russian had run out.

“Maybe you will change — husband with me?”

Milla smiled and walked towards the stairs, past Katya
making out with that Roman, past Bangladeshi girls dressed in
blue saris, moving their hips in synchronicity and counting softly
in English. Why couldn’t she be one of those girls? She bumped
into her mother outside the bathroom.

“
Moy Americanetz,
”
Stalina said to Izzy, and then to Milla,
“
He, at least, inherited my cheekbones.
” Every member of the
Molochnik and Strauss families thought Izzy resembled him or
her, except for Milla’s father, who thought he resembled Galich.

“He needs a change,” Milla said, as her mother bore him
away.

In preparation for the wedding, Stalina had redecorated
the bathroom: a tiger dispensed paper towels, and fuchsia fur
sprouted from the toilet seat, which Milla closed and sat upon.
She dialed Julie’s home number. She was in town, after all.

“Old married
baba
, how are you?” Julie sounded so
enthusiastic. Milla’s call was a wonderful surprise, which
brightened the usual weekend dullness?

Milla told about her job. She was a full accountant now.

Julie said she was still at the old place, but not for long. “I am
almost old married
baba
, like you.”

Milla held the phone away from her ear. “Happy,” she said.

“He is old boyfriend I was girlfriend to in high school. Now
is under-minister for waste on farms.”

The wedding would be in Poland; otherwise, Julie would
have invited her. As Milla was forcing herself to ask whether
there was a wedding website, or somewhere she could see photos,
someone knocked on the door. “
Lyagushinka
,” Baba Byata said,
“
open up
.” She took the opportunity of Milla’s silence to defy
bourgeois proprieties, in English, no less, and ask whether she
was “kaka.”

Stalina

Stalina waved at Mr. Rehman from the top of the stairs and
lifted up Izzy for him to see. He looked properly impressed. Truly,
Mr. Rehman was quite a man. He’d loved that documentary on
Entebbe she’d lent him.

The handkerchief interrupted her thoughts. “
Of course, our
multifarious nation has always included some Asiatics, ‘so many
countries, so many customs,’ it’s all very diverting. However,
the essential Russianness must remain. Where is the essential
Russianness?
”

“
I made
vareniki
.” Stalina saw now, through jaded eyes and
handkerchief, that what she had considered her greatest victory —
an agreement to have the wedding here, rather than in the wilds of
Pennsylvania — had been pyrrhic. Look at these girls, lip-synching
into her Modernist dining room table, treating it the same as they
would a bathroom mirror in a train station.