The Cosmopolitans (6 page)

And when I see her blond hair,

her body lean and fresh

I love her more than I love one

who’d give me Luzerne.

A skinny blonde. Of course. Not that it was necessarily easy to
be the ideal. Yana was sure it was difficult, sometimes. She had read
about it.

She typed, “Troubadours put women on pedestals, where they
stood in their restrictive skirts: lifeless statues, not equal partners.
In idealizing their love objects, troubadours murdered them,
basically.”

Yana began to pace again. Katya wasn’t back yet. How could
their parents possibly believe she was still at the library at ten on a
Sunday night? If the last few evenings were any indication, Katya
would return at two, tumbling out of a car that barely stopped. She
might be laughing, for a few seconds at least, slipping across the icy
lawn, before making her way inside. Yana told herself again that it
was all right to tell their parents about Katya’s lies, promised herself
to tell them tomorrow, knew she wouldn’t.

Osip

Osip awoke from dreams of frying potatoes with the great bard
Galich. Stalina was hunched up with her rear in the air, mumbling
something. Sometimes, she mumbled in her sleep; sometimes, she
argued and bargained; sometimes, she screamed, “
Get off him,
” “
Not
yet.
” Osip turned her onto her side and stroked her shoulder. It had
to be her shoulder, not her arm, and only in one direction. “
Nu, all
right
,” she muttered, and quieted.

He put on the tennis-racket bathrobe Stalina had bought for
his last birthday and plodded to the kitchen, from which emitted
some kind of music. Katya sat there, looking transfixed. (High? Had
it finally happened?) “Katyenok,” he said. She jumped, and then
slouched herself back into boredom.

“Hey.” Katya was still wearing her daytime clothes, and eating
the top layer of the Polish chocolate wafer cake the Chaikins had
brought over. The chocolate had been poured into curlicues and
heraldic symbols, like you were being knighted for eating it. He
reached for a piece, but the rackets stretching around his stomach
made him pull his hand back.

“
I had such strange dreams,
” he said, stretching and smiling. He
wanted things to be cozy between them, but they hadn’t been for a
long time. “About Galich. No one understands my Galich,” he said
in his joke voice. She looked interested, for once. “Should I play you
some?” he said. She shrugged, but paused her music.

Osip rummaged through the cassettes Stalina had tried, more
than once, to throw out, and had finally relegated to a giant ceramic
pig.

He turned the tape on and they waited, but instead of Galich’s
baritone, out came the reedy, hysterical voice of Osip’s brother Lev,
speaking in his odd British and Russian-accented English about
discriminatory university admissions in the USSR. “But vee, the
Soviet Jewry, will not suckle at breast of oppressor…”

Katya smirked. Osip began to render his usual apologia: Lev
had spent ten years in the Perm labor camp for saying those things
she found so amusing, she should have seen him when they’d first
immigrated, President Reagan himself… “We wouldn’t even have
house without Uncle Lev.” Katya rested her head on her folded
arms.

He replaced the cassette, and Galich began one of his untitled
poems. Osip explained that the hundred-headed monster represented
the Soviet government. “In Russia, only very hip people know what
Galich is really saying.”

“Most people are so retarded,” Katya said in a rush. “Like, I
like this band, Joy Division? But no one’s even heard of them. Just
because they’re old, doesn’t mean they’re not good. Like that kid
Roman today? He thinks the shit — sorry — on MTV is music.”

Osip liked the sound of this old Joy band. It had to be better than
those Sex Pistols on her tee shirt. “Maybe you play them for me?”

“Okay,” Katya said, tapped the cake knife on the table through
the rest of Galich’s song, and then shot upstairs. “You can download
them, but I don’t think that’s fair,” she said, a little too loudly, on
her way back down. She imitated Brezhnev, which she always did
when she was in a good mood. “
Exports from our petrochemical
factories
—”

Osip laughed, but worried that she might have woken Stalina
or the other girls. Quietly, he said, “How you can do that, when you
weren’t even born —”

Katya sat on the stairs with a thud, muttering. It was a strange
way to end a joke. After a minute, she got up again, walking more
slowly. “Okay, I’m going to play you, like, their most mainstream
song, because if you don’t get it, you definitely won’t get anything
else by them.” She put the tape in and a man spoke quietly over
music, about love, and even though Osip couldn’t quite make out
what the man was saying, he had a reasonable tone.

“Very good,” Osip said, nodding at Katya.

“Really? You’re not just saying that to seem young or whatever?
Sorry.” She looked down and broke off another piece of wafer
cake.

“What are words?”

“Okay.” Katya re-started the song and said the lyrics along with
the man. They were about routines, and ambitions, both of which
topics, come to think of it, were lyrically under-represented, even
in the oeuvres of the bards. “Very interesting,” Osip said during the
chorus. It was generous of her, quietly reciting this for him, in her
voice that so often sounded as if it were being forced out of a can.

“So maybe we go to a concert of Joy? For your birthday?”

“Uh, the lead singer killed himself in like 1980.”

“But, Katyenok, you were not even born in 1980,” was the first
thing he thought to say. Why would his daughter be listening to
suicide music? He scooped up some cake crumbs with his fingers.
“
Even Galich didn’t kill himself, and you know how he suffered
.”

“So?”

“
Music should be
” — he searched for an English word to make
her understand —
“
motivational.” It was the wrong word, he knew
as soon as he’d said it, a word from work.

“Now you sound like fu — like Yana, how she’s always
pretending to love Joan Jett. You want me to pretend?”

He didn’t know where to start explaining and put on his joke
voice again. “Just because you and sisters don’t like same music,
doesn’t mean you can’t be friends.”

“I have friends,” she said, scraping the cake knife along the edge
of the plate.

He took the knife from her hand and cut himself a giant slice.
“
Friends are not — you don’t want to be like Uncle Lev. You want to
have a family.
”

She leaned back, away from him. Russian made her defensive;
he shouldn’t have used it. “That’s what you guys are always scaring
us with.” The next song came on, someone screaming, in a nasal
voice, some garbled, unintelligible phrase.

He said, “You want to just live by self? Sit in room and listen to
death metal?” The chocolate tasted of gasoline.

“Oh my God, it’s not death metal.”

“It is. It has death, and metal. Death plus metal by simple
equation is death metal.” His voice had gotten high.

Katya leaned forward, making one last attempt at explaining
the hipness of her music. “He doesn’t sing about death. If you just
listen —”

He couldn’t agree to this death-worship. “A little too much I am
listen for tonight.”

“Whatever.” She turned off the CD player and stood.

“Are you meaning it?” he said.

“What?”

In a falsetto: “I don’t need my family, I don’t need anyone, I —”
He broke off and stuffed another wafer into his mouth.

She sighed and shifted between her large, pink-slippered feet.
“I’m always saying something spastic.”

He wanted to end on a funny note, so he held his hand out for her
to shake. Her hand was warm and damp, like something just born.
Who could know what she was thinking? After she went upstairs, he
wrapped the cake in cellophane and wandered back to bed. He had
a few more years with her, at least.

Stalina

“
If you were in Russia…
” Stalina’s Russian Soul, that blowsy
whore, kept whispering, its moist
nalivka
breath coagulating on
Stalina’s ear and keeping her from sleep.

Stalina hadn’t believed in souls, Russian or otherwise, until she
was on the train to Italy. Finally, she’d gotten her family permission
to immigrate; finally, Osip, Milla, and Yana were all asleep; finally,
Stalina’s nausea had passed; finally, she could begin planning for
their stay in Rome — would those
matryoshka
dolls they’d bought
really sell? For good prices? Were Italians really that stupid?

As the train tunneled through woods, she heard an inane lisp:
“
Our last chance to gaze at our beloved birches.
” She twisted in
her seat: no one was awake except for some soldiers, skinny and
gallant — they’d insisted on giving up their seats, were standing
and smoking and almost mouthing their dirty jokes so as not to
disturb the others. They seemed not have heard the voice. All the
traitors to the motherland in their soiled going-abroad best (they
hadn’t anticipated, although they should have, that they would be
waiting eighteen hours in the boiling station): they slept so soundly,
attached to one another through the shoulder or the ear, like paper
dolls, leaning in synchrony through the curves.