The UnAmericans: Stories (4 page)

D
OWNSTAIRS LOOKED
like an American hotel lobby: potted ferns, gloomy nautical art, a pretty concierge tapping away with long pink nails on a computer. Men in glossy black loafers and dark mustaches—I had never seen so many mustaches—whispered into cell phones, conducting business I sensed was enormously important. I sat on a sofa and watched them, but after a while I gave up trying to understand their conversations and wandered into the gift shop. There I found all the presents I needed to buy without ever going outside: a matryoshka nesting doll for the baby, a set of bath towels with the hotel name stitched in Cyrillic for the fool, a scalloped wooden jewelry box for Beth.

Back in the room, Sveta was still on the phone, wrapped to her chin in blankets. She nodded at me and cradled the phone to her cheek, suddenly responding to the other end in only
nyet’
s and
uhuh’
s. Her voice was low and wavery; I knew not to mention the hotel’s long-distance rates. I sat beside her on the bed and opened up the matryoshka doll. A smaller doll was tucked inside. I opened up the next one and the next one, until there were five little dolls lined up on the bedside table.

Sveta placed her hand over the mouthpiece. The look she shot me made me swallow, hard. “Go enjoying the day,” she whispered. “I think I’m wanting to stay in.”

I sat there, staring at my wife, with her short rumpled hair, bare toes peeking out from the heap of blankets. I wanted to ask what that look was for. It was even worse than the one I’d gotten in the bathroom: it was the terrified look you’d give an intruder barging into your hotel room. But I had a feeling I knew the answer, and the last thing I wanted to hear Sveta say was that she had made a mistake. I knew it was ridiculous to be threatened by a dead man, but I couldn’t help it. Nikolai had been the kind of man, I decided, whom people in America had never referred to as Nick. The kind of man who would have seemed ten times more charming and intelligent than I did, simply because of his accent. A man who would have looked dashing in his white radioactive gear, wandering the Chernobyl countryside while women fell at his feet. A man who made love like a pro, a man who was probably—oh, God—the
original
big bear.

And yet I knew, deep down, that it wasn’t only him. It was the way Sveta had closed into herself this morning as we passed that department store. It was the bewildered way she’d looked out the taxi window, as if her city had gone into hiding. It was the fact that she’d called her cousin when she felt this bad, rather than turning to me. I hadn’t even had time to mess up in the ways I’d anticipated, ordering stupidly in a restaurant or bumbling in front of her friends. That moment in the taxi earlier, when apparently I’d said something embarrassing I still couldn’t pinpoint—those sorts of things I had worried about, of course, but had believed they’d all seem inconsequential once we returned home to New York. But this felt different. As if the moment the plane landed in Kiev, Sveta was no longer certain I belonged in her life.

All at once I felt crowded and dizzy and nauseous. I took in some air, what felt like all of it left between us, and said, “How about showing me your old school?”

“Not now.”

“Later, then. When you’re off the phone we can go.”

“Howard,” Sveta said, “I’m not wanting to give tours now. Why don’t you go seeing some sights yourself?”

“It’s fine, I’m in no rush.” I sensed I was talking my way into a hole, but I couldn’t stop. I never fucking could. “Relax now and we’ll go out for an early—”

“Stop, please.” She muttered something to Galina, put down the phone and led me to the door.

“Listen,” I said, reaching for her arm—but as I said “listen” she said “have fun” and closed the door. I stood outside the room, noticing, for the first time, the view of a soccer stadium from the open hall window. Amid the bleats of horns below I could hear the faint cheers of the crowd in the distance. I leaned against the wall and said “No” out loud.

Then I knocked, twice, and Sveta opened the door.

“You’re my wife,” I said. “Just tell me. Did I do something, anything, to make you feel—”

“It’s nothing like this.”

Then I said it: “You thought you loved me, and it turns out you don’t.”

A maid wheeled her cart by. Down the hall, a vacuum hummed. “I’m so sorry,” Sveta said. She stared at the carpet, then thrust a guidebook at me.

T
HE DAY
was blue and crisp. Trees were still bare but the snow had melted, visible only in tiny patches along the sidewalk. I stuffed the guidebook into my fanny pack and roamed the streets, mapless and lost. I looked up at the blocky rows of concrete tenements, wondering if Sveta had lived in one of them, if she’d had a balcony crisscrossed with clotheslines and dotted gray sheets, like the ones billowing up now in the breeze. Two boys played tag, zigzagging through a row of parked cars, and I wondered if Sveta had been the kind of girl who would have hitched up her school dress to play with them, or if she would have stayed upstairs with her grandmother, avoiding cuts and bruises. I didn’t know, and I felt ridiculous standing there in the narrow alley. So I followed the walking tour in the book instead, moving onto cleaner, bush-lined roads. I visited Lenin’s statue and St. Volodymyr’s Cathedral, the Taras Shevchenko Museum and Golda Meir’s childhood home, caring less about the significance of each place as the day dragged on.

Down a skinny brick road I wandered into a square, elegant stone buildings towering over me: this city really was much more glamorous than I had expected. Women in dark wool coats shouldered past, swinging department store bags, leaving behind whiffs of perfume I didn’t recognize. A grocer sifted through a bin of tomatoes, chucking the rotten ones into the gutter. Back home, it was morning. The storefront metal grates would just be coming up along Broadway.

I needed something to show Beth and Ya’akov, some proof I was even here, so I walked through the square, snapping photos. Through the viewfinder I stared at the grocer’s green eyes and light skin, exactly like my own. Of course some of the people here looked like me: if my grandfather hadn’t had the foresight to sneak onto a cargo ship almost a century ago, I too might be out here while some silly tourist photographed me. And this was if I had been lucky. I knew this was the moment I was supposed to lock eyes with the grocer and think, Could he be a distant, forgotten relative? (Or, just as likely, the person who had beat the hell out of a distant, forgotten relative?) But the only thing on my mind was how I had gotten here, halfway across the world to the city my grandfather had escaped, with a woman I barely knew. I wondered where Beth was. Probably still in bed, in her dark, cramped apartment in the city I had fled, sleeping beside a man she barely knew: the things we do when we’re lost.

But maybe Beth was truly happier living a poor pious life with the fool. Maybe in religion, Beth really had discovered a way never to be alone. Maybe
I
was the only lost one, wandering the streets of Kiev, competing with a dead man. I hated to think the fool had been right about Sveta and me all along—that perhaps the fool wasn’t such a fool after all.

Across the square I found a restaurant, the entrance winking with fairy lights. I took a seat in the corner and flipped through the menu to see what I could stomach. Chernobyl was about an hour away so most vegetables were out, and the guidebook warned that restaurants didn’t refrigerate their meat. I settled on a chocolate babka.

A waiter appeared. “Something to drink?”

What I really wanted was a glass of Chianti, but when in Rome. “Vodka?”

All around me, people sat clustered together, clinking glasses and leaning close in conversation. I wondered how I looked to them: an aging man dressed so obviously like an American, wearing spanking white sneakers and a baseball cap. How had I let myself become just another sad old man at a table for one?

My drink came and I gulped it like water. Outside the window, the sun was going down, spreading over the city as evenly as butter. I ordered another and watched people stroll arm in arm through the streets. Watching them disappear around corners in the shadowy light—it was beautiful, and for a moment it comforted me to cradle my drink as the city faded and grayed.

But then the sky got dark and the streets went quiet and the group beside me paid and walked out. Soon, I knew, the restaurant would close and I would have to leave. But when I thought about returning to the hotel and listening to a crying Sveta apologize again and again as I wheeled my suitcase down to the lobby, when I thought about the long flight home and the freezing taxi line at Kennedy and the silent apartment that awaited me, the helplessness that rushed at me was so real I felt it move through my fingers and hair.

So I tried the only thing I could think of. I put down my head and prayed. It felt like the fakest thing in the world and at first I didn’t know what to say, or even who to say it to, but then I closed my eyes and tried. I prayed for calm in the world and for joy, I prayed for Beth and Ya’akov and the baby, for Sveta and even for Gail, but inside I knew I was praying mostly for myself. I was praying for a way out of this sadness. And when that didn’t work, when the waiter cleared my glass away and the restaurant emptied, I prayed for that safety net of people to appear. They would be just as Beth described, reverent and serene, and as they sang in unison about God’s grandeur and His pity, they would move closer together until their shoulders were touching and stretch their arms open wide, ready to take me in.

It wasn’t even noon
, and already the heat was so strong that the other moshavniks were tarping the vines and escaping inside. I wished I could head home and take the afternoon off before I returned to the base and began another week as Lieutenant HaLevi’s personal driver: possibly the least essential job in the Israel Defense Forces.

But there were dozens of tomato plants left to prune, and I didn’t want my mother, the production manager, stuck doing it alone. So I knelt in the dirt, the sun burning my shoulders right through my t-shirt, while in the distance my older brother and his girlfriend lazed in the pomelo groves. My mother would have called me a schlub if I’d skipped a day of work, but she was too relieved Asaaf was home from Hebron to care what he did. Last Sunday he was discharged, and all week it’s been,
Let Asaaf sleep in, Give Asaaf the remote control.
And I’ve been nice about it. But watching him now, his head in Yael’s lap, her fingers running through his hair, already beginning to grow out of its buzz cut—seeing him with her got to me even more than usual, and I yelled, “Could you get off your ass?”

He flipped me off and turned back to Yael. But after a second he hopped onto the tractor and I thought,
One point, me.
And the truth was that we really did need his help. If the temperatures continued to climb through summer we’d have to worry about calcium deficiencies and blossom end rot eating away at the tomatoes, making them unsellable; I could already see the vines beginning to wilt as Asaaf rode past me and down to the squash field. His shirtsleeves were rolled to his shoulders, revealing his bulky brown arms, and I wondered why, even when he wasn’t, my brother always seemed to be showing off. Behind him stretched dunams of farmland, marked by stucco clusters of other kibbutzim and moshavim that rose out of the valley, then dropped away just as quickly. The day was so quiet all I could hear was the hum of the tractor and the chickens squabbling in their coop, and I was suddenly reminded of how pretty it was out here. My brother plowed through the fields and down to the sunflowers, and then I lost sight of him as he cut behind the dairy. When he reappeared he was chugging down a hill, and then he must have hit a root, or a rock, because the tractor tipped. Just a little at first, and I waited for it to steady out. But it teetered some more and I watched Asaaf, small as an action figure, fly right off and tumble down the grass. From that distance, the landing seemed so soft that I waited for him to pop up and take an exaggerated bow. But he didn’t, and that’s when the tractor started to roll, over and over, until it stopped at the bottom of the hill, right on top of him.