Troika (5 page)

I dry off and put the robe on, wrap a towel around my wet hair so it looks like a turban, white and high like the Sikh from the club. There’s a little sign on the sink that tells me I can save the planet by
reusing the towel. I wonder why anyone
wouldn
’
t
want a new towel and I figure they really don’t care too much about the planet but they’re just trying to save some money on cleaning—so I toss the towel on the floor and step out of the bathroom. And I don’t feel guilty about it at all, ’cause I got a footprint, a
carbon
footprint as small as a mouse, and I get to have a little fun sometimes without worrying about the whole fucking world.

When I come out, Julian’s sitting on a chair at the desk and he’s reading a book. I can’t see what it is, but it’s thin and has a soft cover. He closes the book and looks up to me, sort of sad, and he raises his left hand high above his head, still, like he’s a real polite kid trying to get the teacher’s attention. And he says I guess you want to talk about this, and he points to the ring.

I sit down on the corner of the bed, cross my legs and adjust my towel-turban. Yes, I say, I’d like to know, ’cause I’m a bit confused. Julian takes the ring off his finger and holds it up to the light, rotates it, examines it. He looks at me, but he’s having trouble with eye contact, keeps looking down every time our eyes catch. He shrugs his shoulders and places the ring on the desk, on its edge. Then he holds the top with his left index finger and flicks it hard with his right. It spins tight like a top, stays in a small area of the desk, about the size of a dime, and holds its speed right there for a few seconds, maybe five. Then as it starts to lose speed, the spin isn’t as tight and the ring covers a bigger area, moving side to side, bigger and bigger, the size of a nickel, then a quarter, going slower and slower, no longer standing up straight, wobbling, wobbling, slower and slower until it falls to the desk. Then there’s one last little jump before it goes flat and still. We watch the ring, all quiet on the wood.

I reach for Julian’s knee. He pulls back just a little, a flinch like he’s afraid. And just then, at that moment—perfect timing—there’s a knock on the door and it’s room service. I turn away from the ring.
I’m thinking here comes our food, and I’m glad for the distraction, relieved that right now I get to stay ignorant. I’m hungry and looking forward to my sweet potato fries and I hope they didn’t forget to put an orange slice in my soda. Julian jumps up off the chair and says I’ll get the door, you try to find something to watch. And as I’m pointing the remote at the TV, waving it back and forth like a flyswatter ’cause it doesn’t seem to be working, it occurs to me that there’s option number three, which hadn’t even crossed my mind.

Option number three is where things just stay the same.

T
here Frankmann sat, at the age of eighty, staring out his office window to the busy wharf below. He scratched his short beard and wondered, despite his advanced age, what role he might one day play in the world. Such thoughts—fantasies of future greatness—had filled his mind during adolescence, when he wondered if he would be an officer, a Talmudic scholar, a sculptor, a hunter of tigers. But during the intervening decades of his great commercial success, he no longer considered his role in the world, choosing instead to focus on the daily ledger, the profit and loss, the measure of his remarkable ability to make money in every possible circumstance—and it was only on his eightieth birthday, when Frankmann looked at himself in the mirror and saw for the first time an ancient man, that he realized he’d not yet made his mark.

Frankmann peered through the window, searching for the tuna boat that was scheduled to return from the Sea of Japan. He looked
at his watch and noted that the boat was three hours late. As the vessel’s
de facto
owner, he was concerned. He worried about the safety of the crew. Frankmann knew their wives and children, and he cared for them—not in an apparent manner, but from a safe, some would say unreachable, distance. And, as he was a man guided by economic rationality, he also worried about his investment: the boat, the gear, the fuel, the fish.

He turned his attention to the far end of the wharf. There, the fat woman Garlova stood in front of a makeshift bar. To her side was a green jug of potato vodka and a wooden barrel filled with fermented horse milk that Frankmann had purchased from a slow Mongolian on advantageous terms. Sailors, fishermen, construction workers, young men from the navy, even a poacher who’d come into town to sell muskrat pelts, lined up with rubles in their hands. Frankmann wondered how much he would make selling booze that day—and how much Garlova would steal from him. He didn’t mind if she stole just a little, a few rubles here and there; that was part of the unspoken pact between master and servant in this part of the world. A little theft made things work smoothly, greased the gears of commerce. But with too much, things broke down.

Frankmann’s eyes moved to a store on the other side of the bar—the butcher Korsikov who sold fresh meats and poultry and was rumored to have taken recently to gambling, drinking and other forms of dissipation. For the past year, Korsikov had been habitually late with his rent, and Frankmann began to worry that the butcher might default.

The old Jew watched as the butcher and his wife, a devout woman, carried boxes out of the shop; he wondered what they could be doing. After unloading a flank of venison onto the back of a flatbed truck, the butcher looked up to Frankmann’s office window. Fearing detection, Frankmann quickly ducked to the side and, unsure if the
butcher had seen him, peered out from behind the dusty velvet drapes. Frankmann remained still.

The butcher turned back to his wife and beckoned her to hurry. With a rusted cleaver in her hand, she exited the shop. She locked the front door, turned the knob to ensure that it was secure, and then kneeled before the doormat, placing the cleaver on the ground by her side. She appeared to pray, bobbing her head, making vague motions with her hands and finally clasping them together. Her husband watched respectfully as she removed from her bloody apron an envelope and placed it and a ring of keys under the mat. She lifted the cleaver off the ground and joined her husband, who placed his arm around her shoulders. They stared at the shop, rubbed their eyes as if they had just awoken from a dream. After a few moments, they got in the truck, took one final look around the wharf and drove away—bronze smoke billowing from the tailpipe.

Frankmann called out to his assistant, a young woman from town who had been working by his side for three years. Kira was her name, and she was such a consummate professional that, despite her youth and beauty, she seemed to be wrapped in a protective, asexualizing veneer that demanded respect and eliminated any absurd desire on Frankmann’s part. “Kira,” he said, “I think the butchers have abandoned us. How much do they owe?”

Kira opened the rent ledger and ran her finger down the page. “Five hundred rubles.”

Frankmann stepped out from behind the drapes. “And the deposit we have?”

Kira flipped to another page. “Fifty.”

“So we’re out four-fifty?”

“That’s right, sir. Do you want me to try to collect? I can file the papers.”

Frankmann turned his attention to the sea. In the distance, his tuna boat—listing slightly to the starboard side—puttered in from the south. He exhaled in relief. “No, Kira, they’re poor and in trouble. There’s no sense.”

Kira nodded. With a marker, she drew a thick line through the butcher’s account. “I will try to find someone else,” she said.

“Good, but this time, we need a bigger deposit. And no more butchers.”

Kira returned to the ledger, calculating the day’s receipts from all of Frankmann’s enterprises: the liquor, the tuna boat, the mechanic shop, the wharf rentals, the pelt trade, the boardinghouse. She then subtracted the day’s disbursements: the wages, the fuel, the wood and, of course, the massive bribes to numerous Communist Party bureaucrats—bribes that allowed Frankmann to operate a capitalist enterprise so conspicuously, so profitably. At the end of every day, Kira would hand Frankmann a slip of paper on which was written the net amount: usually a profit, but on rare occasion a loss. On this day, Kira’s calculations revealed a net profit of two thousand rubles, more than some people in town made in an entire year.

Frankmann eyed the metal box overflowing with cash, then turned his gaze to the butcher’s shop. “Do you know where the butcher lives?”

“Just up the road from the old tractor plant,” Kira replied.

“In a house?”

“Yes, he and his wife live in a house.”

“Any kids?”

Kira grabbed a handful of bills from the box and began to arrange them in order of denomination, placing them in neat stacks. “They’re older, moved out years ago, I think.”

“Do they live nearby? The kids?”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “One’s in the army, the other off to Moscow.”

“How do you know all of this, Kira?”

Kira wrapped a rubber band around a stack of hundred-ruble notes. “From church,” she said. “I know them from church.”

“Do they still make tractors?”

“Excuse me?”

“The factory. Do they still make tractors?”

“Oh, no,” Kira replied, confused that the businessman who knew everything that happened in the area did not know about the factory’s demise. “It’s been a good twenty years since it closed. And now it’s all broken windows, rust, drug addicts.”

Frankmann shook his head, his anger apparent. “They should have let me run things around here. I offered, you know.”

“I know,” Kira replied, placing several stacks of rubles back in the box and securing the lid.

“Things would have been different. For everyone.”

Having been both witness to and beneficiary of Frankmann’s commercial genius, Kira nodded in agreement. The two segued into a state of motionless silence during which Kira imagined Frankmann as a young man, wondered if she would have loved him, borne his children—and during which Frankmann bemoaned his age and the cruel irony of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“So, sir, do you want me to put the cash in the safe?”

“Not today, Kira.”

“Okay,” she said, pushing the box across the desk in Frankmann’s direction.

“Take it to the butcher and his wife.”

Kira was surprised. “The money?”

“Yes.”

“All of it?” Frankmann nodded. His order was so uncharacteristic, so commercially illogical, that she wondered what his motives might be. “And what should I tell them?” she asked.

Frankmann turned his back to Kira and looked out over the wharf, over his small empire. “Tell them,” he said, “to stop cursing the Jews.”

Kira observed the old man’s silhouette in the window. “Your generosity might make it worse, you know.”

Before Frankmann could respond with a story about his dear aunt Elena, one that would have confirmed Kira’s sad thesis, a knock on the door interrupted their conversation. Frankmann was accustomed to carrying large amounts of cash, and he had been robbed several times over the years. Kira knew better than to open the door with so much money left unsecured, so she rose, lifted the metal box, stashed it in the safe and hurriedly closed the heavy metal door. Frankmann opened the top drawer of his desk and surveyed the four pistols. He chose the 1933 Tokarev TT, scuffed matte silver with a black handle—a fine weapon, reliable and powerful, that he had purchased under questionable circumstances from a Red Army officer desperate to rid himself of the gun.

Frankmann peered through the peephole in the door but saw no one. “Who’s there?” he called out.

“It is Julian. Julian Pravdin.”

“Who?” Frankmann asked, turning to Kira for assistance.

“My name is Julian Pravdin.”

“It sounds like a boy, a young boy,” whispered Kira.

“Are you a boy, a
young
boy?” Frankmann asked.

“Yes, I am, sir.”

“Are you here to rob me?”

Confused, Julian did not immediately respond. “No, sir.”

“Then why are you here?”

“My mother sent me. She is dead and said you would help me.”

Frankmann wondered who this woman could be. “Who is your mother?” he asked through the door.

“My mother is Maria Pravdina, the wife of Ivan Pravdin.”

“Pravdin the hunter?”

“Yes, that was my father.” Julian pressed his ear against the door.

“I knew of him,” Frankmann said. “He was regarded in this region as a great man. A brutal ending with the tiger, though. But I know nothing of your mother.” Frankmann raced through the list of women he had known in his life, a short list for a man of his advanced age. “I’m sorry, but I know no such woman,” he said.

Kira walked over to the door. She, too, pressed her ear against the wood so that now both she and Julian were listening through the heavy door. “I think he is crying,” she said. “We should let him in.”

“No,” said Frankmann. “It may be a ruse. It wouldn’t be beneath these wretched thieves to employ a street urchin in their treacherous scheme.” Kira shrugged her shoulders and returned to the desk.

“Please, sir,” Julian called out, stepping away from the door. “My mother said you would help. I have no one.”

“Who is your mother?” Frankmann punched the door in frustration. “How would I know her?” the old man demanded.

Again, Julian did not respond quickly. He composed himself, wiped away his tears with the back of his hand. “My mother was a prostitute,” he said, “and you were her customer. She treated you very nice, gave you things that you were lucky to have.”

Frankmann shivered. He dropped his head, trying to avoid Kira’s stunned look. He peered through the peephole one more time and again could see nothing, no one. He released the bolt and turned the knob. Before him stood Julian in his frayed church suit, his face wet, his hair combed, a satchel over his shoulder. “Come in, son,” he said to the boy. “We have much work to do.”

T
here’s an old Colombian who lives across the way from me and my mother in Miami, Old Pepe’s his name, and he’s a got a little cottage with a tin roof and a yard in the back with lots of flowers. There’s birds-of-paradise, rosebushes, peonies and lilacs, and boy do I love the smell of those flowers, especially after a hard rain when the sun comes out, the ground is moist and the stems are drooping from the weight of the water.

He’s also got dozens of birds, bright-colored parrots from all over the world, but mostly from Latin America. Sometimes they’re all together in the little shed and sometimes lined up tight on the branch like the bottles behind the bar at Paris Nights, and sometimes, when he reaches deep into a burlap bag and grabs a fistful of seed, you see them flapping, flying, dancing around in a big cloud of rainbow colors.

If you told me that Pepe’s a hundred and fifty I wouldn’t be
surprised at all, ’cause not only does he look every bit that old, but he’s got the smarts of a man who’s lived for hundreds of years, seen everything and forgotten nothing. Pepe’s an Indian, a Guambiano from the south of Colombia in a state called Cauca, which is in the Andes and it’s not far from the border with Ecuador. And the only reason I know that is not ’cause I’ve been to Colombia, but ’cause I looked it up in an atlas that my dad gave me for one of my birthdays.

Of course I’d love to go to Colombia, especially to Cartagena, ’cause Gabriel García Márquez is my favorite writer and if Cartagena is only half as beautiful as the way he describes it then I must see it, stroll through those plazas and churches and smell the flowers. And maybe even fall in love there, ’cause could there be a more beautiful place to fall in love than Cartagena, a more romantic place in the entire world for a man and a woman to fall in love?

The Guambianos make me laugh, so funny, so short and dark-skinned with broad noses and thick black hair, and the sweetest thing about them is how they dress. They wear these colorful ponchos, bright blue with red-and-white piping, stringy scarves, sometimes white, sometimes red. And then there’s the hats! Oh, how I love those hats, old-fashioned black bowler hats, and I’ve got no idea how they came to wearing them. Indians from the jungle and they wear formal black hats like they’re going out to the theater in London a hundred years ago. And that’s how Pepe dresses. Doesn’t matter if it’s hot or cold, cloudy or a lot of sun, rain, wind, he puts on his poncho, his scarf and his bowler hat and tends to his birds.

One time when I’m little I forget my key and get locked out of my house. It’s raining and Old Pepe sees me peering through the crack in my back door and trying to wedge open the window by the
kitchen. He invites me inside and makes me a cup of tea. He gives me a fashion magazine to read, says you just stay here until your parents get home. So I open the magazine and all the photos have girls, pretty girls, dressed the way my mom dressed when she first met my dad, and I’m confused and look at the date on the cover. Turns out, the magazine’s twenty years old and I wonder where he got it and why he keeps it after all these years.

I sit in Pepe’s living room, flipping through the magazine, and the pages are all stiff and wrinkly ’cause it’s old and the air in Miami is so humid that it turns a magazine like this into a swollen, puffy thing that doesn’t lie flat. I sit on the couch, tap my feet on the floor, though I can barely reach. I pray that my parents get home soon. It’s a mystery to me, this house, and it’s the first time I’ve ever been inside. I look around, and on the wall not far from where I’m sitting is an old photograph of a man in a military uniform. It’s not the type that a general wears, with fancy medals and ribbons, but the kind a regular soldier wears, the uniform of a young man, a boy, who maybe has no idea why he’s fighting. Olive-green fatigues and a floppy hat and a hand-rolled cigarette. I look closer at the soldier’s face, and I can see that sure enough it’s Pepe when he’s young. The skin is shinier, the jaw stronger and the hair darker, but the shape of the face, rounded and thick, and the eyes, soft and sweet like he’s holding back tears, are the same. In a glass frame next to the photograph is a medal, gold-colored and round, dangling from a red-and-yellow silk ribbon.

I sip my tea and look at the pictures of the pretty girls in their funny clothes and decide that I’m going to take some old dresses from my mom’s closet and play dress-up. Just then, Pepe steps out into the rain and picks up a metal mallet. He lifts it real high and hammers away at some rusted metal pipe sticking out of the ground.
Bang, bang, bang. Now, I don’t have any reason
not
to trust Pepe, but I’m nervous anyway ’cause I’m a little girl alone in this house and I’m afraid my parents will be angry ’cause I lost my key.

Between the rat-a-tat-tat of the rain on the tin roof and Pepe pounding away at the pipe, I’m struggling to listen for the sound of my dad’s car, loud and rough from a bad muffler. Finally, after what seems like an hour but is probably only ten minutes, I hear the car coughing in the driveway and my parents walking up the back path. They’re yelling at each other, not
bad
yelling but in that funny way that a man and a woman yell at each other when they know they’re not hurting any feelings.

I jump right up and run outside and hand the magazine to Old Pepe and say thank you, sir, and he smiles and says anytime. I run across his yard and right up the steps, put my arms around my dad’s waist. Inside, he dries me off and doesn’t even get mad when I tell him I lost the key. And then I tell him about Pepe and how he brought me inside and gave me tea and a magazine. My dad and my mom look at each other and then at me and say is that all? And I’m confused. What else could there be, I want to know. My parents look relieved when I say that, and only when I’m older do I realize why, and not ’cause they had any concern about Pepe, but ’cause that’s a parent’s job. That’s how they’re wired.

I tell my dad about the photo of Pepe dressed as a soldier and the medal in the glass frame, and my dad tells me the rumor is that the old Indian fought for the liberals in the Thousand Day War and that he was a fearless warrior but compassionate and loved by many. The Thousand Day War? I ask, ’cause that is one very long war. And my father says yes, three years or thereabouts, and when he says it like that it doesn’t seem so long. When I’m older, in my teens, I learn that this war ended in 1902. And that would make Pepe a hundred
and twenty-five, maybe a hundred and thirty years old. Which just can’t be possible. But that’s the rumor, so who knows.

My father didn’t have a college degree, didn’t even get past the eighth grade, but he was what they call a self-taught intellectual. Our house was filled with old books, magazines, newspapers, and they were stacked everywhere. There was tons of stuff on history and political science, economics too. My father was a
libertario
who believed in individual freedoms and just wanted the government to stay out of everyone’s business, let them achieve what God had planned for them without some bureaucrat screwing it all up. He also loved fiction and had an entire bookcase, floor to ceiling, with the great Spanish-language writers. Gabriel García Márquez, Federico García Lorca, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pablo Neruda. So I’ve been reading some of the best fiction in the whole world since I’m a little girl.

When my father came to the States, I don’t think he knew ten words of English, but he got to be a proud American real fast and set his mind to learning the language as good as a native. And he made sure me and my mother learned too. Now, truth is it’s hard to ever catch up a hundred percent, but you can get pretty close if you try. We must’ve had a dozen dictionaries in the house. English, Spanish, English-to-Spanish, Spanish-to-English, even an old Italian one. And my father would walk around with his reading glasses that he got for two bucks and he’d call out new words, new
English
words. And for every one I got right, he’d throw a coin in a glass jar, usually a nickel but sometimes a quarter for a big word.

One time, he screamed out
scallywag
. Well, that’s a funny word to say, scallywag. I never met a single person who can say scallywag
without smiling. And it just so happened that I saw the same word in the dictionary a couple of days earlier. Pure luck. So I yelled back
good
-
for
-
nothing
!
Well, you should’ve seen the look on his face, so
shocked, and he took a five-dollar bill out of his wallet and dropped it right in the jar. And what a thrill, to make that man happy
and
get paid for it.

Anyway, after that day with the tea and the magazines, I start sneaking into Pepe’s yard after school and on weekends, and he’s been teaching me about his birds ever since, where they’re from, what they eat, when they sleep, who they love. And I’m pretty sure that I know more about parrots than most people who make a living knowing things about parrots. Pepe doesn’t have any favorites, he loves them all equal, but I’m partial to a few of them. There’s a cockatoo, a galah from Australia—
Eolophus roseicapilla
—and it took me forever to pronounce it and even longer to memorize it. This cockatoo, he’s got a pink chest, pink like the sand in Cuba, with gray wings, a white crown on the top of his head and a chipped beak. Rojillo’s his name, ’cause that’s the name I gave him when I was a little girl and Pepe laughed when he heard the name and sure enough it’s stuck after all these years.

Then there’s a boy and a girl, a pair of burrowing parrots from Argentina,
Cyanoliseus patagonus
they’re called, and they’re green with patches of gray and a little turquoise blue near the tail feathers, and what I love about them, what I
really
love about them, is that they’re monogamous and that’s how they’re wired, how their genetics work. Chica and Chico, I named them too, Girl and Boy, and they stick to themselves. They’ve got their own branch where they sit and clean each other and watch the other birds. And the other birds know they better stay away or else Chico, who’s real protective of Chica, will raise his feathers, flap them in a scary way and squawk so loud that I can hear him from my bedroom.

When I’m ten, Pepe gives me Chico and Chica for my birthday. He says I’m giving you these birds, but it’s not like a normal gift, where you hold it in your hands and you put it on your shelf or a
cage in your room and you can do with it what you want. It’s a different sort of gift, he says, and they’ll stay right here, not in a cage but right here in their home. And he points to their branch in the mango tree. They won’t belong to you or to me but to each other. And I ask, so how’s that a gift? If I don’t get to keep them? Pepe smiles, the type of smile that a wise old man gives a little girl who doesn’t know much—and he removes his black hat and underneath is a thick clump of shiny gray hair, almost white, and he wipes his face with his hand, shields his eyes from the strong Florida sun. And he says not only is it a gift, but it’s the best type of gift.

Pepe takes a carrot from his pocket and breaks it in half, hands me both pieces and nods in the direction of Chico and Chica. Slow, he says, and I do just that, holding the carrots in both hands and moving careful toward the branch. Chica is closer to me, and as I get near her, Chico moves behind her, slides across the branch and positions himself between me and her, real chivalrous. I hold out the carrots and the two birds move away together along the branch, sliding their claws real quick. Pepe places his hand on my arm, says hold right there. So I stand with my arms out and the carrots just a few inches from the birds. Chica looks at Chico, and Chico looks me in the eyes, takes a couple of steps toward me and opens his beak. He sticks his tongue out, which is plump and cracked and looks like a piece of old leather that’s been out in the sun for days.

Just when I think he’s gonna take the carrot, the two of them shimmy a few inches away so they’re at the end of the branch with nowhere to go. I’m so nervous ’cause Chico and Chica are mine now. Pepe just gave them to me—even though they need to be free and I understand that—but I love them and I’m afraid they’ll reject me. I turn and look at Pepe, and his hat is on his head now and he pulls the brim down and makes a motion with his hands. Go, girl, go.

Chico gives a little squeak and takes a couple of steps back in my
direction, but this time Chica doesn’t follow. He opens his beak wide, sticks out his leathery tongue and I place the carrot on it. His beak snaps shut like a mean turtle and he nods, turns to Chica. She opens her beak and looks up to the sun and seems to enjoy the warmth. Slow and careful, Chico places the carrot in Chica’s mouth and she clasps it tight and looks straight ahead. Chico turns back to me and opens his beak. I place the other carrot on his tongue, and the two birds crunch away, strong and fast, and in no more than a few seconds the carrots are all gone.

I turn to Pepe, excited and feeling real connected to the birds, to
my
birds, and so happy that they ate my carrots and hoping that they trust me now. Pepe lifts the brim of his hat so he can see me better, so I can get a better look at his face. He puts his hands on my shoulders and looks at me the way a grandfather looks at his granddaughter when he wants to say something important. And then he says you see that? He looks over at the birds then back to me. Remember, lovely Perlita, remember what you just saw. And I shrug ’cause I know I just saw something sweet but I don’t know exactly what Pepe means.

Pepe gives a little playful pinch on my shoulder and he says remember, Perlita, when you get older, you look for a man like that, someone who protects you, who feeds you first, who won’t take a bite of anything, won’t take a single piece of food or clothing or firewood until you’ve had enough first. Firewood? I ask, ’cause why would I need firewood in Miami, and besides, we have an electric heater that we plug into the wall if it ever gets chilly. Yes, firewood, Old Pepe says, firewood. You promise me, Perlita? Yes, I say.

Pepe picks a feather off my shoulder, a little puff of white like a cotton ball, not the kind of feather that’s long and thin and full of colors. He holds it to the sky and says here, Perlita, make a wish. And I close my eyes and turn my face to the sky. I can feel my
cheeks roasting in the sun, and I make a wish, the same wish I always make, even to this day. And then I open my eyes and the feather’s on his palm. I blow real hard and it bounces across his hand like a tumbleweed, then catches a breeze and floats high, high up over the mango tree where Chico and Chica sit, and they watch it fly too, their heads swinging together like they share one brain, then up over the fence and out east, over the bay and toward the ocean.