Mother Country Read online

  “What did I promise?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just I took it for granted, I guess. That you’d never leave me.”

  Larissa turned around and walked out of the embassy, passing back through security and gliding into the shadows of the front hallway. Nadia ran after her across the lacquered lobby, the too-quiet orderly lobby with free glasses of water and free bathrooms. “Larissa, come back,” she called, drawing unpleasant stares and whispers. Her entire torso was soaked in perspiration. “Larissa!”

  “Are you canceling?” the young officer said into her microphone.

  She stopped, frozen, not breathing.

  “Or should we draw up your documents?”

  “Yes,” she finally said. It was the most impossible word she’d ever uttered. It was like plunging a knife into her body over and over again. Yes, yes, yes.

  At the Women’s Day party, Georgina must have heard the movement at the door, the indecisive sound of her halted steps, because she interrupted her own story, raising her voice for Nadia’s benefit. “But you know what? She’s our Ukrainka, she’ll be fine.”

  This time “our Ukrainka” sounded ominous. Nadia had wanted to leave, to never speak with these friends again. But she managed to emerge from that hallway, pretending she’d heard nothing. Shaking her hair from the light sheen of snow, a wide, celebratory smile on her face. She never told them that she heard their judgment, and what was encrusted within “our Ukrainka” were remnants of ancient Russian imperialism. Even in the Soviet “Union,” there was never a doubt that Russians were all that mattered, Ukrainians always in second place. And the thing that cut her down to her very sinews, more wounding than their condescending nickname for her, was the fact that her friends believed she was a terrible mother.

  It was a small triumph then to leave Lena and Georgina huddled near the too-high bar stools at this ridiculous nightclub as she made her way toward the long-haired wine drinker. Upon closer inspection, he was a little too pretty for the real job she had in mind, a man who was probably weighed down by a messy tangle of romantic prospects. In her mind, she’d pictured a misshapen type whose gratitude would be the driving force of the transaction, someone who would take one look and wonder how he could help bring their plan to fruition. In any case, it was too late to turn back. The man was looking at her in the disinterested way all young men appraised her now that she was close to fifty. They slightly raised their eyebrows as if the only thing she could possibly want from them was directions or perhaps to find out the exact time.

  “May I talk with you a moment?” she asked in Russian.

  “You are speaking to me?” He had a thick accent, from someplace mysterious and sexy like Tashkent. He nodded to his friend, an older man around her age, who reluctantly moved away.

  She could see Lena and Georgina, their skin paved with blue neon light. That she picked the younger, more attractive man was clearly shocking to them.

  “Shall we have a seat?” She pointed to the nearest empty love seat, a velvet tufted thing.

  The befuddled man sat at one end. He was wearing cheap-looking leather pants, the material bunching at his thighs. He was confused, polite wonder giving way to suspicion. Was she perhaps a dirty old lady? Was she one of those former rural beauties who were not aware that their peak had long ago crested?

  “If you don’t mind,” she said. “I’d like to show you some pictures.”

  Her purse appeared on her knees and she fumbled with its clasp, a silver button that refused to be pushed through the loop. When it finally opened, her hand gratefully landed on the phone. Across the room, there were her friends, astonished, barely able to mask the serrated edges of their envy.

  “What kind of pictures?”

  “Trust me, you will not be disappointed.”

  The man’s neck was tensed but he bent his head down next to hers. This close to a young man for the first time aroused no distinct desire in Nadia. His scent was not masculine at all, but a decadent swirl of citrus and cinnamon and hair pomade.

  The first image of Larissa she could find was the one where she was seventeen years old and leaning against a pine tree, the light behind her blond hair plaited down the length of one arm, making her hair bright, incandescent. Her gaze was unusually open, relaxed, eyes directly meeting the camera. It was a stunning photo because it conveyed a face of fierce, unquestioning love. “Our Larisska,” her mother had written with the attachment. “Found these in boxes under bed.”

  She continued to scroll. Larisska bathed by the light of a computer screen. Larisska standing in front of one of her most beautiful embroidered tapestries, where peasant women danced in bright red caftans. Standing with the other teachers and her first-grade class in a blouse she bought for her in Rainbow on Kings Highway. That famous old picture of the two of them on a blanket in Yalta, white chairs and Crimean mountain ranges in the background.

  “Do you like her? Do you think she’s pretty?”

  “Sure, I guess so.” The man shrugged. “Your daughter, I presume?”

  “She’s even better looking in person, I promise you. And a heart like you won’t find here, with these painted harlots.” Nadia waved around the room, realizing she was encompassing Lena and Georgina in the designation. “She will heal a mouse with a broken leg, that’s how bighearted she is. She works with the sweetest children in school. And funny too. She repeats anecdotes perfectly, gets the punch lines just right.”

  His face was furrowed, but then it suddenly cleared up.

  “Oh. I understand. You want me to go out with her. This is you trying to set her up, right? She’s having trouble finding a date?”

  The very idea, Nadia thought. Her daughter could date actors and models if she wanted to, that’s how pretty she was. But Sergei, the last love interest Nadia knew about, turned into a disappointment. Her mother told her never to bring his name up in front of her daughter. But now six years had passed and Nadia realized she had no idea what her daughter had been up to during that time, whose company she was keeping. “Oh please, Mama,” was her only response when she broached the topic.

  “Not just date. I have a proposition for you.”

  “What’s that?” He seemed to be entertained by their exchange, patient enough to hear her out. The volume on the music reached a new decibel, accompanied by screams of recognition.

  “There’s a visa called K-1. You heard of it? It is for fiancés.”

  “A visa? What do you mean for fiancés? What’s this got to do with me?”

  “You’re not engaged already, are you?”

  “No.” He laughed, looking around him as if for rescue. He met a friend’s gaze and made a theatrical show of shrugging.

  “She’s in Lugansk region right now. You know what’s going on there, a senseless war. I’ve tried lawyers and immigration agencies. It seems living in a war zone won’t speed up her case. But you won’t regret it, I promise you. She will make you a fine wife, and if you are unhappy, you can always divorce, yes?”

  The man emitted something between a laugh and an exhale. “Here all this time I had no idea what you were getting at. And it’s just that you want me to marry your daughter for a green card.”

  “There’s the K-1 visa. I read about it,” she said, pleased to finally be understood even if his reiteration of her reasonable request sounded crass and illicit. She could feel the flush leaving her face and neck, a flush that rarely went away these days. The music changed to a wordless, robotic beat and the dancers out on the floor were embodying its soulless rhythm.

  “You know, don’t you, that this costs, babki? A buddy of mine did it. I think the going rate is twenty thousand, am I right? Not that I’m agreeing.”

  “But you will love her. And she will love you. You and I will go to Moscow to meet her—they need that, the K-1 people. They’ll want proof you’ve met—and you will see that I did not exaggerate. She is as beautiful as the photos. She is a real innocent girl. I will be nearby to help you set up your hom
e. She is a modest girl but also very smart. I can see you are a man who prizes intelligence in a woman.”

  “Let me stop you right there.” The man was rising, the neon light imprinting multiple shadows across his torso.

  “Wait.” She followed him to the bar, her phone flashing photo after photo. Larissa at ten showing off new sneakers. Larissa at twelve in her school uniform. Larissa in bed, the day she left, blankets at her chin, a scowling face pointing at the wall. Her back pointed at the camera. Go away, just leave already.

  “I’ve been polite so far because you’re my mother’s age, but enough is enough.” The man was gesturing to his friend, slinking between bodies with that ridiculous glass of red wine still in hand. The chase was garnering some attention.

  Behind her, she could feel her friends moving toward her in protective concern, swooping in for their rescue. What on earth was she doing following this young guy around? She could see them agreeing that she was embarrassing herself, that she needed to be removed before someone recognized her from the neighborhood.

  She caught up to the man anyway, scrawled her cell phone number on a napkin and pushed it in the pocket of his jacket. “In case you hear of someone,” she quickly added in response to his panicked look. “You might know a man who is interested.”

  He moved closer. An unpleasant mix of alcohol and garlic was being breathed upon her. “I don’t know a man who is interested. Unless you are willing to pay. Are you willing to pay?”

  That was when she felt Georgina’s hand at her elbow. “Nadyen’ka, come with us. Excuse us.” They were guiding her away from the man and his older friend to the exit of the club. The room was now clogged with gyrating bodies, anonymous forms sparkling in the sinister blue of the overhead flares.

  “What was he talking about, paying? What kind of woman did he take you for? None of us are that desperate yet, thank goodness.” Georgina was talking nervously, a whole stream of nonsense about older women and younger men, and how it was a real shame how little dignity was accorded to women over thirty-five. Her insistence that Nadia not take it personally was only making Nadia refuse to be led. She dug in her heels and drew out the squeeze to the front doors as long as she could.

  Outside, an even longer line stretched around the corner obscured by cigarette smoke. Already inebriated women bolstered one another up, laughing and punching at their phones.

  Georgina described to Lena her version of what she’d witnessed, full of indignation about his offensive treatment of Nadia. “You better believe I told him what’s what. He had no right to treat my friend like that. He was not nearly as nice-looking up close. A horse face, am I right?”

  “What a basran.” Lena squeezed Nadia’s arm in solidarity.

  Georgina said, with what she imagined was tact, “Of course when I said you should go out there and introduce yourself, it’s a matter of delicacy. Strictly speaking, we should really wait for them to come to us. Even here, men like to be the aggressor.”

  “I thought you were after the friend,” Lena said. “The friend seemed like a better fit. He seemed so disappointed when you walked away.”

  “That other one was still a baby, wasn’t he? No older than my son.”

  The three of them started away. They managed to free themselves from the frenzied cluster around the entrance to the club, all those young people begging for loopholes, why they should be allowed in ahead of other people. The women turned onto quiet, dangerous streets. From time to time, they heard ambulance sirens. It was that hour of the night—cars packed with men from lawless, tormented countries in search of trouble. It was the time of night women stuck together, called each other when they were safely at home, doors tightly bolted.

  “What were you showing him on your phone?” Lena asked. They slipped onto larger avenues, navigated all those drunk young people colonizing the sidewalks.

  “Pictures of Sasha, the little girl I nanny. He wanted to know about my job, and when I told him what I do, he said he liked kids. I don’t know what you ladies are worried about. He was the one who asked for my number.” She said this lie easily, proudly.

  “Is that right?”

  “What about the friend?”

  “What friend? The hairy guy? Oh, I was heading for him at first, but you know, close up, this guy was cuter, so I went straight for him. He swooped in before I could even consider the older guy.”

  Her friends exchanged a glance. In channeling Regina, she was clearly not sounding like herself, but what did that matter? At some point, Larisska would make it here. At some point, Larisska would have to forgive her. At some point, she would need Lena and Georgina less. At some point, after twenty more years in this country, she would have more of what Regina has obtained so easily. She would become a boring American mother with a boring American story. In the meantime, she would stop at nothing until it happened.

  “I’m sorry what I said about him. I must have misread the situation. And to think I dragged you away,” Georgina murmured. “I’d have killed you if you did that to me.”

  “That’s fine. We’d already exchanged numbers. I’ll probably go on a date with him next week.”

  “Of course you will, honey.”

  They continued on in a flurry of laughter. Lena started telling them about the infamous Italian owner of her exclusive salon, how he charged his rich American clients arbitrary fees depending on his mood. Because the salon was booked months in advance, they never complained or asked about what they’d received for those exorbitant prices.

  “Once he billed a woman a hundred and fifty dollars for a crappy blow-dry and she didn’t make a peep about it. Just handed over her credit card like it was normal.”

  “Are you serious? I can’t believe it!” Nadia said.

  She acted shocked, the naïve, sheltered Ukrainka astounded by the sophisticated deceptions being carried out in the big cosmopolitan city. It was her role in their group and she finally learned how to play it.

  5

  To New Happiness

  Brooklyn, December 2014

  Outside the synagogue, the mothers and nannies were lined up with strollers. It was a few minutes to three, the metal gates of Sasha’s preschool still shut. A sideways wind of unenthusiastic snow was enveloping Nadia, and she clustered with all the others under the awning of the construction project next door, a sleek apartment building of windows dwarfing the brick town houses.

  Feverish one-sided cell phone conversations in assorted languages made Nadia check her own phone for any word from Larisska. She had just written her after hearing about the Donetsk airport under siege again, the poor Donetsk airport! The same place she would sometimes greet her university boyfriend, her dental technician sweetheart, after his trips delivering black market forged teeth to post-Soviet patients willing to pay for them under the table. She remembered his rosy-cheeked paleness as he alighted from the plane with flowers, waving before even glimpsing her face. It was once a place of expansiveness and hope, this airport, a Ukraine connected to the world. Now there were men trapped inside, some with limbs exploded, bleeding to death. “The Ukies deserved it,” the very same dentist sweetheart had recently posted on Odnoklassniki before she could block him. “Get the hell off our land.” Of course she had written none of this to her daughter. Just the usual check-in, the need to make sure Larisska was healthy, whole.

  Larissa hadn’t written back. The doors opened, the mothers and nannies filtering inside. She followed them down the corridor past an explosion of wall art, watercolors of paired animals signed by children in what she learned was Hebrew, multicolored nine-pronged candelabras affixed to paper. In the classroom, Sasha was holding her own creation, a flat, wooden candleholder that seemed like an imminent fire hazard.

  “A menorah!” she corrected, annoyed, when Nadia gushed over the lantern’s beauty.

  “Menorah,” Nadia obediently repeated.

  The teacher appeared younger than Larisska, and made sure to address each mother. Her eyes glazed ov
er the nannies. “Happy holidays. Don’t forget…” And Nadia lost the rest. The woman spoke tentatively as if expecting something, waiting for something she was not allowed to name. This reminded Nadia that Regina had slipped her envelopes for the teachers that morning, cards that contained gift cards in amounts Regina could barely afford.

  “But they work so hard,” Regina said in that vaguely empathetic way of hers, as if her mind could not possibly grasp the rounded nature of another’s daily life. “I can’t imagine being a teacher. The toughest job in the world.”

  Of course, Regina had no idea about the toughest job in the world. This teacher was probably spending her time off on a family vacation or enjoying holidays in the city. Compare this to teachers in Ukraine, the winter breaks of her own mother or Larisska. While the students were out, they were to spend their own breaks and summers spackling and painting the school walls, changing dead light bulbs, fixing toilets and sinks at the school despite a lack of plumbing experience. If they were lucky, teachers received an appreciative basket of potatoes from a student’s garden. They were not getting gift certificates for frothy coffee drinks, that’s for sure. Toughest job in the world. But she handed over an envelope like everyone else, smiled her thanks, and started layering Sasha up for the outdoors.

  Her phone rang, the unexpected sound of it ricocheting against her thoughts. It was a number unknown to her, the area code local.

  “Allo,” she said.

  “Is this Nadezhda? Nadia? I’m sorry but you didn’t write down your last name.”

  The man spoke accented Russian; the gruffness of the syllables and delivery pointed to a Georgian provenance. When the phone rang and it wasn’t her nannying job or her friends, it was most likely her on-the-books employer. VIP Senior Care called at irregular hours for her to fill sudden vacancies or remind her to enroll in certification courses. They rotated through staff regularly. The owners of the company were engaging in some kind of Medicare fraud or immigration fraud or embezzlement, and employees too close to the company’s business operations were quickly swapped out for new ones.