Mother Country Read online

  How long had it been since a day took an unexpected turn?

  “The thinking mysterious woman,” he said, watching her.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She had always found men invoking the mystery of women a lazy shortcut for the hard work of understanding them. But the silky delivery—mysterious woman—slipped neatly into her pores. The door swung open to the third floor and, flushed, she followed him down the hall.

  He rapped on a door at the very end of the corridor, in a cool pattern of threes with the back of his knuckle.

  “Look, it’s Ded Moroz,” said a young mother, in a mock-surprise voice meant for a child. “Look who’s here, Andreas and Anastasia. Welcome, welcome.”

  Nadia heard the familiar cheer of children kept inside too long, the anticipatory patter of tiny feet. Boris was in full Ded Moroz mode now, tickling the twins under their chins and asking them if they’d behaved this year. He was pretending he had no idea about any gifts, that his visit was no more than a rest stop on his way to other little children.

  “I don’t believe you,” the little girl pouted in English. “Where are my toys?”

  On the table, cookies were fanned out, oblong purple grapes clustered inside an orange bowl. The apartment itself was sparsely furnished, its tan walls bare of art or photographs. The one decorative item was the New Year’s yelka, propped against a corner. It was lushly outfitted in silver ornaments and porcelain figurines, drizzled with tinsel, so tall that its point curled into the ceiling. Nadia approached it, felt a few fir leaves prickle between her fingers. They were real.

  In Ukraine, as in Russia, New Year’s had been the most important of holidays, a single day that contained within it all of one’s hopes for the future. Their own plastic yelka was more like a bush, but each branch was lovingly draped with ornaments. She would pool her money and her mother’s meager pension to buy caviar and other appetizers for the spread, then Larissa would be bundled for a trip to the main square for fireworks. On television, they would watch The Irony of Fate or Enjoy the Sauna for the thousandth time, then the president’s New Year’s address. At midnight, she and her mother uncorked Soviet champagne. Even after the end of the Soviet Union, it was not truly New Year’s without Soviet champagne.

  In this country, Nadia never bothered with the entire spectacle, but this one was reminding her of all the faith and optimism an ordinary yelka had to shoulder. The tree itself was a kind of prayer. In Ukraine, they had always hoped for the simplest of necessities, food and clothes and good health. Peace during wartime would never have occurred to them as a New Year’s wish. They thought that was all in the past.

  The girl twin was screeching over a braided blond doll draped in a blue Snegurochka-like dress. Elsa’s beautiful, she’s perfect, she was screeching. The boy unwrapped a fire truck and set off a siren that could wake the dead. If she had dared to gift Sasha with a plastic screeching toy, her mother would have pursed her lips and the next day it would be purged. And she would be right. There was not a single thank-you, no recognition of gratitude. Nadia watched as the spoiled kids retreated to their own areas with their toys.

  This mother did not seem to know what was expected of her now that the presents were dispersed. She was pretty and small-boned but with a bit of disarray about her, the buttons on her shirt off by a single hole. She ushered them toward the table of desserts already decimated by the children. She squinted at Nadia but addressed Boris.

  “She’s a bit … how to say this politely … mature for your Snegurochka, no?”

  Boris laid a protective hand on the lower curve of Nadia’s back, “Now, now, my Snegurochka here is the perfect age. I had my children young. Who are my children anyway, eh? Didn’t you ever wonder how the Soviet state invented a Ded Moroz with a granddaughter but no daughter?”

  “Magic,” Nadia said, warmed by his defense of her. She decided this mother got the gratitude she deserved. “You were a lonely old man, and you made Snegurochka out of the snow in your backyard. Isn’t that right, Borya?”

  “That’s right. And she stayed with me out of sheer duty.”

  “I actually think I’m the ideal age for Snegurochka.” Nadia sniffed. She took the cold cappuccino out of its bag and began sipping it regally.

  “I didn’t mean to offend you, quite the opposite,” the mother began, uncertain of whether Nadia was truly offended. “You are just different, and that’s very admirable.”

  “Ladies, ladies, who wants to toast?” Without asking, Boris opened the glass cabinet and brought down a swan-necked bottle.

  “Help yourselves,” the mother said, glancing toward the bedroom where the toy fire sirens were matching real fire sirens for noise level. Boris added a generous splash of liquor to Nadia’s coffee, they clinked, and he flung back the contents of his glass.

  She drank so infrequently that almost immediately, even as the alcohol burned the back of her throat, it felt as though she were shape-shifting into a lighter person, someone who dwelled only behind a veil. Behind a veil, there was no such thing as war, not to mention day 317 of a war, not to mention a war that seemed indifferent to the comforting peace of cease-fires. The “Day of Silence” in Ukraine was turning out to be a joke as usual, a smiling face hiding a gun behind its back. Poroshenko’s idea of uniting the land was warning that if the airport fell to the separatists so would the entire country.

  “Have a cookie,” Boris prodded her.

  The mother was visibly looking at her watch. “Thank you, Ded Moroz, come back next year,” she said loudly, even though the children were out of earshot. “And of course Snegurochka too.”

  She shut the door behind them.

  “I never got the cookie,” Nadia said, which prompted Boris to wrap her into a sympathetic full-body hug.

  They rode the elevator to the next assignment, a girl who would be receiving the same blond-haired doll in a blue dress dotted with snowflakes (it seemed two others would be getting an identical doll, a doll Regina refused to buy for Sasha for a reason that was not clear to Nadia, something about “the Disney capitalist machine”), a pony with a rainbow mane, a mermaid puzzle.

  “Look who’s here,” said the next mother in the exact same upbeat tone, although she was older, her appearance more polished. This apartment was decorated in a sleek modernist style. A black leather couch and chairs with squiggly lines for feet stood on top of a rug splashed with jagged geographic shapes. The New Year’s tree was placed next to the television. The adornments here were restrained: no tinsel, the ornaments clay animals that looked like children’s art projects. The sight of those sloppily painted, one-legged horses and blotchy cows made Nadia ache even more. Larissa spent weeks before New Year’s weaving little animals out of wheat, firebirds and angels and horses, and they would drape them over the plastic fingers of the yelka.

  On the red-lacquered coffee table were the remnants of zakuski: the marinated mushrooms, the pickles and pumpernickel bread, but they were swept aside by slices of poppy-seed cake, priyaniki, chocolate-covered zephyr. In front of them stood a four-year-old with bangs and a bowl cut, fingers and chin smeared with chocolate. She used to love just gazing at her daughter at this age; her eyes were two almonds under a pair of disheveled little eyebrows. She loved watching her busy with a sewing project, her intense gaze so fully on the picture forming in front of her. Or climbing into bed with her in the middle of the night, a little body adjusting itself to the adult shape. Or watching her eat wild strawberries with ravenous pleasure, popping one after the other into her mouth until it expanded like a chipmunk’s.

  You have no idea that the all-consuming baby love for you is temporary, that as children age, the love stretches, becomes distracted by lesser things. She was starting to see the first signs of it in the relationship between Regina and Sasha, the way Sasha no longer ran into her mother’s arms when she came home, satisfied in the cocooned elixir of her own private play. Pain moved through her with steady deliberation. The kid looked nothing like Sasha or even
Larisska with her sleek bob of brown hair; she was happily spreading chocolate tracks on the face of the new doll handed over by her red-suited date.

  The father emerged from one of the bedrooms. He was buttoning the top of a striped business shirt, headpiece still attached to his ear. “Drink, Ded Moroz?”

  “I won’t say no,” Boris said, settling onto one of the squiggly chairs. “Don’t forget to take care of my granddaughter here.”

  The man grinned and uncorked a Hennessey cognac. “Ded Moroz got lucky this year, eh? Just tell me when to stop pouring.”

  “Just a little in my coffee,” she said, holding out the Rendezvous Café cup. The by-now familiar burn of the alcohol settled on the melancholy, scorching it.

  They consumed half the poppy-seed cake and a few zephyrs. The man seemed to have settled into his role as host, bursting open a cantaloupe with a knife handle and handing them dripping pieces. He substituted her coffee cup for a real glass and poured them another round.

  “To new happiness, yes?”

  His wife reminded him, did he forget they were late to Lev and Oksana’s party? They still had to stop by the drugstore to get the card. The man waved her away. Ded Moroz and Snegurochka were much more fun than those desiccated corpses she called friends. You tell them that to their faces, the woman shot back. I dare you.

  Nadia’s temples were starting to vibrate. Did her daughter’s resentment go further back than she thought? Of course Nadia might have better hidden her sacrifices from Larisska over the years. “It’s not like you have a father to discipline you. It’s just me here,” she remembered yelling in frustration after some misbehavior. Or once even on New Year’s, when Larisska complained about her gift of a world map not being laminated, “you must have turned into an ungrateful tvar’ because you have no father at home to guide you.” In hindsight, the absent father was probably used too often as a threatening disciplinary tool.

  On the way to the elevator, Boris watched Nadia fumble with the wobbly tiara. “I like it falling off your head like that.”

  “I’m getting tired. How many to go?”

  Boris grimaced. “One more visit. They get these godawful ugly dolls and then we’re done.”

  “Okay.”

  “And then let’s find somewhere more private to celebrate, shall we?” Boris’s face was damp, his eyes glistening with what she imagined was desire and what the hell? It’s not like she had virginity to lose. It’s not like she could blame Larissa for her lack of a sex life anymore. She pulled aside the front of her coat.

  “We could go to my place,” she said with what she hoped was a seductive lilt. There was a hesitation in his eyes, as if he had expected resistance or at least modest demurral. What was the point of saying no anymore? she reasoned. What was the point of all those absurd rules her mother concocted about reeling in men like trout? The elevator was stuffy, filled with the air of their cognac breath, the aftertaste of chocolate. He stabbed some upper-floor button and she closed her jacket.

  “Do you have anything salty? A pickle or vobla or something?” Boris asked when the next woman opened the door. “I’ve been eating nothing but sugar all day.”

  The woman blocked the door, hands folded over her stomach. She was wearing a ribbed black turtleneck, a gold Star of David poking out around a scrawny neck. “I thought you were working today. We weren’t expecting you.”

  “Just a little herring? Some salad and bread? Where’s the spread? Is it a holiday or not?” Boris gripped two young boys around their waists and spun them into a constellation.

  The woman held the door open for Nadia, scrutinizing her the way you do with a not entirely well-executed painting at a random gallery.

  “You’re wondering why I look too old to be his granddaughter,” Nadia said. It was probably the alcohol, but it suddenly seemed important not to be intimidated again. “If you must know, he had my mother very young. Now I am fated to keep Ded Moroz company in his old age.”

  “Is that right.” This was not a question, but the hard-faced woman moved to the side and allowed Nadia entrance.

  “Where are the toys?” a five-year-old cried. He and his little brother were in desperate need of a haircut. The older one’s ringlets scaled down the small of his back.

  “I thought you said they were girls,” she said, before realizing he only mentioned that the gifts would be dolls. Here you were not supposed to make assumptions about gender and the toys children preferred. Regina corrected her alarm more than once when one of Sasha’s friends, Oliver, showed up to a playdate in a princess dress and she had volunteered for him to change into a costume more appropriate, like that of a pirate or sailor. “You are being old-fashioned,” Regina would say, her tone a high-minded replica of her daughter’s. “Besides, people get very offended about that here, so please don’t say anything, and let the boys wear whatever they want.”

  This woman didn’t hear her exclamation anyway. She was fingering the strand of her necklace with knobby fingers. Hers was a face that struggled: almost nonexistent lips, cadaverous skin, narrow brown eyes. The apartment displayed no masculine presence, and Nadia knew better than anyone what a fatherless home looked like.

  The garbage bag of gifts was splayed open, the two boys digging inside. The dolls with snowflake dresses were burst open from their boxes. “That’s what you got your grandsons?” the woman said. “Frozen dolls? Is it because they were on discount or something?”

  Boris pretended at shock. “How could you accuse me of this? In fact, they are very popular this year, Anyush, and hard to get. Girls, boys, they all go crazy for them.” The kids ran over with their dolls, each settling on a Boris knee. The younger one dropped the doll, fascinated with pulling the rubber elastic of Boris’s beard and then snapping it back into place.

  Grandsons. Nadia gradually took that in.

  This Anya returned from the kitchen with a bowl of Salad Olivier, slices of bread circling the rim like sunflower petals. She raked Nadia over with a long vertical glance. “Another year, another Snegurochka. At least this one is in the vicinity of your age, Papa. I’m impressed. You’re growing.”

  “Hey, hey. What are you doing to me here? Can’t you see she and I are on a date?”

  A lump formed in Nadia’s throat. She could picture the Snegurochka of the year before, a woman like the one behind the counter at Rendezvous Café, young and elongated, a messy shock of brown hair, whose eyes and tiny waist were her best features. Why was she even surprised? But despite herself, Nadia’s heart radiated outward toward Boris, for the particular narcissism of children. How little time children spent envisioning the daily longings of their parents.

  “You know what, Anyush?” Nadia said. “Your father has told me a lot about you. He said you work very hard, that you are a special, loving person. He’s very proud of you, you know.”

  On the couch, Boris’s expression was hard to read. He was pretending not to be listening, but his bouncing leg slowed. The boys loudly protested when the game stopped.

  “Even if you are his age, I don’t plan on liking you,” Anya said.

  “I don’t expect you to.”

  She shrugged. “In any case, you’ll be gone before February.”

  “Let’s toast to a happier new year ahead,” Boris interrupted, peeling the children off him. “Where is the Soviet champagne? It’s not New Year’s without Soviet champagne.”

  Anya bent over the refrigerator, slipped out a bottle with a black-and-gold label, and handed it to him to open. Boris worked the cork with his thumbs, pointing it away from the children, until it arced. Froth dribbled over the rim of the bottle.

  “Anyush, bring Snegurochka here a real glass, something better than that measly coffee cup.”

  She was slow about it, but she did bring down three mismatched glasses from behind the glass cabinet. Nadia could see an entire row of glass figurines, hedgehog, moose, and porcupine, its quills tinged a vibrant blue.

  They settled to eat in front of the tre
e. This yelka had a giant Star of David on top and candy for ornaments. Chili-pepper lights were strung across its middle, flashing a soft pale red. So this was her first Jewish New Year’s even though there was nothing, apart from a single loaf of delicious-looking challah, to distinguish it as Jewish. There was the familiar caviar, the salads, the herring smothered by onions and sunflower oil. But maybe that was the whole point of a Soviet New Year’s, a vague holiday stripped of religion, of history, of anything but unsubstantiated, untainted faith in a better future.

  Boris winked. “You know, now that I’m seeing you in this light, you actually look like one of those dolls all the kids got. You do, you know, blond hair and all.”

  “Thank you,” she said, her face vibrating with heat. For the life of her, she would not meet Anya’s eyes, but she could also sense that Anya wasn’t looking at her, that her true thoughts were far from this room.

  Outside, evening sloped down without warning. What lay beyond the window was a pervasive inky haze. The near future presented itself to her in a series of wispy thoughts. She was missing Georgina’s party, but felt no urgency about making it. Her sister Olga was coming to New York in a week and she would have to steel herself for that. Nothing beyond today felt tangible.