Mother Country Read online

  The garbage bag of presents lay empty like a deflated balloon. Boris clicked on a few lamps. The boys were rushed off to bed, the unloved dolls splayed across the couch. Their clothes had been removed, and they lay there in unnatural poses with twisted torsos and braids, hands raised over their heads in astonishment.

  She took out her phone to write Georgina she’d be late and saw two missed texts. From Georgina: “He looks like a criminal. Call me later so I know he didn’t boil you alive.” And from Larisska, just a few blessed words. “Nice beard. Send pic?” She could have levitated right there with happiness, high above the glittering Jewish star of the yelka. “My daughter wrote back!” she wanted to scream. “My daughter’s alive!”

  “I’d love to take a picture of you and your daughter before we go,” she said instead. “May I? Do you mind?”

  They posed, his arm pulling Anya closer, his daughter’s torso resisting. Neither of them smiled, but there was no denying they were a pair in the way their faces settled in for the shot. No matter their mutual disappointment, they were still father and daughter, the raw, undiluted fact of it. Nadia saved the photo, swished it over to Larisska with a “Better in person? Happy New Year!” On a whim, she also sent it to Regina.

  They rose to go.

  In the elevator, she was still wrapped in a cloud of elation. When her daughter wrote her back, it always renewed her hope for the future. A textured, colorful life seemed within her grasp. She started to say, “I hope your car didn’t get towed,” but Boris gripped the back of her neck in a single swooping motion. The soft pillow of his fake stomach was pressing her against the sharp brass railing lining the mirrored wall. Her lower back was bruising, the rim of her mouth wetter than it needed to be. But from around his head, in the mirror, she caught a glimpse of herself in the sparkling tiara. Her hair was a soft, otherworldly blond, her cheeks swirling with a girlish red. She was pungent with a precise, realized beauty.

  She flung her arms around him.

  “Kiss me, kiss me,” she kept repeating, even though that was exactly what he was already doing.

  6

  Not Too Young to Know Nothing

  Ukraine, May 2000

  In Ukraine, guests never called ahead, nor were they expressly invited. They simply showed up at your door. Yulia and her husband, Gena, had been sitting around Nadia’s table for years. They had all known one another at school, and it was easy between the three of them, free of formality, an enclosed circle of safety and trust. They were always on hand to help Nadia ring in the weekend after a long week of work in Kharkov, but tonight was special; it marked the beginning of a weeklong vacation for Nadia. She was pulling Larisska from school, the two of them booked on a train to Yalta in the morning.

  When Larissa returned home with her grandmother, she didn’t appear surprised to find her mother with the happy couple ensconced at the kitchen table on their second cup of rose-hip tea.

  “My husband is leaving me for a computer, Larisska,” Yulia announced by way of greeting. “That’s what’s going on. If you were wondering how I’m doing.”

  “Yul’ka! Show some discretion. She’s a child!” Nadia protested.

  Gena stood up to greet Larissa with a kiss on the cheek. “Every time I see this one she gets older, what is that about? Hard to believe she is already twelve.”

  “Only twelve,” Nadia corrected.

  “Already thirteen,” Larisska said with emphasis. She took off her jacket, patiently waited while her grandmother untied the hat’s knot under her chin. She slid into an empty chair, prepared to join the grown-ups. “What kind of computer?”

  “That’s right, thank you for reminding me, Larisska.” Yulia cleared her throat for emphasis. “My husband is leaving me for a computer.”

  While Yulia was known to make dramatic pronouncements, Nadia secretly thought it bad luck to give voice to something that could possibly materialize. On one hand, it appeared that the institution of marriage was created for people like Yulia and Gena, who parried and griped but always made up with renewed affection. But still, at thirty-seven Yulia should make more of an effort than she did, with her drooping folds of discolored skin under her eyes, those unflattering striped sweaters that enhanced her wide hips. She should really stop talking about her husband leaving her in front of her husband, Nadia believed.

  “I can tell her what’s going on, can’t I tell her? She’s very mature for her age. It’s time she found out about the real world.”

  “Go ahead and unburden yourself,” Larisska eagerly encouraged, her eyes luminous. “What did Dyadya Gena do now?” She was dipping sugar cubes into the tea and sucking them, a habit Nadia usually abhorred.

  “Am I allowed to speak?” Gena tried.

  Yulia interrupted. “It’s like this, Larisska. My husband is working on a chatterbot. Do you know what that is?”

  “Something with computers?”

  “Right. A program that talks to you. Why you would need a computer to yammer at you all day, I have no idea. Half the time, this chatterbot’s not even telling the truth, lies through his teeth. But now that Putin is president, my businessman of a husband thinks there will be more money for projects like this over there.”

  “Software that lies to you?”

  “Ridiculous, right? So my husband here wants to move to Peter to snuggle together with his fellow programmers and his chatterbot and use his new technology for good or evil. I wish him the very best.”

  “And now you see why I never married,” Nadia cut in. She heard the slam of a bedroom door, her own mother retorting, “Oh, so that’s why you never married.”

  “You were so right, Nadyush. You know, I almost thought you were very brave to be a spinster, but it wasn’t worth it. Men are fucking goats, useless mudak.”

  “Yulia!”

  Yulia had no boundaries with her own fifteen-year-old daughter, which was why her Ida was sneaking around at night, enmeshed with young people who, like her father, were restless, unhappy, but were sublimating it into politics. You could not find two more different mothers than Nadia and Yulia. And what was there to be unhappy about? Nadia had a full week off from work and they were going to the seaside. The economy felt like it was on the upswing, there was finally food in the stores. Yana Klochkova won the gold again in the Sydney Olympics. They had a brand-new space heater for the winter, inherited from a neighbor whose wife just committed suicide and was divesting himself of their possessions. Sure, there was a tense hunt for a missing journalist, striking miners, and a military agency dumping toxic waste into the soil. But all this seemed minor compared to a contagious feeling of hope that this volatile country was finally stabilizing.

  “Yulia, you’re going a little too far rhetorically, are you not?” Gena said. He turned off the computer and switched the radio to the frequency of loud static. “But have you seen anything get better since Ukraine’s independence? If anything, our politicians are even more allergic to honesty and state-building and are busy redirecting any profits into their own deep pockets. This is not the place to start a business or do any research. It will just be stolen or shut down.” He turned off the radio, his voice switching back to normal. “Shall we make this a real party or what?”

  Nadia pointed toward the cabinet, and he slid open the glass doors for the vodka.

  “Don’t be shocked, Mama,” Larisska said in that new haughty tone of hers. “I’m almost thirteen. I know full well that our country is a mess and our men are dogs.”

  “Do you now? Well, I don’t know why I keep sending you to school then.”

  “Don’t be mad.”

  Larissa moved her chair closer, her cheek resting against Nadia’s arm. At the sight of this, Ida rolled her eyes. It was these moments Nadia cherished, happy that unlike her contemporary, Larissa was still in many ways a little girl who needed the comfort of her mama.

  “Of course I’m not mad.” But what would her girl say if she knew that three years ago her aunt Olga put in the paperwork to
sponsor them to emigrate to the United States, that Nadia had packed both of their bags and hidden them in the far reaches of her bedroom closet? Would Larisska be upset at not being told? In any case, it was beginning to look like she had nothing to worry about. Their turn seemed like it would never come.

  “Men are dogs, eh? Those are great lessons you are imparting to a young, impressionable girl, ladies. Nicely done,” Gena said, pouring them a round.

  Yulia pulled him in for an apologetic kiss on the cheek. “You’re not a useless mudak.”

  Nadia kissed him on the other cheek. “And as you can imagine, I told her none of those things. And as far as I’m concerned, we are all perfect right where we are.”

  And she meant it. They could hear her mother shifting about in the cot in her room, the sound of Prokofiev emanating from her old record player. Outside the window, there was the purple silhouette of pines. The new space heater was keeping the room exceptionally warm.

  Suddenly, Yulia shot up. “Larissa, you can actually help us. The chatterbot is supposed to be a thirteen-year-old boy from Odessa, but Gena is helpless with slang. He has enlisted a few thirteen-year-olds, Ida’s friends, to help him make the program sound more realistic. But we need more. Maybe you could tell us a few phrases the kids are using.”

  “That sounds so fun,” Larissa said, running to their room. “I’ll make a list.”

  “What words can the kids be using?” said Nadia. “Leave her alone, we’re going to Crimea tomorrow.”

  “You’re being a little unreasonable. Let the girl help if she wants to. It’s perfectly harmless.”

  Before she could remind Yul’ka of a fact that she may have forgotten, that Larissa was sick and therefore not a typical girl her age, a meek knock on the door announced Artem. He was a classmate of Larisska’s who lived one flight above them, and he followed her daughter around like an embedded piece of lint. Nadia considered letting him believe they were out, but then the knock returned.

  “Is Larissa home?” came his beleaguered, plaintive voice. Everything he said took the form of a question. It is cold out? Larissa at school already? His was a quiet but ominous persistence, a lurking outline with nothing filled in. Nadia rose to open the door, and there he was; his body looked like it was filled with stuffing instead of coursing with blood.

  “Artem, why don’t you ever call first? Can’t you see we have guests,” she said, not that he could take a hint. He continued to stare at her daughter with those watery eyes of his, rubbing his thumb and pinkie finger together. He looked like her vision of the Underground Man, not that she’d read Dostoevsky since grade school.

  “I just wanted to say hello?” Each word was protracted, mechanical.

  “Hello,” Larissa said, running up and peeking her head out the door, notebook under her arm. They stood murmuring in the hall until the boy finally left.

  “What did he want?” Nadia asked.

  “Nothing.” And Larissa proceeded to scrawl on the page with her pencil.

  As parents of children on the cusp of adolescence, she and Yulia exchanged knowing looks. They knew they were entering a new realm of secrets, of private, unspoken thoughts. Of longings they would not be able to access or resolve. Years of heartache, rejection, and hope awaited their girls but there was no slowing it all down, no denying the kids were getting older. What was a mother to do?

  * * *

  November was a perfect month for a Crimean vacation. The foreign tourists had scattered, the air with just the right kiss of warmth and humidity. Strolling the wide paved streets of Yalta’s embankment, past the markets and open-air restaurants, Nadia decided she had no need for Europe or America, not when all this belonged to Ukraine. She looked at Larissa, the sleeves of her shirt and jacket rolled up to expose her arms to the sun. They were both inhaling the sea air with giant hungry gulps.

  Larissa’s voice penetrated her thoughts. “Do you want to hear my words for Tyotya Yulia?”

  “What words?”

  “The things kids say. For the chatterbot. We use a lot of American words, for example, and twist them into Russian.”

  Nadia smiled. “It’s not just the young people who do that, you know.”

  She recognized an old coworker from the pipe factory who was strolling with her husband, and waved. The woman paused to remark on how lovely Larissa was, how slender and elegant, how fast she was growing. A budding beauty! But Nadia switched the topic to the weather. The warm breeze was refreshing, was it not, especially compared to the almost-winter nonsense of back home?

  They had barely moved on when Larissa continued. “‘Jokery’ is one. We have two guys that are always called that because they are smart-asses. Here’s another one. One kid in my class said after school that our coal miners being out of work was an act of ‘Kuchism.’ That’s pretty clever, right? Kuchma’s name but Americanized.”

  Nadia gripped her daughter’s arm. “Look, it’s one thing to joke around at home but I hope you’re being careful. You don’t know who’s listening. It’s not your business to say anything bad about Kuchma. Do you understand?”

  “But everyone makes fun of him. And for your information, Artem doesn’t like Kuchma either.”

  “Lower your voice, please. Well, you should definitely stay away from Artem. I mean, do you even like him? He follows you around like an abandoned puppy dog. Doesn’t his mother ever brush his hair?”

  “No, as a matter of fact she doesn’t. And it’s really sad.”

  Larissa grew quiet, her skin burnished with a rosy glow. Through childhood, she had been the easiest of children, clingy and shy but eager to please Nadia. The former was just now shedding but a difficult age was looming, when you could visibly see the closing of the gates, your child’s mind shutting itself off from you, growing impenetrable. Just in the last few months, Nadia watched a new, defiant personality that was pushing against the safe borders carefully crafted for her.

  Nadia broke the silence. “You feel like something sweet? Should we find the ladies with the buckets of baklava or trubochki? Let’s check that you can have a bite or two.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  The prospect of a little sugar treat turned Larissa into a child again. Nadia took out a needle and the little green blood sugar meter that Olga sent them from the United States and decided it was worth the sacrifice of the last of the precious strips. On a nearby bench, she pricked her daughter’s middle finger and pressed the strip to the seeping blood. But what a reward not long afterward to watch Larisska push the flaky pastry into her mouth with a hungry eagerness of deprivation. The backdrop of mountains seemed to rise up as if to shield her daughter from the ominous curiosity of strangers slowing down to watch a young girl in the middle of devouring.

  * * *

  As the days passed, she was startled at how much Yalta had changed. How it failed to click with the Yalta of her childhood memories. She remembered it as a luxurious getaway, her mother in glamorous languor posing on the beach, one freckled arm shielding her eyes from the sun. How beautiful she looked in her one-piece bathing suit, how trim and girlish. Nadia could still see her so vividly calling Olga and herself back from the depths of the water. They’d barely waded in higher than their hips when they would hear, “What do you want, for my heart to break? Get back closer to the shore.”

  She and Olga would be roaming the seashore, gawking at the hotels and health spas built into the coastline. At their own pensionat, she still remembered the meals: soup, cutlet, and the magical kompot, a drink brewed from dried fruit. As a special treat, her mother would buy them lemonade. The mysterious lushness of the wooded vista, the romance of the sanatoria on the green slopes, palm trees, the villas and dachas, the magic of the never-ending promenade. Men walking in white suits and hats, the women in fashionable trench coats, under the shade of umbrellas. Professional photographers snapping coquettish pictures of the couples, women posed prettily beside rosebushes, men peeking at them from behind the leaves.

  They wo
uld be signed up for excursions during the day, museums and cave tours. And at night, going to the philharmonic concert in the fanciest of their sewn dresses, looking up at the boxes where the most important Soviet dignitaries sat. She could still remember the hush of the dimming lights, the first notes of the music. Everyone around her listening with the same breathless rapture. For those few days in Yalta, before all that ocean and the proximity of greatness, she had felt like a movie star, a head pioneer, everything that was important, visible.

  She wanted Larisska to feel the same way about Crimea, and her daughter did seem to be enjoying the beauty of the scenery. They took turns posing before the shoreline and in front of the museums and churches. They packed picnics and ate in restaurants and signed up for bus excursions. But the girl was not experiencing the Yalta of her youth. The buildings were crumbling, large gashes disfiguring their façades. The tourists were thinned, the souvenirs gaudy. The men were dressed like football players with long necklaces and shaved heads. Babushki in doorways were begging for change, “for bread, for bread.” And that same afternoon, while picnicking on the beach, she once again heard the buoyant sound of Prokofiev. It was the very same orchestra she had seen as a child, now playing for spare change on the beach. She gave Larisska a few hryvnias and watched her clamber over the rocks to drop them into the conductor’s hat.

  * * *

  The next day, on the trolley, Larissa’s face was glued to the window toward the stretch of the indigo Black Sea. They were climbing up the mountain, the pull of the copper rails above them tugging them onward. “It’s beautiful here, just breathtaking.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Nadia drew her daughter closer. The limestone undulations on the southern shore near Alushta were coming into view. This was how she remembered the otherworldly landscape, the dip of the valleys, the craggy beauty of the volcano deposits. “This is stunning, right? But the city has changed. You should have seen it in the Soviet days. Now that was beauty. I wish they kept this place up better.”