Mother Country Read online

  The guide up front was pointing out Byzantine monasteries, warning them not to miss the bust of Tolstoy tucked between foliage. It was her perfect vacation, someone droning facts at you while you closed your eyes. She felt herself sinking into the passivity of being a helpless passenger, a lovely, foreign feeling of ceding control.

  “Now that I think about it, so much of our slang is crude or foreign. When we want to say ‘awesome,’ we say ‘kaif,’ but that’s mostly Ukrainian,” Larissa was saying. She was a girl who did not stop talking, even as Nadia was always warning her to rein it in. No boy liked a girl who talked too much, not to mention that talking was always dangerous. She wished Larissa had a better instinct for silence.

  “Hm-hm.”

  “We say ‘cool’ or ‘sweet,’ we also say ‘krutoy’ if we call someone arrogant.”

  “Interesting.”

  “I was called a ‘chick’ once.”

  Nadia’s eyes popped open. “Who called you that?”

  She could see Larissa blink, recalibrate. Pull something back inside of her. “Nobody. I think it was about someone else actually. Or I saw it in a movie.”

  Nadia sighed by way of making it clear that she knew perfectly well what Larissa was trying to do but transferred her attention back to the window. They were reaching the highest altitude, which meant they would soon be dipping down, the trolleybus pointing its nose downward. The initial descent always made her throat go soft.

  “Forget the slang nonsense,” she said. “Just look out the window. You know Chekhov lived here, Gorky. Remember that story ‘Lady with a Lapdog’? Remember the first line? ‘It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.’ It was set in Yalta.”

  “I didn’t read it. You told me it was too racy.”

  “That’s right. I forgot.” At the highest point, the Angarsky Pass, the majesty of the cliffs shimmered in bright resolution before them.

  “I wonder why you didn’t take me sooner, Mama.”

  “How could we? After 1991, it was all chaos. No one had any money for vacations.”

  “I’ve seen the pictures of Yalta when you were a kid and I’ve always been so jealous. But isn’t it amazing that all this belongs to Ukraine? Artem says…” All the talking was starting to drill inside Nadia’s head, calling up a vague nausea. She frowned.

  “I don’t want to hear about Artem. Larisska, you need to have your own mind and don’t be influenced by the pessimism of others. He’s a strange kid anyway.”

  “That’s right,” a woman interrupted behind them. She had been muttering loudly the entire time, a droning insect adding to the irritation in Nadia’s ear. The lady pulled herself forward, her cleavage hanging over their seat. “The story was set here because Chekhov was Russian. And Crimea is Russian. Not Ukrainian, Russian.”

  Larissa looked confused then crumpled. “But I thought…”

  The woman was not old enough to be this rude. She was around sixty, her white shirt cut too low, a giant cross gleaming bronze on her chest. “Young girl, Khrushchev gave it to you as a present in 1954. Some present, am I right? You want to know what happened? One night, he was drunk and sentimental. Some Ukie must have whispered in his ear and slipped a document under his pen. Can you imagine, little girl? He just signed away Russia’s precious territory on a whim. Don’t you worry. We will get it back.”

  “If you please, I would appreciate it if you let my daughter be. Thank you,” Nadia said. She was trying to be as polite as possible, ignoring the “Ukie” slur. She was going to say that Khrushchev did not sign over Crimea to Ukraine on a whim, that the story she heard was that the peninsula was in deep financial trouble, and because of geographic proximity, Khrushchev wanted to pass the expenses onto a country that might better understand Crimea’s agricultural climate, but she didn’t want any trouble. She just wanted them to be safely ignored.

  The guide was telling them that the altitude of the Argansky Pass stood at 752 meters above sea level. They were poised at its tip, marveling at a plaque that offered the same information.

  “Mark my words. We’ll get it back.” The woman returned her entire body to her own seat, grabbing a nearby yellow railing for support as the trolley sloped downward.

  “That’s what Artem said too.” Larissa turned away from the window.

  Nadia felt too paralyzed to speak, afraid of the ears sitting behind them. They were passing vineyards in the hollow of valleys, the trolleybus heaving itself down the mountain on its rickety well-trodden rails.

  * * *

  “He is still in a very rudimentary stage,” Gena was saying. “It’ll be a few years before we can show him to the world.”

  “Rudimentary stage, eh? Sounds like someone else I know.”

  “Will you be quiet for one minute, Yul’ka? Would that kill you?”

  “Probably.”

  That was the way it was between Yulia and Genya. She chewed him out like he was an enemy of the people, and the next minute, she would be embracing him in Nadia’s kitchen as though they were the luckiest of couples. Nadia always admired that Yulia stuck by this nerdy guy who was decent but unassuming and colorless even back in their school days. His chunky glasses, clothes layered every which way, two eyebrows that threatened to collide in the middle of his face.

  “Why did you make the chatterbot thirteen years old anyway?” asked Yulia. She was rolling fish into a spherical shape and taking dainty bites of it. “Who wants to engage in conversation with a thirteen-year-old? Personally, I’d prefer a grown-up chatterbot who is an attractive, delovoy man who actually pays attention to his wife. Am I right, Nadia, or what?”

  Gena ignored the dig. “We did it on purpose. We wanted him not too old to know everything and not too young to know nothing.” He turned to the computer, “Am I right, Eugene?”

  “I don’t know,” the computer replied. “That’s an act of Kuchism.”

  Yulia and Gena broke out in laughter. But what was funny about that? What if they could trace the insult back to her daughter? What if they could arrest her? Just the other day, they discovered the poor Georgian journalist dead, and it appeared that their own president could be to blame. Okay for them to laugh, these activists, but that wasn’t Nadia. Let the crooks destroy one another while she stayed quiet, out of harm’s way.

  “I think that’s enough, don’t you?” she said, and whispered, “No politics. I don’t want Larisska to worry about politics yet, understand?”

  “Nadia’s always grumpy when her vacation is over,” Yulia said as if speaking to a crowd of people who didn’t know her.

  “Hey, Larisska,” Gena called out. “Come hear your influence talking. Come, maybe you’ll make him smarter.”

  Larisska emerged from the bedroom with embroidery she was working on. She ran to the table and said, “Can I talk to him?”

  “Of course. His name is now Eugene and he has a pet guinea pig. Maybe you want to ask about that,” Gena said. To Nadia, he mouthed, “No politics, don’t worry.”

  “Hello, Eugene.” Larissa looked so serious, as if having a real conversation with a human friend.

  “Hello, nice to make your acquaintance,” a voice in the computer responded.

  “Do you like your pet?”

  “He is my friend.”

  “What is six divided by three?”

  “I’m not sure. Three?”

  Her friends were right. Nadia was in a wretched mood. The end of vacation lingered sour on her tongue. Tomorrow meant the five-hour train ride back to Kharkov and work. The breathtaking vistas of Yalta, the bracing picnics on the beach, the cool mugs of kvass, were a dream that had abruptly ended. She wished the tour guide could have somehow been transported here, a voice of fact and reason in control of the route.

  They heard a knock on the door, the telltale sluggish sound of Artem. He knocked again. Why couldn’t he stop the knocking?

  “Shall you get rid of him or shall I?” Nadia asked her daughter.


  “Aw, let him in,” Yulia said, wrapping an arm around Gena. “You can’t keep them out in the hall forever.”

  “You are wrong,” Nadia said. “I am the mother and I can.”

  “I’ll just say I’m busy.” And Larissa slipped out into the hall, conferring in the same low tone. But then they were back. “Artem wants to meet Eugene.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Nadia said under her breath.

  The kids walked in, Larissa leading Artem to the computer. He squinted into its blue light.

  “Hello, Eugene.”

  “Hello. Are you thirteen too?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wonderful.”

  To Nadia their two voices sounded exactly the same. The same affectless lack of peaks and emotion. The same flat monotone. It filled Nadia with a panic she could not name.

  “Let’s ask him some facts about our country. Who is our president?”

  “Kuchism.”

  “No, silly. Leonid Kuchma. Who is our prime minister?”

  “That’s easy. Victor Yushchenko.”

  “Very good, Eugene. Does Crimea belong to Ukraine or Russia?” Larisska asked.

  “Good question,” Eugene said, pausing as if to think. “I don’t know.”

  “Smart kid, eh?” Gena said. “Always better to say you don’t know than pretend you know everything. Much safer that way.”

  “Russia.”

  “Look, he changed his mind.” Gena looked pleased with his creation.

  Nadia started clearing the plates from beneath them even though she knew they were not finished. The woman on the bus returned, along with the sour taste. “Of course it belongs to Ukraine, Eugene. Why are you always making up stories? I have a splitting headache.”

  Yulia rose and started shooing out the guests. She kissed Nadia, encapsulating them both in a hyacinth perfume. Her dear friend always so sensitive to her moods. She waited for Gena to hold out her coat, and she slipped her arms inside. “You too, Artem. It’s getting late, your mother is probably looking for you.”

  Artem’s body seemed to rise at the same time, a slow folding in of the limbs. “I doubt it?”

  “His mother barely knows he’s around. She starts drinking as soon as she gets back from work.” Larissa said this as if they should all feel sorry for him now. As if Nadia had the time or any resources really to feel sorry for a kid who was always hanging around where he wasn’t wanted.

  * * *

  The end of vacation felt more devastating this time around, Nadia thought, back on the train to Kharkov. She barely had time to savor it. And something else, a sense of foreboding for the future. During the week she rented a room in an apartment of a elderly woman who left food for her on a cold plate under a steel pan lid but otherwise didn’t talk to her. This was unbearable in the beginning, but now the only thing Nadia was looking forward to was this silence.

  The landscape outside the window was a brown swirl of factories, hills formed out of the melting of metals, communication towers, shuttered coal mines, and the intermittent stretches of beauty. The rivers, sunflower fields, windswept steppes, the mounds of green and yellow. The light was dimming on the place, an instant association with leaving and returning. She arrived in the evenings and made it home in the evenings.

  It’s not like she minded the work at Turboatom, but the people kept more to themselves than in her bustling Rubizhne plant. These big-city types were operating with an air of superiority at the global importance of the company. No one whistled, the friend groups were impossible to penetrate even after seven years at the company. She barely made an effort to find out more details about why their company was such a world leader or anything about the nuclear turbine construction business; she stuck to her ledgers, the updating of financial records, and that was it.

  You would think she’d be used to it by now, but tonight, she had been more reluctant to leave Larissa. These days, her grandmother was powerless to do more than feed her, oversee the preparation for school, verify that Larisska wore enough layers in the cold. And Artem was hovering, with his sluggish disaffection, his snarled and outgrown hair, skin the color of fried dough. Who knew what they talked about when Larissa was way too polite to shake him off? What thoughts did he put in her head? Who knew how often he came by when she was away?

  She simply had to remove Larisska from this dangerous climate. She would check in with Olga to see if she could prod the immigration people, move them along. The sky outside sank into night. They had to leave, she realized. It was the only way to save her daughter.

  * * *

  It was another Friday night, another impromptu visit from her friends, but this time, they informed her, it was to be a going-away party. Gena and Yulia sat on opposite sides of the table, her mother was busy refilling little bowls with raspberry jam. It was happening so quickly. Gena was really leaving for Saint Petersburg, Yulia and her daughter Ida moving to Kiev where his family would help them settle in. Ida and Larissa sat strangely silent at the children’s table, no giggling or whispering between them.

  “Couldn’t you wait to move to Kiev for a few months?” Nadia suggested. “You can stay with us. We’ll find room.”

  “No, no, we couldn’t,” Yulia demurred.

  “Didn’t you hear that they’re protesting the dead journalist over there? It’s not safe in Kiev right now.”

  “But that’s what’s so exciting.” Yulia placed a warm, ringed hand on top of Nadia’s. The reality of Gena’s leaving was now certain, but she was surprisingly cheerful. Her face was flushed with a new purpose.

  “What’s so exciting?”

  “It’s a great place to be right now. All that energy. All those men.”

  That last part was directed toward Gena, who tossed her a withering look. “Men, eh? Have a good time then.”

  “I will. What else am I supposed to do? Cry every day while you are whoring around with your computer buddies? Seducing the Russian-model types in the big city?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I plan to be doing. That’s why I’m going actually. Eugene was a complete ruse, an elaborate scientific cover for my womanizing.”

  Yulia turned to him, hands crossed. “You know, that wouldn’t surprise me one bit. Ida and I have more important business. Like the future of Ukraine for example.”

  “I’m sure they will be relieved to have you at the Parliament.”

  Nadia was too exhausted to censor their bickering in front of the girls. She was imagining how silent the apartment would feel without the spontaneous warmth of friends, the hasty setup for snacks, their overlaying banter going deep into a Saturday morning.

  “I’d like to visit. Imagine, in just a few years I’ll be able to go all by myself,” Larissa said from the children’s table. She had been paying attention to the volley of the adults a little too closely, Nadia noticed, her sharp eyes darting from Yulia to Gena as if making sense of a map she would need sometime in the near future. “Can we visit on your next vacation, Mama?”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said, Larisska? We’re not going to Kiev anytime soon. There are protests now. It’s very dangerous.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught an eye roll between Yulia and Larisska and felt herself growing hot, blurry with anger. Yulia and Gena thought they were so superior, so flush with optimism, but they didn’t take the train to and from Kharkov every week! They didn’t see the ramshackle thatched-roof huts along the way. The people who lived in them were not the same people as at this table. They didn’t hear the hatred in the voice of the woman behind them on the trolleybus. They were fooling themselves if they weren’t afraid for the future!

  “Enough with the long faces. Let’s drink to Eugene and his success. May he grow up to be the smartest thirteen-year-old chatterbot in the world,” Gena said.

  They clinked glasses. Nadia swallowed her vodka. She was no drinker; it wasn’t settling in her stomach well. But she tried to pantomime genuine merriment. “To Eugene.”

&nbs
p; She heard the footsteps before she heard the knock on the door.

  “That’s it.” She rose, aware that what she was doing was stomping, and loudly too. She pushed past her mother, who was applying a nervous hand to her neck. Yulia’s coat fell off the hook, a damp, wool heap on the floor. Nadia pulled on the doorknob with some violence. Confronting the sad-sack face of Artem, she spoke in an undigested rush. “Ah, I see you’re back. This is excellent timing. Congratulations, Artem. This is your wedding day. The priest is on his way. What, why do you look so surprised? In certain regions of this country, kids younger than you two get married.”

  She heard her daughter rushing up behind her, protesting for her to not be rude or something ridiculous like she didn’t have a right to speak to her friends in that manner, but Nadia kept the door cracked open just enough to keep her in. It was the two of them facing off, just her and Artem.

  “Well, what do you have to say for yourself? Can’t you see we have guests?”

  For a moment, it looked like he was going to stand his ground with that insolent mug of his. She thought he would demand to speak directly to Larisska. But then he looked at his hands, examined them closely. And he spun on his heels. Nadia watched him lumbering down the hall, and the only emotion she felt at his retreat was victory.

  7

  Fondue

  New York, January 2015

  The Marriott Times Square hotel was a brass-gilded country of mauve carpet and glass walls. Meeting her sister in a place like this was the equivalent of a reunion at a neutral checkpoint, both sides with their guns lowered. When she materialized from the elevator, Olga walked toward Nadia in petite steps that still managed to traverse the lobby in impressive time.

  No one would accuse them of being sisters; there was the seven-year age difference, of course, but Olga was broad and brown-haired, an assortment of body parts attached to a lanky, athletic figure. They both had blue eyes, but her own were watery while Olga’s were translucent, ice-sharp. She kissed Nadia on each cheek as if stamping produce with a sticker. A coral shawl was flung across her shoulders.