Mother Country Read online

  “It’s worth it for us to … how do you say, sacrifice? To live in this neighborhood,” Regina explained to her on more than one occasion.

  “Why this neighborhood? Because of mayonnaise store? You cannot live without fresh … what is it? Rhubarb mayonnaise?” she asked in disbelief.

  But Regina just smiled and shook her head. “Nadia, you don’t understand.”

  Regina and Jake’s apartment consisted of two rooms and a kitchen on the fifth floor of a brownstone in desperate need of renovation. The bathroom was tiled in mustard yellows and browns with a leaking claw-foot tub and a shower curtain not long enough to contain pools of spraying water. The kitchen cabinets were almost all off their hinges, the rusted hardware loose, the oven lit only when you jiggered the knob and helped it along with a match. The ceiling in the “living room” was stamped with an amoeba-shaped water stain.

  Was any neighborhood worth this discomfort? It was clear to Nadia that Regina and Jake had no time alone together, their marriage frayed by the sardined living conditions. And poor Sasha was always losing friends when Regina never reciprocated the invitations of other families. The pattern was always the same—Sasha would be invited one or two times to some classmate’s house, then Regina would volunteer they meet in a public place like the park. When the weather deteriorated she was forced to invent excuses for why Sasha was unavailable for any more playdates. Eventually, the friend drifted away, Sasha heartbroken, repeating, “When I go to Isabella’s?”

  All this to stay in a neighborhood that sold yarn and expensive handbags and eyeglasses, ice-cream shops with six-dollar scoops that had lines around a velvet rope. More than once, she wanted to shake Regina and tell her that her entire life would improve if her family moved to a neighborhood they could actually afford.

  She peeked around the corner into Sasha’s “bedroom.” The girl was crouched on the floor, squeezed in between bed and white dresser. “Okay, Sashen’ka. We go Mila’s house.”

  “Too busy.” The dolls were seated in high chairs, eating in a restaurant, of all things. (Nadia’s dolls had once explored nature or cooked elaborate meals. They sewed and danced and studied their multiplication and marched in parades. It came as no surprise to Nadia that American dolls whiled away their own pampered days in restaurants.)

  “Yes, I see you very busy. But Mama said…”

  “Ramen, please,” one inappropriately busty doll commanded from a solicitous waiter.

  The phone rang again. “Nadia, sorry, it just occurred to me.” Regina’s meek voice was being drowned by the screech of ambulance sirens. “… you mind putting a new outfit on Sasha?”

  “New outfit? But she is dressed already.”

  Nadia quickly scanned Sasha. The little girl looked fine to her in her jeans and pink tunic, a pink sequined headband sweeping back her long chestnut hair.

  “Actually, I’m thinking that Tea dress with flowers and Hanna Andersson leggings, and the Primigi Mary Janes?”

  “She is warmly dressed for the weather. Do not worry, she will not catch chill.”

  There was a pause. “Oh, I know. I have no doubt you dressed her … good. But I’d like her to look especially nice for this playdate. Mila’s mother is on the … how do you say … committee … of this school, and…”

  “Oh, I understand. No problem, Reginochka.”

  “Sorry to bother you. Thank you, Nadia.” Regina sounded relieved, as if she had expected Nadia’s stern objections and was happy, if only in that moment, not to be judged.

  * * *

  This Mila’s brownstone was one of the gleaming, renovated ones on Strong Place, an idyllic, tucked-away block that Nadia enjoyed strolling. Unlike Sasha’s loud corner just off earsplitting Smith Street, this was a hideaway of leafy perfection, of brownstone after elegant brownstone illuminated by perfect sunshine by day and gauzy lanterns in the evenings. At night, when the interiors exploded with light, Nadia enjoyed staring into the cavernous, curated lives within, owners gliding between windows with books or trays, glasses of wine. Contorted, modern chandeliers reflecting light on enormous works of modern art. It was even better than television, gaping at these foreign worlds.

  They lingered at the steps, the windows large and open, the brick exterior clean, the door painted an inviting, unchipped cherry red. It was clear by the single buzzer that Mila’s family owned the entire house. At her side, Sasha lingered. She was gripping Nadia’s hand, her thumb making an indentation in her palm. Nadia let her press the buzzer with a single uncertain finger.

  The door swung open and a voluptuous, dark-haired woman in coral lipstick waved them inside. “Come in, come in,” she said in Russian, and just the sound of those familiar words filled Nadia with hope. It occurred to her how rarely in her long days with Sasha she heard the mellifluous flow of the Russian language.

  “I hope we’re not late.”

  “No, no, we were just finishing a late lunch.”

  The woman’s bosoms receded to another room, and the two of them were abandoned in the foyer with this Mila. By glancing the little girl over, Nadia understood why she was asked to change Sasha’s outfit. Mila was wearing an expensive-looking printed herringbone dress, sunflower sandals, and a satin headband with a floppy bow. She also looked to be older than Sasha, at least five years old.

  “Follow me, Sasha. Let’s go.” She was leading Sasha onto a different floor, one that was presumably all hers. Her dictates held an even more officious ring than Sasha’s.

  “Tea?” the nanny called from the other room.

  “Thank you, that would be most welcome.”

  “Come join me.”

  Usually, she dreaded the necessary socializing during these so-called playdates. (“Can you explain ‘playdates’?” she asked Regina in the beginning. “I know, the very word is ridiculous, isn’t it?” Regina had laughed, empathizing with her confusion.) Not that she was able to properly socialize with the other nannies or mothers. The nannies were usually from lands incomprehensible to Nadia—Dominican Republic or Trinidad or Saint Lucia. After the initial tortured chitchat with the few English words Nadia had at her disposal, they silently agreed to type on their own phones for the remainder of the “playdate.”

  But now, she followed this Russian woman into a gleaming kitchen straight out of a magazine. A kitchen embellished with steel and marble, with a refrigerator the size of a car and an industrial-sized oven with charming burgundy knobs.

  “It is so beautiful here, pravda?” the nanny said. She was pulling down marked glass jars decorated with a soothing array of Indian prints. “There are many tea options. Lemongrass, verbena, something called Golden Monkey, chocolate mint truffle, rooibos, South African red bush, green, green lavender, green mango, green peppermint.”

  “How about just plain tea? Normal tea.”

  The nanny smiled. “I know exactly what you mean.” Her smile was as generous as the rest of her, framing mostly straight white teeth. She selected the jar with loose black leaves, and sifted some of its contents into a strainer. Nadia tried to gaze away from those breasts but they were tightly encased, conical orbs peeking out of striped cotton like the smooth curve of a baby’s bottom.

  Running footsteps overhead sounded like a pair of galloping horses. The nanny turned her head to the ceiling. “Mila, you know pine floors are sensitive. Walk, please.”

  The footsteps halted.

  “Okay, nanny, I won’t do it anymore,” came the perfectly fluent Russian response.

  “Amazing,” Nadia marveled. “I can’t get Sasha to speak to me in Russian for the life of me.”

  The nanny gave her a sidelong glance, a quick flicker that Nadia couldn’t entirely interpret. “So what’s your story? There’s an accent. From where?”

  For some reason, Nadia was starting to feel uncomfortable. She wished the tea would steep faster. “Ukraina. Lugansk area.”

  The nanny whistled. “That’s tough now, eh?”

  “It’s horrible.” It was all she could d
o not to confide in this stranger. Her daughter, her mother, her friends. The one word she received was from a cousin who’d made it to Kiev. He told her over Skype, “It’s impossible to explain to you, Nadenka. The bridges are gone, the hospital. Bodies just left to rot in the streets.” Last time she saw Larissa over Skype it was at night, and outside the window, she could see the arc of flares shooting across the sky. Her mother said they took turns sleeping in the tub.

  The galloping resumed upstairs, but this time the nanny didn’t correct it. “I can’t imagine. A nightmare over there. You must have relatives.” The nanny served the tea and they sat silently among the gleaming stainless steel surfaces. Nadia became aware of a street leached of sound, so unlike what she had become used to in Brooklyn.

  “I do. We’re all terrified. Of course all we want is to be left alone.” The last thing she meant to do was wade into politics. That most immigrants from the Soviet Union were Jewish in this country was a fact that took some getting used to—in Ukraine she had met one Jew, maybe two. But here weren’t they all simply immigrants? “What about you? Where are you from?”

  She heard giggling upstairs, the slamming of doors. The turquoise tiles above the stove gave the wall a look of a picturesque cobblestone street.

  The nanny was no longer smiling. “Moscow. But my parents were from a small town in central Ukraine called Dzhurin.”

  “Oh really? I know where that is.” With immigrants it was better to talk about anything but Ukraine, a touchy subject for Russian-speakers, western Ukrainians, and Jews. “This is such delicious tea. What flavor is this?”

  “Of course eventually they had to leave with the other Jews.”

  Nadia set down her tea. “Well, I dream about one day getting to Moscow. It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it? When I save up some money, I might meet my daughter in Moscow. It seems like the only way I’ll ever get to see her again. I couldn’t take her, you see.”

  “You left your daughter behind?”

  In the woman’s voice, she perceived a snap of hatred. It was too bad. She had been looking forward to the possibility of a nanny friend. Child-caring hours were so long and monotonous and she envied the nannies she saw passing their work time in pairs, their braids swinging in unison as they pushed strollers down Smith Street.

  “I think you misunderstand me. I didn’t leave her. I came so she could join me here.”

  “You left your own daughter?” the woman repeated. “You left your own child in the middle of war?”

  “There was no war then. She aged out of the application and I had to fill out a new application for her when I landed here. This was the only way she could leave. I send her money every month.” Nadia was shocked. Did civilized people speak so rudely to strangers?

  But this nanny kept talking. “You know, my parents were forced out of Dzhurin. Once my father grew beets instead of corn, and he was arrested. Can you imagine being arrested for growing beets? Of course, there was a famine, the region needed beets, but who cared about that?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “At the collective farm, they would report my father for any infraction. Turned him in and everything, slapped his many war medals down on the table and said he had a ‘Jewish mug,’ a zhidovnia morda. And that was after he survived the ghetto and the Soviet army. He died today, my brother’s dealing with all the arrangements. Mila’s parents couldn’t find a substitute babysitter, so here I am.”

  “That’s terrible. Do you want me to stay and watch Mila for a few hours?”

  The woman slid a row of cookies from a tray as if they were engaging in pleasantries. “They would freak out. No, I will wait for them to get home. I don’t know why all this came out. Look, try this one. It’s dipped in chocolate with a raspberry filling. You’ll lick your lips. These cookies cost more than my purse.”

  “No, thank you.”

  The nanny bit into a cookie. “They said he was not a bad guy for a ‘zhid.’ Believe me, I have no cozy feelings toward either Russians or Ukrainians, and you should feel exactly the same way.”

  Nadia rose suddenly, a loud scrape of the stool against shellacked bamboo floor. She felt her breathing speed, one breath bumping up against the next. The familiar feeling of being impotent. Or worse, being vaguely, impersonally hated. So often, the most incisive, externally imperceptible abuses in this country came to her from the mouths of other immigrants.

  “Maybe it’s best that I check in on Sasha.” Before the nanny could protest, Nadia was halfway up the stairs. “Sashen’ka,” she called out. “It’s time for us to go.”

  Finding the kids was not easy. There was a long hallway flanked by three closed doors and she tried them all. One was a master bedroom with French doors that opened out to a balcony. The other two were children’s bedrooms connected by a walk-in closet exploding with voluminous clothes. One wall was devoted to children’s shoes, strappy and buckled, toes neatly pointing outward. An entire section of the closet consisted of costumes: witches and princesses, tutus and ladybugs. She stood there for a minute, a burning sensation in her throat, a pulsating twitch in her right eye.

  She heard voices overhead so she climbed another set of stairs into an enormous loft drenched with toys. Her first reaction was to marvel at the hardwood floors, at the broad windows framing the first pussy willow buds of the season. The room was splashed with luxuriant light, the dappled color of which, it seemed to her, only rich people could afford. When she turned her attention to the kids, the sight that greeted her did not entirely make sense. The girl Mila was holding real scissors, long and silver, with inlaid pearl handles. And Sasha was sitting underneath them, among a constellation of hair lying in feathery layers on a shaggy white carpet.

  “Dear God, what did you do?” She ran to Sasha and inspected her head. Half of it remained intact, beautiful waves curling down her shoulder. The other side was hacked into wisps and spikes snarling around her ear.

  “We’re playing salon,” Mila explained. “I am the hairdresser from Salon de Quartier, Sasha’s my client.”

  Sasha was blinking up at her, suppressed fear beneath a need for … what? Collusion? Sympathy? Guilt?

  The nanny was behind them now in a cloud of sugar and lavender perfume, wringing her hands. “Oh no, Mila. What did you do? We’re going to have to tell your parents. Sashenka, please forgive Mila. Mila, say you’re sorry.”

  “You should have been watching us better, nanny.” Mila sweetly put down the scissors.

  Nadia picked Sasha up in her arms. It had been many months since Sasha allowed herself to be carried in this way, crumpled and small, pressed against Nadia’s chest. She was visibly scared, the way she was when the consequences of her own naughtiness solidified and were presented to her. It reminded Nadia somehow of walking on the edges of the Kremina Forest with her own Larisska where the air smelled of pine. They called the vast wooded area “Green Pearl” because of its fecund lushness, and at one point, not long after the diagnosis, she imagined a deep inhale of pine would cure her daughter of diabetes. How simple their relationship was then.

  She descended with Sasha down the stairs, picked up her purse and stroller. “Thank you for having us.”

  She could hear the nanny behind her apologizing for the disaster of a morning. She was emotional, she hoped Nadia could forgive them all.

  “Of course,” Nadia said. “I wish I could help, but we really should go. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  She cradled Sasha and the stroller and Sasha’s bag filled with nonchemical sunscreens, organic dried fruits, filtered water, and sun hat, and her own bag, heavy with her lunch and letter to the New York senator and change of shoes and a paperback. She hoisted all of them at once and suddenly felt immensely strong again. As if she could carry much more, half the world, in her steely, female grip.

  * * *

  On their way home, they walked past the new ice cream shop. A line was already formed at its front doors, children emerging with their cups of fancy treats, parents
with their own cones. This time, she took note of Sasha’s crumpled face. Instead of veering Sasha right past them as she normally did, they joined the back of the queue. Once inside, she watched the people in front of them as if through a clouded window, adults tasting from tiny plastic spoons and contemplating which flavor to choose as if the fate of entire nations rested on it. When they inched closer, she lifted Sasha up to peer inside the display cases. No tubs of plain vanilla, mind you, but chunks of caramel or chunky peanuts covered in chocolate or entire candy bars shoveled into barrels of what appeared to be frozen hazelnut. Sasha pointed at a spotted vat, which turned out to taste of peppermint and a haze of chocolate flecks. Sasha seemed to be cheering up. As she reached over to take a cone from a young man, she didn’t appear to notice that the waiting hordes were staring at her asymmetrical hairstyle.

  “Very punk rock,” the cashier said, whatever that meant.

  “Let’s go.” She paid the ridiculous six dollars and winced as Sasha submerged her entire mouth in the freezing dessert. Larisska’s ice cream, like her own when she was a child, had been heated in a pot until lumps succumbed to soupy broth. How she would chase those orbs of ice around with her tongue! But Russians would never give children ice cream or drinks laced with ice cubes, and in her bones Nadia believed this to be right. It couldn’t be good for throats or stomachs to be exposed to cold like that. But here was an entire culture that felt differently, and she was part of it now.

  Ice cream consumed, they let themselves into an apartment that looked even shabbier than the one they left, the floors more sloped and stained than before, the caulking more visible in the corners. She became aware of how wide the wet splotch on the ceiling had spread, how it made the expensive furniture look cheaper. On top of the air conditioner, pigeons were putting the finishing touches on their nest, earsplitting cooing competing with the honking of snarled traffic. Regina would be horrified, would blow the entire thing out of proportion. Preschool pictures were looming and she would treat the matter as if it were a national tragedy. It would be up to Nadia to situate the haircut as a child’s prank, to calm the hysteria.