Mother Country Page 4

  Sasha, her mouth still sticky with peppermint, slipped off her shoes without being asked. She even placed them in the cubby designated for this very purpose. She looked puny with half a head of hair, her shoulders and rib cage slight, belly protruding.

  “What do you want do? Shall we play restaurant with your dolls? Did they ever get that soupchik they ordered from that no-good waiter?” Nadia asked quietly.

  Sasha walked directly to the chalkboard and contemplated the numbers scrawled there in Nadia’s careful, florid penmanship.

  “Odin, dva, tri, chetyri,” she began to recite. They were a team again, the solidarity of the wounded with a secret. Nadia nodded vigorously at “tree” and at “cheteerie.” She praised Sasha’s pronunciation. She volunteered hot dogs for dinner, but framed them with pureed carrots, and when Sasha ate every bite, she held the girl close, listening to the stubborn consistency of her beating heart.

  When Regina came home at almost seven o’clock, Nadia put on a brave, cheerful face. Even before Regina set her canvas bag down and slipped off her sneakers, Nadia was working on easing the severity of her reaction.

  “Don’t worry, Reginochka. Her hair was so beautiful, but it will return to its length in no time. It’ll probably be even thicker and healthier.”

  Regina looked confused, then her eyes fell on her daughter. She screamed, “What happened?”

  Nadia explained what she had mentally prepared, making sure to level her tone. The girls were left alone. It was the way of children. It would grow back. This should only be the worst thing that happens to you, she thought privately.

  “I don’t understand this at all.” Regina was winding her fingers around the cropped stalks and phantom hair that used to curl behind the ear and onto the girl’s shoulder. “You were there, weren’t you? You were watching her? How could this even have happened?”

  “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

  “But her hair was perfect. We just got it cut at the salon on Atlantic. It took so long to find a style she liked.”

  Sasha, overwhelmed by her mother’s emotion, broke into a fresh round of tears. The two rocked in the tight wedge between living room and “bedroom.” Nadia watched them, a struggle waging inside her. Once, her Larisska returned from a day with her friends with her hair completely caked in mud; they’d all taken turns “shampooing” one another out of roadside puddles. But so what? She’d slapped Larisska halfheartedly across her backside, and sent her with a towel to the bathroom.

  This was not the best time to emerge with the letter to the senator, but was there ever a good time?

  “What’s this?” Regina looked up at the envelope, uncomprehending.

  “Would you please translate into English and type up for me? I wrote it just as I want it to say. My daughter is trapped in Lugansk region. Right where fighting is.”

  Regina unpeeled herself. “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  She guessed it was true. She had never mentioned Larisska to Regina. At first, it was out of caution with a new employer who might use a sentimental connection like this one against her. Then it seemed easier to immerse herself in Regina’s life, to mother her and Sasha instead.

  “Look, as you can see this isn’t a great time.” Regina sighed, visibly irritated. “And I’m not very good at reading Russian. What is it you want me to do?”

  This was a Regina she did not understand. The only way to make sense of it was to love her even more, for all her frail, childlike extremity of feeling. After all, she was living her life with no idea that there was a war going on where innocent people were dying, where the threat of death occupied their every thought, where they had no idea if they could find enough food to feed their children. How could this lucky American woman possibly comprehend that a bad haircut was not the end of the world?

  Nadia spoke succinctly, like a history teacher. “I don’t know if you have been reading the papers. But it is a complete emergency. A civil war and all the fighting is in my region. There is a referendum on the future of our region and my mother cannot vote in our town. She will have to be driven outside of Donetsk to find open polling booths. Even then she is not safe and her vote is probably useless. Every day, there is heavy artillery, bombing. Tanks around the perimeter of the forest, blockades, snipers shooting. I need to do something. I need to save them, and my best and only chance is to start with Larisska. She is like you, you know? Young but not young. She can’t take care of herself.”

  The speech did seem to land with Regina. Her face took on a fresh compassion, perhaps even lending her more perspective on the haircut debacle. She kept stealing looks back at a Sasha still entwined around her leg, thinking. “I had no idea. Well, Nadia, I guess I don’t really understand the situation in Ukraine…”

  “You are writer. If you could write me that one letter in English in a nice florid way, in the way of a native English speaker. Maybe then the senator will pay attention to me.”

  There was no room for all of them and this fresh sadness inside this minuscule kitchen. “Okay. Why don’t you leave it with me and I’ll take a look later.”

  Nadia slid the letter onto the table and gathered her things. She was surprised to hear Regina’s laughter.

  “You want to hear something funny? The more I look at it, I actually like it,” Regina said. She was holding up Sasha’s other side, evening the two parts into a projected whole. “It’s kind of … how do you say … In English, we say ‘funky.’ It will be easier to brush for sure. Wait until I tell Jake. We may be able to rescue it after all.”

  “Very punk rock,” Nadia said, which made Regina laugh even more. They embraced good-bye after the envelope of cash was exchanged.

  At the door, Nadia turned. She put her heavy purse down and gestured for Regina to come closer. “Before I go, I need to tell you something. Something very important. What just happened with Sasha, you should not make such a big deal of it. There are worse things that could happen.”

  Regina had this faraway smile on her face, as if she really had recovered. But Nadia saw her soul clearly. It was no different from that of their beloved little girl in the playground, outwardly composed but silently devastated over the loss of a ridiculous, expensive white rabbit. And how could Regina possibly know her daily, pressing, constant palpitating fear? This was one thing she owned, an emotion native to her, the one that gave her strength and resources that Regina was lucky enough to lack.

  She bent down and repeated the main Vera Brezhneva lyric into Regina’s ear—“Don’t fall apart, my dearest girl”—in the calm, confident manner of that American mother at the playground who knew exactly what to say in a crisis, who somehow possessed the ability to make whole what was recently broken.

  2

  The Western Ones

  Brooklyn, May 2014

  When she arrived at her second job at Grisha’s, Nadia heard the fierce sound of clanging cookware. This meant Aneta was angry again and the transition would be a headache.

  To hear her tell it, Aneta hated being a home attendant, detested old people and their smells, found Grisha a dissolute lecher, and couldn’t stand dirty Brooklyn sidewalks. Their employer, VIP Senior Care, punished her with the occasional overnight shift, which she attributed to pro-Russian biases in former Soviet Union immigrant circles, as if there were a Putin-led conspiracy to push ethnic Ukrainians out of the most desirable elderly caretaking jobs in America. She was angry for a million other reasons Nadia could not even begin to fathom.

  “Your Majesty, waltz in at ten like nothing,” she huffed as soon as Nadia turned the key. Lately, Aneta insisted on speaking English exclusively even though none of them had a decent grip on it.

  “I no late.” Nadia pointed to the clock on her phone. It said 8:58.

  She heard Grisha call out in Russian from the catacombs of his bedroom, “Thank God, you’ve come to save me from this monster. It seems your beleaguered but proud country of Ukraine has elected a new president and now this one’s become insuffe
rable.”

  Aneta was a ruddy woman from some village outside of Berdychev. Stocky and square, she dressed in floral muumuus, scraggly hair tightly pulled back into a bun the size of a child’s fist. Her face could be vastly improved, Nadia often thought, by just a few more teeth or at least the occasional smile.

  She wagged her finger at Nadia. “Speak English. English. With me, always English. Or, if you like, Ukrainian. You should be speaking mother tongue. Are you not Ukrainian too, you separatist Putin-lover?”

  This was not the time to explain to Aneta that though Nadia’s mother tongue was Russian, she prayed every day that both western Ukrainians, separatists, and Russians would leave her hometown in eastern Ukraine alone. In her worst nightmares, she never imagined it would come to war. How she wished the two sides of her fractured country could talk to each other, come together peacefully to find a way forward for a united Ukraine that served west and east. That dream was as far away from reality as it would ever be. But this was definitely not the time to remind Aneta where her actual allegiances stood (with America, naturally, the country that has saved both of their lives, not that Aneta expressed any appreciation!). It was best to distract her or wait for her to leave. Or at the very least, change the subject.

  “How was Grisha night?”

  “How could it be? I was trapped with this idiotka.” Grisha wheeled himself into the living room. He whistled, looking her up and down. “My, my. You are height of female beauty, Nadia Andreevna. Your hair is magnificent today. You look like a firebird. Or at least Tatyana from Evgenyi Onegin. Young and spritely.”

  “Thank you, Grisha.”

  He ignored Aneta, who was gathering her things on the countertop and shoving them into her beige handbag. At one time or another, Nadia glimpsed empty yogurt containers, sweets they were forbidden to bring inside the homes of diabetics, earplugs, stockings, used tissues, nasal spray, even a change of underwear. When Aneta was this worked up, her hands shuddered. In her attempt to shovel possessions back into her purse, a cell phone slipped out of her fingers and crashed onto the linoleum floor.

  “See what you people did?”

  “Let me help you,” Nadia said.

  Before the Maidan protests began, before Yanukovych was ousted, before the “Lugansk People’s Republic” declared their independence from the rest of Ukraine, Aneta didn’t protest that Nadia and Grisha spoke Russian. Aneta’s own Russian was quite fluent, if thickly accented. Back then, they all communicated fluidly, imparted important information about their shifts, went over the medication schedule, and even enjoyed the overlap in their hours by watching addictive reality television shows on the Russian cable station together. But as the war continued to rage and news of the election results was imminent, Aneta began pulling away, as if their very existence was an affront, demanding they all speak Ukrainian. What was poor Grisha supposed to speak when he was from Saint Petersburg and emigrated with a good-for-nothing son at the age of sixty-four? Was he to learn a new language? And what about Nadia, growing up in an ethnic Russian enclave in the Lugansk oblast’?

  On the floor, the cell phone’s cracked face showed a picture of an attractive girl Larisska’s age, framed by blond curls. Nadia reached for it.

  “She’s beautiful. Is this your daughter?”

  “You not touch. Nothing.” Aneta wrapped her bruised phone in a scarf. She made a final sweep of the apartment and at last shoved open the front door.

  “Bye, Aneta. Have nice day,” Nadia said, in English, through her teeth.

  “‘The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea,’” Grisha intoned to Aneta’s back. He was always displaying his erudition by quoting Great Russian Writers.

  Aneta froze, a hand still on the knob. The back of her neck practically sizzled with rage.

  Just be quiet, Nadia silently ordered Grisha. Let her go. “What that mean, eh, old man? What you say?”

  Two older women were slowly making their way across the hallway to the elevator. The one with the cane complained about a granddaughter that never called to ask after her health, the other with the rolling walker had an entirely different monologue going about the deteriorating quality of the produce at NetCost. They were, naturally, conversing in Russian.

  Aneta lingered in the door frame. But then, as they listened to the pure Moscow cadences disappearing down the hall, she seemed to reconsider. Before Nadia knew what happened, Aneta traversed the room and slapped her across the face. The shock of it was the initial sting, Aneta’s ringed, creased, foreign hand at her skin. But then the pain initiated in her chest, up the neck, and exploded at the place of attack. Her eyes filled with tears immediately, her very sockets burning from the heat of it.

  “Slava Ukraini, traitor,” Aneta said, noting her surprise and anger with satisfaction, and stormed out. They could hear the stomp of sensible heels against linoleum floor.

  “Nu, nu,” Grisha clucked. “‘However stupid a fool’s words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.’”

  “What?” she said. It was a question aimed toward the universe at large. The outlines of the room were losing its focus. “I could kill her.”

  “That’s Gogol, in case you’d like to be more cultured. I prefer my women cultured. Especially before we undertake the most beautiful act a man and a woman can enjoy together.” Grisha wheeled himself to the cabinet where his medication was stacked. Myriad orange bottles for any imaginable ache. Back home, old men were being blown up in daylight; here old men took pills to marvel at their erections. “Shall I take the little blue one now? Or shall we be patient until after lunch?”

  She tried to gather herself, bring her own anger under control. The apartment was cleaned in a hostile manner, items of contradictory functionality all whisked together in messy little piles. Candy and pills, glass cleaner and room spray, old photographs and bills. She wished she could yank that Aneta back here and punch the rest of her teeth out. I’ll show you my mother tongue! But she had dropped the letter to the senator in the mailbox only yesterday, and without this job, the official, documented nature of this job, Larisska would never be allowed to come.

  She found the nursing uniform in her tote and slipped her arms through it. “I don’t understand that miserable woman. In the best country imaginable and she’s not happy.”

  “Would you be happy if you had that face to carry around?”

  Nadia suppressed a smile. “Let’s go breathe some fresh air, shall we?”

  The mirror displayed a thick head of copper-blond hair in desperate need of coloring, glistening eyelashes, an inflamed cheek, already swollen. Looking down, she saw that Grisha had reached up into the freezer and folded some ice cubes into a waffled kitchen towel.

  “Speaking of face, go ahead and press it,” he said, wheeling over. “Bring the swelling down. Our magical lovemaking will just have to wait.”

  * * *

  That night, like every night, she anxiously opened Skype. Oh, how beautiful it was, that undulating S floating in a cloud of blue. It was the vein that pulsed its way to her beloveds. The technology had been a godsend, soothing the sting of those first years in the country. Her mother’s face filling her screen, the slope of her forehead, her gray-stranded bob, drooping eyelids, even the gold crowns at the back of her mouth. Her mother would call Larisska over, and sometimes her daughter would comply, arms crossed at her chest. That silent act of defiance used to infuriate her.

  But, ah! The contours of their faces, the darling sounds of their voices. On Larisska’s twenty-third birthday, she was able to witness her girl blow out candles, a self-conscious huff, the lights extinguished. Through the screen she could examine Larisska’s profile, probe the depths of her gray eyes for unhappiness or loneliness, satisfy herself with her daughter’s weight, her pallor. She could pepper them with questions: if Larisska was diligently monitoring her insulin, if her mother’s blood pressure was being carefully overseen by her doctor. Larisska never answered these queries directl
y, of course. She made it very clear that she was only fulfilling her filial duty by allowing her own mother to view her on Skype. Once that was accomplished, she edged away into the peripheries of the apartment, untracked by cameras.

  But now Nadia would be more than satisfied with Larisska’s cranky voice in the background. It had been two weeks since the power and internet went out in Rubizhne, and Channel One flashed pictures of bombed-out hospitals and bridges and deserted apartment buildings. Bodies covered in blankets in broad daylight, people returning to houses torched to the ground. Twitchy gunmen patrolling the streets. Abandoned factories engorged with chemicals just waiting for the spark of gunfire to explode into the skies. And America granting no asylum.

  And there were her daughter and mother as grayed-out boxes on her computer screen, unreachable. Still, she powered up Skype a few times a day, searching in vain for that green check mark. A check mark meant her mother or daughter was safe. A green check mark meant life.

  * * *

  The following morning, she pushed Grisha in his wheelchair under Brighton Beach Avenue’s rattling subway tracks. They had just bought a satchel of potatoes and the afternoon was crisp, free of humidity. If she had her Larisska waiting for her at the apartment, Nadia would be perfectly content. A tumble of potatoes swinging on the handle and the kind of sunny late-May day that magnified the few trees bursting out of concrete, deepening and sorting their unique shades of green—heaven! At the corner grocery stands towers of pineapples, underripe mangoes, and black cherries were practically spilling onto the sidewalk. Women in ruched dresses wound arms around the elbows of open-shirted, buttoned-down men. Teenagers guffawed and plotted the weekend in groups, their gold necklaces swaying. Outside Russian restaurants, smokers in black sunglasses accepted car keys, finished their cigarettes, and disappeared screeching around the block.