Mother Country Page 6

  “The girl came here on a student visa and went, ‘Oy, oy, oy, I can’t go back there. It’s a war zone!’ So they let her stay.”

  Nadia lost all interest in the potatoes. A sour acid expanded in her throat. “My daughter’s been on the list a total of sixteen years now and they keep telling me to wait our turn. Can you imagine?”

  Grisha looked mortified. He probably regretted telling her. “I know, you told me. It’s tragically unfair, but that’s the seesaw of politics. Maybe these days, the Americans prefer Ukrainians. You know, the Western ones. Who knows?”

  * * *

  At home, a stack of mail awaited her, a spool of messages from her two girlfriends unfurled on her voice mail. She’d missed a party at the salon. Should they all go in on the same house in the Rockaways this summer? What about some night this week for drinks? Her creaky heart lifted once more. She had made friends here at least, friends who checked on her, missed her, who noted that she existed. If she squirreled away a bit of money she didn’t send home, she could even allow herself a new dress that could transition from summer to fall, a white dress in which she would greet her daughter at the airport. The girls—yes, at around fifty years old, they were still girls—could go dancing in one of the nightclubs she and Grisha keep passing on one of their strolls. There must be a man there for her, most likely Russian. Not as dashing as the technolog or as dully stable as her old neighbor Pyotor, but fiercely loyal, and they would combine the rest of their lives once Larisska came. This was still a country where things like that happened.

  She flipped through the pile of catalogs, for a modern Italian furniture store in the neighborhood, a lingerie mail-order company that featured women wearing lace with downturned faces. Smiling at the idea of wearing something like that in front of Grisha. He’d have a heart attack on the spot! Then the letters. Back home, she had enjoyed parsing through the mail, had taken pleasure filing away the queries requiring her answer. A bookkeeper held an important position, and she had received piles of urgent official mail. But here, she preferred the catalogs. Letters were indecipherable, credit card offers and advertisements had to be parsed, word by laborious word.

  But then she came across a letter that was no junk mail. It was from the senator’s office. She saw the woman’s name printed in official blue letters in the upper, left-hand corner. The envelope was too thin to open slowly, too white and bereft of words:

  Dear Ms. Borodinskaya:

  I have received your letter requesting assistance with your immigration matter. Each year, the U.S. Department of State receives an enormous number of petitions filed on behalf of foreign nationals who wish to immigrate to the United States. I understand that the immigrant visa application about which you inquired has been assigned the 2B Preference Category and a priority date of November 4, 2008. Currently, visas are only available to 2B Preference Category applicants with priority dates before May 1, 2007.

  She didn’t bother trying to interpret the rest. By now, the one thing she understood was what “no” looked like. She knew all too well the feeling of helplessness before governments that cared nothing about people like her or her daughter’s suffering. For the first time in six years, since arriving in this exquisite miracle of a heartbreaking country, she could identify with Aneta’s steady, droning anger. The anger of small, powerless people. Right now, for one moment before the feeling subsided, what she wanted more than a reunion with her daughter was for a vengeful adversary to chasten this country, bring it to its knees, make it humane through a powerful injection of fear.

  The next morning, she evaded Grisha’s attempts at conversation, her throat dry with bitterness. To avoid explaining her mood, she turned on one of his favorite mind-melting shows. Then she was free to retreat into the galley kitchen and work on salvaging the potatoes, submerging them in a mixture of water and white vinegar. It was easy to keep busy, turning their browned husks over and over in the oily pan, half listening as women complained that their men were unemployed video-game addicts, that they were desperate, emasculated for the lack of work and opportunity. “Who’s going to help them?” they said. “They should get off their lazy asses,” came protests from the audience. The arguments escalated into insults. She tuned it out, the ugliness on the screen, checking the interiors of the potatoes with the knife tip. As she worked, she could feel Grisha’s eyes sliding away from the screen and down her spine.

  Something in the caving of her heart made her put the spatula down and turn off the burner.

  “Okay, just this one time,” she said, and walked over to him. She took his dappled wrist, and drew a trembling hand to her right breast. Neither of them spoke, only listened to the on-air sounds of verbal combat. Grisha allowed his hand to linger where she placed it, but his fingers neither caressed nor squeezed. They rested, like exhausted refugees warmly welcomed into the country of their dreams.

  3

  After the Mandarins

  Ukraine, 1992

  At first, it was as if nothing had changed. But then Nadia noticed escalating acts of deletion and substitution. At the post office and other government agencies, documents began appearing in the Ukrainian language. Then a few storefronts were altering their signs from Russian to Ukrainian—odezhda turned clothes into odyag. On television, some of her favorite Russian shows disappeared. Then, the ruble went away and coupons took their place, “transitional currency” that was supposed to be accepted at state stores. Next summer, they promised, the hryvnia would be introduced.

  The best course of action, her friend Yulia whispered during their smoking breaks, was to hide rolls of money in your socks, buy everything with cash, avoid the banks. But did that make any sense if one currency was being phased out, another not yet to be trusted? They were always being reminded that the country was finally independent, no longer a part of the Soviet Union. Ukraine had even applied for International Monetary Fund membership! The changes were supposedly a good thing, but few ethnic Russians in the Lugansk region believed anything but misery would ensue from such a drastic, hasty transformation. The eldest of them had seen it all before.

  To begin the dreaded wait at the store, Nadia woke early, when the sky was still encrusted with flecks of night. She moved with a stealthy whoosh of her slippers, but from her cot, Larisska heard her and popped up from a tangle of hair and bedclothes.

  “Where are you going, Mama?”

  “Go back to sleep, kisa.”

  “I’m hungry, Mama.”

  This was something she was repeating a lot lately. For the past few weeks, just as they were trying to acclimate to the upheaval, Larissa had been inconveniently eating and eating, but also losing an alarming amount of weight. There was no way to keep her in food with the talonchiki of bare necessities assigned to them—sugar, margarine, flour, farmer cheese—and now even those were becoming impossible to procure. The prices were so outrageous and arbitrary no one understood what was valuable anymore. The president was saying it was for their own good. “The social protection of the population under the conditions of the liberalization of prices.” What in the world did that even mean?

  “Baba will take you. I’ll see you after school.”

  Larissa’s face crumpled and her lower lip started to quake. Nadia could tell tears were amassing, tears the girl was working hard to contain because she knew her mother didn’t like it. “No you won’t.”

  “My darling. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  It was strictly verbal comfort. In reality, by the time Nadia finished work, fought for the staples needed that week, and picked up nitroglycerin or something else for her mother, Larisska would already be in bed.

  “What if we stayed home again today?” Larisska said, stretching out gangly, dimpled arms. If only there was a way to explain to the child that her mother’s absence was necessary for their basic survival, that she was fortunate to be lovingly cared for by her grandmother. That her biological father had not yet provided them with a single ruble, thank you very muc
h, so everything that went into their mouths had to be procured by Nadia’s own hands. But her daughter clung to her with a forehead matted with blond baby tufts. It was all Nadia could do to tear herself from the feathery playful pecks of the five-year-old, hoist herself into a wool dress and snagged tights and get out the door.

  “Be careful,” her mother called after her.

  The scene at the store was the usual bewildered chaos she’d come to expect by now. The doors not yet open but the crowd was seething with anticipated rage. Everyone was accusing one another of cutting the line, men were banging their fists against the shuttered glass, babushki berating the most aggressive for their boorish behavior. There was no mayonnaise today, they were being told, a limited amount of sugar and salt. She took her place at the end of a long line but she knew it was useless. They wouldn’t make it halfway up this queue; the people waiting since dawn would grab what they could carry, provide for their immediate family first then sell and barter the rest. The doors opened and she was being trampled.

  “Take your dirty paws off me,” she yelled at some man who was trying, under the camouflage of stampede, to efficiently grope her breasts. He protested innocence—an honest mistake, he was swept off balance—but she was disgusted. It was a relief when the pandemonium stretched far behind her.

  * * *

  At work, almost despite herself, she still listened for the technolog’s first whistle of the day. It came exactly at ten thirty, and this time, she was pretty sure it was a popular new song called “Lullaby, 1933,” about a mother who goes crazy after her twins die in the Great Famine. Only the technolog was capable of repurposing a dirge about Stalin starving his own people into a cheerful Monday-morning musical greeting. He burst into the accounting office, his starched white shirt open at the collarbone, the shoulder pads of his suit enhancing his muscular upper body.

  “Good morning, Nadezhda Andreevna.”

  “Good morning.”

  “A sunny day for a change.”

  “An unexpected but welcome development.”

  “I hope the numbers are adding up correctly. You didn’t forget a decimal point, did you?”

  She wanted to say, “Oh, they’re adding up all right. Too bad they add up to nothing.” Instead of actual paychecks, the general director of the factory was now handing out promissory notes. She, like all the employees, had not been paid in three months. Her current task was to calculate the amount owed to each worker, and transfer it onto a thick piece of paper stamped with the company logo.

  But she would never articulate a grievance like this in public. They had been trained all too well not to speak their minds. The people in power would do what they wanted anyway—independence or no independence.

  Just the other day, she was watching television where a man who had been the most fervent of communists two years ago was transferring his passionate loyalties to an independent Ukraine. And what about this new president tearfully saluting the Ukrainian flag? It wasn’t so long ago that he was convincing them all that Ukrainian independence was impossible, that Ukraine continuing as a Soviet entity was the very best thing for the country. And now the same man was doing an about-face, saying that they were meant to extract their identities from a place they had been aligned with for over seventy years. Easy for the West to say, but what about the ethnic Russians in the East, mere miles from the Russian border? Were they too meant to put themselves in opposition to a country that they were raised to love, whose poetry they had memorized since they were children, whose language flowed like nectar out of their mouths? All while they weren’t paid, their bridges and hospitals deteriorating around them? She longed to believe in a truly independent Ukraine, a solid, unified, proud country. But there was no doubt in her mind that as far as their corrupt politicians were concerned, it was business as usual.

  “My dearest technolog, my accounts have never been this balanced,” she answered instead, with what she hoped was a flirtatious lilt to her voice. “These are the most well-rounded numbers I’ve ever had the pleasure of calculating.”

  She wanted to hate him. But the technolog was fiendishly handsome with his sculpted jaw and veined hands and hazel eyes the color of dying leaves, a lighter version of which Larisska inherited. And even though they had only made love that one fateful time, he still looked at Nadia from beneath those leaflike fronds he had for eyebrows as though she were a wild strawberry sprung up in winter.

  “Fear not, my sunshine. I hear we might have a solution coming today.”

  She looked around. The secretaries were returning from their meetings, displaying a less belligerent look. And no one seemed to pay attention when he called her “my sunshine.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It will be almost as good as money.”

  She couldn’t help but prod the contours of his guilt. “I don’t know how we’ll go on. We barely make it from day to day. If it weren’t for my sister’s dacha, her chickens and cucumbers, we would probably starve.”

  The technolog cleared his throat. He had seen her pregnant, had even helped Larisska color at Nadia’s desk on a few occasions; he had long ago guessed the truth. “We’ve all felt the pinch. No one said this would be easy.”

  She whispered, “Shouldn’t someone take a little responsibility?”

  At times like these, she wondered why she was still waiting for him to assert his role in her life, even if just between the two of them. Her insinuations were either too subtle for him or he was ignoring them on purpose.

  Just then, the loudspeaker was telling them all to gather in the warehouse for a special announcement from the director.

  The technolog winked. “All is not lost. You’ll see.” And she felt the foreign shard of hope, an emotion she was sure had been wrung out of her.

  They were told to walk in orderly rows but the halls were flooded with every level of employee at the plant. If it were just two years ago, there would have been order to this migration, but the end of the Soviet Union meant no one knew how to enter a room anymore, where to stand, what to recite, whom to respect, how to publicly gather. She saw a glimpse of Yulia in the blue uniform of the line inspector. She was waving to meet up after work; she had some extra potatoes to share.

  They were shepherded into the freezing room and directed to form a circle around a covered truck. The technolog shimmied next to her, pressing his shoulder against hers. As they waited for the rest to file in, he was rubbing her forearms for warmth, his hands igniting a trail of heat down to her elbows. She allowed herself to cradle the fantasy of the two of them in her mind, a normal couple at work, and when that grew too painful to hold, she let it go.

  They were all blowing into their hands, stamping their feet from the cold. Their boss began with an apology about the unfortunate lack of financial remuneration—independence took time, you see. The government needed to get on its feet, then the workers would get paid. A fresh slash of light dappled the room with sudden brightness.

  “But while we are waiting for our salaries to resume, the Ukrainian People’s Republic is very much sensitive to our temporary difficulties. As you well know, our factory is their very top priority. What is more elemental than directing the flow of natural gas to our nation?” The director was a man who had given many a patriotic speech, but even he seemed to lose confidence in the shape of his own words.

  Instead, he climbed onto the back of the truck and lifted the burlap with a flourish. There was a burst of something orange, round, exotic. Nadia moved closer for a better look. Mandarins. It had been a while since Nadia tasted a mandarin, so it took time to adjust to the sight of fragrant, orange balls. Mandarins, someone bounced the word down the rows.

  “Our good news is that while the country is working hard to establish our independence, it has not forgotten us. We will be paying you in mandarins. We finish so-and-so pipes, you get forty mandarins, and so forth. I don’t need to tell you how much a mandarin will fetch at the market.”

  Watching everyone
take in the news, Nadia noted smirks quickly hidden, the stricken deflation of disappointment, the hollow gaze of cynicism. She looked up at the technolog, at his red ears, his dashing sideburns, the small terrain of unshaven stubble under his chin. Looking at him so closely was like approaching a painting in a gallery, marveling at the individual strokes that made up the whole. A solitary muscle in his neck was tensing and releasing. He took her hand, and in a single fluid motion, she felt two mandarins being palmed to her.

  “Here’s some extra. Does your daughter like mandarins?” he whispered. “Mine adores them.” Was he making a distinction: your daughter versus my daughter? Or was it finally an admission of knowledge, a fusing? Your daughter and my daughter? Your daughter is my daughter?

  After Larisska was born, her mother chided Nadia for neither telling the technolog’s wife the truth and snatching him for herself nor actively looking for a husband of her own. There were men, her mother said, who could love a sweet little girl, especially if Nadia were willing to provide him with a child of his own. At twenty-eight, she might still find a businessman who could take her to Europe or America. At thirty, she would have to resign herself to an unpleasant life as a spinster or, in a best-case scenario, a practical arrangement with some downtrodden widower. (And there is no excuse for that, Nadyenka, a girl as beautiful as you. Blond with blue eyes, a pretty, voluptuous figure.)

  How could she explain to her mother that it was enough for her, standing next to this man, the vapor of their cold exhales commingling. She could swear to knowing if he was in the building or outside it, feeling an anticipatory shiver when he entered the factory even though the doors were on a separate floor entirely, far from her range of hearing. She could remember every second of their one sexual encounter, how his eyes closed well before his lips reached for hers, how his fingers skimmed the bulb of her neck, his hips gently parting her legs.