Mother Country Read online

  “If only we could get out of here,” she burst out, thinking of Olga’s husband, how crazy his plan to leave had initially seemed. “Even Poland is better than this.”

  “Emigration? What are you talking about?” He looked taken aback, shocked, even. “Surely you agree that our duty is to stay here, to build our own nation.”

  “But what is the nation’s duty to us in the meantime? Can you tell me that? A paycheck might be a good start. And then food to spend it on.”

  “Tea,” her mother called out. “Whenever you are ready, there is tea. If you would like it. We do need to get going to school.”

  The technolog seemed to be crumpling, receding. “I should get going anyway. In any case, they will announce it on Friday. I wanted you to know first in case you wanted to start making inquiries. Once everyone knows, it’s going to be madness.”

  He looked like anyone else, unremarkable. A man in an ill-fitting leather jacket. She could already hear her mother: What were you thinking? Once the job’s over, you’re never going to see him again.

  “Thank you. That was very thoughtful of you. Please excuse me. I was just very upset.” She turned her voice soft and spongy as bird’s milk candy, and started to edge into the closed circle of his arms. Another inch or two and her cheek would be pressed against his.

  But he was swiftly moving toward the door. “I hear there is work in Kharkov. I would set out for there if I could.”

  Larisska in coat, hat, and gloves brushed against the leather of her father’s jacket with one of her chiffon bows. The straps of her nursery backpack were sliding off her shoulders.

  “I’m really very, very thirsty,” she appealed to him. “Are you going to color with me again?”

  The technolog reached out as if to pat her head. His hand was suspended like meat in aspic. He produced some muted utterance and disappeared into the elevator.

  * * *

  On her way to work, Nadia took a detour toward Chemists Square, and sat on a bench in front of the giant white marble Lenin. This was her favorite Lenin statue in Rubizhne because of the casual nature of his stance. He had one hand in the pocket of his jacket, and he was holding a leather briefcase with the other. He might as well have been waiting for a metro or tram, on his way to an office position just like hers. As a child, finding herself among all these Lenin statues was so comforting. Wherever you went in town, a kind man stood nearby, protecting you with his benevolent gaze, sympathetic to your flaws but loving you with all his heart. As an adolescent, she had understood deep in the hidden recesses of her soul that she was safe as long as Lenin was around. All he wanted was to pave her path, protect her from enemies. Love her.

  Later, of course, she mostly knew this was a fantasy, a girlish fairy tale, though she planned on encouraging Larissa to believe in him too if only to protect the sweet magical thinking of childhood. But now, she sensed he was being physically ripped out of her life. What would she turn into if she were no longer allowed to dream about him?

  Usually, cheerful flower bouquets lined the foot of the monument, but today, Nadia noticed something unusual: funeral wreaths.

  * * *

  “Do you notice how thirsty your daughter is? Did she just eat a lot of sugar?” the pediatrician asked that same afternoon. “Because desserts are strictly forbidden. You understand, don’t you? She has diabetes.”

  “She ate mandarins. Many mandarins,” Nadia said, with a fresh, panicked glance at her daughter. Her body was numb with guilt or shock, she wasn’t sure which.

  “And chocolate,” Larissa said.

  “But my daughter just lost her job and her sister just won the green card lottery and is leaving us for America,” her mother moaned. “We will have nothing to eat. How can we afford all this?”

  “It’s not the end of the world, but your lives will change,” the doctor said, ignoring her mother’s outburst. “I’ll show you how to inject insulin, but you will have to learn to do it yourselves. You will need to draw blood before each meal to measure sugar. You will have to boil the syringes after each use, drastically change her diet to avoid hypoglycemia. Her teachers need to be notified. You will have to be vigilant to make sure she is eating enough.”

  As Nadia assailed the doctor with questions, Larissa calmly sat with her one-eyed pink bear. She seemed pleased to be in the same room with them all, their attention finally directed at her. Her pleas were finally being taken seriously.

  “You see, Mama? I told you I was thirsty.”

  There was nothing to be done; Nadia would have to leave immediately, seek work in Kharkov before the rest of her coworkers learned the news on Friday. She would have to figure out a treatment plan and then leave it in her mother’s hands to execute during weekdays when she was gone. It was too much to take in at once, her mind blank with the enormity of what lay ahead of her.

  In the dusk, they passed the city council, and along the park lane on Victory Street, she noticed the Chernobyl memorial, an arch that rose skyward with orderly brick and gave the appearance of crumbling back to earth. She had committed the inscription to memory when it was first erected. It read:

  To the victims of Chernobyl catastrophe—

  to the fallen,

  to the living,

  and to the never born.

  Three years before, Alesia had left the building with her daughter one night and never returned. Whenever she passed the memorial, Nadia remembered her fearful rejection of Alesia’s friendship. Why had she offered nothing to help this woman? Nadia had even pleaded new-mother fatigue when Alesia asked if they could make the trip to the Chernobyl memorial together. She was afraid her neighbor would discern in Nadia’s eyes gratitude for the healthy daughter, the brighter future. Now what kind of future did her daughter really have?

  The evening was turning cold. Larisska attempted to leap between them as they stopped to pay their respects. She was using their hands as swinging ropes, chattering about the news at school: that new kid Mykhailo from Kiev heartlessly pulled on her pigtails all day, and guess what, Mama, that morning, they were told they might soon be singing a brand-new Ukrainian anthem! Wasn’t that exciting?

  “What do you think it will sound like?”

  Nadia looked down at the foot of the monument, an artistically disorganized pile of rocks. She adjusted Larisska’s scarf more firmly to shield her from the bite of wind. “I have no idea,” she said.

  4

  Our Ukrainka

  Brooklyn, July 2014

  At nine o’clock at night, Lena and Georgina were pounding on her door. She could hear them giggling violently on the other side. “Open up, quick.”

  “Devushki, what on earth?” Nadia cried, fumbling with the dead bolt.

  Her friends stormed into her dining room. They looked terribly big-city chic to her once, but now she couldn’t help but notice their shrunken dresses and absurd heels. Their shoulders were barely covered by the armor of a transparent shawl. Georgina’s dyed-red hair was slicked to one side, a greased-down ponytail draped over a single silver shoulder. Her eyelids were smudged in sparkling blue kohl. Lena’s highlighted pixie was poking straight into the air, her mouth outlined in thick magenta pencil.

  “No excuses this time. We’ve made an executive decision: you’re coming dancing with us,” Lena said. She surveyed the situation with an expression of exasperated sadness. Nadia in her floral house robe for the night, remote control in hand. A carton of untouched strawberry ice cream and the debris of butter cookie dinner were spread across the coffee table.

  Nadia muted the television. She had been running First Channel continuously for the past hour trying to make sense of a Malaysian plane scattered across the field just hours’ drive from her home. Almost three hundred people, eighty of them children, their bodies flung across Hrabove. Villagers trying to contain the fire, tractors keeping flames away from crops. Bodies almost intact, still harnessed into their seats, the sad sight of luggage sprayed across the field. It was unbearable. Naturally
fingers of accusation were being pointed across the country. Ukrainians saying it was the separatists, the separatists blaming Ukrainians. The West blaming Russia. Those in power vowing to get to the bottom of who did it and everyone else certain it would never happen again.

  She could make no sense of the news coverage here, rebels and militants? Pro-Russian and separatists? Why was the news complicating an already complicated issue? Western Ukrainians have always hated ethnic Russians from Eastern Ukraine, and her people have always distrusted Ukrainians. Russia believed, erroneously, persistently, that Ukraine had always belonged to them, that it was inferior, that it had no right to exist. It was a question of borders, loyalties, grudges, ethnicities, aggressors encroaching on territories they had no right to traverse. Generation after generation of war, acrimony, famine, survival. In between all that were people like her mother and daughter, their loyalties split neatly across political lines, silent witnesses as windows were being blasted out of high-rises, burning metal falling to the ground. None of those worries about the impasse in her homeland heightened a desire to go to some seedy nightclub.

  “It’s time we got you out of the house. All you do is work and worry about Ukraine. How are you ever going to meet a man?” Georgina was already flinging open her closet and pawing through her few decent dresses. “A sexy baba like you shouldn’t be sitting at home on a Saturday night spooning ice cream into her maw. Here, this one will do. You look like a movie star in this one.”

  “I don’t want to meet a man. Have you gone mad?”

  “But honey,” Georgina said. “When was your last boyfriend? That old neighbor of yours back home? Or Larissa’s mysterious father?”

  “I’m not looking for any boyfriend.”

  “But who was it really?”

  Her friends were not the only ones who wanted to know about her love life in Ukraine. Regina too once asked if she was married or had a partner. It was dangerous terrain, so to deflect the question, she in turn asked Regina how she and her husband met. Americans loved repeating the romance-origin story, she found, because Regina poured them both a disgusting fermented green tea beverage and spilled the whole story.

  She and her friends were sipping white wine in an Irish bar in some Manhattan neighborhood when Jake entered with his gang, the two groups merging as the bar filled with an aggressive after-work crowd. Regina found herself flirting with one of the friends, a banker fresh from working in Russia. She tried to keep up with his feverish, impassioned Russian, but when it became clear that Regina had no adult knowledge of the country and couldn’t bond with him about politics and slang and Russian music, the friend grew dismissive. Other than a knowledge of traditional food, she seemed to barely be Russian at all, the banker said. She lacked any depth, any authenticity. She knew it was silly to be hurt by the words of a stranger who knew nothing about her childhood struggles assimilating in New Jersey (she didn’t even speak English until fourth grade, had no friends, was bullied by peers who called her “commie”) but she burst into tears.

  “So Jake swooped in to comfort me, and close up, he was much cuter anyway. And we knew some of the same people at Middlebury … a university in Vermont. And so I went out with him. I sound like an idiot, don’t I? I know, it’s a boring story.” Regina was apologetic as usual, though it was true that Nadia’s attention had been flagging. “Probably not nearly as interesting as your love stories. It seems like everything in the Old Country is more dramatic than here. We met, we dated, we married, we moved to Brooklyn, we procreated. Blah, blah, blah.”

  What she would give now for Regina’s boring story: the ease of fluency in English by age nine, attending an American university, meeting a husband without too much difficulty, conceiving a child, living in a land free of war. A family together. At the very least, she wouldn’t be dragged out to some horrible nightclub at almost fifty years old.

  Lena and Georgina exchanged a glance that implied a recent conversation on the subject had yielded a fresh approach. “Have you thought that it might look good for the authorities if you had a husband? It might expedite Larisska’s application, that there is a stable family waiting for her.”

  It was a low blow, using Larissa to get her to join them, one that she would have overlooked a week ago. But now it seemed like exactly the kind of maneuver they would make. “She’s an adult, it’s not like she’s a child who needs a new papa. Now leave me alone.”

  Her voice unnerved them, especially Lena. She looked ready to retreat. But Georgina was doubling down.

  “So what? It’s not what she needs but the kind of front you want to present to the people that matter. You don’t know how they think in Immigration.” She was unfolding Nadia’s comfortable working blouses and striped cotton crewnecks and shoving them back into drawers with disgust. “Don’t you have a single sexy thing in this wardrobe?”

  “A married couple always looks good to authorities. It’s more proper,” Lena said. But she hovered at the door. Lena was a better reader of people, probably because she worked with them all day.

  The point, however ridiculous, did latch onto her mind. Her hopelessness was seeping into possibilities that had not even occurred to her. Maybe Lena was right in a way. A married couple probably did look good to authorities. The right sort of married couple actually might speed things up.

  She rose. “I’ll get dressed.” With a single sweep of the hand, crumbs and empty cartons descended into the garbage can and the coffee table was neat again.

  Lena and Georgina had expected prolonged resistance, and the shock of her almost immediate compliance was visible on their faces.

  “Really?” Lena said.

  “Really. But what I wear doesn’t matter.” She marched past her friends and yanked out the first thing that emerged, a gray cowl-neck sweater and pleated black pants. “This will do just fine.”

  “This old rag? Are you kidding me?” Georgina started. “At least show a little leg.”

  But Lena gave her a silent signal that said “Back off.”

  “You’re really coming then?” As if she still didn’t believe it herself.

  “I’m coming, fine.”

  The girls looked pleased. They had made many similar efforts in the past, but Nadia usually fended them off. Between her jobs with Grisha and Regina, she worked seven days a week. Even as she admired her friends for their indefatigable energy, she had no time and no extra money to spend on such outings. And what was there to do in clubs at their age? Her friends were both divorced, with grown children, but they dolled themselves up every Friday and hit up Taous or Amnesia in the city. Once, Nadia let them drag her to one of those venues for her birthday, but they were at least twenty years older than everyone there. It was humiliating to witness her friends flirting, huddling together like anemic birds in minuscule skirts. And the whole club shining a chalk-white spotlight on her mottled face while doing a rendition of “Happy Birthday.” And there were Georgina and Lena swearing they only went for the music and revelry, for the particular talents of “DJ Pushkin” or “Yanni” or the pleasures of private karaoke. But their aims were transparent: a husband or at least someone who could make their decisions, pay for groceries, rent, or at least the occasional fur coat, be a companion on vacations, perform the role that would allow them to slip back into mainstream, coupled immigrant society. For now, the three of them were peers in solitude, inseparable.

  “Let’s at least go somewhere local. No Amnesia.”

  “Fine.” Lena quickly arbitrated with Georgina. “Nadia is agreeing to join us. It’s only fair.”

  “Okeydokey, no Amnesia,” Georgina said in English.

  “At a time like this, with what’s going on in my town, it seems wrong to be doing this. I mean, did you see the horror with that plane?” Nadia embarked on the process of dressing, the panty hose that promised sleek enclosure, the pants that slimmed her hips.

  “And what good are you doing for Ukraine or those poor Malaysian passengers sitting around here?”
Georgina said.

  In the past, she never minded that her friends pretended she was their equal in heartbreak. But their biggest problem was a son who kept borrowing money for ill-fated business pursuits (Lena) or severe constipation (Georgina). Sometimes Nadia wondered if there wasn’t some inherent Russianness to their complaining, a private certainty of their superiority.

  Georgina emerged from her bedroom with the only dressy heels Nadia owned. They were metallic gold, a size too small. They once belonged to Georgina, who had benevolently passed them on. “Perfect. You will kill in this.”

  Instead of arguing, it was easier to float along friendship’s good intentions. She slipped on the heels. The straps instantly sank their teeth into the back of her heels. Discarding them, she slipped on her comfortable rubber flip-flops with a wedge, adorned with a flutter of silver petals. In these, she could walk.

  Lena rushed them out. “Wear what you like but hurry up. Ladies get in free before ten o’clock.”

  * * *

  Brighton Beach at night was a mixture of festive lights and music on the main thoroughfare, but when you turned off the central street, you were confronted with long stretches of residential darkness. This particular block was lined with shuttered shops, except for a slow-moving line snaking down the sidewalk. Young men in jeans and football shirts checked their cell phones, while women in oversized hoop earrings and turtleneck dresses sashed by leather belts argued with the bouncer at the entrance.

  “This is crazy,” Nadia said, eyeing the bare collarbones and breasts in line. “What are we doing here? We’re not twenty-two.”

  “Come on, girls.” Georgina pushed her way past men in transparent mesh shirts and identical women with their straight, blown-out hair and strapless dresses, and the bouncer (Georgina’s nephew!) encircled them, pushing them through the front doors. The air smelled of smoke and incense, a viscous, gummy atmosphere. Two women in leather bikinis were practically licking each other onstage, the music—a pounding remix of a lesser Vera Brezhneva song, “Sexy Bambina”—was thunderous. Everyone was touchingly young. She wanted to be home. Oh, how she wanted to be home.