We are silent as we speed past the birch trees and high-rises on the outskirts of the city. Normally Misha would scandalize Mama with stories of his college co-op antics and she would act horrified while being secretly amused, but they are not in the mood to clown around, though that is all I can think to do so I don’t dissolve. It seems impossible that three days ago Baba’s brother, Boris, called to tell us that her heart gave out in her sleep.
Baba had seemed fine when I’d skyped her the other week to tell her I was twelve weeks pregnant. Her hair was still dyed a fiery red and she wore a face full of makeup and complained about her latest suitor. I sported a sweatsuit and had been devoting my energy to being pregnant and finishing my novel by the end of my final semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Baba regarded me as if she smelled something burning, so I braced myself for a thorough critique of my appearance.
“Imagine,” she said. “A great-grandchild of mine born in Iowa. Ridiculous!”
“We’ll speak Russian to the baby,” I told her.
This made her cackle. “You—and Roman? What nonsense. You will send the child to Kiev every summer to visit his great-grandmother. There is no other way to do it, don’t you see?”
* * *
—
The Mother Motherland, a monstrous steel statue of a woman lifting a gleaming sword and shield to the sky, looms before us on the opposite bank of the Dnieper River, which means we have almost arrived at Baba’s. Misha and I have visited her several times since she returned to Kiev—though we haven’t seen it since the revolution—while Mama only returned with us once a while back, though she had been the first of our family to return years before Baba, to bury her own mother. She had spent most of her return visit with us escaping Baba to see her cousin Marina. My grandmother was offended by her lack of attention and referred to Mama as Sappho. “Why is your mother spending so much time with that woman?” she had cried. “Those two have wandered off to the island of Lesbos!” Mama and I still laugh about it, though it stopped being so funny after my brother came out to me.
The driver drops us off in front of Baba’s building. Instead of her boisterous brother, I see a leather-jacketed man standing near the entrance, sending smoke rings into the air. His hair and beard are as dark and lustrous as his jacket and he looks like he can lift up a car with one hand. We lock eyes as the last of the smoke rings dissolves over his head, and I wonder if I’ve finally fallen asleep. I don’t realize he’s here for us until he approaches.
“Valentin,” he says, shaking Mama’s hand first, then mine and Misha’s. He’s one of my grandmother’s protégés from the Toastmasters Club—whenever she mentioned him, I pictured a younger boy, not a full-grown man. “I am sorry to meet under these circumstances,” he says. “Your grandmother changed my life.”
“For the better, I hope,” I say in my battered Russian, and when he laughs I feel as if I have finally swallowed something that has been trapped in my throat for days.
“Enough,” Mama tells me.
My brother looks up at the building. “It hasn’t changed,” he says.
I say, “Why would it?” We follow Valentin into the elevator, past the concierge, an old lady in a tiny booth watching a soap—we barely fit. He tells us that Baba’s brother is up there, entertaining the guests. “He got caught up in a fit of singing,” he explains. We smile politely and shrug and he turns to me. “Are you a singer, Oksana?” he asks as the elevator finally releases us.
“Not even in the shower,” I tell him.
My brother has our father’s rich voice, though he doesn’t like to show it off. But Mama and I can’t carry a tune to save our lives. I always wished I was a singer, not a writer—it would suit me better, being good at something I could show off to a crowd, basking in flagrant adoration instead of squirreling myself away with my sad novel, never knowing if I was any good.
The apartment hits me with its smell of Baba’s lilac perfume and cigarettes. I hear Boris belting out the last notes of “Katiushka” before everyone bursts into applause. He is standing in my grandmother’s living room, which is crammed with at least two dozen people, half of whom I have never seen before, who hover over endless bottles of vodka and overflowing bowls of salat Olivier and pickled vegetables and herring. Two of my aunt Alla’s paintings hang in the room: her three-headed self-portrait and a whimsical painting of her father in a field with a fan of scythes floating behind him like the tail of a peacock.
“Tanya! Oksana! Misha!” Boris cries, bounding over to squeeze us all, coating my cheeks with sloppy kisses. He is a vain, stocky man with dyed black hair who stands with his chest puffed out like a bouncer. He looks my mother up and down and whistles. “Tanya—you haven’t aged a day.”
“It’s good to see you, Borya,” she says, batting him away. He is four years younger than Baba and an old flirt, a lifelong bachelor. Baba always said he had a cheerful disposition because he was just a baby when their father was purged and too young to remember World War II. Mama doesn’t care much for Boris; she finds him frivolous.
Boris drags us around and introduces or reintroduces us to distant cousins and Baba’s friends from her university and literary journal and Toastmasters, and I can’t keep them straight, still feeling drugged from the flight and even foggier after meeting Valentin. The only friend of Baba’s I remember well is Anatoly Petrovich, who died months after we met in Yalta. Mama gloms on to Cousin Marina fast and they are already in the corner, conspiring like criminals. Boris whispers rather provocatively to two of Baba’s younger lady friends. It takes my brother about five seconds to find people his age—Marina’s daughter, a Goth teen also named Oksana, among them—and he’s already holding court, gesturing madly, speaking a much cleaner Russian than mine. Though he is American born, he has studied the language and history of our country, while I care more for the blue of the Dnieper River, savor the way white fatty salo melts in my mouth, and feel desperate longing whenever my husband and I overhear someone on the street speaking our first language.
Valentin pays my grandmother a moving tribute—he is a businessman who had little meaning in his life after his wife left him, until Baba met him at a wedding and roped him into joining the Toastmasters. After enough people speak, I realize it is my turn. Mama is exempt because she’s not Baba’s blood, and my brother is considered too young and too American.
I raise my glass and ramble about how I can’t believe Baba’s gone, while I scramble for a way to define her. “She could laugh at anything,” I say. I describe the tiny cicada-infested matchbox of a room Baba and I had to share back in Gainesville, Florida, my family’s first home in America. I say that when she was feeling particularly spirited before bedtime, she would ruffle my hair, flick off the light, and say, “Another day closer to oblivion, here we go!” Her sporting declaration terrified me at first, but after a while I didn’t mind it. I appreciated that she never sugarcoated anything with me or treated me like a child. “In fact,” I say, “she made oblivion sound kind of fun.”
This elicits a few nervous laughs and I drink my splash of wine in one gulp, because when you are toasting the dead, you don’t clink glasses, something I learned half a lifetime ago, after Papa died. But I have much more to learn, apparently. Mama yanks me aside as I am filling my plate with all the pickled vegetables I can find.
I expect her to tell me that I have been overexerting myself and that it’s time to rest, but she criticizes me for something else entirely. “You used the wrong word for ‘dead’ in your speech,” she tells me. I’d said pogibla instead of umerla, which I’d thought meant the same thing, but apparently pogibla does not just mean “passed away” but “died under tragic circumstances,” which is not the case.
“Of course Russians would have a word just for that,” I say.
Mama nods, not without pride. “A rich language,” she says.
* * *
—
I end up on the balcony with Valentin as the guests trickle out, facing a row of new apartments and an abandoned factory with bullet-riddled walls and shattered windows. He offers me a cigarette and I am tempted but remember my baby, though I don’t mention it. Nor do I mention the nagging nausea that never leads to actual puking, my sore-as-fuck breasts, the fatigue pushing down on me that is even worse thanks to jet lag. This man is all darkness, simmering before me like a stack of hot coals, nothing like my Roma, who is sinewy and blue eyed and light haired. My dear husband, who is on a campus interview this very moment in the hopes of securing a better life for our growing family. I start rambling, not about my husband but about how much colder it is in Iowa, and Valentin’s lips curl into a smile.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing,” he answers. “I just like hearing you talk, Oksanka Amerikanka.”
He is flirting but my accent is shit, my vocabulary no better than a seven-year-old’s. My husband’s is even worse because he’s second gen—on the rare times he has to speak Russian to interact with relatives, he sounds like a five-year-old girl we call Romana, his alter ego. Still, we are determined to speak only Russian to our child, to pass down the dregs of our heritage even if Baba had thought it was impossible.
I am self-conscious now, watching Valentin watching my lips, and I try to think of the least sexy thing I can say.
“What kind of a businessman are you?”
He shrugs the question away. “Import-export,” he says with a fatalistic nod. “And you, I know, are a writer. What are you writing about?”
I sigh, but it’s easier to go on than I expected. I tell him I’m working on a novel based on the period Baba and her family spent in Kiev under Nazi occupation, dark years filled with heartbreak and intrigue, something I’ve been writing for over five years now, asking Baba about it during our Skype chats without telling her why. And now I stare out at the foggy, car-filled city and find it hard to imagine that most of its buildings and citizens were destroyed during the war, while my grandmother lived to tell about it. This is the first time I have told someone who isn’t my husband what my novel is about, but there’s no reason to keep the secret anymore.
“I wanted to show her a draft when I finished,” I say. “I’m almost done. It was supposed to be a surprise.” I don’t bother wiping my face.
“I assure you it would have made no difference. She was proud of you anyway,” he says.
“She was?” I picture her scowling at me over Skype.
“She was always bragging about you—more than ever when you began your prestigious writing program. Anytime you sent her a story, she would make all the Toastmasters read it. In fact, I have something to show you in that regard.”
“You do?”
I follow him to Baba’s bedroom, where Mama insisted I sleep. Being alone with him in a room with a bed in it—even if it’s the bed where my grandmother died, red sheets to match her hair—makes me the slightest bit excited, perhaps heralding the return of the sex drive I have been awaiting since I started my second trimester two weeks ago. He smells like a hint of sweat from a long day, a scent that mingles with my grandmother’s perfume. I have never cheated on Roman—I have never crossed the line, but I have tiptoed on it with my eyes closed a few times, and if a breeze had hit me I might have toppled like Lenin’s statue during the revolution four years ago. We stare at each other and I forget why we’re there until he opens a desk drawer, scans it, and hands me a notebook.
“She had a surprise for you too,” he says. He puts a hand on my shoulder, tips his head, and says he will come by tomorrow.
It takes me a minute to understand what I’m reading—the words, which I have to whisper aloud because that’s the only way I read Russian, are strangely familiar. Baba had translated my poems and stories into Russian, and who knows what for. Though she had taken quite a bit of poetic license, it amused me to see. In my poem about Baba and Boris and me getting drunk on the shores of the Dnieper on my first return to Kiev, she had cut out the last three lines, about me puking in the river, ending the poem with an image of the sun setting over the city.
Seeing what Baba has done to my poem reminds me of an anecdote Mama loved, one of many featuring a Jewish couple named Sara and Abram. Sara tells her friend, “You know, everybody loves Pavarotti, but I’ve heard the man in action and find him to be quite overrated. He rasps, he quavers, he bellows, he sings completely out of tune!” Her friend asks, “Oh, you have heard Pavarotti sing?” “No, no,” Sara says. “But Abram did, and he sang it over for me.”
* * *
—
I climb into Baba’s deathbed after Mama and my brother fall asleep in the living room. Her bedroom has orange wallpaper, a small desk, and a dresser piled with Baba’s necklaces and makeup. On the walls, there is a photo of Misha and me, one of Papa, and Papa’s sister’s painting of the Dnieper River that Baba had hung up in our Florida bedroom long ago. A stack of romance novels sits on her nightstand, a bookmark sticking halfway out of the one on top.
I imagine Baba falling asleep in this bed just days before, never to wake up. Did she feel the void eating her up? Somebody must have changed the sheets, though the bed still smells like Baba. Swaddled by my grandmother’s scent, I am a kid in Florida again, staring at the dark ceiling as if this night is my last on earth. The edges of the world slip away from me.
I miss Roma. He never made the journey to the ancestral home with me, though he had met Baba when she flew out to California for our wedding. She liked him the moment he gave her his coat on a not-cold evening; he instantly liked her when she looked him up and down and said, “He’s a bit too handsome, in my opinion, but otherwise he’ll do.”
I never asked her what she meant: A bit too handsome for me? A bit too handsome in general? I add this to the list of things I will never know. I call my husband.
“Oksana,” he says, picking up after one ring, and I feel a warmth rush over me.
“I’m here,” I say.
“How is it? How are you?”
“Depressing. Weird. I miss you.”
“The baby?”
“Hanging in.”
“I wish I could be there with you.”
“Me too,” I say, though we don’t mean the same thing right then. If he were beside me, I wouldn’t want him to hold me and hear me wail about my grandmother. I would want him to fuck my brains out. I am desperate to feel alive again. Though since I got pregnant, during the few times I’ve actually felt like fucking, he’s stopped being fun in bed and has been all gentle, saying things like, “I don’t want to scare the little girl,” leading me to say, “Or boy. And go harder.” Roma wants a little girl who will love her father madly, and I want a boy to spoil, like my brother. In fact, he doesn’t want a boy to the point where he wouldn’t come inside me from behind when we were trying to conceive because he claimed it would raise our chances of having one.
“How was the interview?” I say.
He sighs. “I think it went well, but there’s just no saying. They’ll call in a few days.” I am grateful he doesn’t say he wishes I was back home to calm his nerves. “Tallahassee is kind of a dump,” he says. “I don’t know if we can live there.”
“We can live anywhere,” I say. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. You need to rest up for tomorrow. They’ll love you in Colorado too. Everybody does.”
“Even you?” he says, trying to be playful, but I can feel the edge to his voice. He knows how I can be, even pregnant and grieving, because he can be that way too.
“Especially me. Though I hope they don’t love you quite as much as I do,” I say.
“I can’t make any promises,” he says. “Take care of yourself, all right?”
I flick off the lights and get under the deathbed covers and stare at the ceiling and hope my almost-child is resting b
etter than I will. Though I’ve always wanted kids, since I got pregnant all I can think about is what I’m giving my boy life for—just to bumble around for a bunch of decades at best, get his heart broken, send me and my husband to our graves, and then return to dust himself, with maybe a few transcendent nights in between, moments when he feels infinite and like he’s never going to die? This doesn’t strike me as a very nice thing to do to somebody who didn’t ask for it, not at all.
“Good night, little one,” I say, resting a hand on my stomach. “Another day closer to existence, here you go.”
* * *
—
Boris returns the next morning to help go through Baba’s things—lipstick on his collar, shameless man that he is—though we insist we only want a few photos. He keeps trying to push memorabilia from Baba’s travels on us, along with her fur coats and my late aunt’s paintings, but I don’t have any use for those things. I hope to get through it all as quickly as possible and check out the Maidan with my brother and Valentin, who called earlier, offering to take us around. But there is no end in sight with the boxes.
I spot an image of a teenaged, suited Papa with closely cropped hair, shaking Brezhnev’s hand onstage to accept a Math Olympics gold medal. Brezhnev’s eyes are closed. In another box, there’s a stack from Papa’s choir days, where the boys are stern and lined up in rows with starched shirts and obedient expressions, Anatoly Petrovich grimacing in the center. Then there’s a photo of Baba at about the age I am now, looking unabashedly happy in a tall grassy field with Papa in his underwear, holding a sickle. I had only ever seen the version of this photo containing Papa and his father; I had never considered that Baba must have taken the picture and had been right there all along.
Boris puts an arm around my brother and begs him to sing at my grandmother’s funeral reception. “You simply must,” he says. “It’s not a question.”
Oksana, Behave! Page 20
