Oksana, Behave!

by Maria Kuznetsova

  “It is a question, and the answer is no,” my brother says, impressing me by his facility with the language.

  “But your grandmother said you have a beautiful voice, like your father.”

  “He does,” Mama insists, but she’s only half there, sifting, sifting.

  “What am I supposed to sing?” Misha says.

  “Your grandmother’s favorite Soviet songs. Don’t worry, there are a number of us singing, you won’t be alone,” he says. Then he brings in another box tower and begins singing.

  Dark is the night, only bullets whistle over the steppe,

  Only the wind hums in the wires, the stars flicker dimly

  In the dark night, my love, I know you are not sleeping,

  Near our child’s crib, you secretly wipe away a tear

  “Dark Is the Night” is a World War II ballad meant to tug at my brother’s heartstrings—the lonely soldier missing his beloved—but it does no good. When I first heard it, I had latched on to the beloved part and thought it was a love song, until Papa told me otherwise. Hearing this old song in my native land makes me feel relieved to finally be home again but also devastated, because I won’t ever have a reason to return now. But my brother is unmoved when the song is over.

  “My Russian isn’t even that good,” he says.

  “Good enough for singing,” says Boris. “Your grandmother wanted this—she made this plan years ago. She wanted no sadness, lots of drink, and for you to be up there.”

  My brother shakes his head. “I’m not really a performer.”

  “You will rise to the challenge,” says Boris. Then he changes tactics. He pats my brother on the back and says, “Handsome boy. Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “No girlfriend,” my brother says.

  Boris chuckles. “That’s the right spirit, boy. Better to play the field, handsome boy like you. I was handsome once, believe it or not, and I still play the field!”

  My brother is not amused. “I won’t sing,” he says.

  Mama does not look up and continues sifting through the photos. Misha’s sexuality is a subject she and I have never broached, though I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t be happy about it. She might at least suspect it, given that he wears my scarves and hangs out mostly with girls, but I don’t know how many of those cultural markers are identifiable to a Soviet woman.

  I’m suddenly pissed off at the injustice of it all, Mama showing us her old wedding photos and Boris joking about girlfriends while Misha has to pretend he’s straight. I want to strangle Boris, though he doesn’t even know what he’s done.

  When he leaves, Mama shakes her head and says, “Silly man.”

  “What makes him so silly? Would he be less silly if he settled down and had a few kids?” I say, and I am surprised by my own sharpness.

  “Maybe so, but that’s not why I can’t stand the man,” Mama says. “He always took such advantage of your grandmother. She paid for his dinners, his whores, his gambling debts.”

  “I thought they were great friends,” my brother says.

  “She thought so too. She had a big heart. A big, foolish heart. She couldn’t resist her baby brother,” Mama says. “And neither can you, Oksana.” She tousles Misha’s hair and says, “But your brother does not use his powers for evil.”

  My brother rolls his eyes and pulls away. “As far as you know,” he says, and a mischievous smile flickers on his face. He has been given permission to scandalize Mama, and he has been holding back for too long: He tells her about making hummus laced with molly for everyone in his co-op, a birthday party featuring a piñata filled with whip-its, a festival where everyone got naked and threw condiments at each other, and a polyamorous roommate who has five different girlfriends who all claim to love him and one another.

  “An education,” Mama declares, shaking her head, but he has made her smile. As long as my brother doesn’t mention fucking dudes, they are as thick as thieves, much closer than she and I can ever be. She pinches his cheek and adds, “I did not say you use your powers for good either, little fool. Only silliness.”

  * * *

  —

  I am surprised to find icons on Valentin’s dashboard, but I shouldn’t be. Though Baba was an atheist to the bitter end, many people got religious after the Soviet Union collapsed, desperate for something new to believe in. Valentin has snipped off the seatbelts in his car for what he says are cosmetic purposes and drives about 150 miles an hour, blasting techno; I guess his icons will save us in the event of an accident.

  The square looks just as it did before the revolution, free of tires or tents or sandbags or burning wood. Just people shopping and getting off the Metro and staring into the abyss of their phones. I imagine Baba’s soul shining through the spire at the center of the square. “It looks like you have finally made an effort with your looks!” she would tell me. “But that does not mean you have to be a whore, my darling.”

  The only difference I see is the memorial to the hundred who died fighting for Ukraine’s independence, their photographs stacked up in neat rows like tombstones, surrounded by flowers, candles, and religious ephemera. My brother is visibly disappointed by how orderly the Maidan looks; he was hoping for more remnants of the bloody revolution.

  “It looks fine,” he says, surly boy.

  “We were able to rebuild quickly. Thank God,” Valentin says rather sternly, and I can’t blame him for not indulging us American rubberneckers. He lights a cigarette.

  “Where do you stand?” my brother asks him, and I want to shut him up. The last thing I need is a political discussion, but off they go, and I hope I am not asked for my opinion. Almost everything I know about Euromaidan comes from one Netflix documentary, and I don’t like to talk politics. I’m just heartbroken that the Russians have taken Crimea, because of my fond memories of the summer I spent in Yalta with Baba.

  I watch Misha and Valentin zip back and forth and realize my brother is flirting. Misha is convinced half of our male family friends are closeted, but this time, in this place, it’s a dangerous assumption, and I hope he doesn’t take it too far. Valentin tells my brother he’s for Ukraine, the Russians are pigs, and Misha—who would rather die than be on the side he’s expected to be on—says the Ukrainians are no angels either.

  Valentin laughs. “Who among us is an angel?”

  He does not wait for an answer, just puts out his cigarette and turns slightly away. He excuses himself shortly afterward, when his phone buzzes.

  My brother cracks up and digs his fingers into my forearms, narrowing his eyes in an imitation of a smoldering gaze. “Who among us is an angel?” he says.

  I push him away. “Incorrigible boy.”

  “There’s a chance he wants me, Sana,” he says. “Don’t deny it.”

  I try to distract him instead of discouraging him. “Incorrigible boy,” I say again, and add, “yet I hope to have a boy just like you. Next month we’ll know if it’s a boy or a girl.”

  My brother is unimpressed. “But when do you find out if it’s gay or straight?” he says, and I smack him, hard, and he cackles.

  Then I gaze out on the square, the bleak sunlight softening the gray buildings surrounding it. “Baba cursed the Russians when they came,” I say. “But mostly because the fighting kept her from strolling outside.”

  Misha has tears in his eyes, and I didn’t mean to do that to him. I am relieved to see our guide returning to us. We had promised Mama to pick up food and booze for the next round of friends and relatives, so we head to a store a few blocks away. Valentin smokes again and I reach out to dissolve his perfect rings. Once I have him to myself—Misha banters with the meat-counter lady—I grab his arm.

  “Tell me—why did she translate my stories?”

  He laughs. “She was always trying to get them into her journal. They kept getting turned down
. The editors said, ‘We suspect the original author may have some talent, but we can’t say the same about the translator.’ ”

  I laugh too. “What a waste of time. I can’t believe she did all that without telling me.”

  “I don’t think she saw it as a waste of time.”

  I grab a few thick Russian yogurts just for myself, treats that had always waited for me in Baba’s fridge, even though they aren’t quite sour or sweet enough to appeal to me in my current state. After we check out, I put three bags in each hand, but my brother grabs them before I can protest and says, “You shouldn’t.” So much for the patriarchy. Valentin watches the exchange and then appraises me. He holds my gaze and nods at me slowly but repeatedly, like he is deeply agreeing with something profound I am saying, but I haven’t said anything he could be saying “yes” to.

  * * *

  —

  Mama and Misha and I bundle up and step out to explore the city on our free day. I have never visited Kiev in winter and am used to the flood of green over the hills and the slopes and the riverbanks instead of the sad scraggly trees and flat gray sky. We cross the Dnieper to the left bank, where I grew up, and regard the Mother Motherland statue once more. She is terrifying and hypnotic, dwarfing the ancient gold-domed churches below her.

  “Symbol of oppression,” my brother says.

  “Soviet nostalgia,” I say.

  Mama shakes her head, displeased with our observations. “Eyesore,” she declares.

  Sifting through the rubble of her youth, Mama leads us to a bridge a few blocks from her high school, keeping a hand on my back as if I’m planning on taking a spill at any moment.

  “This is where your father and I locked eyes,” she tells us. I have heard versions of the story before. “He loved to cut school and smoke under this bridge. When I walked by one time after class, he gave me this—manly look. He had a reputation for being a bit of a rogue, you see. But against my better judgment, I was smitten.”

  “This bridge?” Misha says.

  It’s a nothing bridge, just some wooden planks hanging over a dirt path surrounded by trees and brambles. I picture a young, rascally Papa smoking under it, tufts of brown hair falling into his eyes. A Papa not much younger than Misha.

  “Your father was so brooding, so handsome. You should have seen him…” Mama says.

  “Gross,” says my brother.

  “Little simpleton, it was a beautiful thing,” Mama says. She squeezes my arm to imply I know what she means. If only she knew what I have been thinking. My parents’ courtship was indeed a beautiful thing, even if it is sad to think of it now. Though what dominates my mind is not their long-ago love but yesterday’s outing—Valentin in the driver’s seat next to me, his jaw firm as he navigated us through the city, the edges of our hands touching near the gearshift.

  “A beautiful thing,” Mama says again as we turn away from the bridge.

  “Sorry if that was depressing,” my brother tells her.

  “Silly children,” she says. “It was a happy memory. Besides, how can I be sad when I have you two? It was all worth it, don’t you see? Oh, dear Oksana, you are going to love being a mother, I just know it,” she tells me. Then she looks at my brother, and looks away.

  * * *

  —

  That evening Mama and Misha have dinner with her cousin and Goth Oksana—“Off to the island of Lesbos,” Mama says with a wry smile—and after Valentin and I stroll down the bank of the Dnieper, we end up at his place. He lives on the top floor of what Roman and I call a doucheplex, a shiny apartment with shiny counters and floor-to-ceiling windows, which looks like it was built yesterday. Valentin asks if I’d like some wine, to call my bluff, but I say yes, and he drives in the corkscrew and watches me and waits and I do nothing, so he pours the wine and extends a glass in my direction and I take a big hearty sip.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?” he says.

  “I didn’t?” I say. I put down the glass. “I thought I mentioned it.”

  He gives me the smile you smile at a liar. “It wouldn’t have scared me off.”

  “I am going to love being a mother,” I tell him.

  “I don’t doubt it for a second.”

  I run a hand down his arm and lose my footing, feel myself dipping into the abyss. Why the fuck not? He’s hot, he’s here, and I might even like him a little bit. I’m tiptoeing over a telephone wire and the night is dark, the wind and bullets hum and whistle past my ears, and I look down and trip, trip, trip, as if I am the lonely soldier of “Dark Is the Night.” All it takes for me to tumble isn’t a declaration of love or the feeling that this man is clutching my heart but having this sexy near-stranger stroke my face as he says, “I want you” in my native language. Nobody has ever said this to me in Russian, and it stabs my soul.

  He kisses me against his douche counter—his tongue is smoky and warm—and whirls me to his bed and he’s on top of me, lifting up my dress, looking up like he’s waiting for me to tell him to stop while knowing I won’t. I arch my back and let him go down on me and think about the baby in there, wondering if he is confused and if he can see a little foreign tongue darting toward him, a less poetic stabbing, but, fuck, I feel like all the bloated stale air that has been coursing through my body for months has finally been let out, and it doesn’t take me long to come. Valentin is serious when he emerges and wipes his mouth like he is at a business dinner.

  I won’t fuck him, but I return the favor—eyes closed after I am reminded of what it’s like to face the dick of a man you don’t love—and amazingly I come again when he comes in my mouth, and then I smooth down my dress and feel like it is all a fair exchange. I freshen up in the bathroom and study myself in the mirror. I put a hand on my slightly swollen belly, thinking I love my baby more than ever, because now we have a secret. In the moment I pictured the child cringing at the sight of Valentin’s trespassing tongue, I became 100 percent sure he was a boy. I just know it. A baby boy like my brother. I will love him until I die.

  Then I rush to puke in the toilet, the release I have been waiting for for months now, and it feels fucking fantastic.

  Valentin drops me off—those damn icons stare me down the whole way home and I stare right back—and I am relieved the apartment is quiet and dark.

  But there’s a light coming from the kitchen. My brother is sitting at the tiny table, staring into the blinding light of his laptop. There is no avoiding him. He stands to face me, the computer glowing behind him.

  “What is the matter with you?” he says. “I mean, really. Don’t you get that you’re supposed to be the fucking normal one around here?”

  “Straight isn’t normal,” I say. “And since when are you so into monogamy? What happened to all your free-love polyamorous bullshit?”

  He ignores my questions, which are beside the point. He takes a step away from me as his screen goes black, retreating into the darkness. With his bushy hair and thick brows, he looks like a grown man; more specifically, he looks like my father. He is my father. How much fucking wine did I have? He is Papa shortly before his death, tired and coming home late from work, so late that I am already getting ready for bed, so late that the only reason he may see for living is Mama and my brother and, of course, me.

  “I don’t get you,” my father says. “You’re finally finishing your stupid book. You’re finally having a stupid baby. What else do you want?”

  I back away from my father, toward my deathbed. I laugh at the enormity of all the other things I want and settle on just one.

  “I wish I could sing,” I tell him.

  * * *

  —

  Baba was cremated, but we still go to the cemetery to pay our respects. She gets to have it both ways, her ashes in an urn and a tombstone next to her long-dead husband and daughter. We stand before the plot with her portrait etched
on the tombstone, one from her younger days, when everyone was alive and she was hip and wore tortoiseshell glasses. The cemetery is bleak and endless, crammed with statues and portraits of the deceased. Vines crawl over the untended graves, but Baba has kept our family plots in top shape. She must have been there recently, because there are bouquets of roses on her husband’s and daughter’s graves. Baba had leaned her daughter’s painting of Kiev’s Mariinsky Park against her tombstone. She preferred the earlier, simpler paintings of Kiev to Aunt Alla’s later experimental work, and I couldn’t help but agree.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I say. “I’ll take home Aunt Alla’s painting of the Dnieper.”

  “That’s wonderful, my darling,” says Mama, squeezing my hand. “Kiev has always been close to your soul too. Your grandmother would have loved for you to have it.”

  I didn’t want the painting because of the river. I wanted it because I wanted to remember the way Baba would stare off at it before bed when we shared a room in Florida. But there was no explaining that.

  Something occurs to me then. “Mama,” I say, “don’t you want to visit your own mother’s…”

  She shakes her head. “What for, dear child? She’s not there, don’t you see?” She looks away, but I don’t let go. My brother has wandered off, inspecting the nearby graves.

  “Who was Yaroslava? Someone from the war?” I say.

  “Pardon?”

  “Your mother. She always called me ‘darling Yaroslava.’ I thought it was someone she knew when she was a kid in the war.”

  Mama laughs heartily. “Why did you think that, silly? No, no, Yaroslava was the washerwoman in our building when I was growing up. She had the most generous cleavage!”

  The discussion is closed before I have a chance to decide whether I’m glad I asked.

  A handful of Baba’s mourners begin to trickle into the cemetery—there will be a livelier crowd at the reception. Valentin is present, though unchanged toward me, as if we had simply completed a business transaction, import-export.