Troika

by Adam Pelzman

  The German woman and the officer guided Julian to the couple. Frightened by everything—new people, a new country, a strange language—the boy stood before them. He extended his hand in their direction. “I am Julian Pravdin,” he declared in Russian.

  The woman stepped forward, leaving her husband behind. Rather than shake the boy’s hand, Irina leaned down and wrapped her arms around him in a slow, deliberate manner. “We’re happy to have you,” Irina whispered. “Frankmann has sent me another gift.” She withdrew and turned to her husband, who looked unsure, trepid, as if it were the first time he had ever come so close to a child. Their own children—two daughters now in their late forties—had left home nearly thirty years ago, and it had been decades since they’d lived with a child of Julian’s age. Irina grabbed Oleg’s elbow and pushed him toward the boy.

  “Pleasure to meet you, sir,” Julian said with a formality he had perfected at the orphanage.

  Oleg sighed at the sight of his new responsibility—and he wondered if his debt to Frankmann would ever be repaid. “Pleasure to meet you, too,” he said, stiffly shaking Julian’s hand.

  After the official completed the required paperwork, the German woman gave the boy a kiss on the cheek and moved to her awaiting family. Julian watched her leave, watched with longing as her children and grandchildren embraced her. He turned back to Oleg and Irina, who walked him to a large American sedan in the parking garage. Julian marveled at the car, with its soft cushions and an illuminated dashboard that was unlike the small, austere Moskvitch and Zhiguli so common in Siberia. Oleg drove and, except for the occasional gasp when her husband glided out of the lane and then jerked the car back into its proper place, Irina sat silently in the passenger seat. The route to northern New Jersey took them through Queens and its endless landscape of semi-detached homes, down through the Midtown Tunnel, under the East River, then ascending to the eastern edge of Manhattan.

  Unaccustomed to driving in the city, Oleg made a series of unwise and strange decisions that took them on a route so circuitous that it resembled the winding nonsense of a child’s Krazy Straw: up Third Avenue to Seventy-second Street, east along Seventy-second, down Second Avenue, west along Sixty-sixth Street to a transverse that cut through Central Park and then south on Columbus Avenue. But rather than continue straight down Columbus, then Ninth Avenue—a clear path to the Lincoln Tunnel and, on the other side of it, New Jersey—Oleg veered left onto Broadway, toward Times Square.

  Irina turned to her husband. “Wrong turn,” she said, unable to contain her frustration any longer. “Again.”

  Oleg gripped the wheel. “This one was on purpose,” he said.

  “On purpose? Now we’re stuck. Why would you get on Broadway?”

  Oleg lifted his right hand and, with his thick thumb, pointed to Julian in the backseat. “To show him the lights. After everything, the boy deserves to see the lights.”

  TRIGGER FINGER

  Julian’s new home sat at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac about a half hour west of New York City. It was a sturdy Tudor built in the 1920s, with a manicured lawn that had clean, clipped edges and a row of rosebushes bearing the signs of fastidious attention: ample and precise spacing, healthy blossoms, the stalks pruned with forty-five-degree cuts, leaves free of spots and mildew, a base clear of weeds.

  When Julian first arrived in the suburbs of northern New Jersey, he was enrolled in a local public school that was poorly equipped to ease the boy’s difficult transition. So when he appeared for the first day of the academic year dressed in new clothes that were too formal for this casual—some would say sloppy—school, he was met by two brothers who bore not even the slightest resemblance to each other. The older of the two—by ten months—was wide in the shoulders, with cropped hair, a pug nose and protruding ears. The younger boy had a slight build, with dangling curls, droopy eyes and a nose that was so long and so impossibly thin that, when viewed from the side, it resembled the beak of a puffin and, when viewed from the front, appeared as if there were no nose at all—just two pinpricks for nostrils. Yet despite their physical differences, the brothers were identical in their provincialism and xenophobia.

  Within minutes of the opening assembly, they seized upon Julian’s newness, his separation from the herd, and they mocked his clothing and his strange accent. Julian tried to avoid the brothers—slipping behind a door, sticking close to a teacher—but despite his best efforts, he was not able to escape their pursuit. They followed Julian down the halls, flicking at his ears, yelling commie, commie! Please, Julian begged in his accented English, terrified and desperate to avoid conflict; please, he cried, one of the few new words he had learned in the weeks since his arrival. But the brothers were unrelenting, and Julian soon found himself cornered, with a gathering crowd of bloodlusters cheering wildly.

  As the brothers closed in, Julian thought about his father’s courage and his mother’s deathbed instruction. Intent on extending his brave lineage, Julian sized up the boys. He decided first to attack the larger and presumably more menacing of the two, and then turn his attention to the thin one with the droopy eyes and the peculiar nose. Commie, they yelled. Anything but, Julian thought, proud of the lessons in commerce he had learned from Frankmann.

  The boys drew closer. And then, just as Julian prepared to throw the first punch, he took his eye off the smaller of the two boys. And in that moment, the less menacing one—in appearance only—leaped forward, like a bullfrog vaulting off a log, and nailed Julian with a clean shot to the jaw that knocked him to the ground. The other brother then delivered four quick kicks to Julian’s gut and ribs before a teacher, noticing the raucous crowd, ran over and intervened.

  “Your first day?” Irina cried from a seat in the kitchen that was stocked with appliances Julian had never seen in Siberia: a dishwasher, a microwave oven, a refrigerator with an ice dispenser in the door, a shiny copper and brass espresso machine. “A fight on your very first day of school, Julian! How could you do such a thing? And a suspension on top of it.” She looked forlornly over to her husband. “Our girls never got into trouble. Did they, Oleg?”

  Embarrassed by both the suspension and the outcome of the fight, Julian dropped his head. With his right hand, he held his aching ribs. Oleg had been in dozens of fights as a young boy, and he understood a schoolboy’s shame. He held his hand up to his wife. “Calm down, Irina, please,” he said as he sipped cappuccino—his favorite—from a porcelain cup. “They called you a commie?” he asked Julian.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And they mocked those handsome clothes Irina bought you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you come back from your first day with your brand-new shirt torn up?”

  Julian rubbed his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said, frightened of what punishment awaited him.

  Oleg placed the cappuccino on the kitchen table, crossed his hands over his chest and smiled. “So, let me get this straight, boy. You can kill a man with your own hands but you can’t hold off a couple of little punks from Jersey?”

  Julian blushed at the reference to Krepuchkin—a man and an event that Julian wished to strike from his memory. “Frankmann told you that? He told you I did that?”

  “Frankmann told us everything, boy. That’s why my wife was so happy to have you.” Julian looked over to Irina, who was fingering a strand of beads. Oleg stood in front of the espresso machine and steamed more milk. “It’s always the little ones who have the trigger fingers,” he said, pouring the hot milk into his cup.

  “Excuse me, sir?” Julian asked, distracted by the beauty of the glistening machine: its levers, its tubes, a shiny eagle on top, the locomotive hissing sounds.

  “The little ones, boy. Always hit the little ones first. And remember, anything goes. The throat, the eyes, the ears.” Oleg paused and looked at the boy, recalling his own difficult childhood in a Saint Petersburg ghetto and the horrors he endured.
“And the groin,” he said to the boy, “don’t forget the groin.”

  Julian looked down to his own waist. “The groin?” he asked.

  “Of course, Julian, anything goes. They don’t follow Olympic boxing rules in the schoolyard.”

  Oleg returned to the machine and steamed even more milk. He pulled a cup from the cabinet and dropped in several spoonfuls of cocoa. After giving the milk one more prolonged blast of steam that created a fluffy froth on top, he poured the milk over the cocoa and placed the cup on the table before Julian. The boy looked at the hot cocoa, leaned over the cloud of steam, inhaled the sweetness—but did not touch the cup.

  “Go ahead, boy,” Oleg directed. “If you were expecting a punishment, that’s not going to happen around here. We’re not your parents, more like grandparents. And grandparents aren’t in the punishment business, you know.” Comforted, Julian reached for the cup, held it with both hands, felt its warmth. “And besides, Frankmann said that you’re a child who needs his space, that you’re not the type of boy who responds well to authority. That with you it’s just the opposite. And the last thing I want,” he said, chuckling with admiration for the boy’s gallantry, “is my skull split wide open.”

  Julian blushed again. Noticing the boy’s discomfort, Irina cast a disapproving glance at Oleg and pulled Julian’s chair close. “I tell you, boy, it’s a blessing that you’re here,” she said. “A gift from God.”

  Rather than consoling him, Irina’s expression of kindness evoked in Julian deep shame; for Julian, being valued invariably preceded great loss. He drank the hot cocoa and looked around the kitchen, careful to avoid the woman’s gaze. “Don’t worry,” she said, “you will get used to this new world. It was a big adjustment for me and Oleg, but now life is easy for us.” She picked up the beads and rubbed them with her thumb and forefinger. “The biggest barrier,” Irina continued in Russian, “will be your English. So tomorrow you will start with a tutor, a professor from the university in Petersburg who now lives in New York. We were on faculty together in Russia, he’s a member of the intelligentsia like me, and a master in Russian, English, French, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, all the greats. He will come here twice a week to teach you. It will take time and much effort, but in three, four years’ time, your English will be better than the philistines’ around here.” Irina noticed a speck of blood in the corner of Julian’s mouth. After placing the beads back down on the table, she licked the pad of her thumb and wiped the blood away.

  That night, Julian lay in his bed, sobbing, replaying in his mind every moment of the lost fight. He longed for Petrov and Volokh, and he mentally revised the confrontation by inserting his friends into the scene. There they were, in the school with him, by his side, ready to fight. Julian imagined Petrov blocking the punch of the thin boy with the odd nose. He pictured Volokh delivering a straight right to the jaw of the older brother with the crew cut. He fantasized about pummeling the brothers into submission, being celebrated by the encircling crowd, hugging his friends from the orphanage. Julian came out of his fantasy and wondered what Petrov and Volokh were doing at that very moment, if they had enough food, if they too had been adopted—or if another boy had joined them in the drafty room with the bulging mattress. Julian wondered if he had been replaced.

  Julian returned to an image of the fight, to the altered, nourishing version in which he emerged victorious. His father now joined him in this fantasy, and he thus imagined himself returning home at the end of the school day and boasting about the bullies he had defeated. His father beamed, praising his only child’s courage, his victory in battle. This imagined validation soothed Julian, brought an end to his tears.

  And then Julian thought of his mother—whose participation in this fantasy was essential. Julian imagined her entering the flat in the boardinghouse with dinner for the two of them: cured meat, potatoes and a slice of berry pie. He saw his wounds, his bruised lip, how his mother licked the pad of her thumb and wiped away a speck of blood from the corner of his mouth.

  “Tell me,” she said to Julian in his imagination—or was it now a dream? “Tell me again how these monsters threatened you, how you were outnumbered, how you prevailed. Tell me, dear Julian, how you refused to submit.”

  TO THE DOGWOOD HE POINTS

  The first time Julian and Sophie ever spoke—years before they became lovers, years before they married—was in a writing class, senior year in high school. Julian was a handsome young man, not conventional or perfectly symmetrical, but beautiful in an atypical way, what with his crooked nose and a pale scar across the right cheekbone, the chipped incisor. There was the tar-black hair and the dark eyes. And then there was his physicality, the twitching litheness in his body, a restlessness deep within. Julian was not large, but strong and sinewy, smooth in his movement—feline, powerful, agitated.

  There were some tough guys in the school, but none wanted any part of Julian—for with Julian there was the tacit threat of disproportionate response, a disregard for civilized combat. It was as if, in response to a light slap, Julian might tear off a boy’s ear or gouge out his eyes. The only fight Julian ever lost, his very first fight, was in sixth grade. A month after that defeat, he approached the two brothers who had beaten him; he took out the little one first with a knee to the groin, then he punched the big one in the throat, smashed his face into a locker. After that, Julian’s reputation was sealed.

  Despite his physical appeal, despite the giggles of the girls behind the locker doors and the notes passed to his unwilling hands, Julian seemed oddly disinterested in the local girls. During his senior year, a rumor spread that Julian preferred older girls, women, in college or out of school, and that he preferred them from the city. At different times, he was said to be dating a freshman from NYU; an actress with tattoos and a Mohawk who lived in the East Village; even a single mom, a waitress, who had a railroad apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. Some of the boys speculated that Julian’s reluctance to date girls from school was really a cover for a hidden homosexuality, but none had the courage to confront him with this accusation. Not that he would have minded. In fact, he would have found it entertaining. He was self-contained, autonomous, sui generis.

  Sophie and Julian sat next to each other in the writing class taught by Margaret Bristol, a middle-aged woman who at first glance appeared dowdy and sheltered. But for those with sharp powers of observation, there were signs that suggested otherwise, signs that suggested Bristol nurtured a fading inner wildness and that, in her youth, her insides and her outsides were aligned. And it was only when she aged and got puffy, when her hair thinned and became brittle, that her physical appearance diverged from her inner life.

  Sophie was intrigued by Bristol, and she searched for clues to the teacher’s past. There was the sloppy tattoo of a serpent on her right ankle that had been rendered hazy and vague from years of sun and migrating skin cells. There was the tiny dot on her left nostril—an indented freckle that Sophie imagined might be the remnant of a nose ring. When Bristol readied herself at the end of each day, she put on round retro sunglasses with blue lenses.

  There was not what one would consider a sexual chemistry between Bristol and Julian, nothing to suggest a teacher’s improper romantic interest in a student and that student’s misguided reciprocity. But what existed between them was a silent understanding that they would be lovers if only Bristol were forty years younger (but not if Julian were forty years older). Bristol, as beautiful and as enigmatic in her youth as Julian was now, knew from personal experience that there were layers of pain beneath his sangfroid. She understood Julian innately, for she too once kept people at a safe distance through similar conventions: aloofness, physical beauty, an internal algorithm that allowed her to quickly distinguish friend from foe and, for the unfortunate one identified as foe, the threat of a brutal and disproportionate response.

  Bristol’s assignments were designed not only to improve the writing skills of
her students, but to provoke self-examination, to coax from her students the mysterious secrets and conflicts that formed their characters—further enhancing their craft in the process. Often, students participated in this exploration with little understanding of their own involvement; they wrote, only to realize after the fact that something unintended and therapeutic had occurred.

  But Julian was keenly aware of Bristol’s intentions—and because he saw in her something daring and protective, not unlike his mother, a deep trust developed within him. So when Bristol asked the students to write about a thing, to describe an object in careful detail, Julian bravely chose a tiger’s paw (wide as a dinner plate, claws curled like the tip of a witch’s boot, leathery pads painted with strips of wet grass); when asked to describe a smell, Julian chose the odor of encroaching death (bitter, acrid, as if milk had curdled and spoiled, but also sweet, like a pot of sunflower honey in the Siberian sun).

  The most challenging assignment coincided with the nearing end of the school year, when Bristol asked her students to describe a fundamental disconnect—where one’s unwavering convictions were at odds with reality, where what one sees and believes and what others see and believe diverge to such a degree that they are irreconcilable. One student described her color-blindness, how she could not distinguish between navy blue and black, and the fashion failures that ensued.