The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

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  —

  Olga happened to be in Moscow on March 31 of the next year. She was hoping to spend some quiet time with us and to tell my mother about Sasha. Instead she stumbled onto a scene of total disorder. I was sitting on the floor, wedged in between the large wardrobe and my mother’s bed, sobbing and refusing to come out. My mother, my grandmother, and my grandfather were taking turns trying to reason with me, using different tactics ranging from bribes to threats to reassurances that my father loved me very much.

  Olga didn’t adopt any of my family’s approaches. She assessed the situation, then marched into the bedroom as if nothing were out of the ordinary, as if I weren’t shaking in the corner, red faced and covered in snot. She announced that she and I were going to make orange ice cream. She was holding a string bag full of oranges in one hand and a large brick of the best Moscow ice cream in the other. She meant business. I didn’t have the strength or the desire to argue with her. Plus, I’d never made or eaten orange ice cream and couldn’t possibly say no to that. I crawled out of my hiding place, and it was only then that Olga alluded to my distressed state. She said, “Go and wash your face, dear. We don’t want snot all over the ice cream.”

  Here is how you make orange ice cream: You halve the oranges, carefully scoop out the flesh, and remove all the skin and pith from the segments. Then you mix ice cream with the cleaned, diced pulp, spoon the mixture into the empty orange halves, sprinkle some shaved chocolate on top, and put it all into the freezer. Our small freezer had no space, so we had to temporarily remove a whole chicken and a block of lard. Olga said that it would take at least an hour for the ice cream to set, and that the best way for me to kill the time would be to read a book. My grandfather was napping on the sofa, my grandmother was cooking dinner, and my mother and Olga went into the bedroom to talk. I took out a book and sat down on our living room carpet to read, but after ten minutes or so I was knocking on the bedroom door, asking if an hour had passed. “No!” my mother yelled. “Go away!” It took me four more attempts before they finally came out. I saw that Olga had been crying and my mother looked shell-shocked, but I didn’t care. I was too excited about the orange ice cream.

  It didn’t disappoint, the rich ice cream with sparkly orange crystals in round cups so cold they made your fingers ache. I tried to make it many times as an adult, but every time it came out bland and runny and desperately silly. Back then, though, I thought it was magical. I proclaimed it the best food I’d ever tasted and hugged Olga with all my might. I did wish for a mother who was more like Olga—kind, pretty, and smelling of oranges—and less like my own mother, who was angry and losing her hair. But I was eight now and my capacity for cruelty had diminished, so I decided not to share this with my mother.

  “I have to tell you something,” my mother said to my grandparents and me as soon as Olga had left. “And you’d better sit down.” My grandparents were putting the dishes away, and I was crouching on the floor, trying to build a castle with the empty orange cups.

  “Olga has a lover,” my mother said. That got our attention.

  My grandmother gasped and my grandfather froze with a wineglass in each hand.

  “His name is Sasha.”

  My grandmother pointed at me to remind my mother of my censoring presence, but my mother just shrugged. She never had a problem with my reading whatever I wanted or watching grown-up movies with her or listening in to gossip. Although I didn’t know anything about sex, I understood what there was to understand about lovers. People fell in love with people while married to other people. When that happened, they wanted to kiss those other people, instead of their spouses, but they had to lie about it so that their spouses wouldn’t be hurt. Most of the movies we watched and most of the books on our bookshelves had this plot twist, so I assumed that the situation was fairly common. It was clearly upsetting, since the people involved often cried or screamed or even engaged in physical fights, but it was nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, I’d now gathered enough clues to suspect that this was exactly what had happened to my father before he left us.

  And now it had happened to Olga. I wondered if she and the man had already kissed.

  “Okay,” my mother said. “That’s not the whole story. Olga’s lover is deaf and blind.”

  Now my grandmother did have to sit down.

  “How can you be both deaf and blind?” my grandfather asked.

  “Easy,” my mother said. “You can’t hear, and you can’t see.”

  This was when I started to laugh. I laughed and laughed and laughed, until my mother had to slap me.

  There were more questions.

  My grandfather wanted to know if Sasha was all right mentally. “Yes, more than all right—he has a Ph.D. in philosophy,” my mother said.

  My grandmother wanted to know when and where Olga had met him. A month earlier. At a conference in St. Petersburg on the philosophy of perception. Sasha had been the keynote speaker.

  “Speaker? How?” my grandfather asked.

  “He hand-signs, Dad!” my mother said.

  “How?”

  My mother looked as if she were about to slap my grandfather the same way she had slapped me, but instead she answered him. “You take a person’s hand and you touch it in a certain way. Different movements mean different letters.”

  My grandfather shook his head. “Her poor husband,” he said. “To have your wife cheat on you is bad enough, but to cheat with a deaf and blind man!”

  “We don’t choose who we love,” my grandmother whispered.

  “This is just another of her whims,” my mother said. “I give it a month.”

  But, of course, it wasn’t over in a month. Or in six months. Or in eleven months.

  We didn’t see Olga in all that time. She didn’t come to Moscow often, and when she did she spent her free time with Sasha. But she called my mother now and then, and they talked on the phone for a long, long time. My grandparents and I would hang about waiting for my mother to finish so that she could recap the conversation for us. My mother always started by saying, “Apparently, it’s still going on.”

  Whenever she could, Olga would beg her boss to send her on a business trip to Moscow. He wouldn’t do this without a bribe. One time she gave him theater tickets, another an expensive bottle of cognac, and then he demanded that she give him her place on the waiting list to buy an imported dining room set. What did she care about tables and chairs, anyway? She cared only about Sasha. Didn’t she care about her husband, too? Of course she did! She felt affection and respect for him! It was very painful to have to lie to him. There were times when she’d return from Moscow on an overnight train, and he’d be there, waiting for her at the station with a small bouquet of flowers. This made her feel just awful!

  “ ‘That man is crushing me with his kindness,’ ” my mother said to us with a mocking smile. She was quoting Chekhov’s “The Grasshopper,” not that I knew that at the time.

  No, Olga’s husband didn’t suspect anything at all. Olga didn’t understand how this was possible. His wife was crazy in love with another man and he didn’t see any signs? Sometimes this made her angry. Because didn’t it mean that he didn’t really know or understand her? If he truly loved her he would notice that something was wrong! Sometimes Olga would get so mad at him that she felt like physically hurting him, like slapping him across the face with that pathetic bouquet.

  Once, my mother said that she had a theory, a theory about why Olga had picked a deaf and blind man. It wasn’t love. Not really. Olga had always wanted a child, so she’d gone and found a man who would be fully dependent on her. Like a child, you see? My mother sounded mean when she said this, and I could see that my grandparents weren’t buying her theory.

  During that year, I often pondered what it would be like to love a deaf and blind man, or, rather, what it would be like to
be one. I’d close my eyes, put my hands over my ears, and try to walk. It was easier than I’d imagined, but inevitably I’d bump into a bookshelf or a corner of the dining table. I’d cry out in pain and open my eyes and my world would be safe and normal again. But Sasha couldn’t do that. He couldn’t just open his eyes and uncover his ears and be able to see and hear, no matter how scared he was in his dark silence. I thought that deaf and blind people had to be exceptionally brave.

  “I don’t think I can stand it much longer,” Olga told my mother one day in early March. What really killed her was how difficult it was to communicate with Sasha when they were apart. Sasha couldn’t call Olga, because of her husband, but Olga called him often. Usually, they were assisted by Andrei, Sasha’s alcoholic roommate, a blind but not fully deaf man, who would hand-sign with Sasha and then translate to Olga. But he could convey only certain information, not the feelings! He was filthy minded and rude, and he was often drunk! He made fun of Olga when she asked him to translate how much she missed and loved Sasha, and he never said that Sasha missed her, too. Olga wasn’t sure if Andrei was choosing not to translate that part, or if Sasha didn’t say that he loved her because Andrei’s presence made him shy. At the end of a phone call, Olga would ask Andrei to pass the phone to Sasha so that she could listen to his breathing. Sometimes Olga would sing to him. Sasha said that, even though he couldn’t hear her, he could feel the vibrations. Olga knew a lot of weepy ballads, and she would sing them as loudly as she could. This was often more eloquent than Andrei’s dumb translations. If only the phone connection were better. There were times when the call was disconnected midsong. Olga would find herself all alone, hundreds of miles from Sasha, sitting on the low wooden stool in the dark hall of her apartment with that greasy old receiver beeping at her like an angry siren, making her want to die.

  “It’s about to end,” my mother said after telling us about the hostile receiver. But it didn’t end.

  A couple of weeks later, Olga called my mother again, this time from Moscow, and announced that she had quit her job and left her husband and come here to be with Sasha for good.

  “You’ll all meet him in two weeks,” my mother said, her voice high-pitched and trembling. “Olga’s bringing him to dinner.”

  “Deaf and blind! Deaf and blind! Deaf and blind is coming to dinner!” I started to scream.

  Coincidentally, my father called to say that he wanted to take me skiing on April 7, the very day that Olga and Sasha were coming to visit. I said no. Who wanted to ski? A deaf and blind man was coming to dinner!

  I can’t and I won’t describe the pleasure of delivering that “no.” For that alone, I’ll be grateful to Olga forever.

  * * *

  —

  On the day of their visit, our entire apartment was filled with reverberating bangs. This was the sound of my mother whacking a beef filet with a meat pounder. We had decided to serve Sasha and Olga the most festive dishes we knew: Salad Olivier and Meat the French Way. The meat needed to be pounded very hard to work the French Way. I really wanted to pound the meat, too, but my task was to cut up potatoes and eggs for the salad.

  My grandmother was polishing the silver and giving the cognac glasses an extra shine.

  “Is it safe to use the good glasses?” she wanted to know. But my mother only groaned and gave the meat another whack.

  “Is he neat with the toilet?” was my grandmother’s next question.

  “Please, stop!” my mother begged her. But my grandfather thought this was a valid concern. He said that after he used the toilet my grandmother often asked him if he was blind. And that man really was blind!

  But the toilet issue wasn’t what troubled my grandfather most. “How will we talk to him?” he asked.

  “Well, Olga knows sign language,” my mother said. “So I assume she’ll hand-sign what we’re saying to Sasha, and then translate his responses to us.”

  That didn’t sit well with my grandfather. What he loved above all was impressing new people. He wasn’t especially informed about politics or culture, but he loved to express his opinions on these subjects in a booming voice and with a stern lowering of his right eyebrow that demanded attention and respect. My grandfather was justifiably worried that, without the added power of his eyebrows and his voice, he wouldn’t be able to impress Sasha with the mere content of his opinions. He ended up taking a leisurely dump while perusing recent issues of Pravda, hoping to build up his opinions so that they could stand on their own.

  Then it was my turn to ask a question, and I used a child’s license to speak what was on everybody’s mind. “Is he scary?”

  “No! Of course not!” my grandmother said without much reassurance.

  And my mother said, “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

  I was ashamed. I decided that even if Sasha was scary, I’d pretend he wasn’t, for Olga’s sake.

  Don’t you just hate those endless minutes between the time that your guests are supposed to arrive and the moment that they actually ring the doorbell? The women in my family are famous for being ahead of schedule, so all the preparations had been made. The Meat the French Way was resting in the warm oven. The salads were mixed and decorated with slices of boiled carrots. The cold cuts were carefully arranged according to a strict color scheme. The people were washed and combed and dressed in their best clothes. All we had to do was wait.

  These days, I have social media to fill such moments. I just refresh my feed again and again, killing minute after nasty minute. But back then what was I to do? I kept running in circles between the kitchen window, from which I could just glimpse the stop where Olga and Sasha would get off the bus, and our front door, where if you pressed an ear to the frame you could hear if the elevator was coming up. This was what I always did when my father was supposed to come and pick me up. “Stop it! You look pathetic,” my mother would tell me then, but she was the pathetic one. Trying on different dresses before my father’s visit, combing her hair this way and that, applying and reapplying her makeup, and then invariably running to hide in the bedroom as soon as she heard me yell, “He’s coming!”

  I managed to miss the first sight of Sasha and Olga. The doorbell caught me unawares, sitting on the toilet, with my underpants around my knees. “No!” I screamed. “Don’t open until I come out!” Few things were more embarrassing for me than being caught on the toilet by our guests. Especially by guests of such magnitude. But, of course, my mother opened the door. Who ever listens to a child begging for something from the toilet?

  I used my grandmother as a shield and came out of the bathroom hidden behind her. By the time we made it to our tiny entrance hall, Sasha and Olga had taken off their coats and were vigorously wiping their feet on the doormat. Sasha was shorter and bulkier than Olga, with a soft square face. His eyes were half-shut; he seemed to be squinting. Olga was holding his left hand. Everybody took turns shaking his right hand, and he sounded out everybody’s name in a strained, bellowing manner. I stepped forward. Olga leaned in to kiss me and said that she had told Sasha that I was her favorite person in the whole world and he was eager to meet me. I saw that she wasn’t just holding Sasha’s hand, but playing with his fingers. Then it dawned on me that this was sign language. That Olga had been talking to Sasha that whole time.

  Sasha put his right hand forward, and I put mine into his. He closed his palm over my fingers and smiled at something behind my back. I turned around, but there was nothing there, except our gurgling fridge with a pile of empty boxes on top of it. Olga took his left hand and put it on top of my head, and he lowered his gaze and almost met my eyes. There’s an expression people use when someone is blocking their view: “Hey, you’re not made of glass!” But Sasha looked through me and beyond me as if I were, in fact, made of glass. I got scared and wanted to hide, but I caught Olga looking at me, so I smiled and squeezed Sasha’s hand. He bellowed my name and signed s
omething to Olga. She translated that Sasha was really, really happy to meet me. I knew that this was true, because she was beaming as she said it. Or perhaps she had been beaming to begin with.

  “You look radiant, Olga!” my grandfather said in his booming voice. My grandmother agreed with him. And my mother asked everybody to follow her to the table.

  Salad Olivier turned out to be less than ideal food for a blind person. All those hard slippery cubes of vegetables and meat, bouncing off the fork, scattering on the plate. Sasha had to chase those cubes around, tapping his fork against the surface of the plate like a cane against the sidewalk. Whenever he managed to hunt down a cube, he’d take a sip of his cognac, as if in celebration. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, even though I knew that this wasn’t polite. “You should be ashamed!” I kept telling myself.

  At first, Olga let Sasha focus on his food while she took on all the talking.

  No, Sasha wasn’t born deaf and blind. He’d lost his sight and hearing at the age of four, after a long battle with meningitis. His parents had refused to treat him as an invalid. They’d taught him to be as independent as possible. Then they’d sent him to a special school for deaf and blind children. This was a really excellent school, and Sasha had proved to be a brilliant student. He had been one of only four graduates who were invited to study at the Moscow State University. Olga said this with exactly the same proud expression that my mother had when she told people about my achievements. All four of those students went on to get their Ph.D.s in philosophy, but Sasha’s achievement was especially remarkable, because he was the only fully blind and fully deaf person in the group. Sasha’s roommate Andrei, for example, could hear just fine with the help of a hearing aid. Imagine how much easier studying must have been for him! It wasn’t really fair to compare his career with Sasha’s.

  “Of course, it’s not fair,” my grandfather said with an impressive lowering of his right brow. “In fact, I recently read in Pravda—”