The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  “They’re better.” declared Peg. “Do they have videos in this country?”

  “Mom, for Christ’s sake!”

  “I’m only telling her she should see the original trilogy.”

  “She’s right,” said Henry, “Episode One sucks.”

  The day Max left passed in the usual blandness of the suburbs. She remembered nothing of it till the night, when she finally got Lucy down and went to bed, exhausted but unable to sleep because Max was late again, and her mother, an iceberg of resentments, floated round the kitchen doing her bit to wind up the stress. She lay awake listening for him and wondering if he really drank alone or if the drink was always decorated with a skirt. Approaching cars sucked up her hope then spat it back as they passed. Way after midnight she rang Henry. He suggested Max was in a drinking ring and would get back in the wee small hours. But Henry made some calls. The awful possibility snapped everyone awake. In several bedrooms across Washington, lights burned and state employees in pyjamas grasped that the unthinkable might have happened.

  About two am Lucy was playing arpeggios with her tiny fingers then shaking as if something above puzzled her. This was a pattern marking her discovery of the world around her. Peg gathered her up, shuffled into the kitchen and ‘phoned the police. When she was told a call on Max’s car was already out she knew something serious had happened. Bars have broads but this had eternity edging it. She remembered his haunted dumbness, hovering above her bed that morning. Numbed with fear, she sat with her shaking baby under the only light in the neighbourhood.

  “How much further?” asked Peg.

  “Forty minutes” translated the shaking baby. Thirty-five years ticked down to thirty-five minutes. The tea planter, Jar Jar Binks fan and dog were gone. Lucy had no grandfathers to flag down passing rides, only a small knot of women squeezing a short length childhood: a traumatised mother, one grandmother shrill and impossible, the other institutionalised. No men inhabited her landscape beyond the stray lovers drawn to Peg’s depressed beauty, and the distant Henry; no pets were allowed but goldfish. Somewhere down the pike Peg had grown into her own mother.

  When Henry and the posse arrived in the morning it was obvious something serious had happened. The car had been found by the baby shop, condemning her to wonder if it were a last regret mailed in code. She had known all night that he was gone for good; deep down all the messages are there to be unscrambled by anyone with a mind to.

  It was explained that Max had been under investigation but no conclusions had been reached, and until they knew what happened his salary would be paid into the family account. If anyone asked, she should say he was away on a project. Had anyone suspicious called? Had he ever acted in a way that made her suspicious? Only about the women she smelled on him among the cocktail vapours. She was shocked and couldn’t grasp the information about his treachery, but when she asked if he had gone to Russia, their evasiveness poured into her like concrete.

  The next night found her back in the kitchen, baby at breast; alone with the night voices insisting she and her child weren’t worth staying for. There were interrogations, shocking questions, long empty days. Her milk stopped.

  “The only good thing is it’s got the little one on the bottle!” crowed her mother, happy that she had been proved right. “I always knew there was something wrong with him.”

  A year after his disappearance, the Kremlin announced he was in Moscow and his salary stopped.

  No one had spoken for miles. The bus was filled with stage fright. She looked at her watch. Twenty minutes.

  Black Sea

  The driver drew their focus from the two bare bodies on the beach to a middle-aged man in polo shirt, shorts and sandals walking from the sea.

  There are no instructions for the epic that wraps itself in ordinariness, no clues on how to cope with the next few ticks of a clock or heart that lead to a dreaded moment. Sliding his toes through the sand towards them, Max clung to the thought that they too would be reeling under the hammer of the next few seconds. He worried that he would sound archaic, use phrases and words that faded with the sixties, sound foolish. What would he say anyway? What might they say? What is the formal language that bridges the unbridgeable? What will he say if Henry suggests they have a drink? That was the easiest route for most; the stiffness melting, the laughter after the second glass, the ease, the natural inclination to fondness of everyone, all in a few mouthfuls he daren’t take.

  He pushed on past the happy kids and the topless Germans, towards the mini bus that had brought the judge and jury to his house. Notions of mending fences had been washed away by the sheer absurdity that there were any fences left to mend; they had been atomised decades ago. He had visualised Peg a thousand times in the past few days and had come up with no stratagem to deal with the awful prospect of seeing her again. Now he drew close enough to recognise the silhouetted head in the minibus, but a drag of skin from chin to neck shocked him. The same broad head bulked up beside her. Henry was occupying more space these days and Max supposed his own roughened edges would shock them. They had been such glorious young creatures. The sun suddenly caught Lucy’s blonde head at the passenger window, staring at him like an onlooker at an auto accident.

  He left the sand and crossed the road easily, as if he were sauntering back from the john after the ruckus at the hotel, put his hands on the sill by Lucy, and nodded.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  Peg, the hundred-metre freestyle champion in the Eisenhower years was now a painted, bejewelled grande dame of the Biltmores Arizona. Tucked away in the shadow at the back of the minibus, she had a dreadful Dorian Grey impact on Max.

  “You made it.”

  “Yeah.” Lucy broke the American paralysis. Shock buzzed the minibus as she introduced Timmy and Arnold. “You know the others.”

  Time had disarmed them. The great division that straddled the twentieth century and split the shadows in the minibus and the old man leaning against it was nothing more than memorabilia in a collectibles market; history had moved backwards to raise the ravenous gods of the old religions and beach these Cold War refugees as out-of-date modernities. Everything was neutralised in a lacuna of self-consciousness, wordlessness and inactivity, but the driver wanted to get home and he shifted the historical stasis, opening doors, unloading suitcases and ushering them out. Max led to the little house with apologies for its simplicity, and they followed like sheep into a male nest where nothing matched, and everything was marked with the imprint of unaltered habits.

  Coffee was offered, the bathroom pointed out. Brief outbursts of chatter rebounded in the silences. The little house thrummed to the strain of verbal constipation. Non-sequiturs bounced from free university places for Georgians in Germany to the beautiful dolphinarium in Batumi, and whether the accordion was the national instrument. But the personal disintegration that accompanied the long swan song also hit them. Max ripped them from youth to age in one leap. Lucy was a decade and a half older than Peg had been when the rheumy face replete with evasion currently making coffee in the kitchen, first caught her eye.

  As Max produced coffee aromas in the kitchen, there were things to be taken in: books, ornaments, caps of a kind once found on men with ponytails in San Francisco. The first sprays of evening pink dusting the headland treetops prompted clichés on charm and beauty. Everyone was drawn to but didn’t mention the three topless Germans bringing their Teutonic exhibitionism to a little place that like their American guests was still easily shocked.

  Henry found refuge at the piano and to his adagio vamping they took turns for the bathroom and observed the differences in this small house from those of their homeland: the appalling absence of television; the sense of time layered into the walls; the kilims, seat covers and cushions with their alien patterns, the wild flower and grasses dumped in cheap jugs: shapes and smells from an inc
omprehensibly different civilisation, and Gia’s smooth desk supporting stacks of papers, a thumbed copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and an old Soviet typewriter which drew Arnold to its antique mechanics like a wasp to honey. It was a home laden with strange traps for them. In the bathroom vases of flower mottled the white walls and a few local luxury products softened the Spartan functionalism.

  Lucy was the first to notice the absence of alcohol, and wondered where he had hidden it. With his reputation it would be around somewhere. The others also noticed, discreetly. Nevertheless, Henry could do with a stiff one. Later. A glass of local wine perhaps, under a vine, with his feet dangling in the Black Sea and the strains of a distant accordion on the evening breeze. Peg stayed fixed on the horror of the nipples on the beach. Timmy slid to the stained glass panes in the sidewall window and pretended to be scrutinising them and the view of the headland at the end of the beach. Lucy joined him; nodded back at the girls on the beach and bustled up her own tits and they smirked.

  Max brought in a tray of small cakes and tiny cups and disappeared again when Henry made the first blunder by suggesting to Peg that he looked good. This propelled Arnold to a window to itemise the trees in Max’s garden: orange trees, magnolia, possibly a walnut, and some coniferous that had him beat.

  “Thujas.” carried clearly from the kitchen; the spy was listening, “African, originally. Sometimes known as the arbor vitæ.”

  The light through the coloured panes turned the grey varnish on Lucy’s nails brown. The headland forming the west horn of the bay burned bright and hot and the houses in its blue shadow seemed cool. It was a little paradise, worn at the edges. She could see why her father had ended up here. Timmy talked quietly about the peoples who had passed by, Greeks, Romans, Persians and the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan.

  “The Romans called it Iberia, like Spain.”

  “Couldn’t they think of something else?”

  “Georgian wine was big in Ancient Rome.” He wondered if he should have mentioned alcohol.

  “Been reading up?”

  “On the ’Net. You’re dad’s on the ’Net.”

  “I know.”

  The coffee tray entered in Max’s uneasy hands, the cups trembling as they were brought to the table. The act of pouring became ceremonial, conferring a respect as if these simple actions transcended regret and treason. Keep pouring the coffee, each seemed to say – nothing can happen while the coffee is being poured. For Lucy, the little black connection between jug and cup released a wisp of steam and recalled a cabinet of pastries in an ex-communist café under the Popeye forearms of the solid ladies of a solid past. Arnold could feel the stupidity of the grin he had fixed on his face and as the coffee aromas reached him tried to remember when he last trimmed his nose hair. Henry had never been short of conversation; discussions, anecdotes and words were the material of his income and influence, but watching the coffee hit and jump in the little cups, the topics, jokes, openers, and points that made him such a smart guy abandoned him. And behind them Medusa stared, daring each to look directly at her and be turned to stone.

  They sipped and nibbled tiny cakes. Mumbled compliments progressed to nothing; reservoirs of small talk quickly baked dry, so Max swung to the practical. He was staying with Shota; the happy couple had the run of his house. After coffee they would be taken to Masha’s, where Peg and Arnold had a room in the house and Henry a bed in the studio gallery under the stars. Masha would be back from Batumi soon, they had after all, arrived a little early.

  “You’re a little late,” reminded Peg.

  The shot across the bows pulled everyone into line. The venom that Henry reserved for Max had been a comfort down the years, but Peg could see it evaporating on Max’s piano stool. An old drinking friendship where they could lean on the bar comparing beach tits and mourn the passing of exaggerated virility threatened to resurrect itself. She felt the flinty edge of everyone’s disregard, as if the pain that drove her from pillar to post were too distasteful to be acknowledged. Decades of humiliation and poverty were passed over for peace with the criminal currently dispensing coffee like glass beads to the Indians. Nothing that happened had any meaning. She sat facing their backs as the villain explained they were invited to a meal at Shota’s after the wedding rehearsal at which there would be an exchange of greetings with the locals and, no doubt, the loaves and fishes of forgiveness would multiply and the swords be beaten into ploughshares. But the healing power of time was not going to remove the old knife twisting in Peg’s gut. They knew they sat with a suicide bomber fingering the detonator.

  Max ploughed on: “At an Orthodox wedding, there is a crowning ceremony in which the family participates.”

  “Crowns?” said Timmy, “Like Queen of England crowns?”

  Peg had never thought of this son-in-law: the extent of his existence was a temporary addition to the Christmas card list. She realised she could pass him in the street and wonder where she knew him from.

  “Yes. We’ll be shown what this entails at the rehearsal. It’s not too complicated. Also the tradition of the bride being given away by the father? In light of the circumstances, it might be more appropriate if Henry….”

  “You do it.” fell like a guillotine from the abandoned wife, reminding everyone that punishment was part of the itinerary. Max looked at his daughter for veto.

  “No. That’s okay. Let’s stick with tradition,” Lucy said as casually as she could, and Peg hissed at the window.

  “I think in Georgian,” said Max, “Am I making sense?”

  “Sounds like you’ve never been away.” Henry’s second gaffe filled the room.

  “Something interesting out there, Mom?” A storm brewed in Lucy’s voice, but Arnold suggested a swim might wash the journey out of them and the thunder rolled away. Max couldn’t find a reason why they shouldn’t swim, as long as they weren’t too long.

  “Mom, did you bring your bathing things?”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  Max bore a straight course through the rest of the evening by guiding them with inexhaustible charm and patience through the rehearsal at the church, a process hardly enhanced by Masha’s sullen presence, although she and his daughter did flicker into sporadic conversation. Peg’s disapproval of this native trophy woman with her earthy fashion, her ethnic beauty and her unadorned but hot womanliness filling the recesses of the church with a sexual waveband was as fixed as a mask. Thereafter every nook and cranny of the evening, the place and the local customs was picked over for disapproval. Max could never remember her like this; she could slip into a certain indifference when she was young, but the change to this hardened state had required years of assiduous application. Glimpses of Henry’s old jokey self peeped through the general anxiety that seemed to be his characteristic now. Arnold, Peg’s third, or was it fourth husband, was utterly charming, a peacemaker and an example of that particular type of unassuming American for whom Max had always had a great deal of time. The long road down the years seemed to have wrung profound changes; it was like seeing only the first and final acts of a stage play. How much of this was due to his impact and how much to the usual ravages of time could not be ascertained, but there was enough in this little church to keep a whole faculty of therapists going for years.

  Timmy was interested in the icons and Max was happy to translate his questions and father Gregory’s enthusiastic answers. Lucy seemed quite mischievous, as if this powder keg they were sitting on would give her a good laugh when it went off.

  Shota’s meal was a roaring success. Several locals had been invited and, with the exception of Lucy, the Americans were introduced to the secrets of the Tamada, the Georgian ritual of talking and toasting, and creating the right ambience for conviviality, in this case conducted by Shota with enough restraint to protect their guests from undesirable alcoholic excess. In fact, the stream of S
hota’s wit and some of the local wines whose viniculture he explained in fine detail, carried the guests into a very relaxed state. Even Peg was able to smile a couple of times and shift momentarily from her aloofness into the current of the evening. Lucy and Max were served a whole range of squeezed fruit juices, cherry, orange, grape, pomegranate, which they discussed as if they were great wines, defining the nose and the aftertaste. There was no lack of wit in his daughter; she could sustain a length of humour farther than he could and to a much more absurdist place. But Max sensed the dark history lurking behind the sociability, the sleeping dragon around which everyone but Peg quietly tip-toed.

  “Best way to handle it,” said Shota after everyone had retired to bed, “get them half-cut. Shame you can’t do it. You’d look less like a trapped rabbit. You’re not going to die tomorrow, Max.”

  That was Max’s conviction. Tomorrow would be the day of reckoning. But it would not come from the family; they would provide the torture; the coup de grâce would come from a Moscow hood. His fears and neuroses were coalescing into a conviction that his daughter’s wedding was the day selected by fate for his death. Despite his best efforts, the reunion of the former Soviet Hero and his family had not only made it to the local press and television but had also been sold to Russian news by some ambitious editor. Tolya might well have seen him over his breakfast eggs; he would certainly have to be some kind of idiot not to now know who Max was and where and when he could be found. And if he missed the information in the newspapers, there was a brief mention at the end of the Moscow evening news.