The UnAmericans

by Michael Carter

  “Max, this is completely insane. I can understand that you’re under a bit of strain, but don’t go mad with it,” said Shota.

  “Shota, they know for certain I’m going to be at my daughter’s wedding. Time, place, opportunity.”

  “Max, they probably missed it. You know, these people tend not to be big readers and news watchers. And with due respect, you aren’t exactly front-page stuff.”

  “I might be the day after the wedding.”

  But the rational convictions were backed up by something subtler. Life carried a weight of irony that would be rejected in the average script and the law of probability indicated that there should be no surprise when apparently unlikely things happened or strange coincidences collided. They were within perfectly normal sequences of logic. The wedding, far from being an unlikely setting for his murder had a peculiar appropriateness to it. Press would be sniffing around the edges for scandal or stories. It would be easy for a hood to blend in with them and wait for his moment. Psychopaths such as those who had dispatched Gia in such gruesome fashion would derive a further kick of satisfaction from such criminal boldness. It was part of it all, the high of the risk, the hit of the hit. They were like addicts and would no more be able to stop themselves than Max could stop himself all those years before from betraying the people who were the wedding guests next day.

  “Max, don’t you have enough problems without worrying about being shot?” asked Shota, “If things go as bad as you think, it might be a relief.”

  Max had placed himself at the heart of darkness and madness. Now this great mass would move and there was little he could do except move with it and be vigilant. He never thought he would bring himself to this point, where he was throwing himself upon the mercy of his family and offering his throat to an unknown killer. All in a celebration that in itself would become historic in the village, even without the morbid events he felt sure would occur.

  He could find no relief from these convictions, but felt lost in a vortex that was rushing him to destruction. He spent the night before his daughter’s wedding with the Makarov under his pillow. Shota’s spare room was a condemned cell and the scatter of stars he saw through the window, his last, nervy meditation on life.

  Wedding day

  Shota was all Georgian humour and earthiness around Lucy, gently denouncing her father as a run-down intellectual adrift in a land of peasants. Timmy was ignored and breakfast on his second wedding morning became another tranche of small humiliations. The priest asked him a couple of questions and he called Max to translate, while his bride, dazzled with Shota’s Old World masculinity, was ushered under the magnolia to look over the table arrangements for the feast.

  A bottle of five-star French brandy was produced, and even though it was early, there seemed no argument against having it. “I shouldn’t really.”

  “Come on, how often do you get married?” grinned Shota from his Nietzchean moustache, and Timmy watched her transfixed by the bronze liquid gurgling into the glasses and knew there was nothing he could say or do.

  “Let’s go round the other side of the tree,” she whispered in Russian to Shota. “They’ll just have a hissy fit.” And they touched glasses and as it burned over her throat a great sigh of relief bubbled up from her through the magnolia leaves.

  Light smeared the room and the sea fell in the silence. Her place in the bed was empty. Timmy rose and rushed to the bathroom door, “Lucy?” In the front room he lay like a fly against the window. She was missing again. The village was barely discernible in the dawn gloom, then he saw a dim shape moving parallel to the beach in an easy crawl. As his eyes adjusted and saw it was Lucy, he realised it had been a dream. She often had dreams in which she drank; all alcoholics had them, she said. He just had one of her drinking dreams. That was taking co-dependency too far.

  He watched her in the huge space of the sea, at home in all that grand loneliness. Some people seemed so at odds with humanity. Out on the waves, she was fine. He turned back to bed for a couple of hours before another attempt at marriage, lay there and tried to invest the occasion with some significant thought, but found nothing.

  The dawn turned up the bay. Jet lag woke her on her wedding morning to swim in no more light than a tear in the sky, face down, arms lazy and rhythmic, a slow dip and stretch she could keep up for hours, held on the kissing lips of the big sea.

  It was a peace she could never find anywhere else, the sea, the sky, her body and the rest of the world a shore length away. Back home, she often swam way out beyond the jetskis seeking the distant stretch of peace away from it all. Cursed by many of her parents’ demons, she had been blessed with their ease in water. The internal and external clamours faded and gave way to a rising and sinking rhythm, and the complete harmony of her tiny body on the huge seas. But she became aware of her private Idaho being invaded. The stranger bore out in a fast crawl then slipped into an easy breaststroke. A gasp skimmed against rocks quarter of a mile off. Then came the sense of commonality; the wave between two climbers on opposite rocks, the joggers’ nod as they wheeze past each other, and she realised her companion in solitude was her father. They were alone, the thing she wanted and dreaded. They would have to talk. All her questions, banked over the years, deleted themselves. He waved, she waved back; he called, “Lovely, isn’t it?” She called back “Yeah” and suddenly there seemed no need for anything more; they swam around, never closer than fifty yards, and luxuriated in the emptiness, the sea and the growing light.

  Max noticed three gulls cruising for surface food and heard the fracas as they hit the surface. Wings flapped and they squabbled over something, but through the racket he heard her coughing and kicking up and automatically sped towards her. She was in trouble, swallowing gouts of the Black Sea, all her co-ordination gone, as if she suddenly had forgotten how to swim. She didn’t notice him till he touched her arm.

  “Seagulls,” she gurgled by way of explanation and he understood and remembered a giant gull over her tiny body in an American garden and thought all that Freudian shit is true, then.

  She felt calmer with his swimming between her and the gulls, near enough if she got into trouble, far enough to let her be until they hit the surf and walked onto the beach. A child’s giraffe rubber ring watched Max shake sand from her towel. He felt her tense when he draped it round her shoulders and withdrew his hands, but she remained transfixed by the squabbling gulls out at sea. They picked their way between abandoned buckets and spades, wind brakes and loungers.

  The solitariness of the early light drew Max and the sea was his sanctuary. But another swimmer was trespassing and when he saw it was his daughter he had turned back for Shota’s. Then he recalled the priest’s counsel to act as if, and waded out. But he couldn’t tell her this. He wanted to hide his distance from her. It was her wedding day. He was at war with his nature.

  “Mom used to say I was a water baby. I guess I got that from you.’”

  “Her too. She could swim real good.”

  “Really?”

  “Schoolgirl champion.”

  “God.” Her mother was an unknown space, gated and fenced off. The thought of her swimming, having an enthusiasm for a talent, seemed impossible. Lucy couldn’t imagine her in a white cap grinning, maybe even raising an arm in happy triumph at winning a race, being congratulated by friends, pulling herself out of the water and walking to the victor’s podium and the handshakes. The cheers of her classmates, the smiles and the waves, the small moments of pride; a young girl happy with her body. But it had happened. All buried now. She had never seen her mother swim, could not recollect ever seeing her in a bathing costume.

  “Strange to think of her being remotely athletic.”

  “Yes. Tempus really fugits.”

  “Shit!” Her nails dug into his bicep as a gull landed by the abandoned bucket and spades and opened its wings
. “They’re following us!” He turned her up the beach between the giraffe and a canvas chair. She explained how she didn’t know where this fear came from or why it started, that she kept thinking she was over it. But Max recalled waking under that neighbour’s tree to her tiny wails and the huge gull flapping its wings above her. She had shaken like a puppy in his arms afterwards. It seemed too intimate to disclose, as if telling her would open a relationship for which he was not yet ready, or admit to something he didn’t want to be known. All he could do was agree they were horrible birds. As they crossed the sand, other things to say crowded in both but neither found an opener. The night before, he’d kept it formal at the wedding rehearsal and at Shota’s afterwards loosened a little, but when things threatened to get too familiar he found ways to keep distance, translating, and distracting himself with a host’s duties.

  The silence tightened round them and neither could break it, all the way to his little house. Max left her at the door.

  “Well, it’s a big day.”

  “Yeah. Thanks for…”

  He nodded and smiled. “See you later.” He turned for Shota’s.

  She roughed her hair with the towel and crossed to the small side window. Through the orange pane, she saw a distortion of his figure on the road to the village pour and flit from flaw to flaw in the glass. She cursed and her eyes unconsciously scanned the shelves where the drink might have stood.

  When the sun pitched up, a few elegant smocks, sleeveless coats and embroidered slippers shifted among the suits and summer dresses. Peg dismissed them as ethnic Disney, but to Arnold they were the hospitality of legends. Since his commitment to this family adventure, his wife’s hysteria and glimpses of her past induced a sense that everything between them was bogus. Peg never mentioned her history; the mysterious first husband was referred to as a civil servant. Only when he proposed did she reveal the cold war fall out, and this made him grateful that a life that had become routine but contented, now had a little infamy and colour, albeit, second hand. She was beautiful, and low maintenance. She ran the marriage the way she ran the house, formally and to rules from which there could be no deviation and that was fine by him; he liked the quiet life. One day she mentioned casually that her daughter had a drink problem. When Lucy phoned to say she had been clean and sober for six months and was in AA, Peg shrugged and said yes for how long, but Arnold shut himself in a bathroom and wept.

  Two men in beautiful Georgian shirts waved when they saw him at the window. The sky was clear; the blue was urgent with heat. It was a fine day.

  The magnolia lights snapped wanly in the brilliant morning.

  “We have power for the wedding. So far,” said one of Shota’s girls. In the kitchen Shota and Max were arguing.

  “You cannot take a gun to your daughter’s wedding!”

  Max was marooned somewhere the other side of rational thought.

  “Max, leave the gun. You might drop it in the church.”

  He handed it over. “I wish Gia was here.”

  Shota looked up. “Why? He’d only try to dip his wick.”

  Lucy’s wedding

  Timmy and Lucy’s wedding began in the open air with their betrothal in the church porch. Max who had brought and given Lucy away, stood back with Masha to translate and guide them through the ceremony. The sun slanted between tall cedars and warmed their backs. The dome above was missing huge patches of gilt as if it suffered a skin condition.

  Max instructed them quietly as the rings were exchanged then asked them to hold out their hands to Father Gregory, who bound their wrists with his stole and carefully drew them out of the sunlight into the church. The night before, its bleakness had torpedoed Lucy’s spirit. Cheap lamps dumped pools of dim light on chipped pillars and broken flagstones, missing windowpanes and patches of filler on grimy walls. But a few ancient effects worked a magical transformation. Candles glowed through clouds of incense, and through the smoke, gold burned on walls panelled with icons. Into this mix, the harmonies and cadences of Eastern chorale poured from a choir hidden in a gallery over the door, and the intensity of image, smell and sound, all the more powerful for being conducted in a language neither understood, shook their New World sensibilities. Here Christ was the holy source of the long river of faith that flowed through centuries, and not a regular guy in Tommy Hilfiger to be crooned to. Barry Manilow with scripture it was not.

  As Father Gregory drew them along the threadbare carpet from the door to a wooden altar in the middle of the church, the family fell in behind: Max behind Lucy, and Peg behind Max, Masha behind Timmy, and Henry behind Masha. Shota and Arnold made up the rear. Kids wandered, older faces peered from spindly chairs by the pillars, everyone else stood. “Where are the pews?” Peg had asked with contempt at the rehearsal, but this was a nation that prayed on its feet. Saints shone above candle clusters on shrines fastened to pillars or standing free in the body of the church. Necklaces of candle flame snaked into recesses and a tall screen of saints on cream panels rose up in the honey shadows beyond the altar.

  This panoply of celebration of which she was the focus, fermented the contradictions in Lucy. Self consciousness at the attention and feelings of fraudulence were contrasted by a sublime sensation of being touched by something that bored through Time, a long spine of religious constancy from which history hung its flux and madness. The irony struck her that she was being physically dragged to her wedding, physically bound to her husband and being physically pulled to confront a previous indiscretion. The altar towards which Gregory gently drew them was obviously Gia’s. Timmy too recognised the style, unmistakeable as a signature, and the chiliastic power of two millennia of Christ and the Church of Byzantium that had filled him with wonder the moment he stepped into the church ebbed away. In the Master of Heaven’s house, the Dark Angel settled on him as a flock of his wife’s adulteries, and as they stopped in front of the offending altar, he saw Gregory give Lucy a salacious wink, confirming that she was a local item by injection and he was the outsider and clown.

  The Yanks were as overdressed as Oscar nominees in K-Mart. Her mother in blue was a sapphire on fire; the men wore dance band white jackets, cummerbunds with silver paisley waistcoats and under an inflation of LA hair, Lucy strained her shiny Hawaiian wedding dress, gathered in over ambitiously for these thinner sober days.

  Gregory sent the long litany through the incense in a mahogany baritone. Her inner litany was that the choir above them, the glowing saints, the crowns on the altar, the smiling villagers, and the ritual were nothing but her father’s stage management for keeping his distance. Father Gregory winked again at Lucy, then at Timmy; perhaps he suffered a little in translation but he seemed odd and over attentive at times even to their Californian sensibilities. “Mad as a brush” was Shota’s assessment. His intonations prayed for the happiness of the couple, for fidelity until death. The night before when Max translated the final prayer that the marriage bed be not defiled, Peg pin-balled a “Tut” round the pillars. Today that Byzantine earthiness would be lost to her in the streams of Gregory’s Georgian.

  Praying that the couple have children and see their children’s children, Gregory smiled at Peg, the woman the young Max loved, but decades of unhappiness remained set hard and he perceived the colossus of her disappointment.

  “The servant of God, Timmy, is crowned to the handmaiden of God, Lucy, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.” The rings were exchanged, symbolising that the strength of one would compensate for the weakness of the other, and the imperfections of one be balanced by the other, an ideal honoured in their home more in the omission than the practice. Harmonies pushed to a crescendo and as the betrothal ended and the marriage began, they joined right hands and held a candle in their left hands.

  Gregory beseeched the Lord to join these his servants and unite them in one mind and one flesh. A crown like a gia
nt garlic bulb sank Timmy slightly then Masha’s craggy hands lightened the load. Lucy’s pearl and ruby garlic bulb was raised into the stream of notes. It sat on her easily and she realised her father’s hands were taking the weight. Gregory continued with a prayer in Georgian, and lifted a small cup purportedly of wine from which they were to drink three times, but he was aware of the bride’s difficulty around this and had spent part of the morning straining raspberry and sour blackcurrant to match the deep colour of local wines. He chanted the blessing in Georgian, then proudly in his new American English: “You drink from this common cub to show that togedder you share the sweedness and the bidderness which is marruge.”

  A bible the size of a small table was lifted onto Gregory’s shoulder and he turned his back on them to symbolise that it is the Gospel that makes a Christian home and they should follow it.

  “Go.” Max’s whisper brushed across her and she felt him lead her lightly with the crown. They followed the giant bible perched on Gregory’s shoulder in a circle round the cross on the altar, her father’s hands synchronising perfectly with the sway of her movement, the hands of a musician floating the heavy crown perfectly, letting her feel its firmness but not its weight, slipstreaming the Gospel under billows of harmony, and the numinous intoxication the sacrament was designed to charge.

  A child stared up from his mother’s skirt, a constellation of candles reflecting in huge, dark eyes. Villagers smiled, cried, but those with little respect for themselves cannot accept it from others, even the divine, and in the piety and immanence, burned an acid presence in the stones of the church stripping away Lucy’s defences and probing something tender. They would find she was a fake. The ancient ceremony and their generosity oppressed her. Her father’s hands were crowning her, a choir was singing and a priest had learned English for her; “How much do you fucking want?” she screamed silently at her self, “This is what you fucking want!” But she wished she were back in Santa Monica hiding from seagulls.