The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

  Then through my hiccups, I hear a voice, a teacher speaking: It’s enough, Darya Ivanovna, let Lena out, she’s learned her lesson. Always pitying the Yids, the monster barks. Enough, the teacher says, her grandmother will be here soon. What can she do to me? the monster says, laughing. They’re speaking things I know. I know that Yid’s a Jew, and Jews are bad but who’s the Yid? Not I! The door is thrown ajar, light gushes in, and there the teacher stands with arms like white wings flapping. She cradles me and whispers: wipe your eyes, Lena, get yourself in order, wash your face, straighten up, don’t feel sorry for yourself. She strips me of my soiled shirt. Naked, I’m fitted in my shuba and pushed into the freezing January gale under the red-rimmed sun. By the time Grandmother Zinayida comes to pick me up, my face is clean and white again, stripped of trauma, compressed into a small hard ball. And when Zinayida asks me how my day went, I say, fine, fine, I played in the snow today with Alla Feldman, we made a snowman with our frozen hands. But then her face transforms, her features wilt, her veiny hand is on my naked chest, her lips press on my burning forehead. My pants are full of vomit, piss, and shit. The fever’s risen to 104 degrees, I’m shaking, smiling, nodding, coughing—the winter gale has come in—see, here, it’s whirring in my lungs. Zinayida grips her skull with fingers stiff from horror, cheeks palpitate from scarlet rage. She yells at everyone, the teachers, monster, children, and seeks a sign, some hint of shame, to trickle out of their unified apathetic gaze. An accident, they say, an unfortunate coincidence.

  She was her kindergarten nurse, I hear my father saying to his mother, she had pneumonia for a month. We wrote a letter to the director of the kindergarten, demanded that the nurse be fired, but she’s still there, working unpunished and unperturbed. Terrible, Grandmother Liza murmurs, terrible, but that is not all of Russia, not all Russians. I plug my ears now harder, a fist inside each hole, and through a distant echo hear the door slam.

  My father grabs my hand and into the rain he takes me, a black gargantuan umbrella opening in his other hand. We’re running to a movie about dinosaurs and earthquakes, an import from Japan. Rain fills our shoes, beats against our legs, washes our faces. Wind pulls our bodies forward, jerking the umbrella from side to side. Try to stay under it, my father says, hide from the rain. But my father is tall and wide like a giant, and I feel like a Lilliputian from the story grandma Zinayida reads to me at night. Swaying, I tilt away from father and gulp the water tumbling from the sky. Hold the umbrella, he says, hold on or you’ll keep getting wet. I clasp the slimy handle in my fingers and squeeze it hard. Wind rages at my back and creeps inside my coat, a serpent of cold air encircling my ribs and thighs. At first I think I’m dreaming, but no, I feel the wind unfurl the sidewalk underneath my feet and up, up, up into the angry air I rise, no longer bound by gravity to earth. I’m flying, look, papochka, I’m flying, I shout, delighted, in his ear. He doesn’t hear me; his thoughts are tucked away in Grandmother’s apartment. Papochka, papochka, I’m rising, climbing, disappearing in feathery black clouds. I’m Jack on the beanstalk. I’m the Snow Queen in the sky. He turns to me abruptly, a stricken twisted face, and at his shoulder, my green galoshes dangle like inverted cactuses suspended from the sky. Who’s the giant now, I wonder, drunk from weightlessness, from power. He grabs my legs and pulls me down; my father’s arms are stronger than the wind. He takes away the magical umbrella, untangling my fingers from its grip. Stay under it, he yells, irritable, scared. My feet are on the sidewalk now, treading the earth like all the other tiny people of the world. I feel sadness entwine my heart, the sadness of not being able to fly.

  Back in our kitchen in Moscow, a red table and red chairs face a window without sun and Babushka Zinayida is fussing over me, beating eggs inside a silver bowl, her face zigzagging in blue-gray wrinkles, her alabaster skin’s like mine, her emerald eyes look at me beneath two blonde brows. I have a surprise for you, your favorite, she mutters, relaxing the space between her brows. I wave my spoon in ecstasy, drooling as I catch Beluga in a pickle-sized jar—a sea of shimmering black pearls. I tear into it, ecstatic, ravenous. I am eight and queenly and special, imbibing a deficit from the black market, the same black market that got Bella her new expensive Levi’s jeans. I purr with pleasure and my fingers work in competition with my tongue. But I am small and my stomach fills up quickly and I say full, I’m full, Grandmother, I don’t want to eat any more. Grandmother’s wide forehead crinkles, a frown gathers in the brows, and she shakes her blonde head at me, her hand at me: hear, stupid child, of a world that was mine:

  It’s 1941 and I’m an angel with golden flowing hair and green eyes and porcelain skin, colors so light, no one ever suspected me of being a Jew. The Russians said, “you’re not a Jew! Tell us the truth: did you mother have a secret lover? Did she sin with a Slav?” I’m eighteen years old and I’m running barefoot in a blue sundress through alleys of pines and un-graveled earth. It’s 1941 and the Nazis have invaded Ukraine and now they’re entering the outskirts of Moscow, moving quickly through our forests and meadows and entering our dachas, looking for Jews, hounding Jews with their German shepherds and bayonets and idiotic ideology. Suddenly people are running, I’m running, everyone is running to the trains to evacuate to the South—to Uzbekistan. I see the Nazi pilot, I see his face. The plane is so low, so low, Lenochka, he can reach out and choke me in his hand, he can pull the trigger. But he only fired bullets at my bare feet. I was saving ten children, eight-year olds, five-year olds, three-year-olds, an infant in my arms. My grandmother, with her royal golden hair and brown eyes, like a queen she presided over her eighteen children, eighteen children, all of whom, except for three, will die by 1945. Out of the ten children in my care, only five will survive the war. The Nazi pilot laughed at me, at me and the children! Laughed like crazy. Laughed and fired bullets. Bullets at our bare feet. Bozhenka saved me, God saved me! My blonde hair saved me. All would have been different if he had seen a Jew. I see the Nazi pilot always—in my dreams, when I wake, when the door shakes. I see him now—shhhhhhhh, don’t ever tell anyone what I tell you—you’re too young to be burdened with my life, so eat, eat this precious food. Grandmother quiets down when my mother and father come in.

  But they’re too late: I heard everything and licked all the caviar away, leaving the buttered bread untouched upon my plate. Why do you spoil her like that, my mother laments, there won’t be any left for Bella; she must learn to share with her sister. She needs the vitamins, Grandmother says, it’s good for her, it’s just for her. And my mother, frustrated, fatigued, plops down next to me. You’re always spoiling them, she mumbles in defeat. I spoiled all of you, Grandmother bites back. My mother sighs, consigns herself to silence. Her face is luminescent white, an oval rising out of a dark red mane. She is in her new silk robe, a grandiose black canvas embroidered in wine-colored roses that stare like rejected lovers from her breasts. Her features soften and a smile blossoms, bathing her countenance in a godly glow. Her lucid eyes swim in blue twilight waters and settle from time to time on my mesmerized face. Will I ever be beautiful like you, I ask my mother. You’re already more beautiful than me, she whispers and her long thin fingers wipe the envy off my face. I push the jar of caviar toward her; I want to share with you, I say. No, no, my mother murmurs, blushing, finish it, I’ll get more from the black market soon.

  How was Kiev, my mother asks my father, how was your mother? But he says nothing; his eyes strike venom at his egg-filled plate. She was sad, I speak for Father, sad to see us go. I feel my fingers numbing, I feel a fight is brewing, my father’s anger growing in each unspoken word. She should come with us, Zinayida says. We don’t know yet, my father snaps, if we’ll even get out. Bella enters the kitchen in a blue silk robe, an imitation of my mother’s. Have you told them yet, she asks. While you two were away—my mother turns to my father, voice like a bowstring breaking—Grisha was attacked. Your grandfather was attacked. Grandmother looks only at me. Behind her high demeanor and stoic face, she’s weeping, jus
t not for us to see. What, how, my father asks and jumps from fear out of his chair. The KGB, Grandmother whispers as though they’re here in our kitchen, hiding like toy soldiers in our red cabinet drawers, they smashed his jaw with a metal knuckle bar. She forms a hard red fist.

  When Grandfather returns from the hospital he looks pale and gaunt; deep creases cut his forehead into roads, distorting the outlines of his eyes. His mouth is toothless, formless, a pitch-black cave, and when he smiles at me, I stare from curiosity and disgust. He wears fake teeth, but only for an hour—for the guests. And when he pulls them out—this bleached white fence out of his mouth—he gags and starts to cough. He smokes three packs a day, as though he’s still young and virile, hanging with his war buddies on the porch, whistling at my grandmother’s undulating behind. He smokes each cigarette with love, bearing in each puff a dole of memory. I hide his cigarettes under my pillow. I hide them in the ground in our park. I send them off to garbage cans in alleys. Where are my cigarettes, he yells, accusing Grandmother, where have you taken my only pleasure in life. You can’t smoke, Grandpa, I tell him, the doctors say you can’t smoke. And so he knows it’s me and ransacks my closets, drawers, and pillows, his porcelain teeth glistening at my dour face. He runs his fingers through my tangled hair, as if to say, that’s sweet of you, child, but you’re too young to understand the old.

  Enraged and breathless, I run to find my parents to complain: he’s ruining his lungs, his heart, his toothless smile. But my mother and my father bear his guilt upon their backs, for they too are smokers, elegant and regal, recent members in this club for shattered nerves. They’re smoking more now that two years have passed and there’s no permission slip in our mailbox, no word yet from the KGB. They have even acquired the physique of longtime smokers, their shakes and twitches calming as they puff. They’re moving seamlessly from pack to pack each day now that the mailbox stays empty through New Years Eve, 1982. They’re closing the gates, Grandfather says, hundreds are being refused. We’re done for. We should have applied sooner, my mother says. Her eyes accuse my father. We can’t become like the Goldmans and the Shapiros, my mother wails, they’ve lost everything—jobs, respect, friends, they’re ghosts now with packed suitcases under their beds. What will become of the children, if the teachers—oh Bozhenka and the neighbors find out, what will Bellochka and Lenochka do? We should never have applied in the first place, my father whispers, but only I can hear him. But Isaac Goldman is a nuclear physicist, Grandmother points out, what are we—nothing—we’re nothing to them! What do they need us for? Bella begins to whimper, tears drawing circles around her gray-blue eyes. We should have applied sooner, she cries, copying my mother, then runs to the middle bedroom where she sleeps alone like the princess on a pea.

  Grandfather smokes as he dreams of America, watching rain turn into sheets of gray, reading newspapers full of lies in the green wallpapered room he shares with Grandmother and me. They sleep on a tall plush bed with lion feet and a metal fortress at their heads, their bodies rising and falling to the sound of their synchronized snoring. Now that Grandfather has a mangled jaw, air rattles on his gums and whistles like a dragonfly he’s caught and caged. With each day he looks grimmer, grayer, his white skin turning a yellow-green, and a cough tears apart his lungs. In America, he tells me, you’ll learn Hebrew and find out about Passover and Hanukkah. What’s Hebrew, I ask. It’s a language that Jewish people speak. Who’s Jewish, I say angrily, we’re Russian, everyone says so! Everyone, everyone, he says, inhaling smoke into his ailing lungs, is stupid! And until you see it for what it is—stupidity as the patriotic hymn of a Marxist Socialist Whoredom, you’ll never be free of it yourself. I’m confused, I whisper.

  Let me tell you a secret, Lenochka, lest you think I’m just an old fool, coughing and croaking like an invalid. I’m a big operator—shhhhhhhh, but you must not tell anyone for I speak now to strengthen you against the future, to give you pride in who you are: I’m fighting rats, you see, suffocating them slowly, dribs by drabs, the information leaks out, soaked up by the hungry on the other side. When you get to America, don’t forget me. But you’re coming with us, I cry. No, no, the rats will kill me soon, my sweet, but don’t be afraid. I’m not afraid. Know that your grandfather did important things in his life, and I’m old now, old enough to die. You must listen to your grandmother, he tells me, for she’s a very great woman and I fear I haven’t been a very good husband at all. That’s because you were fighting rats, I say. That’s right, my sweet.

  Two days later, at two o’clock in the afternoon as the sun seeps through our velvet curtains and dances on our parquet floors, two men appear at the door. They have human eyes and lips and noses, and they possess arms and legs, but I suspect they’re lyudoyedy, blue-bearded ogres, with human blood drying in empty brown veins and green metallic stones inside their ribcages instead of hearts.

  Gregory Abramovich Guildenshtein is having a heart attack, they announce in one voice.

  Who said, Grandmother screams at them.

  I said, my grandfather declares, stepping out of his room, a cigarette butt sitting stubbornly between his lips.

  No, Grandmother begs, it’s not your time yet—it’s not your time. Where, where does it hurt? She’s weeping, my grandmother is weeping and screaming all at once.

  Let’s not play charades! And let’s not make this unpleasant, Comrade Guildenshtein—do not induce us to beat up an old man, one lyudoyed says, his gaze fixed on her.

  You’ve already done that, Grandmother replies, then sputters words that sound like fragmented cries.

  I’m ready, Grandfather says, already clad in his gray traveling suit, a black hat covering his balding head. But Grandmother lays her body down on the floor, a human beanbag, a human shield, and Grandfather leans down and lifts her from the ground and kisses her softly. I’m sorry for all the pain I’ve caused you, my dearest Zinochka, forgive me, Zinochka, forgive me, and she erupts in an earsplitting, heart-quaking, embattled cry. And in that instant, Grandfather disengages and spreads his arms out like a wartime jet. The men mangle his wings and take him away on a white sheet, on a white stretcher, in a white ambulance where he will die. The phone rings a week later and a voice in the receiver states: we are sorry to inform you that your husband, Citizen Gregory Abramovich Guildenshtein, died of a massive heart attack a few hours ago. Was it hours, minutes, days ago, we do not know, and the words, massive heart attack, like massive bullets, reverberate through our home. And when Grandmother hangs up the phone and tells Bella and me that our grandfather has passed away, I will smile. I will remember for a long time that I smiled, and feel horror and stupefaction for smiling. But with time I will forgive myself, for I was only a child and death seemed like a strange place where Grandfather had gone to smoke and dream of America in the rain.

  PART IV

  The Elusive One-Night Stand

  I returned to New York in pieces, weak and depressed; only its vibrancy and anonymity and perennial crudeness gave me relief from my thoughts. There were multitudes of cranky cab drivers; gaseous exhausts from trucks and buses decreasing your lung capacity; vans and SUVs that almost ran you over as you crossed on green light; Fifth Avenue saleswomen who helped you find the exit; art gallery curators who stared you down till you were several inches shorter; outrageous fashions erupting on sidewalks on men and women, gay and straight and transgender, at whom you could gape without feeling self-conscious unless they were famous, in which case you had to jerk your head in the opposite direction to feign indifference; apartments the size of a kitchen sink in a Midwestern suburb with unobstructed views of other people’s perverse habits; and, naturally, rude people who pushed, elbowed, cursed and glared at you in the subway, and for whom you prostrated yourself and murmured “I’m sorry” as they smacked your head with their briefcases (because of the still untainted Midwestern heart you hid in your chest).

  Here where every waitress, doorman, banker, lawyer, housekeeper, taxi driver, doctor, butcher, and c
ashier was a closet writer, painter, dancer, singer, and musician—here I belonged, specifically on the corner of 44th Street and 7th Avenue, where a neon sign read Fantasy Hotel and directed one to use the exit door to enter. On Bella’s generous loan, I called this Broadway hole my home until I got a job and a more permanent hole for myself. Murals of jungle animals were etched into walls, and a leopard-print blanket straddled the king-sized bed. There was a coffin-like compression to the space that gave one the sensation of being interred in a cage for futuristic scientific observation. The amenities included Neutrogena soap, a sink large enough to wash one hand but not two at the same time, and cheap polyester linen masquerading (in the brochure) as “Egyptian silk” that enveloped the body like a heating pad. The heater raged incessantly, puffing my face into a fiery dragon. This was a “boutique hotel,” New York’s answer to the standardized and banal Radissons, Hyatts, and Holiday Inns.