“Probably Agafia, then?” she asked Ulyanka, her brow in a sarcastic arch while her heart quickened its beat: the conversation was going in a totally different direction from what she expected, but it had begun, Ulyanka was talking to her. “You know, don’t you, that her father was working for the Russians? Did she tell you that?”
Ulyanka shook her head (gosh, it hasn’t been that long since she braided her hair and the braids swung back and forth comically when she did that).
“No, Dad told me.”
She paused, then said roughly, as if she’d had to find the courage to do it: “Is that why you broke up with him?”
Olha licked her suddenly dry lips. She doesn’t know! Thank you, dear sweet Jesus, she doesn’t know anything. To conceal her joy, which spontaneously spread across her face, she turned her back to Ulyanka and opened the fridge. Should she make them cocktails? Same size, like equals?
“That, too, among other things,” she muttered, addressing the cheese. “That was the final blow, the last drop. He just wasn’t the right man for me, not a match. Not like your dad. Would you like a mojito?”
“I’d like a martini, please.”
Olha was struck by the automatic response—it revealed a habit: that’s how you reply to a waiter who’s getting in the way of an important conversation. Who’s Ulyanka been going to bars with? With Hanka Odainyk?
She must be very lonely, that girl, if she came seeking Ulyanka’s intimacy. Trying to become friends on the basis of “my father once had an affair with your mother” did not strike Olha as a normal thing to do; clearly this Hanka, be she Hafia or Agafia (or even just plain old Anna—the name is still stolen, stolen from her, Olha!) must suffer from neurosis and identity issues—Ulyanka told her dad that Odainyk left his family several years earlier and they, too, found out about his death from someone else and not immediately, and were told it was his heart, or maybe a stroke. Of course, to a seventeen-year-old it all sounds the same, Olha smirked, heart attack or stroke, they think fifty years old is one foot in the grave. She did not like the idea of Odainyk dying of a heart condition—it implied he had a heart, not just anatomically, and somehow catapulted him into being “one of us,” one of the Kyivites who, after the troops opened fire at the Maidan protesters, suffered from posttraumatic stress for months, aggravated by the shock of war, and were so easy to pick out from the crowd because they spoke quietly and reacted violently to sudden noises—some froze if a spoon was dropped, clattering, to the floor in a restaurant, some couldn’t swallow solid food because they had a lump in their throats, some had their hair fall out or nails break, the women had their cycles off kilter. Olha herself interpreted her physiological changes as delayed reactions to the stress of war and even humbly bragged about them sometimes, as in, there’s always a silver lining—lost twelve pounds without even trying. At her concerts, people thanked her for her civic engagement, she felt electrified at all times, plugged into the national grief, and friends asked her to take good care of herself and not to take everything so much to heart, because cardiologists and neurologists were reporting an exponential leap in complaints and a shortage of in-patient beds—a collateral effect of any war that usually goes unnoticed, they talked a lot about this. And then she has to find out that the joke’s on her, her civic engagement is plain old menopause, and it’s Odainyk who gets to die of a broken heart. It’s always like that, no sooner do you get used to a certain way of seeing things, you have to give it up, and how are you supposed to hold it together? The kid wants a martini now. Sometimes Olha could understand people who were nostalgic for the old Soviet days: at least nothing ever changed back then. You didn’t have to make any choices.
“We’re out of olives for the martini.”
“I’ll take a lemon, then.”
“Do you, by chance, have a picture of her? On your phone?”
“Of Hanka?”
“Uh-huh.” Olha energetically mashed mint leaves with a wooden pestle in a glass, sucking in the smell with her nostrils, like ozone after a storm. She would win, she would definitely win this duel with her daughter, she no longer doubted it.
“I don’t know. I’d have to look. But you’ve seen her.”
“I have? Where? When?” Forgetting her face, Olha turned back to Ulyanka, who sat slumped at the table—like a guest, Olha thought, She won’t get up and come fuss in here with me. Must still be mad, then. “She’s been to one of your shows—at the Docker, maybe. Or the Last Barricade.”
Olha knew the kid wasn’t being vague on purpose—she truly didn’t keep track. Which hurt even more.
“Do you think I get so few people at my shows I remember them all? And I’ve never sung at the Last Barricade.”
“Well, I don’t know then. Hanka said it was a small place. She kind of dug you, by the way. She said you were okay.”
“She did?”
“Yup.” Ulyanka missed Olha’s irony. “She said that all women do a terrible job with ‘Day Goes, Night Goes,’ but yours was pretty good. And your jazz cover of ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’ sounded even better than Madeleine Peyroux’s.”
“I’ll have you know I covered it way before she did.” Olha took a deep breath, feeling her cheeks flush with inspired outrage. “Back in the nineties. I owned that song. And if people like Hanka’s father hadn’t taken the country apart and sold it to the Russians, who flooded all our airwaves with their dreadful pop, and drove us to begging, my albums would be selling hundreds of thousands today, have no doubt!” For a moment Ulyanka had that bored blah-blah-blah, heard-it-all-before look that was usually followed by a shadow crossing over Ulyanka’s face, which was usually followed by, Just let me be, Mom! and Olha worried that her outburst had severed the contact she had barely established with her daughter—but Ulyanka was about to practice her deposition skills.
“That’s not what Hanka said. She said her father paid for you to be auditioned by some big-deal producers, and they turned you down. Like your range wasn’t good enough for the big stage, or your breathing, something like that. Basically, you didn’t cut it—you were no Billie Holiday, they said.”
“Is that really what she told you?”
Olha suddenly remembered the girl. She remembered the table at which she sat, how she was dressed—in green, like a troll, hair in dreadlocks, a dragon on one bare shoulder, a tattoo or a sticker. Someone like this would indeed attract Ulyanka as an antithesis to all the glamorous rich kids who drove their own Mercedes to class. She felt alone among them. The hip Hanka was awkwardly tall, with broad shoulders and large hands, altogether ill fitted, as if she hadn’t learned how to inhabit her own body yet, or the body itself wasn’t done coming together for her. It took Olha a while to notice the girl’s fine features—she was quite beautiful when she sat still and stopped making faces—but Olha had noticed her not because of her appearance (although yes, the girl’s profile plucked at a forgotten poignant string, made her wish, during the instrumental intervals, for the girl to turn around, let Olha see that profile), but because the girl insisted on being noticed no matter what and thus became a real bother for the musicians: she laughed loudly, talked at the wrong time, made things clatter, until even her friends began hushing at her, and Olha was left with an anxious aftertaste following that performance, unsure whether that girl was drunk, or high, or intentionally came to mock her. Olha dismissed the last thought outright—she could drive herself paranoid with that. And now it comes out.
Turn, girl, do turn around. Let me see your profile.
Again the dark forest came for her, sneaking up, entangling her legs in the dense brushwood, drawing her into the thickets. Setting its sights on her own child.
Oh no, that won’t do. You’ll get squat.
Maybe this is the girl’s way of looking for a relationship with me, Olha thought in a flash of rage-powered insight. What if she wants me to adopt her, metaphorically? To tell her about her daddy—what a great catch he was, handsome and fun? I’m not such a heartless
bitch that I would begrudge an orphan a few good words about her father; he was, in fact, good looking once and a fun time, so why shouldn’t we talk about such a great guy? Like in that Lemkos folk song—“Let’s drink for Yanichko, who has loved us four . . .” A gorgeous song, by the way, just begging for a jazz cover . . . She should invite her and Ulyanka, the two of them, for drinks—not for ice cream, mind you, they are grown women!—for drinks, for martinis, for double and triple martinis, let’s drink, drink, ladies, so we could bring that little bumpkin, apple off a certain tree, into the fold of the family, talk to her about her daddy, may he have what he deserves wherever he is now—share the good memories, leave all the shit outside the frame, of course, the children don’t need to know all that, neither his nor mine, I’m not a bitch, I am a mom, my job is to defend the little ones, and the one in dreadlocks knows this no worse than Putin and acts accordingly—“Our troops will stand behind women and children”—she set herself up behind Ulyanka and is coming at me like a tank. Aren’t you a clever one, Hanka! I wonder, is it nature or nurture—did Odainyk have a chance to teach her how to live like this or did she follow her own nose to the same path? Because the strategy is the same: worm your way into someone else’s life, worm right into their weak spots, get them to feed you, to give to you from their own heart (just close your eyes and think of England, is that really so hard?), to feed you as much as you want, as much as you need to grow and mature. No, girl, you’ll get squat. Wrong door. The only good thing I can tell you about your daddy is to thank him for biting off less of me than he could have, so that today I find myself neither in a ditch nor under a fence somewhere—and I could have been!—that I didn’t become a whore, a drunk, a junkie, and most important, that nothing, you hear me, you little shit, nothing binds me to him today—that I did not give birth to my Hafia Odainyk with the full panoply of her dad’s characteristics that she’d have to spend her whole life spitting out of her—now there’s something that’s indeed worth drinking to, every single day, to celebrate to my dying day how lucky I am not to be your mother. Is this what you’d like to hear from me?
Olha put the drinks on the table and let her hand rest, for a moment, on the glass: the cold touch soothed like a cool towel on a burning forehead. Don’t look at me that way, she begged Ulyanka in her mind. I am not your enemy, daughter dear. It’s not me you have to worry about.
She saw quite clearly, as is only possible among blood relatives—as though she were looking at the world from inside Ulyanka’s head—why Ulyanka, who had already outgrown teenage rebellion, had changed so much toward her recently, and had grown so much closer with her father: for all these months the poor child measured herself against Hanka Odainyk, as in a mirror—measured herself against a girl who she, in her mind, might have been had she had a different father, had her mom stayed with Odainyk. At seventeen this must take its toll, this constant measuring up—especially when the alternative father is dead and can’t interfere with the workings of your imagination. Olha urgently felt she needed to hug the kid and hold her head against her chest, but the fear, deep in her stomach, that Ulyanka would tear herself loose, the way she’d been breaking away from any physical contact with her—cruelly, as if fighting off a rapist—brought Olha back to her senses and stopped her.
“You see, honey,” Olha felt she finally found the right tone, “there’s this thing called the revenge of a scorned man. Men, just so you know, hold grudges much worse than women. Once you leave him, he’ll be making up shit about you for the next twenty years, and tell his children too. What I mean is you can tell your Hanka that at the time her father could barely afford cat food, let alone pay someone to audition me. He was almost half a million dollars in debt.”
Olha was pleased to see Ulyanka’s jaw drop at this, which instantly made her look like her eighteen-month-old self, a funny round-eyed toddler who saw a turtle for the first time, they took a picture.
“Of course, if this girl believes that her father was a gas oligarch and this is a part of her identity, then perhaps you shouldn’t traumatize her, let her keep believing it—just please, not at my expense, because this is fake news . . . so, cheers?”
Ulyanka lowered her head over her glass. Then she turned away abruptly, and Olha, with that same prick of satisfaction, realized the girl was hiding tears—easy to tear up, just like her mom!
“Don’t cry, kiddo,” she said, gently. “It’s not worth crying over. Just a burst illusion—that’s not a loss.”
Now, now was the time, Olha thought, flexing her muscles like a cougar before a leap, to pivot to her losses. And menopause, now the kid will understand. Cheers. She took a gulp from her glass, and the alcohol rolled down her throat like garland of happy lights coming on one by one. The invisible corpse of Odainyk that had been raised for a moment from under the floorboards went up in flames in her mind’s eye, its final sparks circling around the kitchen and disintegrating into dust. Now she’ll be able to mention him to Ulyanka in the future. Or not. It did not matter—she was free. Free.
A fat tear ran down Ulyanka’s cheek and dropped on the table. Oh, baby—Olha felt a moist squeeze inside and a tickle in her nose, but the last thing she needed was to dissolve herself. It was probably because of this swell of sentiment that she didn’t immediately hear the words Ulyanka half sobbed:
“You are such . . . you are all such . . . you all lie.”
“Who do you mean—all?” Olha asked, stumped.
“You! The grown-ups!”
This came so unexpectedly childlike and pitiful from the mouth of her intelligent daughter, straight-A student, who, in conversations with her father, easily deployed words already quite obscure for her mother, that Olha almost laughed out loud—but then realized what Ulyanka said.
“Who’s lying to you?”
“You are!” Ulyanka sniveled. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this? You think I’m stupid, don’t you? No, you don’t even think that, because you just don’t think about other people! You only think about yourself.”
That’s her slapping me back, flashed through Olha’s mind: That’s how she must have felt in the car when I hit her.
“I don’t think about you, do I?” she repeated quietly, voice lowered by a third, into her deep-chest velvety timbre. She hesitated whether to add something more biting (If you’re so unjust toward your own mother, how do you expect to judge other people one day?) but decided it would be too much; Ulyanka’s sense of justice kicked in by itself—the girl blew her nose into a paper napkin and continued more calmly:
“You only think of how to keep me from getting in your way. That’s the way you treat all people, not just me. Like everyone’s doing backup vocals for you or something. You seem like you are onstage all the time, Mom. You want one thing from people, including me, and Dad—for us to harmonize with you. To hit the key, your key. That’s why you don’t have any friends of your own, it’s only Dad’s friends that ever come over here. You just don’t see things that don’t fit your narrative and you want me not to see them either. But I don’t want to live like that.”
“That’s not fair.” Olha felt helpless; she felt she was about to burst into tears—this time not in solidarity of feeling but entirely on her own.
“What’s fair is not always something you like,” Ulyanka recited something she obviously learned from someone else. “You want everything to be perfect. For everyone around you to say what a brilliant singer you are, what a passionate patriot, what a model family you have—heck, if I’d have gotten up onstage and sung with you—you’d be in heaven!”
“Just you wait—live a little, see how other people live, and you’ll understand that you did, thank god, grow up in a model family. I can only hope you can build one as good for yourself one day.”
“There won’t be any liars in my family!” Ulyanka shot back with cold precision, and Olha felt like slapping her again. “You—everything about the way you live seems fake, Mom. Like it’s all for show. Like you’re fo
rever trying to prove something to I don’t know who, I don’t know who’d gotten to you—but you have to keep showing how cool you are and how cool your life is. There can be nothing not cool in your life. If I’d been born with cerebral palsy or something, you’d have hidden me and never mentioned me to anyone, am I wrong?”
Is it, Olha desperately grasped at a new idea, that Ulyanka sees that Hanka girl this way—as a handicapped person, or something like that? She’s always been such a sensitive girl.
“Or what if,” Ulyanka continued, “I quit school and enlisted? Straight to the front, imagine that! Scary, isn’t it, can you do that? You’d be hysterical for days until Daddy brought me back—go ahead, tell me I’m wrong?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Olha’s voice was muffled, a piano with the left pedal pressed. She felt a jolt of fear—a migraine?—Anything but that, I can endure anything, but why is the child being so cruel?
“Am I wrong? You just don’t want to hear the kind of truth you don’t like! You run away from it! Andriy told me his mom made dinner several times expecting you, because you promised her you and Dad would visit—but all for naught, because you did not come, you found something more important every time, a rehearsal, or some other bullshit. You don’t want to see a cripple, do you? Well, you’ll just have to!”
“Wait!” Olha pleaded. “I don’t understand anything. What cripple? Who’s Andriy?”
“Mine!” Ulyanka’s voice welled with tears again, and Olha instantly realized—there it was, the real thing Ulyanka had been keeping down this whole time, her thing. “My Andriy!”
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