The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  Moscow, 1968

  Helena’s three-family building sat on the back half of a divided lot on the Cambridge–Somerville line, tucked in behind another house. A trellis, sagging from the weight of a Concord grape vine, covered the flagstone walk. Crushed fruit littered the concrete steps leading to the porch, where all the names on the mailboxes gave an impression of serious overcrowding. Below Helena’s name on the third floor mailbox was that of her son, Jonathan. He lived in Jamaica Plain but registered his car in Cambridge. A long list of Tanzanian names covered the second floor mailbox: Membe, Batenga, Bukurura, Amani, etc. There were actually only three single men living in the apartment, but not always the same three. As they moved in and out, the list was appended with new names, written on masking tape in various hands. On the mailbox for the first floor, along with “Gulnaev”—Helena’s Section 8 tenants, a family from Chechnya—were several other Chechen surnames; probably relatives using their address for some official business.

  It had been a nice little junkyard district when Helena bought the building fifteen years earlier, in the early ’90s—only a few houses on her end of the block. Since then, condominium complexes and parking garages had sprung up everywhere. Her building was hemmed in on three sides, but her south windows faced the open sky above her neighbor’s back yard. One moonlit night, Helena and Jonathan had sneaked past the neighbor’s house with two passive solar panels and installed them on south wall of her building to supplement the forced-air heating system. The results had been disappointing, though, and now she was blowing insulation into the ceiling of her kitchen with a machine she’d rented by the hour. She worked slowly. At seventy-one, she’d become unsteady on a stepladder. Insulation escaped from the keyholes she’d cut in the drywall before she had a chance to cover them up, and clouds of itchy fluff blew around the room, sticking to her sweaty arms and neck and to her tights. The hose kept clogging. Each time, she had to climb down, turn off the machine, and pull the impacted wad out of the nozzle. She was beginning to worry that she wouldn’t make it back to the rental place before they closed.

  She heard a knock on the back door and descended the ladder carefully. Zabet, one of the Chechens from the first floor, stood in the dark stairwell holding a Pyrex dish. Zabet’s hair, cut stylishly short and dyed a reddish brown when Helena had last seen it, was covered now with a black hijab. It made a striking combination with her thin, gracefully arched eyebrows, which were tattooed on—as were her eye- and lip-liner. Helena smoothed the fluffs of insulation from her own hair and asked Zabet in. The Gulnaevs were political refugees. They had been living in Helena’s first-floor apartment for seven and a half years. Zabet and her husband, Axmet, had two children: a son, Adlan, now twenty, and his sister Alla, who was seventeen and no longer living at home. All of them were dark and lithe, with long, straight noses and intelligent, almond-shaped eyes. Their beauty somehow made their problems seem more tragic.

  When they first arrived, Zabet often came to Helena for help. Helena welcomed the opportunity to use her college Russian. She read employment ads for Zabet and helped her apply for food stamps. These were the sorts of things she’d dealt with herself thirty-five years earlier when she was newly divorced, with a son and a daughter of her own. She found charter schools for the children. Also a Balkan choir, a homework club, and a dance school that offered sliding scale tuition.

  At first Helena had a hard time making sense of their story—because her Russian was rusty, and because they’d moved around so much. Axmet and Zabet had met as college students in Novosibirsk and fallen in love, to the disappointment of both families, who’d had other plans for them. They’d lived in Grozny and in Zabet’s home country of Dagestan before settling in Kyrgyzstan, where Axmet had relatives. Then, around the time of the second Chechen war, Axmet had lost his job. Zabet described arrests and beatings—sometimes attributing them to ethnic hatred, sometimes to bad luck or random chance, sometimes to professional or family jealousies. Even when Helena didn’t understand the words—visilat, obvinyat—she could guess their meanings from Zabet’s dramatic expressions.

  During the their few years in Cambridge, things seemed to go all right for the Gulnaevs. Helena helped Zabet pay for a cosmetics course, and she got a job in a salon in Brookline, where the clients were mostly Russian Jews. Axmet found work at a muffler shop. Somehow, though, setbacks always outpaced advances, and they weren’t quite able to cover their expenses. Axmet had health problems. Adlan graduated from high school and enrolled in classes at Bunker Hill Community College, but he dropped out within a few months. Zabet told Helena it was because his classes were too easy—that he was planning to apply to some real colleges.

  As their problems mounted, the family seemed to retrench. Zabet and Alla began covering their hair. Adlan grew a beard and began attending a local mosque. Only Axmet was unaltered; he still shaved and wore work pants, running shoes, and fitted t-shirts that showed off his boxer’s physique. Then, unexpectedly, they took Alla out of school. The concern was that she was “having boyfriends.”

  “She’s becoming a wild girl, Galina,” Zabet explained. “You don’t know how wild.”

  While Helena was still thinking of a way to get Alla back in school, she learned of her engagement to a Chechen boy whose uncle was a wealthy businessman in Kazakhstan.

  “Does she want this?” Helena asked.

  “Yes,” Zabet said. “She wants away.”

  Alla and her new husband would live in Almaty. She could finish school there, Zabet said. She was interested in the law, or maybe social work. Helena couldn’t honestly say her prospects there were worse in Almaty than in Cambridge. Somehow, though, she ended up back in Chechnya living with her in-laws. In Grozny, of all places, where the Gulnaevs’ journey had begun. Within a year she had a baby.

  Zabet handed Helena the Pyrex dish and stepped into the kitchen. “I brought you cabbage with meats and rice. I think you like this before.”

  “Golubtsy,” insisted Helena. “Bolshoi spasiba.”

  “Yes, of course, golubtsy.” She collapsed in a chair. “Oh, Galina!” This was what she called Helena. “Is problem with Alla. She is in Grozny hospital.”

  Helena sat down across the table and winced. “Alla is sick?”

  “She have a fever, very high fever, and pain in stomach.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “Well, you know Movladi’s mother make her work too hard.”

  Helena had heard this already. It was much as Zabet would reveal of any misgivings. “But do they know why she has a fever? Is it some kind of infection?”

  “Yes, infection.”

  “What kind of infection? What’s wrong with her?”

  Zabet tugged nervously on the sleeve of her sweater. “I wish she could go to Kizlyar. To the better hospital, for antibiotics.” Zabet’s family was in Kizlyar, just over the Dagestan border.

  Helena shook her head, not understanding. “They aren’t treating her? No antibiotics?”

  “Of course, but I call this morning and she still have a high fever. I don’t think they are giving her real drugs. You have to pay to make sure they give her real drugs, not counterfeit. I know the doctor in Kizlyar to get them.”

  “Maybe she should come back here if she’s sick.”

  “No, no—is better there.”

  Helena didn’t have the heart to mount a defense of the American medical system. She submitted to it herself only when starkly necessary.

  “How much money do you think you’ll need for this?”

  “Well, something else. I wish I could go to Kizlyar, to take care from her. And I know we already owe you. I have some necklace that I can sell. Antique necklace. I can show you. But I’m asking, can you lend the money now?”

  Zabet’s face, a pale oval inscribed by black fabric, was pinched with fear for Alla. Of course Helena would give her the money, but she already felt the drag of futility.

  It was 8:30. She’d have to keep the insulation blower for
another day.

  Axmet leaned into the engine of Jonathan’s Subaru, listening. Jonathan liked Axmet very much. He was compact and muscled, and Jonathan particularly admired his shapely Caucasian moustache. He could be moody, sometimes passing Jonathan in the stairwell of his mother’s building without a greeting, but there was usually a kind of conspiratorial manliness about their interactions that Jonathan found flattering. A few times he had even been invited into the Gulnaevs’ kitchen for a glass of brandy, which had been served in a cordial glass from a mirror-lined credenza jammed up against the fridge.

  “Bad sparkplug wires,” Axmet said, straightening up.

  “Didn’t you change them last month when you tuned it?”

  Axmet shrugged cryptically and closed the hood. He had been a mechanical engineer back in Chechnya, but Jonathan suspected that he was not a very good auto mechanic. His repairs were never without complications. For instance, the Subaru had been guzzling fuel since the tune-up. Jonathan was loath to complain, though, because Axmet had only charged him for parts (air filter, points, plugs, and wires). Axmet himself had insisted on listening to the engine just now; he’d been sitting on a kitchen chair on the sidewalk when Jonathan pulled up.

  “I can replace wires.”

  “Well, I’m kind of running around today, Axmet.”

  “Leave the key, Jonathan! I can fix it now.”

  “I told my mother I’d take her to Home Depot. Can I look for you in an hour or so?”

  “Of course, Jonathan!”

  This was all part of a complex system of barter between his mother and the Gulnaevs. Axmet worked on his Subaru and Helena’s Civic. She’d had eyeliner tattooed on her face at Zabet’s salon. (The idea creeped Jonathan out). Zabet was always bringing food upstairs: black bread or borscht or some Chechen dish. All this was in exchange for rent forgiven—their mandated contribution to the Section 8 payment. And, he suspected, other favors. As much as he liked Axmet, Jonathan found the Gulnaevs frustrating and depressing. The stories his mother told him about them were full of baroque Chechen problems requiring Chechen solutions: bribes, arranged marriages, Soviet-era medicine. It seemed to him that the family was not any better off after seven years of his mother’s interventions, and he wondered if she would have become so involved with them if they were from somewhere else. On her bookshelf: Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Idries Shah.

  “Tell your mother dryer is fixed,” Axmet called out as Jonathan climbed the front steps. “Tell her it was thermal fuse. And thanks her again. For Alla.”

  Jonathan found Helena in her kitchen. She poured her coffee into a mayonnaise jar, screwed on the lid, and put the jar in her purse—one of her bizarre habits of thrift.

  “Axmet says to thank you for Alla. What does that mean, thanks for Alla?”

  By the set of his mother’s jaw, he could tell she’d loaned them more money.

  “What do you need at Home Depot?” he asked when she didn’t answer his first question.

  “A door.” She belted her jacket. “For the dining room in the first floor. Zabet is bringing Alla back from Dagestan in a few days with her baby, and they need turn it back into a bedroom.”

  “Alla’s moving back in?”

  “Zabet doesn’t want to leave her with her husband’s family while she’s recuperating.”

  “Recuperating from what?”

  Helena waited until they were in Jonathan’s car to answer. “The doctors said it was herpes simplex five.”

  “Simplex five? I’ve never heard of that. Did her husband pick it up from a hooker?”

  She frowned. “I should do some childproofing.”

  “How long is she staying?”

  “I don’t know. I’m hoping she doesn’t go back at all. Zabet didn’t come out and say it, but I think her husband has been abusing her.”

  “Jesus. What next?”

  Helena looked tired under the fluorescent lights at Home Depot. As she reached up for a package of cabinet latches, Jonathan noticed that her tights had worn through at the heels. It infuriated him to think how the Gulnaevs must see his mother: a rich American landlady. “You should get the cheapest piece of hollow-core shit they have, Mom,” he said as they walked through the aisle of doors, craning their necks.

  “Hah. You sound like Adlan. I asked him what happened to the old door, and he said he threw it away. ‘I never saw a piece of shit like that before I moved to your country.’ That’s what he said.” She leafed through the doors on the rack like pages in a newspaper. “The cheapest six-panel is eighty dollars, without the hardware. Maybe I can get something at the salvage yard.”

  The rest of them were depressing. Adlan, though, Jonathan actively disliked. He assumed Adlan, who struck him as some kind of charlatan with his skull cap and hiphop pants, was behind the family’s religious turn—and therefore, he assumed, this latest misery.

  “Why do you let him talk to you like that?” he said. “They aren’t even paying rent.”

  “Yes they are.”

  “You told me they weren’t.”

  “I’m getting Section 8,” she said crossly.

  “I know that. But you said they were supposed to be paying some of it themselves.”

  “Axmet lost his job. Zabet’s hours got cut back.”

  “Of course they cut her hours back. Who wants to get make-up tattooed on their face by a lady in a burka?”

  “It’s not a burka. It’s a hijab.”

  “Anyhow, I guarantee you Section 8 did not approve that apartment for four adults and a baby.”

  Helena took the mayonnaise jar out of her pocketbook and unscrewed the lid. “Maybe it would be better if Alla and her baby stayed upstairs with me.”

  “What? Where are they going to sleep?” Helena had two bedrooms in her apartment, but one was stripped down to the studs and completely filled with tools. “Mom?”

  “I heard you. They can sleep in my room, of course.” She screwed the lid back on without taking a drink.

  “And where are you going to sleep?”

  “The sofa pulls out.”

  Jonathan enjoyed telling people about his mother’s crazy building: the Chechens, the Tanzanians, sneaking around with the passive solar panels. Still, the thought of her in her flannel nightgown, stacking the cushions on the floor and pulling out the sofa bed, of the dusty old blankets he remembered from his own childhood, her scratched reading glasses and pill bottles on the cluttered end table—the whole picture filled him with shame.

  Helena had spent a week removing the old shingles from the front wall of her building—a job that should not have taken more than a few days. She pulled out the nails with a cat’s paw, bundled them with twine, and stacked them in the alley on the side of the house so she could put them out for the trash men a few bundles at a time. Now she was nailing on new shingles, working from the ground up. She used a chalk line to keep the courses straight. She was almost up to the second floor windows. Looking around, she saw that she’d forgotten to bring the level with her the last time she moved the plank.

  Axmet sat on a kitchen chair at the end of the flagstone walk, looking out at the street. It had become his regular spot in the last few months. Helena called out to him: “Axmet, can you pass me that level?” He didn’t turn around, so she called again, louder this time, and he jumped up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you. Could you pass me the level?”

  He got up and steadied himself against the neighbor’s house.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Headache.”

  Helena knelt on the plank and reached down as far as she could. He passed the level into her extended hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m so tired of climbing up and down. So, Axmet, did Alla tell you about the place we looked at?”

  “What place?”

  “Horizon House.” She held the level up to the course of shingles and used her cat’s paw to pry loose the one she’d just nailed on. “They offer GED classes. Alla shouldn’t need much help, thoug
h; she could probably pass the test if she took it today. But they do have some job training.”

  “Alla is going to college?” Axmet looked confused.

  “No. Well, maybe. It’s more like a residential program.”

  “Why Alla don’t stay here?”

  “I’m not sure it’s . . . well, do you think it’s safe for Alla and her baby to stay here right now?”

  “Why not is safe?”

  “You know her husband’s been calling, right? Threatening to send someone to take the baby?”

  His face hardened. “Don’t worry Movladi. I can take care Movladi.” He sat back down on his chair, facing away from the house.

  Upstairs in her apartment, Helena found Zabet sitting on the sofa with Alla’s baby, a curly-haired little girl named Malina.

  “Galina, come sit!” Zabet moved the baby onto her lap and patted the cushion next to her.

  “Just give me a moment,” Helena said, taking off her tool belt.

  “I am showing Malina her mother’s wedding video. Sit for a minute.”

  Helena sat down.

  A snow-topped mountain, a sky of impossible blue. A waterfall dissolving into a beautiful sunset. A pure white dove gliding across the screen, peeling away the sunset with its beak to reveal the image beneath: three old women chopping vegetables in an outdoor kitchen. “Those are Movladi’s aunties,” Zabet said. She pressed fast-forward as a wedding tent went up in juddering video frames. She took her thumb off the button to show Adlan offering a stack of dollar bills to another young man. “Movladi. This is, they are pretending only. A—”

  “A ritual?” asked Helena.”

  “Yes, a ritual. See, Movladi turn him away.”

  Young women danced across a cement courtyard in long, brightly colored dresses, hands held high in elegant shapes. Zabet’s free hand twisted with the rhythm of the pandur music in the background. “See, Malinochka? Your mother is the best dancer. You remember, Galina. You take her to dance class.”