“Duty?”
“Duty,” she agreed. “You shall honor your mother and father. But when she is grown, then she will decide for herself.”
“And until then?”
“Until then, she will go to mass as her parents wish.” She cast him a sideways glance with just a hint of sparkle in it. “And she will go with her old grandmother to shul.”
Ganady goggled. “How did you do that?”
“I? I did nothing. But my daughter also has a parent to honor.”
“Is Marija unhappy?”
“Does she seem unhappy?”
“Not really, just...very grown up.”
“Marija is resigned to patience.”
Ganady was much impressed with his younger sister—to be so patient in following her heart. It brought to mind the seeming impatience of his own heart.
“Is that what I should be? Resigned...to not finding Svetlana?” There, he had said it, and it had hurt just as much as he had thought it would.
Baba paused in her washing to look at him, her eyebrows rising until they disappeared beneath the curly fringe of white hair that framed her face.
“Marija can be patient because she has faith. And because she is faithful. Ask yourself—do you have faith?”
Ganny opened his mouth to answer, but Rebecca Puzdrovsky chose that moment to bustle back into the room, a soup tureen in her hands.
Ganny returned to scraping plates into the garbage bowl and Baba Irina began to hum Take Me Out to the Ballgame.
oOo
The next day was much like the last, except that Ganady was at the machine shop earlier. He did his work dutifully and with less fog in his brain than he had the day before. It concerned him, though, that he had not dreamed in the night. Two cockroaches rescued and no dreams to decode. He had been almost certain that these cockroaches were related to Svetlana in some mysterious way—if not literally—and that saving them from death must be of merit. He whispered prayers to the Lord to give him some help in this respect and kept his eyes open for more cockroaches.
He found one just after his lunch break when he went to the bathroom sink to wash his hands. He had flipped on the tap and picked up the bar of Lava soap, eyes searching the corners of the little room for possible cockroach hideouts. Finding none, he turned back to the sink, letting the warm water play over his hands, liking how the odd rough texture of the soap made the foam feel so soft in comparison.
He was rinsing his hands when movement in the drain caught his eye. There, struggling desperately against the flood, was a small black-and-red cockroach, its front feet only barely maintaining a hold on the metal rim of the drain.
Ganny gasped and shut off the water. The little creature bobbed upward and over the lip of the drain, where it lay, spent, sodden and unmoving.
Ganny grabbed a paper towel and slipped it carefully beneath the insect, flipping the edge so that the bug rolled away from it.
Not knowing what else to do, Ganny blew on it, hoping it might dry more quickly, praying he hadn’t killed it. His prayers were answered and the little creature began to move, sluggishly at first, then finally with more vigor. It wiggled its legs and antennae, began fluttering its wings, and at last flipped itself upright on the paper towel.
Ganny breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m sorry,” he told it. “I didn’t see you in there. It’s not really such a good place to hide. Or find water.”
The cockroach responded with the usual waggling of antennae, but did not move from the towel. Ganady wrapped it very loosely so as not to crush it and carried it to his empty lunch box, where he stashed it—towel and all—with more murmured apologies.
“I have to work the rest of the day,” he told it as he closed the lid. “But you’ll be safe in here. Oh, and you’re welcome to any crumbs you find.”
Ganady watched the clock after that, eager to go home and deliver this latest refugee to its comrades. It was about an hour before quitting time when he saw his brother sidle over to his lunch box and flip up the lid.
He was struck dumb, standing there behind a shelf full of machine assemblies, and could only hold his breath, praying that his brother wouldn’t see the cockroach.
Alas, Nikolai let out a yip of surprise and leapt back from the lunch box. When he reached for it with both hands, a murderous gleam in his eye, Ganady shoved himself into motion, darting out from behind the shelf.
“Hey, Nick. What’s wrong?”
“There’s a big old cockroach in your lunchbox!”
Ganny got close enough to snatch the box out of his brother’s hands. “It’s not that big. Actually, it’s kind of small. And a pretty shade of red, too.”
Nick goggled at him. “A pretty cockroach? Is this what you snuck into your lunchbox? I saw you sneak something, but I figured it was some of that streusel Mrs. Heinz made for us. I was going to snitch some.”
“It...it was a piece of streusel,” Ganady fibbed. “This thing must’ve been in there and ate it all up.” Certainly, it had eaten every crumb left over from lunch; the inside of his lunchbox was empty of everything but cockroach and paper towel. “I’ll just go throw it out.”
“I’d wash it down the drain. Or flush it down the toilet. Make sure it stays gone.”
Ganady was already moving toward the little loading dock behind the stockroom. “That’s okay. I’ll just let it out back here. It’ll find a nice garbage can to move into.”
Nikolai watched him all the way out the door.
On the dock, he made a show of shaking the box over a garbage can next to the dock, but with his back to the shop, Nick would not be able to see that the cockroach was wrapped safely inside the paper towel.
When Ganady came back in, Nick was gone. He hid his lunchbox under an empty bin and contrived to work within sight of it for the remainder of the day.
oOo
By the end of his second week on the job, Ganady had rescued close to one dozen cockroaches. In one day alone he carried home three in his lunchbox. He had to be very discreet, for he knew Nikolai was watching him.
He deposited each new refugee atop his dresser. He’d cleared it of everything but The Baseball and his mitt to make room for them all, then reconsidered and replaced the statue of the Virgin, which Svetlana seemed to have found of comfort.
The cockroaches were never in evidence when he first entered his room, but once they sensed his presence they would appear and watch him. But, though he had rescued so many, still he did not dream of Svetlana. He spoke to the cockroaches every day about her, but they behaved as if they didn’t understand him. He began to wonder if they were not simple vermin after all.
He wasn’t sure where they went when they weren’t in his room, but one night as he was preparing to go down to supper, he saw two of them scuttle beneath the door, returning from some reconnaissance.
“You should be careful,” he told them. “If anyone else sees you, they might just step on you. You should especially avoid my Mama and Baba. They don’t like cockroaches much.”
The two paused in their promenade and waggled at him, turning several times back toward the door.
Before he could do more than wonder what had excited them so, the door of his room flew open and revealed Rebecca Puzdrovsky. She had a broom in her hands and a wild look in her eyes, which darted to and fro as if they would leap from her head.
“Ganady, have you seen—” she began, then looked past him, her mouth forming a great O. “Oh!” she said. “Oh! OH!” and then uttered a sound Ganady was sure rivaled those of the most ghastly wraiths from Baba’s tales.
Ganny turned in time to see the cockroaches atop his dresser freeze in abject terror. A second later, they were gone.
Ganady turned back to face his poor Mama, certain of his doom. His prospects brightened somewhat when Baba Irina hove into view behind her daughter.
“What is it, Ravke? You could wake the dead with that screeching.”
“There were cockroaches!” cried Mama, her eyes still s
eeking them in every corner. “I followed two of them into the room, and there were...hundreds of them. There.” She pointed, her hand shaking. “Dancing around the Virgin.”
Baba Irina’s eyes met Ganady’s so sharply, he was forced to take a step in retreat. He shook his head mutely.
“That’s ridiculous, Ravke. What would hundreds of cockroaches be doing dancing around the Virgin?” She pushed past her daughter into the room and went to Ganny’s dresser. “Here, you see, there’s not even one little cockroach here. If there were hundreds of them, where could they have gone, eh?”
Mama approached the dresser with obvious trepidation. “They were there, Mama. I saw. So, maybe not hundreds, but dozens.”
“Yes? Well, where are they now, I wonder? Ganny?”
He snapped to attention.
“Are there dozens of cockroaches hiding in your room somewhere?”
“Oh, no, Baba. Of course not. Why would there be? Where would I keep them?”
“Look, Ravke,” said Baba Irina. “You can see that the street lamp casts some strange shadows on the wall here. It’s just moths fluttering around the window. See?”
And indeed, there were moth shadows that seemed to meld with those cast by the objects atop the dresser. But Ganady knew that was not what his mother had seen. He felt terrible trying to deceive her. His only comfort was that he had told the literal truth; he had barely a dozen cockroaches all told.
At last Baba prevailed, and Mama left the room, grumbling, “But I saw two come in here. Those were not moth shadows. Where are those two?”
Baba Irina shrugged. “Who knows? They could be anywhere. You’ll surely never find them tonight. Let the boy get some sleep.”
The two women left him then, his grandmother giving him a ferocious look as she closed the door behind her, his Mama mumbling to herself about moth shadows.
When their voices had trailed off down the stairs, Ganady returned to his dresser to see if the cockroaches would come out to him. They did. And when they had arrayed themselves atop his dresser, he saw that there were now exactly twelve. He was sure there had only been eleven before. He found the two that had drawn his Mama into the room with them. They were easily recognizable; the one with a split wing he had seen before, but the other—the smallest cockroach of all—was brand new.
He smiled. He had rescued the cockroaches and now they were performing rescues of their own.
“Well done,” he told Split Wing and then, yawning, put himself to bed.
oOo
He dreamed. Perhaps it was the twelfth cockroach, perhaps it was the scare of almost being caught out, perhaps it was neither of those things. But whatever it was, he dreamed.
He was back at Connie Mack, sitting along the first-base line at a night game with Mr. Ouspensky and his Baba Irina. The two old people sat side by side, holding hands. There were other people in the stands, but to Ganady they were merely blurs of color. He couldn’t see their faces and could only hear their voices as that fuzzy, disjointed babbling one hears when one is near sleep.
The night was fine and balmy, the breeze blew in from left field. The players were warmed up and ready for the first pitch.
“Well, Ganny,” said Mr. O.
And his Baba echoed, “Well, Ganny.”
“Well, what?”
“What are you waiting for?” asked Mr. O.
“I don’t understand.”
“What are you waiting for?” asked Baba Irina.
“I’m...I’m waiting for a...a miracle. For magic. I’m waiting for something to happen?”
“Like what?” asked Mr. O.
“Like...I don’t know. If I knew, I guess I wouldn’t be waiting for it.”
“A miracle, he wants,” said his Baba. “How many more miracles do you need?”
“One more, I guess,” he answered, and was startled by the crack of a bat—a sound so loud it seemed to tear the fabric of the night. He glanced up and saw, arcing up through the dark air along the first base line, a majestic pop foul.
He stood. Just below him, near enough to almost touch, Eddie Waitkus fielded the ball and tossed it into the stands. Right at Ganny. He reached up and felt the ball settle into the pocket of his glove.
Around him, the crowd murmured.
“Wow,” said Mr. O. Which was exactly what Yevgeny had said when he had caught the ball in real life.
The murmuring grew, changed, sharpened. Some of the voices seemed familiar. Surely that was his Da he heard behind him. He turned to look over his shoulder, but the stadium lights went out and he found himself in total darkness.
He sat up in his bed, surprised to still be able to hear the murmuring. It was coming from downstairs, he realized, and was punctuated by what sounded like his Mama crying.
He rose, turned on his bedside lamp, and scrambled to find his jeans, which had fallen to the floor at the foot of his bed. He put them on and was pulling a shirt from his closet, when his bedroom door opened and Marija came into the room. There were tears in her eyes, but behind the tears her eyes were as fierce as Baba Irina’s.
“You’ve got to get out of here, Ganny,” she said. “They’ve called the hospital on you.”
“What? I don’t understand. Why would they do that? I’m not sick or anything.”
“It’s the cockroaches. They know about the cockroaches and they think that means you’re meshuggeh. Baba tried to tell them that you’re okay, you just have a quest.”
“She told them that? That I have a quest?”
“Well, actually she told them you have an obsession and that you have to find Svetlana. But it doesn’t matter what she told them; they just think she’s getting old or that she’s meshuggeh, too. They think it’s silly that she should want to marry Mr. Ouspensky. At her age, Mama said—like she was too old to be in love.”
She seemed to remember her mission then, and reached out to tug at his arm. “But you have to go, Ganny. They’ve called the hospital to come get you. I don’t know what will happen to you if they take you away from here. Maybe you’ll never find Svetlana then.”
It did not occur to him to wonder, at that precise moment, that his little sister had mentioned his quest to find Svetlana twice in the same speech. His heart was too full of the chilling possibility that he would be kept from that quest. His mind was occupied with the thought of being locked away and never even knowing what had become of her.
He pulled on his shirt, socks, shoes and a jacket while Marija fretted in the doorway, whispering, “Hurry, Ganny!” at intervals.
He had almost dressed when he saw that the cockroaches had congregated on his dresser, clustered about the feet of the Virgin Mary. He had almost forgotten about them in his distress, and was stricken with sudden fear. What would become of them if he was not around to protect them?
Frantically, for Marija had begun to yip like Esther Isaacson’s little terrier, Ganny dug in his closet for his old school book bag. If he could get the cockroaches into it somehow...
He found the bag and scrambled to the dresser, but the cockroaches, who seemed to sense there was something afoot, had begun to disperse. “No!” Ganny cried, but the insects ignored him. They disappeared like water down a drain.
“Oh, Ganny!” Marija’s voice was shrill with panic. “Someone’s coming up the stairs!”
Well, there was nothing for it but to go without them. And there was no way to go but out the window. So, with no cockroaches, with nothing but the clothes on his back, Ganady Puzdrovsky pulled up the window sash and slipped out onto the ledge. He found himself two floors above the sidewalk with the awning of the front stoop just below. He dropped to the awning, slid from there to the railing of the stoop and leapt to the sidewalk.
He was running before his feet hit the ground and headed for the end of the block. Even so, it was not a clean escape, for he heard a shout from above and behind him, and glanced back in time to see a head pull back into his bedroom window. He ran faster, paying little attention to where he was
going, caring only that there was no one behind him.
When he stopped, he was in Passyunk Square, standing among the bare-limbed trees, staring up at the stars. They looked like tiny ice chips in the sky, remote and cold. They made Ganady realize how alone he was. For the first time in his life, he could not go home.
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket and found them empty. The Baseball was still sitting on his dresser.
Twenty-Five: Sister Cockroach
Bereft, Ganady drifted across the intersection of Thirteenth and Reed and into the alley behind Gusalev & Son’s butcher shop. Light shone from a second floor window, splashing the wall of the building opposite with a fuzzy rectangle of light. Inside the rectangle, a blurry shadow play was being staged, and voices tumbled from the window into the alley below. Ganny couldn’t make out any words, but the heat of argument was clear enough in the emphatic gestures of the shadows and the blistering tones.
He stood and looked up at the window for a while, wondering if that was Mr. Joe up there and who he was arguing with. Well, he owned it was more a monologue than an argument. A man’s voice was doing most of the blistering, while the second individual only offered an occasional bleat of protest.
Svetlana?
He vacillated at the door for some time—reaching for the latch, then pulling his hand away, then reaching again. What if it was Svetlana? What if it was not? He’d already made more than his share of stupid mistakes barging in where he shouldn’t be.
He made up his mind to wait until the muted shouting had ceased and then to see if Mr. Joe would talk to him. He settled himself on the top step of the back stoop and pulled his jacket tight against the cold.
He was nearly dozing when the back door of the butcher shop flew open and someone far too big and burly to be Svetlana bulled out onto the stoop. Ganady had no time to react before he was bowled off the steps and down onto the cobbles of the alley. A large, lumpy object fell on top of him, making him give up all the air in his lungs with a loud, “Oof!”
Princess of Passyunk Page 27
