Immigrant City

by David Bezmozgis

  To placate Kostya, Emil posed a rhetorical question: If Bomka has forgotten about us, why are we still getting monthly cheques?

  The delay was understandable. Lawyers were notoriously slow. And who could compete with immigration officials—bureaucrats—when it came to laziness and inefficiency?

  Emil counselled patience, but he paid a promoter to get Kostya on the undercard of a show in Windsor. This he considered money well spent—many of the fighters on the card would be Americans, and the whole thing would be broadcast on television in Windsor and Detroit. Also, the promoter had given his word that he would pit Kostya against a young fighter, a Golden Gloves champion, handled by smart people, expected to go far. But most importantly, the show would allow Bomka to see with his own eyes the value he was getting for his money.

  The fight was scheduled for the February of a cold winter. To get to Bomka, Emil parked near his mansion and spent the pre-dawn hours wrapped in blankets, sitting in the van. Once Bomka left for work, Emil tailed him to his office. He waited an appropriate half-hour and then followed, bringing with him a box of chocolates for the secretary. When he recounted the story for Kostya, he stressed that Bomka had been very glad to see him—and particularly glad about the imminent boxing match in Windsor. So glad, in fact, that, to undertake the drive, he planned to hire one limousine for himself, his wife, kids and Skinny Zyama, and a second limousine solely for Emil and Kostya.

  “I hope you refused the limousine,” Kostya said.

  “You don’t want the limousine?”

  “Someone who hasn’t won a fight in six years shouldn’t arrive in a limousine.”

  “To be honest,” Emil said, “I don’t entirely disagree, but this isn’t something I could have explained to Bomka Goldfarb. Here’s what I suggest: if it bothers you, ignore it’s a limousine. Pretend it’s the van.”

  But the limousine, a black stretch Cadillac, was not easy to ignore. As soon as they climbed inside, the driver drew their attention to the bar, the television, the VCR, the selection of Russian videos, and the refrigerator stocked with smoked meats and caviar. Everything compliments of Bomka Goldfarb.

  “He has a fight today. No food. No alcohol. No distractions,” Emil said.

  “Too bad,” the driver said.

  “That’s the way it is,” Emil said.

  “It’s four hours to Windsor,” the driver said. “A long time to stare out the window at nothing.”

  “Elite athletes must be focused,” Emil said.

  “No doubt,” the driver said. “I was never an elite athlete myself, but I know something about it. My daughter is a dancer and my ex-wife was a prima ballerina. Danced with Baryshnikov.”

  “Very interesting,” Emil said.

  “Boxer,” the driver said. “If you get bored staring out the window, say the word, I’ll tell you my life story.”

  Eventually, Kostya heard his story, though not before he and Emil arrived at the Bavaria Club in Windsor—a low two-storey building with a wooden roof and white stucco walls. From the parking lot and the entrance, it resembled either a restaurant or a modest hotel. Obeying signs and arrows, Emil and Kostya located the Sports Hall; there they discovered a ring encircled by several rows of metal folding chairs and a handful of people—easily identified as other fighters and trainers waiting for the weigh-in. Emil had never met the promoter in person and so was forced to approach a number of them before being directed to a man younger and fatter than Bomka Goldfarb. The man saw Emil coming and, despite the look on Emil’s face, extended his hand and smiled. Emil leaned into the promoter’s face, ignoring his outstretched hand, and started shouting—mainly in English but partly in Russian. Kostya understood only the Russian, a collection of obscenities bred of the prison camps and the army.

  After Emil finished his tirade, he stalked back to Kostya.

  “We could call Bomka,” Kostya said. “Say the fight is cancelled.”

  “No use,” Emil said. “We’re fucked.”

  In a limousine, somewhere between Toronto and Windsor, Bomka, his wife, his two sons and Skinny Zyama were eating and drinking the things Kostya and Emil had denied themselves. Kostya could picture them all, including Bomka’s wife and children, even though he had never laid eyes on them. He imagined them in the Sports Hall, dressed for the casino but installed on the metal folding chairs, in a half-empty room decorated with German banners and dingy photographs of the German countryside.

  “What do you want to do?” Kostya asked.

  “We came here to fight; we fight,” Emil said.

  Fourth on the undercard, Kostya fought. His opponent—no young Golden Gloves champion—was a grim, heavily muscled black fighter who, in place of satin trunks and boxing boots, wore army surplus shorts and basketball shoes. Outside the ring, with a weapon, he would have been the sort of man Kostya would have been happy to avoid, but inside the ring, restricted to using only his hands, he was plodding and mechanical. Had he cared about the promoter or the spectators, Kostya might have tried to carry the fight into the second round. But there was nobody to impress. Bomka’s wife had taken one step inside the Sports Hall, paused, spoken three words and then she, Bomka and the children had disappeared. Only Skinny Zyama remained, and so he was able to watch Kostya joylessly punish the black fighter to the body and then stop him with a left hook to the temple.

  Afterwards, by way of congratulations, Skinny Zyama handed Kostya a Russian Riviera matchbook.

  “Call if you want a job,” he said.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1974, Mikhail Baryshnikov defected in Toronto. In 1978, at the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee office in Rome, Luda Sorkina brandished the letter Baryshnikov had written to her. The letter was not long, but in it, Baryshnikov devoted an entire paragraph to Toronto. A little provincial perhaps, Baryshnikov mused, but a good place to start a ballet school.

  “At the Riga Ballet, I danced with Baryshnikov,” Luda Sorkina informed the case worker.

  Luda Sorkina displayed this same letter when the family met with a diplomat at the Canadian embassy on Via Zara; she showed it to her remedial English instructor at George Brown College—having had it translated shortly after the family arrived in Toronto; and when she applied for a small business loan from the Jewish Immigrant Aid Services, she carried the letter, her diploma and a Latvian newspaper clipping that included a photograph of herself dancing with Baryshnikov.

  Seated at the bar of The Russian Riviera, Volodya Sorkin told Kostya, “There wasn’t enough room in the marriage for the three of us.”

  “You, her and Baryshnikov,” Kostya guessed.

  “Me, her and the letter,” Volodya said.

  Volodya was a regular at The Russian Riviera. He came not as a diner, but as a patron of the bar. On nights when his limousine wasn’t booked, when he used the car for fares to the airport, Volodya stopped in to catch Ivetta’s performance in the Vegas-style floor show. Before the show, he nursed a drink and talked to whomever was around—mostly to Kostya, who had little to do but sit at the bar. Fights and confrontations were uncommon. The clientele at The Russian Riviera was predominantly middle-aged, educated and relatively well off. Also, it was Jewish. In this respect, Kostya discerned a cultural difference between Russians and Jews: on the rare occasion when there was trouble, nobody pulled a knife.

  Through Volodya, Kostya became acquainted with Ivetta. Kostya hadn’t had much interaction with the dancers and musicians, who socialized mainly with one another, but he had taken notice of Ivetta. Not because of some striking physical attribute—with the costumes and the makeup, all of the dancers looked like slight variations of the same woman—but because she possessed a quality Kostya had observed in the best athletes: she gave the impression of effortlessness. It was the illusion that the forces of time and gravity did not apply equally to all people.

  Her face and neck still flushed with the charge of the performance, Ivetta slid in beside her father at the bar. She kissed Volodya affectionately, and see
med to take no note of Kostya until Volodya turned inclusively in his direction.

  “This is my good friend Kostya,” Volodya said.

  “Very nice to meet you, Kostya,” Ivetta said.

  “Kostya is a boxer,” Volodya said.

  “Was a boxer,” Kostya said.

  “Not anymore?” Ivetta asked.

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “When were you a boxer?” Ivetta asked.

  “It depends who you ask,” Kostya said.

  “I asked you.”

  “Then I would say six years ago.”

  “And if I asked someone else?”

  “Then they might say two weeks ago.”

  Ivetta fell silent, arched her head and studied him. She seemed to be contemplating something, but Kostya couldn’t imagine what. The expression on her face made Kostya wonder if she had misheard what he had said. It was possible, maybe because of the noise in the restaurant, that she had heard not the words he said but instead some strange words that sounded like them. Kostya thought to repeat himself but reconsidered. Instead he told her that he had seen her dance.

  “She’s the star,” Volodya said.

  “She’s very good.”

  “Nice of you to say,” Ivetta said.

  “If I could move like you, I would still be boxing.”

  * * *

  On subsequent nights, even when Volodya wasn’t there, Ivetta took to joining Kostya at the bar. At first, she did so seemingly without intention. After the show, she would pass by the bar, evidently on her way somewhere else, and discover Kostya—unexpectedly, as if for the first time. Kostya would see her brushing past and invite her to sit. Later, the pretense was dropped.

  Initially, their conversations centred on Kostya’s boxing and his life in Siberia. Ivetta seemed interested in things that Kostya found mundane if not embarrassing. But since she claimed a genuine interest, Kostya told her the details of the furniture plant, his boxing trials with Emil, his empty years after the fall of Communism.

  Ivetta spoke about her life with her mother and her own ambitions. Ivetta had been nine when her family came to Toronto and sixteen when her parents had divorced. Her father had worked for years as a taxi driver to support them while her mother tried to establish her ballet school, but once the school was established, she discarded him. In Riga, Volodya had been a civil engineer, but in Toronto he could not find a job in line with his qualifications. Later, when her mother asked for the divorce, she said it was because Volodya was no longer the man she married. She had married an intellectual, an engineer; now she lived with a cab driver.

  To Kostya and Ivetta, independently, Volodya said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Passing them at the bar, Skinny Zyama said, “Don’t get her pregnant. It will kill my show.”

  The night Ivetta finally went home with Kostya, they left the restaurant in separate cars. Kostya drove ahead in Emil’s van and Ivetta followed in a new Nissan Maxima. At the parking lot, Kostya felt the urge to apologize for his car, and in the apartment, he felt the urge to apologize again. Clearly, she was used to better. All he could offer was what Emil had left him. He hadn’t changed anything in the apartment since Emil had departed, cursing the apartment and his possessions—everything he had acquired in his time in Canada. He had never belonged here, he’d told Kostya, and he’d felt, every day, an exile. A man in his fifties should not come to a strange land, not knowing the language, absent connections, and expect to thrive. He had abandoned his homeland because of a pernicious system, but now that the system had been overthrown, he would return. He would go to Moscow, where he could restore his reputation. The borders were open. Russia was replete with talent. A Russian fighter could now ply his trade all over the world—in Europe, in America, in Australia.

  “Keep everything, including the van,” Emil had said. “The ministry mails the registration renewal in October. They have it organized by birth month. Mail them a cheque and send me a birthday card.”

  Kostya slept on the same mattress that Emil had salvaged years before from Goodwill. His furniture consisted of a metal and Formica kitchen table with mismatching pine chairs; a faded grey velour couch; a coffee table with a scored glass top; and a large Zenith television set in a wooden console.

  But in spite of the shabbiness of the apartment and the van, Ivetta didn’t complain. Even as she spent increasingly more time there, she never once suggested that Kostya replace the table or the bed. Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, after The Russian Riviera, they drove to the apartment in their separate cars. On the other nights, Ivetta slept at her mother’s house. Finally, when Luda Sorkina confronted her, Ivetta fled to Kostya’s apartment in tears. She threw herself onto his bed and bawled. She stayed like that for a long time, her back shuddering—either imploring or forbidding Kostya to comfort her. When Kostya laid his hand on her, Ivetta related the painful details of her argument with Luda. Her mother had said cruel, shameless things. Ivetta increased her sobbing when she told him the worst of them.

  “At least your father was something before he became nothing,” Luda had said, “but you, you’re starting with nothing.”

  * * *

  On Saturday, at eight o’clock, in among the arriving guests, Kostya spotted the face of the larger gangster and then that of his smaller companion. Kostya watched them drift from the door to the fountain. The larger one settled in to Kostya’s right and his friend took the next seat over. After nodding to Kostya, the larger gangster asked the bartender for two cognacs, and, when each snifter had been filled, he made no move to pay.

  “We’re guests of Zyama Karp’s,” he said. The bartender glanced at Kostya.

  “It’s fine,” Kostya said.

  “Where is your boss?” the gangster asked.

  “Around,” Kostya said.

  “Tell him we’re here.”

  Kostya rose from his seat and walked the length of the bar to Skinny Zyama’s office. As he passed the gangsters, he remarked that they were both dressed the same as before—with the curious exception that the smaller gangster had holes in his socks. He was seated on his bar stool with his legs bent, and the holes exposed white, hairless skin.

  Kostya found Zyama standing before a full-length mirror, adjusting his suspenders and straightening his bow tie. His shoes were poised beside his desk and his tuxedo jacket was draped over the back of his captain’s chair.

  Turning from the mirror, Zyama eyed Kostya.

  “Fix your tie,” Zyama said.

  Kostya fingered the knot of his tie and gave it a superficial tug.

  “The gangsters are here,” he said.

  “What gangsters?”

  “The New Jersey gangsters.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “Drinking at the bar.”

  “Sons of bitches.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get rid of them,” Zyama said. “Just don’t make a scene.”

  On his way back, Kostya paused to transfer a set of brass knuckles from his breast and into his left trouser pocket. Typically, he did not carry a weapon. Any problem he could not solve with his fists was likely a problem he could not solve. But in this instance, anticipating the gangsters, he had brought the brass knuckles as a limited precaution. He felt their weight against his thigh and checked to be sure that their outline was not visible through the fabric.

  At the bar, the larger gangster was smoking another cigarette and surveying the foyer and the dining room. He watched Kostya’s approach.

  “You told him?” he asked.

  “You should finish your drinks and leave,” Kostya said.

  “Is that what he said?”

  “No. He just said leave.”

  “He’s making a big mistake.”

  “Someone is,” Kostya said.

  “Maybe even you.” The gangster smiled.

  The gangster remained on his stool. Whatever would happen would not happen just yet, Kostya sensed
. The initial crush of guests were then assembling in the foyer—a collection of witnesses and complications.

  Kostya left the bar and took up his position by the door, where he oversaw the familiar procession. Moguls in designer suits—their fortunes amassed in the wake of the Soviet collapse—parked their Bentleys, BMWs and Mercedes and ascended the steps accompanied by their bejewelled wives. Lesser businessmen and professionals—there to celebrate birthdays and significant anniversaries—trooped from Hondas and Toyotas carrying flower arrangements, cake boxes and bottles of vodka. Amid the disorder of coats and the near-suffocating fog of rival perfumes and colognes, Kostya saw Ivetta and her mother approaching—both looking elegant and unhappy. As they neared Kostya, they became more unhappy. With them were an old man and an old woman—Ivetta’s grandparents. Her grandfather was clean-shaven, his hair full and white. He wore a brown suit and, for his age, moved precisely and energetically. Her grandmother, unlike most women her age, had hair that was neither dyed nor cut. Instead, her grey hair was gathered in a bun. She wore a colourful shawl over an oriental-looking dress and held her husband’s arm. When Luda addressed Kostya, the woman abided patiently.

  “So you’re him?” Luda said.

  Before he could answer, Luda turned to Ivetta.

  “Is this him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are your manners? Why don’t you introduce us?”

  Painfully, Ivetta made the introductions.

  “Mother, Kostya. Kostya, my mother.”

  “Why so formal?” Luda asked. “We may be in-laws. We should embrace.”

  That said, neither she nor Kostya inclined to embrace.