“Who is he?” Ivetta’s grandfather asked.
“Ivetta’s boyfriend,” Luda told him.
“We invited him?” the grandfather asked.
“He works here.”
“Is that so?”
“He’s the doorman,” Luda said.
“The doorman?”
“Yes.”
“Does it pay well?” the grandfather asked.
“All right,” Kostya said.
“Cash?”
“Yes.”
“By the hour?”
“A flat sum for the night.”
“What about tips?” the grandfather asked.
“Not usually.”
“You live in a house or an apartment?”
“An apartment.”
“Where?”
“Antibes.”
“We used to live there. How many bedrooms?”
“One.”
“What do you pay in rent?”
“Seven hundred dollars,” Kostya said.
“Expensive. You should save up, get a house.”
As her family proceeded into the dining room, Ivetta lagged behind, her face dark with hostility. Keeping a sterile distance from him, she said, “How could you do this to me?”
She spoke loudly enough to cause people nearby to turn their heads. In private, Kostya thought he might have been able to contend with Ivetta’s anger, but in public he felt inhibited by shame. The feeling was the same he had experienced as a boy, singled out before the class, shifting by his desk, the radiators ticking.
“I only asked for one thing,” Ivetta said.
“If it was possible, I would have done it,” Kostya said.
“Do you care about me at all?”
“Yes,” Kostya said.
“No. If you cared about me, you would have never let this happen.”
With a cool finality, Ivetta pivoted on her heel and stranded Kostya in the foyer. He watched as she struck across the floor and into the dining room to join her family. For the first time, he felt the desire to hurt her. He had never done it before, never hit Ivetta or anyone, man or woman, in anger, but at that instant, there was a pressure in his hands and his shoulder blades that wanted release. If he had been asked to describe the pressure, he would have said it amounted to the phrase, repeated: Who needs this? If he was able to step outside or find a quiet corner, Kostya thought he could contain the feeling. If he could blind himself to Ivetta in the dining room, to the people jostling him, to the gangsters at the bar, he could arrive at a solution. Only a few steps and he could be outside, where he could breathe and think. But as he pressed toward the door, he saw the larger gangster waving to him, a leer in his square face, and Kostya did not resist.
“That’s some girl,” the gangster said.
Without answering, Kostya resumed his seat at the bar.
“A good figure and a temper. The sort that likes it rough. Gets down like a dog; begs to be slapped around.”
The guests were all in the dining room now, sitting down to their excess of food. Soon the band would start up. Lyona Ostricker would assume the stage and sing Russian classics and then coarsen his voice and do an imitation of a famous black jazz singer. Guests would toast the objects of their celebrations. Bow-tied waiters would deliver the first course. The dance floor would fill and the band would play Russian and American disco.
“This isn’t going to end well,” Kostya said.
“For who?” the gangster asked.
“Good question.”
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” the gangster said.
“It does if you stay,” Kostya said.
At the far end of the dining room, near the stage, Skinny Zyama was holding court at his usual table. Guests and acquaintances stopped by to pay their respects. The choreographer, a woman twenty years his junior, kept him company.
“You don’t expect us to leave without seeing the famous show?” the gangster said.
“The show is an hour away,” Kostya said.
“We came this far, we’ll wait,” the gangster said.
Kostya regarded the smaller gangster. He sat coiled and seething, his eyes feverish. For the duration of the hour, until the show began, he held the same position. But when the lights dimmed, the people cleared the dance floor, and the prelude for the spectacle began, he started to shift in his chair. And when the dancers—Ivetta included—assumed the stage for the Fiddler on the Roof number, the smaller gangster lowered himself from his seat and made for the men’s room. Without a word, the larger gangster followed.
The Vegas-style floor show normally lasted half an hour. What intermittent changes the choreographer imposed never altered the length of the show. The guests came with the expectation of a half-hour’s entertainment by versatile performers. After the Fiddler on the Roof, there was something in which the dancers leapt across the stage dressed like cats; then there was a scene from Swan Lake; then a song called “Cabaret,” for which Ivetta was the lead. Kostya had seen this incarnation of the show at least thirty times and had memorized its rhythms to the extent that he could hear the words and visualize the steps before they were executed. And he knew that after the end of Fiddler on the Roof, there remained more than twenty minutes in the show—twenty minutes during which the guests’ attention would be concentrated on the stage.
Quietly, suppressing the impulse to hurry, Kostya crossed the length of the foyer to the men’s room. On the way he placed his left hand in his pocket and slipped his fingers into the brass knuckles. With his right hand he pushed open the heavy men’s room door. To the right were eight tall porcelain urinals. To the left was a long expanse of black marble floor, and six white marble basins on nickel pedestals. The walls were covered with gilt-framed mirrors, and by the door were two brass tubs—one filled with fresh linen towels, and the other with a pile of the same towels, already soiled. Opposite the basins were four ceiling-high toilet stalls—slabs of black marble with nickel-plated doors. The washroom was spotless and silent. Kostya listened for some indication of the gangsters. Down the line, using his knee, Kostya tested the stall doors. The first two swung open but the third held fast. At the disturbance, a voice belonging to the larger gangster said, “Occupied.” Kostya jostled the door again.
“Fuck off,” the gangster said.
Gauging his distance, Kostya reared back and slammed his heel against the door. The bolt gave way, and the door flung inwards to reveal the two gangsters. The smaller one was seated on the toilet, and the larger gangster squatted in front of him. It took Kostya a moment to decipher what they were doing. The smaller gangster had his jacket off and one of his shirtsleeves rolled up. A belt was cinched at his biceps and a syringe protruded from his forearm. So far as Kostya could tell, the man did not look conscious.
From his position on the floor, the larger gangster gave Kostya a look of animal hatred.
“My brother is sick,” he said.
An instant later he sprang up. Kostya moved reflexively, slipped to his left, shifted his weight and threw an uppercut that caught the gangster’s jaw. He felt the force of the blow through the brass knuckles and into his shoulder. He could not remember when he had hit anyone as hard, and he felt a shiver of pleasure descend through his knees. The gangster tottered to one side, bumped against the stall and then pitched backwards onto the floor. He lay there, prostrate, breathing raspingly. Kostya saw blood on his face and shirt collar and a spreading pool, oily black, on the dark surface of the marble.
For a time the only sound in the room was breathing. Kostya heard his own, that of the beaten gangster, and the slow, nasal exhalations of the smaller gangster, slumped against the toilet tank. Kostya tried to settle his pulse and clear his mind. Both men were breathing; they would live. Kostya had contained the mess to the washroom, and if he acted quickly he could summon Skinny Zyama, remove the gangsters and clean up without disturbing the guests. Nobody could accuse him of failing to do his job, but Kostya derived little contentment
from this. The job was something he no longer wanted. The thought of pleasing Skinny Zyama or of sitting at the bar another night to watch Ivetta dance seemed unendurable. It occurred to Kostya that he could leave the gangsters to be discovered by Skinny Zyama or someone else. He could walk away. While the show was still on, he could leave without attracting attention. He could find another apartment and another job no worse than this one. It did not need to be difficult.
Kostya took another moment to compose himself. He examined his hands and saw blood. If he stepped out, he could not step out covered in blood. But before he could consult the mirror, he heard movement at the men’s room door. Kostya blocked it with his foot.
“Busy cleaning. Use the women’s room,” he said.
“The hell I will,” the man replied and kept pushing.
Kostya slipped his fingers back into the brass knuckles before he released the door and Ivetta’s grandfather forced his way in.
“There’s been an accident,” Kostya said.
“I can see that,” Ivetta’s grandfather said.
The old man bent and examined the gangster’s broken face.
“It only looks bad,” Kostya said.
“I was at the front. I’ve seen bad.”
He walked over to the smaller gangster and placed a hand on his chest.
“Still beating,” the grandfather said.
The old man then stepped into the neighbouring stall and urinated. When he finished he moistened a towel in the sink and handed it to Kostya.
“There’s blood on your face,” the old man said.
“It’s his,” Kostya said.
“He needs an ambulance,” the old man said.
“If you think so,” Kostya said.
The music for “Cabaret” flowed into the washroom as the old man opened and closed the door. As the door swung shut, Kostya’s thoughts turned to his own grandfather. The man had died when Kostya was still young, but Kostya could recall sitting with him as he related stories of the Great Patriotic War. A German grenade had taken three fingers off his left hand. On the back of the hand, he had the date and place of the battle tattooed in green ink. At that time, reminders of the war were everywhere. There were tributes and parades to honour the veterans. Movie theatres showed documentaries and heroic epics. In the streets and back lots, Kostya pretended with his friends that they were the Red Army on the attack. To cries of “Forward, comrades!” they rose from culverts and trenches and charged across the steppe, rifles pointed, greatcoats flapping. Kostya hadn’t thought about any of this in years, though at one time he had dreamed of glory on the battlefield. Later, these dreams were supplanted by dreams of the ring.
Kostya failed to notice that the smaller gangster had begun to stir until the man half-raised himself from the toilet. Kostya watched with a measure of sympathetic curiosity as the gangster scanned the room, absorbing the details: the broken door, the blood, his brother’s disfigured face. He lifted his eyes to Kostya as if seeing him for the first time.
“Where am I?” the gangster asked.
“The Russian Riviera,” Kostya said.
The gangster rocked on his feet and spread his arms across the stall, his elbows locked, his torso tilted forward.
Kostya expected him to collapse at any moment. He looked like a fighter who had gotten up when he should have stayed down, whose pride and courage would only be rewarded with a harsher beating.
“How did I get here?” the gangster asked.
“I don’t know,” Kostya said.
“How do I get out of here?”
“I don’t know that either.”
About the Author
DAVID BEZMOZGIS is an award-winning writer and filmmaker. His debut story collection, Natasha and Other Stories, won the Toronto Book Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book, and was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award. His first novel, The Free World, was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His second novel, The Betrayers, was also a Giller Prize finalist and the winner of the National Jewish Book Award. His writing has appeared in many publications, including The New Yorker, Harper’s, Zoetrope: All-Story and The Best American Short Stories. David has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and a Radcliffe Fellow. He is the director of the Humber School for Writers. Born in Riga, Latvia, David lives in Toronto.
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Also by David Bezmozgis
The Betrayers
The Free World
Natasha and Other Stories
Copyright
Immigrant City
Copyright © 2019 by David Bezmozgis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Cover illustration: Shutterstock
Some stories in this collection were previously published in a slightly different form: “Immigrant City,” Tablet magazine; “How It Used to Be,” Zoetrope: All-Story; “Childhood,” The Walrus; “Little Rooster,” Zoetrope: All-Story; “Roman’s Song” (published as “The Proposition”), Harper’s Magazine; “A New Gravestone for an Old Grave,” Zoetrope: All-Story; and “The Russian Riviera,” The New Yorker. Special thanks to the editors of the earlier versions of these works.
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition: MARCH 2019 EPub ISBN: 978-1-4434-5780-4
Version 01282019
Print ISBN: 978-1-4434-5779-8
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