“I guess so.” Daniel looked intensely uncomfortable.
“No, don’t worry about it; it’s what we would have done,” Gennady replied. He felt better now, as if the scales had balanced between them: it was possible even to be magnanimous. “I want to try your mother’s Christmas cookies. Are these also springerle?”
The look of relief on Daniel’s face was almost comic. “She’s never made those before. There are always sugar cookies, and I bet she’ll make gingerbread men now that Toby – that’s my nephew – is old enough to bite off their heads. And Mrs. Gottwald down at the Journal has probably sent lebkuchen…”
***
Of course, Gennady knew that not all Americans lived like this. He and Daniel had visited Good Shepherd subscribers who lived in squalid apartments, listing trailers, little farmhouses that still lacked indoor plumbing. This house, these decorative tins that Daniel and Gennady were helping Mrs. Hawthorne fill with five different kinds of cookies, this was the life of the haute bourgeoisie – and if in the Soviet Union people of a similar professional stratum lived the squalid apartment life, well, wasn’t that equality? Just because one followed a profession, why should one live better than the proletariat?
In Moscow, this reasoning would not have held water for three seconds: just look how the high Party officials lived! But in America, with no Party officials in sight, it offered a fragile thread of comfort or at least moral superiority.
“I don’t suppose we could mail one of these tins to your folks in Russia?” Mrs. Hawthorne asked.
“Oh…” Gennady stared at the linzer cookies packed on top of the boxes, their jam filling winking like jewels. “The customs officials would eat it.”
He was suddenly afraid that she would ask about his folks, and hastened to change the subject. “Who will receive these cookies?”
Mrs. Hawthorne rattled off a list: relations, coworkers at the Journal, neighbors, friends from church. “I hope you’ll take these over to the Greens, Daniel. You know Helen’s living at home again since her husband died, God rest his soul.”
“Ma,” Daniel groaned, and then swallowed his exasperation and said, “Of course, Ma.”
Gennady perked up. “Helen?”
“She was my girlfriend in high school,” Daniel said. “But she broke up with me after I left for college because she’d fallen in love with someone else, and just because he’s dead now doesn’t mean she wants to get back together with me, Ma.”
“She might,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. “How can you know if you never see her? They were inseparable in high school,” she added, as an aside to Gennady. “They started going steady junior year. Daniel gave her his class ring – ”
“Which she mailed to me during my second semester at college! Because she fell in love with Reggie!”
“Because she didn’t want to wait four years for Daniel to graduate to get started with her life,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. “Which is fair enough, of course. Half the girls in her class married right out of high school; she didn’t want to be left out. And I’m sure she loved Reggie. But she loved Daniel, too, and I don’t think anyone ever totally gets over someone they truly loved. What do you think, Gennady?”
Gennady nibbled a linzer cookie thoughtfully. “Perhaps you are right,” he said, “that if you have really loved a person then there will always be a sort of tie between you. But that tie isn’t the same thing as love, it’s just an echo of it, you couldn’t base a marriage on it all on its own. But,” he added, because the opportunity to tease Daniel was irresistible, “after all, maybe it could grow again into love. Daniel should take the cookies to the Greens and see.”
Daniel cast his eyes at the ceiling. “Et tu, Brute?”
But he gained a reprieve for that night: it was already dark by the time they finished packing the tins. “You can go to the Greens tomorrow, Daniel,” Mrs. Hawthorne declared. “Tonight, we’ll move right into the kitchen for the blini. I got smoked fish down at LeClair’s, Gennady – I expect it’s not quite like the smoked fish you get in Russia, but we’re pretty proud of it here in Wisconsin…”
There was a smoked trout, still in its speckled skin, and a creamy white fish that Mrs. Hawthorne identified as Menominee, and three golden fish no larger than Gennady’s hand. “Chubs,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. “They’re my favorite: so tender. And we’ve got a bowl of sour cream, and a crock of butter, and…”
“You got caviar?” Daniel peered at a blue bowl full of orange fish eggs.
“Only salmon roe.” Mrs. Hawthorne was apologetic, as if at home Gennady might be used to gray beluga.
“Very good,” Gennady assured her.
“We have jam, too,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. “The Polyakovs always said that in Russia you don’t eat your blini with jam, but my children always liked it that way. And of course…”
She opened the freezer and removed a bottle of Stolichnaya.
Gennady pressed a hand over his heart. “You are the tsaritsa of all the Russias.”
“I hope not,” Mrs. Hawthorne laughed. “That didn’t work out well for her, did it? We don’t have proper vodka glasses, but Alexandra Kropotkin’s cookbook says cordial glasses are just about the right size.”
The handsome cut glass cordial glasses looked much smaller than the twelve-sided tumblers Gennady was used to, but perhaps there had been smaller vodka glasses before the Revolution. Anyone who could afford special vodka glasses probably had less sorrow to drink for, anyway. “Yes, yes,” Gennady said. “Very good.”
“Are there any other drinking customs we should follow?”
“Take a bite right after you drink,” Gennady told her. “You should always eat when you drink, always. And never drink alone.” In Russia, it would also have been proper to match each other drink for drink and toast for toast, but he suspected both Hawthornes would keel over and die if they tried to keep up with him.
They had a jolly evening anyway, taking shots when they wanted and eating blin after blin. “How are you still so sober when you’ve had six shots already?” Daniel marveled.
“Practice,” Gennady told him. “But here, give me a seventh and perhaps I will dance a gopak on the table.”
“Do you even know how to dance that?” Daniel scoffed.
“Anyone can dance anything when they are drunk enough, my friend! Give me ten shots and I can do a tango.”
“And who will be your partner?”
“Your lovely mother, of course. Do you waltz, madam?” Gennady asked, and they did a turn around the kitchen before the scent of burning blini prompted Daniel to snatch the turner from Mrs. Hawthorne’s hand.
“I haven’t drunk like this since I was a college girl,” Mrs. Hawthorne confessed, flushed and laughing, as she threw herself into a chair. She had downed all of two shots.
“During Prohibition?” Daniel asked, grinning at her over his shoulder.
“Oh yes, during Prohibition. None of this moonshine business, though. Mamie’s family used to vacation in Canada during the summers, and she would come back with a box of the good stuff for us – brandy and rum and I don’t know what – of course I stopped after I met your father. He was a teetotaler,” she added for Gennady’s benefit.
Gennady nodded gravely. “You have many years of drinking to catch up, then?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that! But certainly I can’t take a shot as neatly as you. How do you do it?”
“You just tip your head back – back – and pour it right down your throat.” Gennady suspected this technique of shot consumption had developed to cope with liquids considerably less palatable than Stolichnaya. “Here, I will show you how we drink na brudershaft – to brotherhood.”
“Oh, wonderful! How?”
“You interlace your arms, like so – yes, just like that. And then you drink from your partner’s cup. And then…” He planted a swift kiss on Mrs. Hawthorne’s cheek.
She yelped with laughter. “Oh, you bad boy! You should have warned me.” She kissed
his cheek in return. She smelled like vanilla and sugar. “I used to be a terrible flirt when I was drunk,” Mrs. Hawthorne reminisced. “Clearly you’re just as bad.”
“It’s not that kind of kiss,” Gennady protested.
“It’s like the kiss of peace, I suppose,” Mrs. Hawthorne said. “Oh, I suppose you’re not familiar…”
“But I am. Daniel has taken me to church.”
“Daniel! You went to church? On purpose?”
“For the case, Ma.”
“It is a kiss of brotherhood,” Gennady explained. “It means now we are proper drinking brothers.”
“Drinking buddies,” Daniel corrected.
“Drinking buddies. Yes. Now we can call each other by the ty form, if only you had it in English. Or if Daniel would like to practice his Russian?”
Daniel menaced him with the pancake turner. Gennady filled two of the cordial glasses with vodka and lifted one to Daniel in mock salute. “Davai na brudershaft, Daniil.”
Mrs. Hawthorne, laughing, snatched the pancake turner from Daniel’s hand. “Oh, all right,” Daniel said. He took his cordial glass too. “Davai na brudershaft.” They interlaced arms, and drank, and Gennady kissed Daniel’s cheek, then poked Daniel in the ribs when he didn’t return the kiss: “You too. Unless you want to be drinking enemies?”
Daniel gave Gennady a smacking kiss of such force that his stubble scraped Gennady’s face. Mrs. Hawthorne clapped her hands together, laughing. Gennady said, “Now you must call me Gennady. No more of this Matskevich.”
“You could have just said that anytime,” Daniel said, wiping his lips with exaggerated care. “No kissing necessary, tovarisch.”
“The Polyakovs did not teach you how to say tovarisch correctly?”
“The Polyakovs did not speak Bolshevik!”
Gennady laughed.
Then Mrs. Hawthorne said more seriously: “This is a beautiful ritual, Gennady, but please don’t do it with Anna tomorrow. Her husband’s a very jealous man.”
“Of course, of course,” Gennady said. “When she is here, I won’t drink at all.”
“Like that’s going to help,” Daniel scoffed. “You’re a terrible flirt even when you’re sober.” His eyes caught on Gennady’s, the glance just a little too meaningful to seem teasing. Gennady felt something like a bee sting in his chest, and remembered quite suddenly, the honeytrap.
He was a guest in Daniel’s house; he had met Daniel’s mother, and eaten her bread and salt. How could he pursue the honeytrap after that?
And the comforting thought came to him that the honeytrap had already failed. He had given it a good college try, as the Americans said, even to the point of cuddling close to Daniel and holding him all night in the Bluegill Motel, and Daniel hadn’t taken the bait. What more could Gennady do? Of course if Daniel threw himself at Gennady’s head he would fulfill his mission, but otherwise, enough was enough. Finis.
Arkady would be furious. Gennady took another shot.
“Gennady’s cut quite a swathe through the waitresses of the Midwest,” Daniel was telling his mother.
“Of course he has. Girls love the accent, don’t they? And he looks like trouble.”
“With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool,” Daniel said. He smacked his palms together. “Have you heard The Music Man, Gennady?”
Gennady took another shot. “No.”
“Oh, we’ll have to play the record then. This is great. All of American culture encapsulated in one musical.” Daniel disappeared, and a record began to play in the living room.
Mrs. Hawthorne slid a fresh hot blin under Gennady’s nose. “Remember to eat something when you take a shot,” she said, smiling, and Gennady smiled back at her hazily. “Daniel’s just teasing. I know you won’t make trouble for Anna.”
“Of course not,” Gennady assured her. “I would never hurt your children.”
She kissed his forehead, and he felt momentarily close to tears at the motherly gesture. “You’re a wonderful person,” he told her earnestly.
“I think you’ve had enough to drink,” she said, and kissed his forehead again.
In fact he had a few more shots during The Music Man; not a lot, just enough to cheer him up again. By the time the record finished, he had reached a state of such euphoric sleepiness that Daniel had to shake him awake.
“Why don’t you go on up, Matskevich?”
“Gennady.”
Daniel smiled. “Gennady. You’re falling asleep on the table. Go to bed.”
The upstairs was cold, which relieved Gennady in a strange way: at least they didn’t keep the whole house warm. And the cot was very comfortable. Mrs. Hawthorne had made it up with a soft down pillow and flannel sheets and a thick handsome quilt that Gennady pulled up over his nose. He felt pleasantly light-headed from the vodka (he must have lost some of his tolerance in these months in America) and cozy as a mouse in its hole.
When Daniel came up a little later, he didn’t turn on the lights, but undressed in the moonlight that trickled in through the Venetian blinds. He had a very fine chest, well-muscled, smooth, with just a thin line of hair down the center, and in the dusky light his skin looked softly blue. “You look like an ancient British warrior,” Gennady muttered.
Daniel clutched his discarded shirt to his chest. “You’re awake.”
Gennady propped himself up on an elbow. “They dyed themselves blue and ran into battle naked,” Gennady said, nodding at Daniel’s bare chest. “I suppose they looked like that.”
“They also spiked their hair with lime,” Daniel said. He grabbed a pajama top and put it on so hastily that he got the buttons in the wrong buttonholes. Gennady pulled the blanket up over his mouth to hide his smile.
“Pull that up over your eyes, why don’t you?” Daniel suggested. “Stop watching me undress.”
Gennady lowered the quilt again. “Why? Are you deformed?”
Daniel threw his shirt at Gennady’s head. By the time Gennady had disentangled himself (perhaps he was more inebriated than he thought; the shirt seemed to have enough arms for an octopus), Daniel had already changed into his pajama pants, and was slipping into his bed on the other side of the room.
“Go to sleep,” Daniel said sharply.
Suddenly Gennady felt ashamed of himself. He had behaved like Oksana’s shpionka; behaved like Arkady, leering at Daniel’s chest. And for what, when he had just decided not to pursue the honeytrap?
Habit, perhaps.
Daniel’s voice came through the darkness, gentler now. “Good night, Gennady.”
Daniel had forgiven him, it seemed. Gennady pulled the quilt back over his nose. “Good night, Daniel.”
Chapter 10
The next morning, Daniel took a tin of cookies over to the Green’s house. It was partly to please his mother, partly curiosity to see Helen – but mostly self-defense.
Matskevich undoubtedly wasn’t trying to flirt with him. The Soviets had different ideas about how men should behave toward each other: the “fraternal kiss of socialism,” after all.
But all the same, the way that Matskevich orchestrated that exchange of cheek kisses, and told Daniel to call him Gennady from now on… and then compared Daniel to a naked British warrior daubed in woad…
Well, when Daniel got into bed after that, it wasn’t hard at all to imagine Matskevich (no, Gennady; Gennady) sliding into bed with him, just as he had when the power went out at the Bluegill Motel – only this time he wouldn’t be driven by the cold. Gennady kissing Daniel’s neck, murmuring teasing things into Daniel’s ear, sliding his hand under Daniel’s pajama top, under his waistband…
Daniel had thrown back all the covers and walked down the cold hall to the bathroom. Mr. Gilman had given him a second chance, and Daniel wasn’t going to blow it – blow it, he thought, and had to bite his sleeve to keep from giggling like a nasty-minded schoolboy.
Paul had been shocked by that nasty-mindedness. He had slapped Daniel across the face once
for trying to blow him: “That’s filthy and I won’t have you doing it.” Then, more gently: “The ancient Greeks thought that was a degrading act for freeborn men.”
As if it mattered at all what the ancient Greeks would have thought of what they did, when right-thinking people would be horrified that they did anything at all.
And undoubtedly the Soviets thought the same way. If he made a pass at Matskevich, if Matskevich even saw him thinking about it, it’d probably cause an international incident, Jesus H. Christ.
Even after he went back to bed, Daniel hadn’t slept very well. But the cold walk through the snow to the Greens’ woke him up, and he felt tolerably alert by the time he rang the doorbell.
Through the door Daniel could hear Bing Crosby’s Christmas carols, laughter, a boy’s shout of “I’ll get it!” and the sound of pelting feet – and then the door flew open, and a boy of about seven or eight looked up at him.
He looked almost startlingly like Helen: brown hair and round cheeks and a light smattering of freckles. The resemblance only strengthened when Helen herself appeared behind him, and Daniel had the abrupt disorienting feeling that he had slipped somehow into another life, where he and Helen had gotten married and this little boy was their son.
Helen’s welcoming smile turned into a look of surprise. “Daniel!”
Daniel summoned his most charming smile and held out the tin of cookies. “My mother sent these over for you,” he said. “She conscripted me as her delivery boy as soon as I got home for Christmas.”
“Well isn’t that sweet! I’ve always thought your mother was just the sweetest woman in Shinocqua,” Helen said. She took the cookies with a smile and put a hand on her son’s head. “Have you met Jimmy before?”
“Jim,” the boy corrected, almost in a whisper, and his mother smiled at him.
“Jim,” she corrected herself.
“Jim,” Daniel said, and stuck out his hand to shake. “It’s nice to meet you, son.” The boy ducked his head and shook Daniel’s hand, and then he was off like a shot, retreating toward the sound of laughter and Christmas music.
Honeytrap Page 9
