by Zhanna Slor
“Back to Ukraine, she says! And what would we do there, Annushka?” Now my grandpa is the one who starts laughing. “Sell a basket of apples on the street to tourists? Live on the street? This is what happens to old people who are alone. They’re like the stray dogs running around downtown, except those dogs are better fed.” Dedushka shakes his head, the laugh gone from his voice. “We had this conversation too many times. When you were little.”
“Da?”
“Every day, when I would walk you to school, you would ask: Dedushka, can we go home today? I want to go back to our apartment on Ruska Street, I miss the swings and the cats and our neighbors, Alla and Nella. I said, Devotchka, this is our home now. There’s nowhere to go back to.” Dedushka sighs and claps his hands on his knees. “You were a very sad little girl.”
“Dedushka, you’re thinking of Masha,” I tell him. “I was only a baby when we were on Ruska Street.”
My grandpa blinks then turns his head towards the ceiling. “Da, da. Pravda. You’re right. It was your sister,” he says. “You’ve always been more angry than sad. More... American.”
“Me? Angry? American?”
“I will tell you what I told her then: there are good things and bad things about living anywhere,” my grandpa says. “As long as you have your people, why should it matter if you stay on one tiny piece of it over another tiny piece of it?”
“Try telling that to Hitler,” my grandma laughs, and actually, it’s pretty funny, so we all start laughing. But then the phone starts ringing, and my grandpa ushers Baba Mila into the bedroom, and the moment has passed. “Go on already!” he tells Babushka, then saunters to the kitchen wall and picks up the phone. It rings five or six times by the time he gets there. “Yes, yes, we are almost ready,” he says, which is a straight-up lie. “She doesn’t have to wait here, Pavel, we’re not children.”
He looks at me then and hangs up the phone.
“What?” I ask.
Dedushka starts leading me towards the door. “Go, go, you’re only making things worse,” he says, practically pushing me out. “We’ll be down soon.”
“Dedushka, he can wait two minutes,” I say, but he keeps pushing me until my hand is on the knob. “Don’t you need help?”
“Who’s here? Pavel?” my grandma asks, coming out of the bedroom, still in her robe. “Why doesn’t he come up here? He’s avoiding us.”
“He was here yesterday, what are you saying?” my grandpa asks. “Go back to the room and get ready! You’ll see him in the car!”
“There’s something very strange about him the last few weeks,” my grandma says, shaking her head. “Maybe I was a bad mother... Certainly, I did something wrong that he treats me this way.”
“Oh, enough already,” Dedushka Sasha says. He’s starting to really get mad, I can tell. I feel sort of bad for him. All he’s ever wanted was for everyone to be happy but no one even wants to be happy. They want to feel alive.
“What do you mean he’s acting strange?” I ask my grandma in English. “How has he been strange?”
“Sneaking around here, all quiet and serious,” my grandma says. “Like when he used to get a bad grade and didn’t want to tell us.” Here she looks at me. “Your father was not a very good student, you know. It’s really a miracle he’s done so well, if you think about it.”
“Mila!” Dedushka Sasha cries. “Bozhe moy! Are you a saint, and didn’t tell me? He’s perfectly normal!”
My grandma shrugs at us like we’re idiots. “Well, what do I know? I’m just an old useless lady, like everyone keeps telling me.”
“Who told you that?” I ask, almost laughing again. People are always getting mad at Baba Mila, but I doubt anyone said this to her. She is cantankerous, but she’s no fool. My dad always told me how he couldn’t get away with the smallest indiscretion when he was a child, because she always seemed to know what he was up to before he did. This is part of the problem with being an only child for so long: too many eyes watching you. She and Dedushka Sasha had wanted more kids, but after my dad, she had nothing but miscarriages. She used to call him her little miracle. Then she called him her little joker. Not because he was especially funny, but because he was always getting in trouble for talking too much in school. Her idea of him as a class clown made it better somehow. As a result, to combat this notion, my dad has since been far too devoted, always prepared and preparing to save them and us. Always so serious. If he jokes at all it’s after several rounds of shots and I never get the joke. I never get any Russian jokes. I think there must be an inverse correlation of how separate you are from a culture with how much your sense of humor can align with it.
“Go, Annushka,” my grandpa says. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“I know perfectly well what I’m saying!” my grandma yells. “Just like I know perfectly well that Mikhail is trying to steal my grave right out from under my nose!”
I look at my grandpa with sympathy. “I thought you said it was Pyotr,” I tell her quietly.
My grandpa, who is sitting back down again, leans forward, claps his hands even harder on his knees, and says, “Enough, Milachka. That’s enough.”
“Why, Sasha? What did I say?” she asks, looking more confused than ever.
“It’s fine, Babushka. You didn’t say anything wrong,” I explain, but still, I put my hand back on the doorknob. Before I open the door, I turn around to ask her one last thing. “Hey, Babushka. Do you have any nieces or great-nieces named Zoya?”
My grandma takes maybe two seconds to think this over before she starts shaking her head. “No, I would remember such a poor choice in names.”
I can’t decide if I feel relieved or not, knowing this for sure, but I don’t have time to worry on it much because my grandpa starts pushing me out the door.
“Lyudmila,” Dedushka says. “Let her go! Get dressed for God’s sake!”
I hear him screaming this all the way out the door and down the hall, which smells like burnt eggplant. It could be coming from anywhere, Russian immigrants make up most of the building’s residents and they all love to burn eggplant. Half this floor used to be full of my grandma’s siblings, but some level of dementia has taken nearly all of them. It doesn’t look like she will escape this fate either. How terrifying it must be to become lost in your memories when you have memories of Stalin and Nazis holding guns to your head. I bet no one ever thought about that after making it out alive and starting to rebuild their lives from scratch. Will my grandpa be forced to watch his sister die in his arms again at the camps? Will he relive being shot at by SS soldiers while he climbs the broken fence and runs through the fields of Poland? He barely talks about that time in his life, and I don’t blame him. He and my grandma probably assumed all those terrible years were behind them. That the past stayed in the past.
Maybe my dad thought the same thing. But he was wrong. They were all wrong.
ANNA
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CHAPTER EIGHT
Walking back to the car, I start to get sad. Seeing my grandparents always makes me sad, all cooped up in that stuffy apartment building, unable to get around on their own. And guilty, too. Couldn’t my parents have insisted they learn more English, or how to drive a car, or do anything at all besides babysit us? They probably feel so useless now, or at the very least bored out of their minds. I try to visit often, now that I live only five blocks away, but I am handicapped by my poor vocabulary and never stay long.
If I studied abroad for a semester, though? I’d pick it up in no time. And the more I think about it, the more I can’t stop thinking about it.
“No luck?” my dad asks when I get in the car, where he is blasting AM 620, a.k.a. the channel where Republicans scream a lot. They’re even louder today, angry, talking about the upcoming election. John McCain is not leading in the polls, and people are mad. I’m simultaneously glad and don’t care. Everyone already knows who they are voting for. The
y knew before it all started. Now it’s all about telling each other they are wrong and evil people for agreeing with the other guy.
Yeah, I’m staying out of that, thank you very much.
“They’re still changing,” I explain. I lean back into the chair and rest my legs on the dashboard. Then I notice my converse shoes have torn at the seam and put them back on the floor before my dad has another fit about how he didn’t move here from the Soviet Union so that I could wear ripped clothes. “Sorry. I tried.”
“Hmm,” my dad mutters, not looking up.
After a long silence, I search my brain for what I can talk about so that it is no longer Republican pundits screaming in my ears. “Babushka said you’ve been acting weird the last few months,” I say, casually. I let out a long, exaggerated yawn. “Is everything okay? You and Mom…?”
My dad sighs and reaches toward the knob of the radio, turning it down. “Babushka also says your cousin Yulia is stealing all her bedsheets,” he says.
“She didn’t mention that to me…”
“She’s sick, Anastasia,” my dad says. “You know that.”
“I guess.”
I want to say more, but my dad looks so lost in thought that he might as well have put a brick wall between him and the passenger seat. Furthermore, he won’t look up from his phone, and keeps furiously typing away. His expression reminds me of the nights when I was little, and he used to check if Masha and I were asleep in our room, how angry he was to see us still awake, playing games or giggling about something. Once he even locked us in separate closets as punishment. Now, when I think about it, I wonder why he did that. Didn’t he want us to be friends? Later, when we were older and had our own rooms, he never had to do this again, but mostly because we were no longer interested in talking all night long. Sometimes I miss those nights, even though at the time it felt so unjust. Having to share a space will make anyone closer, even if you don’t like the person. They become as necessary to you as your bed or desk or clothes, if only because of their constant presence. It’s probably why even though my grandparents on both sides didn’t always get along, they still treated one another like family. And why I’ve always felt so close to them. Some of my earliest memories include walking to school with my grandpa, or playing card games with them for hours while our parents were at work. I spent far more time with my grandparents the first five years we lived here than I did my parents or Masha, who was older and made friends easily.
“Who are you emailing anyway?” I finally ask. I cannot fathom being able to email someone from my phone, let alone needing to so urgently. “Is it work?”
“It’s nothing,” Dad says, but he stops typing on the phone. I turn my focus to the floor of the car, at the wrinkled, coffee-covered pieces of paper. An empty bag of Fritos. This is also strange for my dad; usually his car is spotless.
A door slams shut outside, and I see my grandparents finally meandering towards us. My dad slips out of the driver’s seat, and goes to the back of the car, clearing it of papers and folders. He leaves his phone in the cupholder, and I glean what appears to be a long email exchange with a lawyer. The header says from the Law Offices of something or another. I catch something about a living will, and a question about inheritance. Why would he be asking about that? I can’t get a better look, because soon my grandma is guided into the backseat, a tirade of complaints following her. “…He’s not my brother,” she spits.
“Mama, come on. How can you say that?” my dad asks, coming back around to his seat.
“A brother comes over once in a while. A brother at least sits down for tea.”
“Maybe Marcus doesn’t like tea,” he offers with a forced smile.
“Marcus is her brother?” I ask of the quiet, elderly man I’d seen on occasion in their building, who is now standing outside waiting near a bus. “I thought they were friends or something.”
My dad moves to the other side of the car to help my grandpa into his seat, then answers me: “Anastasia, how can you possibly think that after all this time?”
I shrug. “He never comes to anything. He seemed familiar to me but that’s it.”
“That’s what happens when you always fight with your siblings. You can live on the same floor and never speak,” he says. “That’s why I always tried to encourage you and your sister to be friends.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” I snort, thinking again of the separated closets. If anything, we became friendly despite his efforts. Until she up and left me, of course. Since then, it’s been basically crickets. I’m self-aware enough to realize my obsession with the email from Zoya has something to do with this; an urge for more family, when the rest of mine is either gone or doesn’t speak the same language or, in the case of my dad, totally disinterested in talking to me. He doesn’t even pretend to wonder what I mean; he simply gets back into the driver’s seat and pulls the car out of the parking lot, turning onto Farwell Avenue.
I’m taking off my coat again when my grandma clears her throat. Her breath smells fishy and I have to cover my nose with a shirt sleeve.
“Pavel,” my grandma starts. “Don’t you know someone in Ukraine named Zoya?”
My heart plummets. Considering she has on occasion forgotten which grandchild I am, or who the president is, I hadn’t expected my grandma to remember that I said anything. I barely remember that I said anything; it’s already so far out in the back of my mind. Now, all I can do is hope she doesn’t call me out.
“I do not,” he says tightly. If he is worried, he is good at not showing it. I squeeze my nails into my palms and wait anxiously to see where this conversation will end. I don’t expect him to admit much, but maybe it will throw him off his game. Deep down, I suspect the message couldn’t have been random. Plus, why would he be talking to a lawyer? Could the two things be connected?
“Are you sure?” my grandma asks. She stares ahead, deep in thought. I watch my dad’s face. If I’m not mistaken, he looks a little sweatier. This seems like an overreaction for what he claims to be a spammer, but what do I know? It is getting pretty hot in the car. I open the window a little to get some air.
“Yes.” My dad glances in my direction, then turns back to watch the road. “Why do you ask?” he says. I wonder if we are both thinking the same thing: did Zoya find a way to contact my grandma too? If so, I must admit the girl is thorough.
“Oh,” Babushka shrugs. She thumbs a crumb from her chin and then folds her hands across her lap. “I don’t remember.”
Inwardly, I breathe a sigh of relief. My dad, on the other hand, grips the wheel with an intensity that was definitely not there before. Then he turns the radio back on and doesn’t speak for the rest of the drive.
ANNA
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CHAPTER NINE
Later, I’m standing on the balcony of my uncle Marik’s house with my fourth glass of wine when someone comes outside to smoke. For a moment I think it’s my dad, wanting to confront me about my grandma’s question, but it’s only Marik.
“Privet, Annushka,” he says, starting his cigarette with a shiny gold lighter. “How are you?”
“Horosho,” I respond. Uncle Marik is really my dad’s cousin but in our family everyone’s just an uncle or aunt. It took me until I was quite old to work this out; when I was young, I assumed my parents had tons of siblings, but they’re both only children. Marik is married to one of Baba Mila’s nieces, my great-aunt Rachel’s daughter Marina. He owns a painting and remodeling company and is super rich, judging from the location of this brand-new riverfront condo, replete with string lights and perfectly assembled patio furniture that is very clearly not from IKEA. I can’t begin to imagine what any of it costs. All I ever do, when it comes to money, is think about how to not spend it. “How are you?”
“Good, good,” he mumbles back, about as bored with my question as I am asking it. Below us, a few tiny boats buzz down the Menomonee River, transforming the water
into icy white streaks. Beyond the river is an unimpressive constellation of skyscrapers; further on, lights of factories burn yellow. “Life is good.”
I watch as Marik takes another long drag of his cigarette. Maybe it’s the four glasses of wine, but for a second he no longer looks like my uncle—a tall, muscled man in his late forties, always dressed in outrageous silk suits and pointy leather shoes at family functions—and instead seems like some old-timey Russian gangster. I wonder if this is how others see him: like a person to be frightened of. I really have no idea what he did for work before we immigrated, besides spend three years in the Russian army. It’s possible someone mentioned it before, but if so, I no longer remember. This happens to me a lot; the way I didn’t realize I was losing my native tongue until years after it was already happening, I somehow managed to misplace everyone’s histories too. I wonder how much farther I can stray before it all disappears entirely, forever. Is heritage a lighthouse, blinking in the night, always prepared and preparing you for an eventual return? Or is it an unmapped land, a place that, if you leave, you may never find your way back to? Look at any immigrant family once it’s had a generation or two of kids. Histories fade into anecdotes; foreign words are buried along with elderly grandparents. Every year that passes we are closer and closer to losing everything that makes us what we are. It’s the shadow that lingers behind every American dream. The one you don’t even realize is there because you never see it.
But I see it. I see it all the time, like a sixth sense, a different kind of ghost.
“Marik, what did you do in the Soviet Union?” I ask aloud. Because why the hell not? “For work, I mean?”
Marik glances at me in his periphery, then looks back out onto the river warily. “Oh. This and that.”
