Snow in May: Stories (21 page)

“One of the original first-aid bags made for the Red Army combat medics in World War Two. Some medicines and instruments are still inside,” Sveta said.

“Great Patriotic War.”

“Yes. Same war. This is Brian’s favorite piece. Two hundred dollars for such a museum exhibit, can you believe it?”

Two hundred dollars. That was more than Masha’s monthly pension.

Sveta opened the buckles and pulled out several packs of gauze bandages wrapped in brown paper, a tourniquet, a brown bottle of iodine with a dropper, and a small syringe, its needle still intact. She neatly laid out the contents on the floor. Everything looked brand-new. There wasn’t a single spot on the gauze, nor a speck of rust on the glittering syringe stopper.

“Sometimes, when I’m alone, I look through these things over and over, I don’t know why. The longer I am away from Russia, the more surreal it all seems. Most of all, my childhood. Everything else I don’t mind forgetting.”

Masha picked up a book about Stakhanovites and brought it up to her nose. It smelled of salt and rust, like the window heater in the library where she had studied for exams almost forty years ago.

“You can return anytime, if you’ve changed your mind. We’ll make something up. We’ll help each other,” Masha said, looking up at the colorful army of grinning
matryoshkas
.

“That wouldn’t help.” Sveta laughed. “Nostalgia goes down better with vodka.”

Masha waited for Sveta to tell her what
would
help. She considered raising the question of “family reunification.” The term seemed absurdly grandiose and brought to mind exhausted soldiers in bloodstained fatigues rushing off the trains into the arms of their mothers, wives, and daughters. Masha yearned for a simpler kind of daily reunion: to cook a good breakfast for her girls in the morning, to bring Sveta tea with raspberry jam and a blanket when she studied, to braid Katya’s wispy hair and sprinkle it with bright barrettes. To be privy to all their moods, good and bad.

It would take Sveta another three years to become a citizen, and only then would she be eligible to apply for the reunification. By then Masha would be truly old and sick, a burden. And what if Sveta failed to reestablish her medical career? Brian didn’t seem to want Masha in the house any longer than necessary. He treated her with measured, ceremonial complaisance.

“Svetochka, remember how one winter when you were seven, you took off your boots outside when I wasn’t looking and jumped barefoot in icy puddles? You wanted to catch a cold so that we could stay home together and watch figure skating.”

Sveta smiled. She seemed relieved to change the topic.

“Instead you caught pneumonia, and we ended up at the hospital. Only one TV, in that horribly drafty common room, and of course we never watched it. Instead we read your favorite fairy tales and made up our own.”

“I remember.” Sveta picked up the syringe and rolled it between her fingers.

“You know, once, back in the early eighties, the gossip reached us at the Aviation Administration about a young engineer at the airport who had injected milk into his veins to trigger high fever. He wanted to stir up pity in the girl who had left him for another guy at the March eighth dance. He spent a week in bed, hoping she’d come back.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Anyway, that can’t be right, Mama.” Sveta sat up straighter. “A milk injection into the vein could cause an embolism or sepsis. Blood poisoning. It’s much more serious than spending a week in bed. He’d need antibiotics, intravenous fluids, possibly a transfusion or dialysis. Could be fatal. Are you sure that’s what your lovesick engineer did?”

Sveta was so smart and lively, talking like this, even more beautiful than before. “You don’t think Brian’s obsession with Russian things is bizarre?” Masha said.

The look in Sveta’s eyes was both harsh and amused, as if she’d been waiting for Masha to say something yet was disappointed that she finally had. Masha thought Sveta would go on about America, how everything was a business deal here, and how what Masha now felt was buyer’s remorse.

“If he collected stamps or first editions, that would be fine. But historical artifacts—that’s somehow strange. Why?” Sveta said, putting the bandages and the syringe back into the medic bag. “He’s a history teacher, for God’s sake. And he loves our history the most.”

Later that night Masha came up with the idea of singing a song called “Kruchina” at the party in honor of Sveta and Katya receiving their green cards.

*   *   *

The green card party was held two days before Masha’s scheduled flight back home. She and Sveta stayed up well past midnight the night before, making the dumplings and cutting up piles of ingredients for three different kinds of salads: Olivier, herring and potato, and cucumber. They got up at seven to make stuffed cabbage and a giant pot of borsch. Then Masha put the finishing touches on the eight-tiered cake Napoleon, Sveta’s favorite, and placed two bottles of champagne into the fridge to chill, worrying that just two wouldn’t be enough.

While Masha and Sveta cooked, Brian, who had been beaming like a birthday boy since morning, recruited Katya and Brittny for the cleaning detail. Katya refused at first, citing again the impending math decathlon. But when she saw Brittny grudgingly twist her T-shirt into a knot above her belly button, crank up the radio, and attack the carpet with a vacuum, Katya tied up her T-shirt, too, and dusted, shaking her tiny backside in time with the beat.

By five o’clock the table was set, the house decorated with red, white, and blue, and each member of the family was dressed as if for completely different occasions. Brian wore his work outfit—khaki pants and a navy corduroy shirt, clandestinely pressed by Sveta the night before. He had pomaded and combed back his hair. He looked trustworthy.

Sveta had plaited her hair into a thick braid and put on makeup for the first time since Masha’s arrival. She wore jeans, a sweater, and a black Russian shawl with bright traditional designs. The girls, too, wore jeans and turtleneck sweaters.

Masha discovered just how overdressed she was when she came upstairs from the basement, where they had set up her bed. She was in her staple party outfit—an old maroon velvet suit and a silk yellow blouse with a bow tie. Now, with her heavy makeup and a low bun of hennaed hair, she felt like a matron about to receive some Soviet medal she didn’t deserve.

By six o’clock Brian’s friends arrived with giant bags of chips, tubs of dip, trays of carrots, beer, wine, and a bucket of fried chicken, the smell of which quickly permeated the entire house.

Lizochka, Sveta’s housecleaning partner, brought two bottles of vodka. Her high-busted peasant girl’s body was stuffed into a floor-length green dress and accessorized with three strands of faux pearls and a gold Orthodox cross. The American guests blended into one androgynous crowd of khakis and sweaters. Masha forgot their names soon after the introductions.

The guests took to the Russian food first, asking Sveta questions and pointing into the bowls. Masha couldn’t pick out a single English word she knew. She was unhappy with the results of her cooking: with American ingredients, all the dishes came out either too bland or too salty or too sweet. She poured herself a glass of vodka while Sveta wasn’t looking. It was bad for her blood pressure.

Miladze, a Georgian-Russian singer whose one CD Brian proudly owned, wailed sad songs about lost love in his breaking falsetto. Brian sat next to Sveta, monitoring her every move and fingering the fringe of her Russian shawl. She pulled up his sleeve seconds before he was about to drag it through a glop of sour cream that was melting into the scarlet borsch, and went right on translating the questions about the Soviet Union and the Cold War some of Brian’s friends had for Masha. They peered at Masha as though searching for signs of something alien and tragic. She smiled politely and answered for a while, then took her vodka glass to the armchair by the window.

Soon, the guests tired of the Russian food and moved on to the fried chicken. From time to time the men stole glances at the muted American football game on TV. Masha noticed Brittny sneaking some vodka into her apple juice. Katya pecked at her food, then attempted a wiggly dance to Miladze, but after an eye roll from Brittny, she quit and went to sit on her mother’s lap.

The house was hotter than ever. Blood pumped in and out of Masha’s head. All the noise had congealed into a thick mass of linguistic DNA, and she couldn’t catch a word in either English or Russian. She sat isolated by incomprehension, a fish in a tank.

People were grouped in threes or fours now, their mouths in constant motion: chewing, swallowing, talking. The expressions were strained, thinking hard about what to say next. A few times Masha noticed a yawn, stifled hastily by a doughy hand. It was nothing like the parties they used to have in Russia, when everyone sang songs and fell asleep on the floor. What had they talked about back then? What had they laughed about? She couldn’t remember, but she was angry at these people. They’d come out of obligation, and now not only did they take up priceless time she could be spending with Sveta and Katya, they also got the wrong idea about Russian cuisine.

Through the window the winter looked like an impressionist painting, blue and streaked with shadow, the edges of houses and cars blurred by the snowstorm. The trees stood hunched under heaps of snow. They reminded Masha of her elderly friends back home. She imagined them gossiping about her and her girls now, while they dawdled by the porch of her dilapidated
khrushchyovka,
spitting shells from toasted sunflower seeds into the gray snow. These same friends would vie for American souvenirs when she returned home.

*   *   *

After Sveta and Katya had fluttered away to America, Masha’s days took on the calm rhythm she had dreamt of since her early motherhood years. Back then, she had felt utterly alone in the world, despite being surrounded by people who constantly wanted something from her: Svetochka, coworkers, girlfriends—single or tormented by screaming children and indolent husbands—and her elderly parents, who called precisely ten minutes after she’d fallen asleep. Now she could sleep for as long as she wanted.

Most mornings Masha snapped to wakefulness before sunrise. She often had nightmares about Sveta and Katya’s new lives, fueled by the influx of American movies into Russia. The dreams ranged from nonsensical domestic disasters out of
Home Alone
to full-blown
Terminator
-style apocalypses. She promptly turned on the TV and watched the latest Mexican or Brazilian soap opera, then the news. Daily reports of the development of yet another economic crisis and the attendant social miseries were comforting: it meant that sending the girls away was the right decision.

To escape the oppressiveness of her small apartment, Masha went for long walks. She passed the Palace of ProfUnions, the recently unveiled war memorial, School #15—now the English Lyceum—where both Svetochka and Katya had studied. In the winter, Masha still caught glimpses of them among the squealing students riding their backpacks down the iced porch steps. A few blocks up was the Children’s World store, where the girls had cried rivers from both happiness and disappointment.

Their music school was a squat wooden building from the forties, its floors sagging from the weight of all those pianos. And there was the small park with wooden benches and a greenish bust of Berzin, leprous from decades of spiteful weather and pigeon droppings. How much ice cream had been licked there, how many chocolate potatoes eaten, kilos of sunflower seeds crunched? On that curb by the third bench from the left, little Sveta fell and tore open her lip, and behind that garbage can Katya hid from Sveta and Masha. It seemed that everything had happened on a single, maddeningly short day.

In the evenings Masha took the bus to the town hospital, where she now worked as a part-time cleaner, and where Sveta had once been the attending emergency room physician. More and more Masha came across her former colleagues from the Aviation Administration installed there. Some looked comfortable roaming the hallways in their favorite robes or snuggled in beds, surrounded by books and parcels from visitors; others lay in semiconsciousness with their mouths half open, already oblivious to the switches between day and night. She cleaned the floors in the patient rooms and the hallways, she cleaned the radiators, the windows, the stairs. Blood knocked on the back of her skull like a chime: soon it would be her time. She hummed “Kruchina” under her breath.

Kruchina
was an archaic word for grief, found mostly in the old folk songs and poems.
Kruchina
grief was not regular sadness or disappointment with everyday troubles, but rather the existential sorrow about a woman’s lot that never goes away, not even at the happiest of moments.

Masha remembered this song from one of the movies of her youth, when all the movies and books were about the war and patriotism, about the great sacrifice for the future. German soldiers were burning a Russian village. The children screamed, the helpless grandmas and grandpas shrieked, the animals and fowl scattered for their lives. A young German soldier broke into the last
izba
standing and found two women huddled on a bench. Except for a single candle, the house was dark and it was hard to see what was in the shadowy corner: a trunk or a cradle.

Before the soldiers could reload their guns, the women began to sing “Kruchina.” In the middle of this chaos, time stopped. The soldiers listened as the voices washed over their round helmets and tense shoulders, crept into their machine guns, and spread through their stiffened veins and cold stomachs, like mother’s milk.

Sveta might not have even seen the movie, but she and Masha always sang “Kruchina” when their hearts, one or both, were in the wrong place.

*   *   *

Somebody’s heavy hand patted Masha’s shoulder. She started.

“
Nu,
where you going to hide when it’s time to go back?” Lizochka whispered in a soggy, commiserative tone. She plopped into an armchair next to Masha. “You know, when I was a child and misbehaved, my mother always said she’d send me to Magadan.”