Snow in May: Stories (7 page)

Marina and Sonya remained in Magadan. Since we didn’t know how long I’d be in Anchorage, we decided it would be better not to interrupt Sonya’s school and music education, friendships, and activities. At the time, Magadan was suffering a mass exodus to the continent. With the collapse of the Union, social and economic infrastructure also collapsed. Power outages occurred weekly, schools weren’t heated, inflation soared. The shops were finally full of imports, but only the New Russians could afford them. For everyone else salary was delayed for months, and Marina was paid with a few coupons for the local grocery store. I thanked my fortune to be able to send a big box of food with the pilots on the short flights from Anchorage—a weekly Christmas for my family. Sonya was crazy about sushi, strawberry milk, cream-filled toaster strudels, yellow legal pads, and highlighters.

In ’96, just as I thought that my life couldn’t get any better, there was another power shakeup at the Aviation Administration. As soon as I had finished setting up the business from scratch—every detail, from the American way of de-icing airplanes to the printing of tickets—the new bosses fired me. A few months after I returned to Magadan, Marina left me for a TV journalist of local semifame. Her hair was long and red. Sonya was thirteen, too old to lie to about certain things.

For a year I floundered. Then I decided to prove to Marina that leaving me was the biggest mistake of her life. I joined one of the young airlines that cropped up during the first fertile years of capitalism, contacted several investors I’d met in America, and worked with red-eyed determination. After a couple of years, we had a fleet of five planes. By ’99, I was back in Anchorage on my own terms. So, in a way, I was fortunate that Marina left me, too.

I took Sonya with me so she could attend the last two years of high school in America. She catapulted to the top of her class and went to Princeton on a full scholarship. In college, she entertained ideas of becoming a film director, an actress, a photographer, and, briefly, even a fashion designer, but in the end she stuck with her childhood dream of following in her grandmother Olya’s footsteps. She’s twenty-eight now, an oncology resident in New York. When she finds the time, she dates. She is not the kind of girl who’d jump into marriage after two weeks. In America, young people are cautious, afraid of the losses that may come with marriage and love. While in the USSR, most of us had nothing to lose but innocence—and even that we usually managed not to lose much of. Sonya is wiser than Marina and I were at her age. And if she makes a mistake, I hope that luck will come to her rescue, just as it has always come to mine.

Marina moved to Anchorage a year after Sonya. By then her relationship with the TV journalist had disintegrated. She let her hair grow out to her natural color and cut her bangs, which made her look so much younger. I hadn’t divorced her because, having no official relations in America, she wouldn’t have been able to immigrate, and Sonya needed her mother. We are still not divorced; there was never a hard-pressed need for it. Marina still lives in Alaska and is friends with many other Magadan expatriates. We often speak on the phone. She has almost forgiven me for the ways in which I had disappointed her, and I have almost forgiven her betrayal. After all, she’d been nothing but a positive influence in my life.

In 2011, our little airline company ceased flights between Anchorage and Magadan—there was no longer a market. Perhaps Americans had become disenchanted with the way Russians did business. I wouldn’t blame them. The portal of friendly associations and opportunistic marriages had shut. Instead of taking a four-hour nonstop flight across the Bering Strait, those who wanted to visit relatives now had to connect through Seattle, Seoul, Vladivostok, or through Los Angeles and Moscow—all the way around the globe. In the summers, it would probably be easier to paddle over in a canoe, fingers crossed and betting on the old Russian
avos
—“what if.”

What if, what if.

My partners and I disbanded the company, paid our debts, and called it a good run. Then, after more than fifty years of snow, vicious winds, and icy nights, I moved to California, where Angela had been living for years and working as a manicurist. Hers is a whole other story. I live quietly now, minimally, in the golden land of dreams, which to Tolyan and me had once seemed farther than the moon. I manage a few properties. I try not to tax my luck.

*   *   *

I’d been walking on the beach for almost an hour—my exuberant Sputnik so wet and happy—thinking about how readily I always dismissed Tolyan’s disabled child. I’d tucked that tragedy between a hapless first marriage and a failed career. But, surely, this misfortune had influenced his life in ways I couldn’t imagine. How was the boy now? I almost didn’t want to know.

On the other hand, knowing Tolyan, I could as easily see him as an emotionally and physically absent parent to a healthy child. Children were not one of his great interests, nor was his career. Though, how many blows on the head could one take until one finally decided it was safer to stay on the ground?

Perhaps I had misinterpreted Tolyan’s comment back in ’92, and he didn’t blame me for what had gone wrong in his life. He simply wanted to reconnect, and that was what today’s phone call was about as well.

How much of my life did he know? What news, what rumors had reached him?

Or maybe he wanted to ask for a favor. If he had sought me out, the favor was probably big. Russian people had a notion that all Americans were rich and powerful, and definitely all Russians who had made it in America. First, it wasn’t true. And second, he didn’t know what it had really taken, all the dirty details. My family didn’t know. He couldn’t just show up and pick the fruits.

I was getting a headache. These were silly things to get so worked up about. Like a wound-up toy, Sputnik jumped up over and over to a stick I held at shoulder level. For the next three days he would have to lie stretched out on the carpet “without hind legs,” as we say in Russia.

Tolyan had been present at the pivotal moments of the first thirty years of my life. But he was incidental, not critical to my progress. A mere cobottler. I would have achieved all the same things with another ski- and tennis-obsessed man-child by my side. If I hadn’t broken my leg and Tolyan’s father hadn’t gotten us tickets to the Black Sea sanatorium where I’d met Marina, I would have met someone else. There has always been a surplus of good women in Russia.

On the other hand, maybe luck was like a magnet, and to function my positive pole required his negative one. The prospect of calling him back made me angry. I hurled Sputnik’s stick into the ocean, and he took off after it.

I felt a stab of pain in my chest, and at once I was certain I was about to die. I will die.

I sat down slowly.

All my senses had burrowed deep into my body, and I knew that if I opened my mouth I wouldn’t be able to speak. I felt as if I were holding my naked heart in the palm of my hand and it was pumping there, laboriously, trying its best but not making any promises. I held it as carefully and tenderly as I could, with awe and fear, like I once held my newborn daughter. I needed to take a breath but was terrified that if I did, I’d drop it. I’d drop my heart on the hot sand and die.

This horrible feeling lasted for about three minutes. Finally, the pain loosened its choke hold. Was that my first heart attack? I’d have to see the doctor. Luckily, I could afford it.

Sputnik was yelping and licking my knees and hands. He’d retrieved the stick and brought it to my feet. I grabbed his wet neck and kissed him on his bearded snout. I was overwhelmed with relief; it flowed into my past and reinforced its stitching. I’ve forged a good life.

The platinum waves broke on the shoreline and retreated, broke and retreated, leaving ribbons of froth and trash in their wake. A plastic bottle without a label filled with water and leaking. Green and brown seaweed. A feather. I closed my eyes and took a full-bodied breath.

No, the magnet theory of luck is a preposterous idea.

I have to take better care of myself, that’s all. I’ll swim laps in the pool when I get back to the condo and call Sonya afterward. She’ll be happy to hear about my cardio efforts. I won’t mention the heart incident; she has enough to worry about as it is. I won’t tell her about the cognac and the good chocolate I have every night, while Angela and I watch Russian news and talk shows on satellite TV. Though Sonya probably knows; somehow she always knows everything. I’ll spend half the night reading from
The Next 100 Years
by George Friedman, a book I highly recommend. Sputnik will snore next to me and kick me from time to time, dreaming of the chase.

I narrow my eyes and, instead of white California sand, see the snowy mountains of Magadan. Skiing in those young days of spring felt like flying high above life, a sensation duplicated when one is newly in love. It is a pleasant reminiscence. But only in solitary confinement does memory become a merciless editor, cutting a bearable story out of the ever-accumulating mess of days.

The Witch

1989

We set out for the witch’s house in the still-gray morning. Babushka drove, squeezed behind the steering wheel of our boxy yellow Zhiguli. Mama sat in the front, fumbling with my migraine diary. Over the last year, the doctors had failed to establish any correlation between the excruciating pain that assaulted me weekly and what and how much I ate, when and how much I slept, what I did, the season, the weather, or my geographical location. No medication had helped. The witch was our last resort.

Although my babushka, a nurse at the Polyclinika, had assured me that this witch, a good witch, a healer, had cured her friend’s heart disease, I was scared. I kept picturing the fairy-tale Baba Yaga, who lived deep inside a dark forest in a cabin held up by chicken legs. Her home was surrounded by a fence of bones, on top of which human skulls with glowing eye sockets sat like ghastly lanterns. Baba Yaga flew in a giant iron mortar, driving it with a pestle and sweeping away her trail with a broomstick, on the hunt for children to cook in her oven for dinner. Were Baba Yaga and this good witch sisters? Were all witches sisters? How often did they visit each other for tea?

The car smelled of gasoline, and a cauldron of nausea was already brewing in my stomach. I didn’t need the migraine diary to predict another cursed day. Soon the world would be ruined by blobs of emptiness, like rain on a fresh watercolor. Everything familiar would shed its skin to reveal a secret monstrous core. And, after a tug-of-war between blackness and fire, an invisible UFO would land on my head. The tiny aliens would drill holes on the sides of my skull, dig painful tunnels inside my brain, and perform their terrible electric experiments. I’d rather get eaten by Baba Yaga.

We took the same road out of the town as for our frequent mushroom-picking trips. The trees grew in two solid walls, the leaves silvering in the windy sun like coins. Mama stared out the window. After whispering late into the night, she and Babushka hadn’t said a word to each other all morning. This was a strange summer. Mama would usually accompany me on the three-day train from home to Syktyvkar, spend a week at Babushka’s, then head back to Papa and work. This time, she showed no signs of planning to leave. In fact, she hadn’t been herself all year: all the time awake, eyes and cheeks burning, telling me to remember that she loved me most of all in the world, as if she was about to die or move away.

Often, after an especially long bout of migraine, I imagined myself an orphan. How miserable and sad I would be without Mama, how feeble and helpless, and how lucky Vasilisa the Wise was in the fairy tale. Her mother had left her a magical doll, who, when fed, became alive and told Vasilisa to go to bed and not worry about anything. While Vasilisa slept, the doll did all the impossible work that was demanded of Vasilisa by her mean stepmother and stepsisters or by Baba Yaga. Oh, how I wished for a magical doll of my own.

“If you decide on it, at least make sure you don’t bring them the same gift, like your brilliant stepfather, Lev Davidovich. Twice,” Babushka said in a brash, joking tone. “Did I already tell you this story?”

Mama ignored her.

“Goes to Sweden, brings me a watch,” Babushka went on. “I look at the receipt in the box: two ladies’ watches. Gets all nervous, says they made a mistake at the register. Yes, very likely—a mistake at a Swiss register. One of the best lawyers in town and a complete idiot in life. A few months later I’m unpacking his suitcase from another business trip—two nighties. One small, one big. I leave them, see what happens. Surprise-surprise, he gives me the bigger one, the small one disappears. He wasn’t sure what size I wore, he says, so he got two. After sixteen years of marriage he wasn’t sure!”

“Quit it,” Mama said and turned back to me. “How are you feeling, kitten?”

“Another one’s coming,” I said. I missed my old, understandable illnesses—coughs, stuffed noses, ear infections. And I missed the gamelike remedies: mustard chest compresses, an orchestra of little glass cups tinkling and tingling on my back, a night spent in a headscarf soaked with vodka.

“Of course, I later gave him and that witch such a beating they took turns writing complaints to the regional Ministry of Health. Fools,” Babushka cried out. “I always had more friends than him because I am a good person. Our chief doctor, Olga Nestorovna, bless her soul, looks out for her women, always has. She knows that most men are dogs, as I say as well, except for one.” She shot Mama a look.

“The witch?” I said.

“That one’s another witch, Alinochka,” Babushka said. “A bad witch.”

“Enough. This is not helping. You’re scaring Alina.”

“I just don’t want you to do something you might regret for the rest of your life.”

“You don’t think I know that? You don’t need to torture me!” Mama yelled. My heart winced. “Stop it now. If it passes, you’ll be the first one to know, I promise. Please, let’s focus on Alina.”

“Precisely,” Babushka said.