The Cosmopolitans (5 page)

Next, he heard some ostentatious clapping, and Mrs. Molochnik
saying, “
All right, Osya. Don’t beat the table, it didn’t do anything to
you.
”

Mr. Molochnik said, “
Think, my friends, how our bards
sacrificed. Alexander Galich: imprisoned, murdered.
”

“
I think he was only exiled,
” Leonid’s father said.

“
He died trying to fix a radio, right, Arkady?
” Alla said.

“
You don’t think the KGB had its dirty tentacles all over that
transistor? You are like children
.”

“Osya,” Mrs. Molochnik said.

“
Forgive me, what do I know? What’s the point of arguing? He’s
dead, dead, dead all the same.
”

Mrs. Molochnik said, “
Osip Mikhailovich, what do you say
about getting a little sleep?
”

“
I understand,”
Mr. Molochnik said.
“
This is a time to talk about
happy things. Bim bom, bim bom, that’s what we should be singing.
”
He shuffled past Leonid and Milla, raising a hand in greeting or
farewell, and made his way up the stairs, still bim-boming.

“Your turn,” Milla said. Leonid put down the word
Zen
, which,
breathing noisily through her nose, she challenged and disqualified.
He only had to play one turn after that — a meek
tree
— before his
parents collected him.

Milla

Back in her room, back in her sweatpants, Milla called her
grandmother.

“
Da, lyagushinka, little frog, what’s the matter
?” Baba Byata
said. She had nicknamed Milla, her favorite granddaughter, “little
frog” on account of her long tongue, with which Milla was able to
touch her nose. Her grandmother’s delight in this nickname, and in
demonstrations of its origins, was a small, guilty reason that Milla
had been a little bit relieved when she’d moved to Boston.

Milla told her grandmother everything and a bit more. She
called Leonid Chaikin a capitalist pig and her grandmother said,
“
Da, I understand
,” with only a slight bit of irony: she still believed
in the ideals of Communism and the treacheries of money-lust.

“
I showed him,”
Milla said, and told a slightly exaggerated
version of her Scrabble victory, which confused her grandmother,
who had never played, and Milla had to explain about the values
of letters, and it wasn’t as satisfying to tell this part of her story as
she’d anticipated. She said, “
Still, it’s very sad, to have your parents
stand in the way of your true love.
”

“
Da, da
.”

“
I wish you were right here
,” Milla said. Her grandmother was
wearing, she knew, a polyester housecoat with cheerful, to Byata’s
way of thinking, green flowers with orange stems. The housecoat
was buttoned to the neck and scratched Milla’s forehead, not
unpleasantly, all those times she’d cried into it. She invited her
grandmother to Stamford.

Byata said, “
It’s such a long trip, the train stinks…”

“
But I’d cook for you. I just learned to make chicken a l’orange.
That’s a French chicken recipe. Mom would be happy, too, she keeps
talking about taking you shopping for supplements.”

“
Yes, your mother’s very,”
Byata took a breath,
“
activnaya
.”

“
So
,” Milla said, hoping that her grandmother might, in sympathy
for Milla’s plight, answer her question honestly, “
did you move to
Boston to get away from Mom? I would understand
, totally.” She
began to tell again about what Stalina had said about Malcolm, and
how Stalina had probably set out to ruin their love, because she was
jealous.

“
You know, lyagushinka, in these modern times, you can just
call that boy you like
.”

A few minutes later, Milla took a deep breath and dialed the
number she’d been trying to forget. “Am I interrupting?” She
imagined a pyramid of beautiful girls in underpants, standing on
one another’s shoulders to make the shape of a “Y,” for Yale, and for
the questions of “why” he had ever bothered with someone like her,
before tumbling down onto his bed.

Malcolm said no, he’d just come through the door. He’d been
working on his thesis, listening to this amazing vocalist, Ori Shacktar,
she’d been in the Israeli army, klezmer could be really raw, did Milla
know that?

Milla told him about how rude she’d been to Leonid. “You
dumped me, and he hates me, and now I have to marry him.”

“I — what?”

“You don’t understand my culture!” She sounded like Yana.

“Hey, hey, calm down. You always take what I say the wrong
way.”

Milla tried to take the deep breaths — five counts in, five counts
out — her father had taught her in her crybaby youth. She said, “I
hardly ever cry, you know that.”

“Anyway, you don’t want to marry that other guy, you want to
marry me.”

“I never said that, what makes you say that?”

“I want to marry you, okay? I think it would be fun to be married
to you. I mean, this isn’t a proposal, I’m only twenty-three, it’s more
— a proclamation. Yeah, a proclamation. Of love.”

Milla thought to look at herself in the mirror. It was her there,
not a raw klezmer singer, not a model, but her own face, crazed with
happiness.

Yana

Since I drank of the cup of love,

I shall love forever secretly.

“The roots of the modern-day ‘love discourse’ first appeared in
medieval France, where troubadours such as Raimbaut d’Aurenga
(cited above) found that both common and noble audiences
preferred songs of heterosexual” — what? Strivings? Yana rose
and strode about the room. She’d use her old favorite: “
limning
heterosexuality, and so decided to ‘produce’ these ballads in large
quantities. Commercial considerations, then, have always been
behind the perpetuation of the idea of romantic love.”

Yana sat back and looked at her paragraph. Was that a Marxist-
feminist critique, or what? Her professor edited a journal of advanced
studies. She imagined whispers following her across campus, “only
undergraduate ever to publish…”

Or, was she being “tendentious, sophistic and repetitive” again?
That was what the professor had written, in small, embarrassed
letters, on the back of her last paper. She wished her parents could
help her, that she had the kind of parents who’d been doled out to
so many of her college classmates (although not to the few who’d
agreed to be her friends), parents who read and debated their
children’s papers over Thai, and contributed to progressive judges’
re-election campaigns, and paid psychiatrists to help their children
figure out where their parenting had failed. Yana would have settled
for parents who didn’t either laugh (Stalina) or become enraged
(Osip) that she was trying to write like a Marxist. Instead, she was
on her own, basically, and she had yet to answer the question: Why
did audiences keep asking for love songs?

Milla bounced into the room, apparently in the manic stage of
the bipolar disorder she’d acquired upon meeting Malcolm. “He’s
going to marry me!”

So he’s going to do the honor of making you his domestic slave?
So he’s generously agreed to depress you, to load you up with stress-
and childbirth-related illnesses, to ensure you die approximately
five years earlier? Milla waited, frozen into her smile. Yana imitated
the freshman girls who’d stopped to eat the chocolate and caramel
cookies at the Women’s Center table at orientation, before they’d
realized what the cookies represented, but after Yana had begun
telling them about an upcoming all-woman dance. “Uh-huh?” she
said, and she probably gave the same pained smile the freshman
girls had.

“It wasn’t a formal proposal, that’ll be later.” Milla found,
almost with relief, several worries: sure, Malcolm wanted to marry
her now, but what if something happened between now and the
engagement? Had Yana ever heard of promise rings? Did she think
Malcolm had heard of them? If he had, and wasn’t planning on
buying Milla one, wasn’t that weird? Was that weird, or was she
being too demanding?

Yana said, “You know, marriage as the fulfillment of romantic
love is a nineteenth-century construct.”

Milla wound a curl around her finger. “That can’t be true.”

Yana found evidence on the Internet, but Milla just kept asking
the same questions over and over again, until Yana surrendered.
“You look good in white.”

Worrying about whether she’d be able to get to sleep, Milla
returned to her room, and Yana opened her book to a lyric by Arnaut
Daniel: