The Japanese Lover (12 page)

T
he two women were having lunch under the historic stained-glass cupola in Neiman Marcus on Union Square. More than anything, they went there for the popovers, served warm straight from the oven, and the pink champagne, which was Alma's favorite. Irina ordered lemonade and both raised their glasses to the good life. In silence, so as not to offend Alma, Irina also toasted the Belascos' wealth, which allowed her the luxury of this moment, with its soft music, elegant shoppers, willowy models parading in high-fashion dresses to tempt purchasers, and obsequious ­waiters wearing green ties. This refined world was infinitely removed from her Moldovan village and all the hardships she had suffered in her childhood, let alone the terrors of her adolescence.

The two women ate peacefully, savoring Asian dishes and ordering more popovers. A second glass of champagne loosened Alma's tongue, and on this occasion she talked about Nathaniel, her husband, who was nearly always part of her reminiscences; she had managed to keep him alive in her memory for three decades now. Seth had vague memories of his grandfather as an exhausted skeleton with burning eyes propped up on downy pillows. He was barely four years old when his grandfather's painful expression was gone forever, but he had never forgotten the smell of medicines and eucalyptus vapor in his bedroom. Alma told Irina that Nathaniel was as generous as his father, Isaac Belasco, and that when he died, among his papers she had found hundreds of IOUs for loans he never called in, and precise instructions to pardon his many debtors. She found herself unprepared to take charge of all the matters he had left unfinished during his devastating final illness.

“I've never in all my life worried about money matters. Strange, isn't it?”

“You were lucky. Almost everyone I know has money worries. The residents at Lark House all scrape by, and some of them can't even buy the medicines they need.”

“Don't they have health insurance?” asked Alma in astonishment.

“The insurance covers part of the expense, but not all. If their families don't help them, Mr. Voigt has to draw on Lark House's special reserves.”

“I'll go and talk to him. Why did you never tell me this before, Irina?”

“You can't solve every case, Alma.”

“No, but the Belasco Foundation could maintain the park at Lark House. Then Voigt would save a stack of money he could use to help the neediest residents.”

“Mr. Voigt would faint in your arms if you suggested such a thing, Alma.”

“What an appalling thought! I sincerely hope not.”

“But tell me more about what happened to you after your husband died.”

“I was drowning in all the paperwork, when it finally occurred to me to ask Larry. My son had lived quietly in the shadows and had grown up to become a cautious and responsible gentleman without anyone really noticing.”

Larry Belasco had married young, in a rush and without fuss, both because of his father's illness and because his fiancée, Doris, was visibly pregnant. Alma admitted that at the time she was so preoccupied looking after her husband that she had few opportunities to get to know her daughter-in-law, even though they lived under the same roof. Yet she ended up loving her dearly because, quite apart from her virtues, Doris adored Larry and was a good mother both to Seth, the little mischief maker, who soon was bounding around the house like a kangaroo, driving out the lugubrious atmosphere, and later to Pauline, a placid little girl, who kept herself amused and seemed to have no further needs.

“Just as I never had to worry about money, so I never had the bother of domestic chores. In spite of being blind, my mother-in-law looked after the Sea Cliff house until her dying breath, and after her we had a butler, who seemed to have come straight out of one of those English films. He was so mannered that in the family we always thought he was making fun of us.”

She told Irina that the butler was at Sea Cliff for eleven years and left when Doris dared to suggest how he should do his job. “It's her or me,” the butler told Nathaniel, who by this time no longer left his bed and had little strength to struggle with this kind of problem, despite his having hired all the staff. Faced with this ultimatum, Nathaniel chose his brand-new daughter-in-law, who, despite her youth and her belly rounded by seven months of pregnancy, had already proved herself a compulsive lady of the house. During Lillian's lifetime the mansion had been run with goodwill and spontaneity; as for the butler, the only noticeable changes were the length of time it took to serve each dish at table and the cook's sour expression, because he could not stand him. With Doris's strict regime, the house became a model of precision where no one felt completely at ease. Irina had observed the results of her efficiency: the kitchen was a spotless laboratory, no children were allowed in the living rooms, the wardrobes were scented with lavender, the sheets were starched, daily meals consisted of minuscule portions of fancy dishes, and the flower displays were renewed weekly by a florist. All of this however did not lend the house a festive atmosphere, but made it as solemn as a funeral parlor. The only thing that the magic wand of domesticity had spared was Alma's empty bedroom, as Doris held her in reverential awe.

“When Nathaniel fell ill, Larry took charge of the Belasco law firm,” Alma went on. “He ran it very well from day one. So when Nathaniel died I could delegate the family finances to him and devote myself to resurrecting the moribund Belasco Foundation. The public parks were drying out and were filled with garbage, needles, and used condoms. Beggars had moved in, with shopping carts crammed full of filthy bags and their cardboard shelters. I know nothing about plants, but I threw myself into gardening out of love for my father-in-law and my husband. To them it was a sacred mission.”

“It seems as if all the men in your family have been kindhearted, Alma. There aren't many people like them in this world of ours.”

“There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It's the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that's why they get noticed. You don't know Larry very well, but if you need something at any time and I'm not around, don't hesitate to turn to him. My son is a good man, he won't let you down.”

“He seems very serious, I wouldn't dare disturb him.”

“He's always been serious. When he was twenty he looked fifty, but he got stuck like that and has stayed the same as he's aged. Just look, in every photograph he has that same worried expression and drooping shoulders.”

Hans Voigt had established a simple system for the Lark House residents to judge the performance of each member of staff, and he was intrigued by the fact that Irina always obtained an excellent report. He guessed her secret must be her ability to listen to the same story a thousand times over as if she were hearing it for the first time, all those tales the old folks keep repeating to accommodate the past and create an acceptable self-portrait, erasing remorse and extolling their real or imagined virtues. Nobody wants to end their life with a banal past. However, Irina's secret was in fact more complicated: to her each one of the Lark House residents was a replica of her grandparents Costea and Petruta, to whom she prayed every night before going to sleep, asking them to accompany her through the darkness, as they had done throughout her childhood. They had raised her, toiling on a thankless patch of ground in their remote Moldovan village, where not even the slightest breeze of progress blew. Most of the locals still lived in the country and continued working the land just as their ancestors had done a century earlier. Irina was two years old in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, and four when the Soviet Union collapsed and her country became an independent republic. Neither of these events meant anything to her, but her grandparents lamented them, as did their neighbors. They all agreed that under communism they had been just as poor, but at least there was food and security, whereas independence had brought them only ruin and abandonment. Anyone who could leave did so, including Irina's mother, Radmila, so that the only ones left behind were the old and children whose parents could not take them with them. Irina remembered her grandparents bent double from the effort of growing potatoes, faces lined by the August sun and freezing Januarys, with little strength left and no hope. She concluded that the countryside was fatal to health. She was the reason her grandparents kept on struggling, their one joy—with the exception of homemade red wine, a drink as rough as paint stripper that gave them the chance to escape their loneliness and boredom for a while.

At first light, before she walked to school, Irina used to carry buckets from the well, and in the evening, before soup and bread for supper, she would chop wood for the stove. In California she weighed 110 pounds in her winter clothes and boots but was strong as an ox and could lift Cathy, her favorite client, like a newborn babe to transfer her from her wheelchair to a sofa or the bed. If she owed her muscles to the buckets of water and the ax, she owed the good luck that she was alive to Saint Parascheva, the patron saint of Moldova and the intermediary between the earth and the kindly beings in the heavens. At night as a child she would kneel with her grandparents before the saint's icon to pray for the potato harvest and the health of their chickens; for protection against evildoers and soldiers; for their fragile republic; and for Radmila. To Irina as a child, the haloed saint in the blue cloak who was holding a cross seemed far more human than the silhouette of her mother in a faded photograph. Irina did not miss her but enjoyed imagining that one day Radmila would return with a bag full of gifts for her. She heard nothing from her mother until she was eight years old, when her grandparents received a little money from their distant daughter. They spent it cautiously so as not to make their neighbors jealous. Irina felt cheated, because her mother did not send anything special for her, not even a note. The envelope contained nothing more than the money and a couple of photographs of a stranger with peroxide-blond hair and a harsh expression who looked very different from the young woman in the photo the old couple kept next to the icon. After that they received money from her two or three times a year, which helped alleviate their poverty.

Radmila's drama was similar to that of thousands of other young Moldovan women. She had become pregnant at sixteen by a Russian soldier passing through with his regiment and from whom she heard nothing more. She had Irina because her attempts at abortion failed, and she escaped far away as soon as she could. Years later, in order to warn her about the world's perils, Radmila told her daughter the details of her odyssey, with a glass of vodka in her hand and two more already down the hatch.

One day a woman from the city had come to the village to recruit young girls to work as waitresses in another country. She offered Radmila an amazing once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: passport and ticket, easy work and a good wage. She assured her that just from the tips she would be able to save enough to buy herself a house in less than three years. Ignoring her parents' desperate pleas, Radmila boarded the train with the procurer, little suspecting she would end up in the claws of Turkish pimps in a brothel in the Aksaray neighborhood of Istanbul. She was kept prisoner there for two years, servicing between thirty and forty men daily to pay off her ticket, although the debt was never reduced because she was charged for her lodging, food, shower, and condoms. Any girls who resisted were beaten up, marked with knives, burned, or even found dead in an alleyway. Without money or documents escape was impossible; they were locked in, did not know the language, the neighborhood, or the wider city. If they did manage to evade the pimps, they came up against the police, who were also their most assiduous clients and whom they had to pleasure for free.

“One girl threw herself out of a third-floor window and was left half paralyzed, but she still had to keep working,” Radmila told Irina in the half-melodramatic, half-didactic tone she used to refer to this wretched episode in her life. “As she couldn't control her sphincter and constantly soiled herself, men could go with her for half price. Another girl became pregnant and performed on a mattress with a hole in it to fit her belly into; in her case, the clients paid more, because they thought that fucking a pregnant woman cured gonorrhea. When the pimps wanted new faces, they sold us to other brothels, and so we went down and down until we reached the depths of hell. I was saved by fire and a man who took pity on me. One night there was a blaze that spread to several houses in the neighborhood. Journalists arrived with their cameras, and so the police couldn't turn a blind eye; they arrested us girls shivering in the street, but not one of the damned pimps or clients. We appeared on TV, where we were accused of being depraved and responsible for all the filth that occurred in Aksaray. They were going to deport us, but a cop I knew helped me escape and got me a passport.” Eventually, Radmila reached Italy, where she worked as an office cleaner and then in a factory. She had kidney problems, and was worn out from her experiences, drugs, and alcohol, yet she was still young and her skin had some of the translucent quality of her youth, similar to her daughter's. An American technician fell for her, they got married, and he took her with him to Texas, where some years later her daughter also arrived.

The last time Irina saw her grandparents, one morning in 1999 when they left her at the train that was to take her to Chisinau on the first stage of her long journey to Texas, Costea was sixty-two and Petruta a year younger. They were much more decrepit than any of the residents of over ninety at Lark House, who aged slowly and with dignity, with full sets of their own teeth or proper dentures. Irina had discovered that the process was the same: they advanced step by step toward the end, some more quickly than others, and lost everything along the way, for we cannot take anything with us to the other side of death. A few months after Irina left, Petruta's head slumped over a plate of potatoes and onion and she didn't wake up again. Costea had lived with her for forty years and concluded there was no point going on alone. He hanged himself from the beam in the barn, where the neighbors found him three days later, drawn by his barking dog and the bleating of the goat, which had not been milked. Irina learned this years later from a judge at the juvenile court in Dallas. But she never talked about it.