You Are One of Them (19 page)

A balding guy in plaid bell-bottoms and a Brown University sweatshirt sidled over to us. “You are from America?” he said in English. I nodded. I felt like a doll on display. Wind her up and see the American drink vodka!

“You know Brighton Beach?” he said.

“This is Sasha,” said Andrei. “He lived in Brighton Beach for a year in the 1970s.”

It became clear that Sasha’s English vocabulary was stuck in that decade. “I’m hep to the jive,” he said.

“Lucky you,” I said.

“Do you read
Cosmopolitan?
” he asked me.

“No,” I said.

“Do you read
Playboy?
”

“Nyet,”
I said. The Russian word seemed more forceful than “No.”

“There are some very interesting articles about the joys of sex with older men.” He raised his eyebrows. “Can you dig it?” Except it sounded like “Ken you dick it?” when he said it. He smelled of garlic. I swiveled away from him.

Suddenly Andrei pointed across the room.
“Vot ona,”
she said. There she is.

It was Svetlana. She wore a fitted red sweater with a plunging neckline. Her skin was milky and virtuous, and her breasts, I realized with a start, were large. My own body was girlish; I was still waiting for boobs. Maxim kissed her three times in the Russian fashion—left cheek, right cheek, left cheek—and then she spotted Andrei and moved toward us.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” Andrei said.

“Privyet,”
Svetlana said. She lit a cigarette.

“Careful,” Andrei said. “
Nasha
Sarah has the delicate constitution.”

“Why is U.S. Constitution delicate? Because of founding fathers? They were not real men?”

“Not the United States Constitution,” I said. “My personal constitution. Like my makeup.”

“You need the makeup,” she said. “You would look much better with the lipstick.”

Andrei ignored us.
“U menya tost,”
he announced to the room, and glasses were refilled.

“Nyet, spasibo,”
I said, but Svetlana topped off my glass anyway. I didn’t want to be rude.
This is how diplomats become alcoholics,
I thought.

The toast was to Maxim, and it was obviously affectionate. The audience was rapt. It was like being at a wedding. Andrei concluded by wishing his friend happy birthday, and then everyone broke into clamorous song. On birthdays Russians of my generation sing a song from a beloved Soviet cartoon called
Cheburashka.
We had to watch it in college. In the cartoon a crocodile plays an accordion in the rain. “Let people stare,” he sings. The song is cheerful, but the lyrics of the refrain (“Unfortunately, a birthday is only once a year”) suggest that joy is fleeting. “Can’t they just enjoy the moment?” someone in my college Russian class asked, “without reminding you how soon the fun will end?”

Andrei was at my side, pouring more vodka into my glass. He sang part of the birthday refrain, soft as a lullaby.
“Tolko raz v godu.”
Only once a year.

Svetlana pinched my arm. “Sarah,” she said. “Your birthday will soon be here.”

“How do you know when my birthday is?”

“Jennifer told me.”

“When?”

“On seventh of November.”

“I mean when was she talking about my birthday?”

“She wanted to buy for you the gift,” Svetlana said. “We with Jennifer were at the diplomat
magazin.
”

“The diplomatic store.”

“
Da.
It was day before she returned to America. I thought I would never see her again.”

Did Jenny give me a birthday present from Russia? What I remembered most clearly were her rhapsodic descriptions of Svetlana that fall. I recalled, suddenly, her determination to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and her novice efforts to form Russian letters on the wide-ruled pages young children use.

“And you remember my birthday, even after all this time?” I said. I wanted her to confess that she had talked to Jenny about me more recently.

“Is easy to remember. It is our Revolution Day.” November 7 was when the party marked the anniversary of the October Revolution; during Communism it was a day of military parades and marching Young Pioneers. Svetlana wandered off.

What did Jenny give me for my eleventh birthday? Sixth grade. Was that the year I celebrated at a bowling alley? Jenny, my mother, and me, with a lane to ourselves. A cake with cream-cheese frosting. It all came back to me. Jenny and I took turns penciling our scores into the squares on the sheet of paper provided. I got two strikes that day. I won both games and choreographed a goofy victory dance. I’d spent so much time inventorying my losses and rejections that I’d lost sight of the wins. How many other moments of triumph were buried in the archives of my brain? Jenny’s birthday gift to me was wrapped in green and white stripes. I recalled tearing off the paper with uncharacteristic abandon.
A balailaka.
That’s what she gave me. A Russian folk instrument, painted red with gold flowers. My mom strummed it right there in the bowling alley while she and Jenny sang.

“Who is Jennifer?” said Andrei.

“My friend,” I said.

“The dead friend?” he said.

“Svetlana knew her, too,” I said. “She visited Moscow when she was young.”

“Tolko raz v godu,”
he sang again. Only once a year.

I was already feeling muddled. The room was hot, and people were drifting in and out of frame, blurring in and out of focus. What the fuck, I thought. Might as well get drunk. I swigged the whole cup of vodka and shook off the burn. The man with the guitar shouted, “This is for our American!” and broke into the chords of “Hotel California.”

“I hate the Eagles,” I said under my breath.

•   •   •

L
ATER—
I
DON’T KNOW
how much later, because I’d lost all track of time—Andrei had me pressed against a wall in the living room. His hands inched up my legs, but he kept his eyes on me, as if he didn’t know what his hands were doing.

“I don’t trust you,” I said. My voice was unsteady.

“You’re not supposed to trust me,” he said. “I’m Russian. Your government
taught
you not to trust me. But you trust in God, yes? It says so on your dollars.”

“I don’t believe in God,” I said.

“I thought all Americans believed in God.”

“Not me,” I said.

“What do you believe, Sarushka?” He prodded me with the diminutive; in his grip my name turned tender. He wrapped his hands around my throat, and I thought, for a moment, that he was going to squeeze the life right out of me. Instead he cupped my neck and pressed his thumbs gently into the knobs of my collarbones. “So skinny, Sarushka,” he said. He bent forward, let his lips grace the triangle of skin between his hands.

“I think I’m going to faint,” I said, but I was already falling as I spoke. I was on the floor without knowing exactly how I got there.

“You melted,” Andrei said. He was crouching next to me, and I could see that he wore combat boots and that they were flecked with white paint. I tried to stand but couldn’t.

“Vsyo khorosho?”
he said. Is everything all right?

“I’m sorry,” I said. Not because I’d fallen but because I was sorry to have caused a fuss. I didn’t want him to worry about me. I’ve never been good at leaning on people. I’d had only two drinks, but it was on an empty stomach. And the room was so hot. And I’d been standing in one place for too long. My knees must have locked. I tried to explain this to him. I tried to tell him that it was nothing to worry about, that this was not the first time I’d fainted, but my words warbled. I was groggy. I didn’t know what language I was speaking. I didn’t see Svetlana; had she gone home? There were still a lot of people there, but the party no longer had a nucleus. Everyone was scattered in different corners of the room. One couple was making out on the couch, sucking at each other with gasping, gulping sounds.

“Vsyo khorosho,”
Andrei said again, but it wasn’t a question this time. Everything’s okay. He repeated it again and again. And so I finally stopped trying to keep my head up and just let it fall onto his willing shoulder. Someone turned up the stereo. We sat against the wall with eyes shut.

“
The Wall,
” Andrei said to me in English. “Pink Floyd. That was an important album for us, before glasnost. It was so strange, you know. I went away to Washington, and when I came back, everything was different. In D.C. we hardly left the embassy grounds, so we were living in a miniature Soviet Union, but then we came back in 1989 and it was like a different country. We were raised to be like everyone else . . . But now . . .” He laughed. “Capitalism is all about individualism.”

“In theory,” I said. “We’ve got our share of joiners, too.” I could feel how flushed I was. No doubt I looked awful.

As if reading my mind, he said,
“Ty krasavitsa
.”
You’re a beauty.

“Ya?”
I said. I still wasn’t used to hearing that I was beautiful. People started telling me that in college, when I had apparently completed my transformation from ugly duckling. When I got to college, I was considered sexy for all the things that had been held against me when I was younger.
You’re hard to read,
said one guy.
You’re disarmingly cool,
said another. And when their exploring fingers found their way inside my pants, they said, like metereologists describing tropical weather zones,
Here’s where it gets really warm and wet.
I didn’t trust those guys, with their undiscerning hard-ons, with their fumbles and grunts. One boyfriend fondled my breasts with the clinical detachment of a doctor looking for lumps. Their lust was fickle, careless. They were greedy. They would take what they could get, use you up, spit you out. But I liked the reductive nature of sex: in the moment’s heat, affiliations fell away like clothing. You were left with skin and sweat, humanity’s sticky essence.

“Ty
,”
he said. The informal you. He took my hand, then turned it over and studied my palm. “A long life,” he said in English. “Many adventures. All over the world.”

“I don’t believe in fortune-telling,” I said.

“The American who doesn’t believe in anything. Come on,” he said. “If not God, you must believe in democracy. Or the stock market. Or Coca-Cola.”

“I’ve always been loyal to Coke,” I admitted. “I’ve never liked Pepsi.”

“Aha!” he said. “She believes in the Real Thing.”

“I don’t know what’s real,” I said. “And what isn’t.”
It’s not that I didn’t believe in anything
, I thought;
it’s that I regretted believing too much. I believed in too many people. Like an idiot, I believed in forever
.

“I have something for you.” Svetlana materialized next to me and yanked me up off the floor. Then she pulled a white envelope out from under her sweater.

“What’s this?” I said.

“A special invitation,” she said.

“You can’t come all the way to Russia and not visit a dacha,” said Andrei
as he stood up.

“Your chance to see typical Russian country house,” Svetlana said. “You will be our guest. We will have shashlik!”

“Shashlik is kebabs,” Andrei said.

“Unfortunately, my family’s dacha
is only for summer,” Svetlana said. “But we will go to our friend’s house. Her dacha is ready for winter.”

“Winterized,” Andrei said.

“Da,”
Sveta said. “Andrei will drive you.”

“When?” I said.

She just pointed at the envelope in my hand. I opened it. Inside, the card read,
“Sunday. 12 o’clock
.
Our friend is expecting us.”
The words swam before me.

“I think I’m drunk,” I said. “And I don’t like being drunk. I need to go home.”

“To USA?” Andrei said.

“Eventually,” I said. “But right now to Corinne’s. To the apartment I’m staying in.”

“I will escort you,” Svetlana said. “I am ready to leave.” She touched Andrei’s arm.
“Do zavtra.”
See you tomorrow. She went to get her coat.

“What are you guys doing tomorrow?” I said to Andrei. I was surprised to feel a jealous pang. Not of the sexual sort—though I did wonder if he and Svetlana had ever slept together—but the familiar sense that alliances were forming around me, that while I remained alone, others were teaming up. I felt comfortable with Andrei because his English was so good, because he had lived just a few blocks away from my childhood home. But he and Svetlana obviously knew each other very well. They were in league somehow.

“She meant Sunday,” Andrei said.

“She said tomorrow,” I said.

“She thinks today is Saturday,” he said.

“If you say so.”

“Eto ya znayu.”
I know so.

“What else do you know?” I looked at him. He had a narrow, elegant face and short, reddish brown hair. His smile was tempting. I had a sudden urge to kiss him. I leaned in and let my mouth meet his. His lips were chapped and dry. I pulled back.

“I know you are very beautiful,” he said.

“I’m not going to sleep with you,” I said.

“Nyet,”
he said. “Of course not.”

“Sarah,” Svetlana called from across the room.
“Davai!”
Come on.

•   •   •

I
N THE CAR
ON THE WAY
back to the center of the city, Svetlana asked the driver to turn up the radio; it was techno music, and I could hardly hear myself think.

“It’s so loud,” I said. I could feel a hangover brewing. The night’s events jostled in my head, and I was already having trouble separating fiction from fact. Did I really kiss Andrei? Did Svetlana really invite me to a dacha?

“I do not want him to hear us,” Svetlana said.

I turned to look at her. I couldn’t get a read on her face in the dark. “What?” I said. “Are you actually going to give me some real information? Or do you just like creating a sense of mystery?” I could smell the smoke from the party on my clothes and I couldn’t wait to take a long, hot shower. “Smoke and mirrors,” I said. “One-way mirrors.”

“What did you think of our consumer research?”

“Sorry if I messed it up,” I said. “But you promised me a surprise. I thought I saw Jenny in that room.”