Seventeen #2
“I suppose,” he said. “People who thought they would have jobs when they finished high school—there were no more jobs. And the inflation meant that whatever you had was suddenly worthless. There were no more police, there was nothing.”
He offered her a cigarette but she did not accept; really, the smoking had become too much. But after they sat in silence for a minute she changed her mind and took one.
“That’s why they love him, you know,” he said. “He made them feel safe again.”
“I know,” Amy said.
They sat next to each other on the bench for a several quiet minutes, but it was a nice kind of quiet, the wind in the trees and the animals flitting about the graveyard and Zazi sighing at their feet.
“What did you think about Americans?” she asked. “When you were a kid?”
“About you?” He laughed. “Americans love to know what other people think about Americans. Every American I’ve ever worked with, they always want to know what do you think of our food? What do you think of our cars? They want us to be impressed.”
“Are you?”
She held her breath.
“Sometimes.”
Zazi was dozing at their feet, and a few yards away was another dog, stretched out in the sunshine, but not Angel. Of course not Angel. She was suddenly certain she would never find Angel. But right then, on this bench, she did not feel like a fool.
“To tell you the truth, we have everything that you have in America, and some of it is better. My guess is that maybe even a lot of it is better. Our subway is better. Our bread.”
“Hmmm,” she said. “Do you have skiing?”
“We have skiing.”
Amy hated skiing. “Do you have pizza?”
“Excellent pizza.”
“Do you have baseball?”
He chuckled. “Nobody in Russia has the least bit of interest in baseball. But if we did, I guarantee you our stadiums would be top-notch. Did you see the Sochi Olympics?”
Amy never watched the Olympics. “I heard you guys did a pretty good job.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I never watch the Olympics.”
She laughed.
“Of course, not everything is better. Air, water, traffic, our politics. It is all quite bad. And if you are poor, it is even worse than that.”
“But you are not poor,” she said.
“I am not,” he said. “In many ways, in fact, I have wealth.”
If she had dared reach out to Andrei, if she had taken his hand, if she had touched his face—the wind whipped against them every so often and she could use it as a pretext, somehow, dead leaves flying at her, to lean into him.
She knew how to do it, she used to do it.
She could maybe even make him think it was his idea.
But she wouldn’t do it. She was enjoying being with him too much to want to break the spell of being with him, to want to even risk breaking it.
Still, he saw her sneaking a look at him. “Yes?”
“Yes?” she said.
“You were thinking something?”
She did not want to know about his wife; she wanted to know everything about the wife. “Tell me about your wife.”
He took a drag of his cigarette, blew smoke toward the sky.
“She worked for Colgate-Palmolive.”
“The toothpaste people,” Amy said.
“Toothpaste, detergent, yes.”
That was not what Amy had expected. “She didn’t mind working for an American company?”
“Why should she mind? She made a decent salary. But Colgate closed its Moscow branch after the war started, so she found a new position at a Chinese firm. They pay more.”
She sold toothpaste for a Chinese firm. Amy had expected an artist, a painter. Or, for some reason, a shabby housewife. “What’s she like?”
“What is she like?”
“What’s her name? What sorts of—I don’t know, what does she look like?”
His eyes wrinkled a little bit. “Her name is Lena,” he said. “She has some Korean family somewhere, so she has black hair. So does our daughter. And brown eyes. But our daughter has blue eyes, like me.”
“Lucky girl.”
He smiled. Those eyes.
Lena.
“Where did you meet?”
“Online,” he said.
“I didn’t know Russians had online dating.”
“We have all the things you have, Amy.”
“I know, I just—” Actually, she still didn’t know.
“We texted for a while and then we met at a bar for the first time. I was surprised at how she looked, even better than the pictures she sent me. That was the first thing I said to her. She said I looked worse than the pictures I sent, but that’s what she’d been expecting, so she was not disappointed. ”
How on earth could he have looked worse? “When did you get married?”
“When we discovered she was pregnant,” he said. “I didn’t see myself getting married, but she was traditional, and then her father told me that if I didn’t marry her he was going to crash my car with me in it.” He smiled. “So we married.”
“Was it a nice wedding?”
“It was a very nice wedding,” Andrei said. “And then she had the baby two months after that.” He flicked away his cigarette. “She was a very nice baby.”
He shook out another. He was going to get cancer; did all men in Russia get cancer?
“Did you ever want more?”
“More what?”
“Kids?”
“No,” he said. “She was all we wanted. We didn’t think it could ever be any better.”
“I know what you mean,” she said.
On the telephone wires strung in the distance, Amy could see a few crows settle and squawk. Or maybe not crows—these birds seemed bigger, even from a distance.
They lifted off the telephone wire as a single unit, squawking again as they passed overhead.
“Does your daughter get your emails?”
“She does,” Andrei said.
“What do you write to her about?”
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and Amy thought that she had finally asked too much.
But then he said: “Mostly I write about life on the front. The battlefront. Battlefield? I’m not sure how you say it. I believe she currently thinks I’m in Donetsk. She thinks I’m a soldier.”
It took Amy a moment. “Ah.”
“I tell her about members of my battalion. I tell her how we won the latest fights, how the Ukrainians are welcoming us like heroes, that sort of thing.”
Amy nodded at him, kept her eyes on the valley.
“It is what her mother wants,” he said. “When I video with her, I turn off all the lights and tell her that my fellow soldiers are sleeping in the barracks.” He was leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.
“Or that they’ve all gone to a hospital or to a school or something. To help save the Ukrainians.”
Amy stayed quiet.
“Or she shows me the drawings she has made at school. I’m holding a gun, or I’m rescuing an old woman from a Nazi. She’s a good artist.”
Amy wondered if a day would come where he had to tell her the truth. If not, he’d be spared, but if so—if so, at least he’d get to see her again.
“She makes me promise her that I won’t get hurt.”
“How do you respond?” Amy asked.
“I am happy to promise that,” he said. “Since I will not be getting hurt.”
She didn’t say anything else, and neither did he. She thought: The valley below us is open like a thousand questions. The thought ran into her mind but she wasn’t sure what it meant. But it stayed there, circled around.
Across the world, parents and children writing letters to each other, creating a reality they thought the other person wanted, or simply lying. To what end? To protect what? And what did they destroy along the way?
Zazi was paying attention to a small black bird, and Amy was afraid he’d get up and chase after it and she’d have to follow.
But she didn’t want to stand up, didn’t want to make Andrei think that she judged what he was saying or thought worse of him, because she didn’t.
He loved his daughter enough to lie instead of disappear.
“I’m sorry you have to do this.”
“It is okay,” he said. “It is not what I would have chosen, but I am glad that she is proud of me.”
“You’re a good dad,” she said.
He looked at her then, and although he wasn’t smiling, his glowing eyes seemed to lift at the edges.
Amy felt the air between them start to hum again, and the urge to take this man into her arms was almost overwhelming, but she had no idea what he would do, and that had never been her thing, she had never really been forward like that, and then he looked away from her, and the moment ended as quickly as it had started.
She wanted the moment to return. “Do you ever—”
Which was when a particularly ambitious bird dashed in front of them to grab something from the ground.
Amy tightened her hold on Zazi’s leash, but even a thirty-pound dog had the strength to move a woman a hundred pounds heavier when it was after something.
Zazi pulled her off the bench toward the church, in the direction the bird had flown.
Chasing him, she tripped on several stones buried in the grass and almost wiped out, a romantic comedy moment the afternoon didn’t seem to call for.
Zazi stood at the tree trunk and barked furiously at the impudent bird, who stood on a branch, chittering.
“Let us go into the church,” Andrei said, coming up behind her. “It is peaceful inside.”
She and Zazi followed Andrei around the bend a little further until they came to the wooden double doors carved with intricate symbols. Zazi planted himself in the doorway, unwilling to come any further. Amy tied his leash to a sapling.
The air inside was filled with the smell of incense and swirls of smoke from what seemed like one thousand burning candles.
Andrei said, “There is never anyone here during the week.”
“Then who lights the candles?”
He shrugged. “It is a mystery.”
The church was not one of the grand stained-glass affairs Amy had seen in Paris and Rome, or even the more modest, wood-and-stucco ones she’d attended for weddings and funerals in the United States.
This building felt like the home of a deeply religious grandmother, cluttered with candles, gilt portraits, heavy wooden furniture, velvet chairs, alcoves, statues, and candelabras.
Toward the altar was a semicircle of life-sized icons, painted with gold and silver paint, creepy in their dead-eyed stares.
The floors were cracked tile and the walls were painted with scowling angels and above the altar an image of God floated in a mist of brownish clouds.
Below Him hung one of the drooping crosses.
“You’ve never been in an Orthodox church before,” Andrei said.
“I haven’t.” She approached a life-sized painting, in the corner, of a woman holding a small child on her knee. Her skin was olive; her eyes were defiantly black.
Andrei stood next to her, but he was looking down at his phone, not at the painting.
In the dim light of the church, the woman’s halo glowed.
“They consider them family, all of these saints,” Andrei said, gesturing to the life-sized portraits that surrounded them, each with its own glowing halo.
“They’re like the parents and great-grandparents.
They help you get your messages to God. If you find the right one to pray to, you’ll get the results you want. ”
Amy moved from saint to saint and tried to figure out who did what as the smoke swirled around them, and the motes of dust floated in the thin light filtering through the stained glass.
There was the old man with the lamb: the saint of shepherds?
The young man wearing a crown made of pearls: the saint of wealth.
The woman holding a cross with a grapevine wrapped around it.
She locked eyes with the icon and waited for a sense of peace or understanding to wash over her, or even a guess as to what she should pray for.
Maybe the grapes meant agriculture. She kept looking at her, though—her beautiful face, the delicate lips, the folds of her white gown.
The halo around her was bigger than all the others, and she seemed to have a message barely hidden behind her lips.
She turned to say something to Andrei, but was surprised to see his eyes closed in front of her, his lips moving rapidly.
The sense of trespass was sudden and deep.
She moved away to let him pray for what he needed to pray for.
Outside the church, in the clean, cool air, Amy untied Zazi and stood for what felt like many minutes, leaving Andrei inside the church to ask for intercession.
The birds were at it again, flying and squawking, and Zazi stayed by her feet while she scratched the top of his head (good boy, such a good boy), and she thought about how some saints were holy fools, she had read that once somewhere, that a holy fool was someone who rejected the customs of the world to pursue godliness in all things, and that the truest holy fools were animals, because they had no need to participate in human life, they were incapable of society’s failings and all of our failures, and they were therefore divine.
When Andrei emerged from the church, his eyes had tears in them, and Amy couldn’t help herself—she reached out for him and folded him into her arms.