Fourteen #2
Amy had protested twice in her lifetime: the Iraq invasion in 2002 and the Women’s March of 2017, both times down Fifth Avenue, past the museums and mansions all the way to Washington Square Park.
She felt righteous and alive both times, and obviously perfectly safe, lots of room to breathe, lots of fellowship among her fellow protesters, food carts lining the sidewalks.
For the Women’s March Lynne had knitted everyone those pink hats, and they took selfies and the police even took selfies with them, and the whole thing wasn’t exactly a party but it wasn’t a menace, either.
What did they have on the line? They were protesting Trump and what he’d said about women, sure, and they were expressing their general displeasure with the way the election had gone, and they were sad about Hillary and the fact that America would perhaps not get around to electing a woman president ever, or at least not in their lifetimes, and while all that was true and galling, they also agreed that the afternoon had been invigorating.
It had been cheerful; it had made them feel good.
Whether or not they effected any change—well, they hadn’t expected to effect change!
They had expected to come together, and they had, and then they had gone to happy hour at Le Coin and Judd had gotten them rosé and oysters on the house, of course. For the cause.
And Amy was thinking back to that moment—the oysters, the women sitting around the tables in their pink hats, rosy cheeked from the outdoors, they were all six years younger then and optimistic even in their despair—when a siren started bleating, blaring, the most piercing noise she had ever heard.
Reflexively she took several quick steps back and almost tripped over the dogs who had been lying on their sides.
They got up, offended, and took off in the opposite direction.
Andrei didn’t move, however. He was still gazing into the crowd from his station as if he were watching a movie.
“Andrei?”
He couldn’t hear her. She came back, touched his shoulder quickly, and he acknowledged her, nodded, pointed out to the sea of people.
The police had stopped the march by lining up in front of the crowd like a sea of Darth Vaders, holding their plexiglas shields, and the horrible sirens were coming from the police vans behind them, but instead of dispersing (daarbiet!
DAARBIET!) people were dancing, dancing , like they were at a nightclub or a rave.
Just dancing in front of the police in these athletic, incredible poses, skinny twenty-year-old men and women, draped in their flags, turning the shriek of the siren into the pulse of a club track, and Amy looked at Andrei, who was smiling. The crowd had made space for them.
They would not find Maia, of course. She knew that.
But they stood there anyway until they could no longer feel their fingers and their eardrums no longer recorded individual noises but rather just an oceanic roar and they watched the marchers march and the ravers rave, and when the police eventually lost patience and began spraying the crowd with their beastly water cannons, they felt stray droplets spray against their faces and still they did not move.
She was still not brave enough to join them—she could not join them—but at least she felt the water hit her face.
IT WAS ONE in the morning by the time they got back to the house. They were hungry, frozen, exhausted, tingling. The dogs, asleep, snuffled and rolled over as they walked past. Some were snoring. Some moved their paws in the air as they slept.
“You found her?”
Irine, ghostlike, at the kitchen table.
“It was impossible,” Andrei said. “There were probably five thousand people in the crowd.”
Irine nodded. Her eyes were red and the ashtray on the kitchen table was overflowing. Next to it she had an open bottle of something, a small empty glass. Her phone. “I have not heard a word.”
“Nothing?”
Irine looked at Amy, bleakly.
“Well, it was pretty peaceful down there, so I think she’s okay,” Amy said.
Irine waved away the smoke from her fresh cigarette. “Then why do you two look like you’ve been in a war?”
Nobody said anything.
Then, Andrei: “It was a long night. I’m going to bed. I hope she comes home.” He turned and headed up the stairs.
Amy sat down at the table with Irine. Irine seemed neither pleased nor put out by the company. She slid her cigarette pack across the table.
Amy lit up and watched the smoke collect under the pendant lamp above the kitchen table. She should probably buy Irine a fresh carton.
“Marmar said she told you the story of my sister.”
“Yes,” Amy said. “I’m so sorry.”
Irine took a long inhale on her Crown. Blew out the smoke in a stream. “For a long time I thought I would be okay one day, but now I know that you are never really okay after a thing like that,” she said. “You do not really forget.”
Her eyes had circles under them and her face looked grayish. She poured herself another drink but didn’t take a sip. Amy hoped whatever heart trouble she had wasn’t too terrible.
“Did you know,” Irine said, “that when George W. Bush came here in 2005, I was in the crowd?”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes,” she said. “It was very exciting. The American president! Nobody could believe it. My mother, Marmar, all of us—we walked down to Liberty Square together, and I remember the way people were streaming down the street. It was the first crowd I felt safe in since 1989. So many guards, you know? Nothing bad would happen.”
Amy nodded.
“And it was worth it. Being in that crowd. His speech was so inspiring. Bush told us that we were free. That we were part of Europe now and for forever. He told us that what Georgia had done was an inspiration to the rest of the world.”
Amy tapped the ash from her cigarette into the pile on the ashtray. Again, that strange sensation of being in a movie, of watching her life from a distance.
“I remember standing in that crowd, listening, thinking that the president was right, that the sacrifices we had made in our lifetime, that the marching, the starving, all of it—my sister’s life—that it had all meant something.
Because we were free. The American president was here in Liberty Square, something that would have been unimaginable when I was a child.
I looked at that man and thought of my sister, I thought—I wish she were going to be here with us for this beautiful future we have fought for.
I wish she could see this man in front of us.
My mother and my aunts thought the same thing. ”
Irine wiped a finger under an eye, took a sip of whatever she was drinking.
Amy got up and got herself a glass. “I was eight weeks pregnant then with Maia. I felt sick the entire pregnancy, but that day I was able to make it all the way to Liberty Square and back without feeling ill. I heard your president and I thought it was—what do you call that? I thought it was the intercession of God.”
Chacha, which burned Amy’s throat even more than the first time.
“So this was 2005, right?”
Amy nodded, her tongue bristling.
“In 2008, Russia invades the northern part of our country. George W. Bush is still president.”
“I remember.”
“But do you remember what he does about this? Because we are a beacon of light and freedom? Because he is so proud of all that we have accomplished? Do you know what he does to protect us?”
Amy knew the answer but didn’t want to say—
“He does nothing.”
“Irine, the US was already in two wars at the time—”
“He does nothing.”
“But in all practicality, there was no way the US could have—”
“Russia accused us of genocide against our own people. Genocide! That was their premise. Took Abkhazia. Took Tskhinvali where my father’s people live.
Their army surrounded Tbilisi for six days, while the city trembled.
They could have demolished us in a second.
And you Americans, with all your talk of liberty, you just watched all this happen and—tell me, did you even know all this was happening? Did you even bother to watch?”
Irine coughed wickedly. She really did not seem well. Amy had never looked up how to dial 911 in Tbilisi, and she had no idea where to find the grannies, but maybe Andrei knew—
“And then in 2014 Russia invaded the Donbas. And then it claimed Crimea for Russia. Just claimed it! Can you imagine! As if Canada just came and said, we’ll take New York City, thank you, and nobody does a thing about it. You just let them have it!”
She began coughing again.
“Irine, maybe you should—”
“Last year Russia invaded the rest of Ukraine. And they are still there, just like they are still in Abkhazia and Tskhinvali and Crimea and if you think they will stop there you are as silly an American as I have ever imagined.”
Amy poured some water for Irine at the tap, handed it to her.
“Marmar said you wanted to know if I am for the Russians,” she said.
“What I meant was—”
“I am not for the Russians. But I am for reality.”
“Of course.” Amy tried to keep her voice gentle.
“This is not a free country. This will never be a free country. George W. Bush was full of bullshit.”
George W. Bush, with his twang and his malapropisms, how impossible to imagine him here.
“We can cry and scream that we want to be part of NATO, part of Europe, but they will not have us as long as the Russian boot is on our neck. And we know by now that the Russian boot will never come off our neck, and nobody will help get it off no matter how many times we ask them to. Which means that the kids at the bottom of the hill can yell about it, can scream, can get tear-gassed, can get beaten, can go to prison, but we will always be Soviet here, even if we don’t like to think that.
And the more that we adjust to that reality, the more peace we will have. ”
“Irine, the future isn’t written for any of us. It’s not.”