The Cosmopolitans Read online

  The

  Cosmopolitans

  Nadia

  Kalman

  Livingston Press

  The University of West Alabama

  Copyright © 2010 Nadia Kalman

  All rights reserved, including electronic text

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60489-066-2 library binding

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60489-067-9 trade paper

  Library of Congress Control Number 2010929243

  Printed on acid-free paper.

  Printed in the United States of America,

  Publishers Graphics

  Hardcover binding by: Heckman Bindery

  Typesetting and page layout: Joe Taylor

  Cover design and layout: Lev Kalman

  Cover art: Elena Kalman, Lev Kalman

  Proofreading: Connie James, Joe Taylor, Tricia Taylor,

  Stephen Slimp, Gerald Jones

  Author’s acknowledgements on page 239

  This is a work of fiction.

  Any resemblance

  to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  Livingston Press is part of The University of West Alabama

  and thereby has non-profit status.

  Donations are tax-deductible:

  brothers and sisters, we need ’em.

  first edition

  6 5 4 3 2 1

  The

  Cosmopolitans

  Куда плывете вы? Когда бы не Елена,

  Что Троя вам одна, аxейские мужи?

  Where are you sailing to? If Helen were not there,

  What would Troy be to you, young warriors of Aegea?

  — Osip Mandelstam, 1915

  Lev

  They are none of them fans of tradition. Tradition is for great-grandparents, and not even for theirs, who traded their shtetls for the Universal Struggle.

  Was it traditional to leave Mother Russia, to leave it truly, not just to sit on the floor listening to an imitation folk bard sing about it? They flew to the land of the free, and they worked towards diplomas in computing, and after a few years, they could afford boom boxes to play the old wistful songs, they could afford to be tearful when they listened.

  They would categorically disagree with all of the above. They would tell me I am generalizing like a Marx. They would ask, Why I don’t write about Samuel: he never attended a single computer class and look at him now, a home health aide and a cocaine addict, have you ever heard of a vocation and an addiction so mismatched? Why don’t I write about Pasha, who owned a wig store and was always offering us free front pieces, because “Pochemu i net?” why not? Who died butting her car into a highway divider, who may have died on purpose?

  I say, it’s no exception to think you have an exemption. Then, bowing my head, I admit that when I say all, I mean most, and when I say most, I mean my brother Osip’s family, the Molochniks of Stamford, Connecticut. Nothing to do with you, Valera Stas Sasha Abram Yosha Genady Zoonia Manya Margarita Natalya Kiril Foma Galina Rachel. How could I write about you? How could I remember you, or you me?

  Stamford has its North, nearer to New Canaan, home to formerly famous pro wrestlers and Gene Wilder; and its South, where we Molochniks live. However, Connecticut gives even its undistinguished residents ways to distinguish among ourselves. My brother’s family lives across from a gas station, but his wife can say they live in a Tudor. I live in a low-income housing project, but I can say I live in Augustine Manor, for that is what our developer, who installed a bidet in every toilet and a coat of arms below the “No Solicitation” sign, chose to call it.

  I’ve climbed to the roof, free from my neighbors’ footfalls, their warring cooking smells, ignoring my knees and the No Trespassing sign, for one reason only: to scratch out a pleasant, simple tune.

  Milla

  “That’s not how it starts, you know,” one of the uncles said. There were three uncles at the table: a doctor, an editor-Quaker, a novelty tee shirt maker; all tall, all dark, all maybe-handsome if they weren’t so old, in their forties, maybe. Milla was twenty-one, at a Seder with her boyfriend Malcolm Strauss’s family, in a Manhattan apartment on the park, with unwashed hair (it had been a last-minute invitation), her lip balm under one leg, her leg under Malcolm’s hand, pecking with her spoon at a matzo ball and guessing at etiquettes, a large and poorly concealed pimple on her chin.

  “No one in America knows how Anna Karenina really starts,” the uncle went on.

  “What?” Malcolm’s mother Jean said, her hands at her throat. She’d wanted to be a musical-theater actress, but was a divorce lawyer instead.

  “Everyone in the English-speaking world just quotes it like that. The original translation was incorrect, but it was a tremendous hit, so they just kept it.” Milla was now fairly sure it was the doctor uncle. He was the most confident one, according to Malcolm. Everyone had always thought he would win the Nobel Prize, and even though he hadn’t, even though the tee shirt maker was wealthier, and the editor-Quaker more cultured, the doctor remained the grandmother’s favorite.

  “So how does it really start, then?” Jean said. “Milla, you must know.”

  Eight? Twelve? Sixty? beautifully groomed heads turned towards her. Malcolm squeezed her leg. “Actually, I think it does start: ‘Happy families are all alike,’ just like in the translation,” she said.

  “But Richard just said it doesn’t,” Jean said.

  “Yes, but Russian people are very educated,” said one of the aunts. She was now Milla’s favorite. Milla would remember her by her, well, her fatness, which just made her all the more beautiful and maternal. “Pasha, for instance,” the aunt continued. “Our ‘housekeeper’?” She made scare quotes around the word with her fingers and a few Strausses smiled. “In Russia, she was a dentist.”

  “Huh.” Jean said. “Malcolm, do you know?”

  “About what?”

  “The first line of the book, aren’t you listening?”

  Malcolm smiled, leaned back in his chair. “I’m just a music major.”

  “What do you do with a music major?” Jean asked the group. She pointed at Malcolm like a cop about to shoot and he pointed back at her and Jean smiled, letting him off for now.

  Looking around the table, Uncle Doctor said, “Anna Karenina starts with the couple arguing, and then Tolstoy puts that line, as an explanation. I read about it in the New Yorker, I’m pretty sure, so…” He gave a modest shrug.

  “When I last reread Anna Karenina —” Milla made sure to pronounce the title with a Russian accent — “it started with ‘Happy families.’”

  “And you read the book in the Russian? The whole thing?” Jean said.

  “Of course,” Milla said, trying to imitate the tone of Jean’s voice when, earlier in the evening, she’d told the family about a peerless eye cream. “I’m positive I’m right.” She waved her spoon like a sickle.

  “Hmm,” Malcolm’s mother said. “Bobby? Do you agree?”

  Bobby was Malcolm’s father. Chubby as a seal, he wore a black suit with lavender stripes, which Jean had bought for him, and had said nothing for the entire meal, except to agree with Jean that the suit was, indeed, incredible. “Never read it,” he said now.

  “But you went to Harvard!” Jean said. “And he’s never seen The Philadelphia Story.”

  The aunt who, throughout the dinner, and apparently, throughout the past three months, had been exhorting them to party as if it were 1999, said, “Send him to the lions.”

  Malcolm smiled and said, “I never saw it either. I don’t like that actress.”

  “You don’t like Katharine Hepburn?” Jean’s face now carried an expression of stupefaction so extreme her eyes had crossed.

  “She’s too hard, and I don’t like he
r voice, and she’s not sexy.” He was so easy here, everywhere. He slurped a spoon of soup.

  “I know your problem,” Jean said.

  “What’s that?” As he slung his arm around Milla’s shoulders, she thought of how well she slept, with his arm just like that, and let her chest relax into the thought of him.

  Jean said, “You just don’t like strong women.”

  “Yeah, I do. Milla’s strong.” He paused. “Still waters run deep.”

  Attempting to prove she was loud, boisterous, even, Milla ventured, “You know, in Russia, there’s this saying, v teehom omute cherti vodyatsah, devils live in quiet waters. So, you never know.” Silence. Deep-set Straussian eyes stared from all directions.

  “Great broth,” the uncle who made tee shirts finally said.

  Osip

  Everything was in confusion in the house of the Molochniks. The Chaikins were due to arrive in an hour, along with their son, Leonid, a stock analyst with a face like a potato, who’d bought himself two mountain bikes, just in case the right girl came along. That girl, according to Osip’s wife, was Milla, but Milla drooped through the house, a dying swan in sweatpants. She’d mentioned the Chaikins’ visit to her boyfriend Malcolm, and Malcolm had said that if she was seeing other people, he would, too. Osip thought his beautiful Milla had nothing to worry about — Malcolm was not a James Bond — but who cared what Osip thought? No one even cared that he was wearing the fuzzy checkered sweater his wife had put in the trash the previous week.

  Yana, their middle daughter, tried to work the word “clitorectomy” into every conversation, as if it were the name of a boy she loved, and had created a mountain of what she called “girl clothes” in the upstairs hallway, and the mountain was slowly collapsing, skirts fluttering to the floor whenever anyone passed, and she was taking photographs of this.

  Katya, the youngest, had locked herself in the bathroom again. Was she dyeing her hair? Cutting off her eyelashes like she had that one time? Smoking crack, like the police chief’s daughter on The Commish? Creating a viable hydrogen fuel?

  Osip stood at the table and watched his wife whip meringues. “It’s perfect,” she said in her meticulously Muscovite Russian. “Milla’s an accounting major, and accounting is a little lower than stock analyzing. So the woman is a little lower than the man, and the man feels good, and they talk about business.” Every few seconds, she wiped the counter clean of batter, only to splatter it again, only to wipe it again. This was completely contradictory to the Just-In-Time manufacturing techniques Osip had just learned at work, which he could resist sharing with her only because he had a more important mission.

  “God loves the trinity,” everyone had said when Katya was born. Osip loved the trinity too, but he had always wanted a son, for the sake of one important Jewish word: moderation. Many of the Molochniks’ problems stemmed from the immoderate number of girls in the house. A boy would tell Yana that Osip wasn’t actually very patriarchal at all. A boy would address Katya in the street language of modern youth: “Tell me the dealio with all those earrings, and failing math, when you have a father to tutor you, yo,” and she would explain herself, and then Osip would know what to do. It wasn’t natural, him alone, battling all these forces.

  Stalina called up the stairs, “Yanka — are you waiting for Pushkin to set the table? Get to it, girlie.”

  Yana said, “Why? So the prospective owner of Milla’s vagina can think she’s tidy?” and clattered down in her steel-toed boots.

  “You give me headache already,” Stalina said. Whenever anyone spoke English to her, she took it as a dare.

  “Shh, little girl, shh,” Yana said, “Your voice will never be privileged.” She began tossing silverware onto the table.

  “Katya,” Stalina called up the stairs. “Nu, come on.”

  The Commish, Osip’s favorite television policeman, off the air four years now, but never to be forgotten, would say now or never, junior. “You know that program at the Jewish Community Center, ‘Tolerance Now’?”

  “No,” Stalina said, chopping an apple into a variety of abstract shapes.

  Osip deployed Zionism. “It’s to benefit Israel. They send children to Jerusalem, and bring other children here.”

  “Children should stay where their parents put them.” She looked up from the apple battlefield. “These other children, who are they?”

  “They’re Muslims, Stalinatchka, but from nice countries, Bangladesh, Egypt, these are the ones who, if they see someone making a bomb, they can say something like, ‘Look here, my fellow Allah-enjoyer, I’ve lived with a few Jews myself, and they’re really not so bad.’” Stalina raised her flour-hoary eyebrows. “He’ll say, ‘Did you know Jews invented the hologram?’ Because we’ll have taught him things like that, veedish, see?”

  “What is the Point of Stamford?” Stalina said. Osip knew what was coming: a speech she often gave to visiting Boston friends. “It’s provincial, yes, without question. However: have you noticed, historically, that most blockades and suchlike happen only to large, important cities? No one cares about Stamford, so it’s safe.”

  He grabbed her shoulder. “And that’s exactly —”

  “But when you start bringing devils to these quiet waters —”

  “Devils? Stalinatchka!” he said, possibly overplaying his shock. “People used to call us that.”

  Yana came back in and took some glasses from the cabinet. Stalina asked about Katya; apparently, she remained in the bathroom.

  “Still? And Milla?” Stalina said.

  “The hozaika vlagalishta, keeper of the vagina, is in my room.”

  Stalina said, “When you’re done, tell Milla to get down here. And get Katya out of the bathroom — Milla needs to make herself up. And enough with trying to shock us with your feminist tricks. That’s not even the word Russian people use — they say pipka, for children, or zhenskiy organ, which is more polite, or pizda, to be crude, right, Osya? You think you can shock me?” Stalina lifted a ladle of meringue batter. “When you and your sisters had full diapers, guess who had to clean your pipkas?”

  Yana clattered back upstairs, muttering something about Stalina being a rebel.

  Osip said, “The boy the JCC has for us is a graduate student, in industrial engineering. Maybe Katya will let him tutor her in math.”

  “Katya doesn’t need a tutor, she needs to listen to her mother and learn some manners. Like you, why are you just standing there like a prince? Finish the salad.”

  “Of course, zaychik.”

  “And don’t call me zaychik. I’m a big fat woman, not a little bunny rabbit.”

  Quick as a fox, he got three cucumbers, a bag of spinach, and four tomatoes from the refrigerator, laid them on the counter as a symbol of good faith, and wrapped his arms around his wife’s waist. “You, big and fat? I can put my hands around you, practically.”

  “What’s this ‘practically’ supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re tiny, all bones, come kiss me, my little bone-bag.” Osip’s kiss scattered the flour, exposing purple rouge. “And you know, it doesn’t look like Lev’s ever moving into that extra room, he lives the bachelor life now.”

  “What life?” Stalina was beginning her Lev lecture. It was time for Osip to deploy his most powerful weapon.

  “Do you know, there are no Russian host families on the list right now? We don’t want those JCC people to think only Americans can be generous.” He paused to let it sink in. “They’ll say, those Russians just come to take our charity, never give anything back.”

  A tornado rose in the mixing bowl. “The terroristnik will be your responsibility, understand?”

  “Yes, zaychik, let me kiss your pink nose…” Osip was saying, when Milla slouched into the room. Osip tried to smile at her, but she didn’t notice.

  Stalina said, “Sit down, Millatchka. What are all these tears? Osya, what are you doing? We have forty-five minutes exactly. Will you be able to find it within yourself to cut a cucumb
er before then?”

  Eyes on the floor, Milla said, “You know what’s wrong.”

  “What, Malcolm? But Milla, bood’ milloi, be kind, like your name, like your mama is asking, Chaikins will be here in forty-four minutes, what you want for them to do? Cry with you for boy you’ve known a few months?”

  “Seven months.”

  “Seven months.”

  “You’re right, seven months, who cares? Let’s party.”

  Osip tried to hand Milla a new tissue, but she seemed to be reading a secret message on her sweatpants.

  “I don’t know why you get ironical,” Stalina said. “Leonid is stock analyst.” She put down her whisk: what more was there to say?

  Milla said, “I just want to be with Malcolm. I don’t know why you forced me into this setup.”

  “Ah, and I force you also to tell Malcolm?” Milla rolled the tissue between her hands until it resembled a cigarette.

  “Milla, bood’ milloi, listen to me,” Stalina said in a softer voice, and in Russian. “You don’t want to be an old maid like I was, until I met your father, everyone laughing about you, the husbands of your colleagues thinking they can kiss you. You’re in college; it’s the right time to meet the right man.”

  “Malcolm was the right man.”

  “If Malcolm were the right man, he would hear about Leonid and hustle down here and propose. But no. Malcolm is the kind of man who will maybe marry someone when he’s forty and she’s pregnant.”

  “You don’t know, you only met him like once.”

  “And where did you first meet him? In the park, like pigeons. He should be studying and not running to the park. Milla. Did you ever put on a miniskirt, like I told you to, and sit outside the hospital?”

  “Malcolm goes to Yale!”

  “And he’ll keep going until he’s thirty. Those professors can tell he’s nerazviti, underdeveloped.”