Purge (23 page)

“You must not have gotten any sleep.”

“What does an old person need with sleep?”

Maybe that accounted for Aliide’s faraway look. She stood next to the table with the percolator in her hand and didn’t seem to know where to put it. Aliide Truu looked lonely. Zara cleared her throat.

“Vladivostok.”

Aliide startled, put the percolator on the floor, and sat down in a chair.

“Tell me about it.”

Zara started by telling her about the statue with the flag in honor of those who fought on the Eastern front, the harbors, the way you could smell the Sea of Japan in the paneling, the wooden decorations on the houses, her mother’s girlfriend who made the world’s best Armenian delicacies: dolmas, pickles, fried eggplant that was so delicious, and
shakarishee
cookies so heavenly that when they touched the roof of your mouth they made the driving snow outside look like sugar for the whole day and into the next. They could knock the pitch out of a board! And they used to listen to Zara Doluhanova on the record player, singing Armenian folk songs in Armenian, and Puccini in Italian—all sorts of languages. Zara had been named after her. Her mother had just been crazy about Doluhanova’s voice; she was always looking for news of Doluhanova’s trips to the West, all the places she went, all the cities and countries. With such an amazing voice, she could go anywhere! For some reason, Doluhanova’s voice was the only thing that her mother got excited about. Zara got tired of not being able to talk when Doluhanova was singing, and preferred to go to her friend’s house and listen to her Mumi Troll cassette—
Novaya luna aprelya—
Ilya Lagutenko, the singer, was wonderful, and he had gone to the same school as Zara. Sometimes Zara’s grandmother had taken her to look at the ships on their way to Japan; it was the only place besides the botanical gardens that she was allowed to go, just to watch the ships, and the wind from the sea would strike her forehead as it pushed inland. It was nine thousand kilometers to Moscow by train, but they had never been there, although Zara would like to visit some day. And the summer. The Vladikki summer. All the Vladikki summers! One time someone figured out that if you put aluminum powder in your nail polish it would make your fingernails glitter, and pretty soon every girl in town had fingernails that shone like the summer sun.

Once she got started, Zara got carried away with her story. The words tasted good. She even missed Zara Doluhanova. And Mumi Troll.

Katia had wanted to hear about Vladivostok, too, but no matter how she tried, Zara hadn’t been able to tell her anything about the place. Only occasional images of Vladikki passed through her mind, and they were always the ones that came to mind when Katia talked, but she didn’t want to mention them to Katia—like how Grandmother had started drying hardtack around the time of Chernobyl, in case of war, and how after the accident they watched television and had no idea what was happening, and how people on television were dancing in the streets in Kiev. Chernobyl was a troubling subject, because that’s where Katia was from, and that’s why she wanted to marry a foreigner, and why she was interested in Vladivostok. She wanted to have children. If the right man came along, she planned to tell him she was from someplace else, not from Chernobyl. Zara thought it was a good idea, too. She would have liked to ask more—Katia didn’t glow in the dark, and she didn’t look any different than any other girl. Nevertheless, she had said that the less people talked about Chernobyl and the less they wrote about it and the less they knew about it the better. She was right. Even Zara didn’t want to hug Katia, not even when she cried about missing her family or after she’d had a bad customer. She preferred to comfort her by talking with her about something else, anything else but Vladikki. Thoughts of her hometown had seemed strangely wrong in that place. Like she wasn’t worthy of remembering her hometown. Like all her beautiful memories would be tainted if she let herself even think about them in that place, that situation—let alone talk about them. She had only touched the photograph hidden in her clothes once in a while, through the fabric, to make sure it was still there. Pasha didn’t know that Katia was from Chernobyl, of course, because he had picked her up near Kiev, but he had told her to say she was from Russia if any customer asked her, because no one was going to want to shove his dick into death.

Zara tried to shake Katia out of her head. She didn’t want to tell Aliide about Katia. She should stick to Vladivostok. Her chatter had almost got Aliide smiling, and she urged Zara to have another piece of pie. Zara accepted it and felt brazen. She had simply forgotten how she had been used to asking Pasha’s permission for everything. She felt brazen because she had some more pie without Pasha’s permission. She felt brazen because she was telling stories to someone that she didn’t have Pasha’s permission to talk to. She was brazen because she wasn’t supposed to be here, in a place where she didn’t need to ask Pasha’s permission to take a pee. If her head started to ache, Aliide would probably offer her some medicine, without even asking. If she started her period, Aliide would give her something, make her a bath, bring her a hot water bottle, and she wouldn’t owe her anything. At any moment this unreality could disappear, and Zara could fall back to reality, customers, debts. At any moment Pasha and Lavrenti could pull into the yard—at any moment—and she wouldn’t be able to think about Vladikki anymore, and tarnish her memories of home with that world. But she could think about it now.

“You were happy there,” Aliide said. She sounded surprised.

“Of course.”

“What do you mean, of course?”

Aliide seemed delighted all of a sudden, as if she’d just thought of something entirely new.

“Well, that’s fantastic!” she said.

Zara cocked her head.

“Yes, it is. And it was fun being in the Pioneers.”

She had never been in the best row for the marching or anything like that, but it was nice to sit around the campfire and sing. And she was proud of her Pioneer badge. She loved the red background and she used to stroke Lenin’s shining gold forehead and his golden ears.

But when Zara talked about Vladivostok, Katia kept bubbling up in her mind. She could never tell Katia about Vladikki now. She was too late when it came to Katia, and Katia hadn’t asked for much. Zara had thought that the day would come when she would make Katia a Vladivostok girl, but that day never came. Should she risk telling Aliide these secrets, even if it might mean that Aliide wouldn’t help her get away from Pasha?

Pasha started the videocassette. The first thing to appear on the screen was a cock, red and erect, then the hanging, hairy stomach of a middle-aged man, then a young girl’s breasts. The man ordered her to squeeze her breasts, and the girl kneaded and massaged them, and the man began to fiddle with his dick. Another man came into the picture and wrenched the girl’s legs apart, spread her open, took out a disposable razor, and shaved off her hair.

Pasha sat down on the sofa, shifted into a comfortable position, and opened his fly.

“Come and watch this.”

Zara didn’t obey quickly enough, so Pasha came and dragged her in front of the screen, swore, and sat down on the sofa again, taking out his prick. The video played. Pasha jerked off. His leather coat creaked. Outside it was daytime. People were going to the store, buying bratwurst and sauerkraut, speaking German; there was a fly buzzing in the light fixture in the store.

“Watch!”

Pasha hit her on the back of the head and sat down beside her to make sure she was watching the video. He tore off her robe and ordered her onto all fours, with her rear end toward him and her face toward the screen.

“Spread your legs.”

She spread them.

“More.”

She obeyed.

Pasha jerked off behind her.

The potbellied man on the screen pushed his dick toward the girl. He was going to come in her face.

The girl had Zara’s face.

The girl’s face was covered with sperm. The other man put his dick inside the girl and started to groan. Pasha relaxed, and warm mucus ran down Zara’s thigh. Pasha zipped his pants and went to get a beer. The can hissed open. The sound of Pasha’s long gulps ricocheted around the nearly empty room. Zara was still on her hands and knees in front of the video. Her knees hurt.

“Turn around this way.”

Zara obeyed.

“Rub your pussy. Spread your legs right.”

Zara laid down on her back and rubbed Pasha’s sperm into her.

Pasha got out his camera and snapped photos.

“I’m sure you realize what will happen to these pictures and videos if you try any tricks.”

Zara stopped rubbing.

“I’ll send them to your babushka. And then I’ll send them to Sasha, and Sasha’s parents. We have their names and addresses.”

Had Oksanka told them about Sasha? Zara didn’t want to think about Sasha anymore. But he still came to mind, a voice that said her name, Zara—it sometimes woke her up. Sometimes it was the only reason she remembered being Zara and not Natasha. Especially on the edge of sleep, in that spongy land, drunk or otherwise drugged, she would suddenly feel Sasha wrapped around her, but she would shake the feeling off immediately. She was never going to have a home of her own with Sasha, and they would never drink champagne at each other’s graduation, so it was better not to think about those things; it was better to have a drink, pop a pill, beg Lavrenti for a snort and suck it up. And it was best not to think too much, it was easier that way. She just had to remember one thing: Even though Pasha had Zara’s face on the video, the video was not Zara’s story but Natasha’s; it would never be Zara’s story. Natasha’s story was on the video. Zara’s was someplace else.

When the girl started to talk about Vladivostok, her twitching eyebrow settled down, she forgot to rub at her earlobe, and a dimple leaped out on her cheek, disappeared, then came back again. Sunlight lit up the kitchen.

The girl had a pretty nose. The kind of nose that would have been a pleasure to see from the day she was born. Aliide tried to imagine Talvi in Zara’s place, sitting at the table chatting, twinkling, talking about her life, but she couldn’t. Since she had left home, Talvi had always been in a hurry to leave whenever she came to visit. If Aliide had been a different kind of mother, would Talvi have turned out differently? Maybe she wouldn’t scoff on the phone when Aliide asked if she’d planted a garden, saying that in Finland you can buy anything you need from the store. If Aliide had been different, would Talvi have come to help with the apple harvest, instead of just sending her some glossy photos of her new kitchen, her new living room, her new all-purpose appliance, and never pictures of herself? Maybe when Talvi was a young girl she wouldn’t have started to admire her friend’s aunt who lived in Sweden and had a car and sent the girls
Burda
magazine. Maybe she wouldn’t have started playing currency exchange and practicing disco dancing. Maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to leave. But the others wanted to leave, too, so maybe it wasn’t Aliide’s fault. But why had this surprisingly talkative girl from Vladivostok wanted to go to the West? She just wanted to earn some money. Maybe it was simply that Estonia was full of people who kept saying that they should have left for Finland or Sweden during the war, and the thing was repeated and passed on to the next generation with their lullabies. Or maybe Talvi had thought of wanting a foreign husband because her own parents’ marriage was a model for something she didn’t want for herself. This girl wanted to become a doctor and then go back home, but ever since she was a teenager Talvi had just wanted to go to the West and marry a man from the West. It started with her paper dolls—they drew clothes for them like the ones in
Burda
—and continued when she spent a whole summer scrubbing her Sangar jeans. She and her girlfriends rubbed them endlessly with a brick to make them look worn out like the jeans in the West. That same summer the neighbor boys played a game called “Going to Finland”—they built a raft and sailed it across the ditch, and then they came back again because they didn’t know what to do in Finland. Martin became more disillusioned every day. Aliide couldn’t share his disappointment, but when land restitution became the topic of the day, she had to admit that she felt disappointed in Talvi, because she wasn’t the slightest bit interested in the application process, not if it involved paperwork. If Aliide had been a different kind of mother, would Talvi be here to help her with these things?

When the girl had come here yesterday, Aino had been over to talk about land issues yet again, and Aliide had repeated the same advice she’d given her who knows how many times. She and her brothers should do the paperwork together, even if her brothers were drunks. That way if something happened to any of them, there would still be someone to take care of things. Aino wanted to wait at least until the army pulled out of the country—she suspected that the Russians would come back in full force, and what would happen then, would they all be taken to the station and put in cattle cars? Aliide had to concede that the soldiers didn’t look like they were going anywhere; they just came to the village now and then to thieve, making off with cattle and emptying the shops of tobacco. It was handy, though, to be able to buy army gasoline from them.

Aliide’s eyes crinkled up; there was a tickle in her throat. This Russian girl sitting on her wobbly-legged chair was more interested in what went on in this kitchen than Aliide’s daughter was. Talvi never talked as beautifully about her childhood as this girl did. And Talvi had never asked her how to make marigold salve. This girl wanted to know what the ingredients were. This girl might be interested in all the tricks the Kreels had taught Aliide—which plants to pick in the morning and which during the new moon. If it were possible, she was sure this girl would go with her to gather Saint-John’s-wort and yarrow when the time came. Talvi would never do such a thing.