The Boy From Reactor 4 (8 page)

Giant speakers suspended above a runway stage thumped with a Joan Jett rock-and-roll anthem. Two women gyrated on the floor, arching their backsides within inches of the faces of their worshipping clientele. Nadia counted thirty-three customers scattered around her brother’s club. None of them wore fine black leather coats, and none of them looked familiar.

Marko came around from behind a bar the length of a destroyer and gave her a lukewarm hug. With his shiny head and gray goatee, he looked like a prematurely old Cossack. A blast of mint gave way to the inevitable stench of alcohol.

“Oh, man,” she said in Ukrainian. “You’re drinking again.”

He blinked. “I can control it.”

“Last month, you told me you were sober for twenty-three days straight. What happened?”

“I think I can handle one cocktail.”

“Oh my God, you’ve got to be kidding me, Marko.”

“Just stop. You call me from your car all frantic and shit, telling me to be careful like my life is in jeopardy. Then you show
up here with your holier-than-thou attitude. I don’t need this, Nancy Drew. I really don’t.”

Nadia looked around to make sure someone hadn’t crept close enough to listen. She pulled her checkbook out of her purse.

“I’m giving you an early birthday present,” she said. “It’s going to be a big one to make up for all the years we were incommunicado.” She wrote her brother’s name on the check. “I want you—no, I
need
you—to leave the country for two weeks. Immediately.”

He laughed in disbelief. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Ain’t no one leaving the country”—he stopped laughing—“unless it’s you. What the hell’s going on?”

Nadia started filling in the amount. “I don’t have much money left, or I’d make it more. Three thousand dollars. The Bahamas. Or maybe Aruba—”

Marko grabbed her wrist and lifted the pen off the check. “Stop. Stop writing.”

Nadia tried to force the pen down, but Marko wouldn’t let her hand budge.

“Talk to me, little sister,” he said. “What’s going on? What’s this all about?”

She pulled her hand away and rubbed her wrist. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She looked around again. No one suspicious. “It’s not safe for me to do so.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell you anything except that your life is already in danger. If I tell you more, someone could try to get it out of you, and I won’t put you in that position. You have to trust me on this.”

“Trust you? Listen to yourself. I’m your brother, and you won’t trust me by telling me what’s going on.”

Nadia remembered when Marko had secretly tracked her during her three-night survival test on the Appalachian Trail to make sure she didn’t get hurt. She was twelve years old at the
time. Her father had insisted she become the youngest girl in the history of the Ukrainian scout organization PLAST to earn the survival merit badge. Marko had saved her from a pair of criminals who’d escaped from prison. Now his life was in jeopardy because of her.

“I’m so sorry this is happening,” she said. “I’m so sorry we’re having this conversation.”

Nadia resumed writing the check.

Marko said, “Does this have something to do with that antiques ring you busted up last year?”

Nadia didn’t answer.

“Does it? Were the people you put away just a front for someone else?”

Nadia signed the check.

“Oh no,” Marko said. “They were, weren’t they? Oh, shit. Uke or Russian?”

Nadia tore the check out of her book and slid it across the bar toward him. “Will you please leave the country? For your own protection.”

Marko glared at her, slipped off his stool unsteadily, and raised both pant legs. A gun was strapped to the left, a twelve-inch Bowie knife to the right. “Got all the protection I need right here.”

“No. No, you don’t,” Nadia said. “Not from these people.”

Marko’s face darkened, as though he understood her message.

“I’m begging you,” Nadia said, pushing the check closer to him. “Please go on a vacation. For me?”

Marko tore the check into eight pieces.

“Asshole,” Nadia said under her breath. “I knew this would be impossible.”

“Then why did you bother coming?”

She added a dollop of sarcasm to her voice. “Because I hate you and I want you to get hurt.”

Nadia gathered her purse and started to leave.

“Yo, Nancy Drew,” Marko said.

She turned. As a child, Nadia had escaped from her parents’ demands that she be the perfect student, Ukrainian, and daughter by reading mysteries. She always had a Nancy Drew in her hands, and it was Marko who supplied them. He delivered newspapers before school and bought her books with the proceeds.

“I’m leaving for Bangkok on Monday. Bunch of us are hiking to Burma. Two weeks. You need me to cancel and stay, just say the word.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that from the beginning?”

“That would have been the normal thing to do. Not our family way, though, is it?”

Nadia managed a smile. “Watch out for the snakes.”

“You too, Nancy Drew. You too.”

CHAPTER 16

N
ADIA ZIPPED DOWN
the highway to Rocky Hill, a bedroom community between Hartford and New Haven. Her mother’s condo conveniently abutted Dinosaur State Park. Yellow paint peeled from the clapboard exterior. The glass on the bottom half of the storm door was missing, as though her father were still alive and had kicked it during one of his tirades. She remembered how his temper had frayed when she resisted taking the three-day survival test. She didn’t need to be the youngest Ukrainian Girl Scout ever to win the most coveted merit badge, she told him. He screamed at her that she would never make it in America. That she had to be stronger, tougher, and more fearless than the other children because she was an immigrant’s daughter.

Her mother’s role in her upbringing had been one of tacit participation. When her father berated her for a less-than-stellar teacher assessment at an American school or a rival’s victory in a Ukrainian spelling bee, her mother fixed Ukrainian comfort food and gave Nadia compliments. But Nadia’s rewards were always conditional on her scholastic and community achievements. Both mother and father acted the same in that regard. Any and all affection she received was always conditional.

When Nadia entered the kitchen, her mother was arranging photographs at the circular wooden table. She didn’t get up. She didn’t even glance Nadia’s way.

Nadia wrapped her arms around herself. “What happened to the bottom of your door?” she said in Ukrainian.

“A T. rex got lost and kicked it when he saw his reflection. What do you think happened? The juvenile delinquents next door were playing soccer. When I told their mother she should fix it, she told me to go F myself. Can you believe that?”

“That’s terrible, Mama.”

“They’re Puerto Rican. What do you expect? This country will let anyone in now. This country is going to hell. You want some tea?”

“Tea would be nice.”

Nadia’s mother glided to the stove, her elongated, birdlike jaw leading the way. The belt from her black satin robe dangled behind her like the tail of a pterodactyl that had escaped with the T. rex. After preparing two cups, she joined Nadia at the kitchen table.

Nadia looked at the photographs scattered all around. In one, her father stood beside Marko on Mount Carleton, the Canadian peak of the Appalachian Trail. Her father, windswept hair like an angry lion. Marko, a pipsqueak, about eight.

“Do you have any pictures of Father when he was young? When he lived in Ukraine?”

“I have some pictures when we met in Lviv. After he was bit by the nationalist bug and moved from Kyiv. And I have some wedding pictures, but of course, we got married here in ’71. Why are you asking? Are you still obsessing over what your father did and didn’t do for the Partisans? What’s wrong with you?”

“What’s wrong with me? When I lost my job, I took a look at my life.”

“Oh, really. And what did you see?”

“Nothing, Mama. I saw nothing, because other than my career, I have nothing. I have no one.”

“You have nothing,” she said under her breath. “You have a college education, you have your health, and you’re an American citizen. You have everything.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. And what does this have to do with your father? Wait. Let me guess. Your father didn’t dote on you, and after he died, there was no man around the house, so you have trust issues, right? You can’t hold a relationship with any man, and he’s to blame.”

“No, he’s not to blame—”

“No, he’s not. You are. Because your entire life has been about money. You’re just another in a long line of Tesla quick-buck artists. Working with those criminals on Wall Street. You could have stayed in Hartford and been a mortgage banker. Helped people buy homes.”

“Yeah. That would have been much better.”

“You want a man? Be a woman. Go get a man. Stop blaming your father.”

“I’m not blaming him. I’m just trying to find out who he was. You never want to talk about him. You never answer any of my questions. So I have to do it on my own, don’t I?”

Nadia studied a photo of Marko and her in Ukrainian scout outfits, army-green shorts and matching knee-high socks.

“This is a nice one of Marko and me,” Nadia said. “I was hoping you might have one of Father and
his
brother.”

The teacup froze at the edge of her mother’s lips. “Well…I don’t know…I don’t think…You know, it was a tragedy. He died so young.” She blew on the tea and took a sip. “Why the sudden interest in your father’s brother? You never asked about him before.”

Nadia squeezed lemon into her cup. “Because I met someone who knew him. My uncle didn’t die as a child, like you and
Father said. His name was Damian, and he was a
vor
. A thief, as in Thieves-in-Law, right?”

Her mother’s face dropped. “Who told you this?”

“An old friend of his.”

“What old friend?”

“Victor Bodnar.”

Nadia’s mother lowered her teacup nervously. It rattled to its place on her plate. “Dear God. Victor Bodnar. I would have thought he was in hell by now. I can’t believe his name is coming out of my daughter’s mouth.”

“I didn’t know who he really was.”

“He’s a thief. A con artist. He makes a living stealing from honest people. How and why did you meet him?”

“It’s complicated. One thing led to another…” Nadia motioned at the photos. “What’s with all the pictures? Why the trip down memory lane all of a sudden?”

Nadia’s mother waited a beat. “I’m looking for the same thing you are.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your father’s brother. Damian. I’m looking for pictures of Damian.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve been getting letters from Ukraine from a man claiming to be him.”

Nadia’s mother slid two sheets of faded white paper across the table.

Dear Vera,

How do you start a letter to your sister-in-law when fifty years have passed since you last saw her? When she thinks you’re dead?

You don’t.

But I have to.

So let me try again.

Dear Vera,

I’m not dead. I’m alive. I know you won’t believe this until I offer you some proof. And even then, you may not care. But it’s not for my sake that I write. Let me explain.

I was found guilty of theft of state funds and sentenced to hard labor at Sevvostlag in 1960, when I was twenty. I was not buried in asphalt, the way everyone was told. Three members of my crew were. Three weren’t. The man who I robbed wanted me to suffer daily for the rest of my life. He spared my life so the gulag could kill me every day.

Five years later I killed a man in the gulag in self-defense, but they gave me a life sentence anyways. I was in the gulag until they closed it down in 1972. After that, I was allowed to settle in Kolyma, where I remained a prisoner. I worked on the Kolyma Highway—the Road of Bones—until 1983, and then on the Trans-Siberian Railway until 1998.

In August of 1998, a man came looking for volunteers. We were told the work was dangerous but that the pay was high. He told us we would be pardoned and allowed to leave Kolyma and resettle in Ukraine. I have lived outside Kyiv since then.

In 1994, I had a son with a woman who was doing the same work. She has died since then. My boy’s name is Adam, and it is for his sake that I write this letter.

My health is not good. I am dying. Adam is sixteen. I want a better life for him. Would you be willing to sponsor him? Let him come to America, the best place on Earth. He is a good boy. He has done nothing wrong. He does not deserve this fate.

I do not have an address because I do not want anyone to find me. I do not have a phone because I cannot afford one.

There is a woman in Kyiv. She knew the woman who bore my child. She agreed to give me her phone number and address for the sake of the boy.

Clementine Seelick

Yaroslaviv Val 8