25 A Sturgeon for Misha

We walked down the esplanade, past a creaky bumper-car set imported from Turkey, festooned with indecipherable Turkic exhortations beneath a cartoon of a young brown woman being chased by a drooling gray wolf brandishing a knife and fork. To think how much of this world we don’t understand. We pass it by and shrug. But if a Turk had appeared on the esplanade and explained to me why this cartoon was supposed to be funny, why it was attached to a bumper-car set for children, and why, pray tell, this particular set of bumper cars had landed here in the middle of Absurdistan and not in some dusty provincial Turkish amusement park—well, just think of how much more I would now know about this Turk and his nation, how much less prone I would be to dismiss his kebab-skewering, Atatürk-loving, repressive ways. Perhaps it would prove instructive for Misha’s Children to spend their summers in a Turkish resort by the Black Sea, sunning themselves and learning about their dark Moslem cousins. I made a note to call Svetlana in Petersburg and tell her to make it happen.

Thoughtful and depressed after the history lesson, Nana and I walked along a pier stranded between two listing derricks and toward a mammoth pink clamshell. The clamshell, once in use as an amphitheater, had found more profitable use as a seaside restaurant called the Lady with Lapdog. We were the only customers despite the prime dining hour, the waitstaff having gone to sleep around a circular table, mostly middle-aged men in transparent white shirts, heads buried in their hands. They looked up at us wearily, displeased by the midday disturbance. We ordered the tomato salad, drenched in olive oil. It had been some time since I’d seen vegetables that colorful. I grabbed my gut, turned away from Nana, and started rocking back and forth, as if imitating my sworn enemies the Hasids.

“Mmm,” Nana said. “Fresh, so fresh.”

She poured herself a Turkish beer and I did the same, only adding a glass of Black Label to the equation. An old waitress in a filthy miniskirt and fluorescent panty hose approached, bearing in each arm a dish of eight perfectly square sturgeon kebabs. I glanced at Nana, but she hardly noticed me, lost as she was in the act of lancing her first kebab with her mighty fork.

My mind collapsed on itself, the toxic hump started humping, but it was unsure of the brand of toxicity to be released—either cold melancholy or the streetwise aroma of the Bronx. The sturgeon kebabs were the color of an Indian chicken tikka, their edges were charred black as the void, but their consistency was mealy and tender. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I whispered in appreciation. The fish juices pooled over my chin and fell in oily yellow drops onto the plate, the tablecloth, my track pants, onto the ceramic floor of the Lady with Lapdog, into the barely breathing Caspian Sea, over the starving deserts of the interior, and into the lap of my beloved Nana, sitting across from me in silence, eating.

More fish came. I ate it all. I could feel my father’s hands upon me. The two of us. Together again. Papa drunk. Myself timid yet curious. We would stay up all night. We would ignore Mommy’s threats. Who could think of a school day in the morning when you could drop your trousers and pee all over the neighbor’s anti-Semitic dog? I could feel my father’s vodka breath in my mouth, in my nose, in my ears, my pasty body pressed to his prickly one, both of us sweating from the ghetto heat of a Leningrad apartment in deep winter, drowning in that strange atavistic stirring, shame and excitement in equal measure.

I ordered a batch of the Central Asian flatbread called lipioshka, using it to soak up the sturgeon juices shimmering on my plate. The beer and Black Label were gone; fresh cantaloupe had replaced them. The fruit was as bright and orange as the fish kebabs, only bursting with sugar instead of salt. I let the wedges chill against my inflamed gums, then breathed in the cantaloupe, which coated my throat with orange lather before dissolving into the center of my body, gone forever, like everything else I’ve ever eaten.

I looked up at Nana. She was shivering with delight. Her big, tough, cracked homegirl’s lips were purple and flecked with all the juices on offer, except for mine. She was more alive than anything around her, and her aliveness distorted the oil derricks behind her and the Sevo octopus and the dingy esplanade and the Turkish bumper cars, and that made it all real and lovely and true. “There is a new seafood restaurant,” she said.

“On Tenth Avenue,” I said.

“Not far from—”

“—that new boutique hotel—”

“—they’re gonna build.”

“The one with the portholes—”

“—next to the Belgian place.”

“The one thing you can’t find—”

“—in New York?”

“Right—”

“—is a good paella.”

“You need a very big skillet—”

“—the tapas bar.”

“The one on Crosby—”

“—with the sherries.”

“The boquerones—

“—the olives.”

“Zagat-rated—”

“—twenty-three for food.”

“I went on a date—”

“—there?”

“Everyone does.”

“Even you?”

“Me?”

“I wish.”

“I wish right now.”

“I wish I was—”

“Me, too.”

I eased my elbows onto the fish-stained tabletop, sneaked my head into the crook of my arm, and let loose with the sadness. I felt Nana touch my soft wavy hairs with her hand, which was slow and methodical in its ministrations. Unconcerned about the snickering waiters, she was quiet and dry-eyed, a professional tour guide comforting her charge after he was robbed of his wallet and passport. “Sorry,” I said.

“Sorry for nothing,” she said, which may not have been her best English, but I understood what she meant.

“I’m drunk,” I said, which was only partly true.

She settled the bill and we walked slowly, unevenly, at last hand in hand, down the pier toward the teeming esplanade. A SCROD billboard hung along the pier, a Communist-era-looking tableau of three middle-aged local men beneath an exclamatory slogan in the local language. All three had hooded gray eyelids, reminding me of a parade of turtles sauntering down toward the tide. One looked like a tired intellectual. He and another were distinguished by poorly made silver teeth, the third by a thick, feminine mouth and a daring young man’s expression. A wheezing loudspeaker beneath them blasted the techno music of five years ago interrupted by snippets of angry Sevo oratory. “What does it say?” I asked, pointing at the billboard.

“ ‘The Independence of the People Will Soon Be Realized!’”

“I like that funny-looking guy with the girlie mouth,” I said. “He looks like an Odessa singer. He must be the junior dictator of the bunch. ‘Don’t hate me. I’m not Stalin. I’m only in training!’”

“He’s my father,” Nana said.

I did not register what she had said at first; per the usual, I had been lost in thought about some aspect of myself. “Oh,” I said finally. I stopped to examine my palms, the prominent green veins trying so desperately to bring blood to the fingers.

“I have something to tell you, Misha,” Nana said in Russian, dispelling what was left of my Belgian identity. “My papa knew your papa well. They were in business together. He was a very dear man. When he came to Svanï City, to our house, he would bring me sugar cubes and mandarin oranges. As if there were still shortages, like in the Soviet days. As if I were starved for vitamins and sweets.”

“Oh,” I repeated in English.

I closed my eyes, trying to think of Papa, but what happened next trumped his memory. The ripe green papaya smell beneath the perfume, the feathery but strong feel of arms against my side hams, the soft kiss of downy lips against my forehead. Beneath the picture of her own father exhorting passersby to violent rebellion, my Nana was holding me close.

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