Snow in May: Stories

Kruchina, 1998

Five nights before her scheduled return flight from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Magadan, Masha stood by the door of her granddaughter’s bedroom. She checked one more time to make sure no one was around and then she knocked.

“What?” Katya yelled in English. Masha knew that word well.

She came in and closed the door. The overheated room was half the size of Masha’s entire apartment in Magadan. Katya, heartbreakingly scrawny in her blue parachutelike nightgown, was lying on her bed in a jumble of thick math books, crumpled pieces of paper, and candy wrappers. She raised her head and looked at Masha through the curtain of her sparse brown bangs, annoyed.

“Katen’ka, I need your help,” Masha said. Katya stuck a yellow pencil into her mouth and chewed. “Please, sing one song with me at the green card party. For your mama.” Masha sat down on the side of the bed, and Katya’s trash and books slid toward her.

“Baba, you’re ruining everything,” Katya yelled.

“Shhh.” Masha picked up the candy wrappers and stuffed them into the pocket of the apron she wore over her flower-patterned housedress. “Please.”

“I can’t.”

“Katya, please speak Russian. You know I don’t understand.” Masha could read the English alphabet and look up words in a dictionary, but when listening she couldn’t catch much beyond “hello,” “good-bye,” “please,” and “thank you.” And “what.”

“I hate singing. I’m only good at math.” Katya took Masha’s hot, plump hand and massaged it with her icicle fingers. It was in these private, transient moments that Katya shed the mask of American coolness, which she worked so hard to maintain in front of her stepsister, Brittny. She smiled archly. “Maybe if Brittny sang with us, too?”

“Katya, don’t joke. She’s Americanka, how can she sing with us? She doesn’t speak Russian.”

“I’m Americanka, too.” Katya dropped Masha’s hand and pulled out a lollipop from the pillowy recess. Masha could never understand why Americans had to have so many pillows on their beds and couches. Katya unwrapped the lollipop and looked impatiently at her opened math books.

“You’re a different kind, Katya. You live in two worlds. Imagine, each foot standing on a globe beach ball. Remember, like we had in Yalta?”

“I’m not five years old, Ba.”

“One day, Katya, you’ll realize that there is no bigger blessing in life than an opportunity to help someone, especially someone whose blood runs through your own veins.”

“Gross,” Katya said in English and rolled her eyes.

Masha looked at Katya’s thin neck sticking out of the collar of her nightgown, the slingshot fork of her clavicle and ropy shoulder, the pollen sprinkling of freckles, like her mother’s. “Do you love your mama?” she said.

Katya frowned and sat up. “Why?”

“If you love her and want to show gratitude for all she’s done for you, sing with me.”

Katya narrowed her dark eyes.

“It will make her happy,” Masha said.

“She’s fine already.”

“Katen’ka, please. I would be embarrassed to sing by myself. You know I don’t sing well. What if I paid you?”

A flicker of innocent superiority flashed in Katya’s eyes. “Okay, Baba, okay, I’ll sing with you. I don’t know why we have to sing at all. People don’t sing at American parties. But I’ll try; we’ll be embarrassed together.”

“Everyone will be too drunk to notice,” Masha said, and Katya threw back her head and laughed, the white lollipop stick bobbing in her throat. Masha lunged toward her and pulled out the candy.

“Bozhe moi, Katya, you’ll choke!” She broke out in a sweat from even this small exertion. Her housedress had ridden up her stocky thighs, and her heart was pounding.

* * *

Masha had come to America for three weeks to visit her daughter, Sveta, for the first time. Sveta had married Brian two years earlier through a special agency and moved with now eleven-year-old Katya to Fairbanks, which in the winter turned out to be as frostbite-cold and snowy as their own Magadan.

The marriage had been Masha’s idea. She had followed the lead of a retired colleague who had married off her divorced and just as hardworking and beautiful daughter (there were so many of them!) to an American, thus, as she’d put it, fulfilling her role as a mother. Masha, too, wanted to be a good mother.

“You must get in line for luck, Svetochka. How else?” she had said to her daughter. “Under the stationary stone water doesn’t flow.” Sveta’s boyfriends after the divorce were all cheaters, alcoholics, men who disappeared for days, and the one who found it funny, when Sveta asked him something important, to reply “Yes, dear, you should buy yourself that little hat.”

Sveta crossed her arms. Her cobalt eye shadow and frosted hair made her look older than thirty-seven.

“Give me one reason why you don’t want to try.” Masha felt the familiar strain of her heart muscle in the starting blocks before a race. She could see her daughter’s success, while Sveta herself was still far from considering it.

“I am not a prostitute, for a start,” Sveta said. Her lipstick had seeped into the groove of a small scar above her lip.

“No one’s selling anyone. You’ll try to find someone decent, who wants the same as you — a companion and to make a family,” Masha said. “You can find a job at the hospital and actually get paid for it. I heard the doctors have a very good salary over there.”

With A-student diligence, Masha studied the success stories in the pamphlets and translated with a dictionary the letters from potential suitors. They found that decent person in Brian, a high school history teacher — an employed nonalcoholic with no criminal record. What more could one ask for? After months of correspondence and a few linguistically trying phone conversations, Brian traveled to Magadan to propose and to explore nearby Gulag ruins. He was a Russian history buff.

“And you? How are you going to be here, all alone?” Sveta said, when she was almost convinced.

“You can send for me when you’re a citizen, Svetochka. They have what is called ‘reunification of the family.’ You don’t worry for now. I’ll finally have time to read all of our World Literature series and organize those boxes of photographs,” Masha had said, already feeling the pleasurable pain of a lucrative sacrifice.

* * *

As Masha was acclimating to the cluttered, overheated house in Fairbanks, an inkling of unsettlement lodged into her, and the more she tried to tease it out, the deeper it burrowed, like a fractured splinter.

She observed Sveta’s new family. There was Brittny — with the stylishly misspelled name (Masha was told) — Brian’s fourteen-year-old daughter, who was so developed, blond, and luminescent in her health that it hurt Masha’s eyes to look at her next to Katya. Her own granddaughter was still a closed bud of a girl. Her skin yellowish from a sickly early childhood, her hair mousy. Her cunning, olive-dark eyes were her liveliest feature — the sole inheritance from a father she didn’t remember.

Yet Masha considered a motherless fate more tragic. She sympathized with Brittny, who had lost her mother to cancer at five, and tried to surround the girl with wordless care. In return Brittny, strawberry-lipped and breathless, looked at Masha with amused condescension. She stepped around her as though Masha were a stranger who had fallen on a busy sidewalk and spilled the embarrassing contents of her bag.

Then there was Brian. Though his belly had extended several centimeters forward and his graying hairline had retreated several centimeters back, he looked much the same as when Masha first met him: tall and solid, with bright blue eyes, like Brittny’s, straw-colored brows and mustache, and ruddy dimpled cheeks. The perfect American. Masha quickly remembered his irritating habit of pulling on his nose when he spoke.

Sveta and Brian treated each other as though the other were a sick, sensitive child. Brian discouraged Sveta from doing any housekeeping, although Sveta cleaned houses part-time with Lizochka, the Russian wife of one of Brian’s teacher friends. Several times Masha saw Brian turn off the faucet when Sveta was about to wash the dishes. He snuck up on her, a superhero in a tucked-in flannel shirt and sweatpants, when she was folding clothes in the laundry room. He tore anything weighing more than three kilos out of her hands. He allowed Sveta to cook Russian food only; the rest he made or brought home himself. He closed her textbooks — Sveta was studying to confirm her medical degree — walked her over to the squashy couch in the living room, and massaged her shoulders and feet.

Sveta played her part of damsel-in-domestic-distress with gusto. She shut her medical textbooks, sighing every time as if this was the relief she’d been secretly hoping for, only to continue her studies into the night, long after Brian had gone to sleep. In fact, she accomplished most of what was needed to run the household while he was at work or sleeping. She packed Russian-style sandwiches for lunch, with butter and kielbasa. She laundered, ironed, folded, and rolled things up. She cleaned. She even started making special low-sodium meals for Masha’s high blood pressure, until Masha convinced her to stop fussing and took over the kitchen.

It was the spectacle of their selective, almost aggressive care that made Masha suspicious of its sincerity and, by extension, the sincerity of the whole marriage. Of course, it was preposterous to think of the situation in these terms. Sveta’s marriage to Brian was never meant to be entirely sincere.

Yet, all the advantages of America now paled in comparison with the look in Sveta’s eyes: half the time glazed, and the other half tense and calculating. Nothing like the bored contentedness Masha had hoped for.

One night in the second week of her stay, Masha had made tea and sat Sveta down at the kitchen table. Brian was at his favorite café, grading midterm papers.

“Svetochka, what is this circus you and Brian are putting up? You can tell me what is happening. I’m your mother, I’ll understand everything.”

Sveta looked betrayed, as though Masha were a teacher who had intercepted a love note and read it to the class. Then she smiled toothily — the American way — and said, “You mean the dishes? Brian thinks a woman like me shouldn’t have to do housework.”

Sveta had gained some weight since Masha last saw her. Sveta’s face had softened, and the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth had filled out. She wore less makeup now, usually just lip gloss, and let her golden brown hair grow long and natural. Looking at her daughter, dressed in loose blue jeans and a T-shirt, and with her hair in a ponytail, Masha had an irksome sensation that she had been transported to the past, to Sveta’s medical school years, but now the role of Sveta was played by an older, skillfully deceptive actress.

“I thought such men existed only in fairy tales,” Masha joked. “Besides, you work as a housecleaner—”

“That’s different, Mama. I know what you’re thinking: if he’s such a knight, why does he procrastinate over doing the housework himself? He also could be more strict with making the girls do their chores.” Sveta rubbed her fingers. “Right now is the time for the girls to concentrate on their education. There will always be dirty dishes and smelly socks, whereas the young mind won’t absorb knowledge like a sponge forever.”

This seemed to Masha a Potemkin speech, prepared especially for her visit.

“If there is another car, why does he drive you to the store for tampons? You were a professional in Russia. You saved lives.”

“He’s trying to help the only way he knows how. I can save a lot more lives if I keep off the icy roads. Besides, I didn’t save lives, you know that. With all the shortages at the hospital — no supplies, power outages — it was mostly the talking cure.” Sveta giggled, but it felt mechanical. When she belittled her own achievements, she stripped away at the coating of pride that kept Masha going through the most difficult and lonely times of their separation.

“Everything is somehow not right,” Masha said, staring at her daughter’s fingers. They had retained their original childish shape, now even more pronounced because of Sveta’s weight gain: plump bases tapering toward the tips, dimples on her knuckles. Masha wanted to shake her. “Do you want me to talk to him? I’ve been learning English. Maybe I can—”

“Mamochka, don’t.” Sveta folded her hands under her chin. “Everything is good. He’s been very nice to us. He never even raises his voice. If you like to slide, you must like to pull the sled, as they say.”

“He doesn’t have the right to interfere with your studying. You didn’t come here to die a housecleaner.”

“He doesn’t. I am lucky to stand a chance of translating my profession. Lizochka used to be a chemical engineer, but she can’t work now the way she worked in the Union. It’s all different here. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll send Katya to a special boarding school for math and science. And if she does well, she might get a scholarship to one of the best colleges, like Harvard or Princeton. Scholarship means studying for free. Good education is very expensive here. From Magadan to Princeton, can you imagine?” Sveta’s face finally brightened and relaxed.

Masha nodded and got up from the table. She tore off a paper towel, softened it in her hands, and blew her nose.

“Nu, if you’re happy, I’m happy.” She wondered how many times she would have to repeat it to herself to make both parts feel true.

“Come.” Sveta took Masha’s hand. “I want to show you something.”

She led Masha to the master bedroom, on the second floor, next to Katya’s bedroom. The room was hot and smelled of vanilla. Masha began to perspire. Sveta got out a key from the back of a desk drawer and unlocked the double doors of a tall oak cabinet.

“Brian’s treasures,” she said and opened the creaky door.

Books about the Soviet Union occupied the top shelves. Reproductions of campaign posters for five-year plans and movie playbills were pinned to the back of the middle section. Several more stood rolled up on the bottom. Plastic boxes with pins and military patches, commander watches, and several generations of Soviet and Russian money filled the middle shelves.

Next to a crowd of traditional matryoshkas and matryoshkas with faces of Russian politicians and American sports stars, Masha noticed a box from the porcelain tea set that she and Sveta had bought together in Magadan.

“Docha, why is our tea set locked up in this cabinet? You don’t want to use it?”

“I thought it was too nice for every day. I’m saving it. Maybe to give Katya for her wedding.”

“The future is an interesting thing. During the Soviet years we sacrificed for the future—”

“Mama, don’t start on that.”

Sveta squatted down and pulled out a cardboard box from the bottom of the cabinet.

“Fragile,” she translated the word handwritten on the top. She lifted the cover to reveal a drab olive-colored backpack with a faint red cross etched on the flap.

Sveta sat down cross-legged on the floor, and Masha settled next to her, her knee joints cracking. She was still surprised at how quickly she’d gained weight after she was laid off from the Aviation Administration, despite the general hunger of the post-Soviet years; how fast she’d developed high blood pressure.

“One of the original first-aid bags made for the Red Army combat medics in World War Two. Some medicines and instruments are still inside,” Sveta said.

“Great Patriotic War.”

“Yes. Same war. This is Brian’s favorite piece. Two hundred dollars for such a museum exhibit, can you believe it?”

Two hundred dollars. That was more than Masha’s monthly pension.

Sveta opened the buckles and pulled out several packs of gauze bandages wrapped in brown paper, a tourniquet, a brown bottle of iodine with a dropper, and a small syringe, its needle still intact. She neatly laid out the contents on the floor. Everything looked brand-new. There wasn’t a single spot on the gauze, nor a speck of rust on the glittering syringe stopper.

“Sometimes, when I’m alone, I look through these things over and over, I don’t know why. The longer I am away from Russia, the more surreal it all seems. Most of all, my childhood. Everything else I don’t mind forgetting.”

Masha picked up a book about Stakhanovites and brought it up to her nose. It smelled of salt and rust, like the window heater in the library where she had studied for exams almost forty years ago.

“You can return anytime, if you’ve changed your mind. We’ll make something up. We’ll help each other,” Masha said, looking up at the colorful army of grinning matryoshkas.

“That wouldn’t help.” Sveta laughed. “Nostalgia goes down better with vodka.”

Masha waited for Sveta to tell her what would help. She considered raising the question of “family reunification.” The term seemed absurdly grandiose and brought to mind exhausted soldiers in bloodstained fatigues rushing off the trains into the arms of their mothers, wives, and daughters. Masha yearned for a simpler kind of daily reunion: to cook a good breakfast for her girls in the morning, to bring Sveta tea with raspberry jam and a blanket when she studied, to braid Katya’s wispy hair and sprinkle it with bright barrettes. To be privy to all their moods, good and bad.

It would take Sveta another three years to become a citizen, and only then would she be eligible to apply for the reunification. By then Masha would be truly old and sick, a burden. And what if Sveta failed to reestablish her medical career? Brian didn’t seem to want Masha in the house any longer than necessary. He treated her with measured, ceremonial complaisance.

“Svetochka, remember how one winter when you were seven, you took off your boots outside when I wasn’t looking and jumped barefoot in icy puddles? You wanted to catch a cold so that we could stay home together and watch figure skating.”

Sveta smiled. She seemed relieved to change the topic.

“Instead you caught pneumonia, and we ended up at the hospital. Only one TV, in that horribly drafty common room, and of course we never watched it. Instead we read your favorite fairy tales and made up our own.”

“I remember.” Sveta picked up the syringe and rolled it between her fingers.

“You know, once, back in the early eighties, the gossip reached us at the Aviation Administration about a young engineer at the airport who had injected milk into his veins to trigger high fever. He wanted to stir up pity in the girl who had left him for another guy at the March eighth dance. He spent a week in bed, hoping she’d come back.”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Anyway, that can’t be right, Mama.” Sveta sat up straighter. “A milk injection into the vein could cause an embolism or sepsis. Blood poisoning. It’s much more serious than spending a week in bed. He’d need antibiotics, intravenous fluids, possibly a transfusion or dialysis. Could be fatal. Are you sure that’s what your lovesick engineer did?”

Sveta was so smart and lively, talking like this, even more beautiful than before. “You don’t think Brian’s obsession with Russian things is bizarre?” Masha said.

The look in Sveta’s eyes was both harsh and amused, as if she’d been waiting for Masha to say something yet was disappointed that she finally had. Masha thought Sveta would go on about America, how everything was a business deal here, and how what Masha now felt was buyer’s remorse.

“If he collected stamps or first editions, that would be fine. But historical artifacts — that’s somehow strange. Why?” Sveta said, putting the bandages and the syringe back into the medic bag. “He’s a history teacher, for God’s sake. And he loves our history the most.”

Later that night Masha came up with the idea of singing a song called “Kruchina” at the party in honor of Sveta and Katya receiving their green cards.

* * *

The green card party was held two days before Masha’s scheduled flight back home. She and Sveta stayed up well past midnight the night before, making the dumplings and cutting up piles of ingredients for three different kinds of salads: Olivier, herring and potato, and cucumber. They got up at seven to make stuffed cabbage and a giant pot of borsch. Then Masha put the finishing touches on the eight-tiered cake Napoleon, Sveta’s favorite, and placed two bottles of champagne into the fridge to chill, worrying that just two wouldn’t be enough.

While Masha and Sveta cooked, Brian, who had been beaming like a birthday boy since morning, recruited Katya and Brittny for the cleaning detail. Katya refused at first, citing again the impending math decathlon. But when she saw Brittny grudgingly twist her T-shirt into a knot above her belly button, crank up the radio, and attack the carpet with a vacuum, Katya tied up her T-shirt, too, and dusted, shaking her tiny backside in time with the beat.

By five o’clock the table was set, the house decorated with red, white, and blue, and each member of the family was dressed as if for completely different occasions. Brian wore his work outfit — khaki pants and a navy corduroy shirt, clandestinely pressed by Sveta the night before. He had pomaded and combed back his hair. He looked trustworthy.

Sveta had plaited her hair into a thick braid and put on makeup for the first time since Masha’s arrival. She wore jeans, a sweater, and a black Russian shawl with bright traditional designs. The girls, too, wore jeans and turtleneck sweaters.

Masha discovered just how overdressed she was when she came upstairs from the basement, where they had set up her bed. She was in her staple party outfit — an old maroon velvet suit and a silk yellow blouse with a bow tie. Now, with her heavy makeup and a low bun of hennaed hair, she felt like a matron about to receive some Soviet medal she didn’t deserve.

By six o’clock Brian’s friends arrived with giant bags of chips, tubs of dip, trays of carrots, beer, wine, and a bucket of fried chicken, the smell of which quickly permeated the entire house.

Lizochka, Sveta’s housecleaning partner, brought two bottles of vodka. Her high-busted peasant girl’s body was stuffed into a floor-length green dress and accessorized with three strands of faux pearls and a gold Orthodox cross. The American guests blended into one androgynous crowd of khakis and sweaters. Masha forgot their names soon after the introductions.

The guests took to the Russian food first, asking Sveta questions and pointing into the bowls. Masha couldn’t pick out a single English word she knew. She was unhappy with the results of her cooking: with American ingredients, all the dishes came out either too bland or too salty or too sweet. She poured herself a glass of vodka while Sveta wasn’t looking. It was bad for her blood pressure.

Miladze, a Georgian-Russian singer whose one CD Brian proudly owned, wailed sad songs about lost love in his breaking falsetto. Brian sat next to Sveta, monitoring her every move and fingering the fringe of her Russian shawl. She pulled up his sleeve seconds before he was about to drag it through a glop of sour cream that was melting into the scarlet borsch, and went right on translating the questions about the Soviet Union and the Cold War some of Brian’s friends had for Masha. They peered at Masha as though searching for signs of something alien and tragic. She smiled politely and answered for a while, then took her vodka glass to the armchair by the window.

Soon, the guests tired of the Russian food and moved on to the fried chicken. From time to time the men stole glances at the muted American football game on TV. Masha noticed Brittny sneaking some vodka into her apple juice. Katya pecked at her food, then attempted a wiggly dance to Miladze, but after an eye roll from Brittny, she quit and went to sit on her mother’s lap.

The house was hotter than ever. Blood pumped in and out of Masha’s head. All the noise had congealed into a thick mass of linguistic DNA, and she couldn’t catch a word in either English or Russian. She sat isolated by incomprehension, a fish in a tank.

People were grouped in threes or fours now, their mouths in constant motion: chewing, swallowing, talking. The expressions were strained, thinking hard about what to say next. A few times Masha noticed a yawn, stifled hastily by a doughy hand. It was nothing like the parties they used to have in Russia, when everyone sang songs and fell asleep on the floor. What had they talked about back then? What had they laughed about? She couldn’t remember, but she was angry at these people. They’d come out of obligation, and now not only did they take up priceless time she could be spending with Sveta and Katya, they also got the wrong idea about Russian cuisine.

Through the window the winter looked like an impressionist painting, blue and streaked with shadow, the edges of houses and cars blurred by the snowstorm. The trees stood hunched under heaps of snow. They reminded Masha of her elderly friends back home. She imagined them gossiping about her and her girls now, while they dawdled by the porch of her dilapidated khrushchyovka, spitting shells from toasted sunflower seeds into the gray snow. These same friends would vie for American souvenirs when she returned home.

* * *

After Sveta and Katya had fluttered away to America, Masha’s days took on the calm rhythm she had dreamt of since her early motherhood years. Back then, she had felt utterly alone in the world, despite being surrounded by people who constantly wanted something from her: Svetochka, coworkers, girlfriends — single or tormented by screaming children and indolent husbands — and her elderly parents, who called precisely ten minutes after she’d fallen asleep. Now she could sleep for as long as she wanted.

Most mornings Masha snapped to wakefulness before sunrise. She often had nightmares about Sveta and Katya’s new lives, fueled by the influx of American movies into Russia. The dreams ranged from nonsensical domestic disasters out of Home Alone to full-blown Terminator-style apocalypses. She promptly turned on the TV and watched the latest Mexican or Brazilian soap opera, then the news. Daily reports of the development of yet another economic crisis and the attendant social miseries were comforting: it meant that sending the girls away was the right decision.

To escape the oppressiveness of her small apartment, Masha went for long walks. She passed the Palace of ProfUnions, the recently unveiled war memorial, School #15—now the English Lyceum — where both Svetochka and Katya had studied. In the winter, Masha still caught glimpses of them among the squealing students riding their backpacks down the iced porch steps. A few blocks up was the Children’s World store, where the girls had cried rivers from both happiness and disappointment.

Their music school was a squat wooden building from the forties, its floors sagging from the weight of all those pianos. And there was the small park with wooden benches and a greenish bust of Berzin, leprous from decades of spiteful weather and pigeon droppings. How much ice cream had been licked there, how many chocolate potatoes eaten, kilos of sunflower seeds crunched? On that curb by the third bench from the left, little Sveta fell and tore open her lip, and behind that garbage can Katya hid from Sveta and Masha. It seemed that everything had happened on a single, maddeningly short day.

In the evenings Masha took the bus to the town hospital, where she now worked as a part-time cleaner, and where Sveta had once been the attending emergency room physician. More and more Masha came across her former colleagues from the Aviation Administration installed there. Some looked comfortable roaming the hallways in their favorite robes or snuggled in beds, surrounded by books and parcels from visitors; others lay in semiconsciousness with their mouths half open, already oblivious to the switches between day and night. She cleaned the floors in the patient rooms and the hallways, she cleaned the radiators, the windows, the stairs. Blood knocked on the back of her skull like a chime: soon it would be her time. She hummed “Kruchina” under her breath.

Kruchina was an archaic word for grief, found mostly in the old folk songs and poems. Kruchina grief was not regular sadness or disappointment with everyday troubles, but rather the existential sorrow about a woman’s lot that never goes away, not even at the happiest of moments.

Masha remembered this song from one of the movies of her youth, when all the movies and books were about the war and patriotism, about the great sacrifice for the future. German soldiers were burning a Russian village. The children screamed, the helpless grandmas and grandpas shrieked, the animals and fowl scattered for their lives. A young German soldier broke into the last izba standing and found two women huddled on a bench. Except for a single candle, the house was dark and it was hard to see what was in the shadowy corner: a trunk or a cradle.

Before the soldiers could reload their guns, the women began to sing “Kruchina.” In the middle of this chaos, time stopped. The soldiers listened as the voices washed over their round helmets and tense shoulders, crept into their machine guns, and spread through their stiffened veins and cold stomachs, like mother’s milk.

Sveta might not have even seen the movie, but she and Masha always sang “Kruchina” when their hearts, one or both, were in the wrong place.

* * *

Somebody’s heavy hand patted Masha’s shoulder. She started.

“Nu, where you going to hide when it’s time to go back?” Lizochka whispered in a soggy, commiserative tone. She plopped into an armchair next to Masha. “You know, when I was a child and misbehaved, my mother always said she’d send me to Magadan.”

Masha was irritated at being disturbed.

“Svetochka got lucky, with a grown child and all. Do you know how rarely the immigration goes smoothly?”

Masha shook her head, although, of course, she knew. She looked toward the table, where Brian was clearing the dishes. “We tried not to think of the complications.”

“And look at her now. Don’t you dare pay any attention to the dirty looks.”

“Nobody throws dirty looks at me,” Masha lied again.

“So, how did she choose him?”

Masha sighed.

“He had the right persistence. Translated his letters into Russian. Sent flowers, money for Sveta’s English lessons. And — very important — he looked like in the photos, not much fatter or older.”

“A-ga. He probably studied with a life coach — everyone has one here. He didn’t make the mistake of sending a gift that required taxes to be paid at the post office, like my Roger. We can’t all afford to receive such packages.”

“Well, he’s a history teacher,” Masha said, surprised to feel a tinge of pride.

There was laughter at the table. Lizochka threw back her head in a snorty giggle.

“Americans, they’re funny. Humor is different, you have to get used to it.”

Masha was about to ask her to translate the joke, then changed her mind.

“Does Sveta ever complain to you about anything?” she said.

Lizochka gripped Masha’s hands. “No, never. She knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Masha nodded, suddenly tipsy.

“Worry about yourself, Mashen’ka. Sveta’s going to be fine,” Lizochka said. “Time to check on my Roger before he starts making his bed under the table. Don’t want him saying it’s my Russian drinking influence.” She pecked Masha on the forehead and waddled back to the table. Masha didn’t even see that Americans were drinking that much.

Miladze stopped, mid-wail. Brian was standing by the stereo with a glass of champagne. Lizochka quickly returned with a glass of champagne for Masha.

“I’ll translate for you,” Lizochka said, gesticulating “no need to thank me.” “Brian is very eloquent. He’ll say something nice about you, too, you’ll see.”

Brian raised his glass.

“Tak, he’s starting … I’ll do my best here but I’m not signing any papers. You know, Americans, they never sign anything without a lawyer. Now he’s saying he’d like to congratulate Sveta and Katya on their new green cards, though they’re still conditional. Soon, they’ll become real citizens and their old friends back in Russia will be green with jealousy.” Lizochka laughed with the rest of the guests, her breath hot and sour.

Brian talked on, conducting with his champagne glass and, from time to time, checking the length of his nose. It seemed to Masha that Lizochka was translating much too slowly, leaving out crucial information. “Something about shame and the government. He feels he has known your daughter all his life. Something about how he almost died when he came to Magadan. Oi, I hope he’s not talking about that Gulag hike he and Roger went on. Okay, okay — oh, that is very romantic. He’s saying that he has finally found the love of his life, Sveta, and Katya, a wonderful second daughter and sister for Brittny.”

Sveta smiled and nodded to everyone at the table. She patted Katya’s knee. Katya, who had been resting her head on Sveta’s shoulder, eyes closed, wiggled her leg, and Sveta’s hand slid off.

“He’s saying that we all know how much he loves Russia. His boys at school collect Lenin pins and Komsomol banners, and watch documentaries.” Lizochka paused and furrowed her painted eyebrows.

“What? What is he saying?” Masha poked Lizochka’s thigh. She felt, absurdly, that her life depended on this speech by this strange man, who was, thanks largely to her, her daughter’s husband.

“It’s hard to understand. Something about a circle, and we, well them, being a part of the real history. They can look into your, our, our eyes, the eyes of the people who had been through it all, who had once been strangers on television and in newspapers, the enemy, and see for ourselves, themselves, that you, no we, are just like us. Them. I don’t know what the devil he’s talking about…”

Masha latched on to the one word she understood—“dream.” She’d used it over and over in the correspondence with Sveta’s potential suitors. Everyone emptied their glasses and applauded. Brian’s eyes were phosphorescent with alcohol and pride.

Sveta dabbed the inner corners of her eyes and smiled at Masha from across the room. Masha wanted to go to the table and sit with her daughter, to hold her plump, childlike hand, but she couldn’t bear another question about toilet paper rationing or surviving on a diet of cabbage and potatoes.

Perhaps Lizochka was right, and Sveta was going to be fine with Brian. As long as neither of them ad-libbed. He was not unkind. Perhaps Sveta did harbor that mutant feeling some women were capable of: grateful love. And its fraternal twin — separate happiness.

Brian bent down and tried to draw Sveta’s face out from its hiding place in the crook of Katya’s neck. Sveta looked up and, as he went in for a celebratory kiss, instinctively offered him her cheek. The confirmation of this banal domestic tragedy — getting exactly what you expected and not one gram more — stung Masha doubly, for herself and for Sveta. She wanted to stomp her feet, throw a tantrum, like a girl.

She saw Brian approaching her. The broken capillaries under his skin made it look like rotten watermelon flesh. And that repulsive yellow mustache.

“Babushka, it’s time for our surprise,” Katya sing-songed in Russian. Her voice was thin and loud, ideal for folk melodies.

“No, no,” Masha said. How to say “different plan” in English? “Katya, stop. I think, ne nado, nezachem all this,” she whispered, but Sveta had already heard them.

Brian announced something to the guests. They perked up. Lizochka went up to the table and downed another shot of vodka.

“And then cake Napoleon, right?” Katya squealed and plopped down on the chair next to Masha’s. “Ooooh. Warm.”

“Mama, what’s happening?” Sveta said in Russian.

Masha stood up. The world darkened.

“Babooshka, mee zhdat’,” Brian said in his broken Russian.

“Mama, are you feeling all right?”

“Grandma, c’mon, I want to eat the cake!”

“Apladismenty!” Lizochka cried out and began clapping. Everyone followed suit. Masha sat back down.

“Oh, dedicated to Mama,” Katya said; this Masha understood.

Katya began to sing, and Masha had to join.

That is not the wind bending the branch,

That is not the bugle grass humming.

Their voices poured out clear and a little off-key, mew-like on the high notes. They breathed at the wrong places. Katya was singing with so many “ah”s, so many “ah”s didn’t exist in the modern Russian language. Masha didn’t dare look at her daughter. Instead she focused on a constellation of red spots on the carpet.

That is my heart moaning,

Trembling like an aspen leaf.

Katya’s voice stuttered.

Kruchina haas exhoh-oh-ohsted meee …

She was choking on giggles now. Masha scanned the room and easily located the source of trouble: Brittny was wiggling her hands in fake sign language.

Treacherrrous snake …

Burn, buuuurn, my k-kindle …

Brian jumped up from his seat and, without uttering a single word, slapped his daughter on her beautiful pink cheek. Brittny screamed at him and flew up the stairs. Moments later, a door thundered shut. Katya ran up to Sveta and they draped their arms tightly around each other and closed their eyes as the wave of deafening pop music crashed on the frozen room from the second floor.

Masha grabbed a few empty plates from the table and escaped to the kitchen. She felt nauseous and hot, her body swimming. She took the cake Napoleon out of the fridge and cut it, then licked the frosting off the knife blade — a bad omen in Russia that meant you will become mean. She didn’t care; she already was mean. She hoped that Sveta would come into the kitchen and forgive her, let her save them, all three.

For a wild instant, Masha considered going up to the master bedroom, getting out the ancient syringe, and injecting herself with milk. If she ended up at the hospital, she would spend a few more days with her girls. And if she died — well, that would be an interesting little twist of her fate.

It was so hot in the house, always so stuffy and hot. She needed fresh air. She opened the hallway closet, where the guests’ coats had fallen from the hangers, and sat down on the soft pile to rest for a second. Her head was spinning. The coats smelled of cigarettes, stale bedsheets, and dogs — of long, boring, happy lives.