Moonlight in Odessa (32 page)

Jane introduced me to Zora and Gambino – accountants by day, musicians by night. Lea, a woman with no angles, only curves, sang with Zora. When she looked at me a little too intently, Jane told me in Russian that the woman was ‘pink.’ (In Odessan slang, it means lesbian.) Tans’s best friend Jonothan wore a bright silk shirt and was young enough to be Tans’s son. In Russian, we would call him
smooglie
, swarthy. We would also call him well built, for his shoulders and upper arms were muscled like Vlad’s. He stared at Jane, who carefully ignored him. Jono’s sister, a lanky stockbroker, was so proud of her G-string decorated with a sparkly butterfly that she lowered her trousers to show everyone.

‘Come meet my friend Daria,’ Jane said.

She pulled up her trousers, asked, ‘Is that an engagement ring,
ma chérie
?’ and took my hands in hers. She squinted at the diamond and said, ‘Darling! That speck of dust isn’t a reason to get married! It’s a reason to get divorced.’

Tristan turned red. Jane glared at her. My hand flew to my chest.

‘Behave!’ Jono warned. ‘Or you can spend your nights in a rented conference room at the Sheraton with the other low-life sharks.’

She shuddered at the threat.

‘Size doesn’t matter,’ I told her, taking Tristan’s hand. ‘Intentions do. Tristan called faithfully, wrote every day, and traveled to Odessa, Ukraine. No other man I know would have put in so much time, effort and money.’

Tristan looked at me gratefully and Tans’s friends looked at me with interest. I thought of Vlad, who would have defended himself. Then I remembered how he’d given me jewels and vanished after he’d got what he wanted.

Perhaps to erase the awkwardness, Tans swept Jane into his arms and said, ‘Let’s dance, darling.’ Jane laughed but she didn’t say no. They swayed together. I smiled; they were such an unlikely couple. Jane was four inches taller and three decades younger. Tans met my gaze. I looked into his eyes and saw something disturbing in them. Then he smiled, and I saw that I was being ridiculous. Why did I have to be so suspicious? Why couldn’t I relax and enjoy myself, instead of sizing everything and everyone up?

When the song faded away, Tans told everyone I was from Odessa. He described the gracious people and the gorgeous architecture. Gambino asked if the staircase was as majestic in real life as it was in the film
Battleship Potemkin
. Jono recommended a book about the Black Sea. Zora said her great-grandparents had lived a thirty-minute wagon ride from Odessa. They emigrated in 1910 after a pogrom had left many homes in their village charred.

They were so kind that I nearly cried in relief. No one assumed that because I was from Ukraine (Yes, they’d actually heard of the Ukraine!) I was destitute, or that Tristan had ‘saved’ me. In fact, they thought that I saved him! Jane and Tans and their friends saw me for who I really was.

Tans’s personal library was richer than the Emerson bookmobile, which came only once a week, Fridays from nine to noon. In the dining room, lined with shelves of leather-bound books, there was a constant buffet on a formal table. Freshly squeezed orange juice. Coffee so rich, it could have been served in Turkey. And the food. Oh, the food! Hummus so creamy. A potato salad so light and golden it rivaled my Boba’s. Dolmas wrapped by hand. Not since I had been home with Boba had my stomach so rejoiced. Food –  how it feeds the soul, feeds the memory, feeds the needs we don’t even know we have. More than one person watched me devour the bundles of rice wrapped in grape leaves.

Jane and I sat across from Tans and told him how wonderful it all was. He basked in our praise, his mustache twitching with pleasure. Tristan slumped down beside me, ‘What am I supposed to eat? This’s all different.’ Diffrnt.

‘Would you like to try the potato salad?’ Jane asked. ‘It’s delicious. Almost as good as Boba’s. Let me get you a plate.’

In Odessa, women serve the men. Jane told me that in America women didn’t serve anyone. So I knew this was a big gesture on her part and was grateful.

He perked up when she put the plate in front of him. ‘Boba did make the best, didn’t she?’

Tans protested good-naturedly that his was the best.

‘Maybe in San Francisco,’ Jane said.

‘Let’s give him California,’ Tristan said.

‘But Boba has the title for the universe,’ I concluded.

I was thrilled that they were getting along. That everyone was making an effort. How I wanted Jane to like him.

There was a constant coming and going of artists and singers and intellectuals.
This
was what I expected when Tristan had told me he lived near San Francisco.
This
was what I wanted. I felt at home with these people. They were witty and clever and amusing. Several took me aside and said, ‘When you decide to leave that putz, I’ll help. Call me.’ The women slipped me fifty dollars so I wouldn’t be completely dependent on him. I tried to refuse, but they insisted that I could pay them back. Although I appreciated their kindness, I felt embarrassed for Tristan, and hurt for him that he’d been rejected. But I could also understand why.

Tans, Jane, and their friends weren’t seeing him at his best, in his Emerson aquarium surrounded by familiar greenery.

As usual, I woke up at 6 a.m. Some of Tans’s guests were just leaving. I sat at the kitchen table with a burning-hot glass full of coffee in my hands and savored the moment. I liked to get up early, to have the world to myself. When Jane joined me, we spoke Russian for hours. We had the kitchen to ourselves and no one was there to be offended by our escape into another language. Tans seemed to understand how important it was that Jane and I had time together. He tried to occupy Tristan. For most of the day, she and I moved from room to room. With Tans’s running interference, Tristan was always a room behind.

I asked Jane to tell me about Montana, about life with Tans. I was too embarrassed to talk about my life. How could I explain? How could I tell Jane things I didn’t understand myself? How I’d fallen in love with Tristan before I met him. How here and now I wasn’t sure that I still loved him. How could I tell her when I could barely admit it to myself?

After lunch, Tristan thoughtfully offered to take Jane and me on a tour of San Francisco. He drove us to the Fisherman’s Wharf, which was packed solid with tourists, but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless and bought some postcards for Boba. Then we went to a park, where families picnicked, children played, friends threw Frisbees, couples cuddled on the grass. In Emerson, people walked or jogged exactly thirty minutes for exercise, or not at all. They drove to the store, even if they lived only three blocks away. I marveled at these throngs of people who, like me, were happy to spend a glorious day out of doors.

Tristan offered to buy us tea at the Japanese Garden. Jane and I found a table and he went to order. I felt proud that he had given us such a
lovely
day. I wanted Jane to like him.

He returned with a tray. ‘Can you believe it? Eleven dollars for tea?’

Shame washed over me. Jane had paid for her plane ticket to San Francisco, and he complained about spending a few dollars. I could barely meet her gaze. An Odessan man would never talk about the price. It’s uncultured.

‘They forgot to give us napkins.’ He went back to the counter.

In her distinctive Russian (Jane sounded like an old Odessan lady because her vocabulary and inflection were learned from her neighbor, a lavender-haired pensioner with an attitude), she said, ‘Eleven dollars for tea?’

We giggled.

‘Seriously,’ she continued, ‘Tans and his friends can be intimidating. It’s probably not easy for Tristan. It was nice of him to take us around today.’

‘It was,’ I agreed, happy that she appreciated him, at least a little. ‘Men just like to grumble so that we acknowledge them.’

‘Sound the horn and praise him,’ she said as he returned with a handful of napkins.

‘Beeeep!’ I squealed out like a schoolgirl.

My eyes met Jane’s, and I burst out laughing. So did she.

‘What’s so funny?’ Tristan asked.

How could I tell him that
he
was what we found amusing?

I loved America. I loved the wide, clean streets. I loved the spacious wood homes set on invincible green lawns. I loved the choices at the supermarket – from the pre-made food to the cleaning products. I loved living in a place where no one stole light bulbs in hallways, where no one pissed in the elevator, where dust didn’t cover my shoes, the streets, the sidewalks, the buildings. I loved the light that filtered through Tristan’s home. I loved the distance between houses. Privacy. What a wonderful concept. I loved the calm. No bottles clanging together, no one stomping on the ceiling, no family fights seeping through the walls, no babies wailing, no babushkas complaining, no televisions blaring. It was as though someone had pressed the mute button on the soundtrack of my life.

I loved living in a house – not waking up to the smell of a neighbor’s burned toast in the morning, not falling asleep to another’s techno music at night. I didn’t miss the domestic disputes of the Sebova household – the missus screaming that the mister was an alcoholic, the mister shouting back that if he was it was because of her. I didn’t miss Petr Ivanovich’s incessant hammering.

In America, the houses were unique. So were the people. Everything was so personal. Even license plates held messages – from
Go Packers!
on a Jeep to
Thanx Dad
on a red convertible. If there was a child in the car, there was a ‘Baby on Board’ sign. I couldn’t say Americans wore their hearts on their sleeve, but they did wear their logos on their chest. Nike. Coke. Pepsi. The flag was everywhere – on sweaters, on cars, hung outside people’s homes as well as at businesses. In Odessa, no one wore a Ukrainian flag on their chest, I could tell you that. In Odessa, the bakery sign read
Hleb
, or bread; here, it was Mama’s Little Bakery. Here it’s not just ‘restaurant,’ it’s Ruby’s Café or Aunt Sarah’s Pancake House.

Above all, I loved listening to the language, to all the contractions and contradictions that my English teacher Maria Pavlovna never taught us: gimme, gotta, gonna, wanna. Perhaps she didn’t know they existed. I wrote down new words in my notebook. Spiffy. Snarl. Stuck up. Dead meat. Dude. Even if I didn’t recognize them, often I could tell their meaning by the person’s expression.

I loved America. I loved that drivers let me cross the street instead of trying to mow me down. I loved the post office personnel, so cheerful when I sent letters to Boba. I loved the way total strangers talked to me. When I went to the doctor’s office for a blood test, the nurse came out wearing all white, looking like a shiny star, and said in a beautiful voice, ‘Daria Kirilenko, we’re waiting for you.’ I felt like a princess. At the supermarket, a teen put my purchases in bags. In the stores, the saleswomen asked if I was looking for anything in particular. In the café, the waitress brought a glass of ice water with the menu and said, ‘Take your time.’ Everyone said, ‘Hi, how ya doin’?’ These small courtesies filled me with gratitude. No strangers were nice like this in Odessa unless they wanted something.

Sometimes, I looked around in wonder. But the Americans didn’t seem to notice the thoughtfulness surrounding them. How they took things for granted. Everything was easy here. Everything worked all the time – no shortages, no blackouts. Everything was perfect.

My visa would be up in six weeks. I was passionate about America, but not about Tristan. Maybe I’d learn to love him, like oatmeal. Like the way I grew to appreciate David. I didn’t know what to do. I could call Jane, who would tell me I shouldn’t marry him. Or I could call Boba, who would say I should.

I dialed and said, ‘I’m not sure what to do.’

‘You went to America to get married.’

‘I don’t think I love him,’ I said in a small voice.

‘Does he love you?’ Boba asked.

‘
Da
.’

‘My little sparrow, give him a chance. There’s nothing for you here. You looked for an engineering job for six months and ended up a secretary. Think about your friend Maria, who graduated first in her class at the conservatory and has a voice like an angel. And in Odessa, she’s a waitress. It’s not right. It’s just not right. But that’s the way it is. Don’t come home. There is nothing for you here. Remember how lucky you are to be in America. Passion fades. Love grows. Security is the most important thing.’

She was right. I should marry Tristan. That’s why I’d come. He wanted to marry me, wanted children with me. He was honest, decent, and dependable, unlike Vlad. He’d been a perfect gentleman. And he was American.

And if I married him, I could stay in America.

Part II

Three things in this world he loved:

Evensong, white peacocks

And worn maps of America.

He didn’t like crying children,

Tea with raspberry jam

Or hysterical women.

And I was his wife.

–
Anna Akhmatova