The Western Ones

When she arrived at Grisha’s, Marina heard the fierce sound of clanging cookware. This meant Aneta was angry. These days, Aneta was always angry.

To hear her tell it, she hated being a home attendant, detested old people and their smell, found Grisha a dissolute lecher and couldn’t stand dirty Brooklyn sidewalks. Their employer, VIP Senior Care, punished Aneta with the occasional overnight shift, which she attributed to pro-Russian biases in former Soviet Union immigrant circles, as if there was a Putin-led conspiracy to push ethnic Ukrainians out of the most desirable elderly caretaking jobs in America. She was angry for a million other reasons Marina could not even begin to fathom.

“Your Majesty waltz in at ten like nothing,” she huffed as soon as Marina turned the key. Lately, Aneta insisted on speaking English exclusively, even though none of them had a decent grip on it.

“I no late.” Marina pointed to the clock on her phone. It said 8:58.

She heard Grisha call out in Russian from the catacombs of his bedroom, “Thank God, you’ve come to save me from this monster. It seems your beleaguered but proud country of Ukraine has elected a new president and now this one’s become insufferable.”

Aneta was a ruddy woman from some village outside Berdychiv. Stocky and square, she dressed in floral muumuus, scraggly hair tightly pulled back into a bun the size of a child’s fist. Her face could be vastly improved, Marina often thought, by just a few more teeth.

She wagged her finger at Marina. “Speak English. English. With me, always English. Or, if you like, Ukrainian. You should be speaking mother tongue. Are you not Ukrainian too, you separatist Putin-lover?”

This was not the time to explain to Aneta that though Marina’s mother tongue was Russian, she prayed every day that both western Ukrainians and Russians would leave her hometown in eastern Ukraine alone. This was also not the time to remind Aneta where her actual allegiances stood (with America, naturally, the country that has saved both of their lives, not that Aneta expressed any appreciation!). With women like her at a time like this, it was best to distract her or wait for her to leave. Or at the very least, change the subject.

“How was Grisha night?”

“How could it be? I was trapped with this idiotka,” Grisha wheeled himself into the living room. He whistled, looking her up and down. “My, my. You are height of female beauty, Marina Andreevna. Your hair is magnificent today. You look like a firebird. Or at least Tatyana from Evgeniy Onegin. Young and spritely.”

“Thank you, Grisha.”

He ignored Aneta, who was gathering her things on the countertop and shoving them into her beige handbag. At one time or another, Marina glimpsed empty yogurt containers, sweets they were forbidden to bring inside the homes of diabetics, earplugs, stockings, used tissues, nasal spray, even a change of underwear. When Aneta was this angry, even her hands shuddered. In her attempt to shovel possessions back in her purse, a cell phone slipped out of her fingers and crashed onto the linoleum floor.

“See what you people did?”

“Let me help you,” Marina said.

Before the Maidan protests began, before Yanukovych was ousted, Aneta didn’t protest that Marina and Grisha spoke Russian. Aneta’s own Russian was quite fluent, if thickly accented. Back then, they all communicated fluidly, imparted important information about their shifts, went over the medication schedule, and even enjoyed watching addictive reality television shows on the Russian cable station together. But as the war continued to rage and news of the election was imminent, Aneta began pulling away, demanding they all speak Ukrainian. What was poor Grisha supposed to speak when he was from St. Petersburg and immigrated with a good-for-nothing son at the age of sixty-four? Was he to learn a new, thoroughly useless language? And what about Marina, growing up in an ethnic Russian enclave in the Luhansk oblast? With Poroshenko’s dull, bureaucrat face on television all day long, Aneta was clearly exploding with ethnic pride.

On the floor, the cell phone’s cracked face showed a picture of an attractive girl her daughter’s age framed by blond curls. Marina reached for it.

“You not touch. Nothing.” Aneta wrapped her bruised phone in a scarf. At last, she shoved open the front door.

“Bye, Aneta. Have nice day,” Marina said, in English, through her teeth.

“‘The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.’” Grisha intoned to Aneta’s back. He was always displaying his erudition by quoting Great Russian Writers.

Aneta froze, a hand still on the knob. Marina could practically see the back of her neck sizzle with rage.

Just be quiet, Marina silently ordered Grisha. Let her go.

“What that mean, eh, old man? What you say?”

Two older women were slowly making their way across the hallway to the elevator. The one with the cane complained about a granddaughter who never called to ask after her health, the other with the rolling walker had an entirely different monologue going about the deteriorating quality of the produce at Net Cost. They were, naturally, conversing in Russian.

Aneta lingered in the doorframe. But then, as they listened to the pure Moscow cadences disappearing down the hall, she seemed to reconsider. Before Marina knew what happened, Aneta strode across the room and slapped her across the face. The shock of it was the initial sting, Aneta’s ringed, creased, foreign hand at her skin. But then the pain initiated in her chest, up the neck, and exploded at the place of attack. Her eyes filled with tears immediately, her very sockets burning from the heat of it.

“Slava Ukraini,” Aneta said, noting her surprise with satisfaction, and stormed out. They could hear the stomp of sensible heels against linoleum floor.

“Nu, nu,” Grisha clucked. “‘However stupid a fool’s words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man.’”

“What?” she said. It was a numb question aimed toward the universe at large. The outlines of the room were losing their focus.

“That’s Gogol, in case you’d like to be more cultured. I prefer my women cultured. Especially before we undertake the most beautiful act a man and a woman can enjoy together.” Grisha wheeled himself to the cabinet where his medication was stacked. Myriad orange bottles for any imaginable ache. Back home, old men were being blown up in daylight; here old men took pills to marvel at their erections. “Shall I take the little blue one now? Or shall we be patient until after lunch?”

She tried to gather herself, bring her own anger under control. She wished she could yank that Aneta back here and punch the rest of her teeth out. I’ll show you my mother tongue! But without this job, the official, documented nature of this job, Larisska would never be able to come. This fall marked six whole years since Marina had been forced to leave her behind. She had written a stream of letters to the New York Senator, one of them even translated by a neighbor’s daughter. (“Dear Mrs. Senator: I am writing you urgently with the hope that you will help speed up the immigration process of my daughter who lives in war-torn Ukraine. Her application to join me in America has been stalled for five and a half years now and the current situation has become very dangerous for her.”) But who was listening?

She found the nursing uniform in her tote and slipped her arms through it. “I don’t understand that miserable woman. In the best country imaginable and she’s not happy. Let’s go breathe some fresh air, shall we?”

The mirror displayed a thick head of copper hair in desperate need of coloring, glistening eyelashes, an inflamed cheek, already swollen. Looking down, she saw that Grisha had folded some ice cubes into a waffled kitchen towel.

“Go ahead and press it to your face,” he said, wheeling over. “Bring the swelling down. Our magical lovemaking will just have to wait.”

 

 

That night, like every night, she anxiously opened Skype. Oh, how beautiful it was, that undulating S floating in a cloud of blue. It was the vein that pulsed its way to her beloveds. The technology had been a Godsend, soothing the sting of those first years of immigration. Her mother’s face filling her screen, the slope of her forehead, her gray-stranded bob, drooping eyelids, even the gold teeth at the back of her mouth. Her mother would call Larisska over, and sometimes her daughter would comply, arms crossed at her chest.

But, ah! The contours of their faces, the darling sounds of their voices. On Larisska’s twenty-third birthday, she was able to witness her girl blow out candles, a self-conscious huff, the lights extinguished. Through the screen she could examine Larisska’s profile, probe the depths of her gray eyes for unhappiness or loneliness, satisfy herself with her daughter’s weight, her pallor. She could pepper them with questions: if Larisska was on schedule with insulin, if her mother’s blood pressure was being carefully monitored by her doctor.

But now it had been two weeks since the power and Internet went out in Rubizhne, and Channel One flashed pictures of bombed-out hospitals and bridges and deserted apartment buildings. Bodies covered in blankets in broad daylight, people returning to houses torched to the ground. Twitchy gunmen patrolling the streets. Abandoned factories engorged with chemicals just waiting for the spark of gunfire to explode into the skies. The American president changing no laws, offering no asylum.

And there were her daughter and mother as grayed-out boxes on her computer screen, unreachable. Still, she powered up Skype a few times a day, searching in vain for that green check mark. A check mark meant her mother or daughter was safe. A green check mark meant life.

She pushed Grisha in his wheelchair under Brighton Beach Avenue’s rattling elevated subway tracks. They had just bought a satchel of potatoes. The afternoon was crisp, free of humidity. At the corner grocery stands, towers of pineapples, underripe mangoes, and black cherries were practically spilling onto the sidewalk. Women in ruched dresses wound arms around the elbows of open-shirted, buttoned-down men. Teenagers guffawed and plotted the weekend in groups, their gold necklaces swaying. Outside Russian restaurants, smokers in black sunglasses accepted car keys, finished their cigarettes, and disappeared screeching around the block.

Grisha was greeted from all directions, women bending down to him, grasping his hand. “If it isn’t the poet Grisha,” they said, some gently mocking. He took advantage of these exchanges to evaluate their spilling cleavage. Firm-lipped babushki cracked smiles at him, and he called them seductive ladies, a true coven of Sophia Lorens. The Sophia Lorens ignored Marina entirely; to them, like most people she encountered these past six years, she was a most insignificant personage, a ghost.

It was the kind of day that should have filled Marina with its promise, that reminded her of Rubizhne’s golden late-afternoon light. But she could not peel off the night’s terrors, with its revolving reels of poor Larisska, her helpless, motherless daughter, locking herself in the bathroom against the whine of the sirens, against the shelling, the howls of agony in the streets. She outwardly shook when she imagined their central pharmacy destroyed, no insulin reaching the town, and how her daughter loved those Napoleon cakes that were probably long gone from the shelves. She tried to comfort herself with the resilience of her mother, who’d inherited the fortitude of her own mother, a World War II survivor who’d procured a cow in 1940 and fed her entire family with it. But her mother would be seventy next year.

“Good morning, Gospodin Poet,” called out yet another woman of a certain age, not even glancing Marina’s way.

“Are you really a famous poet?” she asked Grisha when they waited for the light to change. “How come I’ve never read a single poem if you’re such a celebrity here?”

He swiveled around in his wheelchair, eyes moist at their pink corners. “I will be whatever you want me to be, Marina Andreevna. For you, I will be Alexander Blok himself.” Grisha was growing an uneven scraggly beard, more filled in at the cheeks than chin and neck. Marina had offered to shave it, but he said it lent him Imperial distinction. He liked holding a cane as they rolled along, sometimes wielding it as a conductor’s baton.

She smiled. “I’ll take Okudzhava. I’m not picky.”

“I love women who aren’t too picky.”

“You’re ridiculous, Gregory Markovich. Recite me a poem of yours.”

“And eradicate my entire mystique? What if you’re not educated enough to appreciate it?”

A pair of ridiculously dressed middle-aged babas stalked right by him in bare legs and gold sandals shimmering in the sun, and he swiveled to better appreciate the receding promenade. She felt strangely rejected, as if Grisha was conspiring against her with the rest of the borough.

“Recite one for me. Please?” she pouted, forcing his attention back to her.

Every surface in Grisha’s apartment was littered with medicine. Pills clustered in days-of-the-week containers, white ovals outlined on the dining room table. At home, she used Russian Google to figure out what function all the pills performed. There was depression medication and nitroglycerin, pills for erections and ancient antibiotics, central nervous system stimulants, pain relievers. Vials of insulin clogged up the refrigerator’s vegetable drawer.

“How is my beauty feeling after her last altercation with Baba Yaga? Cheek all healed?” he asked when she lowered him onto the couch for his favorite reality show, “Masculine/Feminine.”

“Aneta? She doesn’t bother me.”

With the additional incursion of Aneta’s name overlaying her worry for Larisska, her mood was completely soured. She busied herself with unpacking groceries. The entire place had the smell of rotting food and medicine, the dreaded scent of solitary old age. A new fear struck her—growing old in this foreign country, no husband, no child, no English language.

“What’s this?” she cried. Buried under a stack of kitchen towels was an opened pack of cookies, those tasty American ones with cream pressed between two wheels of chocolate. She flourished them before him as proof of his transgression. “Gregory Markovich. Do I need to remind you that diabetes is a serious disease? My daughter…”

“I know, I know. Your daughter suffers from it. But we are different. Mine is Type 2, which is much less serious. And I’m an old man. If I don’t have my pleasures, I might as well hang myself.”

She felt his hand lightly brushing her behind. Some of her acquaintances worked as home attendants for old ladies who berated them all day, who accused them of stealing worthless family knickknacks or colluding against them with pernicious relatives. She knew that a lonely, good-natured pervert was not the worst assignment in the world and this was a legitimate company that could prove to the government she was officially, gainfully employed, ready to sponsor her daughter at any time. She removed Grisha’s palm from her butt, then theatrically dumped the cookies in the garbage.

“Oh, no, that’s just unnecessary,” Grisha moaned extravagantly. “They are Oreos. Haven’t you ever experienced the Great American Invention that is Oreo?”

“Your blood sugar, Grisha. It’s not funny. I keep picking up your insulin at the pharmacy but it’s clear you’re not taking it. Look how many vials you have lying around in the fridge.”

Grisha tossed up his hands, as if to say, I’m beyond all hope! I need the love of a good woman! And turned back to the television. “At least Aneta’s off the next two weeks. We are all free from her for a while.”

“That’s the best news I heard all month.”

On Russian television, a man complained to the reality show host that his wife went at his head with an axe to prevent him from seeing their daughter. He pointed to the center of his scalp where hair gave way to a sutured purple gash. The audience did not look as horrified as one would expect.

“If you’re such a poet, why do you sit in front of this lowlife drek instead of perusing Lermontov?” Marina checked behind the pans, saw a round tin of butter wafers, but decided to leave it.

Grisha didn’t respond. He was absorbed in his program, a balloon of deflated belly spilling over his belt. On screen, the man was showing the viewers stitches criss-crossing from crown to ear. All at once, it overwhelmed her. Hot tears burned her cheeks. She felt herself gulping for air.

“Come here.” Grisha turned off the television and the apartment was plunged into darkness. She had forgotten to turn on the light, the windows facing a courtyard filled with garbage. She had not realized that evening was seeping so quickly, and the dread of the upcoming night rattled inside her.

“I don’t think I can handle your insinuations tonight, to tell you the truth.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“I haven’t heard from her in weeks, Grish. They say on the news that bridges are being blown up. No one can leave town.”

“I know. That’s terrible.” Grisha’s eyes were soggy blue islands surrounded by more yellow than white. He was reaching for her.

“How are they surviving without light or water? Using the toilet? She’s probably not even getting our packages.”

“A tragedy, your war. ‘But man is a fickle and disreputable creature and perhaps, like a chess player, is interested in the process of attaining his goal rather than the goal itself.’” Grisha motioned for her to join him on the sofa. “Look, Marinochka, there is always a way to get around a system. Use your connections, write letters, complain. Do what you have to do. This is America.”

“You think I haven’t written letters?” she said, but what she really wanted to say was, You think this isn’t your war too? She allowed him to squeeze her hands for a while, until her politeness gave out. Behind him, she glimpsed the empty vials of insulin scattered across his desk.

“Take the ones in the fridge. There’s a cooler under the sink,” he said, following her gaze. “We can get more next time.”

As Grisha slept, she opened Skype. The program was slow in loading, but once she was signed in, she had to look twice. Beneath her daughter’s picture, there was a green check mark. Slowly, she guided the cursor over that precious square and clicked. The dial, the ring. Her stomach clenched. All the questions of the past week were rising in her at once: Is their building safe? How is their health? Has Larisska been getting her insulin? But the screen just rang and rang, and after a few more hopeful taps, she gave up.

It was hard for her to picture Rubizhne now. These years in America had winnowed her memories to a mere snatch of images. Flinging open her fifth-floor apartment window onto the tops of the majestic mast pines, pin-straight as if reaching for the sky. The smell of fresh pine woven through the dry, bracing air, the sight of forest stretching far back into the horizon. Her soul escaped her throat every time she thought of home. In Rubizhne, she lived beneath birds she never saw in America, the aerial swoop of swallows and swifts.

The wide boulevards planted with rows of roses. Streets lined with busy markets, neighbors selling cuts of pork, fragrant tomatoes, eggplant. Over there, everyone had some connection to the soil. Those who worked in the plastics factory bought produce from friends who grew it.

She would never admit this to a single American, but the pleasures in Rubizhne were more acute than anything she experienced here. How the entire town came together for national celebrations, gathered in the main square for Chemists’ Day or Family Day or Victory Day. Wares and talents spilling out from the sidewalks—the seamstresses showing off their caftans, the painters offering portraits on the spot. A karaoke competition breaking out next to the fountain, a children’s puppet performance in one corner of the square. And after all that, fireworks, the likes of which she will never see again. Not even the dazzle of Fourth of July over Manhattan came close to the splendor of the splash of color against Rubizhne stars, everyone’s tired faces turned to the explosions.

How lovely it had been to walk just a few paces to the plastics factory where she was bookkeeper. The neat row of transparent shampoo bottles. The leather ledgers with the numbers in the right boxes, the satisfaction of an anticipated balance. She was respected there—always called Marina Andreevna, the technolog stopping by to flirt, to ask if the numbers added up properly or perhaps she missed a decimal point? The scent of pure spirits on his breath, the hairy manliness of his ropy arms leaning on the edge of her desk. She looked forward to hearing him whistling a Makarevich song as he strode down the hall. That one hour against his cold metal desk that would result in Larisska. The voluminous daisies he left on her chair for Woman’s Day.

But when she tried to thank him, he publicly denied he was their presenter. “I’m shocked. How could you think so? I’m a married man, Marina Andreevna!”

Then, humiliated, meeting up with her childhood friend Yulia after work, both of them wearing dresses cut in different styles from the exact same Soviet fabric. The whole group of school friends piling into café Avalon, taking turns buying her mugs of cold kvass.

All that was now gone, her mother had told her before Skype went dark. The factories shut down, the playgrounds and parks deserted. No more Chemists’ or Family Day. No more fireworks in the central ploshad. No more markets with watermelons and potatoes and sunflowers straight from a neighbor’s garden. On Odnoklassniki, the wife posted in a status update that the bushy-eyebrowed technolog of Plastics was killed by stray gunfire back in the spring.

On the day of Aneta’s return, Marina found it hard to rise. The orange light slashed at an angle, but her room was cold. She hauled herself out of bed and dressed, gulped down tea and assembled her lunch. The streets were empty aside from the very elderly making their laborious way down the sidewalk or squeezing pears suspiciously at corner delis. It had rained here too, the streets slick with a thin veneer of dampness. Her feet felt light against the concrete and she allowed herself to linger in the morning sunshine, to notice the way it slipped between the subway tracks above her and dappled the ground. She felt herself capable of truancy, exploring the Iranian Jewish mansions on Ocean Parkway or veering north toward the Victorian houses in Ditmas Park. Anything but facing Aneta.

But she turned on King’s Highway anyway and let herself into Grisha’s lobby. It was one of those ubiquitous Brooklyn co-ops where all the funds were diverted away from apartment repairs toward an opulent lobby. She had been impressed at first glance: a mirrored wall, a floor fanned by sea-colored tiles, a tufted velvet bench balanced on gold metal legs. But upstairs was another story; dirt-mottled floors, the intermingling scents of fried dinners, a row of chipped maroon doors. Behind one of them, Aneta was insulting her rather vocally.

“That cow left you alone too, eh? I go away and everything is big mess.” When Marina walked in, Aneta turned, “And now you did it.”

Aneta’s hair was loosened from her bun, face glistening from sweaty exertion. Grisha looked unusually dispirited at the dining table. A bowl of unappetizing ricotta cheese with a suspended spoon in it was plopped before his roughly shaven chin.

“What now?”

“That’s it. I’m reporting you to VIP. This is last straw.”

Marina felt defeated exhaustion grip her muscles. “What else did I personally do to you? Did I bomb your village or something?”

Aneta hissed, “I told you to speak only Ukrainian to me. Is that so hard? And considering what you did to that helicopter in Slovyansk, I don’t think it’s so very funny, do you? Twelve people dead, maybe more.”

“What I did? You think I shot it down last night, and that’s why I’m late this morning?”

Aneta set her face into a straight line. “If not you, then your Russki-loving friends.”

“It’s rude in front of Grisha to speak a language he doesn’t understand.”

“He doesn’t need to understand us.” Aneta started scrawling something on a sheet of paper. Evidence against her? Lies about her to the VIP offices? “Once they fire your lazy ass, you can go ask your beloved Putin for a pension. But here, we actually work for a living.”

She would have to beg to keep her job; there were dozens just like her waiting for an open post. But Marina couldn’t resist the ridiculousness of the image. “When I see my beloved, as you say, I’ll be sure to ask a few of his friends to look in on your relatives in Berdychiv.”

Aneta’s eyes almost burst out of her skull, and the sight kept her and Grisha crying with laughter for a full half hour after she was gone.

On the walk to the pharmacy, Grisha fell asleep in the wheelchair. His head lolled to his right armrest, allowing her the luxury of being enveloped in her own thoughts. The day was cold and overcast, not June-like at all. Every morning, she expected the rush of warmth, but even the afternoons withheld it. A rogue drop of rain sprinkled Grisha’s face but she kept pushing him onward.

In the pharmacy, babushki were arguing with the white-coated woman behind the counter. Each had her own demands for the pharmacist: just a few extra pills to send to relatives in Russia or Ukraine or Uzbekistan. Would it kill the woman to throw in just three or four more? An expired prescription was still good, wasn’t it? And what do these words on the bottle mean—“This medication can increase the effects of alcohol”? Her vodka-loving husband argued this was a very good thing.

The pharmacist was overwhelmed as usual, arguing with the entire horde simultaneously, pushing stapled packets across the counter. “But that’s not legal, how many times do I have to say this? Let your cousins get their own medication over there.”

“No one trusts those drugs. They look like our pills but they’re fakes,” one of the babushki was arguing.

“Can I help you?” The woman was looking toward Marina for an infusion of sanity. She pushed past the grannies to hand in Grisha’s slip for the insulin she would be packing away in a small cooler inside a cardboard box that would probably never make it to her daughter. While the debates at the counter raged, she tested some lotions on the back of her palm.

“Gregory Melman,” the pharmacist finally called. As Marina paid, they exchanged a look of complicity. They were two sane people among the mad at the sanatorium. The woman even gave her a tight, friendly nod of approval.

Back in the apartment, Marina flipped on the television and rooted around for edible potatoes. She hummed as she peeled. “So what do you think? I haven’t heard from VIP. Maybe Aneta’s all talk after all.”

“If they took you away, I would start drafting the most beautifully crafted suicide note they’ve ever read.” Grisha opened a book, leather and gold-embossed, turned a few of its parchment pages. Maybe the Lermontov joke struck a note with him after all. It was nice to see him reading instead of immersed in those nihilistic programs.

“Why was Aneta gone that whole time anyway? Was she sick?”

“No, nothing like that. Her niece got asylum. She’s getting a green card. It seems our friend is nice to her own family. Can you even picture Aneta as an warm and fuzzy auntie?”

“You’re kidding, right?” She popped her head up, the back of her skull slamming into an open cabinet door. “Her niece got out of Ukraine? How did she manage that? She’s barely been on the waiting list a year.”

“The girl came here on a student visa and went running to the Embassy. Oy, oy, oy, I can’t go back there. It’s a war zone! So they let her stay.”

Marina lost all interest in the potatoes. A sour acid expanded in her throat. “My daughter’s been on the list sixteen years now and they keep telling me to wait our turn. Can you imagine? We applied when she was nine years old, by the time the visa comes through, she’s twenty-one and they tell me she’s too old, she has to start over when I get my green card.”

Grisha looked mortified. He probably regretted telling her. “I know. It’s tragically unfair, but that’s the seesaw of politics. Maybe these days, the Americans prefer Ukrainians. You know, the Western ones. Who knows?”

At home, a stack of mail awaited her, a spool of messages from friends unfurled on her voicemail. She’d missed a party at the salon. Should they all go in on the same house in the Rockaways this summer? What about some night this week for drinks? Her creaky heart lifted once more. She had made friends here at least, friends who checked on her, missed her, who noted that she existed. If she squirreled away a bit of money she didn’t send home, she could even allow herself a new dress that could transition from summer to fall. The girls—yes, at fifty, they were still girls—could go dancing in one of the nightclubs she and Grisha keep passing on one of their strolls. There must be a man there for her, most likely Russian. Not as dashing as the technolog, but fiercely loyal, and they would combine the rest of their lives once Larisska came. This was still a country where things like that happened.

She flipped through the pile of catalogs, for a modern Italian furniture store in the neighborhood, a lingerie mail-order that featured women wearing lace with down-turned faces. Smiling at the idea of wearing something like that in front of Grisha. He’d have a heart attack on the spot! Then the letters. Back home, she had enjoyed parsing through the mail, had taken pleasure in organizing it, filing away the ones requiring her answer. A bookkeeper was an important position, and she had received piles of urgent official mail. But here, she preferred the catalogs. Letters were indecipherable, credit card offers and advertisements had to be parsed, word by laborious word.

But then she came across a letter that was no junk mail. It was from the Senator’s office. She saw the woman’s name printed in official blue letters in the upper lefthand corner.

Dear Ms. Borondinskya:

I have received your letter requesting assistance with your immigration matter. Each year, the US Department of State receives an enormous number of petitions filed on behalf of foreign nationals who wish to immigrate to the United States. I understand that the immigrant visa application about which you inquired has been assigned the 2B Preference Category and a Priority Date of November 4, 2008. Currently, visas are only available to 2B Preference Category applicants with priority dates before May 1, 2007.

She didn’t bother trying to interpret the rest. By now, the one thing she understood was what “no” looked like. She knew all too well the feeling of helplessness before governments that cared nothing about people like her or her daughter’s suffering. Now, incredibly, she willed her earlier sarcastic comment true, that she could somehow speak to Vladimir Putin. For the first time in six years, since arriving in this exquisite miracle of a heart-breaking country, she could identify with Aneta’s steady, droning anger. Right now, for just this one moment, what she wanted more than a reunion with her daughter was for a vengeful adversary to chasten this country, bring it to its knees, make it humane through a powerful injection of fear.

The next morning, she evaded Grisha’s attempts at conversation. Instead, she worked on salvaging the abandoned potatoes, submerging them in a mixture of water and white vinegar. It was easy to keep busy in the kitchen, turning their browned husks over and over in the oily pan. As she worked, she could feel Grisha’s eyes sliding down her spine. Something made her put the spatula down.

“OK, just this one time,” she said in English, and walked over to him. She took his dappled wrist, and drew a trembling hand to her right breast. Neither of them spoke, only listened to the cheap plastic clock pulsing above the television. Grisha allowed his hand to linger, but his fingers neither caressed nor squeezed. They rested, like exhausted refugees warmly welcomed into the country of their dreams.