MARCH 20, 2014

  In the dark, he spots the glowing lights inside. The outline of his mother in the window, waiting. He and Katya step outside the car and Misha takes the bags. He can hear music playing, faintly. An old cassette of Olga Pavlova. His mother’s favorite. He can hear her singing—how he missed her voice.

  She’d shown him how to read music, but it was Vera who had shown him how to play—her thin fingers on the neck of a guitar. Like this, she’d say, adjusting his fingertips on the strings. Misha liked to pretend to make mistakes so she would correct him.

  Now, before they walk to the door, Katya touches the small of his back, near the belt. Her hand feels as if it’s always meant to be there, on him, guiding and following at once.

  His mother opens the door and cries, Mikhail, my son, my son, and she wraps her large arms around him, enveloping him like a blanket. She sees Katya and her eyes widen in joy, in hope, in silent prayer. She opens the door wide and they are welcomed into the cottage by the warm and the dry.

  His mother fusses over them, warming the borscht, the bread. She isn’t wearing her scarf, and her hair is thinning. Her fingers and wrists are thicker now, her arms and face browned from working in her garden.

  “You will see in the morning,” his mother says, standing in the kitchen, Misha and Katya at the small table. “The berries, the way they thrive here. The bushes are full, so full they are heavy. We will pick them, together. You would like that? We can make fresh jam.”

  Misha looks at Katya, who smiles. “I would love to see your garden,” Katya says.

  “It is her pride and joy,” Misha says, eyes flickering, mischievous. “The garden is her favorite child. It doesn’t talk back.”

  His mother turns from the stove, red from the steam. She waves the spoon at him. “Ah, the garden talks. She tells me the sun is warm, the water is fresh, the soil is soft. She tells me, she shows me, ‘Look at the earth! Look at how she lives! They said it was dead, this land. They said it was poison!’ You will see,” she says to Katya, “how beautiful the garden is.”

  Around them are old black-and-white photographs—his grandmother’s things. Photos of Misha’s mother as a child, round-faced and joyful. He sees the marriage photos of his mother and father, grandmother and grandfather, great-grandmother and great-grandfather. Photos of great-grandfather in the war. The embroidered towels draped behind the photographs. The stitching of berries blood red and black, the flowers blue and gold, generations old and yellowed, the rushnyk made by a girl long ago. Wooden carvings his grandfather and great-grandfather made, whittling on the porch, to keep their hands out of trouble. The crystal vase—a wedding gift when his mother was married—is filled with wilting flowers, the water slicked with algae. Misha makes a note to replenish them, to clean the vase.

  “I’ve made your old room, Misha,” his mother says, after they have eaten, cleared the table. “I did not know there would be a guest—”

  “Let Katya take my bed, Mama. I’ll sleep here, on the couch.”

  His mother wipes her brow, distressed by the lack of communication, by the surprise guest Misha knows has both pleased and confused her. She looks at her son, and he can feel her heart.

  “Let me get the blankets, the pillows—” she goes to the armoire, framed by bookshelves, filled with books, and Misha takes what she hands him. Olga Pavlova clicks. The end of side one. It is 11:35 p.m. His mother rubs her eyes, and she looks like a little girl. How much he loves her. How old she is becoming.

  “Go to sleep, Mama,” he says. “I’ll show Katya her room. We’ll turn in, soon.”

  She nods, quieter, slower now that she’s tired. He stands up, and it’s his turn to eclipse her, walking to her room, and she pats his back, wipes her eyes.

  She turns to Katya and says, “This is my son, and I love him more than anything.”

  Katya nods at her, understanding.

  The two of them, alone. They’ve made tea. Misha goes through the cassettes on a bookshelf, searching for something to replace Olga Pavlova. Katya looks over his shoulder, reading the titles. There are hundreds, it seems.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve seen a cassette tape,” she says. “Longer since I’ve listened to one.”

  Misha can feel her warmth without touching. He can sense her without feeling her. And he likes her, there. “So many of these came after the USSR. We didn’t have access to much American music, but since then, my mother became a fanatic.” He takes out a tape—Celine Dion. There’s Michael Jackson. The Beatles. Tchaikovsky. Queen. Journey.

  “She listens to all of these?” Katya asks.

  “When the wall came down, we listened to everything,” Misha says. “I started bringing them to her, anything I could find. She doesn’t understand much English, so she listens for the melody and the voices.” He takes out Shania Twain. “This is her favorite,” he says. He puts it into the player, snaps it closed.

  They listen, eyes locked. When the track plays, Misha grins.

  Man! I feel like a woman!

  Katya erupts into laughter, throwing back her head. He notices one filling on a top molar. He finds himself joyful at what he’s never noticed before, having never seen her this way. A small mole under the jaw, near the base of her neck. He has an urge to know all of her. The cartography of her, what’s hidden.

  Katya drinks her tea, still fighting her laughter, and finds a tape.

  “Bruce Hornsby and the Range?” She picks it off the shelf. Misha puts the tape in.

  “This came out the year we moved to L’viv,” Katya said. “Dad had this one, and others, smuggled in. I was adopted, then we moved. It was the beginning of the end, anyway. In ’91, he blasted it as loud as the walls could take it, Mom said. Then we moved to the United States.”

  Misha flips over the case, reading. “Nineteen eighty-six.”

  Katya nodded. “Big year, this part of the world.”

  “When did you move? The month?”

  “We moved to Kyiv two weeks earlier, mid-April. I remember because it was just after my birthday.”

  A silence. Misha looks at the cassette player. Bruce Hornsby and the Range plays on.

  “You were here,” she asks him, “that day. You left, right after? That night?”

  “A little later,” he tells her. “My father still needed to work.”

  Misha’s father, an engineer, had been called to examine the damage of the fire. They put him inside a helicopter, hovering over Reactor 4. They dared not fly directly above. He said he felt like a moth in a plume.

  His father came home that night and the plume lingered and merged into rain clouds. Acid rain burned the forests, the beasts covered in scabs, in tar. The families in Pripyat were evacuated from their homes. Most of Misha’s friends from school went to Belarus and Misha never saw them again.

  His family went to the funerals and memorials of the men who had died. Misha squeezed his father’s hand, glad his father was still alive. It was a year later while living in Kyiv that his father passed away.

  “Vera’s father was killed instantly, inside the reactor. I felt guilty that my father had survived.”

  But it was the plume that killed his father—not the explosion. It was the plume that seeped into his father’s body, into his cells, it took ahold at the base of his throat.

  “The doctor gave my father a picture of the moth inside him—the shape of the mass. That’s what it looked like. A moth.”

  Misha’s father, a man of science, brought it home to show his wife and son. Misha’s mother cried, slammed the bedroom door, unable to listen.

  “I stayed with him,” he says. “I looked at the black-and-white image with my father.”

  Misha’s father sat at the dinner table and drew his son a simple map of Chernobyl. He showed where the fire started and how far the smoke had traveled. He explained how things went wrong and how they should have functioned, as he understood. Misha’s father took off his glasses, placed them near his glass of vodka and rubbed his eyes.

  You need to know this, Mikhail, his father said. You must know that all actions have consequences. Everything in life is an experiment. There is always something to be understood that wasn’t understood before. There is always cause and effect. There is always something to be learned.

  After his father died, Misha and his mother moved in with Vera’s family. They moved to Dnipropetrovsk. It was difficult for Misha’s mother. She promised one day she would return home.

  “That first year in Dnipropetrovsk, Vera and I went to the river a lot. That’s where we truly became close. It was the beginning of us, there.”

  Misha would teach Vera about the river, the Dnieper. He knew many things about it because of his father, who had taught Misha about the ecosystem: the plants, bugs, algae. Their dog, Dracula, would sniff the grass, and Misha would peer into the water, fish nibbling on the rocks.

  His father had told him about microorganisms, the composition of air, and the cells that made up Dracula’s tongue. After his father was gone, Misha taught Vera about these things, lying on the beach in the sun.

  Misha loved his father and missed him. But that first year, when he was nearly twelve years old, Vera kissed him in her swimsuit while the wind lifted the gulls.

  “I would tell myself, ‘this wouldn’t have been possible, would it, had Dad lived?’ It was my way of thinking it was a blessing, somehow. A way of accepting his death. That maybe it was God’s design. But what kind of God is that? Tit-for-tat. Your father or your wife?”

  His mother always told him, God has a plan. So Misha made his own plans. He went to college, became an engineer. Vera went to a conservatory to play the violin.

  A long time ago. A lifetime, it seemed. A dream.

  And now he was back in his grandmother’s home, now his mother’s home, and his wife has been years dead. Here, now, he tells Katya all this, and she listens to him, near him, tilting her head quietly, a presence of peace, while her long hair falls on her neck, her shoulders, her chest, dark and wild. He is struck by her, the fact of this woman being with him, who had lived so near him thirty years ago when the reactor blew. Near him, near Vera.

  Katya steps closer to him, slides her finger into a beltloop near his hip, and pulls.

  Meanwhile, Bruce Hornsby sings, That’s just the way it is.

  HOW TO MAKE LOVE TO

  A MAN NOT YOUR HUSBAND

  You will lead him because he will not lead you. Even though the ring is gone, your husband is always in the room, until you mentally push him out.

  When you kiss this man, it will feel new and old at once—it will taste like a familiarity you’ve missed, a familiarity that frightens you, and the response, the way he responds to you, tongue and teeth, turns you on.

  You’ll fumble, and the first time you will both be mostly dressed, his jeans unbuttoned, your jeans unzipped taut around your thighs, but his cold hands will slide up your back, over your breasts, and your belly will kiss his. You’ll have to guide him, but he finds your fingertips, and while he’s inside you, he’s also listening by feeling, by following—and you tell him, his rough jaw buried in your neck, that you want him to make you come, and he’ll say, show me—

  When you grow near, he’s watching you and you don’t feel shy, you don’t feel afraid. You want him to see you, you want him to see all the parts of you, every part of you, everything broken and torn and stretched and sewn. You want him to see you come, you want him to see you widen, expand—you want him to see what he’s done to you, what he’s capable of doing, of making you feel good—

  And it feels good—it feels good to have him inside of you, it feels good to have his teeth pinch your breast, his tongue tracing, his fingertips slicked with you, with him, as he sends you—he sends you—and it feels good, being touched, being loved this way, being touched this way, being this way, with this man, with this man who could love you this way, who has given you this gift, this gift of sending you, his body with your body, his sex with your sex, his hands locked with your hands as he sends you, as you send him…

  The quiet comes, and you look at one another, tears in your eyes, in his eyes. And you say nothing, and he says nothing, because neither of you know, in his radioactive bedroom, on his radioactive sheets, with his radioactive semen, and your now radioactive womb, if you will ever make love like this again.

  Instead, you hum him a song they would sing in the fires of Maidan. He lies on top of you as you comb his hair with your fingers, and you hum, and he closes his eyes, his temple on your clavicle, your whole heart beating—

  The pine and fir are burning,

  A boy has loved me from afar.

  AUDIO CASSETTE RECORDING

  SIDE TWO

  Spring. Every bud a burst. An eruption. Think of when a child is born: that is how spring enters the world. The cataclysmic joy of Demeter as Persephone returns to earth.

  Stravinsky knew it. In The Rite of Spring, The Procession of the Sage, the symphony strikes like a hammer, again and again. It pounds—

  That is how my first daughter entered the world: violent, red, screaming.

  And then the Sage falls to his knees and kisses the ground, and the whole tribe turns upward to look to the gods.

  Nadia loved her so tenderly, the way she carried her in her belly and later in her arms, the way she wrapped her in her cradle. Nadia was made to be a mother—it was her sacred joy, her holy purpose. To mother us all.

  When we married, she wanted a child right away. I hadn’t yet gone to Prague, and she was hungry for life. She was still dancing in the ballet with Anna, and she would soon go to Cuba.

  “I want to have your child,” she said to me, nights before she left. I wondered so many times before why it mattered to people to have children.

  Anna—how she loved Nadia. When they arrived in Havana, Nadia called me and she said, Sasha, Anna is here. Yes, yes—she is well! Oh, Sasha—she is holding my hand now because I am shaking. I was so ill on the plane, but I am well, now. I have been to the doctor. Yes, everything is well! Oh, Sasha—

  God made us in His image—my old piano teacher had said.

  And so, on the phone, Nadia told me we had made a child, and when she was born, we named her Zoya.

  When Nadia returned from Cuba, everything was done to keep my dear Nadia healthy. Our mothers fed her, made her strong and walked her. She was radiant, proud.

  I remember the night I met her—looking much the same way—in the home of the Bolshoi director, when she wore her blond hair back, her green eyes large and smiling. She laughed in the midst of a group and I caught her eye. She saw me in my army uniform, arm in arm with Anna, and she came over to us.

  Who is this? Nadia asked Anna, touching her arm.

  This is my brother, Aleksandr. Sasha, this is Nedezdha.

  She held out her hand to me, and I took it.

  Nadia, she said.

  Anna pinched my side, and she left us alone, together. We stayed that way as long as God allowed.

  When I returned to Moscow, Zoya was nearly two years old. I kissed her head of curls, pale like her mother’s. She clung to Nadia, who held her on her lap. Nadia looked small compared to the growing girl, but she was still a dancer in her musculature. The arms that held our daughter had oftentimes held me, held others. The feet that held her up were callused and rough. Her soles were sandstone, her ankles fine as karst. And our daughter, Zoya, was volcanic—joyful, tearful, laughing, crying.

  For five years, while I secretly trained in the KGB, while I performed in the symphony, our daughter grew. She had started dancing lessons with other children and Nadia and Anna would play with her: prima ballerina, where Zoya was the soloist—a Russian princess.

  I want to be the Sugar Plum Fairy, she said to Nadia as she watched her Aunt Anna perform the role. Nadia kissed her little hands, saying she would taste so divinely sweet.

  And Papa will be the prince, Zoya whispered. The curtain closed. She squeezed my hand in the dark.

  And so, we were very happy.

  Until.

  Always, until.

  ODESA, UKRAINE

  FEBRUARY 27, 2014

  Adam is waiting for her at the airport when she lands.

  “Hello,” he says, his smile sympathetic. Americans are always smiling for no reason. Still, Slava thinks he is more sensitive than she remembered. He takes her bag, freeing her of the weight.

  “Are you hungry?” he asks. “You must be. Dinner? Then hotel?”

  Slava nods and smiles back at him. She takes his hand. Slava knows that sometimes, a man wants you to touch him without asking. Sometimes, a woman does, too. Slava wants to be touched.

  She is thankful for Adam and Misha.

  When she called Misha to tell him she had gone back to Odesa, maybe America, he tells her to travel safely. He says, I love you, Slava, for the first time, then, Stay safe.

  When she called Adam, she told him everything. Of Dascha, their relationship, her plans to leave Kyiv. He had already known about the disappearance. He tried to meet her in Kyiv, but she needed to go, now. Adam says to her, I’m sorry, Slava. Then, How can I help?

  There are protests in Odesa, too. Anti-Maidan protesters incite further aggression. Yanukovych is gone, disappeared to Russia, and pro-Russians come to the streets.

  At dinner, Slava drinks water from a glass. Adam sits across from her. Adam has the grilled squid with vegetables. Slava has mussels in white wine.

  “My sister is arriving tomorrow,” Adam says in Russian. He always speaks to her in Russian. Slava feels as if for the first time she’s noticing just how good his Russian is. “Alexis always wanted to come back to Ukraine,” Adam says. “We haven’t been since we were children.”

  “Is your family Russian?”

  “I haven’t told you my mother is Russian? I’m surprised I didn’t mention it. Alexis is arriving in Kyiv today to handle a death in the family. An estranged uncle. We are all reeling from it. I wish we could have all met there and traveled here together.”

 

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