However, the Rudinskys would not disrespect Grandmother’s memory. When the men went off to the secondhand market near Rome to pawn what they’d lugged from Minsk, and the women to the firsthand market to spend on provisions what the men made in the secondhand, it was Grandmother who remained with the children, walking them to the pebbly beach, where they splashed around in the bottle-green Mediterranean water. It was she who supervised the children as they distended their bellies with translucent muscat grapes that looked as if filaments of sun had lodged inside. (Grandmother did not touch the grapes. The grapes, expensive, were for the children.) It was Grandmother who tucked the children to sleep, though she didn’t read stories. She ran her fingers, the skin flimsy and loose, through their hair until they calmed down and dozed off.
All the same, to indicate displeasure, the Rudinsky high command had sent low-level envoys: Vera had come with her grandfather. The parents (Garik, taxi driver; Lyuba, bookkeeper) had claimed night shifts. It wasn’t enough for Grandfather. Slava watched the old man’s eyes roll past Vera and her grandfather Lazar, a scowl on his lips.
Slava stared at Lazar. He was stooped as a branch being reclaimed by the ground. In the town near Rome where Soviet immigrants were settled en route to America by some unknown geopolitical contract, Lazar Timofeyevich Rudinsky remained a legend years after the Rudinskys had departed for Brooklyn. The secondhand market was such that people came from Rome itself. Those who had gone through Italy before the Rudinskys and Gelmans sent word about what Italians wanted from their strange interlopers: linen sheets, Lenin pins, cologne, Zenit cameras. Also power drills, cognac, and Red Army caps. Every morning, the Soviet men shrouded themselves in Soviet linens and mongreled into the soft air of Tyrrhenian falclass="underline" “Russo producto! Russo producto!”
Lazar Timofeyevich had an idea. He made rounds of the immigrant homes, inviting the men to the little villa assigned to the Rudinskys. His wife, Ada Denisovna, walked around with wafers and tea. Vera and Slava colored in the next room — V&S Alimenti was working on a new shipment of grapefruit. After the men had finished their tea, Lazar Timofeyevich handed out Italian phrase books. Everyone would memorize — he didn’t ask, he told — basic Italian numbers. Diecimila lire, centomila lire. Whenever anyone looked like he might have a sale at the flea market, an Italian mark ready to spring for a peaked cap or a power drill, one or two of the others would walk over and trot out their new Italian as if they were other customers. Trying to compete with the Italian mark. To drive up the price. Capisce?
They stood there in a circle, ten sixty-year-old men, rolling their r’s and puckering their fingers like the Italians. Diecimila lire, centomila lire. Va fangul. What else was this fucking life going to ask them to do?
They made it happen, however. There were a couple of flops to begin with, Syoma Granovsky losing a nice scarf sale because Misha Schneyerson had become so animated that he outbid all the Italians in the crowd. But then they figured it out and everyone’s earnings increased.
Now Lazar was stooped to the waist. Slava didn’t have to ask about his wife. The homes of Soviet Brooklyn were filled with men who had been left to themselves by the last people to know how much looking after they needed. The men protected their families in a place liable to go berserk on its Jews without notice, and the women protected the men. They died first, leaving the men the most frightening leftovers: life by themselves. They were terrified of being alone. More terrified than they had been of America, more terrified than they had been of the Soviets, maybe even more terrified than they had been of the Germans.
Next to her grandfather, at the far corner of the other end of the table from Slava, far enough for her words to be lost, though the mascara with which she had burdened her eyelashes would have been visible from across the courtyard, sat Vera Rudinsky. Vera. In Russian, Faith. It was a grown person’s name, which explained why Vera had been so irritated by Slava’s childish pace cutting out paper eggplant for their supermarket. (Finally, she moved Slava to price tags and took cutting out for herself.) An adult in a child — she had been thin as a steeple, her face blue with pallor, as if life had breathed into her only once — Vera was serious, like Slava’s grandmother. Verochka, Verusha — everyone called her by diminutives as if to rub out the age from her name. Ve-ra: the lips shy, then exhaling in wonder. Vera — a wife’s name.
But Slava could not find that girl in the person who sat across from him, his first sighting in a decade. Little Vera Rudinsky, studious stork, had been replaced by a bronco with long nails and wild hair, the eyes of a hunter for a husband in the Russian classifieds (as Mama looked over her shoulder), though underneath the thick layer of blush on her face, Slava could still make out the unexpectedly felicitous result of Garik and Lyuba Rudinsky, two penguins, mixing genes on some Crimean beach a quarter century earlier.
Slava closed his eyes. The area behind his chest noised like a beehive. He wanted to go home. He would curl into the blanket and this terrible day would come to an end. And tomorrow, when his story about the explorer came up for judging, maybe there would be good news. He opened his eyes and saw Vera again. Her transformation was so macabre that he could not take his eyes from her.
Grandfather rose, a small glass in his hand. A moment passed before everyone noticed. Berta burned holes in the foreheads of three Slav neighbors from the floor. The Jews are having a funeral, and you morons are hollering like degenerates. Probably Grandfather had thought it rude not to invite them.
Finally, the table grew quiet. Televisions from the neighboring apartments howled through the cardboard walls, the wailing heroine of a telenovela mixing with some kind of program about the Russian civil war. “In the name of the Revolution,” a wintry voice said, “I am seizing this train.”
“Some of you may know,” Grandfather said, “twenty-five years ago by now, we were in a car accident. A blue day, blue as… I don’t know.” He pointed weakly at Uncle Pasha’s blazer, a bruised blue with white stripes. Grandfather’s free hand moved around the tablecloth, looking for invisible crumbs. “This was in Crimea. She lost a lot of blood, so they gave her a transfusion. Bad blood, as it turned out. Everything that came out of there was bad. It was a ticking bomb you don’t know it’s inside you. Cirrhosis. Well, at least she managed to make it out of there. But, what, it’s better that her headstone is in a language she didn’t know?”
Berta laid a puffy hand on Grandfather’s wrist. “I know,” he said. “I know. And look — she spoke English. She did. When we had to study for the citizenship…” He turned to Slava. “Slavchik, tell it.”
A table of eyes and half-turned bodies regarded Slava with practiced amusement. He had told this story before. He nodded. “To become a citizen,” he said. He coughed and straightened. He was going to try. “You have to agree to defend the country. No matter your age. It’s called: ‘bearing arms.’”
People nodded, smiled cautiously.
“I was thirteen or fourteen,” he went on. He sneaked a glance at Vera. She observed him dutifully but gave no sign of seeing anything other than another table loaded with smoked salmon, fried potatoes, and brightly colored bottles, another meaningless feast, though she would attend them to the last of her days without objection. Slava cursed himself. Vera also he had expected to remain as she was when he left her? He ridiculed his naïveté. Then inspected the lurid creation across the table once more, setting up the small laugh at the end of his story with her in mind. “But I had the best English, so I practiced with her for the interview. ‘Grandmother, will you bear arms for the United States of America?’ She’d make a fist, pump it in the air like Lenin, and shout ‘Yes!’”