Rana placed the cassette on the kitchen counter as she put away groceries. They had invited Lorraine and Ted for dinner. Rana was hesitant about having a homosexual in her home — she’d never met one before — but Piotr reassured her that Ted would be most gracious.
“Music,” she said. “For dinner.” She tossed a lump of ground beef from one hand to the other until it was the shape of a thumb. Tomato sauce bubbled on the stove. A head of cabbage waited for Piotr to cut it into salad. He picked up the shrink-wrapped cassette. He had not thought of Vassilov in years. He did not recall telling Rana about his childhood fantasies. But she remembered things he could not, and perhaps as they had lain together, his hand encircling hers, he had whispered to her, Once, when I was young…
During dinner, Ted’s deferential charm won her over, and by the end of the night, she reprimanded Ted for his rough face. “I will show you where to get a proper shave,” she said. “So smooth, your face will forget what hair is like.” As she cleared the table, Lorraine played with their son, Mikhail.
“Like Gorbachev?” she asked.
No, not like Gorbachev. Rana laughed. Mikhail was named for the economist Mikhail Stetslovich, he of the elegant theorems about needs and desires. Stetslovich had formulated a version of Maslow’s hierarchy, years before the publication of “A Theory of Human Motivation.”
“We must chart a population’s needs and desires on separate graphs,” Stetslovich wrote in his last manuscript. “For although certain constants remain as points of reference between the two, the curve of the desires always rises faster.” Stetslovich ignored the base of Maslow’s pyramid, the physiological needs, which Stetslovich considered overly self-evident: breath, food, water, sleep, excretion. Also, homeostasis and sex. If Stetslovich had included those base needs, he’d be celebrated today. But the pogrom caught him, and all that remained of him was an homage: a young boy living in Queens.
Lorraine held Mikhail in her lap, and Mikhail flailed his arms and clipped one of her ears. Rana chastised him, and Lorraine said that she was all right.
“Take a look,” she said, holding out her left earlobe for Rana to inspect. A chip of flesh was missing. “Compared to that, his little hands are nothing.” She squeezed Mikhail’s fist as if testing how ripe it was.
Piotr knew that Mikhail would be good at baseball. His arms were strong and sure of their position. But his unsteady walk, even at five, meant that he would fail at American football. Mikhail had inherited his father’s gangly legs and big feet, which Piotr had, in turn, inherited from his own father, whose feet had been just big enough to stay one step ahead of the Germans. Piotr had not yet formed opinions about Katia. She was still an infant. But she had her mother’s beauty and olive skin, delicate features that seemed so fragile.
“Have you ever thought about family?” Rana asked Lorraine.
“Yes,” she replied. “Sometimes.” Lorraine kept her eyes on Mikhail’s, as if trying to hypnotize him. Rana was about to ask another question, but Piotr stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. Lorraine, he guessed, had made her peace with her decision long ago.
As Ted put on his shoes to leave, he whispered, “Beautiful family.” Katia had been put to bed. “You’re a lucky man.” Piotr knew that Ted felt a little envious. He waved at Rana, who waved back. After Piotr shut the door, Rana said, “I will find him a nice Muslim girl.” And unexpectedly, Piotr saw memories swirl across her forehead, a dark vortex, but the moment passed, and she continued: “And if he does not like the girl, then I will find him a nice Muslim boy.”
The bus to Gandhidham lurches, stops, and swerves, seemingly at random. Above every other seat is a small mounted fan. Piotr requests his neighbors not to turn them on, as the breeze disrupts his papers. Piotr gives calculations to Stefan, the head of this United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination mission, who draws up a tentative distribution path based on the number of trucks and personnel available. They have contacted local drivers in Gandhidham, and Stefan wonders if he has hired enough. Piotr prefers silence when he works, but when that is impossible — with rumbling tires and ceaseless coordinating and strategizing — he snakes the cords of the headphones up the inside of his shirt and hits “Play.”
By the time they reach Gandhidham, the tape has repeated three times. Piotr has not only memorized every note and pause, but also Vassilov’s exhalations after a vigorous arpeggio, his feet working the pedals and tapping the hardwood floors of the concert hall. Midway through the octave study of op. 25, no. 10, the driver pulls the brake. The bus hisses. The metal arch welcoming visitors, crowned with a carved wooden sign announcing “Gandhidham,” bends, as if disappointed in the city whose name it bears. Gandhidham was built in 1960, but that did not save the city from damage. At the bus station, the buses lie crushed beneath their own shelters.
The military base remains intact. Atop a shoulder-high rock wall, painted pink, concertina wire curls between bayonets. Outside the gate, the implements of war — a long-range shell launcher, an old Soviet tank the color of moss — now serve as statuary, as if peace weren’t the absence of war, but merely war repurposed and disguised. The base’s squat, boxy buildings, built with beige efficiency, are cracked but functional.
Most of the soldiers have been deployed to the countryside as peacekeepers, emissaries of the military’s goodwill. The few who remain work with ruthless discipline; the distribution trucks are loaded and ready.
This pleases Stefan, but the trucks are uneven. Some have equipment piled high until their axles bow and groan; others are almost bare. The routes have been planned assuming equivalency among the vehicles.
Without prompting, Piotr unfurls maps from his sack. He licks his fingers, skimming through maps printed on yellowing fax paper, maps on whisper-thin onionskin, maps that bleed color from one region to the next. Area of effect. Population centers. Per capita income. Roads and rivers, points of transit, possible landing sites. He punches numbers into a calculator and scribbles notations, performing a necessary, heartbreaking calculus: If we distribute here, we can reach x number of victims; here, only y.
Only a handful of drivers speak English, and Stefan relies on those who do to explain the routes to those who do not. The most heavily laden trucks will go with four workers each; the lesser ones can make do with two. Two men are enough to lift a sheet of galvanized iron and bend it to their will.
Turquoise-blue tarps are folded into parachute-tight bundles; when opened, they display a yellow UN symbol printed in the center. Plastic, but waterproof. Two representatives from CARE mention constructing semipermanent housing, but this is a longer-term goal. Despite his quid pro quo venality, Babu Roshan is correct: aid workers fly in, and then they fly out.
But this is their mandate. Lorraine’s DART focuses on observation and informatics. Lorraine is more hands-on than Connor was, which Piotr admires, and less political, which he appreciates. But this should be obvious: disaster relief, in and of itself, is less political. His working relationship with Lorraine is better than it had been with Connor. With Connor, he felt as if he were merely a set of extra limbs attached to Connor’s body, that they ingested the same air, thought the same thoughts.
But with Lorraine, he feels needed. He feels he accomplishes something, even if those accomplishments are fleeting, miniscule. Lorraine trusts his work implicitly, though she occasionally peers over his shoulder to double-check his calculations. He’d never admit it to anyone — especially Rana — but he sometimes misses the adventure and the unknown that Connor fostered. But, he reminds himself, adventure is a game for the young.