He waves a hand in my direction, as if to say how can we be happy sitting around in this small, stinky apartment all day? But this blasé reaction doesn’t match what he says, which is, “Of course we are. Don’t listen to your grandma when she’s in this kind of mood.” Then he chuckles a little. “Stalin. Now that’s a name you don’t hear much anymore.”
“You don’t…” I search my brain for the right Russian vocabulary. “Prefer another city? Not here?”
“Where else would we go?” he asks, grinning again.
“Back to Ukraine?” I ask, even though this is a dumb question. I know that there is no going back to Ukraine, not the one we left anyway. That place no longer exists. The Soviet Union is gone. For as long as I could remember, home was a street I could never reach, other than in my dreams.
“Back to Ukraine, she says! And what would we do there, Annushka?” Now my grandpa is the one who starts laughing. “Sell a basket of apples on the street to tourists? Live on the street? This is what happens to old people who are alone. They’re like the stray dogs running around downtown, except those dogs are better fed.” Dedushka shakes his head, the laugh gone from his voice. “We had this conversation too many times. When you were little.”
“Da?”
“Every day, when I would walk you to school, you would ask: Dedushka, can we go home today? I want to go back to our apartment on Ruska Street, I miss the swings and the cats and our neighbors, Alla and Nella. I said, Devotchka, this is our home now. There’s nowhere to go back to.” Dedushka sighs and claps his hands on his knees. “You were a very sad little girl.”
“Dedushka, you’re thinking of Masha,” I tell him. “I was only a baby when we were on Ruska Street.”
My grandpa blinks then turns his head towards the ceiling. “Da, da. Pravda. You’re right. It was your sister,” he says. “You’ve always been more angry than sad. More… American.”
“Me? Angry? American?”
“I will tell you what I told her then: there are good things and bad things about living anywhere,” my grandpa says. “As long as you have your people, why should it matter if you stay on one tiny piece of it over another tiny piece of it?”
“Try telling that to Hitler,” my grandma laughs, and actually, it’s pretty funny, so we all start laughing. But then the phone starts ringing, and my grandpa ushers Baba Mila into the bedroom, and the moment has passed. “Go on already!” he tells Babushka, then saunters to the kitchen wall and picks up the phone. It rings five or six times by the time he gets there. “Yes, yes, we are almost ready,” he says, which is a straight-up lie. “She doesn’t have to wait here, Pavel, we’re not children.”
He looks at me then and hangs up the phone.
“What?” I ask.
Dedushka starts leading me towards the door. “Go, go, you’re only making things worse,” he says, practically pushing me out. “We’ll be down soon.”
“Dedushka, he can wait two minutes,” I say, but he keeps pushing me until my hand is on the knob. “Don’t you need help?”
“Who’s here? Pavel?” my grandma asks, coming out of the bedroom, still in her robe. “Why doesn’t he come up here? He’s avoiding us.”
“He was here yesterday, what are you saying?” my grandpa asks. “Go back to the room and get ready! You’ll see him in the car!”
“There’s something very strange about him the last few weeks,” my grandma says, shaking her head. “Maybe I was a bad mother… Certainly, I did something wrong that he treats me this way.”
“Oh, enough already,” Dedushka Sasha says. He’s starting to really get mad, I can tell. I feel sort of bad for him. All he’s ever wanted was for everyone to be happy but no one even wants to be happy. They want to feel alive.
“What do you mean he’s acting strange?” I ask my grandma in English. “How has he been strange?”
“Sneaking around here, all quiet and serious,” my grandma says. “Like when he used to get a bad grade and didn’t want to tell us.” Here she looks at me. “Your father was not a very good student, you know. It’s really a miracle he’s done so well, if you think about it.”
“Mila!” Dedushka Sasha cries. “Bozhe moy! Are you a saint, and didn’t tell me? He’s perfectly normal!”
My grandma shrugs at us like we’re idiots. “Well, what do I know? I’m just an old useless lady, like everyone keeps telling me.”
“Who told you that?” I ask, almost laughing again. People are always getting mad at Baba Mila, but I doubt anyone said this to her. She is cantankerous, but she’s no fool. My dad always told me how he couldn’t get away with the smallest indiscretion when he was a child, because she always seemed to know what he was up to before he did. This is part of the problem with being an only child for so long: too many eyes watching you. She and Dedushka Sasha had wanted more kids, but after my dad, she had nothing but miscarriages. She used to call him her little miracle. Then she called him her little joker. Not because he was especially funny, but because he was always getting in trouble for talking too much in school. Her idea of him as a class clown made it better somehow. As a result, to combat this notion, my dad has since been far too devoted, always prepared and preparing to save them and us. Always so serious. If he jokes at all it’s after several rounds of shots and I never get the joke. I never get any Russian jokes. I think there must be an inverse correlation of how separate you are from a culture with how much your sense of humor can align with it.
“Go, Annushka,” my grandpa says. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“I know perfectly well what I’m saying!” my grandma yells. “Just like I know perfectly well that Mikhail is trying to steal my grave right out from under my nose!”
I look at my grandpa with sympathy. “I thought you said it was Pyotr,” I tell her quietly.
My grandpa, who is sitting back down again, leans forward, claps his hands even harder on his knees, and says, “Enough, Milachka. That’s enough.”
“Why, Sasha? What did I say?” she asks, looking more confused than ever.
“It’s fine, Babushka. You didn’t say anything wrong,” I explain, but still, I put my hand back on the doorknob. Before I open the door, I turn around to ask her one last thing. “Hey, Babushka. Do you have any nieces or great-nieces named Zoya?”
My grandma takes maybe two seconds to think this over before she starts shaking her head. “No, I would remember such a poor choice in names.”
I can’t decide if I feel relieved or not, knowing this for sure, but I don’t have time to worry on it much because my grandpa starts pushing me out the door.
“Lyudmila,” Dedushka says. “Let her go! Get dressed for God’s sake!”
I hear him screaming this all the way out the door and down the hall, which smells like burnt eggplant. It could be coming from anywhere, Russian immigrants make up most of the building’s residents and they all love to burn eggplant. Half this floor used to be full of my grandma’s siblings, but some level of dementia has taken nearly all of them. It doesn’t look like she will escape this fate either. How terrifying it must be to become lost in your memories when you have memories of Stalin and Nazis holding guns to your head. I bet no one ever thought about that after making it out alive and starting to rebuild their lives from scratch. Will my grandpa be forced to watch his sister die in his arms again at the camps? Will he relive being shot at by SS soldiers while he climbs the broken fence and runs through the fields of Poland? He barely talks about that time in his life, and I don’t blame him. He and my grandma probably assumed all those terrible years were behind them. That the past stayed in the past.