Alla sighed and picked up another snapshot.
“And here is Marinka, the young one. Pretty, right? Too pretty, if you ask me. She’s been hanging out with boys ever since she turned fifteen. All I want is for her to marry and settle down. But again, she would need a place to live.”
Alla put the snapshots down on the table and went to take a plastic container with sour cream out of the refrigerator. She then put two deep plates and two silver spoons on the two ends of the table and placed a wooden trivet in the middle.
Sergey brought the pictures closer to his eyes. Alla was right — Marinka was very pretty. Pert, muscular, with dark eyes and dark hair, her laughing face glowing with wild energy. She was the kind of girl with whom you’d want to wrestle in bed. Sergey had a quick image of himself grabbing her wrists, pinning her down, and her kicking and laughing. But Natasha was very pretty too, although her beauty seemed to be softer, less aggressive, less obvious from the first glance. She was the kind of girl you’d want to kiss while walking with her in a park. She didn’t resemble her sister at all, except for her long dark eyes, which looked exactly like Marinka’s and, Sergey noticed with surprise, like Alla’s.
“Your daughters are beautiful, and they both look like you,” Sergey said.
Alla looked at him from the stove and smiled, “Thank you, Serezha.”
And then the hot borscht was in their plates. Steaming, bursting with colors. All shades of red in perfect harmony with the faded purple of beets, the deep orange of fat rings, the white of sour cream in the middle, and the dark green of parsley bits.
“You know what?” Alla said, as they were about to plunge their spoons in. “We simply have to have some of Masha’s vodka now.”
She opened the freezer, and Sergey smiled at the bright collection of colorful, translucent liquids in half-liter bottles on the three upper shelves.
“Ash berry is the best one. Masha’s husband drove upstate specially to gather the berries.”
Sergey poured about a finger of faint amber liquid into each of two shot glasses.
“We have to make a toast,” Alla said, and looked into her glass. “For going home? No matter if they’re waiting for us or not?”
“For going home,” Sergey said, and they clinked their glasses.
He felt a chill on his tongue followed by a great immediate warmth spreading down his throat and chest. He took a big heavy spoonful of borscht and brought it to his mouth, holding a piece of bread under the spoon.
Puffed Rice and Meatballs
ONCE, in a hazy postcoital silence, Katya’s lover came back from a shower, dropped the towel to the floor, climbed into bed, and said, “Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about the horrors of communism.”
Katya sat hugging her knees so that her body resembled a triangle with her head as an apex. She had put on her bra and panties — she hated nakedness, how it turned into something sadly irrelevant after sex.
The request startled her. What exactly were the horrors of communism? Katya’s childhood coincided with the Stagnation Period. People weren’t killed or put in prisons as easily as before, there was plenty of space in mental hospitals, and — as for the freedoms of speech, residence, and such — what did little Katya need them for? Was having to wear a red tie horrible, or standing in a two-hour line to see Lenin’s body in his tomb, or standing in an even longer line to buy toilet paper? Katya didn’t think so. It was rather funny. Even nostalgic now. And why would a man with whom she’d gone on only a few dates and exchanged a few embraces be interested in something as intimate as her childhood?
She stared at her lover suspiciously.
He had propped up his head with his elbow. His expression was of calm anticipation. This man didn’t want to know her better. He was simply asking for entertainment — for an easy, amusing, and preferably sexy story about the exotic world to which his lover had once belonged. Katya’s shoulders relaxed.
After some mental probing she picked a story. She wasn’t sure if it had anything to do with communism, but she thought that with a few effective details she would be able to make the narrative exotic enough. She put her right cheek on her knee and turned to her lover.
“Do you want to hear about my first sexual encounter?”
“Gladly!”
“When I was little, I attended a day-long preschool, like most city kids. We were on a very strict schedule, similar to a prison or a labor camp. Every day, at one P.M., we had a nap. Our teacher — I remember only that she had red ears and a long lumpy nose — put us in two lines and led us to the bedroom, a gloomy room where the blinds were drawn at all times and the beds stood in tight rows, a girl’s bed alternating with a boy’s.”
“I see,” Katya’s lover noted with enthusiasm. “So you were sandwiched between two boys.”
“Not exactly. Between a boy and a wall, because my bed was the last in a row.
“We stripped to our underwear — boys and girls had identical white underpants and undershirts — climbed into the beds, pulled the blankets to our chins, and turned to the right side. We weren’t allowed to sleep on our backs or our left sides. As soon as we all were in bed, the teacher said, ‘I’m going now, but if I hear even a squeak from you, I’m coming back, and I’m coming back with the thing!’ Nobody knew what the thing was, and nobody wanted to find out.
“‘And if you go to the bathroom, it better be an emergency!’ she added before leaving for the dining room.
“I couldn’t sleep on my right side. I just lay there scared and bored, facing the back of the boy next to me, staring at his blanket’s ornament through the rectangular slit in the blanket cover.
“Delicious sounds coming from the dining room distracted me even more. I listened to the plates clatter and the persistent scraping of a serving spoon against a pot’s bottom. I knew that in a few minutes the teacher would open the entrance door and let in her sons, twin boys of about nine. She would seat them at our tables and feed them the food left over from our lunch. I saw them once, when I pleaded an emergency and ran through the dining room to the bathroom. Their plates were piled up with shrunken meatballs and pale mounds of mashed potatoes. Their knees were bent awkwardly under one of our little-kids’ tables. Their ears moved along with their jaws.
“I tossed in bed and thought about meatballs, which during naptime always seemed awfully tempting, even though I’d repeatedly refused them during lunch. ‘Want to be hungry? Fine,’ the teacher had said, hastily taking away my plate. ‘This school is no place for picky eaters.’”
Katya’s lover listened with a warm and amused expression, tinted with slight shadows of impatience. She didn’t know why she’d mentioned the teacher’s boys at all. She’d better hurry up and get to the sex part.
She continued her story. “A thin voice from the next bed interrupted my meatball fantasies. ‘Hey, are you asleep?’ The voice belonged to a chunky blue-eyed boy named Vova. He had turned toward me and lay blinking with his white eyelashes.
“‘Can’t you see that my eyes are open?’ I asked.
“‘Shh.’ He pointed in the dining room’s direction. The white eyelashes blinked some more. ‘I’ll show you my peesya if you show me yours.’