“I’ll teach ya,” Nastia suggested, taking everything out of Mark’s hands again. “It’s pretty straightforward. It’s all about the spices.”
She took out the fish and vegetables, herbs, some dark-red powders and crushed roots, mixing and mashing, mincing and sifting, then tossing everything into a large pot that soon started boiling and taking on colors Mark had never seen before. He stood behind her, thinking about Kolia, remembering what his uncle had said about trust, and trying to figure out what he meant by it. He was unsure of how to act around his cousin, and he considered just leaving, but the thought of Kolia made him stay put. To keep his mind off his uncle, he asked Nastia where she’d learned to cook so well, which turned out to be a long, involved story. Nastia grew up in a seaside town, between the factory and the port, where she lived in the workers’ dormitory with her mom. Nastia didn’t have a dad, so the neighbors would take care of her whenever her mom rushed off to work.
“Our neighbors were real witches,” Nastia said. They taught her how to use all kinds of dubious seasonings to make food that was nutritious… but not always edible. She remembered countless flavors and smells both fair and foul, fowl hanging dead in the kitchen, and the cold basement inhabited by slugs and packed with autumn vegetables. One time the neighbors accidentally locked her in that basement. She sat there until her mom came home in the evening.
“Ever since then, I haven’t been afraid of the dark, not one bit.”
“I’m not afraid of the dark, either,” Mark said, thinking back to the time when he wound up spending the night in this apartment. Kolia had set up a pull-out bed in the hallway and lain down on his sofa, struggling to fall asleep, tossing and turning, muttering and waking up when it squeaked like an accordion. Mark listened to the racket Kolia was making, timing the intervals between his screams; then he suddenly dozed off. He woke up, lifted his head, and immediately saw Kolia, who was standing in the kitchen by the window, stark naked, staring intensely into the black and lemon night. The moonlight made his skin green and his skull shiny. His breathing was heavy and predatory. He stood there, unmoving. Then he turned around and headed back to his room in the dark, not paying any attention to Mark. His heavy, wary steps squeaked on the hardwood floor like the first snow under the paws of a zombie hunting for prey.
Nastia poured her concoction into two bowls, went into the next room, took a seat on the rug, and set her food down. Mark followed her, carrying the box of wine. It blew up in his hands when he tried to open it—wine was everywhere, sousing the rug, seeping through its thick surface, touching its lines, and ruining the symmetry of its patterns. Mark came running back with some napkins and practically started licking the damn thing clean, but Nastia stopped him.
“Relax. I’ll get the stain out later. I know an ancient Indian secret for cleaning synthetic Chinese rugs.”
“Is that right?” Mark asked incredulously. “How’d you learn that?”
“A lot of foreigners would stay at our dorm—mostly sailors and amber merchants. They even taught me how to read. I learned Esperanto first, actually. Russian came later. Do you know Esperanto?” she asked, fixing her hair and straightening out her dress.
“Yeah, but not very well,” Mark answered.
Then he thought back to when Kolia had to settle a dispute with some Poles the family was doing business with, which meant Mark had to conduct lengthy negotiations with them by telephone, in English. Kolia was touting him as their in-house interpreter, even though he didn’t speak it all that well, and the Poles spoke it even worse. Mark could hardly understand them, and what he did get didn’t please Kolia one bit. He stood next to his nephew, glaring at him, his expression cold and detached, constantly asking him questions, getting frustrated, which made Mark panic, so he understood even less. Finally, Kolia grabbed the receiver from Mark, gave him a real piece of his mind, and proceeded to negotiate with the Poles himself. He showed Mark the phone bill afterward, as though it were a list of the sins he had committed as a child. “It’s all about trust,” Mark thought. “Duh.”
They seemed to have forgotten about their meal—Mark was just sitting there, remembering all the troubles he’d known in his life, thinking about the times he’d been too heedless, about when he’d trusted people, and about how hardly anyone trusted him, which made him feel even more troubled and unsettled. “She really does look like her mom… and my mom, too,” he thought. “All the women in our family are alike—they talk so much that you can’t get a word in edgewise. Then they think you’re not listening to them.” Nastia had curious eyes and a tender face, just like his mom. She dressed lightly, too, seemingly unafraid of drafts and unfazed by the cold, and she could find the right words just as quickly and enunciate them just as loudly and clearly, too. “I wonder what her dad was like,” he thought.
Nastia got pensive and sad—her cousin was sitting on the bloody rug, immersed in his own thoughts and paying no attention to her. Or at least he was acting like it. She told him another story.
“I was really young when I fell in love for the first time. Everybody in my city falls in love really young, especially the women. He was about ten years older than me, just like you.” She touched Mark, but he didn’t pay any attention to that either, he just hunched his shoulders. “That’s why it didn’t pan out. I was very upset. I started thinking this was my punishment for falling in love so young. Long story short, I just up and got braces.”
“How come?” Mark asked, confused. “Is she for real?” he thought to himself. “Trust.”
“To repent,” Nastia explained. “So I wouldn’t be tempted to kiss anyone. I didn’t kiss anyone for two years. Two whole years. Well, that was until I took those things off. But once I took them off… ,” she said, fluttering her eyelashes.
“What?”
“Now I kiss everyone,” Nastia answered.
“Everyone?”
“Yep, everyone.”
At that point, Mark finally realized what she was getting at. “Trust,” he thought, and kissed his cousin. He was really going for it, but he had no idea what was compelling him to do such odd things. He hadn’t forgotten, not for one second, whose apartment this was and whose rug he’d just soused with wine. He hadn’t forgotten, not for one minute, Kolia’s heavy gaze and dry voice; he remembered where Kolia hid his knives and sharpeners, his threatening voice over the phone, his gray-brown face swelling up with anger, the veins bulging in his neck, his hoarse breath, the smoke and fire billowing out of his wide nostrils. He remembered, he was scared, but he couldn’t help himself. Meanwhile, Nastia couldn’t quite figure out what had gotten into him. She liked how clumsily he was kissing her, and how he smelled, but as soon as he touched her dress, as soon as he crossed the line, she slapped his hand warmly, tenderly pushing him away, emitting a short, admonishing shriek, and Mark tumbled back, but he immediately recalled all the blood and wine that had been spilled in this building, all the ashes and golden sand that had been flushed down its toilets, all the deaths and insults its walls remembered, and he touched her face once again, caught her hands, deprived her of her clothing. Nastia laughed and resisted; she was saying something, and he even answered her, without really processing her questions. At one point, she even started to regret that she’d gotten her braces taken off, because he was so persistent, this older cousin of hers, with all his fear and trust. She grabbed his short, fair hair, pulled his head back, and looked him straight in the eye. Then he pushed her hand away again and muttered something to distract her while he shifted closer. She let him do just about everything, not stopping him, seemingly waiting for some signal. When that signal that only she could hear rang out, her elbows dug into the rug and her whole body arched as she slipped out of his arms and scurried away into the darkness. Mark caught his breath, calmed himself down, and then went for her again. That went on for a few hours, until she finally ran out of patience, and he hastily laid her down, unresisting, on the synthetic Chinese rug.