Through the window the winter looked like an impressionist painting, blue and streaked with shadow, the edges of houses and cars blurred by the snowstorm. The trees stood hunched under heaps of snow. They reminded Masha of her elderly friends back home. She imagined them gossiping about her and her girls now, while they dawdled by the porch of her dilapidated khrushchyovka, spitting shells from toasted sunflower seeds into the gray snow. These same friends would vie for American souvenirs when she returned home.
* * *
After Sveta and Katya had fluttered away to America, Masha’s days took on the calm rhythm she had dreamt of since her early motherhood years. Back then, she had felt utterly alone in the world, despite being surrounded by people who constantly wanted something from her: Svetochka, coworkers, girlfriends — single or tormented by screaming children and indolent husbands — and her elderly parents, who called precisely ten minutes after she’d fallen asleep. Now she could sleep for as long as she wanted.
Most mornings Masha snapped to wakefulness before sunrise. She often had nightmares about Sveta and Katya’s new lives, fueled by the influx of American movies into Russia. The dreams ranged from nonsensical domestic disasters out of Home Alone to full-blown Terminator-style apocalypses. She promptly turned on the TV and watched the latest Mexican or Brazilian soap opera, then the news. Daily reports of the development of yet another economic crisis and the attendant social miseries were comforting: it meant that sending the girls away was the right decision.
To escape the oppressiveness of her small apartment, Masha went for long walks. She passed the Palace of ProfUnions, the recently unveiled war memorial, School #15—now the English Lyceum — where both Svetochka and Katya had studied. In the winter, Masha still caught glimpses of them among the squealing students riding their backpacks down the iced porch steps. A few blocks up was the Children’s World store, where the girls had cried rivers from both happiness and disappointment.
Their music school was a squat wooden building from the forties, its floors sagging from the weight of all those pianos. And there was the small park with wooden benches and a greenish bust of Berzin, leprous from decades of spiteful weather and pigeon droppings. How much ice cream had been licked there, how many chocolate potatoes eaten, kilos of sunflower seeds crunched? On that curb by the third bench from the left, little Sveta fell and tore open her lip, and behind that garbage can Katya hid from Sveta and Masha. It seemed that everything had happened on a single, maddeningly short day.
In the evenings Masha took the bus to the town hospital, where she now worked as a part-time cleaner, and where Sveta had once been the attending emergency room physician. More and more Masha came across her former colleagues from the Aviation Administration installed there. Some looked comfortable roaming the hallways in their favorite robes or snuggled in beds, surrounded by books and parcels from visitors; others lay in semiconsciousness with their mouths half open, already oblivious to the switches between day and night. She cleaned the floors in the patient rooms and the hallways, she cleaned the radiators, the windows, the stairs. Blood knocked on the back of her skull like a chime: soon it would be her time. She hummed “Kruchina” under her breath.
Kruchina was an archaic word for grief, found mostly in the old folk songs and poems. Kruchina grief was not regular sadness or disappointment with everyday troubles, but rather the existential sorrow about a woman’s lot that never goes away, not even at the happiest of moments.
Masha remembered this song from one of the movies of her youth, when all the movies and books were about the war and patriotism, about the great sacrifice for the future. German soldiers were burning a Russian village. The children screamed, the helpless grandmas and grandpas shrieked, the animals and fowl scattered for their lives. A young German soldier broke into the last izba standing and found two women huddled on a bench. Except for a single candle, the house was dark and it was hard to see what was in the shadowy corner: a trunk or a cradle.
Before the soldiers could reload their guns, the women began to sing “Kruchina.” In the middle of this chaos, time stopped. The soldiers listened as the voices washed over their round helmets and tense shoulders, crept into their machine guns, and spread through their stiffened veins and cold stomachs, like mother’s milk.
Sveta might not have even seen the movie, but she and Masha always sang “Kruchina” when their hearts, one or both, were in the wrong place.
* * *
Somebody’s heavy hand patted Masha’s shoulder. She started.
“Nu, where you going to hide when it’s time to go back?” Lizochka whispered in a soggy, commiserative tone. She plopped into an armchair next to Masha. “You know, when I was a child and misbehaved, my mother always said she’d send me to Magadan.”
Masha was irritated at being disturbed.
“Svetochka got lucky, with a grown child and all. Do you know how rarely the immigration goes smoothly?”
Masha shook her head, although, of course, she knew. She looked toward the table, where Brian was clearing the dishes. “We tried not to think of the complications.”
“And look at her now. Don’t you dare pay any attention to the dirty looks.”
“Nobody throws dirty looks at me,” Masha lied again.
“So, how did she choose him?”
Masha sighed.
“He had the right persistence. Translated his letters into Russian. Sent flowers, money for Sveta’s English lessons. And — very important — he looked like in the photos, not much fatter or older.”
“A-ga. He probably studied with a life coach — everyone has one here. He didn’t make the mistake of sending a gift that required taxes to be paid at the post office, like my Roger. We can’t all afford to receive such packages.”
“Well, he’s a history teacher,” Masha said, surprised to feel a tinge of pride.
There was laughter at the table. Lizochka threw back her head in a snorty giggle.
“Americans, they’re funny. Humor is different, you have to get used to it.”
Masha was about to ask her to translate the joke, then changed her mind.
“Does Sveta ever complain to you about anything?” she said.
Lizochka gripped Masha’s hands. “No, never. She knows better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.”
Masha nodded, suddenly tipsy.
“Worry about yourself, Mashen’ka. Sveta’s going to be fine,” Lizochka said. “Time to check on my Roger before he starts making his bed under the table. Don’t want him saying it’s my Russian drinking influence.” She pecked Masha on the forehead and waddled back to the table. Masha didn’t even see that Americans were drinking that much.
Miladze stopped, mid-wail. Brian was standing by the stereo with a glass of champagne. Lizochka quickly returned with a glass of champagne for Masha.
“I’ll translate for you,” Lizochka said, gesticulating “no need to thank me.” “Brian is very eloquent. He’ll say something nice about you, too, you’ll see.”
Brian raised his glass.
“Tak, he’s starting … I’ll do my best here but I’m not signing any papers. You know, Americans, they never sign anything without a lawyer. Now he’s saying he’d like to congratulate Sveta and Katya on their new green cards, though they’re still conditional. Soon, they’ll become real citizens and their old friends back in Russia will be green with jealousy.” Lizochka laughed with the rest of the guests, her breath hot and sour.