I continued, “Hearing my grandmother and Lara laughing in the kitchen brought me out of my state of paralysis. They were slapping and kneading the bread Lana Lana had left in the cupboard to rise earlier in the day. I felt invisible. No one saw me going to Pepe. I stood over him; he growled and bared his teeth pathetically. My voice came back. ‘It’s all right, boy. I’m not going to hurt you.’ I spoke until his body relaxed. I touched his soft pink ears and caressed his furry chin. He liked being tickled there, and he closed his eyes with relief.”
“What happened after that?” Amalia asked.
“That night Pepe was locked in the basement and was not allowed to sleep in my room. After everyone was asleep, I took my pillow and sat by the basement door. I could hear Pepe’s panting, and I told him, ‘We’ll go to the beach tomorrow for a run. You’ll swim in the river, and we’ll walk together, like always.’ I fell asleep at the door. When I woke in the morning, I was in my bed. In the kitchen my father was reading the paper, and my mother was making yogurt. The door to the basement was open, and Pepe was gone. I asked about his whereabouts.
“My mother said, ‘A farmer took him to chase the rats out of his barn. He’ll be happier there.’
“I was met with silence when I asked if I could go visit him. Later that evening I found his collar in my mother’s dresser when she sent me to fetch her sweater. I left the collar where I found it. The next day I went to look at it again, but it was gone. Neither my mother nor father ever said anything about Pepe again. Soon after that my father was also gone.”
“Well, now that we’ve heard that nice cheery story, Stalina, what about your mother?” Amalia’s sarcasm was amusing even during this difficult time.
“Cremation,” I said matter-of-factly. “I’ll arrange to have her cremated. The rooming house must have a place they store ashes until relatives can pick them up.”
“Ashes A to Z.”
“Ashes to zashes. Interesting sort of library.”
I waited until it was six in the morning to call the rooming house. The same nurse I gave the bras to before leaving was on duty. She would make the arrangements for the cremation, and she informed me that they could only hold on to the ashes for a month. I told the nurse I would send her two hundred American dollars and that my friend Olga would retrieve the ashes and collect the picture of my father and the locket of Lenin my mother always wore.
Amalia went to the sink and splashed some water on her face before making a pot of coffee. My tea, made minutes before, had gone cold.
She sat next to me and reached for my hands. Her hands were still wet, and the cold made the hairs on my arms stand up. Lifting my hands in the air, she said, “Come on, Stalina, let’s dance for your mother.”
She sang.
We sang together.
We danced around the kitchen and banged pots and pans, making a racket. Amalia’s son, Alexi, came up from the basement and gave us a disapproving look as he opened the refrigerator and took out a container of milk and some leftover chicken. He had become very handsome in the last two years. He was sixteen and had let his dark brown hair grow to his shoulders and parted it in the middle. Around his neck he wore a thin piece of leather as a choker with a small skull in the center over his bulging Adam’s apple.
“Stalina’s mother has passed away,” Amalia told him.
He took a bite and said, “Sorry to hear that. It sounded like you were celebrating.”
He went back downstairs with a chicken leg in his mouth, the carton of milk, and a box of gingersnap cookies under his arm. I could hear music with a loud bass beat coming from his underground lair.
“Alexi stays up all night and loves to snack in the morning on leftovers. His father was exactly the same,” Amalia said as she sat down and put her head in her hands.
Her husband, Yossef, was a construction worker who died when he fell from the roof of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. He had been part of a crew that was repairing the copper gutters. Alexi was only two years old then. Yossef’s death was considered his own fault because the police found a half bottle of vodka under the seat of his car. Amalia and Alexi were isolated and scorned because Yossef’s actions were considered a crime against the state. Amalia made a public appeal to clear her husband’s name. She told the authorities it was her bottle of vodka and that he only drank beer because it helped to steady his hand. If it had been beer, he would have been a hero, but giving a bad name to vodka was a no-no. The authorities believed Amalia’s story, but they were still unhappy with the mess Yossef’s splattered body left on the plaza outside the cathedral. A couple who were sitting on a bench kissing when the accident occurred filed for trauma assistance and were given two months’ pay and an apartment in the country to go to on weekends. Amalia received nothing. She left Leningrad angry and sad. That was 1980.
The cuckoo clock struck half past six; the sun was just starting to come up. It was otherwise very quiet in the kitchen. Amalia’s cats, Shosta and Kovich, wandered in for their morning meal. Amalia dried her tears with the palms of her hands and kissed my forehead before going off to bed.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You look tired, Stalina. Why don’t you go to bed, too,” she said as she held my face between her hands.
“I will, after a while.”
I went outside and sat on the front stoop as the sunlight began to spread across the patches of grass and mounds of dirt and rocks in the front yard. Amalia had started to dig things up to put in a garden. The ground was very hard, so she had worked it with a pickax and a shovel. She left her shovel standing upright, wedged between two boulders. It reminded me of my father’s shovel in the photograph I had taken so many years before, and one of the many poems he wrote about gardening tools. Working in the garden inspired him. The morning light came through the trees and warmed the handle of Amalia’s shovel. One of Father’s poems was about Mother and her garden. He called it “Sophia’s Garden.”