They both stared at each other silently, and then Arkady got his voice. “The best shop is called St. Petersburg,” Arkady said.
“I like the one next to M&I,” Radya said.
“M&I, that’s where I had the coffee that burned my throat,” I said.
“They always keep their coffee too hot,” Arkady said.
“But they make the most delicious meringue cake with chocolate and walnuts,” Radya added.
“I actually heard someone talking about it on the street,” I said.
I had to get away from them. There’s something foul about informers, and Radya and Arkady had started to reek. They made me ill. “I’ll stop there on my way to the bookstore. I better get going,” I added.
“Stalina, I forgot to ask you with all the confusion—how is your mother?”
“Radya, would you let the poor girl go,” Arkady said as he grabbed another handful of sunflower seeds.
I looked at the urn. Both of them looked at me looking at the urn.
“Nadia didn’t tell you?” I said. “My mother passed away in Petersburg not long ago.”
“Where is…” Radya tried to ask.
“I had her cremated.”
“And her ashes?” Arkady asked.
“Scattered in the Baltic Sea,” I said.
“Radya, maybe this urn you bought was filled with someone’s ashes. I feel sick,” Arkady said.
“Oh Arkady, stop fussing. Whatever it was is gone. Stalina, your mother will be happy in the sea; she was a beautiful swimmer. I am sorry for your loss,” Radya said.
“Thank you, I appreciate your hospitality,” I said. I felt my palm sweating as it clutched the photograph. I grabbed my bag and held it behind my back as I slipped the frame into a side pocket.
Arkady’s mouth was already filled with sunflower seeds when I went to shake his hand. He nodded and said nothing. The door closed behind me with a whoosh of air from the vacuum created in the windowless corridor.
I spoke to my mother on the way down in the elevator. “Thank you, Mother, for the amusing show. Your ashes went out to sea over the rooftops of Brooklyn. Now you cover half the globe. It’s better that we sent you out to sea; otherwise you’d be trapped in that apartment with the Chernovskys. The urn, your ashes—what a mess you made all over their fancy-schmancy furniture. It was all very amusing.”
I could see my mother nodding her head in agreement. Whenever she acknowledged something, she would close her eyes as if to trap it in her soul. My mother liked to hold on to things. Hate, ribbons, Stalin, and her wedding ring. Being a mother was the only thing she could not hold on to. Hers was a cold distance she never learned to control. After the siege, she was simply waiting, for a strong cup of tea, for Stalin’s henchmen to take my father, for me to leave, and for death. She was always far away. I pulled the photograph out of my bag and looked at it once more, feeling slightly woozy from the whole encounter, or maybe it was just because the elevator wobbled on its way down to the lobby.
Outside on Neptune Avenue, the wind greeted me like a wall. I leaned into it and walked as if climbing the Altai Mountains. I grabbed my collar and pulled my coat closed. Breathing in the salted, slanted air put a big sting in my lungs that reminded me of home.
St. Petersburg, the name of the bookstore, was scrawled in red neon script above the door like a ribbon of candy. It was a market of videos, magazines, music, and books. A feast from home for an immigrant tourist like myself. There were hundreds of romance and science fiction novels. Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Chekhov were carefully placed for good measure on the narrow, crowded shelves in between the smooth, hard plastic covers. So many, many books. The splashy covers and rough parchment pages were a trip home for my hands and eyes. The Cyrillic letters were like fireworks dancing in front of me. I grabbed a book off the shelf. The cover had an astronaut in the foreground and a blond female alien floating in space behind him. I opened the book to page one and read.
Lt. Yuri Griskovksy tied his bootlaces and thought about the general’s wife flirting with him at the state dinner the night before. Fanya was her name, and she was a lot younger than her husband. She had beautiful blue eyes and a petite, athletic figure. He wondered if the flirtation was the reason he was chosen for the extremely dangerous mission, Asteroid Zero. He discovered a handkerchief in his left boot infused with her gardenia perfume. He placed it inside the vest pocket of his flight uniform so that he could take it with him into space.
Romance and space travel—how Russian of you, dear author. I’d buy the sequel also, Alien Children of the Asteroid’s Moon. Procreation in space—this should make for fascinating reading. In the store’s video section they had Krokodil, our famous puppet cartoon. Krokodil Takes a Trip by Train. I’d bring it as a gift to Nadia for letting me have the day off. Good-bye, Brighton Beach. Next time I’d have the meringue with chocolate and walnuts.
Chapter Twenty-three: Returning Home
The subway rumbled back from the end of its line while the sunlight flickered a little through the tracks and Brighton Avenue was pulled away from me. The light flashed along the tops of babushkas’ heads. Women becoming blonds in the beauty salons closed their eyes as the train went past and the fading Cyrillic lettering on the walls disappeared. My eyes were pulsing to the speeding landscape as I went back into the beast and held tight, waiting to be put out at Port Authority and Forty-second Street.
Inside the terminal a man was playing a banjo under a poster of the Statue of Liberty. I would have to save my visit to that torch-wielding lady for another time. The strain of the metal strings vibrated off the steel girders and made the air sweeter. My hips swayed with the beat. I was happy.
“That’s right, mama, you move those big ol’ scrumptious hips. I’ll keep playin’ for ya,” the musician said with a big smile flashing a gold tooth.
He quickened his rhythm. I sashayed over to his money hat and threw in a dollar.
“You dance like an angel, mama! God is going to want you for his own, but right now I’m glad you’re here on earth in the blessed Port Authori-tay!”
“Moscow, Kennedy, Port Authori-tay!” I sang back to him as I made my way outside.
“A world traveler, oh my, my, my!” I heard him sing as I went through the doors.
I wanted a taste of the city once more before getting on the bus. The streets were torn up with huge, gaping holes. Men were working down below. I had seen them years before. Their yellow hard hats still bobbed up and down as buses and cars rumbled past. They looked like residents of a new sub-level city, added to accommodate the masses. I thought of Frederica the palm reader and wanted to see her to tell her how accurate her prediction of betrayal had been. I also thought it would be helpful to have her tell me something else about my future. But when I turned the corner, I saw that her storefront was gone. Only a big, gaping hole remained, empty and blackened like a tooth pulled from a giant’s lower jaw. The Christ Almighty Church was still standing, but its side wall was now exposed. There was an advertisement on the wall. The faded letters read:
The words were transparent like clouds disappearing into a mountainside. A church wall advertising a peep show? I would expect that in Russia, but here in New York, it was a welcome sight for me. It was almost like a poem, and it made me feel even more at home. A Cheap Way to Heaven was still there, but the sign above their door said “Fifty Cents a Minute.” I wondered what would happen if I raised the rates at the Liberty. The cost of linens had recently gone up.