To my friends and family pictured before me, I say, “I offer you these blunt portraits to shed light on how the last ten years have been. Please pardon me this indulgence, as I drink in honor of this anniversary and my recent citizenship. Apeeteeta!”
Thiip!
Mmm, cold, thick vodka, like a fresh pillow against my face.
A toast to Nadia, my ex-boss and autocratic friend, who left five years ago to take her parents back to Petersburg to die. Without her I would not have the Liberty Motel. The other motels she put in the hands of her black suit boys. I am proud to say that our short-stay empire is thriving along Windsor Avenue here in Berlin, Connecticut. The city is still dying, and lucky for us, because as the city continues in a spiral down its sinkhole of recession, our short-stay motels continue to flourish.
To short stays and long sips! Spaseeba! Nadia!
Thiip!
I made Carmela my business partner. She knows beauty well and has used her love of the land when decorating our special rooms. She was inspired to complete the Caribbean Room, and she was thoughtful enough to incorporate my idea for the “cabana-bed” into the design, which pleased me very much. My most loyal customers, Joanie and Harry, waited with great anticipation for the completion of that room. Ten years after the “roller coaster” incident, they are still conducting their affair “on the side,” as they put it. Neither one wants to give up the other, so they accept their situation with dignity and are pleased to have a place like the Liberty to come to.
A toast to inspired romantic settings and Strauss and Sons Hardware, the local store where we buy everything to decorate the rooms! They always have everything I need, no matter how big or small.
Thiip!
The vodka when chilled correctly is so very smooth.
Carmela molded the blue carpet in the Caribbean Sunset Room into a theater of waves surrounding the cabana-bed, which stands on stilts and has a thatched roof. When the door opens, sounds of the ocean begin to play over and over. She is very, very clever. Harry likes the wraparound sunset mural painted on three walls.
“You see it from all sides when you are lying in the cabana-bed,” Harry says. “It’s all very intoxicating.”
Joanie told me soon after the room was finished, “Harry got me some fancy-schmancy jasmine perfume for our ‘Caribbean’ time. Maybe someday we’ll go to the real Caribbean. Until then, your rooms will have to do, Stalina.”
That was six years ago. They have yet to visit the “real” Caribbean.
“Ginger and coconut are other scents you might want to try. I hear they can be very enticing,” I told her one day when she was returning the key.
After she tried the new scents, she reported back to me. “The coconut made Harry sneeze, and the ginger made him itch where his thumb is missing.”
That’s when Joanie told me the story of how Harry lost his thumb.
“Harry used to run away when he was a boy from his home in Brooklyn. His father fought in World War II, was very strict, and wanted to punish him after he found him hitchhiking onto the BQE for the fifth time. Can you imagine? It’s amazing Harry survived; he was only twelve years old. His father set the dog after him. The dog grabbed his hand, and as Harry tried to slip away, the dog’s jaw locked down on his thumb. Harry’s mother ran away with him from the hospital in the middle of the night. She left Brooklyn and moved here to Berlin and got a job in an umbrella factory. They heard later his father put his head in the oven in their apartment in Canarsie. The neighbors smelled gas and called the police. His father was still alive but unconscious. They revived him, but he was like a three-year-old. When his mother died, Harry went to the nursing home where his father lived. He took a gun and a bottle of arsenic, but he could not kill him. The drooling, rocking, and loud cartoons got to Harry. He told me the story when we were in high school. That’s when I fell in love with him. He’s a real mensch.”
A toast to your love, Harry and Joanie, my most loyal customers.
Thiiip!
Mmm, peppery, this vodka is.
Nadia wrote after her parents passed away within a month of each other.
Dear Stalina,
My parents are gone. Putin gave them special honors. They were mentors to young “Vladi” in his early KGB days. Did you know it is illegal to spread human ashes in Russia? I had no idea. I put their remains together in a Chinese urn my mother kept on her mantel in Brooklyn. You may have seen it when you visited them. She brought it with her when they left Brighton Beach. They sold many of their things at a flea market at the beach before they left. I wish they had kept some of their photographs from Russia. My father had a photo taken with Stalin. You can get good money for that sort of Soviet memorabilia. But the urn my mother refused to sell. It was a very valuable antique that my father purchased on one of his trips to China. I keep it by my bedside. I miss them very much. Petersburg is more beautiful than ever. Much is happening here for the three-hundred-year celebration, and of course the mafia still runs the city, so everything functions very well. Why don’t you come visit for the festivities?
Oh dear urn, you earned your keep. What liars Nadia’s parents were! Maxim never mentioned anything about it being illegal when he spread my mother’s ashes in the Baltic Sea.
Thiip!
Mmm, the vodka is just the right viscosity.
Among the photographs surrounding me is the one I took from Arkady and Radya’s glass side table in Brighton Beach. It was from a photo booth arcade with a fake setup where you could have your picture taken with our leaders, Stalin and Ezhov standing next to a bridge in Leningrad. Trofim had the same photograph, but in his, which was taken later than Arkady’s, Ezhov had been airbrushed away. It was for this version I scolded my lover.
He would argue, “It’s for protection, Stalina, just like your name. I got a deal at the photo booth. They gave me extra copies. Would you like one?”
“You do look handsome on that bridge.”
I did take one of the copies, but the photograph was not enough to protect my dear Trofim. His students thought he went mad when one of them saw him eating a slice of Lysenko’s brain on a piece of sourdough bread and reported him to the authorities. The police did not mind his charade with the calf brain; they actually knew about it because the KGB had Lysenko’s real brain. It was Trofim’s experiments to improve Mendeleev’s vodka recipe that ended up being the final straw. The KGB did not want anyone changing what they already considered flawless. Olga sent me the article from Pravda, which I have taped to the back of the photograph.
Thiip!
It reads,
The body of physicist Trofim Nayakovsky, who had been missing for several years, was found dead in his former lab at St. Petersburg University. He was thought to have gone crazy after a student saw him consuming a slice of a human brain, and soon after he disappeared with no trace. His body, preserved in a vat of chilled vodka, was found when renovations for the tercentennial started and the lab’s refrigerated vault was emptied. Death by drowning was determined, as it was hard to tell at so late a date if there were any signs of a struggle. One of his former students said that after he was seen eating what was thought to be a piece of our scientist Lysenko’s brain, the authorities started making inquiries about the professor’s activities. The student, who wishes to remain anonymous, told the authorities that in addition, the professor’s teaching had become scattered and erratic, and he was obsessed with developing a new recipe for vodka. The brain was actually that of a calf. The vat filled with vodka, in which Prof. Nayakovsky was discovered, had been placed inside a large centrifuge that was being stored inside the cold vault. Relatives were contacted, and after the body thawed, they requested cremation. He is survived by his wife, Tatiana, and children Yosip and Nina. During the next year, many institutions are having facelifts in preparation for the upcoming celebrations. We wonder what other surprising discoveries will be made.