In the morning, we’d leave the train together and they’d be so charmed by my small talk they’d ask me to the dentist with them. They’d fix me, starting with my teeth. The girl would think of me as a much older brother. Her father would think of me as a much younger brother. They’d invite me to move in with them in their titanic Moscow mansion. I’d consider the offer. It’d cramp my free-wheeling bohemian lifestyle, but they’d plead and offer me great sums of money. I’d turn down the money. I’m not for sale. But I’d accept the invitation to join their family, for their sakes obviously. I’m a Samaritan. I’d teach the girl all about growing up, and teach the divorced father how to forget his first marriage and find a new one. I’d only stay a few months because I won’t be held down. They’d talk about me in reverent tones for years.
The following morning the cabin attendant yanked me by my ear from a restful slumber. This was to be expected, given the only required experience for Russian Railways employment is a history of anger issues. The father and daughter had already gone. Must’ve forgotten to leave their names and phone number. They’d probably regret it the rest of their lives.
4
In July 1990, when the warmest month in Kirovsk’s fifty-three-year history coincided with the collapsing of Soviet authority, the elderly began swimming in Lake Mercury. In the mornings they gathered on the gravelly banks with their gray hair bunched beneath fur hats and they stripped to their undergarments. When they raised their hands, their triceps sagged from the bone. One man gazing at the waters patted his potbelly tenderly. Maybe he’d spent the last fifty years wondering if it could be deployed as a flotation device, and now, finally, would find the answer. There’s nothing quite like the sight of two dozen half-naked octogenarians. We enter the stage of life as dolls and exit as gargoyles.
“Why are you swimming here?” I asked one of the women. She stood beside a rusted sign that warned off swimmers. She was no taller than me — which is not to say I was short, just short for a biped. Her hazel eyes held my fuzzy reflection. Her generation had journeyed through hell so we could grow up in purgatory.
She glanced to the rusted sign. It depicted a grapefruit-headed man made of forty-five-degree angles falling into the open jaws of a shark. Perhaps before she was arrested and condemned to Kirovsk, she had grown up by a lake where her father had taught her to float by keeping his hand beneath her arched spine so she knew she wouldn’t sink, that he would be there, until one day she lay on the calm surface, her back parabolic, her arms crucified on the water, her brown hair sieving algae, and she flitted her father a look and he raised his hands as if her glance was a loaded gun, and for a second she floundered, terrified she would sink to the lake bottom without him to hold her, but she stilled her arms, gulped the air, she was doing it, all by herself, she was floating. Perhaps she wanted to tell me that if she had outlived Stalin, the Berlin Wall, and the Soviet Empire, a little dirty water wouldn’t kill her. Instead, she glared at the sign. “I’ve fried scarier fish with just a sliver of butter.”
She joined the other grandmothers. Clad in nothing but discolored undergarments, they hobbled to the gravel bank. All around, smoke blabbered endlessly from the smelter stacks. A woman with a noose of scar tissue carried her wooden cane right into the water. The others followed, and all together, they waded in. After a half-century drought, they remember how to swim.
A husband and wife backstroked across the lake, water glistening toward shoulders, legs splashing in unison. A rope, lashed around their waists, tied them together, in case one began to sink.
A one-legged man paddled with slow thrusts of his arms. Both real and phantom legs were weightless in the water below.
A man with a mustache as wide as his waistline, whom all the world had nicknamed Walrus, took his first tentative strokes, marveling at the cool rush against his skin, the freedom of movement, and began weeping right there in the water for the countless times he had given up hope, the countless times he had prayed for death in the mines, in the prison camp, and now, now gratitude cracked him open, and he thanked God for ignoring his prayers, for letting him live long enough to learn to swim.
And in the middle of the lake the woman I’d spoken with floated on her back, eyes closed, as if nothing in her many years had ever gone wrong.
AUGUST grew warmer. Centrally planned weather patterns were in open revolt. To everyone’s surprise, the bathing babushkas didn’t turn lime color, or grow third ears; if anything, the chemical mélange restored to them a long-ago dissipated vitality. Soon grandparents in their sixties joined the geriatric swimmers, followed by people in their fifties, then forties, and so on until the youngest children of the youngest families dipped their baby-prawn toes into the water. No one believed the state-sponsored propaganda: The philosophy of Marxism-Leninism predicts the inevitable contours of history, the individual is significant only in his submission to the collective, the chemicals in the water cause cancer. Our revolution was a Sunday swim.
My mother, as I’ve said, wanted no more from life than an afternoon at the Black Sea. That August, my father came home with leopard-print bikinis.
“What’re we supposed to do with these?” Kolya asked, eyeing the two-piece.
“It’s a swimsuit. I’ll give you one guess.”
“It’s a bikini.”
My father grabbed the top piece from Kolya’s hands and tossed it in the trash. “Now it’s a Speedo.”
This summer Lake Mercury, the next the Black Sea, my father promised. But contrary to his plans, by the next summer the pain in my mother’s chest would have already taken her to the doctor, then the hospital, then the crematorium, and finally the living room bookshelf, where her ashes still rest, and will likely spend eternity, in a pickle jar between a can of spare buttons and two phone books, despite my father’s promises to someday scatter them in waters off Sochi.
But before all that, we went as a family to Lake Mercury, my mother in her leopard-print bikini, my brother and I in our leopard-print bikini bottoms, and we splashed in the lake, the water a mouthful of dirty change, my open eyes burning as I watched the flailing limbs of the decapitated swimmers, and at the end of the day, when everyone was sun drunk, or punch drunk, or just drunk, that hour in summer when falling inhibition and rising permissibility intersect, my father chased my mother across the gravel bank. With leaping strides he lunged for her in her leopard-print bikini, claiming he was a leopardopterist, that he would pin and mount her, and my brother and I chased them, two cubs protecting our leopardess. We bared our teeth and snarled, we clawed and growled, we were wild, we didn’t care, and all the while my father chased and my mother fled, her laughter held by the stadium of smoke rising from the Twelve Apostles, never had I seen her so happy, never so loved, so wanted, never had I seen her as a sexual being, as desired quarry, as anything but a taciturn and dissatisfied figure at the kitchen sink who occasionally walloped me over the head with a soup ladle; and even though my father had no appreciation for metaphor, or feline biology, or the sunbathers he hurdled over, even though he was my father and she my mother and we were all a few steps from the precipice, I look back at that moment, that afternoon, with flooded longing, and think: We should all be so lucky to get from life a sunny-day swim in chemical waste.
That same afternoon, my father borrowed a Polaroid camera and lined us up on the bank of Lake Mercury. I’d never seen a Polaroid before, never seen any camera more advanced than the Zenit E-series. In the sulfurous light, Kolya’s chest was as pale as amphibian spawn. We flanked our mother and waited with pinched smiles as my father framed the photograph. Goose bumps pinpricked my mother’s bare thighs; they had never before seen direct sunlight. We had ranged far above our natural latitudes.