Our little family might have ended right then as our helplessness, our collective failure, amplified within the uneven triangle we made. But Kolya took the dish from my father and opened the kitchen window. “To air out the room,” he said, and he calmly lobbed the dish out the window. My father turned to Kolya, as if to hit him, but when the dish shattered in the alley below, his entire face loosened. “You know, I think that belonged to Boris’s wife,” he mused. “Your mother always hated her.”
“This belongs to her too,” Kolya said, and flung a massive platter out the window.
“And this,” I chimed in, throwing a glass.
“What about this?” Kolya asked, tossing a soup pot before anyone could answer. A loaded glass pitcher burst with silverware shrapnel. My father lifted a dozen stacked dinner plates and calmly slid them out the windowsill. We pitched sugar jars and salt shakers and saucers and teacups and large plates and small plates and soup bowls and porridge bowls. We threw every dish brought by neighbors, friends, and mourners, and then we ransacked the cupboards, tossing frying pans and cutlery, bread boards and cooking trays. It was an exorcism. We stripped the kitchen of any dish, utensil, and mug until nothing survived that would ever need to be washed. It was the morning after my mother’s funeral and there we were, we couldn’t stop laughing. We went on until there was nothing left but one plate for each of us. When the last excess plate shattered in the alley below, my father finally closed the window.
5
For several weeks I left the painting suffocated in bubble wrap beneath my divan. Well, I say divan. Really, it’s a stingily cushioned hunk of aluminum built to last rather than to provide comfort, like something you’d find in a fallout shelter. I’ll sleep when I’m dead, I tell my friend Yakov. No other choice, really. Sometimes I find condom wrappers between the cushions. They’re all mine, definitely. The flat is owned by a widowed she-huckster who’d sell me into slavery in my sleep, if I slept. Her two grown sons live here too. They think they’re tough just because they’ve been to jail, joined a gang, survived stabbings. But I could teach them a thing or two. It takes less courage to criticize the decisions of others than to stand by your own, for instance. Good advice. Attila the Hun said it, and he ransacked half of Europe! But to some people ignorance is a sleeping mask they mistake for corrective lenses. They’ll quote me on that someday.
The two sons smoke as if desperate to commit suicide but only by emphysema. Their mother only lets them smoke in the bathroom, which they’ve filled with a black-and-white television, a broken boom box, a dozen ashtrays, and a sawed-in-half sofa. It looks like something between an outdated disco and the office of a pornographer who’s seen better days. When I asked on my first morning if they might leave so I could use the facilities, their eyes became death rays. The bathroom was a foreign land whose culture and traditional way of life I was oblivious to. I backed out with my hands raised and eyes lowered. I spent most of my time in St. Petersburg, the most beautiful city on earth, searching for an unoccupied toilet.
One of the finest I came across in my wanderings was in a café three blocks from the Teplov Gallery, where Galina had said there’d been an exhibition on Zakharov a year or two back. Yakov walked with me part of the way. He’s an excellent listener. Most cats are. Except Siameses, the chatty little bastards. I have human friends, obviously. But everything’s easier with a cat. He wants a little fish soup in a saucer and the occasional scratch on the head. I want the illusion that an animal bred to trade affection for food can understand the inquietudes of my soul.
Yakov had gone to investigate a dumpster by the time I reached the Teplov Gallery. The door handle was a silver bracket. The marble foyer was poorly plagiarized from an imperial summer palace. None of the art would hang above eye level, but the ceiling rose to the lower stratosphere. Even the air tasted imported from a country ranked high on the quality-of-life index.
Behind the ticket counter stood a man as skinny as a soaked poodle. He sported a shirt of swatch-size plaid and a blond ponytail that, unless destined for a chemotherapy patient, should’ve been immediately chopped off, buried in an unmarked grave, and never spoken of again. Hipsterdom’s a tightrope strung across the canyon of douche-baggery. He clung by a finger.
A few ruble coins glinted on the floor before the ticket counter. Were they just coins, or part of an art installation? The modernists ruined reality for laypeople.
I approached the counter. The temperature was set to meat locker. A couple tourists consulted a cinder-block-size Lonely Planet. Banter’s the doorway into a stranger’s good graces and I entered guns blazing. “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let your hair down!”
“Excuse me?” the ticket cashier asked.
“I need to ask a bit of a favor,” I said, slouching into the counter. “Not long ago there was an exhibit here on a Chechen painter. I’d like the phone number of the exhibit curator. She lives in Grozny.”
“Fuck off.”
“Thank you, but no, just her number would be fine.”
Had I lived a life well watered with affection, I might not have withered under his arid stare. Before I could mount a fuller defense, I met the grim glare of an Orc in a security guard’s suit. Our atoms must’ve been polarized like repulsing magnets, because for every step he took toward me, I involuntarily took one toward the door. As much high culture as a prison weight room, that museum.
The door swung closed behind me. The problem with rejection is that it feels imposed even when it’s earned. I told that to Yakov. He was perched on a yellow Citroën. He hopped down, scampered to me, and rubbed his pebbly nose on my shoes. Life’s little pleasures are the consolation of the paupered. But Yakov’s nose on my shoe, his hot purr up my pant leg, well, you take your triumphs where you can.
I should’ve gone to class, but I hadn’t gone once this term and didn’t want to confuse the professor by showing up. If I’d devoted as much brainpower to finishing school as I had to staying in school, I’d probably have a Nobel by now. I’d become one of those prisoners you read about who’s lived locked up so long that he tries to break in once he’s been let out. Who in their sane mind would ever want to leave?
Yakov followed me across the street and through eight blocks of midday monotony.
A vacant-eyed man studied a tram schedule under Plexiglas, but it was clear that no map could show him where he was headed.
Elderly women who hadn’t smiled since Gorbachev was general secretary queued outside the post office. They wore overcoats in midsummer, distrustful of every source of authority, even the calendar.
Up ahead, a supermodel as lean and pointy as a stiletto stared right at me. She was probably part of a stylish Ocean’s 11—like con. She’d size me up and see I was perfect for the role of the dumpy clown whom the whole crew rallies around when George Clooney gets distracted by his charity work. We’d rob a Dubai emirate blind. I’d give my cut to starving orphans because I don’t do it for the money. I do it for the thrill. She’d leave George Clooney and we’d live forever in the desolate beauty of a Malaysian beach. Drinking mai tais for breakfast would never get old. Roll credits.
“Your zipper’s down,” she said as she passed me.
Endurance, I reminded myself, is the true measure of existence.
Back home, I disinterred the painting from its bubble wrap for the first time since returning from Moscow. The canvas itself was hardly larger than a sheet of notepaper. This is where Kolya died. I’d known that, obviously, for several weeks, but seeing it there I flinched. I set the canvas on the shelf between the two pickle jars holding my parents’ ashes. Rather ghoulish, but family reunions usually are. I was twenty-eight years old, too old to be an orphan, but too young to be the sole survivor of the Kalugin tribe. Good God, I was probably expected to carry on the family name. Never has so much been asked by so many of someone who has so little.