“I know a fairy tale,” the girl said in her syrupy little girl’s voice. “It’s about a fishee that gets caught in the sea and then the fisherman plucks the fishee’s eyes out so she can’t swim back, and then he cuts her stomach open to take out the caviar—”
The mother reached down and swatted the girl’s tender neck. “That’s a stupid story,” the mother said. The girl did not cry out. She merely touched her neck and whispered, “Didn’t hurt at all.”
“Listen,” the mother said. “You’re a nice man. Too nice to be talking to us, or to such a stupid girl with her ugly stories. My boys are starving. If you give me fifty dollars, we can go beneath the docks, all three of us. I know a little space where no one can see us. You can do whatever you want.”
“What?” I said.
My body floated up, like a balloon, like a Walloon or what have you. I was gone from this place; I was in New York, with Nana, on a park bench. The sun was setting. A day of commerce was at an end. I could smell frankfurters and homeless men. I could smell myself on Nana’s smooth brown hand.
“What?” the woman repeated, as if mocking me.
“What are you saying?” I said.
“Just that if you wanted to,” the woman said evenly, “if you had the money, we could go beneath the docks. All of us, or just you and Yulia. It would take fifty dollars, and we wouldn’t ask any questions.”
I swung at her. I had no plan of attack, but almost immediately, my fist found its way inside her mouth and was working to dislodge those hideous golden incisors. To no avail. She bit down on me, but there was no blood. Neither of us screamed. I breathed out the word “bitch” but heard only its stinging falsity. I raised my other hand, trembling, into the air, as if I were an A student trying to draw the teacher’s attention. I formed a second fist and brought it down on the woman’s head, co-opting all the weight at my disposal. The woman crumpled. She just lay there on the broken, glass-strewn concrete, shaking feverishly and trying to mouth a single word, which may have been “police.”
As if there were any police left.
My ankle throbbed. Yulia, the little girl, was biting me, digging her nails into my flesh. At first I didn’t shake her off. I stood there and let the pain accumulate, willing it to shock me into action, into a new state of resolve. But the little girl couldn’t do it. She had neither the strength nor the sharp teeth to change me, to make me see differently. I turned around and started to walk away, loosening her grip on me with each hard-won step, dragging her silently across the concrete and broken glass. “Papa,” I heard her cry after she had finally fallen off my ankle. I didn’t look back.
I wanted to go back to my bed in the Hyatt. I wanted to take a long bath in the Roman tub. I wanted my allergy-free pillow and a mindful note from Larry Zartarian by my bedside. The farther I walked away from the pier, the more I hated the little girl. A part of me—a hideous part, to be sure—wished I had punched her instead of her mother. Wished I had killed her. A brick to that mousy smile, to all our mousy smiles. Let us all die, I thought. Let this planet be free of us. And then, a hundred years later, let the resurgent earth sprout wispy dandelions and delicate hamsters and five-star hotels. Nothing will ever come of the human race. Nothing will ever come of this land.
I was walking, or so it seemed, toward the International Terrace, toward the 718 perfume store, and toward the Hyatt—but those three things existed only in a very abstract sense. I was walking toward the ideal of the Hyatt. Toward the memory of a 718 perfume store. Toward the faint outcropping of the burnt-out International Terrace. What I was really doing was walking away from the girl, whose screams for Papa followed me down a road stained with the blood of others.
“Friend,” a voice called out to me. “Friend, where are you going?” A spry old man, an amiable clown, was running alongside me, his feet barely keeping up with my long, desperate strides.
“To the Hyatt,” I said.
“It’s gone,” said the old man. “The Svanï bombed it. Tell me, friend, who are you by nationality?”
I told him. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the man crossing himself. “Some of the best people in the world are Jews,” he told me. “My mother will be your mother, and there will always be water in my well to drink.”
I continued staring ahead, walking briskly, and trying to recapture my solitude. Everyone talked too much here. No one left you alone. What if I didn’t want the man’s mother? What kind of stupid imposition was this ritualized mother-swapping?
We walked for a while without a word between us. And then the man took several authoritative steps that were actually the prelude to a halt. Without knowing why, solely through the power of his suggestion, I lingered as well. I looked into his face. He wasn’t old at all. The thick zipperlike creases forming an odd parallelogram across his face were the strokes of a large knife wielded with impunity. His nose had absorbed so many uppercuts that it had taken on the retroussé shape of a New England debutante’s. And his eyes—his eyes were gone, replaced by small black cylinders that could see only the target in front of them, the pupils reflecting but one frightening idea trapped in a single cone of light. “Let me shake your hand,” the man said as he took hold of my limp arm and squeezed. “No, not like that. The way real brothers shake it.”
I did my best, but the air had gone out of me. His fingers were covered by a jumble of numerical tattoos, testifying to a life spent in Soviet prisons. “Yes, I’ve been to jail,” he said, noticing my gaze, “but not for thieving or killing. I’m an honest man. You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you,” I whispered.
“Any enemy of yours in Svanï City is an enemy of mine,” the man said. “What did I tell you about my mother?”
“That she’s my mother also,” I stammered. I could feel fat bloody pain in my right hand, and the world tilted toward the left, as if to compensate. If I was going to die, I wanted my Rouenna near me.
“My mother…no, our mother is in the hospital—” the man started.
“What do you want?” I whispered.
“Just hear me out,” the man said. “I could have done wrong by you. I could have called my friends who are waiting around the corner with their kinjals. Just like this one.” He turned his torso to let me see the glint of the short Caucasian dagger glowing dully in its wilted leather scabbard. “But I didn’t.”
“I’m the Sevo Minister of Multicultural Affairs,” I sobbed, feeling the weight of humiliation settle around my shoulders, cloaking me as it had never done before. “I run a children’s charity called Misha’s Children. Won’t you please let go of my hand?”
“Our mother is in the hospital,” the man repeated, tightening the grip around my big, squishy hand as my vision turned a new shade of purple. “Are you so heartless that you won’t help her? Do I really have to take out my kinjal and slice your stomach open?”
“Dear God, no!” I cried. “Here! Here! Take my money! Take whatever you need!”
But in the single opportune moment when he let go of my hand so that it could find my bulging wallet, I felt the fear fall away and the humiliation lift. It wasn’t the money. No, it wasn’t the money at all. But after thirty years with my head on the scaffold, after thirty years of cheering on the executioner, after thirty years of wearing his stifling black hood, one thing was certain: I no longer feared the ax.
“Fuck your mother!” I said. “I hope she dies.”
And then I ran.
I ran with such speed that people, or what remained of people, silently fell away before me, as if I had been expected all along, like mortar rounds and destitution. I collided with burning cars and burning mules, and I felt the smoky air dissipate around me, creating the conditions for my salvation. For I wanted, more than anything, to be saved. To live and also to take vengeance for my life. To shed my weight and to be born anew.