She came back a month later and then left again in the winter, asking me for some time to think things over. She got married while she was thinking, but didn’t sever ties with me, obviously. I started feeling jealous of her husband.
“What do you need him for?” I asked. “What are you keeping him around for? You’re just putting him through a lot of pain.” She agreed with me, but couldn’t divorce him, obviously. Well, and he wouldn’t just leave without a fight. I wanted to have a talk with him. She forbade me to do so, throwing hysterical fits and saying she’d kill herself if he found out about me. She promised to sort everything out, obviously, promised me that everything would be all right. In the spring, they got divorced.
“What was the point of getting married in the first place?” I asked. She explained, saying something about debts that we have to repay to those who love us, about the love that drives all of us, about payments and settlements, about honesty and justice. I realized that they were still seeing each other, although she’d never said anything about it, obviously. That’s how the summer started. In June, she said she was pregnant. It wasn’t mine, obviously. It wasn’t his either, obviously.
BOB
“I’d say that America really is a country where everyone enjoys equal opportunity,” Bob Koshkin wrote in one of his concise emails to his friends and family. “In my view, America’s unshakable constitutional framework and sound democratic principles are foundational to that equality. I believe in the viability and flexibility of American liberalism, under the auspices of which big business and government regulatory agencies work together harmoniously for a better future. The only thing that’s a bit unsettling… that’s not the right way to put it—the thing that absolutely floors me—is that there are just so many black people everywhere.”
He had landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport two months ago, at the beginning of the summer, boldly disembarked, and forged on, thinking, “This is how Columbus must have felt way back when.” He wobbled through the terminal like a sailor walking on solid ground; just thinking about the vast ocean he’d crossed made his muscles spasm, but he’d reached American soil and it was high time to explore the continent and civilize the natives. Once Bob got into the city, he called his old high school classmate who had been hanging his hat in the East Village for the past decade or so. His classmate showed up in half an hour wearing a bathrobe, no less. Bob was decked out in a cowboy hat with Carpathian red deer running around the band, a light jacket, and flashy, colorful shorts. There’s a chance his classmate wouldn’t have recognized him without those shorts. They hugged, and even kissed each other, looking like two transvestites meeting again after a prolonged separation. The transvestite in shorts was happy to see his old partner, while the transvestite in the bathrobe would have preferred to put the reunion off as long as possible. Bob’s classmate didn’t invite him back to his place. They went to the Chinese restaurant around the corner and ordered some tea. Bob was counting on his classmate picking up the tab, so he sat on his hands until he did. Bob opened up his dad’s leather suitcase, with the heads of lovely East German girls pasted all over it, and took out a souvenir plate that had Crimean landscapes on it, of all things.
“I got this for you,” Bob said. His classmate thanked him, catching a glimpse of Mount Ai-Petri.
“Oh,” he said, “that’s the first place I got the clap, in Yalta. I was there for training camp.”
“Should I take it back?” Bob asked, embarrassed.
“Nah, man. Oddly enough, I remember that trip quite fondly.”
“The faculty of memory,” Bob noted in one of his subsequent messages, “is capable of reconciling things that initially seem incompatible or mutually exclusive in terms of their logical content. Sometimes I think that our consciousness is built out of our most sorrowful and heart-wrenching stories and memories. The all-encompassing nature of memory and the irreversible experiences it contains are probably what drove humanity to invent sports, the arts, and anesthesia.”
His classmate walked him to the subway and then went about his business, holding the plate under his arm like a fallen halo. Bob took a train to the hallowed city of Philadelphia later that evening. Tracking down his relatives proved surprisingly easy—there were only two Koshkins in the phone book, his aunt Amalia and his uncle Sasha. Actually, his uncle was listed as Alex here in America, but Bob wasn’t about to let that stop him. He dialed their number and was greeted by a slightly shrill voice that turned out to belong to his cousin Lilith. Bob told her about the purpose of his visit and his place in the Koshkin family tree at great length, swallowing long strings of consonants and losing his train of thought. He sensed that his story lacked credibility, but he pressed on, appealing to their childhood memories and good old Koshkin hospitality.
“Yep,” he yelled into the phone, “you got it. I braved a Ukrainian Airlines flight and crusaded through all the duty-free zones! I haven’t eaten in two whole days! But I never doubted I’d find your family and hold you in my brotherly embrace once again!” Lilith gave him directions. She warned him that getting on the train without a ticket wouldn’t fly here in the States, and that they weren’t going to come bail him out if he got caught.
The Koshkins had settled in Philadelphia a long while ago and weren’t planning on moving back to Ukraine anytime soon. They’d picked up the language quickly, but they hadn’t forgotten their roots. Uncle Alex worked for a big food wholesaler. Aunt Amalia had been a teacher, though Bob wasn’t quite sure whether or not she was gainfully employed in America. Their sixteen-year-old daughter, Lilith, the family’s pride and joy, dreamed of being a dentist one day.
“Good for her, choosing a career based on a realistic assessment of her talents,” Bob wrote in one of his emails. “That’s why I’ve always dreamt of going to Brazil and becoming the queen of Carnival.” The Koshkins, an ethnically mixed family, had an odd lifestyle. They took a selective approach to adopting American customs. Despite the many years they had spent in this faraway land, they still celebrated all the Soviet and Orthodox holidays—in addition to the Jewish ones, of course. Easter and International Workers’ Day blended together smoothly. One year, Uncle Alex’s friends from some weird Hasidic anarchist group persuaded him to march in their parade. The Koshkins celebrated the Fourth of July, too, because they regarded it as a Jewish holiday, for some reason. Uncle Alex’s colleagues didn’t question his rationale; he was getting into the holiday spirit and that was good enough for them.
Bob’s unexpected visit caused much consternation in the Koshkin household. This alien from the East spooked his hosts; his thick sideburns and flashy shorts made them want to make doubly sure that he had a return ticket. Bob’s family back in Ukraine had severed all ties with their relatives overseas. Uncle Alex didn’t remember his older brother, Seva, Bob’s dad, very fondly. In fact, he remembered him as a complete prick, for several reasons. First, Bob’s dad was a Party member; second, he had a grating personality; and third, he hadn’t given Uncle Alex any of the money he made from selling their parents’ cottage. It seemed like Uncle Alex had buried that distant past a long time ago, only to have it turn up on his doorstep again. He just didn’t know how to react. At any rate, Uncle Alex decided to prepare his special pasta dish, and then the whole family gathered around the long dinner table and started looking through the pictures Bob had brought with him, where the young Koshkins, Seva and his little brother, were looking life straight in its suspicious eyes, their teeth flashing whitely in defiance at their indeterminate future. Seva was fit and self-assured, while Alex was chubby and effeminate. The old photographs clearly disgusted the latter.