• • •
LAST NIGHT, SAID MARINA, Baba Fira rode into town on a horse.
Were you happy to see her? Frida asked from the backseat.
Levik chauffeured them down Coney Island Avenue, skirting double-parked halal-meat delivery trucks, imprinting the frank façades of nightclubs and funeral homes onto their retinas. He tensed up when Marina touched on the spiritual realm.
You don’t understand, said Marina. You were too young when she died. Baba Fira was always an old lady — desiccated, wrinkled, a fright. From my earliest memories, her back is so hunched that her nose points to the ground. To make it from one room to the next, she pushed a chair in front of her. It took an hour to get from the kitchen to the bathroom, and you can’t imagine the sound. But she must’ve been only fifty at the time. A little later, not much, I somehow got stuck with bedpan duties. The last twenty years of her life, she was practically a corpse. Not a woman you imagine on a horse.
But in the dream she was fine? asked Frida, though the last place she wanted to be was in a car with her parents, analyzing dreams about their grandparents. She put her open mouth to window, as if trying to suck the outside into her lungs.
She was sort of slung over the horse and dangling, like a coat.
You said hello?
I was too busy yelling at you. You were supposed to be accompanying her to make sure she didn’t fall, but instead you were home. She rode into Potemkinskaya all by herself.
Frida looked at the back of her mother’s head, or rather the back of the headrest attached to her mother’s seat, which grew a face and walrus tusks. A moment ago Baba Fira had been riding her horse under the train tracks, galloping past Zuckerman Pharmacy, turning onto Brighton Sixth. The horse, unlike Baba Fira, was large, black, splendid. But evidently the whole time this horse had been riding into central Odessa. Instead of helping her great-grandmother, Frida had been home, a home she didn’t remember and couldn’t imagine. How did she die? she asked.
Levik ran a red light. She was always dead! he shouted. She never died!
Stroke, said Marina. Do you even have to ask? The answer is always stroke.
What about cancer? said Frida.
Levik dropped them off at the banya and went on his way. He had big plans for the day.
A series of practical steps and formal interactions distracted from the conversation, which had settled comfortably on the subject of cancer — who had it, what kind, coping mechanism (Alla Gabor, breast, happy to get new ones, eating only asparagus puree). A silent rule with discussions such as these was that they weren’t returned to. A penny might fall from your pocket and you’d bend down to pick it up, in the process dropping the subject for good.
There was a misunderstanding with the poised Baltic lady who inspected their gift card, apparently issued under old management. Current management used different gift cards. But the management at this establishment changed weekly, and there was always a new Baltic lady to have a gift-card misunderstanding with. When enough fuss was made and Marina’s blood pressure reached a satisfactory mark, the situation was suddenly resolved. Bleak smiles exchanged. Marina and Frida put their wallets and keys into a plastic bag and in return were granted keys to lockers. With light steam! said the bloodless Baltic lady, who had a smattering of white pimples on her temples.
For those who have only imagined the scene inside a ladies’ locker room, the actuality was a handful of half-squatting women struggling with their locks. The key never fit, and then the key got stuck. There was an atmosphere of stifled panic. Bathroom doors were left flung open, as if the occupants had fled. The floor was wet and contaminated-seeming. A woman came in with hair piled on her crown like a scoop of ice cream about to tip. One side of her bathing suit had ridden up a dimpled buttock, exposing skin that was soaked, shapeless, pinkish, like whale blubber. Women, too, went to great lengths to avoid eye contact.
Marina seemed to think there was a race on for who got to the sauna fastest. The clock was ticking, there wasn’t a second to spare. She abandoned Frida to her miserably slow maneuvering and hustled to a clear victory. By the time Frida made it, her mother lay across the top shelf, shutting out the world. Her palms were open, fingers curled, summoning total relaxation. Legs rolled apart. Russet tufts strayed far from the edge of her faded swimsuit (the functional one). She appeared to be making a public demonstration of the phenomenon of gravity, which had healing powers if allowed to work its magic but which the smallest disturbance turned into a force of harm. Frida sat two shelves below, squeezing her knees. Cold wedged deeper than you’d imagine and had to be extracted arduously. This was the seminal moment, when it was necessary to just commit. In the dim corner, someone was panting.
Did he sound at least a little happy? asked Frida.
Damn it! cried Marina.
What’s wrong? What did I say?
I got honey in my eye! She rubbed her eyelid and licked her hand. Her feet flew up to the ceiling. Did who sound happy?
Pasha — when you said that I was coming.
My brother doesn’t get happy.
Though it would appear that Frida was getting exactly what she wanted, she felt uneasy, perhaps because of the way events had unfolded: She’d voiced a desire to go to Odessa, pretended it was a firm decision, pretended there was no talking her out of it, opposed the pleas of her family, stood her ground, didn’t let her father’s newly acquired stutter or her grandpa’s wildly vacillating blood-pressure readings shake her determination — and when that determination was finally registered, the entire matter was seen from a new light. Of course she should go! It was the city of her birth after all, and her only cousin getting married. Hadn’t they been encouraging her the whole time?
But she preferred not to go to the grocery store alone!
Besides, said Marina, I haven’t exactly told him yet. After a pause she added, He hasn’t been feeling well.
My God, has the man been to a doctor?
Don’t be silly. Nobody goes to doctors in Odessa.
Shhh!
As the atmosphere was halfway between sewer and cathedral, it was unclear what the convention was about speaking. A full-blown conversation, evidently, was frowned upon. The process demanded respect. The banya experience was ritualistic, sacred. An air of immense gravity was brought about by the sense that one’s ancestors had been heating their bones in the same way for millennia. The banya didn’t just offer heat, a good sweat, but a connection to something primal and a purification that went far beyond the pores. They sat in these small, dark, wood-paneled rooms, silent except for labored breathing and the occasional hiss of water on coal, shedding layer upon layer of falsehood, soul grime, dead skin, pretension. To encapsulate, the process was as follows: Sit clutching your red, splotchy knees and counting the seconds if you’re a daughter, or lie back and snore occasionally if you’re a mother, for half an hour on a shelf in a scorching, oxygen-deprived chamber, leave chamber and jump into a tub of ice water if you’re a mother, or dip your toes in if you’re a daughter, repeat at least five times in order to be sure you’ve gotten your money’s worth.
A young man who looked like he’d crawled from under the earth’s crust, as if his home were amid igneous rock and magma, who may have been made of a single cell blown like a balloon to man size, opened the tiny metal window onto the coals and used a frightening contraption that must’ve had some alternate, highly specific function to fling water inside. There was a deafening hiss; nothing else happened. He wrapped the end of a towel once over his palm and spun the towel above his head, a naked cowboy with a terry-cloth lasso. Individual nose hairs were set on fire. Further inhales were put off until the lungs took them by force. An oppressive heat descended, intending to stay awhile. The young man sat down beside Marina’s feet and began to sweat. The pores could be seen working. They were trained, disciplined pores. Not like those on Frida’s legs, which refused to release a drop. The man held an unkempt birch venik like a weapon between his knees.