I put my head in my hands. “You must excuse me. Preparing for the move has exhausted me.”
“Thank you for telling me all that, Baba. You didn’t have to.”
I laugh weakly. “I bet you got more than you bargained for when you asked, didn’t you, darling? I’m sure you have a hard time understanding. You are so devoted to Yuri. It’s a beautiful thing to see.”
She gives me a wan smile and blinks a few times, a strange reaction. “I understand everything. I had my wild days. Don’t you remember?”
“Who could forget?” I say, recalling the endless stream of deadbeats she had dated, some of whom I had the misfortune of meeting. One of them even had a piece of metal going through his nostril like some kind of a bull in search of a matador. I believe he called himself “Rainfeather.” It was ridiculous. But now my tea boils and I excuse myself. I have said too much.
Tomorrow I leave for good—Misha’s men came this morning to haul everything away. I watched them carry off the drab old landscapes, the uncomfortable velvet dining chairs, the ivory coatrack, things that meant nothing to me while they were a part of my daily existence, and yet I felt heavy as I watched them being wrested from our home, like a part of my soul was being dragged out along with them.
After I began my story, I decided the natural place to donate all the money from the sales. I will be giving the money to the Kharkov orphanage where my father and Uncle Pasha spent their adolescence, if you can believe it. I made a call to confirm that it was still standing, and it was. I considered visiting, but I thought the trip wouldn’t do me any good, only adding weight to my old body. “Come on by,” the woman in charge kept telling me. “See what kind of a place it is.” I told her I was old, too old, but thanked her for the invitation anyway.
I hear Stas entering the apartment before I can mention the orphanage to Natasha. He apologizes for missing the last part of my story; he got a call offering him a new position as a waiter and had a few details to work out. I congratulate him and prepare to tell him that I didn’t miss him one bit, though perhaps I did a little, perhaps I am growing a bit fond of the derelict boy. But he looks too solemn for kidding around, and also a bit different. Something is off about him.
“Nice haircut,” I tell him. “With it, you almost do not look like a homosexual.”
Natasha gives a nervous, gentle laugh. “He’s not gay, Baba.”
“Whatever you say. This kind of thing does not ruffle my feathers,” I tell her, though I am a bit surprised. “In any event, boy, the hair does not look bad,” I say.
“Thanks,” he says, running a hand through his hair.
I am depleted. I try to focus on the prospect of sinking into my warm bed—a moment of reflection with the dregs of my tea and a few pages of Tsvetaeva’s Moscow Diaries should do the trick. I long for Misha to rest beside me, to feel his bulk weighing down his half of the mattress, to have his arm draped around me in the night. To hear his heavy snore, which annoyed me every night until I no longer heard it, until I finally learned how loud the night was, how it could keep me up for hours—the planes soaring overhead, the cars roaring by, the cool air hitting the windowpanes—sounds my husband had kept at bay.
“Listen, Baba,” Natasha says, inching closer to the screen. “I meant what I said earlier. I’d love it if you came to visit this summer. It would be so good to see you, to have you meet Tally…and, well, I’m putting on a play and I’d love for you to see it.”
“A play?” I say, intrigued in spite of myself. “About what, darling?”
“A one-woman show,” she tells me. “It’ll be a surprise. But I think you’d love it.”
“I haven’t seen you onstage in a while.”
“Exactly.”
I light a cigarette, picturing the long days ahead. The morning’s journey to the sea. The days when I try to relive my long-ago summers, with young Natasha and my lovers at my side, the only place where I felt happy. But the joy I felt beside those crashing waves—it wasn’t because of those lovers. It was because I was with my darling granddaughter, a girl whose life I was shaping, who felt at ease with me in a way she never did in her own home. I was saving her, in my own way.
Though I failed my sister, there was Natasha, my second chance. I did nothing for my sister when our father or our grandmother died besides disdain her for not toughening up. I did not carry out my promise to my father to take care of her. I let Bogdan step in and do the caretaking, and where did that lead her? Then I barely tried to keep her in Kiev, where I could have brought her back to life, and instead just watched her walk off to her new life while I only cared about the child in my belly—a child who, it was true, would one day bring me my greatest joy through Natasha, but I could have spent more time caring about my damn sister.
As I stare at Natasha’s gorgeous, weary face, it feels ridiculous to live out my end on the sea without the person who made me happy there. I do the calculations. I will still have nearly two months on the water on my own before I take off. And then—another chance to see Natasha onstage. How could I deny her?
“Oh, darling,” I say. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
Natasha
Stas helps me lug a bunch of last-minute crap to the stage two weeks before opening night. As I turn on the lights over the set, I have to say I feel pretty fucking proud. The rusty old train car is on-point. The craggy mountains in the background look almost real from a distance, with the dark, wispy clouds hovering above them. The apartment to the left of the train is just how I pictured it, with its wooden beds and fiery stove and even a broom in the corner. The ground is covered in little pieces of gravel that it will be tough to walk over. The market hides behind the train car, old wooden carts filled with fake rotting onions and potatoes. And I made it all happen, by begging old Babies founder Vadim to use his stage, asking Slavik, another Babies defector who made killer sets and also owed me one, to help put this thing together, but mostly by working my ass off to write the damn play. The last six weeks have been crazy, but in the best possible way. It’s amazing, how much I got done while Talia was napping. If only Mama could have seen me, poring over my notebooks, replaying my recorded calls with Baba over and over, crossing shit out, saying words aloud to see if they sounded right, crumpling paper up like a mad scientist, focused as hell on my pages in a way I had never felt about a single assignment in high school, like a good little student-actress.
The last time I was onstage, not long after I got together with Yuri, it was for a stupid Anna Karenina spinoff, a story told from the point of view of Dolly, a much more woman-friendly version where Anna gets to run away with her lover and nobody dies, and even old Karenin finds happiness again. It was called Happy Wife and it was a bit one-noted. But I missed it, standing under the bright lights as an empowered Dolly, feeling free after kicking my loser husband aside. My grandpa watched a video of that one from Kiev and wrote, You were too deferential to Anna onstage. You needed to showcase your talents a bit more. That one cracked me up; as if I hadn’t tried! And now I take a photo of the stage and post it: #curtainsuptomorrow #Iseeyoupostpartum #Sovietstoriestolife, and wait for the flood of love to pour in; at this point I’ve stopped posting anything about my family so people know what to focus on. I’ve got two weeks to go and I want every last thing to sparkle, the show, the stage, the lighting, my costumes, I want the theater to be packed. Since Baba really is going to see it after all, and I want it to be perfect, especially since she doesn’t even know what it’s about.