In the living room stood a glass table with photos of Cyril’s mother, father, and Paul. There was also one of the sketches Cyril had done of Paul on his deathbed, framed in mock brass. He couldn’t recall having seen it on display before, not that he was often invited to Steve’s.
Bottle of red wine in one hand and a bottle of white in the other, Steve draped an arm around Cyril’s shoulders.
“I’m grateful to have known her.” Gazing at Cyril with earnest drunk eyes, he added, “I only wish I knew my grandfather, too. Tell me about him.”
It had been forty years since he’d died and Cyril didn’t know what to say, more importantly he didn’t know what he wanted to say, or what he was willing to share: that his father had nightmares, that he was haunted, that he was never happier than when wearing his welding mask and leaning over his bench with that acetylene torch? So many memories of his father were fading. Had Paul never told Steve anything? “He liked Laurel and Hardy,” said Cyril. “And Chaplin. And Buster Keaton. All those old guys.”
Hearing those names drew Father Shevchenko into the conversation. “Chaplin. The Great Dictator. Genius. And brave.” Shevchenko smelled heavily of camphor and vodka. His long grey beard made Cyril think of a tangled root system. “Hitler wanted his head.”
Steve’s heavy-lidded eyes considered the priest, then he shocked both Shevchenko and Cyril with a story about the war. “Grandma told me there’d been rumours of Cossack regiments going over to the Germans. Grandpa considered defecting. She said what if they were defeated? He’d be shot as a traitor and then what about her and dad? In the end it didn’t matter because he was captured and put in a camp. Then when the Krauts overran them she and hundreds of women got transported into Germany. She left dad with a neighbour. Two years in a munitions factory. Munition factories were prime targets for the Allied bombing raids. Why waste good Germans when you can stick a subhuman Slav in there, eh?”
Shevchenko exhaled.
Cyril didn’t breathe at all.
“The manager’s assistant was a woman, Frau Wagner.” He pronounced it Vogner. “She needed a secretary, someone who could type fast and accurate. So grandma said that’s me. Can you do forty words per minute? She said she could do fifty. You believe that? Hadn’t typed in a year. They set her up and said type. She did sixty. That got her off the factory floor and into the office. Heat. Quiet. Flowers in a vase. Coffee, real coffee. She said she hadn’t tasted real coffee in five years.” Steve paused as if choking up. “She wept when she told me that.”
Cyril observed the dramatic touch. Coffee? She never drank coffee, she was a tea drinker.
“Apparently this Frau Wagner was beautiful. But ruined.
She’d lost her husband and her son. One day she couldn’t talk about it and then the next she couldn’t stop. She made up stories. How the boy was living in Argentina. How after the war she would meet him and they would go to the circus, because the boy loved the circus and practised magic tricks, could make cards disappear. Ten months grandma worked for her. Shared her meals, which meant she ate twice what the others did. They hated her for that but didn’t dare touch her. Sometimes grandma even went to her house to work. Place was full of clocks. Grandma remembered that. Clocks. Ticking like hearts. A house full of hearts. Those were her words. A house full of hearts. When the Red Army liberated them Frau Wagner was taken away and shot.”
Cyril nodded familiarly to Steve, meaning he knew the story well. In fact he was scalded. Why had she never told him? If she’d kept it from everyone he could understand, but to tell Steve?
“Incredible,” said Shevchenko, eyes brimming.
Steve nodded deeply. Then turned abruptly to Cyril. “Oh yes” he said, as if just remembering. “About the will. Grandma named me executor.” He shrugged implying that it only made sense.
“It’s what I do. Pop by the office tomorrow. Say ten. We’ll sort it out. Pretty straightforward.” And with that Steve slopped more wine into Cyril’s glass and, discovering that the bottle was now empty and he was lapsing in his hostly duties, went off to find another.
Father Shevchenko turned his considerable attention upon Cyril and asked how he was bearing up.
Cyril performed a long exhalation bespeaking his pain.
Shevchenko nodded quickly. He sipped his drink and smoothed his beard. “Your mother told me you’re a bit of an artist.”
He became evasive. “Is that what she said?”
“It’s God’s gift.”
Cyril made vague noises and wondered what she meant by a bit of an artist? Mockery? “I push a pencil around.”
“You owe it to your talent to do more than that.”
He’d read somewhere that a talent was a measure of ancient Roman currency. His mother had never mentioned anything to him about talent, his, hers, Paul’s, anyone’s, God-given or hard-won. Cyril didn’t know the priest well. As a boy he’d thought of priests as unimaginative wizards who performed the same act over and over each Sunday.
Chuckie appeared with a beer in one hand and a slab of poppyseed cake in the other. Shevchenko leaned away as though preparing for an assault, a reaction that Chuckie seemed to enjoy.
“How’s school, Charles?” asked Shevchenko.
“They invited me to leave.”
“Why would they do that?”
Cyril detected beneath the priest’s concern a hint of vindication, a hint of satisfaction at justice being served.
Chuckie was working on his PHD in Political Science. Something to do with Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, the one advocating industrial expansion and the other agrarian expansion. Cyril had looked it up. The one time he’d asked about his studies Chuckie, perhaps tired, perhaps disdainful, perhaps simply a goof, had ignored the question and talked about baseball. Cyril hadn’t known whether to be insulted or bemused. Chuckie had been at his doctorate ten years and racked up forty thousand dollars in student loan debts and now worked part-time in the post office. Cyril could not deny that Chuckie had genuinely liked his grandmother, or at least found her an interesting source of information. He was always in the kitchen cross examining her about Ukraine, though never failed to end those sessions without borrowing money. In deference to the occasion, Chuckie’s thinning blond hair, usually in a ponytail, was combed and his goatee trimmed.
“It’s the law of the excluded middle,” Chuckie explained to Shevchenko. “Black–white.
Is–isn’t. In–out. I, it would seem, am out.” Chuckie smiled exposing a thick black grouting of poppy seeds between his teeth. He’d inherited Della’s teeth, long and white, and eyes that protruded.
“I don’t follow.”
“I don’t follow either. That’s the problem. Nonconformity. By way of punishment they would fain deny me access to the means of doctoral production.”
Chuckie’s grin widened.
“The PHD trap.”
“It’s a Mexican standoff. I owe them money and they owe me a doctorate.”
“So you’ve finished your thesis?”
“I have written five hundred and thirty-five pages.”
“That’s a lot of pages.”
“Indeed it is. Over twice the requirement.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“That would be telling.”
“There must be some recourse.”
Chuckie’s smile widened and his eyes narrowed. He shrugged as if it was all quite simple. “Doesn’t matter anyway. Funding cuts will render degrees useless. The Tower will crumble on its own.”