They are drinking the Armenian cognac Andrei has brought, five stars imprinted on the label, the best cognac that never reaches their store counters. He has also brought a stick of hard salami called servilat she has seen only on the tables of theater banquets. They are slathering butter on slices of white bread, gluing to it the glistening dark-red circles pocked with white to make open sandwiches, which they devour in three bites because they are both starving. If her mother were here, shuffling down the hallway, she wouldn’t like what her senses would reveal: Sasha is wearing Andrei’s shirt over her naked body, and they both reek of the sweet, sweaty smell of sex. They chew on servilat and reminisce about Ivanovo, the only chunk of life they still have in common, the life when they were innocent, the life whose scenes still roll before her eyes like an old, beloved film.
“Do you remember the orchard at the end of our street, with those lilac bushes?” she says. “When I walked home from my piano lesson, twice a week, I always bumped into you at that turn where the fence was coming down in waves. Do you remember that?”
“Bump isn’t the exact word I’d use.” He laughs. “I waited there for you, deliberately, every Monday and Wednesday, from four to five, because I was never sure when your lesson would end.”
“Even in the rain?” she asks with a foolish smile she is unable to suppress. She knows the answer, of course, but she wants to hear it from him.
He knows this is not a real question. This is a silly postcoital game they are playing, and he knows to oblige. “Especially in the rain.”
“And then we could walk for five minutes next to each other before we turned onto the street where that scary house stood, behind a rotting fence. I always hated that we had to say goodbye there, by that black fence, before we went in different directions, so that Grandpa wouldn’t spot us together.”
They are smoking Andrei’s cigarettes, filtered and mild, much better than the harsh Cuban tobacco she buys for herself at Leningrad kiosks.
“When your father came back, I was so envious,” she says. “I wanted my father—not my real father but my imagined one, who looked like Kolya—to walk through the gate of our courtyard, just like that, and claim me. I often saw him in my mind, in a uniform cinched by a belt with a shiny buckle. He opens the gate and immediately walks toward me, then picks me up and hoists me onto his shoulders. And then, in my mind, I sail across the courtyard, taking it all in: the black roof of the shed, the backs of waddling chickens with their necks marked in Grandpa’s indelible pencil, the highest branches of apple trees I never got to see that aim straight into the sky. I so much wanted Kolya to return and claim me as a father would.”
“I know, but you didn’t want my father. He was a convict and a drunk. And anyway, by the time he showed up, I didn’t need a father. And even if I did, I certainly didn’t need him.”
How unfair it all seemed. Of all the fathers for whom so many sons and daughters had been waiting, the only father who returned was the unwanted one.
What she really wants to convey to him is the sadness that fills her about leaving him so shortly after his parents died. She should have been there to protect him, instead of choosing to save herself. The words don’t come, making her turn to a safer subject. “You used to walk around reciting Mayakovsky, remember?”
“I remember.” Andrei gives a little chuckle and takes a sip of the cognac glowing in his glass like honey.
She recites the lines they all had to learn by heart:
“Of Grandfatherly gentleness I’m devoid,
There’s not a single gray hair in my soul!
Thundering the world with the might of my voice,
I go by—handsome,
Twenty-two-year-old.”
“Back then, I thought I could’ve written it myself,” says Andrei. “To be handsome and twenty-two, with not one gray hair in your soul—that was the dream. No, it was even more than a dream: it was a goal, a manifesto.” His eyes grasp hers for a moment, then return to his glass, to their Ivanovo past. “Back then, I wanted to be a fighter, too. A revolutionary. Rising above the muck of that courtyard, the outhouse and the chickenshit, the moonshine my father brewed behind the shed so he could muster enough courage to hit my mother. To make a better life.” The honey depths of cognac must hold a great deal of Andrei’s Ivanovo childhood for him to stare into his glass as long as he does. “Mayakovsky was like a mayak—a lighthouse. He was everything I wanted to be.” Andrei pauses. “And everything I’m not.”