The news affected Senderovsky more than it did the others. He watched the video footage of the Midwestern murder-by-cop over and over while he was on the toilet locked in the upstairs bathroom. He memorized the scene. The ugly institutional shoes, the ugly institutional pants, the baton and flashlight and walkie-talkie, the upturned sunglasses worn high over the buzz cut, and beneath all that brute institutional force, a dying man crying out the last word that was likely also his first, those two repeating syllables, Ma and Ma. And then he was a man no more, but a lifeless slab hoisted on an institutional gurney, and there was static and instructions and dispatch codes. All of it perfectly commonplace, like an order for Gruyère cheese placed at the local market for curbside pickup.
During the ascending phase of his career a speaking service had dispatched Senderovsky to give rousing lectures about coming from a failing country and transforming himself from a bullied immigrant to a successful landowner with nearly a hectare to his name. He had by then published a memoir describing the difficult relationship he had had with Mother and Father Senderovsky, but he would end his mostly comic lectures on a serious note by thanking his parents for doing one thing right in their lives, for subjecting themselves to refugee humiliation in order to bring him here to this clime and soil, away from the oppression of their disintegrating homeland.
But what if it had all been a mistake? Was it a coincidence that the two countries that seemed the most interested in sheltering and then putting to work the Soviet-fleeing Senderovskys with their magnetized Soviet chessboards and lacquered folk-spoon collection were apartheid-era South Africa and this country?
All these years, Senderovsky saw, but he also did not see, or pretended not to see. （Or refused to see.） When he decorated his Petersburg Bungalow, when he spoke to his wife and daughter in upper-caste Russian, when he wrote comically about the world he had escaped from, of fat oligarchs run amok, when he put on the metaphorical shapka and epaulets for his Los Angeles agent, he distanced his gaze from the country he inhabited. In the end, he had fled from all the land that was not in his possession. He had made of himself a protectorate. （And who would protect him in the end but the local sheriffs?）
He had been a refugee to this country and now the countryside provided an added refuge. From a childhood based on kasha and blows, he had risen to the kind of stature that will allow him and his friends, his chosen ones, to outwit the virus and whatever else a collapsing ecology had in store. File that, along with three proofs of privilege and the appropriate fee, at the local county registry for the American Dream.
As an immigrant his mission had been simple. He was brought here by his parents to make money off what an important Jewish author had once termed “the American berserk.” You came, they laughed at your accent on an urban playground, and then you were given your degrees and guided into battle. By which point, you were just a scab sent in to reinforce the established order. In the video, as the white policeman was draining the air from his Black victim’s lungs with his knee, another cop, a Hmong immigrant, stood in front of him in a wide-open stance, daring anyone to come to the dying man’s aid. He could have been a Russian, a Korean, a Gujarati. All of us, Senderovsky thought, are in service to an order that has long predated us. All of us have come to feast on this land of bondage. And all of us are useful and expendable in turn.
At the mouth of the state highway, away from the liberal estates, they were putting up blue flags supporting the police. Senderovsky saw them on a walk and shuddered at the way the flags flew, stiff and new, as if unsure of themselves and their capacity to instill fear. In case the point of the flags wasn’t subtle enough, muscular dogs ran down one property’s minor hill to growl at passersby. （Karen and Nat avoided the house on their walks because the unchained dogs frightened them.） Imagine what it would take for Senderovsky, the owner of the largest （by area） estate on the road, to ring that doorbell （after evading the dogs） and demand （beg?） for the flag to be taken down? What would he say? “Sir, it offends me”？ “Sir, I’m scared.” The whole point was to offend him. The whole point was to make him scared.
He wanted to leave. To get on a plane. To flee them all. But where would he go? Across the ocean the ground swelled with the blood of his dog-bitten ancestors. Isn’t that where one belonged? Because otherwise, wasn’t he, as Vinod had finally called him, after thirty-three years of observation, after an entire Jesus of a lifetime, a fucking fraud?
* * *