Stuart Kaminsky - Fall of a Cosmonaut

“No … I …” he said, trying to back away, holding his hand up.

What happened next was a blur of imagination and confusion.

The man with the gun grunted and staggered forward. The other man turned toward the first and Ivan could see something heavy, a rock, crash into his face. The second man fell next to Ivan, soundlessly bleeding, his nose broken. Ivan tried to sit up.

The first man tried to level his gun but someone stepped forward and seemed to punch him in the stomach. The first man let out an “Ohh” that faded like the air from a flat tire.

“Are you badly injured?” Misha asked, helping Ivan to his feet.

“Badly? … No, I don’t think so. They tried to kill me. They are Russians,” said Ivan, bewildered.

“We heard,” said Misha.

Ivan looked at the two men who were with Misha. They seemed familiar. Yes, they had been in the bar.

“How did you know? How did you find me?” asked Ivan, now on his feet.

One of the two young men took off his jacket and handed it to Ivan, who tied it around his waist.

“My friends told me that this was a place where people come to get together. We saw them dragging you from the car.”

“You make friends quickly,” said Ivan.

One of the two young men said, “Maybe another time.”

The evening had already been a nightmare by the time Sasha and his mother had arrived at the movie theater.

They had gone out for dinner. Lydia had insisted. This was a special occasion. She would pay. They had eaten at the Yerevan, with Lydia, who had picked out the restaurant, grumbling rather loudly that she was not terribly fond of Armenian food.

“Then,” Sasha had said, loud enough for his mother and the people at the tables on both sides of them to hear, “why are we here?”

“Because you love Armenian food,” she said.

Sasha did not love Armenian food. He liked it reasonably well, but it was certainly not a culinary love. The bozbash -‘lamb and potato soup’-which seemed just fine to Sasha, was “too full of spices” for Lydia, who drank it all anyway. The chebureki -‘deep-fried meat pies’-which Sasha found delicious, were, according to Lydia, “filled with things that would block your heart and kill you.” She ate her entire plateful and drank a large glass of Armenian brandy.

The waiter had refused to acknowledge Sasha’s shrug and search for sympathy in a conspiratorial glance.

“What are you smiling about?” Lydia had said over brandy.

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“You look content,” she said suspiciously. “You’ve found some woman.”

“No,” he said, loud enough for her to hear. “But I was asked to be a movie star today.”

Lydia shook her head. She did not understand her son’s jokes.

“You should look terrible,” she said. “Your wife and children are gone. You should go get them. You could be in Kiev by train in half a day. I would pay. I want my grandchildren back.”

Now the entire restaurant, Sasha was sure, knew the history of the Tkach family. He doubted if that history interested them.

Lydia had paid the check, saying, “My son loves Armenian food. It doesn’t suit my stomach. He’s taking me to a movie.”

The waiter had said nothing. He didn’t have to be particularly polite. His tip was built into the check.

“ Shto ehtah zah feel’m, ‘what kind of movie is this?’” she asked.

“I told you,” Sasha said, “a kahmyehdyeeyoo, ‘a comedy.’”

“It is Japanese?” she asked. “I don’t like Japanese. Your great-grandfather died fighting the Japanese, and for what, Vladivostok.”

“It isn’t Japanese,” said Sasha, ushering his mother out of the restaurant. “It is English.”

And then they were in the movie. It was crowded. Before it began, Sasha begged his mother to turn on her hearing aid. He still had daymares of the last time he had taken his mother to a movie.

They sat.

“I can hear perfectly,” she said, loud enough for a thin young man with glasses in front of her to turn and give a look designed as warning against such outbursts during the film.

There were few empty seats in the theater. The murmur of the crowd was loud. Then Sasha Tkach’s nightmare in darkness began. The movie had started.

The subtitles seemed too long for what the English actors were saying on the screen.

“Which one is Monty?” Lydia asked aloud.

How, Sasha thought, could one explain. “The skinny one with the bad teeth,” said Sasha. “It’s his nickname.”

“Look, what? I thought those were women,” she said a little later. “One of them is standing by that urinal, peeing. It’s a man dressed like a woman.”

“It is a woman making a joke about men peeing,” said Sasha.

“Be quiet, please,” said the young man with glasses, turning to them.

“What is funny about women pretending to pee like men?”

“I don’t know,” said Sasha, sinking down in his seat, barely watching the movie, hoping for the end to come soon.

“What is … why are those men taking off their clothes?”

“They want to make money stripping,” Sasha explained. “They’re out of work.”

“I know that,” she said. “I can read, but who would want to see those men take off their clothes? Well, maybe that nice-looking one. Ah, I knew it, he’s a sissy boy.”

The young man with glasses turned around in his seat and said, “He is gay and you are loud and I think you should leave so that the rest of us in this theater can salvage some sense of satisfaction from this so-far intolerable situation.”

“I’m a police officer,” Sasha said, sitting up and reaching into his pocket to pull out his badge. “This is my mother. If you think you are having a bad time, try, if you have the imagination, to think of how I am feeling. You will go home alone. I will go home with my mother.”

“You have my sympathy,” said the young man with glasses, “but …”

“Right,” said Sasha. “Mother, let’s go.”

Sasha started to get up.

“I like this movie,” she said, refusing to budge.

“Listen to your son,” came a voice from behind.

“Why are they breaking those beautiful little gnomes?” asked Lydia.

“Sometimes, my mother, people get the uncontrollable impulse to break things. Let’s go.”

“You don’t like the movie. We will go,” said Lydia. “He invites me to a movie and then we leave before we know what’s going to happen.”

Sasha guided his mother up the aisle. Several people applauded their departure.

Once outside, Sasha took a deep breath of relief.

“I don’t understand why you didn’t like the movie,” Lydia said.

“You didn’t laugh once,” he said as they walked down the Arbat toward the metro station.

“It wasn’t a comedy,” she said. “You didn’t understand. That was the problem, why you didn’t like it. It was sad. They were out of work.”

“Mother, you are absolutely right,” he said.

“When are you going to Kiev?”

Akardy Zelach sat at the small kitchen table, turning a chicken bone over with his fork. His mother shifted her position in the next room. He could see her. She, like him, was a bit heavy and awkward, but she had a confidence and dignity, a certainty about everything, that he would never possess.

She was watching some game show on television. Akardy could see that it involved a big wheel with numbers that made no sense to him. Contestants spun the wheel and the audience shouted as it turned. His mother, fist clenched, urged the wheel on, turned sideways to will it another notch or turn.

“Then,” he said. “I should refuse.”

“If you can,” his mother said. “If you cannot …”