Stuart Kaminsky - Tarnished Icons

“Me,” said Pulcharia, knee-high to his baggy trousers, holding out her arms.

Sasha picked her up, kissed both her eyes and nose and hugged her, thinking that in spite of Lydia’s insistence that the child looked like Sasha’s grandmother, Pulcharia was clearly Maya’s child. This was how Maya had looked as a child. They had photographs. Lydia denied the striking resemblance and insisted that her granddaughter was a replica of Lydia’s own mother.

Sasha put his daughter down and accepted a cup of coffee and a slice of bread from Maya. Only then did he turn to his mother, a small, wiry woman with a determined face that would have been considered handsome were it not for her nearly constant scowl. There was more than a bit of gray in her short, wavy hair. She wore a sagging, heavy blue robe and regarded her son with a look of determination.

“Dobraye utra,” Sasha said, continuing to eat. “Good morning, Mother.”

“Two things,” Lydia shouted as Pulcharia sat herself down at the table near the window and ate last night’s bean soup and a large piece of bread. The child had the enviable ability to tune out her grandmother.

“Yes, Mother,” Sasha said, sitting in front of a bowl of soup and joining his daughter. He was sure that Maya had finished eating sometime before.

“First,” said Lydia, “the child kicks in her sleep. She moves all around. I can’t sleep.”

Lydia’s unceasing snoring was evidence to the contrary, but Sasha looked up as his mother moved toward him.

“I’m afraid you’ll just have to sleep in your apartment more,” he said.

Hovering over him, she ignored his comment. Maya looked at her watch, gulped down the remainder of her coffee, kissed Pulcharia, gave Sasha a look of sympathy, and moved to give the baby a good-bye kiss. “Second, this apartment is too cold,” Lydia said.

“Everyone’s apartment is too cold or too hot,” said Sasha. “It is a fact of winter life in Moscow.”

“I intend to complain,” Lydia went on.

“To whom?” he asked, dipping his bread into the soup.

“Third,” Lydia said. Maya was putting on her coat.

“I thought you said there were only two things,” Sasha said before he could stop himself.

“Grandma did,” Pulcharia confirmed.

“You have still made no effort to be assigned to an office job,” Lydia said.

“I don’t want an office job,” Sasha said with what he thought was remarkable composure considering that he had gone through this conversation with his mother perhaps a hundred times before.

“You have a family,” she said.

Maya closed the door quietly and escaped.

“Yes,” he said.

“People try to kill you. You do dangerous things.”

“Sometimes,” he said.

“You’re like your father,” Lydia said. “You have a temper. You’re easily angered and your emotions get you into trouble.”

Sasha checked his watch. On this point, he knew, his mother was right. Sasha’s father, whom Sasha did not even remember, had been an army officer. He had died on duty in Estonia when Sasha was two. The official cause of death was pneumonia, but Lydia was convinced that he had died of debauchery.

“Your father was always volunteering to go to distant places, even Siberia,” she said, “because of his hot blood.”

And, Sasha was certain, to escape from his wife, who had been a beauty but who almost certainly had the same personality then as she was displaying now.

“Today you ask for a transfer to a ministry office position,” she insisted. “I will go back and see some of my old friends. They have already said they would help.”

Sasha took his and Pulcharia’s bowls and put them and the spoons in the small sink behind him.

“No, Mother,” he said.

“Then I will talk to Porfiry Petrovich again,” she shouted.

To this the baby reacted with a scream followed by crying. Lydia didn’t seem to hear him. Pulcharia ran to the crib, where she had some success in quieting little Illya.

“Porfiry Petrovich has no power to transfer me,” Sasha said. “Besides, he would not do so without my consent, even if he could.”

“Colonel Snitkonoy,” she said. “I’ll go directly to him.”

“He will pat your hand, tell you he understands, promise to see what he can do, and then forget you came except to tell me that it would be best if I did what I could to keep you away from him.”

“Stubborn,” she said. “Like your father.”

Sasha nodded.

“He needs a new diaper,” Pulcharia called. “He stinks.”

“The baby needs a new diaper,” Sasha shouted, walking across the room to take his own coat and wool cap from the rack near the door. “And I am very late.”

“This conversation is not over,” Lydia said.

“Of that I am certain, Mother,” he said, buttoning up.

“Gloves,” Lydia said.

He pulled his gloves from his pocket and displayed them.

“He stinks,” Pulcharia repeated, leaning over the railing of the crib to get the odor more directly.

Sasha hurried back across the room, kissed his mother’s cheek, and marched quickly toward the door.

“I don’t want to stay home with Grandma,” Pulcharia said as he opened the door. There were tears in her eyes.

“She loves you,” Sasha whispered so that his mother could not hear. “You must stay with her.”

“Yah n‘e khachooo,” said Pulcharia. “I don’t want to.”

“I’ll bring you something special,” Sasha said, taking his daughter in his arms and kissing her again. “Now I’m late.”

“We’ll go for a walk,” said Lydia, moving to the crib. “We’ll go to the park.”

“Okay,” said Pulcharia.

When Lydia had worked in the offices of the Ministry of Public Affairs, she had frequently lived with Maya and Sasha and it had been almost tolerable. Now Lydia was retired, on an insignificant and often unpaid pension, and had plenty of time. In spite of the pitiful pension, Lydia was not poor. During her more than forty years in the ministry, Lydia had quietly managed to put away money. What little she saved, she converted from rubles into jewelry, jewelry she bought from people who needed cash for bread. Gradually Lydia learned enough about jewelry to know what she was buying and to make sometimes remarkable purchases. She kept everything in a box she hid carefully wherever she was living. Then, after she had officially retired, with the Soviet Union in the process of falling, Lydia sold her jewelry, piece by piece, at a profit, to the sudden influx of entrepreneurs, carpetbaggers, and outsiders in Moscow.

While Yeltsin stood on the top of a tank proclaiming the end of Communism, Lydia was going to the proper ministry offices and arranging to buy government Bread Shop 61 half a block from where she was living near Solkonicki Park. When Gorbachev had started using words like perestroika -the restructuring of the Soviet communist system-and glasnost -openness to express one’s opinions-Lydia had called a cousin who was a farmer on a collective outside of Kursk and made a deal with him. It was simple. If the government ever did fall and the farmers became free to own and deal, she would be willing to purchase all the wheat he could produce on his land and that of some of his neighbors. It was not an enormous amount, but it would be enough to supply flour for the bread she planned to sell. Lydia’s cousin even knew someone in Kursk who could convert the wheat to flour at a reasonable rate, with her cousin, of course, getting a small commission for that service. Lydia and her cousin would annually reset the price, and she would make it a fair one. Living in fear of having no government to which to sell his crop, her cousin and his friends had readily agreed. Then she had made the necessary vzyatka -the unofficial bribes needed to get services-obtained the necessary purchases, and became the owner of a bread store. The bureaucrats who had sold her the government store that they now deemed worthless were happy to take her money even though its value was dropping crazily. She had bought the store and had full papers and rights to it. It had even left her with significant savings.