Emily Rubin - Stalina

This was a few years ago. A pair of teenage lovers went the way of Romeo and Juliet. They left a note that said, “We love this room and each other very much. Good-bye.” I sent this note through the police to the families. I hope they are glad to have something from their loved ones and to know that even in such tragedy the motel had given them a place of peace, however briefly.

Bill Clinton had just been elected president, for the second time. It was late on election night and most of the votes were already counted. Carmela and I were not yet citizens, but we watched on the television and ate lots of popcorn, throwing bits to the cats. In Russia, the elections were never cause for celebration. Democracy was a shadowy illusion of the Kremlin. Elections were always landslides. Little did we know that while we amused ourselves, and Bill Clinton was basking in his triumphant second win, the desperate couple was drinking a poisonous cocktail.

I made my usual fifteen-minute warning call to the room, the Caribbean Sunset Room. After several calls with no response, I went in and found the young lovers in each other’s arms, dead. The double suicide made the tabloid papers. Apparently the young fellow had spurned the older sister of his beloved. The rejected sister went mad and had to be institutionalized. The family never forgave him and tried to keep the lovers apart. The papers made him out to be a ruthless cad. I remember seeing them before they went to the room. They seemed simply young and in love. Business slowed down for a while after that, but not for long. This sad story was soon forgotten.

A couple of years after the suicides, there was a death by hanging, but that one never made the papers. President Clinton was in the news again. This time it was about a stain on a stocky girl’s dress. I never understood what the problem was. I can understand his wife being upset, but he’s a man—they are known for losing their minds when it comes to what my mother used to affectionately call their “Monsieur Mindless.”

“Tell your lover, ‘I miss your Monsieur Mindless,’” my mother said to me one night. “It never fails to fluster them, but men like to know you are thinking about them. Miss your, monsieur —get it, Stalina?” She was simply being philosophical about men. Her experience was limited to my father and Maxim, but her delusions made her expansive with advice. She knew English and French and would mix the languages in our conversations often. I was very confused, and had been crying about Trofim.

“Yes, Mother, I miss his Monsieur Mindless,” I said.

“Don’t bother with him; he’s a two-faced snob. You can always find someone else to fuck.”

I was too shocked to react, beyond choking back my tears. When I told my friends the expression, they thought my mother was hysterically funny. I informed them that she was losing her mind. My friends still loved the expression, and when we would gossip about the men in or out of our lives, “Monsieur Mindless” was always there. Sometimes I still miss Trofim, but luckily, I live here at the motel and have this red heart-shaped tub to soak away any troubles in the water and bubbles.

That terrible night, a fellow who had been to the motel several times, always with a different woman, rented the “Roller Coaster Fun Park” for two hours. After half an hour he came to the front desk to get change for a fifty-dollar bill. I got a better look at him and saw how strangely he was dressed. His black raincoat had a fur collar, and his head was covered with a baseball cap that had “I Love Berlin” embroidered in red across the front. Previously, I remembered him being bald, but this time he had chin-length black hair sticking out from under the hat. I recognized him for the distinctive pockmarks on his face that had the shape of half moons on both his high cheekbones. He usually signed in as Santa Claus, but that day he signed the name Julius Caesar.

“Hello, how are you today?” I gave him my usual greeting.

“You recognize me?” he shot back.

“It’s your handwriting. Santa Caesar, Julius Claus, it makes no difference—you have a very distinctive half-moon shape to your…letter C , sir.”

“Santa Caesar, I like that,” he said.

I heard the door to the Roller Coaster Room open, and then a woman’s voice. “Hey, what are you doing? I thought you’d be right back. I’m feeling lonely all by myself in here.” She had left the door half open.

To my regular customer I said, “Julius Caesar was a very complicated man.”

“Was he now? You are a smart little lady.”

As he turned to go to the room, he looked back at me and said, “What is now amiss that Caesar and his senate should redress?”

It took me a moment, but I added, “Act Three, Scene Four.”

“Act Three, Scene One,” he said as he tipped his baseball hat with the wig attached.

He was in the room for less than an hour, and then he left without the woman. As he passed the front desk, he said, “She’s resting up for the time we have left. Here’s an extra twenty in case she needs more time.”

An hour passed, and I heard nothing from the room, and there was no answer to my phone call. A hardening knot of unease began to grow sharp tentacles in my stomach. I chewed an antacid, which helped, but I still felt that something was terribly wrong.

The crow was making a huge racket outside the room. There is an ugly side to the short-stay world, and this was one I would like to say never happened. As I opened the door, the strong smell of the woman’s perfume hit me, and then I saw her, a scarf pulled tight around her twisted neck. She was hanging dead from the roller-bed-coaster.

I called the police. Two came quickly. Many of them are my customers. They help to keep my business going smoothly and don’t want any trouble for their comrades. The woman, a local prostitute, was one they knew well.

As one of the officers picked his teeth with a matchbook, he said, “We’ll call this a suicide. No worries—we’ll take care of the body. You can go back to work.”

The other officer said, “No need to mention this to anyone, Ms. Folskaya. We’ve got your back.”

“My lips are sealed,” I replied. The poor woman; what brought her to such a sad end I can never know.

Most of my work here at the motel is very routine, but as you can see, at times it can try my patience. And as with the events of that night, they can sometimes do much worse. Booking rooms, taking inquiries from hushed voices in random phone booths, or dealing with the demands of my regular customers who act like this is their own private club. This is my life, my work, my world now.

“What do you mean the Roller Coaster Room is booked?” one of them snapped just the other day.

“Sorry, it’s first come first served; that’s our policy,” I responded.

“But I use the Roller Coaster Room every Thursday at three o’clock. I have now for a year.”

“Why not try the Caribbean Room? It’s very popular.”

He is an older gentleman who always signs himself in as Mark Twain, a local hero here in the Hartford area.

“You’ve got me over a barrel. She’s not going to like it; she likes to eat cotton candy while we…”

“Yes, I understand, but the Caribbean Room has its own romantic charms.”

“Maybe I’ll bring her a piña colada instead of the cotton candy.”

“That’s the spirit,” I said.

Time somehow always moves on. Last week Carmela found half a green rubber sexual pleasure device. I believe it is called a dildo . It was cut in half and left on the back seat in the Highway to Heaven Room. She never found the other half. People get crazy. I gave her a twenty-dollar bonus for dealing with that, and we had a good laugh. Another time a pair of fur-covered handcuffs was left in the Gazebo Room locked onto one of the bedposts. We had to dismantle the bed to remove them. Carmela wanted to give them to her boyfriend, but I warned her that without the key they could prove to be dangerous. She hung them on the wall of the linen room, where the cats love to swat at them. Yes, now we have more than one cat. Amalia recently went back to Russia to take care of her mother and left her cats, Shosta and Kovich, at the motel with me.