Christian Kiefer - The Infinite Tides

Peter unlocked the door and swung it open grandly. “Enter, my friend,” he said.

Keith nodded and waved Luda in first and then followed her. The smell of cooking food was everywhere. “My god that smells great,” he said.

“Ah yes, you see,” Peter said. “I tell you this is best food you will have ever.”

Luda giggled and moved past them and into the interior of the house.

“I believe it,” Keith said. Perhaps this was the way it worked: one man gets a job and another loses one, as an Olympian passes a baton. Perhaps this was an equation that would be solved by Keith taking Peter’s vacant job at Target.

“Astronaut Keith Corcoran,” Peter said. “This is honor to have you in our home. Please make yourself comfortable. I want to know everything about this Mr. Chen. I must know all. About research center too. I look up on Internet but you have inside story I think and this is not on Internet.”

“Sure,” Keith said.

“Petruso,” Luda called from deeper inside the house.

“Yes, come, come,” Peter said. “I apologize for excitement. I ask you here to enjoy yourself, not to get your information.”

“I’m glad to help,” Keith said.

Peter walked further into the house and Keith followed. He had seen it once before, when he had stumbled into this room to sling Peter’s unconscious body onto the sofa, but he had paid little attention to it then. It was similar to Keith’s house but not quite the same, the floor plan differing in ways that were subtle but noticeable. There was no kitchen island here; in its place was a broad, dark wood table with long benches on either side. The walls were decorated here and there with needlepoint tapestries that looked very old, each encased in an ornate wooden frame. A stag with a series of Cyrillic letters underneath. Another a series of small houses with curling smoke before them with a few sentences below the houses as if the letters sprouted out of the earth.

“Very beautiful,” he said.

“Ah yes, from my great-grandmother, that one,” Peter said. “And that one there from great aunt on father’s side. They come from Ukraine. My family is from village and make these things for selling. Later cities come and life changes.”

Keith nodded and stood looking at the hanging pieces.

“Many artists in family. My uncle carves whole scenes out of horns of oxen. So beautiful and detailed. Those are in Ukraine still. Too hard bringing here.”

Luda moved around the kitchen with a kind of bustling energy that at first glance might have seemed foreign to her being. Keith was struck by how very lovely she was, her dark eyes shining from her pale face, black hair pulled back into a small bun. Her bearing was of class and grace but the fluidity of her motion was incongruous with its setting: like watching a queen bake a cake or hoe a field.

Peter was excited and did most of the talking and Keith did his best to educate him on the research center, explaining its structure and the kind of work that was developed there, all the while reminding him that even entry-level jobs like the one Peter would be applying for were highly competitive. Peter continued as if such information was irrelevant but Luda interjected from the kitchen.

“Please,” she said. “Is this real interview?”

“Real? Yes,” Keith said.

“They are serious about him?”

“Yes, they’re serious. It’s a real interview.”

Luda had paused in the midst of her work preparing dinner and appeared to Keith now as if the center of a painting, the counter sloping toward her on one side and on the other the sink with leafy sprigs of wet vegetables fringing its polished steel surfaces, and then in the midst of that warmth stood Luda herself, not an image of a woman but rather an image of a human being in a location of weight or meaning, as if the locus of some physical space that he had forgotten about entirely but which was somehow present here, in this house, and the sight of which rendered him unable to speak.

They sat at the table, Luda and Peter on one side, Keith alone on the other, and Luda dished out a series of pillowlike cabbage leaves from a casserole dish, each stuffed with ground pork and beef and dripping with some kind of thin red sauce and topped with sour cream. The smell that emanated from it was wonderful indeed and upon the first bite the flavor of it flooded through him all at once. He simply could not remember the last time he had tasted anything so good and he said as much and Luda blushed.

“This is Ukrainian food?” Keith asked.

“The best Ukrainian food,” Peter said.

“The only food I know from that part of the world is that beet soup.”

“Borscht,” Luda said.

“Bah,” Peter said. “Beets are like terrible dirt. I hate them. Old grandmas make for children to eat for cruelty.”

“Shush, Petruso,” Luda said. “He might like borscht maybe.”

“No one likes borscht except grandmas with no teeth. He has teeth,” Peter said.

“I haven’t eaten like this for so long I can’t even remember,” Keith said.

“Thank you.”

“She is best cook,” Peter said.

“I agree,” Keith said. “And I don’t think I’ve ever had borscht.”

“I will cook you borscht then next time,” Luda said.

“Not even you can make borscht good,” Peter said.

Luda smiled and then said to Keith, “I am happy you have made my husband your friend.”

“Luda, do not—,” Peter began but Luda placed her hand on his and he quieted immediately.

“Petruso does not want me to say maybe but it is true. You are someone to look up to, I think. For Petruso and this family.”

Keith searched for something to say in response. “I don’t know,” he said at last.

“Yes,” she said simply.

Again the pause as he thought. Then he said, simply: “Thank you.”

“He knows this,” Peter said.

“Maybe true,” Luda said, “but good to say.”

Was he someone to look up to? Even now? He might have believed this to be possible once but that was so long ago now. “I’m glad to be here,” he said.

The food warmed him to the core. He had been given a glass of fruit juice of some kind — peach, he thought — and a glass of wine and Peter kept both glasses full so that Keith had no idea how much wine he had drunk, knowing that given his medication only a few glasses were enough to bring on drunkenness, a state acceptable when sitting outside with Peter but less so when sitting in Peter’s home as a guest. And yet he did not feel like a guest but rather was warm and comfortable and full as if he had become a member of the Kovalenko family somehow. It had been so long since he had felt such a sense of belonging. Not for many years with Barb. With Quinn, though, even during those last months when they were often at odds there had been brief moments of contact between them, silences in which they had simply been together, father and daughter.

And then he could feel her memory turning inside him and he looked up from his dinner plate. Her face floated in the room somewhere, watching him with vacant eyes.

“You are OK?” Luda said and he looked up at her abruptly.

“Oh,” he said, “yeah.” He looked from her to Peter. Both of them were staring back at him.

“You look maybe not well,” Peter said.

“No, no, I’m fine.” He paused and then said, “Maybe too much wine.”

They both continued to stare at him and he took a quick drink of water and then looked back at Luda and said, “You know,” and then paused again, cleared his throat. His heart thumped wildly in his chest. “I know a bit about Peter’s life but I don’t know anything about yours.”

“This is nothing to talk about,” Luda said.

“Please,” Keith said. Just that. Quinn hovering against his chest. Then: “You grew up in Ukraine?”