Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

“What?” she said.

“Then, if you like, you may come to Soviet Union and live in my house one year. But only if you like,” he continued. “It is no obligation.” His accent was halting and twisted, like nothing she had ever heard.

“I know nothing about this,” Maxine said.

“It is glasnost program.”

“It's like nobody tells me anything,” she said.

“You have a brother,” Yuri stated flatly, and fished a piece of paper out of his jeans. “His name is Brian. He is for me the exchange host.”

“Nobody calls him Brian,” Maxine told him. “We call him Bat.”

Yuri gazed at her with his exhausted eyes. He reached into his jeans pocket again and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, then sat down on the porch and lit one, throwing his match onto the rock lawn.

“Because his room is like a cave,” Maxine said.

Yuri nodded. “You are talking of the mouse with wings.”

“Yes, exactly.” She left the house and sat down next to him and waited until he was done smoking. Then she picked up his suitcase and led him to Bat's room. It was pitch black in there and smelled like an armpit. She usually avoided it.

“Well, here's your new home,” she said. “You can watch TV if you want.”

Maxine's mother made enchiladas that night and they all ate dinner together, in the dining room. This was such an unusual occurrence that Maxine and Bat stood in the kitchen beforehand, momentarily baffled, until their mother gestured to the chairs around the table. In their house people tended to be preoccupied by individual activities — work, school, juvenile delinquency, as the case may be. They rarely ate meals together, were rarely even home at the same time. Maxine enjoyed this setup as a rule, especially when it freed her own days from scrutiny, but she liked it less when Russians started showing up on the doorstep unannounced. She sat down across from Yuri, who had taken a nap that afternoon but still looked tired.

“Yuri, these are enchiladas,” her mother said. “A local specialty. It's Mexican. We are very close to Mexico, I guess you know that.”

“Ah, yes,” he murmured, looking out the back window as if he might see Mexico right there. Maxine followed his gaze: there was nothing to look at, just some faded rosebushes blooming into the alley, then the square backs of other houses, all the same-looking houses in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

“I didn't make them too spicy, because I thought you might not be used to it. But if you do like hot food, you can put the salsa on it. Salsa comes from the chile pepper. Do you have chile peppers in Russia?”

“Chiles are a New World crop, Mom,” Maxine put in.

“Oh, shut up, Max,” Bat said, and Yuri looked at him. Bat was slumped in his chair, hair falling over his eyes. He also looked exhausted. Last year he'd been suspended for selling speed out of his locker; school administrators took it away from him, and since then he had had no energy. Their parents thought this could all be traced to their divorce.

Yuri lifted some enchilada with his fork. Strings of cheese stretched down to the plate. He chewed carefully, swallowed, and smiled. “This is delicious, Mrs. Watson.”

Maxine's mother beamed at him. “Why, thank you, honey,” she said.

On Sunday, as always, Maxine and Bat had dinner with their father at Furr's Cafeteria.

“Ah, the Russian's here. Welcome,” he said to Yuri, extending his hand. “We're real happy to have you.”

“Thank you,” said Yuri.

They picked up the wet plastic trays and pushed them along the metal counter, past the salads and Jell-O. Yuri watched Bat carefully, Maxine saw, and said to each counter person, “The same as him, the same as him.” He wound up with a plate full of starches, macaroni and cheese and fried potatoes, but seemed satisfied. At the table he gulped down two glasses of Coke, then went back with Bat for coconut cream pie.

“So, Yuri, what part of Russia are you from?” their father said.

“Like you know any part of Russia,” Bat said.

“I live in the very far north,” Yuri said. “I like the weather here.”

“Okay, I seen this on the TV,” their father said. “That's the land of the midnight sun. In the winter it stays dark, but in the summer, the sun shines all the time, right? Way into the night.”

“Yes,” said Yuri. He took a fork to his pie and tried it. When he smiled, the chocolate sprinkles caught between his teeth were as dark as dirt.

Yuri stuck next to Bat all the time. There was one other exchange student that year, a Swede who was living in Happy Valley and called Yuri on the telephone a few times, almost singing his name in his lilting accent, but Yuri discouraged his advances. He explained at the dinner table that he had come to America to meet Americans, not Swedes. At school Maxine sometimes saw Yuri and Bat drifting down the hallway together, or smoking cigarettes in the parking lot. Bat said he thought that Yuri was a spy, a Soviet agent brought over by their parents to watch his movements. “We're living in a police state,” he whispered.

“You are like paranoid,” Maxine said.

Yuri seemed to enjoy the desert. Bat had just gotten his license and bought an old Chevy Malibu — probably with his drug money, Maxine thought — and the two of them spent a lot of time driving around outside town, Yuri staring quietly at the juniper and yucca, the pink and pocked brown of the rolling canyons. They drove to the falls at night and swam in the turquoise water, or threw rocks at the ducks in the Pecos. All this Bat reported to Maxine, speaking in a hushed tone, when they met in the hallway at home.

“He's my shadow,” Bat said. “But I have to say he's not a bad guy.”

Maxine didn't see either of them very much. She was a junior and taking AP English and practicing for the SATs. More than anything she wanted to go away to school, someplace east, with leaves changing in the fall and tall brick buildings stacked with dusty books, anywhere away from the desert, from Furr's and JCPenney. Her history teacher, Mr. Vasquez, was coaching her on the SATs. He was a short man whose receding hairline revealed dark freckles on his head as it went. She wondered whether they'd been there his whole life, waiting under his hair, or had come into existence only as his scalp came into contact with the sun. In class he wheezed nervously and coughed a lot, but one-on-one, talking with Maxine about her education, he grew passionate and raised his voice. He felt strongly about her future. He talked about the Ivy League, which she always pictured as a huge dome, like a football stadium garlanded with vines, spanning all the New England states.

“The SATs are your passport out of here, Maxine,” Mr. Vasquez said, and she very much wanted this to be true.

On Thanksgiving, Yuri took careful bites of the sweet potato and marshmallow casserole. “This is delicious, Mrs. Watson,” he said. He said this about everything. Maxine suspected he'd been coached.

On Christmas Day he went into Bat's room and brought out small wrapped gifts: for Maxine and their mother, beaded necklaces; for Bat and their father, Communist Party watches. One had a hammer and sickle where the twelve should be, and the other had a tank. Bat got the tank version and loved it, showing it all around school. Some guy whose father was in the reserves called him a Communist, and after the fight Bat came home with a bruised cheek and a black eye. But he kept wearing the watch.

Yuri received letters from the USSR, odd, blocky handwriting on thin blue paper with many stamps, a single page folded over itself to make an envelope. One night after dinner he reached into the pocket of his jeans and unfolded one of these. Inside was a picture of his two little sisters, ten-year-old twins with black hair in braids.