Zhanna Slor - At the End of the World, Turn Left

“Me? Angry? American ?”

“I will tell you what I told her then: there are good things and bad things about living anywhere,” my grandpa says. “As long as you have your people, why should it matter if you stay on one tiny piece of it over another tiny piece of it?”

“Try telling that to Hitler,” my grandma laughs, and actually, it’s pretty funny, so we all start laughing. But then the phone starts ringing, and my grandpa ushers Baba Mila into the bedroom, and the moment has passed. “Go on already!” he tells Babushka, then saunters to the kitchen wall and picks up the phone. It rings five or six times by the time he gets there. “Yes, yes, we are almost ready,” he says, which is a straight-up lie. “She doesn’t have to wait here, Pavel, we’re not children .”

He looks at me then and hangs up the phone.

“What?” I ask.

Dedushka starts leading me towards the door. “Go, go, you’re only making things worse,” he says, practically pushing me out. “We’ll be down soon.”

“Dedushka, he can wait two minutes,” I say, but he keeps pushing me until my hand is on the knob. “Don’t you need help?”

“Who’s here? Pavel?” my grandma asks, coming out of the bedroom, still in her robe. “Why doesn’t he come up here? He’s avoiding us.”

“He was here yesterday, what are you saying?” my grandpa asks. “Go back to the room and get ready! You’ll see him in the car!”

“There’s something very strange about him the last few weeks,” my grandma says, shaking her head. “Maybe I was a bad mother… Certainly, I did something wrong that he treats me this way.”

“Oh, enough already,” Dedushka Sasha says. He’s starting to really get mad, I can tell. I feel sort of bad for him. All he’s ever wanted was for everyone to be happy but no one even wants to be happy. They want to feel alive.

“What do you mean he’s acting strange?” I ask my grandma in English. “How has he been strange?”

“Sneaking around here, all quiet and serious,” my grandma says. “Like when he used to get a bad grade and didn’t want to tell us.” Here she looks at me. “Your father was not a very good student, you know. It’s really a miracle he’s done so well, if you think about it.”

“Mila!” Dedushka Sasha cries. “Bozhe moy! Are you a saint, and didn’t tell me? He’s perfectly normal!”

My grandma shrugs at us like we’re idiots. “Well, what do I know? I’m just an old useless lady, like everyone keeps telling me.”

“Who told you that?” I ask, almost laughing again. People are always getting mad at Baba Mila, but I doubt anyone said this to her. She is cantankerous, but she’s no fool. My dad always told me how he couldn’t get away with the smallest indiscretion when he was a child, because she always seemed to know what he was up to before he did. This is part of the problem with being an only child for so long: too many eyes watching you. She and Dedushka Sasha had wanted more kids, but after my dad, she had nothing but miscarriages. She used to call him her little miracle. Then she called him her little joker. Not because he was especially funny, but because he was always getting in trouble for talking too much in school. Her idea of him as a class clown made it better somehow. As a result, to combat this notion, my dad has since been far too devoted, always prepared and preparing to save them and us. Always so serious. If he jokes at all it’s after several rounds of shots and I never get the joke. I never get any Russian jokes. I think there must be an inverse correlation of how separate you are from a culture with how much your sense of humor can align with it.

“Go, Annushka,” my grandpa says. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

“I know perfectly well what I’m saying!” my grandma yells. “Just like I know perfectly well that Mikhail is trying to steal my grave right out from under my nose!”

I look at my grandpa with sympathy. “I thought you said it was Pyotr,” I tell her quietly.

My grandpa, who is sitting back down again, leans forward, claps his hands even harder on his knees, and says, “Enough, Milachka . That’s enough.”

“Why, Sasha? What did I say?” she asks, looking more confused than ever.

“It’s fine, Babushka. You didn’t say anything wrong,” I explain, but still, I put my hand back on the doorknob. Before I open the door, I turn around to ask her one last thing. “Hey, Babushka. Do you have any nieces or great-nieces named Zoya?”

My grandma takes maybe two seconds to think this over before she starts shaking her head. “No, I would remember such a poor choice in names.”

I can’t decide if I feel relieved or not, knowing this for sure, but I don’t have time to worry on it much because my grandpa starts pushing me out the door.

“Lyudmila,” Dedushka says. “Let her go! Get dressed for God’s sake!”

I hear him screaming this all the way out the door and down the hall, which smells like burnt eggplant. It could be coming from anywhere, Russian immigrants make up most of the building’s residents and they all love to burn eggplant. Half this floor used to be full of my grandma’s siblings, but some level of dementia has taken nearly all of them. It doesn’t look like she will escape this fate either. How terrifying it must be to become lost in your memories when you have memories of Stalin and Nazis holding guns to your head. I bet no one ever thought about that after making it out alive and starting to rebuild their lives from scratch. Will my grandpa be forced to watch his sister die in his arms again at the camps? Will he relive being shot at by SS soldiers while he climbs the broken fence and runs through the fields of Poland? He barely talks about that time in his life, and I don’t blame him. He and my grandma probably assumed all those terrible years were behind them. That the past stayed in the past.

Maybe my dad thought the same thing. But he was wrong. They were all wrong.

Walking back to the car, I start to get sad. Seeing my grandparents always makes me sad, all cooped up in that stuffy apartment building, unable to get around on their own. And guilty, too. Couldn’t my parents have insisted they learn more English, or how to drive a car, or do anything at all besides babysit us? They probably feel so useless now, or at the very least bored out of their minds. I try to visit often, now that I live only five blocks away, but I am handicapped by my poor vocabulary and never stay long.

If I studied abroad for a semester, though? I’d pick it up in no time. And the more I think about it, the more I can’t stop thinking about it.

“No luck?” my dad asks when I get in the car, where he is blasting AM 620, a.k.a. the channel where Republicans scream a lot. They’re even louder today, angry, talking about the upcoming election. John McCain is not leading in the polls, and people are mad. I’m simultaneously glad and don’t care. Everyone already knows who they are voting for. They knew before it all started. Now it’s all about telling each other they are wrong and evil people for agreeing with the other guy.

Yeah, I’m staying out of that, thank you very much.

“They’re still changing,” I explain. I lean back into the chair and rest my legs on the dashboard. Then I notice my converse shoes have torn at the seam and put them back on the floor before my dad has another fit about how he didn’t move here from the Soviet Union so that I could wear ripped clothes. “Sorry. I tried.”

“Hmm,” my dad mutters, not looking up.

After a long silence, I search my brain for what I can talk about so that it is no longer Republican pundits screaming in my ears. “Babushka said you’ve been acting weird the last few months,” I say, casually. I let out a long, exaggerated yawn. “Is everything okay? You and Mom…?”