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

I open the door further to let him inside. The blanket I am wearing around my body falls to the floor, and a shiver passes through me momentarily before I can get it back on. “Papa, I told you I wouldn’t be able to call you or drive back. It’s Shabbat. No phones, no cars.”

He lets out a breath of air, as if he’s been holding it since we last saw each other. “I didn’t know that. Sorry.”

“I told you that like three times!” I complain. Is fifty-five is too young to have Alzheimer’s? Or is it just the constant lack of sleep eating away at his memory skills?

Papa doesn’t move from the doorway. “Maybe you did. I can’t remember.”

If he didn’t look so worried, I might be annoyed at him, possibly angry, too. But he’s too pathetic-looking to be angry with. This stuff with Anna is clearly getting to him. I’m sure it doesn’t help that Mama is gone. My dad was never good at being alone; he went straight from his parents’ house to living with my mom and her parents. Then we came along, and it had been a full house ever since. The quiet, vast emptiness is likely starting to get to him.

“Come inside,” I tell him now, gesturing towards the very messy living room.

“This is okay. I came to take you to your grandparents,” he says. “They calling me nonstop.”

“Oh,” I say, grabbing my coat and bag. “Okay.”

“How did you even know where I was?” I ask Papa, sitting down across from him in the car.

“I remember house,” he explains.

“Did you talk to Zoya?”

“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”

“Papa! I’m doing everything I can out here and—”

“I tried. I couldn’t get. Odnoklassniki where we talked. The account is deleted. Emails got returned.”

“Sorry, I shouldn’t have snapped at you,” I say, looking out the window as we zoom past Gordon Park and over the Locust Street bridge. “I’m tired.”

“What about you?” he asks. He moves away from me, a funny look on his face. “Other than getting drunk, did you find something?”

“Maria?” my dad asks again.

“Sorry. I did make some progress. I got some phone numbers from a friend of mine,” I say. “Got” is probably a nice way of putting it; I had forced Liam to write down the numbers for me before I would get out of his shitty van. “For her old roommates.”

“Da?” Papa looks pleased. He reaches into his cigarette carton and takes one out to light. “That could help.”

“Problem is…”

“Shabbat.” He smiles a little. “See, I do listen.” He looks out the window in thought, then opens it to let out the smoke. The sound of birds twittering enters the room, and for a moment, I feel relaxed. It’s easier now when my dad is relatively calm. When he is nervous, or anxious—which happens often—it’s like there’s so much of it inside him it spills over onto me and I can’t feel anything else. It’s probably why I am so much more relaxed in Israel. “Okay. Well, I can call them after grandparents.”

He turns down Oakland Ave, and becomes quiet for a moment. Then he gazes at me with a strange expression. It’s part wistful, but disappointed or angry too. “Did you know your sister smokes?” he asks.

“What? No.”

“She thought she could hide it from me…” he starts, then shakes his head. “I’m not as stupid as I look.”

“I can’t imagine anyone calling you stupid,” I grimace.

Papa inhales deeply. “No matter what I try to do for you two, you just do the opposite.”

I swallow. “She’s nineteen. I’m sure it’s a phase.”

My dad looks me right in the eye. “Was it a phase for you?”

I turn away. I don’t think he’s talking about smoking anymore. “Give her a break,” I say. “It’s not like it was when you were her age. People don’t have time to ask questions when they’re starving.”

“And this better?” Papa says, gesturing to the ceiling of the car, meaning the entire world of 2008.

“In some ways it’s better. In other ways, it’s worse,” I shrug. “But that happens with every generation, don’t you think?”

Papa sighs, then pulls into a parking spot on Farwell Avenue. He puts his coat back on and opens the door, all in one swift motion. I follow him outside as we walk into the apartment building more familiar to me than any of our previous homes because my grandparents hadn’t lived anywhere else in nearly twenty years.

“Did you look at Anna’s bank accounts at all? Did you find anything?”

He shakes his head. “Nothing.” Then he goes into his pocket and reaches for his wallet. “That reminds me.” He shoves a bunch of cash in my face.

“What is this for?” I ask. He’s so close to me now I can smell his generic Dove soap. I back up a little.

“It’s not from me,” he explains. “It’s from your grandpa.”

“Oh. Nazi money?” I ask, taking the pile. It’s probably my portion of all the quarterly reparation money he gets from Germany. There’s like over a thousand dollars in there. I figured once I left he would give my half to Anna, but it doesn’t appear that way now at all. Or maybe he did give money to Anna. Maybe that’s the money she used to leave town. “Wow. That’s a lot of German guilt right there.”

Papa slides his hands into his coat pockets and starts walking up the stairs. “I guess maybe we know where Anna got the money to leave,” he says.

“Mashinka!” Dedushka cries out with joy. “Finally! You’re here!” He wraps me in a suffocating hug, before allowing my grandmother to do the same. By the end of which I have to sit down on their itchy couch to catch my breath. This is hard, when it’s probably eighty degrees inside. I wave a hand over my face, hoping they will get the hint. They do not.

“What took you so long?” Dedushka asks me instead.

I turn to my dad in confusion.

“They calling me nonstop since you landed,” he repeats in English. “But you had… enough to deal with.” The way he says it makes me understand: they have no idea that Anna is gone. Maybe they don’t even know my mom is gone.

“Excuse me,” I tell my grandpa, the closest phrasing to ‘I’m sorry’ that Russian has. “I was really busy.”

“Too busy for your grandparents?” Babushka chimes in from the rug-covered couch. It disturbs me slightly that she hasn’t bothered to put on real clothes for our visit. She’s in a long, cotton dressing gown with several large stains on it, and holds a thick blanket over her lap that smells like it didn’t dry well enough before she took it out of the dryer. “Who practically raised you? Oy, such ungrateful girls you have Pavel.”

My dad explains: “Mama. She only arrived yesterday.”

“I’m here now,” I say, trying to relax them. “Isn’t that good enough?” As I begin to peel off my coat, which is now stuck to me with a layer of sweat, I take the moment to look around the apartment. Was I expecting it to be different? If so, I would have been disappointed; it is exactly the same. I don’t think even one old framed photo from the long array of our school yearbook pictures has been moved. Like a time capsule from the nineties. No, like a time capsule from the Soviet Union. Because they still have all their old flower-patterned dishes and hand-painted tea sets and beautiful glassware sitting behind a glass case, as if in a museum collection, practically untouched. They never made friends here, not really, and I doubt people come to visit them other than my dad. And sure, most people in the building are old and Russian, some of them even related to them. But they probably have nice china of their own. What reason would my grandparents ever have to take it out? Even on their birthdays, we always went out to eat, or for the major ones, had parties in Russian restaurants.