Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

“My house didn’t have a swimming pool,” I said.

“But you are still rich.”

“My father is rich,” I admitted. I was never comfortable talking about money. I knew that by world standards I was wealthy, but in the milieu where I was raised, most kids had trust funds.

“And your mother?”

“My parents are divorced,” I said.

“I know this. Jennifer told me.”

“Was this before or after she told you I was sad?”

“Of course you were sad,” she said. “Your sister died.”

I said nothing. I didn’t like the idea of Jenny’s using my family history as an anecdote.

“He gives you money, your father?”

I blushed when I thought of the enormous check he’d sent me for graduation. “Sometimes,” I said.

“I give the money to my father,” said Svetlana. “I have bigger salary now, at American company, than either of my parents. Average salary in Russia is eighty dollars per month. My mother works for Russian Olympic Committee for twenty-five years, but I am making more in one week than she is paid in whole month. My father is the chemical engineer. But I am supporting them.”

“Wow,” I said. I had been proud of myself for earning enough money for my trip to Moscow—I’d made the most of all those shifts at the coffee shop—but now I felt like a spoiled child. Maybe Svetlana was right about America. It was like kindergarten.

“Someday,” she said, “I will be rich like you.”

I moved my spoon to the other side of my plate. I felt so self-conscious that if Svetlana had offered me a cigarette, I would have smoked it just to have something to do with my hands.

“You must to eat,” she said.

“I think maybe I should just drink a Coke or something. It will settle my stomach.”

“I have something better than Coke,” she said. She reached under the table and produced a can of Czar.

“You carry this around in your purse?” I said.

She shrugged. “Now we can brainstorm,” she said. She tested the word as she said it, as if it were a melon she was examining before purchase. “Richard says whoever has best idea for Czar wins trip to New York. To work in office in Manhattan for a few weeks. It is incentive. I want to go to USA.”

I poured the can into my empty water glass. The cola was flat. “You really think people are going to drink this instead of Coke? Instead of Pepsi?”

“And instead of kvass,” she said. Kvass was a traditional Russian drink made from fermented rye. “Why not? We must to make brand stand for something.”

“Stand for what?” I said.

“When you think of Russia, what do you think?” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“First thing that walks into your mind when I say Russia.”

“The KGB,” I said.

“ Kak interesno. This is what most Americans say,” she said. “People come here and expect to see the spies. This is brand association.”

“It’s not a brand,” I said. “It’s your country.”

“USA is brand,” she said. “Your government is selling itself as Land of Free, da? Here in Russia we must—how do you call it?—reposition ourselves. So if Czar is Russian cola, what does this mean? How is this cola different from American cola?”

“You said I should come to Moscow to learn the truth,” I said.

“Ah, truth. You Americans love truth.” She leaned back in her chair and cracked her neck. “I think it is the favorite word—after freedom, of course. You want the truth, and you ask for it like the eggs you order for breakfast. Today I want my truth sunny side up! And tomorrow hard-boiled. And then sometimes it is scrambled. And you congratulate yourself for ordering this truth, because you think asking for it is what matters. But what is truth? Pravda? No, Pravda is a newspaper. We understand that there is not one truth. There is your truth and my truth and yes, your Jennifer Jones’s truth.”

“She’s not my Jennifer Jones.”

“No? You act like it. She is your obsession.”

“I’m not obsessed with her,” I said. “She was my friend.”

“Obsession,” she whispered theatrically. “Like Calvin Klein, yes?”

“If she’s really alive, tell me where she is.”

“I can tell you where the defectors—how do you say?—gang it out.”

“Hang out.”

“ Da, gang out.”

“She’s a defector?” I said. My shrink was going to have a field day.

Svetlana lit a cigarette and gave me a coy smile. “This would be very interesting truth. Front-page truth for sure. Is possible she lives in dacha outside Moscow, near Edward Lee Howard. KGB gave him apartment on Arbatskaya, dacha in country. Sure, maybe Jennifer Jones also has kvartira on the Arbat.”

“Everything is maybe!” I said.

Svetlana smiled. “Exactly,” she said. “Babushka na dvoye skazala.” Literally, Grandmother said two things. Meaning no one can know for sure.

“I’m sick of maybe.”

“Good thing come to those who wait.”

“I can tell that you work in advertising,” I said. “Everything you say sounds like a slogan.”

“Richard gave to us the presentation of slogans.”

“What presentation?”

“It was history of famous advertisements, from UK and USA. I know your Energizer Bunny. Your ‘Ring Around the Collar . ’ I know your ‘Good to the Last Drop . ’ Your ‘Ultimate Driving Machine.’ Your ‘Breakfast of Champions.’ Your ‘Snap Crackle Pop.’ ‘Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your Hands.’ ‘Takes a Licking and Keeps On Ticking.’ ‘Just Do It.’ ‘The Real Thing.’ ‘Where’s the Beef?’—”

I interrupted her. “Did Richard give you a test?”

“Kakoy?” Which?

“You just memorized all those ads for fun?”

“I am learning to climb corporate ladder.”

I studied her face for signs that she was joking.

“Capitalism,” she said with a shrug. “You swim or you drown.”

“Sink or swim.”

“Sink or swim, da, ” she said. She pondered the slice of bread in her hand and sighed. “It is not only the maps.”

“What maps?”

“The maps are always changing. Petersburg became Leningrad, then Petersburg again. And Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, even Ukraine break away from Soviet Union. And the cathedral? The Cathedral of Christ the Savior? Right here in center of Moscow? Stalin tore it down, then Khrushchev built the swimming pool there, but now they have torn down pool to build again the church. Perhaps someday it will be another swimming pool.” She waved her hand as if sweeping away cobwebs. “Everything is different. It is not the world we grew up in. Even our flag is new. Ponimayesh? ”

“Da,” I said. “I understand.”

“Everything we were taught to believe in does not exist anymore. We cannot go back. So we must to find the new things to believe.”

I admired her flexibility. She was too resourceful to sink. I looked at my watch and realized we’d been away from her office for two hours. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

“This is what you call working lunch,” she said. Then she lifted a finger to silence me and held it in the air, as if it were a radio tower waiting for a signal. I listened. Finally she leaned in and whispered, “The truth is that Jennifer is not ready to see you. When she is, I will contact you.”

“Does she know I’m here?” I said.

She sliced a finger across her neck to kill the discussion. Then she raised her glass and nodded at my glass of Czar.

I lifted it in a reluctant toast. Russians are fond of toasts. “U menya tost,” they say. I have a toast. I waited for Svetlana’s contribution.