Kseniya Melnik - Snow in May - Stories

“A cat? How do you know it was the same one?”

“Makin stood up and sang the last few lines. His voice was weak now, so he overcompensated with passion. Everyone was a little uncomfortable. I managed get a glimpse of his nails.”

“There’s Mama.” Sonya’s mother was coming from the back stairs. She had already put on her fur hat and was barely holding on to her frost-proof fur coat, a thing so big and bulky it was known in the family as Little House.

“Our cabaret-beauty,” Oleg said. “There was a rumor that Makin had abandoned personal hygiene, and his nails grew so deep into his skin that he had to have surgery. But his nails looked completely normal to me, and he didn’t stink. He wore what they said he always wears now: a ratty turtleneck sweater with safety pins on the chest and felt boots.”

“Why was he wearing safety pins?” Sonya said. The story was making her sad.

“Protection against evil eye. And Gutman, I guess.” Oleg chortled.

“What are you talking about?” Sonya’s mother said.

“I haven’t even gotten to the good part.” Oleg tore Little House out of her arms and opened it up, a little too high for her. She climbed in. “In the middle of yet another round of toasts, an old woman in a housedress and slippers bursts in and starts assaulting the Moscow guests, screaming and flailing — something about Yeltsin’s mafiosos. She tried to drag Gutman out the door. To see a grandma curse like that…” Oleg shook his head.

“Who was she?” Sonya said. Her mother was looking at Oleg with suspicion, an expression Sonya noticed more and more often lately.

“Maestro didn’t explain anything. We caught it all on film, I can let you watch later.”

“He is an old man and a giant, giant talent,” her mother said.

“So, for him it’s forgivable?” Oleg said.

“If he’s made mistakes, I’ll be the last in line to judge him.”

Sonya stared at the way her mother’s nostrils flared when she spoke with ardor. In frosty weather, her cheeks became picturesquely red, and her nose stayed small and pale. The opposite always happened to Sonya: her nose reddened and her cheeks’ color drained.

“Let’s go, philosophers.” Oleg ushered them toward the exit.

“I still don’t understand why Makin didn’t come,” Sonya said.

Her mother bent toward her and whispered, “Your grandfather knew Makin when he lived in Magadan, did you know? Ask him before he leaves.”

Sonya had almost forgotten about Deda Misha, who was visiting from Kiev. She knew, of course, that he’d lived in Magadan when he was young, but in her mind, she could only picture him as she knew him in the summers during her school breaks, tending his vegetable garden in a short-sleeved plaid shirt.

Oleg strained to push open the theater’s heavy doors. “What are you two conspiring about? I think—” he said, and was cut off by the wind.

Sonya turned for one last look at the four figures on the theater roof: a soldier with a machine gun, a kolkhoznitsa with a bundle of rye and a sickle, a miner with a hammer, and a huntress with a rifle, gazing into the snowy distance. Legend had it that if a person stared at the statues long enough, they would make a sign revealing the secret location of the Kolyma gold stolen by the escaped Gulag prisoners. She found the two windows Oleg had told her were Makin’s. They were dark, but Makin had an unobstructed view.

* * *

Oleg waited downstairs while her mother walked Sonya up to the fourth floor of their building. They still had a wooden door, tooled with cracked faux leather and tacks, while all their neighbors had installed heavy metal doors. If they had had a metal door, Sonya’s father liked to joke, would it have prevented her mother from leaving?

“How is Papa?” her mother whispered.

“He talks to Americans on the phone a lot.” Sonya realized she could’ve said anything; she could’ve even lied. But she didn’t know what she wanted to happen now.

“Good.” Her mother took off one of her gloves and pressed her red fingers to the keyhole. She stood like this for a moment, as if letting a few fingertip cells sneak into her old home. “Tell Deda Misha I send hello and wish him safe travels for me. And don’t forget to ask him about Makin.”

Sonya felt terribly sad that her mother would now have to take a long bus ride to Oleg’s kommunalka, with that cold-tiled communal bathroom and the cockroaches spying from the cracks in the wall. “Bye, Mama.” She buried her nose in the wet fur of Little House.

Once her mother disappeared down the first flight of stairs, Sonya rang the bell. After some time Deda Misha opened the door. He wore her father’s brown sweater and her mother’s pink apron.

“We thought they’d kidnapped you! Come in, come in. Hungry?”

“Hungry, of course.”

Sonya’s father lay on the couch, watching the news and reading a book called Business Advice from an American Lawyer . Sonya kissed him on the forehead. He smelled faintly of sweat, but — it was obvious now — he was so much better and more handsome than Oleg. Her favorite feature of her father’s were his pale green eyes, which, like her mother’s nostrils, she didn’t inherit.

“ Shto, survived?” he said. A sly smile ruffled his mustache.

“Makin didn’t even come.”

Her father shook his head. “An understandable matter.”

“Sonya, come eat!” Deda Misha called from the kitchen.

“Go eat, Sonya,” her father said. It was a command veiled by a joking tone. He talked often this way since he got back from America.

“I was about to,” Sonya said. “Am I at least allowed to take this stupid dress off? Mama sent hello, by the way.”

“Just the hello? What about the money? They must be waiting till he wins the Palme d’Or and Hollywood calls. All right, I’ll wait, too. See you in L.A.”

Sonya didn’t reply; she never knew what to say to her father’s digs at Oleg or her mother. When she was with him, her father consumed all of her daughterly attention. She changed into track pants and an old turtleneck sweater, thinking of Makin’s safety pins. The New Year’s discotheque was just a week away, Sonya remembered with a jolt. She wanted it to be both sooner and later. Max would be there, of course, and he would ask her to dance. Everybody expected from them at least one slow medlyak —face-to-face, his arms around her waist, her arms around his neck. She would have to say yes.

In the kitchen, Deda Misha was pouring borsch into bowls. He’d made it Ukrainian style, with squares of lard floating on the scarlet surface. Sonya parted the curtains and rubbed the cold, frost-white window until a clear hole appeared on the glass. All three windows of Max’s apartment were dark. Where could he be? The basketball practice had finished hours ago, and he never went to bed early. Maybe at one of his teammates’ apartments. She’d heard of wild parties hosted by the girls in the B section; those girls were the most developed and grown-up in all of ninth grade. The booths by the theater would sell anything to anyone, even cheap vodka that made you go blind. And where was Max’s mother?

She closed the curtains and held on to the fabric for a second. She had recently decided, after much agonizing, that her first memory was of her mother hemming these curtains — Sonya distinctly remembered the pattern of blue and orange pears — and therefore, all the memories prior belonged to her previous lives.

She sat down at the table and began to fish the pieces of lard out of the borsch. Deda Misha put out a plate with black bread and sat down opposite her. He had thin knees and a formidable belly that was squared on top from the hernia he earned at fourteen, during the war. His white hair was thick and wavy — the best in the family.