Authors: Reggie Nadelson
I nodded and bent over a cigarette, trying to get it lit. The wind blew out the match.
"You felt something about us, you and me, so I am going to tell you what it is," she said. "You never noticed how come you and me we always take the cigarettes out of the pack the same way, we hold it same way, we always sit on the couch together the same way?"
Genia lit a cigarette. Again I noticed the way she took the smoke out of the pack. The fog seemed to drape itself over my face and it was wet and cold.
"This old man where I lived before on Brighton 6th, the general, the man you know as my father?"
"Yes?"
"He was not my father," she said. "He was not anything to me, just old man who takes me in, lets me work as maid. I came illegal to this country, you knew that, right? But he takes me in and he lets me send for Ellie, whose father I married and get divorced from even before she is born in Moscow. The old general, I live with him as kind of maid but he adopts Ellie, gets me a green card, is not bad man. But not my father. My father was someone else. I decide never to tell you, or tell anyone, but now I am telling you, Artemy." She took off my jacket and gave it back to me because I was shivering. I put it on.
"Who was your father?"
She raised her head and looked at me.
"We have the same father," Genia said. "Your father was also mine."
"Listen to me, Artemy, your father, our father, he has an illegitimate child a few years before you are born, which is me. He has girlfriend, I don't know, one night stand or big love affair, I don't know. But he is married so this is lousy for his career.
My mother is young lady who cannot take care of me, they say, so I go to orphanage. Later I hear that the woman, my mother which I never meet, is sent away. I think he makes this happen. He has a family, he is a top young guy in KGB. Where does she go away to, my mother, where does she disappear to, my mom?"
"How did you find out about him?"
"People talk," she said. "Later, when I am almost grown, people at orphanage, people who knew my mom, they talk. You think because it was Soviet Union, people don't gossip?" She laughed. "So I find him, I ask him once. I go to see him. I find him on the street in Moscow nearby his office and I ask, and he says I don't know anything. I'm sorry, he says, it wasn't anything to do with me. He is very nice, very handsome." Genia paused. "He gives me some chocolate sweets. But I learn nothing."
"You're not saying he had her killed, your mother?"
Genia said, "Oh, Artemy, you remember these days, it was like bad spy novel. It wasn't always so simple, so crude. Things happened. People got sent to different cities. Children went to orphanage or were adopted. Me, I had both. For a while I had nice family to live with, but poor and like peasants, no culture, no books. Then back to orphanage. It was OK, I don't go to some gulag, probably not even my mother went. People like my mom just evaporated into a different life."
"Do you know where Billy is?"
"I heard Johnny's mother mention Breezy Point," Genia said. "She doesn't know I heard. I was going to call you as soon as I got rid of her. I think you should go there, Artemy. Just go, OK?" Abruptly, Genia kissed me on the cheek three times, Russian style, and retreated towards her big house, then turned to watch me.
It was after three in the morning when I drove away and in the rear-view mirror I could just see Genia through the foggy night. Lit up from the light on her porch, she stood and rocked, arms locked around her body, like an old Russian woman trying to sell her shoes on the street and knowing no one would buy them.
I held onto the idea that Billy was alive. The fog closed in. Barely able to see my own headlights, I drove towards Breezy Point. I knew I should have smashed down the door on the fishing shack, but I should have done a lot of things.
Looking in the rear view, seeing my own face, I knew what Genia had told me was true. From my pocket, I got out a picture of Billy and put it on the dashboard; in it I saw my father's ghost. It was the kind of resemblance you might not see if you didn't look for it, if you didn't know the truth, but once you knew, it was obvious: my father was Billy's grandfather. The same piercing perfect blue eyes; the sweet smile; the blond hair. I looked in the mirror again. I had my mother's dark hair and my eyes were a different blue, but I could see the resemblance between the three of us. Had I known? Had I known this all along?
I thought about my father, about the day he came home and told us he was no longer needed, and I heard my parents fighting. He said he was sad, losing his job. My mother called the KGB monsters and slammed the door. Eventually we all left Moscow and went to Israel and she hated it. She thought it was provincial, but my father liked it.
Mossad guys came to the apartment in Tel Aviv and sat with him and he advised them. He had been a top intelligence strategist, and they liked him and played chess with him. He wasn't even Jewish but he was OK with Israel. He died because he got on the wrong bus one day and it was bombed. My mother was left behind in a country she hated.
I drove back to Marine Park and over the bridge where, for the second time, a state trooper stopped me and joked about Red Alert, then warned me about the fog. A ship had run aground off Jersey. Most of the roads on Long Island were shut because of the fog. Take it easy, he said, and I said I would, but as soon as I was over the bridge, I picked up speed.
Billy was out there. Heshey Shank knew about the fishing shack and he had taken Billy to it, I was sure now; I tried to believe Billy was still alive. I smoked and talked to myself and drove as fast as I could on the roads that were solid ice. I hit the accelerator hard and Mike's van rattled and pie boxes flew off the seat. I didn't care. I inhaled nicotine as deep as I could and watched Jamaica Bay, where fog lapped the wetlands, and it came to me, this thing in my own past. I felt both terrified and relieved. I felt like an Alzheimer's patient on the verge of release from the jail cell, the lock-up of my own memory.
It was like paradise, the first time he wentfishing. It wasn't a word he
was supposed to know: paradise. It wasn't a word people used in
public, not forbidden, but not nice. He didn't know what it meant but
he read about it in books and he read that people said the word in
churches, though he had only been in a church once when it was
raining and he got caught and sheltered in an old run-down church
where a few elderly women kneeled and moaned and prayed.
For him paradise was a place where there was a river. Paradise, he
imagined, felt like this, blisful, cool, a breeze off the water. Normally
he was a city kid. The countryside was usually boring, a place where
people talked about mushrooms and the Russian soul. He was a city
kid. He liked Moscow's winding streets and the ramshackle old houses
and shops where you could get certain records and books that no one
else had. He liked the food markets. He was drawn to places in the
huge gray city where there was color, especially in the winter.
This part of the countryside, this place by the river, was different
—
the fishing, the sitting in the sun, the being with his father. It was only
a little river, a crook in a river, the place where it turned in a different
direction.
The water was cold and clear and the two of them sat on the edge
and dangled their lines and ate ice cream. He was ten. He could
remember every detail, the silver birch trees, tall and thin, the leaves
like coins rustling when the breeze blew, the hot sun, the damp of the
bank under his thighs, mossy damp, cool and solid. His bare feet were
in the water; his toes dug in the cold squishy mud.
For years and years afterwards, he could remember the days by the
river, the exact way the river looked, the stones in it, the feel of the
mud, taste of the sour vanilla ice cream, the tall man beside him. The
ice cream came in a paper cone. Birds chirped in the trees or the hedges,
though he didn't think of it as chirping. Humming. They hummed and
twittered.
He had a canvas satchel on the ground next to him. It was the bag
he used for school, but it contained thick slabs of good white bread and
real sausage made with meat and yellow cheese and hard-boiled eggs.
It also held fishing line and a can of grubs he'd dug up in a friend's
backyard. There were books in it, too:
Oliver Twist
by Charles
Dickens because hisfather approved of Charles Dickens; an American
western novel by Zane Gray that he'd read so many times the pages
were falling out. His father pretended not to notice when he read silly
books. He glanced over at his father who was leaning against a tree,
his pants rolled up over his calves, his shoes and socks on the ground
next to him, his bare feet just touching the water. The fishing line
looped lazily from the pole he held lightly in one hand. The smoke
from his cigarette curled up into the tree above him. Once in a while,
he turned his head slightly and opened his eyes and smiled at his son
next to him on the river bank.
He could remember all of it, even the texture and color of the fish
that he caught, a short fat silvery fish thatfopped on the grassy bank
where they sat, but, as the years passed, he couldn't quite picture the
man beside him, his still young handsome father. It was his father, he
was sure of it, but he could never get the picture back.
The storm came up out of nowhere. The humidity rose. The heat
simmered up like a bathhouse filling with steam. The sky turned dark
as if a fuse had suddenly blown and all the lights went out. Then the
lightning cut across the sky and the trees rattled their leaves and rain
smashed down on them. The man grabbed him by the hand, and he
tried to grab the fish and his satchel and both of them dropped out of
his hand.
Then he looked and saw it wasn't the narrow familiar river, but
huge, too wide to cross without a boat. Rostov, hisfather called it. A
big city called Rostov on the Don River. An important port, his father
said, a crossroads, a canal to the Volga, a place of important shipping
and rail transport, of science and culture. When he was a boy, he had
worked on the big rivers, he had been on a life journey, he had been
part of a great revolution, he said, still a romantic, sentimental man.
In the port
—
his father was allowed in ports because of his job
—
they walked by the big freighters. The wind blew off the river, the cargo
nets swayed in the sky above them. They were heavy nets made of thick
rope. Bulging with giant crates like shopping in immense string bags,
one of the nets was lowered into the hold of a ship. And when it was
lifted out, it was empty. The empty net swung faster, and he
remembered trying to run backwards, his father holding his hand. He
felt the net was coming to pick him up, trap him, entangle him so he
could never escape. Maybe someone would force his head in between the
thick ropes. He had heard how it happened.
Somewhere, he heard about a boy or man whose head was forced
into the openings of a net. The squares that made up the nets were big
and the rope was strong, big and strong enough for a man to get his
head stuck in. He had heard that somewhere, and he didn't know by
whom or where, these nets were used as restraints. As punishment for
people who committed crimes. He heard that if you got your head stuck
or if someoneforced it into the square of rope, you strangled to death.
It took a long time. It took days for a boy or man to strangle to death.
In spite of the cold, I was sweating. Thinking about Billy, about the fishing trip the summer before on Shank's boat, had triggered it. The trip when the fish spilled out of our bucket on the dock in a storm and Billy caught them in his net. I had mixed them up, the trip with Billy, the fishing with my father and the stories about the punishment nets.
I had always remembered the fishing trips to the little river bend. To Nikolina Gora outside Moscow, where my father had a friend with a dacha, a famous, official writer. But I had never until now remembered the trip to Rostov. We went in a plane. It was a big deal. Before we went, everyone talked about the river at Rostov, the wonderful quality of the water, the fish that swam in it. It was a big deal because people didn't travel much and I had never been on a plane, but I had pushed it out of my mind. I had forgotten Rostov. Now I remembered the port and the cargo ships and the heavy nets and the kid in Moscow who told me about the KGB's use of nets for punishment.
When I asked my mother, she told me to keep quiet about it, but I didn't. I asked my Uncle Gennadi, who was my father's best friend and who was in the KGB with him, and I asked my father. Did you? I asked. Did you do that?
By their silences and grim looks I knew not to ask again, but I also knew it was one of them, or both, who had been involved in the use of nets. Or they knew. At least they knew.