Vaclav & Lena Read online

  “Is joke?” Rasia asks, because her son must know what is for dinner. The house is so full of the smell of borscht that you would expect the air to be tinted a little purply-red; you would expect that there might be condensation of borscht on the ceiling and on the walls and on the windowpanes.

  Lena opens a drawer next to where Rasia’s large behind vacillates with the stirring of the borscht. She takes out four forks, four spoons, and names each one in her mind so that she’s sure she has one for each person. Mother spoon, father spoon, Vaclav spoon, me spoon. She says mother and father in her brain, but she means the mother of Vaclav and the father of Vaclav. This is not confusing to her because her own brain would never confuse the mother of Vaclav with the mother of Lena, because Lena has not seen her own mother since before she could have even remembered her.

  Lena thinks about her own mother in a very different way from the way she thinks about Rasia. Rasia has a smell like strong perfume. She’s a big woman with a big rear end who wears faded, worn-out dresses and leather loafer-shoes on her feet and who makes smelly soup that she stirs and who makes chairs creak when she sits on them. Lena’s mother is an idea. Lena’s mother is a mystery.

  Lena sets down the silverware and sits in the same place she always sits, next to Vaclav, across from his father, next to his mother.

  Vaclav makes quick work of doing his job, setting out napkins and putting one water glass in front of each plate.

  Lena sits while Vaclav fills her glass first, then Rasia’s, then his own. She watches while Vaclav fills Oleg’s glass with vodka.

  Vaclav and Oleg sit down next. Vaclav quietly, Oleg with a low, embarrassing groan. Rasia will not sit down yet; she’ll remain standing until she has served borscht with meat to everyone, and then she’ll sit.

  Rasia holds the pot of borscht to her side with two hands, her dark armpit exposed above it. She thuds the pot on the kitty-cat-shaped steel trivet on the table, then plunges the ladle into the borscht and brings it back like a piston. The ladle is white, stained with brown. The borscht is the color of the carpet in the school library, Lena thinks. Rasia fills her husband’s bowl. The borscht is the color of flowers. Rasia plunges the ladle into the soup again and again, serving Vaclav. The borscht is the color of a dress a queen might wear. The borscht floods Lena’s bowl. The borscht is the color of blood. The borscht is the color of blood, and in it are not pieces of meat but moles that have fallen off the many chins of Rasia. Once Lena’s mind has taken this turn, she cannot turn back.

  Rasia sits heavily on her chair. She arranges her large belly above the waistband of her pantyhose. She holds her spoon above her bowl and lowers her head, but before she takes a sip, she glances at Lena. The air in the kitchen is wet and thick. Each breath Lena breathes is of borscht, of the sweaty spot between the folds of Rasia’s belly, of the breath from the back molars of Oleg, of the bits of moles floating about in the soup.

  “Eat! Lena, eat!” Rasia is focused on Lena. Lena lowers her spoon into her borscht. She angles her spoon to try to get a spoonful with no moles.

  “What is your problem? Can I give you personal invitation?” The yelling startles Lena, and she plunges her spoon into the borscht.

  “She is so skinny like children on the streets of India. It is not cute, this skin and bones!” Rasia says, and then slurps her borscht.

  Hot stomach stuff is rushing to the back of Lena’s throat, filling her mouth. She stands from the table, thinking maybe she can make it to the bathroom, where no one will see her, and she will rinse out her mouth and come back to the table maybe with her cheeks a little hot but otherwise no one will know anything. She’s thinking the bathroom is so close, the bathroom is so close, and if she can just keep her mouth closed, everything will be okay. But then there is another hot hiccup, another bubble, and she can’t keep it inside her mouth the way she thought she could, and it bursts out and onto her shirt and onto the floor, and she is barely three steps away from the dinner table.

  Rasia rushes to her as Oleg throws his napkin down on the table and pushes his chair backward. Rasia’s back softens as her big, squishy arm extends around Lena, and she leads the girl, shaking, to the bathroom. Oleg takes his big glass and goes into the living room to sit on the couch and watch soap operas from Russia on the big-screen TV. Once he finishes the glass, he will start to snore, and he will snore on the couch until it is time to snore in the bedroom.

  Vaclav pulls his feet up onto his chair to keep them away from the puke and looks down at the floor. Lena’s puke is not like his puke. His puke, behind the swings at school, when he has eaten too much and swung too much, is substantial and often borscht-colored. Lena’s puke is like the sea foam on the beach at Coney Island, frothy, stale, and not as yellow as pee.

  Vaclav rises from his chair, careful not to step in the lovely puke of his lovely assistant, and reaches for a dishrag with which to clean up Lena’s too-small mess.

  In the bathroom, Rasia dabs at Lena’s face with a wet washcloth. Are Lena’s eyes really so dark and huge, Rasia wonders, or do they just seem this way because her skin is so pale, her face so small and delicate? Lena sits on the seat-down toilet, holding her pukey T-shirt balled in her hands. Rasia decides, while cleaning Lena’s frightened face, to clean and dry Lena’s shirt, and not to mention the incident to the Aunt.

  Rasia wonders if anyone has talked to Lena about the girl things that she would talk to a daughter about if she had a daughter. She wonders if one day Lena will have to ask the Aunt for a training bra to train her breasts to do what breasts are supposed to do, or if she will save her allowance money and go by herself to the department store. Rasia wonders if Lena misses having a mother, and then tells herself that this is stupid. Of course she does. It is hard, in your mind, where to put Lena; it is hard to know what to do with so much pity. Rasia tells Lena to wait in the bathroom while she fetches a clean T-shirt. Lena sits on the toilet, shirtless, arms crossed against her rib cage, staring at the tile.

  HARD TO KNOW

  …

  When Rasia walks Lena home, she notices that Lena holds her hand harder than usual. Maybe this is all in her mind. It seems, also, to Rasia that Lena is skinnier than usual, but with children, it is hard to know.

  When Rasia opens the door to take Lena inside, and turns on the light, and looks around, she sees that everything is the same as it was the night before. Rasia’s best guess is that the Aunt has not been home, not to clean up the mess or to add to it. Lena has been left alone. There is no doubt in Rasia’s mind that this is not a place for a little girl to live. Of this she is sure, and this, this is hard to know.

  VACLAV DOES EXCELLENT THINKING IN THE BUBBLE BATH

  …

  Vaclav wakes up early, without any help from his alarm clock. This morning, Vaclav has a clear, steely resolve to win his campaign for permission to perform a magic show on the boardwalk at Coney Island.

  Still in his pajamas, he sits at the desk in his room, takes out his thesaurus, and begins a list.

  EVIDENCE TO PARENTS OF THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF VACLAV FOR PROMOTING PERMISSION TO PERFORM MAGIC SHOW ON THE BOARDWALK OF CONEY ISLAND:

  1. Room cleaning

  2. Chore doing

  3. Table setting

  4. Homework finishing

  5. Grade achieving

  6. Extracurricular accomplishments

  7. Devotion to career of magic

  Vaclav replaces his pencil in his pencil cup, pleased for the moment with his list. He then pads gently to the bathroom to brush his teeth, careful not to wake his snoring mother and father.

  Vaclav runs a bubble bath, because a bubble bath is where he does excellent thinking about his magic. He lies back, submerging himself only to the ears, and listens to the sounds of his body, the sounds of his house, through the water. His heartbeat is the same as the thump of something too heavy and hard in the clothes dryer of Mrs. Ruvinova upstairs. The gurgle of his tummy is the same as the gurgle of the pipes in the wall.

>   Vaclav closes his eyes, and the roar in his ears is the roar of an excited crowd. He is big and tall, now a man. He is dressed in a tuxedo that shines black and blue in the stage lights. Behind him, a curtain lifts to reveal Lena, in her own future adult body, strapped to a spinning wheel for the knife-throwing act. The audience gasps. Vaclav, from thin air, pulls out a handful of sharp knives. He fans the knives like playing cards and holds them up to the audience, to increase their anxiety. To demonstrate the sharpness and realness of the knives, he cuts a large gash in the curtain behind him. To make the audience think of the terror of such a blade piercing Lena’s beautiful skin, he throws a tomato into the air and slices it in two. Lena, spinning on the wheel, looks afraid but is not, really. Really she is trusting in Vaclav, and trusting in the precision, the perfection, of the act, for they have fine-tuned it over many years of practicing together.

  Still, she is attuned completely and totally to Vaclav’s every muscle twitch, every blink of his eye. Even invisible signals he may give her with his mind—she listens for these like a radio that hears the silent songs in the air.

  There is a loud knock on the bathroom door.

  Oleg often needs to pee suddenly in the morning, because big glasses of vodka do not sit happily in the piss belly of a fifty-year-old man.

  Vaclav is always telling his father that the word in English is bladder, and his father always responds that learning how to name piss and shit is not why he came all this way from Russia. He came from Russia, he is always telling Vaclav, for Vaclav to learn about stocks and dollars and American business, and to buy his papa a hot tub full of American Hooter waitresses one day.

  Vaclav hoists himself out of the tub and plants one dripping foot on the bath mat, one dripping hand unlocking the door, the other dripping hand covering his you-know-what, so that his papa will not make fun.

  As soon as the door is unlocked, Oleg bursts in, without giving slippery Vaclav any time to plunge back under the cover of the bubbles and water. He sees his son holding what he should not be holding, and lets out a roaring laugh.

  Vaclav plops back into the tub and sinks down while Oleg pees, groaning with relief. Vaclav dunks his head under the water, to hide from the yellow smell that is in the steam, that is everywhere.

  Oleg finishes his peeing and puts everything away inside of his pajama pants. Then he looks at the tub, looks at his son submerged under the water, his eyes squeezed shut. Oleg grunts and leaves the bathroom but does not close the door.

  It is not easy for Vaclav to return to his vision of the future, but he keeps this vision in his mind, in the back of it, so that his dream is never far away from him. He dries his body and wraps himself in a large bath towel, then pads into the hallway, slowly, listening and sensing. His father has already fallen back to sleep; he can hear his parents snoring together in their bedroom. This is good. He will have time to lay the groundwork for his plans.

  Vaclav takes great care to comb his hair, to tuck in his shirt, to wear an outfit for school that will please his mother. He tiptoes into the kitchen, and without turning on the lights, he silently sets the table. He even fills the teakettle, and puts it on the stove, and lights the stove, carefully. Because his mother has taught him that it is possible to turn the knob of the stove and leave gas pouring out with no fire to burn it up, and that this will explode the house like Chernobyl, he makes sure that the hiss of the gas meets the snap-snap-snap that makes fire to heat the water for the tea. Vaclav even slices bread and makes toast, and arranges the toast nicely on plates, and puts out his mother’s favorite jam for breakfast. Then Vaclav sits at the table and waits.

  He can hear the alarm clock buzz in his parents’ room, then his mother clunking around in the bathroom, and finally his father coughing his morning cough, so Vaclav knows he won’t have to wait long.

  When Rasia enters the kitchen, she takes in everything with her eyes. Vaclav can see her catalogue the room, and he can see her begin to smile. But her smile is the wrong sort of smile right away. It is not a happy smile, it is a nervous smile, a smile that goes straight across her face instead of curling up at the ends.

  “Vaclav, we have to talk about what is happening in the bathroom,” she says.

  Even though he does not know what, Vaclav is sure that he has done something wrong. He suddenly feels embarrassed and anxious, because Rasia is staring at him and looking nervous, and this is not good.

  “I know now about your bath time,” she says, trying to speak softly and gently. She wants to have an open, supportive conversation with her son, because everyone says to talk to kids about these things so that there is no secret and no shame. She means to sound warm, nonjudgmental, but straightforward. Like Oprah.

  “You go in there at nighttime so no one will know? Is this happening every night?” Rasia can feel that she is not sounding like Oprah.

  Vaclav knows now what she is talking about, and he knows that he was not doing this thing in the bathtub. Vaclav knows now that when his father came into the bathroom, and he covered his mekki with his hand because he was embarrassed for his father to see it, his father thought that he was doing masturbating in the bathtub. Vaclav knows about this from talking to boys at school who know a lot about it from their older brothers or from television stations that they have at their homes.

  Rasia takes a deep breath and tries again.

  “Where did you learn this?” She is still meaning to make this conversation a nice conversation, but it is coming out all wrong, and she is sounding like a KGB commandant instead of a cool American mother. She doesn’t want to have the same horrible conversation that she had with her own mother. She doesn’t want Vaclav growing up like she did, believing that if you touch or even scratch yourself for an itch your buhguhgie will rot and fall off on the ground and shrivel up like an old potato.

  Vaclav knows that no matter what he says, she won’t believe him, and that if he argues with her, she’ll talk more about it, and she’ll ask more questions, and he’ll die of being embarrassed. If he denies it, she’ll think that he’s a liar in addition to being a person who does masturbating in the tub at night. Vaclav knows that it is best to just stand and be quiet and be still.

  “Vaclav, this is okay to talk about; you can tell me.”

  “Okay,” says Vaclav, and, grabbing his backpack, he bolts for the door without even bringing up the question of permission to have a show on the boardwalk of Coney Island.

  “Have a nice day of school!” she shouts after him, grateful herself for his escape.

  FAMOUS AMERICANS

  …

  Only after Vaclav runs out of the house does Rasia notice that he made toast for her, that he set the table so nicely, took out her favorite jam, that he even put up water for tea. Rasia turns off the stove and sits down at the table. At first she has a panic because she thinks the list is homework that Vaclav has forgotten, and she is about to run out the door to give it to him, until she sees the words parents and then magic show and stops. She reads his list, all the reasons he should be allowed to do a magic show.

  She wants him to stop with the magic, all the time magic. But she understands.

  They spent a long time waiting to come to America. A long time she waited to have Vaclav, because things were so terrible, and then there was glasnost, and just when Rasia thought things were going to be getting better, they got worse, and everything came apart.

  She went, eight months pregnant with Vaclav, to wait in line to get on a list to go to America. Oleg had a good job as an architect, he didn’t want to leave, but he said if she wanted to wait in a line and put their names on a list, then fine. She didn’t realize it then, because she was still a young person and still in love, but he was the same then that he is now, his tuchas always stuck to whatever chair he’s sitting on, no matter how uncomfortable.

  They told her there was a limit to the number of Russian Jews America would take, that it could be years. They told her they could get her on a plane to another coun
try the very next week. She told them thank you, and that she would wait. Vaclav was born, and Oleg lost his job just like everyone else, just like she knew he would. Now he was a new father who couldn’t pay for his son’s diapers, and he went out every day to complain with the other men. He came home smelling of vodka, but Rasia thought if she could get him out, if they could get to America, everything would be fine, and he would be sweet again and make his jokes again.

  The economy got worse, and Vaclav got bigger, and they kept waiting. In the meantime, she bought books and tapes and learned English and taught Vaclav. She didn’t want him to be scared to leave his home, like she was, she wanted him to be excited to be American. She paid a small fortune for black-market English books for children about famous Americans, about Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks, George Washington Carver, and Molly Pitcher, but his favorite, the one he asked her to read again and again, every single night, was the book about Harry Houdini.

  Vaclav especially liked the part of the book about how Houdini came to America when he was four, just like Vaclav, how he became America’s most famous magician, how he amazed President Theodore Roosevelt with his magic and performed at the World’s Fair, about how he could escape from heavy chains, how he could jump, handcuffed, from bridges. He liked the parts about how Houdini struggled with his act, how he practiced and never gave up.

  Rasia thought that this Houdini person probably drove his mother to an early grave, worrying her with all his death-defying feats and doing Chinese water torture, and was not someone Vaclav should be so interested in. But Vaclav wanted to hear a story about a little boy who came to America and became a big, brave, magical man, and this she understood.

  Every night she read Vaclav the book about Houdini, until he knew every word. When they finally got their papers and Rasia told Vaclav that they were moving to America, he already knew all about the place they were going to live: Brooklyn, the home of Coney Island, where Harry Houdini performed his first magic show. It was coincidence only—Rasia knew someone who was in Brighton Beach and could give her a good job doing bookkeeping and help them to find a house—but to Vaclav, it was a sign.