“Well, whoever fucked up and put me there is probably paying for it now,” said Lenny.
“What you need for a cold is a little black pepper with your vodka,” said Alyosha. He reached over and sprinkled some black flakes into Lenny’s shot glass. “Down the hatch—this’ll cure everything.”
“How do you know it was a mistake?” I said.
“What else was it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone wanted to teach you a lesson,” I hinted, and thought, What the hell am I doing?
Lenny stared at me. “What are you talking about?” He sneezed again.
“Poor pet, let’s get you some tea,” Valentina said, and Katya was instantly up and on her way to the kitchen for a kettle. Not a moment later, she set a steaming mug before Lenny and began to stir in an ample spoonful of sugar. My God, I thought, he doesn’t even stir his own tea.
“The danger may not be over,” I said. “Maybe it’s a little early to celebrate.”
“A father worries,” said Valentina. “That’s the way it should be.”
“What are we drinking to?” Zhorik said, lifting his glass.
“To family!” said Valentina. “Lenny is part of our family, and now we are happy to welcome into our home his charming father—Yuliy Leontevich.”
I nodded and drank down my vodka. I had come to terms with the fact that I couldn’t spend a week in this country without having my liver held up at gunpoint. We all had two more shots once Zhorik brought the pork chops. First we drank to the women at the table, then to happiness and prosperity—“in this life,” Alyosha added mysteriously.
“Alyosha believes in reincarnation,” said Zhorik. “He’s thrown in his cards on this lifetime.”
Alyosha looked down, accustomed to the eternal abuse. “In my next life, I’ll come back as a Siamese cat.”
“Why wait until your next life to come back an animal?” Valya said. “Turn your jacket inside out and walk into a zoo. The kids will throw candy at you.”
“A toast!” Zhorik announced. “For those who are not with us.” We raised our glasses and held them without clinking for this most somber of toasts. Not for the first time I noticed how joylessly an alcoholic drinks. Alyosha seemed to take no pleasure in the shot that had been poured for him. He stared at it for a while, like a person staring at a spoonful of bitter medicine, then swallowed it grimly.
I glimpsed Lenny reaching across Katya for a pork chop. “Here, Katusha, give him this one,” Valya said, picking out the biggest, best-glazed piece of meat. There were obviously two roles for men at the dacha: browbeaten little boy or pampered pasha. Alyosha was the first, Lenny the second. Each, in its own way, infantilized.
Lenny murmured that it was stuffy, and Katya leaped up instantly to open a window. I had believed that my son did not come home because he was ashamed to return a failure. I hadn’t taken into account the sumptuous passivity to which he’d become accustomed, the voluptuous pampering at which Russian women were so adept.
“Take those things out of your damn ears,” Valya shouted spontaneously. Alyosha was again listening to his Ekho Moskvy through earbuds. “Can’t you see we have company?” Alyosha reluctantly took out his right earbud, and continued listening to Ekho through his left. “I’m going out for a smoke,” he said, getting up, in a posture that said, To hell with you all. Just at that moment, Zhorik refilled Alyosha’s glass and glanced at me mischievously. Like a marionette whose strings had been released, Alyosha sat back down and swallowed. “You see that!” Zhorik said triumphantly. “Bet you don’t have alcoholics like ours in your America!”
“You can’t judge by American standards,” I answered. “In America, an alcoholic is someone who hasn’t picked up a drink in ten years.”
Valya looked at me curiously. I did my best to explain to the table the concept of AA. “We had a party, and I offered some cognac to our neighbor, Jim,” I said. “He declined. When I asked why, he told me: ‘Julian, I’m an alcoholic.’ I said, ‘Jim, I admire your abstemiousness under the circumstances. How long has it been?’ ‘Twenty years,’ he said.”
Valya hooted loudly at this. Lenny looked less entertained.
“For Americans, it’s all or nothing,” Lenny said. “They all love to talk about their freedoms, but they can’t live and let live. I’ll tell you a story: My mother’s first job in New York was in the programming department of Bloomingdale’s. She didn’t know anything about programming; she was just trying to keep her head above water. I got the flu, and she couldn’t take any days off, so my sister stayed home with me while Mama went to work. The school called. Mama told them that I was sick and that my thirteen-year-old sister was staying home to look after me. They sent a cop and a social worker to our apartment, and threatened to arrest my mother if she continued to keep Masha out of school. Didn’t she know she was supposed to hire a sitter in these situations? A sitter! My mother didn’t have money to buy herself new shoes! That was the last time she told the truth to Americans.”
Valya shook her head. “But Mama kept her job.”
“It wasn’t an easy time,” I said. “My first job was in computers too, but downtown. I’d take the subway every afternoon to Sixty-fourth Street, and we’d meet at a Chinese restaurant across the street from the department store, where I’d help her write up her programming code. She’d take it back upstairs to type it. We survived like that for months.”
“What a good husband,” Valya said with flattering affection in her eyes.
“Not a good teacher, though,” Lenny mumbled. “I remember all the yelling.”
“I don’t recall any yelling,” I said, trying to sound good-natured.
“Oh, come on. Truth only at the dacha. You were always yelling at Mom, for being dense, for not picking the programming up fast enough, for not picking up English fast enough. It wasn’t like she’d grown up speaking it.”
I grinned painfully. But Lenny wasn’t done.
“You said so yourself, that Mama probably would have divorced you if she hadn’t been so dependent on you those early years.”