Only her resolute determination not to transmit her feelings to her young son—to allow Yulik to go on as if everything were normal—carried her through the weeks. But the boy, sensitive to every change, seemed to become afraid of separating from her even for short periods, as though he sensed that if he let her out of his sight just once she might disappear forever.
She kept him home from school and let him spend his days looking at picture books in his cot. His favorites were the books that showed how to make models out of cardboard, with pages whose figures could be cut out with scissors to make parachutes or toy windmills, grain elevators, lighthouses. She sat up reading to him from books about aircraft and sea vessels, locomotives and steamships overcoming great distances. She let him nap late into the evening, while the red sun was setting behind snow-covered roofs. At night the boy would wake up and find his mother sitting on a chair beside his cot, leaning over him, her thick curls falling on her shoulders, her warm hand petting his cold, moist forehead. She would shush-shush him and tell him to go back to sleep. Watching her son breathe heavily while he slept, she experienced for the first time an acute sense of her mortality. She tried not to anticipate what might happen to the three of them. She could no longer picture a future.
I felt like Alice in Wonderland. The cat tattooed on the side of Kablukov’s breast grinned homicidally as it vanished and reappeared through a veil of floating steam. I tried not to stare too pointedly at Kablukov’s flesh while the three of us—Tom, Kablukov, and I—lounged like Roman senators with bedsheets draped around our laps.
Kablukov had left his Ray-Bans in the locker room, but his eyes were half hooded in the attitude of someone accepting obeisance. “Do you know why I like doing business with Americans?”
“Please, Ivan Matveyevich, do tell us,” I said. My throat ached from the steam, or maybe from the effort of having to be civil.
“Enough with the formalities. Please, call me Vanya. I like Americans because you are like us. Simple. Not like those complicated French, or the chilly Germans, or the Japanese—who the hell can read their faces, they all look alike to me.”
I translated for Tom, who did a fair imitation of looking amused as Kablukov set aside his beer glass and leaned across the stone bench to squeeze his hand, as though to seal the mutual understanding.
Around us, grown men were sprawled or slouched on marble slabs, breathing through their mouths, absorbed in the grave business of their health-inducing stupor. A few squatted against the Turkish tiles by the polished spigots, scrubbing one another’s hides or thrashing them with dried birch leaves before banishing the toxins in bursts of cold water. If I closed my eyes, I might have been in a tannery. The vapor seemed to turn all conversations into a mutter, save the cries of “Harder! Harder!” that occasionally rose above the echoes of thwacking and thrashing.
“A man can be a ‘professional,’ a good worker. But what is work? It is only…a thing.” Kablukov signaled for an attendant. “What matters is what is on the inside.” He hit his fist against the strangely shaped cross etched on his chest. “A man’s spirit. Take care of him,” he ordered the ancient-looking attendant, motioning at Tom. The wiry little man gestured for Tom to prostrate himself on the bench and then proceeded to whack Tom’s back and legs with birch twigs, gently at first and then, after a few nods from Kablukov, with more vigor, flagellating Tom’s smooth Midwestern flesh in rhythm to his poorly suppressed grunts of pain.
“Easy there,” Tom warned the man sheepishly, between groans.
Kablukov adjusted his loincloth and took a few heavy swallows of steam, then ordered the attendant to bring two fresh beers, which the man did with disturbing efficiency. Kablukov released a gurgle of air as he popped each cap. “There’s no point spending less than three hours in a banya,” he advised us, upending his beer bottle, then waiting for me to take a drink. “You Americans go to your doctors and buy your pills, pills, pills, and we”—he spread his arms and planted the bottle on the bench—“we take care of our bodies right here!”
As an advertisement for the banya’s salubrious benefits, Kablukov hardly struck me as a model specimen. The first time I met him, he’d appeared to me a physically powerful man. But that first impression was a testament to the value of an expensive suit. When he was naked, it was plain to see that, like a walrus, he had no shoulders. All his formidable bulk was concentrated in front of him. Decades of lard and vodka consumption had coarsened his tapered frame and bloated his face into that of a veteran pimp or public official.
“You’re selling me a horse I already own,” I said, a bit too irascibly. I was impatient to know what Kablukov was after. “I mean, I used to come here to Sanduny,” I amended.
“Ah, before we lost you to the Americans.”
“Even as a boy,” I said. “With my father.”
“Is that so?”
It was, in fact. I had come here with Papa, though only one time. I’d retained the fading memory in glimmering patches all of my life. It was the last image I had of my father.
“My own father was Armenian. You see this?” He tapped the tattoo on his chest. “People think it’s some ordinary cross. It ain’t. It’s the Holy Lance. It’s the spear they used to stick Christ Himself.” With his index finger Kablukov made a slow surgical swipe along his left rib. “The Holy Lance was brought to Armenia by Saint Gregory the Illuminator.”
“You learned that from your father.”
Kablukov looked at me like I was nuts. “My father? If I spotted that bastard walking down the street, I’d pop him. However”—he raised a finger—“I believe in the importance of remembering one’s heritage. That’s why I have this.” He pointed to a faded blue inscription on his forearm. “He who’s been thrown in the water is not afraid of the rain.”
Kablukov now ordered the wiry attendant to give peace to Tom’s abused flesh and come service his own. I tilted my head back and dozed to the murmur of men’s voices. The muffled banya noises formed a braid of sound around me as I faded in and out of mental acuity. I had tried to fight sleep, but the intervals between my conscious moments were diminishing, while slabs of memory rose up like stepping-stones in a streambed.
—