We eat. I turn the conversation to Sky World, a run-down amusement park outside Moscow we used to go to as kids. Tanechka does not remember it.
Yuri has the party laughing with his descriptions of the wooden roller coaster, and then the swinging platform ride. The rides at Sky World, they were so dangerous. Our stories make for a jolly table. Even Tanechka smiles. Her smile fills me with so much happiness it nearly spills over into tears.
The rides are especially shocking to Aleksio, Mira, Nikki, and Tito—this is part of what makes it funny.
“You Americans,” Yuri snarls. “With your smooth plastic playgrounds like easy chairs.” We argue about this, but Tanechka doesn’t seem amused anymore, as if she tamped down her pleasure. She says almost nothing through the rest of the meal. The silent treatment, as Aleksio would call it. She wishes to go to the church, of course.
Mira asks her questions now and then about her life in the convent, and Tanechka answers politely. Always a short answer. Yes or no, if possible. She thinks we’re no better than the brothel, but I saw her laugh. The old Tanechka peeking through. I’ll have her back. I’ll make her come back.
The one time she speaks up, it’s to tell us to hurry up about the brothel—this she says at dinner, even though we have gone around on it very many times.
“You should have left me and taken them. I would’ve been fine.” She waves her hand, taking in the table. “All of this. I’m grateful, but I don’t need it like the other women. I would’ve endured what those women couldn’t. I was most fit of all of them to endure what was to come.”
I throw back a glass of vodka, welcoming the clean, hard burn. “We will rescue the women.”
Aleksio explains about the police being compromised. That it would be shut down only provisionally and likely moved if we don’t strike deep into the network. “Think of it as a ceiling,” he says to her. “Merely closing this brothel is like fixing a leak in the ceiling by painting over the stain.”
“You tell it to the virgin there awaiting the man who bought her. Frightened, alone, cut off from all she knows. What would she say about your ceiling?”
I bite back a smile. She is glorious. Yes, this is the nun speaking, this nun like an enemy in Tanechka’s body, murmuring her stupid prayers, fingering her ridiculous prayer rope, but more and more this nun feels familiar.
Aleksio explains the big picture to her more carefully, as if she didn’t understand the first time. Tanechka purses her lips. Tanechka is annoyed. I exchange amused glances with Yuri—we’re both seeing it.
“Yes, Aleksio, I understand. I care nothing of your ceiling. These women alone. They care nothing for your ceiling.”
Aleksio stiffens. “We’re maximizing our effect.”
“Maximizing your effect,” she spits.
Mischa bites his lip. Pityr beams. This nun, unwilling to accept our obstacles, our explanations. She doesn’t understand why it can’t be stopped now. She sees girls in trouble. Go, take them out. That’s her attitude. Have your cake and eat it too. Fuck everything. So Tanechka.
I set down my glass. “Would you have us shutting it down in a violent way, then? Would you like that instead?”
“A false choice,” she says. “There are more options than those two.”
“Maybe pray?” I challenge.
“You tell the police and trust in that. You find the good ones and tell them.”
“Police,” I sniff. A comment like that is beyond childish. Tanechka would never say it.
“The police are there for a reason,” she says.
“The police are for rent in this town,” I say. “Have you heard nothing of what Aleksio said? It’s not so different in Russia. You just don’t remember.”
She gives me a challenging look. She’ll have none of my shit. It warms my heart.
She turns to Mira at one point. She’s rightly identified her as a possible ally. “Surely there’s an Orthodox church here in Chicago.”
“You’re not going to a fucking church,” I say.
“They’d let me contact my sisters in the convent.”
“So will I,” I say. “As soon as you change out of that nun costume.”
“I told you I won’t.”
“Well then,” I say.
An awkward silence falls over the table. Yuri tries with more stories of Sky World, but the fun is lost.
Later in the kitchen Mira scolds me, tells me that this is a horrible choice I’ve left Tanechka with.
I shrug. “It’s done.”
“What if I call her convent?” she says. “You said she couldn’t, but I could.”
“If she cares about talking to her sisters there, she’ll change out of her nun clothes.”
“You’re pushing her. You’re making her dig in. And you’re acting like a jackass. Why would she even want to remember anything if you’re the guy she’d end up with?”
I grab the box from Petrovsky’s and begin to arrange the orehi on a colorful plate.
“What are those?”
“Nuts, we call them. Orehi. Cookie dough with brown custard inside. A silly child’s treat, but Tanechka loved them.”
“She won’t give in on the clothes now.”