Hotel Moscow (17 page)

S
ATURDAY WAS THE
day her parents expected her to visit—or at least expected to hear from her if she were either working on the weekend or traveling. With the time difference, it was dawn in New York, but they were early risers and would soon be staring at the phone, willing it to ring. Yesterday, her father would have received her fax in his office. She hadn’t asked him not to tell her mother, leaving it to him to decide whether to hurt her.

“EuroTours forgot to book a tour bus,” Amanda told Brooke upon her return to their room. “But they’re sending one now.” She went downstairs to wait for it.

Brooke placed a request with the international operator and waited for the call back. Through the window she could see only some distant buildings. Somewhere, hundreds of kilometers west in Riga, Latvia, her mother had spent her pubescent years.

Brooke recalled first becoming aware of her mother’s “otherness” on a summer Saturday, when her mother came to pick
her up from dance class. All the other mothers picking up their daughters wore shorts or Capris in pastel colors. Her much-older mother looked out of place in a dark, flowery cotton dress that hung below her knees. And not only was her hair not highlighted, teased, or coiffed, it was steely gray and pulled back into a severe bun. Her mother looked more than just ancient; she looked embarrassingly foreign, a stranger Brooke wanted nothing to do with.

Glancing at the phone, waiting for its ring, remorse and fondness filled Brooke. She wished she hadn’t been so judgmental of her mother’s shortcomings, so acutely alert to what was lacking in their home life. From the vantage point of maturity, Brooke could see that her mother was a brilliant woman whose education had been cut short, whose life had been thrown out of orbit. In spite of the hurdles, her mother managed to pave her own professional path in a new land, in a new language she studied obsessively. Starting as a bookkeeper, she eventually majored in accounting, and by the time Brooke was a teenager, her mother had learned to drive and had opened her own accounting office. The same frugal, exacting, opinionated, and unforgiving nature that made her difficult for Brooke to bear were perfectly suited for this career.

It was only in the bosom of her family that her mother’s austere and tormented soul snuffed out any moments of joy. Bertha had been merely five years old, still living in their tiny Brooklyn apartment, when one night she overheard her father begging her mother to “just try once in a while.” Her mother had responded, “My dead relatives don’t get a ‘once in a while.’ They are dead. And so am I—or I should be.”

Brooke sighed. When the phone finally rang, she dreaded what she had to say. “Mom? How are you?” she asked in a cheerful tone.

“No better than expected. Not worse either. Where are you?”

Brooke gulped air. “In Moscow.”

Thunderous silence, then, “What do you want with those anti-Semites?”

Brooke’s father had picked up the other extension. “She’s probably there on business.”

Business reasons might be acceptable to her mother, as had been Brooke’s visits to her firm’s Frankfurt office; profiting from the Germans was the little that Jews could do in return for the horrors they had suffered. “You can call it that,” Brooke said.

“Meaning what? Are you there on business or not?” her mother demanded.

“What else would send her to that cursed country?” her father replied. “She needs to know all the international machinations.”

“Can’t she exclude the one country that killed my whole family?”

Brooke held the phone away from her ear, letting their bickering take its course. A couple of exchanges later, when the two of them ran out of steam, she asked, “So how is the weather in New York?”

“Weather,
shmether.
Who cares? It’s raining, all right? Now can you explain why you went to Russia, of all places?”

“Actually, Mom, I came here to take a look at the new economy. But I got involved in helping women make sense of it. They know nothing about business. They are like five-year-olds when it comes to finances or marketing—”

“Helping? You’re there for charity? Of all places on earth, you chose to help our enemies?”

Brooke bit her lip, holding back the retort that, perhaps by showing them benevolence, they’d no longer be enemies. Such liberal ideas had never taken root in her mother’s thinking. “It came by chance. All the executives at the office were told by the new management to take two weeks off. That new banking practice was applied to us.” Brooke shifted the receiver to her other ear. “Amanda already had this mission set up so I just joined—”

“Why not just stick a knife in my back?”

“Martha, leave her alone,” her father said. “She’s a grown woman.”

“Grown? And where did she grow up, you tell me? What kind of home did she need to grow up in in order to know that she owes it to her dead grandparents, aunts, and uncles not to go out of her way to help these murderers?”

Pulling the phone cord, Brooke stepped to the window. When had her mother’s enemies ceased to be her enemies? At what time in the process of purging herself of her parents’ past had she leaped over the clear separation of “us” versus “them”? She sat down on her cot, the enormity of her betrayal filling her. She had been insensitive to her mother’s psyche, to her own family heritage.

“Next she’ll be helping the murderers of your children in Prague,” her mother told her father. “Will you defend her then? Maybe you’ll send a donation?”

“Bertha, there are other miserable places around the globe,” her father said feebly.

“Yes,” her mother said. “India. Lots of unhappy people
there—and they never had pogroms. You can find poverty there, even leprosy. But get out of Russia!”

“Go to Israel, and do
tzedakah
for our own people,” her father said.

Brooke dropped her head into her hands as she clutched the phone to her ear. Her heart pounded with the old pain, the wound her parents had carved in the center of her being. They had assigned her one job—to remember—and she had willfully ignored it. “Mom, I just arrived two days ago,” she said. “I’ve made promises—”

“Why do you care about the feelings of some Russians more than you care about the feelings of your family? Why can’t you do the simple thing and maintain respect—” Her mother’s indignant voice suddenly pinched and choked.

Dead people did not have feelings,
Brooke thought.

“Brooke,” her father took over the conversation, using the name he’d never grown comfortable with. “Do they know you are Jewish?”

“It rarely comes up.” Brooke shifted the chain so the Star of David returned to rest in the front. Instinctively, she had turned it when Irina arrived, wanting to keep her Jewishness out of the picture.

Her mother sobbed into the phone.

“Okay, Mom. I’ve been considering not staying for the whole program—”

“Today,” her mother cut her off. “Get out of there today. Please. Remember—”

“I remember! You never let me forget!” Brooke screamed, then sobered. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” She
replaced the receiver in the old-fashioned cradle, feeling drained and ashamed of her outburst.

She could fly to Frankfurt; it would be a good opportunity to discuss the new office landscape with Hoffenbach. Also, she could use visiting his office as an excuse to tell Amanda that although she, too, was deserting the group, she would explore the launching of a micro-lending fund here. Yet, how could she manage such a project without setting foot in Russia again? Anti-Semitism wouldn’t be eradicated here in the coming decades. No, there was nothing for Brooke here. She’d be better off investing her energy helping Israeli women and making her parents happy in the process.

She called Delta and booked a flight for the next day, Sunday. Then she left a message at Hoffenbach’s office because she didn’t have his home number.

T
HE MORNING WAS
bright and warm, and Olga was filled with anticipation for the evening. Who would have ever believed that one day she’d host an American guest in her own home? In the outdoor market, on rickety tables constructed of wood planks, autumn colors played in the piles of yellow squash, brown potatoes in open burlap sacks, mud-covered carrots, and mounds of purple beets. Every few meters, Olga examined a bottle of oil, a wheel of cheese, or a crock of butter produced in the farmers’ kitchens.

The chicken merchant beckoned her, pointing at four emaciated fowl hanging from a post over his head. The state of the chicken reflected the economic problems of Russia, Olga thought: the leaner the times, the scrawnier the chicken.

“How much?” She poked her finger at the clammy, yellowish skin.

He unhooked one from the post and held it up in both palms, like an offering. “Three thousand rubles.”

“That’s a week’s salary! Thievery!” She sniffed the chicken front and back for signs of decay. “Two thousand.” She pointed at the smudges of feathers left. “Burn them and clean the insides.”

“Twenty-five hundred.”

“Twenty-two hundred. And let me check the inner organs before you wrap them. Don’t break the liver or the spleen.”

“Do you think this is America?” In quick, short slices, his knife cleaved the chicken’s center. “Twenty-three hundred.”

“We should only have it as good as in America.” She lit a Dukat. “In America citizens have shopping centers and supermarkets. Do you know they have stores with dozens of washing machines where you can do your wash and then put them in other machines that dry your clothes while you wait?” She punctuated her words with a wave of her cigarette. “In America, every woman has electric appliances to do her kitchen work—to peel, chop, or mix. You can’t begin to imagine what they have in America. Have you heard of an electric
toothbrush
?”

“They’re too lazy to brush their own teeth that they need a machine for that?” The merchant’s knife gutted out the chicken’s innards and laid them on a newspaper for her to examine. “Americans are stupid. They order things by mail! Can you imagine not inspecting the merchandise before they send it to you? What do you do when they dump on you all the ruined or broken items? And anyway, anybody can steal from the package before you even get it.”

Olga nodded. “You may be right about that. But think of the other things that make life easy: freezers with prepared frozen meals, ready to eat, and canned vegetables of the best quality, not rotten stuff like here.” She would ask Brooke what they did
with the bad fruits and vegetables, if they didn’t slip them onto consumers’ plates.

She scrutinized the chicken’s liver and heart for color, and the guts for feed, then watched as the merchant dangled the chicken over a candle to burn off the remaining feathers. “Throw away the head, but I’ll use the stomach, neck, and the knuckles in my soup.” She would cook the iron-rich liver over the open flame of her stove. It would be a delicacy for Galina.

“In America, chicken is bought already cleaned, cut up, and wrapped.” The merchant rolled the purchase into a newspaper. “Even seasoned. Ha! A sure way to hide an old chicken that died of disease.”

As she tucked her purchase into her string bag, Olga thought that tonight she’d ask Brooke how American housewives knew how to select a chicken if it came preseasoned and wrapped.

There would be other questions, such as how to proceed with her investigation. She hoped it would be
their
investigation. Olga couldn’t do it alone, not without the American’s financial savvy. She had no idea how to follow “the money trail.”

An hour and a half later, Olga’s legs throbbed from walking on the uneven, muddy paths of the market. The strings of her three bags, filled with onions, beets, carrots, parsley, squash, turnips, cucumbers, and radishes, strained her shoulder muscles. For her guest tonight, she had splurged on herring and cheese, and had even bought three eggs. Her favorite meat merchant had been in the market, and she bought sausage, almost certain he didn’t make it out of old horse meat.

She took the subway to Baumansky market, thirty minutes away, where she bought fresh oranges for Galina to keep
away the flu—Olga’s daughter-in-law was busy with both a job and university classes. Olga wanted to help the young mother become a modern woman, the kind Russia needed.

At the flower stand, she bought fresh red carnations for her table. When she returned home, she would send Viktor to the dairy factory for milk and butter, and then have him stop at the baker. Let him stand on line for an hour in each place. Her husband might be an
intelligent,
but when it came to housework, he was as lazy as any other man. Right now, while her stiffening joints cried out for a day of rest, he was home, reading a book and listening to classical music. When would she get to stay in bed for the day and read a good novel?

The sun grew hotter as Olga, still wearing her wool coat, trekked the four blocks from the subway. She felt dizzy. She missed her little Zhiguli, as old and unreliable as it had been. Damn the toad. She removed her scarf and stuffed it into her coat pocket. Her bags became heavier with each step.

She heard the pounding of feet before someone elbowed her hard. Strong hands knocked her to the ground. The bags were ripped from her hands, almost tearing off her arms.

It was so fast. Lying face down, she felt the grating taste of dirt in her mouth. She spat, but her saliva was mixed with mud and drooled down her lip. She lifted her head and a sharp pain pierced her temples as she saw three strapping youths fleeing with her bags. She recognized one of the boys; he had been a good son who used to sit with his mother in the park. How had he turned into a no-goodnik, a thief? And right in his own neighborhood! Didn’t he care about the shame he brought upon his mother?

Olga propped herself up on one elbow in the caked mud. Inch by inch, she pushed herself up to a sitting position. She checked her limbs and rubbed her scraped, throbbing knees. To her left, a lonely turnip was all that remained of her stolen bags. Gone was her food for the week. Three hours of shopping and hard-earned money wasted.

The bouquet of carnations lay strewn about, stems broken.

She was tired. A sense of loss, of injustice, of powerlessness, washed over her. As if through an outer pair of eyes, she saw herself, a lonely
babushka
in a heavy coat, scruffy-looking and sitting in the dust, unable even to pull herself up.

Her hands covered her face as silent sobs heaved her chest, broke, and choked in her throat. How she wished she could cry. Cry for all the boys whose mothers had taught them good values but who learned bad things because they had to. Cry for Mother Russia, where her granddaughter would grow up.

Still, she held back many unshed tears. They hardened into anger.