This Is Not Your City (21 page)

Daria knew he was speaking like a child for her, but even so, whatever he said next slipped past her. She smiled anyway, pressed his hand between hers. It was something about “happy,” about a “good life,” about “welcome.” It was something that, standing there in the Prisma parking lot with a beautiful boy as cheerful as a golden retriever, she could convince herself would someday be true.

“He's a decent boy,” Daria tells the interpreter. “Truly. Better than I thought.”

The interpreter seems impatient, a man who learned her language thinking it would be of more importance than it has turned out to be. The language of diplomacy has turned into the language of sad women in kitchens and too-sweet tea. He asks for her patronymic, and Daria doesn't know if he wants to address her properly in Russian or simply be intrusive, make her reveal a name she no longer has any use for, a person she no longer is. Daria Fedorovna, he says, tell me about your daughter, and for a moment Nika feels like someone else's child. The interpreter eats four slices of pulla, one after another. It isn't homemade, but he compliments her anyway. Daria pulls more pastry from the bag and slices it finer, fans it out on the plate. She pours him another cup of coffee.

Nika hadn't wanted to leave, Daria confesses. There was her school, her home, her whole life. There had been a boy. He was twenty and worked in the post office. Nika was fourteen. Daria forbade her to see him, and Nika laughed at her. Now in this country Nika looks too old, eighteen instead of fifteen, but in Finnish she speaks like a child. I don't want. I do. Yes,
I like cigarette. Daria is scared that Nika, too, will end up in a stranger's bed, and if that happens this will have been for nothing.

“Do you think she might have tried to go back?” the interpreter asks her, and Daria doesn't know. It seems so monumentally stupid, a kick in the teeth to her mother, to the marriage. It seems like something, on second thought, Nika might have decided to do. But when Daria looks in Paavo's filing cabinet Nika's passport is still there. She shows it to the interpreter. One page has Nika's visa glued in, another is stamped Nuijamaa, where Paavo drove his new wife and daughter across the border for the first and last time in a Ford Fiesta. “It looks the same,” Nika had announced, crossing into Finland. For thirty kilometers of nothing but forest she was right. The towns, though. Even the villages. So tidy and glossy, pasteurized to the blue-white of skim milk. It was a long drive, and at the end of it was a town so small, so far from the border, it had none of the amenities the agency had suggested she look for: no language classes, no foreign social clubs, no international center where she could sit with other Russian mothers and discuss ways to save their children.

The interpreter thanks her for her time, when it is clear that it is his own that he feels has been wasted. The pad he brought to take notes is mostly empty. She shows him out and then stands on the balcony, watching him unlock his car and drive off. The green on the trees is still pale, the birches fluffy with lightveined leaves. It was a long winter, and patches of snow stayed slumped in the shade of the pine trees until May. Now Daria has not seen stars for weeks, and she does not miss them. She has put potted plants all along the edges of the balcony, some balanced on the railing and tied precariously with twine to the rungs, and in the long summer light they are finally starting to grow. The blue nights husband the herbs, the vegetables, which they will have fresh and now not so expensively. The supermarkets here make her nervous. It is sometimes a physical pain, to pay so much for things. In the register lines she sweats and brings the groceries home with damp patches under her arms.

Daria looks in the cupboards, plans dinner. She takes steaks from the freezer to thaw. It is too early to do anything else and
the apartment is not big enough to occupy her with cleaning. She did the living room and Paavo's bedroom only yesterday, when Nika was already missing but her mother did not even know. So Daria turns the handle of Nika's door. Her daughter has learned at least one thing in Finnish:
Pääsy Kielletty
. She has written it in black marker on a piece of notebook paper and taped it to her door. No Entry.

Nika's room is a glorious mess, alive with her daughter's things, the smell of her, the perfume Daria suspects she stole, the floor shining with the glitter Nika glues to her eyelids with Vaseline. The top of the dresser is littered with makeup, a dark purple lipstick worn away at a sloping angle, a black eyeliner as blunted as a crayon. Nika wears thick streaks of it every day, doesn't wash it off at night, comes out of her bedroom in the morning looking like a sluggish raccoon. Daria wants to tell her that she must always take off her makeup, that to leave it on will someday make her look ten years older. She wants to tell Nika a thousand things, and practices speeches to her daughter in her head so often they are threadbare before she has the courage to say them aloud, as if struggling so hard in one language has made her mute in every other.

The marriage is a gaping hush, an unraveling hole that cannot be darned. It is growing. It has swallowed the girl Daria was, who spun terrible fairy tales in her school notebooks, about princesses and white horses and the blood-pricked thorns of roses, the icy shards of hearts. It has swallowed the woman Daria was who narrated her days. Who said, this is what happened today. This is who I saw. This is what we talked about. This is who has gotten fat. It has swallowed the woman who asked, how was school today?—and worse, the silence has swallowed the daughter who sometimes answered her. Daria has sold herself for nothing, because her daughter is becoming as mute as she is. How was school today, she says in Russian, and Nika has no answer, not in any language, not in the one she was born with, or in the three she is supposed to be learning. Not in Finnish, or the English she takes three times a week, or the Swedish she is required to take for two, another language she cannot speak, another she does not need, another class she will fail. Paavo has
had to put his signature on Swedish tests turned in blank, Nika's name written on the top and every question unanswered. Can't you try harder, Daria has asked her. How do you still know nothing? Speak, Daria has begged her. Just speak. Please.

If Nika writes fairy tales, she has never shown them to her mother. Math was her best subject in Vyborg, and in Outojärvi it is one of the only ones she passed. Her marks would be perfect except for the word problems lurking at the end of every exam. Sometimes she reads them well enough to solve, and those tests Daria sticks to the refrigerator. Nika is a practical child, and has never, as her mother once did secretly, rhymed storm clouds as dark as her soul, or a love that burned like fire. It is just as well, Daria thinks, because the love Daria has known has never burned like fire, and her heart has never broken into shards. It simply beats and that is a language of its own, useless and irrefutable. The heart has one word only, and however wrong or right her life might have gone it would have the one word still.

Daria scoops clothes from Nika's floor into a hamper, puts tissues blotted with lipstick into the wastebasket. The school year ended three weeks ago, and Nika's schoolbooks are in a pile in the corner, where she dumped them to empty her backpack for camping. Daria stacks them neatly. Nika's grade report recommended she repeat the year. Paavo said he'd talk to the headmaster again, meet with the teachers, see what he could do. He did not sound hopeful.

“It's okay,” Nika shrugged.

“Don't you want to keep up with your friends?” Daria asked, in Russian.

“What friends?” Nika said, then added, because she could, “Matti's graduating anyway.”

“And doing what?”

“Looking for work. Staying in town.”

“What kind of work?”

“Why do you care? You sold candy. You don't work at all now.”

“I work.”

“Being Paavo's wife? I guess that's work. I guess that's some kind of work,” Nika said, and Daria blushed.

Beneath the stack of Nika's school things there is a folder Daria recognizes, a packet of “Helpful Hints” from the agency. Phrases for courtship, for proposals, for visa arrangements and a life together in two languages:
You are very beautiful. I believe strongly in good family life. My hobbies are to bake and cook. I am sincere and passionate. I like fidelity
.

One of Daria's friends with a PhD in Comparative Literature and a job managing a florist shop had read it over and laughed. “Full of mistakes. You memorize these and you'll sound even stupider.”

The agency had already drawn up Daria's profile with a “1” under language skills: Some basic phrases. Cannot write or talk on telephone.

Daria doesn't understand why Nika would have this folder until she turns a page and reads Nika's notes. There are pages of endearments she has practiced writing over and over, until her handwriting is not so awkward. She has copied phrases out on blank pages to memorize them, inserted Matti's name on the blank lines.
I want to give you the world. Can you speak slower? My heart is like a bird that is ready to zoom up to the sky. Am I deserving for your love?

“Sexy,” the agency had told her. “These pictures are not sexy.”

Daria had borrowed a camera from a friend and asked Nika to go with her to a city park near their apartment. Nika's pictures were headshots, Daria leaning against tree trunks and smiling to show off her straight teeth, shiny brown hair, careful makeup that you could see she did not really need. Daria had Nika when she was twenty-two, was thirty-six when she signed up with the agency. Not so old. She has never smoked and her skin is good for her age, mostly unlined.

“You can't even see your body in these. Who will be interested? They'll think you're fat and trying to hide it.”

Daria is slim, almost skinny. She is proud that she does not eat much, that she could wear her daughter's clothes if she wanted to.

“What do you think the men will be looking for? Why do
you think they'll pick you? Your teenage daughter? Your “1” in language? We need other photos.”

Daria asked Nika to take those photos, too, in her bedroom with the blinds pulled down. Their apartment had only two rooms—Daria slept on the couch in the living room. To be on a bed it had to be Nika's—to wear sexy clothes, those were mostly Nika's, too. There was the shot of her on her hands and knees on the bed, in a short robe, barely covered. The shot she leaned over for, her cleavage at the center of the picture. It was one of Nika's bras that gave the best effect, a padded purple one that pushed Daria's small breasts up and together. Daria knew the bra from doing the laundry and asked to try it.

“Maybe your purple one. That might look best.”

“Mom.”

“Please. I need you to help me with this. I'll wash it for you after, if you want. It'll be dry by tomorrow morning if you want to wear it.”

“Mom.”

“Please,” Daria had begged her daughter, and Nika had done it. She had fished her bra out of her dresser, pulled her shortest skirts from the closet, the shirts with the lowest necklines. Daria tried to think of the clothes only as costume changes, a whirl of scenery and props as her daughter positioned her in the doorway, on the bed, the nightstand lamp on and then off. She lay on her back, her arms over her head, one leg bent; Nika slit open the blinds and striped her mother with sunlight. “Maybe undo another button,” Nika said. “Pull it down a little. Pull the shoulders wide.”

The shirt was one Nika had begged for before her first day of high school; she'd bargained for the bra when it went on sale at a department store. The skirt had been a reward when Nika scored highest in her class on a trigonometry exam.

“Do you think this is sexy enough?” Daria kept saying, hating herself but having no one else to ask.

“You're sexy. The pictures will be sexy. Stop worrying,” Nika told her. She bent and shaped her mother's limbs like a doll's rubber legs, crooked plastic arms. She lifted a skirt higher on Daria's thighs, the hem pinched between her thumb and
middle finger. Daria could feel the tongue of her daughter's fingers not-touching her as the fabric settled over her skin.

“Much better,” the agency told them. “Much,” and at the time Daria was relieved. Yet if she had to put her finger on the moment it started to spread, the toothed silence between them, she would probably mark it there, that Sunday afternoon in Nika's bedroom with the blinds drawn, Daria dressed in her daughter's underwear. It was a long time before Nika wore those clothes again. The purple bra did not turn up in the wash for weeks. But Nika did not have so many clothes she could afford to be that choosy, and eventually they all showed up again, the skirts and shirts and the short robe. Her clothes are one more way that Nika has not fit in here, but she has refused new ones. Nika and Daria both know that Paavo disapproves. He has copied down Nika's size from the tags inside her clothes and bought her loose jeans and sweaters. She wears them most often when he is not around.