The Language of Sisters

  We raised our glasses to Nick. He was gallant and respectful and thanked everyone for including him and then made a toast to my parents and congratulated them on their anniversary and thanked them for creating me, “the love of my life.”

  My uncle Vladan stood next and made a toast to my parents. “My brother, Alexei, my longtime friend, Svetlana, we grow old together, right, and it my honor and privilege. But Alexei ...” He paused. “Your wife looks much better than you. Looks like your daughter, old man. Yes, she does. Woe on your life. You got to do something about your face.”

  Ah, Uncle Vladan. So funny... .

  Not to be outdone, my uncle Yuri stood and said, “Alexei, you have been married to Svetlana for many years and I must be honest. You got the better part of the deal, brother. I still cannot understand why she say yes. Maybe she drunk? Were you drunk the day of your wedding, Svetlana? Come on, you can tell all of us now. Must have been drunk! No? Well, to my brother and to my sister by marriage, I raise my glass to you. To the beauty and what is my brother called? The beast.”

  My uncle Sasho said, those bushy eyebrows up, “Svetlana, you are bright woman. What you still doing with Alexei? Come. I not married. I need wife. I take you, Svetlana.”

  Oh, they were funny.

  Zoya and Tati gave my mother a red box. She unwrapped it and pulled out a purple, lacy negligee. It was exquisite, I have to say. We clapped and cheered.

  My mother held it up over her white lace dress and turned to my father. “Alexei, I think we leave this party early.”

  My father stood up. “No, Svetlana. We not leaving early. We leave now.” He grabbed her and danced her toward the door. “Good-bye everyone. I have better things to do.”

  We ate our favorite Russian food. We drank vodka shots, and my father got out the key to the wine cellar.

  We again toasted my parents. We shouted, “To family! To the Kozlovskys!” and clinked our glasses together.

  The only one not happy was Valerie. She looked ill. She tried to fake it.

  I heard her voice in my head.

  They’ll come for me, I know it.

  Ellie dropped her fork and stared at Valerie.

  I put my wineglass down.

  Listen for me, she told us. Listen.

  * * *

  Nick hooked an arm around me as we walked back to his truck that night. “Nothing is ever dull in your family, is it?”

  “ No. ”

  He laughed.

  “Are you sure you want to be around these people?”

  “Yes, baby. Positive.”

  I kissed him.

  I do love my white bedroom in my yellow tugboat. It is even better with Nick in bed with me. I fell asleep hugging Nick, the river no longer lonely.

  * * *

  My mother was very pleased with Nick. She named a new special after him at the restaurant. It was called “Welcome To The Family, Nick.” It was a beef and lamb dish with sauerkraut on the side. She and my father stood in church and asked everyone to pray for the happiness of their daughter, Antonia, and her new man, Nick. My mother would let them know when the wedding was! I received many, many calls and e-mails of congratulations. What to do with a mother like that?

  * * *

  Keeping The Monsters At Bay: Shopping Defensive Strategies meant that I should buy Nick a cool coat I saw ... and I should buy a pile of lingerie.

  24

  “Mama, Papa, first off, I love you.” Dmitry leaned forward on our parents’ kitchen table.

  “We love you, too, Dmitry,” my parents said, together.

  “I need to talk to you. I need to ask you some questions, and I need the truth.”

  It was time. My parents knew it, we all knew it.

  Valerie, Ellie, Dmitry, and I were at my parents’ home for Sunday dinner. Knowing the topic, Valerie had not invited her family, and I had not invited Nick. On the kayaking trip Dmitry had told us, “I can’t stand it anymore. If I don’t find out the truth, I’m going to lose it.”

  The table was set with a white tablecloth, peonies, and candles. My mother had made chicken Kiev, my brother’s favorite. When we were done, we got down to the secrets that have followed our family like a continuing train wreck from Moscow to Oregon.

  “I know you’re hiding something. I’ve asked about my past many times, but you both shut me down. Papa, you tell me that I am your son and that I came from an orphanage. Mama, you tell me to forget my life in the Soviet Union. I can’t forget it. It’s still in me, these snatches of another life. The rocking horse, a blue box with a woman on it with a parasol, a red and purple butterfly, wooden ducks, a blue door, a vegetable garden. And that white dog, I think he’s dead. A locket, for God’s sakes. I keep seeing a blond woman, who I think may be my mother, and I have seen woods, scary and dark, my whole life. I have no memory of an orphanage. I do, however, have memories of blood.”

  My father slumped back in his chair at the head of the table. He put a hand to the scars on his face, a parting shot from the Soviet Union. I knew he did not realize he was doing it. My mother, at the other end, slumped at the same time.

  “I remember blood, too,” I said.

  “What?” Dmitry said, whipping his head around to me.

  “You had blood on you, Dmitry, when Papa brought you home late that night. Your first night with us.”

  “You never told me this, Toni. Never.”

  I heard the accusation. The hurt betrayal. My chest tightened, as if my guilt and regret were lodged there. “I was ten. They told me not to tell. They told me I was to tell you that Papa got you at the orphanage, but even as a kid I knew that an orphanage would not have released a child in the middle of the night, Papa wouldn’t have been beat up, and there would not have been blood on both of you.”

  My father went gray. My mother closed her eyes, hands together, praying.

  “Oh, my God. Why was there blood on me? On Papa?” Dmitry shouted. “Why? What happened? Whose blood was it?”

  “Dmitry, I am sorry,” I said, my tone begging for forgiveness. “I kept a secret when I shouldn’t have. I kept something from you that you had a right to know.”

  Dmitry stared at me in shock. “How could you not tell me this, Toni? I have told you so many times that I kept remembering blood. You could have told me that I came in with blood, that I wasn’t imagining it. That it was part of my history, not a nightmare that kept repeating itself. At least I would know I wasn’t losing my mind.”

  “I knew, too,” Valerie said.

  It was as if a silent bomb exploded in that room.

  “Me too,” Ellie said.

  Second bomb.

  “You two knew about the blood, too?” Dmitry said, incredulous.

  They had known? My sisters, who I could sometimes hear in my head, they knew, too?

  “That night when Dmitry arrived, you crawled back in bed and started to cry, Toni,” Valerie said. “I got up and looked out the bedroom door, and I saw Papa carrying Dmitry to the bathroom. I saw the blood on both of them. Mama saw me and told me to shut the door and later she told me, Never tell, Valeria, never, ever tell. Papa told me the same thing the next morning, and I promised I wouldn’t. And I haven’t. I wish I had. I am so sorry, Dmitry. I should have told you.”

  “I got up after Valerie came back to bed,” Ellie said, “I went to the bathroom. The water ...” Ellie closed her eyes. “It was red. The curtain was drawn. Papa was in there but I could still see. Dmitry had blood on his hands and his clothes. Mama turned and told me to go to bed. The next morning she said, Never tell, Elvira, never, ever tell. Papa said the same thing to me.”

  “Oh God,” Dmitry said. “Really? All three of you?”

  “I didn’t know they knew,” I said, which my sisters echoed. All these years, we hadn’t known the other sisters knew.

  “The truth. Now. Tell me.” Dmitry pushed a hand through his blond curls. “Did you kill my mother, Papa? Did you? Did you kill my father? Why? Why would you do that?”

&
nbsp; My parents seemed to crumble, my mother visibly shaking. I felt ill.

  “No, son,” my father said in Russian. “No, I did not kill your mother.”

  “Your papa would never have killed your mother, Dmitry,” my mother said, also in Russian, so I started thinking in Russian. “He would not lay a hand on a woman in violence.” My mother wiped her eyes. “We must tell him, Alexei. He cannot rest.”

  “Tell me,” Dmitry said, in Russian, slamming his fists on the table. “Tell me now.”

  My father closed his eyes then said, “You are right, son. There is more. Much more. It begins before you were born. In Moscow. In a university, with me, your mother, your uncles, our ideas, our faith, our beliefs. We wanted a free, democratic society. Freedom of press, of protest, of religion. I was jailed for my beliefs. Your mother, I was sure of it, would soon be jailed, too.

  “The man who tortured me in prison was named Rurik. He never thought I would be released. He thought I would die there, that he would kill me or that I would die later, working in hard labor. He talked to me, often, sometimes as if I was a friend. I would have a wrist chained to a wall and he would tell me about his wife. I would be starving and he would eat dinner in front of me while he told me about his childhood. I would be bleeding, or beaten, by him, and he would tell me about the women he’d slept with.”

  I shuddered, sickened for my father.

  “Rurik said his own father had beat him, that he had been a drunk. He was out on his own at thirteen. Became a beggar, then a criminal, never caught, then came to the prison as a guard. He showed no mercy. He was relentless. He laughed at our pain, mine, my father’s, the other prisoners’.

  “He would say to me, ‘You think you are smarter than me, a farmer’s son, because you are a professor? No, you are not. Who is on the ground in his waste and who is standing, Professor Kozlovsky? You think you are better than me? Who has a job and who is dying?’ ”

  My mother put her hand over her mouth as a sob escaped. I reached for her other hand.

  “Rurik talked about his wife all the time. He was obsessed with her, said she was the most beautiful woman in all of the Soviet Union. Said she was his. That he would never let her go. That he owned her.” The candles flickered, my father studied them. “Rurik killed his wife.”

  My sisters gasped. Dmitry’s temple beat. My mother, however, was not surprised. She had always known.

  “For weeks before he killed her, he thought she was having an affair with one of the men in town, so he beat her to get her to tell him the truth. One day he came back to the prison and whispered to me that he had killed her and dragged her outside into the woods and buried her by a large rock. He was enflamed at her betrayal. He said he put a piece of cement over her grave. ‘So she can’t get out and go to heaven.’ He laughed at that, too. He did not believe in God. His wife did, and he told me he heard her praying when he beat her. He mocked her prayers as he mocked the prayers of my father and me. He told me that she got what she deserved. He went from rage to tears. He would cry for hours over his wife—her betrayal and her death.

  “Within days it was clear he was having a breakdown. He started fighting with the other guards, so he was told to take a vacation. I was released, ironically, the day after he left. The Bessonovs bribed me out of prison. Your uncles tried but had not been able to do so from the States. They had no influence, but Stas Bessonov did.

  “Anyhow, I am sure, if Rurik was there, he would have fought against my release, maybe to the death. My death. He never thought I would get out. The timing was God-given.”

  “Was Rurik arrested for killing his wife?” Ellie asked, so pale.

  “He was not. Rurik and his wife lived outside of a small village, in the country. No car for her. He said that he didn’t let her leave the house. How he thought she could have an affair, I don’t know. He was insane. Anyhow, he was planning on going to the pub soon and telling everyone that his wife had run off. Left him. That she had a boyfriend. Then he could avoid suspicion.”

  “How do you know, though, Papa,” Valerie said, ever the prosecutor, “that he was not arrested? Didn’t we leave Moscow about two weeks after you were released?”

  “Yes, we did. When I was better. When your mother, when you all”—he nodded at my sisters and me—“nursed me back to health.”

  “He could have been arrested then. Later.” Valerie always wanted justice. “After we left. Did you tell the police?”

  “No. They would not have believed me, an enemy of the people, accusing his jailer of being a murderer. And Rurik would have known that. He was never arrested.”

  There was more. So much more. I felt it coming like a tank. We all did.

  “How, though?” Dmitry asked. “How are you sure?”

  My father’s back was ramrod straight. “Because I killed Rurik.”

  Because I killed Rurik.

  What? It was like being hit by a sledgehammer. We struggled to get our minds around it. Our father killed a man: his jailer.

  “I went to his home, two days before we left for America. It took me awhile to find it, but the next day I killed him. We fought. I killed him with your grandfather’s knife, a knife he had from the war. It was my way of allowing my father the chance to be a part of killing the man who killed him.”

  Sometimes it is hard to understand everything, all at once. It’s too brain scrambling. It’s too graphic. You can’t get your mind to react, because it’s overwhelmed. It’s like trying to swallow verbal thunder.

  We sat in that verbal thunder, stricken into silence.

  “What?” Ellie whispered.

  “You killed the man who—” Dmitry started.

  “... who killed grandfather ...” Valerie said.

  “... the man who tortured you—” Ellie said.

  “... the man who told you he had recently killed his wife?” I said.

  “Your papa,” my mother said, and I dare say she was proud. “He is an expert fighter. He was a boxer. I am proud of his skills.”

  “Thank you,” he murmured.

  “I was scared that night,” my mother said. “So scared. I waited up for you all night. Praying. I begged you not to go, but you did.”

  “I know you prayed, Svetlana. I felt your prayers.”

  I remembered, as if it happened last week. My mother begging my father not to go, his telling her it was for his honor, his father’s honor, insisting we leave without him if he did not immediately return. The next morning, my mother praying, asking us to pray, sitting by our window in that tiny, freezing apartment in Moscow.

  “And here, my son,” my father said to Dmitry, “is where this story takes another turn, one I did not expect amidst the revenge I knew I had to take against Rurik. You are not from an orphanage, Dmitry. I lied to you.”

  “Yes, we lied,” my mother said. “Do not be angry only at your papa. Be angry at me, too, my love.”

  “Where then?” Dmitry said, hands flat down on the table, as if to steady himself, face flushed. “Where did you get me?” But understanding dawned on his face, inch by inch.

  “Oh, my mother of God and holy crap,” Valerie said.

  “Oh,” Ellie said. “Oh.”

  “Oh, Lord,” I said.

  “Dmitry,” my father said, so gently, “you are Rurik’s son.”

  Dmitry’s face froze, stunned, for long seconds, then he lowered his head to the table, his hands over his blond curls. I patted his back, reeling.

  “I didn’t know he had a son, Dmitry. He never talked about you, only his wife. I killed your father, Dmitry, with my father’s knife, for what he did to me and my father. When he was dead, I dragged him to the woods, when it was dark, as far in as I could, and buried him. I cleaned up the blood, then burned the rags. I hoped that no one would come looking for Rurik, at least for a while.

  “I planned it so that we could immediately escape to America before the police had any chance to figure out who had killed him when they discovered he was gone.” He grab
bed Dmitry’s hand, his beloved son whom he never quite bonded with, Dmitry’s memories dancing like demons in the back of his head. Dmitry pulled his hand away.

  “I heard you cry, son, in a back room, down a hallway. I didn’t know you were there. I swear I didn’t, and there you were, standing up in a cardboard box, no crib. You had blood all over you. At first I thought you were hurt, then I realized what had happened. While I was burying your father in the woods, you came into the room and you must have slipped on the blood from our fight.”

  “I slipped on my father’s blood.” Dmitry’s eyes were dazed.

  “You slipped on your father’s blood,” my father corrected, “mine, and you slipped on Rurik’s blood.”

  I leaned back against the chair, weak. Ellie put a hand to her mouth. Valerie looked drained.

  “I couldn’t leave you,” my father said, “which is what I think Rurik did after he killed your mother and then came to work. He left you. Alone. It was winter, it was freezing. I could not leave you. You would have died in that house. I couldn’t take you to the village and drop you off, try to find other family members. I would have been caught. Jailed. Killed. What then, for your mother, your sisters? Your mother had been investigated for our meetings, for our faith, too. We knew she would go to jail soon. We were shocked she had not already gone.

  “Who would take care of your sisters without us? Your uncle Vladan had been gone for years. Your uncle Yuri and uncle Sasho were gone, too, in the last year. I would have had to sacrifice my wife, your mother, your sisters, and I couldn’t do that. It was a small village anyhow, no orphanage. I picked you up and you stopped crying. I comforted you. I needed to move quickly, and that’s what I did. I didn’t have time to clean you up, to clean us up. I put you in the car wrapped in a blanket.

  “On the way home you fell asleep against me, your head in my lap. It was a long trip home. When you woke up I sang to you, fed you a sandwich your mother had made me. I could not take you to an orphanage in Moscow. Those are no place for children. No love or kindness. Abuse. Not enough food. I could not do that to you. There were no viable choices. I could not sacrifice my family by trying to find yours, and I could not sacrifice you by putting you in an orphanage. The decision was made. You had to come with us, to America.”