The Cosmopolitans (29 page)

“
The Eastern hordes are overrunning these nuptials.
”

“
What could I do? It was the grandmother with her asthma.
Anytime someone says no to her, she starts puffing.
”

As she descended the stairs, someone caught her by the arm —
Edward Nudel, with his wife Ella. “
Guard your
proudest adornment,
”
the Soul said, and then added, unnecessarily, “
virtue
.”

“
Such a little punim, may I…?
” Ella Nudel said, and held out her
arms for Izzy. Babies loved Ella, Stalina remembered, as Izzy lolled
open-mouthed on Ella’s rest hotel of a bosom.

Edward was wholly uninterested in Izzy, as he had always been
wholly uninterested in anyone without at least a master’s degree
in one of the physical sciences. With a certain air of obligation, he
made the joke: “
Bangladesh just formed.”

Stalina completed it: “
Use baby oil and it’ll go away
.” It was
remarkable how many of her friends and relatives had remembered
this grizzled bit of Soviet humor. What else did they remember —
preschool praise songs to diversion dams? The favorite chocolates
of long-dead district doctors?

Edward cleared his throat; he was usually only one joke away
from his main point. “
Stalinatchka, I must take at least ninety
seconds of your time
.”

“
Are you going to try to seduce me into your lab again?
” She’d
chosen the wrong word, provoking an odd look from Ella and a
whispered rebuke from the handkerchief. If they only knew: in his
old age, Edward had become so fragile it was frightening to kiss his
cheek, let alone anything else.

Edward said, “
We are now fully equipped to conduct
combinatorial chemistry at the highest levels, so you see, you have
no choice but to join
.”

“
Edward thinks it’s all very interesting
,” Ella said, rocking
Izzy.

“
What sorts of compounds…
?” Stalina tried to sound casual.

“
For shame
,” the handkerchief said. It had no right to interfere
— it had stopped bothering to accompany her to the dull hospital
lab long ago.

Ella said, “N
ow, my dears, my new friend and I go in search
of zakuskis and tea
,” and bounced Izzy over to the buffet. Stalina
couldn’t help a huge smile as Edward described his new Cellomics
ArrayScan. The difference between her current lab and Edward’s
was like the difference between cutting trees with handmade tools
and cutting them on a tractor or with a chain saw or some such thing.
She listened for almost an hour, stopping only when the handkerchief
warned of her lord and protector’s approach.

Osip

The rabbi and imam were gone; everyone had their shoes
back; Izzinka was napping; Milla was crying; the Russians were
drunk, the Americans more so: what better time for a toast? Osip
stood, briefly lost his balance and grabbed the side of the cabinet.
Stalina’s figurines swayed, their yellows and navies and browns
blurred together, it was beautiful — why couldn’t Stalinatchka see
the beauty?

“Wedding friends,” he said. “I am losing daughter, but getting
country. A small country, but, still, very nice.” A few small smiles
were his only response. He was trying, he wanted to say, he was
trying to be funny about this awful plan.

“So we are very happy, and — we love you.” The Russians
applauded fervently, the Americans politely, the Bangladeshis
warily. Yana and Pratik sat as they had since dinner, like electro-
shock patients, with fingertips touching on the top of the table.
Stalina asked Mr. Rehman to make a toast.

“I have prepared absolutely nothing.” Mr. Rehman stood and
walked to the head of the table. “Perhaps, instead, I could simply
translate Mr. Molochnik’s speech into Bengali?” but Stalina shook
her head.

“Good luck,” Osip said.

“Thank you, I will certainly need it.” Mr. Rehman coughed and
reddened.

“Yes, but you should say, ‘To the devil!’ That’s how we say in
Russian.”

“We are speaking now English,” Stalina said. Osip sat down.

Mr. Rehman said, “I will begin with a quotation from the Koran,
if you do not mind.”

“Of course we do not mind, we are open mind,” Stalina said,
crossing her arms.

“All right, then, the Koran tells us that humans do not choose
whom we love. Rather, the Lord Allah chooses, and when we listen
to him, he blesses us.”

Now he translated into Bangladeshi, and even those guests who
did not know the language looked upon him with respect. “As some
of you know, my son Pratik has recently completed his dissertation
on disaster preparation. Is not marriage itself a kind of disaster, in
the very best sense of the word? Suddenly, another life is swept in to
our shores, like silt in a flood.”

“Yana now is silt?” Osip said to Stalina, in what was not quite
a whisper. Why couldn’t any of these groom-fathers simply say the
bride was beautiful and sit down?

Mr. Rehman paused. “At first, we do not know what to do with
this new gift. Sometimes, indeed, we rather wish the waters had
never come, that our old life could continue apace.”

Lev

Osip said, why not have the leaf ceremony Labor Day weekend?
Our parents were Soviet people, after all.

“Did you know my parents, winners of the Stalin medal?” he’d
written, asking the readers of Russian-language newspapers with
names idealistic (
The New Russian Word
), futuristic (
Contact
),
Canadian (
The Canadian Russian-Language Newspaper
), im-
perialistic (
Our Texas
), and diffident (
By the Way
). He hadn’t been
sure whether or not to mention that they’d immediately given the
medal to a Mongolian orphan, that he might exchange it for food. It
was an unusual, and certainly memorable, deed — but our parents
may have been too modest to tell anyone outside the family about it,
so in the end, he’d left it out.

Someone had written back. Osya read aloud, “‘
I knew a Solomon
Molochnik in Kolyma, but he’d never been a captain
.
And —’
” Osip
showed me a black-and-white photograph of some men, not in
military regalia, standing in front of
 
a hut. Our father was furthest
to the right.

I said, “Don’t you remember? He had much bigger ears than any
of those men. Poor Russkie fogies, seeing a lost camp comrade in
every newspaper ad.”

“
Next year
,” Osip said, “
Maybe we can all travel to Mongolia
and visit the hospital our parents saved.
”

“They tore it down
,
” I said, bringing the tea to the table.

“
What, just like that?
”

“The Mongolians did so much damage it wasn’t worth fixing
.
”

Incompletely reassured, he joked, “
I wish those Mongols would
come to Yankee Surgical.
”

I should have said something else, to tie together the sticks of
that story. Osya would have pitched in, we could have raised that
barn again.

He leaned forward. “
Will you speak over the leaf?
”

I told him, fine. Let him plan what he wants. Didn’t I once
plan to break our parents out of Kolyma in a helicopter? Didn’t
we brothers plan that if we ever got to the U.S., we would start a
company together, become those monocle-wearing capitalists we’d
only seen in cartoons?

Milla

Milla saw the scribbled notes on their bedside table:

Isidor’s Song

My father was made of cash

But you and I are built to last

Wanted to love her but didn’t (repeat)

Now my son is the one I love

You will always be good enough

When Malcolm returned from rehearsal, she looked up from
nursing Izzy and said, “You’d love to love me, baby?” She’d meant
it as a joke, a musical, pointed joke, harkening back to that disco era
song, pointing forward to their future, when they’d laugh about how
she’d misunderstood what he’d written. She now realized she had
been too ambitious with the joke.

“You looked at my song?” Malcolm said.

“It was right there.” Izzy chewed on her nipple. When he was
done, would her nipple be gone? Or would it stand proud, like a
tattered flag after a battle? She wished she hadn’t started this problem
with Malcolm and that they were making nipple jokes instead.

He paced and his shadow, too large for the room, climbed up
and down the pink walls. “You never come to the gigs. And your
body — shouldn’t you be weaning him by now? It’s like it’s some
sponge of motherhood.”