The Language of Sisters (34 page)

He was gone, up the golden staircase.

He was dead.

I was dead, too.

* * *

When I see golden staircases climbing into the sky, through puffy white clouds, up to heaven, I turn away. Every time.

* * *

I told my sisters, in my head, that Marty was dead.

They both called. I didn't answer. They waited and didn't call me again. They respected the time and the quiet I needed with Marty. They gave me space, to cry until my body ached, my head throbbed. We are close sisters, we are not invasive.

They were with me in spirit, and I knew it.

I called Marty's parents first, and they came over, hardly able to walk. They had lost their son. Their only child. Inconceivable.

Two hours later, after the funeral home came and Marty's parents were back at their house, collapsing, I called my sisters. I didn't need to say a thing. Both of them said immediately, “I am coming.”

They came. My parents came. Dmitry flew out. We cried together, for my husband, Marty Romanowsky, my life and my love, gone.

18

“I started working in clay when I was sixteen. I had to create. I had to make something. School had no interest for me at all. Art was, is, my destiny. It's my life's work. I want to bring beauty to people's lives.”

Zelly Ostrander was a well-known ceramic artist. I was sure readers of
Homes and Gardens of Oregon
would love her, her home, and her art.

Zelly had white, curly, long hair. She was “seventy-five and proud of my wisdom,” thin and almost six feet tall. Her art studio was in her backyard—one room, a pitched roof, two sinks, and filled with clay, a hundred different paint colors, brushes, drop cloths, equipment, and two pottery wheels. She made her own art and taught at the university.

Zelly Ostrander's art was stunning. Think of blue flames, mixed with a rainbow, swirled up with a magical spoon, and you had her work. Her specialty was bowls. Bowls for cereal, bowls for fruit, bowls for salads, bowls that you would build a glass fronted armoire for and display as art.

But Zelly's bowls weren't ... normal. Some tilted at an angle. Others had an almost lacy rim. She had a blue and pink bowl with three dragonflies perched on the edge; bowls with a green and blue swirling design with a ruffly edge. She painted butterflies on bowls so detailed they looked as if they'd flown in from the window.

Zelly told me about her life growing up with her parents in an apartment in San Francisco. Her mother owned a gun shop, her father worked on the docks. “They loved me, but glory be, they were tough people. My father fought for the union. Those men didn't mess around, they got the job done, and if a few skulls were cracked, that was the way it had to be. My mother was not above a fight, either, but I was their soft spot.”

How she came to art? “I didn't speak until I was six. Until then, I drew pictures to show how I was feeling. That's where it started.”

On her day-to-day life, “I create art. I read. I see friends. I have a whiskey every night, like my mother. She had a cigar, I don't. I travel the world twice a year. I must see this planet before I die.”

On her home? “I've only had it for three years, but I feel like I've been looking for it my whole life. A home isn't only wood and concrete, is it? It's ...” She spread her arms out. “A bowl. A colorful, clean, safe bowl with a roof where you live your life.”

“I love your work,” I said. “I have two of your bowls. One is white lattice with snowflakes painted along the side and another is an ocean wave.”

“Ah. You bought during my freezing year and my drowning year. My mother died during the freezing year, the snowflake year. I still miss her. The ocean bowls I made when I felt like I was drowning. I suffer from bipolar depression. I'm not embarrassed for you to print that, either. Please do. Others need to know they are not alone.

“It comes in like an invisible, bio-chemical avalanche. A wave, hence the ocean. As I get older, I know how to handle it better, but it's never easy. It's like living with a tsunami. Sometimes it comes and gets you and you have to swim to the surface and not let it get you thinking that you'd rather die than deal with the swimming for one more day. It's a hard-fought battle every time.”

“I love these.” I pointed to rows of flowered bowls. The bowls simply opened up like flowers: roses, camellias, tulips, daffodils, lilies, violets, orchids.

“I'm in a flowery time of life, so I make flowers.”

Made sense to me. I bought a set for Marty's parents.

Maybe I needed to work on embracing flowers again. Maybe.

* * *

The next day, in my head, I heard Valerie say,
They scare me.

I called, got her voice mail. She was in trial. She called about eleven that night. Nick and I were reading in bed, a new book, discussing it as we went.

“What are the Bartons doing now?”

“They're furious, naturally, that I'm trying to put their murdering son/brother/cousin in jail and insist he's innocent.”

“Do they not know him? Are they not listening to the evidence?”

“What people don't want to believe, they won't. To them it's a conspiracy. We're out to get them. We're on the side of a corrupt government. The evidence is a lie, manufactured. They glare. They snicker when I'm in front of them. Today the judge told them to be quiet or they would be escorted from the courthouse. He then put two guards there, either side of the row, to glare at them.”

“Did it quiet them down?”

“No. They were removed from the courtroom.”

“Tough lot.”

“Yes.”

“There's something more. I can tell.” I felt that chill of a snake winding around my spine yet again. “What is it, Valerie?”

“There was a dead possum on my back porch today.”

I was speechless for long and stunned seconds.

“I thought there were security cameras. You've called the police?”

“They came in through the shadows, hoodies on. The police can't identify them.”

“I thought the police were also driving by?”

“They are. They snuck like lice over the back fence.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be. This guy has to go to jail.”

“We'll be scared together. You're carrying a gun?”

“I am now. Love you.”

“Love you, too, more than Mama's Russian tea cakes.”

I hung up the phone and leaned back against Nick. He held me while I shook.

The cold spine snake slithered, head poised, ready to bite.

 

 

 

Things went rapidly downhill for our family after our father and grandfather were arrested. Valeria was in bed for days, aching from being thrown against the wall, clutching her head. My mother, also with a splitting headache that lasted a week, as did the nausea, pulled herself together, attended to Valeria, and went to the police station. She demanded to see her husband and her father-in-law, Konstantin. They refused. They pretended they didn't know where either one of them was.

By then, we were all alone. Uncle Vladan, Uncle Yuri, Uncle Sasho and their families—all gone. Uncle Leonid dead, though the Communist Party would not confirm it. Friends volunteered money for gas, and my mother drove hours to a prison that she thought my father and grandfather might have been taken to. She demanded to see them. They put her in a cell for three days. Told her not to come back and said she was lucky not to be locked up, too, for being an enemy of the people. “Pray to your God now,” they mocked my mother, exhausted, starving, as she hobbled out.

Valeria, Elvira, and I were so relieved to see her after three days alone, we cried and clung to her.

My parents had always saved what little they could, but life in Moscow was rough and it would not last for long at all. In addition, my mother was worried that we would be taken away from her, now that she had been exposed for being a Christian.

My mother started sewing for people, a skill her mother, Lada, an expert seamstress, had taught her. She had put it aside as a college professor and a mother.

She went to the people she knew, professors, colleagues, students who came from wealthy families. She offered her services. My mother, a woman with a PhD in Russian Literature, a college professor, scrambling for work to mend someone's torn pants.

She put her pride aside, and she did it, though I heard her swearing in French now and then. Many of the people were too scared to give her work, but some did, quietly, secretively. She picked up the work late at night, at their back doors, and they handed her the money. Some people took advantage of her desperation. “I hated Professor Gerasmiov when I worked with him, and I hate him more now, may he die in pain, alone with no one but cackling hyenas to watch him writhe.” He negotiated the work down to a pittance in payment, because he could, knowing she needed every ruble.

Others were fair, a few generous. “One of my students, Vada Utkina, comes from a wealthy family. They pay more than I ask.”

My mother quickly decided that the way to make more money was to start selling fancy gowns for wealthy women—all wives to high ranking Communist Party members, of course. It worked. The money started to come in, but we still struggled, the pantry often bare, the refrigerator not much better.

Bogdan and Gavriil's father, Stas Bessonov, came down one night, and offered my mother money. My mother told us to go to bed when Stas arrived. We did but, as usual, I snuck out, along with Valeria, and listened.

“I cannot accept it,” our mother said. “But thank you, Stas.”

“Svetlana, you must. I hear you are making gowns for the enemy.”

My mother bent her head. “I hate them, too. I have no choice.”

“I do not blame you at all, Svetlana. It is for food, it is for the girls' survival, but take this. It's what I have now. Pay me back when you can.”

“Stas, it is wrong to take this money. I can provide for my family.” She bent her head, covered her face, her shoulders shook.

“Svetlana, please, don't cry. I don't know what to do when women cry. It makes me nervous.”

“I cannot take it. I doubt I will ever be able to pay you back.”

“Then don't. It's yours. Here. A tissue. No more tears now. Don't make me nervous.”

Stas put the money on the kitchen table, tapped it with his finger. My mother, full of pride, integrity, a woman who had been fired from her university position, a husband and father in law in jail, no living parents nor brother, a mother with three girls to feed, took it. She hugged him.

“Svetlana, your husband has always treated me with respect, as have you. I am a man from nothing. You know my business. I have appreciated the friendship. Plus the children are friends. I am helping many families now. It is a horrible time, and I will do what I can for you.”

This gentleness from a man who regularly whacked people and dumped them in the river.

“I am trying to get Alexei released. It takes time, it takes bribes, it takes the right person signing off.” He cracked his knuckles.

“Thank you, Stas.” My mother was close to breaking, but she wouldn't, because that's not what a Kozlovskaya woman did. She had told me often, “We stand strong, always, Antonia. Don't you forget that.”

There was more help coming from the Bessonov family, which Valeria and I found out later that week.

“Do you want me to show you how to get some money, Antonia?” Bogdan asked.

I had witnessed my mother crying the night before. I was hungry all the time, my stomach eating itself, growling, but I didn't want to tell my mother.

Hunger is a scary thing. It hits at the root of your life: You get too hungry, and you'll die. Worse, the people you love will die. You can't think, you can't plan, you can't dream if you're hungry. Elvira resembled a walking sheet. Valeria was moving slowly. My mother was down to bone.

“Antonia?” Bogdan said again. “Do you want money?”

“Yes.” I did.

Bogdan showed me. It wasn't that hard, and I was trained by the boy who was trained by the best, his father.

Bogdan and Gavriil trained Valeria and me how to pickpocket and Elvira how to be a distraction. They trained us using their own pockets. The boys were competent teachers. They were patient, skilled, and they helped us with every movement. Gavriil told us how to study people, to watch for the signs that indicated they were wealthy, that they would actually have something to steal.

In that time of stagnation in the Soviet Union, the Cold War an economic icicle, it was easy to see who had what. Most people had nothing. We were not after them. We were after the ones who did.

I was scared to death the first time I pickpocketed. I felt as low as the sidewalk under my feet. I had been taught not to steal, yet there I was.

My first victim was a well-dressed woman in a fur coat and hat who I saw walking through Red Square, St. Basil's Cathedral, with its ice-cream tops, in front of her. Bogdan and Gavriil said to me, “She has money. See her purse. See her rings? Diamonds. She could sell one and we could live off of it for six months.”

My stomach rumbled. I thought of my mother that morning, sewing at the table, swearing in French when a stitch went wrong, working, working, working.

I followed the woman, Valeria beside me, Elvira behind her. We skipped along, singing, our bows on the tops of our heads bouncing around. I accidentally bumped into her. I slipped my hand in and out of the woman's purse. She had forgotten to zip it, which was why we targeted her.

“Excuse me.” I smiled. Valeria smiled, too. The woman smiled back, went on her way.

Guilt, and fear, hit hard. I cried over the wallet I held in my hands. I knew I was now going to hell and the devil would burn me with his tail, so help me God, forgive me. We rushed around a corner, then another, and hid in an alley, making sure that no one was following, as Bogdan and Gavriil had taught us, then we hurried to the meeting place.

At the meeting place, between two buildings, outside of Red Square, I sat down and covered my head, a dancing devil with a burning tail skipping through my mind.

“Antonia,” Bogdan said, getting to eye level with me. “I know you're upset. You don't have to do this. You can go home. I understand.”

I sniffled, wiped my sleeve. Beside me, Valeria stared straight ahead, stricken. Elvira, only six, snuggled into me.

“But your family's broke. Your papa's gone. He's in jail with your grandfather, our father told us. We don't know if, or when, they're coming back.”

“They're coming back,” I cried.