The Q Train
The train runs slow in the tunnel under the river and then runs slower and then stops between stations for eleven minutes. A child two benches down is singing under his breath, in Russian, the alphabet.
Keep your face still.
The bruise is on fire.
Second day. Yellow-green at the edges. The body trying to reabsorb something it did not ask for. You shift your weight. The bruise shifts with you. You do not know whose hand.
The bruise thinks about the name that came out of him. Not yours. Not his wife's.
Two syllables. You would recognize it if you heard it again.
You count the days backward without meaning to. You arrive at a number and the number is not safe. You will buy what you need at the pharmacy on Coney Island Avenue.
The train starts.
Brighton Beach Avenue
The elevated B rattles above you. Under the tracks, green concrete, wet for no reason, a smell that is old fish and old bread and the sweetness of fryer oil past changing.
Everyone is older than you.
Everyone is speaking Russian.
You pass the bakery with the round sweet bread and the one with the flat sour bread and the one with cakes shaped like things children like. The storefronts have been Russian since the 1970s and Ukrainian since later — and more Ukrainian since lately. A man pushing a cart of wholesale onions toward a back door. The onion man says something to a woman sweeping the sidewalk of a deli and she laughs. You do not catch the joke.
Through the open door of the third bakery a television is playing news in Russian you do not read. The news-voice has a cadence you know from your grandmother's kitchen — the cadence of news. The words are past you before you could catch them. You walk on.
In the grandmother's kitchen there was also her husband. Andriy. Cassette deck, Metallica low while Oksana stirred. So close, no matter how far. You did not know what it meant when you were six.
A man is pushing an onion cart across Brighton Beach Avenue. Everyone here has been working since before you got off the train and will keep working after you are gone.
You find the address.
3115
It is not a shop. A door between two buildings. Same color. You walk past it once and back.
The number is in the transom.
You ring.
"Kto skazal."
You say the name of the woman who gave you the address.
She is Larysa, a woman at an advertising agency, born in Odesa, who told you, last year, when a woman's name was enough to frighten you, if you ever need someone to read something for you, she is my aunt, she is the person.
The door buzzes.
Three flights. Cooking fat on the landing. Detergent. A cat somewhere.
The old woman is tall. Broad-shouldered. Dyed-black hair from a box. A housecoat over a dress. Seventy-five. Her eyes very awake.
"Come."
The living room is a room that has been a living room for forty years. Brown couch. A television under a crocheted runner. Three framed photographs on top of the television — a wedding, a child, a man in uniform. A samovar on a side table, electric, plugged in, cold. A cup on the end table with tea dried to the bottom. The apartment came with her from Odesa in the 1970s, and has not let go of it.
She does not offer tea.
"Sit. Show me."
You take the envelope from the canvas bag.
You take the photograph from the envelope.
She takes it from you. Arm's length. Close. Arm's length. She does not blink.
"Where did you get this."
"From a locker."
"Who put it there."
"I don't know."
She turns the photograph over. Reads Ne zabud'. Turns it back.
"This is you."
"Yes."
"The dress."
"I don't remember owning it."
"You did not own it. You wore it. Once. For this photograph."
Flat. No question.
"Where was it taken."
She looks up at you over the edge of the photograph. Her eyes are tired in the way Marcus's eyes were tired.
"It is a staircase."
"Yes. Where."
"Not in Ukraine."
She says this slowly. She looks at the window, at the dust on the sill.
"Where."
"I cannot tell you."
"Can or will not."
"Will not."
She puts the photograph face down on the table. Her hand stays on it. Then she pushes it back to your side.
"You have brought a photograph to Brighton Beach that you should have buried."
"It is not mine to bury."
"It became yours when you took it out of the envelope."
"My grandmother's name is on the envelope. In her hand."
"Your grandmother has been dead for seven years."
"Yes."
She nods. Nods for longer than the nod requires.
She looks at the window again. Nothing behind the dust on the sill. She looks back at you.
"Then the envelope is a lie, or the grandmother is a lie, or the hand is a lie. One of the three. I will tell you which I think. Not today."
"Why not today."
"Because you came alone. Next time bring someone who loves you."
She stands.
The photograph stays on the table.
You pick it up. Back into the envelope. Envelope back into the bag.
At the door she puts her hand on your forearm — on the burn-scar, through your shirt, without knowing it was there.
"Devochka."
Soft. Not the man's low.
"The man who will come to the door after you will be wearing a coat that is not for this weather. Do not answer."
"How do you know."
"I know."
"Are you safe."
"Nobody is safe, devochka. Go."
After
You go.
Back on the avenue. The B train rumbling overhead.
A woman with two children passes you. The walking one says mama four times in a row, not asking for anything, only locating the mother in space.
You walk toward the water.
Somewhere behind you, not close, a footfall you heard twice and then did not hear again. You do not turn.
You need five minutes before you get on a train.
The Boardwalk
Long and mostly empty, the hour of a weekday in May. The ocean is flat. The sky is flat. An old man fishing from the railing. A gull.
You duck under the pier.
You sit on a piling.
You are shaking.
Not the ninety-second shake of yesterday. Something lower. A shake that does not go away, that adjusts itself to your breathing and rides under it.
You put your hand inside your jeans and touch the bruise.
I do not know whose hand. The one that keeps changing. The yellow-green one.
Someone held me hard enough that I did not wake up. I am not sure when. I am not sure who.
For one second I think her name.
The name that came out of him.
I do not know why I think it. I do not know her.
I take my hand out.
The water is cold under the planks. Gull feathers stuck to the piling by something tarry. A smell of salt and spilled beer and decades of it.
A bar on Brighton Beach Avenue I passed had its door propped open. A man singing, not drunk, not well. A woman laughing at something I could not see. Four or five men leaning on the wood the way men lean on wood in any city, in any decade. They were not watching anything. They were waiting.
Defenceless under the afternoon.
The men at the bar did not turn when the door closed behind the woman's laugh.
My world in stupor.
I sit under the pier. I know she will not tell me where. I know what I came to find. I did not find it.
Back
You get up. Sand in your shoes. You do not take them off.
You walk back toward the train.
The door of 3115 is shut.
The man is half a block down, leaning on a parked car, not reading anything, not doing anything, wearing a coat that does not belong to this weather.
He is not the man from Washington Square.
A different one.
Which means they have more than one.
He does not look at you. He looks at the middle distance.
You walk past him.
The Train
B back into Manhattan. Then the 2. Then the 3.
The bag on your lap. You do not open it. You know what is in it.
A woman across from you is reading a paperback. She is holding it with her thumb over most of the cover. You can see part of a title. A name. You catch the first letter. The letter is the one. A contraction in the stomach. A held breath. The woman turns the page. The letter is gone under her thumb.
Your phone: eleven messages.
Nine from your mother. Two from Alina.
You do not read them.
You will read them tomorrow.
You turn the phone face-down and close your eyes and let the train carry you.
Payphone
A diner on 9th, nowhere near the apartment. The booth at the back. Coffee.
You call Carmen from the diner's payphone. The diner still has a payphone. Four quarters.
"Carmen."
"Vera."
"I need to come to the restaurant tonight."
A pause.
"The restaurant is not safe."
"I know."
"Come at eleven. Come to the back. I will meet you at the dumpster."
"Thank you."
"Bring nothing I cannot carry."
The line goes.
The Soup
The waitress brings water without asking.
You drink the water.
You are not going to the apartment tonight.
Your mother has arrived or has almost arrived or has not arrived and you do not know which.
I am sorry.
I am sorry.
I am sorry.
The waitress has been watching you from the counter. Maybe fifty. A kind mouth, a tired face, a wedding ring, and a second ring on her right hand that does not match the first.
She comes over.
"You okay, honey."
"Yes."
"You want a soup."
"No."
"I'm bringing you a soup."
She brings a soup.
You eat.
The soup is chicken. It has been on since the morning. A man started it at five, left at eleven, the waitress took it over. You taste the morning in it, and the afternoon, and the labor of two people who have been standing behind this counter since before you were born to a woman who stitches names inside collars.
You finish.
You take the PA envelope out of the bag. You take the photograph out. The velvet dress. The window. The adult out of focus behind you. You look for a long time. You put them back into the bag separately. You do not put the photograph back in the envelope.
You leave more money than the soup cost.
You go.
⁂