Accommodations Read online

  AFTER WATCHING THE NIGHTLY cartoons in the common room, I return to my own room, and tripping over my suitcase yet again, I decide to unpack: with a disposable handkerchief I wipe off the table, the windowsill and the shelves in the cabinet, where in a few minutes I have laid out underwear, pantyhose, a toiletry bag with Bambino ointment, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a tube of mascara, what little is left in my Constance Carroll compact and sanitary pads. In the vase, I replace the dusty plastic roses with a bunch of heather from a ditch on my way back to the Vega, and—feeling pleased—I lie back down on the divan. The first time in my life I’ve ever had my own room, and it’s in a place named after the brightest star, I think, and as a sudden influx of happiness starts to soothe me to sleep, the hallway thumps with the hit pop song I recognize from senior prom and weddings: Wheel of Fortune, by Ace of Base. “What you gonna tell your dad? It’s like a wheel of fortune.” I jump to my feet and peer out from my room. “ What you gonna tell your dad if this wheel lets you down?”

  From the common room a man in a messy plaid shirt runs out; then he dashes up the stairs. A second man, similar to the first, staggers in his wake, his eye black, in a bluish-lilac tracksuit made of thin, almost transparent polyester.

  “Sergey! Sergey! Zhdi menya!” this second figure bellows. “Ya nye khotyel!” Clinging to the railing, he tries to climb the stairs, but he staggers and falls several steps down, onto the muddied mat. And as if this weren’t enough, now a woman peers out from the common room, her hair an angry blonde, paper curlers on her head, her body wrapped in a bathrobe made of velour.

  “Alex? Vy zhivyotye?” she asks and nudges the man lying on the floor with an embroidered slipper.

  The man called Alex sits up on the floor now and hiccups. The woman giggles, waves her hand and returns to the common room, whence shreds of the Ace of Base song can still be heard, interwoven with lines of dialogue from a Russian film. I’m thinking about retreating into my room when suddenly from upstairs there begin to fall the guts of some pillows, duvets without covers, white like salami’s moly coating, clothes and moccasins.

  “Poshol von. Ya nye khochu zhyt’ s toboy v odnoy komnatye!” shrieks Sergey.

  Alex meekly collects his scattered things, clambers up to the top of the stairs, turns when he gets to the second floor and disappears down the dark hallway.

  “Waldek!” I knock on his booth and peek in at our manager, who with a blissful expression is peeling an apple with a penknife.

  “What is it, college kid,” he replies so calmly it’s almost as though he is completely unaware of the scene playing out in the hallways of the Vega.

  “You think you could call?”

  “Call who?”

  “The police?”

  “The People’s Republic of China, why don’t I.”

  “But they’ll kill each other.”

  “Well what am I supposed to—” He waves his hand. “Don’t worry, university gal. The twins always horse around a little when they get back from the market by the Promenade. They chase after one another, get tired, drink whatever they’ve got left to drink, and then they hit the hay.”

  “But who are these people?”

  “They’re Russians, Russians who work the markets. Sergey and his twin brother Alex. They’re good kids.”

  “And the woman in the curlers?”

  “That’s Ludmila, a distant relation of our beloved Natka. She got here not too long ago and works over at the pavilion of what used to be the Adria, but don’t ask me what she does there, exactly, because I have no idea.”

  “Where’s the Adria?”

  “The Adria is, or was, on Home Army Avenue, where you take your bus to school. When I first joined up with the Czestochowans, that was the best place to go dancing in the whole town. Every Sunday from ten on they would serve beer out on the patio. They’d only sell it to you as part of a combo that also included an appetizer. The appetizer consisted of a piece of cheese with butter on it and sprinkled with spicy paprika. Now, you would collect this appetizer in this one place, but you couldn’t eat it, because over yonder the lady had to see it in the client’s hand in order to sell him a beer. So you had all these guys standing around in line, nice and polite like, with their appetizer out. You could get two bottles of beer for every appetizer. One day I stop by after I get off, take a look, and what do I see on stage? Not the stripper that’s supposed to be there, that’s for sure. Instead there’s some half-naked jackass that’s walloping around, getting groovy. I’m about to head out since that ain’t really my thing, but then I look a little closer, and can’t believe my eyes. It’s my old pal Gray Jurek, in the flesh, the same guy who always tooted his own horn, saying he was some kind of sex demon. I don’t know whether he was just tired that night, or if he’d had too much liquid courage, but he goes and gets all tangled up in his own underpants and just falls flat, right beside this table where some bigwig is having his leg meat jelly. And everybody’s dying. The head of the Adria vanishes into the back. And this red spider sets his fork down, gets up from his chair, puts his hands on his hips and says: ‘Rocco, sir! Rocco, sir, please!’”

  I return to my room. I hang my now somewhat sweaty clothing on the chair and try washing up in my sink, splashing water all over the linoleum just because I’m not brave enough to go out into the hallway to the open bathroom. I change into my flannel pajamas and snack on trail mix, staying up till midnight writing a letter to my mother.

  When the Vega quiets down, meaning that all that can be heard from the common room are the low murmurs of the television, I turn onto my stomach, press the edge of my blanket into my crotch, and moving rhythmically, I picture myself as Rocco, standing naked on a stage. All around me tiny specks of dust, lit by little overhead lamps like spotlights, spiral and dance, crashing together and flying apart until at last they collapse onto their dark audience.

  I WAKE UP, FROZEN, AT AROUND TEN, and once I’ve put my feet on the hot water bottle Natka insists is a suitable replacement for heating in my room, I turn on the Eltra Hania. After reporting on the mail bombs in America, they play the song Last Christmas by George Michael. I push the duvet aside and wrap the throw around me and look out the window. It is December, and midmorning is cool and smells of soot and benzene. I leave my room in search of Waldek, to ask him for some hot water so I can make tea. His booth is empty. In his chair dozes Adelka, curled up and whimpering as though wrestling with something in her dreams. I head for the common room, parting the beaded curtains and standing on the threshold breathing in the fragrance of freshly brewed coffee, which stifles the disgusting stench of the previous evening’s festivities.

  I’m greeted by one of the Russian twins I saw running around the Vega. My eye chases after the sound of his “Dobroye utro,” finding him in the corner. He is sitting in just his underwear, with his legs crossed. His foot moves from side to side in its slipper; his face wears the satisfied expression of a man in a five-star hotel somewhere in the Canary Islands, not someone living in an unheated workers’ residence. Unaccustomed to the sight of a naked male stranger, I look away. But as I start to withdraw from the common room, he, to my surprise, starts to talk to me in Polish:

  “I have noticed that you people from Czestochowa have a crow on your city’s coat of arms.” He points to the one pinned to the door frame.

  “That’s not all!” I smile. “The current mayor of Częstochowa’s name is Wrona.” The word must be similar in Russian, because he seems to understand it means crow.

  “You are kidding.”

  “No, it’s true.”

  “Well. I don’t suppose you know why in some Russian towns the domes on the churches are all scratched up?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s because the crows play this game where they take the lid off of a jar of mayonnaise, and they slide down off the roof on it, like little snowboarders.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Or they slide down the church domes, and then at the last
second, they just brake with their claws.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Or they toss nuts down onto the crosswalks. When it’s don’t walk, the cars are cracking nuts for them, and when it’s time for the pedestrians to cross, that’s when the crows swoop down and gobble up their little snack. I used to have a crow that lived with me once. Karkusha was her name. Kara, I called her.”

  “Was she a rescue?”

  “These babies were too big, and they fell out of their nest, and of course there was no way to stuff them back in there again. They were big, but they couldn’t fly yet, and of course they would get killed if we left them there in that park. So each of us—I remember it was three of us, me and my friends—we each took one of the baby crows home. At first I thought a crow like that was pretty stupid, that its brain was the same as a chicken or a pigeon. That’s what I thought. It’s only now I realize, and it’s even scientifically proven, that the intellect of a crow or a raven or whatever is actually closer to that of a monkey or an ape. They’re really very clever. And of course being in my home she taught me all about that, with her behavior, all the things she figured out how to do.”

  “Did she follow you around?”

  “Yes. And she would beg for food! Later on I made her a nest, and she would drag anything she could find that was shiny into that nest. But the best was the time my mom had these sovkhoz cucumbers, and they had these little yellow flowers, religiyki.”

  “Reliwhat?” I try, but he ignores me.

  “Every now and again you had to pluck some of their flowers off, so that there wouldn’t be as many of them, but the ones there were would be bigger. And my mom would do that, she’d pluck them and put them in a little pile. And that crow was there, flying around, observing. The next day the neighbor comes and says, ‘I’m going to kill this crow of yours!’ she shrieks. ‘What are you talking about? Why?’ we ask her. ‘I’m going to end up with no cucumbers because of her! She ripped off all the little flowers and left piles of them all over.’”

  FOR SAINT NICHOLAS DAY we meet in the common room, eat the broth with noodles Natka brought in a plastic canister and play Russian Schnapsen. As he makes the game’s first bid, Sergey hums: “Pust’ vsyegda budyet solntse.” Waldek, humming along, says pass. I, although I have no idea why, bid one-twenty, fervently praying that Alex tops me, since with a king and queen of diamonds I have no shot at making that many points.

  “Russian soups were thicker,” Alex pronounces as we finish eating and set our dishes in the corner by the Christmas tree. “I’d add chicken, potatoes, macaroni, sautéed pepper, carrot.”

  “Bay leaves?” I ask.

  “Leaves, chopped parsley,” Alex continues, staring at the deck.

  “Could you grow bay leaves in Siberia?”

  “Over where we lived, over by Omsk? No, university woman, bay leaves grew in the Caucasus. But what I really loved was this soup that had meatballs in it. But also pelmeni, and manti, which are similar to pelmeni, but bigger and steamed, and chebureki, which are like potato pierogi except for three times the size, and you fry them on both sides in the pan, and then inside: meat in onion. We called fish soup ukha.”

  Waldek can take no more of Alex’s culinary reminiscences and leaves the common room for a minute, returning with a can of sardines, which he opens with his penknife. He wipes off his greasy fingers on a flap of shirt sticking out from the bottom of his sweater.

  “If you wish I’ll tell you the story of my fiancée,” he proclaims.

  “Yeah!” we all cry in unison, and setting down our cards forget immediately who was bidding what as we fix our eager eyes on the manager of the Vega. Alarmed by our volume, Natka, who stayed later than usual today in order to finish up some paperwork, sticks her head into the common room.

  At first Waldek says nothing, heightening our curiosity. Then he sits down by the heater, stretches out his legs and takes a crumpled photograph out of his wallet.

  “Her name was Adelka.” He shows us a petite blonde.

  “Adelka?” I ask in surprise.

  “Right you are, college gal. Our wiener dog’s named after her.”

  “So where did you two meet?” asks Natka, who finds she can’t hold out any longer and comes into the common room and sits in the armchair opposite Waldek.

  “Church,” Waldek responds.

  “Church?!” I shriek, for the thought of a feverishly praying Vega manager Waldek seems as unlikely to me as the Martian canals described by prewar issues of Urania.

  “It was in August, right around my uncle’s funeral. There I am heading for Stradomka to cool my heels a little, just sit by the water like when I was a boy. Then I start to get hungry and head back into town. It’s hot. The crowds keep tripping me up, and these pigeons, these kids, dogs, whatever all else, pilgrims waving pennants, hawking knockoff Black Madonnas. It’s a madhouse, and I need out. So I escape into Saint Sigismund Church, just because it happens to be open. I amble down along the middle there. Silence. And the temperature is perfectly cool. I dip my fingers in that holy water, sit down, look around, kind of uncomfortable, but there right next to me is this girl, small or petite or whatever, and she’s just bawling. Bawling! You can believe me or not, but even though I’m not one for romance or relationships, her I fell head over heels for at first sight. We went and got some ice cream, and then we went to the movies, and then we went for some vodka, and somehow it ended up a couple days later she was living with me in that rough neighborhood of mine. The days flew by, one after the other, and we saw nothing of the world besides each other. The lengths I would go to, all that hustle, for her to get her garb and her lipsticks, her leather boots, though I can assure you she never asked me for a thing. She was meek like you can’t even imagine. She worked nights at a pasta factory. Every day she’d wash that orange apron of hers in the sink, iron it, and then she’d come back in the mornings with bags full of macaroni: shells, spirals, what have you, although we never ate them, we thought they were terrible, we just gave them to the neighbors.

  “As you’re surely aware, Częstochowa is small, and everyone knows everyone. One day after my shift I stopped by Sir. I wanted to get an engagement ring for Adelka and figuring that that was where the Gypsies and Romanians all sold their stolen gold. So I go in. And sitting at the counter there’s this guy, Gutek, maybe you guys know him, head of the mafia in Częstochowa. Gutek must have had a lot to drink because he starts to blabber about this villa on Mirowska that this guy who had a mirror factory built over by the stud farm.

  “‘Zbych doesn’t force his girls to do anything,’ he says and glances over at Vadim, that Romanian who comes to Natka sometimes for duds, like he was wanting to accuse him of sending his women begging. Vadim gets real stiff, his hands go white around his beer bottle. The waiter runs off into the back, and we kind of slouch down a little because everybody knows all hell’s about to break loose. You could tell Vadim kept on hesitating whether he wanted to beat the shit out of Gutek or not, but in the end he lets it go. Good thing, too—if he’d gotten into it he’d have been pushing up daisies in the Aniołowski Woods. ‘Believe you me, one of his girls,’ says Gutek, ‘has been conning her man this whole time saying she’s got the night shift at some pasta plant. Every day before she leaves she puts this little orange apron in her bag, heads to Tesco, buys the cheapest shells, spirals, rigatonis she can find and dumps them into different bags.”

  “I knew what they were saying off the bat. I ran out of there without a word. I wandered the town in desperation half the night. Adelka, for the love of God, Adelka!, I hollered. Why? When the shock passed I went home, and don’t even ask me what I was planning on doing.”

  “Of course!” shrieks a fascinated Ludmila. The twins glance at Natka.

  “And? Did you find her at home?” Natka asks, her voice trembling a little.

  “Did I find her at home. Gutek caught on, had her sent for.”

  “And? Did you try to find her?” I ask.

&nb
sp; “College kid, I’ve been looking for her ever since,” he whispers, then repeats: “Ever since.” His eyes glimmer, nearly water over.

  AT SIX TWENTY P.M. MOSCOW TIME, Russian aircrafts attack Grozny. The bombs damage four power stations and a television tower.

  The halls of the Vega are exceptionally quiet. Not even the TV in the common room is on. The potted palm curls up its leaves from the cold. Slowly the trail of muddy tracks that stretches from Natka’s office to the front doors of the Vega—which wobble on their hinges like they serve in a saloon—dries. Everyone but Sergey—who keeps reading books in his room on the second floor, playing songs every so often on his harmonica, playing himself in chess, packaging his jute bags for market—is sitting around the space heater, their eyes never wandering from its orange spirals.

  “When we were living in Siberia,” Alex interrupts the silence, “there was this one cow named Apryelka.”

  “Apryelka …” I repeat, because it strikes me as a nice name.

  “Because she was born in April,” Alex explains. “That cow really made an impression on me. When she sensed we were about to sell her, she completely changed her behavior. She just wandered around mooing, with these tears pouring down her face like peas. Eventually my parents went to this struggling sovkhoz, where they bought Mayka. Mayka had been brought up under deep communism, getting her ears pierced, with this little number put in there. So then we went and took her home with us and started to just hang around a little where she was, started cleaning her, giving her different types of tasty treats, and it was like she could tell, I mean that we were really taking care of her, that we cared about her, and she became more similar to a dog or something. We never had to worry about her. We knew that if she went off somewhere she’d always come right back.”

  “How’d you land in Siberia?” Waldek asks.

  “My dad was in the military, they transferred him there. Meanwhile my grandpa got his electrician’s degree, and everybody told him not to enlist, because there had to be a man left in the village, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I’m not going to just sit around with the girls, he said. Although I think he regretted it later. In Smolensk, or not Smolensk, further west, as they were pulling up in their train there was this German flying his plane over them so low you could see his ugly mug and see that he was smiling, but our boys couldn’t do anything about it since all they had was just a couple of rifles. One day this guy Georgii comes up and says, Hey, you, look, there’s some lard there hanging off of that bush. Well, let’s eat it, hollers my grandpa, because they hadn’t had anything to eat in two days or some such. He runs out and looks and what do you know, those smoked scraps were actually a piece of the nurse’s ass from when she’d stepped on a mine as she was trying to run off.”