The Guest Room(87)

Instead of answering, he stared at the weapon. Here he had tried and failed to come home with a handgun just the other day, and now there was one in his kitchen. Just a few feet away. In the slight hands of this nineteen-year-old girl. It was, it seemed to him, strangely and surprisingly beautiful. Russian, he surmised, though he couldn’t have said why. It actually looked a bit like the kind of pistol James Bond used to carry—the old James Bond. The Sean Connery Bond. She dropped it onto the table, rattling her cup and saucer.

“What makes you think I didn’t kill Kirill?” she continued when he was silent. “What makes you think I didn’t kill that big, mean cue-ball-head baby?”

“Because I don’t,” he answered finally. He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “Because…Anahit…you didn’t. Okay?”

Using a single finger, she spun the pistol in a circle on the tabletop, pushing the gun by its grip. “Six bullets left in magazine. Six. You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me.”

“Then tell me something,” he said. “Tell me one thing. Tell me one thing I should know.”





Alexandra


I told him lots.

I told him about my mother and my grandmother and the sculptures on the streets in Yerevan. I told him about Vasily. I told him about the cottage and Moscow and coming to America. I told him that like his little girl, I once had whole trunk full of American Barbie dolls.

“But how?” he asked. “Where in the world did you get them? How did you get them?”

I only had three cigarettes left in the pack, but I smoked another one as I told him. I told him the story just as it had been told to me.

…

On Wednesday, December 7, 1988, my father and grandfather—my father’s father—were stealing two boxes of wristwatches for a Communist Party official. Very big-deal guy. The official was going to give them away at fancy gathering at his fancy dacha on Lake Sevan. And the wristwatches were with other stuff in these two crates.

My father and grandfather were smooth operators. You had to be in the Soviet Union in 1988. But they were also strong and smart and kind. My father, my mother said, was among the bravest freedom fighters in Nagorno-Karabakh. He was a hero. I wish I had gotten to spend more than eighteen months with him, but I didn’t, and I don’t remember a single thing because I was just a baby and then just a toddler. I told Richard how my father had died in hydroelectric plant accident.

The crates had come to Armenian city you’ve never heard of called Gyumri. They had come to the airport from East Berlin. That’s how long ago this was. And Gyumri was still called Leninakin. The watches were supposed to go to a jewelry store at the Alexandrapol Hotel. It was the sort of store that has velvet ropes and plush carpeting and glass cases with lights inside them to make the diamonds glitter like a disco ball. But that party official had other ideas. My father and my grandfather worked at the airport, and so it was easy for them to “redirect” the crates into my grandfather’s sand-colored Lada. They put one crate in the backseat of the car and one in the trunk. It barely fit, not because the crate was so big but because the trunk was so small. One time, I was dancing at a party for group of Moscow gangsters—it was scary, because Moscow gangsters are so insane they make cue-ball-head babies look like kindergarten teachers—and someone made a joke about putting a body in the trunk. Then someone else said that it would have to be very little body. It sure couldn’t be anyone in the room, they laughed, not even me or Sonja, who was with me that night. It’s true. You can’t even fit a teenage exotic dancer who is really just sex toy into the trunk of a Lada.

My grandfather and father were supposed to drive the wristwatches to Lake Sevan, but my grandfather had forgotten the directions to the dacha. They were on the dresser at his and my grandmother’s apartment. And so the two of them went there. Six stories and thirty apartments, lots of concrete and many thousands of cinder blocks. And none of it built to withstand an earthquake, especially the sort of 6.8 magnitude earthquake that would destroy the city. They say the Soviet Union building codes were the same in Gyumri, where there was always big chance of an earthquake, as they were in Kiev, where there really wasn’t big chance at all.

Of course, Kiev had other problems in 1988. The city’s not that far from Chernobyl, and 1988 isn’t that far from 1986. As Americans like to say, do math.

My grandfather ran up the stairs to my grandparents’ apartment on the fifth floor while my father waited in the car, smoking a black-market cigarette. My grandfather probably went two steps at a time, skipping every other stair. He was very vigorous. My grandmother used to put her hands on his cheeks and kiss him, calling him her Cossack.

It was while my grandfather was upstairs that my father heard the rumble. It was very low. But he knew what it meant.

Within seconds, that rumble became a roar. As my father was snuffing out his cigarette, the road rippled up like giant sea swell, the asphalt growing cracks like big black spider veins. Then some of those veins swelled into canyons wide enough to swallow whole cars. But not my grandfather’s Lada. Instead, my grandfather’s Lada was suddenly facing uphill. The telephone and electrical wires were snapping, and the transformers on top of the poles became like the sparklers children play with on big holidays. Then one by one they exploded.

My father climbed from the car, planning to run up the stairs and rescue his parents. Crazy, yes? But he was their son. Then, before his very eyes—which soon would be filled with so much dust that he would only be able to see out of his left one for hours—the building pancaked. It just collapsed in a funnel of smoke and soot that fluttered down upon him like volcanic ash. He was twenty-three years old. Most of the buildings on that street pancaked like that; most of the people were flattened. The whole street was rubble.