of it as she started to help Aliide slice more tomatoes. It felt nice. There was a cozy feeling in the kitchen-the steaming pots, the rows of jars cooling. Grandmother had always been in a good mood when she was canning, putting things up for the winter. It was the only housework she ever participated in-she would, in fact, take charge, only occasionally telling Zara’s mother to shred the cabbage-but now Zara sat at the table with Aliide Truu, who hated Grandmother. She should raise the subject again, not wait for a suitable moment that was never going to come. Aliide was absorbed in grating the horseradish.
“This is for winter relish. Three hundred grams, and the same amount of garlic, apple, and peppers. A kilo of tomatoes, salt, sugar, and vinegar. You just put it all in the jar, you don’t need to heat it. It preserves the vitamins.”
Zara’s hands moved nimbly as she sliced the tomatoes, but her tongue still wouldn’t loosen up. Aliide might be angry at her, too, if she knew who she was-she might refuse to help her, and then where would she go? How could she break the relaxed mood that her talk of Vladivostok had created? Grandmother and Aliide couldn’t have had their falling out over a few ears of grain-it wasn’t possible, no matter what Aliide said about it. What had really happened here?
Zara had been watching Aliide whenever she was looking the other way or absorbed in her housework-her fragility, the black around her fingernails, her calloused skin with faint blue veins under the tan. She had been searching for something familiar, but the woman puttering around the kitchen didn’t resemble the girl in the photo at all, much less her grandmother, so she concentrated her observations on the house. When Aliide didn’t have her eye on her, Zara touched the shears and the large, rusty key hanging on the wall. Was it the key to the shed? It had hung on the wall next to the stove when Grandmother was here. She found a wooden rake’s tooth on the lintel over the door-had Grandmother’s father made it? A washstand. A black coatrack with Aliide’s coat hanging from it. Was that the cabinet where Grandmother had kept her trousseau? Here was the stove she had warmed herself by, and there was a spinning wheel stashed behind the cabinet. Was it the spinning wheel that Grandmother had spun, kicking it with her foot? Here was Grandmother’s flywheel, here was her bobbin, treadle, and spindle.
When Zara went to get some empty jars from the pantry, she found a cask behind the milk cooler. She felt it. Smelled it. There was something dried on the rim. Sourdough starter? Was it the same starter that Grandmother made her bread from? Two and a half days, that’s what she had said. The dough had to sour for two and a half days in the back room, covered with a cloth, before it could be kneaded. The smell of bread would hang about the room as it ripened, and on the third day it was time to start kneading the dough. She kneaded it with a sweaty brow, twisting and pounding it, this dried-up dough, covered in dust, hardly used over the decades, the same starter that Grandmother’s young hands had kneaded when she was still happy, here with Grandfather. And you had to bring the baker some water now and then to rinse the dough from her hands. The bread oven was heated with birch wood, and later a piece of salt pork would be put in a bowl in the oven, and the fat would sizzle out of the meat into the bowl to brush on the fresh bread. And the flavor! And the smell! Rye from your own field! It all seemed amazing and sad and Zara felt like the cask was very near to her all of a sudden, as if she were touching her young grandmother’s hand. What had Grandmother’s hands been like when she was young? Had she put goose fat on them every night? Zara would have liked to explore the yard, too-she had offered to fetch Aliide some water from the well, but Aliide said that she’d better stay indoors. Aliide was right, but still Zara felt like going out in the yard. She wanted to walk around the house, see everything around it, smell the dirt and grass. She wanted to go and peek under the shed. Grandmother had been afraid of that spot when she was little-she had imagined that dead souls lived there, that they would pull her under the shed and she wouldn’t be able to get out again, and she would see them all come looking for her, searching, her mother in a panic, her father running, calling her name, and she wouldn’t be able to do anything because the dead souls pressed her mouth shut, souls that tasted like moldy grain. Zara wanted to see if Grandmother’s apple tree was still standing-it was a white transparent, an early golden apple next to the shed. Next to the white transparent there should be an onion apple tree; maybe she would recognize it, even though she’d never eaten onion apples. And she wanted to see the damson tree, and the plum tree on its stony ground, in the middle of the back field where there were snakes, which were scary, but there were also blackberries, so you always had to go there. And the cumin-did Aliide still grow it in the same place?
1991
Right from the start Pasha had made it clear that Zara was in debt to him. She could leave as soon as she’d paid him back, but not before! And the only way she could pay him was by working for him-working efficiently, doing work that paid well.
Zara didn’t understand where the debt came from. Nevertheless, she started counting how much of the loan she had paid off, how much was still left, how many months, how many weeks, days, hours, how many mornings, how many nights, how many showers, blow jobs, customers. How many girls she saw. From how many countries. How many times she had to redden her lips and how many times Nina had to give her stitches. How many diseases she got, how many bruises. How many times her head was shoved in the toilet or how many times she was drowned in the sink with Pasha’s iron fist around the back of her neck. You can count time without the hands of a clock, and her calendar was always renewed, because every day she was fined for something. She danced badly even after a week of practice.
“That’s a hundred dollars,” Pasha said. “And a hundred for the video.”
“What video?”
“And a hundred for stupidity. Or did you think you could watch that video for free, girl? We brought them here to teach you to dance, baby. If we hadn’t, they could have been sold. Get it?”
She got it-she didn’t want any more fines. But she got them anyway-fines for learning slowly, for complaining about the customers, for having the wrong look on her face. The count started from the beginning again. How many days, how many mornings, how many blue eyes.
And of course she had to work to eat.
“My grandpa was in Perm in thirty-six. You didn’t get fed there if you didn’t work.”
Pasha would praise Zara and tell her that she was really paying down her debt nicely. She wanted to believe his notebook, with its dark blue, smelly plastic cover and Soviet seal. The meticulous, even columns of numbers made Pasha’s promises believable enough that it was quite easy to put your faith in them-if you wanted to, that is. And the only way to keep going was to put your faith in them. A person has to have faith in something in order to survive, and Zara decided to believe that Pasha’s notebook was her ticket out of there. Once it was done, she would be free, she would get a new passport, a new identity, a new story for herself. Some day all this would happen. Some day she would rebuild herself.
Pasha made the marks in his notebook with a German fountain pen that had a picture of a woman on it. Her clothes would come off when he tilted the pen, and come back on when he tilted it the other way. He thought it was such a marvelous invention that he set up a pen-importing business with a friend in Moscow. But then one of the girls got ahold of one of the pens and tried to gouge his eyes out, and in the fight the pen was broken. After that the girl-Ukrainian, perhaps-disappeared, and all the girls were fined, because harm had come to Pasha’s pen.
He didn’t find a new favorite until a Finnish customer made him a gift of a lotto pen. The Finn spoke a few words of Estonian, and an Estonian girl named Kadri had to translate for Pasha what the
“Very important. Lotto is to us as the future. In lotto, every man is equal. Everyone’s equal in the lottery and it’s Finnish and it’s a wonderful thing. It’s Finnish democracy at its best!”
The man laughed-
