Our apartment building manager’s name was Heime. He chewed green Clorets gum and every afternoon he worked at the nearby tennis courts as a ball boy. I did not understand the purpose behind spending an entire afternoon collecting balls while watching other people play, but he must have enjoyed it because that’s all I ever saw him do.
He often asked for my help carrying his groceries, that’s how I learned his apartment was overcrowded with boxes, most of them filled with yellow tennis balls.
He was past middle age, thin, not very tall with receding grey hair.
I was nine.
Heime was single and this helped him to keep his attention focused on us immigrants as he had no other distractions and the building was composed mostly of families like ours who had just been resettled.
We lived on the second floor, up the winding staircase with the carved wooden banister. The walls had an irregular texture, as though they had been filled in where there had been cracks, or old plaster had chipped away and nobody bothered to smooth it out before painting over it. I later learned that this was done on purpose, to emulate a typical Spanish interior.
Enclosed by those imperfect walls my mother spent her days hiding behind the rectangular, wide body of the General Electric refrigerator. She sat in silence while her crocheting needles moved effortlessly, choking the red and black yarn into tight stitches. Her misery clung to her like a cocoon, all enveloping and difficult to shed.
Our kitchen on Cochran Street looked out onto to a patch of tall grass and overgrown weeds filled with the relics of abandonment. The screens on the windows served to keep out the fresh air along with the flies and mosquitoes.
This was a new life where everyone was free.
There would be no need to envy your neighbors for having those hard to get imported shoes, (In America shoe stores existed on almost every corner) although they would have come in handy as she walked the two miles to take me to school every morning. Back and forth in a straight line twice a day she made the trip. She wasn’t familiar with the bus system and being surrounded by strangers frightened her. She memorized her route with mathematical precision and never strayed from the maze of residential streets and wide boulevards that brought her to her destination. She knew that if she ever got lost she would have no way of asking anyone for directions.
Language was not an option.
It was while standing on the sidewalk waiting to cross Highland Blvd. that a car swerved by her and as it turned the corner a teenage boy with long disheveled hair, extended his skinny arms through the open window of the passenger side and doused her with water.
He was laughing.
The boy disappeared into the body of the car as it sped away.
She stood on the street corner dripping wet, trying to focus through her thick glasses as though in a haze. It was like looking through the milky gauze of those familiar polyester curtains that let you see the shadows, the outlines of what was happening beyond your window without fully revealing anything.
Those who stopped at the traffic light gave her a perplexed, brief glance whose indifference penetrated the car window and landed with disdain at her feet.
“Well... I’m glad it wasn’t acid he spilled on me” was all she could think of. In the end she was grateful that she was just wet on a hot summer day, and not peeling from something used in chemical warfare.
She had heard about such random incidents while listening to the Russian news.
Every day my mother waited outside my school to walk me home. My eyes were permanently focused on the asphalt, how our feet took one step after another and came in and out of view like the movement of a swing.
Now you see it, now you don’t.
There were areas where the road was cracked and full of potholes, and streets where it was smooth and tiny particles shone underfoot like glitter.
We waked hand in hand. Mute as fish.
In a well respected elementary school in my new country I settled into a life of quiet resignation. In Russia I was called a Jew. In America I was called a Communist.
Both had a derogatory, threatening connotation that filled me with fear. Name calling had been familiar to me, it played the role of a prelude, a mere foreshadowing of the duress that was to come. I tried explaining that true Communists didn’t leave the ex USSR and that overall, refugees were not bad people but that did not stop my classmates from dragging me down the halls by my long braided hair, lifting me up off the ground by my legs, swinging me like a hammock in the wind.
This was a school where we prayed before meals, where my classmates bowed their heads and closed their eyes in earnest devotion.
“Baruh Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha’olam....ha’motzi lechem min ha’aretz..aaaamen”
“Amen”
It was lyrical and as I mouthed the words and sang with inflection, following the lead of the instructor standing in the middle of the cafeteria, I was just like them.
After a while a kind of sinking feeling came over me. I didn’t know what to call it, but I knew how it felt. It was the same sensation as when unexpectedly someone you trust pushes you down a grassy hill and tells you it will be fun, and instead you wind up with bruises and scraped knees. Your head feels dizzy long after your body stops rolling and you have trouble focusing on that one figure looming above you from atop, the one you called “friend”.
I stayed after school and sat in a circle on the floor next to Mrs. Harris, a generous teacher who devoted her time to improving my English. She was a slim woman with perfectly straight blond hair cut into a bob. Everything about her was perfectly straight, her hair, her luminous white teeth, her posture and her long fingers when she pointed at her mouth as she placed her tongue between her teeth when teaching me how to make the illusive “th” sound. I understood that by doing all of this I was evolving. I was becoming an American, and that my desire to be like everybody else was silent and deep.
Around the house I refused to speak Russian and my mother stopped calling me by my name and out of frustration referred to me only as “Amerikanka,” the American.
We had been in our apartment for three months when the downstairs neighbor drank a glass of hydrogen peroxide and in the middle of the night the ambulance came and took him away on a stretcher. He was wearing a white undershirt with a pair of suspenders hanging loosely over his bony shoulders, attached to his pajama bottoms. His wife was quick to make sure he had slippers on his feet, as if she expected him to be using them to make his way home. He was gaunt and pale. I watched him go from the top of the stairs. Heime was there in his bathrobe, disarrayed and speaking to the paramedics. He shook his balding head back and forth as if in disbelief .
The family was from Minsk and had a granddaughter who was afraid of water . Every time she had to take a bath or shower we could hear her shrills throughout the building.
“Go back to bed. It’s not nice to stand by and watch other people’s grief” my mother said as she came up behind me.
We walked back upstairs together, her arm wrapped around my shoulder. I’m not sure if she wanted to comfort me or keep me from turning back and looking at the scene taking place below us. In the living room , my father was asleep on the couch. To the left of the sofa there was a green checkered armchair and a small television set with a broken antenna which stood on a glass table with a brass frame. He had forgotten to turn off the light. He was in the fetal position with his hands gently tucked under his head of thick grey hair. His knees peered out from beneath the sheets, and one could trace the blue veins that crept across his kneecaps. My mother walked over to him and with a loving gesture covered him with a blanket. I could smell the lingering odor of cigarettes in the room even with the window open.
“I don’t want him to smoke anymore” I whispered.
“I don’t either. As soon as he finds a steady job he promised he would quit.” my mother reassured me.
I wondered if she heard him during the night pacing up and down, smoking ,coughing, clearing his throat until he fell silent. The bottom of his eyelids were always just a little red, as if he had been swimming without goggles.
During the day he walked around the house like a jailer, his keys always in hand or in his robe pocket. I think he was afraid of loosing them, almost as if they opened the door to a secret world only he could see. In reality those keys opened the door to our meager one bedroom apartment in a dubious part of town and the mailbox which only rarely contained anything other than bills or advertising that my mother could not understand. Every once in a while it would bring a letter from a relative who had stayed behind.
My memory is covered in paper cuts, tiny areas that sting and leave a dull ache.
I lay in my bed that night listening, but all I could hear was the deafening sound of crickets that sounded like human cries.
Rimma Kranet is a Russian-American fiction writer with a Bachelor’s Degree in English from University of California Los Angeles. Her short fiction has appeared in Brilliant Flash Fiction, Construction Literary Magazine, Club Plum ,Coal Hill Review and Change Seven Magazine. Forthcoming in The Short Vigorous Roots: An Anthology of Immigrant Fiction in the Age of Dissent and EcoTheo Review . She resides between Florence, Italy and Los Angeles, California.