The Cloud of Unknowing (6 page)

“No, no—is better there.”

Helena didn't have the heart to mount a defense of the American medical system. She submitted to it herself only when starkly necessary.

“How much money do you think you'll need for this?”

“Well, something else. I wish I could go to Kizlyar, to take care from her. And I know we already owe you. I have some necklace that I can sell. Antique necklace. I can show you. But I'm asking, can you lend the money now?”

Zabet's face, a pale oval inscribed by black fabric, was pinched with fear for Alla. Of course Helena would give her the money, but she already felt the drag of futility.

It was 8:30. She'd have to keep the insulation blower for another day.

Axmet leaned into the engine of Jonathan's Subaru, listening. Jonathan liked Axmet very much. He was compact and muscled, and Jonathan particularly admired his shapely Caucasian moustache. He could be moody, sometimes passing Jonathan in the stairwell of his mother's building without a greeting, but there was usually a kind of conspiratorial manliness about their
interactions that Jonathan found flattering. A few times he had even been invited into the Gulnaevs' kitchen for a glass of brandy, which had been served in a cordial glass from a mirror-lined credenza jammed up against the fridge.

“Bad sparkplug wires,” Axmet said, straightening up.

“Didn't you change them last month when you tuned it?”

Axmet shrugged cryptically and closed the hood. He had been a mechanical engineer back in Chechnya, but Jonathan suspected that he was not a very good auto mechanic. His repairs were never without complications. For instance, the Subaru had been guzzling fuel since the tune-up. Jonathan was loath to complain, though, because Axmet had only charged him for parts (air filter, points, plugs, and
wires
). Axmet himself had insisted on listening to the engine just now; he'd been sitting on a kitchen chair on the sidewalk when Jonathan pulled up.

“I can replace wires.”

“Well, I'm kind of running around today, Axmet.”

“Leave the key, Jonathan! I can fix it now.”

“I told my mother I'd take her to Home Depot. Can I look for you in an hour or so?”

“Of course, Jonathan!”

This was all part of a complex system of barter between his mother and the Gulnaevs. Axmet worked on his Subaru and Helena's Civic. She'd had eyeliner tattooed on her face at Zabet's salon. (The idea creeped Jonathan out). Zabet was always bringing food upstairs: black bread or borscht or some Chechen dish. All this was in exchange for rent forgiven—their mandated contribution to the Section 8 payment. And, he suspected, other favors. As much as he liked Axmet, Jonathan found the Gulnaevs frustrating and depressing. The stories his mother told him about them were full of baroque Chechen problems requiring Chechen solutions: bribes, arranged marriages,
Soviet-era medicine. It seemed to him that the family was not any better off after seven years of his mother's interventions, and he wondered if she would have become so involved with them if they were from somewhere else. On her bookshelf: Ouspensky, Gurdjieff, Idries Shah.

“Tell your mother dryer is fixed,” Axmet called out as Jonathan climbed the front steps. “Tell her it was thermal fuse. And thanks her again. For Alla.”

Jonathan found Helena in her kitchen. She poured her coffee into a mayonnaise jar, screwed on the lid, and put the jar in her purse—one of her bizarre habits of thrift.

“Axmet says to thank you for Alla. What does that mean, thanks for Alla?”

By the set of his mother's jaw, he could tell she'd loaned them more money.

“What do you need at Home Depot?” he asked when she didn't answer his first question.

“A door.” She belted her jacket. “For the dining room in the first floor. Zabet is bringing Alla back from Dagestan in a few days with her baby, and they need turn it back into a bedroom.”

“Alla's moving back in?”

“Zabet doesn't want to leave her with her husband's family while she's recuperating.”

“Recuperating from what?”

Helena waited until they were in Jonathan's car to answer. “The doctors said it was herpes simplex five.”

“Simplex
five
? I've never heard of that. Did her husband pick it up from a hooker?”

She frowned. “I should do some childproofing.”

“How long is she staying?”

“I don't know. I'm hoping she doesn't go back at all. Zabet didn't come out and say it, but I think her husband has been
abusing her.”

“Jesus. What next?”

Helena looked tired under the fluorescent lights at Home Depot. As she reached up for a package of cabinet latches, Jonathan noticed that her tights had worn through at the heels. It infuriated him to think how the Gulnaevs must see his mother: a rich American landlady. “You should get the cheapest piece of hollow-core shit they have, Mom,” he said as they walked through the aisle of doors, craning their necks.

“Hah. You sound like Adlan. I asked him what happened to the old door, and he said he threw it away. ‘I never saw a piece of shit like that before I moved to your country.' That's what he said.” She leafed through the doors on the rack like pages in a newspaper. “The cheapest six-panel is eighty dollars, without the hardware. Maybe I can get something at the salvage yard.”

The rest of them were depressing. Adlan, though, Jonathan actively disliked. He assumed Adlan, who struck him as some kind of charlatan with his skull cap and hiphop pants, was behind the family's religious turn—and therefore, he assumed, this latest misery.

“Why do you let him talk to you like that?” he said. “They aren't even paying rent.”

“Yes they are.”

“You told me they weren't.”

“I'm getting Section 8,” she said crossly.

“I know that. But you said they were supposed to be paying some of it themselves.”

“Axmet lost his job. Zabet's hours got cut back.”

“Of course they cut her hours back. Who wants to get make-up tattooed on their face by a lady in a burka?”

“It's not a burka. It's a hijab.”

“Anyhow, I guarantee you Section 8 did not approve that apartment for four adults and a baby.”

Helena took the mayonnaise jar out of her pocketbook and unscrewed the lid. “Maybe it
would
be better if Alla and her baby stayed upstairs with me.”

“What? Where are they going to sleep?” Helena had two bedrooms in her apartment, but one was stripped down to the studs and completely filled with tools. “
Mom?
”

“I heard you. They can sleep in my room, of course.” She screwed the lid back on without taking a drink.

“And where are
you
going to sleep?”

“The sofa pulls out.”

Jonathan enjoyed telling people about his mother's crazy building: the Chechens, the Tanzanians, sneaking around with the passive solar panels. Still, the thought of her in her flannel nightgown, stacking the cushions on the floor and pulling out the sofa bed, of the dusty old blankets he remembered from his own childhood, her scratched reading glasses and pill bottles on the cluttered end table—the whole picture filled him with shame.

Helena had spent a week removing the old shingles from the front wall of her building—a job that should not have taken more than a few days. She pulled out the nails with a cat's paw, bundled them with twine, and stacked them in the alley on the side of the house so she could put them out for the trash men a few bundles at a time. Now she was nailing on new shingles, working from the ground up. She used a chalk line to keep the courses straight. She was almost up to the second floor windows. Looking around, she saw that she'd forgotten to bring the level with her the last time she moved the plank.

Axmet sat on a kitchen chair at the end of the flagstone walk, looking out at the street. It had become his regular spot in the last few months. Helena called out to him: “Axmet, can
you pass me that level?” He didn't turn around, so she called again, louder this time, and he jumped up. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to startle you. Could you pass me the level?”

He got up and steadied himself against the neighbor's house.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Headache.”

Helena knelt on the plank and reached down as far as she could. He passed the level into her extended hand. “Thank you,” she said. “I'm so tired of climbing up and down. So, Axmet, did Alla tell you about the place we looked at?”

“What place?”

“Horizon House.” She held the level up to the course of shingles and used her cat's paw to pry loose the one she'd just nailed on. “They offer GED classes. Alla shouldn't need much help, though; she could probably pass the test if she took it today. But they do have some job training.”

“Alla is going to college?” Axmet looked confused.

“No. Well, maybe. It's more like a residential program.”

“Why Alla don't stay here?”

“I'm not sure it's . . . well, do you think it's safe for Alla and her baby to stay here right now?”

“Why not is safe?”

“You know her husband's been calling, right? Threatening to send someone to take the baby?”

His face hardened. “Don't worry Movladi. I can take care Movladi.” He sat back down on his chair, facing away from the house.

Upstairs in her apartment, Helena found Zabet sitting on the sofa with Alla's baby, a curly-haired little girl named Malina.

“Galina, come sit!” Zabet moved the baby onto her lap and
patted the cushion next to her.

“Just give me a moment,” Helena said, taking off her tool belt.

“I am showing Malina her mother's wedding video. Sit for a minute.”

Helena sat down.

A snow-topped mountain, a sky of impossible blue. A waterfall dissolving into a beautiful sunset. A pure white dove gliding across the screen, peeling away the sunset with its beak to reveal the image beneath: three old women chopping vegetables in an outdoor kitchen. “Those are Movladi's aunties,” Zabet said. She pressed fast-forward as a wedding tent went up in juddering video frames. She took her thumb off the button to show Adlan offering a stack of dollar bills to another young man. “Movladi. This is, they are pretending only. A—”

“A ritual?” asked Helena.”

“Yes, a ritual. See, Movladi turn him away.”

Young women danced across a cement courtyard in long, brightly colored dresses, hands held high in elegant shapes. Zabet's free hand twisted with the rhythm of the pandur music in the background. “See, Malinochka? Your mother is the best dancer. You remember, Galina. You take her to dance class.”

More chopping of vegetables. Cartoon animals scampered through the scene—a squirrel, a deer, a porcupine.

“Movladi's family pay a lot of money for this video,” Zabet said. “Is the best director in Almaty.”

Now the camera followed a line of white Mercedes limousines, and now a row of men in dark, old-fashioned clothes sitting on wooden chairs. Helena recognized Axmet among them. She was startled for a moment, as though she had spotted him in a Stalin-era ethnographic film.

“Zabet, how is Axmet doing? He didn't seem well when I saw him just now.”

Zabet sucked air between her teeth:
tsstch
. “You know his headache get all the time worse. And he don't eat without throwing up.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“The doctor said he have to stop working, he need resting. But what working?” She offered a palm to the sky.

The camera wobbled around a room full of women, stopping at Alla in her wedding dress. Zabet was fixing the veil on her head, which was surrounded by yellow cartoon birds.

“There,” Zabet said, hitting pause. “There, see?” Handing the baby to Helena, she got up and tapped the screen. “One of my necklace—garnet and pearl. That one is Alla's favorite. Galina, I have to get dinner started. There's a bottle in the fridge for Malina, and Alla will coming home soon. She say 5:30, latest.” She kissed Malina on the cheek and let herself out the back door.

Helena carried Malina to the kitchen and put her in her high chair. The baby reached up expectantly with her starfish hand, and Helena gave her a spoon—something for her to bang on her tray.

“Buh,” said Malina.

“Buh,” answered Helena.

“Buh BAH.”

Helena was thinking about Alla's wedding dress, its scoop neck and princess sleeves. She wondered if Alla wore her head–scarf and abaya in Grozny.

The front door slammed, then the bedroom door. Helena picked up the baby. She found Alla in the bedroom, dumping her suitcases out on the floor. The recent illness had made her face narrower, and Helena was struck by how different she looked from the girl in the video. She pushed her sleeves back and clawed through the pile. She still had on the thin black rubber bracelets she'd worn in high school—a dozen on each wrist.