Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis Read Free Book Online

back into his pocket and walked over to the Moskvich.
    –Chaim, you watch the stupid cocksucker.
    Sergei squatted under the bumper, took a deep breath, and lifted the car a meter off the ground.
    From the time I was four until we left Riga two years later, Sergei was a regular visitor to our apartment on Kasmonaftikas. As a rule, he would come and see us whenever he returned from an international competition. Two years after my father discovered him, Sergei was a member of the national team, had attained the prestigious title of “International Master of Sport,” and possessed all three world records in his weight class. My father called him the greatest natural lifter he had ever seen. He was blessed with an economy of movement and an intuition for the mechanics of lifting. He loved to lift the way other people love drugs or chocolate. Growing up on a kolkhoz, he had been doing a man’s work since the age of twelve. Life had consisted of hauling manure, bailing hay, harvesting turnips, and lugging bulky farm equipment. When the army took him at eighteen he had never been more than thirty kilometers from the kolkhoz. Once he left he never intended to return. His father was an alcoholic and his mother had died in an accident when he was three. His gratitude to my father for rescuing him from the army and the kolkhoz was absolute. As he rose through the ranks, his loyalty remained filial and undiminished. And in 1979, when we left Riga, Sergei was as devoted to my father as ever. By then he could no longer walk down the street without being approached by strangers. In Latvia, he was as recognizable as any movie star. Newspapers in many countries called him, pound for pound, the strongest man in the world.
    Sergei left a deep impression on my four-, five-, and six-year-old mind. There wasn’t much I remembered from Riga—isolated episodes, little more than vignettes, mental artifacts—but many of these recollections involved Sergei. My memories, largely indistinct from my parents’ stories, constituted my idea of Sergei. A spectrum inverted through a prism, stories and memories refracted to create the whole: Sergei as he appeared when he visited our apartment on Kasmonaftikas. Dressed in the newest imported fashions, he brought exotic gifts: pineapples, French perfume, Swiss chocolate, Italian sunglasses. He told us about strange lands where everything was different—different trains, different houses, different toilets, different cars. Sometimes he arrived alone, other times he was accompanied by one of the many pretty girls he was dating. When Sergei visited I was spastic with a compulsion to please him. I shadowed him around the apartment, I swung from his biceps like a monkey, I did somersaults on the carpet. The only way I could be convinced to go to sleep was if Sergei followed my mother into my bedroom. We developed a routine. Once I was under the covers Sergei said good night by lifting me and my little bed off the floor. He lifted the bed as though it weighed no more than a newspaper or a sandwich. He raised me to his chest and wouldn’t put me back down until I named the world’s strongest man.
    –Seryozha, Seryozha Federenko!
    My father took me with him to the Sutton Place Hotel where the Soviet delegation had their rooms. A KGB agent always traveled with the team, but it turned out that my father knew him. My father had met him on the two or three occasions when he had toured with Dynamo through Eastern Europe. The agent was surprised to see my father.
    –Roman Abramovich, you’re here? I didn’t see you on the plane.
    My father explained that he hadn’t taken the plane. He lived here now. A sweep of my father’s arm defined “here” broadly. The sweep included me. My jacket, sneakers, and Levi’s were evidence. Roman Abramovich and his kid lived here. The KGB agent took an appreciative glance at me. He nodded his head.
    –You’re living well?
    –I can’t complain.
    –It’s a beautiful