We Are Not in Pakistan by Shauna Singh Baldwin Read Free Book Online Page B

trenches come almost to her waist. The wind would freeze her cheeks the same way in Moscow or Ukraine right now.
    What’s happening there? She has to read Russian newspapers to know — American TV showed only a few seconds of the panic after the ruble recall. Even when Yeltsin stopped the old Communists with a day-long battle that left Moscow’s parliament building blackened and smoking, it was news for just a few minutes. But American intentions, they are good. They have even opened a Holocaust museum in Washington.
    What is Rivka doing now? And Laima? And the teachers she worked with in Moscow? They are not so lucky. If there’s a story about Russian women on TV, it’s about trafficking and prostitution.
    Olena doesn’t look for Rivka among those faces but listens carefully to the names of the reporters. One day she will hear Rivka’s.
    Does the old country stay the same, frozen, immobile as we wander and wonder? Do we fade as people forget us?Why do so many memories come now, when we are safe? Here, where few seem to have heard of Chernobyl and few seem to care that it happened? Are my memories real or contaminated?
    In the mailbox is a letter unevenly plastered with new Ukrainian stamps. Smiling inside, Olena climbs the back stairway to the apartment, puts her handbag on the hall table.
    Viktor and Matushka are sitting on the futon in the living room, watching the CBS news. Paula Zahn says many Russian women want rich men to marry them and take them to America. “Prostitutes!” says Matushka.
    She comes into the kitchen and says reproachfully to Olena, “Viktor is hungry,” when she means, “I’m hungry.”
    â€œDa, da!” Olena says, to send Matushka back to the living room.
    She opens the freezer above the refrigerator as if about to take out something. She holds the letter from Dedushka to the light to read it.
    Her face chills.
    A doctor writes to tell Olena Dedushka is no more. Something about a gas connection that Dedushka never got because a politician wanted the connection for his chauffeur. Poor Dedushka must have died of the cold last month — and Olena was not with him.
    Olena pulls the freezer door toward her like a shield, holds the handle to keep from falling. Again she reads the letter. And again.
    Oh, Dedushka, you who were more father than my father! I am truly an orphan now. You — keeper of memories, witness of my childhood — are lost to me. Forgive me for leaving you.
    Now no one of her blood is left anywhere in the former Soviet Union.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    August 1994
    Matushka is trying her glass of Stoli with a drop of Tabasco because she cannot find Stoli Pertsovka in the local stores. What a waste of good vodka! But it keeps her sitting before the TV, waiting for Viktor to return from the lab and Olena to serve her holupki. Olena takes her time stuffing beef, rice and tomato filling into boiled cabbage leaves so she doesn’t have to sit beside Matushka on the sofa or on Galina’s floor cushion.
    These days, thanks to Jewish Social Services, Matushka’s been retiring to her room at night smiling. “S bogom!” she says, and, coming out in the morning, “Shalom.”
    â€œYou know the accident,” Olena overheard her tell Galina. “It happened because of the communist atheism. They fell away from Yahweh.”
    What a thing to tell a child. And Galina is still a child, even if she is almost fifteen.
    And Matushka has begun opening the door to strangers who offer to replace her television-induced confusion with their certainty — Jehovah’s Witnesses, Evangelical Christians. This morning, she accosted Olena as she was leaving for work and made her listen to a passage from the book of Revelation. “The Third Angel blew his trumpet and a huge star fell on a third of all rivers and springs; this was the star called wormwood, and a third of all water turned to