The Family Hightower Read online

  “Do we know each other?” she says in Ukrainian. She’s wondering if his interest is romantic or criminal. He doesn’t say anything at first, which puts her on guard. She goes through the small conversations she’s had with strangers in the past few days, maybe the wrong things she might have said to the wrong people without knowing it. The things she might have been an accidental witness to.

  “No,” he says at last, and in that single word, she can already hear his American accent, tell how much he doesn’t know the language. It’s endearing. “I wanted to see you,” he says. Extends a tentative hand. “I’m Peter.”

  “Madalina.”

  “Can I see you again?”

  She smiles, wants to tell him something nice, but is afraid he won’t understand what she’s trying to say, because his Ukrainian is so bad. So she just digs into her pocketbook for a business card and a pen. Writes her phone number on the back of it and hands it to him.

  “Call me,” she says. “I like coffee.”

  He smiles back at her, and she leaves then. Later that night, falling asleep, she can’t say quite why she decided to give him a chance. Look at the kinds of friends he has. Look at the people he’s with, her father would say. Too ambitious. But she sees a thing in him that, so far in Petey’s life, only his mother and his aunt Sylvie have seen. She looks right through the swaggering, angular young buck, sees the good boy Muriel tried to raise. Just prone to mischief, that’s all. She’s sure enough of herself to think that she can handle it. He calls the next day.

  You know how the story goes. It’s first love, for both of them, and it happens fast. Within weeks, they feel like they’ve discovered a new continent, a new ocean. They’ve been let in on a giant secret; something about the world has been revealed to them that no one else seems to know, or maybe they’ve all just forgotten. They look at their friends with pity, because nobody they know can be as happy as they are. By the end of the second month, for each of them, the other seems to give off light, and they transform the city wherever they go. The colors heighten, run together, like it’s all a carnival and they’re spinning around in it, screaming, laughing, their hands in the air. They’re impregnable, they have superpowers. They could jump from the roof of her apartment building and land on their feet, right on the sidewalk, walk to the curb, and hail a bus. They could turn knives into paper, bullets into steam, but they don’t have to. No one would dare touch them.

  It’s only when Petey’s Ukrainian gets a little better that Madalina realizes how deep in he might be. Like I said, reader, Madalina’s not stupid; it’s just that she doesn’t imagine that whatever Petey’s involved in could be so terrible. She’s thinking it’s just about money. A little graft, a little corruption. Getting government contracts to do construction, putting up money for a bunch of guys to do half-assed work building fancy new apartment complexes on the highway out of Kiev. The returns come in when the units are sold to foreign corporations for a price that’s too high. Or maybe there’s a favor called in to someone in the finance ministry in return for a business arrangement in Lviv so exclusive that it amounts to a monopoly. The kind of thing that, as a friend of her father’s was fond of saying, is illegal but not a crime. Just the way of the world, the way things get done, among those who understand that the size of your bank account and who you know just might be all that matters. This is what legitimate market economics looks like, right? Government and business working so close together that it looks criminal. The market looked like that when it was criminal, she reminds herself, under Ceausescu, under Brezhnev, even under Gorbachev. That was the big lesson of the planned economy, that you can’t stop people from buying and selling things how they want to buy and sell them. Telling people how much a loaf of bread is worth from on high is just asking people to walk down the street to buy their bread from a guy selling it out of a van—the guy who bought it all up quick, maybe before it hit the store, because he knew it was worth more than the government was saying. He knew it and he was right. The farce went on for so long that the black marketeers got really good at their jobs. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that they grew so fast when the collapse of communism set them free. It doesn’t surprise Madalina. But she isn’t prepared to accept that it’s gotten so bloody, or that her sweet Petey has it all over him.

  She only realizes it after he says the smallest thing. They’re in Kiev, in a café with dark wooden beams and strong coffee, and he mentions that he has to get some papers for a shipment his business is conducting. She starts talking about the customs house, about imports and exports—it’s her line of work, too. Tariff schedules. Changing regulations. All that sort of thing. But she sees fast that Petey has no idea what she’s talking about, none whatsoever, and he can’t hide it. He loves her too much, and his Ukrainian isn’t good enough to hide his ignorance.

  “Petey, what are you investing in here?” she says.

  “Import-export stuff,” he says.

  “But that’s what I’m talking about, and you don’t seem to understand it.”

  For a tiny moment, the Petey she’s gotten to know is gone. He has a look on his face that’s small, and scared. Asking her to leave it alone.

  “I don’t need to understand everything about it just to invest in it,” he says.

  “I know that. But don’t you feel like you need to know more than you do?”

  “No. That’s not how it works.”

  “What does it work on, then?”

  He’s looking for the word and, this time, finds it. “Trust,” he says.

  “That’s it?” she says.

  “That’s all market stuff ever is, isn’t it?”

  He’s confident again, smiling. But she can’t get that look out of her head. For a few days, she tries to ignore it, to not think all that much about where Petey goes when he’s not with her. But it’s too much. She’s thinking of that man in Berlin. All the girls she interviewed in Berlin, all the girls she knew in Negostina, the ones who weren’t as lucky as she was, to be so clever, so quick with language, to have parents like hers. To have anything. There are so many of them, she thinks, all along that border of Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova, and she’s heard way too many stories from there to not know how bad things have gotten there. How the open gates to Chisinau, those apartment blocks built as though they were the entrance to a palace on either side of the highway, are more like a broken dam, and the current is raging, pushing people westward. Some of them riding the tide. Some of them being dragged, screaming, under the water. Coming apart against the rocks.

  So Madalina tells Petey that she has a day off, says she’s just going to spend it at home, but then follows him instead. It all seems innocuous. Lunches, coffee, dinner, vodka. Petey doesn’t seem to do much of anything. Then there’s a conversation with a man who moves his hands as he speaks with great deliberation, as if meaning’s a solid thing, a weight resting in his open palms. Petey leaves this last appointment weaving a little—the vodka’s still a little much for him—and he and the man exchange a slow handshake that gives Madalina the impression that maybe Petey’s not sure what kind of deal he just closed, but the other man is under no illusions. Her poor American boy. One too many generations, a little too much money and capitalism, too many pop songs and TV commercials, between him and the place where his family is from for him to read the fine print written all over the streets, the movements of limbs, the pursing of lips, the long silences where people just breathe. We’re a wolf, she thinks, and you’re just a small boy.

  She’s about to go home when she feels a hand on her shoulder, not warm. She flinches and wheels. It’s a man with a close-cropped haircut, a leather jacket, slacks. The gangster uniform. His eyes travel over her, linger at each part, before he nods a few times. A faint smile, approving. There’s nothing sexual in his gaze at all, and that makes it worse.

  “You’re the American’s girl,” he says in a hitched Ukrainian that
suggests it’s his third or fourth language.

  “Who are you?” she says.

  He goes by the nickname Pocketknife, because he does a little of everything. But he’s not going to tell her that. He switches to a more, but not quite, fluent Romanian. She realizes she has no idea what nationality the man is, which means the costume isn’t just going along with the crowd. He wants her to know what’s up.

  “Did he forget something at home today?” he says.

  “I’m not going to play this game with you,” she says.

  “Good. Then I can just tell you that we are going to kill you. You and your American boy, because you have connections to journalists that we do not want to be that close to. You are even a journalist yourself. So you are as good as dead already. Maybe we will kill the other man, too, his friend, if he talks. Would you like to know how we will kill you?”

  “No.”

  “I think you will be very interested to know. Because there is a lot on you—in you, in fact—that can be very useful for us. That we need to kill you is a matter of course. But since you appear to be in excellent health—do you smoke?—we will be able to get excellent prices. Your lungs. Your liver. Your kidneys. Your eyes. Perhaps even your heart. It has many more years of life left in it.”

  He says it like he’s just passing along information, something that’s been decided somewhere else. She doesn’t know why he’s telling her, when he knows she’ll have to act on it. Why is it better to have told me? she says. Why do they want me to run? She’s hoping that maybe all they want is for she and Petey to disappear, that being out is as good as being dead. She can’t see the whole scheme; it’s a huge machine that stretches far and away, too far for her to take it all in at once from where she’s standing. But she understands she doesn’t have a choice. Staying in Kiev is now a kind of suicide, and there’s only one place she can go.

  “You’re very pretty,” the tall man says. “Even in my line of work, I can still appreciate such things.”

  Petey comes to her apartment well after dark, finds her packing a few of his clothes into a backpack. A small bag for herself already on the floor.

  “Why did you come here?” she says.

  “To your apartment?”

  “No, no. To Kiev. To Ukraine. Why did you do it?”

  She’s so angry. The man is right: She already knows the answer. But she wants the question to hurt, to carry all her shock, all her disappointment. Her terror at what she’s gotten involved in.

  “What are you talking about?” he says, but his voice is already shaking.

  “Do you really think I’m that stupid?”

  “No.”

  “You must think I’m an idiot to say something like that.”

  “No, I don’t. I love you, Madalina. I love you.”

  “Those two things have nothing to do with each other.”

  She sounds like her own father, Madalina thinks, at their last dinner in Negostina. She sees it now, in her head: her father, Claudiu, trying so hard not to show how scared he is that he comes out looking angry. His hand shaking when he lifts a fork. He drinks too much to try to steady his hand, but it only makes him sloppy. Soon they are yelling at each other. This world, the father says, will eat you alive now.

  Yes, she says, because everything under Ceausescu was so much better. She winces as she says it, knows her father doesn’t need the history lesson. He has the dead friends to remind him of it all the time. Her father gets quiet, and she’s more scared of him then than she’s ever been in her life. But he’s just trying to warn her.

  At least under Ceausescu, he says, you knew how you were getting fucked. Now, you will never know, until it’s far too late.

  Petey just never looked that hard at what he was doing, Madalina realizes. But now she’s prying his eyelids open, forcing him to take a good long stare. And he has no idea what to do.

  “We have to leave,” she says to Petey. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Where are we going to go?” His voice rises and falls like a little boy’s. It’s something she’s doing, how she’s holding herself, a tone she’s taking. He’s shocked all over again, the same shock she’s seen a hundred times in the backpackers and college students from Western Europe and America who come here. Some of them, of course, are oblivious. They’re here just for the cheap alcohol, the license for debauchery that they seem to think being in a foreign country gives them. Or they’re here because they’re fascinated. They want to know just what on earth went on here during the Cold War, which, she understands, the hipsters are already turning into kitsch. Or maybe they don’t have anything in their heads but fairy tales and monster stories. They know about Transylvania only because of Dracula. Imagine that maybe, just maybe, the Roma are dressed like the pirates in children’s books, riding around in caravans drawn by donkeys, telling fortunes and doing tricks with knives. They’re imagining craziness, absurdity. They read Bulgakov and get some of the jokes, but don’t see the darkness for what it is. She doesn’t know what they think. But whatever it is, it doesn’t prepare them for what’s here. They spend the first day inside, on their beds, staring out the window. Come out the next day trying to hide the guidebook they’ve shoved in their pocket, their lips moving in silence. They can’t get through the easiest phrases. Can’t say a word. Can’t get their heads around what it is to be there, to see what history has done, what the people are doing now. And her Petey, who she thought knew a little more than that, is turning into one of them, right in front of her.

  “Madalina?” he says. “Can you get me out?” In a voice so tiny that she wants to take him in her arms, put his head to her chest, and tell him everything’s going to work out fine. Either that or bury the claw end of a hammer in his skull.

  “We just have to leave,” she says. “Tonight.”

  She’s getting even angrier. I had plans, she wants to tell him. Good plans. It was going to be just a few more years of business translation, to save up enough to live on for a couple years if she was careful. She was more than halfway there. Then she was going back to school to do journalism, to be the people she was translating for back in Berlin. She was going to show the world what a few bad men were doing, and maybe get them to stop. At least alert them that the days of impunity were over. That someone was watching them, and had a big megaphone.

  But it’s more than that, because the truth is that, here in Kiev, with Petey, up until today, she was happier than she’s ever been; happier, maybe, than she ever thought she’d be. And it isn’t just Petey, but the city. The sense of a giant, waking up. She sees it in the way they’re renovating the old parts of the city near the center, blasting the paint off the brick and putting a new coat on, gutting the insides and rebuilding them. Recobbling the streets. In the heart of Kiev, Stalin pulled down the twelfth-century church and monastery of St. Michael’s in the 1930s, but they’re putting it back together already; the money came together so fast, and in just a few years, it’ll be back, as though nothing had happened. Even if it’s only a symbol, it’s Ukrainians undoing what Stalin had done. They can’t bring all the people they lost back to life, but they can bring back some of the things they loved.

  But Madalina also just loves the city for what it is. The bright, bright days that turn the dust in the air into light. The beaches along the Dneiper at the Hidropark, where men fish in the early spring before the summer starts and the sunbathers come. The merry-go-round perched on the edge of a cliff high over the river, under the titanium Friendship Arch. Her own neighborhood, beyond the university. The old accordion player in front of the Taras Shevchenko metro stop, across the street from the lawn of a blue factory three stray dogs have claimed as their own. Her little apartment on Mezhyhirska Street. In the square in the middle of the apartment complex on Shchekavytska, there’s an old, abandoned building there that’s already lost its windows and its roof, and the apartment buildings the
mselves look like they’re rusting where they stand. But in the square, families relax in the sun, pushing babies back and forth in strollers. An old man struts by in a neon gym suit. Another man in a dirty T-shirt plants trees. Children in green and orange coats climb on a red and yellow playground. A mom hoists up a kid in a pink suit so she can grab the monkey bars. Orthodox Jewish kids in black and white clothes dart in and out among the hip young things in leather jackets, tight jeans, striped scarves. The air’s filled with the smell of roasting meat, as though the square were a village; maybe it is, and she just didn’t stay long enough to meet everyone. In another park, the basketball court’s asphalt looks like a flash-frozen ocean; it bucks from erosion and frost, and the square on the backboard of the basketball net is hand-drawn. But kids are playing the game all the same. At the trolley stop on the corner, the concrete slabs of the sidewalk are tilted at insane angles, like they’ve been hit by an earthquake. Two teenagers are skateboarding on them, having the time of their lives. In the huge market building on Verkhnii Val Street, the side stalls are filled with clothes, linens. People grind keys, sell power tools and leather belts, woven baskets and flowers. In the middle, the air is rank with meat, poultry, and fish, cheese and onions. Men and women bark out numbers, haggle over prices, while pigeons roost in the rafters above them. The electric trolleys squeal as they spark around corners, wheeze with every stop and start, and there’s scaffolding over everything, offices and apartment buildings, so that you’re never sure if they’re fixing things or taking them out. She’ll miss all of it, and doesn’t want to leave, but she doesn’t have any choice. And Petey is to blame.