Mama

A Chapter by CampionWindisch

Stand alone chapter between parts one and two

MAMA

‘My eight year old grandson healed this lighter. He loves dancing and singing and with his magical hands he can heal other things as well. My son’s son. Look you see. The lighter is Chinese, very simple, but he has remade it in typical Russian style. Look, you see. Where he sealed it with tape at the seams, this way the gas is not always leaking up so fast. They are always getting you to buy another some way.
   ‘These glasses here are for guests, to help against the hangovers.’
   A window, two teeth black with night. Under this a smooth white counter, a sink with a squat red iron spout threaded to the wall. On the counter a porcelain doll in a sky taffeta dress and bonnet with a white blouse. The counter is large white tiles with white grout spoiled in places with grime the color of rust. The doll’s hands are (outstretched) as if in defense. Her hair is blonde. Her eyes blue. At her feet a nonsmoking card, a ribbed glass bowl. What looks to be a scale or a timer. Some knives and rags obscured by two mostly empty plastic bottles of mineral water. A ringed hotplate missing one of its three legs, canted over. A miniature Bizantine throne carved from cherry.
   ‘Men write to my daughters, and then I write replies for them. For my eldest I only had to write one letter. I showed her the reply, she fell in love, and they are going to get married. Obviously other letters came before the proposal, but the work was done by the first letter. Now I’m writing on behalf of my other daughter. I receive letters, write replies and then show her the correspondence. She hasn’t found her true love so far although these guys don’t seem all that bad, and they’re writing to her. She is nineteen. She is getting there.
   ‘Soon she will stop simply corresponding and she will go the socials. The men will come in on the buses. They are coming all the time�"England, America, China, Japan, Japan China. They want traditional values again. They have a lot of feminism out there which I gather many men don’t like�"but wait for my Ekashka when she is livid or when she doesn’t get when she wants and you will see more than feminism. Feminism could be something fixed in the diet I think. They say it comes from learning. Here we have schools, good schools. Smart girls. What can I say? I don’t mean to offend. Probably there is a shortage of beautiful women in the out there. If she stays to the end of the social Aga she will get a small cash prize and there is or there used to be a raffle. It can be tough to stay to the end the first time. I found this with my eldest.’
   A cheap white gas four-burner with black stovetop grates on which sit an aluminum kettle and a towering aluminum stock pot. You can tell aluminum by its general lustrelessness. The other burners are obscured by the woman herself as she sits explaining, dressed in a pink cotton tank (port side n****e erect) and rimless glasses. The pink cotton tank boasts a self contained black undershirt and a broad, lush pink cotton bow at the sternum where the tank meets to reveal the black shirt beneath, it is tied tight as if binding it all together though nothing can come apart. Behind her a contemporary microwave (chrome and black plastic and teflon glass) with a bumper sticker reading ‘ZEN stelw’. A small white plastic bucket with a metallic handle bursting like a tussock with myriad forks, no two the same, tines up. Atop the microwave a tortoise effigy, a large beaker (1000ml), three stainless steel cylinders of ambiguous utility. Hanging on the wall behind the fourburner: three ladles (big, medium small), a rake for fishing pasta.
   ‘Understand: I am not like the other mothers. I go to the social. I am there. I am watching all the time. Other mothers will say blahblahblah it is her choices�"yes, my daughter makes her choice, but it is my choice too, Mama. I will not see my daughter with drunks�"american drunk, english drunk, ukranian drunk, what is the difference. A batterer, whatever, no. Understand. She can get that here. Look at her picture. A Russian man would die. Beautiful. She is nineteen. There has been no serious relationship for her yet. This is something.’
   One two door particle-board cupboard, paint-rolled white and exposed particle-board.
   On the dining table two more mostly empty plastic bottles, mineral water. The aforementioned guest only glasses (a motley of handled ceramic mugs). A glass jar of dry oregano. A squat black and white jar with a grousch-style lid full but for a few divots with fine white sugar.
   ‘Also the socials, understand, it is a strange set-up they’ve got going on there. I wonder really what it is like in other places. I go to the social with my daughter and I watch these men and I wonder how it must be their country, like, getting together. It is like the market for the girls and they are the actual physical stalls. They have the girls lined up at tables in booths all around a big room�"which I don’t know what it is other places but here we have a big stage in the middle where people dance and there are lights and loud music and there are usually one or two coolers of bottled beer in ice by the wall where you enter. The man patrols with a beer in his hand looking into the stall at each of the girls one by one. Then the man sits and it can be ok, but what sort impression does it make on a new relationship. Ten girls to one man. What chances do they have? Not so good as one of ten. It leaves an aftertaste in my heart. I prefer the correspondences. At the socials you find the men ask… simple questions�"job, age, height. Why don’t they ask what does she love, what does she dream? Do you cook, do you clean is what they ask. Of course they do! And they are women as well.    You think a long time, you think, people are basically the same. There is music and food, there is cultural this cultural that, different prayers, whatever, basically still I think: we are still the same. We eat we sleep, we suffer from time to time, we all want sometimes to love someone and always to be loved. Same.’
   Mismatched chairs, an old scrolled woodback, a rocker, a black leather office type on wheels (Mama sits here), and then a white plastic patio chair still soiled in the crevices. What looks to be a (modified) bench seat from an old vehicle, cut and angled to corner the table, which it does, the sides nearest the doll.
       ‘My eldest has accepted the proposal and filled out the papers. Her plane leaves in forty six days. Pheonix Arizona. From there she has ninety days by law to be married or she must return and then from the ninety days it is two years until everything is legitimate. Then she is there. She is an American woman, wife. I don’t know if when it is time I will move to America to be with my daughter. I am in my ways here.
   ‘We will see with the youngest.
   ‘There will be maybe twenty to thirty correspondences before there is a real date set up. It can take sometimes two years from the time of the date to when a girl will leave to get married. For my eldest it is eighteen months since the first letter. Not bad. The agency which I joined for the girls claims seventy-five to eighty percent success but I do not think it can be so. You see a lot of men leaving without girls from the socials. Old men. Strange men. Men who take many trips here, try many times. A man at one of the socials once reasoned with my Ekahska that for him it was a major purchase. He likened her to a car which he must test before he ‘allowed’ it in his ‘garage’. He thought my child was simple. He reasoned further: wouldn’t she need to test him too�"he was an old man, he might not ‘do’ the ‘job’, but they should both of them know before going more down the road. My eldest blushed and I hit this man in the face with the ash tray. This was the old agency.
   ‘The good thing is they pay. For the girls here it free to join the agency. With my eldest for a while at the beginning she was actually paid a small portion of the revenue from the phone calls and the what is it, the chatting, on the computer. But now there is a law or something. Though money doesn’t matter. You can buy a Russian girl anything so long as you are not cheap. A poor man can have any wife he likes�"if it is love it will follow them wherever they go, but he just cannot be cheap. It is important to make an effort, to show. Even if a man has next to nothing he must give over some of this nothing to the woman. If he does not his cheap and he will be cheap with his heart. I do not want my girls to spend there old age in church, loveless. I tell my girls this all the time.’
   The woman herself is broad, soft, with clean, teeming brown eyes. Her smile is even gaps between short rounded teeth, a smile which she speaks through. Small hands with babyfat fingers and a silver ring in a bow on the left (pinky). She (bounces) jovially against the high backed office chair. She is making prayer hands and smiling dreamily.
   ‘Understand: there are many girls who use the site for years and years. The girls here don’t speak english, chinese. Who can speak chinese. The Chinese? Make them prove it. The girls in the city have it easy. You get travelers there, legitimate people, anything can happen. Here we have to wait for the tours. Rarely do new people come to stay. You don’t by chance meet the prince. You have to order him on the computer.
   ‘The ones with the children and other marriages have the most troubles I hear. You see the same people again and again. You get to know them.
   ‘There are no Russian men. Sure in the cities. Petersburg. But there are more women everywhere you look. They don’t have to choose at all. This is a man: even when he has only the one he cannot choose her fully you find. Drunks and fighters and philanderers is what a man becomes when he doesn’t have to try for his women. My husband himself… wherever he is.
   ‘For me I am already forty-five. I think there is a whole other agency for women like me. One where I am the one who pays no? It is better for me now, I can give myself to my children and my grandchild. I tell them: Hope will die last. Our spring has not come yet. Sometimes I think that really is it.’
   Also on the table: A small porcelain house with a chimney painted to look like white brick, a shingled roof with a two-level gable protruding�"a house tall and thin, with vertical bands alternating periwinkle white periwinkle white, mullioned windows (naturally), a double-door french entrance over which is cantilevered a cuneiform hard awning, and then a dun garden of smudged, indiscriminate flora crawling up the walls near the entrance. An elegant bronze filigree napkin holder empty but for a few paper squares which hang languid over one side like a single tired flower stem.

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