The party is in full swing when Gideon and Zoe enter. Zoe timed it so the space would be full and dimly lit, and they wouldn’t attract too much attention. There’s a nightclub stage at the farthest end of the floor Mama rented. A band named Russian Spirit, composed of a piano, bass, drums, and tambourine, is plugging away, fronted by a dude in his forties, sweating through his black dress shirt and matching fedora, and backed by three busty women of the same age, but dressed as if they’d raided their teenage daughters’ closets—in the 1980s. Baba isn’t the only one refusing to give up on figure-flattering fashions.
There’s a dance floor in front of the stage. A handful of couples, a few Mama’s age, most Baba and Deda’s, are getting down. The old guys have serious hip action going. The women match them in wild head tosses and wanton shoulder shaking. Those without partners dance in groups, gyrating their legs, swooshing their skirts, waving their hands beneath the disco ball, a Soviet-inspired hora.
Four rows of tables are set up in semicircles around the dance floor. Each seats four. Each bears two bottles of vodka. The buffet is in the corner, featuring sculpted mountains of beet and potato salad, pickles, olives, caviar, black bread, shredded cabbage, deviled eggs, meat pastries, veal tongue with a dab of mayonnaise on every slice, and herring so dry you have to hit it against the table—that’s how you tell it’s good. And, of course, the pièce de résistance, a whole roasted pig, complete with an apple in its mouth.
Baba and Deda sit at the head, sharing a table with Balissa and Mama. They aren’t dancing. Not in the designated area, anyway. Deda has turned his chair to face the action and is kicking his legs, cancan-style, and raising his arms, torquing his wrists as if screwing in two lightbulbs. Baba is doing her best to ignore it.
The room is flickering with strobe lights bouncing off the mirrored walls and gilt-edged furnishings. But it’s not so blinding as to distract from Gideon’s presence. He’s being stared at. Some are doing it discreetly, taking quick peeks, then whipping their heads away innocently. Some are pretending to study an object right next to him, while their eyes shift surreptitiously for a better look. Others are blatantly gaping.
Zoe turns to Gideon and whisper-shouts over the pounding music, “Are you okay?”
“I’m used to it,” Gideon reassures her.
“To . . . this?” Zoe can’t think of any other way to describe . . . this.
“Looks like any other room of white people to me.”
Right. Where Zoe sees the cringeworthy culture she tries to distance herself from, he sees . . . white people. It’s like when Zoe has to explain to those who’d call her Russian that she’s not; she’s Jewish. Soviet Russians didn’t consider Jews to be Russian, and Zoe’s family never thought of themselves that way . . . until Americans insisted they were. “But weren’t they born in Russia?” Americans would ask. Actually, they weren’t, they were born in Ukraine, except those who were forcibly passed through Siberia. They speak Russian, though, not Ukrainian, because that’s what the Jews of Odessa spoke, since they weren’t considered Ukrainian, either. That nuance is even more difficult to grok. Zoe’s standard reply used to be, “If you were born in Japan, would that make you Japanese?” But then she gave up and, when asked if she was Russian, shrugged and replied, “Sure.”
“Wanna dance?” Gideon asks.
Zoe’s about to shock herself and say yes when the music scrapes to an abrupt halt, and the singer, also their emcee for the evening, announces it’s time for the festive toasts Baba and Deda’s friends have prepared. One toupee-wearing gentleman announces that, on this joyous occasion, he is moved to muse about how marriage is like the following Russian verse:
When you’re first hit in the eye
You’ll let out a mighty cry.
Hit you once, hit you twice
You’ll learn to find it very nice.
The crowd roars.
The next tribute comes in song. An elderly couple share a microphone to warble an original composition that begins, “People sing a beautiful song of you, wise and dear . . .” They’ve taken the patriotic dirge and rewritten the lyrics, so that, instead of Stalin, it’s the happy couple who are being saluted. They’ve replaced Soviet landmarks with Brighton’s, so “mountain heights” become “B train heights” and “where eagles take flight” is “where JFK planes take flight.” When they get to the line about soldiers gearing up for one final battle, everyone hoots in Baba and Deda’s direction. Deda takes his ribbing in good-natured stride, ruefully shaking his head to agree that yes, yes, there have been some great battles between them.
Then there’s another poem that the reciter thinks is hilarious for the occasion, Pushkin’s “I Am in Chains.” Fearing Gideon might be feeling a bit trapped himself, surrounded by a language he doesn’t understand, Zoe tries to include him, translating what’s being said, then offering, “Pushkin was black, you know. His great-grandfather was taken from Cameroon and given as a present to Peter the Great when he was a boy. Peter took a liking to the little guy and raised him in the Imperial Court as his godson. He sent him to France to learn math and engineering, then put him in charge of major government projects.”
“A Russian using a black man for his engineering skills?” Gideon raises an eyebrow. “I can’t imagine such a thing.”
Zoe doesn’t laugh until Gideon laughs. And not until after he whispers, “Relax, Zoe, I’m fine. This is really something.”
That’s easy for him to say. He’s enjoying himself, as opposed to cringing at how lame it all is. Adults—old people!—acting like idiots, thinking they’re being clever with their rhymes and their puns and their references to songs from a time and place nobody cares about. Zoe watches through Gideon’s eyes, which makes the furniture even shabbier, the music even more Eurotrash, the food even more gluttonous, and the people even more cheap, tacky, and foreign. She regrets inviting him. If Alex were here, they could’ve made fun of the proceedings together. They could’ve rolled their eyes and muttered droll comments to prove how above this, how American they were. They’d be having an appropriately miserable time. As opposed to Gideon, who insists on having a blast, no matter how strenuously Zoe tries to make clear he shouldn’t—he’s even bobbing his head along to the atrocious music! It’s not fair. Gideon having a good time is making Zoe have a good time. And that wasn’t the plan.
Neither was Alex showing up.
He walks in like he was invited. Which he was. Technically. He blinks through the smoke, scanning the room. He spies Zoe and waves. He takes note of Gideon. He barely breaks his stride. Did Alex know Gideon was coming? Zoe never bothered to ask Gideon if he’d told Alex. No. Zoe deliberately never asked. Because she was too scared to find out. She didn’t want to know if Alex was upset by it. Or if he wasn’t.
There’s a woman with Alex, a few years older, beautifully put together, tastefully dressed (nothing sparkling), her hair up in a classy chignon. Zoe wonders if Alex brought a date to her grandparents’ anniversary party.
He’s guiding the woman over to Baba and Deda for an introduction. Zoe figures she should be part of that conversation, if only so Mama can whisper, “I told you so,” regarding Zoe letting Alex slip through her fingers. Gideon follows.
But Alex isn’t content to present his new and improved girlfriend in private. He’d like to introduce her to the world. Alex pushes his way to the front of the tribute line, ignoring those already waiting—luckily, being ex-Soviets, they merely sigh resignedly. Alex takes the mic and introduces himself from the stage. He pauses, expectantly, for applause. This mob has been toasting for over a good hour now so, yeah, sure, they’ll applaud.
“The forty-fifth wedding anniversary,” Alex intones, “is the sapphire wedding anniversary. Not as well known as the gold or silver, but, to this gathering, even more meaningful. The sapphire is a holy stone, first mentioned in the Bible, in the book of Exodus. Exodus,” Alex repeats. “What could be more meaningful to us than that?”
Alex takes a breath, suggesting this isn’t close to being over, and goes on to lavishly praise the bravery of those first Jewish emigrants from the USSR, those daring groundbreakers of the 1970s, the ones who took a leap of faith before the trail was blazed, the ones who stepped into the abyss of their own Exodus and set a course to be followed by thousands of grateful others. The ones without whom people like him would have nothing.
That is such a load of insincere, pandering crap and—Is Baba crying? When Lacy’s mother said the same thing, Baba couldn’t wait to make fun of her for being a naive romantic, one of Lenin’s useful idiots. But at Alex’s words, Baba is seriously crying?
Gideon leans over to whisper, “Damn, he’s good.”
Zoe nods in stunned agreement.
“Of all the humiliations our people suffered in the USSR, which was the greatest one?” Alex barely pauses to offer a chance for guesses before elucidating, “Marriage! It was marriage!”
The crowd, primed to applaud and agree, nod their collective heads sagely. Yup, marriage. Marriage was the greatest humiliation they suffered, that’s just what they were about to say, Alex simply didn’t give them the chance.
“We’re celebrating forty-five years of marriage. But what sort of marriage was it?” Again, Alex answers his own question. “It was a Soviet marriage!”
If he means a situation forced on you by outside powers that you initially struggled against then accepted in defeat, trudging through your gray days, resigned and hollow, because extracting yourself wasn’t an option, and, in the end, it was your sole source of food and shelter, then, yes, the marriage of Natalia Crystal and Boris Rozengurt was pretty darn Soviet.
That’s not what Alex means. “It was a marriage sanctioned by Soviet authorities, because the true sanction, the holy sanction, a Jewish wedding ceremony, was forbidden. Such a shanda must not be allowed to stand. Especially not on this foremost anniversary, the sapphire anniversary, the Exodus anniversary.”
Wow. Alex really burned up the Google search for this one.
“This is my friend Rose.” Alex beckons his date forward. Zoe finally recognizes her as one of the cultural advisers Alex hired for his app, to translate idioms. “Rose is a rabbi.”
Zoe feels the urge to throw herself over the roast pig. Just because Zoe judges her family doesn’t mean she wants anyone else doing it. Baba doesn’t deserve to be lectured condescendingly—or, worse, sympathetically—about how she’s doing Judaism wrong. Baba knows she’s doing Judaism wrong. She also knows she’s suffered more for her Judaism than some American-born rabbi whose idea of anti-Semitism is that time in college when the Upper East Side girl made a JAP joke. Just like Zoe itched to lecture Mama about her racism, she’s ready to fight for Baba’s honor. It’ll go a long way toward assuaging her own guilt.
Alex explains, “I brought Rose here tonight so she could perform an authentic Jewish wedding ceremony and our guests of honor might finally be married in the eyes of God.”
Once again, Alex pauses for his applause.
During which time Baba leaps out of her seat, shaking her head, waving her arms, the napkin she used to dab at her eyes a few moments earlier still crumpled in her palm.
“No,” she insists. “This is unnecessary. No.”
“Don’t be shy,” Alex says.
“I do not want this,” Baba reiterates. Then, remembering that it takes two to temper, she swats her hand in Deda’s direction. “We do not want this.”
“But we do!” Alex includes himself in the watching audience. And then he starts a chant: “Gorko! Gorko!”
The word itself means bitter. It’s a tradition to shout it when you want the bride and groom to kiss. To get rid of the bitterness.
If there’s one thing a youth spent in the USSR conditioned this group to do it’s to pick up a rousing cry and keep repeating it until the only objective is to make sure you aren’t the first to stop. Overwhelmed by his friends’ fervor, Deda hefts himself from his chair, smiling awkwardly, like someone caught on a stadium kiss-cam during a blind date that’s going badly. He catches Baba’s wildly gesticulating hands in his and strains his neck to try to get her to look up at him, shouting something that gets lost in the din. She refuses to be appeased.
Out of the blue, Gideon says, “Give her my gift.”
He never got a chance to place it on the designated table. It was too crowded with guests jostling to make sure theirs was in primary position, its price tag hanging out casually, so Gideon has the box handy to thrust at Zoe. “It’ll calm her down, you’ll see.”
Zoe trusts him. She can’t explain why, she just does. Zoe shoves her way toward the stage, through the cheering crowd. Balissa watches with a look suggesting that nothing surprises her anymore as Mama tries to play peacemaker and keep Baba from making more of a scene.
“Open this.” Zoe inserts the present between her arguing grandparents.
“What is it?” Alex asks, miffed at another unscheduled interruption to his grand gesture.
Since she doesn’t know, and Baba, as is her custom, is in no mood to follow instructions, Zoe goes ahead and tears open the package herself. Inside is a sapphire-colored glass picture frame—Alex wasn’t the only one hitting Google. It surrounds a document of rich, fancy paper, inscribed with a bunch of calligraphic flourishes. In Hebrew.
“It’s a ketubah,” Rabbi Rose says, delighted to spot something familiar.
“It’s your ketubah,” Gideon arrives to tell Baba. “This proves you’re already married by Jewish law—you don’t have to do it again.”
“Where’d you find this?” Alex asks the question everyone is thinking.
Cries of “Gorko!” have died down, replaced by murmurs of confusion and splashes of vodka being poured.
Alex demands, “How could you have gotten your hands on their Jewish wedding license?”
“It was part of their immigration file,” Gideon says. “To prove they were Jewish, to prove they were married. I went online, did a little digging, a little backdooring, and I downloaded—”
Baba’s night-long frown fades, replaced with bewilderment. Baba, who prides herself on remaining in control and on top no matter what the situation, suddenly looks helpless and lost.
She turns to Zoe and whispers, “Why would you to do this?”
Without waiting for an answer, right there, in front of all her guests, Baba raises the frame above her head and hurls it to the floor.