25
It was in April that Alyssa Vitalyevna determined that it was a good idea to take Mitya with her to a birthday celebration for one of Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis’s daughters. She was saying that it would do Mitya good; however, she planned to use him as a sort of human shield, because of the precarious position she was in with Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis’s family. Mitya did not want to go, but Alyssa Vitalyevna lured him into it with the promise of buying him something new to wear. Mitya hoped that he would be able to purchase something that wasn’t too boyish, or too girlish, all at the same time.
Alyssa Vitalyevna also wanted a dress for herself. She needed to look splendid for the occasion, and a quick survey of her wardrobe revealed that she had absolutely nothing that would make the daughters embrace her as their new mother-in-law and fear her at the same time.
Because shops would be too expensive, they went to a clothing market. Mitya tried to persuade Babushka to go to Konkovo, where Marina worked, but Alyssa Vitalyevna said that it was not a quality market. They went to Olimpiyskiy instead, which was located inside the former Olympic stadium. Cleopatra had told Alyssa Vitalyevna that her daughter bought Dior and Dolce & Gabbana clothes there for a fraction of the price. They were not real, but you couldn’t tell the difference. Perhaps they were even the same clothes, marked differently with tags that the company did not approve.
The market was sprawling and seemed endless. Alyssa Vitalyevna said that it was necessary to know what you were looking for before you started. The stalls with the good clothes were inside the stadium, not outside, and she had a booth number saved and a particular woman named Valentina to ask for. She did not want to make herself known yet, and they spent about an hour walking around the stalls near Valentina’s.
Mitya did not mind at all; he loved looking at all the different dresses. Unlike the ones he had previously seen, some of them seemed pretty straightforward in their design, and he realized that he wouldn’t mind wearing them himself. The boy clothes on offer were not bad, either, and Mitya kept looking for something that would be fitting for any gender.
After a while, they approached Valentina, who turned out to be a heavyset woman with flaming makeup. She immediately found everything Alyssa Vitalyevna asked for and made great suggestions: for instance, that Alyssa Vitalyevna would look good in a pencil-shaped skirt. Mitya didn’t understand why it was called “pencil-shaped,” but he was fascinated by how good his grandmother looked in a dress. He was so used to seeing her in A-line skirts below the knee and cardigans that when she put on that first dress she had decided on, the sight took his breath away. The dress had thin straps and a leopard print, and the way she filled it up with her breasts and hips was stunning. Her waist, meanwhile, looked wispy and cinched. Would he be able to look like that when he grew up? Perhaps he would enjoy wearing leopard pencil-skirt dresses when he got older.
“I think you’re going to be the star of the party,” he said to her, and Alyssa Vitalyevna smiled. She knew that she would, but wasn’t sure it would be for the right reasons.
For Mitya, they chose a pair of slim black trousers and a black shirt. Alyssa Vitalyevna said that she had seen Brad Pitt wear something like that in a photograph. Mitya knew that Brad Pitt was a handsome actor, with a girlfriend who looked like his twin and had a similar haircut, so he didn’t mind.
When he started putting the clothes on, it turned out that the men’s and boys’ pants were either too wide for Mitya in the legs, or too short in the ankles, and the shirts hung excessively on the arms and torso. After a dozen rejected options, Valentina offered to have him try the trousers and shirt in women’s sizes. Though the buttons were facing the other direction, the clothes fit perfectly, and Mitya couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl staring back at him from the mirror. As Valentina wrapped their purchases, Alyssa Vitalyevna told Mitya to keep this from his parents.
“I’m sure indyuk won’t pay too much attention to the buttons anyway.”
The party was at a restaurant owned by one of Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis’s nephews. The seating was prearranged. When Alyssa Vitalyevna and Mitya arrived, they were sad to discover that they were seated away from each other. Moreover, Alyssa Vitalyevna was not seated next to Khristofor Khristoforovich, as she had hoped, and as would be proper due to their relationship. Instead, she was placed at the table with older women, including Khristofor Khristoforovich’s sister Pupa. “They’re trying to show me my place,” she thought and resolved to work with the situation and make sure that the old ladies were enamored with her. After all, her late husband’s mother had been a big fan, hadn’t she? So Alyssa Vitalyevna sat down and got ready to impress. She began by covering herself up with her shawl so that the grannies couldn’t give her plunging décolleté the side-eye.
Meanwhile, Mitya was placed at the children’s table. It probably wasn’t any more diverse in the represented age groups than the old women’s table, but because everyone was more or less under sixteen, the difference in the ages was noticeable. Mitya’s chair was between a curly-haired little girl and a gloomy big-nosed teenage boy in glasses, who seemed to be the oldest person at the table and twice as big as Mitya. He had never met them in his prior interactions with Khristofor Khristoforovich’s family.
“Kostya,” the boy said, introducing himself, and Mitya shook his extended hand. The boy was dressed in a full suit, with a vest and a jacket, and Mitya realized that his own outfit looked a lot like what the servers were wearing, albeit more stylish.
“So, you’re not from the family, are you?” Kostya asked.
“No, my grandmother is Dr. Khristofor Khristoforovich Kherentzis’s friend.” He wasn’t sure he was allowed to talk about the relationship before he had established whether the boy could be trusted. “Do you know him?”
“Of course! My mother is his cousin’s daughter”—Kostya pointed to a table somewhere to the right of theirs—“and my father is somehow related to him through his father, but honestly, I can’t remember myself, because I never met my grandfather, and we don’t speak about him at home.”
Mitya was amazed. At least this explained how Khristofor Khristoforovich’s family was able to fill a party with a hundred-odd people, while he would have extra fingers if he counted his living relatives. Did Vovka even warrant a whole finger?
“And the one next to you is Nika, but I don’t think she likes talking to boys,” Kostya said. “She is Khristofor Khristoforovich’s great-niece, by the way.”
Mitya turned to the little girl, who looked back at him with her huge brown eyes and said, with or without malice, it was hard to tell: “You look like a girl!”
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Kostya said. “She is spoiled. Here, have some of this khachapuri, it’s fantastic.”
Mitya allowed Kostya to serve him a slice. The melty cheese in it was so good, he wanted to eat it every day for the rest of his life. And he also wouldn’t mind sitting next to the little girl, with her thick curly brown hair, because she inadvertently seemed to get him.
Mitya looked out for Alyssa Vitalyevna and saw her a few tables away, busy in a conversation with an older woman. She seemed to be having a good time. In the center of the room, a white-haired man picked up the microphone and began toasting the birthday woman, Maria. He soon shifted his narrative and began to recall his life in Sukhumi before the war. Mitya knew that Sukhumi was a place in Abkhazia where a lot of Khristofor Khristoforovich’s relatives lived before the war started but had never learned the details.
“Have you been to Sukhumi?” Mitya asked Kostya, hoping he would shed some light on the matter.
“We used to live there when I was small but had to flee during the war. We were running to a ship to take us to safety under the gunfire, and I lost my shoes,” Kostya said, pensive.
Mitya pictured Kostya running on the shore toward a ship, barefoot and, for some reason, naked. Like the little Vietnamese girl in the war photo that Mitya had seen somewhere. Who was firing at him? Why was there a war? Mitya didn’t know the details, but he was sure that Sukhumi was not in Chechnya or Afghanistan. How many wars were there around them? Mitya imagined soldiers shooting at the naked heap of Kostya’s body, making sure he didn’t make it to the boat. The body fell on the shore, the trickles of blood mixed in with the salty water, and Kostya died.
Though it was his imagination, and the real Kostya was sitting next to him safe and sound, Mitya shivered and wanted to hug the boy. Instead, he stayed respectfully silent.
The servers swapped the dishes for the main course: plates of pieces of lamb on bones arranged among vegetables. Mitya had never eaten lamb, and did not even know what it was: Kostya told him of the meat’s provenance. When he put a bone against his lips, it smelled like his wool scarf, with meaty smokiness. It was delightful, especially because Mitya could imitate Kostya and eat with his hands, peeling off the filmy connective tissue that attached the meat to the bone. It was rubbery, crunchy, and especially delicious for this weirdness.
The meandering toast finally came to an end, and music took its place on the loudspeakers.
You’re a very classy lady
And your daddy serves as an ambassador.
You’re obsessed with Dostoevsky
Even though it’s time for you to be a wife now.
Mitya recognized the velvety baritone of the young crooner Valery Meladze. People started dancing between the tables and in the specially allocated spot in the middle of the room. First, there were a few middle-aged women; then they were joined by some children. Mitya saw Khristofor Khristoforovich invite his birthday daughter, Maria, to dance too. Mitya looked at Alyssa Vitalyevna to make sure she was okay and saw her looking on at the dancers with a smile frozen on her face. Perhaps it wasn’t that bad: after all, it was Maria’s birthday, and it was only fair for her father to invite her.
“Girls from the higher society often struggle with their loneliness silently,” went the chorus.
“Kostya, dance with me.” Nika reached right over Mitya and tugged the older boy’s sleeve. Kostya patiently stopped eating his lamb chop and wiped his hands with the cloth napkin. Once they reached the dance floor, Kostya helped Nika put her little feet on top of his dress shoes and started moving his legs while bobbing from side to side, so that she moved around like his puppet.
The song now playing was Irina Allegrova’s “Empress.”
Burn up this town, oh feisty empress,
Forgetting all that matters in the young companions’ embrace
As if the night were to last forever,
And disillusionment would not become the dawn of the new day.
This was the cue for more women to enter the dance floor and flaunt their empowerment. A lot of them, from tiny girls like Nika to hunchbacked older women, danced along to Allegrova’s throaty vocals and made sweeping gestures with their arms. Mitya noticed that everyone from his table had gone, either to dance or somewhere else, and he was sitting alone, surrounded by plates heaped with lamb rib bones. He thought about the elephant cemetery in The Lion King, which had made him uncontrollably sob for an entire evening. The bones looked sad, but also kind of beautiful. Mitya looked around and, satisfied that no one was watching him, snatched the bones from the surrounding plates and stuffed them into his pants pockets. He wanted to save the bones, to make something with them, but he didn’t yet know what exactly. Since Valerka’s tree had failed to sprout in the spring, Mitya didn’t believe in burying things to have them regrow anymore. But he had started believing that art could give anything a second life.
After a few more songs, the dance floor grew sparse. Most of the kids returned to the table, including Nika and Kostya. Kostya had rivulets of sweat coming down his temples. Nika was hot too. She sat down on the floor and started fanning herself with the hem of her dress, so that everyone could see her white tights and the gaping hole in their crotch.
“You don’t dance?” Kostya asked Mitya.
Mitya shrugged. He wanted to, but it didn’t feel right.
“Where did you learn to dance?” he asked Kostya.
Now it was Kostya’s turn to shrug.
“We do it all the time,” he said.
Mitya wondered what his father would say if he were to participate in such a party. Would he dance too? Would he invite Mitya’s mother? Or would he find the dancing men effeminate, no matter the amount of hair on their chests or the strength of their jawlines.
A tall skinny woman in glasses came up to Nika and took her somewhere, telling her it was impolite to sit like that. When a slow song came on, Khristofor Khristoforovich asked Alyssa Vitalyevna to dance. She leaned into him gracefully as they moved. Mitya watched the couple dance, mesmerized: despite being next to their relationship for a long time, Mitya had never realized that it was a romance, in fact, full of passion, and youth.
“Is that your grandmother?” Kostya asked Mitya as he watched the dancers. “She looks so young. Not like my grandma.” He pointed to someone at the table where Alyssa Vitalyevna had sat a minute ago. Mitya wasn’t sure which one was Kostya’s because they were all quite old. But now he realized that they were all looking at Alyssa Vitalyevna and Khristofor Khristoforovich and talking about them. Mitya looked for Maria, the birthday woman, and found her at her seat at the main table, her lips pursed. Just as she had told his mother, his grandmother was not liked by this big family, and it made him sad and defensive. At least his neighbor seemed to genuinely think his grandmother was beautiful.
Nika’s mother brought her back and sat her straight on the chair. Once she left, the girl turned to Mitya. “My mama said that your babushka wants Khristofor’s money,” she told him, deadpan, and turned back around to look at the dancers.
Mitya did not quite know how to respond.
“Don’t pay attention to her,” said Kostya. “Only seven and already causing trouble.” He tapped the girl on the shoulder. “Nika! Be nicer to my new friend, or I’ll eat all of your cake when they bring it out.”
Nika showed him her tongue.
“They don’t like her, do they?” Mitya asked. He immediately regretted it, but it was Kostya, stuffing his face again, so lovely and welcoming, who made him want to be honest.
“Don’t think about it. We’re a big family; no one likes each other, what do you want them to do with strangers? And non-Greeks, especially.” Kostya waved his hand and poured more cola into his and Mitya’s glasses. “They always keep my father out of things because he is a proctologist and not a dentist or surgeon like everyone else.”
“What’s a proctologist?” Mitya asked.
“A doctor who heals butts.”
Mitya inadvertently spat a bit of his cola on the plate with some leftover slices of potato and eggplant. Then he was terrified that Kostya would be offended by his reaction. “I’m sorry!”
“You think I don’t know it’s funny? Relax. And go dancing before you miss the chance. This is sirtaki; we will all be dancing, you should join,” Kostya said as a new composition came on. It was string music that resembled loud, rhythmical dripping.
The people on the dance floor formed a circle and began moving together, like a ripple in the water. They each put out one leg to the side, then the other leg, and then threaded their legs one behind the other to take a step. Every once in a while the circle broke, so that one of the participants could pick up someone from the adjacent tables. Mitya watched Kostya join the ring, then Khristofor Khristoforovich, then Alyssa Vitalyevna. She was not as sure of her movements as the Greeks, but it was apparent that she’d been practicing. The music sped up, and the dripping became a quick string melody.
When the circle was close to the children’s table, Alyssa Vitalyevna reached out to Mitya and gestured for him to join the circle. Mitya was reluctant, but he felt a push from behind: it was Kostya reaching out from the dancing circle. In a second, Mitya was dancing along with the others, trying desperately to copy their movements. It was hard but incredibly fun, especially as the music sped up more and more.
They served cake after the dance, white, fluffy, with pieces of fruit. The teenage girls at the table offered their pieces to Kostya because they were minding their figures, and he shared them with Mitya.
There was more dancing after the cake. Mitya watched Kostya move elegantly. He chose not to participate in the dance himself. Mitya liked Kostya, and wondered if the boy would have admired him had he come as Lena. This raised a wave of longing in Mitya that he didn’t know how to quench.
He wanted to be alone for a moment, so he went to the window closest to their table, sat down on the wide windowsill, and looked outside. It was dark in the street, but people still rushed up and down in the lamplight. Mitya looked at them from his second floor and felt like a god, perched above humanity. He saw them, and they would see him, too, if they only looked up. That was until a young man passing by stopped right beneath where Mitya was sitting.
He had thick brown curls and dark, impressive eyes, and for a moment, Mitya thought that he was Greek too, someone from the party. He looked a bit older, but not by much, maybe fifteen. He stared right into the window where Mitya was sitting and had a vague smile on his lips. It seemed like he could be looking for the restaurant, but he didn’t express recognition or move, just stood there. Could he see Mitya? The room behind Mitya was lit, so most likely, yes. The boy seemed to direct his gaze right into Mitya’s eyes—or even deeper. He smiled more openly, and Mitya smiled back, although he couldn’t know for sure if the boy could see it. Though they were separated by glass and height, Mitya felt the same kind of warm, enveloping energy as he had previously with Seva. But this time, Mitya wasn’t a girl, and yet still warranted it. Was the boy goluboy?
Mitya felt the urge to run down the stairs and out of the restaurant and ask the boy. Or at least introduce himself. But he realized that before he’d be able to reach the street, the boy would be gone. The boy smiled at Mitya some more, and then rotated on his heels and walked away fast. Mitya felt a renewed longing for him, the need to find out, to resolve it, to run after. But then he felt the heaviness of all his losses and realized that some moments were precious just because they existed, even if you could never latch on to them, or reproduce them.
At least now he knew that he could be noticed.
Soon after the cake plates were taken away, Alyssa Vitalyevna told Mitya it was time to leave. Khristofor Khristoforovich had called them a taxi, and it was already there. Kostya heartily shook Mitya’s hand, as if they had become best friends over the few exchanged phrases, but when Mitya glanced into his eyes, he saw his loneliness reflected in them. Still, he was jealous of Kostya. Even if he belonged to a family that was so mean to butt doctors and non-Greek grandmothers. At least he had one. He could come to a place where there were little nieces to dance with, and cousins to share their cake, and grown-ups to look up to. Mitya had no one, only the microcosm of his apartment, where some were suffocated, others suffocating, and, apart from his grandmother and mother, there was no one to admire.
Perhaps that was why he wanted to be a woman.
In the taxi, Alyssa Vitalyevna slumped in the soft back seat. She was happy to finally be able to stop trying to maintain her posture enough, but not too much, so that everyone would see that she was of good stock, but not snobbish.
“How did you like it?”
“It was fun,” Mitya said, honestly, inhaling his grandmother’s wine breath, “and I liked the lamb.”
“Did anyone say anything to you about me?”
“No,” Mitya lied. He didn’t want his grandmother to worry about it.
“I was trying my best, and still some of these aunties were giving me dirty looks,” she said. “And his daughters. That’s why he asked the taxi to come so early, you know, so that I would be able to say thank you to the birthday one in front of everyone and she would have no way to act out. She still gave me the ‘chicken’s asshole,’” she said of the woman’s pursed lips.
Mitya was amused with the expression.
“I think you were the most beautiful one there,” he said.
“No, it was you! I saw how some of the girls were looking at you. They may have olive skin and big eyes, but no ponti Greek has ever boasted blond curls.” She put her fingers through Mitya’s hair. “Never cut it. I know your father doesn’t like it, but he’s an idiot. This is true beauty. And everyone will like it. Girls and boys.” She winked.
Mitya smiled shyly. He hoped so. He had no idea whom he would prefer to like him, but the thing that he knew for sure was that he desperately, overwhelmingly wanted to be liked. And the fact that Babushka understood it, with nuance, with ambiguity, was extraordinary. Mitya felt seen.