landscape of a man

Rehearsal went well, in Will's living room - new songs about being in the right place, about playing solitaire on a hotel bed, about a girl with big brown eyes who leaves all of her things on the floor. My harmonicas spread across the sofa, scribbling notes on lyrics - I so rarely get to make music like this. Intimate, quiet, tender, angry sounds with Jenny and Will.

I knock my juice over on the floor.

Later, a taxi home and the driver asks me if I'm Italian, or maybe Arab before I can say anything. "New York mix." I say definitively, and go upstairs to the empty apartment and some 1AM leftovers.

Saturday morning I play with E and an avalanche of new toys. And then the house is suddenly quiet again. I walk from room to room, unsure. And then, sitting with my Gretsch the second half of an unfinished song comes together. It's about a man, a pirate who knows he is drowning. Well, maybe a bit more than that. About black on black girls, about how you can't cross an ocean standing on dry land.

And now N is here, and she's fixed my favorite pair of boots with some Armenian heels. We cook crab cakes together with homemade mayonnaise and hold each other and end up naked and share pillow talk for hours, and then cook some more and she falls asleep on my shoulder watching some old comedy that's not funny for some reason tonight. And we make love again with the windows open, the sound of traffic filtering in. The cat is going crazy under the bed, knocking things off the kitchen table.

Sleeping in, then her in one of my shirts as a robe - - sitting on the windowsill drinking a giant coffee. We sit in silence, our hands on each other's knees. And then she is going, and I shower and get dressed and there is a short rehearsal and we're at the club, trying to get a soundcheck and I'm hungry but just drink cold beers. The night unravels with N and her friends sitting next to me in the back. And then, it's time to climb onto the tiny stage and I've lost my setlist and the guitar pick in my pocket flies away. But we play and sing, and Will is making great soft sounds like the ocean and Jenny is a kind of bird flying around above the melody. I close my eyes and everything just tumbles out of me, the past and the present. The love for this woman, the love for this little girl. The love of sound itself.

At the end, I stand and sing at the top of my voice, the song about the man that is drowning. Feverish music to end with, wheezing into the harmonica, a tiny storm of sound on a tiny stage. The pain has become a sort of tidal wave that crashes and subsides and I feel like the naked beach as the lights come on and the audience goes home and N is smiling at me with those big eyes, holding me close, whispering to me.

The next morning I wear the same clothes, savoring the same feelings. Walking across the river I hear sirens and watch a horde of ambulances whipping by. Smolenskaya is a flurry of police cars and traffic. N calls me. There was a terrorist attack, explosions in train stations. A black pit in my stomach grows, and I am back on East 1st Street with that same guitar just after I bought it. I am back looking at the skyline and the missing tooth of the World Trade Center that I woke up to every day. I hear the sirens, see the soot covered firetrucks on Houston, the black cloud that blocked out the sun for two weeks. I smell the scorched metal and the flesh and the dirt that came in the windows and never ever went away. I remember walking down the avenues, empty of cars as we all bought things like takeout Chinese or some toilet paper, sharing glances with no idea what to say, maybe just nod. And then back alone in that apartment with nothing but the guitar and the TV that needed to be off, not on.

The phone rings today - random people making sure I am alive.

"I am."

E's birthday (part 1)

E woke up before me, and began her birthday by playing in the half-light of the kitchen with tiny dolls. A thick white fog hid the city beyond our courtyard and the raindrops dangling outside the window. She told me to be the prince who was coming to her restaurant, and to eat lime jello. I made coffee, and studied her as she shouted out the doll's dialogue. Five, now - which means I've been a father for five years.

We played dolls being pregnant and drew pictures of girls, always girls with wide eyes and long hair. Legs like a giraffe's, necks like swans. We put them on the fridge. Time for her mother to take her as we had agreed, only her mother decided not to come and now we'll somehow go out in the rain and tromp to school, late. And now E is sobbing because she doesn't want to go to school, she wants to spend the day with me and I must somehow get warm tights on her and a skirt, somehow brush her hair a little, wiping hot tears from her cheeks, putting the right dolls in the right bag to take with her.

Downstairs, I realize we should have brought umbrellas.

We go back up, making faces at each other through the mirror in the elevator.

And suddenly, it's the first time she opens her Hello Kitty umbrella outside for months, and we splash in the puddles. I sing to her raindrops keep falling on my head and laugh at the significance of the words.

because I'm free,

and nothing's worrying me.

I wonder if she cries because she wishes she was free. Well, we're free to splash in puddles at least, to march down the street and buy an eclair that she eats slowly, staring out the window. We can go to school late and no one cares for once because today is her day.

She dances up the stairs. The smell of cabbage soup is heavy in the dark hallways. I wonder if she will remember this birthday, this little girl who still doesn't understand what day it is, what month it is. She only cares about summer coming, and singing late at night, about what her imaginary sisters and brothers are doing right about now.

the notary and the pale blue sky

The wednesday morning passed quickly, as I worked in silence waiting for the call from Sergey. For months, we had prepared documents that expired, again and again. Waiting for these two women to meet us at a notary office and sign the company over to us had become a daily conversation since October. One of them D, my soon to-be-ex-wife, the other, Katya - an innocent yet difficult woman to say the least. But the call did come, and I went to Autozavodskaya, sitting in the hallway on a crooked chair, the green fluorescents sputtering, the warped white panelling a familiar detail.

Katya was there first, mostly to have other papers created. Her eyes always looked like giant eggs to me. Next, D who poked her head in once and then went back outside to chainsmoke and talk to some foreign boyfriend. Sergey arrived with his wife Jhanna who also had to witness the signing. He stood over me, tall and thin as ever. Always in black, with a knife hanging from his belt, never a hat. He is my first kreisha, my roof, my protection. He smiled a giant smile, his nicotine-stained teeth shining.

The notary was a plump woman who read us all the agreement, stopping and making a face to herself, marking some correction and having an assistant print another copy. She would rip the old version apart with a methodical flourish six or seven times before she was satisfied. A courier for our lawyer sat quietly in the corner, her lips parted. She kept her coat on.

And just as easily as I had worked for three years without pay, as easily as the bank accounts were emptied at a bat of an eye by D, just as I had been three days from deportation last summer, as easily as sitting in this tiny room for 45 minutes, we were done. I laughed at Sergey who had forgotten his glasses and used Jhanna's purple ones instead, resting them on his forehead and forgetting they were there.

Sheer force of will had brought us here, nothing else. Not luck, not persistence, not logic or any sense of morality. We left all that behind some months ago.

Later, in the street I felt an incredible sense of calm. I called N, padrushka maya, my sweetheart. She shouted at the news, and made me promise to celebrate the next night.

And we did, with friends, and E running around the kitchen. I rolled out fresh pasta, covering myself with flour, taking great gulps of red wine. The room was filled with the smell of arugula pesto, and some vanilla flan that I almost forgot in the oven. My friends grew drunk and sleepy, sharing the chairs. N sat on the windowsill, so quiet but winking at me flashing her secret smile, playing with E as they drew pictures of girls and flowers and tiny cars.

The week had much more in store, too much to explain simply. Maybe someday. Chapters of my life were coming to a close. Spring was coming. Birds were returning, drowning out the crows that never leave this city. The filthy snow was melting, revealing millions of petrified dog shits.

On Sunday morning, I took E from her mother's and as we made our way down Kutuzovsky I saw a tiny butterfly fall to the sidewalk. E and I stood over the little orange creature, convinced it was made of paper and had just fallen from a window. A butterfly in March? I rested my hand next to it. The butterfly crawled across the lines of my palm and rested there. I lifted it carefully for E to see.

"Pop, it's dead." She said. "It's really, really dead."

I carried it for a few hundred meters, studying the furry little body, looking for any movement.

And then it flew back into the pale blue sky.

Sunday morning

And you were there in giant movie star sunglasses, the planes whipping above our heads. Nervous, suddenly shy as I cram my luggage into the back seat. You tripping over your tiny shoes, me in a clean purple shirt. We sit quietly in traffic listening to the CD I made for you before I left. Everything has already been said, whispered over the phone late at night.

And turning into my home, I realize this is the first time in three years I am happy to return to Moscow. That familiar taste of old pennies in my mouth, of dread - - it's gone somehow. Kutuzovsky is where I hold you now, in the afternoon with the bright pale light pushing into the room. This is where I live in the landscape of your body, burying my nose in your elbows, the arch of your neck, the invisible curve of your hips.

And later, the ocean of the bath. Washing each other with watermelon soap.

You are very late for work.

In two hours I take E from detskie sad where she runs across the icy courtyard, jumping into my arms, her dolls banging against the back of my head. We jump and laugh and sing like cartoon versions of ourselves in the street. We open boxes and boxes of presents from New York, from Grandma and Grandpa, from aunts and old friends. The living room is a jungle of glittery paper and keepsakes. The cat is hiding somewhere in there making a lot of noise. And then, she sleeps in a new Tinkerbell nightgown her hands curled perfectly to her cheek.

My little girl will be five soon.

I used to measure my sadness with her age. One year of mistaken guilt and sheer madness. Two years of bloodfights and glasses smashing against the walls, knives pulled from drawers. Three years of waking to screaming before the sun came up. Doors slamming off of their hinges before I could even make coffee. Four years of sleeping on the couch, and then eventually the floor. Five years of complete insanity that became so normal I lost all hope in life itself, thinking survival was all I could wish for. Five years with just the love for this this little girl with giant eyes and galaxies of questions. Five years of carrying her when she got sick, when she needed to fall asleep, when she just needed to be held.

Now I can play my guitar for a beautiful woman late on a Saturday night. A woman with great thoughts and kind hands. I can cook her crab dumplings and shrimp in black bean sauce. I can watch her slurping lemon honey sorbet from a great white bowl, as it melts in a pool of pomegranate juice. Her eyes in the darkness, taking all I have to offer.

And then on Sunday morning, she looks out my kitchen window and I feel like I have always been with her.