Ambassador of the Dead

by Melnyczuk, Askold

• ISBN13: 9781582431321
• ISBN10: 1582431329
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-05-01
• Publisher: Counterpoint

Summary

One Sunday morning, Nick Blud, a successful Boston physician, is home in bed when he receives a phone call from Adriana Kruk, the mother of a boyhood friend. The beautiful Adriana, who once vacationed at her family's luxurious summer home on the Black Sea, now lives in a run-down apartment in New Jersey. Abandoned by her husband and estranged from her sons, she summons Nick back to his old neighborhood, where something unspeakable has happened -- exactly what, no one is willing to say.

Ambassador of the Dead is a harrowing tale of ambitions gone awry, and an unflinching meditation on exile and assimilation and the cost of love.

Author Biography

Askold Melnyczuk teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Boston and in the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars

Table of Contents

A Family of Kruks	1	(36)
The Disappearing Sickness	37	(70)
The Ambassador of the Dead	107	(84)
The Woman Who Defeated Stalin	191	(62)
The Invisible World	253

Excerpts

Chapter One

Ada Kruk was sitting in near darkness when I entered the living room. Everything around her, what I could see of it, appeared neat and in its place--magazines and books rose in dusty piles on the coffee and end tables. Embroidered curtains muted the late light, lending the apartment the stillness of a museum after closing hour.

    I put down my bag, took off my coat and folded it across my arm, scattering snow onto the carpet. It was cold. The place had tall windows loose in their casements. Stiff from the flight, I rubbed my neck and cleared my throat, already tingling. I felt watched by faded wallpaper showing horsemen riding to hounds in pursuit, presumably, of a fox. The pattern couldn't have been less suitable for the apartment, the third floor of a triple-decker, and the neighborhood, the port section of a city in northern New Jersey, where I was born thirty-some years earlier, and which was now dominated by Haitians. Yet the fact was Ada tacked that paper up herself, in a bad moment, to honor her passion for Anton, an émigré poet. In this world, you have to be nuts to love a poet.

    Ada, whose long, even-featured face seemed stretched by the earrings dangling down almost to her shoulders, sat motionless as one of those mechanical fortune tellers under glass you used to see at carnivals. Donna Kruk, I wanted to say.

    "You've gained weight," she greeted me.

    "Should I turn on the light?"

    "Why? I know what you look like. We both know what's in this room. It hasn't changed much since you were here last."

    A confusion fell over me in which I seemed to forget myself. Instead of treating Ada like any other would-be patient, I felt obliged to obey her, just as I had when I was boy.

    "Will you excuse me?" she said, looking past me.

    I watched her rise from her armchair and move laboriously down the hall, groping the furniture and walls for support. Her long black dress now hid the ankles she'd once flaunted. Soon she would require a cane. As I marked the slurs of time, her brother Viktor slunk timidly in to ask if I wanted something to drink. He was clutching a glass of clear liquid I assumed was vodka. The cigarette between his spongy lips chuffed smoke. In the bad light, his face was the color of a faded coffee stain.

    "Thanks, no. Why did she call me?"

    The phone rang that morning at my home in Boston where, as usual on Sundays, my wife and I were in bed with the paper. I let my machine screen the call. When the voice identified itself as Ada, the mother of my boyhood friend Alex, I picked up the receiver. My heart tightened--why would she, who'd never called, call me now? I hadn't seen her since our conversation after my father's funeral. She must have gotten my number from Alex.

    Her voice sounded grave. She asked whether I was still a doctor--as if it were a thing from which one resigned. I nodded into the receiver: What did she need? Was it an emergency? It was. Why not call a local physician? Couldn't do that. She needed me to come to Roosevelt. Right away. She couldn't say why. She'd explain everything as soon as I arrived. I doubt Ada ever visited Boston--in her mind, I was practically next door.

    I found it impossible to refuse her. Since my parents' deaths, I've all but lost touch with the community in which I'd been raised. This might have been a final chance to reconnect, though Ada made for a pretty shakey bridge. I gave Shelley the short version--she'd heard me mention both Ada and Alex many times over the years but had never actually met them--and by noon I was at Logan on standby for the next Delta Shuttle. In fact, Alex had called me a few days earlier for the first time in many months. He hadn't sounded well, but then he hadn't sounded well in ages. We spoke briefly--he updated me on problems at work, I told him about a lawsuit a patient was threatening--and we promised to meet soon.

    Flights were delayed and consolidated. Apparently it was snowing in New Jersey. When we finally left, there were no empty seats. The man beside me yammered endlessly, and illegally, into a cell phone. I was tempted to complain to the stewardess, a morbid brunette with a churned, Midwestern accent. I felt anxious. Ada's voice had materialized from too far in the past. My seat mate kept sniffling and swiping his nose, and by the time we touched down in Newark, I had a sore throat.

    I phoned Shelley to tell her I'd arrived. Then a cab whirled me through the late February snow to the apartment on Grove Street, two blocks from the place where I'd grown up. We had moved around the time I started high school. Not one store on Broad Street looked familiar.

* * *

Viktor the Spinner--I'd been searching for the name we used to call him. His nostrils flared, vacuuming in the exhaled smoke so it swirled through the lungs a second time.

    "She'll tell you," he said wearily.

    Tassels of long gray hair splattered over his neck. His blue eyes looked like they had just been watered.

    The walls were hung with Alex's drawings and paintings. I walked around the room for a closer look: an oil of an old man with a long moustache walking a horse by the river nested between portraits of Viktor in a fedora and Alex's older brother, Paul. The paintings were bright and included various surreal elements: Viktor's face, for instance, appeared emerging from an oven.

    Their outlines contrasted with the drabness of the mismatched and oddly arranged furniture. Several ladder-backed cane chairs stood in a semi-circle, as though for a study group.

    Ada returned wearing a long black sweater with white mother-of-pearl buttons over her black dress.

    "Sit," she said to me. "Go to your room, Viktor."

    Obedient as a butler, Viktor turned on his heels.

    "Why did you call me?"

    "Sit," she repeated, settling back into her plush maroon armchair.

    That was when I noticed: her eyes had not blinked once. They may have reflected light but they did not let any in.

    For all practical purposes, Ada was blind.

    Putting my coat down on the chair beside me, I did as I was told.

    "Viktor stepped out of the apartment to buy sugar for the cook, who was baking a cake," she began. "We didn't see him again for twenty years. That was just how things were in 1942. I was in the kitchen, watching the cook make dinner. I sat near the stove, which didn't give much heat, so it was even colder than this. From December to April everyone wore coats. The cook stirred her soup with a fox draped around her neck."

    Grubby from travel, I wanted to wash. I hadn't heard a war story in years; I'd forgotten how they used to overwhelm me with their lack of resolution. Ada. My window on the past. Stained glass. Without her, it would have remained a series of close-ups, a museum filled exclusively with portraits of one's own family.

    "After my brother left, I leaned against the stove and tried reading. Impossible. I closed my eyes and smelled the vegetables, the little bits of meat. I was sorry there was still enough to go around. I looked forward to the day the shortages would eliminate all of it. I'd been a vegetarian for months. Of course I was a pacifist. It was a male pastime, this war."

    I tried imagining living in a state of perpetual emergency.

    "At night Father came back from the Rathaus where he worked as a judge. The cake was for his birthday, but everyone forgot it. By that time, we knew something was wrong. Mother had returned from the doctor's earlier with her own news (which she kept to herself for a couple of days). Now she went out immediately to look for Viktor. She'd done the rounds of prisons during the last war searching for Father. As she'd found him, she'd reason to feel confident she would recover her son. She visited the police station across the street; she checked the hospitals, the secret police, friends in the underground. By the time she came home, Father'd gone out again to confer with his contacts. Mother and I were still awake when he entered the room, his face drawn. He'd learned that Viktor had been arrested, not for buying sugar on the black market but for trying to cross the border a few miles away. They'd taken him to the capital. There was nothing we could do. We had to get some sleep. Even during a war, people slept.

    "Years later, my brother came back. By then, we were living in New Jersey. His time in Siberia didn't do him much good. Twenty years. And now," she looked straight at me, half-smiling again, "how many years later, here you are. Our prodigal. You haven't, I hope, been to Siberia."

    Her ironies clearly pleased her because Ada beamed.

    A dog barked in the apartment downstairs. I looked around, blinking. Late afternoon, windows strafed with flakes, darkening.

    "Why did you call me?"

    "I have another story."

    "Ada," I insisted.

    "It's a good one. About a prostitute. You'll like it."

    "I've heard it." Years ago, at the Black Pond Resort.

    "You have?"

    "If you don't tell me, I'm leaving."

    Her features darkened. I felt a flicker of her anger.

    "How many years, and he can't spare a few minutes," she said to no one in particular.

    "How long?"

    "What?"

    "Since you could see."

    Her fingers twitched.

    "It's my son?"

    "What about him?"

    "There," she said, gesturing down the hall. "In my room."

    "What?" I rose.

    "Wait," she said, leaning forward, her voice rising, more plea than command. "Wait," she said. Then, again, "Wait. There are things you should know."

    Around me I felt the gaze of the horses, the dogs, the men in the paintings. Doubtless somewhere the fox too peered out from behind a juniper or a yew. Everyone was watching me, except Ada. My throat felt terribly tender. In different ways I had loved all the Kruks--they were my little Russian novel, so impulsive and uncontainable, you never knew if they were going to kiss you or bite you; around them, I was always alert, ready for anything.

    And I sat back in my chair, which was small and uncomfortable, and thought about why I had come.

Copyright © 2001 Askold Melnyczuk. All rights reserved.