Jess E. Jelsma
A Cold war
In retrospect, perhaps what happened that February was my fault. After all, according to you, I was supposed to be “acting in the role of the adult,” arranging Miroslav’s weekly tutoring sessions with the color-coded charts that hung on the fridge in both of our outdated kitchens. Miroslav’s house was a perfect mirror of the one you’d purchased after earning tenure, identical from the vintage art deco light fixtures to the eagle-patterned wallpaper that couldn’t help but scream unquestioned, post-WWII American patriotism.
Salvage Scrap to Blast the Jap!
Stamp out the Axis!
Together We Can Do It!
Of course, Miroslav’s mid-century colonial bore no signs of McCarthyism or the Cold War that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis. His uncle was a professor in Cornell’s Language Department, the one Russian specialist who hadn’t yet been forced into an early retirement. He’d defected from the former Soviet Union and was a vocal opponent of all things communism—class struggle, socialism as a mode of economic liberation, and the use of terms like proletariat and late-stage capitalism in everyday conversations—which was precisely why you liked him.
In Dr. Orlov, you saw the opportunity to reunite the allies of the former Lost and G.I. Generations. A chance to return, however briefly, to America’s “glory days.” A time of victory gardens, meat and pantyhose rations, and mandated blackout restrictions up and down the East Coast. Of conscription, illegal abortions, and regular lynchings in the Jim Crow South—but who was really keeping track of all that? As an American history professor specializing in early-twentieth-century warfare, you glamorized the invention of the M1 Garand and the plutonium and uranium bombs that rained down on Axis-controlled Japan. You lamented the loss of classic wartime writers like e.e. cummings, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway, men who had proven their genius intellects before drinking and smoking themselves to death, if not taking a self-inflicted shotgun wound directly to the head.
Now, back upstate for your department-sponsored memorial service, I can’t help but wonder if your misplaced nostalgia wasn’t the primary factor in your death. Undoubtedly, the signs have always been there for those of us inclined to look close enough. Upstairs, your office still boasts old propaganda posters and shelves of Hogan’s Heroes figurines in their original packaging. The roll top desk features countless water rings from decades of your Sidecars and gin and tonics—both drinks, you liked to remind me, that were served up in between fighting in the French trenches. The floor is piled high with back issues of Military History, containers of the lead bullets you used to cast on the stovetop every Sunday, and pieces of the rifle you were restoring shortly before your accident.
But, of course, you already know all that.
Twenty years ago, you taught me how to shoot a pellet gun before moving on to the cleaning and repair of your historic weapons. For my fifth-grade, parent-student show-and-tell, you insisted we demonstrate how to disassemble a bolt-action Mauser Model. On stage, you quizzed me on the location of the stock, barrel, butt, bayonet stud, and cleaning rod in front of my fellow classmates.
“Margaret’s dad is a history professor at Cornell,” my teacher reiterated several times throughout the demonstration. In the days before Columbine and Virginia Tech, you thought it odd that the other parents needed such reassurance.
At home, Mom was forever shifting around stacks of magazines, rubbing Minwax into another set of water rings, and scrubbing grease stains out of the newly installed carpet. The toffee-colored, wall-to-wall Berber was the one modern upgrade you’d permitted after your attempts to refinish the original hardwood had ended in a broken toe and a badly abraded calf from a rented drum sander.
The carpet was also the one significant feature that differentiated our house from Miroslav’s three plots down the cul-de-sac.
“You know, we’d get a better return on our investment if this carpet wasn’t stained with all your gun stuff,” Mom was always shouting passive-aggressively mid-Bisselling. “I don’t understand why you spent six months building that workshop in the basement if you aren’t going to use it.”
“It’s not a workshop,” you’d call back over the umpteenth inning of the Yankees or Red Sox game. “It’s for storage. That’s why it has a deadbolt.”
But how secure could any storage room be when you kept the key on a hook beside the basement door for easy access? The white tag on the split metal key ring read, A Farewell to Arms—a clever play on Hemingway’s best-selling novel, or so you thought.
That February, the key to the basement storage room would open a gaping rift between master, apprentice, and the mother who unknowingly carried on with her housework. For months, the question would linger, unanswered, in the hallway between my bedroom and your office: where was the Nagant revolver, the same model that had been used to murder the Russian Imperial family at the Ipatiev House back in 1918?
Had Miroslav known the handgun’s history, I imagine he would have appreciated the irony as he stood behind his uncle’s woodpile, wielding the revolver of the communist revolutionary.
“For countless, bloody, violent acts against the Russian people,” he might have quoted. “Thus passes the last palace of the last Tsar.”
As you process this confession, you will want to contemplate an alternative history, one in which you reported the missing gun to the police, but this I can guarantee: that no one would have thought to point a finger at me, the tutor turned accomplice to fourth-degree larceny. As you so often boasted, I was a straight-A senior set to graduate that spring, ranked second in my entire high school class. An all-state women’s cross country champion with a 5K time of just over seventeen minutes. A former Girl Scout, trusted babysitter, and ranking member of Ithaca High’s National Honors Society. An eighteen-year-old who had never smoked a cigarette or touched a can of Pabst, let alone considered aiding and abetting an aspiring sociopath.
Yet, if there is still attrition to be made a decade later—Dr. Orlov buried at Pleasant Grove and you soon to be lowered into a plot overlooking the creek—then it’s only fair to acknowledge that I carry some portion of the blame. Because at the end of the day, I was the one who laid the revolver in Miroslav’s palm. I hid the ammunition in the Dream Phone box beneath my bed. I lay back in the replica British conical tent you’d special-ordered from Conway, New Hampshire, the same one I invited Miroslav into at the beginning of every tutoring session, and demanded, “Now, tell me a story in Russian.”
And he acquiesced with, “Давным-давно.”
* * *
Countless theories, both fact-based and the stuff of Soviet-era action movies, circulated that fall following the arrival of Miroslav and Tatianna. According to you, mother and son had emigrated from Russia following the death of Dr. Orlov’s late brother. As respectful neighbors, we were to grant the family privacy while they adjusted to their new situation. No peering in windows or lingering out front in the long, trellised walkway. No probing phone calls, unexpected drops-ins, or tin-foiled casseroles brought over to facilitate round after round of invasive questions.
But not everyone in the neighborhood agreed with your hands-off philosophy. Mid-November, Loris Halbert motioned me over as I was walking home from one of my last cross country practices.
“We all know what they do in there while you’re tutoring Miroslav.” The administrative assistant squinted at Dr. Orlov’s shuttered living room before turning to raise one thin, penciled-on eyebrow at me. “I mean, how invested is Fedor in that kid actually learning English? You tell me. Scale of one to ten?”
But I was paid ten dollars an hour to not ask Dr. Orlov questions, supplied with shrink-wrapped flashcards and workbooks that Miroslav refused to open, let alone complete. I was supposed to be helping the fifteen-year-old learn conversational English. Practicing common greetings and phrases like, “Good afternoon!” and “Can you direct me to the nearest bathroom?”
“All he knows is what he hears on the radio,” you said. “Fedor can only do so much, homeschooling the boy in his free time. He needs someone his own age to help him assimilate.”
If Miroslav only spoke in the language of song lyrics, however, I was never privy to the dialect. During our first few tutoring sessions, he was doggedly silent. His lips were so bloodless where they pressed together that I questioned if he’d mastered the art of self-asphyxiation—if he would topple over right there on my bedroom floor and I would be forced to administer the CPR I’d learned in my high school health class, twenty compressions and two mouth-to-mouth rescue breaths. I watched for signs of cyanosis or bluish skin, for the confusion and agitation that indicated a lack of oxygen to the brain, but Miroslav appeared to be something other than human. When he finally shrugged off his sweatshirt three sessions in, I could see the web of veins beneath the translucent skin of his arms and neck. He reminded me of pictures of Soviet citizens during Stalin’s many famines, starved by a government who continued exporting more and more of their grain to the Eastern Bloc.
“One of the greatest evils of communism,” you’d said, tapping an image of children’s corpses collected like so much refuse in the back of a wagon. “Never take democracy for granted, Margaret.”
Your good friend Dr. McGuffin held a similar opinion of the former Soviet Union.
“Well, of course there’s something wrong with the kid,” the anthropology professor said when he found out I was tutoring Miroslav. “I heard Fedor’s brother was high up under Gorbachev. When the union fell, he was exiled to some Siberian wasteland. Ended up blowing off his head playing Russian roulette or some such nonsense. Ergo, the wife having to put herself back on the open market. A transaction made possible by global capitalism and Lévi-Strauss’ theory of kinship transaction. Women as the ‘gift’ and all that. No form of socialism is ever going to change that.”
While the anthropologist was notorious for over-theorizing neighborhood gossip, I owned Legends of the Fall and had been forced to read Hamlet. I’d heard the rumors about one bride and two brothers that you so readily dismissed—that the Russian linguist had married Tatianna to secure the necessary paperwork. That the union stretched beyond the purely practical or symbolic. That the professor couldn’t keep his hands off his new wife with her blonde hair, trim midsection, and porcelain skin.
Hence, my weekly, then biweekly, then triweekly tutoring sessions with Miroslav.
Hence, the marks I sometimes spotted at the base of Tatianna’s neck, what my fellow cross country teammates longingly referred to as “love bites.”
Hence the thinly-robed figure that could be found on Dr. Orlov’s front lawn every evening regardless of weather conditions, a cigarette clenched between her long, pale fingers as though gearing herself up for round five or six.
The only way you could have missed her was with a willful turn of the head, an assumption that everything was as the linguist had dictated.
Even at eighteen, I recognized that you would never grant that same leeway to me, the daughter stealing from her father’s storage room and liquor cabinet so a Russian teenager would continue telling me stories. Closing my eyes as I lay back in your replica World War II tent and revelled in the sensation of Miroslav’s native language ghosting over my neck, his lips so close that I could smell the vodka, gin, or bourbon on his breath.
“Я ненавижу его,” Miroslav would say, and I would repeat the phrase, less concerned with the words’ meanings than their pronunciations, the swooping consonants and vowels that tightened the hot knot in the pit of my stomach.
For a while, the tent would grow quiet, the only sound that of Miroslav rattling the ice in the drink I’d made him. It was a familiar motion, one I’d seen Dr. Orlov repeat with the frequency of a nervous tick at your neighborhood cocktail parties. The gesture was always accompanied by a skeptical expression as though the Russian specialist was recalling the long list of targets poisoned by KGB agents, weighing his chances of surviving a cyanide pill or low dose of radioactive plutonium planted by an assassin seeking revenge for his decades-past defection.
In contrast, Miroslav was eerily calm and contemplative. He brought his drink to his lips, took a long sip, and let the vodka sit in his mouth for several seconds. I knew he was savoring the acrid taste, the two of us committed, in our own separate ways, to understanding why it was so damn hard to be an adult.
“Давным-давно,” he would start up again. “Once upon a time. . .”
As Miroslav launched into another story, his gaze would focus on my chin, his expression not one of desire, curiosity, or even sadness, but of the infamous Dutch rebels photographed as they awaited Nazi execution—the men huddled together for warmth despite the imminent situation at hand.
Was this the countenance of someone who’d seen his father’s brain matter splattered across a remote Siberian apartment? Who donned headphones in his upstairs bedroom while Tatianna and Dr. Orlov bumped around in the living room identical to ours save for the exposed hardwoods?
The more WOMEN at work, the sooner we WIN!
Victory waits on YOUR fingers. Keep ‘em flying, Miss U.S.A.
OF COURSE I CAN!
If you were here, I know you would admonish me for pondering a past too near us all to have any dispassionate meaning. From your office down the hall, you would remind me that the beauty of history is that the field requires a base illusion of objectivity. A narrative told by the victors until the story is one we all come to metabolize, if not accept.
I wonder: do you remember the first time you showed me your British tent, the replica assembled at the bottom of the basement steps despite Mom’s repeated protests?
“Now suspend your disbelief for a minute,” you said as your pulled back the canvas flap and ushered me across the Atlantic and back sixty years into the past. “Imagine it’s mid-September, 1939. You’re a British soldier, stationed on the Franco-Belgian border. Everything you know comes from your superiors or the radio. What songs are big that year?”
“I don’t know. ‘Strange Fruit?’” I guessed.
“Yes! What else?”
“‘Over the Rainbow?’”
“Right again! The illustrious Judy Garland.”
And with that, you hummed the first few bars and hugged me excitedly to your chest. If we weren’t confined by so much heavy canvas, I like to think you would have put down your Sidecar, looped your hands in mine, and danced.
Now, as I sort through dusty issues of Military History and crumpled department letterhead, I keep an eye on the driveway three houses down the cul-de-sac. I watch, not for you, but for the for the former teenage immigrant who will now be an American man. Will Miroslav still bare the chipped tooth I gave him that February, a rock thrown near the neighborhood’s entrance to convey my equal mix of fear, desire, and disappointment? Will he remember where the two of us ditched the Nagant, Dr. Orlov turning blue behind his woodpile and the gun’s case sitting empty in your supposedly secure storage room?
I’m sure you’d agree that, even for the seasoned historian, it’s hard to simultaneously keep hold of all the facts. What was Ernest Hemingway drinking the afternoon his wife found him in the kitchen holding his best friend, the Smith pigeon gun they’d melt down shortly after his death? What was your intention, the faucet left running for close to an hour, the water spilling over the tub’s rim to flood out into the hallway?
“Поехали,” Miroslav said the morning I brought him the Nagant revolver, the handgun just under two pounds unloaded. “We go.”
* * *
If I am to admit blame for the same weapon that once took over twenty minutes to execute the Russian Imperial family in the Ipatiev Home’s locked basement—the seven revolvers augmented with blows from the butt of a shotgun and stabs of the revolutionaries’ bayonets—then I must also disclose the events that found me and Miroslav in the intimate recesses of your tent. The progression was less one of deliberate intent than a refusal to bend, a Cold War reinstated seven years after the USSR’s official dissolution in 1991. In his State of the Union, then-President George H. W. Bush had said, “By the grace of God, America won the Cold War.” But as far as I could tell, la guerre froide was still alive and well in my bedroom.
At the beginning of every tutoring session, Miroslav would position himself on the floor near my nightstand, refusing to open a workbook, pick up a flashcard, or even feign a glance in my direction. His only reactions came as a response to the stereo, the radio tuned to his favorite top 40s station.
“Cause I am barely breathing,” he would mime with his waxen lips.
“She was touching her face.”
“Love is surely better when it’s gone.”
“Enough,” I said six sessions in, having suffered through over a month of ineffective tutoring attempts. It was early-December and Mom had recently decorated the house for Christmas, a task that involved transforming as many of your war relics into more palatable artifacts. She’d strung twinkle lights over the 1940s pin-up girls that lined the hallway, hung ornaments from the camouflage cargo net tacked up beside the built-ins, and used miniature stockings to obscure the pistols on the guest room’s gun rack.
I knocked over a family of yellowed, Styrofoam snowmen as I unplugged the stereo and thrust the beginner workbook at Miroslav’s bird-like chest.
“Your uncle doesn’t pay me so you can sit around listening to music,” I said.
Of course, in hindsight, Dr. Orlov could not have cared less about what the two of us accomplished. It didn’t matter to the Russian linguist whether Miroslav was fluent in English or spent the rest of his days speaking in song lyrics. I was paid at the beginning of each session regardless of his nephew’s progress, never asked to produce a single completed workbook. Every few weeks, the next volume in the series would arrive in your campus mailbox, brought home to your upstairs study where it would sit untouched alongside all the vintage, war-era novels you collected.
A Corpse for Christmas.
Careless Virgin.
Passionate Land: A Brutal Saga of Mexico in Transition.
Just another of the many clues you missed.
The situation continued to escalate like this: barred from the radio, Miroslav found other ways to avoid filling out his workbooks. In the weeks leading up to Christmas, he rifled through my bedroom closet, pulling out the board games I’d had since my childhood—Guess Who?, Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and most embarrassingly, Dream Phone. When I wrestled the game board from his hands (“Guess who likes you in this talking telephone game!”), he moved on to my old issues of YM. Though he didn’t understand the fine print, he seemed to enjoy the pictures of skeletal models and smooth-skinned celebrities. Next, it was your hand-me-down, historic money collection. He flipped through the binder until he came across a ten-ruble banknote featuring Vladimir Lenin. Your handwritten description listed the bill as USSR, circa 1937, moderately rare.
For the first time, a hint of color bloomed over Miroslav’s cheeks, and I marveled that blood did, indeed, flow through his veins.
Tensions had reached a boiling point by the evening of the cul-de-sac Christmas crawl. I considered approaching Dr. Orlov about the situation, but Mom kept me busy serving punch, restocking the cheese tray, and keeping an eye on the neighborhood kids playing truth or dare in the basement. While you debated the merits of Steven Spielberg's latest war epic, Mom wound through socked and stockinged feet, gathering cake and brownie crumbs before they could be ground into the new carpet.
When the time came to move to the next house on the crawl, she asked me to check that everyone was out of the basement. She was flushed and frustrated as she marched around the kitchen, unable to find the right-sized Tupperware lid for a container of vegetable dip.
I wanted to tell her to just use shrink wrap, but there was no reasoning with Mom when it came to proper Tupperware etiquette. If your misplaced nostalgia manifested as a cache of antique weapons and an undue reverence for writers of the Lost Generation, hers came in the embodiment of outdated, 1950s gender dynamics, each task performed with a frantic sense of duty as though the safety of the nation depended it.
In hindsight, I don’t suppose you minded the dynamic. After all, weren’t such things to be expected from the wife of a male academic?
In the basement, I shooed the last few kids up to the kitchen before pausing outside your replica tent. I could just detect the faint glow of your battery-powered lamp through the canvas. Inside, I discovered Miroslav sitting on the folding cot, a flask in his hands that, upon closer inspection, held some mixture of vodka and liqueur.
“Where did you get that?” I asked over the shuffle of the adults pulling on their winter boots in the living room overhead. Then, because English wasn’t his first language, I snatched the flask and shook the contents at him. “Who did you steal this from?”
Miroslav’s reaction manifested like a dark image ejected from a Polaroid camera. His expression surfaced slowly as though he was deciding whether I was an ally or a threat, someone to take hold of, flee from, or attack. In the space of a breath, he stood up and crowded me back against the canvas flap. He took my shoulders, thrust his face so close to mine that I could nearly taste the alcohol on his lips, and spilled forth a torrent of words in Russian. Though I knew nothing of what he said, the sudden life behind the gesture—famished ghost turned fiery orator—sent a hot, unbidden thrill through my stomach.
And after that, it would never be about empty workbooks or punitive exercises again, but about extending that plummeting feeling for as long as I could, my body so attuned to Miroslav’s pronunciations that I could feel every pause, stutter, and roll of his tongue deep inside my pelvis.
Upstairs, Dr. Orlov’s gaze lingered on the basement door as he drained his eggnog and placed a hand on Tatianna’s hip, or so I imagine it did when I look back. As you always said, everything is far clearer in retrospect.
The inevitable stains Mom would spend the next day Bisselling out of the carpet.
The way you would cease inviting me into your office two months later when you discovered the Nagant was missing.
The long line of suicides that would plague the Hemingway family for generations—the father, all three siblings, and the granddaughter who would choose a slow shuttering of her central and peripheral nervous systems rather than the quick but messy method of a shotgun barrel to the head.
As I sort through everything you left, I get to take on the role of the historian, determining what is garbage versus valuable artifact. I save old postcards, leather-bound photo albums, and handwritten drafts of your last, unpublished manuscript, and make plans to donate or auction off the rest. The still-functioning 94 Mark 6 radio from Japan. The first and second editions. Your collection of over three hundred and fifty different antique weapons.
When the sun begins to set, I pour myself a drink and retire to the front porch. In place of your Sidecar or gin and tonic, I sip from a Negroni, a cocktail you always avoided for its “less-than-noble origins.” Inside, Mom doublechecks the guest list and calls the caterer to confirm the menu for your upcoming memorial service. There are plans to finally strip the living room’s eagle-themed wallpaper, to upgrade the dated kitchen with twenty-first century appliances. First, the upstairs carpet will need to be replaced.
You would loathe the sample books that sit on the floor in your office, low and medium ply carpet in varying shades of beige, but every action has its consequence. Tsar Nicholas II’s twenty-three years of incompetence. Two professor’s shared inability to see beyond their own wants.
Down the cul-de-sac, Miroslav has returned for your service. He stands in his front lawn like his mother once did, his hand cupped around an unlit cigarette. Though his body has changed, his posture is still the same, his shoulders tense and defiant. When the flame takes, he lowers his arm, exhales a perfect smoke ring, and cocks his chin in my direction. He stares at me like we are the last two people left in the neighborhood, and I am reminded of his breath on my neck as I demonstrated how to shoot the Nagant, the two of us concealed behind the woodpile.
“You’re sure no one’s home?” I waited for his nod before cocking the hammer and bracing my finger against the revolver’s notoriously heavy trigger-pull. “Ok. We can fire a few rounds, but then we have to go. I don’t want to get caught.”
“Мой ход?” Miroslav asked for what must have been the tenth time that morning.
And I turned around, placed the loaded gun in Miroslav’s hand, and gave in to his final request.
* * *
Dr. Orlov’s obituary made no mention of his heart attack. For those outside the fold, the sole clue to the professor’s cause of death came in the form of an announcement sent out by the Language Department. The letter requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be sent to the American Heart Association. Though you claimed it was the linguist’s popularity that brought droves of neighbors, faculty, and staff to Pleasant Grove that day, it was the mystery surrounding his death. Bystanders wanted to see how the sister-in-law turned rumored-bride would react. Would Tatianna appear devastated, first her husband then the uncle of her son found dead? Or, had the widow somehow orchestrated the entire thing, a femme fatale worthy of a 1950s American melodrama?
Nameless, Shameless Woman! I Married a Communist.
The Girl in the Kremlin: Amazing, Untold Secrets Exposed!
Red Rape! It Can Happen Here!
At least one person at Pleasant Grove believed the professor’s death had been premeditated.
“Anyone who looked at the man could tell he had a heart condition,” Loris Halbert commented as the casket was carried out of the chapel and into the cemetery. “You know what they say. ‘Ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough for sex.’ She must have realized if she got him worked up enough times, he’d eventually drop dead.”
“You ask me, it’s the diet,” Dr. McGuffin speculated, the attendees crowding in close as Tatianna recited an indiscernible graveside prayer. “Lots of dairy, not to mention red meat, in Russian cuisine. Then there are the potatoes. The pastries. And I’m sure this will come as no surprise, but Fedor liked his vodka neat.”
Everyone but you seemed convinced that Dr. Orlov’s heart attack had been self-inflicted, a fuse shortened by each additional drink, plate of pelmeni, or rumored tryst with Tatianna. There was comfort in the promise of simple cause and effect, of karmic retribution for a life ill-spent. And why not? No one else had seen the linguist’s expression when he’d stormed outside to find me and Miroslav behind his woodpile, the revolver still loaded with five rounds. No one else had witnessed Dr. Orlov cuff his nephew on the side of the head, a blow Miroslav received, his jaw clenched, as if such actions were to be expected. No one had watched the fifteen-year-old charge forward instead of recoil, seeming to steady his stance, cock the hammer, and take aim in a single instance. No one had heard the prolonged silence just before the shot went low, the bullet raising a fine mist of ice and snow. Had smelled the singed violence of the aftermath as Dr. Orlov stuttered and collapsed—first one knee giving way, then two, his arms useless to catch himself as he fell into the woodpile.
Miroslav had been the one to take my hand and say in perfectly discernible English, “Run.”
And then, the breathless flight through the woods that bordered the cul-de-sac. The rock to Miroslav’s mouth at the neighborhood’s entrance. The blood that pooled on his tongue before spilling over his bottom lip. The fury, in the stupid frenzy of the moment, to ditch the revolver in the one patch of ground that wasn’t frozen. The question I was too afraid to ask: “Did you plan for this?”
Ten years later, your obituary also neglects to mention a cause of death. Reading over the paragraph outside the department-sponsored memorial service, I can’t help but think you did it on purpose, one last riddle for the estranged daughter you tasked with careful reexaminations of the past.
Too many gin and tonics in the upstairs bath, or a carefully planned-out mishap? Was this your way of forcing me back into your office? Your chance to make a final statement, gallon upon gallon of water spilling out into the hall carpet?
Back home, I station myself by the punch bowl in the kitchen while Mom circulates deviled eggs and crustless finger sandwiches, upholding her wifely duties to the end. Dr. McGuffin has just returned from a research trip and he regales the crowd with tales of Tibet, Loris Halbert breaking in to scoff at his “death-defying” day on Mount Everest. Tatianna huddles in the corner with a mug of spiced rum and her latest husband, a Cuban history professor you no doubt disapproved of. Miroslav is absent, though I suppose we both know where I can find him.
In the basement, I stop again outside your replica tent. When I pull back the canvas flap, Miroslav rises from the folding cot. He takes a swig from a flask similar to the one I caught him with, the side engraved with Greek letters and a fraternity crest.
“Steal that one too?” I ask.
Miroslav smiles, the gesture more of a grimace than a grin, and touches a finger to his once-busted lip. His front tooth is still noticeably chipped.
“Remember this?”
“I thought you might have gotten it fixed.”
“It’s helps me not forget,” he says, and I can’t tell if he is serious of if we are back to bad translations, English to Russian to his mouth hovering over my neck, the smell of vodka permeating the tent.
“That day. Why did you tell me no one was home? Did you mean to—” I start to ask, but Miroslav steps forward, tucks the flask into the coat of his winter jacket, and produces the seven-chambered Nagant from the waist of his pants. The revolver is corroded and dirt-logged from season after season spent in a gopher hole just a few yards from the cul-de-sac’s entrance.
In an instant, the tent is both claustrophobic and intimate, the canvas impregnated with the early-morning chill of a mid-September morning in 1939 France. With the opening notes of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” as you, Miroslav, and I sit at the bar nursing our Sidecars in between donning M1 Garands and gasmasks. With the choking mix of gunpowder, flying plaster, and singed flesh in the Ipatiev Home’s basement. With the afterimages brought on as if by a bright muzzle or camera flash, the barrels and lenses we stare into in those last moments before death.
“See,” I want to tell you. “A cold war has no end.”
Jess E. Jelsma is a doctoral student in creative writing at University of Cincinnati, where she is an assistant editor for the Cincinnati Review. Recent work appears in Catapult, CRAFT, Entropy, Flyway, The Normal School, and The Southern Review. She is online at jessejelsma.com or @jessejelsma.