The St. Petersburg Traveling Circus

Art and Ilene were standing on the upper deck of the Saaremaa ferry. Art had already wolfed down an open-faced sandwich made with mealy caraway bread, butter, a peppered hard-boiled egg and Baltic anchovies, and was knocking back a portly dark-green bottle with a white castle on its coat of hops. Their red Opel, a free upgrade courtesy of a toothy manager at the Tallinn airport, was sailing the short passage from the mainland in the ferry’s bowels.

Although the southerly wind blowing over starboard was warm, Ilene shivered in her charcoal cardigan worn on top of two other layers. She had long red hair, “the curls like petty demons,” as Art’s mother used to say about Levantine women. In the midday’s light, Ilene’s eyes looked paler and greener, her smile more delicate. Cupping a cafeteria mug with both hands—the way one holds a fragile bird, Ilene sipped weak tea with milk and sugar. Her high-risk obstetrician at Mount Sinai had told them everything was going fine and it was safe to travel now that she was in her second trimester, and yet they were still nervous about little things. Habit is second nature, Art’s father often said, and between the failed in vitro cycles and the miscarriages, Art could count not many months over the past four years when they hadn’t been anxiously waiting or haplessly grieving.

“Know what I think, Ilie-Lily,” Art said in the voice he sometimes employed to sound more American—and more provincial—than he could ever be. “Your grandma must be looking gladly upon you.”

“You really think so?” Ilene asked.

“To schlep to some island in the Baltic Sea where she wasn’t even born. That’s an act of devotion.”

“I’ve always wanted to visit Saaremaa,” Ilene said, her voice unplayful.

“How long did they even live there?” Art asked.

“Almost 10 years. They’d moved there from Tallinn to run a pharmacy. Bubbe Leah came to New York in 1913. She told such wonderful stories about the island and the castle.”

“How old was she again?”

“When she came to America? Seventeen. You could’ve talked to her in Russian.”

“Do you know where they lived?” Art asked, disregarding his wife’s comment about his native language.

“Just the street name. It was a tiny Jewish community, about 15 families on the island,” Ilene replied and handed him her empty mug, asking, with that particular gesture of head and neck, that he go down to the cafeteria and get her a refill.

“And don’t put the tea bag in,” Art intoned. “I know.”

They weren’t the likeliest couple; he a Soviet immigrant, and she the oldest daughter of a hippie who led student protests at Drake in the 1960s, then became a rabbi and moved to Iowa to preside over a congregation of many colors and strokes in a prairie college town. Art didn’t care much for outward expressions of Jewishness, and this wasn’t only a stamp of his Soviet past.

Back in the Soviet Union, Art used to be Artyom, and his mother tenderly called him Tyoma or Tyomochka. Daughter of a Jewish man with Lithuanian roots and a Russian woman from the Pskov province, Art’s mother clung to her Russian half even though she herself also ended up marrying a Jew, her former classmate at the Forestry Engineering Institute. She loved what village memories and traditions her own Russian mother had passed on to her.

“Ilie-Lily” was Art’s invention, a nickname with roots in Indianapolis. At Eli Lilly in Indianapolis, his parents, chemical engineers turned researchers turned refuseniks, had found their first jobs after coming to America. Besides “Ilie-Lily,” Art sometimes called his wife “Iles,” as in British Isles. He bought and sold commodities for a living, and Ilene had learned to endure his trades.

“Ileneyouleantheylean,” Art would tell her as they were about to make love; this was his way of resuscitating a tired joke from Chekhov’s story—about walking on the rug and telling lies as you walked (yaidupokovrutyidesh’ and so forth). He had traded many things in his 20-odd American years, including his own first name. “‘Art’ as in ‘Garfunkel’”? people would ask. “‘Art’ as in ‘painting,’” he answered. He had traded in his name but clung to other vestiges of his childhood and youth, including unchaste Russian sayings, which he loved to translate word for word and tell in polite company. Ilene’s mother shuddered when he did this at family gatherings, while Ilene’s father looked gladly at his rescued son-in-law, concealing a guilty smile in his reddish Abrahamic beard.

Art was almost 40; Ilene had turned 35 earlier that summer. The summer of her pregnancy. They had met in New York, where Ilene used to teach social studies in a private school. A year after getting married, they moved to a renovated Tudor in Maplewood, New Jersey, just a short walk from Main Street with its fabulous bookstore and its toy train station. Art was chained to Wall Street. Being a trader, even a very successful one, wasn’t what he had wanted as a new immigrant, but life made its own arrangements. Unlike many ex-Soviet New Yorkers his age, Art did not cultivate Russianness. He married a non-Russian woman. He mainly practiced Russian with his father, and on more than one occasion he had been told he had a tangible American accent—if not an accent, then at least some un-Russian lilt. He had no interest in taking Ilene to Russia or in having her learn the rudiments of the language. He had moved on, he believed, leaving the immigrant baggage where it belonged—in the past.

On the way to Virtsu, a town on the west coast of Estonia where Art and Ilene caught the ferry to the island of Saaremaa, they had made two pit stops. Pregnancy was making Ilene thirsty, and she was constantly drinking water. Art was just happy it was “working.” The second time they stopped, Art took his wife into the woods to show her mounds of bilberry shrubs with tiny inky-blue fruit and also red berries on long stems that he knew as kostyanika.

“Stone berries,” he explained to Ilene, referring to stone bramble. “Berries of my childhood.”

“I have no ‘berries of my childhood,’” Ilene said pensively.

“Do you want to rest a bit?”

Art threw his jacket down.

“Really tart,” Ilene said after biting a berry off the stem.

“Over there by the roadside there are also raspberries. A blessed forest, my mother used to say about the woods near our dacha.”

A few minutes after they got back into the red Opel, the one-lane empty highway suddenly grew many times wider. Like a nighttime shadow of a branch swaying in a gust of wind, a quick expression of alarm took hold of Ilene’s face, then released it.

“I bet you this used to be a military airfield,” Art said.

“It says here in the guidebook that Saaremaa was a restricted zone even for Estonians. Closer to Sweden.”

“It’s funny; I feel just as much a tourist here,” Art said. “Even though I grew up in the Soviet Union.”

In summer, many of his parents’ friends took their children to Baltic resorts: Pärnu, Jūrmala, and Palanga. But they always stayed near Leningrad. Only once, when Art was a teenager, the three of them took a boat cruise on the Volga and got terrible food poisoning. When Art was 3, they had inherited a dacha on the Karelian Isthmus. A dachka, really, a tiny unwinterized cottage on a postage stamp lot, and that’s where his parents spent their summer vacations. Art usually first went to sleepaway camp and then had almost a whole month with his parents at the dacha. His mother, Russian peasant blood pumping through her heart, planted a kitchen garden and tended it every weekend from May until September. The garden helped a lot when they became refuseniks and his parents no longer had their academic salaries.

When Art was invited to address a Baltic-Scandinavian forum on natural resources, his first reaction was: What would I ever want in Estonia? Art’s relatives on the Litvak side were all murdered, with the exception of his father’s mother, who had moved to Leningrad in the 1920s as a young woman. Not Estonia but Lithuania with its ancestral market towns, Jewish graves, and murder sites would have been Art’s first choice for a trip to the Baltics. And even Lithuania wasn’t high on his list. At home, when Art floated the idea of visiting Estonia, Ilene became very excited. He quickly did some research on the forum only to discover that it rotated among Scandinavian and Baltic countries, and the funding mainly came from oil-rich Norway. The speaking fee wasn’t hefty but didn’t insult him, either, and there was also a cultural program for the participants’ spouses. Art wanted to make sure the flight wasn’t too taxing for Ilene in her pregnancy, and the organizers found them a nice connection from Newark via Amsterdam to Tallinn, where the meetings were held for the first two days. After the meetings, the forum entertained the participants and guests with a long weekend in Pärnu, Estonia’s summer capital. The organizers offered to send them back to the Tallinn airport by taxi, but Ilene wanted to visit Saaremaa. They made arrangements to spend one night on the island, then drive to Tallinn and fly back the following morning. And there they were, on a cloudy day at the end of July, standing on the upper deck of the Saaremaa ferry.

The ferry was painted the cerulean, white, and black horizontal stripes of the Estonian flag. It wasn’t actually going to Saaremaa but to the nearby small island of Muhu. From there, one would take a causeway to Saaremaa. Art commanded these details the way he always commanded details, like a wizard of information. Ilene felt this each time they would go on a trip. She would order a travel guide, study it, put Post-its, and highlight sections in green or yellow. Art never cracked a travel book, and yet he somehow came out ahead. When they were driving from Pärnu, Ilene opened her book and started quoting the island’s highlights: Bishop’s Castle; Stone Age relics; famous meteorite craters.

“They must be real morons,” Art interrupted her.

“Why morons?”

“Off the bat, they should tell you this is a huge island, about 10 times the size of Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a guidebook for Americans. You need a point of reference.”

Art went on talking about Saaremaa’s old Swedish and German name, Ösel, its pirates who used to ravage the coast of Sweden, and also the rebellious locals who fought the Danes and the Brothers of the Sword. By the time their red Opel approached the ticket booth at the ferry terminal in Virtsu, he had already passed Peter the Great and was aiming for the 19th century, when Saaremaa became a resort popular with Baltic Germans. If an American, especially a female, were clandestinely observing Art’s tirade, she would probably conclude that Art was angry. Early in their courtship, Ilene had understood that what may have come across as anger—or arrogance—was actually an eagerness to please laced with a Jewish boy’s desire to know.

During the crossing, they first sat in the airless cafeteria, smelling of fresh paint. Later, they moved to the upper deck. Not far from where they were standing there was a group of three very tall men in oilcloth pants and coats, probably fishermen. They were smoking. “The Vikings,” Art whispered to Ilene. The Vikings exchanged a word or two a minute, barely moving their lips. The tallest of them, a fellow with straw hair and hazel eyes, sized them up and down, then turned away and spat overboard.

Traversing Saaremaa from the northeast to the southwest, they drove for about 40 minutes in the direction of Kuressaare, the island’s capital, stopping once to look at a small church built from rough bottle-green stones. The road looped close to the edge of the water, sun-striated shallows and sand dunes shooting yellow through pine trunks.

“Do you want to take a break?” Ilene asked, reaching near his crotch with her left hand.

He pulled over, then turned around and drove on a sandy path through the woods. They parked in a clearing near the water. A Soviet-era campground must have been there before the Estonian independence. There were two changing booths on the narrow beach, both of them rusty, having gone unpainted for many seasons.

They walked a little bit in the direction where the path disappeared, Art thinking all the while that they hadn’t made love since Ilene became pregnant. Even though the obstetrician had told him in front of Ilene that it was OK to travel and to do “other things,” Art was still unsure.

They climbed onto a small dune and looked around. At the edge, where the sand hugged dry pine needles and moss, Art spread a towel they had taken from the hotel. They sat down, kneading each other’s hands. When Ilene pulled herself close and kissed him on the lips, Art closed his eyes and remembered his jovial Leningrad friend Kostya Frayerman telling him and two other high school friends how his parents “did it” when his mother was pregnant with his younger sister: “The fellow lies down. The chick gets on top but sort of rests her hands on the floor. To protect her belly. And that’s how they screw.” This sounded really perverse to the 16-year-old Soviet boys, and now Art and Ilene were those fellow and chick, the expectant parents.

They made love very gently; she was too far from his face to be able to kiss him. A year ago, Art had started to shave his head once a week, and his hawk nose now looked even more prominent than when she first met him.

“I love you, Artie,” Ilene whispered. “You’re my guy.”

She straightened her long, loose skirt and lay down on her back beside him. He kissed her temple and kissed her left breast from the side, lips pushing against the seam of her bra.

“What’s he doing now? Art asked, lightly touching her stomach with the rim of his right hand.

“He’s doing laps,” Ilene answered.

When they got up, brushing off needles and fine sand, they saw two flaxen-haired girls laughing as they dashed into the woods.

In Kuressaare, they stayed in a refurbished old inn overlooking the market square. The reception area had a wall of exposed gray limestone and a floor of dark brown tiles, some of them cracked and resealed. The receptionist couldn’t find the reservation, and Art became very annoyed.

“They imported Jews for murder,” he loudly whispered to Ilene.

“Shh, people here can speak English,” she admonished him.

The mothlike receptionist finally came back, flushed. Their reservation was misfiled under the first name “Art,” not his last name “Gertsovich.” No one offered to help them with the bags. Their room, a double garret on the third floor, faced an overgrown park, limes choking a path of red gravel.

The medieval town square with about a dozen shops and a splattering of restaurants had been given a facelift, stone walls whitewashed, doors and windowpanes freshly painted, and door knobs and rings cleaned and polished. But just a block or two away from the town square, there were still signs of Soviet neglect.

Cobbled side streets were lined with wooden houses painted ochre, yellow, and maroon. There were many Soviet car makes on the island, old rusty beasts now living out their days in internal exile. An initiate’s pleasure in his voice, Art explained to Ilene the names of the car makes from his youth: Moskvich, Zhiguli, Zaporozhets, and Pobeda. She listened to her husband and took sips of water from a bottle she kept in her satchel. Art spoke English with just a hint of the Russian accent, and at times Ilene even forgot that he had one. Ilie didn’t really think of Art as an immigrant the way her own grandmother had remained an immigrant even after a lifetime in America.

At an open-air café half a block from their hotel, they ate an utterly Estonian lunch of cucumber and tomato salad with dill sour cream dressing, boiled potatoes with onion-fried chanterelles, and gooseberry compote topped with whipped cream. After a nap, they walked to see the main attraction, Bishop’s Castle. Art, who had been skeptical about the trip to Saaremaa, was surprised by how well preserved were the moat, the bridge, and the castle’s limestone walls.

“I bet you there were few visitors during the Soviet period,” he mused. Then he added, “Looks like a giant rook.”

They strolled back to town, not on the main alley but along the fringe of the unkempt park, its air fragrant with linden bloom. As they approached the town square, heading in the direction of their hotel, they noticed commotion, heard voices, and even cars hooting. They traversed the square and saw, at its far edge, a double-peaked chapiteau surrounded by trailers and trucks and a security fence. The colors of the tent were orange and faded red.

“An itinerant circus—what’s it doing here?” Art wondered.

“Sounds magical,” said Ilene.

“It’s probably really bad. A bunch of aging gymnasts and an alcoholic clown.”

“I’d like to go, Artie,” said Ilene.

Across the little window of a makeshift ticket booth there was a handwritten sign, in Russian and English: “Sold out. Next show tomorrow.” Children’s cackles, screaming, and popping noises came from inside the chapiteau.

“Tomorrow we leave,” Ilene said and breathed out.

“Let me try something.”

Art left Ilene outside on a little bench in front of what looked like a yarn shop and ran back to the ticket booth. Feeling an urge to perform a chivalrous exploit, he knocked on the sign inserted in the booth’s window. Impatient, he came around to the side and pounded on the door that gave like cardboard under his fist.

A woman with wavy long hair came out of the ticket booth, fatigue on her eyelids and cheekbones.

Without malice—and without looking at him—she said something in what sounded like Estonian.

“Alyona, that’s you?” Art asked her in Russian, mouth drying.

“Tyomka?” she said breathlessly, arching her ermine eyebrows.

They took each other in—with their eyes—holding back an embrace.

“Tyomka,” said the woman from the ticket booth. “The show’s starting. I have to run.”

“Can you get me in?” Art asked, pulling himself out of the stupor of recognition. “My wife—”

“—come to the entrance. I’ll wait there.”

Art brought Ilene over to the entrance.

“This woman from the ticket booth said she would seat us,” he explained.

“To follow me, please,” said Alyona.

On three sides of the arena, there were 10 or 11 rows of benches, filled mostly with kids. She took them up to the middle of the area facing the entrance from the backstage. Then she asked two blond boys in vests over T-shirts to scoot over and make room for Art and Ilene, shifting the entire row toward the center. An Estonian man who was old enough to have been in the war said something grumpily to Alyona, but she ignored him.

“Thank you so much,” Ilene said to Alyona. “We really appreciate it.”

“Don’t mention, please,” Alyona replied, looking up to the chapiteau’s sky-blue ceiling painted with gold nebulae.

As she walked down the wooden steps to the arena, Art noticed her red shoes with stiletto heels and the deep slit of her silver shimmering skirt.

“What a nice woman,” Ilene said. “Is she Russian?”

“And she didn’t even charge us,” Art replied, not knowing what else to say to his wife.

“We should thank her,” Ilene added as the lights grew dimmer and an explosive march erupted from the loudspeakers.

“Thank her, how?” Art asked.

“A generous tip?” Ilene whispered in his ear and kissed him on the cheek, her right hand resting on his shoulder.

Alyona stood on the arena in a circle of light, holding a microphone and piece of paper in a clear plastic sleeve. She read her greetings in Estonian, occasionally interspersing Russian and English words. Art could tell that she was working hard to keep a dangling smile in place.

Ilene was engrossed in the performance, but Art had trouble concentrating. He noted that the aerial gymnasts, swinging and contorting themselves under the cupola, did not wear lunges with safety ropes, and that the juggling lady in a floppy skirt was a little sloppy with the Indian clubs. Art fumbled with their petite digital camera all through the number with a chimp clad in a deerskin outfit, who was riding on a pony. He only looked up after Ilene touched his elbow.

“Are you bored?” she whispered.

“Just making room for some pictures. We still have photos from a year ago,” Art replied.

A cart drawn by a black goat entered the arena. A thickset animal trainer dressed like a Carpathian peasant—wide trousers, embroidered collarless shirt, sheepskin coat, and a felt hat with a low crown—traipsed behind the cart, huffing and puffing and pretending to be wiping off beads of sweat. His female partner, also clad in a folk costume, rode in the cart along with cartons and baskets with bunnies, geese, and ducks who tried to escape, presumably because they didn’t want to get sold at the country fair. Then the juggling lady reappeared, now joined by a bald man in a red silk shirt and black sequined pants. After tossing tennis rackets and multicolored balls, the jugglers began to add heads of Russian leaders into the mix. The Estonian adults clapped, first cautiously, then rapturously, as the jugglers tossed and then dropped heads of Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev with their telltale details: goatee, mustache, eggshell head with gold-rimmed glasses, bushy eyebrows. Yeltsin’s head with its parted silver-blue hair was the last head to fall and roll off to the side.

“Where’s Putin?” Art said loudly in English.

Ilene placed her right hand on his lap. On her middle finger was a new ring they had bought in Tallinn, a greenish piece of amber with a gnat floating in the middle.

Then, finally, a clown came out. He was wearing oversized stuffed white shoes with blue soles, white tails over a striped shirt, red droopy trousers, and a black bowler over an orange wig. His lips, the tip of the nose, and his cheeks were painted bright red. Ready to be amused, the kids roared with laughter at the clown’s first trick with three wilted yellow chickens. Something about the man behind the clown struck Art as familiar. All clowns are alike, he thought to himself, chasing away another recognition. Standing in a semicircle of light, the clown balanced a square piece of newspaper on his nose. Art peered at him. The clown turned a little and gathered his smile into a zipper, and it was then that Art gleaned the familiar grimace of a Soviet golden boy posing as a communist youth leader. Kolya Zotov, his former classmate. His nemesis. Son of academician Zotov, rector of the Forestry Engineering Institute. So Alyona ended up with Kolya after all, Art thought, gulping water from Ilene’s bottle and spilling some over his shirt. The clown, the fucking clown …

“Artie, what’s wrong?” Ilene asked him at breakfast. “You look out of sort.”

She was spreading cloudberry preserves on a slice of gray country bread. The locals called it sepik.

Art had lain awake in the middle of the night, thinking about the chance meeting at the circus. After tossing in bed, he finally took the sedative he sometimes used on trips to help him unwind, except it made him groggy and irritable the following day. He ended up waking later than usual, when Ilene had already gone down to get coffee.

“I think the migraine is back,” Art lied, truthfully. “Something’s slicing across my right temple.”

“Maybe coffee will help?” Ilene said. “I talked to the lady at the reception, and we can check out at noon. I want to pack quickly and then go on my little expedition.”

“Listen, Iles, I think I’ll lie down for a bit after breakfast.”

“I understand.” Ilene tried to conceal her disappointment.

“How will you find it?” Art asked.

“I know the name of the street, and they told me to talk to the owner of the antique shop we passed on the way to the castle.”

Back in the room, Art lay down, removed his tortoiseshell glasses, and placed a wet cloth on his forehead. Ilene opened the wardrobe and tossed a couple of dresses and skirts into a maroon suitcase on wheels.

“I’ll do the rest when I come back. I still want to take a shower before driving to the ferry,” she said, and brush-kissed Art on the upper lip. “I love you, Artie. Feel better. Go for a walk.”

“You smell good,” Art said and opened his eyes.

He listened to the din of Ilene’s heels running down the uncarpeted corridor. Then he got up and stood behind a half-drawn curtain, watching Ilene traverse the town square, her paisley scarf aflutter. He waited a few more minutes, then called the reception and asked, in a crisp voice, where “the circus people” were staying. The receptionist replied that the majority of the circus people were staying in their trailers.

“But I think they took two or three rooms in our sister hotel, Vannalinna, just two blocks from here,” added the receptionist’s singsong voice.

A small town, Art thought, holding the receiver in his open palm. He washed his face and brushed his teeth—for the second time that morning. Heart honking, he looked up the number for the Vannalinna Hotel in the hotel directory.

“Ms. Zotova, please,” he said to the man who picked up the phone.

“There is nobody by that name; very sorry,” the Estonian man replied.

Pulling Alyona’s maiden name out of some forgotten fur hat of memory, Art corrected himself, “What about Ms. Yunus?”

“Connecting, thank you.”

Alyona’s voice answered after five long ringtones.

“Alyona, it’s me.”

“Tyomka …”

“Can I come over?

“Yes.”

“Right now?”

Art replaced the T-shirt he had slept in with a sage button-down. At the market stalls on the square, he picked up a bouquet of daisies from an old Estonian woman with a drab face. He walked briskly, flowers in his right arm. As he turned at the corner, heading for Alyona’s hotel, he looked over his shoulder.

The room was on the third floor, up a narrow staircase. The door was left ajar, but he still knocked, lightly.

“Alyona,” he breathed out. “Flowers. For you.”

“Tyomka, thank you. You always used to give me flowers.”

She came toward him across the small room and placed her hands on his shoulders.

“Where’s Kolya?” Art asked, pulling her closer and looking, unabashedly, under her low-cut blouse.

“Running errands,” Alyona replied.

“The golden boy now runs your errands?” Art asked, his fingers feeling her shoulder blades and the hooks of her bra.

“That’s about all he runs now,” Alyona said, kissing him with her full lips.

Trying to unhook her bra and fumbling, Art thought that he hadn’t done this in a while—Ilene would come to the bedroom already undressed or didn’t take off her bra. And simultaneously—if it’s possible to think simultaneously about two lovers’ bodies—he thought of Alyona’s breasts. Her breasts were the part of her he remembered most vividly. The cloudy color of unripe cranberries, the feel of mauve-gray areola on the lips ...

He finally undid all the three hooks of Alyona’s bra and placed his hands on her breasts.

“Tyomka, wait, I can’t like that … I need to look at you first.”

As he silently unbuttoned his shirt, his half steps urged her toward the low double bed. Alyona pulled off the blouse over her head and freed herself from the undone bra. Turning her back to him, she unzipped her canary yellow skirt and let it fall to her feet. Art saw a few small scars on the back above the shoulder blades; the scars wound up like pockmarks. When she turned to face him, her eyes lowered. He noticed stretch marks running down her stomach, like salamanders. But these scars and marks didn’t repel but unearthed a forgotten tenderness.

“Tyomka, do you have … you know …?”

“It didn’t happen the last time,” Art replied.

“Don’t say such things,” Alyona said, suddenly on the verge of tears, and Art said nothing and just looked at her lying on the bed beneath him, like the past he still loved but no longer treasured …

Later, when Art returned from the bathroom, he brought back two hand towels. He passed one of the towels to Alyona and got back in bed. She took a cigarette from a soft pack on her side of the bed and lit up.

“May I have one?” Art asked her.

“I thought you Americans didn’t smoke,” Alyona said.

“We don’t,” Art said. He took a long drag, then another one. “How did Kolya get here?” he asked.

“So you’re not surprised that I ended up here?”

“I simply meant—”

“I know what you meant. The bigger question is, what we’re going to do if Kolya turns up right now?”

“I’ll beat the crap out of him,” Art said.

“You can’t. He’s my husband.”

“I did it once before. And I’ll do it again, with joy. It’s been over 20 years.”

“Tyomka, cut this boy crap,” Alyona said. “What are you talking about?”

“The chickenshit never told you? Freshman year, in the spring. The locker room after volleyball practice. All the guys cheered. You know we all hated Kolya.”

“And he despised you all,” Alyona snapped. “He used to tell me you were a bunch of dirty-mouthed hooligans from the skating rink.”

“I thought I was getting expelled after the fight.”

“You underestimate Kolya—the Kolya he used to be. Now there’s little left of it.”

“I underestimate Kolya?”

“Do you remember the elegant silk ties he used to wear? His father bought them on foreign trips.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“You really don’t know, Tyomka?”

“No clue.”

“Oh dear, we should have met on the island of Saaremaa for me to be telling you this ….”

Pulling the sheet up to her clavicles, Alyona sat up in the bed.

“So you and I had already been together for some time. And I knew you were a refusenik with your parents.”

“You were the only person I told at school.”

“But I wasn’t the only one who knew about it.”

“Yes, I suppose so. My parents were nervous all the time that the KGB would notify the administration. And I would be kicked out, drafted and sent to Afghanistan. That was my mom’s worst nightmare.”

“Tyomka, was it March or April when you got the permission to leave?”

“April 1986. Thursday, April 3, to be exact.”

“Did you ever wonder why they let you leave?”

“Yes, we still wonder. Some strange luck. Jewish emigration was nearly at a standstill.”

“I also didn’t know for a while. And then, when Kolya and I …. Already a year after you left …”

Alyona started sobbing. Art got up and poured her some sulfurous mineral water from a bottle on the desk by the window. He took a small yellow apple from a plate and bit it violently.

“Ah, the tears,” Alyona looked at him, tilting her head to the right. “Sorry. It’s just that I’ve never told this to anybody. I was pregnant with Sasha. I was a mess. Already after Kolya and I were married, he told me.”

“How the hell did he know?”

“Because it was his father who arranged it.”

“His father arranged what?”

“Remember what a big shot he was back then. Hero of Socialist Labor. Full member of the Academy of Sciences. Many high-placed pals, including Romanov, the Leningrad party boss. So he pulled a couple of strings.”

Alyona grew silent, pushing in a cuticle with a long nail. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked after a pause.

“Because I’m totally floored. We thought we were just plain lucky refuseniks. Fortunate. So does it mean I owe it—”

“Not to me, silly. To Kolya, if anything. It was his way of getting rid of you.”

“And of having you?” Art got up and paced between the window and the door.

“Is Sasha a boy or a girl?” he finally asked, thinking about the obvious but afraid to ask.

“A boy. Almost a man now,” Alyona replied. “Did your mother have a girl or a boy?”

“A boy. Miles. Born three months after we arrived in Indianapolis. The name was a tribute to jazz, my dad’s idea. But at home we call him Milya.”

“So, how old is he now?”

“Almost 20. Studying at Duke. That’s a very good university. He’s our real American.”

“And your parents?”

“My mother died when Milya was 3. Lung cancer.”

“I’m sorry, Tyomka, I had no idea.”

“I know you didn’t.” Art said. “And your old people?” he added, as an afterthought.

“They moved to Finland five years ago.”

“That’s right, I remember. Your dad’s Finnish.”

“Not Finnish. Ingrian.”

“You have Finno Ugric cheekbones and eyes,” Art laughed.

“Maybe,” Alyona answered dreamily.

“Where in Finland?”

“Turku. Finland invited what had remained of the Ingrians. And many moved there.”

“The Finns are your cousins,” Art said in an encyclopedic tone of voice.

“I don’t consider myself Ingrian. Even my father barely spoke the language. They just moved because they were lost in the new life.”

She paused to light another cigarette.

“I see them about twice a year now,” Alyona added. “They and Kolya don’t exactly see eye to eye. Never did.”

Art could tell that Alyona didn’t want to talk about it, so he switched the topic.

“I have a half-brother now. After mom died, my dad was like a somnambulist. For over a year. Then I gave him a gym membership as a New Year’s present and told him it was nonrefundable. At the gym, he met a woman. She used to be a PE teacher in Ukraine. Fifteen years younger. She was divorced and worked as a trainer.”

“What’s she like?” Alyona asked.

“She’s actually OK. A bit dull. She’s good to my dad. And she was great to Milya when he needed a mother. And Sammy, my half-brother, he’s a really cool kid. Believe it or not, my stepmother actually looks a little bit like you. Legs, breasts. The whole shebang.”

“Your mother was tiny,” Alyona said. “I had a nickname for her: ‘ingénue.’ I don’t think she liked me much.”

“Do you know what she used to call you?” Art asked.

“No. Probably something mean.”

“Well, not exactly ‘mean.’ ‘Party member.’ She said you looked like a young Soviet woman on her way to a career in the communist establishment.”

“She probably resented that I wasn’t Jewish.”

“No. She was part Russian, you know.”

“But your wife is Jewish, right?”

Art didn’t reply. He got up from the bed, still shirtless.

“Do you have anything to eat?” he asked.

“Just local apples. Have another one.”

Art bit off half of another small pale yellow apple.

“Apples in Estonia have this special aroma. Not sure how to describe it,” Art said. “You never explained how you ended up doing the circus thing,” he added, speaking with his mouth full of apple mush.

“If you only knew how many of our former classmates are not working as forestry engineers,” Alyona said.

“I’m not, you’re not, Kolya’s not. That’s at least three.”

“Very clever. Could you pass my clothes?”

Art picked up Alyona’s skirt and blouse from the floor on his side of the bed and handed them to her. Then he pulled on his own shirt. Alyona came around and sat next to him on the edge of the bed.

“In late 1991, Kolya’s father died of a stroke,” she continued. “Probably knew he wouldn’t last in power. I stayed home with little Sasha. Kolya had been in graduate school, doing absolutely nothing—while he was still under his father’s wing. So all of a sudden we had little to live on. Kolya did various things, like selling Czech beer or Chinese tracksuits. And everything else in between. His drinking got worse.”

“Everything gets worse,” Art said, and he wasn’t quite sure what he meant by it.

“It does. Almost everything,” Alyona continued. “Five years ago, we already had Maya. Kolya always—”

“So you have a daughter?” Art interrupted.

“She was an accident. A happy accident,” Alyona’s lips quivered. She looked at Art plaintively, as if saying, Things might have been different, you know. Then she tossed back her wheaten hair and went on with her story.

“Kolya always had a thing for circus, you know.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Used to be his favorite pastime. I could never drag him to see a play or a ballet performance. Only circus. He told me that as a kid he wanted to be a circus performer, but his father forbade him. He always had friends from the circus crowd. He hung out with them. Clowned around at their parties.”

“So he’s a real clown now?” Art asked.

“Well, real or not. We’ve hammered together this little summer troupe. The animal trainers still work in the big circuses. Others have moved on and do this on the side. The animals are the biggest problem,” Alyona sighed. “We do this every year, June to September. We call it the St. Petersburg Traveling Circus, but that’s a big stretch. We do the nearby provinces and the Baltics. I handle all the logistics. Last year we toured in Lithuania. This year it’s Estonia and parts of Latvia. Every week a new town. It’s a living. Nauseating, though.”

“This is a nice enough town,” Art said.

“Entertainment for small-town boys and girls. We don’t even go into big cities.”

Art looked at his wristwatch. “It’s almost 11. I should go. Still need to check out and then catch the ferry.”

He picked up his jeans and disappeared into the bathroom. He rubbed himself down with a wet cloth, then dried himself off and straightened up his clothes.

“Your wife looks like a very nice person,” Alyona said. Her words came out labored, and they both felt it.

“Thanks.”

“No kids?” Alyona asked. “How come?”

“How come?” Art repeated her question. “God hasn’t given us any.” He wanted to tell Alyona about Ilene’s pregnancy but held back. Instead he asked, “Where are your kids now?” his voice still groping for something else.

“Sasha’s in town, working as a courier for an advertising firm. And Maya is with Kolya’s mom at the dacha.”

“Kolya still has the grand old dacha?” Art asked.

“Yep, still does. Except no money to maintain it. The garden is totally overgrown, a fiefdom of raspberries …”

They embraced, and stood silently. A wardrobe mirror with black spots of death around the edges reflected the unmade bed, a Russian glossy magazine, Alyona’s bra on the chair, and the silhouette of a gable roof in the window’s gauzy opening.

“Will you tell Kolya?” Art asked.

“No!” Alyona answered. “Don’t tell your wife. Honesty has nothing to do with this.”

Walking across the town square back to his hotel, Art carried her scent, her arms pressed against his body.

Art hadn’t seen Ilene so bubbly since the day of the ultrasound. All the way to the ferry landing, she was telling him about her visit to the street where she found what had once been a Jewish prayer house.

“Imagine, Artie, the man at the antique shop had old maps. When I told him the name of the street where Bubbe Leah lived, he was so helpful.”

“Did you find her house?”

“Not the actual house. It’s a little alley, really, just a few blocks from the main square. I walked up and down, trying to imagine which house it was. But the man did tell me how to find the old prayer house and the former pharmacy. I’ll show you pictures when we’re on the ferry. And a video of the street.”

“Are you glad we came here?” Art asked, his voice a bit wooden.

“Oh my goodness, absolutely. I feel like my past has opened up to me … Can’t wait to tell Dad.”

Art nodded, keeping time with Ilene’s intonations and fighting the urge to tell her right away. This is madness, he was thinking. Madness. Just drive the damn car and be quiet.

On the ferry, after depositing the red Opel in the hold, they went to the upper deck and stood by the rail near the stern, smelling diesel in the breeze. Ilene streamed a video of a cobblestone alley lined with stooping tin-roofed houses. Then she reached for her untied satchel and removed a time-yellowed cardboard box with the word SAAREMAA and a map of the island printed on it. From the old box she took out three old photographs set in what looked like old pages from a family album.

“Hold these, please,” she said to Art. “I want you to look at these faces.”

One photo was of a Russian Orthodox priest with his family posing against the front entrance of a two-story wooden house. The other was of four middle-aged women in long double skirts and embroidered vests, standing beside market stalls and squinting at the camera. On the third picture Art saw a group of tall fishermen, not unlike the ones he had observed on the ferry going to Saaremaa. The yellowed paper emitted a warm glow, and Art instinctively touched the faces as he examined them.

“They all lived on Saaremaa when Bubbe Leah was a child. I chose these from a trove of old photos,” Ilene explained. She still looked incredibly happy.

“Look, Iles, there’s something I need to tell you. I met an old friend on the island.”

“Who?” Ilene asked, still unsuspectingly.

“Her name’s Alyona Yunus. We went to university together back in Leningrad. She’s the one who got us in to see the circus performance.”

“Is she Jewish?” Ilene asked, and Art was struck by the incongruity of her question.

“No, she’s half Ingrian, half Russian. Not Jewish.”

“When did you see her?”

“This morning.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were going to see her?” Ilene asked loudly, competing with a gust of wind from the sea.

“I didn’t know I was going.”

“Where was your … rendezvous?”

“Come on, Iles, it wasn’t a rendezvous.”

“Where did you see her?” Ilene asked again.

“At her hotel.”

“Had you done this before?” Ilene asked quietly this time.

“Done what? Never,” Art said, and it sounded like the truth.

“How could you do this to me? We’d been trying for so long …. I don’t understand.”

“Come on, Ilie-Lily—“

“—don’t call me that stupid name,” Ilene screamed out.

“I can’t really explain how it happened. Everything just somehow fell into place. That’s where I come from.”

The ferry slowly approached the mainland, coated in fog and draped in conifer. Ilene clutched her satchel the way one clutches a dying old animal.

“Let me bring you some tea,” Art said.

He walked toward the middle of the upper deck. When he turned to open the metal door to the stairs leading down to the lower deck, he felt, with his feet and whole frame, the thud of a fallen body. Then he heard Ilene’s voice tearing at the air like a wounded seagull.