“Lev’s blood pressure? How high?”
“Extremely. The doctor yesterday was very worried.”
“Is Lev worried?”
She folded the last pajama. “Lev thinks a bullet will find him before the stroke arrives. If that answers your question.”
“But you wanted someone else to know. Understandably.”
“Probably there’s nothing you can do. He gets terrible headaches.”
“He seems calm.”
“Oh yes, Lev is calm, calm is Lev. What I said about wearing good pajamas when he is murdered. It’s not photographs he worries about. I don’t mean he is vain. I just cannot think of the word. My English.”
“The word is dignity, maybe?”
“Dignity, yes.”
“He could rest a little more. He’s out every morning taking care of the chickens, but any of us could do that.”
“Oh, he is crazy for those animals. I haven’t seen him so affectionate for something since Benno and Stella. Two dogs we had in France.” She grew quiet, visiting memories of dogs, and maybe living children. “I think the animals relieve him,” she said finally. “Something in the world he can keep safe.”
“But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to offer some help?”
“Yes. To you, he might listen. He calls you ‘son.’ You notice it, of course.”
“Of course. Lev has a large heart. He’s father to the whole world, it seems.”
“He said he finds you steadying.”
“He does?”
“In your manner you resemble Sergei. He wouldn’t have mentioned that, but it’s true. Sergei was quiet. Always paying attention. He was for the good of other people.”
“You must miss him. All of them.”
She shook her head side to side, looking out the window, her lips tightly closed.
Outside, the morning was cool, with puddles still standing from a rain in the night. In the far corner of the courtyard against a blaze of red bougainvilleas covering the wall, Lev stood in a circle of hens. He tossed out grain and clucked softly in some form of gallinaceous Russian, apparently engrossed. He looked up, startled.
“Oh! Have you come asking my friends for proof of their dedication?”
“No eggs needed just now. Breakfast is nearly ready.”
“Now you see, I was thinking, the hens make only a collective contribution. But the rabbits are fully dedicated, when called to serve. We may have two factions here.”
“Like the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.”
He pursed his lips and nodded. “The Omelletscheviks. And the Hassenpfefferviks.”
“Natalya thought you might need help with the animals.”
“No, no.” The flat shovel was out of the tool rack, leaning against the rabbit hutch beside a filled manure bucket. He had cleaned the little shed where the hens roost at night. Later he would take the manure and bury it around the garden.
“You’re a very great thinker, sir. You shouldn’t be doing farm work.”
“You’re wrong about that, my son. Everyone should do farm work. Your name is Shepherd. Did you ever tend sheep?”
“No, sir.”
He took the shovel in hand, watching the hens make their excursionary expeditions into the garden. “Do you know that Stalin is murdering farmers now?”
“Why?”
“His idea for feeding the masses is to create enormous farms. Like factories, with vast machines and armies of unskilled labor. Rather than trust the wisdom of men of the land. He’s imprisoning yeoman farmers, trying to destroy their class.”
One of the hens caught a lizard, and it writhed wildly in her beak. She ran helter-skelter with all the others in zealous pursuit. Their aptitude for carnivory was impressive.
“That is enough talk of Stalin before breakfast. My young friend Shepherd with no sheep. I meant what I said. Everyone should get dirt on his hands each day. Doctors, intellectuals. Politicians, most of all. How can we presume to uplift the life of the working man, if we don’t respect his work?”
Lev carefully folded the garment he wears to greet the animals each day: an ancient green cardigan with holes at the elbows. Evidently he does not expect to be assassinated while feeding chickens. Or it’s his best hope. He took off his glasses and turned his face to the sun for a moment, boots planted wide, the peasant brow facing heaven. He looked the very image of the People’s Revolution in one of Diego’s murals. Then the former president of the Petrograd Soviet put away the manure shovel and went to his breakfast.
Today Van was married. Who could have imagined it two years ago, this very day, on a painted picnic boat in the canals of Xochimilco? Frida was correct, of course, Van didn’t need the trapanovio to catch his true love. Nor did Lev, it seems. He holds hands with Natalya, and together they stand on the deck of this ocean liner, a ship with trustworthy friends and cactuses planted in its hold, and they watch the sun set behind the high wall that encloses them. Frida has been less lucky in love or anything else, declining to get out of bed for weeks now. Her body threatens to fold up shop, and good riddance, she says, since Diego no longer wants it.
Van and his American girl Bunny were wed this morning in city hall, in the nuptial office whose door happens to be directly under Diego’s mural of the ancient Mayans harvesting cacao, though the lovers probably didn’t notice. They plan to move soon to an apartment in New York. Natalya shed a few tears, as tiny and undramatic as her black shoes. She has always known she would lose this son, along with every other.
Lev was more jovial, congratulating the couple with formal toasts and Russian love poems recited from memory. Bunny wore a crown of twined flowers, some old-world notion of Natalya’s, and somehow procured a bag of Van’s beloved licorice for a wedding present. In the courtyard he stood blue-eyed beside his bride making disheveled toasts, absent his shoes for some reason. When Bunny reached on tiptoe to set her floral crown on Van’s head, he smiled so broadly his molars gleamed. So grateful for her affection. He has no idea that everything about him can stop a heart: his shrug, like a little Dutch boy, shoulders raised high and then dropped. His beautiful white feet.
Celebrations are rare in this house, maybe all the more joyful for that reason. And if joy did not fill every quarter, at least no one spent the whole day cooking.
Britain has entered the war. Winston Churchill sent an Expeditionary Force into France, thousands of soldiers to defend the Maginot Line and prevent all of Europe falling to Hitler. Every evening after the plates are cleared, Lev turns on the radio receiver, and everyone goes quiet. All the boisterous opinions that normally fill this room are quashed by one thin voice quivering out of the air from some other world into the yellow-painted dining room. Why should Lev believe the wireless reports, when all others fail him? He struggles with the question himself. But is so hungry for knowledge, he casts his net wide and picks through the catch, hoping he can tell fish from flotsam.