Something Unbelievable Read online

  Something Unbelievable is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 by Maria Kuznetsova

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kuznetsova, Maria, author.

  Title: Something unbelievable: a novel / Maria Kuznetsova.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2021]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020014097 (print) | LCCN 2020014098 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525511908 (hardcover: acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780525511915 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3611.U985 S66 2021 (print) | LCC PS3611.U985 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2020014097

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​202001

  Ebook ISBN 9780525511915

  randomhousebooks.com

  Title-page and part-title art: © iStockphoto.com

  Book design by Dana Leigh Blanchette, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Na Kim

  ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  List of Characters

  Part I: As Easy as Being a Woman

  Larissa

  Natasha

  Part II: Sinister Sister

  Larissa

  Natasha

  Part III: Happy Wife

  Larissa

  Natasha

  Part IV: Sunset

  Larissa

  Natasha

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Maria Kuznetsova

  About the Author

  For some a prologue—for others an epilogue.

  —MIKHAIL BULGAKOV,

  The Days of the Turbins

  List of Characters

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Antonina, called Tonya

  Arkady, Tonya’s first husband

  Alexandra, called Shura, daughter of Antonina and Arkady

  Pavel, called Pasha, son of Antonina and Arkady

  Fyodor, called Fedya, son of Antonina and Arkady

  Dimitrev Senior, Tonya’s second husband

  Dimitrev Junior, Shura’s husband

  Natalia, called Talia, wife of Fyodor

  Larissa, daughter of Fyodor and Talia

  Polina, called Polya, daughter of Fyodor and Talia

  Anatoly, called Tolik, son of Larissa

  Valentina, Anatoly’s wife

  Natasha, daughter of Anatoly and Valentina

  Licky, a cat

  THE ORLOV FAMILY

  Konstantin, closest friend of Fyodor

  Tamara, Konstantin’s wife

  Misha, son of Konstantin and Tamara

  Bogdan, son of Konstantin and Tamara

  THE SHULMAN FAMILY

  Yuri, Natasha’s husband

  Natalia, called Talia, their daughter

  Sharik, a cat

  Part I

  As Easy as Being

  a Woman

  Larissa

  My granddaughter, Natasha, has a long history of caring for unfortunate creatures. When she was a little girl, a recent transplant to America, she and her father would rescue endless varieties of pathetic fauna from the woods behind their dilapidated New Jerseyan duplex—broken-winged birds and feeble rabbits and one-eyed kittens that they would fail to nurse back to health until their dim flames were nearly extinguished. Whenever I visited from Kiev, I would try to put a stop to this nonsense, of course. Natasha’s mother and I would take the pitiful creatures to the backyard and put them out of their misery with a frying pan under cover of night. Oh, her mother, Valentina, was a force, a stunning, steely woman with a vicious gleam in her eye as she wiped the bloody pan on the grass, wanting to harden her daughter against the cold world. But what can you do, she died of breast cancer when Natasha was seventeen, leaving her alone with my hapless son, so the girl has remained as soft as a whore’s bottom.

  When my son was felled by a heart attack five years ago and handsome Yuri, his former student, began courting Natasha, I thought finally, finally, she will settle down, stop caring for useless men, and have someone care for her. And last year, when she told me she and Yuri were expecting a child, I thought, Well, yes, she will have to make some compromises with her acting career, but she will be a natural! I recalled her rapturous, Madonna-like gaze when she beheld her ailing creatures, and later, the slew of stinky pets she took into her various cramped New York apartments, and I thought, She has my simpleton sister’s animal-caretaking genes; she’ll also love holding a crying nothing to her breast, much more than I did anyway. But when she first materialized on my computer screen with the rat-faced girl in her arms, she looked weary and ruined and sweat-covered, shaking my faith in her abilities. She has spent most of the three months since her daughter’s birth chained to her infant and lately, also caring for Stas, Yuri’s overly young, greasy-haired deadbeat of a friend who fled the Boston suburb where they were raised under murky circumstances, whom she was kind enough to take in.

  When I see her this evening, her pale skin emerging in the morning light of her living room, her dark eyes swollen and sleepless, she brings to mind a clump of hair I yanked out of my shower drain just last week. She is holding her hideous baby girl, Talia, stroking her cheek in hopes that she will drift off.

  “Now, listen, child,” I say. “If you train that girl to sleep in your arms, she will become a mother-dependent namby-pamby. You should do what my parents did to me, and what I did to your father. Put her in her crib until she is filled with existential understanding. She will see that she is all alone in a cold universe and must drift off on her own. And while she’s in there, you should leave the apartment and go for a stroll or see a movie.”

  She laughs and shakes her wilted head. “I’ll consider it.”

  “Some would call that child abuse,” says Stas from a dark corner of the apartment. Lately, his presence has been as reliable as that of Sharik, Natasha’s vulgar orange cat.

  “Oh please,” I tell him. “Everyone did it in the Soviet Union, and we raised a generation of strong men.”

  “Alcoholics,” he says.

  “Strong alcoholics,” I concede. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”

  “Not at all,” he says, approaching the computer to give me a slick little smile, and I shake my head at Natasha for not telling this pesky creature to leave.

  She turns to the derelict boy at last. “Why don’t you go take that stroll my grandmother was talking about?”

  “Fine, fine,” he says, lifting a grubby hand at me, and soon enough the door slams shut. Natasha watches him go and then fusses with the quilt on her worn green leather couch and then the threadbare garage sale rug on the floor with her free hand, a desperate attempt to create order. When her gaze returns to me, she looks even more out of sorts.

 
“Listen,” she says, “there’s something I wanted to ask you.”

  “Oh dear,” I say, and I feel nervous all of a sudden, though what could she possibly want from me? Could she be asking for money at last?

  “Don’t freak out,” she says, but she does nothing to calm me down. “But I was wondering—would you mind telling me the story of how your grandmother died during World War Two?”

  I take a moment to collect myself. Why on Earth is she asking now? “Of course I can tell you,” I say. “She threw herself under a train. Then the war ended.”

  “Right,” she says. “But I was wondering if you would go a bit more in-depth? You always promised to tell me the whole story, and I thought, Tally would want to learn her history one day—”

  “And soon I will evaporate and you will have no story to remember.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “You didn’t have to.”

  I take a drag on my cigarette and consider the days ahead. I wonder if she truly wants the story, or if she is only asking because she thinks I need more help than one of her mangled rabbits, a distraction to keep the abyss at bay. I have told her bits and pieces of the story over the years, but never from start to finish, because the girl has the attention span of a ferret and because talking about the war for too long wears at my heart. But what else do I have to live for?

  Old isn’t gold—I am approaching my ninetieth brutal year and wouldn’t mind being clubbed over the head with a frying pan myself. A season has passed since I buried my husband and the days are long. My body is betraying me and my dear Kiev is of no use to me now. Seeing it in its early summer glory without having the able body to enjoy its lush gardens and verdant parks reminds me of longing for Styopa Antonov, a graduate student and Lermontov scholar who studied under me in 1962, a charming man with the firmest buttocks whom I could not touch on account of my marriage—well, now that I think of it, we did carry on after a while, but you get the point. So! I used to hold literary salons in my elegant home filled with obscenely youthful, lust-crazed students arguing about whether or not Yesenin truly committed suicide and sneaking off to neck on the balcony. Now my main source of entertainment is packing up the few things I’d like to take from my apartment down to my cottage on the Black Sea, and letting my husband’s men sell the rest. Chatting with Natasha could only ease my suffering.

  “Fine, fine,” I tell her. “Why not?”

  “Really?” she says, her bloodshot eyes lighting up in genuine surprise. “I thought it would take a bit more convincing.”

  “Let’s get on with it.”

  She is startled once more, caressing the limp strands on her daughter’s head. “Right now?”

  “I don’t have forever.”

  “All right then,” she says.

  She puts a finger to her lips and tells me to wait a second, she has to figure out how to record the call, if that’s all right with me. Then she pats her girl’s butt, and the helpless thing shuts her unknowable eyes, a creature as alien to me as a space monkey, as far away from my Kiev kitchen as a distant planet, an American-born girl whose parents left their homeland as schoolchildren and will hardly be able to pass their Soviet legacy down to her, though they did surprise me by naming her Natalia after my mother, and now Natasha seems to think the girl will one day feel tied to her mother’s Motherland from hearing my sad story. Currently, the only Soviet thing about the child is that with the cosmically disappointed look on her face, she brings to mind Gorbachev during his resignation announcement. Well, what else is there for me to do? I wait for my pathetic little great-granddaughter to settle, and then I begin.

  * * *

  —

  My grandmother Tonya was a weak, spoiled woman, though I must admit she had a rather difficult life. She came of age at the turn of the century, in a palatial apartment in the center of Kiev, a buxom and brainless banker’s daughter, wasting her youth flitting about endless soirees draped in the season’s finest gowns, smoking long cigarettes and flirting with any man with two eyes like the frivolous woman that she was. She married a banker, a colleague of her father’s, and gave him three children: first horse-faced Aunt Shura, then my dear father, and finally my sweet Uncle Pasha.

  But when my father turned twelve, the Revolution blazed through Ukraine like a flame through a silk handkerchief. The Bolsheviks seized my grandparents’ fine apartment overlooking the Khreschatyk, inheriting all the velvet curtains and blinding chandeliers my grandmother spoke of until her dying day. They left her family with two trunks of finery they dragged to their temporary home at the residence of the Dimitrev brothers, friends of the family whose ties to Lenin made them immune to the upheaval, whose apartment overlooked Postal Square and had four floors and gilded windows and a separate entrance just for carriages. My grandparents decided to flee Ukraine before they suffered the worst of it—I am not certain where to, perhaps London, or Milan, or even Paris. They planned to take a train to Odessa and transfer to a more enlightened capital from there.

  But as they plotted their escape, my grandfather died of typhus, you know how these things go. And so, the day before my grandmother and her three children were to leave, stern typhus husband still tepid in the ground, the older Dimitrev brother pulled her aside with a double marriage proposal: she could marry him, and her daughter, Shura, could marry his younger brother. What did she think? She was not a product of the first freshness, but she still had her youth about her, she was not yet forty, and her daughter was a spirited sixteen, and they could have a good life together, and furthermore, it was unpatriotic to leave the Motherland when it needed you most. Could she really see herself raising her children in some dainty land like France, or among the blanched Brits, with their tasteless food and inferior literature?

  But after some hesitation, Baba Tonya turned down Dimitrev senior, got her children and suitcases ready, and had her hosts’ carriage drop them off at the train station. Can you imagine it? Utter chaos. Blood running through the streets. People swarming around like flies on a heap of manure, trying to keep their wits about them as they prepared to face the great unknown. My grandmother hovering over her children like a hapless mother duckling, wondering if her destination would prove more bountiful than her Motherland, home of her ancestors, the Kiev Rus, land of Gogol, cradle of Russian civilization. Or would it be even worse—was she walking her diminished self and her three children into more dire circumstances, which she would have to navigate without a man by her side?

  My grandmother was no heroine. She was no Catherine the Great, riding her horses and taking her lovers and corresponding with Voltaire and changing the world with the force of her fist and tremendous cleavage. The thought of emptying her own chamber pot brought her to tears. She had a large, substantial frame, but she was as wobbly as a holodets. She liked her dances, powder on her face, Champagne at her bedside, a maid to clean up after her thoughtless messes. She heard the train moan like a whale in heat and turned her children around and jumped into the nearest carriage she could find. And so she fell into the arms of Dimitrev senior and accepted the brothers’ dual marriage proposal. Who could blame her?

  Of course, if she could look back on her choice from the vantage point of history, she would see she made an awful mistake, but there was no way to know that at the time. And with senior and junior Dimitrev, Babushka Tonya was able to maintain her lavish lifestyle—to a point. Shortly after the rushed nuptials, the upstairs of the brothers’ apartment was seized and divided up for the so-called proletariat, and suddenly, there was no more room for my twelve-year-old father or his nine-year-old brother, or so the story goes. Dimitrev senior decided to shuttle the boys off to an orphanage all the way out in Kharkov, can you believe it? And my grandmother did nothing to stop him.

  The way my dear father told it, the establishment was quite dignified, for an orphanage. He and his brother shared a bunk bed with warm
blankets and had enough porridge to eat. The place was run by a distant Dimitrev cousin, so the boys were given special privileges, and my father became an aide to the teachers, helping care for the younger children, never shedding a tear, reading every book on the institution’s modest shelves until he ruined his eyesight and was forced to wear bottle-cap glasses. He even maintained his composure on the rare days when his mother would summon him and his brother to Kiev for a visit. They had shined their boots so hard in preparation for their first reunion that Uncle Pasha immediately slipped on the parquet floor at the entrance to the apartment, breaking his nose and dripping blood all over the place, and though a doctor was sent, his nose was never the same afterward. Perhaps that was why his grudge toward his mother was more severe than my father’s.

  When my father turned sixteen, he returned to Kiev to attend the Polytechnic Institute, while his brother chose to stay behind at the orphanage instead of joining him in the ancestral city. My father had left the orphanage in what, 1922, 1923? The Bolsheviks had run everything to the ground, but my father had managed to stay out of trouble. Meanwhile, on the other side of the city, my dear mother, who had been truly orphaned due to a parental cocktail of typhus-cancer at the age of seven, had been slaving away at the restaurant of two mean old aunts ever since, spending her days washing dishes and occasionally wringing the necks of the chickens they kept in the backyard for stew, learning everything from the books she snuck into the closet where she slept. She taught herself to read and write by closet candlelight, well enough to finish school and eventually become a secretary at the Polytechnic Institute, and that was where she met my father.

  They married in 1924 and in 1927 I was born. A year later came Polya, my smelly, spoiled, and achingly gorgeous sister. Papa had done quite well as an engineer at that point, having dug himself out from the horse-stink of the orphanage to the upper echelon of the Industrial Engineering Institute, even becoming the closest friend and confidant of Konstantin Orlov himself, Institute founder and leading expert of Soviet welding, the sneaky fire-breathing business of fusing metal without the pesky need for nuts and bolts. He was a stony man whose only redeeming quality was his handsome son, Misha. My father, however, maintained his humility in spite of his lofty connections. Though Uncle Konstantin offered our family a private apartment in the blocks designated for Institute employees, Papa chose to live among the masses, and my equally austere mother supported him wholeheartedly. He recalled how helpless his mother had been because of all her maids and bedrooms and parquet floors and did not want his daughters to be similarly weak, so he condemned my dear family, the Volkov clan, to a one-room communalka on Vladimirskaya, only a few blocks from his workplace, while Baba Tonya and Aunt Shura continued to enjoy their finery near the bank of the Dnieper.