Sofia

Sofia and my uncle arrived one summer in the ‘80s reeking like pickles and moved into our basement on Blue Hill Ave. I was stunned to share a last name with these strangers from Russia who’d escaped New Siberia in a barrel of pickled cabbage. Baths of lavender, rosemary, lemon—nothing worked. 
My mother said I wasn’t allowed down in the basement, but I snooped. That summer, it felt like I was always creeping around because everything I wanted to see was forbidden and everything I was allowed to see didn’t interest me. So I’d venture down the cold steps on the balls of my feet to try and see how they lived, and one time I heard a voice behind me say, “Alex,” and I screamed. Sofia was right behind me. Her expression flat as snow. In fact, she never smiled, but she had these big stacks of curls that winked and jiggled and flirted as she walked.
My mother asked, “Would a hairbrush kill her?” but only because she was jealous. My mother wore wigs for modesty like a lot of serious Jewish women. Cheapies too. The ones from Saugus that were half off because of storage smell or bedbugs. So she hated Sofia from the start, but of course it had nothing to do with hair. The real reason was that I liked her so much. 
That day Sofia caught me on the stairs, she led me down into the basement for the first time, and I saw where she and my uncle shared a simple metal cot, a stack of bricks where a leg was missing. On the bare unfinished walls sat shelves of glass jars—horseradish, beets, pomegranates, apples stewing in vodka. Then she patted the well-made bed, and I sat beside her. She reached under the bed and pulled out a sketchpad, an artist’s notebook. “Papa’s,” she said. 
Her father was actually a doctor back in Russia, and I couldn’t believe a doctor, who were basically like gods in Boston, could ever be reduced to sharing a bed with his teenage daughter. But at 14, there were many things I didn’t understand. I knew her father cried a lot. And then I learned something else about this strange, bald man with giant ears when Sofia opened his sketchbook and I saw a portrait of a woman with a bow in her hair and a dimple on her chin, who looked just like Sofia. She flipped the page, and it was practically the same graphite drawing with the dimple shifted a few centimeters to the left. And the next picture was the same. And the one after. The bow growing or shrinking. The plump bottom lip thinning, widening. 
“It’s you?” I asked.
Sofia gave me hard eyes and, after a few seconds, I realized it was her mother. They just looked so similar. I didn’t press further, but I looked at her father differently, and I could understand how if you had something that beautiful in your life you’d want to see it again and again and never stop seeing it. 
I pointed at her mother and said, “Very beautiful.”
Then the strangest thing happened—Sofia leaned forward and kissed me. On the lips. Her eyes were open, so were mine. Her fingers light on my cheek. Our lips parted. Her breath a faint sweetness. I could barely draw a breath. Suddenly we heard the thump of a heavy foot on the stairs, and we drew apart.
“Zolotze,” her father called, ducking his head under the overhead beam. He always called her that—it meant my gold—and I figured you could probably make something of your life if someone called you zolotze all the time.
“What do you think happened to them?” I asked my mother once as she was practicing Hebrew calligraphy at the kitchen table. There’s all kinds of laws to writing Hebrew letters: The faces can’t touch. The legs can’t meet.
Mom lifted her head and looked out the window to the backyard where my uncle was walking along the fence, hands folded behind his back. A light drizzle had started. 
“It doesn’t matter,” Mom said with a sigh. “They’re family. We make room.”
From the cellar door, Sofia called her father in from the rain. After the third call, she ran out into the yard barefoot and handed him an umbrella.
It was the same white umbrella my mother made me hide under until I was 13 so the demon Lilith couldn’t find me and steal me away. She warned that Lilith could slip through a window to seduce a boy, or she could steal his seed and bear him jackals. She might appear in garments of flaming fire or stonewashed jeans. I had to remain vigilant. A boy like me was easy pickings. And I was alert, just not for Lilith. It was my mother and all the other adults that Sofia and I were hiding from. They were everywhere. Popping up in the windows. Materializing on the stoop to smoke cigarettes. Shouting our names all over the house then forgetting what they wanted by the time they found us.
To escape, we’d climb the neighbor’s tree which touched our slate roof and that’s where we’d lay on our backs on hot July days, sticking to the gummy tar, watching 747’s land over the harbor at Logan. I’d always bring a few oranges up to the roof because she never got citrus back in Siberia. She’d shove a quarter or an entire half orange in her mouth, like a boxer with a big mouthguard, and savor it, suck on the juice till each cell was dry and withered and drained. I’d never seen someone enjoy an orange that much. 
Then she’d spit out the rind and recite Pushkin from memory, her forehead pale, eyes flashing, pausing to let the airplane pass overhead. I had no clue what she was saying. You’d think this army of words marching out of her mouth in her no-nonsense, Soviet style was about the military or motherland but it was obviously about love. Even me, who knew basically nothing, knew that much. I knew in my bones that Alexander Pushkin wrote about love. And I sat there immobile, listening. Almost trembling. 
It became my dream to learn Russian to understand what Sofia was saying. It became my dream to pickle whatever I could find. I stuffed corncobs and monkey bread and fried chicken into vinegar-filled mason jars, but Sofia dumped them out saying I’d get sick. There was an art to it. Apparently there was an art to everything worth having. 
On the days when I wasn’t with Sofia, at my part-time job I’d ride shotgun in the gas company truck, hopping out to dip a meter down into the storm gutters and read the gauge for leaks. I’d listen for a hiss, always afraid that a pipe would explode. In a way, that’s what everyone was worried about that summer. My neighbors built a bomb shelter in their basement. Everyone was terrified about the Russians invading or dropping nukes. Everyone kept a wary eye on the sky when they walked to the park. Meanwhile, my house had actually been invaded by Russians, and I never wanted them to leave.
That’s how the summer slipped by. Sofia and I sneaking into the abandoned trainyard where the cord grass curved like scythes and creosote wept from a telephone pole, black and wet, shimmering in the heat. We’d crawl up into in the narrow ghost trains and I’d find her dark red lips, and we’d kiss noisily, greedily, her hand pressed flat against the cloudy window glass.
Then we’d come home to find my mother hunched at the kitchen table, her fingers stained with black ink, furiously transcribing passages from the Talmud. All 903 ways to die. Quinsy and croup and madness and shame. We’d watch in disbelief from the door. Sometimes we spied on her in her bedroom as she peeled off her wig in front of her long oval mirror. Her head pink and flaky. Her pale stomach etched with medusa veins. You did that to her, Sofia whispered.
Then it all went to shit like it always does, like people had been expecting all summer, all year, all decade—finally, one day it blew up. 
During the Days of Awe, everyone crying for the lost country, we snuck upstairs to my room. When we kissed, I heard nothing. Not the footsteps, not the door opening—and maybe it never did, maybe my mother teleported into the room like a dybbuk to find us half-naked, Sofia’s shirt unbuttoned to her jeans. My mother cursing in Yiddish that we’d regret this for the rest of our lives.
Once Sofia was gone, my mother hired a company to fumigate our house. They wrapped it in thick plastic gauze and fed a hose into its lungs. The moment they turned on the gas, a family of gray swifts burst from the chimney and zigzagged across the sky, wobbled and veered, making two or three more desperate flaps, before dying upside down on our lawn.
The Talmud says there are three kinds of agony: those caused by grief, smoke, and constipation. The fourth was watching Sofia dragged off to my uncle’s Datsun. My mother turned me away from the window. “I saved you,” she said and snapped her fingers. “She could’ve stolen you like that.” But for all of her knowledge, my mother somehow didn’t understand that Sofia already had.