more than a mild spring breeze. While it might still be winter in Aosta in March, back home in Belarus they were dealing with ice and temperatures around 15 degrees, well below freezing.
Irina was walking briskly, her feet clad in a pair of knockoff Hogan sneakers that sparkled with every step; as she walked she sucked on a piece of honey-flavored hard candy she’d bought at the café after enjoying her breakfast. If there was one thing she loved about Italy, it was breakfast at the café. Cappuccino and brioche. The noise of the espresso machine steaming the milk, churning up the frothy white foam that the barista then blended with strong black coffee and finally sprinkled with cocoa powder. And the brioche, hot, crunchy, melt-in-your-mouth sweet. Just the memory of the breakfasts she used to eat in Lida … those inedible mushy gruels made of barley and oats, the coffee that tasted like mud. And then, the cucumbers—that bitter taste first thing in the morning. Her grandfather used to chase them down with a glass of schnapps, while her father used to scoop the butter directly off the butter dish into his mouth as if it were some caramel dessert. When she told Ahmed about that, he’d laughed so hard he’d come dangerously close to vomiting. “Butter? By the spoonful?” he’d asked in disbelief. As he laughed, he displayed the gleaming white teeth Irina so envied. Her teeth were a dull gray. “It’s the climate,” Ahmed had told her. “In Egypt the weather is hot and so people’s teeth are whiter. The colder it is, the darker the teeth. It’s the exact opposite of skin color. It’s all because of the sunshine you don’t have. Plus, on top of that, if you start eating butter by the spoonful!” and he laughed some more. Irina loved him. She loved the way he smelled when he came home from the market. The scents of apples and new-mown grass floated off him. She loved it when he prayed to Mecca, when he baked apple cakes for her, when they made love. Ahmed was sweet and considerate and he never got drunk and his breath always smelled of mint. The only drinking he did was a beer every now and then, and even then he would say, “The Prophet wouldn’t approve.” But he did like beer. Irina would look at him and think about the men back home, the way they guzzled hard liquor, their foul breath, the stink on their skin. A mix of stale sweat, vodka, and cigarettes. But Ahmed had an explanation for this stark difference too. “In Egypt, we wash more often, because you have to be clean when you pray to Allah. And as hot as it is, we dry off very fast. Where you’re from, it’s cold, and you never really get dry. This too is because of the sunshine,” he told her. “In any case, we’d never eat butter by the spoonful,” and he was bent over laughing again.
But now her relationship with Ahmed had come to the crossroads. He’d made his declaration.
He’d asked her to marry him.
There were a few issues, strictly technical ones. If they were going to get married, either Irina would need to embrace the Muslim religion, or he’d have to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy. And that was easier said than done. She could never become a Muslim. Not for any real religious reasons: Irina no more believed in God than she believed in the likelihood of hitting the Powerball jackpot. No, it was the thought of her parents that kept her from converting. Up north in Belarus, her family was Orthodox and faithful—to them God was “Bog.” Her papa, Alexei, and her mama, Ruslava, her five brothers, her aunts, and most of all, her cousin Fyodor, who had married the daughter of a metropolitan. How could she tell them: “Hi all! Starting tomorrow I’m going to be referring to Bog as Allah”? For that matter, it wasn’t as if Ahmed could call his father down south in Faiyum and say: “You know what, dad? Starting tomorrow, I’m Eastern Orthodox!” Aside from the fact that Ahmed seriously doubted his father even knew what being Orthodox meant: he’d probably think it was some kind of infectious disease. So Irina and Ahmed were considering a civil union. They would grit their teeth and stick to the plan. At least as long as Aosta remained home to them. Then Bog, Allah, or the Lord Almighty would look out for them.
She’d reached the apartment building at no. 22 of Via Brocherel. She pulled out her keys and opened the street door. What a fine big building that was! With its marble steps and wooden handrails. Not like her building, with its chipped terra-cotta floor tiles and damp patches on the ceiling. And no elevator, not like here. In her building you had to trudge up the stairs to the fourth floor. And every third step was broken, the next one was loose, and then one would be missing entirely. To say nothing of the heating, with the kerosene stove that hissed and whistled and would operate properly only after you gave a good hard bang on the door. She dreamed of living in an apartment building like this one on Via Brocherel. With Ahmed and his son, Hilmi. Hilmi was already eighteen and he didn’t know a word of Arabic. Irina had done her best to show him love, but Hilmi didn’t give a damn about her. “You’re not my mother! Mind your own fucking business!” he’d shout at her. And Irina would take it in silence. She’d think of that boy’s mother. The woman had gone back to Egypt, to Alexandria, where she was working in a shop run by relatives; she had never wanted to hear from her son or her husband again, as long as she lived. The name Hilmi meant calm and tranquility. Irina smiled at the thought: never had anyone been given a less appropriate name. Hilmi seemed like a flashlight that never turned off. He went out all the time, he didn’t even come home to sleep, he was a disaster at school, and at home he bit the hand that fed him.
“You miserable loser!” he would say to his father. “You’ll never get me to go sell fruit from a stall like you! I’d rather have sex with old men!”
“Oh really? So what are you going to do instead?” Ahmed would shout back. “Get the Nobel Prize?” It was a sarcastic reminder to his son of how catastrophically bad his grades were. “You’ll just be unemployed and homeless, that’s what you’ll be. And that’s not much of a future, you know that?”
“Better than selling apples out on the street or cleaning other people’s apartments like this scrubwoman you’ve taken in,” and he’d point at Irina in distaste. “I’ll make plenty of money and I’ll come visit you the day they put you in a hospital bed! But don’t you worry. I’ll pay for a nice big coffin to bury you in.”
Usually those arguments between Ahmed and Hilmi ended with the father taking a swing at his son and his son slamming the door as he stormed out of the apartment, extending further the crack in the plaster wall. By now it reached practically up to the ceiling. Irina felt certain that the next time they had a fight, both wall and ceiling would collapse, worse than what happened during the Vilnius earthquake of 2004.
The elevator doors swung open and Irina turned left immediately, toward Apartment 11R.
The lock opened after just one turn of the key. Strange, very strange, thought Irina. All the other times, she had to turn the key three full turns. She went to the Baudos’ three times a week and never once in the past year had she ever found either of them at home. At ten in the morning, the husband had long ago left for work, though on Fridays he actually left home at dawn to go ride his bike. The signora, on the other hand, only came in after doing her grocery shopping at eleven: Irina could have set her watch by it. Perhaps Signora Esther had caught the intestinal flu that was felling victims in Aosta worse than a plague epidemic in the Dark Ages. Irina walked into the apartment, bringing a gust of snowy cold air with her. “Signora Esther, it’s me, Irina! It’s nice and cold out … are you home, Signora?” she called as she put her keys away in her purse. “Didn’t you go grocery shopping?” Her hoarse voice, a result of the twenty-two cigarettes she smoked every day, echoed off the smoked glass of the front door.
“Signora?”
She slid the pocket door to one side and walked into the living room.
The place was a mess. On the low table in front of the TV sat a tray with the remains of dinner still on it. Chicken bones, a squeezed lemon, and greenish scraps. Spinach, maybe. Crumpled up on the sofa was an emerald-green blanket and in the ashtray were a dozen cigarette butts. Irina decided that the signora was most likely in her bedroom with a fever, and that last night her husband, Patrizio, had eaten dinner alone and watched the soccer game. Otherwise there would have been two trays, his and Signora Esther’s.
