The Cosmopolitans Read Online Free PDF

restrictive skirts: lifeless statues, not equal partners. In idealizing their love objects, troubadours murdered them, basically.”
    Yana began to pace again. Katya wasn’t back yet. How could their parents possibly believe she was still at the library at ten on a Sunday night? If the last few evenings were any indication, Katya would return at two, tumbling out of a car that barely stopped. She might be laughing, for a few seconds at least, slipping across the icy lawn, before making her way inside. Yana told herself again that it was all right to tell their parents about Katya’s lies, promised herself to tell them tomorrow, knew she wouldn’t.
     
     
     
     
    Osip
     
     
     
    Osip awoke from dreams of frying potatoes with the great bard Galich. Stalina was hunched up with her rear in the air, mumbling something. Sometimes, she mumbled in her sleep; sometimes, she argued and bargained; sometimes, she screamed, “ Get off him, ” “ Not yet. ” Osip turned her onto her side and stroked her shoulder. It had to be her shoulder, not her arm, and only in one direction. “ Nu, all right ,” she muttered, and quieted.
    He put on the tennis-racket bathrobe Stalina had bought for his last birthday and plodded to the kitchen, from which emitted some kind of music. Katya sat there, looking transfixed. (High? Had it finally happened?) “Katyenok,” he said. She jumped, and then slouched herself back into boredom.
    “Hey.” Katya was still wearing her daytime clothes, and eating the top layer of the Polish chocolate wafer cake the Chaikins had brought over. The chocolate had been poured into curlicues and heraldic symbols, like you were being knighted for eating it. He reached for a piece, but the rackets stretching around his stomach made him pull his hand back.
    “ I had such strange dreams, ” he said, stretching and smiling. He wanted things to be cozy between them, but they hadn’t been for a long time. “About Galich. No one understands my Galich,” he said in his joke voice. She looked interested, for once. “Should I play you some?” he said. She shrugged, but paused her music.
    Osip rummaged through the cassettes Stalina had tried, more than once, to throw out, and had finally relegated to a giant ceramic pig.
    He turned the tape on and they waited, but instead of Galich’s baritone, out came the reedy, hysterical voice of Osip’s brother Lev, speaking in his odd British and Russian-accented English about discriminatory university admissions in the USSR. “But vee, the Soviet Jewry, will not suckle at breast of oppressor…”
    Katya smirked. Osip began to render his usual apologia: Lev had spent ten years in the Perm labor camp for saying those things she found so amusing, she should have seen him when they’d first immigrated, President Reagan himself… “We wouldn’t even have house without Uncle Lev.” Katya rested her head on her folded arms.
    He replaced the cassette, and Galich began one of his untitled poems. Osip explained that the hundred-headed monster represented the Soviet government. “In Russia, only very hip people know what Galich is really saying.”
    “Most people are so retarded,” Katya said in a rush. “Like, I like this band, Joy Division? But no one’s even heard of them. Just because they’re old, doesn’t mean they’re not good. Like that kid Roman today? He thinks the shit — sorry — on MTV is music.”
    Osip liked the sound of this old Joy band. It had to be better than those Sex Pistols on her tee shirt. “Maybe you play them for me?”
    “Okay,” Katya said, tapped the cake knife on the table through the rest of Galich’s song, and then shot upstairs. “You can download them, but I don’t think that’s fair,” she said, a little too loudly, on her way back down. She imitated Brezhnev, which she always did when she was in a good mood. “ Exports from our petrochemical factories —”
    Osip laughed, but worried that she might have woken Stalina or