The Cosmopolitans Read Online Free PDF Page B

the other girls. Quietly, he said, “How you can do that, when you weren’t even born —”
    Katya sat on the stairs with a thud, muttering. It was a strange way to end a joke. After a minute, she got up again, walking more slowly. “Okay, I’m going to play you, like, their most mainstream song, because if you don’t get it, you definitely won’t get anything else by them.” She put the tape in and a man spoke quietly over music, about love, and even though Osip couldn’t quite make out what the man was saying, he had a reasonable tone.
    “Very good,” Osip said, nodding at Katya.
    “Really? You’re not just saying that to seem young or whatever? Sorry.” She looked down and broke off another piece of wafer cake.
    “What are words?”
    “Okay.” Katya re-started the song and said the lyrics along with the man. They were about routines, and ambitions, both of which topics, come to think of it, were lyrically under-represented, even in the oeuvres of the bards. “Very interesting,” Osip said during the chorus. It was generous of her, quietly reciting this for him, in her voice that so often sounded as if it were being forced out of a can.
    “So maybe we go to a concert of Joy? For your birthday?”
    “Uh, the lead singer killed himself in like 1980.”
    “But, Katyenok, you were not even born in 1980,” was the first thing he thought to say. Why would his daughter be listening to suicide music? He scooped up some cake crumbs with his fingers. “ Even Galich didn’t kill himself, and you know how he suffered .”
    “So?”
    “ Music should be ” — he searched for an English word to make her understand — “ motivational.” It was the wrong word, he knew as soon as he’d said it, a word from work.
    “Now you sound like fu — like Yana, how she’s always pretending to love Joan Jett. You want me to pretend?”
    He didn’t know where to start explaining and put on his joke voice again. “Just because you and sisters don’t like same music, doesn’t mean you can’t be friends.”
    “I have friends,” she said, scraping the cake knife along the edge of the plate.
    He took the knife from her hand and cut himself a giant slice. “ Friends are not — you don’t want to be like Uncle Lev. You want to have a family. ”
    She leaned back, away from him. Russian made her defensive; he shouldn’t have used it. “That’s what you guys are always scaring us with.” The next song came on, someone screaming, in a nasal voice, some garbled, unintelligible phrase.
    He said, “You want to just live by self? Sit in room and listen to death metal?” The chocolate tasted of gasoline.
    “Oh my God, it’s not death metal.”
    “It is. It has death, and metal. Death plus metal by simple equation is death metal.” His voice had gotten high.
    Katya leaned forward, making one last attempt at explaining the hipness of her music. “He doesn’t sing about death. If you just listen —”
    He couldn’t agree to this death-worship. “A little too much I am listen for tonight.”
    “Whatever.” She turned off the CD player and stood.
    “Are you meaning it?” he said.
    “What?”
    In a falsetto: “I don’t need my family, I don’t need anyone, I —” He broke off and stuffed another wafer into his mouth.
    She sighed and shifted between her large, pink-slippered feet. “I’m always saying something spastic.”
    He wanted to end on a funny note, so he held his hand out for her to shake. Her hand was warm and damp, like something just born. Who could know what she was thinking? After she went upstairs, he wrapped the cake in cellophane and wandered back to bed. He had a few more years with her, at least.
     
     
     
     
    Stalina
     
     
    “ If you were in Russia… ” Stalina’s Russian Soul, that blowsy whore, kept whispering, its moist nalivka breath coagulating on Stalina’s ear and keeping her from sleep.
    Stalina hadn’t believed in souls, Russian or otherwise, until she was on the