Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So_ A Memoir - Mark Vonnegut [60]
Barb took Bogden to the T that night and came back telling me that he was an engineer but that there wasn’t much work for engineers in Poland. He was not married but had a girlfriend. I could have worked with him all day every day for months and not figured out that stuff.
“He said that in Poland everybody knows bricks. And then he said, ‘Shouldn’t it be “In Poland everybody knows about bricks”?’ ”
Since I took up carpentry I measure children much more carefully, sometimes to 1/32 of an inch.
I have a thing about Russia and Russians. In a past life I was beaten and left to die by the Cossacks or Stalin’s goons. My hovel has been burned. I have no idea where my family is. Three of my children died from diphtheria the spring before. The birches have new leaves. It is snowing. I cry tears of joy.
Nikolai is a good man with a good heart and was very much trying to do something nice for us by taking Barb and me and our son out on one of his charter boats. He knew that I loved boats and didn’t have one and loved to fish but didn’t get to go fishing often. He appreciated that I was honest and available and worked hard at being a good doctor to his kids. I didn’t give him a hard time about not wanting to immunize his children. I believe very much in immunization but don’t see it as a deal breaker. The less arguing I do about it, the more likely the kids will end up immunized.
“The children of irrational parents need good doctors too, Nikolai,” I said. He liked that.
After catching some cod, two bluefish, and an undersized striped bass that we threw back, Nickolai wanted to dive for some lobsters before calling it a day. We anchored a hundred yards off of a beautiful little island that’s been proposed as a liquefied natural gas terminal and watched Nikolai’s bubbles. He was down there a half hour and came up out of breath with three mesh bags full of lobsters.
Understanding favors in a second language isn’t always easy.
I’m sure he would have preferred that they were bigger. There were twenty-three very small lobsters. The biggest one was maybe six inches long. They were basically big crawfish. He wouldn’t have had to stay under so long if they’d been bigger. I was encouraged when he checked the undersides for eggs and threw one back.
We had talked earlier about declining fish stocks, and he had said, “Fishermen cannot catch so many fish to deplete. If are not enough fish, is chemicals and pollution from too many people.” I agreed.
Nikolai grew up in Siberia the son of some of the “fewer but better Russians” Stalin talked about when asked if he felt bad about the purges. He had big hands and was muscular but small and thin in a way that spoke of caloric deprivation either of his mother during her pregnancy or of him early in his infancy, maybe both. He was about five feet four inches tall. You could pour all the calories you liked into Nikolai, and they would never stick. Born in a different place and time, he would have been well over six feet tall. If they keep growing at their current percentiles, his son will tower over him and his daughter will be roughly his height.
Fishing charters was only one of the things Nikolai was up to. He was a mechanic and engineer working on a better way to start bio-diesel engines. It made sense to me. I’ve never known a Russian who was up to just one thing.
I asked a little nervously about measuring the lobsters.
“Are better this way. Only measure these lobsters need is on the fork in your mouth.”
Someone who had grown up starving in Siberia could be forgiven a different attitude toward what you should and shouldn’t eat, but I’d been arrested before for taking quahogs that were allegedly too small and knew how humorless