Libra - Don Delillo [104]
“Mother, you are not going to write a book.”
“It is my life as I was forced to live it because of not knowing if you were alive or dead. I can write what’s mine, Lee.”
“She has relatives there that would be jeopardized.”
“Jeopardized. But you have given a public stenographer ten dollars to type pages for your own book.”
“That is a different book.”
“It is Russia and the evils of that system.”
“It is a different book. ‘The Kollective.’ It deals with living conditions and working conditions. I will change people’s names to protect them. Don’t think we don’t appreciate that you have bought clothes for the baby and that you’re cooking and feeding us, so forth.”
“It was the ten dollars I gave you that you gave that woman for the typing.”
“It is a book of observations, Mother. I owe money to the State Department for getting me home. Robert paid our airfare from New York. I am only looking for ways to pay back my debts.”
“I have a right to my book,” she said. “The President was not available at that time but I spoke to figures in the government during a snowstorm who made promises that they would look into the matter. ”
“It is only an article, not a book. I am having notes typed for an article. It is so many pages.”
“How many pages did she type?”
“Ten pages. That’s all I had money for.”
“A dollar a page I call a rooking.”
“I smuggled those notes next to my skin right out of Russia.”
“Marina watched a daytime movie with Gregory Peck with me sitting right here and she knew Gregory Peck.”
“So what, he is well known everywhere.”
“We have to use the dictionary to talk.”
“Little by little she’ll get the hang.”
“I think she knows more than she’s letting on,” his mother said.
He found a job as a sheet-metal worker, drudge and grime and long hours and low pay. They left his mother’s and moved to their own place, one-half of a matchstick bungalow, furnished, across the street from a truck lot and loading docks. This was the shipping and receiving entrance of a huge Montgomery Ward operation. Marina went to the retail store. She walked the aisles. She told Lee about the cool smooth musical interior.
All the homes on their street were bungalows. Everybody called it Mercedes Street. The lease for the apartment said Mercedes Street. Lee’s map of Fort Worth said Mercedes Street. But the sign on a pole at the comer said Mercedes Avenue.
He sat on the concrete steps out front, next to a baby yucca, reading Russian magazines.
His mother came with a high chair. She came with dishes. Lee told her he didn’t want anyone’s charity. She came with a parakeet in a cage. It was the same bird in the same cage he had given her in New Orleans when he worked as a messenger.
It is the shadow of his prior life that keeps appearing.
“No more,” he told Marina. “You keep the door closed.”
“How can I do that to your mother? She is kind to us.”
“Keep the door closed. Or she’ll move in on us. Absolutely keep her out. She comes with a camera to take pictures of our baby.”
“She is the grandmother.”
“It is the first phase to moving in.”
“It is a picture, Alek.”
“This is how she insinuates. This is conniving her way into our house.”
“You don’t want her coming around but at the same time you try to take advantage of her at every chance.”
“That’s what mothers are for.”
“This is a cruel thing.”
“I’m only kidding and don’t call me Alek anymore. This is not Alek country. June is not Junka. People will think you don’t know your own family by their right names.”
“It doesn’t sound like kidding when you raise your voice to her.”
“You have to learn American kidding. It’s how we talk to each other.”
“All your life she worked very hard.”
“She told you with the dictionary. You and Mamochka.”
“I know this. It’s very obvious to me.”
“Very obvious is only half the story.”
“What’s the other half?”
He hit her in the face. An open-hand smash that sent her walking backwards to the stove. She stood there with her head tucked against her left shoulder, one hand raised in blank surprise.
A man spoke to him from the other side of the