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He’d told her that he’d pick her up, but she didn’t quite believe it until she saw him standing there, tanned and tall and looking, for once, entirely congruous in an Adidas tank and slides with socks. The bizarre design of the airport meant he was able to watch through the glass while she stood awkwardly by the baggage carousel. It was uniquely intimate to be able to see each other, but unable to converse.
Their relationship was both well-defined and beyond definition. She worked for him. He had hired her, there was a contract in the Rozanov folder of her inbox, saved to her external hard drive, and printed and filed in her study (Yuna had lived long enough to despair over more than one bricked computer or corrupted floppy disk). Their relationship was one of goods provided and services rendered, of putting a price tag on both of their time.
They were both more than that and less than that. Cautiously amicable. Pleasantly antagonistic. So much in common and, also, hardly anything in common at all.
And now it coalesced into a fraction of a moment. They greeted each other in business meetings and at coffee shops with a handshake. But this was not, strictly, business. This was being picked up at a foreign airport twenty-one hours before a business meeting. Was it a handshake moment? A half-hug? A when-in-Europe cheek kiss?
Rozanov decided for her, a barely-there arm around the shoulders while he simultaneously nabbed the suitcase handle from her grasp. “You made it! Now we get out of this hellhole.”
Yuna had some expectations of Berlin: grubby in a sort of punk-chic way that she wasn’t too old to anticipate feeling appreciative of, historically interesting, perhaps nostalgically familiar to a woman who could remember where she was when she learned the wall had been breached. At present, it lived up to none of these ideals.
“This airport reminds me of what McDonalds looked like in the ‘70s,” she said, looking at the dated white and yellow plastic as Rozanov marched them towards the automatic doors.
“Yes, but worse smelling. And less clean. They are making a new one. I will tell you a secret about Berlin: if you wish to make someone shut up about how much more wonderful Germany is than America — or Canada — you just ask them when the new airport is opening.”
“Wha— oh God. I thought you were kidding.”
“I do not kid,” Rozanov said sternly, but he couldn’t pull it off, like a kid who was trying their best to fib convincingly. He popped the front trunk of the silver Cabriolet parked right outside their exit and nestled her bag inside.
“What would you have done if I’d brought a larger suitcase?”
“Ridiculous question. I know Yuna Hollander is very efficient, she would not overpack.”
Yuna Hollander would also rent a car with larger stowage space, she thought, but didn’t say, watching the bag only just fit. “Germany has speed limits, right?”
He laughed. He’d only done so perhaps ten times since she’d begun to meet with him, when he’d first laid out his marketing vision, and each time she thought it was such a pity he performed a role as the gruff and threatening assassin on ice. It was a lovely thing, to see his face turn boyish. “No Autobahn between here and hotel, I promise. It will be boring drive.”
It was the traffic that kept him to his promise, piled heavy enough once they reached the city proper that they barely made it to third gear. The cyclists outstripped them. With the top down, Yuna inhaled the air, tasting hot asphalt and cigarette smoke and a faint tang of sewage, while Rozanov asked the perfunctory questions about the flight, the stopover in Paris, whether she’d slept, whether she watched new movies or old favorites while flying. She was no longer surprised that he had manners and knew how to use them.
“This is where the wall was,” Rozanov said, flapping a hand towards a long thin stretch of park. Blithely, as if it hadn’t been the symbolic beginning and end of an entire generation. “There is another section near the hotel.”
Yuna twisted in her seat to stare at the distinct lack of wall. “Are we crossing into the east, or the west?”
“We are in west, crossing into east,” Rozanov said confidently.
She tried to imagine what it was like, when there was ten feet of concrete there, topped with barbed wire. Men in dun uniforms, hol—
“No. Wait. East, crossing into west. Yes? Yes. What? I am tourist, not tour guide,” he defended, at her look.
As far as Yuna could tell, there was only one drawback to flying Business Class across the Atlantic. In earlier days, before anyone in their family signed contracts for millions of dollars, when it wasn’t even a question that Economy was the only fare, she would emerge on a different continent feeling battered and bruised and exhausted, untethered from concepts like “time” and “place” by virtue of the ordeal she’d just suffered. Without the battle scars of cramming her body into seventeen inches of seat for nine hours, without the dulling effect of zero sleep, the surreal foreignness of arriving in a different place was twenty times as shocking.
They drove past bicycles with wagons attached to the front wheels, hauling young children chattering away. They drove over a bridge that spanned a dozen train tracks, and Yuna had done enough pre-travel research to know it wasn’t even the main train station. They drove down a cobblestone road and through more roundabouts than Yuna thought existed in the entirety of Ottawa. They drove past signs for stores and brands she had never ever heard of.
“When did you arrive?”
“In Germany? Ah, four weeks, I think?”
Which would put him at just under two weeks in Russia, she calculated. At most. “I’m sorry about your brother. Th—”
“It is nothing,” he cut over her. Brusque, but light. “I have friends here, I would prefer to see them, anyway.”
She wondered if it would be helpful to tell him that she also had family she didn’t talk to. That she’d run away from, and hadn’t looked back. “Friends from Russia?” she asked instead. “Or America?”
“From Russia. My good friend, Evgenia. We used to party together, before move to Boston.”
“That’s nice.” She felt like all her social skills were still at YOW. She wondered if ‘party together’ meant ‘sleep together.’ She wondered if she was interrupting some sort of summer romance. She was supremely, overwhelmingly grateful that her days of summer romances and heartbreaks and wondering if ‘wanna party’ meant ‘wanna fuck’ were thirty — God, more like forty, now — years behind her, even if spending time with Rozanov meant she felt about ninety years old.
“Yes. She called me, in Moscow, and listened to me complain, and told me to shut up and come to Berlin already. Good choice, no?”
“Good choice,” she agreed, even as she closed her eyes and gripped the seat as Rozanov accelerated through a yellow light.
He turned to her when he decided to obey the road rules and stop at the next red. “You remember the first hotel you try to book?”
She remembered his flat, take-no-prisoners, refusal to allow her to make a reservation, and nodded.
“It is just there,” he pointed across the intersection. Opposite, a wide section of pavement formed a sort of miniature plaza, covered in yelling teenagers with dyed hair and men holding pitbulls on short leashes and the wide dead eyes of people who looked like they were coming down from a week’s worth of cocaine and clubbing and a handful of tents and trolleys loaded with soiled mattresses and other belongings.
“Oh.”
“Yes, ‘oh,’” he emphasized. “I told you you would not like it.”
“It’s close to the Porsche offices,” she huffed.
“It is two meetings, Yuna.” Even though the light turned green, he took the time to roll his eyes at her. “We have five days in Berlin to spend together, it is more efficient to be closer to me.”
“You know you don’t need to babysit me, right? You can still hang out with Evgenia —”
“Ef-geh-nee-ya,” he corrected.
“— Evgenia, or do your training, or … I don’t know, whatever it is that you do.” Fuck, drink, smoke, her brain supplied. But reading the English books she recommended to him was in there too. He was a bit of a Magic Eye puzzle, tricky to see as a cohesive whole.
“Pah. I have — ah, see? That is more wall.”
Something in her neck cracked as she spun her head to look behind them, while he accelerated onto the bridge. “Rozanov, is that a pirate ship?”
“I mean, not a real one? Anyway, I have spent four weeks in this city, I have been looking forward to new face. Time with best Hollander.”
This is what had thrown her so thoroughly off when she’d first begun talking to him. The helix of sincerity and sarcasm that threaded through his deprecating charm.
“Besides, I cannot trust you to survive on your own. First, you want to stay on Revaler Straße, then you wish to book hotel next to Görlitzer Park.”
“You still haven’t told me why that’s such a bad idea.”
“It is not so bad, really,” he shrugged. “If you enjoy drug dealers selling terrible weed.”
“Ah.”
He glanced over, all innocent eyed. “Have I made assumption? Maybe you do enjoy terrible weed?”
She had spent so long preparing Shane to be in the public eye: don’t slouch, be polite, never lose your cool, don’t overshare, assume everyone’s recording you; but she had never needed to be media-trained herself. No, that was just baseline of expectations for the daughter of immigrants. The only permitted way to react to being called Ching-Chong was to stand up straighter and study harder and don’t you dare start crying.
But here she was, the model minority, zipping through Berlin in a silver Porsche with the top down, driven by a charming Russian boy whom she was supposed to hate, but instead had signed to YSL. So she said: “Not since we had Shane.”
“Yuna!”
“I was young once!”
“You are still young. I knew you were my favorite Hollander. I will corrupt you this week, that is my mission.”
“We Hollanders are incorruptible.” She tried to project poise, regality, even as he took a corner twice as fast as she would have, and white-knuckled to keep her balance.
He laughed more than she thought was warranted, his smile stretched to breaking point. It sounded like popcorn cooking as the cobblestoned road pitched his chuckling. “Yuna. Please. It was not so long ago you were telling me to never contact you again.”
“Perhaps I’ll corrupt you. Get you drunk and finally learn how you got my number.”
Even though they were careening down a narrow road, hemmed in on both sides by parked cars, with cyclists and pedestrians in front and behind them, he took one hand off the wheel and offered it to her. “Shake on it. I would like to see you try.”
Yuna’s Google Maps app had eighteen restaurants saved in it, ones she had found searching 'best casual restaurants Berlin,’ and then, once she remembered she wouldn’t have a car, ‘best casual restaurants Kreuzberg.’ Eighteen might have seemed like overkill for four days, particularly considering Rozanov had booked her a serviced studio apartment, complete with kitchen, in the same Aparthotel (another thing she’d had to Google) as he was staying in. Jet lagged, vaguely delirious, ravenous Yuna did not deem it overkill. Her blessed preparations showed her there was an Indian restaurant down the block.
There was a text from Rozanov waiting when she exited the shower.
He was knocking on the door before she had finished putting makeup on. “Do you like pizza?”
“Wh— I — Yes. But I w—”
“Perfect. I will drive us.”
“You really don’t need to babysit me.”
“Stop saying this.”
“Alright, just … give me a second,” she gestured him in. “There’s an Indian place on the corner.”
“Yes. It is not good.”
“It’s got good reviews!” she called, buffing out the last of her concealer. “You can sit.”
He moved in, very precisely, from where he was stock-still by the door, and perched carefully on a pouffe. “I will break your heart now. All Asian food in Berlin is terrible.”
“Surely n—”
“All. I am serious. Good reviews means locals think it is good, but they have never had proper good Asian food. Five stars in Berlin is like two stars in Boston.”
Yuna kept her mouth shut, shoving euro notes and her phone and keycard into a handbag. A Loulou, of course.
But nonetheless, he was able to read her disbelief. “It is true. All curries taste like ketchup. We will try, if you do not believe me …”
“No, I believe you.” She didn’t, but he’d said pizza, and now she wanted the goddamn pizza. She could try the Indian place when he was occupied with something else. “Let’s go.”
It was the kind of place that was impossible to imagine anywhere outside of Europe. A footprint the size of the smallest corner store you’d ever seen, then cut in half. Eight chairs Tetris-ed inside, tables outside on the sidewalk under the awnings, nestled into the ground floor of an apartment building of a tiny suburban intersection. Oak trees shaded the sky, and across the street, parents supervised toddlers on balance bikes, tottering around a playground smaller than a standard backyard.
“Is it supposed to be fizzy?” she asked, when Rozanov returned from the register bearing two glasses, cutlery wrapped in paper napkins, and a carafe of queerly bubbling white wine.
“Weißweinschorle,” he said. “I think, uh, spritzer, in English? Is common here, in summer.”
“Right. Thank you. Ah, cheers?”
“Prost.”
“Santé.”
“Za zdoróvye!”
“Kanpai!”
“Now you are showing off,” he groaned, and she finally took a sip. It wasn’t good wine, that was for certain. But it was cold and crisp and tangy with carbon dioxide, and it felt entirely like the right thing to be drinking on vacation.
Not vacation, she reminded herself. A business trip.
“So tomorrow,” she started, ignoring the look he gave her, “we need to be there at one. I imagine it’ll take most of the afternoon.”
“I will cancel my plans. The plans I made even though you have told me forty times that we have afternoon meeting tomorrow.”
His affect was as far from Shane as she could conceive of, bluster and petulance masking — she had seen hints of — something soft and caring, instead of diligence and rigidity masking something rude and sarcastic (Shane thought she didn’t see him roll his eyes when she reminded him of his schedule. She did, she just chose not to mention it). But at their cores, they were both just boys. Still nudging boundaries, still pushing back on restraints.
Like she would with Shane, she chose to ignore that.
“They’ll already have done their own research into brand synergy —”
“What is ‘synergy?’”
“Ah, if they think their brand values match up well with your personal brand. How people perceive Ilya Rozanov.”
“Fast, sexy, the best,” he ticked off on his fingers. “Like Porsche. Easy.”
“So tomorrow will be about the thematic through line o—”
“What is ‘thematic through line?’”
“Like, the narrative. The story.”
Rozanov kneaded his forehead and muttered something in Russian. She didn’t need a translation to understand it was not complimentary to the marketing profession. Nor, perhaps, to the English language.
“So tomorrow,” she forged on, “they’ll probably present a number of concepts, and we’ll discuss which th— story works best for both you and them.”
“I have never done this with other brands.”
“Well, normally I do it for you. But since it’s summer, and you’re in Europe …”
“Yes, you have decided to make me sit in boring office instead of driving fast cars. I remember.”
Yuna continued, describing the lifecycle from initial contact to vetting to strategy to deliverables to contracts to creative briefs to shoots to post, watching Rozanov valiantly attempt to keep nodding as if he followed or cared. She wasn’t quite sure why, but she felt a need to prove her worth to him, to lift the lid of the black box she operated in, and demonstrate how she wound the cogs and pulled the levers.
“Slava Bogu,” he groaned, when the pizzas came. “No more business talk now, please.”
“It’s a business trip,” she defended, although she was going to shut up anyway, to concentrate on restraining herself from stuffing food into her mouth like a twelve year old boy.
“It is evening. No more business.” He attacked his own pizza with gusto. The scent of wood-fired crust and arugula and tomato sauce had Yuna so hungry she almost felt sick. “Tell me, how is your family?”
“They’re … good?”
“They have better offer than joining Mrs Hollander in Europe?”
“David’s working.”
“Yes, boring accountant job is much better than joining his wife for exciting Europe vacation.”
“It’s a business trip. And he’s not an accountant.”
Rozanov grinned. This repartee was a joke of his by now. “Yes, you have told me many times. Mr Hollander is doing strategic resource planning for government operations. It is not my fault Canadian government is naming his department like they are all accountants. And baby Hollander? What is his excuse?”
“Apart from pre-season training, shoots in New York, and shoots in Toronto?” She took a bite and pretended to ponder. “I imagine he doesn’t want to be photographed with you.”
“Hmm,” he smiled. It was supposed to be a chirp, but it felt mean once it left her mouth. “It is because I am sexier than him. He is scared I will steal all his fans.”
Yuna rolled her eyes. “Shut up, Rozanov.”
“Hah! You sound just like him. Now I see where he gets it from.”
Rozanov brought them a second carafe of wine, and she only demurred once, and he encouraged her to share every tourist attraction she had earmarked as worthy of her attention, time permitting, while he simultaneously derided them and admitted he’d never been.
“I have an idea,” he declared, once the wine was all gone. “We can go see wall now. Not as if it closes.”
“Oh, I’d love to! Hang on, I’ll just pay.”
“You offend me. You offend my country, you offend my mother who raised me. You think I would let you pay?”
“It’s a business dinner, Rozanov. I’m paying.”
“It is too late. I have already paid. Now we leave, yes?”
She had to race to keep up with him, double time steps for each of his strides. “At least let me pay you back for my half. And did you get a receipt? It’s a tax write-off, you know.”
“Yablochko ot yabloni nedaleko padayet,” he grumbled, even as he opened the passenger door for her. “Please, make a guess how much this dinner cost.”
“A—”
“Twenty-five euros. My accountant charges me more than that just to write up deduction. So, no. No receipt. And none of this ‘paying back’ bullshit. Keep your twelve euro fifty, and buy fridge magnets instead.”
She bickered with him, not for the first time, as he drove them back to the East Side Gallery, about hiring a better financial advisor, and secretly plotted to buy every fridge magnet she saw this week, and ship them to him for Christmas.
Not only that, he bought her coffee, shoving it into her hand as soon she opened the door, and proceeding to strew two obscenely large bags of pastries across the tiny dining table.
“I can’t eat all this,” Yuna objected.
“That is good, because I will eat all this. I went for long run, need the carbs. Sorry for the smell.”
It, honestly, hardly even registered, not after decades of daily kit laundering. “Water?”
“Bitte. Now I have seen you eat pizza, and muffin, and, today, pretzel. So Hollander does not get his weird diet from his maman?”
“How do you know about that?”
“I may be bad at English, but I can read GQ, you know.”
“You're not bad at English. You’re fluent.”
“Eh,” he shrugged. “I am better. But I have a strong accent, still.”
She didn’t know which line to take when he got like this. Empathetic? Joking? Mocking? Supportive? It was much easier when he played the braggadocio, when she could needle him back. Perhaps that’s why he did it in the first place, so people would know how to treat him. And so he would know how he was seen.
“It’s an accent, so what? I asked for directions at Charles de Gaulle, and the Frenchman I spoke to looked like I’d spit on his mother’s face when he heard my accent.”
“What? Because you are from Montreal?”
“Exactly.”
He put his cheesy roll down on the paper bag, and wiped smudges of grease from his hand with a napkin. “When we go to France, you will tell me who is being rude to you, and I will make them regret it.”
Those words, in that accent, with his very serious frown: it wasn’t her fault the Russians were the default villain in every movie for fifty years. She burst out laughing.
“Yunaaaaa,” he whined, which definitely ruined the impression. “I am serious!”
“What will you do? Punch them?”
“No. I will make them think I will punch them.”
“They’re your sponsor, Rozanov. You can’t threaten them.”
“I can,” he grumbled, arms folded and pouting. Sometimes his expressions reminded her so much of Shane. Perhaps they could be friends one day. She’d been trying to soften the ground: Rozanov was politely interested, perhaps only in deference to the sanctity of a mother-son bond, but Shane was downright dismissive, hackles raised if she so much as mentioned anything they had in common.
“You can’t.”
He waved his hand at her, a visible offloading of responsibility. “You are the expert. Next time we sign contract, make sure it lets me threaten their employees if they are rude to you.”
“Not if they’re rude to you?”
“Pfft. Where is the sport in that? I like to tease, to joke, you know this. It is ruined if people are contractually obliged to like me.”
“So where does that leave me?” she asked, fighting a hundred spasms to keep her mouth from smiling.
“I know for fact you are not obligated to like me. You would never sign that contract. Besides — can I?” — she handed him the pan au chocolat — “Besides, you are the perfect example. You remember what you told me two years ago? ‘Never contact me again.’”
“How far we’ve come.”
“Yes, you see. That’s where all the fun is.” He smirked at her, a fake tooth poking through, all blustering machismo. Then sank his teeth into the pastry and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand, boyish and juvenile, and she was no closer at all to figuring out the mystery of the real Rozanov.
It had become a joke in their house. Yuna would be trying to puzzle it out, and needed to say it out loud to put the thoughts in the air and tease at them and rearrange them and do all kinds of combinatorics to glue them into homogeneity. She would open her mouth and say: “The thing about Rozanov is —” and David would sigh, theatrical, but indulgent and good-natured, and sink onto the nearest soft surface, and nod whenever he was supposed to.
It was helpful to picture David there, patiently listening in the way that he did, just listening to hear her, not waiting for a chance to interject, while she tried to fit more data points into her model. When she got home from Europe, she would tell him:
The thing about Rozanov is: you would expect him to be the egotistical self-centred celebrity who assumes everyone’s days revolve around his whims, but when she told him she wanted to arrive at the Porsche offices at 12:45, he opened his Maps app and input the addresses and said: “Okay. Fifteen minute drive, so we will leave at 12:20, for safety, yes?” and when she opened her apartment door at 12:15, she almost gave him a concussion because he was already waiting for her, leaning against the door. Was he always like this? Or was he reading the undercurrent of Yuna’s neuroses? Or was this a particularly important meeting for him too? Because of Porsche? Or because of Yuna?
The thing about Rozanov is: he has a sort of bad-boy-Peter-Pan insouciance of the little shits you were paired with in Econ group assignments who never once pulled their weight and told you to take a chill pill, girl, but nevertheless were so fucking irritatingly talented that they coasted through life without ever having to try (there was a chance she may have been projecting at this point). But then he would shake each of the hands of the team who were presenting to them, and as they introduced themselves, he would confirm their job title, which meant he’d not only read, but committed to memory, the pre-workshop agenda documents, down to the detail of Helena, the summer intern, even though he himself was considered an ‘optional’ attendee.
The thing about Rozanov is: he can read a room like nobody’s business. Which is objectively ridiculous, navigating a four-hour meeting in his second language, stuffed full of jargon outside his field of expertise: evergreens, and statics, and straplines, and USP, and demographics, and OOH, and lead generation, and earned media, and buyer personas, and val prop, all conducted by people also speaking in their second language, and still he could surprise Yuna during his cigarette break, widening his eyes conspiratorially and murmuring: “Katrin does not like Tomáš, did you notice?” And she did, after they went back in, seeing now how Katrin flexed her jaw and recrossed her legs whenever Tomáš began speaking.
The thing about Rozanov is: he drinks and smokes and dances and has one-night-stands, and doesn’t appear to care who knows it, winking in paparazzi shots, posing in clubbers’ selfies, never once using his fortune to threaten a lawsuit, even for the most egregious claims (I took Special K with Ilya Rozanov in a Club Bathroom, Before Threesome with Spurs’ Point Guard, one trash mag headline had claimed. Despite the evident falsehoods: his drug testing record, the lack of corroborating witnesses, and the small matter that he’d been playing in a televised game in Edmonton on the night in question, his only comment was: “Why would I visit San Antonio?”). But when the Porsche team presented ideas based around his roguish sex appeal and penchant for playing hard both on and off the ice, he’d wrinkled his nose and said: “I would prefer a more sophisticated story than sexy woman wants sexy man who drives sexy car.”
The thing about Rozanov is: for all his cut-glass stares and barely contained sneers and stoic dispassion, he was unafraid to care, and care loudly. She knew that, to some extent, from the way he sang her virtues and shamelessly flattered and talked her up whenever she succeeded at negotiating some deal or contract, but it was different to see it happen to a third-party. Directed at herself, she could prick her ballooning ego and remind herself he was playing a part. But directed at Tomáš, when he pitched a concept Rozanov liked, who was for the remaining ninety minutes referred to as “my genius friend, Tomáš,” she could observe how genuine Rozanov was being, how sincerely he wanted Tomáš to understand that he had accomplished something that impressed Rozanov.
The thing about Rozanov is: he’ll brag to anyone at any opportunity about being the best, about being the fastest, about how intimidating and scary and fierce he is, but then he turned to Yuna after he parked outside their building and said: “It was okay, yes? I did not make things difficult for you?” which was ludicrous, because he’d been a perfect gentleman and indisputably insightful, and she had been wishing she’d wrangled him into attending all his marketing meetings, even though twelve months ago she’d threatened him that she’d walk away if he acted like an asshole with brand representatives.
The thing about Rozanov is: he’s hot shit and everyone wants a piece of him, there have been fundraising events where people were more than happy to pay thousands of dollars for the opportunity to spend a few minutes talking to him, she shudders to imagine the state of his DMs, he could probably call up any one of the dozens of models and actresses and pretty young things posting bikini pictures from Positano and Capri and invite himself to spend a weekend being slathered in tanning oil and drinking cocktails from a goldfish bowl, but instead he griped that Yuna said she didn’t need him for the deliverables negotiations on Friday, and moaned about how he’s so bored, and what will he do without her company, and she was more than a little reminded of an eleven-year-old Shane, in the interminable weeks between hockey seasons.
The thing about Rozanov is: he’s always so pleased to see her, even when he’d just spent four hours test-driving the Boxster Spyder down the Bundesautobahn 9 and back again while she spent a second day in the Porsche offices, bringing his hands together with a thunderclap that boomed through the foyer and crowing “Yuna!” when she exited the elevator, and it made her wonder about his family, which has always been a no-go zone for the two of them, so all she was left with were the fragments of knowledge that his brother has a problem with Rozanov, a notorious lothario, carrying a handbag even if it’s for the sake of fashion and marketing dollars; and that his mother is dead.
The thing about Rozanov is: they’ve finished the ‘business’ part of her trip to Berlin, no need to see each other again until they set out to Aÿ on Monday morning, but he’d taken her to a gorgeous, sleek restaurant in a moody basement serving modern Swedish cuisine to celebrate on Friday night, asked how she wanted to spend her Saturday off, and now he was here, beside her, casually louche behind oversized sunglasses, milling with the hoards of Americans, Brits, French, Dutch, Polish, Spanish, and Chinese, all in their overtly practical tourist-gear, clutching their phones and handbags close whenever groups of Roma walked by, standing before the might of the Brandenburg Gate.
“How old do you think it is?”
“The gate? I do not know. Hmm, maybe, twenty years?”
She whacked him on the bicep. “Be serious.”
He grumbled, rubbing at his arm like she’d clocked him with a baseball bat. “I do not know! Twenty years, four hundred years? This is why I come on tour with you, no?”
“You’d better pay attention.”
“Why, will there be a test? Do I get a special prize?”
“Yes,” she said, thinking of how he’d begged her for pictures last night when she told him about the time in U9s when Shane had lost four milk teeth in a single game.
“Sehr gut. Here, I want bonus point for the one thing I know about this boring square.” He pointed over her shoulder at a building behind them. “You see this hotel? It is where Michael Jackson dangled his baby over the balcony.”
“Oh my god, it is!” It came flooding back to her, now he’d prompted it, the colour of the stone and the metalwork of the balcony railing, and the heart-wrenching slippery grip under the baby’s arms.
“Bonus point?”
“Bonus point,” she agreed. “How do you know about that, and not museum island?”
“‘Museum island,’ Yuna, who are you thinking you are talking to? I am not boring baby Hollander.”
Their guide started yelling before she had to decide whether she should defend Shane, or share that he was only ever interested in museums with some connection to sports history. “Welcome, everyone! My name is Christiaan, I’m a history student here at Humboldt-Universität, and I’ll be your guide today. A bit of house-keeping: we’ll be out for four to six hours today, so, please, drink lots of water and take it nice and slow in this heat.”
Yuna eyed their group, noting an obese family with matching money-belt sized lumps under their quick-dry no-crease polyester travelling shirts, and a couple in their late sixties or early seventies to keep a watch on. She caught Rozanov nodding reassuringly at Christiaan, despite the fact he was, by a huge margin, the fittest person here.
The gate, they learned, was completed in 1791. Rozanov gave her a weighted look, and she tried her best to put that number in long-term storage, to test him with later. Christiaan led them, like bumbling ducklings, to the Reichstag, and then to Tiergarten, where she asked Rozanov to take a picture of her with the Victory Column in the background, and then she took one of him, and then Liz from Dublin asked if they’d like a picture of the two of them together, which was how she ended up with thirty-seven photos on her phone of her and Rozanov posing together in front of Berlin landmarks by the end of the tour.
There were thirty-odd members of their group, at least nine of whom were American, but none of them seemed to recognize Rozanov, Boston Raiders captain and MVP and Stanley Cup winner (or were too polite to say so), although none among them were blind. He still looked like an off-duty model, and she felt oddly protective when Liz and Emma started chatting him up as they walked from Tiergarten to the Holocaust Memorial, though she wasn’t entirely sure if she was feeling protective of Rozanov or of the girls.
Mercifully, the girls were mature enough to recognize that the Holocaust Memorial was not an apt place for flirtation, and left him to walk, silent, solitary, down into the plinths, shadows and grey enclosing them all despite the summer sun.
Yuna felt a cavernous maw, calling out for her boys, desperate to touch their faces and hold them close, when she found her way out again. She wondered what Rozanov felt, if there was someone he longed to hug after all the oppressive grief that had towered over them.
“I did not think it would be so …”
“Yeah,” she agreed, as they walked away. “Me too.” His arm bumped hers, and she bumped it back. “You alright?”
“Fine.”
Christiaan stopped in front of an innocuous parking lot and reminded them all to stay hydrated, water bottles appearing obediently left right and centre. He explained, while they drank, that this had been the location of the Führerbunker, that it had been destroyed without concessions to historical preservation to avoid the potentiality of its becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis.
And, to top off that sobering thought, Phil-from-Illinois slapped his knee and said: “I knew I recognized you from somewhere. Aren’t you that guy in the Quiznos ad?”
Rozanov shook his head in a pantomime of confusion. “No, this is not me. What is Quizbros?”
Yuna snorted hard enough to inhale a mouthful of water, and he rapped her on the back while plausibly-deniable tears leaked out of her eyes.
They were all sweltering on the unshaded concrete when Christiaan stopped them in front of the Topography of Terror, and explained the history of the site. A couple from South Africa stopped to take selfies, and Yuna and Rozanov shared identical glances of bitchy judgement, which was enough to set her off guffawing again.
The backpackers from Australia dutifully reapplied sunscreen while their group awkwardly waited for what must have been over a hundred ludicrously cheerful selfies in front of what had once been the Gestapo and SS headquarters. Between the three of them, the girls had enough SPF to prevent melanomas for an entire army squadron of Irish troops assigned to a Saharan outpost, so Yuna gratefully accepted some when it was proffered.
They separated on the walk to Checkpoint Charlie, Yuna drawn into conversation with Maggie about her three month Eurotrip before she began a year-long exchange in Uppsala (“Oh, do you speak Swedish?” Yuna asked. “Nah!” Maggie replied, cheerfully. “Can’t be that hard, right?”). Somewhere in the realm of every two minutes, Rozanov shouted: “Bike lane!” from the back of the group, and their whole crew looked down to see who was the culprit and rearranged themselves, only for the entire process to be repeated ad nauseam.
As they plodded north from the Checkpoint, Rozanov caught up to her, bearing two inexplicably-procured ice cold bottles of beer. It tasted outrageously good. “Did she ask how we know each other?”
“I said we work together.”
“Ah,” he nodded, sagely. “That is a good idea. I maybe might have told Phil that you and I met playing Call of Duty online.”
“You didn't.”
He gave her a helpless shrug.
Rozanov, in fact, did say that, because Phil-from-Illinois peppered her with questions, surprisingly un-agist although quite sexist, about how she fell into online video gaming, all the way from Bebelplatz to the Berlin Cathedral. In retaliation, she let slip to Liz that Rozanov was a competitive musher, and smiled sweetly while she asked him all about life in Anchorage and the names of each of his sixteen dogs. It wasn’t until much later that Yuna noticed the middle finger he was giving her in their photograph of the two of them in front of the Pergamon Museum.
The thing about Rozanov is: she really does enjoy spending time with him, and if it weren’t for the thirty-three year age gap, and the business contract uniting them, and the whole Rozanov v. Hollander rigmarole, and the Boston of it all, she wouldn’t have hesitated to start calling him her friend many, many months ago.
Life can be funny like that. You can pull a prank on someone at 4pm, share a luxuriously long dinner with them at 9pm, curse the very existence of their name at midnight, then want to give them a hug and a mug of tea and invite them to come stay with you for the summer by 2am. Or maybe that’s not so much life, as it is Ilya. Rozanov. Whatever.
He and the as-yet-unsighted Evgenia were drinking beers and smoking cigarettes at a weathered table outside the Späti next door when she came downstairs, and though it was a quarter to nine, neither seemed in any particular rush to make a move. “Sit, sit, sit,” Evgenia ordered her. “I have been dying to meet you.”
“Me?”
“Genau. Yes, of course. I must thank you for turning Ilyusha into a model. My friends, they do not care for boring American sports star. But Yves Saint Laurent model? Now I have the bragging rights.”
“Did Rozanov tell you it was his idea?” Yuna asked, sliding in next to him.
“He did not,” Evgenia fixed him with a thoroughly cold glare, and wasn’t it just a treat to see that it wasn’t a Rozanov special, that his countrywoman had it too, and he could be cowed by his own expression returned back at him. “But, a question: you call him ‘Rozanov?’”
“Ah. Just a … habit, I guess?”
“You hockey people are very strange, with this last name business,” Evgenia declared, with the deft brashness of an outsider. “How can anybody look at this face and call him anything but ‘Ilyushenka?’”
“Zheka, don’t,” he warned, but she was already pinching his cheek.
Yuna loved her immediately. “How do I say that again? Ilyush …?”
“Il-yu-shen-ka. Ilyushenka.”
“Ilyushenka.”
“I hate both of you,” he declared. “I regret this. I am leaving.”
“Don’t be a baby. Go get Yuna a beer. Yuna, do you mind if I smoke? Is that okay?”
Yuna nursed her beer while the sun, which had already been lost behind the serried press of apartment buildings, slipped lower and lower until the sky turned a hazy, irradiated purple, and she and Rozanov gave Evgenia a blow-by-blow of the assortment of characters from their walking tour.
“Should we —”
“Yes,” Rozanov interrupted, before Evgenia could even finish. “I am starving. Weltrestaurant? I want schnitzel.”
“Yes,” Yuna agreed, more keenly than she’d intended. “Oh, am I, um, overdressed?”
She'd put on what she would’ve considered, in Ottawa, to be nice, casual, evening clothes for a night out. Wide-legged black slacks and a sleeveless navy blouse and high heels. She’d felt overly formal even in their meetings at Porsche, where the team had been in jeans and button-downs, and now she felt like she was dressed to meet the queen, standing next to Evgenia in tracksuit pants and a sports bra.
“You have Reeboks upstairs, yes?” Rozanov asked. “Maybe those instead of heels. More comfortable.”
The sneakers were an extremely good call, she thought, as they tramped the three blocks of cobblestones over to the restaurant. After a hot hot day, spent far from the comforts of climate control, the night was beautifully balmy, still and lukewarm like a bath, and Evgenia and Ilya drank another beer apiece on the walk, leaving the bottles underneath a trash can for Pfand collectors to harvest, and, my God, what a delight it must be to be young and cool and beautiful in this city for a summer. Weltrestaurant turned out to be a luxurious hall of an establishment, wedged along the side of an indoor market, and though she’d never visited Munich, Yuna thought it fit the Bavarian image in her head, the one she’d once thought of as being ‘German,’ and now knew was definitely not befitting of twenty-first century Berlin. Schnitzels and steins and warm wood and half-panelled walls and amber-tinted light shades.
They opted to sit outside, because it was a summer night and the streets were lively and the wasps had disappeared for the evening and there was no air conditioning inside, just a bank of opened windows, and, perhaps most importantly, Evgenia apparently needed a cigarette every fifteen minutes in order to function.
Yuna learned that Evgenia lived in Schlesi, and at her blank look, was told it was a ten minute walk in “that direction,” not that Yuna had any concept of cardinality, next to Görlitzer Park. “Ahh,” she said. “The weed selling park?” and Evgenia and Rozanov busted a gut laughing, and told her she was practically Berlinerin already.
The waiter dropped off a bottle of white wine that disappeared alarmingly quickly, while Yuna and Rozanov explained their meetings with Porsche, and the campaign direction they’d landed on, and Evgenia gave her an appraising look and said “You are very impressive,” which felt inordinately satisfying, especially considering Evgenia was about as far from their target market as possible, and, predictably, Rozanov spread his hands wide, and crowed: “I told you. Best Hollander.”
Evgenia forced Rozanov to order for the table, and “Wir möchten drei Wienerschnitzel mit Kartoffelsalat, bitte,” sounded mighty impressive to Yuna, but Evgenia corrected him, “dreimal, dreimal, Ilya,” and even though he rolled his eyes, he repeated it back to her, and God, it was like she was watching Shane in an entirely different body, that same focus and need to exceed expectations and the huffiness of not yet being the greatest who had ever lived.
And they ate and they drank and Evgenia told her all about some of their wild nights in Russia, dancing until after dawn and then heading straight to school, and how Ilya had put her up once when she had fought with her father, and Yuna was about to jump in and relate her own fraught teenage years when Ilya blocked that off at the pass and redirected them back to the open question of dessert and coffee and aperitifs.
And Evgenia seemed like a smart young woman, but it was absolutely baffling to Yuna that when Ilya joked that he’ll “tell baby Hollander next game that his maman is not afraid of dessert,” Evgenia was shocked to learn — as in, now, right at that very moment — that Yuna’s son, the Shane Hollander, is also a famous hockey player. “I know the Internet is very slow in Berlin, but, blyad’, Zheka, you cannot do one Google search?” And Evgenia punched him on the arm, and asserted she’d never voluntarily watched a single sporting event in her entire life — again: baffling — which was how they wound up crowded around Yuna’s phone, watching Hollander v. Rozanov highlights on YouTube. “He is handsome,” Evgenia noted, dispassionately, in the same way Yuna would evaluate a nice-looking cloud, and before Yuna could thank her, Ilya scoffed and insisted Evgenia look up Shane’s Rolex campaign. “Yes, okay, Ilyusha, very handsome, happy?” she said, in the tone used to soothe a fractious child. And Ilya began an impassioned defence of Yuna’s beauty and, ergo, Shane’s genetic inheritance, but Evgenia rolled her eyes and said: “You remember I have sex with women, yes? I would prefer Yuna to her son,” which probably wasn’t the first hint that Ilya and Evgenia weren’t sleeping together, but it was the first one Yuna picked up on.
By 11:30pm, Yuna was both loose-limbed from wine and wired from espresso, and the sky wasn’t a bottomless black, more like a gentle deep-sea blue, from either the light pollution or the shortness of the summer night, and it was still so softly warm outside, and the stout vase of dahlia and daphne on their table smelled divine, and even though she was fifty-eight and up past her bedtime, it was the kind of atmosphere where anything felt possible. It felt like a holiday.
“Shall we go?” Ilya asked.
“It’s still early,” Evgenia shrugged, which was ludicrous, because it was almost midnight.
“I don’t think Yuna will agree if we wait another three hours.”
“Wait,” she interrupted, putting the pieces together now. “You still want to go out? When does this place close?”
“Ah, it is open all night,” Ilya answered, which was a clue, if she’d been listening hard enough to hear it. “Come, stay for a drink. It will be fun.”
She agreed, because they’d ordered two rounds of coffees, so she may as well lean into it, and she was on holiday. At least for the weekend. It was all fun and games and adventures.
Right up until the three of them tumbled out of the taxi.
“Ilya Rozanov,” she said, pulling out her Mom voice. “You said this was a cultural institution.”
“I mean, it is?”
In front of them, a line of hundreds of people, dressed entirely in tattoos and minimal scraps of black leather, with piercings gleaming from the reflected light of their phone screens, were queuing along a dusty path, waiting to enter an enormous, freestanding, decrepit building, from which pounding bass was throbbing.
“It’s a club.”
“A club! Ahhh, thank you Yuna, you know sometimes I forget the English words for things.”
“You are incorrigible.”
He frowned. “I do not know that one.” Next to him, Evgenia was shaking with silent laughter.
“You’re … profligate. Obstreperous. Inveterate!”
“Yuna, please! These are new words to me.”
“Like ‘club?’”
“No, ‘club’ is a word I had forgotten,” he replied, mulish. “These words I have never heard.”
“Come for one drink, Yuna,” Evgenia chimed in. “We don’t need to line up, we are on the guest list. Don’t leave me with this idiot all night.”
In her mind, Yuna was running through the myriad reasons why this was a terrible idea. She did not fit in here. She could be photographed. She could get roofied. She had no desire to dance to some awful pulsing techno. It’d be too loud to even talk. Ilya would dump her at the first passing glance of some young knockout. She should get in a taxi, head back to the apartment, take off her make-up, make a cup of herbal tea, and switch on an episode of House Hunters International. That would be the right thing to do.
“I understand if this is too scary, Yuna. It is okay, I will get you a ta—”
“Shut up, Rozanov.” Damn him. “Alright. Let’s do this.”
In a flurry of movement that gave away the extent to which this had been plotted and schemed — that is, with militaristic precision — Evgenia unshucked her backpack, withdrew a sporty and sleek black … in her day, it had been called fanny pack, but this was not of the same dorky ilk, it was a ‘runner’s waistbag,’ she knew from her Adidas research. Ilya shoved Yuna’s phone, credit card, and her hotel keycard into it, and clasped it not around her hips, but crossways over her chest, while Evgenia stowed Yuna’s purse back inside the backpack.
“Not a good idea to have $3000 bag here,” Ilya explained, thoroughly unabashed of his deceptions now he’d got his way. Damn him. “Now we go.”
They strode past the waiting crowd, everyone, to Yuna’s eye, trying a bit too hard to feign nonchalance. It wasn’t until they neared the door that she realized the stream of people walking past them weren’t ‘earlybirds’ going home: they’d been rejected. If only they hadn’t been on a guest list, so she could have been assessed, deemed tragically uncool, and sent packing. Damn him.
“Evgenia’s girlfriend is a DJ. She plays tonight. Later,” Ilya explained, while they waited for the outcome of a spitfire exchange of German with the bouncer, a man who looked like he could plausibly belong to no less than four varieties of criminal gangs. The bouncer looked Yuna up and down, taking in the sensible business-casual attire, the Reeboks, the athleisure bag; and probably also the distinct lack of tattoos and piercings, and the crow’s feet around her eyes, while Evgenia talked yet more frantically. There was a part of Yuna that could recognize that this entire scenario was hysterical, but it needed to age first, become a memory instead of reality.
“How much later is ‘later?’”
“Ah, four? I think?”
“Four, as in 4am? Ilya, I’m not staying that long.”
“No no, of course not.” The bouncer stood aside, and Ilya ushered her in with a hand on her shoulder blade. She caught a glimpse of a run sheet before she was curtly instructed to hand over her bag for inspection. It started at 1am and ran through until midnight. As in: twenty-three hours. Longer, probably, she didn’t think they’d be turning the lights on and shutting the party down all of a sudden at midnight, like Cinderella’s pumpkin. She was so, so old.
There were sheets of paper stuck to the walls stating in a brutalist font that ‘Taking photos is not allowed!’, repeated underneath in French, Russian, and German. At least she’d have that comfort. Her phone was returned to her with an opaque sticker over each of the lenses. She could appreciate a thorough approach to implementing a policy.
Their bags passed muster, and Ilya and Evgenia bracketed her into a dark, cavernous room, stairs leading up, everything raw grey concrete and bare flesh. Piercing white light, almost clinical, illuminated the coat check, where men and women were stripping out of jackets and shirts and dresses and stuffing them into their bags, leaving them in just leather harnesses or mesh tops or black tape across their nipples. Somehow the sheer licentiousness made this all easier to bear: there was no conceivable way she was going to fit in here, so she may as well take this all in like the foreign tourist in a strange land that she was. She was the clubbing equivalent of Phil-from-Illinois, with his money belt and brand-new hiking boots.
Evgenia lined up to check their bags, and Ilya materialized two sets of foam earplugs from God-knows-where, handing her a pair, and Evgenia waved her to the counter to flash her wristband, and explained she could use it to pick up her Loulou. Once, when Shane was little, she and David had taken him and his two cousins on an exhausting excursion to Le Grand Splash, and she was reminded of that now, the anticipatory hustling, the corralling, the careful framing of not “what would you like to do?” but: “which of these two options would you prefer?” She wondered if Ilya was even aware he was using skills straight out of a toddler parenting book when he asked her: “Do you want to explore, or find a spot to sit?”
Upstairs, what was undoubtedly a designated dance floor was presently no more than a barren stretch of concrete slab; midnight was apparently embarrassingly early. The bar must’ve been sixty feet long, studded with drinkers along its edge, and the ceiling was at least as high, if not taller. Another steel staircase led up further, vibrating slightly with the music.
Evgenia beckoned them in close, and with the miracle of insulating earplugs and acoustic engineering, Yuna could hear her perfectly. “I’ll go find Katie. You’re staying here, yes? Klobar?”
Ilya gave her a thumbs up, and she patted him on the cheek, then leaned over and did the same to Yuna. “Have fun!” she yelled, grinning, as if that were either possible or probable. “I’ll find you later!”
Yuna allowed herself to be steered towards an archway, and through into an almost-black room, quieter, lit only by faint orange lamps above a much smaller bar, and a glowing glass case that served as the bar’s counter. Inside the case, amber sculptures were lit from below. She took a stool and glared at Ilya, who merely smiled beatifically.
He ordered them a bottle of surprisingly drinkable red, then plonked an elbow on the bar, rested his chin on his hand and said: “So.”
“So.”
“I would like to hear all about when Yuna was a woman who smoked weed.”
Damn him and his damnable charm. Despite her misgivings, she laughed. “I wasn’t sculpted out of clay at the age of forty. I was once young enough to go to uni.”
“And where did you go to university?”
“Vancouver. UBC.”
“What is ‘UBC?’”
“Ah, sorry. University of British Columbia.”
“And is this a good school?”
He drew it out of her, slowly, in dribs and drabs and then in floods. The Bachelor of Commerce degree she’d taken, the fact she’d aced Statistics in Business but nearly failed Differential Calculus, the first time she used a computer, how she tutored local high school students for cash, her precious Chevrolet ‘Chi-Chi,’ the girls she dormed with, the house they moved into in third-year with cheap linoleum tiles that lifted off the floor if you walked on them with damp shoes, how everyone who took the Consumer Behaviour class came to get her unique demographic insights as the token Asian woman, the road-trips they took to Tijuana. He was a fantastic listener, like David was, concentrating solely on the stories she had to tell, asking for more details, remembering names, laughing uproariously; until she'd practically forgotten she was annoyed with him.
“I am not understanding when you slept,” he said, after she related a particularly hectic time when she’d joined an amateur theatre production, and spent several manic weeks jumping from class to tutoring to ducking home to check her phone messages to manning the box office to jumping onstage as Mrs Webb in what, in retrospect, must have been an awful rendition of Our Town to the curtains-down drinks that inevitably became a minor bacchanalia to finishing tomorrow's assignments at two in the morning in a sozzled, stoned, overconfident frenzy.
“I didn’t, much. Always liked having too much to do, rather than too little. I’m not very good at relaxing.”
“Yes, I know someone like this too,” Ilya said, with a contemptuous fondness. “Mr Hollander, is he the same?”
“Oh, God no,” Yuna laughed. “He’s very laid-back. Not that he’s lazy. Just: calm.”
“So you two are … is ‘odd couple’ the right words?”
“Yes. But no. I mean: yes, that’s the phrase. But I don’t think we’re odd, necessarily. More like … complementary.”
“You say nice things to each other?”
“Wha— oh. No. Not complimentary, complementary. Oh, shit. Hah! Hang on.”
Yuna briefly noted the 00:35 showing on her phone screen — she wouldn’t stick around much longer — before pulling up a definition of complementary.
“Ahhh. I see. So is like: what you are bad at, he is good at. Odd couple, but matching.”
“Yes. Like a jigsaw puzzle.”
“Yes yes. That is a nice expression. How did you and Mr Hollander meet?”
“After I graduated, I went to work for Ernst and — well, it was Ernst and Whinney, back then. David was in the same grad cohort.”
There was a sarcastic smile half-hiding behind his palm. “Love at first audit?”
“Hah! God, no. I thought he was a bit … well, boring is a strong word …”
Ilya laughed hard enough to almost fall off his stool. “Oh, Yuna,” he said, rearranging his hair, “sometimes, you kill me. Did you learn you like boring?”
“I learned he liked hockey. We were working overtime, and he asked if I minded if he put the game on the TV in the lunch room.”
“You Hollanders. There must be a hockey gene. This is how you make perfect hockey son.”
“It wasn’t all easy. His team was …” she beckoned him closer, so she could whisper it directly into his ear, “the Guardians.”
Ilya hissed, and reared backwards. “No!”
“I know!”
“No! Yuna!”
“Believe me, that took some getting over. At least he switched, once Ottawa joined the league.”
“You are telling me,” he said, deliberately slow, “that Mr Hollander is not a die-hard Montreal fan? And you still married him?”
“We can’t help who we fall for,” she said, as he poured the dregs of the bottle into their glasses.
“Like a Russian tragedy. But with happy ending.”
“To happy endings,” she agreed, and clinked his glass.
Face-up on the counter, Ilya’s phone lit up, buzzing. Алексей. He declined the call.
“You can take it, if you want. A friend?”
“No. My brother.”
“Ah. I’m … are you okay?”
“I am fine. Is nothing,” he shrugged.
“Nothing? Or another Russian tragedy?”
It earned her a smile. No teeth, no joy. But still, that was worth something to her. “Yes, exactly. One without a happy ending.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“I do not. I am not meaning to be rude. My family is … I do not like to talk about them.”
“I understand.” And she did, she really did. She'd been the same, at twenty-five. “My family — not David and Shane, my parents — we didn’t get on. At all.”
“This surprises me. You are — you seem like perfect daughter.”
“And you seem like a perfect son.”
His hand cut through the air, like: do-not-bullshit-me. She hated that. “Will you tell me? I cannot imagine why this is.”
“I might need something stronger,” she said, peering into the final sip of Merlot.
“Yes! Fantastic idea. You are brilliant. Vodka? Tequila?”
“We Hollanders have a strict no-tequila rule.”
“Okay, first tequila story, then family story.”
“Well, David drank himself under the table with tequila on New Years Eve 1999 and spent the first two days of the new millennium wishing for death —” she was interrupted, briefly, by Ilya’s cackle, “— and I, well …. I used to get very uptight. About exams. At uni.”
“Shocking. I am shocked.”
“Shut up. And in my first semester, stupidly, I took a Chemistry elective.”
“Why is this stupid?”
“Most people used electives for ‘easy’ subjects … but this was pretty much the most difficult class I could’ve chosen.”
“Right. Okay?”
“So before the exam … my roommate offered me a shot of tequila. To ‘calm down.’”
“You did not.”
“I did.” She buried her face in her hands. “Not my finest moment.”
“And, what? Did it work?”
“It worked too well. Aced the exam, then drank the entire bottle.”
“And now never again?”
“Never. Again.”
“So we take tequila off the sponsorships list?”
“As if you’d accept one. Again.”
“This is true,” he agreed. “Vo—”
A hand hooked around Ilya’s neck, matched by another around Yuna’s: “Ah! We have not lost you!”
Evgenia greeted them like long-lost friends waiting at the port, fresh from an ocean crossing. Not like they’d been separated for approximately one hour. Nor as if she and Yuna had met for the first time scarcely four hours prior. Instead she kissed Yuna’s cheek, pressed her hand, and asked for a complete run-down of all she had missed, including Yuna’s impressions of Berghain, whether Ilya was behaving himself, the quality of the wine, if she’d braved the toilets yet, and her opinions on the music. Frankly, Yuna had tuned the music out almost entirely. As far as she could tell, it had been one steady pulse for as long as she’d been sitting there.
Apparently that was the funniest thing Evgenia had ever heard. She nabbed the wrist of the woman who was talking to Ilya and made Yuna repeat it for her benefit.
“You’re not wrong,” she said, in a scrubby South London accent. “This floor is techno, upstairs is house.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know the difference.”
“Oh, I like you very much. I’m Katie.”
She took the offered hand and shook it. “Yuna.”
“Yuna, you’ve no idea what a breath of fresh air it is to meet someone in Berlin without an opinion on techno music.”
“Or their own record label,” Evgenia chimed in.
“So you play … house? Or techno?”
“House. You’ll have to come up, have a squiz.”
“Katie, there’s no way on earth I’ll be here at four,” Yuna said flatly, ignoring Ilya’s suggestive eyebrow movements. “It’d probably be wasted on me, anyway.”
“What’s your poison? Music-wise?”
“I never really moved on from New Wave. Mod Revival.”
Katie pressed two fingers to her lips and tapped them. “The Cure? The Jam? Oooooh, Pet Shop Boys? Yes, I see it. I love it.”
“Yuna, you’re fucking cool,” Evgenia burst out.
“God, Zheka, do not hit on my manager.”
Evgenia just rolled her eyes, and made no attempts at denial. Yuna tried not to be alarmed by that. “Could you point me towards the bathroom?”
“Ahh—” said Ilya.
“Umm—” said Katie.
“Soo—” said Evgenia.
Then they lapsed into silence and stared at each other.
“Yes, of course,” Katie said, finally. “I’ll go with you.”
When they returned, Evgenia was gone, and Ilya was underlit by his white phone screen, smoking almost directly in front of a No Smoking sign. “You survived,” he said, and it was only half-sarcastic. Maybe even less than that.
“She was a champ,” Katie declared, clasping Yuna’s shoulder like a rescued POW. “Evie?”
“Ah, I think the molly caught up to her. She was talking about going to thank the garderobe workers ‘for their service.’”
“Classic. I’ll catch up with you lot later.”
Ilya’s gaze swept up and down. “You did survive, yes?”
“Yep.”
“Do you wish to talk about what you saw?”
“No, thank you,” she said, polite as could be. “I would like a vodka, please.”
“Yes,” he slapped the counter. “Now we are talking.”
Perhaps sensing that she needed a buffer after that … experience, Ilya regaled her with a tale of a time the Raiders had gone bar-hopping after they’d secured their playoffs spot in Miami, how they’d eventually noticed they’d lost a rookie, frantically called his phone, backtracked through the last five nightclubs, sent him emails, enquired at a couple of hospitals, and were planning on calling team management by the time they finally located him, tucked up in his hotel bed, fast asleep.
He told it well, making her laugh with the details his hands sketched out, the faces he pulled. But. But but but.
How could he think he was a bad son? A bad brother? This boy-man who raced through the damp Florida night, forgoing his own celebrations, to ensure the safety of a kid barely four years his junior? She’d eat her hat if the Raiders didn’t consider him a brother-in-arms of the highest, noblest degree.
She checked her phone when he got waylaid into an overly detailed discussion with the bartender about optimal serving temperatures and glassware for vodka. It was past one, and although the lure of her crisp, room-serviced starched sheets had eased, she was not going to stay much longer. But before she did go, she felt there was a job to be done, and she was notoriously terrible at allowing tasks to be left unfinished.
“I would like to tell you a story,” she said, once he’d convinced the bartender of the merits of storing both vodka and tumbler in the fridge.
“Okay.”
She told him about the shin-ijūsha after the immigration laws were changed in ‘67, about the dearth of Japanese faces in Canada prior to then, following the horrors of the internment and deportation years. She told him about her father, a railway engineer, who was now suddenly eligible under the new system. She told him how her mother had pushed, sure that the U.S. Army presence in Japan would put them at risk when (and it was when, in Seiko’s opinion, not if) the Cold War escalated. She told him she’d been in the womb for seven months by the time they made it to Montreal, where her parents, with a lifetime of social conditioning to conform, immediately determined to assimilate as much as their skin and eyes and accents would permit. How her father asked his colleagues how they spent this wealth of free time, and they answered: we watch hockey. So he watched hockey.
Ilya frowned and nodded and smiled and sipped his drink and ordered them another round, and she let him let these people into his heart a little. Let him identify with the struggles of accented English and the terrors of uprooting your life.
And then she told the story again.
How her mother beat her with a shamoji when she disobeyed. How she was ordered to do things like: win the Science Fair, and that placing third counted as disobedience. How she had been enrolled in twelve years of mandatory clarinet. How she fucking hated the clarinet. How being invited to join the swim team made her an abazure. That her mother threw a fit, shrieking about her ungrateful daughter’s insolence and smashing glass jars against the wall, when Yuna stopped eating the red bean paste sandwiches that were packed in her lunch box, because the other kids in her class wouldn’t stop asking to try a bite and making a show of spitting it out, retching at how disgusting she was. That she was denigrated as mittomonai for not having friends, but that any friends she did make were subjected to an inquisition and deemed a bad influence.
She sank back the rest of her drink, keeping half an eye on the tense throb of tendon in Ilya's neck, and pressed on.
Her rebellious teenage years, once she finally learned to keep secrets from her parents. The silent treatments stretching for weeks after the storms whenever she was caught out. The time she confessed to her father that she was fucking miserable at home, and all he could offer her was one of his ever-present cigarettes, which she took, and was thrashed for later. The countdown of days to turning eighteen, to university acceptance, to graduation. The first time she pushed back loudly, not with quiet subterfuge, and told her mother, point blank, that there was no way in hell she was going to Toronto, she’d been lying for months, she’d already accepted UBC. Her closest friend, Cassandra, acting as a five-foot-three bodyguard while Yuna packed her things and loaded her car and drove to Vancouver and never looked back.
She asked him for a cigarette when she finished, and he left the pack on the counter, equidistant between them.
“You were not a terrible daughter. She was a terrible mother.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
She was itching to give him the moral of the story, to grab his shoulders in her hands and shake him and say: having shitty parents doesn’t make me a bad daughter. Having a shitty brother doesn’t make you a bad brother. But he wasn’t a puppy dog she was reinforcement training, he was a charming and intelligent and complicated young man. So she let him rub his nose and spin his lighter between his thumb and forefinger.
Through the archway, people were dancing now, and over his shoulder she could see a young woman with lurid red hair in fishnets and hiking boots sticking her tongue down another woman’s throat. She thought perhaps this was the only place on earth she could have a conversation like this with Ilya. The foreign, alien atmosphere, untethering them from their normal rhythms, and his constant, immediate deflections.
She caught the bartender’s attention, and signalled for another round.
“I think I would have liked going to university,” he said, after it arrived. “I was not a very good student, but … I think I could have done better if there were less stupid rules.”
“Ilya Rozanov, not a fan of rules. I’ll put together a press release.”
He grinned, which was gratifying, but not what he needed, she reminded herself. He needed a David. Someone who knew how to listen without rushing to get to the point already. Absolutely not her strong suit, but surely she’d picked up some skills after thirty-five years of exposure.
“What would you study?” she asked.
“Ah, I do not know. It’s stupid.”
“Not it’s not.”
“History, maybe? I liked that, at school. I was thinking, before, when you were saying about taking ‘easy’ classes, how strange that is. I do not know if it is just strange to me, or because Russia is different.”
“How so?”
“Before, in the sovok times, education was very important, yes? Was seen as, ah, one of the most important ways to beat the West, to be smarter. So it is strange to think of only picking a class because it is easy, like: is the point to graduate, or to be learning?
“And, now, universities in Russia are full of corruption, full of cheating, like a paper stamp process. So, if I had the chance to learn at a good Canadian school, like yours, then I would want to pick something … interesting, or important.”
God, that makes me embarrassed, Yuna thought, but David wouldn’t say that, so she didn’t either. “Did you ever consider it? Instead of hockey?”
“Ah, no. No. I had terrible grades, and I wanted to leave Russia, and I wanted to make Papa proud.” He shrugged. “And I think I probably would not have been good at it, back then. Still a little too … like, ah, not clear. In the mind. Unfocused.”
“Ilya Rozanov, you were not unfocused. I remember that rookie year. Very well.”
“Yes, I bet you were my biggest fan that year?”
“I think I might have told Shane you could go fuck yourself?”
What a fantastic smile. And what a pity his campaigns had him posing straight-faced or pouty. Perhaps there'd be wriggle room with the planned Porsche campaign, cutting back and forth between him and him driving the car, mimicking his slaloms and slides and acceleration on the ice, to try a few joyful takes.
“He must get his chirping inspiration from you. He has been saying these exact words to me for six years.”
“Like mother, like son.” Then she heard it, and tried not to let her wince be too visible.
“It is not so bad, to be like your mother, if mother is like Hollander’s, or mine,” he said, his eyes fixed on his glass. “She was funny, and kind.”
“That sounds like you.”
“And she tried to care of both of her sons.” Oh no. Oh no. “So even though my brother is a piece of shit who only calls me when he needs more of my pedik money to snort up his nose, I do not know how else to take care of him.”
“That sounds awful.” That’s how David would respond. That’s all David would respond with. But her big mouth was unable to stop itself from continuing: “What if you stopped sending him money?”
“Then he would steal it from the money I send to take care of our father.”
“What does your father thi—”
“My father thinks it is 2001 and I should be a good boy and buy tea on my way home from school. Dementia.”
Oh God. Oh, he was so alone in this world. She was going to redouble her efforts at making Shane give him a second chance.
“Ilya, I —”
“I would like to not talk about this anymore,” he interrupted. “Now you know, yes? But that is … enough. For me.”
She patted his hand. “Okay. Another drink?”
“Yes. Yes, Yuna!”
If he needed to force the brightness back into his voice, she was going to let him do so without comment. He signalled for another round, exuberantly, and she lit a cigarette and he lit a cigarette, and it was sufficient procedural busywork to bury that conversation; not in the cold ground, not forever, more like it had been shoved into the rear of her overstuffed junk drawer in the kitchen and slammed shut.
“You know what I think?” she asked. She felt looser, heady nicotine and floaty vodka on board. She should probably ease off, but how could she walk away from him now, after all that? “I think if you went to university you should have studied law.”
“Me?” he looked affronted. “Law? Yuna, you are the one joking I am terrible with rules.”
“No, you don’t like obeying the ones you think are stupid. But you know them. You can get under peoples’ skin better than anyone. Imagine you trying to rattle a witness? ‘You can’t handle the truth!’”
“Oh, like in a courtroom? Maybe, maybe. That might be fun. I was thinking like my boring lawyer for contracts.” He tilted his head to one side. “Is that some sort of idiom? ‘Cannot handle the truth?’”
“Ilya. Ilyushenka. Are you telling me you’ve never see A Few Good Men?”
He rolled his eyes. “How am I supposed to make time for every American movie ever made? I am never making fun of you for not watching Russian movies.”
She shushed him, and made him suffer through a broad-strokes retelling of the plot, of questionable accuracy since it’d been at least a decade since she’d last watched it. That set them off on overrated and underrated actors (Tom Cruise was a point of contention between them, but he hadn’t watched A Few Good Men, so she told him his opinion didn’t count yet), then over to revered childhood films, at which point he produced his phone and began noting down all of Shane’s favorites (she hoped the list would be used for further cultural assimilation, and not retaliatory chirping), and then she had to suffer through an oration on the profound societal impact of Space Jam.
Time was accelerating now, ever since the bartender had stopped waiting for them to request another round, and just refilled their glasses ad hoc. Ilya had probably spent a lot on vodka, sitting here with her … in fact, he hadn’t let her pay for a thing, all week. She would slip cash into his luggage before she flew out, she decided. That’d show him. Show him both in the you-can’t-beat-me sense, and also the I-don’t-only-talk-to-you-because-you-spend-money-on-me sense.
Anyway. Time was accelerating now, without the ritual of deliberating on another drink. They were talking about Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan — something about the last global pre-social media superstars — and Ilya was arguing that that level of fame could no longer be achieved anymore, not in the splintered algorithmic age, with maybe, maybe, an exception for Messi or Ronaldo or the next soccer prodigy, and then she asked him about Russian soccer, and he began a whole tirade on the 2018 World Cup that only starting making sense about eight minutes in, once she derived from contextual clues that Russia was hosting.
Time was accelerating, and all of a sudden she noticed that there were no more cigarettes left. How was that possible? She only ever had a couple at a time, maximum, since she’d quit for good in 1986, when she and David decided to start trying. But before she even fully comprehended that, Ilya was flagging down the bartender and buying another pack. Oh, so this was how it ran all night and all day and all night again. Why would the young and beautiful and dance-happy ever need to leave?
Time was moving strangely, but there was Katie again, lovely cheery Katie, who was just so delighted to see them.
“I’ve gotta use the loo. Want some help with the line, Yuna, darling?”
Darling Katie. “Yes, God, that’d be fantastic.”
“I will use too,” Ilya said, standing and stretching, and following them to the queue, where Katie shouted something in German at group after group, who all huffed and fidgeted, but grudgingly let them slip in front.
“Ilyaaaaa!” she shouted, when they came back out and he’d already beaten them, grabbing him by the elbow. “It’s wild in there.”
“You should see downstairs.”
“What’s downstairs?”
“Ahh, maybe we don’t worry about that now. Would you like to see where Katie will be playing?”
“Yeah, c’mon babes. Evgenia’s up there too!”
“Evgenia!” Yuna grabbed Katie’s elbow too. The words were viscous coming out, like pouring treacle from a jar, but they were worth the effort. These gorgeous, fun, young people. “She’s so nice. You’re lovely together.”
Ilya held her wrist and led her up the stairs, up up up so many stairs, she liked to count stairs but kept losing track, Katie was at her rear, gosh, this place was packed, she could hardly even see the walls, but that made sense, she was shorter than everyone, why was everyone in Germany so tall? Oh, Ilya had found the bar, excellent, and he got them all water, water tastes so good, wow, she should drink more water, but where did Katie go? Nevermind, there was Evgenia! Lovely Evgenia, hugging her and hugging Ilya, Yuna always pined for long long beach blonde hair like that when she was a girl, Evgenia’s so lucky, Katie’s so lucky, they’re so lucky together, and Ilya’s so lucky too but he’s so sad underneath, a Russian tragedy, but he should have a happy ending too, even though she can’t picture the kind of woman he’d fall in love with, she should ask — oh my God, David! Oh, Yuna’s so lucky too, her wonderful David, if only he was here too, lounging against the bar with them, he’d like Ilya, she knows it, she’s sure of it, he sees through the surface layers of peo— Evgenia’s saying something, but Yuna has to concentrate really really hard to hear her, is it louder up here? Right, she’s saying she’s glad Yuna stayed, and Yuna is too, how on earth had she thought this wouldn’t be fun, and Ilya’s saying next summer all the Hollanders should come, like he invited them to, and that would be fantastic, she’d love that, and she remembered that Evgenia doesn’t understand hockey, like, at all, so Yuna tried to explain it to her, the way that Ilya and Shane are the two greatest of their generation, that they captain rival teams, that they’re like yin and yang, always have been, even before they were drafted, they’d been so baby-faced — Ilyushenka, yes, yes, ja, da, oui, exactly — Ilyushenka is a sensational nickname, just perfect, really — but, really, Evie, they’ve got so much more in common than everyone thinks, peas in a pod in some ways, they’re both so kind and generous and — he is, you’re right, he is blushing — funny and sarcastic, they really would get along, she’s sure of it, if they had the ch— wait, where did Ilya disappear to? Hang on, she’ll just have a quick look for him, there are some alcoves there, maybe he ducked int— oh, wow, wow, okay, that was … something, but definitely not Ilya, Ilya! Ilyaaa! Why is everyone here so tall, it makes it so much harder to— ah, there he was! And he’s swinging an arm around her shoulders and leaning down and asking if she’s in the mood to dance and that sounded like a fantastic idea, it’s been so long since she danced, she used to be good at it, or if not good, at least she enjoyed it, a million years ago.
There, amongst all the flesh and nylon and concrete, Yuna didn’t feel like an elderly overdressed tourist, she felt like just another human swimming in a sea of humans, subordinate to the driving beat and the light shining through a citadel of arms, glimpses of joy and euphoria in everyone’s faces, no more self-consciousness, Evgenia’s head thrown back, and Ilya’s eyes closed, and transcendent, easy, peace.
The thing about Ilya is: he weaponizes his English fluency to hoodwink you into leaving your comfort zone, but he also made sure they ate something greasy and delicious when they walked home together, pausing on Oberbaumbrücke with their Döner to watch the rising sun brighten the Spree, and when he said goodnight he reminded her that the Brandenburg Gate was finished in 1791, and he left acetaminophen and a sugar-free Fritz Cola outside her apartment door while she slept.
The thing about Ilya is: he tries to make a fifty-eight year old woman with the hangover from the sixth circle of hell go bike-riding, as if she has the same regenerative immortality that he does, but when she groaned and insisted all she’s capable of is binge-watching House Hunters International and trying not to vomit, he bought an armful of Gatorade and paprika-flavored chips and foreign candy bars from the Späti and unloaded them all on her coffee table and offered her his comically oversized sweatpants and brayed with laughter alongside her as she bitched about a Kentucky family’s expectations for an affordable quasi-suburbia in Amsterdam.
The thing about Ilya is: he’s so headstrong and opinionated and obstinate (pot, kettle, yes, she knows, David), that’s it’s infuriating when he’s correct, like when he shoved her worn out body into an Uber at 8pm and took her to Tempelhofer Feld as dusk was falling, and the runway in the middle of the city was so fantastically unexpected and enormous and charmingly communal that she forgot how awful she’d been feeling, and when she asked what those cabins are for and he explained they’re temporary housing for Syrian refugees and she was so wrung-out it made her tear up, he walked her back across the airstrip and bought them both gelato.
The thing about Ilya is: he’s capable of being a major pain in her ass, but when she slotted her room card into the check-out box and heaved the entry door open, he dashed over to lift her suitcase into the trunk of the far more sensible Mercedes Benz he’d hired for the ten hour drive to Aÿ, and she wished he would let her take care of him occasionally, in ways she’s not contractually obligated to, because it made her sad to wonder when the last time was he was surprised by something delightful, something caring and tender, and the eighteen fridge magnets she’d bought that she’d planned on sending to his Boston home didn’t feel like nearly enough for the weight he must carry, so she resolved that from now on, she’s going to be Ilya Rozanov’s friend, and the rest of the world can just deal with it.