Part 72
Oksana was sitting at the window seat in the first class section. Zander was next to her.
He was fidgeting one minute, staring at somebody, like another passenger or a waitress, totally absorbed in their actions for awhile, then reading a page of the airline magazine, then saying it was a long way, then calculating how many miles it was, getting a blanket out of the overhead compartment, saying he was going to sleep, not going to sleep, putting the blanket back, fidgeting some more.
"You are way worse than Peter," she said. "Settle down."
"Well, tell me," he said, "I've been wondering. Were you ever happy with Dad?"
It was always impossible to be prepared for his questions. They came out of the blue eighty percent of the time. "No," she answered. "Why you think we end up divorced?"
"It cannot have been unhappy all the time. You must have liked him once."
She didn't answer.
"Come on, tell me some happy story."
"About what?"
"Don't tell me you weren't happy on your wedding day."
"It was a nice day."
"What, the weather?" He laughed derisively. "Not one day you were just happy with him. You never loved him, you just married him, why, to get a green card?"
"No! I got mine the same way he did."
"So you loved him once?"
She said nothing, but looked out the window.
"OK. You liked him once."
"Maybe, for a little while," she smiled a little bit.
"It was a big mistake, of course. You should not have married him. Is it really that hard to admit to making a mistake?"
"It's not a mistake!"
"It wasn't?"
"Of course not. I can't have you and Peter without him."
"But it was all miserable, every second. You must have hated having his kids."
"No! That isn't so!"
"So it wasn't miserable every second."
"No. I did not hate having you kids."
"His kids."
She shrugged. "Somebody need to be their father."
"You're impossible! Totally impossible!"
"You ask impossible questions!"
Zander did not realize how much he had raised his voice. "Impossible to answer only for unreasonable people, that's what!"
The
air marshal was standing there. He grabbed Zander. "Get up,"
he said. He started to frisk him.
Oksana looked frightened.
"You all right?" the air marshal asked her.
"Yes, of course - my son and I were only arguing."
"Yeah, dude," Zander said. "If you were on this long flight and had to sit next to your mother for hours, what would happen?"
The air marshal smiled. He patted Zander's shoulders. "Sit down and relax," he said.
Oksana observed that on the entire flight to Munich, on an American airliner, in first class, Sander fidgeted, talked, argued and failed to go to sleep. Yet on the flight from Munich to Yekaterinburg, on a Russian airline, with no first class section, squeezed between Oksana (she could not get him to take the window seat by any means of persuasion or bribery) and another passenger, he was fast asleep. She tucked the blanket around him.
It took her back; evoking memories. She looked out of the window at the clouds, trying to think of a way to tell him about these good memories he had so suddenly demanded to know about.
The happiest part, she thought, had been the years Aleksander was a baby and a toddler. They had a sports equipment shop; hardly any extra money, a big apartment – well, little by American standards, but big by Russian ones. She took Sander to work and had to have a baby carrier and eventually a play pen in the store. Most customers were charmed; they told her that her baby was adorable, cute, a fine fellow, who looked like her, and a hundred other kind words.
She only stopped bringing him to work when he got old enough to object to being trapped in the play pen and disrupted things. His requests, demands, cajoling, or even attempts at fraudulent deception to get out of there had been a sign for the future, she thought.
They only had an occasional day off, and had often gone to walk on the beach, a couple of times even admiring the beachside house they were later to own themselves. Sander crawled then tried to walk, then toddled precariously, then walked then ran around them on the beach.
Later, she had two children and more to attend to; often out of town, and so she hired Rosa Sanchez. They had more money and things were better that way. But now it was easy to see that it didn't necessarily mean they were happier.
The pilot announced they were approaching Koltsovo airport. She didn't want to wake him up, and just watched him, figuring the usual cabin bustle was going to. When he started shaking his eyes open, she instinctively helped him sit up and grabbed the blanket, which he was already throwing onto the floor. He was too half-asleep to protest.
