The Cosmopolitans by Nadia Kalman

Author:Nadia Kalman [Kalman, Nadia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9781604890679
Google: IvlLbwAACAAJ
Amazon: 1604890673
Publisher: Livingston Press
Published: 2010-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

Osip

Osip leaned back in his lawn chair, which Stalina called a director’s chair. Osip was, at the very least, the director of beer, and this Friday, he had gotten a Danish brand. Why not? They had saved their Jews. The beer itself was all right, if a bit pale and thin, like a Dane. Galich sang on the cassette player. Katya was safe at the library, living half her life there, just as she had when she was fourteen. She’d always been so serious, and yet, she’d had the worst grades of all his daughters.

Pratik came outside and pulled a chair next to his. “What are you drinking?” Osip said.

“Just lemonade.”

“Oh, yes. Sorry.” Muslims never drank, which Osip could not imagine. Jewish laws were reasonable, healthy. Who wanted to eat milk and meat together?

“Is that Galich, your favorite?” Pratik said. Osip nodded and corrected Pratik’s pronunciation.

“Yes, I can recognize him a little bit. What is he singing about now?” Unlike Osip’s daughters, Pratik was interested in the bards.

Osip said, “It is about how one hundred years from today some people will be bored after party and maybe put his cassette in. But cassettes are obsolete technology. Only I have his cassettes, most people, if they listen to him, buy CDs or pirate MP3. For all he was genius, he didn’t predict.”

“Still, we can hope. People still listen to Led Zeppelin.” They sat in silence a few moments, and then Pratik asked him how his work was going.

“It’s going,” Osip said, pinching a mosquito out of the crook of his arm. “Actually, it is going to India.” Osip hadn’t even told Stalina this yet. “I am being reassigned.” He took another drink of beer. “To genius work of subcontractor database.”

“Too bad.”

“No, it is Indians who are too bad, right?” Osip laughed to encourage Pratik. “Bangladeshis know.”

Pratik smiled and flattened a mosquito on his knee.

“How is school?” Osip said.

“One of my professors is having us design emergency procedures for hurricanes.” Pratik frowned at the clear, darkening sky.

“Oh, a praktika, very common in engineering school in Russia.” Osip was being kind. Designing an “emergency procedure” was hardly the same as designing a thermal waste disposal plant.

“Yes, and if it’s all right, I would like to give you my recommendations. I am designing specifically for coastal New England.”

Osip had another drink of his beer. “In Connecticut when we have hurricane it equals just rain, boring, not like in Bangladesh.” Sometimes, this boy made it hard to relax. Osip decided to steer the conversation towards more philosophical realms. “Mosquitoes,” he said, pointing to the bug-zapper, “How many you think die? Is it right that we kill them? If they could kill us, they would kill us. They are only too stupid.”

Pratik said, “Have you ever heard of the Long Island Express?”

Osip spread his hands. What now? “Of course I have heard.”

“The Long Island hurricane of 1938?”

Tomorrow, Osip had to go to work, face Call Me Evelyn and her operatically amplified constructive criticism. Some people, they could hide in their ivy towers, not he.

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