Dolphinarium

Dolphinarium was first published in the Hummingbird Review in 2011.

What if it had rained?

Anya hated the rain. In the old country, the rain would fall often during the hot, sticky summer, continuing into the autumn. On the sunny days, Tatiana and I would trot along behind our only daughter as she raced down one block and up the next until we reached the park. There, like a bumblebee, Anya would zip from tree to flower to lake’s edge, then halt, still as marble, suddenly entranced by a ladybug, or a kitten, or a perfectly smooth stone. We would find a bench or a rock to sit on, far enough not to intrude on her play, close enough to rush to her if she needed us.

By November, the clouds would freeze, the hard cold and heavy snow unrelenting until spring. Anya had real fur-lined mittens, a thick down jacket that used to be Tatiana’s, and a fur cap that had cost a week’s pay. Tatiana inspected her carefully each morning before school, fussing over every button and zipper, making sure the mittens were snug — but not too snug — and the socks dry, with no holes. Only then would we set out for the ugly cinderblock school Tatiana had once attended — the school from which she had been expelled soon after her parents applied for exit visas.

Now, with the Communists gone, we were no longer prevented from leaving as Tatiana’s family had been. I was willing to consider the idea of emigration, but Tatiana was impatient. Finally, one day as we trudged through the snow, she stepped in front of me. She took my hands in hers, her green eyes looking directly into mine. “Alexei, it is time.”

“Time? Time for what?”

“Time to go, Alexei. To leave this place.”

“We’ve talked about this, maya krasaveetsa.”

“Yes. We have talked. But Anya is six years old — we have talked long enough. I do not want her growing up here. The poverty, the corruption, the drunken thugs on the street — there is no future here. Especially for us.”

“Tatiana…”

“You know it is true. It is dangerous here for us.”

“No more so than for anybody else.”

She shook her head and smiled softly. The memory of her life as a refusenik — her father’s imprisonment, her mother’s heartbreak — haunted her eyes. “You don’t know, Alexei. These people — they hate us. You see yourself as Russian, but they do not. To them, you are yevrei. As am I. As is Anya.”

I was unconvinced, but for my wife, for my daughter, I would have moved even to the South Pole. That spring, we emigrated to Israel.

Throughout the decade that followed, we remained outsiders of a sort. Though very comfortable in our enclave, we remained olim hadashim, immigrants — never truly integrated into mainstream society. We rarely had to rely on our heavily-accented Hebrew: our friends and neighbors were Russian, TV programs were either in Russian or were subtitled, even our tax forms were in Russian.

Anya, however, grew up an Israeli, a real sabra. She spoke rapid-fire Hebrew and was immersed in Israeli popular culture. In this country where a former refusenik had become a cabinet minister, where a million of my countrymen had been absorbed, if not always welcomed, my daughter found acceptance and happiness.

Not that there weren’t difficult moments, as when Anya wanted her mother’s help preparing for a party at school. “Ima, would you help me sew a Purim costume? I want to be a belly dancer.”

“Anna Alexova! A belly dancer? What would people think?”

Anya rolled her eyes — a very Israeli gesture. “They will think I’m wearing a Purim costume, like everybody else.”

“What, you can’t go as Queen Esther?”

“Oy, Ima. It’s 2001. You think people still dress as characters from the Megillah for Purim?”

Tatiana’s features softened. “I wouldn’t know, Anushka. When I was little, we did not wear Purim costumes. If we had, we would have been expelled from school, forced to leave our apartment, perhaps even arrested.”

Anya was silent for a moment. We expected further bargaining, or perhaps another eye-roll. Instead, she moved to Tatiana, embraced her tightly, and leaned her head on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ima. I am.”

Tatiana hugged her, peering at me over Anya’s shoulder with wet eyes. Anya had learned in school about the struggles of Soviet Jewry, and we’d answered whatever questions she’d asked about our lives. She even retained some dim memories of the old country. But until that moment, she hadn’t fully absorbed what it had been like for us, Jewish children in a land where to be Jewish was to be a traitor, an outcast.

Anya’s world could hardly have been more different. She was self-assured, beautiful — in every way a typical Western teenager. She loved to spend time with her friends, listen to music, go to the movies, or shop at one of the new malls that seemed to keep appearing out of nowhere.

Still, we hesitated on that warm Friday evening in June when she asked if she could go to a beachside disco with her friends. “This is not something we do on Shabbat, Anuskha.”

“We don’t do anything on Shabbat, Ima. We’re not religious, so what does it matter? All my friends are going.”

“When I was a girl, we — “

“Yes, I know Ima. When you were a girl, you stayed home every evening and played chess while discussing politics and mathematics over a plate of borscht. So thank you again for moving here, where I don’t have to spend every night sitting at home. Can I go please?”

“Aleksei, talk to her.”

Anya turned her big green eyes to me. “Abba, all my friends will be there.”

“So you mentioned.”

“So nu? What’s the problem?”

“Well, we think you are too young to be going out dancing unchaperoned.”

“Yael’s parents are letting her go. Also Irina’s.”

“I see. And maybe Ilya, as well?”

Anya blushed. The older brother of Anya’s best friend Irina, Ilya was on leave from the Army. The two of them had visited the previous day. Tatiana and I had grown up far away and in a very different time, but some things are universal, and the face of a teen-aged girl with a crush is one of them.

Anya answered quietly, her expression briefly revealing the shy schoolgirl within: “Yes, Ilya too.”

I glanced at Tatiana. She wasn’t going to like this. “OK, motek. You call me every hour. If you miss one call, you will not leave this apartment for a year.”

Anya squealed, hugging me and then her mother before racing upstairs to get ready. Tatiana closed her eyes, shook her head, and left the room without a word.

An hour later, Anya hugged us again and ran out the door with Yael, Irina, and Ilya, who had stopped by to collect her. Tatiana and I stayed behind to do what parents of teenagers around the world do: we sat on the couch and waited for her to return.

If only it had rained. Anya hated the rain. She might have stayed home. We might still have our Anushka.

As midnight approached, Anya was standing among dozens of other kids, some as young as 14, on the boardwalk outside the dance club. The sea was inky black, the air warm and redolent of salt. She was supposed to have called home long before, but she and her friends were savoring their youth — joking, teasing — “making life”, as the Israelis say. They paid no attention to the time, or to the stranger among them.

The intruder, a Palestinian Arab, was dressed as a religious Jew. He was on a mission, but there was no hurry: paradise would wait a few more moments. He watched the children for a while, even chatted with some, before doing what he came there to do.

The explosive vest was laden with metal shrapnel — bolts, ball bearings — that ripped through the flesh of the nearby children even as its force tore their bodies apart. A sudden cloudburst of blood and tissue showered the boardwalk, soaking the survivors, pelting them with scraps of the bone and sinew of their classmates, their girlfriends, their brothers and sisters. Their screams rose above the cry of the sirens as rescue workers descended on the scene.

* * *

One hot, dry day extends into the next. Tatiana rarely speaks, her silence settling hard onto my already unbearable guilt. I wander the apartment at night, tormented by questions with no answers. When I finally sleep, Anya appears to me in my dreams. She is covered in blood. She speaks to me: “Now, Abba,” she says, “now you are truly an Israeli.”