You Must Go and Win: Essays Read Online Free Page A

of the Ukrainian poet that Papa had so movingly described as “kind of OK” along the way. It was
a Sunday afternoon and the park was full of families pushing strollers; packs of young guys sporting crew cuts, acid-washed jeans, and collared t-shirts; and dazzling young women. The women mostly walked in pairs, linked at the elbows or holding hands, their dresses glittering fiercely in the sun. I looked down at myself, feeling like I’d somehow surreptitiously slipped past the park’s face-control unit. Cousin Lyonya noticed me staring and snorted.
    “Eckh, these people. They come to the park looking for attention. They have absolutely nowhere else to go and nothing to do with themselves.”
    And I thought: Had my family never left, this would have been my Sunday afternoon. I would have woken up, slipped on something scratchy and sequin-covered, then styled my hair for two leisurely hours before hitting the park. There, my friends and I would patrol the trees like a squadron of mismatched bridesmaids, eyeing the bullet-headed men in ball-hugging jeans, hoping that one of them might impregnate us by age twenty-two …
    We stopped at a bench not far from Freedom Square where we were supposed to meet Volodya, Papa’s best friend from college, and his wife, Inna. Lyonya pulled a packet of photographs and some papers wrapped in a plastic bag from his man purse.
    “These are for your father. Some old family artifacts I think he’ll find interesting.”
    I thanked Lyonya and handed him an envelope with the money Papa had asked me to pass along. In the midst of this exchange, Volodya and Inna appeared. A round of handshakes, and a struggle to arrive at a common topic of conversation, ensued. Time, we decided, for some awkward photos together. Then Lyonya told us to come back to Kharkhov again soon, promising to cook us dinner next time. A quick hug and a kiss and he was gone—the Cousin Who No Longer Drinks Water.
     
     
    Volodya had apparently also gotten a copy of Papa’s dismal list of things to do, because as soon as the niceties were over, he turned to me and said, “Okay then, off to the zoo?”
    We set off across the square, passing beneath the lengthening shadow of Lenin before cutting through the grounds of the university where Volodya and Inna had studied together with Papa.
    “I remember once,” Volodya began, “your father and I lucked into finding some money just lying on the sidewalk. A small fortune, something like twenty dollars. So we decided to realize a long-held dream of ours …”
    Volodya laughed, a bit overcome by the memory, and I imagined a debauched binge of black-market purchases, Papa sitting, pasha-like, atop an illicit blue-jean-and-caviar mountain.
    “We set for ourselves,” Volodya continued, “the goal of visiting every shashlik stand in Kharkov!”
    To me this sounded suspiciously like a quest to visit every Dunkin’ Donuts in Worcester, but I did my best to radiate enthusiasm.
    “Ambitious!” I chirped.
    Volodya was still deep into enumerating the shashlik stands of Kharkov when we reached the iron gates of the Kharkov State Zoo. The zoo’s paths were lined with colorful, campy signs that could have been lifted straight from the set of a John Waters movie, but did nothing to hide the state of the animals themselves, who had gone from sad to miserable in Papa’s absence. I took off down the darkening, overgrown lane alone, past some dull-eyed bears and a collapsed ostrich, stopping to take a picture of a baboon who looked up at me like he hoped I had some Lexapro.
    “I used to talk to them,” Papa had told me. “Not the lions, though. They never seemed interested. Also, all of the expensive
animals were locked up in a different part of the zoo, so I didn’t talk to them either.”
    I was sorry Papa had to talk to cheap animals.
    “That’s what you did? All night?”
    “No. Just until the other guards came around to see if I had a ruble.”
    “Did you give it to