Free Londongrad by Reggie Nadelson

pretty drunk now.
    “You’ll go swimming with me tomorrow?” said Valentina.
    “Sure,” I said. “I’ll call you in the morning.”
    “Not too early. I’m going to a party.”
    “Now?” Tolya said, glancing at his watch.
    “I’m a big girl, Daddy,” she said. “Daddy?” She got up and then squatted near her father, and took his hands. “Don’t go. Please.”
    “What’s bothering you?”
    “I don’t know. I just have this bad feeling, like I ate something off. They do bad stuff to Russians in London.”
    “But I’m very small potatoes, my darling, nobody is going to bother me,” said Tolya. “I’m not Boris Berezovsky, after all.”
    “Please?”
    “I’ll think,” he said. “Don’t nag.”
    She kissed him and got up to go. Tolya called after her.
    “What is it?”
    He took an envelope out of his pocket, and handed it to her. She looked inside and smiled. “Thanks, Daddy. That’s nice.” She kissed the top of his head. “You’re turning gray. You’ll have to start dyeing your hair,” she giggled. “See you both tomorrow, okay? Love you.”
    When Val had gone, Tolya asked me again if I wanted to come to London with him. I said I couldn’t. What I didn’t tell him was that I wanted to stay in New York where Val was, that I wanted to go swimming with her and take her to dinner.
    “How come Val’s so worried?” I said.
    “She thinks they’re killing Russians, some silly shit, Artyom, in London.” For a split second he looked uncomfortable, then he said, “But this is just small, little part of things, and who except English would give asylum to so many people, and protect against bad guys? Also, me I am not in that league of oligarchs. I’m little guy, Artyom,” he said, dropping his articles everywhere, making himself sound like a peasant, as if he didn’t know better.
    “But you’d like to be, wouldn’t you? A big guy,” I said, and saw that it bothered him, that his eyes shifted inwards. He wanted it. He wanted the whole thing. It gave me the creeps. It turned him into a man I didn’t really recognize. Then it passed. He laughed, and we had some more to drink, then he stretched out his legs, inspected his cigar, looked out at the Hudson River, then back at me and said, “It’s just business.”
    “What kind of business? In London?”
    “Restaurants. Wine. All my life I know that without good food, life is nothing, so now I am in the good-food business. In Europe they understand this. In Russia they understand. You have no idea, Artemy, these Russians, these guys, Dellos, Navikov, they get big respect, they are considered true food guys and they are Russians, not French or Italian, and they understand restaurants, they are changing Moscow, they spend money, they buy great chefs, and now they open up in London, London has become wonderful Russian province along with food center of the universe now.” He reached over and turned on the CD player, and put his head back and closed his eyes. “Tito Gobbi,” he said. “ Don Carlos . Gorgeous, yes?”
    For a while we listened, then Tolya suddenly said to me, “You know what is my favorite book, Artyom?”
    “ Nineteen Eighty-four ,” I said, recalling how he had for years carried a tattered Penguin copy. He put it in his pocket and took it out once in a while to read a passage to me. I always told him Brave New World was much closer to the way things had been in the USSR, but Tolya loved Orwell very much.
    “But also Slaughterhouse 5 . Recently I reread this. I am also a pilgrim, like Billy Pilgrim, also unstuck in time, also tumbling in the ridiculous. This writer, Kurt Vonnegut, I love this man. I feel like that, London, Moscow, New York, planes in between, other places, nothing fixed, nothing regular, like many people these days, just falling free here to there. Even as a boy, I always feel I am in contact with creatures from another planet.” He smiled. “Not like UFOs, asshole, you know what I mean,” he