Boomerang of Happiness - 9

Originally, when Leo and Anna planned to get married, they wanted to have a wedding at a restaurant. They did not plan to invite many guests, but even with the closest relatives and friends they counted fifty people who confirmed they would attend. Their parents’ three-room apartment would not be able to accommodate so many guests, and Maria and Pavel found a large restaurant not far from their home where they planned to have the wedding for their fourth child. But now that it turned into a double wedding with more guests and Anna’s parents coming as well, the restaurant was becoming an expensive endeavor and a little too tight for everyone who wanted to come.

At the end of June, less than one month before the double wedding, Maria called Alex and said that the restaurant was not working out and they could not find another venue. When Alex asked what their options were, Maria said that her parents offered to host the wedding at their place.

“You mean, at grandparents’ house in the village?” Alex asked to confirm.

“Yes, they have enough space in the house and in the back garden to accommodate as many as 150 people. It will be nice and spacious there.”

“I am not sure Anna will like this idea. She was dreaming of the wedding in a restaurant, nice dress and all.”

“Oh, she can still have her nice dress, we are just changing the wedding venue. Leo and Anna already know and agreed. If we are to have a double wedding, there’s no better solution.”

“I just can’t imagine Anna being happy to hear that. First I told her she’d have to go to Tajikistan with me and now she will have to give up her dream of the lavish wedding in a restaurant.”

“Well, I am sure you will be able to explain everything to her,” Alex’s mom said.

“I’ll try. What are we having for the food then?”

“All our Kazakh relatives will cook various traditional Kazakh dishes. The table is going to be full, there will be no shortage of good food.”

“That’s what I was afraid of: Another dream of Anna’s going down the drain. I am not sure she will be thrilled about Kazakh traditional food.”

“I see you have a lot of things to discuss with your bride. But keep in mind that it may be a little too late to change anything at this point. I cannot tell my parents we will change the venue again, after they so generously offered their help,” Maria said and hung up.

To Alex’s surprise, Anna took all the logistical changes with no objection, even though she had spent hours talking about their wedding at a restaurant. It was her parents who were not happy at all. They were ready to spring big money for their only daughter’s wedding and when she told them it was going to be in a Kazakh village with Kazakh food, they suggested to cancel the double wedding and do a smaller wedding at a restaurant in Novosibirsk. But Anna talked them into going to Kazakhstan. She convinced them it would be a good adventure and a chance to meet Alex’s entire family.

When the time for Alex’s two-week vacation came, Anna resigned from her position of the accountant at the station. On the last day of work, she brought in a cake her mother made for everyone in her department to say good-bye. When her co-workers realized that, given Alex’s frequent movement for work, they might not see Anna again for a long time or perhaps ever, many of them felt sad. Some even admitted that they would miss Anna, her non-stop talking and all.

One week before the wedding, Alex and Anna left the station with just two suitcases of their personal things. Alex also said good-bye to everyone at work, deep in his heart knowing that he would never see them again. He felt that some big changes were coming for the entire country, but couldn’t quite formulate what those changes would be. He was looking forward to his next post of service in Tajikistan. A lot was at stake for him there professionally, as he felt this was an opportunity to materialize the future he was writing about in his 1989 article. But in the meanwhile, he needed to survive the wedding.

When they arrived in Alma-Ata, Alex immediately felt with his skin that his mother did not like Anna. Maria was too smart and polite to tell him that directly or show it in any way to Anna, but Alex still knew. Growing up with Maria and being a sensitive child with a high emotional intelligence, Alex knew exactly when his mother used her passive-aggressive talk to mask her disappointment or displeasure. She started to call his bride “big Anna” straight away, as she explained, to differentiate her from Leo’s Anna, who was six years younger. However, Alex felt there was a deeper meaning to this, judging by his mother’s tone. Whenever Anna threw her uncontrollable talking sessions at Maria, his mother would just give Alex a reproachful look or, even worse, roll her eyes when Anna was not looking. Only once Maria told Anna, with a tender and caring look in her eyes and a gentle stroke of hand on Anna’s shoulder, “Darling, you must be tired of providing us with so much information. Give your mouth a little break.” Anna did not know if she should be offended by this comment, but fell into silence out of respect for Alex’s mother. For only about a minute.

Alex’s father, on the other hand, was not bothered by Anna’s talking. Or Anna in general. As a truly absent-minded writer and a sharp observer of the nature, Pavel was living in his own world, always whistling various tunes, as he was saying, coming to him from the sky and birds and other creatures of the environment, perhaps existing only in his mind. The only voice that made him occasionally tune in to the human world was that of Maria’s. Pavel was still in love with his wife of thirty-seven years and five gifted children, the last one of which was “an accidental God-given prodigy,” as they called Alex’s youngest brother Max. Pavel was also very happy that all his children would be coming for the wedding: with four of them grown up and building their own careers and families it was a rare occasion when they could all get together.

To keep his mind busy and avoid his mother’s discussions and questions about Anna, Alex plunged himself into the wedding preparations. Leaving Anna to stay with his parents, he went to his grandparents’ place to help out with the arrangements. He was surprised at how much preparation the wedding required: food supplies to be bought, tables and sitting to be sorted out, sleeping arrangements to be thought through. His grandparents had a lot of space in the back yard and it was decided that the big table should be arranged in an “n” shape, with the two couples sitting at the central part and the guests on the sides, both on the outside and inside rims. For that, they needed to build some new tables, and Alex and a couple of his Kazakh cousins took down a big poplar tree on the edge of the garden, had it sawn into timber and built into a crude table that could be covered with a nice table cloth for the dinner.

The largest problem was finding enough alcohol for the wedding. Even though most of Alex’s family and friends were not big drinkers, the standard feature of all Soviet weddings was alcohol flowing in rivers. If the wedding guests did not drink themselves to the state where even the shiest ones started to loudly slur popular songs and dance, the wedding would be remembered as a failure. A bottle of half-a-liter vodka and a bottle of wine per person was considered to be a minimum necessary for a good wedding party. However, Gorbachev’s 1985 prohibition law allowed buying only two bottles of vodka and one bottle of wine per person at a time. So Alex and his cousins had to go to many stores at different times, some in Alma-Ata, to buy six crates of twenty bottles of vodka each, two crates of red wine, one crate of white wine and fifty bottles of Soviet Champaign for celebratory toasting. When he looked at the stacked crates of alcohol, Alex could not believe that any wedding would consume so much, but his Kazakh relatives reminded him again that it was for a minimum of 120 people and perhaps they should buy even more: this was just cutting it.

Leo and Anna arrived three days before the wedding and immediately joined the preparation party. Alex was happy to reconnect with his younger brother whom he had not seen since Irina’s disappearance. Leo took two weeks of unpaid leave then and stayed with Alex immediately after the tragedy. Alex often thought that had Leo not been there, keeping watch and trying to distract him, he would have been long gone because he often thought of suicide then. Now they were sleeping on the floor in their grandparents’ house, talking all night long, remembering their childhood adventures in the village, their first loves and many other things. When Alex asked Leo about his impression of Anna, Leo tactfully said that he’d just met her and couldn’t really say anything. “But if you like her, I am sure I’ll like her too,” Leo added, smiling, “What choice do I have?”

Their oldest sister Daria, her husband Sergei and their four sons arrived by train two days before the wedding. They lived in Tashkent, where Sergei’s family was, and whenever they came to Alma-Ata in the summer, they always brought incredible gifts: sweet cherries, huge melons and watermelons, apricots, pears, grapes, and peaches that tasted as if they came from Eden. Alex and Leo met them at the railway station and they had to get another car with a big trunk to put all the goodies in. Alex was particularly happy to see his nephews, the oldest of whom was 15, followed by 12-year-old twins, and the youngest 10-year-old. Alex always found it amusing that his oldest nephew was older than his youngest brother by two years, a quirk of a large family with kids dispersed in age across more than two decades. All his nephews were incredibly smart, which seemed to be running in the family. They regularly brought home all sorts of trophies from mathematics and robotics clubs and competitions. Spending time with them was pure joy for Alex, as they were quite creative in coming up with all sorts of word and math games. When he was catching up with them this time, he suddenly was washed over by a sad thought that had he married Irina he would have had at least one of his own boys by now. He immediately displaced that thought with a happier one that he will have a child with Anna pretty soon.

Andrey and Nina with their two sons arrived later on the same day, and Alex had to make a run to the airport to pick them up. When they all entered their parents’ apartment, Pavel and Maria were happy beyond words to see all their children and grandchildren together.

“See how many good humans we created,” Pavel said to Maria.

“Yes, a big happy family,” she responded. “Too bad we don’t live close together so that we could see them all every day.”

“Spread out all over the country,” Pavel echoed, chuckling. “Well, what else if not a double wedding would have brought them all together?”

One day before the wedding, Anna’s parents finally arrived. They were supposed to bring Anna’s wedding dress, sawn in Novosibirsk by a special design she’d found in a German catalogue. For that reason alone, Anna’s father drove his Zhiguli Model 3 (“Kopeyka,” as it was widely referred to) all the way down from Siberia to Alma-Ata. It took them three days and two nights of almost non-stop driving, but they were happy to have carried out an important mission of delivering the wedding dress for their daughter. Since Maria and Pavel’s apartment was already full of guests and one and a half wedding couples, Alex suggested he’d take Anna’s parents to the house of his Kazakh grandparents, where a separate room was designated just for them.

When they entered the house and were shown the room where they were supposed to sleep, with only one bed and a lot of traditional Kazakh rugs, mattresses and pillows stacked up along the walls for the wedding guests, they could hardly contain their shock. Anna’s mother immediately asked if she could help with some preparations for the wedding, and was led into the kitchen to help other women with chopping salads and cooking. Anna’s father joined other men in the back yard setting up the tables and long benches, as well as three kazans (huge cast iron round pots used to cook large amounts of plov and meat-based Central Asian dishes) with wood fire in different parts of the garden. When the preparations were done, all adults gathered at the newly assembled tables in the garden, had a dinner of lamb bouillon with noodles and chatted about the wedding and many other things. Finally, when everyone was ready to go to bed, Anna’s parents went to sleep in their car, having said nothing to anyone. Their car was parked inside the large gated internal yard and when Leo discovered them sleeping there, he said to Alex: “That’s quite rude of them, don’t you think? Apa gave them a whole room! Just for the two of them!”

“They’ve never been in a Kazakh house before. Give them a break, Lyova, they probably just didn’t want to inconvenience anyone,” Alex answered with an uneasy feeling.

Next morning, the day of the wedding, Anna’s parents gave a ride to Alex to Alma-Ata, where the registration ceremony was to take place. Alex carefully asked them why they didn’t sleep in the house.

“It was more convenient for us to sleep in the car,” Anna’s father replied.

“Besides, it freed up so much room in the house for other guests!” his wife added.

“But you’ve already spent so much time in the car driving down here, didn’t you want to get a little normal rest?” Alex insisted.

“You know, we’ve spent so much time in this car, and not only on this trip, but also various camping trips and other long rides when Anna was much younger, it doesn’t bother us at all. We’ve decided to continue sleeping in our car while we are staying here. It’s just two more nights,” Anna’s mother said in a tone of a prisoner counting down the days to her release. After this, they kept silent until they arrived to Alex’s parents’ apartment where the wedding procession was supposed to start.

To Part 10

Back to Part 8