Borrowed time

In the collection One More Year, immigrants fashion new, often uneasy existences in the US

(ARTHUR GIRON)

In the story "Better Half" in Sana Krasikov's debut collection of stories, a young woman, Anya, moves from Russia to America to begin a new life. She marries but soon finds that her husband is selfish and immature. One night, during an argument, they begin to fight, and Anya's bottom lip is cut open. Afterward, she warily inspects the damage to her face in a mirror: "She tried to soften her eyes into an empty catastrophic look, but the more determined expression wore its way through."

The reader feels remarkably close to the horrible reality of Anya's situation here, and the sentence shows some of the qualities of Krasikov's writing in this collection. It is alert, lucid, and bracingly compressed; it also displays a careful lightness of touch in its revelation of character.

Many of the characters in these stories have left the former Soviet Union for America; some return to their native country for a brief period; and the difficulties and challenges that a new society presents are reflected in the difficulties and challenges of their relationships and friendships.

In "Companion," for instance, Ilona, struggling to adjust to life as a single woman with financial difficulties in America after a more comfortable, married life in Georgia, is offered the temporary use of a friend's spacious house: Ilona, we are told, "couldn't tell if Taia was offering her a favor or asking for one, just as she couldn't judge if her friends kept things to themselves to protect her feelings or because they found her irrelevant."

Krasikov is particularly adept at dramatizing the way in which her characters become aware of the disjunction between their past and present lives. In "Asal" Gulia leaves Uzbekistan for New York when her relationship with Rashid becomes intolerable. Near the end of the story Gulia is talking to Rashid on the telephone, sitting in the lobby of her apartment building. She attracts the curious glances of two young doctors returning home after a night shift. One of them looks away quickly when she notices him. Gulia reflects that they "were so worried here about appearing intrusive. . . . Everything was the opposite of Fergana, but she could get used to it."

Shortly afterward Rashid suggests that they "ask God for help, together." Gulia replies that it "might be time that you and I started asking God for different things." These sudden recognitions of societal and personal differences are deftly juxtaposed (a lesser writer would have made the connection between them more explicit).

Krasikov also writes well about the sense of disorientation to which a life spent in two societies may give rise. In "The Alternate," Victor is disconcerted in New York by what he finds to be an "American trait" in the daughter of a woman he loved in the former Soviet Union: "In the universe she inhabited it didn't matter what you did as long as you were able to formulate a response to it afterward."

Another American trait surprises the narrator of "There Will Be No Fourth Rome" when she asks a female worker in a Russian factory whether she might take her photograph. The woman replies: "They don't pay us enough for that." The narrator judges it "a very American way to answer."

Krasikov's characters, then, are highly attentive to the instability of their lives. One symptom of this is their readiness to look to the constancy of fate to explain and justify to themselves how their lives have become so bound up in the lives of others.

In "Better Half," for instance, Anya reflects that a work colleague's gossip suggests that "trying to escape your tedious fate only led you back to it." Anya, we feel, may disapprove of that idea, but cannot herself entirely escape its fearsomeness. Similarly, in "There Will Be No Fourth Rome," Larisa, recollecting the death of her adulterous husband in the arms of another woman, says simply: "That's my fate."

Later in the same story, the narrator remarks that Larisa's feelings are "foolish, naïve, embarrassing," but this is not to say that Larisa herself is made to appear to be any of these things. Krasikov is unblinking in her portrayal of her characters' confusions, but her narrative voice is never condescending. Just as impressive is her refusal to allow the poignancy of the situations she represents to overwhelm the tonal control of her writing.

That quality is evident in a moment from "Maia in Yonkers." Maia and her young son, Gogi, have attended the burial of the boy's father. Throughout the funeral, we are told, Gogi "watched [his mother] with an adult's appraising seriousness." Afterward, Maia "sensed in him a new kind of silence - the tormented endurance of a child waiting to speak." The boy is sitting with his mother and his aunt on a sofa. Then: "When he quit dangling his foot, rubbing it on the carpet, he looked up at her. 'Maia,' he said, calling her for the first time by her name. 'You'll have to do something now.' "

The writing beautifully evokes the sudden dignity of Gogi's confused sadness, and the way his attempts to demonstrate maturity illuminate only his helplessness in the face of adult tragedy. The detail of Gogi's "calling [his mother] for the first time by her name" is just right here. It notices rather than intrudes on the boy's grief, and shows Krasikov's writing at its best: clear-sighted, tactful, and moving.

Matthew Peters is a freelance writer who lives in the southeast of England.