Damaged Goods

The maintenance worker waited for the widow, Lyuba Russova, as she passed through the lobby of the Meadow Lanes housing complex. "The visiting nurse needs you in Mr. Grushko's apartment."

Lyuba pulled up short. For the past five years, the stocky man with the watery blue eyes never once looked her full in the face. Even now he was fiddling with his calloused hands. "The blonde with the beaky nose?"

Mitchell nodded. Of the forty-eight apartments at Meadow Lane, thirty-nine were occupied by Russian immigrants. Eight years earlier, Lyuba arrived in America from the Altai region close by the Mongolian border. She rode the elevator up to the fourth floor and knocked on a door at the end of the corridor. Mr. Grushko was sitting in a straight back chair. The emaciated six-footer wore a blank, impassive expression as the thickset nurse bent over a blood pressure cuff. When she was finished, the woman turned to Lyuba. "Has Fyodor been taking his heart medication?"

Lyuba turned to the old man and interpreted the nurse's question. "Da. Da."

"Any bleeding from the rectum?"

The man balked at the question. "Maybe just a little." Lyuba replied.

The nurse scribbled furiously on a pad. "His stools... are they firm or loose?"

Stools were three-legged chairs. Mr. Grushko had a cheap kitchen set that he picked up at the Salvation Army and a camel-colored Naugahyde recliner. "I don't understand the question."

"Bodily wastes… feces. I'm trying to determine if the bleeding is from stomach ulcers or hemorrhoids."

Lyuba told Mr. Grushko what the nurse needed to know. The man sat erect with his mottled hands resting in his lap. Like tenacious, late-summer weeds, several strands of white hair, curled from his nostrils. "Last time she wanted to know about my testicles, now my anus. Why does she always ask embarrassing questions?"

"I don't know." Lyuba replied. "Hard liquor is bad for your stomach. She wants you to -"

"My only pleasures in life are pelmeni and vodka." A messy scattering, remnants of the spicy, meat-stuffed dumplings, littered the kitchen table and surrounding floor. He glanced at the nurse and cracked an ingratiating, gap-toothed smile. "Ask the old hen if her bowels are firm or loose." Lyuba cringed.

"What did he say?" the visiting nurse demanded, sensing that a joke was being played at her expense.

"Find out," Mr. Grushko bellowed, "if her hemorrhoids swell up to the size of golf balls after a particularly hard -"

"He says his stools are normal lately. No problem." Lyuba was growing weary of the verbal sparring. Mr. Grushko would never stop swilling liquor; on her deathbed the visiting nurse would still be an officious prig.

A cell phone twittered and the blonde woman reached for her purse. "Excuse me a moment." Pressing the phone to her ear, she rushed out into the hallway.

"I'm going to the ethnic market later. I'll pick you up an Izvestia, chopped herring in white wine sauce, a chunk of sesame halva and those buckwheat blinis you like."

For the first time since Lyuba entered the apartment, Mr. Grushko's stoic features eased. "How did you know to come here?"

"Mitchell… the maintenance worker."

"Nice man."

"He's got no personality."

Mr. Grushko rubbed the back of his neck with an arthritic hand. For thirty years he worked as a welder at a factory in Smolensk. Stalin toured the facility. Mr. Grushko spent thirteen days at the infamous Lubyanka Prison for talking back to a supervisor. They beat him with a rubber hose, but it could have been worse. A coworker was sent to the Gulag for a similar offense. Lubyanka - in Soviet Russian jokes it was referred to as ‘the tallest building in Moscow, since Siberia could be seen from its basement’. Another joke referred to the building as ‘Adult's World’ as compared to ‘Children's World,’ the name of the popular toy store across the street.

"No, you're wrong," the old man cautioned. "Last Thursday, Mitchell went and got Mrs. Brodsky's groceries when her legs swelled like tree stumps, and she couldn't leave the apartment. He went after work on his own time." The old man cleared his throat, making a series of retching sounds. "And when the exterminators sprayed for roaches in December, he moved my furniture out into the hallway - even the heavy bureau - and wouldn't take a penny for his troubles."

"So what's his problem?"

Mr. Grushko stared pensively out the window, where the muddy earth was flecked with the remnants of late-winter snow. He shrugged and rubbed his unshaven cheeks. "No great mystery... he's just damaged good like the rest of us."

Damaged goods. Lyuba sensed something to that effect early on. The maintenance man smiled easily enough but the expression was tinged with a covert sadness, a melancholy she felt in her bones. It was an entrenched misery that could only be kissed or petted away - and even that with great difficulty. Strangely, that bleak sorrow only intensified her attraction for the man who never looked her full in the face.

Suddenly the front door burst open and the nurse reappeared. "So, where were we?"

*****

Lyuba went back down stairs. Mitchell was washing windows in the recreation room. She watched as a shiny streak of ammoniated cleaner evaporated on the clean glass. "When you're done with the windows, come to my apartment." She had a chronically hoarse voice, and the thick Russian accent heightened the guttural inflection.

"Okay."

Back upstairs, Lyuba removed a container with a reddish liquid from the refrigerator. Transferring the food into a smaller bowl, she heated it in a microwave.

“Borscht... beet soup," She said when the maintenance man arrived. She sat him down at the kitchen table. "Everyone in Russia eats borscht.” She spooned a dollop of sour cream in the center of the bowl and placed it in front of him. "For flavoring we use meaty bone-in beef shank, diced onion, carrots, russet potatoes, fresh dill and a tablespoon of red wine vinegar."

Mitchell stirred the sour cream toward the edge of the bowl mixing it with the vegetables then watched wistfully as the sour cream absorbed the broth and darkened to a pinkish hue before tasting the soup. “This is damn good!” He emptied the bowl.

Reaching out, she rested a hand on his forearm. "Want to spend time together?"

"A date?"

"Yes, something of the sort," Lyuba replied.

"All this time," Mitchell mumbled sheepishly, "I've been trying to get up the courage..."

Lyuba placed the ladle back in the bowl and stirred the vegetables in the sweet broth. "More soup?"