The uncle, who had a craggy face which looked like it had been sculpted from cement, moved past her and into the apartment. His size made it easy for him to barge in and Eva instinctively jumped out of the way to let him pass. Now she knew where Lexie got it from. She was forever chastising him about charging down the campus sidewalks like he owned them, forcing other people to move aside as opposed to sharing the sidewalk like a civilized human being.
“Really, sir, the apartment is in no state for guests,” she said to Sergei’s back.
“He does not speak English,” Michael said behind her. “That is why I am here. To translate. May I come in?”
Eva frowned. “So you’re here to talk to me, not Alexei?”
“Yes.”
“Um, okay, then, come on in. There’s not really any place to sit. We don’t have a couch or anything—“
Sergei took one look at the table, which was covered with her unfolded clothes and swept it clean with one swoop of his large arm before taking a seat as if he hadn’t just knocked all her clean clothes to the floor.
“Mr. Rustanov would like for us to talk at the table,” Michael said, indicating with a sweeping gesture of his hand that she, too, should sit.
Suddenly feeling like a guest in her own home, Eva took a seat in the chair across from Sergei. “We only have two chairs,” she said to Michael.
“That is quite all right,” he said. “I will stand.”
Without any further ado, Sergei held her gaze and said something in a stream of Russian.
“He wants to know what Alexei’s told you about his family,” Michael said.
“Not much,” Eva answered, her unease growing by the minute. “Just that his parents died and his father left him enough money to study over here.”
Michael translated and Sergei looked away, obviously irritated. He then said something else in Russian.
“Anything else?”
She shook her head. “Um, not much. Sometimes I hear him arguing with his uncle—“ She stopped herself and addressed Sergei directly as she’d had been taught to in her special “Talking to the Deaf” master class. “Talking to you on the phone in Russian. I’m just going to go on and assume you’re the uncle he’s talking to. You seem like the kind of guy who’d be totally down for a weekly TransAtlantic argument. By the way, did you have to dump my clothes on the floor? Those were freshly washed.”
Once again, Michael translated. She could tell when he got to the part about the clothes and the weekly arguments, because the uncle’s eyes narrowed to slits.
He said something to Michael, who said, “From now on I will speak in the first person as if I am Mr. Rustanov himself. He has much to say and would prefer that you not interrupt.”
“I’ll try,” Eva said. “But us Texas girls aren’t exactly known for our not-interrupting skills.”
This time Michael didn’t translate, and he said in an aside to Eva, “I know you think you are being funny, but I am strongly advising you to do as he says.”
Something in his tone alerted Eva that this wasn’t just a strange situation, but a possibly dangerous one. Her mind scrambled, trying to figure out if she should stay there and listen or run for her life. But in the end, her curiosity won out. “Okay, I can be quiet,” she said.
This Michael translated, and Sergei nodded before folding his large hands on the table in front of him and speaking in large chunks, stopping every five sentences or so to let Michael translate:
“You may be a nice girl. I don’t know. I don’t care. Russia is not like America. We are not so enthusiastic about the races mixing. If Alexei were to bring you home, it will not be good for the Rustanov family. People would ask us, what is this? I do not want Alexei with an American girl, especially not a black one.”
Growing up in a mostly white Texas town, Eva had encountered her share of racism, but never anything quite this straightforward and blatant. She opened her mouth but Michael shook his head and tapped a warning finger against his lips twice. The protest died as something told her she should keep her mouth closed, even if Sergei was saying he didn’t want Alexei and her to be together because of her nationality and even more so, the color of her skin. There was something about this man. He seemed to be everything people thought her Lexie was, almost casually dangerous to the point that she had no problem imagining him pulling out a gun and shooting her for being disrespectful.
“Alexei did you a disservice,” Michael continued, picking up as if they hadn’t had the silent exchange behind Sergei’s back. “He should have told you about me, about his family. The reason we argue every week is because Alexei is supposed to be the head of our family now that his father has died. He wastes his time with unnecessary schooling when he should be back in Russia taking his rightful place. Another reason we have been arguing is because he says he would like to stay on in America after he graduates. He says he would like to work for a regular business as an executive. He says instead of serving his family as he was raised to do, he now wishes to live a normal life. I will not let this happen.”
Despite how weirded out she was by this entire situation, Eva’s heart soared. She had been worried about how they were going to make it work after Alexei graduated next year and she was delighted to hear Alexei had already started making plans.
She had half a mind to disobey his edict to stay quiet and tell him Alexei was a grown man and he couldn’t stop him from going down his own path or being with her. But that was when Michael brought out a laptop and flipped it open. “He wants me to show you this.”
The screen lit up to a picture of a man in a dripping wet suit, skin bloated, eyes glassy with death. It was obvious his throat had been slit and from the looks of his chest, someone had put a bullet or two into him as well. Seeing one picture of a dead body was horrifying enough, but then Michael pushed a button and a whole slideshow of dead bodies started. There were pictures of men ranging in age from eighteen to sixty, all dead. Not all of them had been dumped in water, but they all had slit throats and chest wounds, and there were a few full body shots that also revealed blown out kneecaps. The slideshow went on for several minutes with at least fifty pictures flashing across the screen until it finally, mercifully stopped on a picture of a young, blond businessman, his eyes still wide with horror, his neck slit with two distinct bullet wounds in his chest.
Sergei began speaking again with Michael translating. “Because you are keeping our dear Alexei from fulfilling his duties, the Rustanovs now consider you our enemy. This is what our family does to our enemies, what we’re known for. And these are only the most blatant things we do. Sometimes our enemies die quietly, in car accidents, or they have falls from windows, or maybe drink a cup of tea, only to find out it has been poisoned.”