{ON THE STANDS}

Spring Has Sprung | CHANGE

Bet you thought that nasty winter would never end. In this issue of Salon, we've got some fresh prose, an out of this world interview and knock your socks off poetry to usher in our favorite time of the year.

{Fiction}

The Thing About Luzhin

BY MICHAEL MORECI

An Excerpt from Baron's Chronicle

Here's the thing about Luzhin: from the night we met, I knew he was not an honest person. It's an opinion never changed, even as we became what some would call friends. There was something about him that inspired me; here was a person who came to America in the early ‘90s when he was twenty, abandoning Russia in spite of its imminent overhaul. And by the way he tells his story, you can tell Luzhin wasn't discouraged by the abrupt, life-altering move. After all, living in Russia, as Luzhin explained it to me, was like living in a hedge maze, only without the exits. You run round and round, following every promise for change, for hope, always looking not necessarily for a way out, but just an opening. A way to something better.

After a year of living as an expatriate in Brighton Beach, Luzhin landed here in Chicago, in Ukrainian Village and was immediately taken under the wings of the older men in the community, Eastern European and Russian ex-pats. In Luzhin they saw what everyone saw in the burly Russian-possibilities. But mainly, their minds had Luzhin pegged as another fresh slab of Communist meat who didn't speak the language and could be easily exploited. They made Luzhin a boxer, even though he hated violence. Which, incidentally, made him perfect for what he was asked to do: take dives. Here was this pick-up truck of a man with squared off shoulders and a block head who, through the workings of his counterparts, had a reputation for decimating other boxers back in Russia, where he was undefeated champion of the butcher's market circuit. Luzhin was no fighter, but because of his training, which was ...

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How We Remember

BY MIRANDA TRAIN

My grandmother has $7,000 under her mattress in case she has to flee to Israel. My father won't go to Germany, and he especially won't buy German made ovens. I grew up in a new era, the politically correct environment of an East Coast American suburb. As a third generation Jew of an assimilated non-religious family, it was my job to forget. Not only did I think my family was crazy for holding a grudge, I had German friends.

There was a great divide between my generation and the ones that had lived through the Holocaust. It was their identity. To me, it was a history lesson. I was lucky. I grew up far away from anti-Semitic sentiment and the shtetls of Europe. It wasn't my story to tell. I didn't have lost relatives or scattered cousins throughout the world like other Jewish families did. We came here before the war and changed our names at Ellis Island. We assimilated quickly and focused on establishing financial security in the new country. I didn't go to temple or fast on Yom Kipper. My culture was based on New Jersey malls and Bon Jovi. I liked it that way; we all did. I represented rebirth. We lived in a bubble where peace surrounded us and the genocide was... done. Yet, sometimes in the safety of my suburban lawn, this legacy of death would shadow me. My grandmother would yell at me for dating a non-Jew, or the TV news would report that someone had drawn a swastika on a school door. And I would realize that it wasn't completely over.

I read "Night," watched "Exodus" and "Schindler's List." I tried to dissolve the cloudy haze that had been separating me from the past. But these stories remained distant and my ...

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Garden

Bonzai BY SUSAN TEPPER

At the garden center Lamont bought a tray of mixed pansies. He'd walked a couple miles to get there, braving cold winds gusting off the Long Island Sound, a steady mist soaking his camouflage jacket. And what did he find when he got there? A greenhouse full of ceramic pots. No nice humid greenhouse odor. Long empty shelves where lush potted plants should've been on display.

Disgusted, Lamont picked up his tray of pansies and exited the greenhouse through the newly installed automatic doors. Wind off the sound hitting him hard in the face, pelting the ground kicking up street sand, as he did the walk back to his garden apartment.
Once safely inside, he slid the tray of pansies out of the waxed, protective floral bag and set it on the floor near his living room window. No sun. Lamont clucked his tongue with displeasure against his teeth. The first of April and still as gray as February!

Turning away from the window, he switched on the TV hoping to find a garden show. Now that he lived alone he spent a great deal of his free time watching garden shows.

Shortly after Christmas, after all the discarded paper from the presents had been balled-up and thrown into the dumpster, while the tree and holly roping and other decorations were still in place, hiswife, Greta, walked out. Lamont had been expecting it. Every minute for two and a half years he'd been expecting it. He had expected to see the walls come crashing down — the inevitable climax to his infidelities. At forty-four, Greta was still considered extremely attractive.

Lamont played the remote until he found a channel with a garden ...

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{Non-Fiction}

Understanding My Kenya

BY BITSY

I have often seen youth as the lyrical age, that is the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him... then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude. [Milan Kundera, The Curtain]

I search for meaning everywhere as I try to understand what is happening in my country, Kenya. Lyrical implies something beautiful, pure, good, even. Does it speak for the stage of being that Kenya has gone through, or does it speak for me as an individual, or can I even separate my country from myself as our birthdays are less than a week apart? Are we passing from immaturity to maturity; a chrysalis that has been violently ripped apart by a post-election result that went so terribly wrong?

Choosing a leader

December 27, 2007 polling day. Kenyans lined up in unprecedented numbers across the country to cast their vote. Patiently waiting, some silent, some chatting conversationally to whomever shared their alphabetically grouped name chronology; Kenyans appeared united in their quest for a peaceful election.

The polling stations were to open at 6am. I left my house at 6:30 in the morning; mineral water, windbreaker and a foldable chair at the ready. The morning was unusually cool for Kenya at the height of its summer season and the low-hanging clouds threatened rain. The polling station was at a local government school in an upmarket residential part of Nairobi, a brisk fifteen minute walk from my house. I drove there...just in case.

There were cars parked, back to back on the grassy kerbsides on all the byroads close to the school. I managed to squeeze my 1969 VW beetle into a spot, not too far from the main road. I grabbed my tote bag ...

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Oriovac

BY CATHERINE KANJER KAPPHAHN

Marijana Kutina, Ilova, Banova Jaruga, I keep track of the names. Each time the train stops at a station, I search my map for the village. Where am I? How far? With my fingertip, I trace the line from Zagreb to Oriovac, which I have circled in blue ink. For years it seems as though I have been inching toward this elusive village, the place where my mother was born between two World Wars, the place where she spent the first five years of her life, the place I have written about, but have never seen.

I am thirty-four, a woman traveling alone, unable to speak the language. In the back of my journal, I have written her address: Kujnik 5. I don't know if the house still exists. By now it would be over a hundred years old. It could have been destroyed during the war since Oriovac is so close to the border of Bosnia. Strangely I feel unafraid, as if I am going somewhere familiar. I stare at the Slavonian landscape here in Eastern Croatia; the fields, hills, and church steeples fly past.

Before I left New York City, I explained to my friends that I had to go on this journey before I did anything else in my life. There was something driving me as I scraped together the money (credit cards, student loans) for my month-long Croatian odyssey. In 1993 I'd visited Croatia with my father, but because of the war it was too dangerous to travel to my mom's village. Vedran, my Croatian friend, a doctor in his fifties with a peppery beard and wise face, peered over the rim of his glasses ...

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{Poetry}

The Hello Girls

BY KC TROMMER

Good morning. Operator.
A few hundred calls an hour. Inferno.
Red lights: incoming white lights: connected
damn thing ablaze at all hours.

9 p.m. to 2 a.m. for the new girls, stuffing cords into
machine mouths:
Schenectady 793,
Saratoga 518,
up to the Stony Creek corner payphone.
1957: there is a script. Not Yes ...

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Firecracker

BY S.G. FRAZIER

A row of glistening kids stood under the pool lamp, gazing through the fence links as one of the witnesses, beer coolie in hand flyswatter in the other, reported to the cops that guilty boys had scattered.

I saw them, belly first, feet slapping the sidewalk running through ...

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