by Lara Vapnyar
About two hours into the trip, when the train was passing some bleak countryside, with lopsided barns and skinny cows stuck in mud, they unwrapped and ate omelet sandwiches that Lena’s mother had made for her, and little meat pies that Inka’s mother had baked at home and brought to Moscow on a train, in a big aluminum pot wrapped in a woolen shawl.
Inka said that her mother was only thirty-four years old. She got pregnant with Inka while still in high school and had to marry Inka’s father. Her father was a smart, mean man who had once been an artist but was now just a common drunk. Her mother was a hairdresser and very pretty. Her biggest fear was that Inka would get pregnant and have to get married young too. Inka had to promise her mother that whatever happened she wouldn’t get married before she was twenty-three.
“Why twenty-three?” Lena asked.
Inka didn’t know. She sighed and cleaned a spot on the window with her sleeve. She said that her biggest wish was to escape the pattern. She said that it was the scariest thing—falling into a pattern and knowing what was going to happen to you.
Lena’s parents had gotten divorced when she turned sixteen. The official version was that her mother threw her father out. At first her mother was euphoric, energized, proud of her resolve. She was brimming with plans for her new independent life, but in a month or two she started to fall apart. What horrified Lena the most was her mother’s staggering insecurity. She acquired this strange new expression, this sideways questioning look, as if she suspected that people were laughing at her. But if she told a joke, it was the other way around; she was terrified that people wouldn’t laugh, and she smiled with such gratitude when they did. And even those stupid omelet sandwiches that she’d been proudly making for years: Now she would push the omelet from the pan onto the cutting board and freeze with the knife suspended in her fingers: “Do you even like them? Are they even good? Lena, please tell me the truth, do you like my omelet sandwiches?” Lena couldn’t stand her like that. She couldn’t bear to talk to her, to look at her. She tried to hide from her mother’s unhappiness as if it were an infectious disease. She loathed herself for that, but she couldn’t help it. Her father, on the other hand, seemed to be okay. “I feel as if I were learning to breathe anew,” he’d whispered when Lena saw him last. He rented a tiny room in a shoddy, crowded, roach-infested apartment, but he didn’t seem to mind. He began to wear a look of cautious happiness, as if he’d discovered a treasure and was afraid that someone would take it away. Lena couldn’t bear to see him happy, when she knew how much the divorce pained her mother. She couldn’t bring herself to visit him after that. She cried at night, both hating and missing him.
Lena looked at Inka’s solemn profile, which didn’t go with the mess of pink and blue in her hair, and wondered if she could understand. She looked like she could.
About an hour away from the camp, the scenery changed dramatically. Woods gradually supplanted fields and meadows, and the closer we got to the camp, the denser the woods became. Inka and Lena stopped talking and looked out the window. At one point they thought they saw a moose. The girls in the seat behind them giggled in delight.
“Was it a moose?” one of them asked.
“I think so, I saw a few last year,” another said, launching into stories about her superfun experience at the camp the year before. Fresh air, sunbathing, good food, plenty of free time. Not only that, but the camp belonged to the Ministry of Defense, so many, many guys worked there. Officers. Soldiers drafted into the Soviet Army from college. Some were even seriously smart. She gushed about discothèques under a starry sky, the riverbank where you could take romantic walks, and the touchingly beautiful clearings in the woods where the grass was tall and silky-soft under your back.
Inka and Lena exchanged glances and smiled. Inka said that she had thought she’d fall in love when she started college. “It’s been eight months—and nothing. Eight months!” Her face tensed with panic. Lena knew exactly how she felt. She told Inka that she had been playing the “boyfriend game” for several years herself. Every time she was about to reach a certain milestone—turn fifteen, sixteen, enter high school, college—she thought, “Now!” And nothing happened. Every time she was going to someplace new—on vacation, on a long train trip, to a party, to a museum—she thought, “There!” And nothing. She would meet a boy from time to time, and he would ask her out, and she would feel a surge of excitement, but the excitement would evaporate pretty soon—usually before the date ended.
In three hours, when they finally got off the train, their knees were trembling and their butts hurt from all the riding. They felt queasy and lightheaded, but they were immediately taken in by the beauty. It was very quiet and unusually cold for July. Everything had the air of spring. The woods, the pines, the squishy soil under their feet, the unbelievably loud singing of birds. Inka shivered in her light shirt and laughed. Lena laughed too. They wanted to run, to squeal, to jump. On the way to the camp headquarters, they passed a group of soldiers sawing branches off a huge fallen pine. One of them waved. They waved back. Lena was overcome with the strange feeling that she experienced only a couple of times after that. She didn’t know what to call it. Anticipation of happiness? No, it had to be stronger than that. Certainty of happiness.
Inevitability of happiness.
The train arrived at Saratoga Springs at a quarter to ten. There were no taxis at the station. The thin crowd that got off the train with Lena petered out within minutes. Some people walked to cars that had been waiting for them with their lights on, others disappeared along the semidark streets leading to the town. And now Lena stood all alone facing the dark parking lot with the empty, brightly lit station behind her. She walked back into the station and asked the woman at the ticket booth for the number of the car service. The woman gave her the number but said that the hotel was only fifteen minutes away by foot. “Twenty—max,” she added before dropping her glazed stare back to her Stephen King novel.
It was slightly colder here than it had been in Boston. Streetlights and windows of the closed shops shone brightly, brighter than necessary, Lena thought. She would see her shadow against the wall of one or another strange house. The shadow would be larger than life, and sometimes if the light was especially bright, the shadow would be so large that she saw the contours of her head looming on somebody’s roof. There were no people around. No movement—not even wind. And no sounds, except for the pleasant rapping of her heels against the pavement. She would hear an occasional car honk up on the main street, too far in the distance to sound real. There was nothing specifically American about this place. A town like this could be anywhere. Western Europe. Eastern Europe. Russia. Lena had a fleeting thought that her summer camp memories had actually transported her to Russia.
It took her thirty minutes to get to the hotel, and by the time they gave her the keys, it was ten fifty-five. She went up to her room and dialed Vadim’s number. He said that he was okay as were the kids. He asked if she was okay. She said that she was. They didn’t know what else to say to each other. Lena plopped down onto the bed, feeling tired and heavy, as if the bed was pressing down on her and not vice versa.
Impossibility of happiness was what she felt now.
TWO
The hotel pool was small and plain, functional—no mosaic or exotic plants. Saturated with morning light. Empty, except for a teenage boy who was folding towels. Lena had been swimming the length of the pool back and forth hoping that it would relax her before the talk. So far, it hadn’t.
She found the slippery heaviness of the water around her body annoying, and the insufficient length of the pool bored her—it was an effort to turn back and continue every time she touched a wall.
The steamed-up door opened with a deep sigh, releasing a thin trail of cold air. A man in a white bathrobe walked in and headed toward the deep end of the pool. He stopped by the chair where Lena had dropped her bathrobe and took off his own, placing it on the adjacent chair. He looked at Lena and made a hesitan
t movement toward the pool. He appeared to be feeling like an intruder. He was tall, a little slouchy, with stooped shoulders and strong calves. He looked at Lena with dark sunken eyes, an intense stare that made her look away. He jumped in with a modest splash and took the right lane. Lena switched from the middle lane to the left. For a few minutes they swam parallel to each other, in different directions—he, under water, fast—she, on the surface, slowly, on her back, then on her stomach. The pool was so small that there was something intimate about the experience, awkwardly stirring, almost indecent. Lena thought that she’d better get out. She climbed out of the pool, walked to her chair, put on her flip-flops, picked up her bathrobe, and headed toward the door. The man swam to the edge and pulled himself up. He looked as if he was about to say something, but then changed his mind and dove in.
At 9 o’clock, Lena found her way to the main building where the lectures were taking place. The room that was assigned for Lena’s talk was a large lovely room, with big windows, and two green armchairs on a stage. Though the talk was supposed to start in five minutes, there was nobody there. She sat down in one of the two armchairs and waited, with her paper on her lap. Across the hall from her room was the breakfast lounge. The smell of fresh coffee wafted in, and she watched the waiters pass her door with trays of colorful fruit and baskets of gleaming bagels. Since it looked like she had some time before she’d have to begin her talk, Lena was tempted to run across the hall to pick up a bagel or a piece of fruit but knew she’d be too nervous to eat anyway.
At about 9:25 the moderator popped in and said that she shouldn’t worry, people were often late for morning events. Lena waited. Nobody came. A blond woman with a long nose and long loose hair peeked in, looked at Lena, and walked away. Lena stood up and walked to the back of the room so that nobody else who happened to peek in would guess that she was a lonely presenter.
At 9:35 the moderator came back, sat down in the back row next to Lena, and made an attempt at conversation.
“Sleepyheads, huh?” she said.
Lena nodded.
The attempt at conversation failed.
The moderator looked at her watch, sighed, and stood up. She shook Lena’s hand and said how sorry she was.
Lena went back to the breakfast room, completely empty now, littered with stained coffee cups and half-eaten bagels, with overflowing trash containers. She ate a little of everything that was left on the trays, then some more of everything, took a cup of coffee and went outside. She sat down on a bench surrounded by flowerless lilacs—it must have been pretty a couple of weeks ago—and dialed Vadim’s number, wondering if he’d be awake. He was. He asked about her talk. Lena said that it had gone fine, better than she’d expected. Nice crowd, interesting questions. She didn’t feel like telling the truth, yet lying left her feeling a little angry, not with herself but with Vadim for some reason.
Lena contemplated whether she could skip the rest of the conference, pack her things and go, but instead she plunged into the masochism of walking down the corridor and listening to the sounds of laughter and applause coming from other rooms. Back in Russia, she used to imagine America as something like this campus—a country with many buildings and many paths leading from building to building, a building with many rooms and many corridors leading from room to room. Nobody came to her room. Nobody cared to listen to her. And yet other rooms were filled with people and voices and laughter. Speakers spoke, listeners reacted to what they said. As if everyone around her was engaging in some sort of a chemical reaction, from which she was excluded. Lena was suddenly seized by an acute feeling of being a stranger in America.
She’d lived here for thirteen years, and in that time her relationship with her adoptive country had gone through several stages. Originally, she had imagined America as a land steeped in adventure, which filled her with panicky adoration. Then there was the incomprehension and dejection which characterized her first months in America, when everything had seemed so strange and hostile: the scenery, the climate, the people. Mostly the people. Everybody seemed to participate in a complicated game based on very particular rules. But eventually, she stopped looking at Americans as a unified mass. They were all lonely to a certain degree, they were all strangers to a certain degree. Some were accessible, others were not; some were interested in her, others were not. This led her to an acceptance of America and Americans that she had enjoyed for the last few years. But recently, with her career going nowhere and her loneliness getting greater and greater, she’d started to feel the onset of panic again.
She read off the titles of presentations printed on little sheets of paper and clipped to the doors, marveling at how stupid they sounded and how transparent their metaphors were. “Closed In.” “Stilted Bodies. Stilted Souls.” “The Magic of Prison States.” Yet, people laughed and applauded. Lena caught the word “masturbation” as she was passing “The Magic of Prison States,” and she stopped by the open door to listen. She had thought the speaker used “masturbation” as some kind of metaphor, but no, it turned out he meant it in the literal sense. He was talking about graphic novels set in oppressive societies. The speaker had a soft, pleasant voice, a calm and confident manner. Not a trace of an accent. He had no business talking about prison states. What could he possibly know? There were notes of warm amusement in his tone that suggested that he understood whatever there was to understand about it. She had lived in America for thirteen years, and she didn’t understand it at all. Where did this arrogance come from? Holding the door, she peeked into the room. The speaker was a tall man with stooped shoulders, restless, a little awkward, seemingly too aware of the impression he was making. Lena couldn’t see his face. There were just a few people in the audience. Six. No, seven—an old man slumped by the window. He looked like he was asleep. Lena heard notes of anxiety in the speaker’s voice that she hadn’t caught before. She felt something like compassion for him. As she leaned against it, the door made a screech, and the man turned toward her. Lena recognized him right away. The fact that he had caught her eavesdropping combined with the fact that he had seen her in the intimacy of the pool made her intensely embarrassed. Lena walked from the room.
The stinky, squeaky floors of the hall made her cringe. The linoleum was a frightening canary-yellow, with a pattern that reminded her of the floor in the camp headquarters where they had their weekly meetings with Yanina. Black swirly lines and brown specks. Lena had been so frightened of Yanina that she would sit staring at the pattern on the floor the whole time.
At the first meeting there were tea and sandwiches. They entered a square room with tables and chairs and two soldiers in the corner pouring the tea from a big vat into thick glasses. The tea was for them, as were cheese sandwiches on a big tray. “Help yourself!” one of the soldiers said. He had brown squinty eyes that seemed to say: “Girls! You don’t know how lucky you are.”
Some women were sitting on the chairs by the wall. One said that she was the camp nurse; another said that she was in charge of the supplies. Natasha. Galina. Nadezhda. Svetlana. Zhenya. Lena forgot which was which right away. She felt as if they were in a theater, the play was about to start, and the actors were already on the stage, but they didn’t know who among them would be the principals and who would be mere extras.
A girl next to Lena whispered: “Thank God, Vedenej isn’t here!” Lena asked who that was. “Major Vedeneev, the camp director. Everybody calls him Vedenej.”
Yanina walked into the room and didn’t take a sandwich. In retrospect, this was the first thing that had alarmed Lena about Yanina. The other woman took a chair and moved it away from the table to the middle of the room. She sat down, her thick legs wide-set and firmly planted on the floor. She looked the girls over, one by one. She seemed to be studying them, even testing them with her stare.
Lena had put her glass down when Yanina walked in, but she didn’t know what to do with the big piece of crust left from her sandwich. She couldn’t finish it—everybody else had stopp
ed eating, and she didn’t want to leave it on a table—she didn’t want anybody, especially Yanina, to think that she was so spoiled that she didn’t eat crust. So she just sat there with the piece of crust clutched in her hand.
Then Yanina started to talk. Her face was meaty and red—her cheeks, her chin, her nose, her forehead, even her ears. Her thin yellow eyebrows looked indecent and scary against all that red, which became deeper and deeper as she talked. Lena decided that it would be safer to stare at the floor. Yanina’s voice was low and sharp, and she seemed to hammer her sentences right into their heads.
“If the property of a unit gets stolen or lost—you’re responsible. If a kid gets sick with food poisoning—you’re responsible. If a kid gets lost in the woods—you’re responsible. If a kid from our unit falls and breaks his neck—you’re responsible. If something bad did happen, in the best-case scenario, your college would be notified and you would have a bad record forever, and in the worst-case scenario you would go to prison.
“By the way, are you aware of the dangers of masturbation?”
In 1989, perestroika, and the sexual revolution, had yet to reach summer camps and pedagogical colleges.
Yanina proceeded to give the girls a lecture on how hormones were our worst enemies, and how all sexual evil started with hands under the blankets and gradually led to rape and pregnancies, and how almost every camp had some incidents every year. And how it was the counselors’ responsibility if anything like that happened here.
The schedule and the long list of our specific tasks followed—everybody was too stunned and intimidated to listen properly—and then Yanina announced that each unit would be assigned to two counselors, and they could choose the age of the children.