by Lara Vapnyar
Lena stopped and looked at Ben. She’d been so engrossed in her story that she had momentarily forgotten about her audience.
“You know what,” he said. “It might sound idiotic, but you made me jealous.”
Lena touched his arm and smiled. And just then his phone started to ring. The vibration was so strong that Lena could almost feel it on her body. She could also feel how Ben stiffened. She moved away from him and straightened up in her seat.
NINE
Ben made his call from a visitor center a few miles away from Augusta. Lena went to the restroom, and when she came out—wiping her hands on her raincoat, because hand dryers never managed to do their job—Ben was still talking. He was half-hidden behind a column. He kept his hand raised at chest level and he moved it up and down, as if reasoning or listing points. Sometimes he would shake it as if disagreeing, and sometimes he would squeeze it into a fist.
He was lying. Another detail added to her rapidly growing version of him. Lena didn’t hear him lie, but she saw him lie. “I missed you, baby. Of course, I miss you. Of course, I love you. Of course.”
That was what he must be saying to Leslie. Right now, right this minute. When Lena was on the phone with Vadim, she said these things too. But when she said these things, it was as if she switched to some kind of automatic mode. The words poured out with ease, familiar affectionate words that didn’t seem to require her presence. It was as if the words had been prerecorded.
She started to walk away, along the edge of the woods, separated from her by the chain-link fence. The sign on the fence said KEEP THE WILDLIFE WILD! Her first thought was that they meant keeping wildlife agitated, that it was somehow important to keep the animals angry, because otherwise they would grow too lifeless and depressed. It reminded her of when her mother said, “You know what? I’m not even angry at your dad anymore,” and how scared her words made Lena. She died a few months after that.
Lena dialed her kids’ number. Misha answered. “Mom?” Then she heard both her children fighting over the phone. She told them about the wild wildlife sign. Misha laughed. He said: “No, Mom! It means ‘Do not feed the wildlife.’ ” Borya laughed too. They didn’t ask where she saw the sign. Then she felt the urge to tell them about the hedgehog farm in Gerry Baumann’s basement, and she did: “This fat man, Gerry Baumann, a famous artist, used to have a hedgehog farm in his basement.” Borya was especially impressed. “You know what, Mom,” he said, “I think those male hedgehogs could breed after all, if they both turned gay, for example.” Lena laughed and shook her head. “No, I don’t think that would have worked,” she said. She asked the boys to call their dad to the phone. She heard Misha yelling, and then some voices in the background, Borya yelling, then puffing into the phone, after which Misha said that Dad would call her back.
There was no way to get into the woods. Lena kept peeking over, hoping to see some of those angry animals. She wondered what kind of wildlife there was. Moose? Bears? Hedgehogs? No, no hedgehogs, they were not native to these parts, she reminded herself. And even in Russia, she had only seen a hedgehog once, a few days after meeting Danya. She had thought this was some kind of a happy sign, an omen. It happened when she and Inka took the campers on a scheduled walk in the woods called an “exploring expedition.” She remembered that hike as if it happened yesterday.
The idea was to “get to the end of the woods.” They carried biscuits, cold drinking water in aluminum teakettles, and a couple of blankets to sit on. Alesha Pevtcov also carried a large jar, because he hoped to catch a frog.
After some time, they could feel that the woods were about to end. They glimpsed uncertain patches of light ahead, and the usual forest sounds changed, they seemed louder and more intense, and there were barely noticeable wafts of wind, and this strange anticipation of something impossible, something unreal, something magical. The kids got very quiet and slowed their pace. Usually, they would be trying to run ahead, and push each other and fight for the first place in line. But not now. Nobody wanted to be the first to get to the end of the woods.
Except for Lena. She wanted to reach that magical place because she thought it would match the state of mind she had entered after that evening with Danya. She was there with Inka and the kids, but she wasn’t really there. She didn’t know where she was. Nowhere and everywhere. She could feel herself diffusing into molecules and permeating everything they passed. She had never felt like that before. She was in love.
“What’s wrong with you?” Inka kept asking her, but Lena couldn’t answer. For as much as she longed to tell her about Danya, she couldn’t possibly share it.
She remembered how she took one of the kids’ hands and said: “We’re almost there. Let’s run!” And they ran until the last trees on the path opened onto a field. She yelled: “Aaa!”
And soon all the kids were running around and yelling.
“Idiots,” Inka said, stretching on the grass with an issue of Art of Cinema.
Lena stretched next to her, facing the sky. Now she knew exactly how the girl from the Song of Songs felt.
As an apple tree among the trees of the forest,
so is my beloved among the young men.
With great delight I sat in his shadow,
and his fruit was sweet to my taste . . .
Kiss me, make me drunk with your kisses!
Your sweet loving is better than wine.
Then she closed her eyes and imagined how it would happen with Danya. This was the simplest and purest fantasy she would ever have.
She imagined herself lying on her back—very straight—with her legs open. Danya lay down on top of her. They reached the point of contact. And they both exploded. That was it. She wanted it so much, but at the same time she was so absolutely sure that she’d get it eventually, that it would happen, and that it would happen exactly like that, that she felt perfectly content.
The sound of a commotion in the bushes brought her back. The kids crowded by the blackberry bush, fighting each other to take a look at something.
“Hey! What are you doing there?” Inka yelled.
“A hedgehog, a hedgehog! We found a hedgehog!” the kids yelled back.
“Bring it here!”
Inka and Lena sat up to have a look. One of the kids, probably Sveta Kozlova, was holding it in the palms of her outstretched hands. Other kids followed her as if in a holy procession. Lena had never seen a hedgehog before. She was sure that seeing it now was somehow connected with Danya.
The hedgehog was curled up and trembling. It didn’t look like an animal at all, but rather like some alien creature—a spiky vibrating ball.
“I want to draw it,” Sasha Simonov said.
“No. Put it down,” Lena said.
“No! He’ll run away.”
“So he will. We can’t take him with us anyway. He’ll die of boredom and gloom.”
Inka looked at Lena as if she had gone crazy. She could have been right. But Sveta Kozlova took her words very seriously.
“Can you really die of that?”
“Hedgehogs can—they are less tolerant of depression than humans,” Sasha Simonov said. Sveta looked at Sasha with interest and put the hedgehog down. Apparently, she believed in such dangers. She was just a little girl, Lena thought. And Sasha was just a little boy. And Alesha. They were little kids, funny, helpless, naïve. For the first time since Lena started working at the camp, she felt something like affection for them.
First few seconds, the hedgehog didn’t move at all. But slowly, so very slowly, he began to unfurl. There was his little nose. Black, leathery, and wet. There were his tiny paws. They looked exactly like the paws of a rat or a mouse. Then they saw the tiny beads of his eyes. And then his tongue. Lena didn’t expect him to have a tongue! A tiny pink tongue, which he stuck out like a cat lapping up milk. And a second later the hedgehog was gone. It rustled through the grass and into the bushes.
Lena couldn’t wait until the second dance. She kept changing her shirt,
unable to choose between the white and the blue, and applying and reapplying her lip gloss. She tried to imagine how Danya would look at her when he saw her at the dance. How he would smile at her, walk over, and put his hand on the small of her back. All without saying a word.
But as they were about to leave for the dance, Sveta Kozlova announced that she wasn’t going, and that was that. She refused to explain why. She insisted that she was staying and there was nothing Lena could do about it. Lena could’ve asked Inka to stay with Sveta, but Inka had already left.
“Sveta,” she pleaded, “Sveta, please.”
She said, “No way!”
“But why?”
“Because the music sucks.”
“Sveta, you’re not serious,” Lena said.
Sveta said, “Yes, I am.”
“Sveta, do you realize that I have to stay here with you if you stay?”
Sveta nodded with great enthusiasm. She was hopeless.
Lena just sat down on the steps. She sat like that in silence for a couple of minutes, and then something occurred to her. She said: “Sveta, do you remember that hedgehog we saw in the woods?”
Sveta nodded again.
“Sveta, I will die of boredom and gloom if you don’t let me go.”
Sveta stared at Lena, contemplating her words, and eventually she sighed and said that she’d go.
Lena squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”
Lena saw Danya as soon as Sveta and she got up the steps to the dance floor. He was standing with other soldiers by the fence. He wasn’t looking in her direction, but he did appear to be searching for somebody. Lena thought she’d just walk up to him and say hello. But the next thing she saw was Dena crossing the floor. Dena stopped in front of Danya and made a bow. Her head plunged forward so that her bright yellow hair flew up and down. She took Danya’s hand. He stepped forward and smiled.
“This song is okay,” Sveta said. Lena realized that she was still holding her hand. Still staring at Danya leading Dena around the floor.
She couldn’t believe how much that hurt.
When Lena was about ten, she asked her mother: “How will I know when I fall in love? What are the definitive signs?” She said, “Don’t worry, you’ll know.” She had just come home from work, and she was sitting on the sofa flexing her toes, making them crack, which she always did when she was tired. She looked at Lena, and her expression was glazed with exhaustion and not friendly at all. But Lena really wanted to get the answer.
“But what if I miss it?” she asked. “What if I confuse it with something else?”
“You won’t miss it,” she said.
“Why? Why are you so sure?”
“Why am I so sure? Okay. I’ll tell you why. Do you think you could ‘miss it’ if you had been beaten, kicked, and punched?”
Lena shook her head.
“Well, then,” she said, “you won’t miss love either.”
Lena was so stunned by Danya’s betrayal that she didn’t notice Vasyok until Sveta said: “Hey, the kitchen guy is waving at you.”
“Do you want to dance?” Vasyok asked. His hands felt awkward and fat on my back. Lena glanced in Danya’s direction, but she couldn’t see him, because there was another couple blocking her view. Lena braced herself for Vasyok’s usual happy banter, but he didn’t say anything throughout the whole dance. She felt strangely, unfairly angry with Vasyok. It didn’t make sense until years later, after she’d felt like that again, when she realized she’d been angry at Vasyok simply because he wasn’t Danya and he couldn’t do anything, anything at all, to make her feel about him the way she felt about Danya.
Lena’s phone rang. A California number. She gathered her strength and answered.
Vadim didn’t question her, but Lena told him a complicated lie about her whereabouts. She hung up and continued to walk along the fence, feeling how her lie started to spread inside her like a disease. A sickening, perfectly physical sensation, which was only going to get worse. There was no end to this fence. It went on and on. She turned back and walked toward the visitor center.
TEN
When they got to the car, Ben’s phone rang again.
He didn’t check the number. He started the car and slowly pulled out of the parking lot.
Lena decided Leslie must suspect something, or she wouldn’t be calling every ten minutes. She felt a pang of guilt.
Interstate 95 turned into a narrow two-lane road surrounded by woods on both sides. More and more cars had Maine license plates. More and more had canoes and kayaks fixed to the roofs, bicycles on the racks, their wheels spinning with pointless zeal.
“Have you been together for a long time?” she asked.
“Leslie and I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, we met in college. She used to date Gerry. So we spent a lot of time together. Then she and Gerry broke up and we kind of lost touch.”
He looked tired. It was as if there were a little generator that had kept him going, and now the generator was off.
“We met again six years ago. At a party. I had just gotten divorced, but Leslie was married. We started an affair, but since Leslie lived in New York, and I was in Boston, we had to go back and forth a lot. So Leslie decided to leave her husband, and she insisted that I move in with her. So now we’re together. In New York.”
“Are you happy with her?”
“Happy? I don’t know. I don’t really know how to define ‘happy,’ and anyway you can’t be happy for long. Happiness is a very acute state, it’s like a fever, you can’t take it if it goes on for too long. But it’s working, it’s definitely working with Leslie.”
Lena very nearly said, “Is it, really?”
Ben kept going. “We’ve known each other for a hundred years, we have history together, we have common interests, we have common friends. And then again, how do you define ‘happy’? How do you even answer that question? Can you answer that question? Are you happy with your husband?”
“Yes, I can. I’m not.”
Lena turned away and stared out of her window. What was so difficult about admitting that you weren’t happy? Why did people think they needed to come up with all these complicated explanations, excuses, justifications? Or perhaps they just didn’t want to admit it to themselves? Lena knew she wasn’t happy. She had known it for a long time. There was a time when she blamed herself for being unhappy. She saw it as some kind of character flaw. She didn’t believe happiness was an acute state, as Ben said. She never confused it with the euphoria of being in love. For her happiness was more like peace, contentedness, feeling that you were in the right place. She’d never had that with Vadim. Even when they first got married, she couldn’t shake off the feeling that they weren’t right for each other. She did feel affection for him, and she was moved by the very fact that he was so familiar, that they’d known each other so many years. She would pass him as he sat at his desk and inhale his smell—she always imagined that he smelled like freshly sawed wood—and her eyes would fill with tears, because this was the most familiar smell in the world for her. She never felt peaceful or contented around him, though. She kept telling herself that happiness was a luxury. She felt Ben’s hand on her shoulder, but she couldn’t turn. Her eyes were filling with tears, and she was terrified that he’d notice.
“Why don’t you go back to your story?” Ben asked. “Who was the second guy who disappeared? Danya?”
Lena sighed. Her story had obviously acquired this new function of saving them from awkward silences.
She drank some water and made an effort to collect her thoughts.
“The second guy was Vasyok.”
“Who is Vasyok? Weren’t you supposed to have a date with Danya?”
“The date with Danya didn’t work out. And Vasyok was a soldier who worked in the kitchen. A very nice guy. He disappeared after he seduced me with Hungarian salami.”
“Was he Hungarian? Is that as dirty as it sounds?” Ben offered a self-deprecating laugh.<
br />
“No! Hungarian salami was considered a great delicacy and was very hard to get. The Ministry of Defense was powerful enough to provide the camp with it, only the kids never got to enjoy it. The camp management ordered some salami for the kids along with red caviar and bananas and other delicacies, but when all those treasures made it to the camp, the staff just divided the food among themselves according to their ranks. Vedenej, the camp director, got the most, of course. Then came Yanina, and after Yanina, the camp plumber, the kitchen staff, some of the senior counselors. The soldiers weren’t supposed to get any salami, but Vasyok worked in the kitchen, so I think he simply stole some.”
“Stole? Some nice boyfriend you had! Salami thief,” Ben said.
He seemed to enjoy hearing about Vasyok much more than about Danya. And for Lena, talking about Vasyok came more easily too.
“You don’t understand. Stealing was considered perfectly fine. Everybody stole. It would have seemed strange and even indecent if you didn’t. But of course everybody stole on their own level. Vedenej and Yanina could steal something really big, like camp funds. Senior counselors stole electronic equipment. Junior counselors mostly stole bedsheets, office supplies, and toys.”
“Didn’t they count bedsheets?”
“They did. They counted everything, even soccer balls, but there was a way to get past that. You see, each unit was given a certain quantity of items, and we counselors had to sign for them. If an item was reported lost and/or missing, they would deduct its cost from our salary. At first, I took it very seriously—after the kids in my unit came back from a walk outside, I made sure to search the grounds for all the forgotten toys so that I didn’t have to pay for them. One time, I couldn’t find a soccer ball. I looked for it and looked for it, but I couldn’t find it. One of the older counselors, Galina, was passing by, and she asked me what I was doing. I said that I needed to find a soccer ball because I didn’t want to pay for it. She laughed and told me to follow her into a storage room. There she picked up a soccer ball from the shelf, took large scissors from the drawer, sliced the ball open and cut it in two. ‘See, now you have two soccer balls,’ she said, as I stood flabbergasted. ‘Go show the pieces to the inventory girl, and she will write them off as two “damaged” soccer balls. Nobody ever checks if the pieces come from a single ball or two different ones.’ I stared at the pieces in awe. We didn’t have to pay for damaged items, only for missing ones.”