by Lara Vapnyar
“What do you mean, no lights?”
“The cabin doesn’t have electricity.”
“No electricity! Don’t tell me there is no running water!”
“There is no running water.” Lena thought she could see Ben smile.
“And the toilet is just the woods?”
“Oh, no. We have excellent facilities here. There’s an outhouse—roomy and clean, or at least it was clean when I last saw it.”
“Nice, Ben. So first you lure women here, and then you tell them that there is no toilet?”
“I warned you it was rustic.” Ben’s eyes glowed with amusement as he lit two lamps and put them on the table, which immediately attracted a swarm of moths. There was only one room in the cabin, with a woodstove, a table and a couple of chairs by the window, and two bookcases in the corner forming a tiny makeshift bedroom. Everything looked rough, dusty, homely and exposed. Lena found it moving.
“I love it,” Lena said. “If only it weren’t so cold.”
“I’ll start the fire in the stove,” Ben said, “but it’ll take a while to heat the cabin. We can make a campfire outside in the meantime. Go to the bedroom, look for something to wear—there should be plenty of old jeans. I used to be thin once, you know.”
Behind the bookcases there was a futon covered with three different blankets, one checkered pattern peeking from under another. At the foot of the futon sat a row of different-sized boxes. The sign on the smallest said MAGAZINES, and the sign on the biggest said EQUIP. She peeked into the EQUIP. bin and saw a hammer, a large net, three broken umbrellas, and a ragged leather case with a thermos inside. The thermos had a white plastic knob and a blue strap. It must have been the same one that Ben and his dad used to take on their skiing trips. She reached out a finger to stroke the hard yellowed leather of the case.
The clothes were kept in a huge plastic bin with a paper sign that plainly stated CLOTHES. The clothes didn’t smell musty at all. They smelled like cold, hard earth and a little like oranges. Which wasn’t surprising, she thought when she found some dried-up orange peel wrapped in a sweater. Most of the sweaters were too rough and prickly. Only one looked both soft and warm, but it had a large brown stain across the chest. All the way here Lena had been fantasizing about undressing and going to bed with Ben as soon as they got to the cabin. But it was so cold here that she wouldn’t have undressed at gunpoint. She took Ben’s high-waisted jeans and wore them over her leggings. She had to tie them with a string at the waist and roll them up at the hem. And she wore Ben’s stained sweater over her shirt. Her reflection in the tiny mirror on the wall reminded her of herself back in Russia, putting on all these bulky warm clothes, getting ready for a school ski trip. She was simultaneously turning into Ben and into her younger self.
Outside, they sat on a rickety half-rotten bench by the campfire ring. The bench was facing the lake, but they couldn’t see the water in the dark; they could only hear the heavy splashes of waves.
Ben had built a complicated structure of sticks and logs, crowned by a Times Business section from 1987. It took him a while to start the fire—he kept adding more and more paper, until the Business section all burned and he had to resort to Sports. That did the trick. The smaller sticks finally caught fire, and the bigger logs followed suit.
Lena shivered and moved closer to Ben.
“Perfect for a horror story, don’t you think?” Ben asked. “How about your scary version of Chaucer or Boccaccio?”
“Actually, there was one story that I didn’t base on any of the classics. I made it up myself. It was my masterpiece. The kids really loved it. It became so popular that they’d ask me to tell it again and again, and they would even retell it to the kids from other units. I heard that it became sort of a camp legend, and the kids were telling it to each other long after I left.”
“Wow! It’s not too terrifying, though? I won’t be scarred for life?”
“I can’t guarantee you that, but if you are, it’s going to be worth it.”
“Okay, go.”
Lena peered into the flames and cleared her throat.
“Once upon a time, two girls went to fetch a pail of water. One was blond and fat, the other dark-haired and skinny, and neither of them was very pretty.”
Ben chuckled. Lena smiled too: “I don’t know why, but this line about the girls not being pretty always managed to crack the kids up. Okay, so. Both girls were wearing summer dresses, sandals, and white socks. They didn’t have a pail, so each of them carried a large tin teakettle. There was plenty of drinking water in the camp, but it didn’t taste good. People fetched water from the little spring that ran under the trees just off the road a couple of miles away from the camp. The two girls went out the gate and started to walk down the country road. There were almost no cars on the road. Just one or two passed by. It was a long walk. By the time they got to the spring, the sun had dropped to the tops of the trees in the woods and become heavy and large and red, and then it fell behind the clouds. They stepped off the road and walked up to the spring and then took turns filling their teakettles. ‘Look!’ the skinny girl said when they made it back to the road. ‘What?’ the fat girl asked. The skinny girl pointed to the sky. There was a huge fiery disc in the sky, just above the top line of woods. It was about three times as big as the sun and it was moving. Going up and down. Slowly. It would drop and graze the tops of trees and then rise a little, drop and rise again. The thin girl was so stunned that she splashed some water over her dress.
“ ‘Do you know what that is?’ the fat girl asked her.
“ ‘The sun?’ the thin girl answered.
“ ‘Does it look like the sun? Can the sun move like that?’ No, it didn’t look like the sun. And they knew very well that the sun couldn’t move like that.
“ ‘That’s a UFO,’ the fat girl said, ‘an alien spaceship. Look, it’s obviously trying to pick a place to land.’ She put the teakettle down on the ground, straightened her shoulders, and raised her arms so that they formed a straight line. Then she closed her eyes.
“The thin girl closed her eyes too.
“ ‘Aliens!’ the fat girl yelled. ‘Here, right here!’
“ ‘Shh,’ the thin girl said, ‘they might hear you.’
“ ‘I want them to hear me. Aliens! Come to me. I’m a space element. I’m a cosmic creature. I’m a part of the universe. Come to me! Take me.’
“The thin girl grasped the teakettle handle tighter as if it could help her to hold on to the Earth. ‘Aliens, please, please, don’t come,’ she whispered, ‘or if you come, don’t take me, take Inka, she really wants you to take her. I don’t. She is a cosmic creature. I’m not.’ ”
Ben laughed.
“The kids would start laughing too,” Lena said, “and sometimes they would even chant: ‘Take Inka! Take Inka.’
“They felt a sharp gust of wind. Then another.
“The fat girl opened her eyes. There wasn’t a fiery disc in the sky anymore. ‘Where did it go?’ she asked the thin girl.
“ ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t looking.’
“ ‘Oh, shit! They’re gone. We should’ve sung something.’
“ ‘Sung?’
“ ‘Yeah. Sometimes it works. But you have to hit a very low note.’
“ ‘Oh.’
“And here the kids would always nod with approval,” Lena said.
“The fat girl sighed and picked up her teakettle. They turned to go back. It was significantly darker now, and colder. The thin girl started to shiver in her wet dress. They’d walked no more than a hundred feet when a car appeared as if out of nowhere, passed them by, then came to a sharp stop a few feet ahead and started moving in reverse in their direction. There was a man in an officer’s uniform behind the wheel. He stopped the car and climbed out. There was something strange about him, but the girls couldn’t say what it was right away.
“ ‘Hey, girls,’ he said, ‘where are you going at such an hour?’
“ ‘We went to fetch some water,’ the fat girl said. ‘Now, we’re going back to the camp.’
“ ‘Oh, the camp,’ the man said. ‘I heard there was a summer camp around here, never been there.’
“ ‘It’s right over there,’ the fat girl said.
“ ‘Is that right? Do you need a lift?’
“ ‘No, thank you,’ the thin girl said.
“ ‘Are you sure? Those kettles look heavy.’
“The thin girl nodded, then shook her head.
“The man smiled, climbed back into his car, and drove away. Only then did the two girls realize what was so strange about the man. This wasn’t a man at all. This was just a huge black sausage in an officer’s uniform. It didn’t have any legs, or arms, or head, and it was soft and wiggly.
“The End.”
“Black sausage?” Ben said. “Black sausage?”
“Yeah, black sausage. The image worked wonders with the kids.”
“It is a memorable image, I agree. As powerful as it is indecent.”
“Indecent? How?”
“Black sausage? Come on!”
“Stop it! Nobody except for you has ever had dirty associations. Didn’t you like the story?”
“I liked it. I did. It’s weird, but it’s good. It’s just something bothers me about it.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
Ben prodded the smoldering logs with a stick and cleared his throat.
“Black sausage . . .” Ben said, staring into the water.
“What about that sausage bothers you so much?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve heard it before. I thought it reminded me of some folktale, but the part about the aliens is something else.”
“I swear I made it up!”
“No, no, of course, I believe you.”
“I mean, I didn’t even have to make it up. The story is based on what really happened.”
“What really happened? An alien black sausage came out of a car?”
“No. What happened was this. Inka and I went to the spring for water. On the way back we saw something bizarre in the sky. A fiery disc significantly larger than the sun and moving in a strange way. I guess it could’ve just been the sun, and it could’ve seemed to move because the clouds moved very fast that day. But we did think that it was an alien spaceship. You know, with all that talk of aliens in our camp, I was scared out of my mind. And Inka really wanted to have an encounter. Yes, she did beg them to take her. But then the sun went down, and we went back.”
Ben prodded the burning logs with a stick and cleared his throat.
“But what about the car and the man in the officer’s uniform?”
“That’s true too, except that there was a real man in the car, and not a black sausage. The man was Major Vedeneev. He was coming back to the camp and he saw us on the road, stopped the car, and offered us a ride. Vedenej sat in the back. Behind the wheel, there was a new soldier. Grisha Klein. Inka perked up. He’d only appeared at the base a couple of days before that, and Vedenej had made him his designated driver. He always topped the speed limit and Vedenej loved him for that. Grisha Klein was a philosophy student who’d been expelled from Moscow University for his ideas, or so they said. He was short, thin, slouchy, with a long nose and wiry hair, jumpy and fidgety at all times. Inka thought that he looked like Pushkin. I thought that he looked like a blinking, crackling lightbulb. Inka hurried to climb into the passenger’s seat next to Grisha. I had to climb into the back seat, careful not to splash my water. I thought Inka would start talking about our extraterrestrial encounter, but she kept silent. She just kept looking at Grisha, trying to catch his gaze. Grisha was staring straight ahead, whistling a weird potpourri of opera and underground Russian rock. His right knee trembled and shook really hard. The car kept jumping up and down, and I thought this was not because the road was bumpy, but because of the vibration created by Grisha’s knee.
“ ‘Your dress is wet,’ Vedenej said. I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and immediately thought that this was an idiotic thing to say.
“He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket, put it on my knees, pressed down with his palm, then moved his hand away. When we got out of the car, I saw that the handkerchief was stuck to my dress, I peeled it off and gave it to Vedenej. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
“ ‘Vedenej has a crush on you—it’s disgusting,’ Inka said to me later that day.”
“See?” Ben said.
“What?”
“Inka said Vedenej’s crush on you is disgusting. Clearly, she had a crush on you herself.”
“She didn’t! You should’ve seen her looking at that boy, Grisha Klein!”
“I don’t know. She could’ve used him as foil.”
The blast of wind from the lake made Lena shiver.
She turned to Ben and said, “Let’s go in.”
“Go ahead,” Ben said. “I’ll be there in a second.”
Inside the cabin, the smoky warmth came in patches. She would enter a cold area and then move to a warmer spot, just to lose it a moment later. The bathroom was the farthest away from the stove, so there it was almost unbearably cold. But the bed wasn’t that warm either. Lena felt the chill on her feet as soon as she took off her shoes. She dove under the blanket to take the rest of her clothes off. She pulled her jeans off. Her sweater. She smiled because they were in fact his jeans and his sweater. She took her socks off. They were, of course, his socks, big and lumpy, the tips hanging over her toes.
She must have dozed off, because she woke up when she felt Ben’s freezing limbs next to her. Poor Ben, she thought, and pulled him into the warmth.
“You didn’t come this time either, did you?” he asked a few minutes later.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Fuck, I thought I’d last longer this time. I thought I’d dodge it, but no, it got me.”
She laughed.
“What got you?”
“You know what! Coming.”
“Oh.”
“Okay. Let me rest a couple of minutes. And we’ll do it again. And I promise it will be much better.”
Lena yawned and turned onto her stomach.
“Or we could just go to sleep,” she said.
“Really? Thank you,” Ben murmured.
“Thank you?” “Really?” Lena thought, but a second later she was asleep.
FIFTEEN
The next morning Lena was the first to wake up. There was an uncertain pale light in the window. In contrast to last night, it was very warm in the room.
Lena wrapped herself in a towel and went outside. This would be the first time she saw the lake and the surrounding woods in the daylight, except that this was hardly daylight. Everything was damp and white, the grayish-white color of skim milk. Farther away, the fog was so thick that Lena felt the urge to reach and squeeze it with her hands or run her fingers through it. The sky and the lake were the same color, it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. She could see the vague contours of the pines behind the cottage, but nothing on the other shore. Nothing at all. No shore. No cellular reception. As if the life that she used to live had stopped or made a pause.
The water was very cold, she thought as she tested it with her toes, but she decided to plunge in anyway. She felt a shocking chill against her breasts, a cold current reaching between her legs, and pleasantly cool water rolling off her butt. “My butt must be the coolest part of my body,” she thought quickly, and then she got used to the water and didn’t think of the cold or her body anymore. Lena swam slowly and quietly in the direction of the sun, a pale yellow circle bobbing uncertainly behind the mist, too weak to break through the white. She felt disoriented and strangely happy.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this way. Well, actually she could. In the camp. In the camp’s pool. Bobbing in the cold water, all mixed up and bewildered, and strangely, stupidly
excited.
They had filled the pool with water a few days before Parents Day. Parents Day was a big deal. Apparently, some of the parents held pretty important positions at the Ministry, so Yanina went to great pains to make sure everything was perfect. She made the soldiers and the staff scrub everything. And she put the counselors in charge of a really complicated entertainment program that included games, contests, the kids’ concert, and, of course, the pool.
Ironically, the heat wave had already passed by then, and the temperature wasn’t even warm anymore, let alone hot. They were supposed to open the pool on Tuesday, but they didn’t open it until Thursday, and even then they had a “soft opening” for counselors, staff, and older kids. She and Inka went while their kids were in the club watching the movie.
Nobody was swimming. The sun was securely stored behind the clouds, and the breeze was chilly if not very strong. And the smell wasn’t that inviting either. The water was muddy-brown and stank of chlorine.
A few kids stood on the wooden walkway around the pool, shivering in their bathing suits, shying away from the water. Some would come closer to the edge and test the water with their toes and spring away. The girls were scrunching their noses and saying that the water smelled like poop and frogs. Counselors hadn’t even changed into their bathing suits. They sat on the long bench on the right side of the pool and urged the kids to jump in. The soldiers who were still fixing things around the pool urged the counselors to set an example. Lena immediately noticed Danya in the back painting the pool fence dark blue. She hadn’t seen him since that dance, but she had never been able to stop thinking about him. Seeing him made her both stirred and upset, but she decided it would be best to ignore him, and she immediately felt some discomfort, like a nagging toothache.
There wasn’t space on the bench, so Inka and she sat on the plastic stools by the entrance.
The girl in the red bathing suit was the first to approach the water. Her bathing suit was a couple of sizes too small and kept riding up her butt, until one or another of her girlfriends would pull the rim of the suit back down. A boy in blue briefs ran up to her and splashed some water on her. Her girlfriends screamed something like “Yuck! Poop! Frogs!” The girl in the red suit jumped away from the boy. He wanted to splash her again. She started to run. He started to chase her. They were running around the pool. Then they were fighting and pushing each other into the water. And finally the girl was in. Thrashing with her arms and squealing like a piglet.