On one of the first days of the semester, Sigelman was coming out of his office just as Jane was going into hers. He frowned at her, his shirt wrinkled under his shabby jacket, jowls waggling, blue eyes rimmed with red. She could see why the graduate students called him the Old Bulldog.
“Professor Sigelman,” she said. “I’m Jane Levitsky.” She held out her hand. He took it in his broad, fleshy, cold one, lifted it to his lips, and kissed it.
“Ah,” he said. “The young Jew.”
For a moment she couldn’t believe he had said it. He held on to her hand, caressing her palm with his big sclerotic thumb.
“Yes,” she said. “And you’re the old one.”
He laughed, showing crooked yellow-brown teeth. “Indeed. I’m very old—a hundred and ten at least! But I still know how to appreciate a pretty face.” As he stood grinning in her doorway, Jane saw that smoke was gently wafting up from his jacket pocket.
“Are you on fire?” she asked.
He looked where she pointed, then turned to scowl up the hallway where Krista, the department secretary, was pinning notices to a bulletin board. With a hand on her arm, he escorted Jane firmly into her own office and shut the door behind them. “Sit down,” he said, and took a seat himself without being asked. From the pocket he removed a pipe and lifted it to his lips. “I can’t smoke in my own office anymore,” he said in the heavy accent that made it sound as though his mouth were full of caraway seeds. “I’ve been busted for it too many times.”
Jane sat down behind her desk. She straightened a pile of books and shunted loose pencils into a drawer as though this were high school and she would be graded on neatness. “What can they do to you? You’re already retired.”
“Yes, but they can make things tiresome.”
“How’s that?”
“They want me to give up my office.” Sigelman sighed. “Space is tight. The graduate students are always complaining. Graduate students!” He spat the words out. “In my day you were lucky to get a carrel in the library, but nobody complained!”
“Surely they wouldn’t evict the leading Karkov scholar of the twentieth century,” Jane said, smiling.
He looked at her suspiciously and then decided to laugh, throwing his head back, his jowls wobbling. “Times change,” he said. “I’m known mainly for the translations now, and even those—who knows? Not so many people read Karkov anymore. They’re looking for new authors. Women. Minorities! If you could find a few limp poems by a female Tatar, imagine to what heights you could ascend.”
“I can’t imagine people are going to stop reading Dmitri Arkadyevich,” Jane said seriously. She loved all of Karkov’s books, even Prince Leopold, which most people found ponderous.
“It’s too long. Professors are afraid to assign it.”
“Dama Zmiev, then.” Lady of the Snakes.
“Dama Zmiev,” Sigelman said with distaste. “Hardly my favorite.”
Jane had a special place in her heart for Lady of the Snakes, the only one of Karkov’s novels that, in her opinion, contained a truly complex and intelligent female character. “When did you last read it?”
“I don’t know. 1968?”
She laughed. “You might want to try it again. It has wonderful stuff in it. Descriptions of the countryside that are almost hallucinatory, and all that creepy superstitious stuff about the snakes. The portrayal of peasant life is unlike anything he ever did before.”
“Yes, yes,” Sigelman said. His pipe had gone out, and he reached into the capacious pocket and pulled out a teacup, into which he emptied the bowl. Then he filled the pipe again with fresh tobacco and lit it. He got up from his chair, walked around Jane’s desk, and stood, leaning against it, regarding her. The smells of pipe tobacco, wool, and age were overwhelming: powerful, repellant, and yet somehow magnetic, too, suggestive of the past and of secret knowledge. Sigelman reached out and picked up Jane’s hand, cupping it in his own large tobacco-stained one. She could feel his hot, sour breath on her face. “Perhaps sometime you will come over to my house and we will have a long talk about Karkov, eh? Drink a bottle of wine. I will make goulash for you! You like goulash?”
Jane pulled her hand away gently. “Who doesn’t like goulash?” she said.
Sigelman studied her. “You know,” he said, “for a while it wasn’t clear the department would be able to keep my tenure line. Karkov, as I said, is going out of fashion.”
Jane smiled uncertainly. “I’ll take that as a challenge,” she said.
He nodded. “So you should,” he said, his rheumy eyes fixed on her. “Listen: I’m known for not mincing words. I’ll tell you frankly that I didn’t like that article you wrote about Amalia Nikolaevna in Silent Passage. The one that suggested that Karkov was a misogynist and went on and on about the wife.”
“I never said ‘misogynist,’” Jane said. “I would never use that word about Karkov. It’s too reductive.”
“So it is.” He nodded again. “I’m glad you agree.”
Jane thought of what Shombauer had said, how Sigelman could be useful to her, how he could be ruthless. She’d be careful, she thought, but she wouldn’t pretend to be somebody she wasn’t. “He married Maria Petrovna, after all, didn’t he?” she said. “He chose a smart, complicated woman, when he could have had anybody.” This was true, though Jane often wondered whether Karkov had regretted his choice, whether Masha’s intelligence and complexity were what had driven him into the arms of the dairy maids.
Sigelman smiled. “Yes, though she was only sixteen at the time,” he said. “Maybe she wasn’t too complicated yet.”
“Sixteen was older then than it is today,” Jane said. She was happy. How wonderful to be an assistant professor with her own office passing the time discussing the Karkovs with Otto Sigelman, of all people!
“So was thirty-five,” Sigelman said. “What was life expectancy? Even when I was a child, fifty was considered ancient.”
“Not that Karkov had done much writing yet, when they got married, had he?” Jane said. “Just Country Days.” Country Days, a collection of sketches of rural life, had been published to substantial acclaim, but it wasn’t in the same league as his later work. “It’s as though he needed Maria Petrovna for the novels.”
“You mean she was his muse,” Sigelman said, drawing out the vowel so that the word sounded sarcastic, though that might have just been his accent.
“And his copyist. Editor, too, perhaps. Her assistance was practical as much as inspirational.” Amazing how much she had done, Jane thought for perhaps the thousandth time. Here she was herself, having moved, like Masha, from the city to the country, swamped by new responsibilities, trying to be half as productive as Masha had been under the harsher circumstances of a more primitive world. She thought of Masha at sixteen, fresh from her parents’ comfortable house in Moscow, accustomed to callers, concerts, dances, and conversation, moving to Dve Reckhi, Karkov’s provincial estate, with no idea what she was getting herself into. Masha had read Country Days with its lyrical descriptions of haying, of the changing light in the birch grove, of the singing of the peasants and their picturesque, blasphemous festivals. In one story a young girl wept as she washed laundry in the fast-running Vaza River. Elsewhere the return of the geese over the thawing March fields was used as an image of the indomitable spirit of the Russian peasantry. All of it was engagingly written and true enough, as far as it went.
But the day-to-day reality of provincial life was very different. The uncomfortable beds of Dve Reckhi; the incredible heat; the obtuseness of the servants; the swirling dust of the yard; the stink of the chicken house; the dull, endless expanse of the hours unbroken by a single carriage passing on the Kovo road: how could she have had any conception of it beforehand? She tried to absorb it, tried to make friends with Anya the cook, and the maids with their crooked teeth, and the stable boys (old men, really) with their dirty beards and bloodshot eyes and their way of looking straight at her when they ought to have looked at t
he ground. She read books and sewed a little and tried to teach Anya to make the dishes she liked. Grisha was out all day doing she had no idea what, and sometimes half the night, too. And when she broke down and wept and told him how unhappy she was—and how nothing in Country Days had prepared her for this life—he laughed and ran a hand through her dark hair as though it were a length of silk he had bought at a good price.
Razve ne znaesh’ raznitsu mezhdu iskusstvom i zhizn’iu? he had asked her: Don’t you know the difference between life and art? She wrote in her diary, “It was as though he had slapped me. It had never occurred to me until that moment that there was any substantial difference.”
She had known him less than a year when she wrote that. How could you marry someone you’d known only a few months? Jane and Billy had known each other six years before they got married. They had first slept together, however, only a week or so after their first kiss in the snow. Billy’s hair had been pure blond then and shaggy, hanging down to the frayed collars of his shirts. He hadn’t grown into his height yet and his chest was a narrow, pale expanse she liked to kiss her way across, making his eyes shut and his jaw go slack. Almost any way or place she touched him (his cheek, the bony small of his back) made him first smile, then reach for her and pull her so close it was as though he were an amphibian who breathed through his skin, and she was his source of oxygen.
Neither of them had much experience with sex then. For Jane there had been the high school boyfriend in his mother’s station wagon, and also a boy she’d met freshman week, a mistake, whom she passed afterward in the library or the dining hall with barely a nod of recognition. Billy was the first person who made Jane feel it was her body he wanted—her particular round, pink-tipped breasts to run his tongue across, her wide buttocks (which she had been embarrassed by before) to squeeze—rather than any woman’s body or girl’s body. He was the first person whose open eyes she looked into during orgasm, the first person who paid attention to her face when he touched her to see what made her smile or moan. It was only later, after they were engaged, that she realized (assuming things in their lives went well, that they both lived to a ripe old age and so on), she would never have this kind of sex—grown-up sex—with anybody else. She might never even see another man naked, except in the movies.
Not that she wanted to. Still, it was strange to think about it.
Things might not have turned out this way. After they graduated from college, Billy had moved to Japan to teach English in a small city two hours from Tokyo. He and Jane corresponded, but he would probably have stayed on for a second year if his mother hadn’t gotten sick. Theirs might have become just a college relationship, memorable because you grew up so much in those intense years, but not much more than that. Once Billy had been in Japan for five or six months, it was hard for Jane to remember the specificity of his presence. She looked at his photograph over her desk and could see only the shapes and colors on the paper—the half moon of his hair already turning brown, the pale blue rectangle that was his shirt, his eyes dark circles surrounded by grayish rings—not the person they represented. And then there was the biology graduate student she sometimes had coffee with (though she told him she had a boyfriend, and coffee was as far as it went). By the spring, when Billy’s letters arrived—long letters with detailed descriptions of the landscape—it sometimes took Jane two or three days to get around to opening them.
But Billy’s mother did get sick, with metastatic breast cancer. He came home in June and spent two months watching her die, cooking for his father, sitting with his mother with the TV on, both of them pretending that they weren’t thinking about her body rotting away minute by minute. He told Jane about this when he visited her, which he did every couple of weeks, spending twenty-four hours in her bed: sleeping, making love, reading. It was as though she fell in love with him all over again that summer—or not again, exactly, but anew, because Billy seemed to have become a new person. Adult, tragic. Stoical. Here she was, living essentially the same life she’d lived in college—a student life—and in the meantime Billy had penetrated another culture, been penetrated by it. Was being penetrated, now, by death.
Still, he needed her. He needed her more than he had before, to ground him. To tie him to life. And she was happy to be able to do this for him. It made her feel grown up, and necessary, and it tied her to life as well—life outside the library, outside the pages of books. When they made love now, it was not more passionate than it had been before, but it was somehow more serious. Billy’s body had filled out—maybe that was part of it—and when he gripped her shoulders and thrust himself inside her it felt more definite, as though he had decided for sure that this was what he wanted. His certainty and his man’s body, and the sense she had that he knew her better than anyone else in the world, made Jane feel as though her body was the land and he was the sun, warming and lighting her. Making her visible.
Billy’s mother died at the end of July. In August Billy found a job teaching at a local prep school and moved in with Jane. A year later they were married. How foreign it all would have seemed to Masha, who had married early, had a clutch of children all in a rush, and died when she was barely thirty-five.
“Oh,” Sigelman said now in Jane’s brand-new office, waving his pipe in the air. “I wouldn’t overrate Maria Petrovna’s influence. Karkov was a great man! Great men manage to make their genius known, whatever the circumstances.”
Old, hairy, yellowed and bent with age, he eyed Jane malignly, fitting his pipe between his teeth. It was hard not to think he was talking about himself.
There was a story about Sigelman that went around the department. It was told to Jane first and most memorably by a graduate student named Felicia Noone, a tall young woman with a long nose, bright green eyes, a cascade of curly reddish gold hair, and the awkward long-legged grace of a flamingo. Felicia had stopped by early in the semester to introduce herself and to invite Jane to join SLAV, the Slavic Ladies Association for Vice—a drinking group made up of Felicia and the other women graduate students in the department. Felicia sat in Jane’s office in an oversize Wisconsin Badgers football jersey, her long thin legs crossed in faded jeans, and told Jane how, when he was teaching, Sigelman used to swear all the time in his lectures.
“It was ‘hell’ this and ‘fuck’ that, every other minute,” Felicia said. “And then one day a student, this girl from some small town upstate, raised her hand. ‘Professor Sigelman,’ she said. ‘I’m not used to hearing that kind of language. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use those words.’”
Felicia paused. She wasn’t pretty, but there was something compelling about her, a showy sensuality that made people look twice. Jane was the newest hotshot in Slavics, and Felicia clearly had her sights on her for a dissertation adviser. She leaned forward and rested her elbows on Jane’s desk before going on.
“So Sigelman says, ‘What? Not used to it? Not used to the word fuck? Well, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! There. Now you’re used to it!’” Felicia leaned back in her chair and laughed, her many mismatched earrings catching the light, shattering it into shards across the walls.
Jane couldn’t help smiling.
Chapter Three
ON TUESDAY Jane missed the 5:03 bus because a student stopped her in the hall with a question. When she got home (twenty-two minutes late), Maisie and Elise, the babysitter, were sitting on the floor in the tumbled living room coloring on scrap paper as the sallow light faded. Elise was a pleasant, spacey, even-tempered twenty-something who had worked for one of Jane’s colleagues the year before. Getting her had been a great piece of luck. If Maisie regarded Elise at first with narrowed, suspicious eyes, Elise did not appear to mind. She approached Maisie with a careless toss of her long hair, a casual smile, and a dirty canvas bag filled with coloring books and plastic beads. Jane loved the way Elise seemed to feel so comfortable in her own pale, plump skin, the way she loved to build cities and zoos out of blocks, and how readily she laughed.
The way she was with Maisie was the way Jane would have liked to be.
Almost two years old now, Maisie had developed into a dramatic, mercurial girl who liked to dance and to wear dress-up clothes, and who was happiest when everyone was looking at her. She could be dazzling when she was in a sunny mood, with her big brown eyes and golden-brown curls and her obvious delight in human interaction—making faces, playing clapping games, singing “The Wheels on the Bus.” She could also throw impressive tantrums when she didn’t get her way. She liked books, the square cardboard kind with bright pictures, and though she preferred to have them read to her, she would also sometimes sit with a stack of them, turning the frayed pages slowly and babbling to herself as though she were reading, which never failed to please Jane—perhaps inordinately. Jane, who had spent most of her childhood curled up with a book in her closet or behind the jasmine bush in the yard—the places she was least likely to be interrupted—worried about what it meant when a child needed so much adult attention. Was it just the way Maisie had been born? Or could she tell how short her mother’s patience was for peekaboo or games of pretend, and was she always therefore in need of reassurance that Jane loved her—reassurance in the form of Jane’s undivided attention? Was Jane spoiling her by giving in to her demands, or was she making her insecure by too often and eagerly turning away? Sometimes Jane thought one thing, sometimes the other.
Tonight crayons were scattered all over the floor along with discarded drawings, books, dolls, Legos, plastic dinosaurs, Cheerios, and sticky crumbs of toast. The blue rug was covered with fish of all sizes and colors, cut out of construction paper. Maisie, wearing silky yellow pajama bottoms and wrapped in a spangled scarf, wriggled among them giggling wildly while Elise, wearing a Greek fisherman’s cap that had once belonged to Billy’s father, stood over her with a string tied to a long Tinkertoy pole, casting. Every evening it was the same, Jane’s first glimpse of her daughter going straight to her heart like an explosion, and then the painful process of moving from one self to another, from professor to mother, like a silvery fish heaving itself onto land to become a frog.
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