On the wall next to the bookcase hung a group of small water-colors, mostly in shades of rust and green and pale yellow. One was of leaves, another of shapes like shadowy fish. A third seemed to be paw prints in a warm, watery violet, as though a cat had stepped in paint and then walked across the paper.
“Those are Susannah’s,” Olen said, seeing what Jane was looking at. “My wife’s.” Of the woman herself there was no sign. Maybe the baby was sleeping and she was taking the opportunity to sleep, too. Maybe she was in a studio somewhere, contemplating colors of paint. Olen sat down on a chair and indicated the futon couch for Jane.
“Who changed the family name?” she asked.
“My grandfather. He was the one who married Sonya, Karkov’s granddaughter.” Olen’s face softened slightly, his jaw relaxing and his shoulders settling as though someone had put a hand on his back. “He thought Olenin was too foreign for the midwest. He was an extraordinary man. Got himself out of the Soviet Union. He didn’t want to stay in Europe—it was too close to the old life. He had America on his mind, and when he got here he made a new life for himself. Out of nothing.”
“But you knew who your ancestors were? On your grandmother’s side?”
“I knew my grandmother’s grandfather had been famous. Wealthy. A count.” He smiled sardonically, leaning back in his chair and tapping the floor with a leather boot. “That was more important to my family than that he had been a writer. He had been rich, he had passed on his wealth to his children, and then the Communists came and stole it all. It was the same on my grandfather’s side—the family had nothing after that.” He looked at Jane. “Nothing,” he repeated, making sure she got the point. “Cabbages and rags! I remember my grandfather talking about coming to this country and walking into a supermarket for the first time in his life. Shelves filled with goods! He had never seen anything like it. Canned peas, baked beans, frozen fish . . .” His black eyes looked past Jane as though he were seeing that store in front of him with its abundant cans, its schools of filleted, rock-solid fish. Jane thought of her own grandfather, her mother’s father, with his skinny chicken neck and his Naugahyde slippers, sitting in his easy chair in Cleveland talking about why his father had left Vilnius.
“It was like that in my family, too,” she said. “Desperation, that’s what drives people to do something that hard. Leaving everything behind the way they did.” She thought of Otto Sigelman, for whom that desperation had been a personal reality, not merely a family legend. Was he owed something for that? Did she owe him something? What, after all, was her own desperation compared to his? A lynx to a tiger, maybe. Still, there was no denying even a lynx’s weight or the sharpness of its claws. It had gotten her here, after all, hadn’t it?
Olen wasn’t interested in Jane’s family. He went on talking about his grandfather, staring into space as though he could see back into the past. “When I went to his house as a boy, the basement was filled with cartons of toilet paper and cooking oil. Canned tomatoes. He never bought one of anything. Two pairs of pants, exactly the same. Two blenders.”
“But it was your grandmother who was descended from the Karkovs?” Jane prodded.
“Yes. She was born after they died, though. And in this country. She had no memories of them. But she was the one who gave me my first copy of Dmitri Arkadyevich, when I was fifteen. In English, of course.”
“You’ve read the novels, then,” Jane said.
Olen gave her a look. “I’m a writer myself, you know. I teach writing.” He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. The sky outside the window had grown paler since Jane arrived, the robin’s egg blue thinned as though with water.
“What have you written?” Jane asked politely.
Olen tapped out a cigarette and jabbed it into the corner of his mouth. “The publishing industry in this country isn’t the way it was in Russia when my great-great-grandfather was alive,” he said. “It’s all about money now.” The cigarette wobbled in the corner of his mouth like a gesticulating finger.
“Yes,” Jane said.
Out on the street a car swept by, its tires purring on the asphalt. Somewhere in the house, a baby began to cry. Its voice drifted down through the ceiling, growing gradually louder. Olen ignored it. He found a book of matches on the side table, lit the cigarette.
“Want one?”
“No, thanks.”
The baby’s cries grew frantic, high gasping shrieks, each louder than the one before, until all at once they ceased, leaving the house ringing with silence. Olen took a drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out in a fierce stream, as though directing it into the smug faces and short-sighted eyes of the editors who had rejected his work.
“Where do you teach?” Jane asked.
“DCC. Dubuque Community College. It’s a decent job. I teach a section of fiction and also a section of lit, though I never got my Ph.D. Quit after a year—what bullshit it all was! My god.” He spoke with a pleased self-righteousness, the sardonic smile comfortably back on his face. “Of course, that’s what you do, isn’t it? Critical theory. Murdering to dissect.”
Jane returned his smile blandly. She liked him, despite his bitter, tough-guy pomposity. He was interesting, even if he wasn’t very nice, and Jane had always felt more at home with interesting people than with nice ones. “I guess that brings us to the point of my visit,” she said.
“Let’s have a beer, then,” Olen said. “If we’re going to talk seriously.”
“All right,” Jane said.
“Susannah!” he called loudly.
The baby began to cry again. Footsteps clattered overhead.
“Susannah! Bring us a couple of beers, would you?” Olen shifted impatiently in his chair, rubbing a spot on the wooden arm with his thumb.
A minute later a young woman flounced into the room with a small baby in one arm and two bottles of beer, held by the caps, drooping from her opposite hand. She clanked them down on the low, chunky wooden coffee table that looked like someone’s high school shop project.
“Beer,” she said, obviously annoyed. She was very young, perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two, with bright, short, sunshine-yellow hair cut close to her head and dark, tired eyes. Sleepless mother eyes, Jane thought. She moved like a sleepless mother, too, weighed down with the stupidity brought on by sleep deprivation, under which a barely controlled agitation kept her moving. She wore old blue jeans and a tank top that rode up to reveal her soft, sagging, blue-white stomach on which the purple-black vein of the linea nigra was clearly visible. “Take Caroline,” she said. “I’m in the middle of ten things, and she won’t be quiet unless someone holds her.” Jane saw that she could hardly bring herself to look at her husband, though he regarded her squarely with a complicated mixture of irritation and desire.
“I can’t hold her,” he said. “She’ll scream.” Jane thought he had wanted to rile his wife, that that had been the point of making her bring the beers instead of getting them himself.
“Just take her!” Susannah said. “You’re her father, aren’t you?” She handed him the baby, which, as he had predicted, began immediately to cry. The tiny face went from pink to beet-red, and the arms and legs flailed helplessly in the soft terry-cloth outfit of unisex turquoise green.
“Someone tell her that.” Olen bounced his daughter up and down in his lap with exaggerated woodenness.
“Hi,” Jane said to Susannah, doing her best to look as though she were oblivious to the scene playing out before her. “I’m Jane Levitsky. I’m—” I’m the one you talked to on the phone, she started to say, but she thought better of it. Maybe Olen’s wife had told her to come just to disrupt her husband’s day, or for some other reason Jane couldn’t even begin to guess at. Who knew what went on in the private stranglehold of other people’s marriages? “I’m here to talk to your husband about his great-great-grandmother,” she said.
Susannah nodded.
Olen stood up now, came out from behind the coffee table, and walked the b
aby up and down the room. She quieted slightly, her cry ratcheting down to a stubborn whimper. “She hates me,” Olen said half-jokingly, holding the baby out in front of him so he could look her in the face.
“Don’t be dramatic,” his wife said.
“She’s a mama’s girl,” Olen said, “Aren’t you, Caroline? Mama’s girl!” He bobbed the baby up and down so that her head nodded as though in agreement. “See?” he said.
“Are these your paintings?” Jane asked Susannah. “They’re beautiful.”
Susannah turned her head and looked at the paintings as though surprised to find them there on the wall. A rectangle of sunlight fell across the pale washes of color, giving them an otherworldly cast. “Yes,” she said. “They’re mine.”
“Your mama did those when she was a free woman,” Olen told the baby. “Before she became enslaved.”
“I don’t paint anymore,” Susannah said. She tugged her tank top down over her stomach, self-conscious now.
“I’m sure you’ll get back to it when she’s a little older,” Jane said. She felt very experienced suddenly, as though her own life weren’t a minute-by-minute procession of fires to be put out.
“No,” Susannah said, looking at her husband. “Somebody’s going to have to earn a living.” Olen, still jiggling the baby, pretended not to hear.
Jane knew none of this was remotely her business. She was here to talk to Olen—to flatter him if she needed to, cajole him. But there was something fierce and exhausted about Susannah that moved her. She was far too young to be living this life. Jane had thought she herself had been too young at twenty-five! “Earning a living is one thing,” she said. “But you need to keep doing what you love.”
Susannah looked at her in surprise. She opened her mouth as though she were going to say something, then shut it again. It was a full, pink rosebud of a mouth—a girl’s mouth—but her eyes were narrow and sharp.
“I love the idea of being supported,” Olen said, gesturing with the baby, which he held loosely along his forearm, like a waitress carrying too many trays. “What are you going to do to support me, Susie?”
His wife shut her eyes, took a breath. Then she opened them again and said, “Right now, I’m going upstairs to do the laundry.”
“We know what that means,” Olen said, looking down and addressing his words to the child. “It means she’s going to take a nap.” To Jane’s great relief, he tucked his arm against his chest, holding his daughter more securely.
“Goddamn it, Greg!” Susannah said. Then she caught herself. Olen laughed. Jane knew that rocky shore between teasing and accusation. She knew what it was like to be stranded on it, to see nothing but sharp shale wherever you looked.
Susannah left the room. Jane could hear her footsteps going up the stairs. A door slammed and a loud humming started up. The baby had quieted and seemed to be halfway asleep on her father’s shoulder, but when Olen tried to sit down, she opened her drooping eyes again and protested in a piercing register.
“I tell you,” Olen said to Jane, serious now. “It’s hard as hell to get anything done with a baby around. She’s up all night. She cries! I’ve hardly managed to write two sentences since she was born.” He looked half-disgusted and half-admiring, like the victim of a clever and original practical joke.
“That’s too bad,” Jane said.
“Open the beers, would you?” he said. “I’ve got my hands full.”
Jane twisted the caps off the two Leinenkugel’s and pushed one closer to Olen. The light in the room had shifted now, and the sky outside the window was the thin, clear white of a blank sheet of paper. “So,” she said. “Maria Karkova was your great-great-grandmother. She’s the one I’m interested in, actually. I was wondering if you had any papers of hers. I was sorry to learn about your father. I did hear you had inherited some old documents of the family’s. Though, of course, I might have heard wrong.” She smiled and spread her hands, palms up, trying to look benign but not uninteresting. Worthy, but not threatening. She imagined Sigelman sitting where she sat now. What would he have said?
“Maria?” Olen said. He took a long pull on his beer, keeping the baby balanced against his shoulder. “Really? Surely there’s more meat, not to mention glory, in pursuing the certified genius of the family.” He jiggled the baby, who sighed contentedly, her limbs hanging slack inside the turquoise terry cloth. Impossible that Maisie had ever been that small or that oblivious!
“She interests me,” Jane said. “I’d love to hear what was said about her in the family, if anything. Any stories that were handed down. It seems likelier that some of her papers were kept than his, don’t you think? Precisely because he was the certified genius, so there would have been more clamor for his stuff.” She waited, watching him narrow his eyes thoughtfully, take another drink of his beer.
“Papers?”
“Letters, shopping lists.” Jane forced herself to keep looking at him. She had no idea what he might have. “As far as I know, all her diaries are in the Newberry, but maybe not. Maybe there were other volumes?” She could imagine Sigelman mentioning the same items—Sigelman slipping pages into his jacket pocket when Olen wasn’t looking.
With his left hand, Olen picked up the cigarette that had not quite gone out in the ashtray. He took a long drag as the baby slumped like a small sack of grain under his right hand. Jane tried not to look disapproving.
“Do you know Otto Sigelman?” he demanded suddenly.
Jane shivered at the sound of the name as though the man himself were standing behind her, his shadow falling across the room, the whiff of his cigar intermingling with the stink of Olen’s cigarette. “He’s a colleague of mine,” she said carefully.
“You know that he was here?”
“I thought he might have been.”
Olen blew smoke back over his shoulder, away from the baby. “Thought?” he said. “You didn’t talk to him about it?”
Jane shifted on the couch, picked up her beer, put it down again. The light continued to fade, though it was only early afternoon. The wind was moving in the leaves outside the window. “He wouldn’t talk about it,” she said.
“Your department isn’t a happy community of scholars?” Olen took a last drag of the cigarette and dropped the butt into his empty beer bottle. Then he shrugged as though to say he didn’t care one way or the other, but his face had the square, solid look of a closed door.
“No,” she said. “Is yours?”
He smiled now, a lazy, charming smile. “No,” he said. “Not exactly.”
“Well, then.” Jane smiled back at him. “You know how it is.”
Olen’s eyes glittered. “There might be something,” he said.
“Something?” Jane’s hands jumped in her lap. “Can I see it?”
“Listen,” Olen said, leaning forward suddenly so that the baby startled and let out a squeak. He didn’t seem to notice. “Listen—fuck it! I’ll tell you what happened. Sigelman came here, just like you did. Gave me a whole song and dance! He wanted what you want—papers, papers. The past more interesting than the present, dead writers more important than living ones. All that crap. And I told him what I was going to tell you: you have cash, you can see what I’ve got! An entrance fee. A hundred bucks for half an hour. Hell, that’s a bargain, vulture lawyers charge twice as much.” He looked at her to see if she would object to this assertion, but Jane wasn’t objecting to anything.
“He hemmed and hawed,” Olen went on, “but in the end he paid up! Cash.” He savored the word.
Jane nodded. She could picture Sigelman riffling through his billfold, thumbing twenties. “Go on.”
“So I brought him some documents I do happen to have. And he sat here and looked through them, and when he was done, he shrugged and said none of it was worth anything. Nothing of any importance—nothing of interest! But then, the very next day, he left a message on the answering machine saying he had changed his mind. He wanted the papers after all. He wanted to buy them! H
e offered me a thousand dollars—as though I would sell off my heritage!” He glared at Jane through the haze of cigarette smoke as though to make sure she understood that he would never, never do that, that he wasn’t that kind of man.
Jane nodded, but she felt cold inside, her stomach knotted up.
“So what the hell is going on?” Olen demanded, jabbing a long, pale finger at Jane. “That’s what I want to know! What made him change his mind? Or maybe it was part of his plan all along, his way of thinking to pay less than if he’d seemed excited to begin with. Who knows with a sleazy bastard like that? So—this is my deal for you, Dr. Levitsky. I’ll let you look at some of what I have for free. All right? Right now. Only you have to tell me what it is, and what the fuck you think he wanted with it.”
“Yes,” Jane said. She felt for him, for the conflict between his ignorance and his desire to look tough and knowledgeable. He couldn’t even read Russian. Whatever papers he had were his property—his heritage, as he’d said—and yet to find out what they meant, he had to rely on strangers. “I promise,” she said. “If I know, if I can guess what he might have wanted, I’ll tell you.”
Olen frowned. She could see that he hated this, but it was the best he could think to do at the moment. He trusted her, at least a little bit—at least more than he trusted Sigelman—and she was determined to try to deserve that trust.
“All right, then,” he said. “Wait here.” He stood up and looked impatiently around for a place to put down the now-sleeping baby.
“I’ll take her,” Jane said, and held out her arms.
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