The original owner—the African-American lady about whom I know nothing—had, as promised, truly planted the entire property with flowers. Along the walkway from the street to the front door was a long row of irises. Under the tree they call “catalpa” she had a small rose garden: it had grown wild, and when I ripped out the gigantic American weeds and cut down the monstrous American thorny bushes—spirals with spikes that could easily have served to secure the perimeter of a gated property—I discovered lovely white roses, surprisingly fragrant considering that in America flowers usually have no scent, vegetables no taste, and that, generally, smells of any kind are culturally unacceptable.
In the middle of the front lawn she had planted a Japanese maple, the kind with little red, filigreed leaves. That was a great thing she had done! I often thought about her, imagining her for some reason in a sky-blue dress: here she is, walking out of our little house, squinting at the sun, walking over to the white roses, to the purple irises wildly gynecological in their construction; touching red leaves with her dark-skinned hand and looking around to see that, behold, it was all very good. I also found out that she had planted daffodils, but over the years they had migrated south, and I would find them on the border of my neighbor’s property, in thickets and vines, in places where my legs couldn’t go but my hands could still reach. Of course, I dug them out and moved them back to the house—that was where she’d wanted them from the very beginning. And I had an intimation of her walking by, casting a glance.
I could see traces of her presence everywhere on the property—and the property was huge. I soon found out what she had planted on the south side and what on the east, what she’d hidden under the pine tree—such as those lilies of the valley—and what she’d wanted to make visible from the front stoop, our flimsy little three-step porch. When lush American summer came, I finally saw her vision in its totality: an immense wall of bushes rose up at the edge of the property and completely shielded us—from the street, from the cars, from the fumes, sounds, and prying eyes. We couldn’t see anyone and no one could see us. If you didn’t know that our house was just there, behind that green wall, you’d have never guessed it. After sunset it disappeared in the crepuscular light, so that I myself could easily miss it from the street.
In the hallway, from the ceiling, there hung a rope. I tugged at it, and a squeaky folding staircase came down. It led to the attic, of course. There, boxes filled with junk from the 1960s were drying out and falling apart—blouses and aprons, the kind one wouldn’t have wanted to wear even then but couldn’t bring oneself to throw out. Nothing interesting. A whole mess of postcards—Christmas, Easter—also boring and unremarkable: “Merry Christmas, dear Bill and Nora.” So her name was Nora. Funny, I had imagined her as a Sally.
Once again she walked by, undetected, running her hand over the droopy branches of the Liquidambar—a beautiful evening-hued tree, full of sweet sap. But Bill didn’t walk by—he never walked in the garden. He stood, camouflaged by the wall, semi-transparent, eyes glistening in the dark.
According to custom, our neighbors came bearing pie. We already knew that this is what happens when you first move in but weren’t sure if we were supposed to reciprocate. These neighbors had a farm.
“Do you eat meat?” they asked.
“Yes, of course,” we answered naively.
“Then come by and pick out a baby lamb. We will slaughter it for you and you’ll save some money.”
We were city folk, and this offer somewhat paralyzed us. Not that we were considering becoming vegetarians, but the idea of coming to a farm, pointing to that one—sweet, curly, innocent—and…what? “Kill it, I want it”?
I reckon they ascribed our sudden stupor to that general idiocy of foreigners.
“Then come by for blueberries, you can pick all you want. We have so many this year, don’t know what to do with them.”
Blueberries I could agree to. I grabbed a basket and off I went, taking the long way through the fields. The distance between our houses was no more than five hundred feet, but those feet were densely forested. The thicket between my neighbors and me was absolutely impassable. Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, entering from opposite sides, would never have found each other.
I looked around for the blueberries, but couldn’t see any. The missus walked me over to some sort of aviary—in the Moscow zoo, such cages are used to house sullen feathered creatures with complex Latin names.
“We have to keep the berries under a mesh or the birds will eat them,” she complained.
I walked into the aviary. High above my head, on the upper branches of the bushes, there were, indeed, berries, but not the cute little blueberries we Russians crouch and kneel to pick. These were industrial-sized, overgrown, American monster-berries. And to pick them, one had to get on tippy toes and reach high overhead. The sun was blinding. The birds desperately stalked the mesh roof but couldn’t reach anything. I didn’t last long. After picking a small boxful, I stopped and decided to head home. Watching me go, the neighbor’s wife concluded that I was a moron, but politely concealed it with a fake smile. Thank you, Lord. I am free! Under a canopy there was a little black boy with a frightened and unhappy face. The husband was busy instructing the child.
“We adopted him.” The neighbor’s wife pointed her finger in the direction of the little one. “Say hi!”
The little boy hurriedly got up and gave a nod.
“He had a bad life before, but he’s happy here,” said the husband, and then turned back to finish his lecture: “First you work, then you eat.”
I took the long way home, through the fields. You could say that nothing bad had transpired, but as often happens with introverts, I felt as if my soul had been trampled on. Was it the birds…? The path veered off into the forest, where houses stand empty, propped up by trees that pierce them like spears.
“Nora,” I said to an empty house in the empty forest. “Nora, he had a bad life before them, but he’s happy here.”
But she was looking far into the distance, and was almost no longer here.
* * *
§
I was working at a small college way up north. Two days a week—Mondays and Wednesdays—I was to teach creative writing. We’d tell the students right away that it can’t be taught, but they’d only smirk, thinking that the grown-ups were lying: “Somebody must have taught them!”
Few of them truly applied themselves, but that wasn’t what irritated me. Much worse was that they didn’t really know how to read and couldn’t be bothered to learn. Didn’t care about what was actually written down on the page.
I’d assign them a five-page story to read. Hemingway. Or maybe Salinger. “So, Steven, can you tell me what this story is about?”
“I dunno. I didn’t like it.”
“Thank you for sharing—your opinion is very valuable to us. Can you tell us specifically what you didn’t like?”
“I didn’t like that the guy was cheating on his wife. That’s just wrong. I don’t like to read about such things.”
“Tell me, Steven, do people sometimes cheat on each other?”
“Yes.”
“So why not write a story about that?”
“Cheating is wrong and it doesn’t teach us anything.”
“So you’re saying that literature must teach us? An interesting and debatable point of view. Can you please elaborate?”
I didn’t give two shits about what Steven would say. What I gave a shit about was not letting this smart-ass little punk—who’d spent the entire night before smoking weed (and still reeked of it) and who’d just cut me off in his Porsche to take my parking spot—think he’d hoodwinked me about even having read the story. Must have just asked his girlfriend outside: What’s this story about? And she said: Some dude steps out on his girl. Now here he is, answers at the ready. Don’t piss on my leg and tell me i
t’s raining, I’ll corner you and eat your brains for breakfast.
But here is the conundrum: if you simply and guilelessly expose a student as a liar and fail him for being unprepared, he’ll avenge himself at the end of the semester. Every single one of them gets a teacher evaluation form from the dean’s office twice a year. They sit down and, diligently bending their wrists unaccustomed to writing, fill out said forms with block letters and slanderous accusations. “Professor didn’t hold my interest.” “Didn’t create an entertaining atmosphere for me.” “What’s with those crazy ties?” “Gave me Cs and Ds but didn’t explain why. Overall, I was disappointed.”
And so the instructor must find more nurturing and beguiling ways to make the student realize he is a lazy ignoramus (if that is, indeed, what she wants him to realize), so that very student will be forced to admit it to himself and his friends will be able to corroborate it. Any earnest appeal to principles, to conscience, to exemplars worth aspiring to, or other such highfalutin crap that’s so popular in my homeland, doesn’t work here at all. Here one must provide nonstop entertainment for the group while simultaneously making each and every student feel they are number one, the subject of boundless and incessant care. All this without familiarity. And without fulsome praise. If a professor attempts to weasel their way into a student’s favor with too much fawning or too high a grade in the hopes of receiving a good evaluation, the student will only come to despise them and, upon getting the last word, shit all over them.
It’s also advisable to put aside one’s intellect: intelligence is annoying. Employ a simpler vocabulary—the students already complained I was using too many words they didn’t know. Try being Puss in Boots infused with the Stanislavski method.
An experienced educator knows: there’s no point in teaching the students. What you need to do is make them feel taught by term’s end.
I turned out to be a poor instructor, but at this psychological trickery and buffoonery calibrated for local conditions, I excelled, though not immediately. At the end of the first year, the students, to whom I’d stupidly and earnestly given my all, gave me poor marks and wrote negative evaluations. The other professors, my friends who cared about me, were devastated.
“You’re a foreigner, Tatyana, you don’t get how it works here. Let us help you, train you, try to fix this.”
“It’s okay. I can manage.”
“But if you get poor evaluations next year, they’ll fire you! And we don’t want to lose you!”
And I don’t want to lose my house, I said to myself. I need this job, and I will keep it. If I need to get on all fours and bark, I’ll get on all fours and bark. Because I love my house, and it loves me.
The following semester I received top marks from all my students. My friends marveled as if I were Uri Geller and had just made a stopped watch tick.
“How did you manage that?! In a single semester? That’s never happened in the entire history of the college! What did you do?”
“I dunno,” I lied, impudently looking them straight in their earnest eyes of liberal intellectuals. I mean, I couldn’t very well admit to them that I had indeed got on all fours and barked for love.
* * *
§
Door to door, it’s two hundred twenty miles from my house to the college—four hours of driving. It’s winter.
On Monday, may it be damned, the alarm goes off at 5:00 a.m. I jump up like a soldier; half an hour to shower and brew five cups of strong Turkish coffee: one for now, four for the thermos. Sandwiches are prepared the night before; a pack of Benson & Hedges menthols is always in the car. Apples are quartered and thrown into a Ziploc bag. Cassettes of Russian rockers Grebenshchikov and Khvostenko, angels of the divinely absurd. Also recorded lectures about something obscure and complicated, so my brain is forced to work and not sleep: Chinese philosophy, the history of opera, quantum mechanics. Also audiobooks of British detective novels (can’t do classic literature, too soporific; to avoid conking out during the drive one needs simple impatient curiosity: who dunnit?). If you assume that five hours of sleep is enough, you are assuming incorrectly.
So as not to wake up my family, I sleep in the magical room. It has a door that opens straight into the garage. A cold draft whooshes in under the door, making the room feel uninviting during winter nights, but only for those who don’t know and can’t see: there is entry here into aetherial worlds. The house is surrounded by snow, piled high; when the sun comes up, it illuminates the room from one side to the other, from the pink southern snowbanks to the pale blue northern ones, and the room will be like a ship, swaying in the air. We don’t know where happiness comes from, but places do exist where it’s sprinkled into heaps. Each time I take off, I leave happiness behind.
I walk out into the garage, get in the car, slam the door, turn on the headlights: the shelves with old crap from David and Nora, the cans with dried-up paint, Grandpa’s sled, curled-up green water hoses, rusted rakes—all is illuminated. I’m an automaton, all my moves repetitive, economical, and calculated.
Opening the garage door with the remote, backing out, closing the door with the remote. Peeling out into the street, making a U-turn, and going north—by feel, slicing through the inky darkness, diving down hills into valleys, on empty narrow roads, past sleeping villages and lonely farms demarcated by tiny beads of light.
This pitch-black hour is the most horrible in my life; it repeats week after week, year after year. I am half reclined in a sarcophagus scattered with litter, as if a long-forgotten, distant relative of some pharaoh, surrounded by her ushabti and her vessels for drinking and eating, which are supposed to last until the Day of Judgment, when one is called and asked: Didst thou steal? Didst thou take from a widow? Didst thou add to the weight of the balance and didst thou falsify the plummet of the scale? There is no greater loneliness, no sharper coldness, no deeper despair. No one is thinking of me in this emptiness—my father is dead, and the rest are sleeping. I have no friend, and no place to find one.
But this death alights upon me for only an hour, and then it’s annulled, as all death is annulled, its sting removed, as we’ve been promised. I know what intersection I am about to cross and under which trees I’ll be stopped at a red light when the heavy, heatless crimson sun appears over the horizon. I know which road I’ll be turning onto as it rises up in the sky in all its morning glory—raging and white, as in those ferocious Turner paintings—blinding all who are speeding northeast behind me. Lower the visor, put on the sunglasses: an entire army of drivers gears itself simultaneously; we are all automatons, all gnawing our way through this difficult world with our crumbling teeth.
No, five hours is not enough sleep, and so the entire journey is devoted to keeping myself from nodding off and hitting the divider; from flipping over, crashing into an oncoming car. Methodology is as follows: continuous coffee-drinking and smoking, cracking the window to let in the frigid air, munching on something and listening to Grebenshschikov at full blast, or, better yet, singing at the top of my lungs and drowning out my idols. This car full of crazy is speeding down American roads, flying onto the four-lane highway, and I can see that I’m not the only one: there is smoking and singing in other cars, too, while the most passionate are dancing at the wheel, drumming away with one hand or both. Finally the highway goes its own way, whistling and rattling, as I veer north; the sun is already high up in the sky, back to its normal size, nothing special.
The air outside is razorlike, the landscape now of cliffs, pines, and new types of birds—perhaps eagles, even. From the mountaintops one can see spectacular valleys, rivers snaking through them, and new skies opening up; everything is different, and beyond the blue mountains—Canada.
* * *
§
By November’s end my students completely stop applying themselves. The other professors tell me:
“What do you expect, they had an entire week
off, they spent it skiing in the Adirondacks—you must know how hard it is to get back into it after vacation! If you want learning, writing, thinking out of them, you’ve got to get it before Thanksgiving. Because now, the plague is coming.”
“What do you mean, ‘the plague’?”
“You’ll see, their aunties will start dying off; grief will prevent them from coming to class and taking tests.”
And what do you know, two groups of students suffered the loss of three aunties, a few uncles were writhing in agony, and the fiancée of one of the most arrogant pretty boys was rotting alive.
“Rotting alive?” I asked again, fascinated.
“Yep!” he confirmed shamelessly. “At first it was just, like, her legs to the knees, then it kinda, like, spread further up, and now she’s literally in her last hours. One more week, I think, is all I need. Such a tragedy, you know?”
I took pity and gave him a passing grade for such beautiful fiction. Yes, I have added to the weight of the balance. Yes, I have falsified the plummet of the scales.
* * *
§
During my years there I did have some talented students, if unexceptionally so, a few of those even planning to make a career out of writing, stocking store shelves with their uninteresting, timid stories tinged with soft-core porn. Most often, they’d pick my brain about getting published in The New Yorker—what and how did one need to write to make that happen? I’d tell them that I didn’t know, that getting published is a different skill altogether. But they wouldn’t believe me. One young lady grumbled: “Fine, I get that you need to sleep with the editor. But what else?”
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