The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Coke?” you said.

  “Oh, cool!” he exclaimed. “I’ll get you a Coke from the fridge.” He turned to go but turned back. “Because, you know, everybody in this house, and I mean everybody, is, like, getting fried all the time, you know?”

  While he was out of the room you looked up fried, without much success.

  Chapter three

  “That Kenny!” the woman said, flapping her hand in dismissal, then snatching the aluminum can out of your hand. “He doesn’t have the manners of a billy goat! I’m Loretta Elmore, and I’ll bet you’d like some vodka, right?”

  “Mayest thou be victorious,” you said in a fairly good English rendering of the common Svanetian greeting.

  “Do what?” said Loretta Elmore. She held the bottle of Smirnoff above a crystal glass, raising one eyebrow in expectation of your approval, and when you nodded she splashed a couple of jiggers into the glass. “Ice?” she said.

  It sounded nothing like the Svanetian kvarmal nor the Russian lyod. “I am having much problems with the English,” you said. “How spells ‘ice’?”

  She took the lid off the ice bucket and lifted out a palmful of cubes. “I-see-ee,” she said. She dropped the cubes into another glass, into which she poured some of the amber liquid from another bottle, as if in demonstration. She held it up, said, “Bourbon and branch on the rocks. Can you say that?”

  You were always good at mimicry, at repetition. You repeated her exactly, with just a slight misinflection.

  “Very good,” she said, and pointed her glass at you and said,

  “Cheers,” and drank most of it in one swallow.

  You drank your vodka, without ice, in one swallow. It was the real stuff, as we say, and the first you’d had since the days in Tbilisi when you spent too much of your university salary on a daily dose of it.

  Loretta refilled your glass and asked, “Don’t you want to take that scarf off your head and sit down?” When you hesitated, she pantomimed removing the scarf and sitting.

  “Sit, ya,” you agreed. “But ‘scarf,’ no. I am having no hair.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me!” she said. “Now that’s terrible. Is that what they did to you? Did they cut it all off!” She scissored together her first and second fingers and you nodded, and she said, “That really sucks! How long were you in the die sinner’s slammer?”

  “Pardon. What means ‘die sinner’?”

  “What you were. Weren’t you?” She spelled the word for you and it did not spell exactly as she and her son had spoken it.

  You brought out your paperback, showed her the cover, and apologized, “I am having to use.”

  “Use,” she said. “Go right ahead.”

  You looked it up: one who dissents, as one who refuses to accept a religious doctrine. Your finger moved a short distance down the page, to another, better word. You tried not to sound didactic, let alone superior. “I think,” you told her, “thou want other word, dissident, not dissenter.”

  “Yeah, that’s right!” she said. “That’s the word Kenneth—Big Kenny, who’s Pa—that’s the word he uses. I just got it mixed up. You’re not a die sinner. You’re a dissident!”

  You smiled. And that was your first awareness, dear Kat, that all of us have problems with English.

  Chapter four

  Big Kenny, or Pa, came home from the Hillman in time for supper and was delighted to find that you had arrived safely, since it had been his idea in the first place: in the course of the evening, and with much help from your paperback dictionary, you were able to determine that your host, or rather your landlord, or perhaps a little of both, Dr. Kenneth L. Elmore, Sr., 71, was a retired professor of anthropology at the university who, in his superannuation and idle hours, espoused several worthy social causes, including Save-a-Child and Urban League and Amnesty International, and had somehow got his name on the mailing list of the Fund for the Relief of Russian Writers and Scientists in Exile. He had not contributed any cash to the Fund, and he did not now intend to contribute anything at all to your welfare, other than excusing you from paying your first month’s rent, or rather what remained of the month of December, and it was to be hoped that you would be able to pay your January rent out of your salary from the university, assuming that his efforts to help you find employment there were successful. Thus far, his efforts had been limited to sending interdepartmental memos to his colleagues in Biological Sciences and Slavic Languages and Literature; he was prevented from phoning or visiting them by an advanced hearing impairment that, in addition to what problems you already had with the English language, rendered communication between the two of you almost impossible. (“The stubborn old gomer refuses to try a hearing aid,” Loretta said in the presence of the nonhearing old gomer, a word not in your dictionary.) Dr. Elmore had received, in reply to his memos, an offer to have you interviewed by Dr. Schvann of Slavic and Dr. Dalrymple of Biological Sciences, and, as soon as you got settled into your apartment upstairs (adjacent to, on one side, Dr. Edith Koeppe of Sociology and, on the other side, Dr. Knox Ogden of English), you would be expected to appear for your interviews. (‘I’ll loan you the borrow of one of my dresses,” Loretta offered generously. “I think we’re about the same size. And you really ought to wear some of my jewelry, at least a necklace.”)

  But Dr. Elmore had very little to say to you, that evening or later. At the supper table (Kenneth, Jr., “Little” Kenny, the only sober person at that late hour, cooked and served a supper of cheeseburgers and french fries), Dr. Elmore casually remarked, not looking at you, “I have the greatest respect for dissidents, particularly those against the Bolshevik ideology,” but in a voice so hoarse and weak that Loretta had to repeat the words for you, slowly, and yell at her husband, “SHE HAS TO LOOK ’EM UP!” while you successfully found ideology, which sounded pretty much the same in Russian, with a different accent. Then the three Elmores, including smiling Kenny, waited for your response to that remark.

  “Dissidents,” you said, “are being…Excuse”—you looked up a couple of words—“successful only if famous. Like Solzhenitsyn. I not famous dissident. I, nobody know.”

  Loretta yelled this at her husband, and he smiled politely and shook his head in sympathy, or in disavowal of having heard; you could not tell which.

  You were not drunk, and neither, precisely, were Dr. and Mrs. Elmore, although all three of you had consumed large quantities of, respectively, vodka, Scotch, and bourbon. You were out of practice, and a quantity of vodka that would have given you only a pleasant buzz in Tbilisi or Leningrad now rendered you a bit stuporous and stuttering and inattentive. Each time Loretta got up to refill your glass, her son would whine, “Mom!” and roll his eyes in disgust and give you assorted facial contortions of disappointment, pity, concern, and beseechment.

  At one point during the evening, Loretta observed that your unusual name was difficult, to put it mildly, and she delivered herself of the opinion that you ought to pick one of the many American translations, Cathy, perhaps, or Katy, or Cassie, or Kitty, or perhaps just Kay. At the very least, Catherine. “What can we call you?” she wondered aloud. Without wishing to be unfriendly or in the least aloof, you announced, “Ekaterina Vladimirovna,” dropping, at least, your unwieldy surname.

  Finally, when Dr. Elmore seemed to have withdrawn entirely into himself and was making no effort to respond to his wife’s shouts of “SHE WANTS US TO CALL HER EE COTTERINA VLAH DEEMER ROV NAH!” Kenny said to his mother, “Can’t you see she’s tired?” and Loretta suggested that maybe it was time that Kenny showed you up to your room, and the boy leapt at the chance.

  Chapter five

  Your room, on the second floor of the mansion, west side, was large enough to house, by Soviet standards, an entire family, but you had it all to yourself, and even a bathroom! You could not believe, at first, that you would not be sharing the bath with Professors Koeppe and Ogden, who, Kenny tried to convince you, both had separate bathrooms. The mansion contained a total of
ten apartments, each with its own bathroom, each populated by a single faculty member or graduate student, the latter on the third floor. Each apartment even had its own small cooking niche (Kenny gave you the word: kitchenette.) Yours had a gas stove, a small refrigerator, and a sink, but there were no pots, pans, dishes, or cutlery. (“I could, like, snitch you some stuff from downstairs just to get you started,” Kenny offered.)

  Kenny had already taken from his parents’ apartment a table lamp and a reading lamp, which he now put upon your desk and plugged in and turned on. Then he struck a match and lit the gas heater embedded in the exterior wall, and he showed you how to adjust it. The same exterior wall had five tall windows interspersed with mirrors, four of the windows with a view of the busy avenue, now traversed by many car lights; one of the windows (as Kenny, pulling aside the heavy drapes, showed you) had an oblique view of the illuminated window of your neighbor Professor Ogden. He had not drawn his blinds, and his undraped window revealed a dim glimpse of his person, supine upon his couch, one arm flung over his face to shield his eyes or comfort his head. (“That old nerd’s really, really sick,” Kenny said. “I mean he’s, like, barfy and gross, you know? He oughta be in the hospital, but Mom can’t make him go.”)

  The furniture of your room consisted of a small circular dining table with three simple dining chairs (two for company, said our Thoreau, and a third for society); a sofa like the one Ogden was confined upon; a spacious desk with desk chair; a comfortable stuffed armchair; two empty bookcases waiting for you to fill them up (you possessed at this point only three volumes, including the Russian-English dictionary: the other two were a fragment [less than half] of a coverless, torn, much-used Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the only thing you’d been able to read in camp, where books were forbidden and this fragment had served several inmates as a toilet-paper supply before falling into your possession, as if Anangka wanted you to learn a little about the language you would be using for the rest of your life, even in its Middle form, and even without any help from a Russian-English dictionary; and a slim hardbound of Günter von Büren’s Protomycetaceae of Switzerland, which the KGB man had permitted you to browse for and purchase cheaply under his suspicious eye at a Zurich bookshop before driving you on to the airport); a chest of drawers waiting for your undies and socks and such, once you acquired some; and a pair of what we call “occasional tables”: good for ashtrays, magazines, clocks, spare change, TV dinners (your room had no TV). In fact, there was a clean crystal ashtray already upon one of them, and you looked wistfully at it and asked your boy guide: “Thou do not objection if I take…papirosa, cigarette, no?”

  “It’s your room,” Kenny pointed out and, looking around him, noticed the door was still ajar and closed it. “Can I have one too?”

  It’s ironic, my Kat, that you, who had already throughout the long dull course of exchanging civilities with the Elmores amused yourself with elaborate plans for a soon seduction of this lad, now scrupled against “corrupting” him by letting him have a cigarette. You studied him and his eager face for a long moment before shaking your head. His face fell. His face, you realized, was much more mobile, expressive, mercurial, than Islamber’s. But you hadn’t shaken your head in denial of his request, only in the realization of your corrupting him. A cigarette is as nothing compared to what I am going to give you, you thought, but in Svanetian, not English. You held out the pack of Virginia Slims (its colors had attracted you, and you’d smoked two entire packs since leaving New York, thinking of the coarse shag makhorka that you’d only occasionally been able to smoke in camp), and his face brightened all over again, and the two of you lit up and smoked.

  There was one essential piece of furniture missing from the room, and you wanted to ask about it but did not know how for the simple reason that the tiny word for it eluded you, that basic appurtenance that is laqvra in Svanetian, logini in Georgian, postyel in Russian, but less than half as many letters in English. You could have tried to look it up, but you would have felt a certain embarrassment in mentioning it, so soon, to Kenny. Staring at the sofa, you supposed that either that was it, or even perhaps the sofa was convertible for sleeping…and seduction.

  And then—it was so uncanny the way he seemed to read your thoughts, or perhaps Anangka, bless her, was on the job and sending messages to him—Kenny hit himself on the brow (not with the hand holding the Virginia Slim) and said, “Hey, I almost forgot!” He moved to the wall and grasped two of the tall mirrors by crystal knobs attached to them, and the mirrors swung out like doors, revealing a recess in the wall containing a contraption that you recognized even in the instant that he began to pull it out and down. “Your Murphy bed!” he said when he had it fully in place on the floor. It was almost a double bed, you realized, as you filed the word murphybed into your vocabulary, but the mattress was bare. Again, as if reading your thoughts, he declared, “I guess you’ll have to buy some sheets and stuff, but I could, like, snitch you a pillow and some stuff from downstairs, just for tonight. Soon as I finish this.” He indicated his cigarette. Suddenly he laughed uproariously at some thought—you hoped not the same thought you were teasing—and he said, “Listen, have you ever heard of Murphy’s Law?”

  You knew coleslaw but not murphyslaw. You shook your head.

  He said, “It goes, like, ‘Anything that can possibly go wrong is sure enough going to go wrong.’” He studied you. “Get it?” You nodded, although you were not certain of the connection between the murphyslaw and the murphybed. Or was he insinuating something, subtly? Perhaps that your attempt to love him would go wrong. He said, “I’ll be right back,” and put out his cigarette and left the room.

  Within minutes he was back, bringing a pillow, blankets, sheets, and a pillowcase. “Oh, ivasu khari!” you said. “Thank thee!”

  “I nearly got caught,” he declared proudly. “But if you ever need anything, hear, I’m your man.” You smiled, enjoying that expression, and thinking in English, Thou art my man, and you wondered how you could possibly tell him at this point, with your limited language, what you most needed. He began to make the murphybed for you, and you searched for words to protest but could not find any. There are no good words to tell somebody to permit one to make one’s own bed. Finished, he looked around the room, as if searching for other hidden doors behind the mirrors to show you anything else he had neglected to show you. “Well, I guess that’s it,” he declared at last. “I hope you’re comfy and all. I hope old Professor Ogden doesn’t bother you. Sometimes he, like, makes a lot of noises in the night, coughing and stuff.” The boy made facial expressions of both wonderment and annoyance. “But,” he said, “maybe his noises will, like, keep you from hearing the other noises.” He waited to see if this had registered with you before he went on, “I hate to tell you, but this place is haunted.”

  “Excuse,” you said, and took up your paperback. “H,” you said, “O, N…”

  “A, U, N,” he corrected you, and you found it quickly, your fingers getting better and nimbler in their constant turning of the pages.

  Finding it, learning it, you closed your eyes for a moment in ecstasy. “O sakvrel Anangka!” you uttered, which is to say, O marvelous Fate-Thing. The boy’s announcement was, as we like to say, too good to be true. But it was true. I, who am a ghost of sorts myself, and have to be, to get this strange story told, can tell you: Lawren Carnegie, the cousin of Andrew, and the man who built this mansion in 1893, a man who had made his fortune supplying his cousin with coal from mining interests in West Virginia, on the night in 1901 when the Titusville mine disaster took the lives of 187 of his employees, tried to put himself to sleep with cognac but, being a corpulent man, required two whole bottles just to make himself drowsy, drowsy enough to consume a third, which deprived his physical entity of its involuntary functions, such as respiration and heartbeat, and his “spiritual” entity has been vacationing behind these mirrors ever since, sometimes clumsily causing scrapes and screeches and an occasional clank to echo betwe
en the glass and the wall.

  “You hear what I’m saying?” Kenny wanted to know, his eyes big and his eyebrows high. “There are ghosts around.”

  You did not need to look the word up, it was so close to the Germanic Geist, even if far removed from your Svanetian lanchal. In Svanland you had known many a splendid lanchal. “I love ghost,” you told Kenny.

  He stared at you in disbelief, his stare slowly shading into one of tentative dislike, as if, smitten with you but reluctant to give you his heart wholly, he had had to search for a flaw, which he had found at last. He did not know what to say. At length he said, “Well, if you’re not jacking me around, you’ll sure be happy here, I guess. If you meet the ghost, just tell him to stay away from me, okay?”

  You smiled and said, “I tell him,” and then, suddenly, you were overpoweringly weary and wanting to sleep. How does one bid farewell best in the English? Lishdobe, lishdobe. You tried a bit of sign language: You touched your hands together as if in prayer and laid them beside your cheek as if in slumber. “I am needing rest,” you said.

  “Oh, yeah, sure!” he exclaimed, and made to leave. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Night, tomorrow,” you promised, “we talk. We play game. I tell thee stories. Thou like story?”

  “I’m kind of old for that,” he said, thinking perhaps you had in mind the bedtime tales he hadn’t heard since his old father stopped telling them seven years before. “But yeah, we could, like, play games. Do you know chess? Aren’t all Russians real good at chess?”