The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “That Loretta,” he said, shaking his head. “Quite a bimbo.”

  You wrote, Many words I am slow to learn, yet. What is “bimbo”?

  “Probably it comes from the Italian for baby.”

  You smiled and wrote, Because she is childish?

  “No, baby in the sense of a babe, a dame, a gal, that is—although it might be considered disparaging or offensive—a girl or woman, possibly an attractive one.”

  You wrote, You remind me of Knox Ogden. But then you realized that you were not going to tell him about Knox Ogden, not yet. You tore up the card.

  “Hey!” he protested. “Don’t ever destroy the written word.” And thus you discovered that writing things down had both its advantages and its disadvantages: It was easy, more comfortable than speaking, and helped you to master the language, but it could not be taken back, it could not be forgotten, it was too permanent. “What did you write?” he wanted to know, and shoved a fresh card to you. But you simply wrote, Let us eat, and then I will write to you about Loretta. There was another disadvantage to note writing: You couldn’t eat and write at the same time.

  I. did not seem to have the appetite that you would have expected from a man his size, although he was properly appreciative of the food, especially the khatchapuri bread, which was hot (and in Svanetia must always be served hot). But he did not finish his soup, ate just a small bit of the chicken, and did not touch the eggplant salad. Months later, in a different part of the country, you would learn that his drinking sometimes killed his appetite.

  When you were finished eating, you held out your hand and said aloud, “Give me four or five,” and he did a strange thing: slapped his hand down on top of your open palm. You looked puzzled, even wounded, and wondered if he was already drunk.

  “That’s five,” he said. “Although it was more a low-five than a high-five.”

  “Cards,” you said. “Four or five cards.”

  “What?”

  He could not hear you. It required a card to ask for a card: You took a used card, turned it over to its blank side and wrote, Please give me 4 or 5 cards. Which wasn’t sufficient, as it turned out, for all you had to write: You told him about the Elmores: Once upon a time, and upon no time at all, Loretta, a local girl or bimbo, then twenty-four, had been working as a typist, not even a full secretary, in the university’s Anthropology Department when the then-distinguished Professor Elmore, fifty-four at the time, had seduced her, starting a torrid affair that had resulted in Dr. Elmore’s divorce from his first wife and his invitation to Loretta to accompany him on one of his periodic expeditions to Manaturu, in the Cook Islands of the South Pacific, where he was gathering material for what was intended to be an exhaustive document on the quaint sexual customs of the Manaturuans. It had been quite a culture shock for Loretta, whose father was a steelworker and whose grandparents had been West Virginia mountaineers, to find herself living among the Polynesian “savages” and eventually, on the second and third expeditions there, learning their language and serving as an interviewer of the women, who were too shy to tell their most private customs to her Kenneth Elmore. It was on the fourth and final expedition that Dr. Elmore and Loretta, then sixty-two and thirty-two, had themselves experimented with one of the customs and in the process had conceived Kenny, who was born upon their return to America and their marriage.

  I read your cards, occasionally attempting a smile. Then his only response to your narrative on its five cards was to ask: “Who’s Kenny?”

  You will meet him very soon, you wrote on a fresh card, and you paused, and reflected, and sipped your drink, and then continued, He is 12, tall for his age but skinny, and he thinks he is the superintendent of this building. Perhaps he is. He is very—again you paused and sipped your drink and did not know how to write this, but tried—jealous and protective of me. He is probably downstairs at this very moment becoming angry because I am feeding you and talking to you.

  Inebriated, I. read this and chuckled and said, “Your boyfriend, huh? Well, bring him on, and let’s see.”

  Almost as if in response to this request (and actually Kenny had been spying for some time through his peephole), there was a knock at your door, and you called out, “Come in, Kenny.”

  “How did you know it was me?” Kenny asked, coming into the room. He was not pouting at you or glaring like a panther at the professor.

  “I knew it wasn’t Professor Ogden,” you told Kenny, and then you introduced them to each other. They shook hands; Kenny was tall, but he had to reach up to take I.’s hand.

  “Have you got everything you need?” Kenny asked him, very politely. “In your apartment, I mean? Have you got all the lamps and stuff you need? Have you got all you need to cook with and eat with and stuff? I could snitch you anything you don’t have.”

  “Thank you,” I. said. “I think I’m all set.” I. seemed to be following what Kenny was saying. Probably Kenny’s voice, you realized, was clearer than yours, or, you decided, it was undergoing a voice change, as Islamber’s and Dzhordzha’s had done, and was lower in pitch than yours, therefore more intelligible to a deaf man.

  “Have you got enough to drink?” Kenny asked him.

  “If I don’t,” I. said, “she does.”

  “Well, good,” Kenny said. “We want you to be happy here.”

  “Thank you,” I. said. “I’m sure I will be.”

  You were amazed that Kenny was being so nice to him, and then it suddenly occurred to you that Kenny probably still felt guilty over Knox Ogden’s death, or that at least he was overcompensating for his hostility toward Ogden. And you realized that you yourself were trying to atone for not having been as nice to Ogden as you could have. Also, it crossed your mind that Anangka intended this new man for some specific purpose, perhaps to divert you from your lust for Kenny. You could not conceive of yourself lusting for this new man, or even pretending a sexual attraction toward him, but possibly Anangka intended for you to receive his sexual attentions and thus be distracted from the temptation of seducing Kenny.

  “Kenny,” you suggested, “maybe I. will let you ride his horses.”

  “Yeah!” Kenny said, lighting up. “I’ve never been on a horse, but, yeah, I’d like to learn how to, like, get off and on one of them like you’re supposed to.”

  I. was looking puzzled. He reached for his cards, but you already had one ready for him: You might offer to let Kenny ride the horses. You don’t have to teach him a lot.

  “What horses?” I. asked of both you and Kenny. And neither you nor Kenny knew exactly how to answer that question. You scribbled on a card, Do you not say you teach riding?

  I. read it and laughed, or made a sound that was painfully like the way that Bolshakov on rare occasions had got something caught in his throat in an effort at expressing mirth or sadistic glee. “Oh, dear, no,” I. said. “Not riding. Writing. What they choose to call ‘creative writing,’ as if there were any sort of writing that wasn’t creative.”

  You and Kenny stared at each other, and then at I. Kenny said, almost with a sneer, “You mean you’re just, like, in the English Department?” I. nodded. Kenny observed, “Just like Knox Ogden!”

  “Who?” I. asked, and you wrote the name on a card and showed it to him, but he shook his head. “Who is Knox Ogden?” I was a little disappointed myself, at the moment, to discover that I. hadn’t heard of Knox Ogden, whose poetry, after all, was not without some national recognition and who had, after all, heard of me.

  You whispered to Kenny, “Let’s not be telling him yet.” And then you wrote on a card, What are the courses that you will teach?

  He read it and showed you three fingers, and ticked them off one by one: Intro Fick, Short Story, Narrative Techniques. No poetry? you wrote. He shook his head. “Just fiction. Only fiction.”

  “Ivasu khari, Anangka,” you said, realizing what the Lady of Fate had in mind for you (actually I ought to get some of the credit). You wrote on a card: Have you publish fiction?


  “Some,” he said, and on four fingers he ticked off the titles of novels he had published. Then he observed, “I couldn’t help but notice, Ekaterina Vladimirovna, how bare your bookcases are. Would you like to decorate them with some of my volumes?”

  He ran next door to fetch you some of his books, and while he was gone Kenny said, “You like him a lot, don’t you?”

  “Oh, not more than you,” you said.

  He blushed. “What did you tell him about me?”

  “How do you know I tell him anything about you?”

  “He asked you.”

  “How do you know he asked me?”

  But before Kenny could answer that one, I. returned, with a stack of four books in his hands, which he placed into your hands. They were still in their dust jackets—nice designs on the jackets, and photos of the author at different times of his life, usually with a beard, which made him look older than he did now. “Just a loan, you understand,” he said. You admired each book, one at a time, and passed them along to Kenny, who did not read novels but was impressed with the author photos and observed, in an aside the author could not hear, “He’s published almost as many books as Ogden, but his are, like, much thicker, so I guess he’s published more words.”

  You wrote on a card, Could I take one of your courses? And you came perilously close to giving him the card, but you decided, for several reasons that we are to examine, that it wouldn’t be a good idea. You tore up the card.

  “That’s twice,” I. told you.

  “Twice what?” Kenny asked.

  “Twice she’s torn up a card, although I told her not to,” I. said, and then to both you and Kenny he said, “I’ll tell you a little joke from the Bodark Mountains. There was this old boy, Dingletoon, reticent but tough, who married a strong-willed, domineering vixen named Sadie, and all the fellers in town laid bets to see which of them would get the upper hand. Well, Sadie had a little dog, and the first day after they were married the little dog up and bit Dingletoon. ‘That’s once,’ says Dingletoon, and he pronounced it the way they do in the Bodarks, ‘wunst.’ And about a week later, the dog bit Dingletoon again. All he says is, ‘That’s twice,’ pronouncing it ‘twice-st.’ Everything went just fine for another month, and then the dog bit Dingletoon again. ‘That’s thrice-st! ’ he says, and whipped out his six-shooter and let the dog have it right between the eyes. Sadie threw a fit at the sight of her dead dog, and she began cussing Dingletoon all over the place, and then she hauled off and slapped him as hard as she could. He just blinked a couple of times and said, ‘That’s wunst.’ And from that day forward, Sadie and old Dingletoon got along fine and never had another squabble between ’em.”

  “That’s funny,” Kenny said, but he wasn’t giggling or even smiling. Then he said, “Well, I guess I’d better go do my homework.” You knew that of all the things on this earth that he hated most, he most hated homework. “Maybe I’ll catch you later,” he said to you, and then he said to I., “Just remember, if you ever need anything, I’m your man.” He said one more thing, to both of you, pointing at his chessboard and pieces, which he’d left on one of your occasional tables, “If you want to use my chess set, that’s okay with me.”

  Chapter fourteen

  But I. was not yet ready to play chess with you. In the coming few months, you and I. would play chess many times, and he would eventually succeed in mating you, but this first night he was simply too tired to think, and he declined your offer of a game, saying he’d have just “one more for the road” and then take off. Road? you asked. The “road” between your apartment and his apartment, he explained, which, as it would turn out, over the next months became a well-traveled road, in both directions.

  But that night he had more than one more for his road. And so did you. Kenny came up more than once to creep into his broom closet and put his eye to the peephole, and to see that you and I. were still sitting there at the table, whose surface you could use for the cards you wrote. Finally Kenny’s mother made him go to bed; he had school tomorrow and hadn’t done his homework. But school for you and I. was not until the day after tomorrow, and you could stay up very late this night, exchanging your fears. You were both scared of facing your students. Without telling him anything of Ishimbay Camp 39, yet, or of Bolshakov, yet, you told him (or wrote on cards for him) that it had been four years since you’d last conducted a class in elementary botany, let alone mycology, and that while you had no doubt of your mastery of the material, you were petrified at the thought of talking to the students in a language that was still strange and new to you.

  It was the other way around with I.: He had no fear of the students, plenty of experience with talking to (or at) students, but his classes for the last twenty years had all been in art history, which was his real field, and he had no experience teaching creative writing, which he was now going to do for this one term simply because he needed the job: The small liberal arts New England college where he’d been teaching art history had suddenly gone defunct through mismanagement and declined enrollment. His life was filled with deaths: His college was dead, his marriage was dead, his father was dead, his current novel was dead, his relationship with his publisher was dead, his ties with New England were dead.

  “I’m an impostor,” he said. “I can’t teach writing. I’ve been telling anybody who would listen, for years now, that ‘creative writing’ cannot be taught. It can only be learned.”

  You wanted to write on a card, Then would you help me learn it? but you’d probably have torn up the card, and that would have been thrice.

  You both became almost drunk, as Kenny observed in his last view through the peephole. Neither of you became dizzy or stinking or addled or sloppy or roaring, but both of you were a little loopy and pie-eyed and mellow and woozy and piffled. Old Lawren got rather supercharged at the sight and began to rattle the mirrors: No, he didn’t actually rattle them audibly, but he caused them to vibrate, to shimmer. The shimmering mirrors were nothing new to you, but they caused I. to wonder aloud if there was a train going by, or a heavy truck. You wrote, Just our resident spook. “Maybe we should offer him one,” I. suggested. You wrote, I have. You wanted to write words for him telling him about Knox Ogden, if not about Lawren Carnegie, but knew you’d probably have to tear up half the cards you wrote.

  You wrote, and did not tear up, and he preserved (he kept all your cards, the hundreds upon hundreds you would write over the next few months), several cards about Svanetia, that mountainous wonderland that sometimes seemed like only an Arcadian dream to you and was the secret lost heart of the Caucasus just as I.’s Bodarks were the secret lost heart of America. You did not tell him, yet, nor did he guess, as Ogden had, that you were a princess. All you said in that regard was that the Dadeshkelianis had owned large houses with towers in Etseri, Betcho, and your own native village of Lisedi, the three principal towns of the most beautiful valley of the Ingur, between massive Mount Layla (13,169 feet) and glacial Mount Ushba (14,882 feet), but that the houses had been collectivized by the Soviets, and now each contained many different families, which was ironic, in more ways than one, for originally the purpose of the towers, the four-to seven-story stone structures with battlemented caps, was defense: defense not against outlanders or invaders but against neighboring families, fellow Svanetians. Family rivalry, clan warfare, blood feuds, or simply mountain feuds, as I. told you they are called in the middle mountains of this country, were widespread and constant, a way of life in the old days, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the towers were built.

  These towers seized I.’s attention, drunk though he was. He had spent a good deal of observation on architecture in one of his novels, and in his art history classes he had always been fascinated by the symbolic “human” qualities of buildings, the personalities of houses, and he wondered if the Svanetian defense towers, which dotted the whole valley of the Ingur River for fifty miles, had any possible phallic significance. The thought had occurred to you more
than once. Your own interest in mushrooms, as you consciously knew, and as we shall see, but as I. was not to learn yet on that night, arose because of their suggestiveness and their insinuative reminder of the towers of Svanetia. Although Bolshakov had refused to believe in those towers, claiming that such a rustic and unsophisticated backwater as Svanetia couldn’t possibly have built them, he had repeatedly tried to show that your “invention” of them was a possible clue to your worship of twelve-year-old penises. Your story of how you’d lost your virginity to Islamber in the top of one of the towers only confirmed Bolshakov’s claim that you invented and mythologized your life.

  But that night you were somewhat taken aback by the boldness with which I. discussed phallic matters, and you declined to make comment, or card, and he did not come to possess a single card of yours concerning penises. Attempting to change the subject, you wrote on cards that what you missed most about Svanetia was not the skyline of frequently upthrust towers in each village, the manmade erections, but the natural tumescences of the countryside: the fantastic flowers; the elephantine plants; the monkshoods taller than a man on horseback; the great Heracleum, with its yardlong leaves and ten thousand blossoms; the so-called enchanter’s nightshade; not even to mention such mushrooms as the strange four-legged earthstar, Geastrum fornicatum. These were the things that Bolshakov had cited as proof that you were only “inventing,” these were the splendors that he could not accept, and you were curious to see if I. would believe you, as Bolshakov had not.

  But I. began singing. In a vibrant bass voice that you would have considered abominable had you realized how off-key it was but that you considered operatic because you didn’t know the key and because you’d never heard a darkie crooning, he began singing this: “Way down upon de Svani ribber, Far, far away…Dere’s whey my heart is turning eber, Dere’s whey de old folks stay.”