The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  He swallows the last of his wine. “I suppose we should go.”

  “Of course.” She smiles in a deliberate, disdainful way, stretching her perfectly painted lips.

  Alexei would have hated that smile if it weren’t for her crowded, cigarette-stained teeth. Most of the young American women he meets would have them straightened and bleached. Alexei hasn’t seen such lovely imperfection in a long time.

  Since he arrived, nothing has gone as planned. For one thing, he’d hoped to stay in the Astoria. This would have been a triumphant gesture—to return to this country and be treated like a success in the place that makes him most crave recognition. But money is tight right now. His investments aren’t healthy, books don’t sell the way they used to, and divorce is more expensive than he’d predicted.

  So Alexei rented an apartment from a woman named Galina. He’d been impressed with the ad she’d placed on the Internet: she lived near the Fontanka, in a stately building where Tolstoy once resided. But Galina lived at the back of the apartment block, past a courtyard so narrow and dark that to walk through it was like wading through a well. A pack of half-starved cats crowded around the door, and inside, the stairway was something out of Dostoyevsky—dank stone steps, mosquitoes, peeling paint.

  Inside, there was a mattress on the floor, covered in flowery sheets. Thick, dusty curtains hung over the windows. The shower ran only cold, and the tiles smelled as though something was rotting behind them. Worst of all, Galina had not tidied any of her possessions before she let her apartment. Her clothing filled the closet. The fridge was full of her food: yogurt, cottage cheese, and Diet Koka. In the bathroom, her makeup was strewn across the counter and a box of tampons sat on the back of the toilet. This was why he would never live with a woman again. They invaded and spoiled domestic space, the way beer and souvenir kiosks ruined the view of the Kazan Cathedral.

  He dropped his suitcase on the bed and looked around the apartment. He had left Manhattan and traveled for twenty hours to arrive here. At home, he owned a small but stunning loft. At home, he was important—one of the best writers alive today, according to the New York Times. His modern, spotless apartment constantly acknowledged that fact, reminded him of it, stroked his ego in the way of an attractive, devoted lover.

  Looking around Galina’s apartment, this haven for cockroaches, he could have wept. Instead, he unbuttoned and removed his shirt, folded it, and placed it on the bed. He wondered briefly about the cleanliness of the sheets, then decided it was best not to consider such things. He went into the bathroom, which had a door that hung off only one hinge. He turned on the tap, leaned down, and put his head under the cool stream of water. Only a few weeks ago in New York, his hairstylist, Sylvia, had washed his hair. She had leaned over him and he had seen down her artfully ripped T-shirt. She talked—probably about a club or a restaurant or her backpacking trip to Thailand—but he didn’t listen. With the water running, her words sounded muted and foreign. He’d closed his eyes and let them wash over him.

  Here, he felt cold water hit his head, nothing like the comfort of Sylvia’s hands. This was how his grandmother had washed his hair when he was a boy. She did this before bed. His shirt off, he would lean over the kitchen sink—a sink that always had a leak, a soft drip that punctuated every day and night he spent at his grandmother’s house. The water from the tap was so cold that it made his head hurt and his ears sting, but still, he loved this weekly ritual. She scrubbed his scalp with soap that smelled of wood chips, and he was able to forget the ordeals of his childhood: his loud neighbors, his drunk father, his careworn and silent mother.

  And now here he was, years after he had last seen his grandmother, years after his father had received a letter stating that she’d died at age fifty-five. Here he was, with his head under water, waiting for that familiar, comforting ache. And yes, there, he felt it—that pain behind the eyes. Welcome to Russia, he said to himself. Welcome home.

  This is not the first time he has returned to this country. He’s been back on three previous occasions, and has written six novels set here. These novels have earned him prizes, and have been called deft, profound, and full of insight.

  But he has turned his hand now to nonfiction. He took this journey to research his latest book, a biography of his grandmother. She was born in Leningrad in 1929, and lived through the war and Stalin. She organized and paid for his family’s exit visa from the USSR, while she stayed behind and died before Alexei had a chance to visit her. She lived through it all, marrying at fifteen, and giving birth to Alexei’s father at sixteen. “Everything happens quickly for me,” she liked to say, and this turned out to be true of her death. One minute she was boiling potatoes, the next she was dead of a heart attack on her kitchen floor.

  When Alexei heard this from his father, he didn’t believe it. It was impossible that his grandmother was dead. She had always survived. She’d lived through the blockade by making soup from cattle-horn buttons and the leather of her small shoes. The winter of 1941 gave her such severe frostbite that she lost two fingers on her right hand, but still, she set up traps and caught stray cats to feed herself and her sisters. Once, she’d pulled out her dead grandmother’s gold teeth and exchanged them for food.

  This is his material: the personal and costly reckoning of history. The quick passing of years. Time itself. He has written nearly the entire manuscript except for the epilogue, wherein he, the author, returns to his childhood home. Not to the communal apartment where he grew up with his parents—that was torn down years ago and replaced with a Pizza Hut. No, to his true home, outside the city center, where his grandmother lived.

  He has already imagined it: the older man, the writer, will return to Moskovskaya after a twenty-eight-year absence. The current occupants will embody today’s Russia perfectly: they will be young engineers or computer programmers, perhaps newly married. They will be kind and listen to the reason for his visit. Perhaps they will recognize his name, and they will surely recognize his desire. They will understand the simultaneous pull and fear of the past.

  They will allow him to walk through the apartment again. He will see the kitchen where he ate blini with his grandmother, and the closet-sized room where she slept. He will smell the same dusty smell that the rooms have always had. He will be offered tea. This ending, the one he can see so clearly, will encapsulate the past and look toward the future.

  There is only one problem: he can’t do it. He traveled twenty hours by plane—taking a circuitous route through Paris, Frankfurt, and Moscow because he used Air Miles—and now he can’t bring himself to get on the Metro and go the seven stops to Moskovskaya. He has been here two weeks, and makes an attempt every day. He enters Nevsky Station. He buys a token, then stands on an escalator that seems endless, descending deep into the belly of the city. Here is where his troubles begin. This far down, the air smells slightly of sulfur, and he has trouble breathing. He can read Cyrillic easily, but the small blue signs confuse him. People push past him and crush themselves onto trains, and the thought of so many bodies next to his own makes him feel ill. Once, last week, he tried to imagine he was in New York, taking the subway to see his agent or his hairstylist, but even that didn’t work.

  Maybe he’s depressed. He has reason to be. His marriage recently crumbled like Saint Petersburg’s plaster walls—a marriage that was ignored and badly maintained, abandoned to the elements and given only the occasional coat of paint. You see, he’s not himself: even his metaphors are tired. Maybe it’s lack of sleep. Here, the constant sunlight and mosquitoes keep him up all night. He has been unable to do anything since he arrived. He avoided bathing in Galina’s cold shower until he began to smell like one of the drunks who sleep on the sidewalk. He craved Uzbek mutton and Georgian bread, but the idea of entering restaurants by himself—looking at menus, dealing with slow service, paying exaggerated prices—was too exhausting. So for two weeks, he lived off street food: blini with jam, ice-cream sandwiches, and Fanta. He supplemented th
is diet with Russian Standard vodka, which he drank by himself in his rented apartment.

  Maybe it’s the uncertainty. He doesn’t know what he’ll find at his grandmother’s apartment. What if the tenants are drunk or stupid or not home? And what if the apartment has been torn down, or transformed so fully—into luxury condos, say—that he doesn’t recognize it? Whatever the reason, he never made it to his grandmother’s apartment, and now it’s too late. His flight for New York leaves tomorrow morning.

  As they walk down Nevsky, Svetlana hooks her arm in his. He understands this gesture means only that she requires support in her high heels, but still. “Would you like to have dinner?” he asks. “I haven’t had a good meal in a while.”

  She shrugs her thin shoulders. “Yes. Fine.”

  He takes her to a Georgian place, and since it’s his first decent meal in two weeks, and his last night in Russia, he orders extravagantly: roasted eggplant stuffed with almonds, pike perch soup, lamb shashlik, bread baked with cheese and egg, and two hundred grams of vodka. The alcohol arrives first. Alexei pours from the small, cold carafe, and watches Svetlana’s cheeks and neck flush from the first shot.

  The restaurant is perfect: it’s so loud they don’t have to make conversation. A singer with a microphone, an electric guitar, and a synthesizer croons folk songs. And a group at a table nearby celebrates the birthday of a chubby blonde named Tanya. The singer dedicates all his songs to her, and she dances in front of him unsteadily.

  The food arrives, and it too is perfect: fat drips from the lamb skewers and the bread has a bright, raw egg on top. Svetlana and Alexei eat in silence. She serves herself minuscule portions—she must be counting calories—and he wants to tell her of his grandmother, a woman who survived the Siege by making pancakes out of cottonseed and sawdust. But he resists the urge to be didactic; it’s one of his major faults, according to his ex-wife. Instead, he watches Tanya dance. The birthday girl sways with her soft arms in the air, her eyes closed. Every few minutes, a friend steadies her and leads her back to the table, where they pour another round of shots and give a toast in her honor.

  “These are the happiest people I’ve seen since I arrived,” Alexei calls to Svetlana over the music.

  “That woman is not happy.” The prostitute waves her fork dismissively. “She is terrified of how old she is becoming. Look. She doesn’t wear a wedding ring.”

  “Wedding rings aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.”

  Svetlana leans across the table. “‘Cracked up to be?’”

  “It’s an expression. It means that something isn’t as good as it seems.” Alexei looks at her as the neck of her purple dress gapes open and exposes part of her bony chest. “How old are you?”

  “Older than I look.” Her smile—that false thing she flashes like a piece of jewelry—convinces him she’s lying.

  “It’s my birthday today,” he says. “I’m turning forty-six.”

  “What?” She points to the singer. “I can’t hear you.”

  “My birthday,” he yells. “It’s today.”

  For the first time, Svetlana laughs. “You and Tanya,” she says.

  The combination of the vodka, the prostitute’s laughter, and the food—so rich in his mouth—gives Alexei courage. “Can I ask you a favor? Will you go somewhere with me?” He speaks loudly and in Russian, to be certain she understands. “I want to see where my grandmother lived before she died.”

  “You want to fuck in your grandmother’s house?” Svetlana seems unfazed.

  “No.” He pours them both another shot of vodka—it can only help. “I just want to see it. I haven’t been back in a long time. And I don’t want to go alone.”

  She puts down her fork. “It will cost more.”

  “I understand that.”

  She tilts her head and looks at him as though she finds him curious. She laughs, and it’s a laugh he could learn to like.

  “Fine.” She raises her glass. “Happy birthday.”

  Here is another secret: he hates Russia. His books have been hailed as full of genuine affection for his country and its people, but he has no love for his motherland. And he will never be one of those expatriates who become nostalgic for Soviet life. He is not writing this memoir out of a sense of loss or regret, but to rid himself of this place. His grandmother’s is the only memory that ties him to Russia, and once he has paid tribute to her, he’ll never return. After this, he’ll write books about New York, California, Boston. About anywhere but a country that slowly destroyed his parents, and allowed his grandmother to die alone.

  What he hates most is the way this place ignores him. New York might bully you—he experienced this in American high school as well as in reviews of his second book. But at least, for a brief moment­­, New York takes note. And on occasion, it celebrates you and seems to belong to you. He has written six books and they have received prestigious prizes, but Russian translators, newspapers, reviewers, and publishers—who are so attentive to other, lesser writers—don’t seem to care for Alexei. Being here reminds him of being a child, mostly ignored by his parents and the other inhabitants of their apartment.

  He hates this place, but like a needy lover, he has worked tirelessly for its attentions. He has chronicled the country’s political shifts. He has invented characters that moved through Moscow’s overwhelming streets. He has borrowed the people’s accents, their pain, their jokes, and transformed them into stories, into something he can almost own. For his efforts, he has won prizes in America; he has made money. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It is much better than those young writers, those naive MFAs who spend a month in a place, then decide they are experts, decide they are owed something. He feels sorry for them, poor things, always tourists in their own settings. He has done better than them, and no worse than the politicians, the oligarchs, the police officers, the mail-order brides, the men who sell stolen umbrellas and bubble-blowers and mechanical rabbits in the streets. He only did what he had to do. He only took what was his, and a little bit more. He only used this place, like the sad and glorious hooker that she is.

  The Metro lines are so deep below the city’s marshy surface that the escalator ride down takes at least four minutes. The station is far below Petersburg’s street level of bruising commerce—an underworld of electric light and bad air, a separate city that seems more real than the actual one. The long ride down reminds Alexei of the first minutes of sleep, a slow descent into dreams.

  Four minutes is a long time when you have nothing to say to your companion. So Alexei is grateful for the second bottle of vodka, which they’d bought from a store on Nevsky. Svetlana had pointed to what she wanted, then reached into Alexei’s pocket and taken out a one-hundred-ruble bill. She must have noticed, earlier, where he kept his wallet.

  On the escalator, she tucks the bottle in her purse. She takes it out and sips furtively, careful not to be seen by police. For a woman who can’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, she has an impressive tolerance for alcohol. She is utterly unlike the young women he’s met in the States, women his ex-wife called “groupies.” The ones who approach him at readings, holding his books against their chests. Those young women are pleasantly surprised when he listens to their youthful literary opinions, when he buys them a glass or two of wine. They seem to feel as though they are breathing a different kind of air when they’re with him, and they’re flushed and grateful for it.

  Svetlana is not grateful. When he tells her that he is a writer, she looks him up and down as though appraising him for value. “Are you a famous writer?” she asks. “Or just a writer?”

  “I’ve done well,” he says. “I’ve worked hard.”

  “You’ve been fortunate,” she corrects him, then tips vodka into her mouth.

  “I’ve won a National Book Award,” he says, before he can stop himself. “And a Pulitzer.”

  But Svetlana points to a gypsy who stands at the bottom of the escalator, selling live kittens on leashes made of string. �
��Oh,” she says. “So cute.”

  “Don’t touch those. They’re probably diseased.”

  She doesn’t seem to hear him. She steps off the escalator and bends toward the cats. Some listlessly lift their noses to smell her hand.

  “Good price.” The vendor picks up a white kitten by the scruff of its neck.

  “This one.” Svetlana points to a thin black cat with eyes similar to her own. “I like this one.”

  “It looks sick,” says Alexei. “It’ll be dead in two days.”

  “It’s weak.” Svetlana reaches to stroke the kitten’s head. “I’d feed it milk and sausage.”

  “It’ll grow to be an attractive animal.” The vendor slips the collar off its neck and speaks to Alexei. “Like your girlfriend.”

  Svetlana looks at Alexei with an expression he recognizes. He remembers seeing this same look on his grandmother’s face, and it’s one he appreciates seeing on his agent’s brow. Svetlana is a negotiator. “If you buy it for me,” she says. “I’ll name it after you.”

  “My ego isn’t that fragile. I don’t need a stray cat named after me.”

  She touches Alexei’s collar. “But what is your name?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I mean your real name.”

  Her casual knowledge of his deception makes him feel as though there’s been some intimacy between them­­—something so quick and subtle that he hadn’t noticed it. “Alex,” he says, without being able to help it. “Alexei.”

  “Oh.” She looks disappointed. “That’s not a good name.” She lifts the kitten to see its underside. “Anyway, it’s a girl.”

  “Fine.” Alexei pulls out his wallet. “I’ll get it for you.” In his wallet, he finds only a five-hundred-ruble bill in with his American dollars. The vendor insists he doesn’t have change, and in the end, Alexei hands over the five hundred. There isn’t time to argue; Svetlana has already walked off with the cat.