The Dark and Other Love Stories

by Deborah Willis

  They pass the Anichkov Bridge, then the circus with its rooftop puppets that bend and shake with the wind. They walk all the way to the Summer Garden, through the lime trees, to the bank of the river. Here, they stop at a kiosk to buy breakfast: two glasses of kvass served in plastic cups, a Twix bar for him and a Bounty for her.

  It would have made a better ending if they were somewhere else. There is nothing romantic about this side of the river. The view is of the Samsung building, MegaFon, and a huge advertisement for the Baltika Breweries. The neon signs are reflected in the Neva’s dark surface.

  For the first time, Alexei wants her. He wants to bring her to his rented apartment, unzip that purple dress, and lay her down on that flowery bed. But sex seems implausible now, and he has a plane to catch. “Where do you live?” he asks her.

  “Far away. Near Grazhdansky.”

  Alexei can’t imagine her in the suburbs, living on one of many geometric streets, in a building that resembles every other building. Her clumped eyelashes and shiny dress belong only here, among the exquisite facades of central Petersburg.

  “I don’t have time to go home,” she says. “I have to be at work in an hour.”

  “Aren’t you at work right now?”

  “I’m also a tour guide. I have to show the Russian Museum to a group of Canadians.” She looks down at the kitten, who stays close to her ankles. “Maybe one of the babushkas will look after her while I do my tour.”

  “Canadians?”

  “They’re worse than Americans. So boring and polite.” Lana leans on the cement barrier, the only thing between her and a sharp drop to the river. “What was your grandmother’s name?”

  Alexei leans against the barrier too, and feels the cold granite against his arms. “Anya.”

  “That’s pretty.”

  “That’s what you should name the cat.”

  “Maybe.” Lana straightens her dress. “Is this all right? Will the Canadians think I look fine?”

  “The Canadians will love you,” he says. “I’ll buy you a coffee before you meet them.”

  “It’s okay. This is normal.”

  Her eyes close slowly, and she leans into him. He feels the jut of her hip against his own. She doesn’t smell like perfume anymore, but like her own sweat.

  “Lana.” He says the name quietly, as though it’s hers.

  Her eyes remain closed and he wonders if she’s asleep. He doesn’t mind. And when she reaches into his pocket to pull out his wallet, he doesn’t mind that either. She takes some bills, and slips the wallet back into his pants.

  “Take more,” he says. “Take it all. You saved my life.”

  She laughs. “That man wouldn’t have killed you. And we didn’t even consummate.”

  She says this word—consummate—without a hint of irony, and it nearly knocks Alexei over. When was the last time he heard someone use that stunning, antiquated word? It’s a word that seems thrilling and magical, like it belongs in a fairy tale. He wants to repeat it over and over. Then he wants to attach it to another word: love. Yes, love. Lyubov. A word he uses so rarely.

  Is that possible? Has he fallen in love? How stupid—he knows better. This girl doesn’t even like him, and she’ll forget his name tomorrow. He also knows that his own feelings—so pure, so generous—can only occur when a person is far from home and hasn’t slept in weeks. As soon as he gets back to New York, to his deadlines and his ex-wife, he’ll get over it. And he will not write about it. This old cliché of a feeling doesn’t belong in the kind of books he writes. It is at home in the kind he doesn’t allow himself to read, even on airplanes. Books full of false promises and hopeful, misleading logic.

  He remembers seeing his grandmother with that man in the kitchen. They were all business in their quiet, breathless proceedings: they never removed any clothing, never kissed. He was too young to fully understand what they were doing. But once, after, he saw them press their bodies together as though money and favors hadn’t changed hands. It was summer, and though it was night, light filtered through the kitchen’s thick curtains. So Alexei leans against Lana and smells her unclean hair. He lets her reach up and touch his face. She does this gently, as though she means it. And beside the dark, well-used waters of the Neva, he buys it.

  Last One to Leave

  It was 1961, she was eighteen,

  and she took the first realistic means to escape the provincial city of her birth: she answered an ad in the Colonist that advertised a job as a copy editor for the Tahsis weekly paper. She wrote a letter to the editor and told him that she read newspapers regularly and had a good grasp of grammar. She was friendly, enthusiastic, willing to work late hours. She signed the letter S. Lambert, and didn’t mention her age. A month later, she received a letter telling her she was hired and expected in two weeks. We look forward to meeting you, Mr. Lambert.

  Rather than correct the mistake, she packed her notebook and her warmest tights, but didn’t bother with the thin blouses her mother had given her, the cardigans with delicate buttons. Those were meant for a different sort of girl, a girl who planned to wait around for a man to marry her. Sydney would make her own life.

  When she arrived in Tahsis, she found she had been misled: this we of the letter—We have looked over your application and are impressed by your writing samples—was nonexistent. One person ran the Tahsis Talk. Earl had white hair that contrasted with his tanned, weathered skin. He was the paper’s publisher, editor, and adman. He also worked at the pulp mill.

  He looked her up and down and saw a stout girl in a red slicker. “I guess you’ll do.”

  The town was hours north of Victoria, only accessible by water or by one swerving washboard road. She’d hitched to get there.

  He was separated from his mother

  but allowed to stay with his father. They slept together on the floor, curled next to other bodies that breathed and wept and coughed. He tucked his head into his father’s armpit for warmth. It was Germany, 1942, and they were Jews. But still, his father whispered, “We must be thankful. We must thank G-d. For each other. For our lives. Even for the fleas.”

  “Not the fleas,” said Havryil, scratching the backs of his legs.

  “Yes, the fleas. We are thankful, because they allow us privacy. Because if they did not exist, the guards would come and disturb us while we slept. We would not even be allowed to dream in our own language.”

  Her first memory

  was of holding her mother’s hand in Water Station, in Vancouver, waiting for her father’s train. He was on leave and would be home for three days before going to fight in Europe. This was before her brother existed.

  Her mother wore heels and gripped Sydney’s hand too tightly. Sydney didn’t know what her father looked like and kept asking, “Is that him? Is that him?” Hoping he was one of the tall, handsome soldiers who stepped off the train.

  He wasn’t tall, but she was relieved he wasn’t ugly. He had dark hair like hers, thick legs, crinkles in his nose when he smiled. He knelt in front of her and patted her head like she was a pet. “Hello, little one,” he said.

  When his father died, falling to his knees

  on the hard ground like a man in prayer, Havryil wanted to feel something, anything, other than the ache in his chest. He decided to pull out his own teeth.

  They had been festering in his mouth, throbbing for weeks. He used a piece of wire stolen from the factory where he worked. Tied it around each tooth, and yanked.

  Afterward, he curled up with his four front teeth clutched in his fist. He forced himself to think like his father. His chest still felt bruised, but he was thankful, at least, that the pain in his mouth was gone.

  Her mother drank sherry

  from a smudged crystal glass. “Your father,” she told Sydney and her younger brother, “is not dead.” He’d simply not come home from the war, she explained, because he’d married someone else. He lived in France now. He had a new family, a mirror image of the old family: a wife, a da
ughter, a son.

  “This is a secret,” said her mother. “As far as everyone else is concerned, I’m a widow.”

  Her little brother was too young to understand, but Sydney knew that her mother still had hope. Hope that another man would come along. There was a smear of cranberry lipstick on the glass.

  He had a name no one could pronounce

  and was from a place no one could pronounce. A Displaced Person, sent to Canada in 1950 because, after the war, there was nowhere left for him in his own country.

  “How old are you, boy?” asked the Canadian doctor who examined him when he arrived.

  If Havryil had understood, he would have said, Eighteen. But since he couldn’t answer, the doctor wrote, 21 years. The same sort of misunderstanding had led to his name being recorded incorrectly.

  The doctor measured Havryil’s arms, looked inside his mouth, and said he’d be good at working with trees. Said, “But you should do something about those teeth.”

  Then he was on a rackety truck, passing a blur of green. He’d never seen so many trees. The truck was met by a man in a blue-buttoned shirt and brown slacks. Probably the boss, from the way he stood straight as a beam. The boss said something Havryil couldn’t understand, then took his work stub. “Jim?”

  Havryil nodded.

  “They don’t make you tall over there, do they?” The boss gave him a punch on the arm. “Guess you’ll be our whistle punk.”

  Havryil did not understand these words.

  The boss showed him two buildings, one for eating and one for sleeping. Inside the sleeping house, there were sagging mattresses and stinking clothes. He was shown to his bed, a bare mattress with a crumpled comic book where a pillow should be—the last man to sleep there must have left it behind. Havryil looked at the pictures, then the words, trying to decipher this new alphabet. Then he sat on the mattress, wishing he had a bag to unpack, cards to play, someone to talk to. He watched a long-legged spider shimmy up its thread.

  She rented a room

  in one of the stilted bunkhouses over the river. She ate toast for breakfast and toast for dinner. She wrote up car crashes and town council meetings and obituaries, getting cramps in her wrists from the heavy typewriter keys. She developed photos in the Tahsis Talk bathroom, with a towel shoved under the door to block the light. She did this at night, after Earl had gone home for dinner with his wife. She liked the quiet. She dipped the prints in trays of chemicals—developer, stop-bath, fixer, hypo-clear—then hung them like laundry on a line.

  One of those photos was of her. After they put the first issue to bed, Earl had taken her picture. She had a warm beer in her hand, her feet up on her desk, a wide smile on her face.

  The other men gambled at night,

  betting rolled tens, but he lay on the hill under a million stars.

  “Making a wish?” said the boss, finding him there, crouching beside him.

  Havryil was sun-drunk from his first days, and half asleep, but still listened as the boss told him about the trees. Pointed to some skinny ones and said, “Those there. Alders. You heard that word ever? Alder.”

  He explained—and Havryil half understood—that alders are mostly too small to bother chopping, but some grow to a hundred feet. “They take root where the ground’s been torn up,” said the boss. “Should have leaves with saw edges. See how that one’s got no leaves? That one’s dead.”

  The next day, Havryil walked up and touched it. It felt dusty smooth like his skin.

  With each paycheck,

  she put as much as she could toward buying her own truck. In the evenings, she wrote letters to her mother and brother, told them about the shaved-wood smell that permeated the air and the sound of fast-running creeks. She sent them clippings of the articles she’d written.

  Her mother would never admit it—she wanted Sydney to quit this silliness and come home—but was likely thrilled to see her daughter’s name in print. Sydney Lambert. Her own byline. “Tidal Wave Threatens Coastline.” “Garage Sale Attracts 200!”

  With his first paycheck,

  he went to Vancouver. He stayed in a Gastown hotel, above a flickering sign that advertised a bar named Miranda’s. He went there and bought a whiskey and found a girl to take home, a girl who didn’t wear nylons over her waxy legs and who kissed him lightly on the mouth and who charged him four dollars for her company.

  The next morning, he used the rest of his money to buy some blue jeans, a wool sweater, new socks, and a rifle.

  “Whadya need a gun for?” asked the boss when he returned to work. “You plan on hunting your own food?”

  Havryil didn’t have an answer, at least not one that didn’t sound stupid. He had assumed all Canadian men had rifles. Didn’t they? Cowboys. Indians.

  “Christ almighty.” The boss shook his head and laughed. “Next time I’ll take you into town, son.”

  She got a boyfriend, which surprised her—

  she hadn’t realized she wanted one. He was a mill boy she met while sitting by herself at the marina’s outdoor restaurant, waiting for her steak dinner. She’d learned this from her mother: a good way to meet people was to take yourself out for dinner.

  The young man fished on the weekends, and was cleaning his catch, slicing salmon and extracting their spines. She saw him notice her. Then he approached and offered her a fish wrapped in newspaper, the way another man might offer a bouquet of roses. “I like a girl with an appetite,” he said.

  Three weeks later Havryil was back

  in Vancouver, the city rain falling down his collar. “First things first,” said the boss, opening an umbrella and holding it over them. He took Havryil to a dentist on Granville. “They don’t need to cost much,” he said. “But the boy needs teeth.”

  Then they went out for lunch—steak and potatoes, the most food Havryil had ever seen on a plate—and the boss noticed the way he held the menu close to his face, peering at the illustrations of sodas and floats. “One more stop.” He gripped the boy by the shoulder and led him to a store that sold glasses.

  When they left, Havryil could see the color of women’s eyes when he passed them; he could see the leaves on trees. He was thankful, thankful, thankful.

  For no reason except that she’d chosen it,

  she was more interested in this new town than she’d been in the city where she was raised. So she went to the small museum and read panels about when James Cook first came ashore in 1778.

  Cook had been lost—looking for the Northwest Passage—when his ship drifted into this cove. Chief Maquinna sent out canoes of warriors to investigate the strange arrival. The Europeans saw a village of wooden longhouses and more trees than they believed possible. The warriors saw white-skinned men and believed they were dogfish that had turned themselves into human beings.

  “Imagine that,” she said to the mill boy, as he kissed her in the back of his truck. “Imagine seeing all these pale strangers arrive in your village.”

  “Sure.” The mill boy slipped a hand under her skirt. “I’m imagining.”

  The name, Nootka Sound, was born out of a misunderstanding. When the Natives explained to Cook that he was on an island, a place you can go around—itchme nutka—he believed they were telling him the proper name of the land where he stood.

  But eventually the two groups communicated, trading lead and pewter for sea otter pelts. Cook named the place Friendly Cove because the Mowachaht people were so welcoming. By 1920, 90 percent of them were dead.

  The boss sat with him each night

  and bitched about this suicide show, the price of diesel, that princess of a donkey-puncher. The boss knew a use for everything, knew everything’s worth: water hemlock’ll kill a guy, cutthroat trout feed him, spruce and cedar make him stink of cash.

  “You’ll have to tell me about the place you’re from sometime,” said the boss. “What do they grow over there?”

  Havryil shrugged and picked tree-pitch from his clothes. But sometimes, because his accent made t
he boss laugh, he repeated the names of things: nettle, foxglove, fish hawk.

  Mornings were her favorite time.

  She liked to sit on the small porch of her house, looking out at the misty sound, a notebook in front of her.

  “Aren’t you cold out there?” When he stayed over, the mill boy always wanted her to come back to bed, to stay under the covers. But the crisp air, the rising sun. This was when story ideas came.

  “Have you heard of that boy who lives out by himself off the Head Bay Road?” she called to him. “Theresa mentioned him at the store yesterday. Said he’s mute.”

  “The DP? Sure, I seen him. He’s been lurking around here for years.”

  “Do you think he can’t talk? Or he just doesn’t want to?”

  “Don’t know, sugar pie.” The mill boy came out and stood on the porch, stroked her hair. “What do you think? Eggs for breakfast? You’ll rot your stomach with all that coffee.”

  Every morning he had a quiet minute

  or two to look down at the steep slide of log pieces, stumps, mud, and chewed rocks. As the whistle punk, he stood in his caulk boots at the top of the skid. His job: to send signals to the engineer by pulling a jerk line attached to the valve of a steam whistle. He’d memorized those signals like a language. A single whistle got the operation going. Three short meant slow down. Seven long meant emergency.

  The mainline hoisted logs, swung them down the slope, and dropped them onto the cold deck pile. The rigging slinger was down there in the gully, dogging the balsam. Fir and cedar slapped down the slope and the rigging slinger’s job was to unhook the wire—a half turn to loosen the slip-noose from the log—then send the rigging back up.