by Jocelyn Parr
It was true, I did think that. The books he’d been reading lately were mine. I’d vaguely thought it wasn’t a good idea but hadn’t been able to identify quite why.
But you know better, I said.
There wasn’t anything particularly new about what he was saying, except the way that he was saying it: as though he despised me.
He reached into my pocket for my father’s pocket watch. I cringed a little because the way he was moving was so aggressive, so not like him. I felt backed into a corner, and I watched him unroll the watch chain in his fingers, looping one end of it around his index finger so that he could unfurl it and dangle it right before my eyes. He brought his other hand level to the watch and, with a slight push, sent it rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Stop it, I said.
How blind did he make you? he asked.
Who?
Your doctor.
What doctor?
Your hypnotist. Your beloved Bekhterev, he said.
I sighed. As we’d walked home I’d shouted at him that we needed to talk, and eventually he’d slowed enough to walk beside me. By then, we were at the park across the street from our apartment, and it was there, as we walked past the stands of trees and bushes that were homes for the former people, I’d told him what I had learned about Bekhterev, about Asja, and about the circumspect report I’d written. Sasha asked me to be straight with him about what I thought had really happened, and I said I still didn’t know enough to say. We crossed the street then and walked quietly into our building, saying nothing until we got into our apartment, where the single light had been left on.
As our door closed behind us, Sasha shook his head at me, saying it was obvious that Bekhterev had been killed. When I asked him why, he said I should start paying more attention to the real world, which I said was rich given how often he left the house. He wanted to know why the jagged edge, and I said I still didn’t know.
So what do you know, objectively speaking? he asked.
I thought about it and admitted that less and less seemed to be objectively true these days. All I knew for certain was that Bekhterev was old, had sometimes been psychologically unhealthy, that he’d had a daughter who seemed similarly compromised about whom he’d never said a word, and that his testimony had released a man named Beilis from jail and imprisoned a woman named Vera.
Sasha didn’t give a shit about the trial. What interested him, he said, was the fact that the state had punished Bekhterev, but only temporarily.
How does one become a scientific superstar in this country? he asked, finding his way to a new concern, which was Luria. After that he wound back to the topic of Bekhterev, which was where he was when he stood there, still rocking my father’s watch back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
He didn’t make me blind, I said, and hypnotism doesn’t work like that.
Sasha lowered himself down and said slowly, Did he make you dumb?
I tried to duck my head away, but there was no away; his body was taking up all the space in the room.
Because you weren’t always dumb to the world, he went on, and you’re really fucking dumb now. Who made you so dumb?
I tried to snatch the piece from him, but he pulled it up higher, just out of my reach, and then, in a manner that appeared too slow for reality, the watch slipped out of his grasp, hit the table with a hollow clunk, and slid onto the floor where it burst open, exposing the delicate inner cogs and sending the glass sliding across the room.
Sasha’s face was all conflict. He hadn’t meant to do it, but he was still angry with me or with the world — I didn’t know which — so he didn’t know what to do with the apology he wanted to say about the watch when he still hadn’t proven his point, whatever that was.
I was on the ground, trying to clean up. The watch face, hands, and miniature fasteners had all broken apart, but the mechanics of the thing were still going. The cogs ticked over but without the watch hands, the time didn’t change. Sasha came around the table as if to help me but instead he callously trod upon the watch hands. A larger ring had come off, too. It was rent and the watch face itself was smashed, a tiny white bruise swelling across the glass surface.
I was shaking.
I could see the back of Sasha’s legs and feet, but didn’t look up. He was facing a wall, as though he were a child being punished, but I saw his right foot step back and heard the smash as his fist made contact. If it hadn’t been a new wall, the kind we called a listening wall because its poor construction facilitated eavesdropping, if it hadn’t been constructed in order to hastily partition apartments, then Sasha might have broken his hand. The wall cracked and splintered at the point of impact. I might have pitied him if I had had any energy left at all. But I didn’t. Everything felt impossible then.
He opened our door and slammed it shut behind him. I heard him pull on his shoes and then the slam of the door down the hall.
I don’t know how long I was on the floor like that, trying to separate the pieces of the watch from dust and small pebbles, when the neighbour started in again with the Valses oubliées. He was a shit piano player.
A few minutes later, I heard footsteps in the hallway that stopped in front of our door.
The door didn’t open. No one knocked. I held my breath.
Sasha? whispered a man’s voice.
I stood, put the pieces of the clock in my pocket and opened the door. Dimitri. I hadn’t seen him for months.
He’s stepped out, I said.
No problem, I can wait.
I don’t know where he went, Dimitri, I don’t think he’ll be back for some time.
What’s going on here? Are you crying? he asked. He was kind enough to stay in the doorway; other friends of Sasha would have barged right in.
Everything is fine, I said, but even trying to say so upset me.
You need help finding him. I know where he is if he’s upset. I’ll take you there. Then you can talk.
No, no. I am absolutely fine, a little tired. I’m just about to go to sleep.
Come on, he said, get your coat and leave this mess for later.
I could trust Dimitri. He didn’t judge me like the others, and I believed him when he said he was worried and wanted to help. I thought he might be the best part of the day, the part that would make sense, and that being outside, too, would change things. When we walked past our neighbour’s door, the music stopped and then restarted, several bars back.
It was warmer outside than it was inside in the way that late summer evenings are.
We always go to the same place, said Dimitri. I come here on my own a lot, you know, to sit and think and watch the sun rise. The dawn teaches you unexpected things, he said, poetically.
Because it was late, we walked down Pirogovskaya in the middle of the street. Dimitri balanced on the street car tracks. We walked to the end of the line, to where the buses turned around and to where there were never any passengers waiting, or at least none that I had ever seen, as the end of the line was right across the street from a monastery, which was, improbably, still in operation.
So where do you go?
Behind the south wall there, he pointed. There’s a little garden shed. We sit on the roof. He laughed at me then but didn’t say anything, and I didn’t know why he was laughing.
What will we drink?
I’ve got something in my bag.
And Sasha will be here?
That’s my guess, he said.
We were beyond the range of the street lamps by then, so I paused to look up at the twilit sky, its blues blackening by the minute. As we walked along the stone wall of the monastery in the damp grass and the unnaturally warm night, my eyes adjusted slowly to the dark. I began to see details in the wall I had missed at first. Lush lines of ivy snaked their way around, up, and over the wall. The irregularity of the stone. When we rounded the corner, a dark mass of moss looked like a continent creeping up the wall with a slowne
ss that looked like stillness, but wasn’t.
At the shed, Dimitri jimmied the door and went inside, coming out seconds later with a stool to which he gestured, saying, Go on.
So I stood on the stool, grabbed onto the ridge of the roof, and clambered up. The roof was flat and made of thick wood timbers that had been worn smooth by the weather.
I lay down, my stomach on the roof, my fingers curled over the edge, and looked at Dimitri below.
Are we allowed to be here? I whispered.
Best place for sorting things out, he said, hoisting himself up.
From the roof I could look all around us, taking in the monastery and the cemetery and a great body of water that the light from the rising moon had just lit up, making it seem like a vast mountain lake and not what it was, a small city reservoir. The water’s surface rippled as if thousands of the insects we called water boatmen were crossing it all at once. Beyond the reservoir, the rail lines glistened and beyond that, I could make out the dark curve of the river. After the river there was a great, black nothingness that, by day, were the forests and fields beyond the city limits. This was the quietest place in the city.
I’m not sure we should stay for very long, I said, though I remember wishing I could stay forever.
He sat down, took a bottle from his satchel and unscrewed the top. He tipped it to his mouth, and I saw the flickering river of clear liquid flow from one end of the bottle to the other, then back. The liquid caught all the light around us and didn’t let go. He lowered the bottle and handed it to me.
He placed a cigarette in his mouth. He lit a match and cupped his hand around the cigarette so his hand and lower face were lit with a deep, soft orange, and then he shook out the match, so that all that was left was the flare of the glowing ember. The fading ember glided down to where he rested his hand on top of his knee.
I took a small sip from the bottle. The liquid skipped past my tongue as if it had no flavour at all or as if my throat were suddenly the place for taste buds, because there, along the back of my throat and then all the way down to my heart, I felt the cool burn of the vodka and then after it was gone, the memory of it finally claimed the tip of my tongue. I felt my cheeks flush, and I set the bottle down between us, propped against his bag.
What happened tonight? asked Dimitri.
I thought of the swinging pocket watch and the way Sasha looked at me so hatefully. I pulled my knees up to my chest and hunched over them, resting my chin on my arms. Like that, I could look out at the water, or press my face to my knees and see only the shadowy folds of my skirt.
Could I have a cigarette? I said.
I didn’t want help. Dimitri handed me his cigarettes and took a drink while I removed one.
When I put the cigarette in my mouth, he lit it and his hands glowed orange again.
Before I met Sasha, when I was alone and more vulnerable to the world, my friends and mentors had concerned themselves with whether or not I would marry, with whether or not a smart woman like me could find a complement in the world: in short, with the most personal things of my life. I remembered a time I went shopping for a dress with Rima. We decided — it was unlike us — to go into the fashion district on the other side of the city, near the bridge, where all the shop owners were French. We were the only two in the store. It was one of the more rundown stores, but they had beautiful glass lamps whose oil reflected the double flames and radiated a honeyed light throughout the room. Racks and racks of old dresses made it almost impossible to move and even more impossible to avoid the two saleswomen — a mother and daughter. Rima was cornered by the daughter, and I by the mother.
When I retreated to the dressing room to try on three dresses, the mother stood outside the room, hovering with her hunched back, her cigarette with the dangling ash. I drew the curtain and slowly undid my dress. I slipped it off my shoulders, first one, then the other, stepping out of my own dress and into a dusty dress I could never wear. Before I had even pulled it up to cover me, the old woman threw open the curtains demanding to know how it fit, if I liked it. I was so angry. I could not respond. The woman zipped up the back of the dress and spun me so that I stood, dazed, facing the mirror in the small space.
C’est parfait, said the woman. And then in Russian, You should buy it, it’s perfect for you.
I stared at myself, at my meagre breasts barely visible beneath the worn silk.
Look at yourself, said the saleswoman. Look at yourself, she said, and say, I love you, I love you, I love you.
What? I said.
Do it! Say I love you, I love you, I love you.
Leave me alone, I said, pulling the curtain between us and then tearing the dress from my frame. I put on my own dress and rushed from the store. I walked a whole block before I remembered Rima, and then I had to walk back.
I felt Dimitri’s hand resting on the top of my back.I butted my cigarette out on the roof, then tossed it down below. He began to press the flat of his thumb into the muscles on either side of my spine, pushing them upwards. I relaxed a little, and let him. I watched the water.
You have to try to understand him. He’s an artist. He’s not made for ideals alone. He’s not like you.
I’m not so idealistic, I said.
Not to hear Sasha speak of it, said Dimitri, which made me sad somehow, to think of how Sasha spoke of me, and also sad to think that in Sasha’s mouth, idealistic was a negative thing, but in Dimitri’s, it was a positive.
What was different now was that the sky was so dark and the water boatmen were making their way across the ocean towards a new life of adventure and discovery, and the railway tracks were glistening with the promise of foreignness, and beyond that the past was underground, and no one could tell me what dresses to buy. I hated the word artist. The way people used it to mean exceptional, when really it was an excuse.
I didn’t know he thought that, I said and looked at Dimitri for the first time. Yes, we had spent time together, but never alone, and here I saw that he was a caring man. He had dark, dark eyes that sparkled with the moonlight, and he was patient.
He’s always saying it, said Dimitri.
We stared out at the blackness for a while. The dark shapes of birds winged by. In a tree, I saw a strange shape dangling from a branch and realized that a pair of boots had been slung up there. Would they fall when the laces rotted? Would the laces rot?
Do you still love him?
Of course!
A quick answer always means its opposite, he said.
That’s ludicrous.
You can love him in a way, but maybe it’s not the right kind of love.
I wanted him to say something easier.
Don’t take offence, said Dimitri. All loves are not the same.
I straightened my back, and Dimitri’s hand slid down to the roof. I took another drink and thought about the shape of the rocks that made up the wall that supported us. My back was cold where Dimitri’s hand had been, and I wished he’d put it back.
I don’t know why he’s so angry, I said. The vodka was having its way with me. Its light was flickering through me, making me warm, making me feel like I was just about to do something, I just didn’t know what.
He’s angry because the world around him has changed, because he was born into a family that promised wealth and security with a little bit of work, and now he’s got to really think about who he is and what he is doing, and he doesn’t want to do that. He’s angry because you know what you want and he doesn’t.
He paused and squinted to watch a single bird fly along the length of the tracks, heading west.
You saw him today, I said.
Yes, he said.
We sat there as if waiting for something, but we’d forgotten about Sasha, even as we talked about him. More birds sailed by. I heard their wings flap against the night air. Beneath them, the cemetery, train tracks, and reservoir started to seem mean and unforgiving. The birds lost their formation. I saw them drop away from one another, losing
their way, falling to the ground, one by one, isolated and away from the group, alone and without their natural guides. It was unfair, I thought, the way we created false lakes, like this one, lakes that are stagnant, unmoving, black pits into which the birds might dive and never resurface.
I think it has started to rain, I said.
Dimitri held his hand out to feel for raindrops, but there were none.
I moved to the edge of the roof, my feet dangling down. I looked back at Dimitri.
He slid down beside me, and we looked down at our feet for a bit, the ground below just out of focus.
No one can ever know a person, and no one can ever know the inside of a love, I said.
I know, he said, looking at me. I felt an energy between us, a feeling I wanted to deny. It was the accident of his hand placed close to mine. I leaned towards him and his arms enveloped me and he felt so strong and certain and smelled like pine, and I told myself it was nothing and kept telling myself that, even when he put his hand on my leg and then slid his hand around my inner thigh and pulled it closer to him so my legs were apart, and I lifted my face to his, and he kissed me and I him. His lips were cool and wet. I closed my eyes and thought of Sasha and even felt that maybe this was for us, that I could be with Dimitri and it would be a thing that would make me want Sasha more, like I would reach for him again because, in that moment, I was with Dimitri and wishing for Sasha, and it was the first time in too long that I wanted Sasha and so I said to myself that this was good. Except I hated Sasha. Was that the same as loving him?
Dimitri’s leg pushed between mine and his arm looped beneath my back. I pushed myself back up the roof’s smooth surface so that Dimitri now hovered over my waist, and it seemed as if his mouth had always known how — with what rhythm and with what pressure and with what speed — to do this. When we kissed again, his mouth was salty and warm and my whole body relaxed as if after a long cold winter it had experienced warmth for the first time. When Dimitri said to me, Sasha mustn’t know about this, I said, I doubt he’d care.