Fresh Mint with Lemon

by Monika Zgustova

  “Yes, you are.”

  “A tramp who goes around the world to see you.”

  The sentence bubbled up from within him against his will. He himself was surprised by what he had just said. And that hateful silence was coming back …

  Quickly, Patricia said, “Read something else.” A thin voice.

  Too quickly, Vadim answered, “This poem, for example:

  The last embers.

  They too

  go out

  whispering

  under the tears.”

  “What sad verses. They make me think about death. About voluntary death.”

  “Do you know someone who …”

  “Radhika, as you know.”

  “But why …”

  “I’ll tell you a fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a little fourteen-year-old girl, a beautiful girl, with black hair, who looked as if she was eighteen. Everybody liked her. Absolutely everybody, even her teachers. One day the math teacher was teaching her equations in his office. They were sitting next to each other. The girl was so pretty that the teacher couldn’t control himself and … There was almost a tremendous scandal, but finally things were hushed up. After that, Radhika couldn’t stand the sight of the teacher. However, the priest also liked her. He came next. Radhika told him about her sins with the math teacher, the priest kept asking her for more details … and, well, in the end he couldn’t hold himself back either. He was crazy about her, he couldn’t get her out of his mind, but after the first and only time that they were together, she never wanted to see him again. He threatened her … In the end, all the men became obsessed with her. And she would select one, take a spoonful of him, taste him, savor him, but always once and once only. After the first time, the chosen man lost all his attraction for her, and, what’s more, became repulsive to her. And so it’s always been, all through her life. Radhika is incapable of having a lasting relationship, she can only tolerate a relationship with someone with whom she doesn’t have sex. And nobody wants that, not even her. And the more repulsion she feels, the more men she needs. For a while she went to a psychiatrist, but he succumbed to temptation as well. And the same thing happened with a woman psychiatrist. If she doesn’t have a man within reach, Radhika is just as happy with a woman. But it isn’t easy … Her everlasting thirst … And you, have you known anyone who …”

  “Who’s like Radhika?”

  “No, I mean someone who wanted to die of their own free will.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Mmmm …”

  “Don’t tell me. Forgive my lack of tact.”

  “No, I want to tell you. You, yes. It was my father.”

  Patricia wondered how she might change the conversation. Why had she started talking about such a personal, dangerous subject? Well, because any subject was better than the silence, that cold ghost that had come between them.

  “But … he didn’t die … right?”

  It wasn’t a thin voice, Patricia’s. It was a cobweb of a voice.

  “Yes and no …”

  “I don’t understand … But don’t tell me, if you don’t want to.”

  “My father … No, you’re right. Let’s not talk about my father. Not about my father.”

  Patricia looked at him questioningly. Vadim answered in a low voice, “My father is alive. I don’t want to talk about him. But my grandfather, who I never knew … My grandfather was a sculptor. One day, the Soviet government organized a competition to make a sculpture of Stalin. My grandfather, naturally, didn’t enter the competition. They came to see him, to tell him that every sculptor had to present his project for the statue. So, my grandfather produced something horrible, something dreadful, so that they wouldn’t choose him. And they ended up choosing precisely him. An honest man could not conceivably accept a commission of that kind. My grandfather didn’t know where to turn. He refused to do the project, of course, but his refusal wasn’t accepted. What could he do? There was nowhere to turn. My grandfather knew that he couldn’t make that monument. But if he didn’t do it, they’d destroy him, if they didn’t actually shoot him outright. My grandfather had no other way out except one. Suicide. They saved him against his will, they imprisoned him …”

  Patricia had heard of the case. A long time ago, when she was little. The affair gave rise to a tremendous controversy among the Russian émigré circles in America. Patricia’s mother admired the moral strength, the greatness of the artist. Patricia’s father didn’t agree: as a simple, village-born man, he held that suicide was something unnatural, sinful. A long time afterward, Patricia’s husband also mentioned the case, but … No! Away with that memory! And she … Each time she heard people talk about him, she wanted to do a portrait of the artist, using a photograph, if nothing else were available. And if she asked Vadim, now, to get one for her? No, she couldn’t do that. What a shame, though … No, she really couldn’t. In the end, she said, “There are situations in which it is best to put an end to your own life.”

  She said it, she pronounced those words. But she wasn’t at all sure of what she’d just said, because she didn’t know the deeper meaning of the words pronounced.

  “Living is easy. But surviving what we live through is another matter!” Vadim said, more to himself.

  “Living is easy? Yes … Maybe it is, for some people. For some people, living is easy from the beginning right through to the end. So easy that they don’t realize its value. In America, I know a lot of people like that.”

  Patricia spoke as if she were swimming in murky, unknown waters. She wanted to feel her feet on the solid ground of the bank.

  “Heaven won’t make peace with anyone who’s had things too easy,” Vadim said, again more to himself.

  She nodded, although she didn’t fully understand what Vadim was saying. She had an intuitive feeling about the meaning of his words, but they were too far away from her world and her experience. She didn’t understand, and that is why she swam over to the bank of fine, golden sand.

  “I remember a story from when I was a student. One day a teacher came and presented the class with a dilemma. There were sixty of us. This happened in the 1970s, during the Cold War. In America they taught us that Russia was our number-one enemy and that every honest person had to hate the Russians. The teacher’s question went like this: ‘Imagine,’ said the teacher, ‘that the Russians have launched an atomic bomb with a delay mechanism at the United States. This bomb will exterminate all Americans and their allies. You have the possibility of sending the same bomb over to them, all you have to do is press a button. If you press it, you will exterminate all the Russians and their allies, and life on Earth will come to an end. What would you do?’”

  “There was a secret ballot,” Patricia explained. “The result? Fifty-seven votes in favor of exterminating the Russians, even though that would mean destroying all life on Earth. There were only three votes against it: if the Americans were exterminated, at least there would still be life on Earth. One of those votes was mine.”

  “The choice made by my classmates,” Patricia continued, “left me in a state of shock. I felt like a black sheep. All my life I’ve felt like that, like the black sheep of the family, you know?”

  “You feel alone among your own people?”

  “Alone? You haven’t understood,” said, Patricia, coughing. “Well, now I see it all differently: we Americans are extremely easy to manipulate.”

  “Do you hate those who order you to hate?” asked Vadim, more as a rhetorical question. He was thinking.

  “Yes, and that isn’t all. For us, the world is America. Any country outside America is the rest of the world, something distant, incomprehensible, uninteresting. We travel to Europe as if visiting a museum, to look at its art galleries and historical architecture, but life and the world only exist, for us, in America. That’s why when there’s a war on, we only count our own dead. We don’t bear the others in mind, because they don’t exist.”

  V
adim was thoughtful. Maybe he’s not very interested in what I’m saying, Patricia thought.

  “And you? What do you think of all this?” the painter asked, with interest.

  “My father … I can’t get him out of my head.”

  Hamlet! Patricia thought, amused, and with a fair amount of irony, as she was sorry that Vadim had listened in such a distracted fashion to what, for her, was one of the most important experiences of her life. Fortunately she didn’t mention Hamlet out loud. Fortunately! she thought, happily.

  “I have a Hamlet-like character,” Vadim said, with a sigh.

  He can read my thoughts, Patricia thought, suddenly frightened.

  “Or rather, I’m like Dostoevsky’s idiot, a weak, indecisive man,” Vadim said.

  Patricia watched his thoughtful, melancholy face, his eyes, which were now all but closed

  “I’ll do a portrait of you,” she suggested.

  With these words, the painter interrupted Vadim’s chain of thought, leaving him taken aback. What did portraits matter to him now! But he didn’t want to hurt her, because that was her whole world. Painting, always painting! Not living, just painting!

  Vadim looked out of the window at the garden. Certainly, pictorial art was also the thing he held most dear. But could a whole room stuffed full of Jackson Pollock originals excite him more, deep down, for an hour, than a minute with someone he loved? Or than the memory of his father’s tenderness when he put him on his knees, many years ago, when he was a little boy?

  Thump! He saw a pear fall off the tree. So soon, at the end of August? In Russia they fell in October. In October, really? Now he wasn’t so sure. He had lived his entire life on urban asphalt.

  “A pear has fallen off your pear tree, I’m going to get it,” he said.

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Can I see your fig tree as well, before I go?”

  They walked through the garden; she picked pears and figs and put them in a wicker basket; they were for him. Occasionally, their hands brushed against each other. Each time this happened, Vadim felt a desire to embrace her. Perhaps not as a lover, it was more that he wanted to protect her. From what? After all, she had two strong sons to protect her, and she wasn’t being threatened by anything. Yes, protect her. From everything. She was so fragile!

  They stopped under the fig tree, he had led her there.

  “This fig tree … You know when I came here for the first time, I saw it through the fence and I thought it was a dream of mine, a dream of happiness …”

  The sound of the phone ringing cut him off.

  “Can’t Radhika get it? Or the housekeeper?” Vadim asked.

  But Patricia was already heading into the house.

  “I’m expecting a call from Holland, a very important one, about my work. An exhibition. But don’t forget what it was you wanted to tell me!”

  When she came back, she was holding a white box.

  “Open it at home.”

  “In Petersburg?”

  “No, in the hotel,” she said, laughing. “Forgive me, I would’ve liked to have given you a ride to Sitges, but this exhibition is making me so nervous! I won’t be able to relax until I get all the problems sorted out.”

  She handed him the box and a large envelope.

  “These are the sketches … Those ones, OK?” she said, lowering her head. “I don’t need them, I was about to throw them into the garbage, but then I thought that maybe … a souvenir!”

  Vadim felt offended. Giving him something she was about to throw away! But, later, when she said “A souvenir,” he took the envelope with trembling fingers.

  At that moment, Patricia realized that, in the half-shadow, Vadim’s eyes and teeth were shining. She stepped closer to him and, with a hurried gesture, brushed the tips of her fingers over the locks of straw-colored hair that fell over Vadim’s forehead. He took a step back.

  She was looking at him. He turned, as if wanting to leave.

  She headed back to the door of her house, so as to continue with her phone calls. But at the doorway she stopped, thinking … Vadim moved away from me when I touched his hair; she thought, he moved away from me. He moved away from me.

  And, when Patricia entered the house, an image flashed through her mind: she is wearing a T-shirt and work jeans, covered in paint. She goes into the living room. Vadim has prepared the tea and, to go with it, he has picked a few figs. No, Patricia interrupted herself, figs don’t go with tea. But there’s nothing she can do about it, figs they are. Vadim invites her to sit down, serves her the tea and the figs on a saucer. They hold hands. They are bathed in the western sunlight.

  How kitsch! Patricia thought, and, remembering that a moment ago he had moved away from her, dismissed this fantasy at once.

  In the summer, everything is extreme, she told herself. Sensuality and aggression, exhaustion and hyperactivity. Summer extinguishes our activity and at the same time makes you want to live. In the summer, you think less and feel more.

  Her reflections and the perfume of the garden in the twilight led her once more to seek out Vadim. She couldn’t believe it, but he was now next to her. He hasn’t gone! she thought, victorious.

  “I should be going, you’re busy,” Vadim said. “It’s just … It’s just that I wanted to see the branch of your fig tree.”

  “In your next life, you’ll turn into a fig.”

  Evening was falling. Patricia was explaining something, but a dog was barking close by and Vadim didn’t understand what she was saying. He was deep in thought. August is a curious month, he thought. Summer starts in June, in July it reaches its zenith, and in August … in August it continues, it goes on, it lasts. August is the beginning of the end. In September, you can feel the end.

  Everything was getting ready for winter. For rest. And now they were at the end of August, he realized.

  As they stood under the fig tree, it struck Vadim that, even if he could live out his dream of sweet inactivity under a tree, he wouldn’t be happy then either. He couldn’t be happy because his thoughts and his conscience would torture him, as would the memories of what he had lived through, the projects and things he would have liked to have done and never got around to. And he wouldn’t know how to be free, because even in a state of nature he would be in the grips of concerns connected with his responsibilities, the ones he already had and the ones he didn’t yet have but ought to. He wouldn’t know how to be free, in the same way that he wasn’t able to be free now, far from all his obligations, now that he was in contact with a woman who he admired and—why not admit it—loved.

  “Wouldn’t you like to live under a fig tree?” he asked, looking at Patricia.

  “Live under a fig tree? We Americans are too practical to do anything like that. We prefer sleeping in a bed, with a roof over our heads. But it’s true that I ought to paint this fig tree: these twisted, knotty branches are like the arms of an old woman in prayer …”

  “For you, everything in life has an aim, doesn’t it?”

  “Before I was like that. Not now … Recently, I’ve changed a lot. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “I don’t know you very well,” Vadim said, thinking that he didn’t know which “before” and “now” Patricia was referring to. Should he have noticed a change in her? But, in fact … yes, the haughty, self-assured painter had become a woman capable of confessing a temporary weakness and a sudden feeling of insecurity. Now she was more human.

  They reached the door of the garden. They stopped under the mulberry tree.

  “Before,” Patricia said slowly, “I only had one aim in life: to paint. And I shut my eyes to everything else. I kept away from men, I found their company unpleasant. And now … you can see for yourself!” She laughed to hide her confusion.

  Vadim didn’t know what to say. What did this have to do with him? Or maybe there was some kind of connection? He had always preferred women to have doubts rather than be in control of the situation, with a clear view of everything.r />
  “With women, and people in general, uncertainty is attractive; it suits you very well.” Vadim also smiled, confused. “The rose of a hundred petals … with its head full of dew … uncertain.”

  “Is that a haiku?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him, now genuinely uncertain. And she raised her arm as if she didn’t really mean to, but couldn’t help herself. She looked at him with the eyes of somebody who feels a sudden weakness, she rested her palm against his cheek, and she lowered her eyes. In her palm, she felt his cheek, fine, warm, and tense, like that of a child. Quickly, Patricia removed her hand and said in a low voice, “Remember me sometime when I’m not around anymore.”

  The dog went on barking.

  She moved away and ran into the house; Vadim watched as she closed the door behind her.

  Only after a long while did he snap out of his reverie and set off on the path back to Sitges. The dog was barking furiously behind him.

  * * *

  Before going to sleep, Patricia saw the image of the figs and the tea once more. So am I over … that? she asked herself. Is it possible that this Russian, who is almost as young as my oldest son, could have helped me get over … that aversion?

  She fell asleep quickly. In her dreams, her sons, their girlfriends, and her husband were looking through the windows into her house, each person at a different window. Yes, their heads filled all the windows. With difficulty, she managed to close all those windows and lower the blinds.

  * * *

  You walk in the dark. The sky is clouded over, you can’t see the stars or the moon. You spot some lightning in the distance, a distant peal of thunder keeps you company. On the path through the countryside, you stumble against roots and stones, but you avoid the main road so as not to see cars and trucks. Or motorbikes.

  Why did you talk about your father? Why? Again you see his wrinkled, dark face, covered in grey hair that obscures his eyes. Even then he never looks straight at you. Why? You see before you a fragile figure who stumbles in the shadows, you notice the smell of the vodka. And the cold. Only the muffled flame of the oil lamp trembles in the darkness and allows you to make out that living corpse.