by Rebecca Lee
“And this is why you joined the Russian army in attacking your own country?” This was Hans, startling us all.
“I did not attack my own country,” Stasselova said. “Never.”
“But you watched as the Nazis attacked it in August of 1944, yes? And used that attack for your own purposes?”
“This night I was there, it’s true,” he said, “on the banks of the Vistula, and I saw Warsaw burn. And I was wearing the fur hat of Russia, yes. But when I attempted to cross the Vistula, in order to help those of my countrymen who were escaping, I was brought down—clubbed with a rifle to the back of the head by my commanding officer, a Russian.”
“That’s interesting, because in accounts of the time you are referred to as an officer yourself—Officer Stasselova, of course.”
“Yes. I was a Polish officer though. Certainly you can infer the hierarchy involved?”
“What I can infer . . .” Hans’s voice rose, and then Stasselova’s joined in, contrapuntally, “What you can infer . . .” and for a moment the exchange reminded me of those rounds we sang at summer camp. “What you can infer,” Stasselova said, drowning out Hans, “is that this was an ambiguous time for those of us who were Polish. You can’t judge after the fact. Perhaps you think that I should be dead on those banks, making the willows to grow.” Stasselova’s eyes were shot with the dying light; he squinted at us and looked out the window momentarily. “You will stand there and think maybe certain men in certain times should not choose their own lives, should not want to live.” And then he turned away from Hans. I myself scowled at Hans. So rude!
“And so I did live,” Stasselova said finally. “Mostly because I was wearing my Russian hat, made of the fur of ten foxes. It was always Russia that dealt us blows, and it was always Russia that saved us. You see?”
THE NEXT DAY I was with Hans in the woods. We were on our stomachs in a clearing, looking to the east, from where the rain was stalking us through the trees. “What I want to know,” Hans was saying, “is why is he always asking for you to see him?”
“Oh,” I said, “he thinks I plagiarized that first paper.”
“Did you?”
“Not really.”
“Why does he think so?”
“Says it smacks of Soviet propaganda.”
“Really? Well, he should know.”
“I agree with him—that you’re judging him from an irrelevant stance.”
“He was found guilty of treason by his own people, not me—by the Committee for Political Responsibility. Why else would he be here, teaching at some Lutheran college in Minnesota? This is a guy who brought martial law down on his own people, and now we sit here in the afternoon and watch him march around in front of us, relating everything he speaks of—comma splices, for Christ’s sake—to his own innocence.”
“Yet all sorts of people were found guilty of all sorts of meaningless things by that committee.”
“I bet he thinks you’re a real dream—this woman willing to absolve the old exterminator of his sins.”
“That’s insulting,” I said. But I realized how fond I’d grown of this professor in his little office, drinking his bitter coffee, night descending into the musky heart of Humanities.
And then the rain was upon us. We could hear it on the tiny ledges of leaves above us more than feel it. “Let’s go,” Hans said, grabbing my hand with his left, damaged hand. The way his hand held mine was alluring; his hand had the nimbus of an idea about it, as if the gene that had sprung this hand had a different world in mind, a better world, where hands had more torque when they grasped each other, and people held things differently, like hooks—a world where all objects were shaped something like lanterns, and were passed on and on.
MONDAY WAS GRAY, WITH long silver streaks of rain. I dragged myself out of the warmth of my bed and put on my rain slicker. At nine-forty-five I headed toward Stasselova’s office. “Hello,” I said, knocking on the open door. “I’m sorry to disturb you outside your office hours.” I was shivering; I felt pathetic.
“Margaret,” he said. “Hello. Come in.” As I sat down, he said, “You’ve brought with you the smell of rain.”
He poured me coffee in a Styrofoam cup. During our last class I had been so moved by his description of that night on the Vistula that I’d decided to confess. But now I was hesitating. “Could I have some of this cream?” I asked, pointing to a little tin cup of it on his windowsill.
“There it is again,” he said, as he reached for the cream.
“There is what again?”
“That little verbal tic of yours.”
“I didn’t know I had one,” I said.
“I noticed it first in class,” he said. “You say ‘this’ instead of ‘that’; ‘this cream,’ not ‘that cream.’ The line people draw between the things they consider this and the things they consider that is the perimeter of their sphere of intimacy. You see? Everything inside is this; everything inside is close, is intimate. Since you pointed at the cream and it is farther from you than I am, ‘this’ suggests that I am among the things you consider close to you. I’m flattered,” he said, and handed me the creamer, which was, like him, sweating. What an idea—that with a few words you could catch another person in a little grammatical clutch, arrange the objects of the world such that they bordered the two of you.
“At any rate,” he said, “I’m glad you showed up.”
“You are?”
“Yes. I’ve wanted to ask you something.”
“Yes?”
“This spring the college will hold its annual symposium on language and politics. I thought you might present your paper. Usually one of the upperclassmen does this, but I thought your paper might be more appropriate.”
“I thought you hated my paper.”
“I do.”
“Oh.”
“So you’ll do it?”
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
He nodded and smiled, as if the matter were settled. The rain was suddenly coming down very hard. It was loud, and we were silent for a few moments, listening. I stared beyond his head out the window, which was blurry with water, so that the turrets of the campus looked like a hallucination, like some shadow world looming back there in his unconscious.
“This rain,” he said then, in a quiet, astonished voice, and his word this entered me as it was meant to—quietly, with a sharp tip, but then, like an arrowhead, widening and widening, until it included the whole landscape around us.
THE RAIN TURNED TO snow, and winter settled on our campus. The face of nature turned away—beautiful and distracted. After Christmas at home (where I received my report card, a tiny slip of paper that seemed to have flown across the snows to deliver me my A in Stasselova’s class) I hunkered down in my dorm for the month of January and barely emerged. The dorm in which most of us freshman girls lived was the elaborate, dark Agnes Mellby Hall, named after the stern, formidable virgin whose picture hung over the fireplace in our lounge. As winter crept over us, we retired to Mellby earlier and earlier. Every night that winter, in which most of us were nineteen, was a slumber party in the main sitting room among its ornate furnishings. There, nightly, we ate heavily, like Romans, but childish foods, popcorn and pizza and ice cream, most of us spiraling downstairs now and then to throw up in the one private bathroom.
On one of those nights I was reading a book in the sitting room when I received a phone call from Solveig, who was down at a house party in town and wanted me to come help her home. She wasn’t completely drunk but calculated that she would be in about forty-five minutes. Her body was like a tract of nature that she understood perfectly—a constellation whose movement across the night sky she could predict, or a gathering storm, or maybe, more accurately, a sparkling stream of elements into which she introduced alcohol with such careful calibration that her blood flowed exactly as she desired, uphill and down, intersecting precisely, chemically, with time and fertility. Solveig did not stay at the dorm with us much b
ut rather ran with an older pack of girls, feminists mostly, who that winter happened to be involved in a series of protests, romantic insurrections, against the president of the college, who was clearly terrified of them.
About ten minutes before I was to leave, Stasselova appeared in the doorway of the sitting room. I had not seen him in more than a month, since the last day of class, but he had called a few times. I had not returned his calls, in the hopes that he would forget about my participation in the symposium. But here he was, wearing a long gray coat over his bulkiness. His head looked huge, the bones widely spaced, like the architecture of a grand civic building.
The look in his eyes caused me to gaze out across the room and try to see what he was seeing: perhaps some debauched canvas of absolute female repose, girls lying everywhere in various modes of pajamas and sweats, surrounded by vast quantities of food and books. Some girls—and even I found this a bit creepy—had stuffed animals that they carried with them to the sitting room at night. I happened to be poised above the fray, straddling a piano bench, with a book spread in front of me, but almost all the rest were lying on their backs with their extremities cast about, feet propped on the couch or stretched up in the air at weird, hyper extended angles. We were Lutherans, after all, and unlike the more experienced, secular girls across the river, at the state college, we were losing our innocence right here, among ourselves. It was being taken from us physically, and we were just relaxing until it fell away completely.
Stasselova, in spite of all he’d seen in his life, which I’d gleaned from what he said in class (the corpulent Goering marching through the forest, marking off Nazi territory, and later Stalin’s horses breaking through the same woods, heralding the swath that would now be Soviet), still managed to look a little scared as he peered into our sitting room, eventually lifting a hand to wave at me.
I got up and approached him. “Hey,” I said.
“Hello. How are you, Margaret?”
“It’s good to see you. Thanks for the A.”
“You deserved it. Listen, I have something for you,” he said, mildly gesturing for us to leave the doorway, because everybody was looking at us.
“Great,” I said. “But you know, right now I need to walk downtown to pick up Solveig at a house party.”
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll walk you.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I got my jacket, and the two of us stepped into the night. The snow had arranged itself in curling waves on the Mellby lawn, and stuck in it were hundreds of silver forks, which, in a flood of early-evening testosterone, the freshman boys had placed in the earth, a gesture appropriate to their sexual frustration and also to their faith in the future. Stasselova and I stepped between them. They looked spooky and lovely, like tiny silver gravesites in the snow. As we walked across campus, Stasselova produced a golden brochure from his pocket and handed it to me. On the front it said, in emerald-green letters, “Ninth Annual Symposium on Language and Politics.” Inside, under “Keynote Student Speaker,” was my name. “Margaret Olafson, ‘The Common Harvest.’ ” I stopped walking. We paused at the top of the stairs that floated down off the campus and into the town. I felt extremely, inordinately proud. Some winter lightning, a couple of great wings of it, flashed in the north. Stasselova looked paternal, grand.
THE AIR AT THE party was beery and wildish, and the house itself—its many random rooms and slanting floors—seemed the product of a drunken adolescent mind. At first we could not spot Solveig, so Stasselova and I waited quietly in the hallway until a guy in a baseball cap came lurching toward us, shouting in a friendly way over the music that we could buy plastic glasses for the keg for two dollars apiece. Stasselova paid him and then threaded through the crowd, gracefully for such a large man, to stand in the keg line. I watched him as he patiently stood there, the snowflakes melting on his dark shoulders. And then Hans was on my arm. “What on earth?” he said. “Why are you here? I thought you hated these parties.” He’d been dancing, apparently. He was soaked in sweat, his hair curling up at his neck.
I pointed to Stasselova.
“No kidding,” Hans said.
“He showed up at my dorm as I was leaving to get Solveig.”
“He came to Mellby?”
“Yes.”
“God, look at him. I bet they had a nickname for him, like the Circus Man or something. All those old fascists had cheery nicknames.”
Stasselova was now walking toward us. Behind him the picture window revealed a nearly black sky, with pretty crystalline stars around. He looked like a dream one might have in childhood. “He is not a fascist,” I said quietly.
“Professor!” Hans raised his glass.
“Hans, yes, how are you? This is a wonderful party,” Stasselova said, and it actually was. Sometimes these parties could seem deeply cozy, their wildness and noise an affirmation against the formless white midwestern winter surrounding us.
He handed me a beer. “So,” he said rather formally, lifting his glass. “To youth.”
“To experience,” Hans said, smiling, and lifted his glass.
“To the party.” Stasselova looked pleased, his eyes shining from the soft lamplight.
“The Party?” Hans raised an eyebrow.
“This party,” Stasselova said forcefully, cheerfully.
“And to the committee,” Hans said.
“The committee?”
“The Committee for Political Responsibility.”
In one of Stasselova’s lectures he had taken great pains to explain to us that language did not describe events, it handled them, as a hand handles an object, and that in this way language made the world happen under its supervision. I could see that Hans had taken this to heart and was making lurching attempts in this direction.
Mercifully, Solveig appeared. Her drunkenness and her dignity had synergized into something quite spectacular, an inner recklessness accompanied by great external restraint. Her hair looked the color of heat—bright white. She was wearing newly cut-off jeans and was absently holding the disassociated pant legs in her hand.
“The professor,” she said, when she saw Stasselova. “The professor of oppression.”
“Hello, Solveig.”
“So you came,” she said, as if this had been the plan all along.
“Yes. It’s nice to see you again.”
“You as well,” she said. “Why are you here?”
The whole scene looked deeply romantic to me. “To take you home,” he said.
“Home?” she said, as if this were the most elegant and promising word in the language. “Yours or mine?”
“Yours, of course. Yours and Margaret’s.”
“Where is your home again?” she asked. Her eyes were glimmering with complexity, like something that is given to human beings after evolution, as a gift.
“I live downtown,” he said.
“No, your real home. Your homeland.”
He paused. “I am from Poland,” he said finally.
“Then there. Let’s go there. I have always wanted to go to Poland.”
Stasselova smiled. “Perhaps you would like it there.”
“I have always wanted to see Wenceslaus Square.”
“Well, that is nearby.”
“Excellent. Let us go.” And Solveig swung open the front door and walked into the snow in her shorts and T-shirt. I kissed Hans good-bye, and Stasselova and I followed her.
Once outside, Stasselova took off his coat and hung it around Solveig. Underneath his coat he was wearing a dark jacket and a tie. It looked sweet and made me think that if one kept undressing him, darker and darker suits would be found underneath.
Solveig was walking before us on the narrow sidewalk. Above her, on the hill, hovered Humanities—great, intelligent, alight. She reached into the coat pocket and pulled out, to my astonishment, a fur hat. The hat! The wind lifted, and the trees shook off a little of their silver snow. Humanities leaned over us, interested in its loving but secular way. I fel
t as sure about everything as those archaeologists who discover a single bone and can then hypothesize the entire animal. Solveig placed the hat on her head and turned to vamp for a moment, opening and closing the coat and raising her arms above her head in an exaggerated gesture of beauty. She looked like some stirring, turning simulacrum of communist and capitalist ideas. As she was doing this, we passed by the president’s house. It was an old-fashioned house, with high turrets, and had a bizarre modern wing hanging off one end of it. Solveig studied it for a moment as she walked, and then suddenly shouted into the cold night, “Motherfucker!”
Stasselova looked as if he’d been clubbed again in the back of the head, but he kept walking. He pretended that nothing had happened, didn’t even turn his head to look at the house, but when I turned to him, I saw his eyes widen and his face stiffen with shock. I said “Oh” quietly and grabbed his hand for a moment to comfort him, to let him know that everything was under control, that this was Minnesota. Look—the president’s house is still as dark as death, the moon is still high, the snow sparkling everywhere.
His hand was extraordinarily big. After Hans’s hand, which I’d held for the past few months, Stasselova’s more ordinary hand felt strange, almost mutant, its five fingers splayed and independent.
THE NEXT NIGHT, IN the cafeteria, over a grisly neon dish called Festival Rice, I told Hans about the hat. “I saw the hat,” I said. A freshman across the cafeteria stood just then and shouted, in what was a St. Gustav tradition, “I want a standing ovation!” The entire room stood and erupted into wild applause and hooting. Hans and I stood as well, and as we clapped, I leaned over to yell, “He’s been telling the truth about that night overlooking Warsaw: I saw the hat he was wearing.”
“What does that mean? That means nothing. I have a fur hat.”
“No,” I said. “It was this big Russian hat. You should have seen it. This big, beautiful Russian hat. Solveig put it on. It saved his life.”
Hans didn’t even try to object; he just kind of gasped, as if the great gears of logic in his brain could not pass this syllogism through. We were still standing, clapping, applauding. I couldn’t help thinking of something Stasselova had said in class: that at rallies for Stalin, when he spoke to crowds over loudspeakers, one could be shot for being the first to stop clapping.