The Secret of Clouds

by Alyson Richman

  “All those students and all those varied instruments in the orchestra . . . That’s a heck of a job. You must be very talented in order to know how to play all of them.” Suzie shot me a look and I nodded again in agreement.

  “Patient more than talented.” He took a sip of his coffee and winced. “Hmm. Not the best, huh?”

  “No. Probably better to fill up at Dunkin’ Donuts before you come to class.”

  We all pushed ours away.

  “So what do each of you teach?”

  “I teach art, and Maggie teaches English language arts.”

  “Let me guess, you always liked to draw, and you always liked to read when you were kids.”

  I laughed. “Yep, that basically sums us up in a nutshell. And did you always love music?”

  “Actually, yeah . . . I guess I did.” When he smiled, he had a dimple on his left cheek. The reverse shape of his scar.

  “You and my father both.” The words tumbled out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  Daniel arched an eyebrow.

  I felt strangely invigorated, knowing I had something unusual to contribute to the conversation.

  “Yeah, my dad played the violin for years, but now he’s taken it one step further. He’s become a luthier in his retirement.”

  “He makes violins?” Daniel’s voice perked up. “I’ve never met a luthier before.”

  I watched as an amused expression appeared on his face.

  “I mean, how often do you even get to say the word ‘luthier’? Makes me feel like I should be raising a goblet of mead, instead of this crummy disposable cup.”

  I laughed; his sense of humor was a welcome relief in the stale and often depressing faculty room.

  “Does he have his own workshop?”

  “As a matter of fact he does.” I couldn’t believe my father’s eccentric hobby would ever come in handy in impressing someone.

  “That’s so cool. Where?”

  I leaned in close. “It’s in my childhood basement.”

  “Well, some of the best art has been done in basements over the years . . . We all know that.”

  “True,” Suzie chimed in. “I’ll never forget the Jackson Pollock project I did that went awry. My mother was not very pleased with the splattered walls.”

  Fifth period was about to begin, and I reached for my bag. “In all seriousness, if you’re ever interested in seeing a violin made, let me know. My dad loves to share his knowledge with those who can appreciate it.”

  “I just might,” Daniel answered, gathering his things. He said it like he meant it.

  12

  APRIL 30, 1986

  KIEV, UKRAINE

  IT is the day before May Day. The weather is still unseasonably hot. And even though the nuclear reactor continues to burn in Pripyat, the government has not called off the big celebratory parade. Everyone will be lining the streets to celebrate. Katya and her fellow dancers from the school will be performing in traditional dress.

  The local children have been making paper flowers to glue onto twigs that they have been instructed to shake as they promenade toward Kiev’s main square.

  Madame Vaskaya has made the girls rehearse daily from morning until late afternoon. The costumes are heavy, the skirts and the crinoline. The bodices with metal buttons.

  But the girls are still happy for the rare opportunity to wear a costume. Typically, they are allowed to wear only a black leotard and flesh-colored tights. One leotard is given to them each year by the school canteen, and they must wash it out every night and then dry it on the radiator. Their toe shoes are not pink satin, but are instead made from pulverized wood and paper and are a murky dark blue.

  Katya is now a full member of the ballet corps. She dreams of one day becoming a principal and being able to travel to Budapest or Prague as, given the strict Communist regulations, it is all but impossible to travel to the West.

  She began her studies at the age of nine, her body analyzed by a Communist committee of dance experts. Her head was measured, as were the length of her torso and the distance from her leg to her hip. The arches of her feet were scrutinized. One of the women on the enrollment panel asked her to mimic clapping rhythms to see if she could maintain a beat.

  As a young girl, she had watched Anna Pavlova dance The Dying Swan on television. The performance, from the Kirov stage in Moscow, had been broadcast on the national station. Although she had been only eight years old, Katya could still remember being enamored of Pavlova’s beauty and elegance, her impossibly long limbs that floated out from the stiffness of her corset and tutu. Katya had walked over to the screen and begun to mimic the movements of the ballet.

  “Incredible!” her father announced as he sat in his armchair, smoking a cigarette. “We have our very own swan!”

  Her aunts were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking cups of black tea. “Look, Oksana,” they told her mother. “Ivan is right.”

  “She’s naturally graceful,” her mother’s eldest sister observed. “You should take her down for auditions this September. The Kiev theater has its own ballet school, and they choose the dancers when they’re no older than Katya is.”

  Her mother did not answer either her aunts or her father. She simply untied her apron and sat down at the table. On the television, as Pavlova extended her leg in a perfect arabesque, Katya saw the reflection of her mother’s face captured in the screen. It wasn’t a look of amazement at the sight of Pavlova, nor one of disinterest. It was the unmistakable expression of longing.

  13

  MAY 1986

  KIEV, UKRAINE

  THE news broadcaster announced that the fire in Chernobyl had been brought under control by the brave firemen who risked their lives to extinguish the flames. But in Kiev, they are told to keep their windows shut and that people should not spend too many hours outdoors. At the ballet studio, one of the dancers tells Katya that her little brother and his entire class have been bused to a camp in southern Ukraine for the remainder of the year so they do not have to worry about the radiation in the air.

  This word “radiation,” Katya doesn’t know what it means. You cannot see it or smell it, yet the windows of the apartment buildings remain shut even as the weather becomes increasingly warmer. The government sends pamphlets in the mail issuing precautions. Everyone should have two sets of shoes. One for outside and one for inside the house. Water for cooking should be boiled, the skins of fruits and vegetables peeled.

  It used to be that Katya looked forward to waking every morning hearing the birds outside their ground-floor apartment. When they moved in, she was excited they were some of the few tenants who had a little garden of their own. But since the Chernobyl accident, she no longer awakened to the sound of sparrows singing, but rather the blare of the watering trucks that came every morning with their long hoses to spray water on the perimeter of the building to wash away the radiation.

  She and Sasha would lie awake in bed, listening to the hissing sound. She would sense his disgust as he pulled the sheets off his body and went to the stove to put the kettle on.

  “They can’t wash it away,” he spat one morning as the water truck left for its next destination. He pressed a palm to the window and shook his head. “And for how long do we keep the windows shut, when every day we go out to work and breathe in the air?” He turned to her. “They have no idea what they’ve done to us, Katya.”

  She hated when he talked like this. The government had assured them they had taken every necessary precaution to keep them all safe. But still it nagged at her that they had moved most of the children south for an early summer break. How safe could it be for the rest of them if it wasn’t safe for the children?

  Then one afternoon in late July, when the air was thick with summer, she noticed that someone on the higher floor of the apartment building had opened their window. A few old
er women sitting on some benches pointed it out to each other, too.

  The next day, she noticed two more windows open.

  “Do you think it means it’s finally safe to let the outside air into the apartment?” Katya asked Sasha that evening. The last few weeks it had been unbearably hot, and although they had two fans, the air that circulated was heavy and warm.

  “I’d rather we didn’t,” he said. “Though, logically speaking, if we’re outside every day going to work and the shops, it’s not going to really matter.”

  By the following week, nearly everyone in the building had opened their windows.

  “What do you think it means?” Katya asked.

  “I think it means everyone has surrendered.” He took a deep breath and walked toward the windowsill. “And that life must go on.”

  That evening, they slept better than they had in weeks. They made love with the sheets pulled back and the window wide open. The lace curtains of the apartment undulated gently, a white flag fluttering in the breeze.

  14

  YURI filled his writer’s notebook with stories and poems. And yet, his remained the only notebook I had yet to cover with contact paper.

  “I still might want to add to it. It doesn’t feel finished yet. Can we wait a bit?”

  I saw no reason to say no. In the meantime, I asked him to write about the baseball he had glued on the cover, and that night, with Bill snoring beside me, I stretched out in bed under the covers and read his words.

  I like baseball because it requires a lot of smarts. Tons of kids play soccer because it’s easy. You run around and then kick the ball into the goal. But in baseball, you have to keep track of every player on the bases, so the math of baseball is always changing. My dad said he likes the statistics too, and I agree. Baseball is like live math. It’s much more interesting than a textbook. I also like that you can always change the stakes every time you’re up at bat. Each player has the power to change the game. Although my doctor told my mom it wouldn’t be a good idea for me to play on a team, I collect baseball cards just like a lot of other kids. Sometimes I put the baseball cards around the edge of my wall and try and create the perfect team. It’s fun to imagine who I might draft if I were General Manager. One day maybe I will be one of the guys who pick the players. I won’t be able to play the game on the field, but I’d still be able to do something with baseball.

  I looked down at his handwriting, which was so much neater than that of most of the boys in my sixth-grade classes. All of them were always in a rush to get out of the classroom, constantly looking at the clock and calculating how many more minutes until lunch or recess. They wanted to be outside or in the gym shooting baskets. My brother was like that, too, at that age, with the endless sound of him throwing a ball into the well of his mitt and the thwack of our neighbor’s bat as they played in the backyard.

  But Yuri’s journal entry echoed what he had first told me when I discovered that he loved baseball: he relished the mental gymnastics involved, all the possible outcomes every time a new batter came up to the plate. Of course, Yuri and his scientist father would enjoy doing all the calculations together. For a little boy who couldn’t play the game, it was a way for father and son to actively participate together.

  I flipped over to the next page of Yuri’s journal, where I had asked him to find a descriptive passage in Shoeless Joe that he liked and illuminate why he had picked it.

  My favorite descriptive passage in Shoeless Joe is when Ray Kinsella is sitting next to the author J. D. Salinger in Fenway Park watching a game, and he is telling him about his magical baseball field back in Iowa.

  “I’d like to take you there. We could sit in the bleachers I built behind left field. The hot dogs are like they were in the old days, long and plump and fried on a grill with onions, and you can smear the mustard on with a Popsicle stick, and there are jars of green relish.”

  I enjoyed this passage first because it describes food and I love to eat. I could imagine the plump hot dogs and the squirt of mustard. I don’t normally like green relish, but even that sounded tempting. This passage was so good I asked my mom to make us kielbasa sausages for dinner that night. I wrapped the sausage in a piece of bread and added on extra mustard. I also liked the passage because when I closed my eyes, it made me feel like I was there sitting in the stands watching the players. I felt like I was at a live baseball game.

  I closed the notebook for a moment and ran my fingers over its cover, with its pasted images of the baseball and the food. And the mathematical numbers and the laboratory beaker, which were references to his father. But the ballet shoe remained a mystery. And the image of the broken heart was painful as a wound.

  15

  I had been looking forward to the Thanksgiving break. My brother and his wife, Annie, were coming down from Boston, and Bill had agreed to spend the holiday with my family. I had hoped that the long weekend would give us more time together. Despite our moving in together, Bill had over the past few weeks seemed strangely remote and preoccupied. He had just landed two new corporate accounts, and the additional hours at the office made him seem almost brain-dead when he finally came home at night. In the city, if one of us was too tired, we would simply avoid going over to each other’s place that night, rather than expose our crankiness to the other. But now, with each of us under the same roof, it was impossible to hide our bad moods.

  “Do you really need to work until midnight on those lessons plans, Maggie?” Bill complained one night as I spread out my papers on the floor. I had thought working in the same room as he would be vaguely romantic, but he seemed distracted by my array of papers and folders on the ground.

  It was true that I was bringing my work home with me, but how could I not? Mine was not the sort of job that I could surreptitiously do on a BlackBerry, like he could. Lugging home twenty-five composition notebooks each night was hardly subtle. And I realized that my conversations with Bill had been lagging lately. If I were being honest with myself, though, what little extra energy I had went not into asking him about the two new tech companies he had managed to secure insurance for but into my classes and working with Yuri. Yet, even as I noticed the distance between Bill and me expanding, my heart did not suffer from loneliness. It still seemed strangely full.

  I knew I had Yuri to thank for that. As much as I wanted to simulate a comparable classroom experience for him, I had to admit there was something refreshing for me about tutoring him one-on-one. He was so bright and articulate, and there weren’t any distractions when I spent time with him. In my classes at Franklin, there was always some child arriving late or leaving early, or that group of kids who were kicking someone’s chair or passing notes. And now, as some of the students were approaching adolescence, a few had started to physically develop, and the rush of new hormones caused a whole other layer of distraction. There wasn’t a middle school teacher around who didn’t feel they were sometimes teaching to a circus. But Yuri was completely focused when he was with me. All my best ideas and enthusiasm poured out of me, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t start imagining myself to be his Annie Sullivan, my lessons opening a whole new world to him.

  Even Katya was starting to warm up to me. During my last visit, she touched my arm and told me that Yuri had given his copy of Shoeless Joe to his father to read.

  “Those two really love their baseball,” she remarked, clearly amused. “Me, not so much.” That was the first time I heard her laugh.

  “After the break, I’ll ask him to write about something other than baseball, so don’t worry,” I promised. “You’ll see.”

  She thanked me and opened the door. Outside, the autumn air smelled of maple leaves. “Have a happy Thanksgiving,” I said as I stepped off the porch.

  “You too. We don’t have such a holiday for gratitude back home. It’s a nice tradition.”

  I nodded in agreement on my way out.
When I reached my car, I looked back at the small shingled house, and the blinds were still open in the living room. Through the window, I saw Katya walk over to Yuri and put a comforter over him and kiss him on the forehead.

  * * *

  • • •

  AT my parents’ house, the scent of roasting turkey and stuffing laced with sage from my mother’s garden filled the air. My brother and Annie were already sitting in the living room, drinking spiced cider, and my mom was busy in the kitchen, her holiday table sparkling with polished silver and glimmering porcelain.

  Dad offered Bill and me cups of the cider, but Bill asked if there was any beer instead.

  I bit my lip. It’s not that my family was all that sophisticated, but we had our rituals. Spiced cider on Thanksgiving. Mulled wine on Christmas Eve. Was asking for a Coors on Thanksgiving really that necessary?

  My dad gave Bill an affectionate squeeze. “There might be some beer in the fridge in the garage. Why don’t you go out and see what you can scavenge?”

  I lowered my head as Bill went toward the mudroom and into the garage. I felt a pang of guilt run through me. Was I being unnecessarily harsh on Bill? I would never have been bothered by any of this when we were in college, yet now I found myself increasingly irritated.

  “You can take the boy out of the frat house, but not the frat house out of the boy,” my dad teased. “I guess he’s not going to be up for hearing me play some Mozart on my new violin.”

  I took a sip of the warm mug of cider. “I wouldn’t count on it, Dad. But I can’t wait.”

  He wrapped an arm around me and kissed me on my head. “That’s my girl,” he said. “Can I convince you to come downstairs and see my latest masterpiece?”

  Bill hadn’t emerged from the garage yet. “Sure, I’d love to,” I told him. I put my mug on the kitchen table and followed him downstairs.