The villagers considered Aglaya a fallen woman. Pregnant, no husband. When I first saw her, on what was to be our wedding day, she was an apparition. Her once-beautiful hair was matted. She was in filthy rags and lace, dirt-caked boots, her pale face drawn and cracked, eyes like craters, carrying wilted violets. Drained and absent.
I had written to her telling her to wait, and that I would come to marry her. But while I was in Italy the baby had been born early, sickly, and was incapable of drinking her milk. She tied the cord that bound them both with string and cut it with a kitchen knife. It was hard as bone, she said. He died a week later. Because she was unmarried with an unchristened child, the baby was denied burial in the church-consecrated cemetery. She wrapped it in her shawl and buried it by the river, digging at the hard mud with her own hands. She had named him Metro.
Overnight, she’d gone to the side of angels. She said there was no reason to marry her now, but I would never agree. There was no dowry except for an aged white cow and the dacha that had survived her father’s death but would soon have to be given over to the state. Remnants of a ruined kingdom.
I found a job digging sugar beets, loading them onto wagons and hauling them into town where they were processed into sugar at a nearby factory. I painted at night, by kerosene lamplight, while she constantly touched her apron pocket where she kept a worn-edged bible. She stopped eating. She did not want to be a woman. She continued to lose all contact with the real world, only with God would she speak.
Unclean, unclean. I am a sepulchre. I do not belong here.
She was only bones, and unfocused eyes. When I came back from the fields one day, the house was empty. I later found that she had walked in rain, on her small bare feet, for eight days. She begged with grace for entry into the Novodevichy Convent in Moscow where the nuns were from noble families. And though she appeared in rags, she was accepted and sheltered.
I wrote to the abbess, who said Aglaya would not see me. She was a child of God now, they said. Pozhaluysta. Do not come back.
The woman who was once my brother’s wife and now my own, disappearing beneath the golden domes of Novodevichy.
I would leave for France, paying for my passage by painting a portrait of a party leader who would later be stripped of everything and sent to a gulag for a casual remark made at a cocktail party. My accepting money from him did not go unobserved. But I understood that my departure from Russia was the departure from my life as I knew it. I wanted to find the life I had intended to live.
We lie in each other’s arms, the tick of the leaves from the wind through the window. How improbable that it was just this morning when I crossed the courtyard of the Sorbonne to deliver a set of commissioned biological illustrations, snails, birds, a sphinx moth, handing them to the collector, M. Barbary. In his office he flicked through the folder, nodded, and passed me the agreed payment. Outside his cramped office window, there was the wind, the same ticking leaves I hear now, bracketing the brief drastic events that can occur in a day.
SONGBIRD
Territory tenure is related to song-sharing with neighbours, but not to repertoire size.
Ornithologists say that if you play or sing to the birds, they sing back.
HE INSTRUCTS ME to pack one bag. We will meet the next morning. The door shuts behind him as though he was never here. I drag the valise from under my bed. The click of the brass latches, its shiny red viscera exposed in the middle of the floor. I am reminded how near to escape we always are. A woollen cape from Mme. Tissaud, two white dresses, underclothes, pencils, inks, notebooks, rolls of paper.
He has returned alive, unbroken. All the fears, the silences about his past he himself has dispelled. I never asked him why, with all my might I hesitated. What disturbed me most were his silences. But tragedy can be told only by someone who is ready to tell. It is almost perverse to be offered up this piece of small happiness that has come at such a cost. My pleasure predicated on someone else’s pain.
In the morning I say his name, its strong syllable filling the room. It takes on an unreal air. Everything is different. He has spoken. A part of his past parcelled out, carefully, like an offering. I had begun to see his mystery as a way of lying but he is not an adulterer in the way everyone thinks. Colour drains back. I am elated, full of certainty.
I walk out onto the street. Its cool grey curve. The people tilt their watches and click along the cobblestones. The leaves move in the wind. The clouds like high wet feathers, the kind that don’t mean rain. I look on this scene with detachment knowing that I am already gone. The arithmetic: he is here. I am gone.
But I don’t see him.
The morning is starting to slip.
There is no way of trusting that fear isn’t founded. That all the things that could happen haven’t happened. Our plans suddenly seem too big, too sure for what surrounds us. I’ve lost the ability of interpretation. It has only been minutes.
The morning widens. There are doves and the loud squeal of engines, and Mme. Tissaud about to walk to her back room and inspect her refrigerator for her black-market cream. She will make coffee and then raise the blinds and let the sun through the glass storefront.
He is there. Faceful of morning light. Blinding me. He is in a borrowed car, one that Istvan needs us to take to the south. I am not looking down. I have only ever walked with him. His body outlined against buildings.
—
Driving, the air softens. Hours later the earth gives in to red, and then the silver of olive groves. The leather seat burns hot through my thin dress. The ditches are red with poppies, there is the slow winding sound of cicadas, and villages stand tucked into the landscape as they always have, undisturbed. Church steeples rise from the hills.
Lev has never owned anything, but people always want to give him things. A dealer from Paris who has begun to champion his work told him to go south. He gave him keys to his family’s old country house. It is derelict, full of dust, covered in vines, he says. He knows Lev has no money. He will charge nothing.
We open the enormous wooden shutters and light is thrown across the large rooms. The air inside is miraculously old. Crickets escape. The wind smells of lavender, just out, everything being ahead of Paris. The days are filled with sunlight, too bright. Disorienting and long, as when the clocks are changed.
The house is unearthed through scrubbing, painting, hacking through weeds and vines that have overtaken the stones. We plant a garden so that we will eat what we grow. The only sounds are wind, birds, the sizzle of sun on the fields. Night slowly comes.
These long days have a sprawling low rhythm so foreign to the concise pieces of time in Paris. Lev’s capture has kept him put for now, there is a stillness. Don’t speak of it, I think. He knows, as I do, that there is a shadow of threat here always, sweet and ripe. We are adept at drawing out the day. Footsteps through the sunlit leaves. I cannot believe Lev is not more burdened by it, but he moves fully and assuredly, the same looseness in his body.
He begins working on a series of paintings for the dealer that he packages and posts to Paris. I have started and abandoned canvases, nothing holding. But life is easier here. There is no need to spend francs on coal, or draw out expensive drinks at cafés, or eat prix fixe at restaurants. No jabs of hunger while passing the opulent displays in boulangerie windows. The property thickens. Leaves unfold. There is the sudden rush of skylark wings. The silver river out back crashes loudly against the smooth stones. My sound journal fills with entries. Eventually a pale blue envelope arrives with money. It is a relief. We have not eaten much, waiting for everything to ripen. Lev comes back from town with eau de vie, wine, bread, olives, and delicious little packages from the fromagerie. Thank god you have talent, I say, sucking an olive pit, or we would starve.
The sun is hot enough in the day that we swim in the nearby stream, without clothes, which causes a flurry among the villagers. Right away we are met with narrow looks. Leonor, who is now living two villages over, tells us what they
say. His accent is foreign. What is on his arms? That young woman’s hair is too untidy, she may be a bit mad.
But the evenings are cool and we work by lamplight. We swallow eau de vie and wait for its truculent burn. Hand-rolled cigarettes to stay awake, the shadows flickering on the stone walls. On these walls we appear giant-sized in the night. I look at Lev’s face.
Why sadness? I can see something in your eyes.
I don’t trust this.
Trust what?
He looks at me.
Happiness.
For the first time it occurs to me that happiness can be a burden.
We consume black coffee and pick berries and herbs and fruit beginning from the trees studded with dusty-necked birds. A bounty amid the rations in the city. Lev scrabbles and unearths. He can make anything from nothing, wild watercress, leeks, mushrooms that he finds in the forest floor. His pockets full of lichen and roots and seeds. He has fallen in love with the weeds, in part because they remind him of his childhood. Even the sunflowers, he tells me. Ukraine is full of them. Soon there are cherries and white peaches soaked in Lillet then lit on fire, and apricots, the nectar sticky on our mouths. His hands on my neck and shoulders when I kneel in the violets. We fall asleep, Lev reciting Mallarmé, Et notre sang, épris de qui le va saisir / Coule pour tout l’essaim éternel du désir, a faded red and white quilt rumpled and warm beneath us.
Everything is thick and old and smells of roses and sun. The stream rushes loudly, and there are fat buzzing bumblebees and wingbeats and white caves and the open blue sky. Our skin grows darker, fingernails bleached from sun. We separate and work and walk alone. The paintings collect.
Lev tells me that his father kept bees in Ukraine. He would receive the queen in a box by post. He spoke tenderly to her, he says, as though she was a woman. The queen is the only sensual life form in the hive. Everything his father did was measured by the sun. Twenty-one days is what it takes for the sun to revolve on its own axis. It is exactly the amount of time a worker bee needs to develop. Then there’s the sex act. It occurs in full daylight, he says, lining up equal-sized wooden panels against the wall. The queen flies as close to the sun as possible. The drone that flies the highest gets the queen, up there in the air. And then the strangest thing happens. The workers begin to feel so loyal to the old queen that their tiny eyes, the eyes that are never exposed to the external workings of the sun, suddenly feel the sunlight. Somehow they sense that a new queen is born from the sun. They cannot endure the light of her. It translates as fear. French apiarists call the emotion that takes hold of the queen the first time she creeps out of her cell and visits the flowers soleil d’artifice. The sun of disquiet. Joy undercut by terror.
At night he is tormented by nightmares, yelling and writhing. It is in one of these terrifying moments that he confesses the escape that presented itself on a quiet evening errand, with a cellmate poet who, it turns out, could not swim. He becomes a gleaming lumpen weight to be carried across streams. Moving through hills, hiding in barns, avoiding roads, towns. Bridges are the worst, he says. They are guarded at both ends. When he wakes, he says he cannot shake the feeling that he is being watched.
I had feared this freedom was self-made. It reminds me that these days are miracles, in part because they contain the possibility of the death of future ones. A small metal clock ticks in the house by the front door. Even when he leaves for a few hours, I note it. Waiting for his return. Aware of how when he is gone there is no present, only the promise of one.
Come with me, Lev says, walking into the house after a long day’s absence.
I follow him along a narrow path high above the river. We sit on the edge of a jagged cliff and watch as the light illuminates the strip of land between us and the far hills, usually bleached as bone. We wait, and then it comes. The entire band of land glows and fills with the profusion of songbirds melodically chattering in a single continuum of expression. Lev and I are stilled into separate spheres of wonder, each of us filling with equal parts of sublime weight and joy from the singing, twining into one sublime weight and joy. And I think, Does what happens on the inside show on the outside? When I look at Lev I know that he feels the same. That the sound seems to be coming from inside. I could do anything, my life could be emptied of everything, I could even fall off the edge of this cliff and die, and every single thing that led up to this would have been worth it just to experience this one immeasurable moment.
We walk back to the house in silence.
Should we go out tonight? Lev says, unexpectedly referring to an earlier invitation that had reached us. A party. I can tell by the way he asks that he wants to go. Artists and writers gathering in an opulent house two villages over.
I’ve got nothing to wear, I say, half-jokingly. But what I really want to say is, I have no desire to leave this.
You don’t need anything, he says, brushing his mouth on my bare shoulder.
—
Leonor’s house glitters gold, ancestral diamonds. Luminaries from Paris fill the tall rooms like a network of tinkling glass. There are more people emptying down to the south. It is safer. Leonor seems exuberant in fur and feathers—flanked by her two lovers—she prizes visceral experiences above any other, especially emotional ones. She has dyed her dark Spanish hair platinum. It glints under the chandeliers. I have been told that Lev has been with her in the past but now they joke and tease each other, like siblings. Lev is quickly encircled by everyone wanting to hear about capture and escape, but he doesn’t tell. For the first time we feel like conspirators. I am bolstered by it. When Leonor says, Cherie, let me take your, and pauses to find the word for the black velvet draped around me, I shake my head and she hands me a glass of champagne. The pricked bubbles loosen my head, tight with ideas and twitches of sound. Heels on the tiled floors, Leonor’s pack of cats clawing and darting throughout the house, the metallic chime of silverware, corks popping, bursts of laughter, dry coughs, the offtime skip of Stravinsky muffled on the gramophone.
I begin to talk with a group of women, one dressed as a man, the others in silk dresses that up close are exquisitely battered, tiny holes, fraying at the seams. They are so animated, talking and laughing, cigarette filters red with lipstick. My mind is elsewhere. I see Lev talking to two women across the room. One of them moves closer to him. He looks over at me and touches the blue flower I threaded in the buttonhole of his jacket before we got in the car. A man with rolled shirtsleeves takes him by the arm outside. I am filled with an extraordinary sense of being, this secret joy. Beside me a woman has scissors in one hand as she kneels on the floor. I realize that what is really unacceptable here is something as bourgeois and staid as romantic love.
Leonor comes over. One of the women leans in and lights the cigarette between her lips, it glows in her mouth. Leonor exhales and turns to me saying loudly, Doesn’t everyone look so much better when they are being fucked? She puts her arm around me. The women laugh. I shake my head at her, though I am smiling. She faces me and says quietly, resolutely, Desire is not a light thing. And, really, what else does one live for? And then she walks toward three new guests who have just arrived. I look around at her house full of people, of priceless carpets covered in cat hair, of the art she’s started safekeeping, hung in clusters in the vast rooms, voices floating up the plaster.
I turn and ask the manwoman, a writer whom I recognize from Paris, what she is working on. She tilts up her head, exhaling smoke. My exit visa.
One of the silk-dress women, the one kneeling, is cutting up a piece of paper and writing questions on them. She has been handing out blank squares for answers and then begins randomly pairing them and reading them out.
What is equality? A hierarchy like any other.
What is the military? The sound of a lamp switching off.
What is reason? —
I decide at this moment to drop the velvet from my shoulders.
Everything stops. The men. The music, the conversation, all the surroundi
ngs are drained to an abrupt silence. Leonor winks at me from the door. I laugh, the sound spreading over the room in a confusion. Lev whisks me out.
What? I say, still laughing but serious-eyed. My heel jags some of the falling black velvet and makes a high-pitched rip. He runs his hand across the fabric, it bends under his fingers. He smiles, shaking his head.
You said—
He looks at me.
I can’t believe skin could have such an effect, I say, rolling down the window of the car, resting my arm on the cool door as we drive away. Times really are troubled. No one usually reacts to such things at these parties. I feel bold, fully myself in the presence of him. All else is frivolous, make-believe. It provokes daring. An act that could be humiliating is just an exit, otherwise we might have stayed until dawn. What I want is privacy, I think. To be alone with him. But what I also feel is the secret dazzle of power.
Lev’s voice above the shift of gears in what I think sounds like, the little satin parts.
No one laughed.
A beautiful naked woman is not funny, he says neutrally.
Why isn’t it? Everyone laughed at Félix.
Men’s bodies are funny.
Why?
I don’t know. He shifts into fourth gear. Gravity.
PEACOCK
Bird of Hera, wife of Zeus. Immortal.
Tail feathers spread silently, all those eyes gazing, marked by the sun.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 19