The Faces of Strangers

by Pia Padukone

  “Levya,” she called. She heard his footsteps, and Leo appeared, huffing. His barrel chest protruded over his towel as he clutched it around his only slightly thinner waist.

  “I’m about to sauna,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Mari isn’t well. Can you drive us to the doctor?”

  It was confirmed: five weeks in. The fetus was the size of a peppercorn. There were small indentations in a pin-sized head that would become a nose, eyes and ears.

  Vera felt her lungs collapse. She gripped the back of the chair to feel herself hold something, to feel her arm muscles engage, to feel as if she had power over something, anything. In that small, sterile room, Mari and Vera both felt the space getting smaller and smaller by the moment, closing in on them, capturing them like a cage. Vera looked at her daughter. While her body quavered like a leaf, Mari’s face was clear and undisturbed; if it had been a pond, Vera could have skipped a stone effortlessly across it. Mari hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived at the office, but Vera answered all the questions the doctor had asked of her, at least when she knew the answers. She didn’t know a few things—did she smoke, did she drink, the date of her last period. She didn’t know when it had happened, with whom or, for goodness’ sakes, why. There were a thousand questions to ask her daughter, but Vera found herself asking only one: “What do you want to do?”

  Mari held herself upright and looked at her mother for the first time. “I want to go home,” she whispered. Vera held her hand out and Mari put hers in it.

  * * *

  Leo could tell precisely what was wrong with his daughter. Mari had returned from the doctor weeks earlier hanging from her mother’s arm. Vera had shuttled her upstairs and told him that she was under the weather. A slight flu. But he was no fool. He wanted to know, how had it happened? Where? And with whom? He wondered if it had been some sleazy, sweaty Ukranian model; he tried to shudder the thought away, but flashes of strange overbronzed skin against Mari’s porcelain body kept rising in his mind. He didn’t ask Mari that first afternoon as Vera had requested, taking care not to voice the very questions that were plaguing his mind. Mari spent most of her time in bed now, languishing like a flower that badly needed watering, pushing herself up to sit when Vera arrived with a tray or a glass. Her face had become withdrawn and pale. The stack of magazines that had littered the perimeter of her bedside had been cleared away and replaced with a trail of Hematogen wrappers that whispered in the breeze of the open window like the carcasses of dried leaves. How ironic that Hematogen, the Russian candy bars constituted of cow’s blood enriched with iron and vitamins, were what Mari craved these days when both she and Paavo had resisted them so obstinately as children.

  “How are you?” Leo asked, opening the door and indicating the wrappers on the floor. “Ema said you wanted more. I can get some this afternoon.”

  “Thank you, Papa. That would be great. They seem to be the only things I can keep down.”

  “Are you okay, Mari?” Leo asked cautiously. His daughter seemed too weak to snap back at him, but he knew that her rage could build and erupt when she had the ability to do so. “What can I do, my baby?”

  It turned out that Leo, despite his constant nagging that Mari’s beauty, and certainly now her modeling, were sure to get her in trouble, fell over himself in kindness toward his daughter. Upon his return from work, he dampened washcloths and peeled open more Hematogen bars. He cleaned out her trash bin after she heaved into it. He smoothed the hair away from her face while she was sleeping, murmuring over her lithe body that finally quieted after being rocked by waves of nausea.

  Neither Leo nor Vera demanded to know the father’s identity. There was an unspoken rule in the house not to worry Mari with such details, to stress her out any more than her body already was. At times Leo yearned to close the door to her bedroom and withhold any more Hematogen bars until she disclosed the information. But his concern for her well-being and that of his unborn grandchild’s was stronger than his curiosity.

  The season had passed fitfully; Vera and Leo fretted over their daughter. In her ninth week, Mari braved the stairs. She held the banister with both hands, edging sideways as though the staircase were a ship and would cant with the next rising swell. She sat at the table opposite her parents and told them her plan. She would leave. She would go to Moscow; Viktor had told her that was where her future lay. She has exhausted everything she can in Estonia. There is nothing more for her here.

  “But what about the baby?” Vera asked, her fingers gripping the edge of the table.

  “What about it?” Mari said. “I will have it there. I want to start new. I want to do this, Ema. I’ve thought it through.”

  “Mari, you have no idea what difficulty a baby will bring,” Vera said. “How will you support yourself?”

  “What else? I’ll model.”

  “But you haven’t told Viktor about your condition, Mari. How can he say that your future is in Moscow when your future has been completely rewritten?”

  Mari stuck her chin out. “I’m not showing yet. Plus, Viktor said I’d make more in one week in Moscow than I would in a month here. It’s true—those insipid Tartu boys make double what I make when I am working triple as hard. This country is completely backward. I can’t stay here if I want a future for myself and for the baby. I’ll put it away. I’ll save. But I have to leave, Ema. If I don’t, I’ll be stuck here forever. Papa, tell her.”

  There were two single mothers in Leo’s office that each left at five thirty on the dot every day. Neither of them went for a drink at the bar around the corner. Neither of them attended the office outing each summer or the Christmas party in the winter. Now that he thought about them, he realized that it wasn’t necessarily their home lives that made them look harried when he arrived at the office; they had already been there working for hours. He made a mental note to be kinder to them, to ask after their children. “Mari, I’m not sure,” Leo said. “You’re so young. To be balancing a career and a baby in a new town... I’m not sure you’re thinking this through.”

  “It’s not a new town,” Mari said, her eyes flashing. “We have been there before. I can do this. I need you to believe in me.” Vera and Leo exchanged glances.

  “Let us think about it,” Vera said, placing her hand over Mari’s.

  But that wasn’t good enough for Mari. The next morning after Leo returned from work, he found his wife standing in the kitchen, clutching a piece of paper to her chest, her face shifting like the early tremors of an earthquake. Leo had the foresight to ask in Estonian, “Mis viga?” Vera snapped out of the trance—whether from shock of the language or from realizing that someone else was home with her—to show the note to Leo.

  Mari’s letter had requested her family to give her space. She was going to Moscow, to have the baby there. She was going to live off the savings that her previous year of successful modeling had brought in until she gave birth, at which point she was going to find another agent, who would bring in more jobs. She would coax her body back into modeling shape—Cindy Crawford had done it, Laetitia Casta and Elle MacPherson. Mari had the same drive, the same resolve when she put her mind to something. She would take care of herself, go on long walks in order to maintain her lean, long legs. She would rub her belly furiously with shea butter and later, with a vile concoction of stewed herbs and roots that she’d wrap and press against her stomach even once it was small and taut again in an effort to avoid stretch marks.

  It doesn’t matter who the father is. He’s not involved and I don’t want him to be. I ask that you respect my decision to do so. This is my path, and I am going to follow it through.

  Leo read and reread the letter and then took the stairs two at a time to his daughter’s room where he saw her closet emptied and half her bookshelf bare grinning like a toothless old crone. Mari was gone.

  NORA

 
New York City

  June 2003

  It wasn’t that the fear of her condition was gone. But it was getting easier to talk about it. Talking to Paavo was easy, even though he had been the first person outside of her small circle of doctors, her family or the group she’d felt comfortable confiding in. With Paavo, it had felt almost normal, as if she was sharing that she was nearsighted or had needed orthodontic treatment as a child. Paavo never judged her or pretended to understand something she knew he never would unless he, too, experienced a sharp blow to his own fusiform gyrus.

  Sometimes she wasn’t sure that she had experienced it herself, but from time to time, she forced herself to remember her reentry into her new life, the one where she had to work extra hard at everything—faces, contours, hairstyles. Somehow it reminded her that she used to be a different person before; that she used to be normal. And that now, after the accident, everything had changed.

  Nora and Paavo should never have met in real life, but the Hallström program helped them identify the kindred spirits in one another that they hadn’t encountered before. After that first awkward interaction over Nora’s notebook, Paavo began to understand something innate in Nora. Perhaps it was because she didn’t judge him on his skittishness, but instead used it as a device to remember him.

  After the first conversation opened the gates of understanding between the two, Paavo began greeting Nora each afternoon on his return from school with a riddle, which quickly evolved into a conversation. Between her biweekly group sessions, Nora visited the library, returning home with stacks of books. It was Paavo who had sparked her interest in understanding her condition better, after he’d suggested that she return to school to take a few psychology courses to get into her own mind, understanding exactly what was happening when it perceived faces. She had started sitting in on some classes at the New School after Arthur had called in a favor from an old colleague. They revved her brain more than philosophy ever had. She felt herself gravitating toward a different calling in life. She wondered if it might be too late. She’d even gone to the bookstore and bought two of the required books for her Psychology in the Meditative State class, underlining passages and reading ferociously when she should have been writing the proposal for her own thesis on Kant. She felt the knowledge she was absorbing unlatch a caged door to her head for the first time in a year, allowing her heart to sing.

  Friendship with Nora came easily for Paavo. Maybe it was because she was a girl, maybe because she was older, maybe it was because she didn’t know the history of his downturn into meekness. By the time Paavo returned to Tallinn at the end of the semester, he had helped Nora forge a new path for herself. And she had succeeded in helping him realize that he didn’t have to stay scared forever.

  June 26, 2003

  Nora—

  I want to thank you for your hospitality and openness while I was in New York City. It is a difficult thing to come to a new country, but you were welcoming from the start.

  I had this thought and I didn’t want to forget it. I was thinking about you and your condition and I wondered if the situation was that your brain was just weeding out the important people in your life. For example, when you need to know someone, you just know him or her and when you don’t really need them in your life, your mind has a difficult time grasping their identity. Does that make sense? It’s like your mind is a sieve that’s only holding the really essential people close to your heart. It’s why I think you’ve never had a problem recognizing Nico or your parents.

  In Russian literature, there is something called dusha. At the heart of it, it means soul. To have dusha is to do something from the bottom of your heart, with love and passion. I think anyone can have dusha, from pianists to politicians. When we go out to eat in restaurants in Tallinn, my family, we rate places on dusha. It can be some of the finest food we have ever eaten, but if it’s not made with intention, with love, by someone who truly cares about others enjoying their food wholeheartedly, well, you can taste it with every bite. I’m sure you have had similar such meals.

  Anyway, I was thinking about dusha and in light of the idea, I don’t think your situation is necessarily a bad thing. I think it’s that you’re able to see people’s souls; that you’re able to see into them, past their faces and into their hearts. I think you are seeing their dusha, that if they are worth having their souls seen by you, then you remember their face. I think you should no longer think of your condition as a bad thing, but as something that helps you find the difference between the meaningful and those you have to see, like the people in front of you. I think once those people make themselves important to you, or you find the meaning in them, that’s when you will begin to recognize them for who they truly are. Maybe it’s a romantic notion, but I think it explains a lot. For now, I hope it helps. And for now, I hope you’re feeling better.

  Warmly,

  Paavo

  MARI

  Moscow

  September 2003

  Mari had first felt the baby kick when she was on a go-see for a new clothing catalog geared toward university students. The briefing packet included a description of the line: “scholarly and cheeky.” She’d pondered what this might mean as she stood in front of the mirror in profile, scrutinizing her usually taut torso which now had a slight overhang of flesh protruding over the rim of her jeans. She chose a blousy wrap dress with strategically placed ruffles across her abdomen, hoping she looked every bit the fashionable academic. As she kicked off her heels at the doorway as requested so that the casting agents could see her at her true height, she hesitated ever so slightly. The makeshift runway, composed of a long roll of white contact paper, scratched the soles of her bare feet. She found herself praying that the ruffles had masked the bloat; if asked, she would tell them she was on her cycle and that the bloat would dissolve. But she wasn’t sure what she’d do if she were cast. At the end of the runway, she turned this way and that so the casting directors could view her from all angles. It was then that she nearly fell over from the tiny but certainly perceptible jab just beneath her belly button. She steadied her composure by flipping her fringe out of her eyes and flashing a broad smile at the row of men that sat behind folding tables, observing her every move.

  In a corner of the hallway amongst the other models waiting their turns to be assessed, she found a spare patch of wall where she leaned back and caught her breath. She placed her palms flat against the base of her gut. Had she imagined it? No, there it was again. The tiniest flutter within, as though a butterfly was trapped within her organs. She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, another model was staring at her. Mari had seen her before. She was a leggy brunette with toned biceps and thin lips. Since Mari’s arrival in Moscow, the two had been orbiting the same circuit of casting calls. On a number of them, the girl had been clutching a child’s hand, whispering to her in Russian that she had to behave and sit quietly while Mama went into the room. The model nodded toward Mari’s hands enveloped over her stomach.

  “How far?” she asked.

  “Sorry?” Mari asked, letting her hands drop to her sides.

  “How far along are you? I’d say twelve, thirteen weeks?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Mari flushed and looked down to the ground.

  “It’s not me you need to worry about,” the girl said, moving closer to Mari so her shoulder blocked the other girls. “It’s them.” She nodded toward the room from which Mari had exited.

  “Shit,” Mari hissed. “You can tell? That means they...”

  “Please—” the girl sighed “—men are clueless when it’s this early. Trust me. It’s the middle of your second trimester that you need to worry about. That’s when I had to come clean. I’m Ginevre.”

  “Mari.”

  “I know. I’ve seen you around.”

  Mari nodded. “Same. So you kept doing
this, huh? Even after? I’ve seen you with your little girl.”

  Ginevre snorted. “If you could call it that. My stomach is tighter now than it ever was—you sell your soul to Pilates, but trust me, it works. Yet there’s still a stigma that I’m a mother. My agent tried to get me to put it on my résumé, saying it would get me onto a whole other tier, but it’s das vidanya to the twentysomething world. I am eking my way through, hoping I still pass.”

  “Oh, you do,” Mari said. She wasn’t lying; Ginevre was pert and lithe.

  “We have a little model mothers group. You should join us,” Ginevre said. “A friend owns a tearoom where we meet every other week. We watch one another’s kids when we have calls. It’s great support, and we share stories, give advice, that kind of thing.”

  “Thanks,” Mari said. “I’ll definitely think about it.”

  “Well, whatever you do,” Ginevre said, “just don’t breast-feed. It makes your tits sag, and then you’re pretty much done for good. No bra, no matter what they say about lift and defying gravity, can correct that.”

  Mari thanked her and left the go-see, worried that one of the other models had overheard their conversation and passed it on to the casting directors. She figured she still had a few more weeks of modeling left in her before she really began to show. She approached calls now with a newfound zeal, attending up to three auditions a day, throwing herself into modeling with a fervor she hadn’t thought possible, until she finally admitted that she herself could no longer mask her ever-expanding stomach and chose to hole herself up in her small apartment to ripen like a fleshy peach.

  * * *

  Months later, the nurse in the Moscow hospital told Mari that the memory of the pain from the birth would soon subside so that she’d be willing to do it again. It’s true, she’d said, her white orthopedic shoes squeaking against the shiny linoleum over which faint, crimson streaks were still visible from where Mari’s blood had been mopped up. Otherwise the human race would die away. Mari scoffed when the nurse turned away to adjust the IV line. Mari would remember every single grasp within her innards as they wrenched her apart, every sucking in of her breath as she had been forced open like a juicy pomegranate. She would remember the purple light that seemed to emanate from the corners of her delivery room even though the lights had been turned out in an effort to calm her. She would remember the glow from the heart rate monitor that was tracking the tiny heart that beat inside her; she had to wheel the whole contraption into the bathroom each time she wanted to sit on the toilet. And after being jolted and racked by contractions that seemed as if they wanted to rip her apart, she remembered sitting on the toilet for hours, the endless urge of wanting to shit and shit and shit until the seismic forces cooled inside her. She would remember the weary nurse who rubbed her haunches methodically as she knelt on the floor, braying like a farm animal until the doctor helped her onto her back in the bed and told her to push like hell.