Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

  In very little time our social ascension slowed, then stopped. I pestered my father with questions—innocent ones mostly, about when we’d be getting more food rations and why it was that the Party wasn’t happy with us. Hadn’t we all been happy before? Apparently I pressed this particular issue hard enough that something in my father snapped. One day as we were setting the table for dinner I asked again, and he grabbed my shoulders, stopping me on the way from the stove to the table and upsetting a platter of food in my hands. “It’s better to be good,” he told me, “than to be happy. Remember that, Zoya.” His eyes scared me. I threw the platter down and ran away from him, hiding my tears behind my hand. It wasn’t long before he was gone.

  All these scenes drifted in front of me as I sat in the Donne School library with my eyes pinched shut, carpet scratching against my thighs. At some point the other girls stopped reciting the poem, but I didn’t notice. There were images in front of me. People in the shadows. Someone with something urgent to say.

  “God, snap out of it.” It took me a moment to realize that Adeline was shaking my shoulder. “It’s no good if you don’t speak English. What was she saying?”

  “What?” I blinked, as bleary-eyed as if I’d just awoken from a deep sleep. “Was I talking?”

  “Oh my god, yes, it worked, but you were just saying, like, gobbledygook.” She rubbed her forehead. “How are we supposed to know what she told us?”

  “Who?”

  “The Gray Governess! The whole point of all this?” Cindy piped in now, looking just as cross as Adeline. “Is there something we’re supposed to do? So our grades are good? Did she tell us to eat dandelion leaves or something?” A few other girls turned to Cindy, curious, and she blushed. “I heard that somewhere, that she told people that.”

  Ti’ budet bolshe, I suddenly remembered. Ti’ budet luchshe. There had been a voice of some kind, after all.

  “I think she told me we’d get better?” I said. I didn’t know how to explain what that meant, or that the grammar of the words spoke only to me. You’ll be more, you’ll be greater—you in the singular, meaning not the rest of them. As the girls around me perked up, I sensed now was not the time to try to make them understand.

  “That seems kind of promising,” Olivia said. Then she peered at me. “Are you sure that’s actually what she told you though? You seemed kind of—I don’t know. Sick. Off.”

  “Off of what?”

  “It’s—Who cares. It’s an expression. But you didn’t look normal. Your eyes were all weird.”

  “Weren’t they closed?”

  “Oh my god, you didn’t know you opened your eyes?” Cindy looked horrified. “Ok, this is getting creepy. Somebody turn on the lights.”

  Marion started to cry, softly. “Jesus wouldn’t love this,” she said.

  “Oh hush,” said Adeline.

  The lights came on and the girls blew out their candles. No one seemed to be paying much attention, so I let the dirt fall through my fingers onto the ground, brushing my palms together to get them clean.

  “Uh, we’ll see you later,” Cindy said as she stood up to leave. “And, um, thanks, I guess.”

  “Sure,” I told her. I let the other girls disperse without me, not quite trusting myself to stand while they were watching. My legs were jelly: I had to use the stair rail to keep myself on my feet as I made my way back into the library proper. Back at my desk I was startled to find the Schopenhauer book upright, the philosopher’s dyspeptic face staring straight into my own. I knew that someone had probably just come by and turned it out of curiosity, but the sight made my throat tighten up. I returned the book to the woman at the front desk without finishing it, and simply skipped that assignment—a book report, which, curiously enough, our teacher never collected.

  Later, alone in my room while Margaret had dinner in town with friends, I took out the last few possessions I had from home, and held them up to my face, one by one. Looking, I suppose, for secret messages in the tattered threads I had left. My locket. My rotten gloves. A little box with a few seeds in it, which I’d collected from the Moscow lilacs which in springtime grew out of every window box and every crack in the city streets. I wondered if they’d still grow for me, here. I thought I might try to find out.

  12.

  In the weeks and months following our botched séance, my school assignments began to take on a more personal quality—the teachers all seeming to draw on some obscure archive of my disquiet that I assumed had been awakened in that basement room. For instance, in art class it was announced that we were going to make busts of our fathers from papier-mâché threaded over balloons on the theory that the round balloons would provide healthy apple cheeks and funny foreheads. And on the theory, too, that this would be fun for us, which everyone but me seemed to agree with. Quality time with dear old dad. Some of my classmates brought in photos to work from, passing them around so we could all laugh at the way that fathers are: so embarrassing, so sweet. A couple of girls asked me if I had any photos of home left, and I thought of the locket, safe in my room, which I almost never wore. “No,” I said, firmly. It seemed easier to tell them that everything was lost, when almost everything was. I claimed to not quite remember what he looked like.

  We wore smocks to protect our clothing, and spent an hour diligently pasting newspaper strips into smooth lines, trying to smear together the edges and adding layers for eyebrows, bent strips for the nose. I didn’t mind so much when the faces were anonymous, and could’ve been anyone—I just didn’t like the idea of calling yet another person up from beyond the grave. I figured I would make a brown-haired, frowning no-man, and everyone, acting on misguided pity, would tell me it looked a lot like me. I would get a decent grade. “You’re not my father,” I whispered to the blank, beige face in front of me as the other girls laughed and kissed their plaster papas on the cheek. In spite of myself, I thought of the real man, my papochka, the day he went missing. His hair messy and uncombed, and his clothing rumpled as he slouched out the door. We never saw him again. Counter-revolutionary ideas, my mother and I guessed. Pulled around a corner by rough hands. Leaving us to survive alone, because he wanted so badly to be good. Despite my efforts the balloon man began to look more and more like him, and I quietly wished it ill.

  The next class period we were supposed to pop the balloons beneath the dry papier-mâché and get on with painting them. But instead we found that half the balloons had deflated overnight, caving our fathers in from the top. It was—I was surprisingly shaken to see my secret curse enacted in such a gruesome manner, even if they were just art projects, toys. Worse still was the fact that my balloon was intact, while others around me suffered the stupid indignity I’d wished on myself. I saw one girl run her fingertips over the dent in her father-balloon, as if she could heal it by longing, or make some sort of emotional splint. She couldn’t, though, and I felt a wave of guilt.

  Can you cause a small tragedy just by wanting to? It seemed that way to me. That cause and effect were intertwined, impossible. And hadn’t Cindy and Adeline implied I was a witch? While we were cleaning up, the girls decided to stomp the balloons and get their revenge for being made to feel they’d failed; the semi-deflated ones wouldn’t burst, having already lost their tension, but the pristine ones exploded and split the papier-mâché back into scraps.

  The whole classroom was uproarious; people were shrieking. We ran around screaming, “Kaboom! Kaboom!” For a second I thought I might belong among these girls, as I had sometimes felt I did with the Young Pioneer scouts back in Moscow, just one in a great blur of bodies, one cell in a great hive mind. But the affection of the room cooled as they ran out of heads to smash. Of course I could’ve given them mine and prolonged the mood: one eager classmate even held out her hands. But now that I had the chance, I couldn’t seem to let it go.

  13.

  Let me get back to Vera, though, dear reader. Just for a little while, to cool my mind, move away from Cindy and Adeline and Marion, w
ho all got decent grades that year after all, though Marion ended up leaving anyway, for a Catholic school even farther upstate. Silly girls, with their simple lives and simpler troubles. I wish I could go with them and escape what came next for me, the dark deeds that stumbled across my path, from a kiss on the lips to a slap on the cheek. Not to mention the darker things, which are still coming, even now. But I can’t go with those girls, and so I’ll go to Vera instead: the one who’ll have me, however reluctantly.

  I doubt Vera had a dacha either, at least not the sort I dreamed about as a child. Too small, too peasant-inflected. And why would she need one, anyway, when her family lived on a country estate? As big as our whole apartment building, surrounded by forests, veined with creeks and rivers. The house bright yellow and white, like the palace at Peterhof. Probably the land was farmed, but Vera’s hands would never have touched soil. She would’ve had smart calfskin riding gloves and a white Lipizzaner, its mane in braids. She would’ve learned to make the horse dance from side to side within a ring, but preferred to trot through the countryside and listen to birdsong, watch the secret life beneath the trees. Perhaps once or twice she came upon two peasants fornicating in the bushes, and this would have been the first time she saw the white of a thigh, the curve of a buttock, the hasty motion of stolen passion.

  I doubt, too, that she told anyone about them. Not from pity or understanding, you see—she just wouldn’t have known any peasants well enough to name names.

  It soothes me to remember Vera as she must’ve been then, during the time that stretched out between our meeting as children and the moment when we were reunited as women and rivals; adults of sound body and mind. Thinking about her youth is restful for me in the same way as looking at a beautiful painting, where a few flicks of the brush come together to create a tableau so warm you want to crawl inside. She had so much that I did not. Silk stockings, piano lessons, an enormous harp in the family’s sitting room, set up by a window that stretched ceiling-high. A peaceful image. I imagine her running her fingertips over the strings, not quite playing, but not without a certain sensitivity to their rhythms. At one point, I know, the family brought in a young scholar to guide her reading—a pleasant fellow, if somewhat foppish. Flopping hair. (Lev told me about him once: never met the man himself, but always thought Vera had a crush, from the way she said his name.) Not quite aristocratic, but attuned to the elegance of mathematics, and selected by her father with help from his connections at the university. Her father: an ordinary man, not overbearing, attached to his things. So attached that later, in Paris, he’d die clutching a golden cuckoo clock that had belonged to his grandfather.

  Perhaps you’ll wonder how I can be sure about any of this. And I can’t be, of course: all I have are pieces, stitched together with wobbly thread. I know what little is in the public record, and what she told her husband, up to a point. Lyrical Lev, Lying Lev, Lev the Lothario, or so he liked to think. He used to give me bundles of their letters to riffle through, as a gesture of closeness, knowing that I liked his handwriting, and some of those contained traces of her past. Just jokes, recollections. The rest I have to make up. Not an act of intrusion, in my opinion, but just embellishment and embroidery: we talk about our own lives this way all the time, stretching the truth to fit our feelings. And Vera and I have become so tangled together that in order to tell you my whole story, I have to tell you hers, too. (A nerve-wracking thought: that I am not complete until she is. Well, then, let’s continue.)

  Vera and the scholar would’ve been given a schoolroom, I think, but Vera never did like being contained. They would’ve gone to the library for their lessons instead, to her father’s study, to the sitting room, on a divan beside the harp. Wherever her parents were not. The servants would bring in a samovar of hot tea, and dishes of honey and lemon and jam. Blue and white china cups. Vera’s lip on the rim of one, puckered out as she sipped. Her eyes peering sideways between dark lashes, and the scholar watching so intently that he spilled all over a rare collection of eighteenth-century anatomical prints which the two had been innocently perusing. Biology hour. His hand running along the inner, upper quadrant of her thigh. Explaining it to her as a surgeon might see it, while her cheeks flushed but her gaze remained steady. Her neck flushed and she let her mouth open. The thighs themselves flushing as they parted just a little wider, as her hand reached out and found something to hold.

  But wait.

  Let’s leave them alone for a moment, our young lovers. It’s the decent thing to do, and more than that, I’d like to walk around the room while their attention is otherwise occupied, removing Vera as the focal point in favor of the space at large. You see, if her life is like a painting, then the details are important: sometimes it’s only by studying the background that you understand a picture’s true meaning, its actual subject. (Not the pink cheeks of the child sitting for the portrait, but the skull on the shelf behind, the fly on the rotting fruit in the bowl, that tell you what the painter thought about youth and mortality.)

  I want to see, if only in my mind’s eye, her oak poster bed and the cherrywood tables that line the walls of her chamber. Her hairbrush, bristles chock with black strands because the maid hasn’t yet been in. Even the bedclothes, tossed. I want to smell her buttery sleep as I back out the door, so it becomes mine, just a little bit. Run my fingers along the Japanese vases lining the hallways, and see the automaton set behind glass that could, when wound, spin its cane and whistle a frightening tune. I want to sit deep in their sofas, all down-stuffed. Even if it makes me sneeze. To walk through the lemon and chicken-fat air of their kitchen, see the calf strung up for roasting. Take a bite out of a candle, leave tooth prints in the taper and flick wax onto the rug, knowing it’ll be vigorously beaten away. I want to see the servants scurry behind secret doors, order the gardeners to stand by height and by age and by favorite rose. Hellebore here, there gallica.

  Oh, but they’re finished now. She and he. So young, their love is instantaneous. It’s over in a second, and it lasts forever. He’ll go back to Leningrad, and she’ll be given a lady instructor. An older lady, compared to the girl. Perhaps thirty, thirty-two. Hair of dun. Glasses perched. Only the memory of Vera’s young scholar remaining, and the hope of meeting again.

  14.

  But they won’t. Sorry, Vera.

  Lev

  19 June

  Airmail via Paris

  My Vera. My Verenka. You aren’t cross with me, are you? I don’t think I could bear it. After all, before I left you pestered me to tell you about the women from my past, because of those beastly rumors, I suppose. And I gave in only because I wanted to soothe you after that series of fits you threw—your version of a fit. A pout. This has been a long time to go without seeing your face or getting a letter, even if I am en route. A long stretch without at least the tender animals of your handwriting creeping out across the page in front of me. Do you know I used to hold every one of your letters up to my face, so the words could caress my skin? I’m imagining it now. How I’d breathe them in, the perfect soliloquies of your qs and ss, the hot hint of the h, the burning uproar of the ж. And did you know your handwriting is identical in every language? That’s not true for everyone. It takes real strength of character.

  The scent changes, though, as you hop between tongues. I’m not sure how you achieve the effect, but you can trust me. I am fluent in you. Your Russian is full of pepper and thyme, all the old world and the new—there’s a bit of whisky in it, too, an undernote which I appreciate. It’s the way you smell on a hot day. After a walk, picking a piece of hair off your forehead, leaning down to pull a bit of grass from your shoe. Grasshoppers flicking by, pinging off the nearby stones and kicking up dust so it sticks to your skin. Intoxicating, of course. Breathy. Sun-bitter. You might think it would all be gun smoke and snow, but no. It’s not the country. It’s you, in the country.

  Your French begins with mineral water and ends with a thin slice of apple. It’s simpler: starvation diet.
The middle is miles of unsmoked tobacco and piles of thin paper to roll it in, with sticky ends. But you’ll be curious about the English. You’ve never liked the way you sounded in America, complained that people thought they knew you just by the way your voice hollowed out over certain vowels. You moaned that your vocabulary took on a martial edge, and now you’ll want to know: on the page, is there any softening? And I say: of a sort. But I doubt it’ll endear you to hear that your American letters are thick with the scent of asphalt melting in the sun. Just pliable, giving under the heel. Bitumen, hydrochloride, diesel drippings. The road one great roasting pan. I wish I knew how you did it. Perhaps you have different pens, but I’ve examined the ink, and would swear it’s all identical.

  Come, Vera, have you smiled at all to learn how carefully I categorize you? Even a little? That’s my nightingale, my night-blooming flower.

  I hope you aren’t moping over poor doomed Dina. Such a minor creature to make such a great red stain over our lives. Don’t let her. Dina’s hair was dark, but not so dark as yours. Her skin was white, but yours is milk. Yours is clean teeth, and the tongue that licks them. You know this. The tongue my tongue, counting your incisors and bicuspids, counting your fingers and your toes. Poor Dina had a single candle in her hand, whereas you have ignited a thousand fatal fires with just the tip of your thumb. Judicious and useful. Les petites morts de Vera. I could recite them in front of bishops and have them declared holy, like the deaths of saints. This one in a moving car. This one leaning against the door frame. This one on a fainting couch, your father in the very next room, waiting to pour us glasses of gin. Whereas Dina had just one death, slow and dumb. Lying in her bed, as still as a virgin.