Invitation to a Bonfire

by Adrienne Celt

  Well, I shouldn’t say the revolution changed nothing. It took my parents, after all.

  That last semester as a Donne student I shook out the Moscow lilac seeds I’d saved and used my father’s method to sprout them, first soaking them and letting them rest in a wet towel before transplanting them into a window box. I had, at that point, a deep sense that no more good would ever come to me from the country I’d abandoned, and those lilacs were the first hint that maybe I was wrong. The first hint that maybe what I deserved would not be the same as what I got—that I might do better. By making some educated guesses and reading a few pamphlets suggested by the Donne School gardening staff, I managed to adjust the mineral content in the soil just enough for the seeds to germinate and bloom. There was a fair bit of superstition involved, too: thinking they might miss the smoggy Moscow air, I borrowed a cigarette from a girl named Charlotte down the hall, and sat in front of the open window blowing clouds of smoke onto the soil. When the first buds opened that April—in the morning, with muted light gracing the petals as if through heavy-handed stage direction—it softened something in me. There were, after all, a few things in life untouched by people and the things we did. A few things that happened if the conditions were right, no matter who you were. Seeds had their own systems. After that I took to researching horticulture in the library, alternately calling forth and smudging out my family with every turn of the page.

  At any rate, with a few weeks still to go before graduation, I had just unlocked my little brass mailbox and pulled out a handful of advertorial trash when one of the Donne School groundskeepers ran up to me. We’d always had a good rapport—I asked them questions about planting seasons and bulb hibernation, and they took pleasure in talking to a young woman who’d actually spent time in the dirt. They taught me things, a second education in seed varietals and local mulch tucked behind the lapel of my official degree. Most of the Donne girls acted as though the facilities crew didn’t exist; at least, not until those same girls had a clanking radiator or a mouse chewing through the walls near their bed. They walked the swept paths and commented on the comeliness of the flowers, all while ignoring the men in brown duck cloth who were weeding under the begonias. Sometimes they got their hands on a bottle of sherry and threw up on the carpeting, taking it for granted that the stain would be scrubbed clean by morning and never bothering to apologize.

  I wasn’t in the mood for a conversation. Not even with this particular groundskeeper, John O’Brien, who was especially kind and always took an interest. What are you planning to do next? I knew he’d ask, and the harrowing silence which would follow that question was more than I could bear. I honestly thought about pretending not to know him, or else hitting him in the face and running out of the room. Throwing the few clothes I had into a bag and making my way to the bus station, scraping together my last few dollars for a ticket to anywhere. For weeks I’d been agonizing over which of my paltry possessions I could carry with me on my back when I left and which I’d have to part with. Now I sparkled with clarity: a couple of sweaters, a week’s worth of socks. The skirt I was wearing and perhaps a pair of pants. What else could a girl need?

  “Zo! Zoe!” John, as always, was happy to see me—and as always, mispronounced my name. He never quite wrapped his head around Zoya, though it is, to me, more obviously mellifluous than the nasal Zo-ee most Americans insist on. I gave up on Zoya Ivanovna Andropova early; here, I was just Zoe Andropov. Sometimes Zo. “I was looking for you,” John puffed. Apparently he’d been running around campus; his face was pink. “I just found out, and I knew I had to tell you right away.”

  “Tell me—what?” I crumpled newsprint between my fingers. He seemed enthusiastic, but what was there to get excited for? Had the fellows put together a collection and bought me a balloon? Americans loved useless presents, I’d noticed. Rewards from bubblegum machines, wooden trinkets.

  “There’s an opening,” John beamed. “Right up your alley.”

  “My alley?”

  “Your—I don’t know—area of expertise?”

  I had trouble with idioms, but even more so with the idea I might be an expert in anything. “You must be mistaken.”

  “No, honey, that I am not.” He puffed again, put his hands on his knees, delighted or perhaps on death’s door. A redhead, his skin was almost translucent, and veritably boiled under any provocation. “They’re building a greenhouse.” He gestured to the rear of the building. “Behind the science hall. Your little green thumb. Gonna be perfect.”

  “I could—” I hesitated. “Work there?” He nodded. “Where would I live?”

  “Probably let you keep campus housing until you save up for a place of your own.” John stood up straight at last, expelling a great gush of air. “We’re all rooting for you, sweetie pie.”

  “You are?” My eyes filled up with tears, and I leaned back against the wall of locked boxes. A weight off my shoulders, but still my knees were jelly. They knew, after all. They knew, already. And here I’d been desperate to escape John’s high expectations.

  After I recovered myself we hurried over to the facilities office; there had been some argument about who was in charge of the greenhouse project, and whether the hiring should fall under the domain of groundskeeping or the biological sciences. But as it turned out, both sides of that coin were keen on my potential, and I was hired with the title of Manager and Caretaker of Hothouse Plants. Following a provisional year, I could be offered a long-term contract, and though I would not be allowed to remain in the room I’d shared with Margaret, a small single would be made available for me until I could secure my own accommodations. In addition to maintaining a selection of fruits and vegetables for the cafeteria and observing student projects (my presence being a failsafe against those girls who slept through their watering or weeding sessions, and those too prim for fertilizer), my purview would include curating a display of exotic flora—a perfect showpiece for the school when anxious parents came to visit. What could be more soothing than warm, green stems bending overhead? And what more appealing than the waxy pink leaves of Stonecrop firecrackers and shock-yellow stamens of Dutch twink daffodils bursting with life while snow gathered in drifts beyond the windows?

  And of course, a girl in an apron and dirty dungarees, walking throughout with her hair pinned back, clutching a spray bottle. Her face pink with intelligence and care. Tending something vulnerable and helping it grow to its best advantage.

  18.

  But where was Vera in all this? Parallel. Elsewhere.

  Soon after her maiden tutoress arrived she was whisked off to Paris to live in her father’s wretched pied-à-terre. On the way there was a masquerade ball in Leningrad (Leningrad! she must’ve thought), because even her escapes were plush, whether or not she admitted it. She wore a black gown à la Madame X, and a black silk mask tied on with a ribbon. Her mouth turned down as she walked from room to room and realized her young tutor was not there. Could not possibly have been there, amidst the champagne and the desperation of the old guard, a few wearing tuxedos that were feathering and fraying at the seams. Vera stood by a little table, one weighted down by a tall potted plant. An aloe all the way from Arizona, with sharp points and rigid leaves on which the staff had secured candles, using epoxy. (My opinion as an expert: not an advisable approach if you have an eye to the plant’s longevity.)

  She was thinking of poetry. Dark and spleen-filled stuff, apropos her new situation, fueled by the glass of wine in her hand. A few men offered dances—older men, friends of her father’s—and she refused, in no mood to please her cher papa. Behind her, a balcony. Below that, the Moika. Dark water shimmering with applied light, and in her fit of teen pique she let herself think All is vanity, before mentally slapping her own wrist for adopting such a quotidian sentiment with such real feeling.

  Her wrist, which—suddenly there were fingers there. Not the sturdy hands of her once-beloved, but long, elegant digits smudged artfully with ink. She looked up, glad for th
e mask, because she hadn’t yet decided on an expression.

  Though she would, soon enough.

  Lev

  22 June 1931

  Airmail via [Redacted]

  Dearest Vera. Grandest and most terrible Vera. I know you’re upset—shall we be very American and even say peeved?—to be left alone in that drafty Craftsman bungalow while I skulk around the border trying to persuade some young patrolman to sneak me across into the country we left behind. I know you disapprove of my entire project, from its conception to its most probable bitter end: a waste of money, a waste of talent, a waste of time. Not to mention the danger to my person, though I think this is the only part of the affair that might thrill you a little, your studious pyatnik turned buccaneer. Black-bearded and ready for anything, buckle or swash. I’ve even bought a gun, Vera. It’s tucked in my waistband, a gleaming black pistol. I made the seller give me lessons.

  I know you think it’s beneath me, darling, but I need that manuscript if I’m to go on as a writer. As a man. It was my first: proof I can finish something once begun. You’ll say that’s silly, because it’s first, not only, unless indeed you mean only still unpublished, only repudiated and rejected, only unloved. You’ll say that in any case I won’t possibly find it: a stack of yellow pages tied together with a bit of twine, which I buried in an old tin box outside the last trolley station on the outskirts of Leningrad. Maybe so, my dear one. Maybe so. But the spirit of the whole endeavor—my entire raison, my vision and scope—lies in those pages, and it would be a violation of the artistic compact not to try and retrieve them from their early grave. Anyway, I told my publisher, and you know he’s quite enthusiastic.

  In the meantime it pains me to picture you bumping around alone in that house. (Or, let’s be honest, sitting behind your typewriter catching up on correspondence. Making a perfect cup of tea, stirring three times counterclockwise. I’m not so foolish as to imagine my absence has entirely undone you or your routines.) And of course my own incompetence prolongs our separation; I don’t have your talent for knowing which hands to shake, which guards to bribe with cash and which to slip bottles of vodka, cognac, or rum. If you were here, the pages would already be a fait accompli, but instead I’ve now wasted a week with my bumbling attempts at travel incognito. Not that I’m bitter, no. The unseasonal wind claws at my face beneath this thin balaclava, and you sit solo, tucked in that ugly wingback chair by the window. No doubt disapproving of me doubly: abandoner, and inept. And here I’ve been writing to you about my old love affairs. What rot, in this besotted brain.

  Let me do better, Vera. Let me tell you the story of us, how the past echoes the future, how our separations always end with reconciliation, reconnection, reconnoiter, coitus. For example: you in Paris, me still degrading in Leningrad. Do you know how I obsessed over you then? Your nose, straight and slender. Your hair, which melted on my tongue like tar.

  I couldn’t stand imagining you crouched in that stinking room in the fourteenth, with your father smoking on the balcony, head lost behind the ambient cloud. Your hips zipped into last season’s skirt, fingertips weary with the cold Paris spring as you set type. None of the essays worth the effort. Don’t argue, it’s true. You read them too. You cranked the printing press that duplicated them duplicated them duplicated them as that dreadful nursemaid sat knitting in the kitchen. What did she teach you, Vera? Bravery? Unconquerable hope? At least I hope she showed you how to mix a proper martini or choose the quality bottle of red from an otherwise weak cellar, but I suppose she was a teetotaler too. Did she know history? Botany? Interdimensional geometry? Where to find the best café au lait?

  (And yes, now I’m being sour to remove the sting of my own betrayal, made clear by the tart kiss you placed on my cheek instead of my lips as I walked out the door. At least your préceptrice stayed by your side, Vera. She had that much on me.)

  Your letters from that time told me so little about your days that I was forced into furious strolls along the canals, inventing villains for you to subvert or be perverted by; enemy soldiers behind your lines. I hope you forgave my petty jealousies, darling, then as now. The sad sketch artists I invaded you with, the bathos of the bad poetry I serenaded you with. I was so thwarted. My heart one grand thrombosis. Lev, minus levity. Lev, mal.

  It wasn’t just your body I missed. (Though I don’t want to mislead you, my youthful mind was far from pure. You’ve always been my poison tincture, turning the most solemn occasion to lust and stardust.) It was the whole of you, how you echolocate the walls of every room and press them ever outward, expanding the space. How you turn yourself into a pinpoint against the enormity, the only thing worth looking at in the whole wide world. Everything grows in your presence, Vera. Everything grows. (And yes, a black little pun still buried there, but I’ll pretend you didn’t see it. Some false solemnity, the better to corrupt you from upon our inevitable reunion.)

  The day we met ruined me, you see. Made me. You won’t begrudge me the reliving of it now, all the better to pepper my mind with flashes of your face: false idols relayed to the real.

  It was a grim soiree. I’ll set the scene: some seven years ago, one Lev Pavlovich, his face sallowed by hunger, which is endemic in the room but admitted by none. Seen as a class weakness. The party nonetheless thick with smuggled alcohol and pickled quail’s eggs, a hundred days’ rations traded up for a single ostentatious display. A sea of suits, unbespoken by time and tragedy. A sheen of masks, to pretend gaiety. Whispers of experiments performed by enemy combatants: kerosene secreted into the veins of all the comely Russian dolls, hoping to make them into ticking-tocking walking time bombs. Or maybe these rumors are mixed up with past indecencies; no one can tell heartless exaggeration from reality anymore. A man breaks down in the corner and says that the homeland is lost to them, they will never return once they pass the borders, their memories will be ghosts. They are already ghosts. All the room’s inhabitants. Partygoers shift nervously, and change the topic to something brighter.

  A curfew is in effect; electricity verboten after eight P.M., so the room is reduced to candlelight, which has an admittedly charming effect. Warmth implied by the glimmer and flicker. You know how I feel about candles, Vera. Even then, you felt it too: I know, because we have the same heart.

  But still. I was bored and glum. There wasn’t a single gentleman present who was fit to converse with, and every Leningrad lady was avoiding me after an unfortunate botched engagement. (Unfortunate for Lev, then. Not for this Lev. Our Lev. Now we can look back on the flagrante delicto in which he was caught with a certain affection that borders on sympathetic arousal. The girl was no match for you, but she was useful in her way.) The waiters circulated mostly wine, but I’d come upon a bottle of scotch stashed, or perhaps simply forgotten, behind a mirror in the marble hall.

  Enter here: the darling imp. Her fingers light on the stem of her glass, tongue reaching out to lips to catch an errant drop. You stood by that grotesque cactus, soft body hitched and stitched into a defiant geometry. Behind you, the balcony. Below that, the Moika. How many times have I repeated this image to myself, wondered what you were thinking? Were you drawing a map of escape in your mind? Tracing lines in the carpets that hung for insulation on the walls? Had you spotted a cockroach and watched it climb into the pocket of an ex-counselor to the tsar? You wouldn’t tell me. Still haven’t. Your imagination is yet a locked box. Of course I didn’t tell you, then, how you dragged the shadow of Dina behind you, catching my eye with her lost silhouette but keeping it with your impudent own. It seemed, after all, unimportant. As I approached you I understood anew the role that Dina had played in my life: not a tragedy, but a guide. Not perfection, but a mark of my own poor imagination, which saw in her the ur.

  I picked up your wrist and turned it over, watching the sweet blood run beneath your skin. You looked at me, quizzical. Mouth turned down. Hair squeezed by the black velvet ribbon that secured your requisite disguise. And then you smiled.

  God Save t
he Motherless Child?

  A look back at the so-called “orphan boat”

  From the New York Register, Opinion Page, May 1928

  NEW YORK, NY. Most readers will remember the daring rescue undertaken by the Committee on Futurity (commonly referred to as “The Furies”) some three years ago, when a group of orphaned Soviet children were secreted onto a passenger steamer in the hopes of bringing them to our country and offering them the best of American values. Details of the children’s liberation were popular news at the time, particularly the unlikely series of tactics supposedly employed by the Furies, which included subterfuge, scout troops, coded newspaper articles, special whistles and hand signs, and the implausibly named “Cat Burglar Escape.” But now, with the arrival of the “orphan boat” at Ellis Island safely in the past, what do we really know about the children themselves and their plans for our nation? Attempts by this newspaper to track down and interview any of the orphans were firmly stonewalled by Fury spokesman Roberts and his team.

  The notion that these children may not be innocent—that they may, in fact, have been part of a plot to infiltrate our home life with spies—first emerged along with the news that the orphans were not from German and Polish ghettos as assumed, but instead from Soviet orphanages all around the USSR. Suspicions only increased during the ship’s two-week quarantine in harbor, which many hypothesized was due not to flu (as the Furies reported) but instead to the heightened political tension around the ship’s passengers. During this period, lights were frequently seen on the boat at night, and sometimes figures were spotted moving around the dock. Sources close to the Register insisted that occasionally the lights would “change color” or “move funny” in the dark, but these reports were never substantiated.