by Sigrid Nunez
But I have never known toughness or violence from Vadim. A cliché: It is often the violent men who turn out to be the gentlest in bed. Still, it was the last thing I would have expected of him: this voluptuous tenderness. Another question: If it was only pleasure, why did we go about it as if it were the gravest business on earth? It wasn’t the same for him, though. He never went as far, he was never as naked as I. It seemed to me that with him there remained always one last integument—thin, but intact. At that moment of greatest exposure, when you feel as if not only your clothes but your very skin had been peeled away, your greatest fear is that the other—the one responsible, the one who has brought you to this point—will look away. Vadim did not look away. Instead he looked harder than ever at me. That’s when I saw that he pitied me.
“But don’t you ever feel, well, you know—degraded? Disgusted with yourself?”
No. Never that.
“But what good can it come to? Even if he were free. What are you going to do, marry a cabbie?”
The assumption that I, that we all are better than Vadim, is not to be questioned.
“And don’t forget, he isn’t free. What about his wife? Think of what he’s doing to her, and what you’re doing to her. Women shouldn’t cheat on each other like that.”
“Not fair, not fair.” (Several voices at once.) “It’s the old double standard. Holding women to a higher moral code.” “Not fair.” “The same old bullshit.”
There are days when I cannot get Olga off my mind. I know that Vadim has always been unfaithful to her, and that she has always suffered from this. But it seems to me that you had only to spend two minutes with Vadim to know what kind of man he was. You had only to look into those eyes to know that he would never be faithful to any woman. Hadn’t Olga realized this too? She must have been full of love once upon a time, Olga. Full of hope.
Clutching her bleached blond hair in her fists, backing away, screaming.
(“My wife say that my penis is too small. Tell me: This is true?”)
“Hey, are you listening? We’re talking to you. We’re afraid for you. The guy is a junkie. A criminal. With a gun.”
“How bad does he have to be? What does he have to do to make you come to your senses?”
“Why do they let people like that into the country anyway? Don’t we have enough criminals?”
“He’s bound to get into trouble again. Men like that don’t change.”
Vadim says that he already has changed. “I am not young anymore. I don’t look for trouble.” Yes, he still likes to get high now and then, it helps him relax, but he doesn’t want to get addicted again, and he is not going to. He believes that if he works hard enough and saves enough money, he will be able “to get something for myself in this country.” He says: “I promise you, I am not going to drive taxi for rest of my life.” He says: “I want to work with my head.” But what if things don’t happen fast enough? Will he have the strength to keep struggling, or will he be overwhelmed? That would be an old story, wouldn’t it: frustration—backsliding—drugs—crime. And if he gets caught, and if he’s arrested? No KGB man is going to help him out here. I don’t want to be around—
“Are you in love with him?”
No. I am not in love with Vadim. He holds some key, it is true. But it is not the key to my heart. He holds some answers for me—I can say this even without being able to say what the questions are. How can this be, when he knows nothing about me. I never talk about myself to him and he never asks questions. He is not curious about my life, about my background or my family or how I spend my days. He has no curiosity at all about me. After all, I am only a woman; facts about me can’t be very important. (Remember what used to be meant by a woman’s “vital statistics”?) But when he speaks I listen spellbound, I hang on every word, as if with the next will surely come that wisdom or knowledge about myself that I am convinced lies with him.
Everyone thinks that he’s got me conned, that he is a villain and I am his victim. If this is true, why is it that my feelings toward him are never aggrieved ones? Why, on the contrary, do I feel guilty toward Vadim?
I often think about Svetlana. I imagine her in that crowded apartment, in the kitchen that smells of cabbage and onions—that smell that rises from the pages of so many Russian books—doing her homework at the kitchen table. In the next room, her mother and father are fighting. Oh, the things they say to each other! She will never get used to it, no matter how often she hears it. For the hundredth time she swears to herself that she will never ever marry. Already at fifteen she looks like a woman, and she has her pick of boys, to her father’s anxiety. She knows her power and she will use it, she will have as many boys as she likes. But she will never marry.
Sometimes she hears her own name being screamed, hears her parents arguing about her, whether she is Russian or Jewish, his daughter or her daughter—and sometimes she gets up from the table and goes in to them and tells them they must stop, she cannot take any more. She who is so proud, who seldom cries, cannot hold back the tears as she pleads with them. She loves them both, and she is best friend to both of them. Confidant, go-between, peacemaker—she knows all these roles. Olga confides in Sveta about her marriage and counts on her daughter to intercede with Vadim in many things. And Olga has threatened Vadim: Leave me, and you’ll never see your daughter again. But Sveta is her father’s confidant too, the one to whom he pours out his heart, whom he has told all about me, trusting her not to repeat a word, and of course she does not. She would do anything to keep her parents together. She has promised her father that, no matter what happens, he will not lose her.
But it is only rarely that Sveta allows anything to interrupt her homework. She works hard at school and she knows what she is working toward: grades that will lead to a scholarship that will get her out of this place. If she must, she will stop her ears with her fingers. But sometimes she feels that she is only driving the curses and the screams deeper and deeper into her skull. Deep, they will echo for the rest of her life.
I could tell her.
These are the first cool clear days of autumn. Vadim and I are still seeing each other, the same way we have always seen each other. On days when he is “lucky”—that is, getting a lot of fares—he calls me from a phone booth in the street to ask if he can visit. If I am home, I always say yes. We always make love as soon as he arrives, and I always come. Later we talk. Sometimes I try to offer him something to eat, but he never accepts. He says he isn’t hungry, but I think maybe he doesn’t trust my cooking. My lack of domestic skills is a source of wonder and amusement to him. He cannot believe how messy he sometimes finds the apartment. I have to work, I tell him. I don’t have time to clean. “No,” he says. “You are lazy. Russian women work, cook, clean, and take care of children—all.” Russian women can do everything, and men (the proverb continues) can do the rest.
On unlucky days, when he has no time to spare, I sometimes meet him downstairs and walk or sit with him for a while, and we smoke and we talk. Sometimes when I come home from work I find him waiting in the cab outside my building. The night I said goodbye to him was one of those fall evenings that are so soft and fresh they could be evenings in spring. The sun has just gone down, and the sky is the same tender blush as a robin’s breast. The streets are crowded with people on their way home from work. My own workday was long and hard, and it shows. Vadim notices right away how tired I look, as I get in the front seat. We kiss. His is a greedy, taking kind of kiss that always makes me feel as if he were sucking out some of my soul. He is in a good mood as usual, though he is tired too, and he has a headache: I can see it in his eyes. He is drinking a soda. He is wearing jeans and the same black sweater he was wearing the first day I ever saw him, the same sweater and jeans he wore every day to class. Like all my students: same clothes, day in, day out. His leather jacket is on the front seat between us; that’s where he usually keeps the gun, under the jacket, but when I am in the cab he slips the gun under his seat.
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br /> I have aspirin in my bag and I offer him some, but he won’t take it. (A man must never complain to a woman that he is in pain, he once told me. Unchivalrous, I guess.) But you really should take some, I say. And we laugh, remembering an old exercise from class. “When you have a headache,” one student said, “you should call forth the doctor.”
“I must tell you what I saw today.” Vadim is always full of stories. He sees the most incredible sights from his cab. Eighth Avenue: a woman, dazed on drugs, facing oncoming cars with one foot propped on top of a fire hydrant, her skirt hiked up to her hips, and “without anything under: you could see—all.”
I teach him the word hooker. That is how our last conversation began. There were plenty of hookers in Odessa too, Vadim says, and sometimes he and Yuri would get in the car and go find one of them, and they would take her into the car, and she would have to satisfy them. He used those words: have to satisfy.
Some confusion here. Could hookers in Odessa be all that different from hookers in the rest of the world? “I don’t understand. What do you mean, have to?”
Vadim looks puzzled, as if he thought his meaning was obvious. “She have to because—because she need this corner. This is where she work, how she make money.”
“That’s just the point.” My voice comes out shrill. I feel a stirring at the roots of my hair. An abomination is looming. “Why didn’t you have to pay her?”
The look on Vadim’s face is familiar to me. He is afraid that it’s his English that is the problem here, that once again he has been unable to make himself understood. I have seen that anxious look of his a thousand times. When he speaks again, his voice sounds dim and fuzzy to me, like the voice on an ancient recording. “Because I”—muttering in Russian, searching for the word—“beat?”
What is he trying to say? He beat her? Because he did beat her? Because he would beat her? How much depends on an auxiliary. “You beat her.”
“No, no. I don’t beat her. I don’t have to beat, because she is not stupid, believe me. But she think I beat—oh, I am sorry. My English!”—gesturing deploringly at himself. “Do you understand?”
I nod my head yes and he grins, showing all his teeth. “You always could understand me.”
I have closed my eyes, I cannot see his face, but I know that his look is anxious again. His hand cups my cheek. “Beloved, you are pale.” He kisses me again and I close my eyes more tightly and think, Drowning must feel something like this.
He says, “You must go to rest now, and I to work.”
But I have gotten my breath back and I have one more question. “Vadim, those girls—women—the hookers. Didn’t they have any—protection?” Vadim looks baffled and I grope on: “Wasn’t there someone—usually there is someone—some man—who—”
“Ah!” His brow clears and he slaps his thigh, as if he finally saw why I have been so slow to grasp things. “Yes, of course,” he says. “You didn’t understand me right. I was their protection.”
He glances at his watch and swears in Russian. “My dear, I am sorry. You know I want to stay here with you forever, but I must go now, I must make money. Today I am very unlucky.”
A police car streaks past, its siren piercing the dusk. Vadim winces and touches his fingers to his temple. With a sheepish look he says, “I think maybe you are right, my dear. Give me please this aspirin.”
I take the bottle from my bag and shake out two tablets. I hold them out to him and rapidly swallow and blink back tears as he bows his large head over my hand and eats from my palm. He washes the aspirin down with the last of the soda he has been drinking and tosses the can out the window. Clankety-clank-clank-clank. In that hollow, tinny sound I hear the rhythms of a snickering laugh.
I get out of the cab and Vadim covers the half-block to the traffic light in a breath, scattering jaywalkers with blasts of his horn.
The soda can has rolled under a parked car. I have to go down on my knees to get at it. Stopped at the light up ahead, Vadim must be able to see me in his mirror. I imagine how I must look to him; I imagine him grinning and shaking his head. The light changes then and he takes off. I stand there holding the empty can and I watch him speed away, speeding out of my life without even knowing it—as he never really knew anything about me.
That night as I was crying in bed, I imagined that he—who else but he?—was there to comfort me. “It is life in Odessa.” It is life everywhere.
He let me go quietly, accepting my story that I had to leave town for a couple of weeks and that I would call him when I got back. And when I never called he did not pursue me. “Is better this way,” I heard him saying to himself. (As if he talked to himself in broken English.)
How bad did he have to be? What did he have to do? I never told anyone the end of this story.
One day, months later, something went wrong with my answering machine, which played back old messages I thought had long been erased. “I know what means actually now!”
And for a long time after, whenever I was in the street, I would look so hard and searchingly at passing cabs that often a driver would slow down and stop for me, thinking I was a fare.
They say the thing most feared always happens, but I told myself it was too unlikely, it never would, not in a hundred years. But only two years passed before it did.
Bad weather, a late day at work, friends waiting in a bar—I stepped into the street and raised my arm.
He came at me so fast, shooting diagonally across Sixth Avenue to the din of brakes and horns, that I jumped back onto the curb.
“Hello, my teacher!”
When I got in the front seat, expressing my astonishment, he replied that there was really no cause for astonishment: “I am in this neighborhood many times a day.”
He looked good. He had put on weight. Less thin, he looked healthier, and he had a decent haircut.
A hint of umbrage as I buckled my seat belt. “You think I don’t know how to drive?”
During the ride uptown, he never stopped smoking or talking. He had moved to the new apartment that he had wanted. He had borrowed the money to buy the lease from his wife’s brother, and he had already paid much of it back. “If you could see where I lived before,” he said, “and if you could see where I live now, you would know that I am really doing all right for myself.” Only he and his wife and daughter had moved to the new apartment. He was especially pleased about that.
He was working six days a week now, earning a little over two hundred dollars a day. After paying for gas and seventy-five dollars to the owner of the cab, he had about a hundred dollars left for himself. His wife was working too, taking care of a sick old man a few mornings a week for six dollars an hour. Things between him and Olga were just the same. “She will never change,” he says. But he is smiling as he says it. (Like a dog on hay, not on harvest, I have learned the saying goes. A dog in the manger.)
I want to know about his daughter.
“She will go to NYU. This is a very good university.” (Perhaps I had never heard of it.) “She says now she wants to be a lawyer, but she is still young. We will see. And she has a boyfriend, a very nice boy—American.” He shrugs. “But she is not really serious about boys now, my daughter. She thinks only about school. Russian girls marry young and have children right away. When I first came here I thought Americans were crazy because they didn’t do the same. But now I see it is much better the American way. I am glad for my daughter. She will be happier.
“I like this boyfriend, but before him she had another boyfriend, and I didn’t like him. He was a very bad person. I threw him out of the apartment one time. I kicked him all the way down the stairs. And that was something, believe me, because, you see, I live on the seventeenth floor.” (Teeth.) “But my daughter is doing very well. And her English!” He rolls his eyes admiringly and we go through a red light. I myself have been admiring how, though his accent is as thick as I remembered it, Vadim has yet to make any mistakes.
I want to know about drugs
. Is he still shooting up? He looks almost surprised at the question. “I don’t do it anymore—not for a long time now. I am too old for this, and besides, it is very dangerous here. I don’t trust the drugs they sell here. I don’t trust black people. And you have to worry about AIDS. What a country. We don’t have AIDS in Russia,” he misinforms me. I start to tell him, but he insists: “In Odessa I never heard of this thing.” Another red light.
We have almost reached my destination when he asks, “And what about you, my dear? I thought about you a lot all this time.”
In two years much in my life has changed. I don’t live in the same apartment, I don’t have the same job, and I have a new (American) boyfriend. But here we are, my friends are waiting, and I know that Vadim is not really interested in any of this. The only thing I mention is that I am going to China.
“China?” He seems unimpressed. “Why do you want to go there?”
I tell him that I have taken a job. I will be teaching English in Shanghai. “I have friends who’ve done it. They say it’s hard but fascinating.”
Vadim looks doubtful. “Maybe. But I don’t like Chinese people.”
I never told him. He never asked. I tell him now.
He has stopped the cab, and we are sitting turned toward each other. I had noticed right away when I got in the cab that there was no jacket on the front seat. I don’t know where the gun is, but I am aware that for the entire ride I have sat as if it were lying right there between us.
“Really?” says Vadim, but he doesn’t look very surprised. That was one of the things about Vadim: Nothing in life appeared to surprise him.
“I didn’t know,” he says. “I didn’t see it.” He cocks his head and narrows his eyes, trying to see it now. “And mother?” When I tell him he nods and says, “When two races marry, the daughter will be pretty. It is the same with my girl. But that is the only good thing about this kind of marriage, believe me.”