by Alon Preiss
He put one hand on her shoulder, brushed the other gently through her hair. “I’ve been traveling, like you,” he said. “A long way. I haven’t been at my house in the forest. The lanterns, I suppose, have died out.” She stared into his gentle eyes, listened to his soft voice in her head. “A long time ago,” Joren said, “I was a young man, and I married a young woman. I had to travel half a day through the woods that ran up the side of a mountain. At the top, there was a pristine white cathedral surrounded by glacial ice that melted a little in the summer; streams would run out of the ice on both side of the cathedral, flowers blooming in their path. We were married in that cathedral, with the sun drifting through the mist and the stained-glass windows, and my bride laughing, her small musical laugh echoing through the sanctuary, bouncing off the ancient stones. We traveled for a day to reach the local port where a ship waited to take us to other lands. A little past mid-day we dismounted by a mountain stream which fed a small meadow. I looked up and saw my bride standing in a clearing, smiling, surrounded by wild-flowers, purple, blue and red, in her white gown. Just standing and smiling. The clouds cleared a bit, and a ray of sunlight shined down on my bride.” He paused, choosing his words carefully. “So now, today, I may spend my time longing to see her again, but I never need to wonder where she is. If I find that meadow again, on the same sort of day, when the same flowers are in bloom, I know that she will be there.”
That reminded Susan of a story, though she wasn’t sure why, but she started to tell the story, and halfway into it, she realized why she was telling it, and she knew that Joren understood, too.
One morning, walking in midtown Manhattan, Susan saw a couple crossing the street. It was a rainy winter day, and there was slush in the street, so they were being very careful of where they walked. But she mostly remembered the way they dressed, like photographs she had seen of people from the late 19th century: the man was dressed in a suit with a vest, but with tails, and a rather large top hat, and the woman wore a dress that gave her a regal bearing. Susan would have assumed that they were going to a costume party, or some other event filled with artifice, except for two telling points: they lacked any air of self-consciousness, such as one might have expected from two wearing such outfits, and they were carrying suitcases, as though they were traveling that day. Also, she noted, it was eleven in the morning, an odd time for a party. And no one was staring at them.
“You know what I mean?” she asked Joren. “Do you see why I told you that story?”
Joren nodded. “The question isn’t who they were. We know who they were – or at least we know who they weren’t. The question instead is: Why did you see them? Maybe as you walked up the street,” he mused, “the wind hit you just the way the wind hit a woman in 1892 at that very spot, and when you looked up you saw what she had seen. Who were they to you? Maybe later that day, the man slammed his fist on a table, causing a little ripple of air currents, which three years later formed a little warm breeze in Eastern Europe, which blew imperceptibly on the nape of your great-grandfather’s neck, giving him a little warm romantic tug, convincing him to marry your great-grandmother.”
He tapped her knee. She liked the familiarity that suggested.
“So these feelings are always with us, in the breeze, or the people who jostle us in the street.”
She moved closer to him, put her lips to his ear. “I think you’re a ghost,” she said. “With your white hair and your white skin. I think you’re a ghost who died a long time ago.” She lay back on her bed and shut her eyes. “Or you’re an angel,” she said. “An angel with great white wings.”
His lips brushed her cheek.
She woke up once during the night, saw Joren standing by the door, watching. When she awoke at dawn he was gone.
She thought, somehow that Joren was now protecting her, that his warm, only slightly sexual love would protect her from bad thoughts and pointless yearnings. But just two weeks later, in her house in San Francisco, she would dream about Joe, Joe driving a big car, smoking a huge cigar. The car going in and out of tunnels. At one point, stopping at a train crossing, and the train whooshing by: long, black and powerful, covered with hair. She would wake up to the noise of cars on the street below and think: I wonder what that really meant.
Joe’s brother Emmett returned home from interviewing a famous European director for The Los Angeles Times to find an astonishing message. On the floor, rolled into a little tube, was a fax from Moscow. Irina was still alive, it said. She had gone to the United States to raise money with Rostislavsky for their next international co-production, and she had never returned. But her mother knew she was alive. Relying partially on friends who had mafia sources who had been keeping an eye on Irina, she had learned that her daughter was working at a little store in Manhattan called The Equinox. Peter wrote that her mother was eager to know someone in America who could find her daughter, who had once been a good girl before she’d fallen in with show-folk and mobsters. The old woman had nearly burst into tears. The Equinox was on 8th Street, on the other side of the park, near the projects on Avenue D. Emmett picked up the phone and called Pan Am.
A terrible headache.
Practically no customers that day, and Irina had a terrible headache. Often, there would be very few customers. But then one day, someone would come in and buy a big ticket item, like a bureau or desk that Ivan had restored, and then Ivan would go out to dinner, all by himself, to celebrate. But today there were practically no customers at all. Irina read a little copy of The Prophet that Ivan had put up for sale many years ago. It was so stupid, it outraged her so much with its stupidity, that she longed to own it. Irina slipped it into her bag. It made no sense – to steal something from a store where she lived and where she spent almost all of her time. She figured she would put it in Linus’s apartment and read it when she was over there.
She and Ivan were not the same sort of person; his passion and belief in moral absolutes conflicted with her world-weary ambivalence. It seemed incongruous, the naive, righteously political old man, and the young girl who knew the world, had seen the bodies, who knew there were no solutions. Still, they initially managed to maintain an uneasy equilibrium. Right from the start, Ivan had kept a careful distance, and he never made a pass at her, never. Irina was first flattered by this. Ivan asked her for her ideas, never wanted to sleep with her. But then she realized that he never wanted to sleep with anyone. He slept in the back room every night. He never brought anyone home with him, no boys, no girls, not even hookers. So then Irina stopped being flattered. If he didn’t want to sleep with anyone, it was not surprising that he didn’t want to sleep with her. Then she became frightened. What did he do, if he slept with no one? Perhaps he killed people. Then she thought: perhaps he shoots heroin. Or perhaps he pays for prostitutes in the alley, embarrassed to be seen with one in front of Irina.
The days turned into weeks.
She had not understood how little her money would buy. She ate a roll for breakfast and a roll for lunch. At dinner she would allow herself a little noodle soup from the Chinese take-out place a block to the West, just across the street. The rest of her money would pay for whatever else she needed – toothpaste, soap, aspirin. Ivan offered her nothing at all, and she was afraid to ask. She still had only four days worth of clothing, what she had packed for her big trip to America with the Bear. In the evening, sometimes, Ivan’s friends would gather in the shop, and Ivan would break out a bottle of wine. His friend Stanley would play the guitar and sing little leftist songs; other graying winos and potheads would applaud. At first, Ivan eagerly invited Irina to join them, but she hated being around old men; they scared her, even though their manner was friendly. Her answers to all of their questions were filled with ambiguity and bitterness. Eventually, their invitations grew to seem halfhearted. So she would spend those moments wandering through the streets.
Even after dark, she felt safer alone by herself on the litter-strewn East Village sidewalks. Sometimes she
would see a figure, stark against the night sky, and she would walk the other way. Sometimes she would run away, or hide in a doorway until the coast was clear. She felt fearless when she left the store, unafraid of death. But in the end, she would always save herself.
One night she wandered along 8th street until she reached the park. She had not been on the other side of the park in weeks, and she was suddenly seized with a bolt of bravery. Before she had traveled across the globe, she had imagined that all of America looked like 42nd Street at night, lit up, filled with energy, laughter, money. This was a fantasy she still relished.
She could afford neither a taxi nor a bus. 10th Street, to the North, would be more dangerous than walking through the park. She would be an obvious target there, on the street, and anyone could leap from an abandoned building, drag her inside, where others sat waiting .... So she plunged into the darkness, scurried through the bushes. The undergrowth occasionally cleared and Irina could see dark figures in the moonlight. Once, uncomfortably close, Irina spotted a couple rolling about in the grass, screwing in an open clearing. Under a tree, she saw a man drinking. She could see two men sitting on a park bench. They were huddled close together, and it looked as though one of the men was putting a needle in his arm, like the Russian junkies who’d returned from the Afghan war half-dead and ghoulish.
She came out on the other side of the park, unharmed, and wandered along 8th Street. Everything grew more bustling as she walked; restaurants from all over the world, merchants selling books on the street, little stores with all sorts of jewelry. It reminded her of the tolkuchki, peddlers’ street markets in Lubyanskaya Square and all over Moscow, filled with the poor facing utter destitution and hurriedly selling off all their worldly possessions. Depressing on second thought, but at least filled with a certain hope. And she had been one of the buyers, not the destitute sellers, which certainly affected her memory of the entire tableau. Back in Russia, even when it was the USSR, her world had been so much more alive.
“I hired you,” Ivan complained one evening, his words slurring into each other, “to give the store an international flavor, not to put up with this silence and moodiness.”
“I am silent,” she said. “I am moody. That is the state of today’s Russian soul. I have given your store an authentic international flavor.”
“You are taking advantage of my generosity, Irina.”
“I wonder what Lenin would have thought of this generosity,” she mused. “Hiring an illegal alien at wages far below minimum, not sharing the profits, always pulling rank.”
“I do what I can,” he said, and she replied, “Communists preach equality but buy themselves fancy food on the broken backs of the workers,” and Ivan called her a reactionary. While that day ended badly, the next morning the sober Ivan pretended that everything was forgotten. Russians are more emotional, Irina thought, and she supposed that was a good thing. Going to sleep silently angry, then waking the next day pretending nothing had gone wrong – that was not a normal way to behave.
For a while, Linus ignored her and no longer came into the store. She knew that he didn’t hate her; she could tell from his longing looks as he passed the store on his way to the apartment. He knew that he had bored her. He imagined himself jaded and witty, but he was neither: he was full of life, stupid and young. Sometimes in the morning when she went across the street to buy a roll, she would see him coming out of the apartment. He would look sad at having lost her attention.
So finally, one day, she saw him pass, and she motioned for him to come into the store.
“I haven’t seen you for a while!” she said. “Have you been avoiding me? Where are you always going to and coming back from?”
“I go out,” Linus said. “I go out and hang out. It’s getting boring, sometimes.”
“I have something that I want to show you,” she said. “Do you have a little time?”
“All the time in the world,” he said.
“Do you still have any money?”
“Not much,” Linus said, “but I still have some credit. Why?”
She looked at her watch. “It’s just ten minutes to closing time. I’ll be up in your apartment, OK?”
Back up at his apartment, with the oversized television monitor. Now the room looked more lived in, sadder. He was no artist, and he was tiring of this exile; ultimately, he would make peace with his family and return to school, become a professional, like the swarms of American businessmen who began to clog Moscow with the ascension of Gorbachev. She knew it, and he was probably beginning to realize it as well.
“I’m going to show you something,” Irina said, and she tossed Linus a videotape. “Let’s watch this,” she said. “It’s all in Russian and other languages from the Union, so I’ll tell you what’s happening.”
Linus started the video, watched the static and snow for a while. Then the title came on the screen. “Chernyy Glaz,” Irina said. It was large, stirring and dark, just the way it looked when she’d first seen the film on a big screen in the Russia Theater on Gorky street. “It’s May Day, 1986,” she said. Children marched in a parade, in the rain.
“Why is the music so ominous?” Linus asked.
“You don’t understand at all,” Irina said. “Look, this is international history, not just Russian. There was an accident at a nuclear reactor in Chernobyl.”
“I knew that, but – ”
“On April 26, the wind was northwestern, and the clouds went to Byelorussia until April 30, and the Baltic countries, including Sweden, received very high radioactivity, and on the 29th, the wind began to change its direction. So by May 1, the radioactivity was in Kiev, and it was raining on the children in the parade. I think this parade resulted in many, many deaths. The children were wearing no hats, and of course the radioactive waste all fell down on the children, and naturally they were poisoned. Everybody got rained on, it was a drizzle, and everyone who went out got his share.” She paused for a moment, looked at the smiling faces of the child-actors. “Of course,” she added, “the government of Mikhail Gorbachev, the hero of the American imperialists, didn’t do anything. They should have prohibited the parade. The government behavior was obviously a crime, not to inform people, not to cancel this parade. Gorbachev is also guilty. In any decent society, he would be prosecuted.”
Now the camera was zooming along the roadway, following a truck driving out of Kiev; the camera paused for a moment on an old farmer with a mule who unknowingly allowed the rain to coat his clothing, a hot, tired old man smiling witlessly as he welcomed his own death. “The process of realization that our government was lying to us didn’t happen overnight,” Irina said, now almost to herself. “It was on a day-to-day basis. We knew from people one thing, from government another thing. On May 5, 6, 7 and 8, we actually began to realize what had happened, because people began to die at Chernobyl. I think even now we don’t know the whole truth.”
The camera had descended beneath a stream, followed a fish for a few feet, then emerged, dove into a forest and focused at last on the broad branches of an ancient tree, sheltering and shadowing a hidden lake. Out of the lake stepped a beautiful young woman, naked and full of life, smiling as she allowed the rain to bead on her body, to mat down her short blond hair. A man’s voice shouted out to her from the shadows of the forest.
Irina lit a cigarette, sucked the smoke into her lungs.
“He is telling her to hide,” Irina said, exhaling, as the room filled with smoke. “He is afraid that someone will see her, all nude, without clothes in the rain.” Irina smiled to herself, the same cutting, mischievous smile that was presently on display on the television screen. The boy stared at the screen, dumb-struck. “She is telling him that he is an idiot. She loves the rain. She says it is cooling her down, to feel it washing over her bare skin.” A man leaned his head out of the forest. “They are now talking a little bit about their lives,” she said. “A little explaining. They will have to return to his parents’ apartment in Kiev,
sharing the room he grew up in. He says this will make him very unhappy.”
Linus pushed a button on the remote control, and the film stopped. An ad for instant coffee filled the screen. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“You see,” Irina said, with a trace of pride, “in Moscow, I was a movie star. I am not so unimportant as I may seem. I was real artist, and my movie played in the biggest theater in Moscow, in Pushkin Square.”
“Why do you want to show me this?”
“To explain. In Russia, I cared only about becoming famous and rich. I loved a man back then, Linus. Maybe really loved him. I don’t know. This man, he promised to help me become a better bigger movie star.” She looked at him to make sure he understood.
He nodded, silently. On television, two young women were discussing menstruation.
“I don’t need to be famous anymore,” Irina went on. “I don’t need a movie. I don’t need someplace warm to live. Now all I want is very simple. I just want someone to take me to a good dinner, at a beautiful restaurant filled with beautiful people. Where I can feel again a princess.”
She took the remote from Linus and pushed play, watched herself on the bank of a big lake, pretending to make love with the young man who portrayed her husband, the doomed Kolya.
“Tomorrow night,” she said, gazing at her own image with unabashed admiration. “Make me feel like a princess. Take me to a restaurant with a fountain, with violins and romance, and clouds, angels and chandeliers.” She was lost in her dreams, and Linus dared not interrupt.
Linus took her to a beautiful restaurant on the upper East Side, a restaurant with small flickering candles, gentle, romantic violin music, attentive tuxedoed waiters, and a fountain in the center of the room that glowed a deep purple. And they returned to his apartment, where Irina murmured romantic asides into his left ear, smiling at the romance and fulfilled longing; and this was, indeed, as close as she had ever come to romance.