The Visiting Professor

by Robert Littell

  “Yo.” She sounded reluctant to be gotten used to.

  “I need you.”

  “What you need is a clue or two.”

  “I am seriously weighing the pros and cons of becoming passionate about someone who exists.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Did you hear what I said you?”

  “I’m not deaf.”

  “A Russian friend from Petersburg has turned up in Backwater. …”

  “Hype for him.”

  “Him is a she.”

  Rain hesitated an instant, then casually dropped an invitation into the conversation. “Hey, bring her home for supper.”

  I explained the situation to Axinya. The person I shared an apartment with, a barber, right? a senior at the university specializing in the economics of the home, had invited her for supper. Axinya, to whom communal apartments were the rule, not the exception, anything else would have caused her to become suspicious, shrugged. “I don’t mind,” she told me with a distant look in her eyes, “as long as the going involves a getting there.”

  She let me work her arms into the sleeves of her leather overcoat lined with an old cloth overcoat, she let me lead her out of the building, down the street past the laundromat to the block of flats in the alleyway off North Main, up the narrow flight of wooden steps. She never uttered a word the whole way. I was running my fingers over the cement lintel, feeling for the hidden key, when Rain threw open the door. Angling her head, smiling an iceberg-lettuce smile, she sized up the Russian competition.

  “Axinya, Rain. Rain, Axinya.”

  “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” Rain announced in a strangely masculine voice. She took Axinya’s coat and flung it over the back of the couch, which was piled high with coats and sweaters and miniskirts. “Like where does she go for her glad rags?” she asked me out of the corner of her mouth.

  Axinya eyed the room with distaste. Left to herself, she would have rolled up her sleeves and put it in order. “Shto ona gavorit?– she wanted to know.

  “She is asking where you bought your shirt. She has a weakness for transparent clothing.”

  “Hey, the two of you must be talking Russian, right?” Rain decided. “Like I’d actually forgotten L. Falk was a foreigner.”

  At supper Rain pulled out all the stops, serving sunny-side-downs on cold toast, serving Italian wine from a bottle covered with plastic straw, serving whole wheat bread and thin slices of cheese so badly made it had holes in it. She set a plate in front of Axinya, offered her the bottle of catsup, smothered her own eggs with catsup when Axinya warily declined.

  To her credit, Rain tried to strike up a conversation with the extraterrestrial who had landed on her doorstep, which was how she saw the Russian lady with the see-through blouse and the washed-out brassiere. “So what do you do when you’re not visiting Backwater?” she asked Axinya.

  “I khad a gooood voyage, tank you so much,” Axinya replied.

  Rain was not put off by the failure of the answers to have any immediately apparent relation to her questions. “Is this your first visit to America?”

  Axinya looked at me. “Isn’t she on the young side for you?” she inquired in Russian.

  “Our relationship is platonic,” I informed Axinya in Russian. “She cracks eggs, she makes sunny-side-downs, I wash up afterward.”

  Axinya hung out a smile to dry on her face, a sure sign that she had not swallowed a word I had said. She turned back to Rain. “I vas borned”—she asked me in Russian how to say after in English—”affta de death of Iosif Stalin, so I am not k-n owing vat it vas like.” Having gotten this off her chest, Axinya for some reason breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Hey, I want you to know I’m really sorry,” Rain, her face longer, grimmer than I had ever seen it, told her.

  “She says you she is sorry,” I translated when Axinya looked blank.

  “She talks like a machine gun,” Axinya remarked in Russian. “For what is she sorry?”

  I batted the question on to Rain.

  “I am sorry about Stalin. Dying.”

  Mayday picked that moment to stagger into the kitchen and sniff at the patterns on Axinya’s stockings. Wagging an obscenely hairless stump of a tail, peering through cataract-studded eyes, the dog must have thought she was getting a whiff of an exotic skin disease.

  Jerking her knees away from the snorting pink nose, Axinya shrieked in Russian, “What is it?”

  “A dog. She is very old,” I added, as if it explained everything—the folds of gray skin hanging from the neck, the black tongue trailing from the drooling mouth, the runny eyes, the pink pig’s nose.

  “Age is no excuse.” Axinya detected a noxious odor and screwed up her nose in disgust.

  Rain, always alert to Mayday’s social failings, coaxed the dog away from Axinya’s feet. “Chill out, Mayday. Go fart into your blanket.”

  Axinya said smugly, “She called the thing Mayday.”

  “That happens to be its name.”

  “Could it be you fled Soviet chaos only to wind up sharing a flat with an American Communist?”

  I laughed under my breath. “The only Marx she ever heard of is Groucho.”

  Axinya was not convinced. “She named that grotesque animal after the proletariat’s high holy day, the first of May.”

  When I passed this tidbit on to Rain, she giggled nervously. “Hey, Mayday’s not named after a holiday. She’s named after my dad’s last words. He was a sergeant in the air force, right? He was heading back to the air base late one night in January when his Volkswagen Beetle skidded into a telephone pole. I was mostly living alone at the time, my dad’s squeeze was hanging out with this chief petty officer from the Forrestal, so when he dialed the only number he knew by heart, it was me that picked up the phone. He was calling from a booth which turned out to be down the road from the scene of the accident. All he said was Mayday. Over and over. Again and again. Mayday. Mayday. I decided he was drunk and hung down on him. To this day I don’t know what Mayday means, assuming it means anything. The next morning the military cops came by to say they’d gone and found my dad’s body in this telephone booth. They said he’d bled to death.”

  Rain’s story, or more exactly the matter-of-fact way she told it, took my breath away.

  “If you’re going to faint,” Axinya said anxiously, “put your head between your knees.”

  In my skull I could hear a child’s voice whine, over and over, again and again, It was not me who hid the code book. For the first time in my life I recognized the voice. It was mine, though God knows why I was denying hiding a code book.

  I turned on Rain. “What are you telling me?” I demanded in the fierce whisper Russians employ when they argue in communal apartments.

  She freaked out. “If he’d gone and used the King’s English like any normal human being, maybe I would’ve understood he was in some kind of difficulty.”

  “Your father was bleeding to death in a phone booth and you call that some kind of difficulty?”

  “The last thing I need is for you to lay a guilt trip on me.” She kicked at the plastic garbage sack in exasperation. “All this happened before I gave my first blow job to Bobby Moran, I wasn’t even a consenting adolescent, forget adult. Get off my case.”

  Axinya was thumbing through the M’s in her English-Russian phrase book. “Mayhem. Mayonnaise. Maypole. But no Mayday.” She looked up, hoping to pour oil on our fire. “It’s probably some kind of American Indian religious rite. It sounds like the kind of thing a primitive person would say before dying.”

  Rain insisted I translate. “My dad was definitely not a primitive person,” she icily informed Axinya.

  It went on that way for an epic half hour or so. Giving a workmanlike imitation of a housewife, Rain cleared away the dirty dishes, stacked them on top of the mountain of dirty dishes already piled next to the sink, served decaf and doughnuts. Axinya asked if there was a toilet in the apartment and disappeared into it
when I flicked on the light. When I returned to the kitchen, Rain looked at me in what I thought was a peculiar way.

  “She has to be the lady friend you told me about, right? The one you saw on Monday afternoons and Thursday evenings? The one who straightened your room beforehand and ironed the sex out of her glad rags afterhand? So do you want to make it with her?”

  “Yo?”

  “Here’s the deal: you want to fuck her, go with the flow, it’s cool with me. Like I could watch, right? Or I could participate. Or I could pull a disappearing act. Whichever.”

  “You want to par-ti-ci-pate?”

  “Join in. Take part. Co-lab-o-rate.” One of her eyes twitched suggestively. “Hey, check it out. Rock ‘n’ roll.”

  I took a deep breath, I squared my drooping shoulders, I threaded my fingers through my tangled hair. “I do not want to fuck her,” I announced with what I took to be grim dignity. “I do not want you to participate or disappear.”

  “So there’s no reason to get pissed.”

  “I am not pissed,” I insisted, but I was lying through my badly repaired, tarnished teeth. I was pissed at Rain for not feeling responsible for the death of her father. I was pissed at Axinya for turning up in Backwater. I was pissed that Rain was being so cool about it. I was pissed that she could think I would want her to collaborate with me collaborating with Axinya. (I had heard about such things, I had even fantasized about such things, but I considered them to be manifestations of the decadence of the West.) Most of all, I was pissed at myself for being frightened because the earlobes I had done cipher work for back in Russia had noticed my departure and wanted me back.

  Down the hallway, the toilet flushed. Axinya took her sweet time returning. Rain and I exchanged looks. I shrugged. Rain shrugged back. When she reached up to put the decaf back on the shelf, her T-shirt drifted away from her body, exposing for a fraction of a second the soft undercurve of a breast and the Siberian night moth lost in a sea of freckles.

  As we say in Russian, I rinsed my eye. Also my heart.

  Axinya wandered into the kitchen. She had a diabolical expression on her face. “I saw the Swedish safety razor I gave you for your name day in the medicine chest next to her sanitary napkins,” she informed me frostily in Russian.

  “Hey, I don’t mind your talking to each other in a secret language,” Rain said snappily.

  “There is only one bathroom,” I explained to Axinya in Russian. “In the one bathroom there is only one medicine chest.”

  “There is only one bedroom,” Axinya shot back. “In the one bedroom there is only one bed.”

  “There is a couch in the room with my computer which opens into a bed.”

  “It is currently closed. If you ever bothered to open it you would see it has no sheets.”

  “I was wondering what took you so long,” I said under my breath.

  “Act as if I’m not here,” Rain muttered. “I’m cool.”

  Axinya fumbled in her handbag for an embroidered handkerchief, delicately blew her nose into the part of it that was not embroidered. “When is your contract here up?” she asked. “What can I do to convince you to return with me to Russia?”

  Suddenly, I do not know why, I wanted to hurt her. “What is in it for you if I go back?”

  Tears welled in Axinya’s eyes, causing her mascara to run. “How can you ask me such a thing?” She tucked a stray tuft of silver hair back into place. “You are in it for me.”

  Observing Axinya’s tears brim, observing one of them trickle down her cheek, I made a mental note to talk to Charlie Atwater. He had already taken a look at the surface tension of teardrops, but there was another chaos-related angle to explore. Given the weight, configuration and surface tension of a teardrop, given the coefficient of friction of skin, given the topography of the cheek down which the tear would flow, I wondered if it would be possible to predict the trajectory of the teardrop on any given run.

  I wondered how I could be so detached about Axinya’s distress.

  What was it with me when I should have been feeling emotion, I wound up thinking chaos?

  Did I have enough chaos in me to make a world? Or too much chaos in me to live in the world I make?

  Rock or roll, right?

  Walking wounded, right?

  My head was spinning from all these questions with painful answers.

  Axinya must have noticed how distracted I was. “There was a time when the sight of me in tears moved you to tears,” she said, turning her back on Rain to hide her emotions, dabbing at her eyes with a corner of the handkerchief. “When my mother died it was me who had to comfort you, it didn’t matter that you had never met her. America has put its mark on you, Lemuel Melorovich. Even your English sounds strange—not like English, really.”

  Yawning noisily, Rain scraped back her chair and padded over to the sink and started washing her underwear in a basin, splashing water everywhere. “Your Russian lady friend is beginning to rub me the wrong way,” she announced over the sound of the running faucet. “I don’t think I’d collaborate even if you begged me.”

  “What does she say?”

  “You are the second live Russian she has ever met,” I explained tiredly. “Her basin runneth over.”

  Axinya slowly turned her head and sized up Rain the way only a woman can inspect another woman. “Her ass is too small,” she said in Russian, “her mouth is too large, her earlobes have a peculiar shape, she does not come equipped with hips or breasts. Seen from certain angles, she looks like a boy. What’s in it for you, sleeping with her?”

  I thought, She is in it for me. But the urge to hurt Axinya had passed and I did not say it out loud.

  Axinya folded her arms across her chest, or more accurately, rested her arms on her chest. “I’ll bet she has a G-spot,” she declared in a sudden flash of inspiration.

  “If I did a major merge with someone whose breasts drooped as much as hers,” Rain commented from the sink, her lips drawn into a tight smile, “I’d pass the Cadillac.”

  “She talks a great deal,” Axinya commented nastily. “Does she say more than listening to can explain?”

  “It is her kitchen. It is her eggs. It is also her frying pan.”

  “Does she really own a Cadillac?” Axinya, impressed despite herself, asked in Russian.

  “She is not feeling well,” I explained to Axinya. “ ‘Pass the Cadillac’ is Lilliputian for ‘throw up.’ “

  “That’s the second time you have mentioned Lilliputian,” Axinya noted irritably. “What is it, a local upstate New York dialect?”

  God knows how I would have explained Lilliputian if we had not been distracted by the siren. Its pitch changed as it turned into the alleyway, a result, as any schoolchild knows, of the Doppler effect on sound waves. Axinya, who happened to be standing next to the kitchen window, stared at the flashing light on top of the police car as it skidded to a stop in front of the wooden staircase. I remember Raymond Chandler using the expression “The blood drained from her face,” but I had never seen the phenomenon with my own eyes until then. Suddenly as gray as sidewalk, Axinya put a hand on the windowsill to keep from crumpling to the floor. “It’s the militia,” she gasped in Russian. “They have come to arrest me as a Russian spy.”

  I went over to the window as the car door slammed and recognized Norman, the deputy sheriff who knows where Jerusalem is. He looked up and waved. I raised a paw and saluted him through the window. He started up the stairs.

  “Not to worry,” I told Axinya. “It is only Norman.”

  Rain went through the living room to open the front door and returned with Norman in tow. He came striding into the kitchen. The metal taps on the soles of his shoes clicking on the linoleum sent an electric current up my spine. Dropping two file folders onto the kitchen table, he noticed Axinya cringing in the corner and nodded amiably in her direction.

  “Explain him, for God’s sake, that I am a journalist, not a spy,” she hissed at me in Russian. She turned towar
d Norman and bared her teeth in a tense smile. “So good day to you, Police Officer.”

  “She is an old friend from St. Petersburg,” I informed Norman, “here to interview me about the nuclear-dump affair.”

  Norman touched the broad brim of his sheriff’s hat with his fingertips. “Any friend of Lem’s.”

  “What does it mean, ‘Any friend of Lem’s’?” Axinya demanded in Russian.

  “Americans have this habit of saying you half a sentence and letting you figure out the other half for yourself,” I explained her. “That is why the political situation in the country is so confused. What I think he is saying you is, Any friend of Lemuel’s is a friend of his.”

  My explanation only added to Axinya’s bewilderment. “How could I be a friend of his when I only just now met him?”

  Still wearing his hat, Norman adjusted his holster and testicles and straddled a folding chair as if it was a saddle. Rain placed a cup of lukewarm coffee on the table in front of him. Rocking back and balancing the chair on its hind legs, Norman announced, “The sheriff sent me over.” He started to say something else, but his eyes went blank as he forgot what it was. To cover the lapse, he tilted the chair forward and spooned sugar into his cup until the coffee spilled over the rim into the saucer. He looked up at us looking at him. A light came into his eyes as he remembered what he wanted to say.

  “It ain’t been announced on the radio yet, but there’s gone and been two more serial murders—one upcounty, a seventy-seven-year-old Caucasian male working as a night watchman at a shoe factory, the other in Wellsville two hours later. The second victim was a forty-four-year-old Japanese male working at an all-night gas station. Both the victims was shot in the ear with a garlic-coated dumdum bullet fired at point-blank range from the same .38 caliber pistol. First time we’ve had us two murders so close apart in time and place.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Rain gasped from the sink. “The goddamn random killer has struck again.”

  “Do you think I should contact the Soviet embassy?” Axinya anxiously asked in Russian from the window.

  “There is no Soviet embassy anymore,” I muttered in Russian.