Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

My parents have gone to a premiere at the Bolshoi and will not return before midnight. Stalling for time, I move about the room, straightening things—the rug’s corner flipped up at a rakish angle, the wet mark of the bottle’s bottom on a bookshelf, a volume of Annensky left spine-up on the windowsill. Even without turning, I can sense him breathing in expectation, grinning at my neck. As I needlessly rearrange my few trinkets (a shell from the Black Sea, a polished shard of amber from the Baltics, a statuette of Don Quixote someone gave my father years ago), I take comfort in thinking how familiar everything is here, how simple, monastic even, and how self-sufficient—the window, the bed, the desk, the chair, the hundreds upon hundreds of books, none of which ever gets dusty.

  When the silence grows audible at last, I hasten to break it.

  “Isn’t it strange to think that of my seventeen and a half years, I’ve probably spent at least seven years reading and doing homework at this desk? And another six asleep in this bed? That’s more than three-quarters of my entire life!”

  Conscious of babbling, I stop. And yet, as I would add if I felt able to discuss such matters with him, the room never seems like a confinement, for when my door is closed and I am alone here, I am—as nowhere else—absolutely free. I have fallen into the small private habit of imagining it as a room full of windows—different, of course, from the sole window facing that eternal eyesore of a construction site, still far from completion, its gigantic piles of cement and rusty machinery now often abandoned for months at a time. No, these are other windows—windows opening into other places, other moods, other realities, which I struggle to translate into words as I pick up my pen every night. I glance toward the book I have just wedged into its place on the shelf of my special favorites. Annensky succeeded where I have failed so far; his poem has lived for so long in my mind, on the tip of my tongue, in the back of my dreams, that I sometimes wonder whether he merely captured, with angel-like precision, that elusive, vast, vertiginous feeling that so often fills my entire being—or whether his poem has itself given birth to that feeling, has gifted me with the joyful sensation of some invisible, endlessly rich, mysterious life just a heartbeat, just a perfect word, away.

  Do you not imagine sometimes,

  When dusk wanders through the house,

  That here, alongside us, lies another plane,

  Where we lead entirely different lives?

  There a shadow has merged with a shadow so softly,

  There a moment will come at times

  When with the unseen rays of our eyes

  We seem to enter each other.

  And we fear to frighten the moment away

  With a gesture, or to intrude upon it with a word,

  As though someone has leaned in so close,

  Making us hear distant things.

  But as soon as the candle is brought in,

  The brittle world retreats without a fight . . .

  For this is what I have come to believe in all the years spent hidden away in my bedroom, with its only window darkened by winter as often as not: that the place I live in does not matter; nor do the daily tasks I perform; nor even the people with whom I spend my time—all these lie on the surface, fortunate or unfortunate accidents of birth and transitory vagaries of choice, which should not in any profound way affect my true essence, my only real life—my self-contained life as a poet—unfolding with its own powerful, inexorable logic, quite apart from political upheavals or career decisions or oppressive boys, in that other, perfect world whose remote starlit music and fresh springtime breezes I catch now and then through my invisible, tantalizingly cracked windows . . .

  “Homework and sleep, eh? Time to broaden the spectrum of activities, I think.”

  I have forgotten Vasily’s presence so thoroughly by now that his voice makes me start. He pats the bed next to him. “Come here.”

  When my narrow bed is made—as it is without fail every morning—it can pass for a couch, which somewhat alleviates the awkwardness of the two of us sitting side by side on its shaggy yellow spread. I accept the bottle from him, take a hurried sip; warm champagne makes the inside of my mouth taste muffled and sour. He pulls me toward him for the inevitable kiss. I like his irreverent clowning at seminars and the clever pieces on new rock bands that he writes for the student newspaper, but I do not like his kisses. I suspect I do not like kisses in general—perhaps my blood is stirred by poetry alone—but I have no grounds for comparison. His tongue is rubbery, thick, and insistent. After an anxious lapse of several seconds, which I count in my mind (one-two-three-four-five—is this enough?), I open my eyes and find his one visible eye likewise open, slanted at an odd angle, staring into mine, almost white in the light of the overhead lamp.

  Freeing myself, I glance at the clock on my desk.

  “My parents may come back any minute,” I announce with barely hidden relief.

  He too checks the clock, and sighs, and, drawing me toward him, speaks into my hair. “This is hard on both of us, I know, but we just have to hold out a bit longer. In March my father will get his new posting, I’ll have the apartment all to myself. Do you understand?” His voice has become a whisper, and when I try to lift my head and look at him, he presses me back into his shoulder. “Wait. Listen. We should talk about the future. My parents approve of you, and yours approve of me. It’s not too early. I’ll be nineteen this summer. I have excellent prospects. My father—”

  He continues to whisper, his breath hot and moist in my hair. I sit propped up against him, stiff with sudden horror. It occurs to me that even though my daily, superficial existence may have little to do with the deep well of my poetry, any trivial repetitive actions, just by virtue of steady accretion, may with time translate into something amounting to an actual change. If I spend days and weeks and months attending a random higher-education program for the simple reason that Olga applied her inflexible will to the task of becoming a journalist while I had little interest in puzzling over possible professions and let her make up my mind for me, one morning I will likely find myself bent over a typewriter in some newspaper cubicle; and if I spend days and weeks and months kissing a random boy for the simple reason that the acquisition of such an experience seems a prerequisite for being a proper university student, one day I may find myself married to the son of a prominent diplomat, living in a cavernous apartment on Gorky Street with a zebra skin crucified on the wall above our conjugal bed. In a moment of pure panic I see my future flash before my eyes, just as one’s past reputedly does in the moment of dying—and my future is a succession of increasingly suffocating rooms.

  When I can breathe once again, I become aware of a new quality of silence, tense, bordering on hostile, as I fail to reply, and fail to reply, and fail to reply . . .

  “There is something I want to show you,” I say in desperation.

  I slip off the bed, run over to the desk, and jerk open its drawer. The letter is lying amidst dried-up corpses of pens and half-spent erasers, still in its jaggedly ripped envelope that bears a foreign postmark. I pull out the single sheet of paper and hand it to him. Expressionless, he reads it while I stand before him, waiting.

  When he looks up at me, his eyes are narrowed.

  “When did you get this?”

  “Last week.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were applying?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. I—I wanted to wait until I heard back.”

  That is true; nor do I have the slightest intention of going—although I do not tell him that, not yet, because I am hoping to soften my impending refusal to consider what I fear was a marriage proposal by speaking vaguely of future possibilities and broadening horizons. I climb back onto the bed and attempt to nestle into his shoulder, as before, but he shakes me off, stands up, drops into the chair across from me. The empty champagne bottle, caught by his abrupt movement, rolls over the bedspread and falls onto t
he rug with a dull thud.

  “So why did you apply?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Just to see what’s out there, I guess.”

  And that is true also; I am not entirely sure of my reasons. Perhaps I applied because—because I had taken my secret gifts for granted for so long that I had come to doubt them and wanted to set myself a test that would have some validity in the eyes of the outside world; or because a small part of me questioned my ability to upend my life, to move to a distant spot on the map; or because Olga, who did everything I myself considered doing, and did it better, talked of attending Harvard in the fall.

  “Don’t you have everything you want here? What do your parents say?”

  Every question comes at me like a stab. I have never seen him like this. He sits in the chair, rocking slightly, his fingers twirling my acceptance letter, his gray eyes pale with anger, sliding past me. There is something raw, something dangerous, in his ordinarily ironic snub-nosed face. He looks like a scorned lion, and I am startled by a faint twinge of regret at the thought that I may never touch his lips again.

  “My parents think it’s a great opportunity. But Vasily, I haven’t yet decided—”

  “This is stupid,” he spits out. “I never thought of you as stupid before. You would have a much better life here. You’re somebody here. Your family is important, my family is very important. You and I, we can accomplish anything we want. Over there, you’ll be nothing, a pathetic little immigrant, an empty space. A zero.”

  I too am beginning to feel angry, but I force myself not to abandon my mollifying tone. “Look, I’m not talking of moving overseas, it’s just a four-year college. It would mean seeing a bit of the world, no more than that. Don’t you ever want to have some new experiences?”

  “You can have plenty of new experiences here,” he says, and a tight, ugly smile twists his face. “In fact, I can arrange for something new right now.”

  I no longer find the hardness in his eyes enticing.

  Things are shifting inside me.

  “I think,” I say slowly, “I think I will do it.”

  He holds up my letter with the tips of his fingers as if it were something contagious, and pretends to study it, rocking the chair faster and faster. “Never heard of this place. Some dreary provincial hole, I gather. Didn’t peg you for the type who’d want to live in an Uncle Tom’s cabin among beggars, niggers, and Jews.”

  For one instant I am speechless. In the next, I receive, for the first time ever, the indisputable waking proof that there is a God who watches over us—a benevolent God with impeccable timing and a twinkle in his ageless eye. My childhood chair breaks apart under Vasily in a spectacular explosion of cracks. As the seat falls in, he falls in also, his arms and legs now crammed into the wooden frame, sticking straight up. And even though I already know that in the next few months, before I leave for a college deep in the American South, there will be many unpleasant encounters—lips thinned, eyes averted—in the university hallways, awkward silences among our mutual friends, gatherings and memories ruined, for the next few minutes—three full minutes, no less, until he manages to extricate himself at last—for the next three minutes, as I watch him flail and strain and turn purple, I am certain that someone is up there, gently holding my life in the palm of his hand—and all is right with the world.

  Part Two

  Past Perfect

  7. Library Cubicle

  The Grateful Dead

  “Hey, you’re that Soviet girl, aren’t you?”

  I raised my eyes from the page. A bear of a boy in a rainbow-colored shirt was leaning on the corner of my desk, setting my towers of books to a dangerous wobble.

  “I prefer ‘Russian,’” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “Russian. So, how do you like it here?”

  “I like it very much,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, I didn’t mean . . .” He seemed vague, amiable, good-looking in a bland, healthy, entirely forgettable way. “I meant, how do you like America . . . You know, what do you like most about it?”

  I smiled politely.

  “The library,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

  He had something written on his shirt. For a moment I puzzled over the meaning of the words, then grew impatient, and glanced at my book.

  “Well, anyway, you’re studying. Sorry to have disturbed you,” he said.

  I turned the page, heard his steps retreating into the silence of the stacks.

  In the past few months I had been asked many things—whether it was true that Soviet children marched to school in formation and were one and all atheists, and did I know Tatiana in Leningrad, and how did I like hamburgers, fraternity parties, and freedom of speech—and while I set much stock by good manners, I did not feel the need to answer every question in the obliging spirit of upstanding national representation. That was Olga’s concern. Upon arriving in the States, she had found herself an unwitting celebrity of sorts—something to do with her timing, her being the first-ever Soviet student in the country, or maybe the first in an undergraduate program, or perhaps just the first on the East Coast—some statistical fluke, in short, which nevertheless meant that she would spend her entire fall giving interviews and visiting local schools, posing for photographers, assuring everyone that she adored freedom of speech, complaining in private that she had had by far more freedom in Russia and that the burden of being the “face of the country” was dulling her complexion.

  I suspected that she was enjoying herself.

  My own entry into my small southern college had passed unnoticed by comparison—a few lines in a student publication, mild curiosity from my fellow freshmen; enough to be recognized now and then and asked about hamburgers, not enough to feel that I stood for anything larger—anything other—than merely myself. For that I was grateful. It was all very well for an aspiring journalist like Olga to inhabit a political essay. As for me, I had never given much thought to the current affairs of the world.

  I wanted to live in a timeless poem.

  I returned to my collection of Silver Age verse but soon found my concentration flagging. I was tired, of course—it was past midnight, and I had subsisted on very little sleep for a long time—but also, I felt oddly bothered by the encounter with the boy. Had I been unnecessarily short? Rereading the same two lines over and over, I thought of the look that had settled on his face, apologetic and offended at once. When, a wasted half-hour later, I heard footsteps approaching through the stacks, I was relieved at the impending interruption. I would be friendlier when I saw him next.

  But when the bookshelves parted to reveal the nearing shadow, it was not the boy in the rainbow shirt—it was the secret visitor of my Russian adolescence, strolling nonchalantly down the aisle, coming to a stop before my desk.

  He was not smiling, nor was I pleased to behold him.

  The last time I had seen him—well over a year before—we had quarreled. For weeks I had been studying ancient Greek tragedy till the wee hours, my mind gloriously full of heroes, oracles, and monsters. He stormed into my bedroom one night just before sunrise, wrapped in some absurd billowing sheet. I felt disturbed and elated—I was certain he would kiss me at last—but instead he pontificated about Aeschylus, quoted reams of Pindar at me, and ended by pronouncing himself the god Apollo, here to inspire me. I was appalled at how pompous he had become of late, and told him so. He threw his laurel wreath to the ground and slammed the door behind him, his only conventional exit in my memory. “Pompous and unimaginative!” I shouted in his wake.

  Frowning, I considered him now.

  “Asleep in a library cubicle, how embarrassing,” I muttered. “Am I drooling, I wonder. Even snoring, perhaps? Did I collapse with my face in the book, and will the print of some poem transfer to my cheek? I hope that boy doesn’t pass by aga
in.”

  “You’ve been thinking about irrelevant matters too much,” he said, and, unceremoniously sweeping the corner of my desk free of books, settled on top of it, swinging his leg. He sported a neat new haircut and was dressed in a dapper suit of spotless white linen; yet in spite of his jaunty appearance, he looked somehow diminished—smaller in the way childhood rooms seem smaller to an adult returning home after half a lifetime’s absence.

  “At the risk of being smacked by this Goliath of an English–Russian dictionary, I will brave the question. How do you like America?”

  His voice was dry, but I saw that there would be no mention of our last encounter, and was glad, and tried to thank him by giving an honest answer.

  “I like it very much,” I said after a moment’s thought. “I like the sense of anonymity. Living here is like—like being just a story among other stories, so I have time to read my own story without peeking ahead or skipping any words, if you know what I mean. And I can access an entirely new range of experiences and feelings, and these feelings are larger somehow, as if I can now see myself and the world simultaneously from two separate vantage points instead of one—a bit like gaining entry to a new dimension . . . But you know, I wasn’t being glib earlier—I mean with that boy—I really do love the library the most. I more or less live in this cubicle. They let you stay all night, did you know? Actually, it wasn’t until I spent my first night here, back in September, that I realized what I’d been missing. Have you ever been to the library in Moscow? You fill out a form, then take your place at one of these communal tables in a gigantic marble room that makes you feel dwarfed, and wait until the book you’ve requested is produced from some unseen depths of the building. When your turn comes, you are summoned to a tiny window and the book is slid over to you on a tray. Of course, they have everything there, but you always have to know exactly what you want beforehand—there are no surprising discoveries, you see, no sense of exploration, no browsing. Oh, one day I’ll write an Ode to Browsing—it’s such a delightfully American concept! It’s what I do here: I walk the aisles, alone, at night, and when something catches my eye—anything new, anything exciting, anything unpredictable—I grab an armload of books, as many as I can carry back to my desk, then stay up until morning reading about Mayan glyphs, or Arctic expeditions, or the art of stained-glass windows in medieval France, or underwater archaeology in Egypt, anything and everything, but always poetry, poetry first and last—” I glanced over at him, and stopped abruptly. “Am I boring you?”