Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  “Not anything in particular. Just things. Did I ever tell you about this seminar I went to in my first month in America?”

  “Yes. Possibly. No.”

  “I don’t remember now what the subject was, but it was one of those workshops where everyone sat in a circle, and the professor had us write down our ‘strengths,’ what we were really good at, you know, on a piece of paper, and then we went around the circle, and everyone read what they’d written. It’s the usual stuff, right, everyone has done it dozens of time, in interviews, and class discussions, and church meetings, everyone here always talks about their strongest points, their weakest points, and the answers are all a given—‘I’m creative,’ ‘I excel at multitasking,’ ‘I’m good with languages,’ ‘I’m a great team player.’ Except that I had never done it before, so I had no ready pat formulas in my head. I remember sitting there for the first minute, absolutely mortified, not having any idea what to say. Then I thought about it, I mean really thought about it, and wrote this long, earnest paragraph. I wrote that I believed I could sometimes sense the essence of things—houses, books, faces, moments in time—that I sometimes caught a whiff of their innermost souls, their unique smells, and that what I was hoping to do with my life was to render these impressions in words so vivid, so precise, that others could feel them too. Then the five minutes were up, and we started going around the circle, and all the long-haired boys said they were creative and all the foreign-exchange girls said they were good with languages. By the time my turn came—it was toward the end—I had caught on perfectly, so I too said I was good with languages. I remember feeling so relieved that I had not been the first one to give my answer . . . But I wonder now . . . It’s like life, you know: the more you learn what is expected of you, the more you fall into these patterns, these grooves, these ruts, the less unique your experiences become, the less unique you become yourself. If you didn’t know, for example, that people got married at a certain age and had children at a certain age and retired at a certain age, would you know to do any of those things, or would you do something else, something entirely different? Because it can’t all be pure biology. I mean, I know you pride yourself on believing only the things you can see, and I love that about you, it’s so reassuring, but—but don’t you have this sense sometimes that our life is essentially just the tip of the iceberg, and if you stop clinging to your puny bit of ice in fear or out of habit and just dive into the water, you will discover this luminous mass going down, deep down, and meet creatures you can’t even imagine, and have thoughts and feelings no one has ever had before . . . That is really why I came here in the first place, and why I stayed here, you know. I mean, I told you I stayed because of that relationship I was in at the time, and that was part of it, I suppose, but mainly, I knew what was expected of me in Russia, and I thought that here I would be able to escape it, escape having a predictable life . . . Well, that, and the language, of course. Because languages are like that too, you know? When you are first learning a language, you are swimming in this glorious sea of possibilities—you feel that you are free to take all these little specks of meaning floating around you and combine them into the most fantastical, gorgeous, dreamlike structures that will be yours and no one else’s, amazing castles, cathedrals, entire cities of words rising out of chaos. But then you start learning the rules, the grammar, what goes with what, and then, worst of all, all these common expressions and mass-issued turns of phrase start impressing themselves onto your brain, so that when you say ‘time,’ you think ‘valuable’ and ‘waste of’ and ‘waits for no man,’ and when you say ‘love,’ you think ‘star-crossed’ and ‘blind,’ and when you say ‘death,’ you think ‘kiss of’ and ‘bored to’ and ‘dead as a doornail’—and before you know it, your words have become these prayer beads strung together and worn-out through countless repetitions, and what original meaning there was is completely obscured . . . Perhaps the longer you use the language, the more in danger you are of becoming gray and trite and shallow, I thought, but if you learn a new language, you can start all over again. And I feel, I really do feel that there are these great big truths out there, or no, not truths, exactly, just these pure slabs of . . . of meaning, of feeling, these monumental things we contend with as humans—you know, love, death, beauty, God—and I thought, if I come to them clean and childlike and with my mind free of preconceptions, or else if I come to them using two roads at once, both the front door of my native language and the servant entrance of my adopted language—or is it the other way around, do you think?—in any case, maybe then I will actually stand a chance of stumbling upon some vast reservoir of poetry just waiting out there in the universe . . . Because I write poetry, you know. Whenever you see me scribbling and I tell you these are just thank-you notes or grocery lists, they aren’t really. Well, you’ve probably figured it out for yourself by now, but I wanted to tell you anyway. I wanted to tell you for a long time, but I was being . . . superstitious about it. I guess I felt I needed to keep my poems secret from everyone until I was ready to share them with the whole world. And I’m still not ready to do that, but I’ve been thinking about something my mother said right after our wedding, and, well . . . I just wanted to tell you. Because I feel happy, you know, happy about us, and the baby, of course, but I’m also scared about the baby, and so sad about Papa, and sometimes—and please don’t be upset now—but sometimes I feel a little lonely, too, so I just thought, if I told you . . . Hello? Hello? Oh, gods, I’m talking to myself again, aren’t I? Paul? Are you asleep?”

  “What? No. Well, yes, I’m afraid I was. But I heard you saying something about a seminar and that you were good at languages . . . Oh, and did you say you wanted to name our son Mustard, or did I dream that?”

  “Yes, actually, Mustard is an old family name on my father’s side, so I think it would be nice . . . Ah, you should hear your silence right now. You dreamed that.”

  “Phew, I was worried for a moment there. I think I can stay awake now. Sort of. Do you want to try saying it again? Whatever it was you were saying?”

  “It was nothing, really. Just go back to sleep.”

  “You should get some sleep too while you can. Only three more weeks now.”

  16. Covered Veranda

  The Swing

  When the screen door banged behind them and they entered the covered veranda, her initial impression was of something narrow, gloomy, and tired.

  It had appeared different the night before, when they had driven along the street for the first time, the baby asleep in the backseat. The sign “For Sale” had flashed in their headlights, and beyond it, they saw three arches aglow in the dark. The house itself was barely visible behind the trees, just a low bulky shape against the paler blackness of the sky, but the lights on the veranda made it seem cozy and warm. “Slow down, slow down!” she cried, but they had already passed. He turned around, and they crept along the street for the second time. It looked even more welcoming then, that yellow light glowing through November drizzle.

  At the end of the block they realized that another car had been forced to a crawl behind them for an entire minute.

  “They didn’t honk, imagine that,” Paul had said. “Looks like a nice neighborhood. Probably kid-friendly. Honey, I have a good feeling about this one.”

  “Yes,” she had said; but what she had liked most about the invisible house with the shining arches was its ambiguous promise, the darkness concealing it. It did not belong to any neighborhood at all, was not pinned down to an address somewhere in the monotonous suburbs of a busy American city, but instead was all shadows and light, and one could just as easily imagine it perched on the side of a lush Caribbean mountain, frangipani trees blooming, ice clinking in the jewel-colored cocktails of a festive crowd on a terrace suspended above the immense mystery of the moonlit sea—or maybe squatting in the deep slumber of a somber medieval village in Portugal or France, all the villagers long asleep, only a solitary
poet rocking back and forth on the lit-up porch, his verses slowly adopting the creaking rhythm of the rocker—or even poised as the last human habitation on the edge of a great Siberian forest, yes, a mossy little house out of some old fairy tale, where evening after evening a small, soft-spoken family gathered in the snug seclusion of light to drink tea from chipped cups and talk about birds and stars and books—a house under a timeless spell where everyone was together, and no one was ill, and everyone was happy . . .

  “What we could do,” Paul had said, “is put a swing on that porch.”

  “If we bought the house,” she had said.

  “If we bought the house.”

  Now they stood on the damp, starkly lit veranda, and the realtor woman jingled the keys again—it seemed to be a nervous habit of hers, almost a tic—and said, “It’s not heated, but you can think of it as a sunroom really, it would be perfect for breakfasts in warm weather.” The enthusiastic lilt in her voice did not match her eyes, which had a dull, bulging look to them, like thick bottle glass. She waved toward the shadowy corner, where three low wicker chairs with enormous pink peonies on the cushions crouched around a lopsided wicker table. “Now, the furniture doesn’t come with it, of course, it’s just to give you an idea, but do try it out, try it out!”

  “No, that’s all right, thank you,” Paul said, ready, she saw, to proceed into the house; but her arms were aching from trying to restrain the squirming, sniffling bundle of blankets, so she walked over to the table and sat down. The cushions proved unpleasantly soft, and as she sank into them, further weighted down by the baby, a faint but visible cloud of dust billowed around her—either the house was not shown very often, or no one before her had ever followed the realtor’s invitation to sit down.

  The baby stopped whimpering and began to wail.

  “He is adorable!” the realtor woman shouted, to make herself heard over the cries. “What’s his name?”

  She was struggling to quiet him, so it was Paul who replied: “Eugene.”

  “A beautiful name!” exclaimed the woman. “So uncommon.”

  “It’s her father’s name,” Paul said, his voice reserved. “Shall we see the rest of the house, then?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, let me just find the right key . . . Do look at the doorbell chimes on your way in, they are a very nice feature, and of course fully functional, everything in the house is fully functional, here, I’ll show you, such a distinctive sound—”

  The inner door moaned on reluctantly yielding hinges. As the woman wedged it open, talking all the while, a long, mournful note that put her in mind of a departing train escaped onto the veranda, and a pale slash of autumnal light cut through the low-ceilinged murkiness beyond. She caught a whiff of stale, unused air. She had been excited by the thought of seeing the place, had felt important and capably adult in her role as a prospective buyer; she had even worn her teardrop diamond earrings and her new black shoes, whether to impress the realtor or to enter her potential house in a fashion befitting a young woman eager to take the next step in the upward progression of her life.

  Now she found she did not want to go in.

  “Please go ahead without me,” she called. “I’ll stay out here a bit longer, get the baby to sleep.”

  The two of them paused on the threshold, looking down at her, the realtor woman smiling glassily and jingling the keys, Paul’s expression bemused. Then they vanished inside; Paul, she noticed, ducked his head as a precaution.

  The door crept closed behind them.

  The baby was still crying, though with less desperation now. She wound the blankets tighter around him—the veranda was chilly, with a deep, dungeonlike chill—and stared outside. The street lay empty in both directions; the trees that lined it were bare of leaves; on the other side, identical one-story houses with darkened verandas sat in the puddles of graying lawns under graying skies. She could see no signs of life. Perhaps everyone had gone to church—wasn’t that what people did on Sunday mornings, especially in kid-friendly places where neighbors did not honk at neighbors?

  “Bun-ga-low,” she said under her breath, trying out the new word. It sounded strange, almost barbaric, to her ears, and for one disorienting moment, the unremarkable suburban vista looked as foreign to her eyes as a row of grass-thatched African huts with monkeys hopping from roof to roof; it was certainly just as far removed from the vague expectations of her childhood. All at once, an overwhelming sensation of randomness struck her—why this house, why this street, why this city? (Why this country, continued a dangerously soft voice inside her, why—but she managed to hush it up before it asked anything else.) And when one stopped to think about it, how odd, how unnatural, how daunting it was to go about choosing a house. She had never pondered the desirable number of bathrooms or the virtues of gas stoves before. She had never owned—had never wanted to own—anything that would not fit in a small suitcase. Now the notion of waking up one day the owner of a mind-bogglingly complex conglomeration of pipes, wires, masonry, and carpentry loomed over her in a vast shadow, almost as ambiguous, thrilling, inevitable, and terrifying as motherhood itself.

  Anxiously she inspected the baby’s face—she could not bring herself to call him Eugene yet. He had grown silent at last and was gazing past her with his pensive blueberry eyes. She pulled the blankets closer to his reddened nose, then looked again at the poisonous pink peonies on the dusty cushions. Something much like panic was starting to stir inside her. She reminded herself to breathe—the peonies did not come with the house, she would be free to get different cushions or have no cushions at all, just as she pleased. But the imminent prospect of all that empty space to furnish only made her breathing quicken. For a house was not like a student dorm room or a rented apartment: in time it became a reflection of one’s being, a monolith under whose foundation one buried one’s roots, a tinted lens through which one viewed the world. It set the mood, the timbre, the pitch of one’s entire life, and for a poet, the pitch of her life would, as likely as not, vibrate through the pitch of her work. Would Byron have ever become Byron if he had resided in an elderly lady’s fussy seaside flat with flowery chintz curtains and a pug for a pet? Could Pushkin have sung the Russian countryside with such fluid simplicity if his abode had been a brooding moorland ruin full of echoes, ghosts, and massive oak cupboards? Could Shakespeare have penned his immortal tragedies if he had chosen to live in a suburban bungalow with peonies on the cushions? At sixteen, she would have replied with a resounding “Yes,” but at twenty-seven, she was no longer certain. (And wouldn’t it be fun, said a voice that never was completely silenced inside her, to compose an “architectural” poem, each verse set in a dwelling, each written in the style most suited to the dwelling itself, from a Poe-inspired wail of woe and loss describing a dilapidated gothic mansion to a cheerful couplet akin to a Mother Goose rhyme sketching a cottage in a sunlit meadow? She brushed the irrelevant thought away.) And if it were indeed true that deciding on the kind of place you would inhabit meant deciding on the kind of atmosphere that would seep into your very blood and, by osmosis, the kind of poet you were bound to become, did she feel confident enough in her real estate acumen and her decorating skills not to fail her art?

  Blankly she considered the dingy tiles of the veranda, the wet black trees across the road, the bleak symmetry of the lawns—and at last panic caught up with her and overtook her.

  The baby had fallen asleep.

  What if she just stood up right now, and walked away?

  The door issued a moan, and the realtor woman stepped out.

  “Your husband wanted me to check on you,” she said, jingling the keys. “He’s inspecting the closets. Ah, Eugene is resting nicely. He feels at home here, I see.”

  She looked at the realtor mutely.

  “Eugene is such a lovely name.” The woman dropped into the chair next to hers, raising another, thicker cloud of dust. “So distinctive.
Personally, I’ve always been interested in his namesake Eugene of Savoy, the famous Hapsburg general, you know. But of course, there is a bit of a family connection there: my father is a direct descendant of the Hapsburgs, you know, and—”

  The door moaned. Paul emerged, remembering to duck his head.

  “It’s great,” he announced with gusto. “We’ll take it.”

  The realtor, flustered, tried to clamber out of the chair.

  “I’m joking,” he said. The woman giggled warily, and sank back down. “I’m going to whisk my wife away on a tour now, if you don’t mind.”

  “Go ahead, go ahead. I’ll stay here, give you some privacy.”

  Paul held the inner door open. She rose, staggering a little under the baby’s bulk.

  Just before going inside, she stopped.

  “Paul,” she said, and smiled up at him to make it almost resemble a joke. “Do we even need a house?”

  He laughed a short belly laugh, appreciative of her sense of humor.

  “If we buy it, we’ll put the swing right here,” he said, pointing, and gently prodded her over the threshold.

  17. Kitchen

  The Only Poem Written in Her Twenty-eighth Year

  By now, the ritual had become so familiar that she kept the overhead lamp off, going through the motions in an automatic haze. At four in the morning, the kitchen looked as if underwater, the cabinets and counters lost in shadows, her progress illuminated by a succession of feeble bluish lights: the subterranean glare of the refrigerator as she squinted into its poorly stocked depths in search of the bottle, the dim oven glow flooding the pans as she pushed them aside to reach the smallest pot, the purple flickering of gas turned down low as she put the pot on the stove.

  As she waited for the milk to warm up, she leaned against the counter, swaying slightly. She was never fully awake these days (these weeks, these months), her reality blurring at the edges. She was never fully asleep either, her dreams only a baby’s whimper deep. She recalled The Cycle of Exhaustion she had written at nineteen—nearly a decade before—and choked on a sob of a laugh. The college all-nighters had possessed a bold hussar quality, a youthful devil-may-care flair, and their feel had been hard, light, and vivid in her triumphant, springing step. This sleeplessness was a wet, heavy weight, relentless and inescapable, creeping into her bones, turning the world gray, the urge to weep ever close to the surface. It filled her with an absolute despair—and, at the same time, a kind of sweet relief: it was good to give up worrying about achievements for a spell and let the weakness of her body take over—good to surrender to the inevitability of her temporary escape from destiny.