Forty Rooms

by Olga Grushin

  She was going to do this only once, after all.

  Pale moonlight slanted through the narrow window; she could see a thin dusting of snow on the ground. She stirred the milk in the pot. Her feet were cold on the tiles. In the bedroom across the hall, her husband snored in a steady, energetic rhythm, and the baby—almost six months old now—made a meowing noise, a precursor to a bout of crying. On an impulse so vague it felt like the prompting of a dream rather than a conscious action, she bent to pull out the bottom drawer near the stove, sifted through a pile of partially unopened mail—advertisements, telephone bills, takeout menus—that nowadays seemed to drift through the house in unabated flocks, sprouting colonies in chance nooks and crannies. Underneath the envelopes lay a flat box scarcely larger than a pack of playing cards. She took it out. Plastic still clung around it, so she sliced through it with a knife, and lifted the lid.

  Tiny bugs of words leapt out and ran all over the counter. She trapped them with both palms, scooped them up in handfuls, pinned their slippery, wiggly little bodies to the door of the fridge, then played with them sleepily, sliding them about, almost at random, in the quivering of the gas flame, in the blue glimmer of the winter moon, until the words began to draw together into lines and she saw that she was making a poem of sorts, except it was like composing on the other side of the looking glass, composing backward—not the usual hum solidifying into sounds, the misty glow of meaning slowly growing more defined, until it sharpened into disparate words, but instead, timid sense trying to sneak its way into the cracks between the silly words already there.

  Also, she could barely read the letters in the dark.

  Feeling comforted somehow, she stood pushing the half-invisible magnets to the left, to the right, stirring the milk, nodding off now and then, until it seemed like some memory from long before, the familiar excitement in her fingertips, the baby whimpering, the kitchen floating underwater, the cold in her feet, the baby crying, the swell and fall of the snores, the baby wailing . . . Waking with a start, she abandoned whatever dream she had been pursuing, rushed to test the temperature of the milk with her little finger, quickly poured it into the bottle, and hurried out to feed him; but at seven that morning, when she entered the kitchen with the baby sniveling in her arms, she discovered Paul standing before the fridge, a half-emptied glass of orange juice in his hand, his head tilted. The poem she did not remember writing snaked in wobbly, uneven lines through a widely dispersed cloud of unused adjectives and verbs.

  “When did we get this?” he said, motioning with his chin. “My sophomore roommate had one of these. I didn’t know you wrote poetry, ha-ha!” He declaimed in a loud, exaggerated manner, grandly waving his free hand in the air:

  “My cook is a drunk and my eggs are bitter

  my driver is a dreamer and we always go so fast

  my friend is a player and I cry all day

  I have a crush on the boy

  who waters the roses

  he has bare pink feet

  and a lovely behind

  I live in the sea—”

  The poem stopped abruptly.

  “I would feel threatened if we had a garden,” Paul said, smiling, and finished the juice in one gulp. When he lowered the glass, there was an orange mustache above his upper lip.

  “I think I was asleep,” she said.

  “My turn.” He swept her lines aside, and as her five dozen words merged with the remaining two hundred, her small creation dissolved without a trace. Pushing the magnets off to the very edges of the door, he selected just three or four—she could not see which ones behind the broad expanse of his back—and arranged them in the middle of the empty space before stepping away. “Ta-da!”

  I love my honey, read the magnets.

  She moved to hug him, but the baby in her arms started to cry, so, aborting the effort, she settled him in the high chair and went to get more milk. When she slammed the fridge door closed, a bit too firmly perhaps, a couple of words were dislodged and plopped down to the floor. She glared at them, bleary-eyed, light-headed with sleeplessness, then began to flick all the magnets off one by one. An unpleasant image of roadkill being scraped off the pavement came to her out of nowhere.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m going to put them back in their box.”

  “Maybe you should leave them. They seem like fun.”

  “We have enough clutter as it is, I think,” she said in a level voice.

  The baby, now full, cooed happily. She looked over at him, and her heart, which had been momentarily unsettled, came to rest in its rightful place.

  18. Nursery

  The Mushroom Hunt

  The nursery was a cheerful room; she had painted it herself. The walls were lime green on one side and emerald green on the other, the ceiling light blue, and the windowpanes and baseboards azure. All across the green of the walls she had drawn yellow flowers with neat round petals, while the ceiling was peppered with plastic stars that glowed in the dark. When her parents had walked into the nursery for the first time, her mother had been volubly enchanted, but her father had seemed not to notice it at all—the only thing in the room he had noticed was Genie himself.

  He sat in the armchair in the corner now, small and sullen, like a ruffled bird in winter. “Isn’t it time for the boy to wake up?” he asked again.

  He always called Genie “the boy,” whereas her mother called him Zhenechka.

  She glanced at the crib, then at the minute hand of the smiling moon on the wall.

  “No,” she said, “not yet.”

  He pursed his lips and resumed gazing outside with a vague frown, and immediately she felt guilty; next time he asked, she would have to wake Genie up. In his presence her father’s face became like a stained-glass window with the sun shining through. At all other times, though, a new sour look lodged itself in his eyes, in the deep crease between his eyebrows, in the lines tugging his mouth down into his beard. Whenever she glanced up at him from folding shirts or tidying toys, a sweaty hand took hold of her heart and dragged it sideways.

  “So what’s beyond this street?” he asked.

  “Another street just like this one,” she replied.

  “And beyond that?”

  “Two more streets like this, and then a highway. There is a grocery store on the other side of the highway, but it takes a while to cross with a stroller.”

  “You must get a car,” he said, sounding displeased. “It’s impossible here without a car. You should learn how to drive. You never leave the house. The boy is pale.”

  She started to explain about taking him out on the veranda for his daily allotment of fresh air, and about not having needed a car before they had moved here, and Paul working on weekends and never having the time to teach her, and, in any case, her not wanting to practice with a child in the backseat; but halfway through her apologetic mumbling, her father made a short, annoyed sound deep in his throat, and she fell silent. He resumed looking out the window, his face closed off. All at once she wanted to abandon the trivial, fussing tasks and the insignificant small talk on which she was squandering what little was left of their time together—she wanted to sit at his feet instead, prop her chin on his knee, stare up at him, and ask him things, the way she had done when she was a little girl. Back then she had tried to pry the mysteries of the universe out of him—“Why is the sky so black?” and “Does it hurt your shadow when you step on it?” and “Why does this song always make Mama cry?”

  She had just as many questions now, though the questions had changed in nature.

  Mama tells me your treatments are going well, are helping you—is that true? How much longer do you really have—how much longer do we have together? Is there enough time for me to prove myself to you? Whenever I see the way you look at Genie, I thaw inside, but I am also hurt: it’s like I have done my part and no lo
nger matter as much. Are you disappointed in me, are you hoping that he will turn out to be more like you? Do you need someone to be like you, to preserve some echo of your life? The meaning of life as you explained it to me that one time, at the dacha, under the stars—do you still hold that to be true, and do you fear that you have not done enough, that after all the decades of unsparing work, your life has not succeeded on its own, not fully, so you want the reassurance of seeing a piece of yourself carried forth by future generations?

  Are you afraid of dying?

  Do you believe in the afterlife?

  Do you believe in God?

  Listen, Papa: I love you. I will give you more, so much more, than a grandchild. I will keep your memory alive to the outermost limits of my soul. I will write a long poem about you when I’m finally good enough as a poet to write it. That should count for something, should it not? I love you.

  She went on folding Genie’s tiny shirts in silence, and her father went on sitting in the armchair, staring out the window with a deepened frown, and in another few minutes Genie woke up from his afternoon nap. He always woke up happy and alert, often rolling some recently learned word around in his mouth—“cup,” “fish”—like a delicious treat, tasting its novel sound with a surprised, pleased look on his small pink face (not pale, not pale at all, she took good care of him). Now, within seconds of opening his eyes, he bounced up, held on to the crib’s railing, and rattled it, eager to get out, eager for whatever wondrous adventures his grandfather had prepared for him that day.

  Genie was blond and blue-eyed, and looked nothing like his grandfather—or, for that matter, nothing like her either.

  “Today,” her father announced, beaming, as he groped for his cane, “I will teach you to hunt mushrooms. Repeat after me: grib. Try again. Grib. Now, real mushrooms grow in a forest, of course, I will take you there when you are a bit older and come to visit me at our dacha in Russia. For now, these buttons will have to do. The white ones are the best, belye griby, we call them, and the red ones—”

  She wanted to intercede: the buttons did not seem safe, Genie was not yet two, he put things in his mouth, he could choke; but she looked at her father and stayed silent, just watched them hawk-eyed for the next ten minutes, while they traipsed all over the rug, Genie wobbling a little, her father’s cane tapping as he limped up and down, both crowing with excitement when they stumbled upon yet another button; and every time, her father admonished the boy to clean the stem thoroughly of leaves and dirt before they gently lowered the button into their imaginary basket.

  In the suburban American room with the painted grass, painted sky, painted flowers, she remembered the smells and the sounds of the Russian woods she had walked with her father two decades before. Once, they had brought home a baby owlet, and another time had come upon a small dead fox curled up in a snowy hollow by a fallen oak. There had been that misty autumn morning, barely past sunrise, when a moose had rushed at them out of a thicket; it had been so close she could see the moist, agitated flaring of its nostrils. A quote she had read somewhere came to her mind: “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness or a lovesickness”—or something like it. And would it also be true, she wondered, that the bigger the lump—say, if you happen to have both sicknesses at once—the better the poem?

  Her mother appeared in the hallway, seemingly shrunk in Paul’s kitchen apron.

  “Zhenechka should have a snack now,” she said, but she too paused to watch them play. Genie had just spotted a button that had rolled all the way under his crib, and was gurgling, then screaming, with laughter. Her father began to laugh too, until it looked as if he was crying.

  “The main regret I have in life,” her mother spoke from the doorway, “is that your father and I didn’t have another child. A child growing up alone doesn’t learn to think about others as much, and if you stay in your head all the time, talking to imaginary friends and not noticing other people, it’s harder for you to be happy in life later on.”

  Her breath went out of her; she was winded with the sense of injustice. I notice other people, she wanted to shout, but aloud she just said, “I am happy.”

  Her mother did not seem to hear her. “The best age difference between siblings,” she went on evenly, “is one or two years, no more than three. Then they are friends growing up, and when the older generation . . . that is . . .” She stumbled, continued in haste, “I mean they will always have each other, no matter what.” Her unspoken words hung heavy in the air of the cheerful blue-and-green nursery. “And if you had a girl, think how joyful it would make your father to spoil her . . . Come now, Zhenechka, let’s have some of Nana’s apple pie.”

  Wildly she turned to her father, hoping that he would shrug her mother’s words away, that he would say something, at least. But he said nothing at all, just stood looking after the boy, the laughter leaking out of his face until only the traces of tears remained, and the hunger in his eyes made her lower her own.

  That night, after everyone else in the house was asleep—her parents in the bedroom, relinquished to them for the duration of their visit, Paul stuffed into the Procrustean snugness of the living room couch, Eugene the younger in his crib, clutching his toy hedgehog that looked like a bear, or else a bear that looked like a hedgehog, a present from Eugene the elder—she lay awake on the unfolded nursery chair, listening to her son’s even breathing. She knew that her mother was wrong, that this could not possibly be all there was, this measured, resigned wisdom of one generation succeeding another, this somnolent song of biological fulfillment in her blood; for her childhood premonitions of the darkly dazzling mysteries that underlay her existence, the dreamtime glimpses of magic that felt so terribly real, the light-headed hum of inspiration that still coursed through her veins now and then—all these things filled her with a sharp, if fleeting, sense of immeasurable depths beneath the thin veneer of her temporary suburban masquerade. Just a corner, just an instant, just a poem away lay an unimaginably rich world where gods walked alongside the chosen few; and if you ever won your way there, your reward was meaning conferred upon your daily labors and travails by the promise of immortality, by the clarity of secret luminescence.

  In her first decade of life, she had understood, albeit dimly and without reasoning, that a certain kind of inner fire was required if you were ever to see the things no one else saw. In her second decade, she had learned that work and daring were necessary also, and in her third, she had added experience—of pain and joy both—to the list. But was she discovering, on the cusp of her fourth decade, that selfishness too was an essential part of this celestial equation? In the end, when all accounts were totaled, did you become great only by disregarding the happiness of those around you—was the mark of a true genius his perfect solitude, his absolute inability to consider anything beyond his art?

  If so, she would have to postpone seeking entry into heaven, for she had other, human, equations to balance first.

  So listen, you up there, she thought as she lay stretched on the uncomfortable chair in her boy’s room, staring at the ceiling. If anyone is up there to hear me, and if my voice is in any way special, if I have earned my right to trickle a few words into your ear, I will make a bargain with you. I will give up my life for a while longer in exchange for my father’s life. I will do my best to make him happy, I will have another child—a girl, please, if you will be so kind to note my special request—I will even give up all thought of poetry while he lives, I swear—just please make him live, make him live—

  And in another, rational, adult part of herself, she knew, of course, that she was being melodramatic and laughable, that she was addressing no one—that she had no power to bargain with the gods, that there were no gods—and still she lay in the dark of the nursery, whispering fiercely. On the ceiling above her, the greenish toy stars glowed with their pale plastic light. For a while they trembled hazily, as her eyes kept spilling over
with tears; then, after some time, their stored phosphorescence began to fade away; and still she stared at them, at their pale outlines, at the places where they had been, for a long sleepless stretch, mouthing promises—and unlike the magnificent stars of her childhood, these stars did make her feel small.

  19. Living Room

  The Call

  When they first moved in, the living room had been her least favorite place in the house. It gave her the impression of some cramped, low-ceilinged cell, like a cabin on a nighttime ship; its windows led onto the covered veranda and stayed dim even in the brightest sunlight, and the sour smell of the previous inhabitants’ feet seemed embedded in its darkened floors. She used to pass through it quickly, feeling an odd constriction in her chest, as though she were unable to take proper breaths. But as the space gradually filled with sofas, tables, and armchairs, her distaste for it just as gradually lessened, until, in their third year in the house, she found herself retreating here more and more often; the mouse-colored, well-heated room soothed her parental frustrations and domestic anxieties, made her feel grounded and calm at the end of another long day.