It Occurs to Me That I Am America

by Richard Russo

  I thought she was joking but she wasn’t. I followed her across the Common to the awning of the Ritz on Arlington and into Firestone and Parson. Mr. Firestone was reaching into the last of the curved jewelry cases. He straightened up quickly. He was pleased, you might even say moved, to see her. They shook hands and then he took both of hers. They were bare of her rings. Drew’s mother had demanded all of her jewelry back. She told Mr. Firestone they were at home soaking and he scolded her for not letting him clean them properly.

  Mr. Firestone went into a back office and came out with a manila envelope from which he slid another smaller manila envelope from which he shook out two rings. Each had a diamond the size of big lima bean in the center. This is a cushion cut, he explained, slipping it onto Cilla’s finger. And this is a cabochon, he said, putting it on mine. Her diamond had a halo of bright sapphires. Mine was all diamonds, all around, even on what Mr. Firestone called the shoulders of the ring. He urged us take them outside.

  Diamonds need to be seen in the sun, he said.

  We went out to the sidewalk on Arlington Street with the rings on our fingers. Cilla laid her right hand over her left as if asking herself for her hand. Her diamond exploded with color.

  I think you should run against Kenny Lorde in the primary, she said to me.

  What? Kenny Lorde was running for state senator in our district.

  He’s weak. You’d thrash him.

  You’re crazy.

  Let’s see the ring, she said.

  I hadn’t dared hold up my hand yet. I was sure someone would come around the corner and pluck it off my finger as soon as I did.

  C’mon, she said. Let’s see it.

  I brought the ring up into the sun. It flashed at everything all around it.

  Magnificent, Cilla said.

  Run against Kenny Lorde, I thought, a thick rope of energy forming fast inside me.

  I had been the racehorse all along.

  LILY KING is the author of four novels: The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, Father of the Rain, and, most recently, Euphoria, winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by the New York Times Book Review. King lives in Maine and is committed to the increasingly threatened ideals of American democracy, including freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and equal rights for all.

  SHEILA KOHLER

  * * *

  The Harlot and the Murderer: Sonia’s Story

  The hero of my story—whom I love with all the power of my soul . . . who was, is, and ever will be beautiful—is the truth.

  —TOLSTOY

  She still comes to me here, stepping out of the shadows, in this savage place. None of my memories of men, even of R., are lit up quite like my memory of her. Lizaveta. So tall, dark-skinned, with her wide-spaced eyes, her big smile, her bright and hopeful gaze, she walks toward me in the muddy street, coming into the uncertain sunlight. Broad-shouldered like a man, dressed like a soldier, with her crooked legs and big goatskin shoes, I see her approaching, clothes in her arms like an offering. Brutally killed so young, she lingers on in my mind like a sacred object, a bronze icon, a glow around her braided head. It was she who found the clothes I wore for my work. She dressed me up, disguised me, changed me as much as she could. Did I become the part I played?

  • • •

  One afternoon, soon after I arrived here, on a high bank by this desolate river, in the great quiet of the wide spaces of the Siberian steppe, an unfortunate shuffled up to me in his heavy shackles. He took off his pancake-shaped hat and bowed his half-shaved head: “Matushka! Matushka! ” “Little Mother! Little Mother!” he called out to me. “Pray for me. Please pray for me.”

  What did he see in my thin face, in the dark circles beneath my eyes, in my drab attire? Is the life I have lived branded in my skin? Is it there in my gaze, my gait, my gestures? Something in my mien, my stance, as faltering and timid as they may seem, led him to single me out, to watch me walk, to approach me freely, without fear and even with affection, as though he knew me, had always known me intimately, like an ever-flowing river, or even as one of his own family. Did he understand I am in a sense one with him, an equal who would not condemn him whatever he might have done, that I am as great a sinner as he might be? Yet he asked me to pray for him, which I have gladly done.

  God bless them all, the ones in chains, in dank cells, the prisoners in this place where I have accompanied them.

  • • •

  It all began with a moment of which I have never spoken. It lingers on in my mind static and silent, like a photograph. Some of my story has already been told and told so well by a genius, but by a man. There were secrets that he could not know, things left out, not said, not seen, not felt, and not heard. He was wrong about me at times—how could he not be?

  I know that his word will almost certainly be considered more reliable than mine: a man’s word against a woman’s. How easily women are accused of lying, of not knowing how to distinguish good from bad. Who will believe the words of a young woman, a woman of ill repute, a prostitute, branded with the yellow ticket, when her story has been told by a famous writer, a celebrated man? Yet what he ignored was that R. was how I escaped my shame, how I reached God or anyway ecstasy—if ecstasy is that moment of exit when the soul takes wing, like a flying fish, and seems to swim from the body.

  • • •

  Now I see myself as the lodgers in that crowded room must have seen me, as my father recognized me, as R. must have noticed me for the first time, hesitating in the doorway: a puny girl with a narrow face, dressed incongruously. She is young but not innocent. Though she has never experienced desire, pleasure, the possibility is within her. It is visible in the avid eyes, the open mouth, the trembling hands. It is the strength of that desire that drives me, despite the difficulties I know I will encounter, to speak up, to speak out, to dare to tell my own version of the story, the real story of a woman of ill repute, now.

  I see my own image from without, from a distance, as though seeing someone else, someone cut off and separate, standing in the entrance to that crowded room, a breathless girl, surrounded by opprobrium, unmistakable in her gutter finery.

  • • •

  I am eighteen years old. It is Saint Petersburg where the pale light lingers late in the sultry July night. I have been, as I do most evenings, wandering the streets, watching my step, keeping my wits about me, glancing around hopefully in the summer stench of stagnant water, lime, and dust. It was well after eight when I heard a clatter on the cobblestones. In the clear light I saw the girl’s thin, pretty face. It was little Polenka, the eldest child of my stepmother, K.I., running toward me out of the shadows at the end of the street, in her thin dress, a kerchief around her head, her cheeks pink, her fair hair streaming out wildly behind her.

  “Come quickly, Sonechka!” she shouted even before she had reached me. I hurried toward her, and she grasped my hand, pulling me along the street in my garish attire, the train of my yellow dress dragging in the dirt behind me, my hand hanging on to my feathered hat, my parasol. Together we ran through the streets, my light-colored shoes spattered with mud and mire. There was no time to ask what was wrong, and I knew it must be death or extreme illness. I thought something had happened to K.I., my stepmother, as of course it eventually did.

  Once we reached our building, I told Polenka to go ahead, taking a moment to get my breath and smooth out the flounces of the worn silk with trembling fingers. She ran up the stairs before me, disappearing into the crowd already congregated in the doorway and down the stairs, the curious, the idle, and the gossipers. All of the landlady’s lodgers seemed to have streamed from their innumerable closets and were squeezing through the doorway into our corridor to see what was going on. I made my way as best I could through the crowd and stood in the doorway.

  • • •

  There is a lot about doors in the book that was written about R. and me and my fa
mily. There are many sudden exits and mysterious entrances. Strangers lurk and listen behind doors. There are struggles at doors, pulling and pushing, bells ringing repeatedly. Like a series of scenes on a stage, there are the necessary furniture, the props, the reader, the audience. The characters squeeze into crowded spaces: apartments, taverns, hotel rooms with mice. They meet by chance in streets and stairways, police stations. They talk to one another at length. Words pour from them for pages. They tell the whole stories of their lives. They overhear conversations as they move along the boulevards, across the bridges and the crowded squares of Saint Petersburg, going from one building to another, down steps into dark, dank taverns and sordid eating places, watched over by landladies, concierges, good-tempered maids.

  But it was not like that, not at all, not for me. So little was said in my life, or if it was, it was said to conceal and not reveal. Words did not reflect reality, or not the one I perceived. There were long silences, many sighs, groans, sobs. More was conveyed with a glance or a gesture—a flash of hate, a sudden slap on the side of the head, the pulling of hair, the thrust of the cane, a hand slipping down a bodice like a snake, an unexpected gift.

  Mostly I remember hunger, the lack of means to buy something to satisfy the crying children, to protect them from K.I.’s blows.

  Money changed hands repeatedly in shadowy rooms in silence or with just the glad chink of it on a dresser. Things happened in doorways, it is true, but there are places in the book where the writer felt obliged to close the doors firmly, to draw the shutters down like eyelids on eyes that prefer not to see.

  • • •

  In Saint Petersburg, as it says in the book, we were housed in a building owned by a German cabinetmaker. The street was near the Haymarket, that huge square where vendors set up stalls to sell whatever they can, a place peopled by pickpockets, hucksters, and peasants in greasy sheepskin coats and knee-high boots as well as the occasional merchant or even an aristocrat looking for a bargain. The air was filled with the clatter and rumble of carts and carriages, the cries of vendors, with soot from the new factories that had sprung up in the city and the stench of garbage and sewage that rose suffocatingly in the air.

  It was there that I met Lizaveta by chance one summer evening. She lived with her much older stepsister, the pawnbroker. I came across her standing in the flickering sunlight, talking by a stall, a bundle of old clothes she was hoping to sell in her arms. Somehow she knew my name. “Sonia!” she called out with a glad glance of recognition, and, despite the clothes, reached out her large hand to clasp mine, holding on to me.

  I felt we had always known each other. We became instant friends, sisters in misfortune. When we managed to meet we discovered our similar lives, our similar hearts. We seemed to come from the same family, though we looked so different: Lizaveta, so tall, strong, and bronze-cheeked, and myself so small, light-boned, and pale-skinned.

  Sometimes we met at the pawnbroker’s small apartment if Alyona was out, but she rarely left her premises. Alyona never approved of me. At rare moments when we met, passing in the corridor or in the entrance to the apartment, she would smile thinly and call me “dearie” in her reedy voice, but she glanced at me with a flicker of suspicion in her small, bright eyes. Besides, she was often busy with her constant customers, students coming and going, the doorbell ringing, and she was wary of strangers on her premises, rightly, as it turned out. She probably felt my presence an intrusion, an unwelcome distraction, even a danger in their hardworking lives.

  More often Lizaveta came to my room, and we had a moment alone. Or we met somewhere on the banks of the Neva or in the shadows of a church.

  Like me, she had lost her mother soon after birth. Her father, though he loved Lizaveta, indeed favored her, was so much older than she and not often home. Her care fell to her stepsister, who treated her like her slave, beating her. Her father made things worse, slipping her surreptitious presents from his pockets: an apple, a good-luck charm, a copper cross, when he came home late and found her dutifully carrying out her stepsister’s wishes.

  After his death she was entirely at the mercy of her stepsister, and like me, she was often glad to escape, coming to me with some object, an offering. She would braid my fine hair, threading a bright ribbon through my pale tresses or dangling a glittering glass earring from an ear; she showed me how to saunter with a slow sway, hands on my hips, how to sigh suggestively, rouged lips parted and damp eyelids lowered, long lashes lingering on the cheeks. Once she brought me a short-tailed goldfinch in a little cage, which I hung on a long cord from the ceiling of my room. I could hear it perpetually hopping about and chirping, dropping birdseed, rocking back and forth cheerfully above my head. We exchanged crosses once, and Lizaveta gave me her copper one, and I gave her one of mine, as I was later to do with R.

  • • •

  I see myself from afar in that first moment I saw R. and everything began: a girl in a photograph in someone else’s album, the kind tinted with color, she already has that same face, the clear blue eyes without innocence, eyes that have seen and accept all. She wears the wide crinoline that fills the doorway, the hat with its flaming fuchsia feather, and mechanically twirls the parasol with the ruffle around the rim.

  A tall, slender man in gray hovers in the flickering shadows of that crowded, candlelit, and smoke-filled room. He leans close over her stricken father, spattered with her father’s blood, and looks up at her. He stares at her, studying her face, her form, her clothes. He watches her leaning against the jamb, lowering her gaze with shame, her head to her chest, as if trying to hide her face, so that she has difficulty breathing and the beat of her heart thunders in her head.

  Murderer! This man has murdered my father! she thinks when she sees his pale face, the dark tormented gaze, blood all over his clothes.

  It was Lizaveta who had acquired my secondhand clothes. She had done her best. The train of the dress was thin and worn in places, but it was silk; the hat was dented at the brim, but stylish with its bright-colored feather, the parasol still a faded pink. In the daylight it cast a pink shadow on my face. “Look how pretty, Sonechka,” Lizaveta had said, twirling the parasol behind her head, looking down at me from her great height—she must have been six feet.

  Occasionally we would escape to the islands and wander in the greenness and freshness, watching with wonder the elegant carriages or a smart woman on a horse tapping its dappled flank with an English riding crop. Or we looked into windows of fine houses at a luxurious life we could only imagine. Sometimes we went to Vasilievsky Island in the summer and sat beneath the trees and talked.

  Or we came to my own place, where I would read to her from the New Testament she had found for me with its worn leather cover, the yellowed pages.

  I am not sure she knew how to read, though she could juggle figures in her head quickly and without error. No one had taught her the alphabet. They called her a half-caste with her swarthy skin, her crinkly hair. Yet her eyes were a pale, innocent blue.

  She was good-natured, openhearted, and merry. How we would laugh together! Tucked away in the room with the icons at the pawnbroker’s, where she was so brutally murdered. We would giggle like adolescents, which I was. I am not sure of her age when she died. Perhaps she was thirty-five or -six, but her café au lait skin was bright like a girl’s, and burnished as though polished on her high cheekbones. She never told me her age. Perhaps she did not know it. I hear us speaking, sometimes both at once, in our eagerness to share the secrets of our hearts.

  • • •

  The girl is aware that her face, her figure are incongruous, shocking in these clothes. As in a dream, I see her as she stands there, Sonia, my double, my reflection, my other, as though looking into a mirror. She is me and yet not me in the flickering candlelight, the smoky air, the grotesque faces grimacing disapprovingly all around her in the shadows of the narrow room. She pauses painfully, staring at the priest, who is at her father’s side, too.

  “What is i
t?” she asks, and someone answers in a loud voice that the drunkard has finally been brought home half-dead.

  She pushes her way forward and faces the sight of her father lying on the sofa, a pillow beneath his head, blood oozing from the corner of his mouth, perspiration on his forehead, the gashed, crushed chest.

  At the same time, she notices a badly dressed stranger in gray trousers holding a cap by his side. The man is so thin he looks as if he might be ill or has been ill. Even in the dimly lit room, she notices his close-set, intense dark eyes, pale skin, aquiline nose, his gray waistcoat spattered with her father’s blood. It is then that she thinks, irrationally, This man has murdered my father! and at the same time, This murderer has pierced my heart.

  “What has happened to him?” she asks, and someone murmurs that Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov has been run down by a carriage in his drunken state while she wandered the streets in her streetwalker clothes.

  • • •

  On the last day I saw Lizaveta, she came to my room before I went into the streets. We sat at my table and drank a cup of tea and ate some honey cakes she had brought for me, as she often did, saying I needed to eat more than I did.

  Then she said someone was waiting for her between six and seven in the Haymarket. It might be a profitable sale, with something I could wear among the clothes. She would bring me something soon. If only she had stayed instead of hurrying off to fulfill a promise so punctually!

  It was a hot day in late July. I still see her standing at my door in her strange worn-out shoes, lifting her big hand in a sort of soldier’s salute, her dark hair so neatly braided flat against her head, her slanting eyes smiling at me, promising to be back soon.

  But she never came back. When I had not seen her around in the Haymarket where I could usually find her and feared she might be ill, I went to the pawnbroker’s.