by Lara Vapnyar
To be fair, Yulia and Sasha did try to involve me in their life. I would go with them to lectures and screenings, but they were officially a couple now, and I would always feel like the third wheel. Plus, now that I was free of my infatuation with B., I saw my behavior of the previous year as temporary insanity, and didn’t want to be around people who had witnessed my humiliation. For the same reason, I would refuse to meet the guys Yulia constantly pushed on me. Her expression would turn suspicious and a little hostile every time I said no. She must have worried that I’d try to steal Sasha, but I had no such intention. Sasha had grown remarkably handsome, tall, wiry, with intense eyes and an interesting nose, but I still wasn’t attracted to him. Anyway, after B., the mere idea of falling into another embarrassing love was too painful for me.
I preferred to stay home and read, or write what I called “sketches” or “notes.” Just like my school essays, they were mostly about my mother. My mother and I felt close to each other, but in a different way now, as equals. We talked about everything. My obsession with B. had left me baffled about the concept of love, and I hoped that if I studied every detail of my parents’ relationship, I would be able to crack love as if it were a math problem. It was then that my mother showed me my father’s letters and the note scribbled on the yellowed corner of the Pravda front page.
This happened one evening when my mother and I were drinking tea in our kitchen. Ever since my grandmother died, my mother had taken to sitting in her old spot by the kitchen window. I sat across from her, where my grandfather sat all those years ago. My mother kept blowing into her tea, while I asked question after question about my father. “But how did you know it was love?” “When did you know?” Suddenly my mother stood up and pushed her chair back. “I need to show you something.” She went out of the kitchen and returned with a shoebox full of old letters. My mother put the box in front of me on the table and I reached in, but she said, “Wait,” and left the room. She couldn’t look at the letters even after all those years.
Len and I ended up spending every day of my Saint Petersburg visit together. He took a week off from work, pretending to be sick. Len said that he liked every single thing about me. I was filled with so much gratitude and wonder that I immediately liked everything about him too. From his gawky frame, to his mop of light brown hair, to his pensive blue eyes, and especially his large mouth that curved downward in a way that made Len look either sad or skeptical.
At the beginning he dutifully showed me all the famous landmarks, but we quickly abandoned them for the sake of the parks with sagging benches where we could sit and talk and kiss. We spent my last two days in Saint Petersburg in my mother’s friend’s tiny apartment. The bedroom was crowded by boxes of sheet music and various musical instruments in cases covered with sticky dust. This gave me the strangest sensation—I couldn’t hear it, but I somehow felt surrounded by music. To get to the bed we had to climb over the early works of Rachmaninoff and squeeze between two cellos and a double bass. We lay on that bed, in the exhilarating agony of fruitless touching, because I was too scared to go all the way.
On the day of my departure, Len came to see me off at the train station. We arrived early and stood on the platform for a long time, hugging. We exchanged “I love yous.” I had my face buried in his neck and my eyes closed. He had his lips pressed to the skin above my ear. We were trying to imbibe as much of each other’s smell as we could. We stood perfectly still. Meanwhile, everything around us seemed to move. It was as if we were inside of a huge complicated organism. The trains would arrive and depart on adjacent platforms, screeching and panting, blowing whistles, emitting their heat and the heavy smells of diesel and grease. And those people around us, dragging their suitcases, stomping their feet on the platform, running, squeezing through, chatting, yelling, groaning. And the rough Baltic wind making its way onto the platform in sneaky drafts. And Len and I were in the middle of it all, but not part of it. We were separate, we were complete and self-sufficient, we were invincible.
The boarding announcement made us shudder. I let Len go and walked up the steps into my car. Len hoisted my suitcase up. I took it and dragged it to my compartment, then ran back to the door to look at Len one more time. He stood in the same spot where I’d left him, craning his neck, searching for me. I waved to him. Then the platform started to move, carrying Len away from me. It took me a moment to realize that it was the train that was moving. Len said something, but I couldn’t hear. He started running after the train. He yelled: “Will you marry me?”
I yelled: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and kept repeating it while I still could see Len.
Later, on the train, some angry woman was moving past me on the way to the bathroom. She said: “Wipe that smile off your face!” and when I didn’t, she shoved me hard on the shoulder. I hardly felt the blow. I was invincible.
I didn’t really ponder what it meant to be married, or explore the idea of something being for the rest of my life. I thought of his proposal and my acceptance as the ultimate expressions of the love we felt at that moment. At that moment. At that precise moment. What we had was here and now, and it was mind-blowing. I couldn’t imagine my life without it or beyond it. And I couldn’t wait to tell my mother!
I found her in the kitchen, drinking tea by the window in my grandmother’s favorite spot. She had my grandmother’s old cardigan on, and she was blowing into her cup like my grandmother used to do. For a second, I thought that this was not my mother but my grandmother’s ghost.
I told her about Len, she started to cry. I hugged her and said: “No! Please don’t cry! You’ll like him, you will really like him!” Len was sensitive, Len was intelligent. He had to work two jobs to make a living, as a TV engineer and as a computer programmer. Len loved music and Soviet comedies. He loved to laugh. He wasn’t funny himself, but he laughed at my jokes. Oh, and he was good at math. He had learned computer programming on his own. Imagine that!
My mother said that these were tears of happiness and that she had a very good feeling about Len.
I said I was sure that he would love her. She was my mother, she was so much like me, it seemed impossible that somebody could love me and not love her.
Note to a cynical reader. I was twenty. I didn’t know a whole lot about how life worked.
It wasn’t until the following day that my mother asked me if I had told Len about America. I gasped.
The thing was that about six months before I met Len, my mother and I had applied for US visas. Uncle Grisha had insisted that we do that. Right now the life of Russian Jews might not be so bad, but nobody knew what would happen next. Hatred and anger that had been suppressed for years were emerging from under the ruins of the Soviet Union. Nationalism, along with anti-Semitism, was on the rise. And right at that time the United States government passed the provision that Soviet Jews (especially those who had relatives in the US) could get entry visas and even refugee status. Uncle Grisha said that it would be remarkably stupid not to use this opportunity. He started the process for us, and now our applications were slowly creeping through immigration offices to be considered.
Immersed in my new love, I had completely forgotten.
We called Uncle Grisha, and it turned out that it was possible to include Len in our application, but only if we registered our marriage before the end of the year.
I explained the situation to Len, and he said that it didn’t matter to him whether we ended up in New York, Moscow, or Saint Petersburg, as long as we were together.
We got married four months later. At the Grand Wedding Palace in Saint Petersburg.
I have one photograph from the wedding. There are ten people in it, all standing on the marble staircase of the Grand Wedding Palace in Saint Petersburg.
Sasha and Yulia are on the top, laughing from the sheer shock of it. Len’s father, who had just met me, is a bit lower, his expression a blank. Len’s stepmother by his side, smiling tensely at something to the right of the camera. Two of Len’s col
lege friends looking stupefied. My sobbing mother on the second step, supported by Rita.
And there are Len and I at the bottom of the steps, holding hands. Len, wearing an ill-fitting suit, is gawky, shaggy-haired, squeezing my hand with a brave determined smile. I’m skinny and young, with messy dark hair, long strands falling all over my face and neck. My dress, which I bought for sixteen dollars including the tiara and gloves, is shapeless and stiff, and bunched up on the bottom so that the tips of my lavender pumps show. None of it matters, because I look ready to take a leap.
Twelve years after my wedding, the Important Fashion Magazine assigned me to write a piece about my wedding dress. I wrote it in about a week and attached a copy of my wedding photo. The editors loved my piece and especially my photo, but they asked for a couple more—recent ones of Len and me, so that they could prove to their readers that we were still happily married. I had written a beautiful fairy tale, so it was only logical that readers would demand their “happily ever after.” No fairy tale should end with its characters taking a leap or plunging into the unknown.
The year was 2003—way before the era of digital. We kept our photos in large plastic boxes in the basement of our home on Staten Island. I opened the box with more recent photos and poured the contents onto the ugly tan carpet. The photos were dusty and sticky, some stuck together. Most of them were of the kids. Dan trying to feed a frog. Nathalie taking off her ski boots. Len and the kids lying in the hammock together. The kids and I going down a woodsy path. Dan and Nathalie performing in a five-minute-long, two-person ballet based on The Hound of the Baskervilles. There were very few photos of Len and me together, and we didn’t look happy in any of them. Far from it. It was always one of three possibilities:
The too-tight hug and the forced smile.
Barely touching and visibly wincing.
Each taking up his/her own space in the photo, seemingly unaware of the other’s presence.
I finally picked a photo that we took on a ski trip to Mont-Tremblant six or seven years earlier. It was ten degrees Fahrenheit and we were both wearing bloated ski jackets, so “barely touching and visibly wincing” could have been attributed to the weather and not the state of the marriage.
Note to Important Fashion Magazine readers. If you happened to read the piece about my wedding dress and were under the impression that my marriage was still happy twelve years later, I owe you an apology. Len and I had been happy for less than a year.
The wedding coincided with the start of the school break, so I got to spend the time in Saint Petersburg fully submerged in the role of a newly married woman. I went shopping with a big checkered bag, I bought bread, I bought onions, I bought rice and buckwheat—I’d never bought grains before. I got myself a wallet because I thought that keeping money in a crumpled wad in a pocket of my jeans like I used to do was unseemly for a married woman. Everything was exciting and new and not completely serious.
The prospect of emigration frightened me amazingly little, probably because I concentrated on arriving, not on departing—never stopped to think what I’d be losing. I thought of immigration as a great adventure, much like my marriage. I had jumped into marriage without thinking and it was working fine, so there was no reason to suppose that immigration wouldn’t. In addition, I thought that I knew what emigration was all about. I’d immigrated from Moscow to Saint Petersburg. Every morning after Len left for work, I would choose a different route to walk toward the center, marveling at how the architecture was nothing like Moscow’s, taking in all the wonderful foreign details, from the way the streetcars were painted to the way people dressed. After each walk, I would come back to the apartment and write. Sasha had recently told me that the Reading World had announced a competition for aspiring writers. The winner would get his story published in the magazine. Both he and Yulia were going to submit stories. I still didn’t take my writing seriously, but I decided to try my luck anyway.
I would write a little every day, interrupting my studies to buy and prepare food. At the wedding, my mother had given me a recipe book her mother had given her when she moved to Sevastopol. The simplest and most successful dish was the fish soup. I threw diced potatoes, onions, and carrots into the pot, and when they were almost ready, opened a can of salmon packed in tomato sauce and added it to the soup. I guess it was similar to Manhattan clam chowder, minus the clams and Manhattan. The main advantage of the soup was that I had to spend very little time cooking it and so almost no time conversing with the neighbor in our communal kitchen. The neighbor, Alla, was a busty middle-aged woman who went braless, wore threadbare robes, and was kind to animals. She had a dog, saved from the street and adopted. Her name was Nusha. She was playful and dumb. She would butt her head into the door of our bedroom every morning and storm in. Once there, she would prance and jump around the room until Len threw a pillow at her and yelled that she must leave. “Nushka, now!” What she did was snatch used condoms we would throw under the bed in the course of the night and bring them to Alla. Alla made sure to comment on that in the kitchen. “I got another little gift from Nushka this morning.” I pretended to be embarrassed, but I was secretly proud. We had lots and lots of used condoms. What better proof of a robust marriage!
Recently, I found out that Nathalie had the same idea of condoms being a marriage thermometer when she was a child. She told me that when she was ten or eleven, she and her best friend Masha went to raid the nightstands in my and Len’s bedroom. Masha was a year older and vastly more experienced, because her parents had already gone through the divorce and had sex with other people. Among other interesting things, the drawer revealed a pack of condoms. “That’s a good sign,” Masha said. “That means your parents are still having sex.” Nathalie felt relieved—she had always worried that Len and I would get divorced. Then something compelled her to check the expiration date. At that time Nathalie was spending about an hour a day doing math with her grandmother. She knew the importance of “doing math in your head ALWAYS.” “They haven’t had sex in five years!” she determined. Masha said that if that was the case, we were going to get divorced for sure.
What it actually meant was that many years ago I was in the process of switching birth control methods and we needed condoms for a few gap weeks. We didn’t get divorced until many years after that raid and we were having sex up until the very end.
Note to children raiding their parents’ drawers. First of all, don’t! Nothing you find there will make it worthwhile. But if you do, know this: while the absence of sex is probably a good indicator of an impending divorce, having sex isn’t proof of the opposite. Your parents can have plenty of acceptable or even pretty good sex and still be miserable.
But back then I couldn’t even imagine ever being miserable with Len. Our love was so strong that it felt like a presence in that communal apartment, as if it were another tenant. It had an amorphous shape and weird density; it was less dense than an actual object, but denser than the air in the room. It felt as if I could touch it. I could move my hand through the air and feel resistance in places where love was. While Len was at work I missed him like crazy. When it was time for him to come home, I would come to the front door and listen for the sound of footsteps on the staircase. When I heard his I would rush to open the door. And he would walk in and hug me, and we would stay like this for a minute or two, while Nushka jumped and panted and wagged her tail.
I would describe all that to my mother, in our daily phone calls. I would be gushing about my happiness, but as soon as I put the receiver down I would be invariably overcome with panic. My mother and father had loved each other too, and look how it ended. My father had died just like that. What if they had loved each other too much, and that was why my father died? Wasn’t it arrogant to dare to love each other that much?
I would lie in bed next to the sleeping Len, letting his hair tickle my nose, taking in the warmth of his back, and think of childish prayers. I couldn’t pray like that anymore, could I? I was a married
woman now. I had to come up with a more grown-up way of praying.
“Dear God [even though I still imagined God as Something],” I would beg, “I’m not arrogant. I swear I’m not. I know I don’t deserve this happiness, but please, please don’t take Len away from me, don’t let him die.”
God didn’t take Len away. What he took away was our love.
NINE
I wonder if there is a precise mathematical formula that lets you determine the exact moment when your love started to die. If you imagine love as a line graph, you can look for the last moment when it was definitely there, and the first moment when it was definitely gone. The moment when your love started to die would be somewhere between those points.
So what was the last moment when Len and I were happy? I remember one moment about a week before we left Russia for the United States. To my complete shock, I ended up winning the Reading World competition. The story I submitted took place during the stagnation period, and focused on a young woman who had to visit remote schools as part of her job for the Ministry of Education. I even included my mother’s favorite anecdote about the Moscow man who wanted to poop. The editor had written me a gushing letter, but I couldn’t really believe that my story was getting published until I received the magazine in the mail, opened it, and saw my name in the table of contents. Katya Geller, “Math in the Sands,” a short story. Len took the magazine from me and stroked its light blue cover, lovingly, as if it were a pet. He was so happy for me that there were tears in his eyes. His happiness touched me more than that of my mother, who was absolutely delirious. Mothers can’t help but love their kids’ writing, especially when they are the main characters in that writing. Husbands are a different story. Afterward, Len and I went for a walk in a park. The day was chilly and bright. We walked down the icy path, Len’s hand on my waist so that I wouldn’t slip on the ice, and my hand over his so that it wouldn’t get cold. The love was still there then, definitely there, caught between our fingers like the flickers of warmth.