by Ellen Litman
In the past Misha could have simply asked the principal and the headmistress, and Kat would have been guaranteed a spot. They wouldn’t say no to a faculty member. But now his own standing is precarious, and it’s likely his contract will be dropped. And Kat herself is not the model pupil she once was, what with the talk that still abounds about her. Still, Misha tells her, he’ll give it a shot. But she must help him in return.
“Sure,” she says, “but how?” and she has a bad feeling even before she hears his answer.
WHEN KAT enters his classroom on Monday afternoon, the first person she sees is Serge. Misha comes in minutes later. He is chipper and confident, sashaying down the central aisle, a stack of typed sheets under his arm. He hands a few pages to Kat. “Read these aloud, will you?”
“What’s this?” she says, thumbing through the pages, though one glance is enough. It is the story Serge discovered.
“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” she begins, but already, almost despite herself, she’s rising. As if driven by force of habit, she walks to the front of the class.
“My ineptness had become evident by the time I turned thirteen,” she starts, and she wants to cry it’s so true—her ineptness, her poor choices, her bad posture. She reads all the way through the opening soliloquy, and when it’s over she stops and waits for someone else to speak.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” says Misha. “Kat will play the girl, Serge will play the boy, and I’ll ask Sveta Vlasenko to play the teacher.”
Now it’s Serge’s turn to argue. “I’m not stage material.”
“Learn your lines,” Misha tells him. “We’ll be starting rehearsals next week.”
“Don’t you want me to, you know, audition first?”
Misha pretends he doesn’t hear him.
“I guess if you don’t need me anymore—”
“Serge,” Misha calls, when he is almost at the door. “I meant to say, thank you.”
“No problem, Mikhail Aronovich. I hope I wasn’t butting in too much.”
“On the contrary, my friend. On the contrary.”
“What’s this about?” Kat asks Misha, when they’re left in the classroom alone. She’s still confused: A play? A role? She stares at the pages. “When did you turn this thing into a script?”
“I didn’t. Your partner in crime did it all. Your grandfather helped him a little, but mostly it’s Serge’s handiwork. I must say, he surprised me this morning. Really gave me a piece of his mind, said that I’d never encouraged you and never given you a chance—”
“Serge has no business getting in the middle of this. I don’t need anyone’s encouragements.”
Misha continues, “I daresay he’s right. He said you used to dream of becoming an actress. How could I have missed this fact?”
“It wasn’t serious,” Kat says. “It was a phase.”
“And now look at you, so dispirited. No wonder you’re afraid to leave this school.”
Damn Serge, Kat thinks. She could kill him. “Does he think he’s my savior? Does he think it’s his mission in life? To rescue old men and poor maidens?”
“Old men.” Misha smiles. “I think that’s true. That’s what he does, our Serge, our guardian angel.”
REHEARSALS ARE EASY, surprisingly easy. It must be because Kat and Serge play themselves. At the start their characters are hostile, in the typical way of all dutiful schoolgirls and hooligan schoolboys. Then, halfway through the script, the two begin to change—Serge’s character especially. He becomes obsessed with his role as a monk, with Boris Godunov, with history and theater in general.
Only the final scene gives them trouble. According to the story, fifteen years have passed. Kat’s character and Serge’s character are now adults. She is a journalist. He is an innovative theater director. They meet by accident and reminisce about their wayward high school past, and only at the very end, as Kat’s character is boarding her bus, does he tell her that he was in love with her.
Around this point, they both clam up and can’t evoke the proper feeling. To make them less self-conscious, Misha suggests they tweak the lines. “Didn’t you know,” says Serge’s character, “that you . . . that I . . . You were the reason I agreed to play the part.” And Kat’s character says, “Why didn’t you say so?”—but it’s too late, the doors are closing, the bus is carrying her away into her separate and settled life.
Jules often comes to sit in on rehearsals. She says it’s because she’s got nothing else to do. Asked if she likes the play, she says it’s cute. “You know, you and Serge. It’s touching, almost.”
For once, Kat and Serge get along—both during and outside of rehearsals. It would be a total, flawless harmony if only he’d stop pestering her about theater school. Or rather: Secondary School No. 25, with its in-depth study of the aesthetically–artistic disciplines. It is located on Kislovsky Lane, a stone’s throw from Pushkin Square. Auditions are on June 10. Candidates must prepare a poem, a song, a dramatic monologue, and a fable. Kat learns this from the three typewritten pages Serge managed to unpin from the front office of the school. “One of these days you’ll get busted,” she tells him.
Talk of theater school gives Kat heart palpitations. She tells Serge that she’s thinking of staying at their current school.
“Stupid,” he says.
“Why not?” she says. “You’re staying.”
“I need to. I have no other choice.”
“Maybe I need to too? Maybe I’m not ready yet—”
“You’re ready,” he says. “You’re just scared. Which means you have to get over yourself. To stay here would be a waste, and you can’t waste your talent.”
“What talent?” she asks him, though she knows what he’ll say. “I’ve never been that good at acting, or, for that matter, at anything else. I’m just average and that’s okay. Because somebody’s got to be average.”
20
SERGE IS RUNNING. IT’S STRANGE, BECAUSE SHE hardly ever sees him running. He can be fast, even elusive, moving in easy, catlike steps—but never in this obvious and clumsy way. It’s when he runs that you really notice how badly deformed his body is, how deeply he’s damaged.
At first she doesn’t see him. She’s in the canteen with the rest of their class, idling through a meager lunch, and she only looks up when Jules prods her. Still, she’s not alarmed, only surprised.
He stands across from her, tries to control his wheezing. It’s not much of a secret anymore that he and she are close. Enough people have spotted them together or heard he’s doing something with the drama club, and they all know about last year’s tutoring. Despite that, he and Kat keep their distance in public, or at the very least try. Yet here he is in front of her, winded and gasping, the rows of witnesses be damned.
“What is it?” she whispers. There’s something in his face that sends chills down her spine. Jules must also feel it, because she clasps Kat’s hand.
He tries to speak, though he’s still gulping air, and somehow Kat already knows that it’s going to be a name. Not Anechka, she thinks. Not Misha, please. She watches his lips, as if in slow motion, attempt to form a word.
And then he says it: “Valentina.”
IN THE initial seconds she finds the word meaningless. A collection of sounds, of disparate notes. Four syllables that somehow add up to “Va-len-ti-na.” Moments later come the smell of lavender, the summer dress with flowers, the linen jacket with a bright red pin, the afternoon she took Kat to the Children’s Railroad in Kratovo. A person: Valentina. Her basket, her apron, her wink. A stub of carrot lipstick on the bathroom vanity.
They’re walking dimly to the bus stop, Serge guiding Kat like she’s a wayward sheep.
“Where are we going?”
“Home,” he tells her.
She hasn’t yet asked him how it happened. He tells her while they’re waiting for the bus: Valentina and Roshdal were out, not far from their house, taking the puppy for a walk. At first, Roshdal thought Valentina must h
ave stumbled. He tried to support her, to keep her upright; but her weight, the way he felt it, was that of an unconscious person. She never recovered, never came to, left no parting smile or words. The doctor said it was either an aneurysm or a stroke. A quiet, near-instant death. “We all should be so lucky.”
Later Kat will wonder how Serge managed to learn so much, though by then it won’t really matter. He takes her up to her apartment and then immediately goes back to school. Kat’s parents and Roshdal are home, and it’s total chaos. The phone rings constantly. Both Anechka and Misha pace. They start doing one thing—try to locate a certain document, for instance—only to drop it halfway through, become absorbed in something else.
Only Roshdal stays motionless. When not on the phone, he sits slumped in a chair, his expression embarrassed, perplexed.
“I’m sorry,” Kat says, and hugs him tenderly.
He smiles at her, a crooked, shaky smile. “Thank you, my pet. Such a misfortune. We’d just been having breakfast. And then ten minutes later she was no more. My mind refuses to accept it.”
The phone rings again, and he says, “Darling, can you get it?”
Most of the phone calls are from relatives, relatives Kat hardly knows or hasn’t met. A few of Valentina’s female friends call, and also, some of the Roshdals’ neighbors.
By suppertime they are exhausted. They turn off the ringer and drink to Valentina’s poor soul. “How could she go so quickly?” wonders Roshdal. “No pain, not even dizziness.”
“The death of the virtuous,” says Misha.
Anechka stares at her fork. All day she’s had this blunt, determined look as she went about her business. Making tea, or answering the phone, or covering the mirrors with blankets. She went through their family albums and found a photo of Valentina that Roshdal always liked. Later she puts it in a black frame.
After supper she makes a bed for Roshdal and gives him some pills from her stash. The two of them talk quietly in Kat’s room.
Kat awakes on a folding bed in the thick of the night. Something’s woken her up—a disturbance, a sound. She peers at her parents’ sofa, but can’t see a thing in the dark. The springs of the folding bed whine as she sits up. And then she hears it again, the noise of running water in the bathroom. On tiptoe she crosses the hallway. She leans her head against the bathroom door and listens to the water gushing down, and underneath it, hard and brutal sobs, the sound of Anechka crying.
ON THE day of the funeral, Kat keeps smelling lavender. It’s with her in the morning; it follows her on the subway, on the bus that she, Serge, and Misha take to Vostryakovo cemetery, while Anechka and Roshdal arrive in a cab. It’s there in the narrow, muddy, barely passable pathways.
A lot of people turn up for the funeral—Roshdal’s old colleagues, Valentina’s friends, a slew of distant relatives. Jules comes with flowers like everybody else. Anechka holds Valentina’s photo, and Roshdal a small pillow with Valentina’s medals from the war. His hand shakes as he leans upon his cane.
Kat stands a few feet away from them. Jules whispers that she has to leave early, to get to her weekly English tutoring; she won’t be joining them for the funeral repast. But Serge won’t step away from Kat. He’s there by her side when the coffin is lowered and Roshdal drops the first handful of dirt and when, despite his most valiant efforts, his face contorts and he starts weeping.
They all come back to the apartment. The table is already set. There’s an empty place setting reserved for Valentina: a glass of water and a slice of bread. The mourners talk about her.
“It’s the flyers that killed her,” says Roshdal. “The rumors, the threats. And like a dumb old fool, I told her not to worry.”
Anechka nudges him gently. “What else could you do?”
“I should have taken her to Israel. She’d have lived to be a hundred years old.”
“She was fragile,” says Gayanoush, the friend who escaped the Sumgait pogroms. “On the surface she seemed strong, always busy, always tending to everyone else. But underneath it, she was frayed. She never completely healed after that war wound.”
Kat never knew Valentina was wounded, or that, as Gayanoush now mentions, she couldn’t have children of her own. “She wanted a family so much,” says Gayanoush. “Her first husband, they only lived together for one year before he passed away. You know, he was our captain. After that, she just assumed she’d be alone forever. A girl like our Valechka, imagine that!”
Still, Gayanoush says, it was years before Valentina met Roshdal. “How happy she was after she married him, how proud of Anechka’s successes, and then once Kat was born it’s all she’d talk about anymore. She finally had it, her family.”
Anechka leans her head on Roshdal’s shoulder. She has been doing things like this for days: staying close to him at all times, patting his hand, kissing his cheek, clutching his arm, hugging him at random moments. For hours she sits next to his chair, searching for something to say. A light-hearted anecdote? A half-forgotten memory? She is his daughter; she should know how to comfort him. But she doesn’t, apparently. She is tense and tongue-tied. She has him to herself at last, but now it means nothing. The years of hostilities have strangled something tenuous between them, the ease they used to share, the necessary trust. He now seems distracted in her presence.
Around ten the guests start to disperse, though for a long time they linger in the hallway, holding and kissing one another and promising to stay in touch.
“How will you manage?” Gayanoush asks Roshdal. “You can’t live there in the country all alone, in that enormous house.” She has already offered to adopt the puppy, but Roshdal said he’d like to keep it.
“Serge will stay with me for the summer, as soon as he’s done with his exams. And maybe Kat will come from time to time to keep us old goats company.”
Unlike Kat, Serge never stopped visiting. He’s been coming to Kratovo every weekend. He saw Valentina last Sunday. Kat still pictures their last visit together, the way Valentina kept fidgeting and fretting, how she begged them to come back. Back then Kat didn’t think her visits really mattered. Even now it seems she wasn’t that important there, not in the way Serge and Jules were. She’ll never know whether Valentina forgave her.
THE GUESTS have left. Roshdal has gone to bed. Misha has gone to check on Zoya Moiseevna—though Kat wishes he’d waited until the next day. She and Anechka are in the kitchen. Kat’s doing the dishes while Anechka sits on the cool linoleum, her back against the fridge.
“Just you and me. It’s been a while, baby.”
“How are you holding up?” Kat says.
Anechka shakes her head. “All this time I thought I hated her, but now it’s like I’m orphaned once again. I was sixteen when I first met her, not that much older than you. I can’t believe I’ll never see her again. I keep thinking it’s not really happening: it’s not she who’s dead, it’s someone else, and she’s just stepped out for a second to check on a roast or a cake.”
“I keep smelling lavender,” Kat says.
“Her lotion. That’s because I’ve put it on.”
“Oh, that explains it. I thought I was going crazy.”
They both laugh, in a demented sort of way. Kat stashes the last plate in the cupboard.
Anechka stretches. “God, it’s really been forever.”
“Have you come back for good?” Kat asks.
“Oh baby, it’s not so easy. Me and your dad, we were kids when we first got together—”
“I’ve seen you,” Kat interrupts. “With that man in the car. Outside the lyceum. I came because I had to speak to you, it’s not like I was snooping—”
“How could you?” Anechka bursts out; then, catching herself and settling down, she adds, “I’m sure you were confused.”
“I know what you look like, Mom.”
They turn away, both trying to occupy themselves with dumb minutiae, Kat wiping the counters, Anechka rooting for a smoke.
“Who is he?”
&nb
sp; “Please, Kat, not now! He’s just someone. A man, okay? A normal man. Not a villain or anything. When you’re eighteen you think you know everything. You fall in love and think that it’s forever. Then it’s ten years later, and you have both completely changed, and when you look at your husband you can’t even remember what it was you liked about him. He nags you and you snap at him, and you don’t get each other at all, and when he speaks you feel like you’re being strangled.”
She stops, and Kat, too, remains silent. Her mother and father. Her self-absorbed, beautiful rebels. Her Orpheus and Eurydice. Marie and Pierre Curie.
“Does it mean you don’t love him?”
“I don’t know what it means. I just knew that I’d die if I stayed here.”
Kat says, “But what about me?”
“You have nothing to do with this, baby. None of it is your fault.”
“What do you think of me?” Kat asks her. She’s asked Misha before, many times—it’s almost like a running joke between them—and yet she has never dared to ask Anechka, guessing that at best she’d be dismissed. Do you love me or hate me? Am I clever or dull? Am I ugly and are you ashamed of me?
“You’re a bit like me, and a bit like your father. It’s when I look at you, Kat, that I remember what the two of us used to be like. And that’s the hardest part, baby, that guilt, and knowing how much we’ve squandered. It makes me want to throw myself under a car. But I can’t go back, you understand? Because whatever life we used to have, it’s over now.”
“What if you change your mind?” Kat tries. She sits on the floor next to Anechka, and Anechka hugs her and cries into her hair.
ANECHKA SAYS she’ll come. The new play will have only one performance, on the last day of school, May 25. It’s just one act and calls for a simple set and costumes: two cassocks, two desks, a bench, a book, a crutch. It’s nothing like their old, lavish productions, though they’ve padded it with a montage, a few earnest poems and heartwarming songs on the topic of “our dear school.”
Kat is dreading the day of the performance. Each time at rehearsal she forces herself to emote, while underneath she feels nothing. It’s bad enough that the school is full of gossip; now she’ll have to stand before them all, unguarded, exposed to their derision. What she wants is to blend in and disappear, come down with something awful that would keep her home for weeks. “I don’t think I can do it,” she tells Jules. “I don’t want anyone to look at me.”