“Cigarettes?”
“Yes.” Now he would have to start.
She nodded. “Well, pretty much all Sonya and I do is smoke and tell lies. So if you ever want to come over for that, feel free. I know you don’t really do anything.”
“I do things. I’m busy. I go to the academy, you know. I have a trainer,” he said. He’d never tried to impress anybody with his game, and he was aware of how very poor he was at bragging, even when he wanted to. He cleared his throat and gazed at a spot above Elizabeta’s head and tried to look intellectual and preoccupied and haunted. “Chess absorbs most of my time.”
“Yes, well,” she said. “If you get a moment, then.” There was a rustling sound from within the apartment, vague cross murmuring and shuffling. Hideous bright light bled underneath the door and through its cracks. The old woman had stirred.
“Finally, you wretched she-beast,” muttered Elizabeta, and then in a high false voice, she said, “Babushka? Puzhalsta? Please, dear grandmother, it’s your tenant Elizabeta here with a question for you. I might find a few rubles for you if you answer the door.”
At this, the steward appeared, her graying whiskered face looking pinched and poisonous. Her hair was wrapped up in a dirty maroon scarf, and she gave off a faint smell of cheap tea and restless sleeping.
“What?” she said, looking at Aleksandr, who moved away from Elizabeta. “In God’s name, what?”
“Worms in the faucet, babushka,” said Elizabeta. “Please forgive me for bothering you. I know you’re very busy.” She winked at Aleksandr.
“Honestly,” said the old woman, who retreated into her apartment again, presumably to retrieve the tools necessary for handling worms.
Elizabeta smiled and shrugged. “Remember,” she whispered to Aleksandr. “Apartment nine, if you want some smokes and general hilarity. Thank you so much, babushka,” she called. “I so appreciate your help.”
“Okay,” said Aleksandr, and left her calling out bright lies to the steward, marveling at how expertly she could pretend to feel something she didn’t.
After a cold shower—avoiding even attempting the hot water faucet—and a day of dry, peeling fatigue and clumsy mistakes at the academy, Aleksandr came back and lay in bed. It was only five P.M., although dark again, as always, and his bed felt colder than usual from having lain unmade and unoccupied for so many hours. He thought briefly about Elizabeta in apartment nine, getting ready for her night of work, and he wondered if he should stop by to say hello and borrow a cigarette and see whether the worm situation had sorted itself out. Maybe he’d sit on Elizabeta’s bed, which would be unmade, like his, and they’d split a cigarette. Prostitutes, like chess students, probably needed to economize. Maybe her roommate, Sonya, would be there, too, and he’d tell them stories about his night out. “Café Saigon?” he’d say casually. “Ever heard of it?” And if they had, terrific, and if they hadn’t, all the better. “How do you stay so brilliant with no sleep?” they’d ask him, concerned. And he would smile and take a long puff from his cigarette, and he would not cough, and he would wink and say, “Practice.”
His bed was growing a little warmer, and he pulled his hands into his sleeves and rubbed them together. On second thought, maybe he wouldn’t go over there. He thought about Misha, wincing in the cold rooms of a psikhushka because he’d done something for a stranger. He thought about the legless man and about his assertion that everyone, everyone, was a motherfucker. He thought he could believe it. Aleksandr rolled over and rubbed his feet together and tried to remember everything he could about his mother’s house in Okha. He thought of his little sisters, who looked like him and swung between scorn and laughter with the suddenness of heat lightning. He thought of his mother, who sat up long nights thinking unknowable thoughts and singing sad songs. It was just as well that he wouldn’t go to apartment nine. It was remembering that he was good at, remembering and imagining. And whether or not these were useful skills for Soviet life, they were things you could do quietly, upstairs in a boardinghouse, alone.
4
IRINA
Cambridge, Mass., 2006
I was playing chess with Lars one day in early spring when the man who turned out to be Jonathan stopped by to watch us. I don’t really know why; his later claims about what drew him over were not ones that I could quite bring myself to believe. Lars and I made an odd pair, I suppose—an impish old man and an unnervingly pale young woman, grimacing at each other over an unimaginative position—and at first I thought that the man had a bet with himself about the outcome of the game. I skimmed my bishop along the board until it was eyeball to plastic eyeball with one of Lars’s knights. The knight was defended, and this move was not really going to get me anywhere. But for some reason, I wanted the man to see me do something dramatic.
“There’s a man watching us,” Lars said loudly.
The man coughed. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Fine,” said Lars. “But you better not cough again.”
That first moment has taken on some mythic contours for me now, I suppose. I’m both impious and clinically self-absorbed, so it makes sense that I look hardest for meaning in my own memories. The man kept standing there. At the time, it was probably vaguely uncomfortable—this man watching us, his scarf whipping out behind him in the wind, his eyes growing stung and watery in the cold. He was passably attractive but not arrestingly beautiful. Still, I wonder if I felt a sense of particularity, of unique rightness, in his face even then—in the curl of his hair and the slight crag of his chin and the pencil shavings of stubble across his cheek, in the way his eyes were tired and snappishly intelligent at the same time. It’s possible that his face felt familiar to me, but it’s also possible that this is a quality conferred only in retrospect. I tried not to look at him.
“Can I play the winner?” he said.
“One dollar,” said Lars.
“How much do I pay you?” he said to me.
“I don’t charge,” I said. I still wasn’t looking at him. “I also don’t win.”
“She doesn’t.” Lars sniffed. “If you’re playing the winner, you’re playing me.”
“I’ll take my chances.”
He watched us play. People talk about being able to feel a gaze, and I never believed that until I had to squirm through this game. I think even my arms were blushing.
“Are you letting him win?” said the man.
Lars harrumphed and looked insulted.
“No,” I said. “I never let anybody win.”
“At anything?”
I was confused as to what we were talking about. “Not if I can help it,” I said. I was aware that this made no sense, since I was losing to Lars—as usual—and it came out as a weird sort of inverted brag.
“Which she never can,” said Lars. “She never can. She always loses.” He was trying to get this point through the man’s head, though I don’t know why. There was a dollar to be made, after all.
We played. My fingers felt self-conscious in the way they grabbed my knight, in the way they lingered when they put the knight down. I felt them fluttering in my lap. I felt myself twirling my hair (I am not traditionally a twirler of hair). Good Christ, I thought. What the hell is this?