“You didn’t say anything about a paper,” I said, “you were accusing me of having the genes for mental illness!”
“But that’s what I was going to tell you about.”
“How could I have known that?”
“She had come home, so angry about getting this F, and I said, well, let me read the paper. She threw it in the trash. I picked it out and read it later that night. Lucas, it was insane garbage. No normal person could write this. That’s when I knew.”
I nodded, trying to be sympathetic. I had heard as much in her voice that night, the despair that I had felt in the beginning, the panic that it was true, that Vera was really mentally ill.
“Do you still have the paper?” I asked. I wanted, badly, to read it myself.
“No. I threw it away. Garbage. Don’t talk to her about rape. It is an obsession. It’s not good for her. Promise me?”
“Sure,” I said, still wondering over what exactly Vera’s thesis had been. If there was no free will, was it possible even to give consent? And if there was no such thing as consent, was it possible to be raped? Or were human beings more like billiard balls, randomly, even violently clacking against each other, or like planets or asteroids, smashing into each other then re-forming in the vacuum of space, pulled into orbits around the nearest star? Possibly such a paper, while insane and even wildly offensive, could be logically consistent and, in its own perverted way, brilliant. No wonder Vera had not wanted to turn in any more work to that teacher.
What I didn’t understand was why she was so concerned with rape in the first place. I had grown up being told the bedtime story of Grandma Sylvia’s escape. I had eaten the rape birthday cake year after year. But Vera didn’t know about any of that. Why had it been on her mind? I worried that something had happened to her.
I wanted to talk to her about it, but I had no idea how to bring it up. I couldn’t even force myself to be specific about it in my own mind: When, how, by whom did I really think she had been raped? I couldn’t imagine the scenario in which it might have happened, not concretely enough to start asking questions, anyway. I also did not want to undermine Katya’s authority as a parent, and so I did not tell Vera about Grandma Sylvia being raped in the snow and surviving on wild onions, or rather, I told her a highly edited version of the tale wherein the Nazi guard simply felt bad for her and set her free outside without explanation. “She never knew why,” I said. And at least that much was the truth.
—
“It’s you again,” a woman said to me on our next walking tour, and I started. It was the woman with the red hair, the woman who looked like my mother. “Mr. Not Nikolai.” She laughed.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry I was flustered that night. I was trying to find my daughter and then I was so rude to you.”
“Not at all,” the woman said, falling into step beside me. I looked around for Vera, but she was already talking to a guy in his early twenties whose name I was pretty sure was Daniel. His khaki pants were ordinary enough, but he also wore a billowing white shirt that was somewhere in between a dress shirt and part of a pirate costume. It was unbuttoned to about halfway down his tan and hairless chest. He had taken her arm as they walked.
“So if you’re not Nikolai, then who are you?” the woman asked me.
“Right. Sorry, my name is Lucas.”
“I’m Susan,” she said.
“Nice to meet you.”
“Are you going to have the genealogist look you up?”
I had no idea what she was talking about.
“Did you not read your packet?” she asked. “They have a genealogist you can meet with to track down your family tree here. Some people even have living relatives still in the city.”
We were stopped in front of another building and Darius was explaining something, but it was too difficult to hear over the traffic, so I settled into chatting with Susan at the back of the group. “Wow,” I said. “My grandmother was from Vilnius proper. I bet they might have some record of her.”
“They might,” Susan said and smiled. We were walking through a kind of park set in an oversize median between the two lanes of a major thoroughfare. There was a massive bronze cubist sculpture and a fountain and a young woman talking on a cell phone, her baby carriage several feet away. You would never see a woman wander that far away from a baby carriage in America. All American women were convinced that their children were about to be stolen at any moment. It was the small differences I noticed most about Lithuania. The way shopkeepers preferred to keep quiet and never tried to talk you into buying things. The way even major businesses were marked with tiny, unobtrusive signs. The lack of billboards. The peculiar substantiality of the puffy white clouds that looked made of sparkling marzipan. I couldn’t help but try to imagine Grandma Sylvia here: a young girl, wandering through the city awhirl with different languages and different cultures.
“Well, I’m gonna do it,” Susan said, clearly trying to nudge me toward also seeing the genealogist. I wondered if she was flirting with me or if she was just being friendly. My normal rule of thumb was that all friendliness was a sign of sexual attraction, but it seemed possible the rules were different on a history tour, a social setting where being chatty and friendly with people was simply expected.
“Are your people from Vilnius?” I asked.
“On my father’s side,” Susan said, and then launched into an inventory of her genealogical stock. “All of which is a long way of saying that I’m hoping to turn all of this into a book, like a nonfiction family-memoir type thing. If I can find out anything about my father’s brother. Are you a writer?” she asked. “It seems like everyone here is a writer.”
“No, I’m just an English teacher,” I said.
She laughed. “Well, so am I! I feel like all I ever do is grade papers anymore. My mind is slowly being poisoned by undergraduate prose.”
“But you have a project,” I said. “You came here and made this trip happen. It’s very admirable.”
She shrugged. “Why did you decide to come to Vilnius?” she asked.
“For my daughter.”
“Is she interested in Vilnius?”
“No, actually.” I laughed.
“Weird plan.”
“I think I was hoping to surprise her with it. With the place.”
“Of course, and you in no way wanted to come for yourself. To see where your grandmother was from.”
“Of course not,” I said. “In fact, I think I stopped having personal emotions seven or eight years ago.”
“Oh, me too, me too,” she said. “Next I’m going to give up eating, and then shortly after that breathing.”
I laughed. I was beginning to sort of hope that Susan was flirting with me.
“You know that famous Tolstoy line?” Susan asked, as we walked. “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
“From Anna Karenina.” I nodded. She was walking with her hands clasped behind her back in a way that seemed wonderfully old-fashioned to me.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about it, and I think that might be wrong. I mean — do you think that’s true? It seems to me, if anything, that happiness is the more idiosyncratic thing, and unhappiness is this sort of chronic disease, where really it’s the same for everyone: They feel unloved or unseen, they resent the people around them, blah blah blah. I mean, doesn’t it seem crazy to you? To say all happy families are alike?”
“I think you may be on to something,” I said.
“Are you happy with your wife?”
“Oh, I’m not married to Vera’s mother. We were never married,” I explained. “We were just teenagers. I didn’t even get to be part of my daughter’s life until she was four. Big drama.” This small lie, about reentering Vera’s life when she was four, had become routine for me. It was true: I had first met her when she was four. But the intervening seven years before I actually reentered her life were simply too damning to say to someone casually.