Do you think it is a nice cat? It hasn’t made one single sound, not even a little mew or a purr, which seems sinister to me, like maybe it is a spirit cat and not a real cat. Okay, now it is purring, so everything is fine. I’m petting it. But it better not get stuck in here because I have no idea where it would go to the bathroom.
You know, Darius said an interesting thing the other day, he said that there is an old saying that anyone who visits Vilnius is destined to return to it one day, which, you know, isn’t that just a way of saying that anyone who comes to Vilnius will eventually be forced to leave? Because you have to leave in order to come back, right? But then I was also thinking, maybe I’m not Russian, but maybe I have to keep returning to the idea of Russia. Like, I’m not from there, but I’m destined to keep returning to it. It’s part of the dance of my identity. Which, you know, what if identity is more of a dance or a pattern than a thing? Like, what if it isn’t so much a noun as a verb? And in the same way, I am destined to keep returning to my own Jewishness or lack thereof. It’s a part of the pattern of the way I am existing.
Do you feel that way about being Tongan? Do you dream of going back for more than a visit, but to live? Whenever you talk about it, it seems like just a vacation, or like a pilgrimage, or something, but do you think you could ever actually live there and belong there again? Or would you be destined to leave, reenacting that initial departure when you were little, returning just so you can leave again, and then returning once more to make sure you really can leave one more time, and on and on?
Maybe that is why I love you so much: We are both doing dances with cultures that aren’t ours and your empty spaces form the perfect foil to my empty spaces so that when you are dancing with death, you are also dancing with me, and vice versa. Because in the end, isn’t it all about death? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, I’m cracking myself up.
There you have it, right from the horse’s mouth: It’s all about death. Then again, I’ve always been a nei-ei-eigh sayer.
With Love,
From Vilnius,
Your night-mare (get it?),
V
PS: Darius told us about Napoleon’s campaign on Moscow (big fat disaster, like major, major cock-up in the deep doo-doo) that ended in 40,000 French soldiers descending on Vilnius only to push people out of their homes, steal all their food, and die anyway because they were so starved they weren’t able to digest the food. They even broke into the university and ate the jars of organs preserved in alcohol. CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW HUNGRY YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE TO DO THAT? More French soldiers died in Vilnius than there were inhabitants of the city, and it was winter, so there was no way to bury them because the ground was crazy frozen. So naturally people began stacking the dead soldiers around buildings as a layer of extra insulation. Holes in the walls of the hospital were stuffed with hands, feet, heads, trunks, whatever would fit. For real, Fang. For real. The spring brought a terrible thaw and…wait for it…plague! Which, I mean, duh, but still.
~ ~ ~
MOST PEOPLE ASSUMED THAT KATYA had gotten pregnant by mistake, and often I let them believe this because the truth was very difficult to explain. The truth was that I had been blindingly in love and eighteen and Katya had whispered in my ear one night, “Let’s make a baby, baby,” and we made a blurry, moonlit decision which, through careful lack of critical thinking, grew into a plan. We would turn our backs on the corrupt world of money-grubbing, status-hungry adults and start our own family. We would live a real life, safe and far away from all the phonies. The summer after our senior year at Exeter, we took a road trip, cut off contact with our parents, and finally settled on a communal farm in North Carolina, nestled at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It took me only a few weeks to discover that I hated it.
I remember mostly being sunburned and eating beet greens and lentils and other food that was too healthy to taste very good. Farming, which I had thought sounded noble and interesting, turned out to be very boring. Everyone on the farm was dopey and friendly, and there was a lot of group sex and partner swapping going on. I wanted to be like them, many of whom were older than me, guys in their twenties with beards, wearing overalls and no shirt and Birkenstock sandals, playing music in the evenings, talking earnestly about the concept of personal liberty. But the idea of being a father, the insane permanence of what Kat and I were doing, gave me a perpetual fever of panic, a swaying wobbly feeling that our lives were out of control.
Katya was only three months along and not really showing. She hadn’t been to a doctor. She said she didn’t need to, that her body knew what it was doing. Sometimes I believed her. Her pregnancy kept away most of the sexual advances from other men. There was a rule against monogamy on the farm. “There is no ownership here,” they said. Still, most guys felt like a pregnant woman was somehow off-limits, and for this I was grateful. I was so in love with her that I think it would have literally killed me to stand by as she slept with someone else.
But her pregnancy wasn’t enough to keep other women away from me. One girl, Chloe, was the most persistent, following me around as I did my chores, making gestural sex jokes with a zucchini. She was a runaway, and as far as I could tell, every guy on the farm had slept with her. One night, I saw three of the men playing with her at once, passing her around. Chloe seemed to be more than fine with all of this. She had been smoking pot, but they all had. There was nothing forced or nonconsensual or even coercive in what I saw, except for the sheer visual wrongness of it: She was short and small, built almost like a child, and she simply looked like a victim when she was making out with three adult men.
Katya called me uptight. “She’s a free person,” she said, “those boys shouldn’t make her do anything, and you shouldn’t make her not do it either.” One day I came into our room to find Kat and Chloe on the bed together. Kat grinned at me wickedly. That was what I hadn’t understood, I think. That she wanted all of this. That she had chosen the farm, not just because it was a way of rejecting the world, rejecting Exeter and sport coats and aspirations to become a member of Congress, but because this was what she wanted. This wildness, this heat and sunburn and freedom. There was a kind of triumph in her eyes as she beckoned me to the bed where she and Chloe were in their underwear. She wanted to trick me into it, sure that if I just did what she said, I would find it as wonderful as she did. Of course, I got in bed with them. I didn’t even have words for what I found objectionable about the whole thing, and the feeling in my stomach, like hot static, seemed indicative of a crucial lack of virility.
The sex was, in retrospect, fairly comical. Chloe explained early on that she was non-orgasmic and taking this off the table left me completely unable to know what to do with her. It was a lot of making out, a lot of awkward taking turns. It probably wouldn’t have been remarkable if Chloe hadn’t started softly crying afterward in our bed. Kat cradled her, comforting her, and extracted from Chloe only that she was very homesick. “That’s all,” Chloe kept saying. “I just miss my mom.”
The next day, someone mentioned in casual conversation that Chloe was fourteen. It was like an explosion that seemed to impair my hearing. I went around deaf all day. I told Katya, and she was unfazed. “Just because she’s fourteen doesn’t make her less able to make her own decisions,” she said. “You remember freshman year. Do you think you were not a ‘real’ person then?” I did remember being fourteen. And I had felt like an adult. But had I been? Did an adult draw the Dead Kennedys icon all over their shoes? But it was true that Chloe was close enough to Kat and me in maturity that I hadn’t even guessed she was so young. Though now that I knew, I couldn’t see Chloe as an adult, I could only see her as a child. I couldn’t see the farm as an Eden, either, but only as a place where a cluster of losers had gathered to fuck each other.