Alena, of course, was right that I could not have known that the blockade was coming. But I had always been right that France was a better place for a little girl whose parents had been jailed as internal enemies. And I could not understand why Alena seemed angrier with me now than she had when Albertine first departed.
On the fourth day of this treatment, I placed my hands around Alena’s vanishing waist and kissed the side and back of her nape. My wife had never turned away my affections, and even now, when she hated me, she accepted my hands, my mouth, and the rest of me, sharing what remained of her body with me.
Of all the things I have to be ashamed of, this one comes to mind as often as any other.
Contrary to the imaginative indulgences of Herodotus, the Babylonians prized sexual fealty. Infidelities were punished harshly, but there was room for forgiveness. Though an adulterous wife caught in the act was usually bound to her lover and drowned in the Euphrates, her husband could grant her pardon. I have wondered how often that happened — and how often for love, how often for revenge.
If a wife went off with another man after her husband was taken prisoner, she was to be drowned, unless she did it for hunger. If she went with the other man because there was no food in her house — if she was lured by his pantry and not his bed — then no blame whatsoever was attributed to her. It has always been understood that people need to eat.
The herbarium was now mostly dark below its single row of high windows. The air by the ceiling, though, held dirty afternoon light. I was alone, but the cracking sound brought me unease, brought fear of exposure.
Even though the rice was raw and stung my tender gums, its nutty flavor filled me with warmth and pleasure inside my skin of cold and discomfort.
This variety of rice grows in the humidity of southern Louisiana, and it was there that we — the great director, Lidia, Sergei, a whole little expedition of us — collected it in addition to several wild landraces. The trip was my last good time with Lidia.
Rice was Alena’s specialization, but she had stayed in the pure air of Leningrad, waiting there to study the fruits of our collecting. In Louisiana, where the air is of another quality altogether — outside of time and living and breathing with heat and moisture — there is no pure, no impure. Most of our skin lay visible to the touch, and nothing seemed wrong….
I stopped, having eaten more than I set out to, having wakened rather than dulled my painful appetite. I longed to take home the small mound of pecan rice left in my palm, to boil it in water, to salt and sugar it and feed it in steaming spoonfuls to my Alena.
But I knew that she would close her lips to the food.
On my way from the institute to our flat, I watched a mother walk hand in hand with her newly mature daughter. Their proximity seemed to please them both, and yet I felt the mother’s hand commanded the daughter closer than she would like to be.
They turned and disappeared from my view behind the rump of one of the stone lions that presides without interest over the Catherine Canal.
In 1776, south of Baghdad, peasants found the unfinished basalt figure of a lion amid the ruins of what was once Babylon’s northern palace. This lion stands hard, trampling the hapless man who lies beneath his paws. Unlike the seated lions that gaze so elegantly at the Catherine Canal, the Babylonian statue was made by someone whose gods were intimately, if cruelly, involved with human fate and the lots of individual men.
Alena stood across the room from me, and I saw her in relief. She spit softly onto a cloth and wiped, slowly, one by one, the cacti from the Botanical Gardens that she had agreed to care for. She kept them as warm as she could with our paltry fire and kept their pores open by rubbing them with her own saliva each day.
I watched and swallowed my own spit to diminish the hunger nausea that I could never move past.
Though Alena’s hair was thinned and oddly parted from multiple nutrient deficiencies, from the room’s distance I could see only that it was as long as it had always been. And backlit by the window, it appeared luminous.
But the window told everything. At the start of the terrible winter, we had tacked layers of butcher paper over it to keep some of the cold outside, only to punch holes and tear the paper into kindling to keep our books from the fire.
So the light that revealed Alena’s former prettiness came through ripped and broken like the paper.
The finest piece of fruit I have ever eaten was in Colima, in western Mexico. Twin volcanoes smoking in the distance, the perfect whitewash of a colonial square in the foreground.
It was a mango, bought off the street, skewered on a stick barely strong enough to support its weight. The old man who sold it to me slashed it quickly, artfully, with a knife that seemed much too long for the job. He achieved brief, crisscrossing incisions just shallow of the hardened flesh around the seed. His precise cuts formed perfectly bitable pieces, only a shade too large — and marvelously so — for the mouth.
“Just bite off a little more than you can chew,” I said to the great director.
But when he looked at me, his eyes did not register the joke. The old fruit vendor smiled, though I am sure he understood not one word of Russian. But he was a man who understood tone, inflection, subtlety, intent — the real meaning of a situation, all that happens between two people.
He sprayed the mangoes with salt and chili powder and lime juice to make us realize the perfect sweet flavor of the fruit itself.
And we did. Even the director moaned slightly, happily, deep in his voice box, his eyes narrowing and almost shining.
The mangoes in upper India were something altogether different. Smaller, greener, more fibrous. Better for putting up than eating fresh, often too sour. But the one I ate after a long night of fighting, touching, fighting, touching, fighting Lidia was too sweet.
Again bought from the street, this one came from the hands of an old woman. Hands not so different from the hands of the elderly Mexican man who had shaken chili powder on the best piece of fruit I have ever eaten.
But her hands moved differently. Precise also, but unconcerned. Just a piece of fruit to be eaten by just a man.
And she served it differently. The mango was already halved and pitted. She cupped it in her hand and scored the flesh into dice, almost to the skin. She lifted her fist as though to strike a hard blow to my face. When I only stood there, staring, she grabbed my hand, formed it into a fist, and punched it for me into the skin of the mango half. The diced pieces spread from my fist like armor. Bite, bite, she said, pretending from a distance to bite off a cube, her small blackened teeth snapping the air.
It was a clever way to open a mango, and the pieces were entirely manageable. But the taste spread unpleasantly in my mouth. Somehow both sour and much too sweet.
I spat out the yellow pulp, and the woman looked at me with supreme satisfaction.
It was her gaze and the taste in my mouth and that yellow color spat out on the street that brought back the sickness from Abyssinia. The malarial mango, I would always think of it.
So it was the other mango, the Mexican one, that I tried to conjure as I scraped with my small penknife at the hard dried core of a mango whose fruit was long gone. My efforts produced little, but I had better luck forcing the seed across the broken surface of a little device designed to grate nutmegs that I had picked up while traveling in Iberia.