“Uh, we’ll see you later,” Cindy said as she stood up to leave. “And, um, thanks, I guess.”
“Sure,” I told her. I let the other girls disperse without me, not quite trusting myself to stand while they were watching. My legs were jelly: I had to use the stair rail to keep myself on my feet as I made my way back into the library proper. Back at my desk I was startled to find the Schopenhauer book upright, the philosopher’s dyspeptic face staring straight into my own. I knew that someone had probably just come by and turned it out of curiosity, but the sight made my throat tighten up. I returned the book to the woman at the front desk without finishing it, and simply skipped that assignment—a book report, which, curiously enough, our teacher never collected.
Later, alone in my room while Margaret had dinner in town with friends, I took out the last few possessions I had from home, and held them up to my face, one by one. Looking, I suppose, for secret messages in the tattered threads I had left. My locket. My rotten gloves. A little box with a few seeds in it, which I’d collected from the Moscow lilacs which in springtime grew out of every window box and every crack in the city streets. I wondered if they’d still grow for me, here. I thought I might try to find out.
In the weeks and months following our botched séance, my school assignments began to take on a more personal quality—the teachers all seeming to draw on some obscure archive of my disquiet that I assumed had been awakened in that basement room. For instance, in art class it was announced that we were going to make busts of our fathers from papier-mâché threaded over balloons on the theory that the round balloons would provide healthy apple cheeks and funny foreheads. And on the theory, too, that this would be fun for us, which everyone but me seemed to agree with. Quality time with dear old dad. Some of my classmates brought in photos to work from, passing them around so we could all laugh at the way that fathers are: so embarrassing, so sweet. A couple of girls asked me if I had any photos of home left, and I thought of the locket, safe in my room, which I almost never wore. “No,” I said, firmly. It seemed easier to tell them that everything was lost, when almost everything was. I claimed to not quite remember what he looked like.
We wore smocks to protect our clothing, and spent an hour diligently pasting newspaper strips into smooth lines, trying to smear together the edges and adding layers for eyebrows, bent strips for the nose. I didn’t mind so much when the faces were anonymous, and could’ve been anyone—I just didn’t like the idea of calling yet another person up from beyond the grave. I figured I would make a brown-haired, frowning no-man, and everyone, acting on misguided pity, would tell me it looked a lot like me. I would get a decent grade. “You’re not my father,” I whispered to the blank, beige face in front of me as the other girls laughed and kissed their plaster papas on the cheek. In spite of myself, I thought of the real man, my papochka, the day he went missing. His hair messy and uncombed, and his clothing rumpled as he slouched out the door. We never saw him again. Counter-revolutionary ideas, my mother and I guessed. Pulled around a corner by rough hands. Leaving us to survive alone, because he wanted so badly to be good. Despite my efforts the balloon man began to look more and more like him, and I quietly wished it ill.
The next class period we were supposed to pop the balloons beneath the dry papier-mâché and get on with painting them. But instead we found that half the balloons had deflated overnight, caving our fathers in from the top. It was—I was surprisingly shaken to see my secret curse enacted in such a gruesome manner, even if they were just art projects, toys. Worse still was the fact that my balloon was intact, while others around me suffered the stupid indignity I’d wished on myself. I saw one girl run her fingertips over the dent in her father-balloon, as if she could heal it by longing, or make some sort of emotional splint. She couldn’t, though, and I felt a wave of guilt.
Can you cause a small tragedy just by wanting to? It seemed that way to me. That cause and effect were intertwined, impossible. And hadn’t Cindy and Adeline implied I was a witch? While we were cleaning up, the girls decided to stomp the balloons and get their revenge for being made to feel they’d failed; the semi-deflated ones wouldn’t burst, having already lost their tension, but the pristine ones exploded and split the papier-mâché back into scraps.
The whole classroom was uproarious; people were shrieking. We ran around screaming, “Kaboom! Kaboom!” For a second I thought I might belong among these girls, as I had sometimes felt I did with the Young Pioneer scouts back in Moscow, just one in a great blur of bodies, one cell in a great hive mind. But the affection of the room cooled as they ran out of heads to smash. Of course I could’ve given them mine and prolonged the mood: one eager classmate even held out her hands. But now that I had the chance, I couldn’t seem to let it go.
Let me get back to Vera, though, dear reader. Just for a little while, to cool my mind, move away from Cindy and Adeline and Marion, who all got decent grades that year after all, though Marion ended up leaving anyway, for a Catholic school even farther upstate. Silly girls, with their simple lives and simpler troubles. I wish I could go with them and escape what came next for me, the dark deeds that stumbled across my path, from a kiss on the lips to a slap on the cheek. Not to mention the darker things, which are still coming, even now. But I can’t go with those girls, and so I’ll go to Vera instead: the one who’ll have me, however reluctantly.
I doubt Vera had a dacha either, at least not the sort I dreamed about as a child. Too small, too peasant-inflected. And why would she need one, anyway, when her family lived on a country estate? As big as our whole apartment building, surrounded by forests, veined with creeks and rivers. The house bright yellow and white, like the palace at Peterhof. Probably the land was farmed, but Vera’s hands would never have touched soil. She would’ve had smart calfskin riding gloves and a white Lipizzaner, its mane in braids. She would’ve learned to make the horse dance from side to side within a ring, but preferred to trot through the countryside and listen to birdsong, watch the secret life beneath the trees. Perhaps once or twice she came upon two peasants fornicating in the bushes, and this would have been the first time she saw the white of a thigh, the curve of a buttock, the hasty motion of stolen passion.
I doubt, too, that she told anyone about them. Not from pity or understanding, you see—she just wouldn’t have known any peasants well enough to name names.
It soothes me to remember Vera as she must’ve been then, during the time that stretched out between our meeting as children and the moment when we were reunited as women and rivals; adults of sound body and mind. Thinking about her youth is restful for me in the same way as looking at a beautiful painting, where a few flicks of the brush come together to create a tableau so warm you want to crawl inside. She had so much that I did not. Silk stockings, piano lessons, an enormous harp in the family’s sitting room, set up by a window that stretched ceiling-high. A peaceful image. I imagine her running her fingertips over the strings, not quite playing, but not without a certain sensitivity to their rhythms. At one point, I know, the family brought in a young scholar to guide her reading—a pleasant fellow, if somewhat foppish. Flopping hair. (Lev told me about him once: never met the man himself, but always thought Vera had a crush, from the way she said his name.) Not quite aristocratic, but attuned to the elegance of mathematics, and selected by her father with help from his connections at the university. Her father: an ordinary man, not overbearing, attached to his things. So attached that later, in Paris, he’d die clutching a golden cuckoo clock that had belonged to his grandfather.