Perhaps you’ll wonder how I can be sure about any of this. And I can’t be, of course: all I have are pieces, stitched together with wobbly thread. I know what little is in the public record, and what she told her husband, up to a point. Lyrical Lev, Lying Lev, Lev the Lothario, or so he liked to think. He used to give me bundles of their letters to riffle through, as a gesture of closeness, knowing that I liked his handwriting, and some of those contained traces of her past. Just jokes, recollections. The rest I have to make up. Not an act of intrusion, in my opinion, but just embellishment and embroidery: we talk about our own lives this way all the time, stretching the truth to fit our feelings. And Vera and I have become so tangled together that in order to tell you my whole story, I have to tell you hers, too. (A nerve-wracking thought: that I am not complete until she is. Well, then, let’s continue.)
Vera and the scholar would’ve been given a schoolroom, I think, but Vera never did like being contained. They would’ve gone to the library for their lessons instead, to her father’s study, to the sitting room, on a divan beside the harp. Wherever her parents were not. The servants would bring in a samovar of hot tea, and dishes of honey and lemon and jam. Blue and white china cups. Vera’s lip on the rim of one, puckered out as she sipped. Her eyes peering sideways between dark lashes, and the scholar watching so intently that he spilled all over a rare collection of eighteenth-century anatomical prints which the two had been innocently perusing. Biology hour. His hand running along the inner, upper quadrant of her thigh. Explaining it to her as a surgeon might see it, while her cheeks flushed but her gaze remained steady. Her neck flushed and she let her mouth open. The thighs themselves flushing as they parted just a little wider, as her hand reached out and found something to hold.
But wait.
Let’s leave them alone for a moment, our young lovers. It’s the decent thing to do, and more than that, I’d like to walk around the room while their attention is otherwise occupied, removing Vera as the focal point in favor of the space at large. You see, if her life is like a painting, then the details are important: sometimes it’s only by studying the background that you understand a picture’s true meaning, its actual subject. (Not the pink cheeks of the child sitting for the portrait, but the skull on the shelf behind, the fly on the rotting fruit in the bowl, that tell you what the painter thought about youth and mortality.)
I want to see, if only in my mind’s eye, her oak poster bed and the cherrywood tables that line the walls of her chamber. Her hairbrush, bristles chock with black strands because the maid hasn’t yet been in. Even the bedclothes, tossed. I want to smell her buttery sleep as I back out the door, so it becomes mine, just a little bit. Run my fingers along the Japanese vases lining the hallways, and see the automaton set behind glass that could, when wound, spin its cane and whistle a frightening tune. I want to sit deep in their sofas, all down-stuffed. Even if it makes me sneeze. To walk through the lemon and chicken-fat air of their kitchen, see the calf strung up for roasting. Take a bite out of a candle, leave tooth prints in the taper and flick wax onto the rug, knowing it’ll be vigorously beaten away. I want to see the servants scurry behind secret doors, order the gardeners to stand by height and by age and by favorite rose. Hellebore here, there gallica.
Oh, but they’re finished now. She and he. So young, their love is instantaneous. It’s over in a second, and it lasts forever. He’ll go back to Leningrad, and she’ll be given a lady instructor. An older lady, compared to the girl. Perhaps thirty, thirty-two. Hair of dun. Glasses perched. Only the memory of Vera’s young scholar remaining, and the hope of meeting again.
But they won’t. Sorry, Vera.
Lev
19 June
Airmail via Paris
My Vera. My Verenka. You aren’t cross with me, are you? I don’t think I could bear it. After all, before I left you pestered me to tell you about the women from my past, because of those beastly rumors, I suppose. And I gave in only because I wanted to soothe you after that series of fits you threw—your version of a fit. A pout. This has been a long time to go without seeing your face or getting a letter, even if I am en route. A long stretch without at least the tender animals of your handwriting creeping out across the page in front of me. Do you know I used to hold every one of your letters up to my face, so the words could caress my skin? I’m imagining it now. How I’d breathe them in, the perfect soliloquies of your qs and ss, the hot hint of the h, the burning uproar of the ж. And did you know your handwriting is identical in every language? That’s not true for everyone. It takes real strength of character.
The scent changes, though, as you hop between tongues. I’m not sure how you achieve the effect, but you can trust me. I am fluent in you. Your Russian is full of pepper and thyme, all the old world and the new—there’s a bit of whisky in it, too, an undernote which I appreciate. It’s the way you smell on a hot day. After a walk, picking a piece of hair off your forehead, leaning down to pull a bit of grass from your shoe. Grasshoppers flicking by, pinging off the nearby stones and kicking up dust so it sticks to your skin. Intoxicating, of course. Breathy. Sun-bitter. You might think it would all be gun smoke and snow, but no. It’s not the country. It’s you, in the country.
Your French begins with mineral water and ends with a thin slice of apple. It’s simpler: starvation diet. The middle is miles of unsmoked tobacco and piles of thin paper to roll it in, with sticky ends. But you’ll be curious about the English. You’ve never liked the way you sounded in America, complained that people thought they knew you just by the way your voice hollowed out over certain vowels. You moaned that your vocabulary took on a martial edge, and now you’ll want to know: on the page, is there any softening? And I say: of a sort. But I doubt it’ll endear you to hear that your American letters are thick with the scent of asphalt melting in the sun. Just pliable, giving under the heel. Bitumen, hydrochloride, diesel drippings. The road one great roasting pan. I wish I knew how you did it. Perhaps you have different pens, but I’ve examined the ink, and would swear it’s all identical.
Come, Vera, have you smiled at all to learn how carefully I categorize you? Even a little? That’s my nightingale, my night-blooming flower.
I hope you aren’t moping over poor doomed Dina. Such a minor creature to make such a great red stain over our lives. Don’t let her. Dina’s hair was dark, but not so dark as yours. Her skin was white, but yours is milk. Yours is clean teeth, and the tongue that licks them. You know this. The tongue my tongue, counting your incisors and bicuspids, counting your fingers and your toes. Poor Dina had a single candle in her hand, whereas you have ignited a thousand fatal fires with just the tip of your thumb. Judicious and useful. Les petites morts de Vera. I could recite them in front of bishops and have them declared holy, like the deaths of saints. This one in a moving car. This one leaning against the door frame. This one on a fainting couch, your father in the very next room, waiting to pour us glasses of gin. Whereas Dina had just one death, slow and dumb. Lying in her bed, as still as a virgin.
You know, I have at times considered shooting you in the gut just to see how differently you’d take the pain. The distinction, I think, would be enormous. Not wan, but angry. Your face alive with terse revenge until the moment it was not. Every second a mortal danger to me, as your precious blood drained out into a puddle round my feet. I would not want to cross you, Vera; it would be safer to kill you. You’re more formidable than I am. We both know that.