And of course, a girl in an apron and dirty dungarees, walking throughout with her hair pinned back, clutching a spray bottle. Her face pink with intelligence and care. Tending something vulnerable and helping it grow to its best advantage.
But where was Vera in all this? Parallel. Elsewhere.
Soon after her maiden tutoress arrived she was whisked off to Paris to live in her father’s wretched pied-à-terre. On the way there was a masquerade ball in Leningrad (Leningrad! she must’ve thought), because even her escapes were plush, whether or not she admitted it. She wore a black gown à la Madame X, and a black silk mask tied on with a ribbon. Her mouth turned down as she walked from room to room and realized her young tutor was not there. Could not possibly have been there, amidst the champagne and the desperation of the old guard, a few wearing tuxedos that were feathering and fraying at the seams. Vera stood by a little table, one weighted down by a tall potted plant. An aloe all the way from Arizona, with sharp points and rigid leaves on which the staff had secured candles, using epoxy. (My opinion as an expert: not an advisable approach if you have an eye to the plant’s longevity.)
She was thinking of poetry. Dark and spleen-filled stuff, apropos her new situation, fueled by the glass of wine in her hand. A few men offered dances—older men, friends of her father’s—and she refused, in no mood to please her cher papa. Behind her, a balcony. Below that, the Moika. Dark water shimmering with applied light, and in her fit of teen pique she let herself think All is vanity, before mentally slapping her own wrist for adopting such a quotidian sentiment with such real feeling.
Her wrist, which—suddenly there were fingers there. Not the sturdy hands of her once-beloved, but long, elegant digits smudged artfully with ink. She looked up, glad for the mask, because she hadn’t yet decided on an expression.
Though she would, soon enough.
Lev
22 June 1931
Airmail via [Redacted]
Dearest Vera. Grandest and most terrible Vera. I know you’re upset—shall we be very American and even say peeved?—to be left alone in that drafty Craftsman bungalow while I skulk around the border trying to persuade some young patrolman to sneak me across into the country we left behind. I know you disapprove of my entire project, from its conception to its most probable bitter end: a waste of money, a waste of talent, a waste of time. Not to mention the danger to my person, though I think this is the only part of the affair that might thrill you a little, your studious pyatnik turned buccaneer. Black-bearded and ready for anything, buckle or swash. I’ve even bought a gun, Vera. It’s tucked in my waistband, a gleaming black pistol. I made the seller give me lessons.
I know you think it’s beneath me, darling, but I need that manuscript if I’m to go on as a writer. As a man. It was my first: proof I can finish something once begun. You’ll say that’s silly, because it’s first, not only, unless indeed you mean only still unpublished, only repudiated and rejected, only unloved. You’ll say that in any case I won’t possibly find it: a stack of yellow pages tied together with a bit of twine, which I buried in an old tin box outside the last trolley station on the outskirts of Leningrad. Maybe so, my dear one. Maybe so. But the spirit of the whole endeavor—my entire raison, my vision and scope—lies in those pages, and it would be a violation of the artistic compact not to try and retrieve them from their early grave. Anyway, I told my publisher, and you know he’s quite enthusiastic.
In the meantime it pains me to picture you bumping around alone in that house. (Or, let’s be honest, sitting behind your typewriter catching up on correspondence. Making a perfect cup of tea, stirring three times counterclockwise. I’m not so foolish as to imagine my absence has entirely undone you or your routines.) And of course my own incompetence prolongs our separation; I don’t have your talent for knowing which hands to shake, which guards to bribe with cash and which to slip bottles of vodka, cognac, or rum. If you were here, the pages would already be a fait accompli, but instead I’ve now wasted a week with my bumbling attempts at travel incognito. Not that I’m bitter, no. The unseasonal wind claws at my face beneath this thin balaclava, and you sit solo, tucked in that ugly wingback chair by the window. No doubt disapproving of me doubly: abandoner, and inept. And here I’ve been writing to you about my old love affairs. What rot, in this besotted brain.
Let me do better, Vera. Let me tell you the story of us, how the past echoes the future, how our separations always end with reconciliation, reconnection, reconnoiter, coitus. For example: you in Paris, me still degrading in Leningrad. Do you know how I obsessed over you then? Your nose, straight and slender. Your hair, which melted on my tongue like tar.
I couldn’t stand imagining you crouched in that stinking room in the fourteenth, with your father smoking on the balcony, head lost behind the ambient cloud. Your hips zipped into last season’s skirt, fingertips weary with the cold Paris spring as you set type. None of the essays worth the effort. Don’t argue, it’s true. You read them too. You cranked the printing press that duplicated them duplicated them duplicated them as that dreadful nursemaid sat knitting in the kitchen. What did she teach you, Vera? Bravery? Unconquerable hope? At least I hope she showed you how to mix a proper martini or choose the quality bottle of red from an otherwise weak cellar, but I suppose she was a teetotaler too. Did she know history? Botany? Interdimensional geometry? Where to find the best café au lait?
(And yes, now I’m being sour to remove the sting of my own betrayal, made clear by the tart kiss you placed on my cheek instead of my lips as I walked out the door. At least your préceptrice stayed by your side, Vera. She had that much on me.)
Your letters from that time told me so little about your days that I was forced into furious strolls along the canals, inventing villains for you to subvert or be perverted by; enemy soldiers behind your lines. I hope you forgave my petty jealousies, darling, then as now. The sad sketch artists I invaded you with, the bathos of the bad poetry I serenaded you with. I was so thwarted. My heart one grand thrombosis. Lev, minus levity. Lev, mal.
It wasn’t just your body I missed. (Though I don’t want to mislead you, my youthful mind was far from pure. You’ve always been my poison tincture, turning the most solemn occasion to lust and stardust.) It was the whole of you, how you echolocate the walls of every room and press them ever outward, expanding the space. How you turn yourself into a pinpoint against the enormity, the only thing worth looking at in the whole wide world. Everything grows in your presence, Vera. Everything grows. (And yes, a black little pun still buried there, but I’ll pretend you didn’t see it. Some false solemnity, the better to corrupt you from upon our inevitable reunion.)