As the first visitors trickled in, drawn by the Welcome Day itinerary printed out for them by the school’s planning committee, my expectations were more or less gratified. Mothers oohed and aahed at the flowers, and fathers poked the moist soil with an air of gardeners’ camaraderie. The girls looked bored, or calm and sly. But they kept their mouths shut, which was enough. I began to think we’d achieved a coup, John and I. We’d set the tone for a year of mute appreciation.
The girls came in waves according to class, freshmen and their eager shepherds first, seniors last. And it was only with the latter of these groups that the tide in the room began to change. The air grew stuffier. I noticed more touching of the plants: girls tweaking stems and leaving half-moons in the leaves with their fingernails. My polite coughs gained nothing, but neither did my overt displays of authority: whenever I asked someone to refrain from shredding the foliage, I was met with a blank and ruthless stare. “Me?” the girl would say. “I didn’t even realize.” The greenhouse garden represented hundreds of hours of work, from research and selection to the careful setup of the past afternoon. But more than that, it was my livelihood. It was my life. Every plant, from the most familiar strawberry to the most outlandish vine, was a part of me. It was all I had. And they—who had so much more by comparison—knew it.
By the time we got down to the last few families, I was desperate. An entire ginger plant had been destroyed, and several roses had been snapped but left attached to their stems by a thread, beheadings as sadistic as they were incompetent. There would be an administrative inspection the next day, and it looked like I’d arranged the greenhouse by letting wild dogs run loose from door to door. I saw Kay, who’d hung around long past the rest of her classmates, say something to a fourth-year named Susan, who had occasionally quizzed Margaret in French. Susan nudged a planter with her toe, just a little, then just a little more, until it tipped over and spilled the barbed orbs of a teddy bear cholla across the floor. “Oops,” she said.
I’d had enough. Paying no attention to John’s quiet hand motion—a finger run, knifelike, along his neck—I walked over to Susan and Kay.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“Oooh,” said Kay. “We’re admiring all the beautiful work.”
I turned to Susan. “And what about you? You know me. I’m friends with Margaret.”
She looked at me with an expression approaching pity. “No you’re not,” she said, and shoved the spilled planter some more with her shoe, rubbing circles in the dirt. “You knew her, but that’s not the same. Even you don’t think it is.” Kay giggled, and Susan rolled her eyes, then grabbed Kay’s hand and pulled her towards the exit. I just watched. Kay’s braid swishing back and forth across her spine, Susan walking with a graceful heel-toe twitch. I could feel the plants in the greenhouse throbbing, or maybe that was my own head. I thought of the ocean I had crossed, the beet field I’d pulled weeds in as a child while Susan and Kay drank glass after glass of sugared fruit juice and probably lounged by the side of a pool. They both had that look: expensive powder over a residual tan.
When they were gone, John told me, “Don’t worry. We’ll put it right.” And indeed we worked into the night, restoring tilted plants and trimming back ragged edges until the greenhouse looked spic and span, ready for the early inspection. The next day, the administrators would be impressed, winking at me and hinting of a long and prosperous career. But that night I went to bed exhausted and spent, an orphan girl with dirt under her fingernails, too afraid to use the communal bathroom shower after creeping back into the dorm. An orphan girl hollow with the knowledge that she still had no home after all these years.
Lev
23 June 1931
Airmail via [Redacted]
Where did I leave off before, Vera? Drunk on my first sight of you, I expect. Shivering in my shoes as you ran your fingertip over the rim of your wineglass at that doomed party in Leningrad, making it hum. We discussed literary ambition—“The key,” you said, “is to see possibilities in the world that no one else has the bravery to face”—and I described my book to you. The same precious first I search for now, then the only. You said the ideas held promise, though I remember the look of mild displeasure on your face. Probably the very look you’re wearing as you read this letter.
But still. That night. With each breath you drew closer to me, until I was inhaling almost directly from your mouth, my Lev-ly proboscis ever approaching your lovely lips. I asked if I could take you on a walk along the canal, and you said yes, then looked around for your father—not to ask him, but to be sure he wouldn’t see. You were seventeen. I was twenty-three. At the doorway a towering butler blocked our path, but I distracted him with a cigarette, which he pinched from me with two thick fingers and sniffed in a vaguely obscene manner. God bless all obscenity, was my opinion. I wanted to toss you into a dark corner and tear you apart with kisses, but didn’t dare. I suspected even then that you could swallow me whole without a second thought and go on your way, little Lev swimming around, hopeless in your belly. Yes, I was afraid of you, Vera. I was exhilarated. Outside you strode over a bridge, on the top of a wall, just high enough that I could see a hint of thigh beneath your uplifted skirt, and when I reached for your hand you gave me just the tips of your fingers, which I sucked. They tasted sweet.
“Naughty boy.” You used your dress train to sock me on the cheek, and then climbed carefully back down.
“I have a page,” I offered.
“A page?”
“Just one, from the manuscript. It’s in my pocket.” I’d been considering this ever since we left the party—it seemed dangerous, like an early proposal. We’d been speaking for only an hour, and already I knew that to give you any piece of my literary efforts would be to embark on a path from which, for good or ill, there’d be no return. But how could I resist the draw of your intelligent eyes, the flick of your clever fingers? “I could let you have a look.”
“Alright.” You stopped, and hopped back onto the wall to sit. Suddenly I was nervous. Sweat broke on my forehead, despite the chill of the night. Whereas you hadn’t a care in the world; you swung your legs and whistled. Still wearing your black mask. “Well?”
The paper was folded into quarters, tucked in the inner pocket of my tailcoat right above my heart. I’d written it earlier in the day, smoking copiously. At that time in my life I had little else to do but sit at my desk and flick ash out the window onto the heads of passersby while I scribbled down my ideas, but even if I’d had teaching duties or—better still—a plan of escape, I was too intoxicated with the work to leave it for longer than a few hours. I’d gotten into the habit of carrying my latest pages around so I could reread them, or even just touch them to remind myself they were real—a sensation half verbal, half autoerotic. I knew no one else thought the way that I did, the way that I do. No one else would see our country for what it was: a land bearing thousands of counterfeit kings, with the legitimate ruler lost among them, having forgotten himself. That was my story. Amnesia, dislocation, masquerade. Peasant kings stealing from the rich before turning on one another, heads beaten in with wooden scepters. I handed you a page thick with script, hoping you wouldn’t see my fingers shake.