As my first year at the greenhouse wore on I curtailed my visits to Marie’s café. They made me too sad. I remembered dragging in my schoolbooks, working to diminish my accent and build up my classroom bluster—and couldn’t bring myself to walk through the door. It was as if I feared seeing my past self at a table, and having to face the disappointment in her eyes. Sometimes Marie waved to me from behind the counter when I walked by, but over time the gesture grew more confused, until at last it stopped.
Instead, I worked. I dug, aerated, primped, and pruned. I babied my seedlings, and sometimes when no one was looking I gave them little kisses. You have to be gentle with a young plant, when even the tenderest touch can knock it asunder or snap its weak spine. But I’m convinced they can feel love.
Girls streamed through the school, washing up and down its many shores giving me pinches or whispering nasty words. Often I felt the flash of their flesh on my flesh, the exquisite bloom of a bruise, and it got to the point where my heart quickened any time I heard a footstep. With reason. Once, I found myself alone in a corner with a fourth-year named Leah, uncertain how it had come to pass. She moved closer and closer, telling me terrible things about myself until her mouth was on my ear, her hand around my waist. One leg twined between my legs to hold me in place as she petted my hair and let me know in no uncertain terms that I was a beggar, a puppet, a ghost. All this was bearable only because I was able to consider the plants my protectorate. The greenhouse a kingdom with me standing guard. Kay and her friends stayed away, most of the time—even Leah cornered me on neutral ground, in the empty student union—and that was something to be proud of, no matter how many lips hissed against my neck.
That year, I also began making more trips to Maple Hill’s small bookstore. During my schooling, I hadn’t often read for pleasure—the bookstore carried only English-language texts, and besides costing too much money these struck me as a waste of leisure time. Now I found, to my delight, that reading came easy. Some language switch had flipped in my brain; I dreamed in English, I spoke it constantly, I corresponded in English with the phone company and various seed distributors. John invited me over for dinner with him and his wife, Siobhan, and we laughed through the night, even playing a board game now that I was confident enough to understand the instructions. Although I’d always enjoyed strolling through the aisles of Sugar Books, smelling the paper and running my thumb over cover cloth, life took on a new tone of satisfaction along with my ability to pick up a volume and skim a few lines before deciding whether or not to buy.
As you might expect, I gravitated especially to Russian writers, for the flavor of home. But none satisfied me half so much as Leo Orlov. He was like nothing else—impressionistic, yet voluptuous in his images. His work unfathomable yet steeped in the human and mundane. Perhaps what I liked best was how strange he was; I didn’t know the term “science fiction,” and even if I had, I’m not sure that’s what I would have called him. (Of course this is a matter of much argument these days, with literary gatekeepers urgent to hold on to him and space/time aficionados praising his stories with nothing short of militant ecstasy.) But I knew that his work would take me on unbelievable journeys, and that was all I wanted. The comfort of a bolt-hole. A doorway appearing, cut into the very air.
You’ll probably remember him from his first true sensation, Felice, the one in which a girl becomes a bird and forms a new army of starlings and crows to get her revenge on the men who betrayed her. But I knew him long before that. There was a small society of us, almost all expatriates, who started with his journal stories published in France and kept on through Knife, Knave and Impresario and Sun Sort. We were all a bit churlish about Felice, not because we found it less than brilliant, but because it let so many new readers suddenly reach out and claim our Orlov for their own. On the other hand, the book that broke him fully into my heart—that ran him, hot liquid, all through my blood—was a short novel called Rothschild, which not many people have read even now. I can’t understand why, but of course this makes it all the more personal and delicious.
Rothschild showed up at Sugar Books in late winter, after an initial thaw had given way to the year’s final deep freeze. I’d been spending nights in the greenhouse, tucking towels around the seams in the windows and readjusting the vents as needed. Suffice it to say, I got little sleep. Once the Donne girls figured out what I was doing, they threw snowballs at the windowpanes on their way home from midnight study sessions, sometimes knocking at the door and running away, leaving poppets on the step with pins stuck in their eyes. God knows where they found the time to make poppets.
The days were bleary with exhaustion, and as one such afternoon smeared over into evening I walked to the bookstore, hoping to cheer myself up. I’d been in recently, and didn’t really think there’d be much new stock, but it was all I could think of. Indeed, the New Arrivals shelf was sparse: just a small shipment of obscure philosophical texts and an unsealed box addressed to a publisher sitting at the foot of the checkout counter. The register girl saw me trying to peer inside.
“Oh, we’re sending those back,” she said. “They packed too many by mistake.”
“Can I look?” Everything else was picked through, and I was too tired to walk through the aisles and try to get excited about some romance or mystery I’d passed over several times before. The counter girl shrugged.
“Knock yourself out. Just try not to muss them up too much or the publisher won’t take ’em.”
I pulled the cardboard edges out from where they’d been tucked underneath one another, and they gave a squeak—then I gave a yelp. “Is this a new Orlov?”
“Who?”
“Leo Orlov. He’s a writer?”
“I figured.” The register girl leaned over the counter for a better look. “Hmm. Search me. I guess it’s new. We didn’t think we could sell that many books by a guy no one has heard of.”
“I have.”
“Well that makes one.”
Lev already lived in New York then, but he was still obscure in America. I pulled a copy out of the box and looked regretfully at the rest. No way I could buy all of them, and anyway what would I do with them if I did? The book seemed to shiver in my hand, the sole survivor of a shipwreck. I was reluctant to hand it over to the register girl even long enough to let her wrap it.
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. I have to read it.”
“You’re not even going to check before you buy it?” She wrote out a receipt for me and placed everything in a brown paper bag. “That’s devotion. Not a lot of readers like you out there anymore.”
“I know,” I said. Though I knew nothing of the kind, the idea made me proud.
“Let me know how you like it,” the girl called out as I left the store. “Maybe if it’s good I can convince the owner to re-order them.”
I had planned to walk to the store for a loaf of bread and a bit of cheese, but I decided that Orlov trumped my aversion to the cafeteria. I’d slip in late and hope that Hilda or Nadine would be there and let me eat with them in the kitchen. A few students would be sure to see me, and no one would applaud me for eating with the cooks, but what did I care? Orlov, I chanted to myself. Orlov, Orlov, Orlov. When I reached the edge of campus I broke into a run, clutching the paper bag in my hand. Buildings blurred by, along with trees and faces. I was almost at the dorm. I was almost free. Most likely it was this excitement that kept me from noticing Kay’s foot stuck out in front of me—a rookie move, really; she tried it every time we crossed paths—and I tripped over her toe, skidding to the ground.