Lev
28 June 1931, later
Airmail via [Redacted]
One more thing. I’ll send these letters together, and hopefully you’ll feel the tug of time between them, how I set down my pen and folded the paper, and then was bowled over by the sense of you, present. I often get this feeling at home, when we’re separated by a wall or a few city blocks; some whiff of you walks into the room behind me, brushes its fingertips over my shoulders, reaches a hand down the top of my shirt to caress the tough nub of my breastbone. I never want you more, Vera, than in those moments. When the distance between us is but a clarion cry, a note on our closeness. Tonight you crawled up onto my knees, pushing my chair back several inches and nearly toppling both of us over. I could feel the weight of you, could almost make out your outline. Your fingers scattering themselves over my skin, as if setting spells from some private grimoire, a book of incantations built to my exact specifications. Bring in the clear and cloudless wife. Her invisibility irresistible, my brain all woolen with desire.
Were those hands my hands? The ones that pulled at me, put me in my place. Was it my hips that pitched and rolled until the inevitable cataclysm? Hull of a ship, breached. Cheek of a woman, brushed by cheek. I know what most people would say about lonely Lev in his lightless cottage at the end of the land. Lantern kicked over, fire brewing in the dirt of the floor before fizzling out. Self abuse, heavy use. But I have more faith than most people. In you, especially.
Tomorrow night I’m meeting again with the courier, Vlad, so he can secret me across the heavily patrolled border back to the home of my birth. Our births. From there I’ll have twenty-four hours, along with my own sense of momentum and the hand spade I picked up—an ingenious contraption that can be folded in two so as to look less like a knife if one’s possessions are tossed by suspicious soldiers. Today I found a small hillock and practiced shooting into it, getting used to the kick of the Italian pistol and fumbling my fingers through the process of a quick reload. I won’t write you again until I’m homeward bound, or perhaps I won’t write again at all. Whether due to hasty retreat or an untimely bullet in an unlikely place (forehead, home of dreams, kaput, et cetera), this may be the last missive you receive from my misadventure. I pray that fate not let those Marxist thugs derail me—I could not stand the sovietskii sabor on my tongue forever, flavor of a lost country. You know they’d keep me if they could, writing incompetent manifestos or moldering in an early grave. With any luck you’ll see me soon, manuscript in hand, all triumph.
But if not, at least I had one last taste of you this evening, and I wanted you to know it, that your distant body was as nourishing as any meal. Salted radishes. Stewed pear. White wine. Red blood. I bit your unseen lip and into my mouth there came an iron tang. Back in our house, in our bed, by your candle, I’m sure you cried out and then reached for a tissue to wipe away the stain. Touched a finger to your newly bruised mouth. Settled back into the pillows, content.
Zoya
The next day I was flush with my financial success, reorganizing succulents to make room for a new display—a small pond for water lilies, which seemed an appropriate homage to the tastes of my new benefactor. When I heard something scuffling at the building’s rear, I thought, Already? It was early for the girls to be harassing me on my home ground. Most weren’t even moved into their dorms, so where had they found the time to come creeping? What eager devils, I thought. What pretty witches. Let’s get started, if you wish.
Taking care not to crush the water lines or kick over any vital terra-cotta, I picked my way to the sound’s point of origin. A window, tapping. A stick outside, giving up with a snap. I thought I might give them a bit of a scare, these interlopers, but even after pushing aside several jungle plants I couldn’t see a soul. The glass was fogged up and lightly mildewed—annoying after the deep clean John and I had done, but this particular pane stood behind a bushy palm, and the fronds hid the worst of the mold. Since my shirt was already filthy, I breathed onto the stain and wiped it away with my sleeve.
Then I screamed.
In that scream: terror, surprise, embarrassment, and then—a tiny trill of pleasure. For there was no pert girl waiting to wiggle her fingers at me in some impertinent hello. Just a long nose, a raised eyebrow. A man bent over and trying every bit as hard to see my face as I was trying to see his. And what’s more, I knew this man’s name. It was Leo Orlov, beyond a shadow of a doubt, though his hair was combed differently from as was usual in his photographs. Lev Pavlovich, I would come to call him.
He stood up and gave me a genial nod, then walked off across the campus lawn as if he did so every day. And, in time, of course he would. I put a hand up to my heart, then touched the cold glass. Not a hallucination. Thirty paces away he stopped and wiped something off his shoe on the grass.
But what did it mean? An imagined Orlov could have been chalked up to the same bout of magical thinking that had led me to strip off my stockings while standing a stone’s throw from the Hall of Science the day before. Dreamy lust, bodily volition. But a real Orlov, a flesh-and-blood incarnation? Perhaps he was just passing through. A road trip with some fellow expatriate, on the run from an agent of the Soviet secret police, the dreaded NKVD. A book tour with a signing at the local shop. I knew vaguely that he was married; perhaps his wife liked maple trees. Perhaps they were visiting someone, an old shut-in astronomer who was helping Lev map the rules of a new star system. Two planets orbiting the same sun in an infinite double ellipse. That kind of thing.
It was lunchtime. Taking a moment to wash my hands and de-smear the green matter from my clothing, I went to the cafeteria in search of answers. Hilda and Nadine both waved from the kitchen; they looked more and more alike these days. Returning students bubbled around me, oohing and aahing at the new ice cream freezer and pulling their parents away from the salad. It was nice to go unrecognized; I had been right before, it was too early for the girls to pay me any mind. Glancing behind myself to make sure I wasn’t followed, I slipped into the kitchen and stage whispered.
“Psst!”
Nadine appeared from nowhere and whapped my head with a dish towel.
“Psst yourself, private eye. Long time, no see.”
“Don’t be grouchy,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”
“I know, Miss Moneybags. John told us. So is that why you’re here? To show off some new gold rings? Silk shirts? What’s going on?”
I tried to look casual, downplaying my interest by inspecting a bowl of fruit salad, moving the grapes around with a set of tongs. Then, as an afterthought, “Is there a new teacher this year?”
Nadine shrugged, and looked to Hilda, who did the same. “There’s always one or two. Someone gets sick, retires. Someone finds a better post. Why?”
“Nothing,” I said, picking up a slice of apple and nibbling the end.
“Malarkey.”
“No, really. I just thought I saw someone I knew.”
“You?” Now Hilda was interested. “Like, another graduate? Or something else. You mean a Soviet?” She looked perturbed.
“It’s probably nothing. Just a writer I like.”
“Oh, him.” Hilda laughed. “Well, then I was sort of right, wasn’t I?”
“You’ve met him?”