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Zoya

33.

Time is a funny thing, dear reader. For instance, you have been tracking great swaths of it on my behalf. Decades gone, in a flash. Little me, in my crib or cradle clutching a bunny, then suddenly sprouting long limbs and leaping over oceans and mountains and calendar years. Not a layman’s task, as such, going forward and back, forward and back. Stopping stock-still on occasion to think through a remark or linger on the lover (Lev)’s face. The second time I met him, he took a piece of my hair and twirled it round his finger, so tight it hurt my scalp. I sometimes stay in that moment for days at a time. The intake of breath, how I moved slightly away to pull the strands even tighter.

Not much (true) time has passed since I began writing, though. (And even less, I suppose, has elapsed for you. You can sink my days of work into a half hour’s leisure reading, the years of my life, thus, double-sunk.) I’m still in this cabin, alone, with far too many hours each day to think about what’s happened, memories escaping along with the whorls of milk in every cup of tea. I got a splinter from one of the cabinets near the stove while rummaging around and looking for an adequate biscuit, and it took ages to pick it out with a needle, but when it was done I wished I had another, just to occupy my mind. The emptiness here is really starting to irk me, you see. I thought I’d made friends with a cat who came skulking for supper two days in a row, but it’s been three now with no scant tabby. Loyalties are not so easily bought here. Perhaps if I had cream.

Perhaps if I could cleanse myself of the whole past, and start anew. Walk outside and find a river to dunk myself in. Kerplunk and done. Water so cold it boils over the rocks. Fish reaching out with teeth translucent to pick off my skin and leave white bones. There’s something hideously erotic about the skeleton, is what I’ve come to think. How it lacks gender, identity, individual distinction. The dead bones of a beloved are not the beloved. I’m starting to lose my grip.

Let me just rewind, rewind. Let nothing barrel towards its inevitable conclusion. Let me pretend that nothing has ever happened, nothing but Lev’s fingers on my scalp. Reader, do you have that power? Unlikely, impossible. But I do sometimes wish.

34.

The first time I stepped into Lev’s home I was so busy fiddling with my clothes that I almost missed the momentousness of the occasion. Stupid, I know, but I just wanted for once to look trim and neat, and my shirt kept riding up at the waistline, tempted by the heavy static in my fall skirt. Now I know better than to think he’d care, or to think the clothes would last long on my body, but I was hoping to make a good impression. He always seemed so cool, compared to me. Lev was already there when I arrived—at three thirty, an in-between kind of hour—and when I got up the nerve to knock he opened the door with the casual air of a man who’s done something a thousand times. Relaxed, almost businesslike. I stumbled when the heel of my shoe caught the doorstop, but he graciously failed to notice.

“Yes, come in, my dear.” He hurried me across the threshold and into the living room, where I was happy to feel his hand slide a bit lower down my back than was strictly polite. Then it went lower still and I—I’m embarrassed to say I giggled. I was still getting used to the idea that pleasure could, and would, repeat, that there might be a rhythm to it that I could step into and stay inside, rocking back and forth, back and forth, into eternity. The sound of my laugh was like a hiccup. “You need a drink,” Lev said, with a smile, and I was grateful.

While he was in the kitchen fixing us cocktails, I walked around the room admiring the furniture, the art, the geometry of the décor. It’s funny now to think how much I read Lev into every flourish, from the arrangement of the books to the color of the rugs. He probably didn’t choose a single thing. Any echo of him had been placed there by another hand, and some part of me must’ve known it, because I carefully avoided looking at any photographs. I wasn’t yet ready to gaze into his wife’s face, and superstitiously enough, I didn’t want her gazing into mine.

(Did I really think she could? I always wonder what Vera knows, and how. Does she make plans and carry them out, like anyone, or does she actually see the future? Are she and Lev lovers, worldly man and worldly wife, or are they actually stitched together at the base of the soul, as each of them would have me believe? Though Lev, of course, says the same thing about me. His lovemaking bears troublingly telltale marks no matter who it’s aimed to please, and I wonder if this is as true of his body as it is of his mind, his heart, his affectionate phrases. If his fingers find the same clever crevices, if my gasps sound like hers, or like another’s. Like every other’s. I sometimes wish I could test this question out on another body, re-creating his passage up and down my spine, between my thighs, to see if I can get the same results.)

Lev came back in with two small glasses in his hands, which we sipped from and then promptly abandoned in our hurry to get upstairs, where the time—evaporated.

Afterwards, we sat in our underwear and talked for an hour or more. I felt the intimacy of that: not touching, just looking. Calm and exposed. Like I was a baby and my mother had just been bathing me, was now patting me down with a towel. The light came through the window in flashes when the trees bent in the wind, and it reminded me of a time in Lipetsk when the birds had been doing wonderful things above the fields, their sense of gravity bothered by the rising thermals and their bodies casting small snatches of shadow along the ground. I must’ve been six or seven then, but I could call it to mind clear as day, and I told Lev about it, a memory I’d never shared with another soul. How the birds swooped and rose, never stuttering in their path. How even when you ran at them—as I, a child, often did—they frightened with choreography, streaming up in two directions like a disintegrating vee.

“I’d have liked to see that,” he said. “If only I’d ever in my life been allowed to choose where and when to go anywhere.”

I laughed, and was surprised when he didn’t laugh with me. “Really?” I asked. I couldn’t imagine him feeling deprived. But he was serious, and I found myself in the strange position of having to explain that my life had not been easy either, that I had suffered. Look at that girl with her smart little jacket, my mother had said, pointing to the landlord’s daughter in Lipetsk. Someday, if you follow her example, people will think you’re just as elegant and fine. Was this what she meant?

“Listen,” I protested, “it wasn’t some field trip. It was—we had no choice.” But Lev said it all still sounded pretty. He always saw a charming, Tolstoyan simplicity in the peasant world, an innocent bliss which the Soviets had cruelly destroyed. My father would’ve lost his mind to hear his struggles co-opted this way by a member of the aristocracy. But I didn’t try very hard to dissuade him. You see, I benefited from Lev’s illusion: if the peasant world was charming, that made me charming, too. And what did it mean to me, anymore, the truth of that life? It was gone.

“You know,” he said a little while later, after we had gotten up and fumbled some more around the room. “I thought that when we arrived in New York, everything would be different for me. It was such a naïve idea, I’m almost embarrassed to admit it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. And he shrugged. Lifting a casual, bare shoulder and then using it to scratch his ear.

“There was this party,” he started, pausing once more, maddeningly, to light a fresh cigarette. And then told me all about it, how he and his wife had been invited to a benefit for some publishing giant, and she hadn’t wanted to go because the man had ties to a house that brought out Marxist literature sometimes—general-interest stuff, he assured me, purely educational. They had declined the invitation, but it bothered Lev. Losing the opportunity to mingle, missing out on connections with the members of the literary press who would undoubtedly be present. He thought he’d forget about it, as he usually forgot about their disagreements—“She’s always right, you see,” he said, with no small amount of irony in his voice—but the night of the party it was still on his mind, and he decided to slip out without her. What she didn’t know about, he reasoned, couldn’t hurt her.