They wouldn’t ask. The provost? He wouldn’t want, exactly, to know if his new star faculty member was dipping into the company ink. They would just assume, and over time it would become the face Lev wore in public. Rapscallion. Dashing bastard. Brilliant enough that no one would protest, least of all the conquered coquettes, picking up a bit of color before going co-ed. No need to actually touch a single hand when the story was so likely, and had so much of its own steam.
Over time things would heat up—he’d mention lipstick on a collar, you know, theoretically, and how wives—plural, imprecise, unnamed—might not like it. Might throw a fit, or even a lamp, straight for the head. Though a well-timed duck meant the object smashed against a wall instead. And at home he’d elbow one over, so if any breezy questions were put to Vera she’d be forced to corroborate, in a manner that made her look complicit in the lie. “Oh yes, he’s terribly clumsy, isn’t he? I can’t let him near any of our finer china.” Meanwhile she would still be signing off on every move, shifting the chess pieces in whatever order she pleased, and he’d make sure she sent every letter, attended every important meeting, made most of the phone calls. Her grip visible on every part of his life except one.
He was a writer. He could come up with the right set of circumstances to forestall any serious suspicion. A woman pushed over the edge, maybe to a sanatorium, maybe something more, when she found out her control was less than total. She would do the work for him, anyway. He just needed to set the stage.
“You really want her gone?” I asked. I’ll admit I was surprised.
“I want to be free of her,” he told me. “I thought it would just be for a while.”
But now, he said, there was me to consider, and I’d changed everything. (A thrill I can still feel, remembering how he said it. Everything?) I’d reminded him that his work was his own, as I’d reminded him that his body was. A stint away, having her mental health called into permanent question, no longer seemed enough. We were too alike, she and I, he said. We were the same soul, a twin soul, in two different women—because of course how else could he fall for us both, how else could he need us both so completely, when his heart was so terribly true?—and the laws of nature would not let us abide for too long side by side.
“We have to get rid of her once and for all,” he said. For his books, for my safety, for our happiness. So all of them could flourish unchecked. I would help him push her to it, he said. Learn her habits. Find a time.
And like a fool, I let him convince me.
Lev
5 July 1931
Airmail via Berlin
My god, Vera. A short note to let you know I’ve survived. Recuperating in Berlin, under false name, natch. Will be home within the week. Alert the school to resume my courses in the fall. Prepare yourself to hear the story of my failure.
As a side note, I hope you’ve had a lovely time on the coast. I was glad to know you decided to take the trip, after all. Your letter reached me just before Vlad and I were set to depart, and it cheered me infinitely to learn you’d be traveling with Zoya and taking the waters side by side. She strikes me as a virtuous girl. Entirely your cup of tea.
Zoya
That first night, after he told me about his plan for Vera, I cried into Lev’s lap. Face scratching against the thick hair on his legs, tears soaking the skin and then, later, staining his pant leg while he petted my head and told me it would be alright.
I asked: “But don’t you love her?” and he said, “Of course.” And that was all. Terse. Determined. He had lived for too many years under her ingenious thumb, and had finally decided to break free. He looked like a man making a terrible choice, which I suppose he was, and it made me wonder what my face revealed to him. Did I look like a weapon? A femme fatale with a knife held casually between her fingers? I told him I didn’t have it in me to kill someone, and he said, “No, darling, we need her to more or less do it herself anyway.” Which I had to admit, with Vera, seemed like the only plausible way. I imagined her stopping a bullet with her hand, just lifting a palm and batting it to the ground. Smelling poison in a glass, or wrestling her way free from a strangling. She was, Lev told me, surprisingly fit. That’s why I was only to watch her for now, and figure out the right time to act.
He didn’t let me dress when he did. Said he was going to tuck me in bed like a good little girl, so I could sleep away my sorrow and wake up the next morning to examine our options with a critical eye. He kissed me, all across my face and down my neck, paying special attention to the flat expanse where my breastbone gave way to my breasts. We had been meeting for months, and he knew what I liked. How I loved him. Most of all when he broke my skin with his teeth, or pinched my thighs so hard they bruised. When he marked me, changed me, made me his. That night he slipped out the door and whispered, “Sweet dreams.” And I lay in bed, blanket up to my chin, shining with the tender lesions he left all up and down my arms and legs. The darkest spot a bruise on my heart, a thought in my head I could not escape.
I loved Lev, but still, my first instinct was to shield Vera. Perhaps out of fidelity to our shared past, the things we had both survived so far. I imagined her shivering alone at home, maybe lighting a cigarette on the front porch with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders, waiting for her husband to come up the walk. Our town in spring was a haven for bats, who came screeching through the sky to decimate the insect population. We all found them rather heroic, but the total saturation was unnerving, as was the way they’d swoop and turn, bending their arcs of flight erratically in the darkness. In my mind’s eye, one came close to the imagined Vera and she gave a cry, dropping her still-lit cigarette on the wood slats and stamping it out madly before running inside. I wanted to knock the bat away and comfort her. Run the back of my hand gently across her cheek until she’d cried herself to sleep.
But that was a peasant’s response: protect the ruling class, protect the status quo. Well, and I was a perfect peasant. During my last years in Moscow suspicion was general throughout the city—everyone informing on everyone else, everyone condemning the informants behind closed doors. I used to have tea with our next-door neighbor Albina, a pleasantly stout babushka who had the unfortunate habit of smacking her gums—the result of bad teeth, which predated state medical care. I’d been visiting her for several months when she pulled out a scrapbook one afternoon and began paging through it with me. Not family photographs or pieces of baby hair cut from her children’s balmy heads, but a bunch of newspaper clippings. They were, I realized, from underground papers, of the sort people passed from hand to hand in dark alleys or printed on T-shirts so they could be couriered without suspicion. But these didn’t contain any vital information from a resistance party, they were just—jokes. Bad jokes, mostly, at the state’s expense. “Where has Comrade Stalin’s mustache been lately?” and “Who disappears faster: a man whose wife has found him cheating or a loyal Party member?” Half of them didn’t even make sense, but there was a hysterical earnestness that made it hard to look away. Albina must’ve thought I’d find them funny. Instead they chilled me to the bone.