I know we’ve been cold to one another lately, my darling, more so with every step I took towards the realization of this plan. My return to the homeland, a rescue mission for my lost manuscript, which you told me I should never find. I’ve been repeating the steps to myself every day and hour leading up to my departure: Locate a map with likely updates to the Soviet roadways: check. Befriend the American military and their biplanes: check. And now, traverse the ocean and land on a distant shore: check. But I don’t want to leave things that way, and the closer I get to the streets where we first met, the more it seems the perfect time for honesty. You used to press me for stories about my early romances, and I always said no, not wanting to diminish in your mind the vision of our ideal connection. But now I think I see your point: how can you trust that my feelings for you are unique if you don’t know my feelings for anyone else? Alright then, Vera. As always, you win. If it brings us closer, it will be worth it.
Of course there were girls before you. In particular there was one, a sweet thing of sixteen who I knew through my father; we went hunting at her country home near Tsarskoye Selo, just outside of Leningrad. It was a quaint place, just seven bedrooms and a sitting room full of brocade and exposed stone, which they always brightened up at night with candles. They left the curtains open for evening cocktails, and I remember coming towards the house after a walk in the dark; above me a sea of stars fell in every direction as if a divine huntress was shaking droplets of water from her hair. And through the window, another set of bright white points, one of which was in the hand of the girl. She moved from one end of the room to the other towards an object I would never know. Her chestnut hair shone upon her head; her skin was white, almost frozen. That passage, no more than a few footsteps past the window glass, seemed to contain within it my whole life’s purpose, my whole mysterious volition: delicious, untouchable, motivated by something just beyond my grasp.
When I went inside I felt certain the spell would break, and for a moment it seemed to. The room was stuffy with the musk of men—her father, my father, both of her brothers—and the fireplace flue was not quite open, so a hint of smoke lingered round the ceiling and the corners. As I walked through the door one of her brothers said something quiet and the other laughed—a sound that made my shoulders itch with the anticipation of a fight. They were tall, hulking. I was long and lean. I went to the sideboard and poured myself a glass of wine from the ready decanter, trying not to let the smoke bother my lungs and thinking how I might make a polite escape. Perhaps fake a chest cold? Pretend exhaustion? Even a girl was not worth this, surely. Then I turned. A single pivoting step that severed one part of my life from the next.
In the far corner of the room, she perched on an armchair much too large for her, so she looked like a child in her father’s study. But such a serious child, and with such poise that I could have balanced my wine on her head without fear of spilling a single drop. The candle she’d carried sat on a small table beside her, lighting her up from below. Her eyes were dark with little points of light, galaxy marbles, runic hints. It was impossible to tell if she was breathing, so still did she hold herself. Not like a doe in the woods, alert to danger. Like the hunter that doe has scented. Patient. Glacial.
Without knowing what I would say, I started to move towards her, but at that moment the maid came in and rang for dinner, and we were all ushered through into the cramped dining room for undercooked veal and a few stabbing attempts at conversation. Once or twice I tried to strike up a topic with the young lady, whose name was Diana, or Dina, but she was half the table away and stuck telling my father about her study of painting—a theme on which he was routinely tiresome, his own mother having dabbled in watercolor. Once or twice she flashed those eyes at me, and my body seized with wanting. Then we all went up to bed.
The week transformed into a series of excuses designed to push me into Dina’s company. I switched from the steady gelding I’d been riding to a mare Dina thought a better companion for her own; the mare and I were bitter enemies from the start, she always pushing my leg into trees and intentionally stumbling over shallow creek beds, and me driving her so hard with my heels that she ended each day sweated half to death. We tore after rabbits instead of foxes. Plunged down embankments too steep to escape and trotted back and forth in twin pique. Dina just laughed at our rivalry, and rode her horse with the grace of a centaur. One afternoon I let her walk me to the river that bordered her family’s property on the pretext that I give my opinion on opportunities to fish it, a practical task I could not have been more ill-suited to as a boy of seventeen, primarily enamored of books and cigarettes and the sound of my own voice. I knew nothing about fishing, and in fact forgot the explanation for our excursion as soon as we were out of sight of the house, though plenty of the creatures wallowed fat in the shade with speckled sides and deckled tails, confident and lazy. Dina let the back of her hand brush my fingers, and as we approached the water’s edge I pulled her into an embrace. “We can’t,” Dina whispered. She pressed her bosom against my breastbone, laid her head on my chest and clutched at me with her little fingers as I bent and ran my hands underneath her skirt. An hour later when we returned, her father asked about the fish and I was at a loss to give him any answer, until Dina smiled guilelessly and said, “He found the river quite singular.”
Her father was no fool, and as you can imagine, our opportunities to be alone together were swiftly curtailed: the greatest satisfaction I would derive from that point onward was in watching her astride that wicked mare from my wicked own. We were seated far apart at meals, and during the cocktail hour Dina’s brothers took up all her attention, asking her to sing them songs they remembered from childhood or playing keep-away with ornamental jewels they plucked out of her hair. They endeavored to make a little girl out of her, but every childish game they concocted just emphasized her bloom into womanhood, a background of dishonesty illuminating a pure truth. Once, while passing me in an ancient narrow hallway, Dina touched my leg high enough up the thigh to ink the pressure of her fingers permanently into my skin. But she did not slow her pace, and soon disappeared around a corner, the tail of her skirt flicking back in a smirk. After we left I thought of her constantly, counting the seconds until we might be reunited. But when my father and I tried to make plans for a return trip later in the fall, we were met with the news that Dina had been shot through the waist by an incompetent hunter who mistook her brown riding jacket for a hide, and died of blood loss some five hours later, fevered white skin almost invisible against the bleached linens of her bed.
I used to dream of her laid out on a funeral bier, her burial gown flowing over the edges like snow. I dreamed that she stood up and stretched, sweet and sleepy, and truly believed that I might bring her back from the grave using only the force of my will. Girl on horseback, jumping death. She was my every fascination, my nightly rhythm, my dream upon waking. She was the only girl I ever loved. Until you.
Zoya
I arrived in Maple Hill in January, halfway through the school year, and spent my first New Jersey winter wandering around and marveling at my good fortune. We suffered ice storms nearly every week, bad enough to take out the city’s power, but cold was nothing new to me. When I woke up and saw my breath, I dressed practically, in layers, and topped myself off with the grass-green wool coat I’d bought at the local department store with the ten dollars offered to all combat orphans by the American committee that took on our care. They mistook the moth-eaten look of my old coat for war-torn: a bit of luck. Each day I tucked my hands into my clean new pockets to protect them from the wind and also to hide the holes in the fingertips of my gloves—I’d never owned anything brand new before, and I was grateful to the winter weather for giving me an opportunity to show off, however minimally. My lips in that freeze looked bitten, and my skin achieved a nearly fashionable pallor, though I would never quite lose the hardy peasant complexion that was my birthright. My roommate, Margaret, slept under an electric blanket; she kept it plugged in even during blackouts, and when I got up on those winter mornings all I could see was the tuft of her hair beneath her pile of supplementary quilts, and the electric wire snaking hopefully down to the floor.