“Are you sure?”
“Things to do, people to see,” I said.
“Alright then.” One more time he frowned towards the man and wife, who were now looking at a young dogwood. “I guess it’s up to you.”
Lev
7 July 1931
Airmail via Berlin
Renka, not sure you got my last letter (was notified it was forwarded home from your hotel?), but if you receive this (God, I hope you receive this), can you take care of a few things for me while I’m still in Berlin? Just want to make sure I’m ready to look my best in classes this year; now that my course load has been reduced “as befits my national reputation,” I’ll need to make an impression.
Black suit, pressed (not by the tailor on the corner who put a burn on the lapel of my Parisian grey wool; you know I despise him).
A few new shirts from New York; whatever you think. You know my size. Though I may have dropped a few pounds in the past wretched weeks, I plan on fattening back up as quick as can be.
Attendant to this: clotted cream, to go on all the summer fruit. A variety of wine, red and white—it would be particularly lovely if you could get Léon to dig up another bottle or two of that 1901 Château Mouton Rothschild. (I think he’s been hoarding them for himself, but you know that man; he always has a price.) Steak, best cut. Slender asparagus. Now I’m just making myself hungry, so suffice it to say I trust you to do the shopping.
I’ll need a new pair of eyeglasses, so please make an appointment with the optician. The old ones were crushed in an unfortunate brawl, the details of which I’ll fill in for you in person, as it would be unwise to commit them to paper.
If there’s a metalsmith you trust, I’d like to get my new pistol cleaned, too, at the earliest convenience.
That’s all for now. À toi ma vie, à toi mon sang, my love. When we meet again it will be Heaven, or something like that, so I hope.
Zoya
Lev bought me cigarettes, mostly because he wanted to smoke in my house, and taught me how to hold them. To take one and tap it on the table, packing the sweet tobacco in, and then light the faraway end with the close side perched between your lips. Mostly I made him light them for me, not because I couldn’t but because I liked to watch him puff and puff, and then to put in my mouth what had been in his. I watched him like a child watches an older child, slyly, and from the corner of my eye. Always hoping for him to approve of me in some way, since he was my life’s first coup, the first thing truly wanted and procured.
On those languid afternoons at the end of the spring semester, when Vera had been told he was running an extra seminar, Lev would sometimes let slip his ideas for new books, stories set in the cold black of space, which he said was not really cold at all but just so low in pressure as to boil liquid into a gas. I imagined this lack of pressure as an embrace, no temperature at all but still so intense as to turn your very blood to steam. Only if you had a cut, Lev corrected. The blood in your body is a closed system. The liquid on your eyeballs, though, would evaporate right away.
We talked about Vera too, which always made me very tense. By the end of May Lev had finalized his plans for the rescue of his manuscript, which he said was doubtless just where he’d left it, and which would change the course of his career.
“I gave her a copy, you know, a long time ago. She didn’t like it.”
“I’m sure it’s wonderful.” I pet his cheek and he batted my hand away with a vexed flinch. It wasn’t always easy to tell what he’d find maudlin.
“You’ll like it,” he went on. “That’s the difference between the two of you. You know how to love what I love.” He lit another cigarette for me and I took it.
He would be leaving the third week of June, not long now. Gone for who knows how much time. “It’s impossible to plan, darling. I’m toppling governments here. Well. Circumventing, anyway.” He told me that, at any rate, I needed as much time as I could get. He had casually dropped my name to Vera as a possible companion, someone to help her pass the time while he was away. She’d spat on the street and kept walking, without seeming to hear, though he’d referred to me as a person he’d met only once or twice on campus. And here I was supposed to convince her to go on a trip with me, somewhere discreet, where I could do away with her in total privacy. “She’s just angry that I’m going after the book,” he said. “She doesn’t like to have her plans tampered with.” And in her plan, the book was long dead.
“What was it,” I ventured carefully, “that she didn’t like about it?”
“You think I know?” He blew a cloud of smoke towards the ceiling. “She burned the thing without a warning, and just insisted she was trying to help me. Didn’t feel the need to be specific. Would’ve driven me mad if”—here, a wry, sexual twinkle—“well, you know we have a passionate marriage.”
“Yes,” I agreed. Still, the question bothered me. Vera seemed always to be with us, a shadow on the wall, a hum in my ear. I imagined her sitting on her front porch directing flies orchestrally, or seeing a stray dog pick through her trash and nudging it out into traffic with pure mental noise. What had she seen in that book? Would I, in spite of Lev’s insistence to the contrary, see it too, once he brought the thing home? He said she and I were the same person, in a certain sense, and though I knew this was mostly a lie he told himself to feel better about sleeping with me, it was also starting to feel true. In Rothschild, the infected women fell in love with the passengers wound round their legs. They let the creatures’ vines crawl up the back of their knees and inculcate themselves into their blood vessels, thickening between their ribs and eating away at their bones like ivy taken root on brick. Vera had become my passenger—or had I become hers?—and I sometimes felt her eyes opening up behind my own, just slightly, blinking as if tired. I wanted to prod her awake—less, now, for safekeeping, and more to hear what she might say about the book and see whether it pinged anything within me. Though this seemed a terrible thing to admit. After all, the reason Lev loved me was my ability to be completely on his side.
That night we smoked in bed until the sun went down and the sheets reeked. When Lev left I walked across the room naked, with a very formal bearing, and looked at myself in the mirror, smudging my face to the left and the right, lifting the skin on my forehead to change the angle of my eyes. Did I look like Vera, in any part? I didn’t see it, but maybe there was something in the underlayer. Maybe there was something oncoming, already too far along to stop. I cooked dinner naked, too, positioning myself as far away as I could from the pan where my chicken leg was frying, holding the tongs with only the tips of my fingers and extending my arm till it clicked in the socket. After a minute I stepped closer—losing my nerve and shrieking when the fat popped, but then taking another step, and another. The hot oil glistened in the pan and sizzled onto my skin in a light mist; it hurt, but there was a certain interest for me in how much of it I could stand. After a while the red spots on my stomach and thighs began to look beautiful in their way. Pointillism. Abstract expressionism. Something I had done to myself on purpose.
Despite how much I thought about her, I didn’t speak to Vera until a week after Lev left for Europe. I saw him the morning of his departure—he’d promised me a visit since he’d be gone for weeks at minimum. Maybe months. He came over while on the pretence of a walk, stretching his legs before the long flight and jittering out a few of his nerves with a brisk lap round the neighborhood. It wasn’t entirely a ruse. After knocking, twice, he waited for me on the porch instead of slipping inside with the key I always left for him under a flowerpot, and when I emerged he grabbed my hand and pulled me into his pace. A stiff-legged, energetic shuffle.