“Not at all,” Vera replied.
“Really?”
“Of course. I enjoy the feeling of my own insignificance.” It seemed like she might be making a joke at my expense, but her face was serious.
“You don’t really think that.” I was picturing Lev, his stout belief in Vera as the guiding hand that led him through his life. Point A to Point Z.
“Of course I do. It would be awful to believe that anything I did mattered, in particular. I like the ocean,” she insisted. “I’ve always liked the ocean. It will be here forever. Not me, thank god.”
Vera that day: sun-swept but not -kissed, flushed but unburnt. I kept seeing her the way Lev had told me to see her, and the way, too, I’d been imagining her since I was a child. Remarkable. Untouchable. She occasionally had things in her teeth, which didn’t fit either of our renderings, but then, it often looked like blood stuck between the gums. I held her slim figure up against my own—silly girl that I still was, trying to figure out whether I could measure up. As if that was the thing that mattered: my feet being larger than hers, my prints obscuring hers in the sand when I stepped on top of them. My arms being longer than hers, long enough to wrap all the way around her shoulders and still have some to spare.
She seemed so different from how she had just the day before, standing imperious on the train platform. I wondered then how much she knew. How much she wanted me to believe she knew. Sitting here with her feet unshod and telling me she’d be perfectly happy to die if it meant she’d also disappear and leave behind something greater that obscured her completely.
Lev
10 July 1931
No postmark
Vera, where are you? You were not here when I got home. I swept into the bedroom expecting to find you sleeping and to kiss you awake, to see your sullen blink at being pulled out of a dream. But the bed was tidy, empty. Your suitcase missing. Mail spilled through the slot in the door and lay in a great sad stack on the floorboards. All I can do is write these notes and leave them in every room of the house, hoping that somehow they’ll transmit a message to you: come back. I love you. Whatever I’ve chosen, whatever I’ve done, I didn’t mean it. Please come back.
You know it used to confuse me, Vera, the way you got angry when I woke you up. I was so eager for your company. “Let me sleep,” you’d moan, and like a brute I’d tug your arm and ask you, “Why?”
But now I understand. You imagine better things than the world can provide, and your dreams are a refuge. A place where the streets never have the scent of trash and urine, and the wind only blows newspapers into your face if they are encoded with welcome messages. Birds aren’t nuisances, they’re harbingers. Cats are familiars. Yes, Vera, yes. Wherever you’ve gone, I assume it’s for similar reasons. You’re in your own world while I am here, inhabiting its pale reflection. So I will not hurry you, I’ll only say: please. Don’t leave me here alone. I thought I could stand it, but I cannot. My life is a perpetual insomnia without you.
Signed, your limited, lonesome Lev. Lowly, left-behind, leprously forlorn.
Zoya
The café was a bit of a disappointment, serving cocoa made from a powder. I decided that the proprietor must’ve lived on the premises, as his red motorboat was tied up outside, and I spotted a pillow and blanket in the corner booth. We sat by the window watching the sea, and trying to convince one another that we’d seen a whale. Great lumbering presences off in the distance. A waiter came by with extra cocoa powder and stainless-steel pots of hot water, single serving; he leaned on the table and told us it wasn’t the right time of day for whales, and we both made a point of ignoring him. Oh look. Right there. Just missed. Yes, I’m sure.
On the walk back the waves were larger, and you could see the shadows of tall seaweed arms suspended in them. The beach smelled raw. At one point Vera tripped, and when I reached out a hand to help her balance she looked at me like she’d never seen me before—which, of course, she hardly had. In a book, in a story, we’d become the best of friends and take off running down the sand together, laughing wild. Each of us would’ve worn one of my sneakers, to save half our feet. But it wasn’t like that. I thought about Lev cupping the fattest joint of my hips and pressing himself to me, hard as stone. I thought about him scratching out notes in the dark. My canvas shoes were soaked and they made my feet cold, despite the heat of the day. By the time we got back to the cabin, pulling ourselves up the rickety wooden stairs, we were both mute with exhaustion. Seabirds called out, mock, mock, mock.
Vera threw herself into an Adirondack chair and squinted at me, against the light. Looking young, almost girlish.
“We don’t really need to carry on with this pretence, do we?” she asked. “It’s awfully tiring. Let’s just admit it.”
“What?” I felt a cold like needles in my blood as she twisted a piece of dark hair around her finger. Her expression could’ve pearled an oyster.
“Lev sent you here to get rid of me.” Such a simple statement, made so plainly, that I couldn’t help but gasp. She smiled, perhaps assuming my shock was a put-on, but it wasn’t, really. I knew I was on unsteady ground. She continued. “He thought it was a secret—but please. He can’t keep secrets from me. Anyway, I’m not sure how you were thinking to do it. But I know that you won’t.”
“You do?” Perhaps I should’ve run right then. Stood up and gotten my coat from inside and hurried to the train station without looking around. It didn’t feel possible, though, to walk away. I tried to make my face innocent, tried to turn my resolve to steel. She saw right through me.
“Yes. You’re too smart. Or anyway, smart enough. To know a more important offer when you hear one.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Let’s talk over dinner. I’m too tired now. I need a bath.”
And at that she hefted her light body up and seemed to float into the house, as if having brokered an understanding with gravity. That sometimes, enough was enough.
You’ll have doubtless sensed the space closing, reader, between where I sit now, writing with my cheap black pen, and where I was, then. A time eclipse. The two moments slowly moving together until a window emerges where like meets like. You can’t jump through, but you can at least peek, pressing your face against the glass to feel the heat from fading summer sun.
When I came downstairs, Vera was heating up two cans of chowder on the stove—in honor, she told me, of the quahogs (emphasis hers) that had shredded up her feet. The spice of seawater cut through the cream, and a box of soup crackers sat open on the table.
“So you do know how to cook,” I said. She raised an eyebrow.
“I wouldn’t count this as cooking.”
Still I imagined her crouched over a hot plate in Paris, keeping herself and her father fed during moments of crisis. So many ration cards; unclear how the per-card items were selected, but the food always seeming to fit the ticket, through molecular sympathy or some more systematic affinity. God knows I remember from home. Yellow cards for dyed margarine, blue for salt, beige for semi-edible meats. Did she chop the salt pork into bite-sized pieces and fry it up with rice or bread? In our cottage, she stirred the soup and watched me, daring me to ask.