The manuscript felt like a holy thing, compared. Pages curled up at the corners, paper frail. As I untied the twine a shower of dust fell as the fibers crumbled. I knew what Vera had said: it was a failure, a flop. But my hands shook as I set the title page aside; beneath, the ink was still glossy and sharp. Untitled, by Leo Orlov. The lost novel. The book that had started it all. I made another pot of coffee and settled in.
Once upon a time there was a kingdom made of cardboard and glue.
It was—a difficult experience to describe. There were moments when I felt the ghosts of my past rise around me, plucking at my clothing, tugging my hair. Kissing me straight on the lips. Exhaust rising from the Moscow streets, long lines at every corner grocery, the tyranny of the butcher shop choosing who they’d allow to buy. Sometimes there were lines to nowhere: you’d turn a corner and see a row of people outside some stucco monstrosity, and when you asked what they were waiting for they all gave different answers. A babushka saying, “R’iba,” fish. A little girl, holding yarn while her mother knitted, who suggested blocks of baking chocolate instead. An old man, visibly drunk, just repeating “Xhlieb, xhlieb,” as if incantating the bread would bring it to his hands.
There were those beautiful moments of feeling home. And then there were the rest.
Vera found me in the morning exactly as she’d left me the night before, curled up on an uncomfortable wooden chair and looking like the child of death. My face was less grim than sallow now, drawn and green from lack of sleep and the gnawing pain behind my breastbone. Heartbreak, I guess you might call it.
“So,” she said, efficient. “You’ll do it.”
“I will,” I agreed. Why did I say it? Because she was right, I suppose, and because she had always had what I did not. At a certain point it was hard not to feel like that was because she deserved it all more. Lev’s body, Lev’s future, his pledge of allegiance—Vera had taken all that in hand while I was still a schoolgirl, trailing Margaret like a baby duck. She had built something beautiful enough for me to fall in love with, so how could I refuse to help her protect it? Even brutally. Even mortally. Vera didn’t ask me anything then, just bustled around the kitchen setting up breakfast. Not really cooking, stilclass="underline" we ate sliced fruit and drank the coffee cold from the pot. She did humor me by toasting our bread in the stove, as I’d suggested, though it came out just as burned from our misjudgment. That morning she was wearing a green blouse and pedal pushers, an almost American silhouette, except for the way her hair was set and her eyes so serious. I wanted to go and close them with a tender touch, mainly to stop them from looking at me with quiet triumph. Today had been my internal deadline, the time by which I should’ve carried out my (Lev’s) plan. Which would’ve meant putting on gloves and moving her body in such a way as to make it look natural and suicidal. Her face held in one palm, on the table. Her shoes off, for comfort, but set nearby with care and an eye for the ordered tableau. It was windy but warm, and occasionally hard fronds of something banged against the doors and windows. Easier to imagine the aftermath than the act itself: my hair blowing into my eyes as I tugged my suitcase outside for the walk into town, which I had planned to undertake in lieu of ordering a taxi.
“You agree,” Vera said. She was seated across from me, eating her toast, and she narrowed her eyes as she put the words into my mouth. “It’s important that you agree that what we’re doing is for the best. You’ll need your strength.” She had told me the night before that if he’d brought the book home, I’d have to destroy it. Just one more thing to take apart: burn it to ashes. She had fewer suggestions as regarded Lev. “You’ll need your conviction.”
Hadn’t I had this conversation before? The two of them were more similar than I’d had cause to know. Though maybe that was just my stubborn pride. Lev had told me often enough of the bound souls, the twinned core, the psychic line that ran between them, which I took for so much hyperbole. That people could be made for one another, each one wrought in paradox from the rib of their mate. Though I believed him easily enough when he said the same of me.
“It isn’t very good,” I allowed. I’d re-bound the manuscript, re-tucked the flaps of every envelope. A touch unnecessary to show me all of those letters; surely one would have sufficed to make the point. “It has its moments, though.”
“I never said he wasn’t a genius. It’s just that he refuses to see that people care about your life, once you let them into it. He thinks he can do whatever he wants and that things will just—work themselves out. I suppose I’m to blame for teaching him that.”
“And you think history will forget? This? What you’re asking?”
“I couldn’t possibly guess. But I know it wouldn’t forget a story like Lev’s grand adventure leading up to a disappointment of these proportions.” True enough. I imagined the newspapers: starting with an affectionate blaze and then fizzling out in polite, confused reviews. The wilting of him—after Felice he got terribly vain—his sickening jaunty laugh turned into a painful cry. The worst part being the way he’d think: She was right. She was always right.
Whereas if he died the narrative would change to a tragic man and his great lost work. Sales of his existing books would soar. People would love him to the point of distraction.
“So you’re not angry about what he sent me here to do?”
She didn’t flinch. Maybe twitched, at the corner of her eye, though she could also have been blinking away a spot of sand. The house was full of it.
“I’ve survived worse things than this” was all that she would say on the subject.
The train ride home was different from the ride to Twisted Branch had been. My car was almost empty, just me and an old codger sitting at the other end, periodically hacking up some ball of phlegm and spitting it into a handkerchief. I was far enough from him that I could try, at least, to ignore the sound, and sleep pressed up against the window. When the conductor woke me to say we’d arrived, I had a red circle emblazoned on my forehead. No matter how I combed my hair it was visible, and only the adults at the station were too polite to point and stare. Children are wonderfully honest in that way. I’m learning to enjoy honesty now, when I see it in others, since it hasn’t been my life’s foremost principle.
The town of Maple Hill seemed changed. More warble, I suppose, and fewer straight lines. This could also have been the effect of temperature: we were experiencing a heat wave, and all around town there were toddlers eating ice pops to keep from overheating. I saw quite a few on my unsteady walk home, with lips of yellow, purple, green. I realized I’d never had a Popsicle myself, and paid five cents for one at the drug store, though they were reluctant to sell it to a grown woman with so many young lives on the putative line. I think the flavor was cherry; it made my tongue numb.