Hunger (5 page)

It grew heavy in my arms as we waited for the boat that would ferry us across half of Lake Nicaragua, to the island of Ometepe. There, a small band of us planned to collect what we could of the coffee, sesame, and strange fruits that grew in its fertile volcanic soil. We would also take notes on an unusual breed of cattle for colleagues in Tbilisi and photograph some pre-Columbian petroglyphs by request of the culture ministry. Alena and I hoped to photograph some howler monkeys.

Heat was coming in with the day, and a pack of dirty boys pestered us for coins. The great director stood at the launch, looking out toward the two volcanoes that rose from the lake to form the largest freshwater island in the world. It struck me that he was seeking to put
maximum physical distance — indeed all forms of distance — between himself and the little beggars.

I watched a woman just down the shore, washing clothes on the rock. Unlike cheap travel paintings of boisterous women working and gossiping and splashing together, she was straight-faced and alone. She washed her family's clothes not as a social event but because they needed to be cleaned.

Sergei, loaded with bananas, distributed them to the beggars, and with the eating they again became boys, joking and playing hopping games with Sergei until the boat pulled close.

On the boat's deck, moving slowly toward the clouds and volcanoes of Ometepe, we cut into the melon.

I was surprised at Alena's appetite, which, four months into her first pregnancy, had been weak for some time. And the large lake's water was chopped by the strong, warm wind, making
the boat jerk up and down. Yet Alena devoured slice after slice of the melon's rich orange flesh. Over and over, she said, “I've never eaten anything so good” and “Absolute ambrosia.” And I thought: I do not know this woman at all.

I had such high hopes for us at that moment. I had already lied to her, of course, but I thought that along with the baby we would be delivered a new beginning.

Alena spit a melon seed into the sublime lake, warmth bathed us, and we were deeply happy for the last time.

What I realized only later, after seeing it again more than once, was that the return of Alena's appetite was caused by the plummeting of her hormones. She was no longer sick from pregnancy.

Alena miscarried the baby in a not entirely uncomfortable inn, in the middle of medical nowhere. She rested on the clean sheets that the innkeeper had insisted we accept while we
waited for a boat to return us to real land. I sat at a table outside and watched our friends swim foolishly among the small but still dangerous freshwater sharks. I drank a sweet, purple drink made from pitaya fruit, and then beer after beer, and ate, grilled, three of the small fish that live nowhere in the world but Lake Nicaragua.

A local man used only a small stick to move a herd of a dozen or so cattle down the beach. I imagined him returning to a simple meal, a thick-waisted wife, and a vague number of small children. I would have traded places with him, at least at that moment. But of course he would not have agreed.

The great director sat with me, our bare feet in the sand that felt like dirt but fell away clean. “This island was once used for sacred burials. We are lucky that we do not have to bury Alena here.”

He sat with me on the boat as I held Alena, and together we watched the volcanoes recede.
I had planned to hike up into the cloud forest of the dormant Madera to see the lagoon in its crater. But now I focused on the perfect cone of the taller, still-active volcano, Concepción, and tried hard to feel worse for Alena than for myself.

The director personally arranged for the several forms of transportation we required, and Alena lived enough to arrive, unconscious and two days later, at the hospital in Managua. During some of the hours of waiting, I tried to picture what our lives would be and failed.

On the way home, there were other hospital layovers, in Atlanta and London. Alena would never again agree to travel pregnant, but, of course, the damage was already done.

•   •   •

Late, late, and I was alone, walking the corridor outside of the grain collections, my turn to guard.

I placed my feet slowly, heel rolling to toe,
heel rolling to toe, making no sound myself, only remembering the sound of the great director's gait. Click, click, an even rhythm covering an uneven stride, longer on the right but faster on that side too, creating a symmetrical sound but a biased walk that had to be corrected by a step to the right about halfway down the corridor, where I now stood, shifting left so I could step right, imitating.

What I had thought of doing many times over the past weeks, I did now without thinking much about it.

Just a few kernels of a few kinds, taking nothing too rare, taking the last of no variety, rearranging the remainder to hide my weakness. My sore teeth, barely able to split raw rice, faired better with the soft pop of millet, the clean chew of teff.

Perhaps I had no right to the rice, no claim on the millet, but the teff was my find, mine to take back. I had collected it with my own hands on one of the first of my many trips with
the great director. “Abyssinia,” I said aloud, my mouth full. “Abyssinia.”

Our steamer harbored in Djibouti the last week of 1926. The great director spent his night alone. Mine, I spent with a wide-eyed, French-speaking Somali girl with a smooth back and beautiful ankles. The next day we proceeded overland, by train, to Addis Ababa.

We were received by Emperor Menelik, who, it turned out, shared an interest in agriculture, wheat in particular.

He granted permission for our expedition as we ate our way through a procession of dishes, increasingly hot with spice: orange squash in coconut milk, mashed eggplant, raw marinated beef, lentils, mixed simmered greens, chicken-and-egg stew. We scooped mouthfuls of each with the thin stratum of fermented bread on which it was served. This
injera
grew like a sponge in my stomach, filling me far beyond comfort and pushing the meats and vegetables into my intestines too soon.

The flesh of my mouth — the insides of my cheeks, the softness under my tongue, and my palate more than my tongue itself — burned, pasted with powdered red pepper. My breath stung my eyes. I interrupted the great director, the emperor, his entourage, to retire.

The next morning, the great director woke me early to accompany him to the market to procure sandals for the fourteen men who would guide and serve us on our journey.

This was our second time on the errand, as the men, preferring money to shoes, had sold the first pairs given to them. An assistant to the emperor had advised us to leave the men barefoot, shackled at the ankles so they would not abandon us in trouble, but the great director refused this course. I assured him that I understood his desire to give our men sandals instead of chains, but I urged him to consider local custom.

Always obstinate, always right, still malarial from recent travels in Syria and Palestine, he said he most certainly would not.

The air was still faintly cool, and few people were walking in the rows of the market when we first arrived. But more gathered with the growing heat, and it was difficult to push through with fourteen pairs of sandals, shoes for which I was sure we had parted with too much money. But we still had carte blanche in those days, and the director was not one to descend to argue with a stall keeper.

A week later, in the unmapped Ethiopian interior, when both of us were sickened with typhus on top of the malaria, our kindness was repaid. Our guides, shod, not shackled, did not leave us behind.

The director made one of his most pleasing finds on the road to Aksum, something previously unknown even through crossing: a stemless hard wheat that fit the law of homologous series. And I found the humble teff I now chewed dry in a cold Leningrad hallway.

The guides pressed us to return to the capital when our sickness worsened. As we were borne out of the interior, tied atop the mules
that our guides considered unmanly to ride, the great director confided in me what he had been writing in his even script on page after page of his notebook. Ethiopia, he said, was indeed a center of plant diversity, and he was now certain that agriculture had been adopted from Ethiopia by Egypt and not, as most geneticists thought, the reverse.

He would be proved right, but he would be dead by then.

•   •   •

In the first days of the blockade, when people's notions of what mattered so altered, Alena asked the new director if she might come back, unofficially, just to do a little research. Nothing important, she stressed, and for no salary, just a little research on some landraces of rice. Genetics was her life.

The new director was not as devoted to Lysenko as we had expected. He was astute both scientifically and politically, which in these
times meant he had only the narrowest line on which to walk.

Some of those who came with him, though, held stupid ideas. Thick-nosed Ivanovich, who believed that all fertilization is useless because only soil texture influences yield, for example, was for a time given charge of vegetable breeding. His wife, Klavdiya, an angular, long-nosed woman who was much smarter than her husband, agreed with his every pronouncement, but always with a slight smile that hinted at irony, distance, disdain. I decided that I could perhaps cultivate her as a friend.

•   •   •

With the start of the war, we lost more in number than we added. All the young men went to the front, leaving only female students and then, later, the young men who returned injured.

Others were evacuated. I was surprised that the new director, who, it goes without saying,
was very well connected, did not get himself evacuated. But not one of us could have known how bad it would get or how long it would last. By the time we knew, it was far too late for most.

Of course the great director was gone too, long gone. Some said in Siberia. Others heard that he was actually in Moscow or had been evacuated to the more interior Saratov prison. His wife, Yelena, who was evacuated from Leningrad with their son, had not been told where he was.

The night before she left, she came to our flat to thank Alena for the letter she had signed. She did not thank me, though she must have known that I could have stopped Alena from signing had I really tried.

She told us that she did not expect to see her husband again. “One of us will be killed by the war or the prison,” she said. “Possibly both by both.”

I tried to soothe her, to give her the best to
think, but my smart Alena shook her pale head. “No,” Alena said. “She is almost certainly right. She will never see him again.

“We will keep up his work,” Alena added, and Yelena smiled, nodded, and pressed Alena's pretty hands.

Before his own arrest, the great director tried to help those who went before him. He put aside his own work, which for him was like putting aside his neck or his spleen, and wrote letters on their behalf. He made trips to Moscow and waited for hours to argue with men who did not want to listen to him or wanted only to hear him beg, which, of course, would never happen. He did everything else humanly possible, but here I must admit that some of it was out of stubbornness. He did not stop to consider that what he was doing might make things harder rather than better for those he wanted to help. But that is how idealists are.

In part because there was so much empty space from so many gone, Alena was allowed a
corner of a basement laboratory and mostly ignored. When the watches of the collection were organized, she was given the harshest hours, at least at first.

After weeks passed, the political and even scientific differences among us broke down. Weight and health became the important measures.

•   •   •

Before Lidia, the woman most dangerous to my marriage was Iskra.

Her mother had renamed her, as a girl, after the early Bolshevik paper. As a young woman, the name fit her well. She was indeed a spark. And I was combustible.

I traveled to Moscow whenever I could, indulging with Iskra in those things my pure, gently ascetic Alena would never touch.

We played tennis and dined on
pelmeni
and good wine and meat and cherry pies at the Prague Hotel while Gypsy dancers performed under moving colored lights.

We smoked cigarettes and tapped our feet to Antonin Ziegler's Czech group at the Metropole, to Leonid Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman at the National.

Afterward, at Iskra's flat, I would carefully unhook — and roll down her beautiful long legs — the real silk stockings I brought back to her from my trips to France. I never knew what would come next.

At the parachute tower, on the day I fell in love with Alena, my future bride had told me that people use danger either to find themselves or to lose themselves. Perhaps the same is true of sex. With Alena, who needed neither to find nor to lose herself, sex was only sex, or perhaps potential procreation. She was wonderful to be with, always, and happy enough to make love. Despite taking her pleasure sadly, she enjoyed it for what it was. But not for anything more.

With no doubt, Iskra used sex to explore and express herself. She was different every time, and I thought that I might never tire of her and that it would be a good and safe thing to have
only one mistress, whom I could eventually give up in older age for my wife.

But I did not give Iskra up for Alena.

I gave her up for Lidia, who, like me, sought in danger and sex not more but less of herself. In the weird mix of pleasure and pain that she always preferred, she abandoned the self that she must have hated as much as I, at least for a time, would come to hate it. As much as she wanted me to hate it.

•   •   •

For three days and part of the next, Alena did not speak to me except for the small phrases and questions necessary between two people inhabiting the same small place under hardship with no opportunity for one or the other to go elsewhere.

My offense was to have suggested, now that we lived under siege, that I had done Albertine a service by turning her out — though
turning her out
was Alena's phrase and not my own.
Now Albertine dined on roast duck and
rampions
and good bread while the children of Leningrad lived as orphans in the Caucasus or chewed sawdust or their own tongues.