Invitation to a Bonfire (18 page)

“You said yourself, it was years ago.”

“In the eyes, I mean. You don't age so much in the eyes. Not that fast.”

“Marie,” I said. “It's me.”

She shook her head. “I'd remember. But I mean, don't worry about it. It's just that I'm thinking of someone else.”

“Ok,” I said. “Well. Ok.”

Marie looked at my cup. “Need a warm-up?”

“No thank you.” I pushed it away from myself with two fingers, and stood. I wasn't sweating anymore, but my limbs still felt sticky, and now all abuzz. “Got to get going.”

“Sure, hon. Keep those home fires burning.”

I left, and the bell chased me out to the street. Marie, I saw, had moved back behind the counter, scouring something unseen. I rested my forehead on a wall a few steps away, knocked it gently against the bricks. A little boy walking by with his mother looked at me with great seriousness.

“What,” I said to him. “
What
.”

But his frown only deepened as he moved farther on.

 

Excerpt of a letter from Vera Orlov to Robert Horne of Horne Publishing

(provided to the Maple Hill Police Department by Mr. Horne, with some reluctance)

Sitting on the train home with the contracts in hand for the re-release of
Knight, Knave
, making corrections (as I'm sure you assumed I would, Bobby). How many times must I tell you all that a delivery date for the next book is impossible? No addendums. Just buy what's on hand. If anyone tells Lev he
must
work by such and such day he'll hole up in his study reading
Oblomov
for half a week and then disappear in that terrible car. Let him be, and he'll sit at the desk. The words come unasked for. Things that matter always do.

Meanwhile this train is impossible. What is it about Americans that makes you all want things to be new and disposable? Tea in a paper cup. I don't understand. It seeps through at the seams. And you. You keep buying ghost stories, Bobby—yes, I look through your catalogues—but what do Americans know about ghosts? I could tell you a thing or two about spectrality that would curl your hair.

In Leningrad we knew our spooks on a personal level, to the point where a party at the end of the world looked just like a party at the height of one's power. Candles, tables, buildings, liquor. Bloodlines, necklines, age lines, ambitions. Fingertips gone orange from tobacco and white hair swept at just such an angle to hide where it's thinned. Terrifically civilized. All
the while, everyone was on the verge of dying. That's the trick, you see. True horror is when the worst possibility wears the face of ordinary life, but no Americans consider themselves ordinary, do they? It's your prerogative to transform overnight, and people act like this is some kind of virtue. This attitude is rubbing off on Lev, and I don't like it.

But listen to me, going on. I'm sure you have better things to do.

Don't bother sending the next round of contracts to Lev, just courier them straight to me. And please get rid of this letter, Bobby, you know I find it morbid and distressing when you keep them.

Editor's note: This letter was undated, but police records indicate that Mr. Horne, when pressed, estimated its vintage as late 1930.

 

Zoya

52.

My plan, in its basic form, involved earning Vera's trust and getting her to take me on a vacation (Lev's idea: get her out of town and away from prying eyes. Now that I'd met their maid, I understood this requirement much better). A trip to the ocean seemed like the thing—quiet seaside hamlet, a rented cottage. Plus, New Jersey is lousy with beaches, so we wouldn't have to go very far. Once we arrived I would give her the poison, and make an anonymous call from the road so her body would be discovered without much delay. Neither Lev nor I was interested in putrescence.

It wouldn't be easy. She was, Lev assured me, a naturally suspicious woman, and I was coming out of nowhere, more or less. (“Less” Lev's introduction, but that clearly hadn't won me any favor.) In her position, I wondered, would I agree to such a thing? A sudden vacation with an ardent stranger, conspiratorial whispers over sherry. I considered my empty apartment, teapot whistling into space, and then thought about strolling down a boardwalk or sidewalk, brushing Vera's shoulder with my own. Without being proud to admit it, I knew I'd jump at the chance; I was not exactly choking on friendship. And that was the point; neither was Vera. Though she gave off an air of self-sufficiency, surely it couldn't erase the natural human need for love. Why else lend her earrings to the maid?

On Tuesday I went home early and tidied myself up, though not nearly to the same degree as I had for my first visit. I washed my face and put on
a clean blouse without bothering to change my pants or shoes. Didn't curl my hair, just ran a brush through. Added a touch of lipstick, and left it at that. Vera wouldn't be expecting fireworks and I thought perhaps she'd appreciate the fact that I worked for a living; after all, Lev did. My fingernails were chipped and rough from where I'd torn at the dirt, pulling up weeds by stalk and root.

This time when I knocked, Vera answered the door herself, wearing a light cotton skirt and a shirt so crisply white it seemed to be made of sun on snow. The color—or lack thereof, I suppose—suited her. She looked like a weather event. Or perhaps like something more peaceful and self-satisfied. A young scout, say.

“Come in, my dear,” she said.

It felt strange to walk around the living room without Lev. The same, but not. His clothes had been removed from around the ground floor; no more jackets slung on the backs of chairs or errant cuff links on the windowsill. Just as I could feel his presence in every detail before, I could feel his absence now. A tea tray had been set out with a gleaming silver service and a platter of
pastila
.

“Did you make them yourself?” I asked, indicating the sweets.

“God, no.” Vera laughed. “You think I have time for that?”

I thought:
I don't know how you use your time.
But that wasn't quite true. I knew when she got up, knew the side of the house where her bedroom lay. I knew that she attacked Lev's work with the loving axe of a firefighter saving a child. I knew she scratched and sniffled, curled her hair occasionally, bothered to wear different shades of lipstick to suit her skirt or shoes.

“But did you learn to cook as a girl?”

She gave me a hard look. One of many questions she would never answer about her past. For instance: whether she hoped Lev's greatness would save her from it, or from some dark future. Or something else. “Let's sit.”

Vera positioned herself beside me on the sofa, so near that our knees almost touched, though there were several open chairs. She poured, making sure to include a dash of milk in my cup just as I prefer, and the
pastila
came from the store Lev frequented, or so I judged based on the
taste. I bit into one and was flooded with a sense of well-being, warmth that spread from sternum to shoulder blades, and from there down. It was not lost on me that Vera guessed without asking how I took my tea.

“Now,” she said, once we both had our cups and plates. “I have something for you.”

“Oh?” I tried to think how I might take control of the conversation, but all the tricks I'd learned in school—the sudden topical swerves and bold declarations—seemed impossible under the circumstances. My body recognized a dominant creature and grew sleepy. Passive. “That's … nice. You shouldn't have.”

Vera pulled an envelope from under the tray; manila, like the one Lev gave me filled with pills. I realized they must have often wandered into one another's offices, and would naturally share the same supplies. She handed the envelope to me, and inside I found round-trip train tickets to the coastal town of Twisted Branch. Vera watched me, waiting for some kind of reaction, but even in my half-drunk kitten state, I was at least able to keep my face blank. Finally she spoke, with a false brightness.

“My husband mentioned that he met you on the Donne School campus. I'm not sure how well you know him, but I imagine if you've spoken even once you'll understand that his whims are often ridiculous.” I said nothing, and still refused to frown or smile. The longer I was quiet, the more Vera would have to say—something. Talk into the white space of me. “Well, I admit I wasn't happy with the idea of being blind-matched with a companion this summer, but he was quite insistent. ‘You'll love her,' he told me. ‘She's a gem,' and so on. Not in those words, you understand, but that was the general bent of it.”

“So?” I prompted.

“I'm giving in. Let's be friends, take a trip. Visit those … deep waters.” She made it sound like drowning.

“Well, that's wonderful, of course.” I said. “But you didn't have to buy my ticket. You're supposed to be my friend”—I offered a shy smile—“not my benefactor.”

“Nonsense. The one is the other. And I'm not sure if Lev told you about my reluctance,” (
She spat on the ground when I said your name
, he'd said)
“but I want to make up for it. On a spiritual level. So we can start our relationship on an even emotional footing.”

“Spirit, emotion. That's rather heady.”

“Well.” Vera smiled. “That's the first thing you'll learn about me. I'm a rather heady person.”

53.

Was I apprehensive, reader? Naturally I was. I'd expected an unwilling participant, a Vera of cold and ice pushing me away with both hands. I'd found instead a bosom buddy, ready-made. Too easy. Too neat. I hadn't thought Lev was going to tell her about our trip to the seaside—that was to be my suggestion, once we started getting along. And so when she handed me the tickets it felt very much like a dare.

Still, there was something intoxicating in what she offered. No Donne girl had ever done so much to win my favor: not Cindy and Adeline with their sweet blackmail, nor Caroline with her sad, dead friend. Not even Margaret. Just Vera, here and now. That she had designs on me, reasons of her own—I had no doubt. But she found my favorite tea cake. Praised the simplicity of my hairdo and leaned in to embrace me when I departed. I couldn't get the scent of her off me all day, and found myself smiling whenever it surprised me, looking around with a pang of regret when she didn't appear alongside it. Putting her hand over my hand. I went back to the greenhouse and pruned rose bushes for the rest of the afternoon, pricking myself several times on the thorns. My arms, when I left, were streaked with blood. Lev had prepared me for Vera resisting, but not for Vera playing our game.

And, well. There is a special pleasure to be found in having one's expectations subverted. Opening a well-loved novel and finding the dead dog resurrected, the hero turning course at the moment of his doom and retiring as a beloved medical doctor in a village
sur la rivière
. I thought Vera would be distant until the moment of her death, a (temporarily) living embodiment of the vast space between memory (mine) and fact. But
instead she was fully present, physical. Ready to wound me, or so it seemed. Her face recalled Kay's healthy malice; I could almost imagine her hair into a braid.

Sitting at home with a glass of wine, I spread the pills before me and fidgeted with them, sticking my fingernail into the seal and seeing if I could pull them apart. One almost split right there in front of me, and it was tempting to open them all and spill them into my cup. What would Vera do then? If I called her in the middle of the night with stomach cramps, and had her rush me to the hospital? If I called, and she found me stiff and dead, and suddenly her problem? I didn't want to die, but I was inspired to make big moves in order to impress my opponent, to show her she was not the only one who could expand the field of play. Our train departed in two days. I had to arrange for John to keep an eye on the plants, had to scour the kitchen of perishables, pack.

I expected Vera to be stern, not sportive. But wasn't that just because Lev had told me she would be? He left us each, Vera and me, with a single role to fill, as if we were automatons moving through a prearranged scene. Can you blame me for being enticed by Vera's suggestion that we might both choose to be more? And by the idea that I might show Vera I was more than she bargained for?

 

Poem by Anonymous

From the Donne School Charter and Handbook

Honesty's a girl who waits at the door

She speaks her piece without a roar.

Clarity shines a light in the dark

Her hand a torch, her mouth a spark.

To reveal is to do more

(The whisper that we're looking for;

the listing step on drunken night—

Drunk on time and dearth and plight).

A girl who snaps to chime the hour

Knowing not her push or power.

To reveal is to bring clean

Though sometimes says more than we mean.

Perhaps it is our keenest sway

To sometimes mean more than we say.

Editor's note: Ms. Andropov doodled lines from this poem in the margins of her later diary entries. Although it no longer exists as part of the Donne School recruitment or matriculation materials, we were able to confirm that a version of it appeared in the Charter from 1913 to 1945.

 

Zoya

54.

For the train, I tied my hair into a ponytail and hid it under a kerchief. Brought along a packet of sandwiches in wax paper, though the ride was only a few hours long. We were to arrive in Twisted Branch before sundown, with enough time to check in to our cottage before dark. The postmaster had the key for us. The grocer had been told to anticipate our arrival with a few necessities already stashed in the cupboards, though we'd need to do a more thorough accounting the next day. Milk, yes. Milk chocolate, maybe not.

I hadn't been to the Maple Hill railway station in years—not since I stepped down onto the platform shivering with anticipation and mild scurvy from my shipboard confinement—and for ten minutes or so I amused myself by noting the changes: new newspaper stand, different hot dog vendor, better benches under the awning. But our train was set to depart in a quarter of an hour, and still Vera hadn't met me by the open cars. I was starting to get anxious when I saw her talking to the conductor some distance away, hat in hand and bags by her feet—more bags, in fact, than she could possibly need. I hurried over.

“Dear,” she said when she spotted me, “why aren't you in your seat? The good places will be going fast.”

I felt a splinter in my heart.
That's right
, I thought.
We aren't a team.
“I was waiting for you.”

“Well, that's ridiculous. I'm sitting in first class, so my place is reserved. Surely you knew that.” Her face was impassive, but I thought I saw a twinkle in her eye. She hadn't mentioned anything of the kind.

“Oh. Of course.” I'd have to be quicker on my feet. Turning to the conductor I asked, “How much would it cost to upgrade my ticket?”

Vera frowned. “I don't know that—”

“I'll pay, of course.” But the conductor stopped me pulling my wallet from my purse.

“My apologies, miss,” he said, “but the first-class berths are all sold out.”

I looked at Vera, and she looked at me.

“Well, don't I feel silly.”

“Not at all, Zoya darling. It was just a misunderstanding.” She gave my hand a squeeze and said, “I'll see you on the other side.”

By rushing I was able to find a seat by the window, though I wasn't facing in the direction of travel and grew nauseous every time we lurched to stop or start. I had a book with me; not one of Lev's, just some popular novel set by coincidence on a train. A lonely girl who meets a mysterious young man and gets embroiled in his dangerous predicament, story and locomotive hurtling towards their final destination with shared volition. The tension was unbearable, but looking out the window made me sick, so I kept opening the book and slamming it shut, grumbling audibly each time I changed my mind.
Ridiculous
, and
Unconscionable
, and so on.

There were several middle-aged men seated near me, and one by one each of them tried to strike up a conversation, asking questions about my husband (
Oh, no husband?
they'd say, with feigned surprise) and then my work, questioning the origins of my accent, which I'd worked so hard to overcome. One fellow—I will not call him a gentleman—said, “Where are you headed? You'll probably want someone to show you around town.” And it was to his grave disappointment that he learned we were not traveling to the same place, and that I would be meeting a companion. When his stop arrived he stood up with an expression of such abject sorrow I'd have felt bad for him, if only he didn't smell so strongly of onions. The rest of the men I was able to silence by distributing my sandwiches.

I reminded myself that, whatever my trials, Lev was surely enduring worse. He had such a sad grey faith in the manuscript, a belief that touching it would shade something in, make apparent the whole shape of his life. Was he now hunkering down in a field, taking cover under a tarp? Was he fishing in a local river, trying to roast his shabby meal in a tin can? White meat flaking, hot and sweet and smoked. I couldn't think of food; it made me burp. And then even my newfound friends looked at me askance, and I had to cover my mouth with a hand.
A new Leo Orlov book
, I reminded myself.
You'll be the first to see it. Almost the very first.
The train seats were green velveteen, but not as pretty as that sounds.

When I stepped down onto solid ground, it was into a wretched and drowsy world. The sea air not so cool as I'd hoped, and the sun getting ready to set. Everything was tinged with yellow and pink, which I'm sure made me look ill. Vera waved from next to a taxicab, infuriatingly refreshed. I thought she may even have changed her outfit, but I was too exhausted to be sure.

“Come on, now, we have to hurry or we'll never make the post office. I think they're holding it open for us, because business hours ended some time ago. And I for one,” she said, straightening her hair, “don't want to sleep on the porch.” She could've done it, though, without losing an ounce of grace; a camp-out girl in a canvas hammock. With the kerchief on my head and sallow rings beneath my eyes, I looked like a vagabond.

“Alright,” I said, and heaved my single bag into the trunk along with her full coterie of matched luggage. My only comfort was that I knew more than she did; I had a plan that would surely catch her by surprise and neuter any other minor humiliations she had in store for me. Over the course of the cab ride, I refused to answer her questions with anything other than sighs and grunts, though if she found this less than gracious, she made no indication. We argued with the security man at the post office until the postmaster emerged and brought us in, handing out keys like they were candy and giving us an overview of the town. Who was nice, who was a beast: the basic gossip. Our taxi waited outside, idling and ticking up the cost, but we were afraid that if we let him go we wouldn't get another. We were right. The streets were black,
abandoned. When we finally pushed our way into the cottage I heard a scrabbling that may have been either cockroaches or mice, though Vera insisted it was the trees outside, or the ocean in the distance.

Why hold on to all this, you might ask me? I don't know where else to keep it. I don't know how to put it down.

55.

Morning tea. For me, milk, for her, sugar. No pills yet. We are still getting the measure of one another. Her black hair has a brown sheen to it if you look in the right light, and this makes her vulnerable to me in a way that nothing else has yet done. I wear an old robe to the table and she doesn't comment on it. We both eat toast just a tiny bit burnt. Not from preference, it's just the way the toaster is. Perhaps tomorrow, I remark, we should use forks and roast them under the broiler.

Everything has a present-tense quality when I think of it in the cabin, the cottage. Even if it was long ago.
Your eyes don't age that fast.
Or do they? I'll have to banish this shaky feeling that the past is still happening, that I could stop it if I wanted.

56.

We decided early on that first morning to walk along the beach as far as we could go, after discussing possible routes over breakfast. It wasn't so grim in the daytime: I could see flowers growing in the front yard, and how all the streets had black concrete and fresh lines of paint. There was a caf
é
at the end of a jetty, some distance from the rest of town and only comfortably achievable in muck boots and by judging the tide right. It appealed to us right away. I can't imagine how they made their money, but this became our goal: cocoa overlooking the water, with no one else around. Before we left, Vera said, “Wait here a moment,” and came back downstairs in rolled-up work pants, god knows where she
got them from. Her body always seemed to be adapting based upon some hidden agenda, and I admired it. The way she existed for her own private reasons instead of existing to be seen, to be known. Though it also made me crazy. I would have liked to press her to me, whole body to whole body, whole soul, just so I'd know what I was dealing with.

Bright green grass lined the dunes and baked into yellow, receded back towards the distant inland. We had to walk through it to get to the shoreline, and already sand was starting to slip inside my shoes. Canvas sneakers, because I didn't have boots, and anyway it was so god-awful hot. Vera had decided to go barefoot, though I warned her more than once that she'd cut her foot on a quahog shell.

“A what?” she mocked.

“A quahog. Kind of clam.”

“A
what?
” When I learned the word from Margaret years earlier, I'd laughed too, imagining a wee piggy burrowing beneath the sea. Now I liked it because it was funny, which wasn't a reason I liked many things. Vera just smirked. “I'll watch my step.”

“If you say so.”

We were bright. The sun getting high, the water cut and riveted by waves. Her pants sat loose on her little backside, and her shirt was buttoned up too high to look winning, though it did protect her chest from getting burned. We picked our way over rocks and around tide pools, cooling our heels in the salt. We passed several houses with terrible fences, picket posts all leaning out at different angles, bidden by weather or wind, strung together with bits of razor wire. The houses themselves were charming and shingled, and eventually stopped showing up.

At noon or thereabouts, we sat to rest on a piece of parched driftwood high up the tide line. We could see the caf
é
about a half mile away, and Vera inspected the soles of her feet, seeming pleased by the cuts she found there, which she claimed didn't hurt a bit. I knew I was supposed to be getting close to her, earning her trust, but every time I tried I felt like I was moving backwards.

“Doesn't it make you feel small?” I asked, indicating the ocean with my chin. “I can hardly stand it.” It was less the sunny waves that made me
think so, and more the memory of a gunmetal sea that my orphan ship had glided through. How I'd once spotted a big wall of water in the distance, approaching us with overwhelming speed. It would've eaten the boat and left no trace, but instead it dropped back into the horizon without getting near enough to cause a ripple. I'd been alone on deck at the time. None of the other orphans believed me when I tried to explain.

“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.