The Air We Breathe (15 page)

O
N THE
M
ONDAY
following Jaroslav's talk, Leo fell asleep on the porch during afternoon rest hours and woke to the hollow
chock, chock, chock
of someone splitting wood near the barns, a sound that in the last moments of his dream made him see an ax in his cousin's stout arms and his mother, framed between two giant beech trees, smiling off to one side. Rising groggily, already late, he pushed open the door of his room and, turning toward the library, nearly crashed into Miles.

“Sorry,” said Miles, who still had his overcoat on, buttoned up to the neck. “I know I'm not supposed to be here.”

“That's true,” Leo agreed. “We're not allowed to have visitors in our rooms.”

“I'm not exactly a
visitor,
” said Miles.

Leo drew a breath, remembering all that Miles had lost. “Who are you looking for?”

“You,” Miles said, “actually. I want to talk to you about something.” As Leo struggled not to look at the clock on the wall—so little time to work before supper, and so much he wanted to do—Miles added, “I think you should consider coming to stay at Mrs. Martin's house.”

“I'm sorry?”

“At my expense,” Miles continued. “A room just opened up on the first floor. It's not the nicest one; it's in the front, and modestly sized. But it's clean, and private, and very much nicer than here. Plus Mrs. Martin keeps a marvelous table.”

Leo shivered, too cold in the windy corridor to think of the right thing to say. As if he'd leave when Ephraim might still come back and when, two floors below him, Irene and Eudora were working with equipment that might someday be available to him. In the weeks since his visit to the basement, he'd been slowly, painfully, trying to recover what he'd once known.
Thus matter does not disappear and is not created, but only undergoes various physical and chemical transformations—that is to say, changes its locality and form. Matter remains on the earth in the same quantity as before; in a word it is, so far as we are concerned, everlasting.
Somehow that sounded more surprising in English than he remembered it being in Russian. All of it surprised him, really; digging down through the rubble that, during his six years in New York, had buried his mind, he'd felt like a worker excavating a subway tunnel. He'd set himself the task of relearning all of Mendeleeff's book, not because Irene expected it—he knew she didn't—or because he needed more than a scrap of that knowledge to help her out in the laboratory, but because he was looking forward, still, to speaking at one of our Wednesday gatherings and he wanted to draw not on his scattered, broken American self but on who he really was.

“I can't,” he finally said, drawing his hands up into his sleeves. “Those places are very expensive, not to mention all the doctors' bills I'd have. I could never pay you back.”

“It's not a loan,” Miles said. He'd lost weight in the last few weeks and his shirt, which normally fit so tidily, gaped at the neck. “It's a gift. Room, board, medical care—it's what I'd give Lawrence, if he needed it. Since I can't help him any longer, I'd like to be of some service to you. When we're both better, I thought I could offer you work as a chemist at my plant. The work you were trained for.”

Leaning forward, his lips trembling, he rested one hand on the doorframe—too upset, Leo assumed, by the very thought of Lawrence to remember the rule against touching the woodwork. “Cement can be interesting,” Miles added. “The nature and proportion of the lime, the temperature and time in the kiln and the grinding of the clinker, the exact blending of the different constituents, the lime with the silica and the alumina—everything depends on the skill and accuracy of the chemist. I need good help.”

“That's kind of you,” Leo said, “truly, but…” Once more he caught himself, continuing as patiently as he could. “Unfortunately,” he said, “my training's in quite a different area. Fermentation chemistry, mostly. Organic chemistry.”

The chemistry, his teacher had explained years ago, of carbon and its compounds—vegetable matter, animal matter, wax and oil and tar and wood, wine and vinegar and starch. Everything alive, which had nothing to do with gray cement. Each day he'd been working through a few of Mendeleeff's pages. Carbonic anhydride, formed during alcoholic fermentation and found in nature near extinct volcanoes and in caves and mountain fissures, had been this morning's lesson. Insects flew into those hollows and died, Mendeleeff wrote in one of his footnotes. Also the birds chasing the insects, and the animals pursuing the birds. A man mining or digging a well in such an area may be suffocated. In a sunny classroom, Leo remembered, he'd once placed a mouse in a bell jar and measured the amount of carbon it expelled before it died.

“Don't you want to think about my offer?” Miles said.

“I wouldn't be any use to you,” said Leo. “Anyway I wouldn't leave my friends here.” He gestured toward Miles's hand, still grasping the doorframe. “You should wash before you go.”

Miles lifted his fingers from the wood. “I'm trying to
help
you,” he said stiffly. “Mrs. Martin's house has amenities that this place can't provide. I thought the arrangement might be good for both of us, but I see I was wrong.”

He turned and hurried away, the hand that had been touching the wood now held, Leo noted, some inches from his body, just as if he were someone healthy enough to worry about getting sick.

That evening, alone in his room with a newspaper propped against his knees—the czar had abdicated, the czar had abdicated: no matter how many times he read the headline and the columns that followed, he couldn't believe it—Leo reviewed Miles's offer only to dismiss it again. Why would Miles think he'd accept that kind of charity? In Russia, he read, everything was on the verge of changing, the rational and harmonious order so many had proposed for so long about to sweep away the corrupt, the foolish, and the antiquated; every day brought a new astonishment. The people rose up, the czar fell down, a provisional government appeared by what seemed like consensus: how could this be? If only he could talk with Ephraim. Since his friend's departure he'd been trying to imagine the community in Ovid and what might be going on there. What might go on here, if we were left to our own devices. In Russia everything seemed possible but here—here, we seemed blocked at every turn, the conversations of our Wednesday afternoons the one place we were free.

NOW, WHEN THE
February Revolution seems like a child's dream and we've seen the consequences of the Bolsheviks' October triumph, when we read daily the terrible news of Russia's civil war and dread what comes next, the optimism of those weeks seems laughable. But it didn't feel that way, then. It felt, Leo thought—many of us thought—as if we were walking into a new world. During the last two weeks of March we had two more excellent gatherings, Pietr talking about the constellations visible from our porches, and then Zalmen and Seth, together describing the design and manufacture of machine tools; these raised everyone's spirits and even Miles, so quiet since Lawrence's death, asked questions at both sessions. Those were the same weeks during which Leo, working steadily, regained his old familiarity with Mendeleeff's work and borrowed other books from Dr. Petrie and Irene, which delighted both of them. Meanwhile Eudora, who cheered Leo on whenever she saw him, nearly finished tuning up the old X-ray apparatus.

Three or four nights a week, sometimes with Irene and sometimes alone, she'd been working in the basement. Finally she understood what Naomi had meant about her hand seeming to draw without conscious instruction; her own hands seemed to understand the tubes and wires without interference from her brain. She couldn't explain to Irene why she did what she did; she couldn't have written down what she was doing or justified her actions according to any rules. Yet as she stared at the apparatus, her hands knew that this part should be moved here and that part there, this connection resoldered. It looked better that way; it made more sense. When the images improved, even she was surprised. It wasn't so different, really, from the implements and appliances in her parents' house, which she'd always been the one to repair. She'd sharpened her father's skinning knives, fixed the telephone when it broke, repaired not only her own bicycle but everyone else's too. Only Naomi's Model T had eluded her—and that, she thought, watching the dead animals yield their secrets under her hands, might after all have been because she'd known it was something Naomi wanted to keep as her own.

Naomi, during those March weeks, found herself watching Leo even more closely. With Ephraim gone, his face radiated a kind of loneliness that she herself had known as a child and, now that Eudora never had time for her, was painfully feeling again. No wonder, if Leo felt so abandoned, that he'd be driven to spending most of his free time in the library with the books Irene had given him. Old things, useless things. Anything to fill his empty hours. She'd examined Irene's frizzy hair and worn face, her shapeless dress and absurd purple glove, and reassured herself that however much Leo liked her books, he could not like
her.
If Irene meant to Leo what Miles meant to her, she had nothing to worry about. How tiresome Miles was when he caught her alone! He pulled his chair close and couldn't stop talking: had she enjoyed the book he'd given her, did she like old things?

Like me,
he meant. What did she care about his interests? The book had left thick brown smudges on her hands and clothes and she couldn't stand to touch it. If Miles would just give his books to Irene, they could talk with each other and leave her and Leo alone. She had her own plans, the thought of which made her able to smile blandly at Miles no matter what he said.

ON APRIL 3,
the day after President Wilson went to Congress and asked for a declaration of war, Naomi drove up the hill to Tamarack State, parked near the power plant, and entered the men's annex through the service door. Although it was spring by the calendar, the ground was still frozen, the woods thick with snow, and Leo was in the library, as he was during every free hour. The door to his room was partway open and Naomi knocked on it twice.

Then as now we live without locks; when no one answered she slipped inside, hoping that Leo would be alone and eager to see her and perhaps also, at the same time, hoping that he'd be absent and she'd be able to root among his belongings without distraction. He wasn't there. She shut the door behind her and sped through the room to the porch, where she examined the blankets piled on Leo's cure chair, concealing the layers of newspaper; the soapstone pig, presently cold; the two volumes of Mendeleeff's book balanced on the little table between the chairs; the second chair, oddly bleak, which had been Ephraim's. Tentatively she stretched out on it and convinced herself she was seeing what Leo saw. Hill, hill, hill, hill, trees and trees and trees. Only the clouds marching from west to east were pleasant to look at. Dark birds rose from the trees, circled around, and settled again; what were they? She imagined Leo, lying a yard away, reaching out a hand to say he loved her.

“Leo?” Abe called.

His chair was a few yards farther down the porch, beyond one of the thin partitions that still, then, marked off territories specific to each room. Silently Naomi retreated inside and inspected Leo's bed, not just the sheets but the blankets, the pillowcases, the movable tray table that slipped over his legs so that he might eat or write with ease. She investigated the nightstand, the lamp, and the stubby pencils jumbled, inside the nightstand drawer, with white quartz pebbles and pinecones. She inspected the slippers beneath the bed and then, moving toward the front of the room, the little cubicle containing the washbasin, the toilet, and the two metal lockers. His clothes were here and the rest of his belongings. Wool pants hung from a hook; she slid her face along the fabric and then sniffed a sweater she'd seen him wear. More clothes, as well as a laundry bag to investigate. She had a few minutes to herself.

And then Eudora walked by the door to Leo's room, as she did most afternoons. Seeing it closed—we were required to keep our doors at least halfway open during our free time, so the nurses and orderlies could spy on us—she knocked twice and, worried at getting no answer, opened it. What she found was not Leo slumped over the sink or hemorrhaging in bed but Naomi, perched on a chair with some clothes at her feet, her hands filled with papers, a metal box on her lap.

“What are you
doing
?” Eudora said. Swiftly, before anyone else could come by, she closed the door behind her. When she turned back she saw Naomi's hand emerging from her waistband. “What do you have?”

“Nothing,” Naomi stammered. “I was just—I saw his door was open and I wanted to come in for a minute and see his things. The locker was already open, sort of…”

“You know it wasn't,” Eudora said, walking over to the chair, as close to slapping her friend as she'd ever been.

“Well, it wasn't locked, anyway,” Naomi said, for the first time seeming embarrassed. “Then I saw this box under a sweater and I took it out. I know I shouldn't have, but once I looked inside, I couldn't put it down.”