Vaclav & Lena (11 page)

“The next night, he waited at her window.

“She did not come.

“Every night, for ninety-nine nights, he waited, sitting like a bug outside her window, and she did not come.

“On the one-hundredth night, the last night, he did not wait outside her window, because he could not bear to know that the princess would never be his, that she did not love him enough, not as much as he loved her. He thought maybe it was better to not know.

“On that hundredth night, the night that he did not wait outside her window …”

Lena interrupts the story with a mighty snore from beneath the blankets. The snore startles Rasia, who has been so absorbed by her storytelling that she has failed to notice that Lena is already asleep.

LENA IS ASLEEP
…

R
asia sits for several minutes, watching Lena sleep, watching her back rise and fall, watching her mouth make the small baby movements that our mouths remember only when we are asleep. She feels a need to watch Vaclav when he is asleep, and she knows there is no one who feels the same about Lena.

After she has watched Lena sleep for several minutes, she stands up, walks carefully to the door, and turns out the light.

In the kitchen, flies are swarming around the dishes in the sink, little tiny fruit flies. She thinks of Lena, who might wake up in the middle of the night and want a drink of water, and who might find no clean cups and no way to fill up a clean glass of water. She finds, under the sink, a bottle of Ajax with a little yellow squirt left. She fills the sink with hot, soapy water and washes dishes until none are left.

She picks old cigarette butts out of the drain and throws them away, and wipes down the sink until it shines.

On the counter next to the sink there is a dish rack, and there are little spots of black mold in its joints and creases. Rasia cleans the dish rack until the mold is gone.

When the dishes are dry, there is nowhere to put them away, because the shelves in the cabinets are dusty and sticky and covered in spills, so with her wet sponge, Rasia wipes down all the cabinets.

The kitchen is clean (not as clean as her own, but much improved), but if Lena gets up in the middle of the night, she might trip over the clothes on the floor on the way to the kitchen. She might trip and bump her knees on the coffee table. She might knock over one of the ashtrays that is full of cigarette butts and matches and gum. She might step on one of the pizza boxes that are on the floor, full of bits of moldy pizza cheese.

Lena might, walking sleepily to the kitchen, step on one of the empty bottles of Stolichnaya that are lying about on the floor.

Rasia empties the ashtrays; she takes the bottles out to the blue recycling bin on the sidewalk; she takes the pizza boxes out to the trash. She washes the ashtrays. She throws away the fast-food drink cups that are crowding the table, the hamburger wrappers, the Diet Coke cans.

She collects in her arms a bundle of clothes belonging to Ekaterina, clothes that smell of perfume and smoke. She walks through the open door of Ekaterina’s room, looking for a laundry basket. She turns on the light with one hand.

She is only looking for a laundry basket.

There is no laundry basket. She looks closer, just to be sure.

On the nightstand, next to the bare mattress, there are spoons and foil and straws but no laundry basket. There are tiny Ziploc bags but no laundry basket.

There is more of the same garbage that was in the living room, cans and bottles and trash, but no laundry basket.

There are cans of hairspray, wrappers of many kinds, but Rasia will not clean this room, no way. This room is not on Lena’s path to the kitchen to get a drink of water.

Walking home to her own house, to her own son and her own husband, Rasia thinks carefully about Lena, as she has so many times before. She thinks about the strange behavior of Lena and Vaclav; she thinks about Ekaterina.

Rasia is not an idiot; she knows what goes on in the world. She knows the story with those spoons and foil and straws.

She doesn’t know what to do. Oleg says she should mind her own business. She doesn’t know what to do.

THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN SARCOPHAGUS OF MYSTERY
…

A
t school, Lena spends all her time with her new friends and ignores Vaclav. Behind closed doors, Vaclav and Lena practice the act each day after school in stolen hours between homework and bedtime. Vaclav does Lena’s homework as fast as he can, whipping through long division, churning out paragraph after paragraph of perfectly Lena-accented English. He wants to make sure that they have time to practice over and over again. Both Vaclav and Lena think about the act all the time. They think about the act when they wake up in the morning, in the shower, while the teacher is taking attendance, during recess, during gym class, and at bedtime, when they both hear the same bedtime story told by the same mother.

In Vaclav’s room, they consult
The Magician’s Almanac
for directions to build a disappearing box.

“Read again,” Lena says, pacing.

“The sarcophagus is, for all outward appearances, a sealed box with a hinged door on the front. Invisible to the audience, and essential to the illusion, is a false back concealing a small compartment in which the magician secrets himself,” Vaclav reads.

“Hmm,” says Lena.

“I don’t understand,” says Vaclav, “Where do I go when I disappear?”

“You go inside, you close door, like a closet. Then you sneak behind back wall, which is not really back wall, is another door, and then open the front door and the audience will see that you are gone, but really you are behind this second door. Easy,” says Lena.

“Easy, but to build the box, look.…” Vaclav holds the book out to Lena. The instructions to build the Egyptian Sarcophagus of Mystery look wildly complicated; they are full of numbers and symbols.

“Hmm,” says Lena.

“Where will we get all this stuff?” Vaclav says. Lena thinks.

“This is a thing takes long time to build. We find this piece of wood on the sidewalk, someone is throwing away, we take. Then later we find someone has extra wood at this house, we take. Then when we have enough, we will build.” She sighs. “So this, it will not be on time. For the act.”

Vaclav knows that she is right, that it will take them a long time to collect all the material to build this sarcophagus. He folds down the corner of the page so that he will remember to look and see what they need to collect, so that they can look in the piles on the sidewalk when it is time for people to throw away their couches and their old kitchen cabinets.

He flips through the almanac, looking for a new trick to add to their act. Lena practices her shimmy for the disappearing-coin trick.

When Vaclav and Lena are apart, Vaclav is excited to tell Lena what he is thinking about the act. He likes to tell her all about the problems that he is worrying about. He knows that when he tells her about a problem, she will look at him like he is a silly turtle, because in the same way that he saw the thing immediately as a problem she will see immediately its solution. He also likes, of course, to tell her all about his new ideas for tricks that will definitely work.

When Vaclav and Lena are apart, Lena too thinks excited thoughts about the act, but she also worries that her new friends would think the act is stupid, and she knows that the act is something that the Aunt would make fun of, even more than the kids at school might make fun of it, and in a worse way.

When Vaclav thinks about the act, and about how his magic is a secret he shares just with Lena, he feels excited. Lena feels ashamed, because she keeps her secret for different reasons.

THE DAY BEFORE THE SHOW
…

T
he day of the show is going to be Saturday. Vaclav knows that Saturday is the day that most people go to the boardwalk at Coney Island, because it is the day that most people have no work or school. The exceptions to this are his mother and father, who must sometimes work on the weekend, and also people who work in restaurants, people who drive the subway trains, and people who work in hospitals, because those things don’t stop for the weekend. Also, of course, magicians. Magicians can do magic every day of the week. Even though it is fall, it is still warm outside, and the boardwalk will be crowded with people enjoying one last summer thing before it gets too cold.

On the day before the show, Friday, Vaclav wakes up early, and is unbearably excited. He brushes his teeth and feels that each moment is both slow and fast. There are butterflies in his stomach flapping their wings so furiously that they might burst into a puff of magical smoke.

Vaclav does not see Lena walking to school, on the sidewalk, as he usually does. He does not see Lena outside the school, talking to Marina and Kristina. Vaclav is worried that Lena might be late for school, and that she might get into trouble for being late.

All day Vaclav cannot concentrate on his classes, because he keeps thinking about his show, and it feels like he is holding candy in his mouth and trying not to eat it. It feels as exciting as getting to leave school early for a doctor’s appointment, knowing the whole day that your mother will pick you up and will even bring snacks to eat in the waiting room. It feels like when it is your birthday and everything is special all day, and everyone you pass on the street and everyone in the pizza parlor and everyone in the world is part of your birthday, even if they don’t know it.

Vaclav becomes more worried when he arrives at ESL, because Lena is not there, and she is usually there before him. Vaclav watches the door carefully, watches each kid coming in to see if he or she might be Lena, and even when the kid is clearly not Lena, he thinks he or she might be Lena just for one tiny part of a second. When Colin walks through the door, Vaclav thinks for a second that Colin might be Lena, even though Colin is a boy and is from a place in Africa where they speak French called Côte D’Ivoire, which you say like
koh-duh-vwah
, which means Ivory Coast, and does not look like Lena at all. Also, Colin is a little bit chubby, and Lena is skinny like a grasshopper. Even so, Vaclav’s mind plays a trick and for a second Colin’s dark arm is Lena’s dark braid of hair, and then it is over and the person is Colin.

For every person who comes into the ESL classroom, Vaclav’s heart makes his brain have a little bit of hope, until Marina and Kristina come in, and class starts without Lena, and then there is no more hope.

“Okay, let’s get started. Everyone take their seats.… Who’s missing? Lena’s not here?” says Mrs. Bisbano, and then she says something that hurts Vaclav’s feelings without meaning to.

“Marina … where’s Lena?”

“She is sick, maybe,” Marina says. Vaclav feels sadness because he was not the automatic person to ask about where Lena might be. This sadness becomes happiness immediately, because Vaclav thinks of how he and Lena are secretly more friends than Marina and Kristina and Mrs. Bisbano know. Vaclav smiles because he thinks of all the secrets he and Lena have that are secret from Marina and Kristina. Vaclav does not imagine secrets that Lena might have with Marina and Kristina, secrets that he might not know about. To Vaclav, this is impossible.

Vaclav is not worried at all about Lena, because she probably just has a cold or is just pretending to be sick and is not even sick. Sometimes Vaclav does this, he pretends to feel sick, and his mother pretends not to notice that he is faking, and she lets him stay home from school, and that is a wonderful thing.

Also, Vaclav is certain that Lena, even if she is sick, will still perform the act on the boardwalk at Coney Island, because she is his dedicated assistant and the show must go on. Even if Vaclav had one arm cut off and eaten by birds with no chance to ever sew it back on, he would still perform the act.

Probably Lena just didn’t want to go to school. Probably she will meet him at his house after school for homework, snacks, and dress rehearsal. Most likely.

MOST LIKELY NOT
…

W
hen Vaclav gets home, Lena is not there. Vaclav picks up the telephone and dials her house, listens for one ring, and hangs up. This is a secret code that Vaclav and Lena have, to call and let the phone ring once, and it means: Call me back if you are able! This way Lena can call Vaclav without having to talk to his parents, and Vaclav can call Lena without making the Aunt angry.

Vaclav waits by the phone for several minutes. The phone does not ring.

Vaclav is worried about Lena, but he knows that the show must go on, and he knows that Lena is knowing this too, and that they are thinking of each other always a little bit. The next thing to do, according to the list called “Schedule,” is to have a dress rehearsal.

Vaclav puts on his costume, which is:

David Copperfield T-shirt from David Copperfield performance at Madison Square Garden

Old blazer that no longer fits but can be squeezed into, decorated all over with glitter and puffy paint

Regular black pants

Shoes with aluminum foil on the top to look like silver shoes

Opaque white doctor’s gloves from the company where his mother works, to imitate the white gloves of the magician

And yet to be obtained: one magician’s magical top hat

Vaclav is planning to make the magician’s magical top hat out of some materials that he has found around, including some shirt boxes from the department store and some tape and some black paint borrowed from school.

Vaclav hopes that at home, secretly, Lena is happily preparing the golden fringed bikini of Heather Holliday.

SHE IS SICK, MAYBE
…

R
asia walks into the house holding many bags from the grocery store as well as her purse, which is very heavy, and she has to pee. She drops everything on the floor, right in the entrance, and tears off her coat and runs to the bathroom. Every day she feels herself getting older, and every day she is surprised by things that leak when they used to hold tight. On her way into the bathroom, she sees that Vaclav’s door is closed. While she is peeing, she decides that after she puts dinner on the stove to reheat, she will go into Vaclav’s room and interrupt whatever is going on. She does not think that Vaclav and Lena are necessarily doing something bad, but she knows that they are doing something secret, and Rasia thinks that something secret might be on the way to something bad.