Vaclav & Lena (27 page)

“These are things that are unspeakable! You know what it is. Vaclav, to make me say this, don’t punish me. I’m sorry, I had to do what I did. It’s hard to live with, and who knows, I tried.” Rasia and Vaclav are both crying now, and Oleg looks like he is watching a soap opera in a foreign language.

“What did you know?” Vaclav says quietly. “What did you see?” He is refusing to believe. He is refusing to understand. He is the silence before a bomb explodes. He is the tick, tick, tick, tick before the boom.

“Vaclav, she was a child and there was no one to care for her; it was a bad situation. What do you want me to tell you?”

“That’s not it,” Vaclav says.

“Vaclav, what does it matter now?” Rasia says.

“You have to tell me. When she left, you just wanted to pretend that she never existed, but I was just a little kid, and my heart was broken,” Vaclav shouts, because he can’t help it. He shouts, gasping for air, “She was gone, and my heart was broken. I just need to know; she was here and then she was so gone for so long, but I never stopped thinking about her, never, and then she was back, and now she’s gone again and I can’t stand it. Please, Mom, please, Mom, please, Mom, please …” His voice trails off because he has run out of air.

He is asking her what happened, but he knows what happened. He is asking her to make it not true.

“Vaclav,” Rasia says.

“Please tell me what happened,” Vaclav says.

“I told you,” she says.

“No,” he says.

“The man, he did terrible things to her.…”

“No,” he says.

“I suspected,” she says.

“No,” he says.

“I was not sure. She stayed home sick from school, and I was worried about her, she had been so skinny, and she wasn’t eating well. Do you remember? She would eat nothing, and then everything? I thought something might be wrong, and she had no one to take care of her, so I went over there to check on her, and I walked in, and I saw,” she says.

“No,” he says.

“I saw him.” She chooses her words carefully, terrified. “I caught him.”

“No,”
Vaclav shouts.
“No. No. No. No.”
His shouts become screams, and his screams become lightning tearing apart ancient trees, and the lightning becomes continents ripping apart, and the ripping becomes the earth splitting in two pieces, and the sky tearing from the earth, the darkness from the light.

Vaclav runs out of the room, into his own room, leaving her there with his father, leaving her sitting there, alone.

Oleg sits next to Rasia at the table and takes her hand in his hand.

“I did the best I could,” Rasia says, to the room, to her husband, to herself.

UN-FORGET, RE-REMEMBER, RE-FORGET, UN-REMEMBER
…

L
ena can’t catch her breath. Lena can’t un-see what she is seeing. Lena decides on the train that she doesn’t want to tell anyone ever. She doesn’t want to tell Vaclav, or to ever talk to him again. To tell anyone would be impossible anyway; she could never give flight to the things she is seeing in her mind by attaching them to words, setting them loose. She decides to forget. She decides to forget again. She wishes she could turn off her brain. She tries not to think, not to think anything at all, but the feeling of hands holding her down, pulling her knees apart, is in her body, and it won’t go away.

Lena keeps seeing Rasia’s face, not her face today but her face in the doorway at her aunt’s house, when Lena was nine. She can remember now that she knew that Rasia was there, to save her, and that the horror on Rasia’s face terrified her.

She feels a familiar feeling, like she has done something hideous. She tries to tell herself that nothing is her fault. It’s not Lena’s fault that Rasia knew she was alone in that house, with Ekaterina, with the kind of people Ekaterina knew, vulnerable and unprotected, night after night. It’s not Lena’s fault that she was born Lena. She has stayed far away from that world, from that place, from that time, from all that hurt and all that mess, away from Vaclav, and Rasia, whose face is part of the disgusting loop playing in her mind; Rasia will only remind her of it. It was better before she went back, before she remembered. She should stay with Em and move brightly into the future. With chamomile tea and Em’s friends, who bring lovely produce to the house. With Em’s friends, who sit outside to watch the stars and drink wine and bitch about men. With Em’s really great music, with the solid French farmhouse distressed wood furniture, with the quilts and the chandeliers.

Lena is on a train moving toward better, and she’s already starting to forget. Emily is a god who came to earth and saved her. She is the sun around which Lena will orbit for the rest of her life. She is the center of Lena’s new cosmology. Lena’s parents don’t exist. Vaclav does not exist; Rasia does not exist. Her aunt does not exist, and the man does not exist. Emily is a bastion of trust and warmth and safety, has always been and will always be. Lena is born again, and moving toward the sun on her train under the ground, she feels nothing.

When Lena gets home, the smell of her house hits her as she’s opening the door, and it’s bright and clear, like open windows and shampoo.

Lena finds Em in the kitchen. Reading in the window seat. Something is cooking on the stove, vegetable soup, not canned soup, not heavy winter soup, not borscht, just a light vegetable soup, which will be golden and perfect, and have some carrots, and squash, and bright green zucchini, and Em will put it in a big earthenware pot because she’s such a hippie, and she’ll put out a crusty bread, and there will be wine, which Lena can try.

The table is set, and there are flowers on the table. They’re not regular flowers, they’re a flowering branch from a tree. Em looks from her book and sees Lena looking at the flowers.

“I took a walk today, and I could not resist those. Aren’t they just amazing? I tore them off a tree, and I immediately thought,
Well, if everyone did that, there would be no flowers for anyone, but still
. And I hid them in my shopping bag the whole way home, I was so afraid, like someone was going to arrest me.”

Em sees the look on Lena’s face and stands up. The moment she says, “What’s wrong?” Lena is like an egg hitting the floor, she comes apart everywhere.

RING, RING
…

I
n his room, Vaclav dials the phone.

The person who picks up the receiver on the other end is laughing with someone else. She says hello, and her voice is warm and loose. There is music playing in the background.

“Hello, am I interrupting you?” Vaclav says. This is not proper phone manners. This is not what he meant to say.

“Oh, no,” she says, “we just sat down to dinner! No worries. How can I help you?”

“Umm, this is Vaclav calling for Lena, please, if she’s available,” he says, but the lady doesn’t respond; she didn’t hear him.

“I’m sorry, honey, who is this?”

“My name is Vaclav,” he says.

“Lena can’t come to the phone,” she says, her voice suddenly serious, but then she adds, softly, “I’m so sorry,” and hangs up.

It occurs to Vaclav only after she has hung up that this sweet, warm voice must have been Lena’s mom, her new mom, her real mom, her adoptive mom, whatever.

Vaclav is angry at her for not letting him talk to Lena. He has to remind himself that she’s been Lena’s mom for seven years, and she probably knows Lena better than he does, which is sad to him. And suddenly, everything is sad to him, his bedroom, lonely and dark, his mom crying in the kitchen, the cruel happiness at Lena’s house, the darkness outside, and it all seems totally lonely, far too lonely.

Emily returns to Lena, who is wrapped in a blanket on the sofa. Although it broke Emily’s heart when Lena told her that she could not bear what she had remembered, could not go on living, Emily knew that actually, Lena could go on living, that she might finally begin.

GO TO MOSCOW TO FIND OUT
…

V
aclav wakes up early the next morning and gets dressed in his room. He decides not to brush his teeth, not to shower, not even to pee. He does not want to talk to Rasia. If he goes into the bathroom, she will hear, she will know he is up and getting ready, and she will try to stop him. He will pee at McDonald’s, he tells himself; he will buy a pack of gum. Nothing will stop him from going to Lena.

When he opens the door of his bedroom, she is there, like a wall, his mother.

“You are sneaking,” she says. Her voice is extra-Russian, like she’s KGB. He just glares at her. “You are planning to sneak to Lena’s house, to talk to her.”

“Mom, just let me go.”

“Listen, wait. All I am saying is this is a big knot of problems, yes? You, me, Lena, her family, it is a mess. So don’t think it is just one problem. That is all.”

“Move,” he says.

“Wait,” she says. “Wait. Lena wants to know where her parents are, no? You don’t need to go to Russia for this. We live, Vaclav, practically in Moscow.”

“Mom, why are we talking about this? I’m going to go talk to Lena,” he says.

“Because to go to Russia, it is stupid, when everyone is right here,” she says.

“I’m not going to Russia, okay? I’m going to Park Slope,” says Vaclav.

“If Lena wants to know about her parents, she should ask her aunt.”

“What?” says Vaclav.

“Lena’s aunt, Ekaterina; she lives on Seventh.”

“I know that. I used to pick Lena up for school every day. Wait, she still lives there?”

“Yes. Of course.” Rasia says this like no one has ever moved. Like Vaclav has asked if the Aunt has kept the same head, or if she traded it in for a better, nicer head.

“Lena said she was gone.… Lena said she was in Russia.”

“Lena, she has many problems,” says Rasia. She can see that Vaclav is starting to get a whiff of something. There is hurt on his face.

“She lied to me,” he says. “I’m going to talk to Ekaterina.”

“Okay,” she says, not moving. “Okay. I want you to, I want you to find the truth, and to understand. I am not stopping you,” she says, stopping him. “I just want you to take a deep breath and think about what to ask her, what to talk about, what you want to say. Because to talk out of anger, it is bad.”

“Okay,” he says.

“I want you to know that with this there is no fixing. There is not magic solution. Lena has many problems. You can’t just make this all—”

He cuts her off. “I know, Mom,” he says, and then he pauses before saying, “Thank you.”

Vaclav pushes past her, and his long legs take him to the front door and out into the morning faster than even he expected.

On the street, walking to the Aunt’s house, Vaclav realizes that he wishes the walk was longer. He wishes he didn’t remember exactly where it was. He wishes a lot of things. He wishes he’d realized it was only seven-thirty in the morning.

The same question keeps dropping out from under him like a roller-coaster ride:
Why would she not start with the Aunt? Why lie? Why the trip to Russia?

When he breathes in the morning air and thinks about what he now knows, it makes sense. It would be awful for Lena to go find the Aunt; it would be hard to talk to her and ask her questions. It makes perfect sense, total sense, that Lena would not want to go back there.

Lena’s lie is burrowing around in his brain like maggots, turning things to maggot shit, turning solid brain cells into hot puddles of jealousy, of mistrust, of suspicion. He wonders if Lena has lied to him about anything else. How can you know anything, do anything, when you don’t know what is true? He has never lied to Lena. Lena has made him lie for her. She has made him lie to his mother and maybe other times. Maybe. It is hard to say. When lying starts to turn your brain into maggot shit, it becomes hard to say what is up and what is down.

Vaclav doesn’t know what to think, but he feels that if he puts together the pieces of the puzzle, Lena’s puzzle, his mom’s puzzle, then this will get better. He doesn’t really even think it will get better, to tell the truth. He just thinks something will change, which is good, because he can’t stand to have it stay like this.

Finding the truth will stop the big false search, take the steam out of her quest to get to Russia. Russia. It has become a word like … something disgusting. Something stupid and disgusting.

Walking outside so early in the morning feels good, in the same way that he is sure that talking to Lena’s aunt will be good.

He feels that for Lena he is healing a wound; he is closing a door. It does not, to him, seem to be an enormous intrusion, an exceptional violation. Lena wanted something; he wants her to have it. He does not consider that he might be slightly, or completely, off base on the question of what Lena really wanted.

Maybe also, a little bit, he knows that if he does this, then Lena will talk to him, definitely, no matter what.

Vaclav charges up the stairs to Lena’s aunt’s house, and knocks hard on the door.

There is no response for a while. Vaclav checks his watch and then knocks again. He resolves to wait two minutes and then knock again. After his third knock, after six minutes, there is a rustling of the blinds next to the window. The door opens a crack, and the Aunt pours herself into this crack, slinks into it like a cat. She looks directly into Vaclav’s eyes, not just at his eyes but into them, way too far. She looks at him in a way that tells him that she will have sex with him right now. There is no other way for him to describe this look.

She does not say hello, she just gives him this look. He is taken aback. He would like to speak. He would like to run away. It takes him a moment.

“Can I talk to you?” he asks.

“Talk,” she says.

“I know you. I know Lena.” There is a gigantic pause. There is a pause like Superman is holding the world still.

“Come in,” she says, and she turns into the house.

TRINA
…

V
aclav follows her inside. He has never been inside before, even when he was younger. It’s dark inside, and it smells stale. Everything is a mess; there are dirty dishes and take-out containers and empty cigarette packs everywhere.