Invitation to a Bonfire Read online

  My parents were on the right side of the war between the Reds and the Whites, of course—which is to say, the winning side. They embraced the changes in our country, from the ideological to the typographical, purging the aristocracy and the last remnants of Old Slavonic spelling from our lives in one fell blow. I remember when the signs and posters in the city quietly rid themselves of the tvyordi znak, a silly little mark that looked like a ъ and did—well, it didn’t do much, but the new regime understood that words and symbols meant something. That changing the language was the same as changing the fabric of reality and the shape of the human mind. It was an exciting time. Occasionally people burned their old typewriters in enormous civil bonfires. Occasionally, too, the Party called for more serious sacrifices.

  There’s a reason, you see, that I didn’t stay on in the country of my birth and apprentice as something useful and hardy: a machinist, say, or a land surveyor. A reason that I am, instead, a young woman huddled in a small cabin by the seashore, scratching out stories in the terrible quiet. My parents died a few years into the new and glorious union of our country. First my father, then my mother, and all official memory of our family as a unit. At fifteen I was taken to an orphanage—a bleakness that I’ve worked hard to scrub from my mind, without success—and then at sixteen was smuggled into the U.S. on a hush-hush transport ship along with a hundred other children, all of us plucked from our uncomfortable beds and promised a better life, which we needed very much.

  What do I remember of the orphanage? The shock of being there. The cross-stitched portraits of Party members framed and hung along the walls, with eyes that watched you move around. It was considered beneficial for us to work on those cross-stitches together in the common room no matter how badly we sewed, and even once I landed on the transport ship I felt pricks in my inept fingers and thumbs from where my needle had pierced the skin. In the orphanage we were told how lucky we were to be raised not by parents but by the motherland herself, and our caretakers frequently used this excuse to smack us into place when we strayed. Rulers sharp on the back of the hand, backs of hands across the cheek, all in an effort to vouchsafe not only our own futures but also those of the Party and the bratstvo, the brotherhood of all mankind. I remember being hungry. I remember a great many dark walkways, blank and featureless faces. And then I remember being carried out in someone’s arms, and told I was going to sail for America.

  A beautiful voice offered me amber fields and purple mountains. Majesty. I had studied English in school, but still I assumed there was some misunderstanding, because who would bother giving anything like that to me? A new home. A new life. I didn’t know then that the mountains and fields were just lines in a song, which the man hurrying me towards the boat was probably singing to keep himself warm: it was a bitter evening. But I decided to put my faith in this new place, just in case. I figured it had to be better than fighting to remain where I’d been.

  5.

  We didn’t have an easy time getting there, though. During our voyage to America, waves of flu swept through the ship and bad weather dogged us. The girl who shared my bunk turned green within a day of setting sail, and took to moaning and shivering beneath our quilt, asking for death. Little Marlenochka. I spent hours trying to find a spot of healthy pink on her skin to report to her in the hopes of earning a smile, sometimes searching from her hairline to the soles of her feet with no success. The attention didn’t soothe her much, even as I scratched her gently with my fingernails and traced her ear with my thumb. She heaved up what seemed like gallons of saltwater, though of course that can’t be right, since I never saw her eat more than a few bites of dry cracker, or drink more than a sip of bouillon tea. I can’t imagine what became of her after we landed. She was so briny, so continually moist. And not alone in that. The bunkrooms belowdecks stank of vomit, and those of us who could still walk would stroll the deck for hours in search of a clean breath of air. But it was slippery up there, and we were weak; many children disappeared without a whisper. I didn’t get sick until halfway through the trip, but I remember trembling against the rail of the ship, staring into the ocean and seeing, to my utter shock, the dinner-plate eye of a whale rise up just a few feet away, clear though untouchable. Was it, I wondered, a hallucination? Certainly it seemed unreal. The eye was wet with tears and seawater, full of sympathy I’d never earned or even dreamed of. The giant grey body moved beside us silently, ruffling the water like it was rearranging a blanket. I began to cry, and then to pray to this giant creature—badly, I’m sure, having never prayed before. The waves were colorless, and I reached towards them. Then the whale sank out of view.

  Despite the hardships we faced in transit, my faith in the American promise remained unshaken. Altered, perhaps, when there was found to be a shortage of aspirin on board, and our fevers were treated with rest and stale tea. Further transformed when we arrived at port and were told that, for reasons of national security, we might not be allowed to disembark. But this only made me more eager to kiss the American soil when I finally stepped down onto it. Everyone smiled at you in America, whether or not they meant it. I found that interesting.

  Lev

  15 June 1931

  Airmail via London

  Vera. Even your name intoxicates, incinerates. Veer-a. A swift turn on the road, a gasp at the end of the act. My Vera. You were Renka, standing on your tiptoes at the edge of the bridge, peering at the line where the water and the air connected. Verena Petrovna behind your black mask at the ball, lit by lamplight. But for me, you were always Vera, first.

  I know we’ve been cold to one another lately, my darling, more so with every step I took towards the realization of this plan. My return to the homeland, a rescue mission for my lost manuscript, which you told me I should never find. I’ve been repeating the steps to myself every day and hour leading up to my departure: Locate a map with likely updates to the Soviet roadways: check. Befriend the American military and their biplanes: check. And now, traverse the ocean and land on a distant shore: check. But I don’t want to leave things that way, and the closer I get to the streets where we first met, the more it seems the perfect time for honesty. You used to press me for stories about my early romances, and I always said no, not wanting to diminish in your mind the vision of our ideal connection. But now I think I see your point: how can you trust that my feelings for you are unique if you don’t know my feelings for anyone else? Alright then, Vera. As always, you win. If it brings us closer, it will be worth it.

  Of course there were girls before you. In particular there was one, a sweet thing of sixteen who I knew through my father; we went hunting at her country home near Tsarskoye Selo, just outside of Leningrad. It was a quaint place, just seven bedrooms and a sitting room full of brocade and exposed stone, which they always brightened up at night with candles. They left the curtains open for evening cocktails, and I remember coming towards the house after a walk in the dark; above me a sea of stars fell in every direction as if a divine huntress was shaking droplets of water from her hair. And through the window, another set of bright white points, one of which was in the hand of the girl. She moved from one end of the room to the other towards an object I would never know. Her chestnut hair shone upon her head; her skin was white, almost frozen. That passage, no more than a few footsteps past the window glass, seemed to contain within it my whole life’s purpose, my whole mysterious volition: delicious, untouchable, motivated by something just beyond my grasp.

  When I went inside I felt certain the spell would break, and for a moment it seemed to. The room was stuffy with the musk of men—her father, my father, both of her brothers—and the fireplace flue was not quite open, so a hint of smoke lingered round the ceiling and the corners. As I walked through the door one of her brothers said something quiet and the other laughed—a sound that made my shoulders itch with the anticipation of a fight. They were tall, hulking. I was long and lean. I went to the sideboard and poured myself a glass of wine from the ready decanter, tr
ying not to let the smoke bother my lungs and thinking how I might make a polite escape. Perhaps fake a chest cold? Pretend exhaustion? Even a girl was not worth this, surely. Then I turned. A single pivoting step that severed one part of my life from the next.

  In the far corner of the room, she perched on an armchair much too large for her, so she looked like a child in her father’s study. But such a serious child, and with such poise that I could have balanced my wine on her head without fear of spilling a single drop. The candle she’d carried sat on a small table beside her, lighting her up from below. Her eyes were dark with little points of light, galaxy marbles, runic hints. It was impossible to tell if she was breathing, so still did she hold herself. Not like a doe in the woods, alert to danger. Like the hunter that doe has scented. Patient. Glacial.

  Without knowing what I would say, I started to move towards her, but at that moment the maid came in and rang for dinner, and we were all ushered through into the cramped dining room for undercooked veal and a few stabbing attempts at conversation. Once or twice I tried to strike up a topic with the young lady, whose name was Diana, or Dina, but she was half the table away and stuck telling my father about her study of painting—a theme on which he was routinely tiresome, his own mother having dabbled in watercolor. Once or twice she flashed those eyes at me, and my body seized with wanting. Then we all went up to bed.

  The week transformed into a series of excuses designed to push me into Dina’s company. I switched from the steady gelding I’d been riding to a mare Dina thought a better companion for her own; the mare and I were bitter enemies from the start, she always pushing my leg into trees and intentionally stumbling over shallow creek beds, and me driving her so hard with my heels that she ended each day sweated half to death. We tore after rabbits instead of foxes. Plunged down embankments too steep to escape and trotted back and forth in twin pique. Dina just laughed at our rivalry, and rode her horse with the grace of a centaur. One afternoon I let her walk me to the river that bordered her family’s property on the pretext that I give my opinion on opportunities to fish it, a practical task I could not have been more ill-suited to as a boy of seventeen, primarily enamored of books and cigarettes and the sound of my own voice. I knew nothing about fishing, and in fact forgot the explanation for our excursion as soon as we were out of sight of the house, though plenty of the creatures wallowed fat in the shade with speckled sides and deckled tails, confident and lazy. Dina let the back of her hand brush my fingers, and as we approached the water’s edge I pulled her into an embrace. “We can’t,” Dina whispered. She pressed her bosom against my breastbone, laid her head on my chest and clutched at me with her little fingers as I bent and ran my hands underneath her skirt. An hour later when we returned, her father asked about the fish and I was at a loss to give him any answer, until Dina smiled guilelessly and said, “He found the river quite singular.”

  Her father was no fool, and as you can imagine, our opportunities to be alone together were swiftly curtailed: the greatest satisfaction I would derive from that point onward was in watching her astride that wicked mare from my wicked own. We were seated far apart at meals, and during the cocktail hour Dina’s brothers took up all her attention, asking her to sing them songs they remembered from childhood or playing keep-away with ornamental jewels they plucked out of her hair. They endeavored to make a little girl out of her, but every childish game they concocted just emphasized her bloom into womanhood, a background of dishonesty illuminating a pure truth. Once, while passing me in an ancient narrow hallway, Dina touched my leg high enough up the thigh to ink the pressure of her fingers permanently into my skin. But she did not slow her pace, and soon disappeared around a corner, the tail of her skirt flicking back in a smirk. After we left I thought of her constantly, counting the seconds until we might be reunited. But when my father and I tried to make plans for a return trip later in the fall, we were met with the news that Dina had been shot through the waist by an incompetent hunter who mistook her brown riding jacket for a hide, and died of blood loss some five hours later, fevered white skin almost invisible against the bleached linens of her bed.

  I used to dream of her laid out on a funeral bier, her burial gown flowing over the edges like snow. I dreamed that she stood up and stretched, sweet and sleepy, and truly believed that I might bring her back from the grave using only the force of my will. Girl on horseback, jumping death. She was my every fascination, my nightly rhythm, my dream upon waking. She was the only girl I ever loved. Until you.

  Zoya

  6.

  I arrived in Maple Hill in January, halfway through the school year, and spent my first New Jersey winter wandering around and marveling at my good fortune. We suffered ice storms nearly every week, bad enough to take out the city’s power, but cold was nothing new to me. When I woke up and saw my breath, I dressed practically, in layers, and topped myself off with the grass-green wool coat I’d bought at the local department store with the ten dollars offered to all combat orphans by the American committee that took on our care. They mistook the moth-eaten look of my old coat for war-torn: a bit of luck. Each day I tucked my hands into my clean new pockets to protect them from the wind and also to hide the holes in the fingertips of my gloves—I’d never owned anything brand new before, and I was grateful to the winter weather for giving me an opportunity to show off, however minimally. My lips in that freeze looked bitten, and my skin achieved a nearly fashionable pallor, though I would never quite lose the hardy peasant complexion that was my birthright. My roommate, Margaret, slept under an electric blanket; she kept it plugged in even during blackouts, and when I got up on those winter mornings all I could see was the tuft of her hair beneath her pile of supplementary quilts, and the electric wire snaking hopefully down to the floor.

  Despite my coat stipend I was given nothing for shoes, and since the tread on my old boots was worn almost completely away I was forced to walk slowly along the slick roads to keep from falling. I didn’t mind. Everything was covered with a film of ice that looked, to me, like sugar glaze. On the bone-bare trees, on the holly bushes with their prickling leaves and poisonous red berries. On white picket-fence posts and holiday lights; on lost purple mittens and the occasional squirrel, fallen from its treetop nest as heavy as a paperweight. The cars lining the streets sported wipers shellacked to their windshields, and every mailbox was sealed tight, whether bearing secret gifts or only more cold air. (Sometimes, I admit, I imagined prying one open and seeing a living bird fly out; I’m not sure why this image appealed to me so much, but it was strong enough to push me once or twice into standing in front of a box and tugging at the metal lip, hoping for some give. Always, though, the approach of a car or some movement in a nearby window forced me to abridge my efforts.) There were no houses in Moscow, at least not like this, small and sweet and personal. There was beauty, of course: art nouveau and cracked gilding, windows that were stories tall. But nothing so pretty or pedestrian. Nothing, since I lost my parents, that felt so immediately like home.

  Each day I made my way through the neighborhoods that surrounded the Donne School, sometimes taking deliberate steps, sometimes gliding along like a skater until I reached the strip of stores that constituted our downtown, where the sidewalks were salted dry. There was a bookshop I entered rarely but with great reverence, a market that didn’t open until ten A.M., a dress shop next door to a tailor, and, most important, a little café that seemed to have prophetic hours, as no matter when I slid out of bed, I was always their first customer of the day. I never bought more than a single coffee, but it was refilled as long as I wanted to stay, and occasionally the proprietor—an old maid named Marie who wore gypsy skirts but sensible earrings—would slip a biscotti onto my plate alongside the white ceramic coffee cup. There, I would labor through the reading that allowed me to scrape passing grades in my classes. It had been expected that I would enter school a bit behind, with the limited English skills and (sadly temporary) refugee sheen I imported from abroa
d, which earned me some pity in those early days. But more than the language, I found it difficult to mimic the bravado of my classmates as they went about their work, offering answers—in front of the teacher!—which were not only wrong but impertinent, while I crossed and recrossed my legs at the back of the room, trying to memorize my textbooks.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t try, but it was all strange to me. The Donne School lecture halls were full of unfamiliar cheer, with paper murals and stacks of books you were welcome to pick up, flip through, argue with. The matching desks and chairs arranged throughout the rooms stayed somehow neat and refinished all year, despite the girls who put their feet up, leaking winter salt and ice onto the wood, and the girls who scraped at the varnish with their fingernails, peeling away long, almost weightless threads. Sometimes they picked out hairpins and used them to carve their initials, but even these small marks seemed to disappear within a few days or even hours, a handyman bustling in with a pocket full of sandpaper. Back home I would’ve considered these girls feral, scribbling their indecipherable notes and wearing stockings with the seams all twisted, full of runs. But here, the messier they were, the more abominably casual, the richer their families tended to be. And though I didn’t understand it, I liked it. I liked them, from afar. They had pink book bags and they threw away half-eaten chocolate bars, which I had to stop myself from picking out of the trash. One or two of them chewed on their hair, calling up the memory of deep, inerasable hungers that I knew none of them had ever felt. I liked knowing that they hadn’t. They flowed together through the halls, giggling and holding hands, studied in the library carrels with heads pressed together in dim lamplight, and I watched them, wanting to swim in that same easy water. We were often asked to give presentations or make speeches in class, and under this attention the other girls preened every bit as much as I recoiled. Because something unimaginable happened: when they finished, people applauded. Every day, every time. And I applauded too, as vigorously as anyone else.