Invitation to a Bonfire Read online

  Expressing a firm or independent opinion felt unnatural to me, and this made composition papers a struggle. I also didn’t care to write about my family history, to the consternation of teachers and counselors alike. “Wouldn’t it make you feel better to talk about what you’ve been through?” they asked me, and I always answered with a firm “No.” It’s interesting how time changes a person. I never would have relented to keeping a diary back then.

  Between the bodies that eventually filed in and the radiator steam, Marie’s café was endemically overheated, and I have many fond memories of sitting at a round table by the fogged-up window, sipping from my bottomless coffee cup. I remember that the room always smelled of the rosemary Marie baked into her scones, though I never had the money to buy one, and that the bathroom had the familiar, bouillon scent of a home whose inhabitants eat a great deal of cabbage. I often wondered if Marie, too, was in exile from some former life, but her nasal American speech made it hard to imagine what that life might be. (A limitation of inventiveness that I have since overcome.) We sat in companionable silence: me turning pages and slurping with unmannered indifference, she ringing up change and wiping crumbs off of tabletops, occasionally humming a jaunty tune that, despite being stuck in my memory, I have never been able to identify.

  I was at Marie’s when I made the discovery that turned school—or, at least, schoolwork—tolerable. The winter sun was halfway down, streetlights buzzing on outside, and I was exhausted by the effort of doing poorly, day after day. You have to remember, my studies were all I had at this point; everyone I knew or loved was back in Moscow, most now dead. As it was, I sometimes initiated chats with the Donne School gardeners just to feel connected to the earth again, and to get back a sliver of the confidence I used to feel among the sugar beet fields of Lipetsk. In the café, I leaned my head against the window so I could watch the hazy figures clip by on the sidewalk in their dark coats, heading home. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed the faint outline of a heart drawn into the steam—some other child must’ve done it, on some other day. But when I pressed my finger to the glass and traced the line, a man walking by outside smiled. At me. My perceived whimsy. My perceived joy. And I realized: maybe I knew what to do, after all. There were plenty of opinions in the world, and any of them could be mine, if I only said so.

  I took the theory to class with me the next day, thinking I’d start small and test the waters, nodding along during someone else’s argument or raising my hand in a group of “pro” or “con” opinions during Civics 102. Back in Moscow I’d had plenty of practice trying on beliefs like sweaters and socks, to see which ones had holes in the lining and which might help me to survive. But that had been a matter of life and death. This was just participation points, adding up to a small percentage of our term grade. Still, I didn’t want to fail.

  Civ 102 was doing a unit on the Greek polis system and the students had been divided into four groups, each assigned a different city-state. We got points for presenting compelling insights about our home polis, and the winners had been promised ice cream. My corner of the room was Corinth—not objectively the most exciting, the height of neither scholarship nor war. But the project had inspired a cliquishness that had little to do with the realities of ancient Greek life. “Athens was the center of everything important,” sniffed a girl named Abigail. “Of course we’ll win.” “Sparta will kill you,” hissed her best friend, Denise, pencil gripped in her fist like a dagger. I’d been conducting diligent research and offering up a trove of facts about Corinthian exports each class period—which was, I thought, the point of the exercise. But other girls wrote snazzy jingles. They made lightning bolts out of yellow paper as offerings to Zeus, and used the popularity of their projects as proof of their superiority in Greek society. Several of my teammates had complained privately that Corinth’s financial status—as a center of trade and a source of fine pottery—was being unjustly ignored because Athens had better temples.

  “We’re the rich ones,” they whispered. “Who wouldn’t want to be the rich ones?”

  Yes, I thought. Who? It was a fashionable enough sentiment that everyone would agree with it, general enough that anyone could have come up with it. And so, mid-period, when the teacher asked for arguments designed to win the daily rhetorical challenge, I raised my hand while the rest of my teammates were distracted arranging a row of flowerpots painted with black tempera.

  “I think it’s been overlooked—”

  “What’s that, hon?” asked the teacher, leaning closer as if to hear better, but also interrupting me. They were all eager to be the one to “get through” to me, or else (I suspected) to prove I was at heart a Soviet spy. I frowned, and muddled on.

  “I said, I think we’ve forgotten how wealthy Corinth was. A, um, a—” I struggled to remember the exact term I’d underlined in last night’s reading—“seat of commerce and industry.”

  Silence in the room for a beat. Then one of the Athenians said, “So?”

  My cheeks flushed. “So I mean, they were rich.”

  “So what? Did they have scholars?”

  “They had, um, the Bacchidae, an aristocratic—”

  “Boring. We had Socrates.”

  Behind me, I heard a pair of girls whispering, “Sure, until you murdered him.” This was my chance. In truth, I didn’t care about the ice cream social or even being right. But people were watching me, almost interested. The teacher was taking notes. No one was asking me about my parents, reminding me how I’d left them, how they’d vanished one by one—

  “Maybe Athens had Socrates,” I said, “until they killed him. But money is power. Money is always power.” New sweaters, I thought. Angora wool. Penny loafers. Midnight cookies. Nail polish. The right to walk into a store and see the counter girl turn her smile up extra bright, and the ability to buy and buy, to change your life in small but measurable ways.

  “That’s … Well—” The teacher peered around the room, waiting for a rebuttal. None came. “That’s a very vigorous position. I think we’ll give the rhet point to Corinth today.”

  I let out a small puff of air. Really, it worked? And so easily, too. My teammates surrounded me, patting my back and offering congratulations. One called me “buddy” and another told me to keep it coming with the good stuff. Even the teacher gave me an encouraging nod, placing a gold star next to my name in her activity log. I squirmed under the unfamiliar touch of so many gentle hands, but still—I smiled.

  7.

  I hesitate to describe the work that earned me Bs and Cs that year as plagiarism: every word I wrote was my own. It’s just the ideas that were borrowed, and the passion for them. My instructors were all relieved to find my papers suddenly passable—no one likes to fail the war orphan. And for my part, I came to enjoy whipping up a textual froth from the enthusiasms of Tolstoy, Thoreau, or de Tocqueville. If my ideas contradicted themselves from one assignment to the next—well. That was seen as the purview of youth. No one minded theft or inconsistency, even vitriol, so long as it meant you were making a statement. This was my first great lesson in being American, and I took it to heart.

  8.

  Of course, Vera had no place at the Donne School then, except as a faint part of my memory, which I was always trying to excise. A character from the motherland, the life I left behind. Back where we met, there were no cozy split-levels or so-called French fries, no one calling you “little miss.” Moscow was a different beast. We had dancing bears, and the Arbat. We had underground businessmen with overlarge hats, and a winter so long and dark that it brought sense to fairy tales: why wouldn’t you make a deal with a witch if she promised to bring out the sun? Our Moscow was a city of men slurring and ruddy with vodka, of old women competent, by necessity, to swing an axe—or at least, my Moscow was. Vera breathed a more rarefied air. But we shared the Young Pioneers scout troop, whether she remembers or not.

  Our scoutmaster would call: Vsyegda! and we would shout back: Gotov! Always prepared. The c
ry of scouts across the globe. I joined the group at twelve, a little later than most, as I’d spent all my previous summers working in the countryside, and Vera showed up halfway through that same year, though I was never clear on her age. Older, surely. That was the brief, golden period in which my father was thriving in the new world order, and our house’s star seemed on the rise. It would not last long, nor would it end well, but I didn’t know that yet.

  I remember walking into the meeting hall that day, following close behind two girls named Lidya and Marta whom I’d been hoping to befriend. I was watching their shoulders move up and down as they skipped along, the slender points of them rising up almost like the tips of wings. There was something about the turn of their ears, the tapering of their ankles that I couldn’t keep my eyes off of, a magnetic drag in their every shift and shrug—I was terribly intent. My lips parted slightly, ready to speak if only I could find the right words. So while they saw the new girl right away, for a moment I missed her.

  When Lidya and Marta stopped abruptly, I ran into Marta’s back, sending both girls bubbling across the room in a fit of giggles. I looked up, face burning. But Vera took little notice of us. Who knows how long she’d been there, alone. Sitting on the edge of a wooden folding chair, one foot perched on the other. Red scarf cheerful and knotted, just like the rest of us. Her white shirt, though, was darted in here and there to fit her figure, and her skirt was hemmed an inch too high. Our chairs were organized in an imperfect circle and I sat opposite her, each of us at an apex. I admit I didn’t like her then. Something in her gaze, which wouldn’t rest on any face and just kept flitting around, to the top of the corrugated wall, to Lidya’s inexpert fingernail polish, to the ceiling, to the floor.

  The hall was enormous, an emptied-out warehouse lent to the scout troop on a weekly basis. We came in through a metal door on one end and sat under blinding fluorescent lights, occasionally using the space to run bomb drills or practice marching in formation for parades. The concrete floor was smudged with black in places where we’d lit preparedness fires; one day our scoutmaster had asked us to bring in kindling and then handed matchbooks to us in groups of three. By the end of that hour, half the troop had inhaled dangerous levels of smoke, but we were so proud of ourselves that most stayed overtime, toasting bacon on camping forks. Now, anyone could see that Vera would have none of this. Game play. Camaraderie. There were charcoal smears on the bottom of her smart little shoes, and with a shuddering foresight knew I’d find those same shoes in a charity bin a few weeks later, and be forced by my mother to take them.

  “Rebyata! Posmotritye!” The scoutmaster stuck her cigarette in the corner of her mouth and clapped as she called us to attention. “We have a new comrade today, Verena Petrovna Volkova, so please make her feel welcome.” Fifteen pairs of eyes turned to Vera, bored into her. The scoutmaster clapped again. “Remember that we are stronger together.” In response—whether to our scrutiny or simply the idea that she might not be perfectly self-sufficient—Vera crossed her legs the other way.

  We spent the afternoon learning how to track, and, more importantly, learning how to evade detection if we should ever find ourselves in the woods and facing heavy enemy fire. It wasn’t one of our more practical lessons, given that we lived in the city center, and it ended in a kittenish game where each girl was given a ball of yarn to mark her trail. The object was to walk around as much of the room as we could without crossing paths. My yarn was blue. Vera’s, red. She passed it from hand to hand, stretching her fingers away from the staticky threads and then squeezing them tight. The scoutmaster, her hair in a perpetual wave, leaned down by Vera and told her it was ok if she wasn’t very good at the activity yet. Everyone had to start somewhere. “Poprobuytye, pozhaluysta.” Try.

  As we unspooled the first of our yarn I was mostly interested in Lidya and Marta, who had taken to holding hands when they saw me, and running away. It didn’t take long, however, for me to realize how poorly they were playing the game. Every few feet their threads intersected, orange over green and then green over orange. They shrieked when they ran into other girls, and made mock guns with their forefingers and thumbs. Even their attempts to be serious led mostly to slapped wrists and volleys of useless admonition: “You go left.” “No, you.” “No, you.” All the while, Vera walked the room’s long perimeter, occasionally hopping over a box or dodging under pieces of sharp-edged machinery. Staying unnoticed, if not unseen. I began to follow her.

  In the years since, I’ve learned that there are veins in the human body so long that, if uncoiled, they’d span city blocks. City limits, even. I’ve also learned that the blood inside our bodies starts to look blue if it’s buried deep, and needs to be pumped with oxygen. It’s appropriate that the image of me trailing behind a young Vera would be one that mimics a trajectory towards the heart. The door to the hall was cracked open, and from time to time a bit of wind would lift the yarn, and then settle it back down. A red string and a blue string, side-by-side. Two little rivers, rushing.

  I followed Vera for a good five minutes, careful to keep my own trail far enough away from hers that they wouldn’t be shoved together somehow and lose us the game by stupid default. She never turned around or glanced over her shoulder, so I assumed she didn’t mind. And why, after all, should one person reach the finish alone when two could go just as easily? The meeting was almost over, and my heart began to pick up speed as I imagined the scoutmaster praising us for following her directions so well. The other girls would look at me with new interest—me and Vera both—as we held our hands aloft in victory.

  Vera slowed down as she approached one of the room’s far corners, and I paused too, holding my yarn in place with the toe of my shoe. Based on what she’d done so far, I expected Vera to duck around a stack of crates and continue down the length of the wall. But there must have been something else in the way, because instead she turned sharp on her heel and stared at me, her face as blank as paper. I realized the reason she’d let me follow her wasn’t charity or goodwill: she just hadn’t known I was there. Within seconds of starting the game, she forgot the rest of us existed.

  “You need to go that way,” Vera said, indicating me back with the flick of her wrist. The first words she ever spoke to me. And the last for many years. When I saw she was instructing me to cross another girl’s line in order to clear her own path, I felt an unexpected resistance.

  “No,” I said. “I’m winning.”

  She shook her hand at me again, nodding her head in the direction she intended, but I stood firm, weaving the loose end of my yarn around and around my fingers. And then I saw a shutter go down behind Vera’s eyes. She looked at the yarn on the ground, all the various threads intersecting around the room, plus our two paths in perfect perpendicularity. A pile of wool, all across the floor. Not just her path. A dozen of them.

  Vera could still have won, then. Made a few careful pivots, dodged around me, headed back to the center of the hall. But I knew that she wouldn’t. She had only been interested in playing when she thought she was making up the rules as she went. As soon as she realized she was part of something larger, and something entirely outside her design, the game lost all its value for her.

  Dropping her remaining yarn into a red puddle on the concrete, Vera walked across the floor, past the circle of wooden chairs, and out the door. As she went she pushed a few of our threads around, smudging them together with everyone else’s in a hopeless tangle. Not, I thought, out of malice. She just didn’t care enough to pay attention.

  The scoutmaster called us all back to our chairs and took a ceremonial puff from her cigarette. “Ok!” she said. “Spacibo, rebyata! I’ll see you next week.”

  Of course, Vera never returned to those meetings. No one mentioned her absence the following week or the week after that—probably the scoutmaster had been informed that her presence would be provisional, and was then told, more curtly, that the experiment had failed—until I began to think I had imagined her. Such a
delicate girl, with her perfect, tailored uniform. Erect in her bearing, total in her indifference. I did become friends with Lidya and Marta, after a fashion, sitting in dingy teahouses together and taking up the hems of our skirts. Though we lost touch a few years later, when I was smuggled out on the orphan ship, and I have no idea what became of them or any of the others.

  As for Vera and me, it would be a long time before we came face to face again.

  9.

  My attempts at mimicry, so successful with the Donne School teachers, didn’t go as well outside the classroom—friendship being, after all, more delicate than intellect. You can fake your way into fear or respect or passing grades, but not affection. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me when I tried to imitate my roommate, Margaret, who was the most beloved person I knew.

  I watched her carefully whenever we happened to be in the room at the same time, or whenever we met in the halls: the way she poked her friends in the ribs with delight when they said something particularly nasty, and the way she laughed, scrunching her nose up to just the degree that her few light freckles were hidden by her mirth. Her beauty, compounded by her happiness. Though I liked the freckles, actually: she was the one who powdered them to death each morning, trying to pretend they didn’t exist.

  When she was away in class or out with a friend, drinking soda and smirking at the outfits of the passersby, I opened her drawers and lifted her sweaters up by the handful, pressing them to my nose and smelling the rosewater her housecleaner had sprayed them with after washing. Periodically, she sent a box of clothes back home to be cleaned and received a fresh shipment, which wasn’t something I could aspire to, personally. (To whom would I have sent them? To what address? The past, c/o my deepest wishes.) But I saved up and bought a bottle of light cologne to scent my own wardrobe, which Margaret did in fact compliment, one time.