Invitation to a Bonfire Read online

  By the time we got down to the last few families, I was desperate. An entire ginger plant had been destroyed, and several roses had been snapped but left attached to their stems by a thread, beheadings as sadistic as they were incompetent. There would be an administrative inspection the next day, and it looked like I’d arranged the greenhouse by letting wild dogs run loose from door to door. I saw Kay, who’d hung around long past the rest of her classmates, say something to a fourth-year named Susan, who had occasionally quizzed Margaret in French. Susan nudged a planter with her toe, just a little, then just a little more, until it tipped over and spilled the barbed orbs of a teddy bear cholla across the floor. “Oops,” she said.

  I’d had enough. Paying no attention to John’s quiet hand motion—a finger run, knifelike, along his neck—I walked over to Susan and Kay.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Oooh,” said Kay. “We’re admiring all the beautiful work.”

  I turned to Susan. “And what about you? You know me. I’m friends with Margaret.”

  She looked at me with an expression approaching pity. “No you’re not,” she said, and shoved the spilled planter some more with her shoe, rubbing circles in the dirt. “You knew her, but that’s not the same. Even you don’t think it is.” Kay giggled, and Susan rolled her eyes, then grabbed Kay’s hand and pulled her towards the exit. I just watched. Kay’s braid swishing back and forth across her spine, Susan walking with a graceful heel-toe twitch. I could feel the plants in the greenhouse throbbing, or maybe that was my own head. I thought of the ocean I had crossed, the beet field I’d pulled weeds in as a child while Susan and Kay drank glass after glass of sugared fruit juice and probably lounged by the side of a pool. They both had that look: expensive powder over a residual tan.

  When they were gone, John told me, “Don’t worry. We’ll put it right.” And indeed we worked into the night, restoring tilted plants and trimming back ragged edges until the greenhouse looked spic and span, ready for the early inspection. The next day, the administrators would be impressed, winking at me and hinting of a long and prosperous career. But that night I went to bed exhausted and spent, an orphan girl with dirt under her fingernails, too afraid to use the communal bathroom shower after creeping back into the dorm. An orphan girl hollow with the knowledge that she still had no home after all these years.

  Lev

  23 June 1931

  Airmail via [Redacted]

  Where did I leave off before, Vera? Drunk on my first sight of you, I expect. Shivering in my shoes as you ran your fingertip over the rim of your wineglass at that doomed party in Leningrad, making it hum. We discussed literary ambition—“The key,” you said, “is to see possibilities in the world that no one else has the bravery to face”—and I described my book to you. The same precious first I search for now, then the only. You said the ideas held promise, though I remember the look of mild displeasure on your face. Probably the very look you’re wearing as you read this letter.

  But still. That night. With each breath you drew closer to me, until I was inhaling almost directly from your mouth, my Lev-ly proboscis ever approaching your lovely lips. I asked if I could take you on a walk along the canal, and you said yes, then looked around for your father—not to ask him, but to be sure he wouldn’t see. You were seventeen. I was twenty-three. At the doorway a towering butler blocked our path, but I distracted him with a cigarette, which he pinched from me with two thick fingers and sniffed in a vaguely obscene manner. God bless all obscenity, was my opinion. I wanted to toss you into a dark corner and tear you apart with kisses, but didn’t dare. I suspected even then that you could swallow me whole without a second thought and go on your way, little Lev swimming around, hopeless in your belly. Yes, I was afraid of you, Vera. I was exhilarated. Outside you strode over a bridge, on the top of a wall, just high enough that I could see a hint of thigh beneath your uplifted skirt, and when I reached for your hand you gave me just the tips of your fingers, which I sucked. They tasted sweet.

  “Naughty boy.” You used your dress train to sock me on the cheek, and then climbed carefully back down.

  “I have a page,” I offered.

  “A page?”

  “Just one, from the manuscript. It’s in my pocket.” I’d been considering this ever since we left the party—it seemed dangerous, like an early proposal. We’d been speaking for only an hour, and already I knew that to give you any piece of my literary efforts would be to embark on a path from which, for good or ill, there’d be no return. But how could I resist the draw of your intelligent eyes, the flick of your clever fingers? “I could let you have a look.”

  “Alright.” You stopped, and hopped back onto the wall to sit. Suddenly I was nervous. Sweat broke on my forehead, despite the chill of the night. Whereas you hadn’t a care in the world; you swung your legs and whistled. Still wearing your black mask. “Well?”

  The paper was folded into quarters, tucked in the inner pocket of my tailcoat right above my heart. I’d written it earlier in the day, smoking copiously. At that time in my life I had little else to do but sit at my desk and flick ash out the window onto the heads of passersby while I scribbled down my ideas, but even if I’d had teaching duties or—better still—a plan of escape, I was too intoxicated with the work to leave it for longer than a few hours. I’d gotten into the habit of carrying my latest pages around so I could reread them, or even just touch them to remind myself they were real—a sensation half verbal, half autoerotic. I knew no one else thought the way that I did, the way that I do. No one else would see our country for what it was: a land bearing thousands of counterfeit kings, with the legitimate ruler lost among them, having forgotten himself. That was my story. Amnesia, dislocation, masquerade. Peasant kings stealing from the rich before turning on one another, heads beaten in with wooden scepters. I handed you a page thick with script, hoping you wouldn’t see my fingers shake.

  You read. I watched, pacing back and forth in a wide arc, since the wall made it impossible to fully circumnavigate you. I could tell by looking at your eyes that you went through the whole thing twice, and could also see when you stopped and lost yourself in quiet thought. At last you turned to me. Your breath coming out as small puffs of cloud.

  “Perhaps,” you said.

  “Perhaps?”

  “Perhaps.” You refolded the paper and held it up between middle finger and fore. “May I keep this?” Though it lasted only a second, you must’ve seen the hesitation in my face. “I see.” You smiled a grim smile and handed back the page.

  “What do you mean perhaps?” I was unable to stop myself from asking. I could feel something dark and meaningful spinning inside your chest, Vera. My polestar, my pet, my set of teeth.

  “You can be great,” you said in reply. “Perhaps.”

  At this you jumped down and took off down the street, your dress dragging on the ground and your hands folded in front of your chest for warmth, though it looked like benediction. I didn’t know then the calculations you were making, considering not just you and me but your own place in history, guiding my hand. You must’ve felt your hold was tenuous. I scampered behind you, having restored my writing to its proper place, but just as I caught up you stopped and stamped your foot.

  “What?” I asked. Panting, heartsick, hands on knees.

  “It’s ridiculous that I should be leaving tomorrow. Tomorrow! This idiotic country.” Naturally I agreed. You and your father were scheduled to depart for the west the next morning in a trap pulled by a single skinny Vyatka mare, catching the train in a small-town station outside the city. I was still stuck at the Herzen Institute off Nevski Prospect, and hadn’t yet put together the money to flee. When my parents were still wealthy (and, of course, alive), my role as a university student and tutor had carried a bit of chic. But now the family money was frittered away in land grants to the government of thugs, and the school was a shell of what it had been. Every course of study was restricted to the narrow regime-
approved areas of focus: Death of the Individual; the Trigonometry of the Motherland; Comrades, Computations, Combinatorics. I felt daily more like a wastrel.

  You said, “I will it not to be so,” and snapped your fingers. When nothing happened, you repeated yourself more emphatically: “I will it!” Lifting your hands up towards the heavens as if to pull down God himself for a chat. And then. Do you remember? A dove fluttered into your waiting palms, cream white and still quite ruffled from his descent. It was as if a lump of snow had gotten confused and manifested; we looked up to see if we could find the strange cloud it had come from, or indeed the chagrined deity who had dropped this marvel on us. Instead there was a rather fat man on a balcony looking frantic and gesturing in our direction while a red-cheeked auntie blew her nose and shook out her handkerchief by his side. You pulled the dove close to your face and looked into its beady eyes. It cooed. You looked. It cooed again. And all at once you threw your arms skyward and the dove flew up, back to its corpulent and inattentive master. Who knows what kind of menagerie he had in there—he caught the bird in one hand like a tennis ball.

  Vera, it was torture for me to let you go without me, but what choice did I have? You were safe in Paris, if not quite secure. And for my part, I spun into a tizzy of activity, writing, writing every hour—except when I had a letter from you. Soon enough I completed my manuscript, and tore back through it page by page. When I was satisfied I copied it out for you, and sent it to your father’s place in a brown paper package, wrapped thricewise and hidden inside a hollowed-out copy of an early Party history book. Around this time there was an increase in search and seizure for all those leaving the city to avoid counterproductive ideas moving across the border, and with my own departure plans on the brink of readiness I knew I couldn’t expect to get away with my book in hand. (You’ll remember the hectic nature of my final escape plans, fraught until the moment I realized that, in my regimen of constant drafting and revision, I’d saved the last few rubles I needed for bribes by forgetting to eat.) So I tied the original manuscript with twine, shut it up in the most airtight box I could find, and buried it at the end of a trolleybus line. You were to be the safeguard of my future—as indeed you’ll insist you have been, if not in quite the way I initially imagined.

  Some weeks of anguish followed, but at last I snuck out of Leningrad on a transport train, pretending to be a mute priest from Lithuania on my way to give counsel to the archbishop of Rome. You met me at the Gare du Nord in a skirt that brushed against your calves. I remember you’d gotten slenderer. Just a quarter inch lost around the waist, but I mourned every molecule. Right there, standing by the man selling crepes from a cart, smelling of burnt batter and hungry civilians, I took you in my arms and slipped the blouse off of your shoulder, biting you and leaving a mark with my teeth. You looked at me in much the way you’d looked at that daring Russian dove, and for a moment I was afraid you’d release me too. Into whose custody, Vera? Instead, you straightened your clothes and took my hand and said, “Well, I think we’d better get married.”

  It would be more than a week before I learned you’d burned my manuscript, for my “own good and protection.” I didn’t inquire about it sooner, as I was too busy proposing to you and proposing to you every hour, trying to make up for the fact that you had asked me first. Plus I trusted that the pages were safe in your charge—an idea you’d have anyway confirmed. Not quite acknowledging that your idea of safety was far broader than my own: that you thought safety for me and my words meant sometimes saving me from myself.

  When I found out I might have screamed at you. I might have walked away. But by then we were quite officially engaged. Weren’t we, Renka? And it was more than that. By then we were inextricably in love.

  Zoya

  22.

  Dear reader, this cabin is too quiet. That was never a complaint I thought I’d level, but here I am: no plant misters hissing on, no dehumidifier humming by the cacti, causing the tarpaulins to shift. Just a quiet room and the scratch of my pen, while outside the wind occasionally has the good grace to whistle through the pines. If I sit very still I can catch the breath of mice under the floorboards, or the crinkling footsteps of birds in the eaves. And I can remember a time when I’d have killed for this kind of peace. Back then, when I thought I was drowning in sounds.

  Have you, has anyone else, ever been driven mad by the squeak of saddle shoes? What about the swish of hair being rearranged? Fingers combing out a knot, then dragging the strands back into place, to be set by a ribbon or clip. It sounds petty, I know, but what you have to understand is that these noises were also harbingers for me of greater unpleasantness oncoming. And they were omnipresent. I might walk into a hallway and hear six girls running to beat the bell, their shoes all squealing against the tile. (One or two would bash into me, if at all possible, though over the years I got better at dodging.) Or I’d duck into the cafeteria for an afternoon cup of coffee and hear sixteen, seventeen braids being redone. Nine buns being pinned. The locks of twenty heads brushed out next to the salad bar. There was a kind of music to it, which I occasionally allowed myself to enjoy: such rich youth, the fat of so much success in the shifting of hair and the snap of well-bleached bobby socks. I sometimes watched the waves of young women—pale or sunburned, auburn or blonde, round or rail-thin—voluminate over the campus lawns and felt a tug. Perhaps nostalgia? Or something more. But these tender moments only made the rest of the time more unbearable.

  As my first year at the greenhouse wore on I curtailed my visits to Marie’s café. They made me too sad. I remembered dragging in my schoolbooks, working to diminish my accent and build up my classroom bluster—and couldn’t bring myself to walk through the door. It was as if I feared seeing my past self at a table, and having to face the disappointment in her eyes. Sometimes Marie waved to me from behind the counter when I walked by, but over time the gesture grew more confused, until at last it stopped.

  Instead, I worked. I dug, aerated, primped, and pruned. I babied my seedlings, and sometimes when no one was looking I gave them little kisses. You have to be gentle with a young plant, when even the tenderest touch can knock it asunder or snap its weak spine. But I’m convinced they can feel love.

  Girls streamed through the school, washing up and down its many shores giving me pinches or whispering nasty words. Often I felt the flash of their flesh on my flesh, the exquisite bloom of a bruise, and it got to the point where my heart quickened any time I heard a footstep. With reason. Once, I found myself alone in a corner with a fourth-year named Leah, uncertain how it had come to pass. She moved closer and closer, telling me terrible things about myself until her mouth was on my ear, her hand around my waist. One leg twined between my legs to hold me in place as she petted my hair and let me know in no uncertain terms that I was a beggar, a puppet, a ghost. All this was bearable only because I was able to consider the plants my protectorate. The greenhouse a kingdom with me standing guard. Kay and her friends stayed away, most of the time—even Leah cornered me on neutral ground, in the empty student union—and that was something to be proud of, no matter how many lips hissed against my neck.

  That year, I also began making more trips to Maple Hill’s small bookstore. During my schooling, I hadn’t often read for pleasure—the bookstore carried only English-language texts, and besides costing too much money these struck me as a waste of leisure time. Now I found, to my delight, that reading came easy. Some language switch had flipped in my brain; I dreamed in English, I spoke it constantly, I corresponded in English with the phone company and various seed distributors. John invited me over for dinner with him and his wife, Siobhan, and we laughed through the night, even playing a board game now that I was confident enough to understand the instructions. Although I’d always enjoyed strolling through the aisles of Sugar Books, smelling the paper and running my thumb over cover cloth, life took on a new tone of satisfaction along with my ability to pick up a volume and skim a few lines before deciding whether or not t
o buy.

  As you might expect, I gravitated especially to Russian writers, for the flavor of home. But none satisfied me half so much as Leo Orlov. He was like nothing else—impressionistic, yet voluptuous in his images. His work unfathomable yet steeped in the human and mundane. Perhaps what I liked best was how strange he was; I didn’t know the term “science fiction,” and even if I had, I’m not sure that’s what I would have called him. (Of course this is a matter of much argument these days, with literary gatekeepers urgent to hold on to him and space/time aficionados praising his stories with nothing short of militant ecstasy.) But I knew that his work would take me on unbelievable journeys, and that was all I wanted. The comfort of a bolt-hole. A doorway appearing, cut into the very air.

  You’ll probably remember him from his first true sensation, Felice, the one in which a girl becomes a bird and forms a new army of starlings and crows to get her revenge on the men who betrayed her. But I knew him long before that. There was a small society of us, almost all expatriates, who started with his journal stories published in France and kept on through Knife, Knave and Impresario and Sun Sort. We were all a bit churlish about Felice, not because we found it less than brilliant, but because it let so many new readers suddenly reach out and claim our Orlov for their own. On the other hand, the book that broke him fully into my heart—that ran him, hot liquid, all through my blood—was a short novel called Rothschild, which not many people have read even now. I can’t understand why, but of course this makes it all the more personal and delicious.