Forty Rooms (7 page)

“My parents think it’s a great opportunity. But Vasily, I haven’t yet decided—”

“This is stupid,” he spits out. “I never thought of you as stupid before. You would have a much better life here. You’re somebody here. Your family is important, my family is very important. You and I, we can accomplish anything we want. Over there, you’ll be nothing, a pathetic little immigrant, an empty space. A zero.”

I too am beginning to feel angry, but I force myself not to abandon my mollifying tone. “Look, I’m not talking of
moving
overseas, it’s just a four-year college. It would mean seeing a bit of the world, no more than that. Don’t you ever want to have some new experiences?”

“You can have plenty of new experiences here,” he says, and a tight, ugly smile twists his face. “In fact, I can arrange for something new right now.”

I no longer find the hardness in his eyes enticing.

Things are shifting inside me.

“I think,” I say slowly, “I think I will do it.”

He holds up my letter with the tips of his fingers as if it were something contagious, and pretends to study it, rocking the chair faster and faster. “Never heard of this place. Some dreary provincial hole, I gather. Didn’t peg you for the type who’d want to live in an Uncle Tom’s cabin among beggars, niggers, and Jews.”

For one instant I am speechless. In the next, I receive, for the first time ever, the indisputable waking proof that there is a God who watches over us—a benevolent God with impeccable timing and a twinkle in his ageless eye. My childhood chair breaks apart under Vasily in a spectacular explosion of cracks. As the seat falls in, he falls in also, his arms and legs now crammed into the wooden frame, sticking straight up. And even though I already know that in the next few months, before I leave for a college deep in the American South, there will be many unpleasant encounters—lips thinned, eyes averted—in the university hallways, awkward silences among our mutual friends, gatherings and memories ruined, for the next few minutes—three full minutes, no less, until he manages to extricate himself at last—for the next three minutes, as I watch him flail and strain and turn purple, I am certain that someone is up there, gently holding my life in the palm of his hand—and all is right with the world.

Part Two

Past   Perfect

7. Library Cubicle

The Grateful Dead

“Hey, you’re that Soviet girl, aren’t you?”

I raised my eyes from the page. A bear of a boy in a rainbow-colored shirt was leaning on the corner of my desk, setting my towers of books to a dangerous wobble.

“I prefer ‘Russian,’” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Russian. So, how do you like it here?”

“I like it very much,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, I didn’t mean . . .” He seemed vague, amiable, good-looking in a bland, healthy, entirely forgettable way. “I meant, how do you like America . . . You know, what do you like most about it?”

I smiled politely.

“The library,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

He had something written on his shirt. For a moment I puzzled
over the meaning of the words, then grew impatient, and glanced at my book.

“Well, anyway, you’re studying. Sorry to have disturbed you,” he said.

I turned the page, heard his steps retreating into the silence of the stacks.

In the past few months I had been asked many things—whether it was true that Soviet children marched to school in formation and were one and all atheists, and did I know Tatiana in Leningrad, and how did I like hamburgers, fraternity parties, and freedom of speech—and while I set much stock by good manners, I did not feel the need to answer every question in the obliging spirit of upstanding national representation. That was Olga’s concern. Upon arriving in the States, she had found herself an unwitting celebrity of sorts—something to do with her timing, her being the first-ever Soviet student in the country, or maybe the first in an undergraduate program, or perhaps just the first on the East Coast—some statistical fluke, in short, which nevertheless meant that she would spend her entire fall giving interviews and visiting local schools, posing for photographers, assuring everyone that she adored freedom of speech, complaining in private that she had had by far more freedom in Russia and that the burden of being the “face of the country” was dulling her complexion.

I suspected that she was enjoying herself.

My own entry into my small southern college had passed unnoticed by comparison—a few lines in a student publication, mild curiosity from my fellow freshmen; enough to be recognized now and then and asked about hamburgers, not enough to feel that I
stood for anything larger—anything other—than merely myself. For that I was grateful. It was all very well for an aspiring journalist like Olga to inhabit a political essay. As for me, I had never given much thought to the current affairs of the world.

I wanted to live in a timeless poem.

I returned to my collection of Silver Age verse but soon found my concentration flagging. I was tired, of course—it was past midnight, and I had subsisted on very little sleep for a long time—but also, I felt oddly bothered by the encounter with the boy. Had I been unnecessarily short? Rereading the same two lines over and over, I thought of the look that had settled on his face, apologetic and offended at once. When, a wasted half-hour later, I heard footsteps approaching through the stacks, I was relieved at the impending interruption. I would be friendlier when I saw him next.

But when the bookshelves parted to reveal the nearing shadow, it was not the boy in the rainbow shirt—it was the secret visitor of my Russian adolescence, strolling nonchalantly down the aisle, coming to a stop before my desk.

He was not smiling, nor was I pleased to behold him.

The last time I had seen him—well over a year before—we had quarreled. For weeks I had been studying ancient Greek tragedy till the wee hours, my mind gloriously full of heroes, oracles, and monsters. He stormed into my bedroom one night just before sunrise, wrapped in some absurd billowing sheet. I felt disturbed and elated—I was certain he would kiss me at last—but instead he pontificated about Aeschylus, quoted reams of Pindar at me, and ended by pronouncing himself the god Apollo, here to inspire me. I was appalled at how pompous he had become of late, and
told him so. He threw his laurel wreath to the ground and slammed the door behind him, his only conventional exit in my memory. “Pompous
and
unimaginative!” I shouted in his wake.

Frowning, I considered him now.

“Asleep in a library cubicle, how embarrassing,” I muttered. “Am I drooling, I wonder. Even snoring, perhaps? Did I collapse with my face in the book, and will the print of some poem transfer to my cheek? I hope that boy doesn’t pass by again.”

“You’ve been thinking about irrelevant matters too much,” he said, and, unceremoniously sweeping the corner of my desk free of books, settled on top of it, swinging his leg. He sported a neat new haircut and was dressed in a dapper suit of spotless white linen; yet in spite of his jaunty appearance, he looked somehow diminished—smaller in the way childhood rooms seem smaller to an adult returning home after half a lifetime’s absence.

“At the risk of being smacked by this Goliath of an English–Russian dictionary, I will brave the question. How
do
you like America?”

His voice was dry, but I saw that there would be no mention of our last encounter, and was glad, and tried to thank him by giving an honest answer.

“I like it very much,” I said after a moment’s thought. “I like the sense of anonymity. Living here is like—like being just a story among other stories, so I have time to read my own story without peeking ahead or skipping any words, if you know what I mean. And I can access an entirely new range of experiences and feelings, and these feelings are larger somehow, as if I can now see myself and the world simultaneously from two separate vantage
points instead of one—a bit like gaining entry to a new dimension . . . But you know, I wasn’t being glib earlier—I mean with that boy—I really do love the library the most. I more or less live in this cubicle. They let you stay all night, did you know? Actually, it wasn’t until I spent my first night here, back in September, that I realized what I’d been missing. Have you ever been to the library in Moscow? You fill out a form, then take your place at one of these communal tables in a gigantic marble room that makes you feel dwarfed, and wait until the book you’ve requested is produced from some unseen depths of the building. When your turn comes, you are summoned to a tiny window and the book is slid over to you on a tray. Of course, they have everything there, but you always have to know exactly what you want beforehand—there are no surprising discoveries, you see, no sense of exploration, no
browsing
. Oh, one day I’ll write an Ode to Browsing—it’s such a delightfully American concept! It’s what I do here: I walk the aisles, alone, at night, and when something catches my eye—anything new, anything exciting, anything unpredictable—I grab an armload of books, as many as I can carry back to my desk, then stay up until morning reading about Mayan glyphs, or Arctic expeditions, or the art of stained-glass windows in medieval France, or underwater archaeology in Egypt, anything and everything, but always poetry, poetry first and last—” I glanced over at him, and stopped abruptly. “Am I boring you?”

“You
are
being unusually loquacious tonight, my dear,” he said, staring off beyond me, into the white electric glare of the shelves. “Personally, I dislike libraries. They smell of death and oblivion. True poetry isn’t meant to be stashed away in pitiful little volumes
catalogued on moldy index cards, then buried in the communal grave of the Dewey Decimal System, to be exhumed once every few years by some pimply graduate student scratching out a tedious paper that no one will ever read. True poetry is meant to be recited—or better yet, sung—thundered to the sky—danced to—made love to—celebrated . . . It should pulsate in your ears and your heart, but all I can hear in these repositories of dust is the clamoring of the forgotten dead on their neatly catalogued shelves, begging each visitor to resurrect them, to bring them into the light, if only for a few pale moments, grateful even for such sorry scraps of attention—”

Suddenly I laughed. “The grateful dead!”

“What’s that, my dear?”

“Oh . . . nothing.”

A petulant look crossed his face.

“There it is again—you are thinking about boys too much. You must be careful.”

I felt his presence to be an acute disappointment. He belonged to my Russian childhood, to the otherworldly realm of fairy tales, secrets, and revelations that—even at my eighteen years of age—was so quickly receding into the distance of both time and space that I could already see myself believing someday that half of it had been real, or perhaps half believing that all of it had been real. Here, under the even, artificial light of humming lamps, in my brand-new, rational life of class schedules, advisor meetings, and black coffee, I no longer felt the need to be gentle with my persistent dreams.

“You sound like my mother,” I said.

“Hardly. I don’t care about your getting hurt. As Catullus proved early on, wretchedness is rather good for poetry. Very few, in fact, are capable of writing well while happy in love—or indeed content with life in general. It takes a special kind of greatness to write about happiness, and, just between us, Horace himself smacks too much of a self-satisfied philistine. One might even argue that the poet’s primary function is to make the misery of the human condition more bearable by converting raw pain into the orderly music of verse . . . But no matter. I mean something else altogether.”

Nimbly he leapt off the desk and stood looking down at me.

“In the beginning was the Word, remember? Now, generally speaking, I’m not fond of those simpletons, but old John did know a thing or two. Listen.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
” His voice rose, gaining in strength, cutting through the hush of the well-lit windowless night, multiplying in echoes, until a chorus of mighty voices seemed to be booming from everywhere around me.
“The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

He fell silent, and for some moments the silence continued to widen like circles upon waters closing over a crashing boulder.

“Walk with me, my dear,” he then said mildly.

I rose, obeying the unspooling of the dream, and together we made our way into the harshly illuminated stacks, straight and orderly as hospital corridors. He walked a step or two ahead, not glancing back at me, talking all the while.

“Everyone is born as a light, a naked spirit, a pure longing to
know the world. Some lights are dimmer, and some brighter; the brightest ones have the godlike capacity not only to know the world but to create it anew, time and time again. The light shines at its purest in your childhood, but as you move farther into life, it begins to fade. It doesn’t diminish, exactly, but it becomes harder to reach: every year you live through calcifies around your soul like a new ring on a tree trunk until the divine word can barely make itself heard under the buildup of earthly flesh. None of this is anything new, of course—just read some Gnostics while you go about your browsing.”