The Drunken Spelunker's Guide to Plato (27 page)

“All I want,” he said at last, “is one more day. One day where I could just sit in a room, nothing more, and know that Leningrad is outside the window.” He looked up, and his eyes met Jake's. “I just want to feel it one more time again—feel that I am home.”

“I know that feeling,” Jake said.

“Maybe someday you could go back?” I offered.

“When I was growing up a little boy in Leningrad,” Vaslav said, still looking at Jake, “you will laugh when I tell you this, but I loved oranges so much!”

“Oranges?” I said.

“You know, an orange was a great luxury for me then, in those days. I got an orange only one time, maybe two times, in a whole year. It was a big deal then for me to get this orange.” He smiled.

“And then?” Jake said.

“And then I ate it!” Vaslav laughed. “I ate it and I was so happy! I was so happy—for days afterwards I had this happy feeling, this satisfaction, you know, because of that orange. The feeling lasted for a long time—longer than you would even believe.”

“And then?” Jake said again.

“And then,” Vaslav said, looking serious, “the longing would return to me. Slowly, but more all the time—this desire, this hunger. And I would think about it—the next orange—and I would long for it. When would my desire ever be satisfied again?

“So I came to the United States, and the first place I came was Brooklyn. And what was there? Right there at the corner of my street? The fruit stand—every kind of fruit in the world! And all so beautiful! Beautiful like only paintings or pictures in magazines could be! The oranges—hundreds of them—every day!

“When I found this place—this fruit stand—then every day I would go there and buy oranges. The man there laughed at me, but nice, you know? Nice laughter because I loved the oranges so much. And every day, I was happy. Every day, I had so easily the thing that I loved.”

“And then you got sick of them, and now you hate oranges?” I asked.

“No,” Vaslav said, looking grave. “No. An orange is a lovely fruit, you know.”

He sighed. “But then after a little while, I felt it start to come
back—this feeling of longing. I felt it begin again, begin to grow in me. Only now, there was a difference. The longing is there, but now I don't know what I am longing for. Now, in America, it seems to me that I can have anything—anything I want is here, ready in the stores, looking beautiful like paintings. I could have ten oranges every day—twenty, thirty. And everything is like that. So the longing now—what do I desire? What will bring me the satisfaction of one piece of fruit?”

He shook his head and drew another clear line with his fingertip down the side of the bottle. His fingers were stained with nicotine.

“Now that I can always eat, I am always hungry. I don't know anymore what it is that I desire. What I wish,” Vaslav continued, “is that I could have just one day in Leningrad—one day when I knew that Leningrad was outside the walls of my room and that complete happiness is possible.”

“Yes,” Jake said. “You want to go home.”

Vaslav laughed. “It doesn't exist anymore,” he said, and got up to put another quarter in the jukebox and buy another round of beers.

Hank's voice warbled out, “Hear that lonesome whippoorwill . . .”

Naturally we expected that Vaslav's suitcase full of songs would either never materialize or, if it did, we would wish it hadn't. It's not that we had never listened, God knows, to less than stellar musical performances by our friends. We had, after all, watched Charlie Blue basically learn to play that bass while he was standing right on the stage. Happy to do it. What are friends for, if not to groan inwardly and still love you?

But Vaslav was different. He had come to us fully formed, descended from the clouds, knowing things we didn't know, having seen with his eyes things we had only dreamed. And to find him human, after all, and fallible—well, it would be disheartening.

But Vaslav talked about the suitcase full of songs all the time. He would bring it up casually in conversation—try to convince us to make the drive to Nashville with him. He was planning to head out, he said, just as soon as he could talk Billy Joe into going with him. Billy Joe, he felt, with his previous experience in Tennessee, was crucial to the success of this enterprise, although he assured Jake and me that we were also vitally important to him and that he would not even think of going without us. This went on for months, so that we got used to it and became habituated to thinking of Vaslav's suitcase full of songs as something that would always be in the future.

It was at Charlie Blue's going-away party that Vaslav played his songs for us for the first time. The Low Lifes were headed to New York to record their first album. Vera and Pete had a party for them out at their little house in the woods. The boys had to catch the plane at 8
A.M.,
which was perfect timing because it meant they would probably still be good and drunk when they touched down in the big city. We felt that no one should approach such a momentous occasion sober.

During the course of the night, Billy Joe played some and Pancho played some and Pamela sang with him. The Low Lifes played some and made funny, bragging, scared-shitless speeches. That was to be expected. But when Vaslav asked to borrow a guitar around 4
A.M.,
we were surprised.

I was standing next to Vera when he started to play. Her jaw dropped, and she stared at him open mouthed for a full minute before she finally shut it. Vaslav was good.

“I didn't know it was going to be like this,” Vera said to me. “Did you expect that it was going to be like this?”

“I'm not sure I expected anything,” I answered. “What did you think it was going to be like?”

“Well, I thought it would be, you know . . .”

“Terrible?”

“Russian.” She stared at Vaslav. “And terrible,” she admitted.

The songs were riveting. They were aching blues songs, driving rockabilly, stomping R&B, even twangy country tearjerkers. Vaslav knew how to write a hook, that's for sure. And somehow he managed to capture all kinds of myths and hopes and disillusioned dreams about America. I guess it was the effect of a long Leningrad childhood spent yearning for things far away.

“I assumed he was just full of shit when he talked about his songs,” Vera said.

“Me, too,” I said.

“I guess we were wrong.”

“Looks that way.”

He played for almost an hour—song after song. By the time he was done, Blossom was sitting in the corner wiping her eyes with a paper napkin and Charlie Blue was looking abashed.

“You know what?” Jake said to Vaslav, looking a little starry eyed. “We should take those songs to Nashville.”

The only person who didn't fall in love with Vaslav was Danny. It's not that he disliked Vaslav or was ever unfriendly to him. Danny was constitutionally incapable, after all, of being unfriendly to anyone. It was just that sometimes when Vaslav was talking or was captivating us with stories and tales, I would notice that Danny's eyes looked uneasy or appraising. Just a flicker of doubt
would shadow Danny's face and then be gone. I watched Danny watch Vaslav. I don't think anyone else noticed, though, except maybe Vaslav himself, who was always extra friendly to Danny.

“How are you doing?” Danny asked me, sitting at the bar in Hell, looking a little longer into my eyes than he needed to.

“I'm fine,” I said, perplexed. “How are you?”

“I'm fine,” Danny said kind of vaguely, like he was thinking of something else entirely.

Jake started spending a lot more time alone with Vaslav. The two of them would go off together in Vaslav's car and not be seen for hours and hours. Vaslav was fascinated by the abandoned cotton mill in Magnolia, and they spent whole days picking their way through the tangled scrub and kudzu outside or the litter and debris inside, talking, talking, talking.

Jake didn't come into the bookstore in the mornings so much. Instead I held Bertie while Rosalita filled in figures in the account books and shook her head and looked worried. Bertie could sit up by then, and she sat in my lap, plump and curly haired and honey scented. She was heavy with the voluptuous carelessness of a baby who has learned that everyone loves her.

I loved her. “Oh, my baby,” I would say to her, “how beautiful you are,” marveling at her tiny perfection and taking an unaccountable pride in rocking her to sleep. “Oh, my baby.”

And she would snuggle into me.

Pancho came around a lot and sometimes would gently take the sleeping baby out of my arms, not waking her, and hold her for a while, rocking softly back and forth on his feet. He was still trying to touch the spirit world and began more and more to have a haunted look about him. Sometimes he came into the
bookstore and paced around looking at the books and gingerly touching some of them with only the very tips of his fingers. Even though we spoke to him, he didn't hear us because he was concentrating, like when he tuned a piano. Then he would go over to the Cave and let himself in with the hidden key and play fiery Rachmaninoff sonatas so loudly that you could hear them if you stood in front of the bookstore.

Pancho never said whether or not he ever eventually made contact. I myself think that maybe anything is possible.

Truth be known, more of us than just Pancho were haunted by the ghost of Tom. Rafi, for example, developed complex feelings toward the coffee maker in the Cave on account of Tom's having drunk so many cups of greasy coffee out of it while sitting at the bar with Rafi on long afternoons. The coffee maker, formerly only an object of derision, became for Rafi a shrine. At first, he wouldn't make coffee in it anymore, treating it as sacred and therefore untouchable. But after some reflection, Rafi came to the conclusion that Tom would not have wanted the kind of veneration that kept him separate from the human bustle and life of the bar. Tom would have wanted to be part of the action. So Rafi began to make coffee again in the peaceful quiet before opening time. He always poured the first cup for Tom and set it in a little cleared space on the shelf next to the cigarette rack where it wouldn't get knocked over.