The Wanting (25 page)

The next day, as usual, I went to see Collette.

I had this idea, I told her, to build a house. “Where on earth would you do that?” she asked me.

“My family has a dacha,” I explained. “It’s my uncle’s, he was once a somebody.”

“And where will you get materials? Are you the Ministry of Construction?”

“I know a few people,” I said. “I can put together a little brigade. I didn’t say it would be built in a week. Just—”

“Ahah! So Roman has his very own five-year plan.” She laughed, and as always her laughter charged my body like a bolt of electricity. But she turned away and started washing the dishes.

I began my drawings.

The house, as all my houses (though I could not have known it at the time), emerged whole from my imagination like a cake coming out of the oven, almost as if it had been put in my brain by someone else. When I went to sleep that night thinking of Uncle Maxim, I had no idea that in the morning I would wake with the entire project clear in my mind—clear, except for how to construct it. My drawings were not about working out a design but trying to accommodate the fancies of my mind to the realities of gravity and the properties of materials like wood and glass. I had conceived beams that extended infinitely, eaves cantilevered to hang without any visible support, jalousies that undulated like the waves of the ocean, staircases that floated without any cables or spines; this was the curse of my training: to imagine everything, to build nothing. We worked for the eternity that was the Soviet tomorrow, our drawings rolled up and gathering dust in the corner
beside our drafting tables. But this time, I was determined to build my house.

Collette, however, refused to take an interest in my project. Instead, she spent her time visiting her artist friends or going to the theater. And it wasn’t just artists she hung upon: there were writers, musicians, academics, actors, dancers, even a few architects like me, and of course the foreigners, the Americans, the French, the Spanish, not to mention the Jews and Zionists who yearned for nothing but Israel or at least the good life in America. Very quickly I became accustomed to the political nature of these evenings and soon became adept at dissecting current events and critiquing Soviet society in a way quite unlike what I had done with my old friends or my colleagues at work. It was no different than learning to endure the stench of Collette’s elevator or suffer the necessary chitchat with her neighbor Plotkina, who always seemed to be dragging her little dog, Vova, behind her. Charlie, the American, appeared frequently at these soirees. Like clockwork, he exchanged his little packets with Collette. By now, I understood these were letters from Pascal. She denied it, but I knew it was so. I began to hate Charlie, and no matter how many times he asked me, I never went to the American ambassador’s house for film night, and when Collette had him over to her place, I always made an excuse not to show up.

I had questioned her about the letters more than once.

“To whom are you writing?” I asked her.

“To my aunt Lorrette.”

“Why doesn’t she come for a visit? It can’t be that hard for her to get a visa. She could come with a tourist group.”

“What difference does it make to you, Roman?”

“It just seems, all this writing …”

A few minutes later I would try again.

“Whom else are you writing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I just want to know.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

“For heaven’s sake, Roman. Nobody.”

“No one at all?”

“What are you getting at?”

“I just want to know.”

“What?”

“If you are writing …”

“To whom?”

“I don’t know.”

“To whom?”

“You know whom,” I finally said.

“Say it then. Say the name.”

But I didn’t say the name.

I don’t know why, but I found myself escaping into the shower, needing water and soap. I stood in the tub, feeling I could happily drown if I just swallowed enough water. I heard myself whisper brutally, “Roman, she belongs to Pascal, and to Pascal you will deliver her!” I wanted to be the person who could do that, who could sacrifice his own happiness for the happiness of his beloved. I was hoping the hot shower would somehow temper my spirit, and I would be reborn with a pure heart.

Even so, the day came when I stole the extra key that hung on the peg near the door. It was easy to do, because she would never have considered it possible I would stoop so low. Sometime later, when she had gone to work, I returned to her apartment.

I knew she kept her letters in a cardboard box tucked beneath her bed. She had decoupaged this treasure chest with flowers, crests, medieval angels, and small strips of colored foil. I set it upon the bed and carefully pried open the lid. Inside, it was also decorated with words clipped from magazines—“love,” “soul mate,” “honeymoon,” “bliss.” In the center of this maelstrom of sentiment she had scrawled in large roman script,
T T
. I did not know what this meant. I suppressed the urge to shred the cover to bits.

My attention was soon drawn to the neatly bound packets of letters stuffed inside like the stacks of rubles my grandmother used to keep in the suitcase in the front closet, in which she’d also
packed a change of warm clothes, gloves, cigarettes, matches, a pencil and notebook “just in case.” Sorting through the letters, I realized that the tightly written notes on pink tissue had come from her aunt Lorrette. I read a few of these. They were almost hallucinatory, filled with absurd hopes and silly chatter about this or that “crucial attempt to improve the situation” and continually inquiring if Collette had received the packages of food or clothing she sent through the normal post, which of course never arrived. Some of the other letters were from correspondents in the West whom I’d never heard of—mostly Jews in San Francisco, Dallas, and London. I read a few of these, too. They were all stuck in the same groove:
Remember we support you! We had a big demonstration! Don’t give up hope!
They were sincere, hopeful, and laughable. But finally I had to turn to the stack of satiny, cream-colored stationery upon which a fountain pen had majestically inscribed itself in purple ink. These were lovingly bound with a luminous chiffon ribbon. The letters spilled out upon the bed as if freed from the bondage of a great and terrible secret. My hands shook as I opened the first one.

It was written in French, of course.

All were signed in the same obscure manner.
T T
. I puzzled over this a long time.

Eventually I realized it was getting late. I returned everything to its place and slipped from the apartment exactly as I entered it.

One Saturday afternoon, Collette collected me at our favorite café near the Lubyanka, and we got on the train to Fili. It was a lovely day in late spring; the trees were bright with soft, green shoots, and the first kingfishers and robins had already built their nests and were settled in for summer. We walked along Grozny Boulevard, taking in the fine spring air and chatting about some film or other,
The Irony of Fate
, or something by Daniela, when I turned to her and said, “I’m almost finished with the plans.”

“What plans?”

“What do you mean, ‘What plans’? The house.”

“You mean this house that you are always dreaming of?”

“Yes, that house. What other house?”

“And so you finish these plans. What then?”

“I’ve told you. I’m going to tear down my uncle’s dacha and build it there, in Zagoryanka.”

“What about your cousins? Your sister? Your mother? Your aunt? Don’t they love their dacha?”

“They’ll be happy for us to live there.”

I again described it to her.

“But Roma,” she said.

“The entire rear wall looking out into the woods will be constructed of glass, or rather, it will appear to be a single sheet of
glass, an illusion, of course, made possible by the use of aluminum framing, and the interior space, the living space all except for the bedrooms, will be one, flowing, continuous vista, again an illusion, because it’s actually built on three different levels, one leading to the other …”

“But Roma,” she said again.

“What, my love?”

“Are you crazy? This house can never be built, and even if it could, I don’t want it. Why won’t you understand that? I don’t want anyone’s house, I don’t want anything here at all. Not a house, not a bigger apartment, not a car, not a better job, nothing. Do you know what I do want? I want to
leave
. Can’t you get that into your head?”

“I swear to you, you’ll love the house,” I said.

“Let’s go inside, Roman, for God’s sake. We’re here.”

We entered an apartment building and climbed to the third floor. I knew she was angry at me, but I also knew she didn’t understand what it meant to have a house and how that could change everything; a nest, a finely contained space with four walls that are your own, that were designed just for you, not a one-size-fits-all with its bathroom always next to the front door and the knife drawer always the first to the right of the sink, but a place that has your name on it, a place in which your soul might have a little rest.

“Roma, enough,” she said. “I’m sick to death of your house. What kind of person would build a house in this country? Can you know me so little? And this from someone who says he loves me.”

Styopa let us in. He seemed deliriously happy to see us. “Welcome! Welcome! I’m so glad you could come! Have some tea. Have some schnapps. You don’t know what schnapps is? Sasha Fromish makes it.” He whistled and wagged his hand to indicate how strong this schnapps was. “Everyone is here, you’re the last,” he observed. I saw Sasha Fromish standing over a large glass jug, pouring out his schnapps. It was dark as beer, and I could smell it all the way over here. His wife, Alla, was slicing a mushroom pirog. Someone had brought some gorilka from Kiev. Yuri Sochin, I think. Everyone said it was stronger than Russian vodka. “Not
stronger than schnapps,” Sasha Fromish said. There were a dozen people at least, the noise was huge, and everyone had brought something to eat.

“Listen, Collette,” I begged her, “you’re missing the point. It doesn’t have to be a permanent place. Just something for now. Until you can leave.”

“Me leave? What about you? Why don’t you want to get out of this hell?”

“I do!” I said. But the truth was I didn’t. And I didn’t want her leaving either.

Collette tore away from me and presented her French potatoes, as she called them, to the assembly. They were bathed in milk and cheese, and there was the loud “Ooo.” These were all Zionists, Jewish renewalists. There were children running around, also, and someone, maybe Volodya Rutman and also probably Maya Tsipkina, called them to order, and the kids piled into the living room and formed a circle on the floor. Volodya handed out skullcaps to the boys. They opened their carbon-copied Hebrew readers, and the lesson began.
Anakhnu lomdim lidaber Ivrit! Ekhat, shtayim, shalosh, arbah!
In the meantime, the parents were huddled in the other room, murmuring their delight.

Misha Abromovich stood up. “I want to welcome everyone, and say to you, Shabbat shalom!”

“Shabbat shalom!” everyone replied.

There was to be a lecture on Jewish history by Tamara Belkina, who had been doing research more or less openly for years and was considered by everyone a great scholar. I think she may have known what she was talking about, as far as any Soviet could know Jewish history, but as for me, I was already far away, in Zagoryanka, pouring the foundation for my house with the beautiful, protean concrete my friend Lonya would have managed in his Byzantine way to acquire with a case of export-quality vodka and a carton of American cigarettes.