I’m going to seal this up now and hope you read it before you leave Leningrad.
Love, Josh, xo (I almost wrote ox instead of xo, but ox doesn’t work for obvious semiological reasons)
“Obvious semiological reasons?” Karen mocked. “Laura, you are not looking that guy up in June. I don’t care if I have to go to Providence myself to stop you.”
“He’s smart,” Laura said. “I mean, he’s kind of intellectual.”
“Yeah, his Theory of the Faded Jeans is absolutely brilliant.”
Laura sighed. She saw it now. Josh wasn’t an intellectual. He posed as an intellectual, spouting made-up theories and shallow opinions made to sound contrary and smart.
Alyosha didn’t do that. He didn’t have to. All he had to do to live a principled life was be himself. That act alone took courage. And he didn’t expect anyone to applaud him for it. In fact, he was being punished for it.
“What are you thinking?” Karen asked.
“Nothing.”
Providence seemed far away. It was far away. Josh was like a character in a movie she’d once seen, not a real person. Reality was this narrow bed she was lying on at that moment, with its thin, lumpy mattress. Karen, her friend, on the next bed, kicking her feet in thick hiking socks. The chipped wooden floor of their room. The tidy corner where Nina slept. Alyosha’s hand inside her glove.
She was starting to like it here.
“Now for something completely different.” She opened the first letter from her parents.
Dear Laurabear,
Honey, are you okay? Are you warm enough? How will we know for sure you’re okay if there’s no way to reach you??? Remember, if you have any health problems — anything at all — that constitutes an EMERGENCY and you must find a way to get whoever is in charge to allow you to CALL HOME. Do whatever it takes. We can’t stand to think of you all alone over there and maybe SICK or DYING….
She read all three letters from her parents, which ran along the same lines, with weather reports and bits of news about her little brother’s school exploits tossed in.
“Laurabear? Snort,” Karen said.
“Okay, Miss Ohio. What’s in your mail?”
Karen glanced at the letters spread out on her bed. “I got the usual crap from my parents about how being in the USSR is a unique opportunity and pay attention to everything. A letter from my roommate describing all the new bands she’s into and all the great shows I’m missing, and one from Roy.” She handed Roy’s letter to Laura so she could see for herself. Roy was Karen’s boyfriend from Oberlin, who was spending the semester abroad too — in Rome. “They’re living in a villa or something, eating mind-blowing Italian food and guzzling wine.”
Laura skimmed the details about the glories of fresh Parmesan cheese and real Italian pizza. Her stomach growled.
“It’s not fair,” she said.
“So not fair.”
But, inexplicably, Laura was still happy to be in Leningrad.
* * *
“I have the whole day off on Monday,” she told Alyosha on the phone the next time she called him. “For Women’s Day.”
“So do I,” he said, though she had the impression that he pretty much worked whenever he felt like it. “Will you celebrate with me?”
“How do you celebrate Women’s Day?”
“You’ll see.”
She had been lazy that day — it was snowing hard — and didn’t bother walking the extra blocks to the farther-away phone booth. The man with the glasses was back, walking his dog in the blizzard.
She put it out of her mind.
* * *
“Happy Women’s Day!” Nina had set flowers on the table and presented each of her roommates with a card. Laura opened hers. On the front was a painting of a red rose and the words MARCH 8. Inside it said, Congratulations on Women’s Day! and it was signed, Affectionately, Nina. Karen got a similar card, and then Nina presented them with a box of chocolates to share.
“Thank you, Nina,” Laura said. “Happy Women’s Day to you, too.”
She and Karen gave Nina a card and a box of Celestial Seasonings tea bags in assorted flavors.
Nina smiled and thanked them. She glowed happily as she bustled to the kitchen to make them all a pot of cinnamon tea. Everyone loved Women’s Day. Or, anyway, the women did.
“I got you something, too,” Karen said when Nina was out of the room. She gave Laura a handmade card, hastily drawn in pencil. On the front was a cartoon of Laura dressed like a babushka in an apron and head scarf. Inside, Karen had written, Dear Comrade Laura: May I congratulate you on being a woman. Now get off your ass and shovel some snow! Love, Comrade Karen.
“Very touching.” Laura made a show of clutching the card to her heart. “Thank you, Comrade Karen.”
“Natia invited me over for tea. Want to come? You’ll like her.”
“Can’t. I’m going to Alyosha’s.”
“Shocker.”
Maybe Laura was revolving her schedule around Alyosha, but she didn’t care. There was no one she liked better. And Alyosha had a place all to himself — however he’d managed to get it — even if it was all the way on the outskirts of the city.
* * *
He opened the door holding a large bunch of blue flowers. “Mademoiselle.” He kissed her hand. “I congratulate you on Women’s Day.”
“Thank you.”
He stepped aside to let her in. The apartment was warm and smelled deliciously of butter and onions. He put her flowers in a vase and set them on the kitchen table.
“What are you making?” Laura asked.
“Pelmenyi. Have you ever tried them?”
“No.” She’d heard of them but never tasted them.
“They’re good. They’ll be ready in a minute.”
He sautéed some onions in butter while some kind of dumplings boiled in a pot on the stove. She sat and watched him. He wouldn’t let her do anything to help, not even hand him a spatula.
“But I can’t just sit here,” she complained. “I feel useless.”
“All right,” he said. “Since you can’t stand being waited on, you can give me an English lesson.”
“Good. We’ll speak English all through dinner.” They were still speaking Russian.
“You’ll tell me the words I don’t know, though, right?” he said. “Because there will be many.”
“I’ll be your human dictionary. Starting … now.”
Now that they were suddenly supposed to speak English, she didn’t know what to say. She’d grown so used to speaking Russian with him that English felt unnatural. And that thought — along with the steam that filled the tiny kitchen when Alyosha drained the pelmenyi from the boiling pot — made her glow. Somehow along the way she’d become nearly fluent in Russian, even though she’d skipped a lot of language classes.
“Hey,” she said in English. “I just realized my Russian’s gotten pretty good.”
He tossed the dumplings in the butter sauce. “Um … slower?”
Speaking English with him was not going to be so easy. “Dumplings. Mmmm.” She smiled and rubbed her stomach, greedy with hunger.
He served her a plate of them drenched in butter. “Yes. Dumplings.”
She sniffed the steam that rose from the plate, fragrant with butter and onions. “Butter.”
He lifted the butter dish to show that he understood. Then he joined her at the table. She ate a dumpling. He waited for her reaction. “Tasty?” he asked in Russian.
She wagged a finger at him flirtatiously. “Uh-uh-uh. English only, please.”
“Good?”
She ate another dumpling. They were slippery, with little meatballs inside. “Very good.”
Slowly they ate. He watched with satisfaction as Laura finished all her pelmenyi. “Good job,” he declared. “Now you are member of Lenin Clean Plate Club. Wait — I get your … prize? No. Wait. I bring.”
He ran into the other room and soon returned with a star-shaped tin pi
n, enameled red, with a gold portrait in the center of Vladimir Lenin as a child. Underneath the portrait it said, Lenin Clean Plate Club in Russian. “From kindergarten. Age five.” He pinned it to her sweater. She laughed.
“So the legends are true. There really is a Lenin Clean Plate Club.”
“For real.” He took a sip of beer. “I have idea.”
“I have AN idea.”
“I have an idea. You read me in English. English book. After dinner.”
She liked the idea. “Which book?”
“You choose.”
So, after dinner, he refused her pleas to help him clean up and sent her into the other room to pick out something to read. She studied his short shelf of English books: Hemingway, Kerouac, Shakespeare, Jack London, Dickens. The movie tie-in paperback of The Great Gatsby he had mentioned before. She pulled out Great Expectations and opened it to the first page.
“ ‘My father’s family name being Pirrup, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. So I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.’ ”
Alyosha wouldn’t understand much of it, but the prose was so beautifully English. If he relaxed and let the words wash over him, he’d enjoy the sounds even if he didn’t know what they meant.
He came into the room with tea, and they settled on the bed to read. He nodded happily at the book she’d chosen. “I read book in Russian. In school. So I know story of Pip.”
“You need to work on your definite and indefinite articles,” she teased. “The. I read THE book. I know THE story.”
“You are THE bitch.”
She laughed. “No, there you need an indefinite article. A bitch.”
He leaned against the headboard with his mug of tea, unfazed. “Please to begin.”
She cleared her throat and began to read. The words tumbled out of her mouth like cinnamon candies. He closed his eyes and listened.
“ ‘Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening.’ ”
She paused to turn the page. He bolted up as if she’d presented him with an opportunity that he must immediately seize.
“Laura.”
She looked up from the book.
“I love you.”
He put down his tea and took the book from her hands. She was too startled to resist. He leaned forward across the bed and kissed her. It was gentle, but she felt the urgency behind it. He would not stop kissing her unless she made him stop.
“Liublyu tebya,” he whispered.
“English —”
“Nyet. English lesson is over.”
She didn’t want him to stop. She let herself fall back onto the bed and he followed, falling with her.
For the rest of the evening they spoke no more Russian, or English, but a language that they both understood completely.
She opened her eyes and found herself on the bed, on top of the blanket, in his arms. The radiator hissed. Her feet were cold. She didn’t know how much time had passed, but the room was dark. Daylight had fled and blue night pressed against the bedroom window. Outside, a dog howled and a tram clanked by on the way to its last stop.
“Hey — what time is it?” Laura lifted her head and glanced around for a clock. Alyosha checked the alarm clock beside the bed and frowned. “Oh no.” She sat up. It was almost midnight. “I missed the last train, didn’t I?” She spoke in Russian. It was automatic now.
“You’ll never make it in time.” Alyosha nuzzled her neck. “So why not spend the night here?”
“I’ll get in trouble. You don’t understand. My roommate Nina —”
“I know, she’s one of those Ninels, little female Lenins. But what choice do you have?”
“Can I get a taxi or a car or something?”
“Not all the way out here. I’m so sorry, my Laura, my little fish. I’m afraid you are stuck. No use worrying about it.” He brushed the hair off her forehead.
“But what if they kick me out of the program and send me home?”
“No one will know you are missing unless your roommate tells on you, right?”
“Right. But she’s” — here her Russian failed her and she couldn’t help slipping into English — “a total narc.”
“What is narc?” As far as Alyosha was concerned, the time for English was over. He stuck to Russian.
“A tattletale.”
“I know she seems like a slave to the system,” Alyosha said. “But deep down she knows the system she defends is not real. She’s just pretending.”
“She seems pretty sincere to me.”
“She’s pretending very hard. We’re all pretending. ‘We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.’ ”
Laura had heard that old joke before.
“You never know. Perhaps Ninel likes you. Perhaps she won’t turn you in. She just wants you to think that she will.”
“Or maybe she’s waiting for just the right moment….”
Her back stiffened as she imagined the consequences of not showing up for the night. But as he kissed her neck and ran a finger down her spine, she gradually relaxed until she found herself lying back on the bed, resigned to her fate.
“Rebyonok…”
“What does that mean?”
“ ‘My little fish.’ I don’t know why, you seem like a pretty little fish to me. I could call you kitten or little bird or tiny tiger, but…” He studied her face, running a finger along her cheekbone. “I don’t know why, but little fish just came to my lips. Maybe because your eyes are blue-gray like the sea.”
She liked it, this Russian business of endearments and nicknames. “What should I call you?”
“Wait and see. Perhaps something will come to you.” He leaned down to kiss her, and she thought of a tiger.
“I’m not sleepy,” she said.
“Then let’s get up.”
He fixed them tea and sandwiches. They played all his Neil Young records late into the night. Laura explained the lyrics that Alyosha didn’t understand, though she didn’t understand all of them herself.
They finally got tired at three in the morning. He turned out the light and they lay in the darkness. Laura felt calm and relaxed. Nina and the dorm had vanished from her thoughts. Alyosha’s eyes reflected the streetlight outside. They stared at the ceiling.
“Tell me a story,” she said in Russian.
“Hmm … Okay.” He turned on his side to face her, his arm draped over her ribs. “This is a story my mama used to tell me when I was little. Every Russian child knows it. It’s an old folktale called ‘The Fisherman and the Little Golden Fish.’ ”
Laura snuggled closer. It was warm under the covers but chilly outside. The tip of her nose felt cold. She warmed it against his shoulder.
“Once, a long time ago, there lived a poor old fisherman and his wife. They lived in a little tumbledown shack by the sea. The fisherman had been having very little luck. He cast his net into the ocean and pulled up nothing but mud. He threw the net again and came up with only seaweed. At last he tossed the net in one more time. This time he caught only one fish, but it was a golden fish such as he’d never seen before.
“ ‘Put me back in the ocean, old man, and I’ll give you whatever you wish,’ the fish said. The fisherman was shocked. He’d lived by the sea all his life, but he’d never heard a fish talk before. He felt sorry as he watched the lovely fish squirm in the net, so he carefully untangled it, saying, ‘Bless you, Golden Fish, but I don’t want anything from you. Go back to your ocean realm and roam free.’ The fisherman gently put the fish back into the ocean and he swam happily away.”
A fairy tale. Laura sighed happily. Alyosha ran a finger along her forearm as he told the story.
“The fisherman went home and told his wife about the golden fish. ‘He offered to grant me
whatever I wished, but how could I ask for anything? I had to let him go.’
“ ‘You fool!’ cried the wife. ‘You could have at least asked him for a new washtub. Ours is falling apart!’
“So the fisherman returned to the sea and called to the fish, ‘Little golden fish, grant me a wish….’ The fish appeared in a blink and asked, ‘What is it? What do you want?’
“The fisherman bowed. ‘Forgive me, Your Majesty Golden Fish, but my wife wants a new washtub.’
“ ‘Your wish has been granted. Go home and there you’ll find a new washtub.’
“ ‘Oh, thank you, kind fish!’ cried the fisherman as the fish swam away.
“The fisherman ran home, and behold! There was a new washtub. But his wife wasn’t happy. ‘All you asked for is a washtub, when we could have had anything? You could have at least asked him for a new cottage. Look at this ramshackle dump we live in!’ ”
Laura laughed.
“So the fisherman went back to the seashore and called to the fish: Little golden fish, grant me a wish…. ‘Forgive me, Your Majesty Golden Fish, but my wife won’t stop scolding me, and now she wants a new cottage.’
“ ‘It is done. Go home and see.’ ”
Laura yawned and grew sleepy as Alyosha went on, telling how the fisherman’s greedy wife kept asking for more. First she wanted a cottage, then to be a fine lady in a mansion, and then to be a czaritsa in a palace, and the richer and grander she became, the meaner she was to her husband — except when she wanted him to ask the Golden Fish for more. Little golden fish, grant me a wish….
By the time Alyosha finished the story, Laura was asleep. She didn’t hear how it ended.
A beam of sunlight lasered through a crack in the curtains. Alyosha kissed the spot where the light landed on Laura’s cheek. “Happy Day-After-Women’s-Day,” he said.
He got up to open the curtain, and the room flooded with sun. She smiled and stretched. “I’m going to be so late for class.” She wished she could stay there forever, nestled in that small apartment with Alyosha.