by Lara Vapnyar
“Inka had a theory about cheating time too. She came up with it while simultaneously reading The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. She said that the Tales were about telling stories with the purpose of suppressing time, killing it so the journey seemed faster. And the Nights were about telling stories to stretch time, to make it stop so that you don’t die. It’s over as soon as your last story is over, you see? But as long as the story continues, it’s never over.”
“You have to go through the motions in order not to die—great theory. Listen, how old were you when you first started thinking about death?”
“I don’t know. Ten, twelve, I think. You?”
“Six.”
“Six, really?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“You knew you would die at six?”
“I didn’t know for sure, but I was scared that I might. I’ve developed a lot of devices to fight it off.”
Lena peered at Ben, trying to imagine what he looked like as a child. It had been easier to imagine him as a teenager, when he was talking about his school the night before. But a child, a six-year-old? She looked at his eyes. Eyes change very little with age. He must have had the same eyes. Dark, alert, inquisitive.
“What were your devices?”
“Yes. The most important thing is to be on top of it.”
“To be on top of death?”
“Yes. You can’t let it get ahead of you, take you by surprise, you have to anticipate every possible way you might die, and vividly imagine how it will happen. The idea is that nothing happens exactly the way you imagine it. So if you imagine everything and in every detail, nothing will happen.”
“Yes, that makes sense.”
“I was in a car crash once, the tires blew out, and the car went spinning right in the middle of the highway with busy traffic. For a few seconds, I was absolutely sure that I’d die. So in those seconds, I vividly imagined my funeral. See?”
“Wow. Impressive.”
“And you thought you had a fear of death.”
“Hey! You seem to be very possessive. Fine, I grant you the exclusive rights to fear of death. How did it start, by the way? Was it triggered by something? An event or a conversation?”
“No. I just got it. I was lying in bed one night and I got it. All of a sudden. First about my parents. Then right after that about myself. And there weren’t any illusions either. Heaven? Reincarnation? Please! Those were for idiots. I knew that I’d turn into nothing. There was me, and then—snap—there would be nothing. Just like that.”
“Nothing?”
“Yep. Nothing. I imagine nothing as this half-physical environment. Murky and sickening and scary as hell. And then I had to live with this knowledge. Days were okay, more or less, not really okay, of course, but there were ways to distract myself. But at night I would lie and think about it for hours.”
Ben’s eyes squinted a little. He seemed to enjoy telling about his miseries.
“For hours? And you were only six?”
“Yes.”
“Couldn’t you tell your parents?”
“You see, I knew that they’d have to lie to me. About heaven, or going into the ground and eventually turning into a flower, or about a magic drug or some such shit. And they would know that I didn’t believe them, and I would know that they knew, and we would all feel like idiots. I had this recurring nightmare. I would be doing something and suddenly feel that She was somewhere near and getting closer.”
“She?”
“She. Her. I called her She. Just She.”
“What did She look like?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never seen Her. That was the whole point—to do whatever I could to avoid seeing Her. I knew that as soon as She appeared something horrible would happen. Unspeakably horrible. And the only way to save myself was to wake up before She made it to me.”
“How can you possibly make yourself wake up?”
“I had different tricks.”
“Tell me!”
“Oh, come on! You’re just making fun of me!”
“No, I genuinely want to know how to fight death. What if I meet it one day?”
Ben laughed.
“One was to go and take a cold shower, there in my dream. Or sometimes I just had to shut my eyes really tight and make a serious effort to open them.”
“In your dream?”
“Yes, in my dream.”
“Did it work?”
“Sometimes I would open my eyes and wake up, there, in my bed, and that was good. But other times I would open my eyes and wake up someplace else. And that meant that I wasn’t awake, that I was simply in some other dream. But the most frightening thing of all was when I opened my eyes and found myself in my bed, but knew that I hadn’t woken up, that I was still in my dream. Then I knew that She’d come for sure.”
A passing car honked at them. Lena looked at the speedometer. It showed 50 mph. Ben must have been too much into his story to keep up with the flow of traffic. She found it touching.
“There was this one time at the cabin,” he said. “It happened at the cabin. I woke up in the middle of the night with an acute feeling that there was something in the room. Some presence. I thought it was a moose, but then I realized that the moose couldn’t possibly have gotten in. So it must be Her. There was only one bed. My father and I shared a bed, and he took up a lot of space, so I wound up very close to the wall. The cabin was made from these exposed logs. They were dark and stringy. I imagined squeezing inside them, hiding from Her. I kept tossing and turning, until my forehead touched the wall. I never realized how fuzzy it was. Ticklish. For some reason, I found it comforting, I knew that as long as I had my forehead pressed against that wall, She wouldn’t get me. I felt so relieved that I started to cry.”
Ben fell silent and peered ahead. Then he shook his head. Lena thought she saw tears in his eyes, but she wasn’t sure.
“I can’t believe I just told all this stuff to you. You must think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t. I told you crazier stuff anyway.”
“No, you didn’t.”
She wondered if he was possessive about craziness as well, and decided not to argue.
“So, you spent a lot of time in that cabin?” she asked.
“No, not really. Dad built the cabin when I was little and he would go there whenever he had a chance. To get away from my mother, I guess. She hated the woods, and so he picked this very remote place, deep in the wilderness, knowing she would never come. Sometimes—a couple of times a year—he would bring me along to toughen me up a little. In the summer he’d teach me how to swim, and kayak, and fish. In the winter he’d teach me to cross-country ski. He really hated the thought that I was becoming a sniveling little worm.”
“Sniveling worm? Is that an expression?”
“My dad’s invention. He was born in Romania. He came here in his twenties, so he spoke with a slight accent, but he loved making up words and expressions.”
“My father used to do that too. He called our cat Mokrohvost (WetTail in English), because it brushed against his feet with its wet tail once.”
“Is he still alive?”
“My father? Yes. He lives in St. Petersburg with his new family. Yours?”
“Dad? No. No. Dad died thirty years ago. I was fifteen.”
“Did you like going to the cabin with him?”
Ben scratched his face.
“I don’t know. I loved it and I hated it. He never told me if he was taking me until the last moment.
“He would ask my mother to pack his things, and then add that she should pack my stuff too. I would get crazy with anticipation. And on the way there, I’d talk nonstop about all the things that we were going to do there, and how I would shoot a moose or catch the biggest fish. Dad was usually in a pretty good mood on the way there, so he would smile at me and pat me on the head and tell me stories about things he’d done when he was there alone and about all the animals that he’d seen.�
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Ben turned his neck back and forth. Then he continued.
“Winter trips were my favorite. It was more of an adventure, because the car would often get stuck and we’d have to shovel the snow, and I thought I was pretty good at it. And also I always loved the first hour of our skiing trips. The scent of pines, and snow, and ski varnish. The ease of the skis against the fresh snow, the swishy sound the poles made, and how we’d stop for tea. We’d stand leaning against a tree and Dad would pour us some from the thermos. I loved that thermos. It came in a ragged leather case and had a white plastic knob screwed on so tight that only Dad could open it, and a real cork under the knob and a blue strap so that you could carry it. We would drink the tea and Dad would tell me stories how he used to go skiing back in Romania and here, in Maine, the snow was almost as good. You must understand. Do you ever feel like that?”
“Like what?”
“That things here are almost as good?”
“Oh, yeah. All the time. The good woods are especially hard to find. And snow. How I love snow.”
“Dad loved snow too. I guess he loved snow more than I did. There were things that I positively hated about snow. It would stick to my skis on the way back, and make them heavier and heavier with each step, how I was cold and hot and sweaty at the same time. And how Dad’s back would get smaller and smaller ahead of me, farther and farther away, and how he’d turn and yell ‘What a sissy!’ By the time we drove back to New Jersey, Dad would act like he was sick of me, he wouldn’t speak, except to yell at me not to touch the water because he wasn’t going to do a bathroom break every five seconds. I used to think that this was all my fault, because I’d been such a disappointment. But now I think he was that way because he loathed the idea of going back home.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
“Yes. She lives in Florida. She seems to be happy there. Does your mom live here or in Russia?”
“She died a few years ago.”
“Do you miss her?”
“I do. A lot. Do you miss your dad?”
“I do.”
Lena thought how strange it was that when she’d first seen this man two days ago, he had been just a half-naked stranger. All she knew about him was that he could swim and had blue swimming trunks with a rather large whale on them. Now he was swiftly and irrevocably accumulating peculiarities, stories, details of the past. Only within this past day Ben acquired a car filled with all sorts of baggage such as an old juicer and his high school notebook, a thorny relationship with his dad, a powerful fear of death, and a crimped muscle in his neck. He was shedding his strangeness whether she wanted him to or not. As was she. The thought was both scary and exhilarating.
Ben touched her hand, then moved his hand away and put it back onto the wheel.
“Will you continue with your story?” he asked.
She smiled and reached for the water bottle.
“So Kostik was the first guy that disappeared. Who is next?”
“Danya. Danya is the next guy I met, but he wasn’t the next guy that disappeared. I met him at the clubhouse.
“Yanina caught me one day after lunch and said, ‘Lena, you’re neat enough, follow me.’ She led me to the clubhouse, where she showed me a few pairs of shoulder straps made of paper. ‘The kids will be singing the Pilots’ Song at the concert, so we need pilot uniforms for them,’ Yanina explained. ‘Their own white shirts and dark pants will do; all we need is shoulder straps. Sixty of them. But make sure to make them neat. The last girl wasn’t very good, as you can see.’
“The task seemed simple enough. I studied the straps on the table. A blue rectangle. Two golden stripes in the middle. Three golden stars forming a triangle.
“Cutting out rectangles was boring but easy. Making one hundred and twenty narrow stripes was manageable too. It was hard to keep them parallel, but I persuaded myself that Yanina wouldn’t care if they were parallel or not. The stars were the real problem. After long and painful practice, I did learn how to draw a star that was almost perfect. But no matter what I did, I could not cut it out. All my stars came out misshapen and missing points. It got even worse when I tried to glue them on. They would stick to anything—the table, the floor, my fingertips, my hair, my T-shirt, my knees—but the straps. And so I sat with scissors in my hands, smeared with glue, covered with tiny golden stars.
“There were only two rooms in our clubhouse. A bigger one with a stage and a wobbly piano, and a smaller one with all the art supplies, paints, chisels, big slabs of gray modeling clay, and even a workbench table. There was a strong smell of paint, glue, and freshly sawed wood. A ray of sunlight went from the window straight to my table, as if to mock me. It was nap time. So the kids were napping or at least caged and quiet, and Inka could do whatever she wanted. I imagined her outside, on the blanket, with a book, or with my Art of Cinema, trying to read, pushing the book aside, turning onto her stomach, dozing off. And I was stuck here in the back room of the clubhouse, with scissors in my hands, with all these sheaves of blue and golden paper spread in front of me.
“ ‘Hi,’ somebody said. A guy in a soldier’s uniform stood in the doorway with a paintbrush in his hand. I was so engrossed in my misery that I hadn’t heard him walk in. His eyes were dark blue. I recognized him right away. He was the wooden-faced guy I saw at the disco.
“I said ‘Hi’ back.”
Danya. Lena was talking about Danya now. Danya of twenty years ago. She felt a painful constriction in her throat. She mentally begged Ben not to interrupt her, and he didn’t. He just sat there silently. Staring ahead.
She continued: “He went to the storage room and returned with a half-finished painting on a large canvas, and a box with oil paints.
“ ‘What are these?’ he asked, pointing at the straps.
“ ‘Just this thing I’m making for the concert.’
“I didn’t want him to see all the ugly stars or the ruined glue-smeared rectangles. I grabbed an old newspaper and put it on top of the pile, but a few straps fell to the floor. Danya picked one up. It had one stripe in the middle and two stars of slightly different sizes and shapes.
“ ‘Is that a shoulder strap?’ he asked. ‘Which rank?’
“ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, taking the strap from him.
“I wanted him to stop staring at my hideous straps, and so I asked about the painting he was working on.
“ ‘The letter D,’ he said and headed to a worktable opposite mine. ‘I am supposed to write “Dobro Pozhalovat” to welcome the visitors, and Avadeniy said that the letter D should represent camp life. I don’t know why. Vedenej’s idea.’
“We continued to work in silence.
“ ‘Come look, if you want,’ he said after a while.
“I walked over.
“The letter D was about three by two feet.
“I peered closer and saw that the D was drawn as two pines forming a triangle with their tops touching. On the bottom of the D was grass with berries and mushrooms. A bunny was peeking out from behind one of the tree trunks, and a squirrel was climbing up the other.
“ ‘Wild strawberries don’t grow under pines,’ I said.
“ ‘Is that right?’ he said, and added some more strokes of red paint to the grass to draw more strawberries. I couldn’t think of another thing to say.
“ ‘Do you want to try?’ he asked, and handed me a clean brush. The brush was larger, lighter than I’d expected, with really soft bristles. I leaned over the painting, careful not to touch any part of him.
“ ‘I have never painted anything with a large paintbrush,’ I said.
“ ‘It’s easy.’
“ ‘I like the smell of paint. Is this oil?’
“ ‘Yes. Don’t be scared. Dip the brush into this jar and make a stroke right here.’
“ ‘Here?’
“ ‘Yes. I need to color in the trunks.’
“ ‘You’re making them blue?’
&nb
sp; “ ‘Brown. Blue is for the shadows. They would look flat if not for the blue.’
“ ‘I can’t. I’ll ruin it.’
“ ‘No you won’t. Dip the brush. Yes, like that.’
“ ‘Like that?’
“ ‘Uh-huh. Not too much paint. It shouldn’t drip.’
“ ‘That much?’
“ ‘Even less than that.’
“ ‘So I just make a stroke here?’
“ ‘Yeah.’
“ ‘Like that?’
“ ‘Yeah. Just do it. Don’t leave the brush hanging there!’
“But I couldn’t bring myself to make that stroke, and I left the brush hanging there and it dripped. A big fat smudge of blue in the middle of the grass. I looked at Danya in horror.
“ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll make a hedgehog out of it. This is just what my letter D was missing—a blue hedgehog.’
“ ‘I like hedgehogs,’ I said.
“ ‘Are you going to the dance on Friday?’ Danya asked.
“I nodded.
“ ‘I’ll see you there,’ he said.
“I nodded again. It was then that he smiled for the first time.
“Nap time was over. I picked up the straps and ran to our unit. There I laid them on the table in the lobby and went upstairs. My heart was beating like crazy. I could still feel the weight of the brush in my hand, my shock when the paint dripped onto the painting, the smell of paint.
“The straps were the first thing that I saw when I went downstairs the next morning. All sixty of them were laid out in neat rows. All done perfectly. Golden stars shining brightly against the blue. It could only be Danya. He saw how upset I was over the stars. He wanted to help me. He was my knight in shining armor. He must have sneaked into the building after everybody was asleep. He must have worked for hours. I couldn’t believe Danya did that for me! He must have really, really liked me. I kept stroking them with my fingers with a big silly smile on my face.”
