by Lara Vapnyar
Inka laughed and prodded Lena with her elbow to remind her to laugh as well. Inka’s excitement was heightened by the fact that her brand-new love interest, Grisha Klein, was at the pool, scrubbing a long wooden bench with two other soldiers. She kept looking in his direction, and even though he didn’t seem to have noticed her, his mere presence made her want to laugh, shriek, and squeal.
Other girls started to run around the pool squealing, even though nobody was pushing or chasing them. But it didn’t take too long for the boys to take the cue, and soon many girls were in the water. Some girls would slip and fall on the boards and the running boys would jump right over them. The cold and the smell of poop didn’t seem to bother anybody anymore. The boy in blue briefs, who had started all this, ran up to the bunch of squealing girls and froze for a second while determining which one to pick, and then he turned away from them, ran up to the counselors’ bench, grabbed Dena’s hand, and before anybody could react, pushed her into the pool.
“I’m wearing my watch, you fucking idiot!” Dena yelled when she climbed out of the pool.
“My watch! You ruined my watch!” And she shook her wrist in the air. But nobody was interested in her watch; everybody was staring at her chest. At the dark contours of her breasts under her wet shirt, and at her nipples that looked as if she wasn’t wearing anything at all and were sharp and long like erasers on the tips of pencils.
Dena followed our stares, gasped, screamed, covered her breasts, and started to laugh like crazy.
It was then the soldiers stopped what they had been doing and joined the game. Other soldiers started to chase the counselors. Most of the counselors jumped off the bench and were now running around the pool with the kids. The more practical of them removed their watches first and left them on the bench. Soon it was a stampede of people, big and small, dressed and undressed, boot-clad and barefoot. The boards creaked under all those feet.
Lena looked for Danya, but he was still in the back, still painting that fence.
“Come on! They’re gonna get us here!” Inka screamed as she jumped off the chair and ran. She didn’t run away from the pool, though, but rather toward the soldiers, closer to the action.
Lena stayed put.
“So we now have the pool, right?” Vedenej asked. He had this amazing skill of materializing out of nowhere and sneaking up on you.
Lena nodded.
Vedenej surveyed the scene.
“The kids are having fun?” He squinted at Lena as if unsure that he’d said the right thing, or that he’d grasped the situation correctly.
She nodded again.
And then Inka came out of the pool. She was spitting water, her hair was flat and sticking to her head, mascara smeared all over her face. But who cared? Everybody was staring at the wet moving mass of her chest. Grisha Klein dropped the wire brush he had been holding and stared at Inka’s chest too. He looked spellbound, as if he’d never seen breasts before. It was love at first sight. Well, at first sight in the right direction.
Then somebody whistled. Other soldiers joined in. Inka squealed and ran to the bench. Vedenej finally looked at her. His eyes popped. Only then did he get what the fun was all about.
He chuckled, obviously unsure what the appropriate reaction would be. He wrinkled his forehead, trying to pick the right one out of a variety of different reactions. Then he chuckled again and looked at Lena with great determination.
Lena saw in his eyes that he was going to throw her into the pool, but she didn’t believe it. Not Major Vedeneev! Not the camp director! She still couldn’t believe it when he walked up to her, and when he leaned over, and when his hands were on her waist, and even when she was lifted in the air. All that time she’d thought that this was some kind of a joke and in the end he’d let her go. And then she broke through the pool surface with a great big splash, which she couldn’t hear, and felt the deafening water closing above her head, and the cold, and then, when she emerged and took a deep breath, the smell of rotten frog poop all around her face.
Lena swam to the ladder and tried to grab the railings, but her hands were shaking from the shock and she couldn’t get a good grip. She was just hanging there in the water when she saw Danya squatting by the edge of the pool. “Do you need help?” he asked, and the next instant she was in his arms. She remembered how enormous she felt after her first meeting with Danya. This time, she didn’t feel enormous at all. She felt rescued for a second, but the next instant she felt very small, and helpless, and exposed, and she wanted to cry.
“Are you okay?” he asked Lena as she stood shivering by the edge of the pool. She nodded and ran to the bench to get a towel.
Inka was waiting for her there: “Look, somebody’s in trouble!” she said. She pointed toward Yanina, who had appeared at the pool out of nowhere and was scolding her husband. But Lena didn’t care. Her encounter with Danya was all she could think about.
She saw him later that day, during the kids’ naptime, as she sat by her unit with a book.
“Hi,” Danya said.
She said “hi” too.
“I wanted to check how you were doing,” he said.
She said that she was fine.
He sat down across from her at the table. He wasn’t saying anything. Lena wasn’t saying anything either. She just kept opening and closing her book. They broke the silence at the same time. He said: “So how’s camp life?” and she said: “So what’ve you been—”
He chuckled and said that he’d been busy at the base, but now Yanina had summoned him back to prepare stuff for the concert. Mostly drawing bunnies and hedgehogs.
He said he loved to draw people, but not animals, because all the animals in his drawings looked freeze-dried. Lena said that her favorite animal was a pig, but she’d never seen a piglet up close. He said that he’d seen many piglets, when he visited his grandmother in Ukraine, and told me how they ran around in packs, and how he tried to feed them carrots. Lena said that she used to imagine that icicles were magical crystal carrots that could grant you any wish. Danya said that he wanted to go to the Arts Academy, but they didn’t accept him. He was planning to try again after his army term was over. Lena said that she was heartbroken that they didn’t accept her into acting school. Danya said that his favorite novel was Heinlein’s Door into Summer. Lena had never heard of it. He said there was this cat in the book who hated cold and snow, there were twelve doors in the house and the cat would go from one door to the next, hoping that at least one of them would open into summer.
There was something frantic about the way they talked. As if they felt that they must hurry, that it was absolutely necessary to spill all these things without wasting a second. But there was also a sense, not a sense but a vague prickly awareness, that the things that they said to each other didn’t really matter, that underneath all that talking something else was going on between them, something far more important and urgent.
They both started when they heard the call for afternoon snack.
“Is it five?” Danya asked. “I have to get back.”
“Okay,” Lena said.
He looked at her as if he didn’t know what to say next.
“You’re not like other girls. I like that. I like you a lot.” He reached over to hug her. His fingers were very strong, Lena could feel them pressing hard into her back. She turned up her face, and he kissed her with such giddy force that they swayed.
Lena was too stunned to feel anything during the kiss, but afterward whenever she evoked the sensation, it made her dizzy with desire.
“Tomorrow night, okay?” Danya said.
She agreed, without even asking what he meant.
And over the past couple of days, Lena thought, there was something similar in the way Ben and she talked. Not that the things they said to each other weren’t important, but the fact that they were sharing them at all had more significance.
Lena’s teeth started to chatter. She must have been swimming for a long time. She got out of
the lake and ran to wrap herself in the towel.
When she got back to the cabin, Ben was already up and dressed. He sat crouched by the fire ring lighting a new fire for their breakfast. The air smelled of burning logs and oranges. The juicer lay on the grass by the fire ring, several halved oranges beside it on a paper towel.
“Hi!” she said.
He said: “Good morning. Get dressed, and get ready for the best breakfast you’ve ever had.”
But when Lena returned, Ben was still struggling with the juicer.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with it—it’s stuck.”
He tried to pry it open with a knife, but it wouldn’t yield.
“Oh, come on!” Ben said and, in a burst of energy, threw the thing into the lake.
“Ben!” Lena moved toward the lake as if she could somehow save it, but he put his hand on her arm. For a moment they both looked out in silence at the spot where it had disappeared beneath the surface.
“Yeah, just like that,” he said, “a huge chunk of my past is gone.”
Lena was sad for him, until she began to wonder if it wasn’t such a bad idea to be getting rid of some cumbersome chunks of one’s past.
They sliced the oranges and ate them like that. Then they toasted some bread over the fire, and ate it with butter and jam. Juice or no juice, Lena had to agree that this really was the best breakfast she had ever eaten.
Then they went for a walk along the path that crept around the lake.
The fog had finally lifted, and splashes of sunlight brought the woods into focus with painful intensity. The blue lake. The different shades of green on the opposite bank. The sharp white of the birch trunks. Silvery cobwebs quivering in the sun. The birch branch that bent over the lake in an arch. The clear water. The glistening boulders on the bottom.
The air became heavy, and it seemed like it was pressing down on their shoulders.
“It’s going to rain,” Lena said. “Don’t you think it’s going to rain?”
“I don’t know.”
They headed toward the north shore of the lake, where the woods were dense with pine trees. Tiny beads of water stuck to every single needle. The beads were not glittery at all, and not transparent, but milky, opaque. The air smelled like wet pines, like pines and lake, and in her mouth it tasted like pines and lake too, tangy and fresh.
Ben put his arms around her shoulders and held her close. He smelled just like the woods, though maybe it was his clothes, saturated with the smells of the cabin.
“Will you tell me about Danya?” Ben asked.
Lena started: “Danya? Why?”
“He was the third guy that disappeared, right?”
She said, “No, Sasha Simonov was the third.”
“Sasha?”
“Yes, Sasha, the crazy little boy from my unit. The one that had vomiting fits.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember.”
“It happened during Parents Day.”
Lena looked at the trunks of the pines. No two looked alike—she had never noticed that before. Some were pleated, some scaly, some cracked like dried soil, some stripped of bark, bald and yellow. So huge, so strong, yet strangely vulnerable, capable of feeling pain. They looked amazingly like the pines at the camp.
“Parents Day started with a frantic search for clean clothes.
“ ‘You have to remember three things,’ Yanina told us. ‘Make the parents feel welcome, make sure they see that you care about their kids, and make the kids wear clean clothes.’
“Inka and I spent the whole morning rummaging in the kids’ suitcases, digging through the clothes that, by this stage in the summer, were so dirty they stuck together, trying to find something that was at least moderately clean. Having made our choices, we had to scrub the dirty spots with our fingers. Inka was angry at Yanina for making us do it, but I didn’t mind. I was going on a date with Danya later that night, and I was so nervous that I was grateful for any distraction.
“The kids didn’t look much cleaner than their clothes. We debated whether we should make them take showers, but we decided it would be too much trouble, and anyway, if the parents wanted their kids to be clean, they shouldn’t have sent them to summer camp. Before the parents arrived, we looked them over one last time and declared them fine. In any case, they looked much better than the kids from the adjacent unit, who had filled the empty crate with dirt and claimed that it was a sandbox.
“Of course, the first thing that the parents did was to try and scrub their kids clean. Most of them arrived on three buses at about the same time. They marched from the gates to the units, where the kids had been waiting like overexcited puppies. They hugged and kissed their squealing kids, and then, almost right away, the mothers knelt down and started cleaning them. In a pretty close reenactment of how we’d just spent our day, they rubbed the dirty spots on the kids’ shirts between their fingers, tried to wipe their knees, or spit on their handkerchiefs and rub their faces. All the while throwing reproachful looks at us. And some of them even pulled clean shirts out of their bags and make the kids change right on the spot.
“After that we took the parents along with the kids on a tour of the grounds. We had been taught to introduce the buildings in a positive light. Like ‘Our cafeteria, where they prepare all meals from scratch, all fresh and healthy.’ Or ‘This is our beautiful swimming pool, the kids will start swimming soon.’ But the kids, of course, wouldn’t let us talk. They wanted to be the ones to describe everything. ‘This is where we eat, they give us cubes of butter on a plate, they never give us extra compote.’ Or ‘See this boy? It’s Sasha Simonov—he puked all over me the other day!’ or ‘That’s where UFOs land. Yes, they do. Yes, we’ve seen them! They hit one girl on the head, her brains oozed out of the hole!’
“Everybody was getting ready for the main activity of the day—stuffing the kids with food that the parents had brought. My eyes popped when I saw the parents open their bags and spread the contents on the picnic tables or, in some cases, right on the grass. Boiled eggs, salami, cheese, potatoes, pickles, pies, cakes, whole roasted chickens, canned meat, canned peaches, fresh peaches, cherries, watermelons, caviar, chocolate, and, of course, candy. Tons and tons of candy.
“As the tradition of our camp went, counselors were expected to sit down and eat something with each family, and at first, Inka and I were excited about the idea, but by our sixth or seventh roasted chicken leg and caviar sandwich, all we wanted was to lie down on the grass and fall asleep. But no, we had to eat more, and smile at the parents, and show them how much we loved their kids.
“Alesha Pevtcov, obviously nervous, took Inka’s hand and walked her to his parents’ table. His hair was combed to the right side and smoothed with either water or his mother’s saliva. His parents looked just like him, and, in fact, remarkably like each other, both small and fair-haired, with pale eyes and colorless brows.
“ ‘This is my counselor,’ Alesha said, and blushed. He looked as if he were introducing his bride. Alesha’s mother looked Inka over just like somebody would look over a future daughter-in-law. It was clear she didn’t approve of Inka’s puffed up, multicolored hair.
“Myshka’s parents, on the other hand, looked nothing like Myshka. They were squat and plump, extremely well fed and well groomed, just like prize pigs at the fair. They both beamed at me and kept thanking me for taking such wonderful care of their daughter. When I finally got up from their table, Myshka’s mother gave me a five-pound box of chocolate candy.
“Around three we led everybody to the club for the concert. My kids sang the Pilots’ Song. They wore dark shorts and skirts, and white T-shirts (distributed by Yanina). All the T-shirts turned out to be too big. I helped the kids adhere Danya’s shoulder straps to their sleeves. The kids sang badly, but they looked so small and touching in those bulky T-shirts, with the beautiful golden stars on the blue background.
“And then it was time to say good-bye to the parents. Counselors who had older kids looked a
t Inka and me with pity.
“ ‘Good luck, girls,’ Dena said.
“ ‘Why?’ Inka asked.
“ ‘Didn’t you go to summer camp as children?’ Dena asked.
“We shook our heads.
“ ‘Then you’ll see.’
“A big procession went to the gates. Parents with children, counselors who were going to take the children back to their units, and a few soldiers. Everybody was calm, subdued, a little tired, a little sluggish. Nobody was talking. We could hear birds and cicadas and the wind droning through the tips of the pines. But once the procession reached the gates, it was as if somebody flipped the channel, and a movie suddenly started, where everybody had a familiar role, which he or she played with varying degrees of sincerity and intensity. Teenage boys would successfully dodge their mothers’ hugs and run off, teenage girls would soon run off too, but not before hugging and kissing their mothers. The smaller children clutched their parents, some getting ahold of the hem of their mothers’ skirts, others hugging their fathers’ legs, burying their faces in their stomachs, grabbing their hands. And as the parents tried to free themselves from their children’s clutches, the crying began. By that time we were pretty much used to children crying, but we had never heard them all cry at the same time. Some sniveled, some sobbed, some wailed, some bawled, some howled, others made sounds that didn’t seem human at all. Then the buses rolled to the gates and the parents looked at us and the other counselors with pleading expressions. We tried to reason with the children. And when that failed, we tried to take their hands, and yes, grab them by their waists and physically drag them away from their parents. When we finally gathered our children and brought them back to our unit, some still sniveling, others calm and energized, Inka said, ‘It’s kind of strange that Simonov didn’t throw a tantrum.’ I was kind of surprised too. And then we saw Sasha sitting on the porch of our unit with his back to the bushes. His face was tear-streaked, but he appeared to be calm. He was quietly showing his new set of expensive felt pens to another boy, whose parents hadn’t come. ‘Look,’ Sasha said, ‘it even has purple and azure and neon green. You need neon green if you want to draw real aliens.’
