The Scent of Pine

by Lara Vapnyar

  “Is that you?” Ben asked. “Was he in love with you?”

  “Oh my God. He was ten!” Lena said.

  “I would’ve fallen in love with you when I was ten.”

  Next there was a long and rather boring series of frames depicting a walk in the woods. Lena skimmed through, until a page-sized rendition of a hedgehog made her stop. The boy was holding the hedgehog in his outstretched hands, about to give it to Lena. But Lena declined the gift.

  “It can’t be kept captive,” she said. “It will die of boredom and gloom.”

  The eyes of the hedgehog were actually clouded with sadness. Lena had never seen anything like that.

  “Amazing drawing, isn’t it?” Ben asked. He was right next to her. Exuding heat and the smell of campfire smoke. His hand on her shoulder. Studying the drawings at the same time as she was. It felt very intimate. Perhaps too intimate.

  The next frame was almost entirely dark, with the barely distinguishable silhouette of Lena hovering over the boy’s bed.

  “Every night, I waited for her to come and sit by my bed.”

  “Do you think Inka meant Sasha? Was he your secret admirer?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know. I never thought of him that way,” Lena said. She thought of Inka’s expression. She said “secret admirer” with a smirk. She must have seen the book. She must have meant Sasha.

  “Every night the counselors would go on dates with soldiers. Lena was the only one that stayed with us. I hoped and prayed it would always be this way. It wasn’t.”

  There was a drawing of a dark camp unit seen from outside. The lonely figure of Lena by the window.

  The next frame was flooded with colors and light. It showed a dance floor in the middle with big waves coming off it to signify vibrations, and lyrics from different songs popping up here and there—one sillier than the next. Ugly figures were dancing, or rather contorting and twisting their bodies. Some of the kids were dancing as well. Sasha and Lena were standing by the fence. Holding hands. Looking on.

  In the next frame Lena lets go of Sasha’s hand and steps forward. She is dancing. Twisting her body at impossible angles. Close-up of Sasha standing alone, his eyes clouded with sadness just like those of the hedgehog.

  The next frame depicted Lena standing by the picnic table holding hands with an ape-like guy in a soldier’s uniform.

  “The first one’s name was Kostik. He was a moron.”

  The next frame was exactly the same with Kostik and Lena holding hands, except that Kostik was crossed out with two fat red lines.

  “I wasn’t going to take it.”

  Lena swallowed and looked at Ben. She had a hunch that something disturbing would be revealed in the next pages, and she didn’t want to discover it in Ben’s presence. She thought of suggesting they go to bed, and finishing the story alone after Ben was asleep. But Ben had already turned the page.

  CASTOR OIL + LENA = THE RUNS

  DATE + THE RUNS = DATE RUINED

  Following the equation was a drawing of a jar with sour cherry jam with instructions on how to mix some castor oil into a jar of jam.

  “Was that what happened?” Ben asked.

  Lena tried to remember. She remembered Inka giving them sour cherry jam that she had snatched from the kids. Everybody except for Lena had some. Lena hadn’t wanted any jam, because she had a toothache. They kept trying to persuade her to have some, but she was firm. Was it possible that Sasha could have poured castor oil into a jar of jam, and then made sure Inka “discovered” it? Yes, it was possible. Inka was famous for taking sweets from the kids. And then as she and Kostik went on that romantic walk to the phone booth, the castor oil started to work. No wonder Kostik acquired that tortured expression.

  Lena looked at Ben: “But why did he disappear?”

  “I don’t know. He just shat his pants and didn’t want you to notice?”

  Lena laughed and shook her head: “Poor Kostik.”

  She turned to the next page and was shocked by its sudden burst of color—a bright blue with tiny golden stars sprinkled across the page.

  The following picture showed Lena crying over the pile of misshapen shoulder straps.

  “Here was my chance to make her notice me.”

  The next series of frames showed Sasha tiptoeing out of the bedroom at night, going downstairs, opening the envelope with the shoulder straps and setting to work.

  “Sasha Simonov? Sasha Simonov was the one who made the stars for me? Not Danya, but Sasha?”

  “Really? It was Sasha?” Ben asked.

  “Apparently. There is no reason he would have made that up. And this makes much more sense too. I’ve wondered how Danya managed to sneak in at night to take the straps and then to bring them back.”

  She sighed and flipped to the next page. She felt embarrassed, disappointed, stupid, and even angry with Danya. Even though it was illogical, especially after all these years. He had never known about the straps. They had never, not once, discussed them. He didn’t know that she thought he was the one who made them. He didn’t know that she’d used them as a point of reference for all these years. Every time Lena had doubted Danya’s feelings, she would tell herself to think of the straps.

  “She didn’t even thank me,” Sasha complained in the next caption.

  Lena thought of little Sasha doing that heroic deed for her, expecting a smile, praise, waiting anxiously for her to notice the straps, seeing how happy they made her, and finally being met with her perfect indifference.

  “But I didn’t know it was him,” Lena said to Ben.

  Ben nodded.

  “I mean, even if I hadn’t thought it was Danya, how would I know it was Sasha?”

  “Well, he was probably the only one in your unit who was good at art.”

  “That’s true. He was.”

  Lena sighed and turned the page.

  The following frames told the story of Vasyok stealing salami to win Lena’s heart and Sasha spying on him, and then telling on Vasyok to Vedenej.

  “What a little shit he was!” Lena said.

  “He was mad at you for not acknowledging the stars.”

  “Still.”

  Lena shook her head in amazement. So it was Sasha who made both Kostik and Vasyok disappear. Vedenej had nothing to do with it. Was Danya’s transfer to the North Sasha’s doing as well? No, Sasha couldn’t have possibly done that. But wasn’t his dad a really big shot? Could it be that he asked his dad to transfer Danya?

  On the next page there was a drawing of a thermometer showing 100 degrees followed by a series of rather uninspired frames depicting hardships of the heat wave at the camp. The only good drawings in those pages were the ones devoted to lambada. Apparently, it was Sasha’s special talent to capture dance moves. His dancing Yanina was simply amazing. He drew her in such a way that she was getting brighter and larger compared to the other dancers in each frame.

  “Is that Yanina?” Ben asked.

  Lena said, “Yes.”

  “She’s very attractive,” Ben said. “I pictured her as this ugly old woman.”

  “She probably seemed old to me back then, but she was younger than we are now. Was she attractive? I don’t know. She was red-faced and beefy—I couldn’t see past that. And then I was so terrified of her that I mostly saw her as a monster.”

  “Well, Sasha clearly saw her as a very sexy woman. And, look, this soldier seems to be crazy about her.”

  There was a soldier next to Yanina in all the frames. He wasn’t dancing, but just staring at her. Lena couldn’t understand how she hadn’t noticed that before. He had a beautiful, chiseled face and bright blue eyes. Startlingly blue eyes. He looked remarkably like Danya. But Lena didn’t have time to ponder that, because Ben had already flipped to the next page.

  “Whoa!” he said.

  There were drawings of people engaged in every kind of sex and sexual position imaginable. Everything took place at night, outdoors, in the moonlight. All the couples were half-hidden
behind the trees or bushes, but since there were more couples than appropriate vegetation, some trees gave shelter to two or three couples. Yanina had a whole tree to herself. To herself and her lover, a blue-eyed soldier. He wasn’t Danya, was he? He couldn’t have been Danya.

  “Do you think he actually saw some of that or this comes purely from his imagination?” Ben asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think he saw anything. The kids didn’t really go out at night. I think it’s based on rumors.”

  “And then the aliens came,” the next caption read.

  Ben seemed to be enthralled by the drawings of flying saucers and purple sausages, but Lena could hardly follow the narrative. She couldn’t stop thinking of Danya and Yanina, and the more she thought about them, the more plausible the whole scenario became. Danya had an affair with Yanina. Vedenej found out about it and pulled some strings to transfer Danya to the North. It made sense. It made much more sense than her own idiotic femme fatale theory. She had nothing to do with Danya’s transfer. She wasn’t a femme fatale. She wasn’t a romantic heroine. Well, she was, but only in her own dreams and the fantasies of a ten-year-old boy.

  “Wait, who is that?” Ben asked.

  There was a drawing of Lena talking to the blue-eyed soldier outside of the unit. They were holding hands. Lena was smiling and trembling. She was actually drawn in trembling motion lines. And Sasha was right there watching the scene with a bleeding heart. The heart was drawn over Sasha’s white T-shirt, dripping blood.

  “Isn’t that the same guy who was with Yanina?”

  Lena stared at the drawing in silence.

  Ben took her hands in his and asked, “Is that Danya?”

  She said, “Yes. Yes . . . This is Danya. I had no idea.”

  She freed her hands, took the book from Ben, and flipped through the rest. A series of frames about Parents Day, the detailed story of Sasha’s disappearance, Lena’s departure, Sasha’s guilt when he found out that she was fired because of him, Sasha’s grief. The last picture depicted a sobbing little boy drawing a hedgehog in shaky lines.

  Lena shut the book. So that was how it was. The only one who had truly loved her was the little boy, Sasha. Danya didn’t love her. Not then, not at the camp. He was attracted to her. He liked her. He loved talking to her. But it was Yanina he was crazy about. The awful Yanina. If he were to tell his own story about their camp, Lena would have been just a minor character. She didn’t know if that newfound knowledge changed anything for her, but it hurt. It hurt a lot.

  She started to cry.

  Ben took her into his arms and stroked her back with such tenderness that it made her cry harder.

  “Do you think that was how it happened?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure that was how it happened. Sasha might be wrong about small details, but everything else adds up.”

  Her face was pressed into his chest, so her words came out muffled. She had felt awkward about reading the book with Ben, but now she was deeply moved by the fact that Ben was there with her as she was learning what really happened in her camp story. She had told him her version, but they had discovered the real version together. It was he who gave her the book, the book that had been in his car the whole time they were driving to Maine, hidden between the pieces of Ben’s past, witness to everything that happened between them, and to Lena’s delusional interpretation, the way those misunderstandings had affected the rest of her life.

  He was so warm that she felt that if he continued to hug her, she would melt.

  She raised her face and said, “I have to tell you about Danya now.”

  Ben nodded.

  Lena took one of his hands and pressed it against her face.

  “He did write to me. It took him six months. At first I was waiting for the letter like crazy. I would come down to the mailbox every morning and linger before opening it, prolonging the expectation that the letter would be there that day. Then I was hoping rather than waiting. Desperately hoping. Once, I even had a dream about getting the letter. And then I started to forget Danya. I thought of him less and less. There were days when I didn’t think of him at all. Then there were weeks when I didn’t think of him. After a while, I stopped thinking about him altogether. It was then that I finally got the letter. Danya wrote that he had been transferred to an outpost close to the Arctic Circle. He wrote that it was very cold and quiet there, but he’d gotten used to the cold very quickly, and he liked the quiet. He’d seen the Northern Lights, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. The trees there were very low—knee high—and the animals were all white.

  “He didn’t ask me any questions. He didn’t mention anything about the camp. He didn’t say that he missed me. He signed it ‘Danya.’ Just ‘Danya,’ not ‘your Danya’ or ‘love, Danya.’ The whole letter was less than a page. I cried for an hour and wrote my reply. I wrote that I loved college, that I was studying ancient languages (we were supposed to study some Latin, but not until the next year), and that he must paint the Northern Lights, that it would be a shame if he didn’t, that it was such a rare opportunity for an artist to see something like that. He didn’t write me back.”

  “You never saw him again?” Ben asked.

  “I saw him about four years after that. By pure accident. On a subway train in Moscow.”

  Lena took a few sips of tea. The story of her past was getting closer and closer to the present. Closing in on her.

  “He called my name, and when I looked up from the book I was reading, I saw him standing right next to me. He was smiling. But he looked different. I wasn’t sure how. Less boyish? I was so surprised to see him that I screamed, ‘Danya!’ He winced and said that he hated that name and that nobody called him that since the army.”

  Ben wanted to ask Lena something, but she ignored him and continued talking.

  “We got off the subway together and went to have ice cream in a little café in the center. He said that he thought about me all the time, but he was too depressed to write. He said that being in the army, especially on that base up North, really screwed him up. He said that he got some very rough treatment on that base, but he wouldn’t elaborate. Not then, not ever. No matter how much I begged him. I asked him about his art. He said that he’d quit art school and was studying math. He said that he thought that painting was stupid. We talked for an hour or so, and then I had to run to my class. He walked me to school. He acted like he was really happy to see me.”

  “Did you see each other again?”

  “Yes, we did. We started to date.”

  “You and Danya dated?”

  Lena cleared her throat. She had to tell Ben.

  “Yeah, we dated for about a year. And then we got married.”

  Ben put his mug down and stared at Lena: “You married Danya?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened? Did you get divorced?”

  “No, we’re still married. Danya is my husband.”

  “But you said that your husband’s name was something else. Vadim, was it?”

  “Yes, his name is Vadim, which is how I think of him now. But Danya was his nickname.”

  Ben groaned and sank lower in bed: “Okay, I need to process that.”

  But Lena continued: “When we first got married, it was good. Fun. I loved making our home—it wasn’t really a home, Vadim simply moved into my room in the apartment where I lived with my mother. But I loved helping him put his favorite posters up and set up his desk. And I loved shopping for food and cooking, and just watching TV together as we ate the pie I just learned how to bake. Vadim was teaching math to undergraduates. I graduated from college and found a job on the radio—I was in charge of finding and editing little-known fairy tales for a children’s show. I loved that job. Then I found out that I was pregnant. Both Vadim and I were ecstatic. But soon after the baby was born, things started to turn sour. There was a huge wave of emigration, and most of our friends were planning to leave Russia to find jobs in Europe or the U.S. Vadim’s p
arents left for California. Vadim eagerly supported them, saying that there was no future in Russia, for us, or for our son. He became obsessed with that idea, and whenever I tried to object, he would get very angry and bring up his experience in the army and say that I had no idea how horrible Russia was. He never really explained what happened to him on that base up North, but hinted that he had had a really hard time. And I kept thinking it was my fault that he ended up there.”

  “So you decided to go?”

  “Yes. Vadim’s parents were already living in California, so it made it easier to get our visas. Once we got here, we kind of switched roles. He became euphoric, and I became depressed. Misha was very young, so I was mostly stuck at home. I was overwhelmed by how much I hated everything here: from the sickening smell of eucalyptus in the air to the fact that you couldn’t get anywhere without a car. But Vadim felt in sync with everything. He found a wonderful job within a month. He sang praises to the ocean, to the palm trees, to his new office, to the people around us, to life in general. And he didn’t even notice how lost and unhappy I was. We were growing apart with such frightening speed. I would look at him and think: ‘He is my husband. He’s supposed to be the closest person in the world to me. Why don’t I feel that way? Why? What’s wrong with me?’

  “Then I met Marcus. He was a graduate student in the film department and worked in a video store. He asked what I was looking for, and I explained how I had read the screenplays for all those famous movies, but never actually seen them and that I finally wanted to watch them. He found some of the movies for me and made me promise that I’d come and tell him about the experience of finally seeing them. We talked about movies a lot. And then gradually we fell to talking about other things. I don’t even remember how it happened that we became lovers. It seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. And I didn’t even feel horrible, because by that time I was so far away from Vadim that he seemed like a mere physical presence at the house, a roommate. I suspected that he felt the same way about me.”

  “How long were you and Marcus together?”

  “For a year. He was the one that persuaded me to go to grad school. He wanted me to leave Vadim, but I couldn’t make up my mind to do it. Mostly because of Misha. And then Vadim found out about us, and it was so horrible, you can’t imagine how horrible it was. It wasn’t just that he was jealous—he couldn’t fathom how it was possible at all. I don’t think he loved me anymore, but he trusted me completely, he thought of me as a part of him, you know, like an arm or a leg—he couldn’t understand how I could betray him, the way he wouldn’t be able to grasp if his arm or leg chose to betray him.