by Lara Vapnyar
A thin, delicate woman’s voice sang something about a little path in the woods that meandered among the trees. Just like the words in this song, Nina thought. She liked the song. When it ended, the singer put her guitar down and walked to the food table. She was wearing a long gray cardigan with drooping pockets. There wasn’t anything mysterious about her. A balding man with a closely trimmed gray beard took over the guitar. Nina’s eyes traveled from the man’s outstretched elbow protruding through his shabby corduroy sleeve, to his stooped shoulder, to the greasy line of his hair. Nina suddenly saw that his untidiness wasn’t some kind of snobbish fashion statement but a sign of loneliness, of being uncared for. She saw that the women sitting in a circle were watching the man just as they used to watch her husband. They were tired, lonely women, just as she was. There wasn’t anything mysterious about them either. Nina also noticed that she wasn’t the only one sitting outside the singing circle. In fact, only a few people sat in the circle, while others were scattered all around Pavlik’s house. A lonely figure here and there sat quietly on a chair, an old box, or a windowsill, or wandered around the room. From time to time the paths of the lonely figures intersected, and then conversations were struck: awkward yet hopeful conversations, just as the one Nina was having now.
“You are a vegetable lover, aren’t you?” a man asked, having seated himself in the opposite corner of Nina’s sofa.
Nina nodded.
“Yes, I thought I heard that from somebody. Do you like to cook vegetables?”
Nina nodded again.
“You know, I love vegetables myself. My wife hates it when I cook, though.” The man rolled his eyes, making Nina smile. He was short, with thin rusty-red hair and a very pale complexion. A tiny piece of toilet paper with a spot of dried blood stuck to his cheek.
“Are you a computer programmer like everybody else?” Nina asked.
The man nodded with a smile.
“And in your previous life?”
“A physics teacher in high school. But I can’t say that I miss it. I was terrified of my students.”
Nina laughed. It was easy to talk to him. Nina looked at his smiling eyes, then down at his hands—short fingernails, white fingers, red hair on the knuckles. She tried to imagine what it would be like if a hand like this brushed against her breast. Accidentally.
Nina wiped the little beads of sweat off her nose. He was a strange, married, and not particularly attractive man. He introduced himself as Andrei.
“So, what’s your favorite vegetable?” Nina asked.
“I would say fennel. Fennel has an incredible flavor. Reminds me of a wild apple and, oddly enough, freshly sawed wood. Do you like fennel?”
Nina nodded. She liked fennel. It had a funny, slightly ribbed surface, and it was heavy and spouted weird green shoots that seemed to grow out of nowhere. Nina’d never tasted fennel. “I like broccoli,” she said.
“Oh, broccoli! I love how they cook it in Chinese places. How do you cook it?”
This man with the piece of tissue stuck to his cheek looked safe enough to confide in. “I’ve never cooked broccoli—or any other vegetable,” Nina said.
“Let’s have a cooking date,” Andrei offered.
A cooking date! Nina couldn’t remember ever feeling so excited. She was sure she had been as excited sometime before, she just couldn’t remember when. So the better part of the following Saturday Nina spent shopping for cooking utensils. She went to Macy’s and abandoned the fifty-percent-discount rule for the first time, buying two drastically overpriced skillets, a set of shiny stainless steel saucepans, a steamer, and a pretty wooden spoon with a carved handle.
“Do you want it wrapped as a wedding present?” the cashier asked.
Halfway home, Nina realized that she hadn’t bought nearly enough. Knives! She needed knives! And a cutting board, and a colander, and God knows what else. She swerved her car in the direction of Avenue M, where, abandoning the second rule about never ever buying anything in cheap stores, she bought a set of knives, two wooden cutting boards and one plastic, a colander, a curved grapefruit knife just because it looked so cute, a vegetable peeler, a set of stainless steel bowls, and two aprons with a picture of wild mushrooms on a yellow background. In a grocery store next door Nina bought a bottle of olive oil, black pepper, chili pepper, and a jar of something dry and dark-green with Chinese letters on it.
Well before three o’clock—the time of their cooking date—Nina had everything ready. The sparkling saucepans and the skillet stood proudly on the stove. The bowls, the colander, the cutting boards, and the knives were arranged on the kitchen counter in careful disarray around the centerpiece: the opened Italian Cuisine: The Taste of the Sun. Nina observed her kitchen, trying to shake off the embarrassing excess of excitement.
Andrei came on time, even earlier. At five minutes to three he already stood in Nina’s hall, removing his bulky leather jacket and his leather cap sprinkled with raindrops. He smelled of wet leather. He handed Nina a bottle of wine and a baguette in a sodden paper bag. “In movies, when a man hands a woman a baguette and a bottle of wine, it always seems chic, doesn’t it?” he said.
Nina nodded. Andrei looked more homely than she remembered. Nina’s memory somehow had managed to erase the red spots on his pasty cheeks, to color his brows and eyelashes, to make him slimmer, and add an inch or two to his height. It was strange seeing him in her house, especially in her tiny hall, where every object was familiar, its place carefully considered. He clashed with the surroundings like a bad piece of furniture. Nina hurried to lead him into the kitchen.
“So, are we cooking broccoli today?” Andrei asked. He began leafing through Italian Cuisine: The Taste of the Sun, his freshly washed hands still smelling of Nina’s soap.
“Broccoli, yes,” Nina mumbled. She was suddenly struck by a dreadful suspicion, which was immediately confirmed upon opening the refrigerator.
In all her shopping frenzy, she had forgotten to buy any vegetables.
She jerked out the vegetable basket, faintly hoping for a miracle. The basket was empty and sparklingly clean, wiped with a kitchen towel moistened in Clorox by her sister’s firm hand. There was only a tiny strip of onion skin stuck between the edge of the basket and the shelf above. Nina turned to Andrei, motioning to the empty basket. Her throat felt as if someone were squeezing it. Suddenly everything seemed hopeless and absurd: the counter crammed with gleaming, artificial sets of kitchenware; the barren vegetable basket; this perfect stranger, who came to cook in her kitchen; Nina herself, with all her energy and excitement of moments ago, now pressing her forehead against the cold vinyl of the refrigerator door.
“Do you want me to drive to a supermarket?” Andrei asked.
Nina shook her head. She knew it would never work now, after everything had been exposed to her in all its absurdity.
“What’s this?” Andrei asked. He was looking toward the back of the refrigerator. A bunch of broccoli was stuck between the third shelf and the refrigerator wall. It hung upside down, the florets nearly touching the shelf below. The bunch wasn’t yellowed or covered with rotten slime. On the contrary, for the weeks that it lay between the shelves, it had become darker and dryer. A few more weeks and it would have turned into a broccoli mummy. It smelled okay, or rather it didn’t smell at all. “I’m sure we can still cook it,” Andrei said. He began showing Nina what to do.
Nina ran cold water over the florets, then shook the bunch fiercely, letting out a shower of green drops. She chopped off the stem, then cut off the base of each floret, watching with fascination how they split into new tiny bunches of broccoli. She then peeled the stem and cut it into even, star-shaped slices. Some things turned out to be different from Nina’s cooking fantasies, others exactly the same. Some were disappointing, others better than she ever imagined. The best thing of all was that, when the broccoli was already on the stove, sputtering boiling water from under the shiny lid, Andrei pulled one of her kitchen chairs close to the stov
e and suggested she stand on it.
“Climb up and inhale,” he said. “The hot air travels up. The strongest aroma should be right under the ceiling.” He stood back, giving her room.
Nina stood on the chair, her hair just grazing the ceiling. She closed her eyes, lifted her nose, and breathed in deep. The warm aroma of broccoli rose up, caressing Nina’s face, enveloping the whole of her.
Borscht
SERGEY WOKE UP with an erection and a headache. The first was soon gone but the second lingered, radiating jagged rings of pain from a point of distress somewhere in the center of his skull.
He closed his eyes, hoping for the comfort of darkness, but saw instead the great hairy surface of the carpet that he had installed in New Jersey the day before. Sergey had been installing carpets for eight months, ever since Pavel had taken him on to work with him, and now whenever he closed his eyes he would see, smell, and even feel carpets. Yesterday’s color was called Georgia Peach but was in fact a pale brown with a pinkish hue, bland and dry. The carpet smelled like dust, glistened with synthetic threads, and was dead to the touch.
All carpets were named after something bright and tempting. When Sergey began the job, he would often ask Pavel, who spoke good English, what this or that expression meant. “Warm honey,” Pavel would translate, “Hawaiian waterfall,” “Mulberry tree.” The earthy tones were the most popular, and the same grayish-beige color could be called Morning fog, Bay fog, Autumn leaves, Brown sugar, or Elk’s horn. At first, as Sergey measured, cut, and tucked, he would entertain himself by making up new, truer names for the carpet colors: Moldy bread, Puddle of dirty water, Pig’s feet, Cow dung on a warm day. He had stopped doing this sometime ago. The names for the colors became just words for Sergey, simple combinations of letters and sounds. The word peach no longer sounded grating, because it didn’t bring a peach to mind anymore. There was no need to think up a better name.
Sergey stretched, careful not to knock the table with his arms. “See, big enough to fit a sofa and separate from where I sleep too,” Pavel had said about the kitchen in his studio. He had sublet it to Sergey, referring to it as “your room” during the transaction and “the living room” or “the kitchen” ever since.
Sergey turned onto his side so he lay facing the mangy back of the sofa, where he kept a snapshot of his wife stuck between the pillows. He hadn’t seen Lenka for almost a year, but he looked at the snapshot every day. And now, whenever Sergey tried to call her face to mind, it was the image in the snapshot that came to him. The woman in the snapshot had the same thin nose as Lenka, the same fair brows, and the same high cheekbones, but her mouth was stretched into a tight smile, and the expression on her face was awkward and insincere. Sergey knew this wasn’t Lenka’s expression, but he couldn’t see what her face really looked like anymore. Sometimes a fleeting memory of the pasty skin of her cheeks, or the dimple in her chin, or the beads of sweat that would speckle the tip of her nose when she moved on top of him, would appear to Sergey, but these visions were always too brief and incomplete to be satisfying. The only time he could see her whole face now was in his sleep, where she often didn’t look like Lenka at all, but Sergey just knew it was her.
Other parts of her body he remembered better. Her legs were thin and pale, easily bruised, often covered in the summer with scratches and pink swellings from mosquito bites. He could see her ribs and her vertebrae when she sat smoking on the opposite side of their bed. Once he began tracing the contours of her spine with his finger, but she made him stop. She said that when she was a little girl, she had this drunk uncle who used to sit her in his lap and “count her ribs,” poking his fat fingers hard between each bone. Lenka’s fingers were light and cool, always light and cool. This Sergey remembered very well.
When he phoned her last night—early morning in Russia—she sighed, and yawned, and didn’t say anything for a long time. He asked her if he had woken her up. “Um, no, I don’t know,” she mumbled. He looked at the snapshot and imagined that it was not a picture of Lenka but of some other—strange—woman, and it was this strange woman who had picked up the phone. The real Lenka, his Lenka, wouldn’t have yawned into the phone, she would have squealed with delight at the sound of his voice, as she always did during the first couple of months after he left for America. The real Lenka would have cried, “Serionya! You!” The real Lenka would have begged him to return home sooner. “Yes, I know, I know we need the money, I know,” she would say, in a light, tiny voice, quickly sounding out of breath. “But can’t you do something—anything—to speed it up?”
Back in Russia, she would rush to meet him when he came home from work every night. She jumped around him like a puppy while he removed his shoes and jacket, hugging him, grabbing him by the hands, covering him with untargeted kisses. He would smile and peck her on a cheek, embarrassed to show how much her reaction stirred him, afraid to reveal his anxiety of the moments before. Every time, as he walked up the stairs leading to their apartment, he tried hard not to run, wondering if Lenka would be jumping when she saw him or if this would be the day when he came and found that something was gone, and Lenka would be clanking dishes in the kitchen or watching TV on the couch and would just nod at him when he entered the room.
The woman in the snapshot smiled at him with her mouth closed and explained in a patient schoolteacher’s voice that since he had such a great job there was simply no point in his returning to Russia now. Yes, the snapshot remembered that they had decided he would go for only a year. And yes, they had saved enough money for a small apartment. But that was enough only for a very, very small one, and then they would need nice furniture and a new car, right? She told him that she missed him a lot, missed him more than he missed her, and that the separation was harder for her than for him anyway, so if she could find the strength to be patient, so could he. It was the woman in the snapshot that Sergey was angry with, in a way he had never been with the real Lenka. He shoved the snapshot farther between the cushions, sat up, and swung his legs to the floor.
There wasn’t any aspirin in the bathroom medicine cabinet. None by the kitchen sink or in the clay bowl where he kept random pills found in his pockets. Sergey took a broom from the corner, shoved it under his couch, and with a generous swing produced a gray, fuzzy pile of objects. He lowered himself onto his knees, carefully, so as not to move his head too much, and examined what he had found. There—among Pavel’s bottle of brandy, which Sergey had finished after last night’s phone call, a months-old Russian newspaper, a telephone bill with a long string of Lenka’s number broken in places by the number of Pavel’s wife, three hardened socks, two emptied aspirin foils, and about a dollar fifty in change—he found a plastic snippet with two extra-strength Ibuprofens inside. He swallowed them dry, swept the rest of his finds back under the couch, and lay down.
Sergey fell asleep and dreamed of a woman’s light cool fingers touching his forehead, stroking his face, dancing down his chest and stomach, getting warmer as they went.
He woke up an hour later to the sound of running water and the bang of a teakettle landing on the stove. Pavel was moving swiftly around the kitchen like a big nervous cat. “Shit, we’re out of milk,” Pavel said in English. Pat, Pavel’s current girlfriend, slouched over a mug at the table, her bare feet hooked around the chair’s legs. Pat had a ruddy complexion and wild hair dyed purplish red. New Jersey sunset, Sergey thought, the first time he saw her. In the mornings after she stayed overnight, Pat always wore a short white bathrobe, which made her seem even more startlingly red by contrast. Her thighs, visible to Sergey under the table, looked flushed, as if they emanated heat. Sergey turned over and closed his eyes, embarrassed by the almost painful sensation this sight produced in him.
WHEN SERGEY got up hours later to an empty apartment, he washed his face and ate a few handfuls of cornflakes right from the box. The teakettle was still warm, so Sergey poured water and instant coffee into a cup and began stirring, watching how the dark granules circled aro
und his spoon, refusing to dissolve, and listening to the sounds of the apartment: the low buzz of the fridge, the dripping faucet, the clock ticking off each wasted second. Pavel and Pat had left a swirl of bread crumbs on the table, and Sergey could still smell the sweet scent of Pat’s hand cream.
The top of the Russian newspaper Sergey had pushed back under the couch caught his eye. It was covered in sticky dust and feeble strands of brown hair, but Sergey spread it out on the table. He sipped his coffee, flipping through real estate ads with pictures of frosty, unattractive brokers, and immigrations services ads with roguish lawyers in bulky suits. He leafed through countless pictures of enormous teeth gleaming next to the names of dentists. Flipped right past the ads for oncologists, for the treatments of skin diseases and erectile dysfunction. Stopped to snort at the holistic medicine ads, which promised to cure whatever the other ads didn’t. Chuckled at the ad for “an authentic witch from the woods of Western Ukraine” who claimed the ability to solve both marital and financial problems. And finally arrived at a section that dazzled him.
The naked women on the page came in various shapes and colors, yet they all had two things in common: they were visibly moaning, and stars and solid black rectangles covered their breasts and genitals. Sergey took a long swallow of coffee and tried to mentally unscrape the stars and rectangles. He imagined that he was the one who made the women moan. The words accompanying the snapshots boasted of heavenly pleasures and hot, hot, hot women. One of the ads promised time with a beautiful, blue-eyed, long-haired mermaid. Sergey imagined her cold, slimy tail, the smell of yesterday’s fish at a Brighton Beach food market.
The ad he liked was small and plain, placed in the lower right corner of one of the pages: A warm, sexy woman will tend to your needs. Affordable. He scraped more cornflakes off the bottom of the box and read the words again, trying to hear them spoken by the woman who had placed the ad. “A warm, sexy woman will tend to your needs. Affordable.” Her voice was soft but clear, and she paused slightly before affordable, so he knew she didn’t want to humiliate him. She was expressing encouragement and understanding. This was a woman who wasn’t going to torture him with longing, who wasn’t trying to deceive or manipulate him, but who would tend to his needs: warmly, skillfully, quickly.
