The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2

by Donald Harington

  “Am not Russian,” you declared firmly. “Mushwan. Shvan. Can thou say ‘Svan’?” He tried. It was not easy, and sounded more like Swan than Svan, which was all right. You told him, “But I play chess, ya. So we play chess. Thou have…?” Your fingers pantomimed the pieces: pawns, royalty, clergy, horsemen, crenelated mansions.

  “No, but I know where I could snitch some,” he declared, and turned again to go. “Well, good night, I guess.” But he hesitated. “Could I—?” he tried. “Could I stay and watch you take off that scarf!”

  You gave him your very best smile, and, dear Kat, even your middling-to-fair smiles are a wonder to behold, but you slowly shook your head. How did you tell him, Not yet? Or, It is too soon? Or, Comfort yourself with the thought that soon you’ll see all of me, but not tonight. But you knew a word, ugly, without looking it up. “With no scarf,” you said, “I am looking very ugly.”

  “You couldn’t,” he said. “You couldn’t if you tried. You are the prettiest lady I ever saw.”

  You blushed, knowing that adjective too. You had learned from him a farewell: “Good night,” you said.

  “What color is your hair? I mean, what color was it?”

  You touched your eyebrows, which were still all there, perhaps too much so, because you would never pluck them. “This color,” you said.

  “Sorta like mine,” he said, and his hair was, in truth, very like yours had been: an ordinary brown, a common brown, the color of mice, or of nuts, or, according to your Chaucer at least, “broun as a berye,” or, best of all, of the forest floor that nurtured the mushrooms that were your singular overriding interest in this life. “Good night,” he said again, and reached out and took your hand and shook it. The handshake was the first time you had been touched since Bolshakov let go of you.

  Before putting out your lights and climbing into the murphybed, you spent a good hour in the cozy, easy company of your paperback book, looking up poison, bourbon, dope, billy goat, cheers, borrow, wrong, etc., etc. Some of the words, e.g., sucks and gross, did not have the meaning that apparently had been intended, whereas other words, slammer, snitch, nerd, barfy, jacking around, could not be found at all.

  And one simple word gave you the most difficulty. You were still thinking about its possible multiple meanings or usages when you drifted off to sleep: like.

  Chapter six

  The ghost of Lawren Carnegie would not make contact with you that night. If he made any sounds at all to indicate his stale and bumbling residue in the physical world, you did not hear them. You slept well, not even wakened when your next-door neighbor, Professor Ogden, had one of his fits of coughing. If your sleep was troubled at all, it was not by Carnegie or Ogden or Kenny Elmore but by the sinister Bolshakov in his trench coat, walking constantly toward you. But the only dream you’d remember when you woke did not feature Bolshakov at all; rather, it was your old familiar dream of climbing and descending an endless sequence of stone steps, concrete steps, iron steps, and wooden steps, staircases that led up or down to significant places whose significance always eluded you.

  The next day, bright and sunny but cold enough to remind you of winters in frozen Svanetia—even the distant snow-clad hills that surrounded this city suggested the topography of the purlieus of Lisedi—was, you realized with a pang of nostalgia, appropriately December 10: International Human Rights Day, the day that the women in camp fasted in solidarity. So you did not need breakfast. You dressed, and rewrapped the black scarf around your head, and counted your money, and went out to explore the town. You walked the short distance, less than a verst (two-thirds of a mile), past other mansions; past the modern building housing WQED, whose fm station was going to serenade you on many a sentient occasion; past the first of the three churches you came to, Saint Paul’s, which was Irish Catholic and where you were tempted, despite being neither Catholic nor even Eastern Orthodox any longer, to go inside and cross yourself and say to Saint George a prayer of thanks for your deliverance; past an institution that even more than the church was unknown in Russia, a bank, Mellon’s, where it was to be hoped you would one day have an account; past the second of the churches, the Heinz Memorial Chapel, with its enormous stained-glass windows, where on any Saturday afternoon three to five happy couples were joined in matrimony; past this to the third and grandest and tallest of the churches, a Gothic skyscraper really, with over forty stories, much taller than the central tower of Moscow University, which you had visited on several occasions without ever being a student or a teacher there. Its central shaft, if you squinted your eyes, could pass for a Svanetian tower, much magnified.

  This building, you discovered upon entering it, was called the “Cathedral of Learning,” and indeed this morning it was already crowded with students on their way to their eight o’clock classes, some of which were meeting in opulent classrooms off the central high-vaulted nave, where there were not pews or altars but tables for study. The students hurrying past you did not stare at you or take any note of your appearance, your black kerchief shrouding a lovely face. Strange for a cathedral, there were two rows of elevators, and the students were rushing into the cars of these, and you followed and rode, because you did not know where to get off, all the way up to the forty-second floor, where you stood in a hallway and stared out a window at the city sprawling in every direction out and out and onward: the distant steel-and-glass skyscrapers of the downtown, crowded together, made a technological phantasmagoria of the towers of Svanetia, those battlemented columns that, poking up all over the landscape (but a mere six or seven stories tall), may have inspired, even subliminally, your initial interest in mushrooms.

  This city spread out beneath you was less than half as populous as Tbilisi, where you had taught and worked, and not even one-eighth the size of Leningrad, where you had studied for your advanced degrees, but somehow it seemed bigger and busier than both. For the nonce, it could suitably prompt you into recollections of Tbilisi: There were those two rivers, bigeminal tributaries like the Kura and the Vera of Tbilisi (these were called longer, more poetic, and more romantic names, Monongahela and Allegheny, words from languages that truly fascinated you, the Indians’). And in the distance, you could see the tallest of the surrounding hills (Mount Washington), which, even if its height was no match for Tbilisi’s Mount Mtatsminda, miraculously had an important feature in common with the latter: a funicular railway running up its slope (in fact, it had two of them, but from your vantage you could see only one, the Duquesne Incline), and you decided to make the fun of that funicular your immediate objective, if you could learn how to get to it.

  But you would not reach it on this day. Other things would divert you from your destination. Coming down from the top of the Cathedral of Learning, you spent some time exploring its International Rooms: There was no Georgian Room, but there were, among many others, each donated and decorated by people of that nationality living in this city, a Russian Room, a Greek Room, a Yugoslav Room, and a Polish Room, each containing objects familiar to you. But the room that most attracted you was the Scottish Room, an especially elegant result of careful planning in imitation of seventeenth-century Scottish workmanship: each of the students’ tablet armchairs was elaborately carved of imported oak; there was an elegant fireplace (nonfunctional) surmounted by a portrait of Robert Burns, and carved thistles everywhere; each of the four large windows facing the avenue was emblazoned with the symbols and devices of the four great ancient Scottish universities, Glasgow, Saint Andrews, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh; and innumerable little details made me sorry my ghosthood wouldn’t allow me to point them out to you, such as the rear window bearing the arms and emblems of the Clan Montrose, my ancestors.

  Leaving the Cathedral of Learning, you sought out the closest bookshop, where you might find a city map that would have transportation routes on it, so you could find out, without the embarrassment of stopping someone on the street to ask, how to get to the funicular railway. The bookshop you entered happened to be the chief books
tore for the university, and you could not resist, while there, browsing. You spent two entire hours in that bookshop, enchanted, and only your sense of the need to protect what little cash you possessed kept you from going on a spree and buying volumes right and left. You even resisted an exceptionally attractive book, a Penguin paperback of a modern English “translation” of the Middle English Chaucer of which you already owned a fragment. But there was one book you did buy—or perhaps, as we shall see, it was Anangka who bought it for you: Roaming through the shelves of student textbooks, taking note that “Winter Term” books had already been arranged in neat heaps by academic department, and searching until you found the section on biological sciences, you discovered that there was only one course, apparently, in mycology, as such, and you snatched up its textbook, J.W. Deacon’s Introduction to Modern Mycology, and you paid at the front desk a price that, like all textbook prices, was exorbitant.

  You would carry the heavy book in its paper bag with you for the rest of the long day, but carrying things in bags was a way of life where you had come from.

  You did not find a map with transportation routes on it, so, at the first bus stop you reached, you tried a combination of sign language and bad English on a waiting passenger, female, middle-aged, large, very dark complexion: “Where catching bus for ramp train?”

  The woman said, “Sugar, where you from?”

  “Georgia,” you said.

  “Shit,” said the woman. “I’m from Alabama myself. You don’t sound like no Georgia to me. And I don’t study no ‘ramp train’ neither.” She turned away from you.

  You waited, watching several buses arrive and depart, reading their destinations on their crowns, finding no words that meant anything to you. Finally, you simply boarded one of them, paid the driver, and asked him, with inclined motions of your hand, “Ramp train? Slope rails?”

  Without taking his eyes from the road, he tore off a slip of paper from a pad, a transfer, and said, “You want twenty-seven.”

  Seated, you attempted to read the transfer, but it offered no clue as to where you should make the switch. The bus took you down from the heights of the university and into the heart of the so-called “Golden Triangle,” with its dazzle of commercial, financial, and mercantile establishments. When most of the rest of the passengers got off, you went with them, and you found yourself face to face with an enormous department store, Kaufmann’s, which would hold you captive for at least another hour. Noontime came, and Kaufmann’s even had an appealing little café inside it, but you remembered it was Human Rights Day, and you ate no lunch. Kaufmann’s let you go, reluctantly, but only to hand you over for the rest of the afternoon to Saks Fifth Avenue, to Horne’s, to more. You bought nothing, could afford nothing, but you wandered up and down the aisles, touching nothing, just looking, looking, looking.

  In one of the stores, you finally touched something: There was an entire department devoted to artificial hairpieces, or rather, actual hair made into headdresses. In every conceivable color. Your fingers almost touched one adorning a simple mannequin head; it was a lustrous auburn, with a reddish cast you’d always wished you’d had. Your fingers could not resist touching one, not attached to a dummy, that was exactly the color your lost hair had been, Chaucer’s berye. You picked it up, fondled it, lifted it as if to place it upon your head. You looked around to see if you were observed. You realized you’d have to remove your scarf for a moment in order to place the wig upon your head. You found a mirror nearby and, first setting down your book bag, attempted to summon the courage to remove your scarf. You summoned it.

  A floorwalker accosted you, a nattily attired gentleman of very erect carriage who lifted his eyebrows at the sight of your bare head as if it were crawling with worms and said, “Perhaps madam would rather try another store.” Quickly you re-covered your head with the scarf, blushing furiously, more than you had blushed when Dr. Bolshakov had forced you to remove your scarf. Indeed, this floorwalker (a word you didn’t know, but you knew he was in charge of this store) reminded you in other ways of Bolshakov, although he was not wearing Bolshakov’s trench coat: the same tightness of facial skin and pucker of lips and point of widow’s peak typical of the habitual onanist. He lifted the wig out of your hands, returned it to its place on the counter, and, when you made no move to depart, said to you, “Go.” When that failed to provide the impetus he intended, he took you by the arm and said, “Take a hike, lady,” and propelled you out of the hair department.

  For his rudeness, I, who restrain myself whenever possible from intervention in the affairs of mortal, earthbound organisms, decided on the spot to punish him, and I hit him instantly with a maximum dose of alopecia areata, which would leave the son of a bitch scratching his scalp before nightfall and would have him pulling out tufts of hair in the next morning’s shower, and would render him totally bald within a fortnight. Can your Anangka do things like that? I got carried away, I’m sorry, but nobody can treat my Kat in that fashion.

  Oblivious to my thunderbolt, you left the store and wandered northward through the Golden Triangle to an area where the triangle was no longer gold but brass, or just brass plated: there were several movie theaters whose marquees each contained the letter X in triplicate. In Georgian, as in Svanetian, the X is pronounced “kh,” almost the way some of us, privileged few, begin the sound of your nickname, Kat. The meaning of the triple X eluded you but piqued your curiosity, and you realized that perhaps the best way to practice your English skills would be to listen to the spoken word in the cinema. These particular films, however, had you sat through one of them, would have disappointed you with their paucity of actual spoken words; at the same time they would have totally captivated you with their bold images. You read the various titles, Hot Prom Girls, Wild West Wild Women, Peek-a-Boo Pah, and The World According to Gwyn, and, on impulse, picked the last. You approached the ticket booth, saw that the price was affordable, and tendered a five to the ticket seller, a middle-aged, morose, pinched woman who reminded you of some of the hardworking peasant women of Svanetia who become old before they’re thirty.

  She would not take your money. She studied your face long enough to see it and to perceive that even though you’d attempted to hood it with that black kerchief you had a surpassingly gorgeous combination of sparkling, innocent eyes, a perfect nose, delicate cheeks, silken skin, and the sweetest mouth this side of the celestial cherubim. “Hon,” she said, “you don’t wanna go in there by yourself. Come back with your boyfriend.”

  Twice today you were turned away! But this woman was not being rude, like that bastard floorwalker, and I felt kindly toward her, even grateful, because the time wasn’t ripe, yet, for you to be watching pornography all alone.

  Chapter seven

  “Well, where have you been?” exclaimed Loretta Elmore when you used your key to let yourself into the mansion’s foyer.

  “To main city. Shopping,” you told her, and began to count the places on your fingers, “Kaufmann’s, Saks, Home’s…”

  “In that coat?” Loretta said, and reached out to finger your threadbare shinel. “It’s a wonder they didn’t throw you out.”

  “They did,” you said.

  “Huh?” she said. “We didn’t know where you were, and we’re holding supper for you. Kenny fixed it himself. He got off his paper route early so he could come home and fix supper for you.” You were abashed, even more so because you would have to find some way to explain, in this difficult language, that you were fasting (a word you didn’t know in English) because it was International Human Rights Day. “Of course we’re not going to feed you every day,” Loretta went on, “and I expect you’ll find the supermarket pretty soon, but Kenny wanted to fix you a little something just for tonight.”

  “I talk to him,” you declared. “I tell him why no thank thee.” You followed Loretta into her apartment, into her kitchen, where Kenny was stirring something in a pot. His face went wild at the sight of you. “Mayest thou be victorious,” yo
u said to him, and then you touched him lightly on the arm (your second touch) and said, “I am much sorry. But today I not eat. Today being Human Rights. Thou understand?”

  He looked at first crestfallen, dismayed, but then stoic and even moved. “You’re not hungry?” he asked.

  “Much hungry,” you said, and patted your stomach, then you thrust your nose over the pot he was stirring, a sauce for something. “Smell good. Look good,” you complimented the sauce. “But today…everywhere…all over Russia, all over Georgia…many people not eat. People go hungry to say, ‘We know how it feels for prisoners to go hungry.’”

  Kenny seemed to understand, and he quit stirring. “I hear you,” he said. “Rats, it’s only gravy for the mashed potatoes.”

  “After thou eat,” you told him, “thou come up. We talk, tell story, play game, something.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  As you were leaving, Loretta said, “Hey, next time you go out, you better let me give you a decent coat to wear. And some jewelry.”

  In place of supper, you had a pleasant hour at your desk with your new book and your dictionary, looking up decent along with mashed potatoes, boyfriend, and hike. You attempted to look up simply X but only found, among many other things, that it was a symbol for Christ or Christian, and you wondered if those movies were restricted to religious people accompanied by their sweethearts. But why three X’s?

  When the knock came at your door, you assumed it was Kenny, and you called out, “Coming in!” But he did not come in. “Door is open!” you called. Actually the door was closed, but you had not locked it, something you hadn’t yet learned the absolute necessity of doing. A man entered. A stranger. It could have been Bolshakov wearing a disguise of beard and mustache, even though the beard and mustache were grayed, and the man was shorter and fatter than bony Bolshakov and not wearing a trench coat or any coat at all but a cardigan sweater with elbow patches, and he looked old and stooped compared with your malefactor, and he was attempting a smile that would been entirely beyond Bolshakov’s ability or inclination, and he was holding in one hand a slim book and in the other hand a glass containing a liquid of the same amber color as that preferred by Loretta, called…yes: “Bourbon and branch on the rocks,” you observed, aloud, but rising to defend yourself.