Fresh Mint with Lemon

by Monika Zgustova

  A bird made a sound in the garden. Also a kind of yawn. It must be sitting on a branch of the mulberry tree, Vadim supposed.

  Radhika invited Vadim to sit at a stone table in front of the house. They chose a place in the shade. Although, in fact, there was very little shade. Radhika sat down right next to him. And the woman started where they had left off a few days ago: she rested a hand on his knee.

  “No, I know you haven’t come to see me. But it won’t be easy with Patricia. You’ve made a bad choice!”

  And she went off dancing to the pear tree. She picked a pear and bit into it.

  “You want one?”

  “Don’t pick it, I just want to smell it.”

  “But pears don’t have a smell. Maybe in Russia they do, who knows. You know, with Patricia … You’re trying to conquer an impenetrable fortress.”

  “But I’m not trying to conquer anything. I just knock on the door, very gently. I don’t expect anything.”

  “Pat and men … is another chapter. Or a whole novel.”

  Vadim ran his fingers over the surface of the pear, which was more green than yellow, with a pink spot on one side, and a few brown speckles.

  Radhika bit into her pear.

  “I’ll tell you a story. The story of a little girl,” Radhika said, while still taking little bites out of the pear. “A kind of fairy tale. Once upon a time there was a little girl with sunflower-colored hair, who was the apple of her parents’ eye. Well, this little girl was ill for a very long time and when she finally got better, she refused to go back to school. She even refused to get on the school bus. No, no, she cried furiously, swinging her little fists all around her. So her mother, who was rich and elegant, took her to school by car. The little blonde girl, drenched in tears, hid her face in her mother’s skirt. There was no way she could be made to go to school. Her parents organized a party for her birthday and invited many of the neighborhood kids so that the little girl could amuse herself and have fun, so that she could go back to being the charming little girl she was before the illness. But the child locked herself in her bedroom, and only after her parents begged her over and over again, she decided to open the door. The little girl slipped through her parents’ hands and got some cake and a glass of lemonade and immediately locked herself into her room again, this time with three or four of her girlfriends. These little girls whispered and laughed, the way little girls do. One of them came out of the room to fetch her little brother. She shouldn’t have done that! The little blonde girl, the daughter of the house, nearly broke the little boy’s hand when she slammed the door shut to stop the little boy from coming in. The little girls got frightened and gradually, one by one, started to leave the room: they felt more at home with the other children.

  “Thinking that the little girl was suffering from some strange illness, her parents called different doctors to cure her, as well as child psychiatrists, but the girl looked at them all with disdain and aversion and didn’t say a word. She twisted her long blonde locks with her fingers so that her hair fell like bunches of grapes over her shoulders, and she didn’t pay any attention to the doctors; it was as if they weren’t there.

  “Until one day the cleaning lady hired by the little girl’s parents, a Japanese woman, brought along her son, a little Japanese boy, to keep her company in that sad house. The boy sat on the sofa and watched TV while his mother went to work, and … a miracle! … soon the little girl came in. The very same one who couldn’t stand the presence of any boy or grown man! The girl sat on the carpet in front of the boy and stared at him. The boy, who was older than she was, invited her with a wave of his arm to come and sit next to him and watch the movie they were showing on TV. The girl shook her curls: no! So Miku—that was the boy’s name—didn’t feel like paying any more attention to her. After a while, the little girl got some sheets of paper and crayons and drew an airplane; she showed the drawing to the boy. He looked at it without understanding. Then, she drew the sky and some stars and without saying a word handed the sheet of paper to the boy. He tapped his forehead, as if to say that she’d gone crazy. Apparently, she didn’t understand him, and ran into her room to show him more drawings.

  “There were cities and trees, the yellow onions of Russian churches and American farms standing on the plains of Illinois—the little girl lived in a wealthy residential district of Chicago; the boy came from a less affluent neighborhood, which is why his mother had to supplement the family income by working as a cleaning lady. There were also drawings of flowers, wild and exotic, of autumn leaves, because in the state of Illinois, autumn turns nature into a symphony of reddish colors … Anyhow, there was everything that you could imagine, including kings and princesses, ships and ports, cops and robbers.

  The boy realized that these drawings had been done by more than one person; that there were two artists, in fact. The drawings had the feel of a conversation to them: a question and then an answer. A family in their Sunday best, meant: What are you going to do this Sunday? The onions of an orthodox church meant: We’re going to attend a Russian mass. And you? A farm between two trees: I’m going to the farm. Yes, this was a dialogue, a conversation. Those two artists went everywhere together, with Indian canoes and medieval ships, they sat on thrones and robbed banks. And, suddenly, Miku remembered something: his brother Aki often drew things that he immediately hid, then he folded the sheets in the middle, put them in an envelope, and sent them to someone. His brother was deaf and dumb, so that was how he communicated with his friends! And that was how Aki communicated with the little blonde girl who was now in front of him, his brother!

  “The little girl stroked his head and took a hold of a lock of his smooth black hair. She smiled. And he knew that she thought he was Aki, who was younger, certainly, but who looked very much like him. So he said to the little girl: ‘I’m not Aki! I’m Miku! Aki is …’ He didn’t want to tell her that Aki was dead, that he’d been run over by a car. The girl got frightened when Miku started to talk and before the boy had time to finish the sentence—which in fact he had no intention of finishing—she once again showed him the drawings of the plane and the starry sky.

  “‘Has Aki gone on a trip to the sky?’ That was the question she was asking him. Miku nodded yes, yes, yes. The little girl felt so relieved that she burst out laughing and crying at the same time; with her face bathed in tears, she kissed Miku on the cheeks, gratefully; the two children laughed together. At that moment the little girl’s mother entered the room; the girl got frightened and started running, to escape, but, just as she got to the doorway, she came back to get the pile of drawings, pressed them against her chest, and carried them off as if they were some kind of treasure.

  “Patricia takes these drawings with her wherever she goes, even here. I’ve seen them in her bedroom. By now Vadim, you must have realized that the little girl in question is our hostess, right? This story, the one about Miku and Aki, was told to me by Patricia’s mother. She told me that, ever since childhood, Aki was the little girl’s only friend. Patricia didn’t want to play with anyone else.

  “One day, long before she met Miku, Pat and Aki were playing together in the street, tickling each other, elbowing each other, and pushing each other around for fun; they were waiting for the traffic light to turn green so they could cross the road. At that moment, a car came by. Aki, excited from playing, crossed the road skipping, without looking. The car didn’t have time to brake and ran him over. They took him to hospital at once, but Aki never recovered consciousness. Patricia was convinced that it had been she who had pushed him into the middle of the road. And that’s why she fell ill. When Miku, Aki’s brother, persuaded her that Aki had gone on a trip to the stars, the girl calmed down and went back to school. But she wasn’t a normal little girl, no, she never would be. She spoke very little and couldn’t stand the other children. She only wanted Aki, and Aki wasn’t there.

  “Since then, she neither wants nor is able to express herself through any means other th
an painting and drawing. That’s why she paints almost exclusively in the Japanese style. That’s also how she communicates with the people she loves, by painting. She and I painted a few pictures together, flowers mainly, tulips and petunias. I did pencil drawings, she made a fair copy of them and filled them in with colors. With you, she’s trying to communicate in the same way: she draws and asks you to invent the poems and titles. Yes, she’s trying to communicate with you, but you’re not like Aki: you’re a piece of wood, hard and insensitive.”

  Radhika gave a quick laugh and bit into her pear.

  “The rest of the story was told to me by Patricia herself,” she went on with her mouth full, “and part of it, I have lived through with her. Patricia was horrified by the fact that she wasn’t normal. She wanted to be like everyone else, no matter what, to wipe out all traces of her special childhood, and she didn’t want to admit that men disgusted her. When she was a teenager, the trend in America was for young, muscular men to be tough and rough, and most men followed this trend. Pat couldn’t stand it but she forced herself to play the role of a weak girl with no beliefs of her own. In college, she met Mark, a law student. Yes, at the University of Chicago. The campus, which belongs to one of the most prestigious universities in America, is located in the middle of a ‘rough’ neighborhood, meaning an outlying suburb in which African Americans live. Blacks, you say? Don’t ever use that word in front of me! I might have known you were a racist! Well, with the excuse that he was protecting her, Mark went everywhere with Pat. Pat, who felt that her childhood had banished her from the community of so-called normal people, hoped that through Mark, she might enter the realm of the normal and usual. The couple spent their weekends walking by Lake Michigan. During the time of long hair, hippies, and communes, Pat and Mark went about well-groomed, in elegant, ironed clothes; Pat, because she wanted to get rid of the fact that she was ‘abnormal’ and identify herself with the ‘normal’ middle class, and Mark … well, Mark is Mark.”

  Radhika added a gesture to her narrative that was so eloquent that any further comment about Mark would have been superfluous.

  “Some people applauded the couple, others envied them—depending on each person’s character. Patricia and Mark, slim and refined, perfect, as if they had stepped out of an American guide to etiquette. They got married when they were still students and they soon had children. Mark was a lawyer, they bought a house in a wealthy residential neighborhood, Lake Bluff. In the summer, they travelled to Europe, where they visited art galleries and museums. They adored the Renaissance.

  “In the ’70s, a large sculpture by Picasso was installed in the center of Chicago. Do you know the one I mean? I don’t know if you remember the controversy that blew up over that particular work of art … no, no, you couldn’t remember, you were just a kid then. Russia at the time was hermetically sealed and Western ideas and controversies only filtered through with difficulty? Maybe. Yes, yes, it’s true. There was the Cold War. But that was such a long time ago, who remembers it now?

  “At that time, Mark agreed with the people who wanted to demolish the statue; Pat, on the other hand, admired it. She adored it. For her it was a whole discovery, a kind of miracle. She went to see the statue, she drew it and she took photos of it from different angles, she walked around it like someone going to church to pray to their special saint. In the beginning, Pat and Mark argued jokingly, but they soon found that their difference of opinion regarding contemporary art meant that they also held different attitudes toward life in general. Boy, am I going on! Do you get what I’m saying? In the end, Mark was a conservative man, and Pat was open to everything new. They had more and more arguments: about mutual friends, about the places they had to visit, about their children’s education.

  “Mark was in favor of the Vietnam War, Pat couldn’t be in favor of a war. On the college campus, she took part in the demonstrations against American foreign policy. And the day came when she didn’t know what it meant to be normal anymore. Be like the others? Sure, but who are the others? She didn’t know. But she knew that American soldiers were dying in Vietnam.”

  “Americans?” Vadim asked.

  “Of course!” Radhika said, amazed.

  “Weren’t the Vietnamese dying there too?”

  “The Vietnamese? What about them?”

  Radhika didn’t understand what Vadim was getting at with his questions. She thought perhaps it was a language problem, that Vadim, whose English was by no means perfect, had misunderstood something.

  “But far more Vietnamese died than Americans, and it was America who started the war in the first place!” Vadim said, and now it was his turn to be amazed.

  Radhika clearly hadn’t thought about the matter like this before. For her, until now, the Vietnamese had never existed. The war in Vietnam was reprehensible, of course, because many Americans died in it, not because the enemy also lost lives. Logically, the enemy has to die. But … what if your enemy is the enemy of a conservative government, which is also your enemy? No, better to leave it, it was too complicated! “You talk like the Communist press in your country,” Radhika said brusquely, as the conversation was beginning to unsettle her. “We’re a democratic country.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, we, America. We have the most perfect democracy in the world. We’ve never started a worldwide conflict; on the contrary, if it wasn’t for us, there’d still be a war in Europe.”

  “The world war?”

  “Yes, the world war. And all the little ones: the one in Bosnia, and the ones in a whole bunch of little countries with strange names.”

  Vadim observed his knee closely and brushed some dust off it. “It’s true that in Europe and Russia we shed blood for ideological reasons. But, what would a world without ideals be like? Bad. The problem is that ideals get turned into ideologies and people kill for them. So,” Vadim smiled gently, “I prefer to sit under a mulberry tree and feed myself with figs.”

  Radhika pinched his cheek.

  “Come to think of it, you Russians have also wreaked havoc, with your violent invasions.”

  “Are you talking about the Prague spring?” asked Vadim, in a low voice.

  “Yes, and Hungary, and Poland, and Afghanistan … you guys have been around!”

  “I know there’s no excuse,” Vadim whispered, so that Radhika couldn’t hear him. He went on in a slightly louder voice, “You know, in Prague a Russian soldier killed himself. He felt guilty for having destroyed the Czechs’ dream. And there were others who—”

  “Suicide is a form of destruction.” Radhika cut him off firmly. She was like almighty God. And the avenging angel, the exterminating angel, sword in hand. “We Americans only value what is positive and constructive and people who fight for what they believe in. We don’t value destruction.”

  Vadim understood her. He sighed. Yes, that’s just how his teacher of Marxist-Leninism used to speak. And, during the old regime, that was exactly what the slogans written in yellow letters on a red background, hanging on the streets and next to the roads, proclaimed. And the Marxist-Leninism teacher, just like Radhika now, was convinced that what he said was the truth. Like the people who had invented those slogans. And what did all that lead to?

  Vadim remembered the human wreck stumbling through the shadows …

  “What else happened to Patricia?” he asked in the end, in a sad, quiet voice.

  “Pat went on living with Mark, reluctantly.” Radhika continued her story, calmly, with interest. “She said that it was important to keep the family together so that the kids didn’t lose their mental balance, but I think that what frightened her most was becoming ‘abnormal’ again. She believed that everything that wasn’t normal had a stigma attached to it.

  “She had her first successes with her paintings. She liked travelling alone to the American cities where they organized the exhibitions. Her self-respect increased. On the other hand, Mark, who at first thought that his wife had a hobby that didn’t affect him, becau
se Pat painted at home, got the shock of his life. It was if he had been struck in the head with a hammer. You thought that this kind of man didn’t exist in America? Don’t idealize American society. And the day came when he slapped Patricia in the face. And, after the first time, it happened again and again. Pat wanted, and also didn’t want, to leave him. She didn’t want to because of the children, and also because she felt a strange pity for him. When Mark got angry, he was capable of breaking a vase or a few plates, he was beside himself. And, afterward, he cried and begged her to forgive him. Poor guy, you say? Men always take the side of other men. And what about Pat? It was during this period that I met her. She was seeking medical help for her husband and she couldn’t ask her friends, because Mark was a well-known lawyer. So she went to a women’s support group that I run. I advised her to leave her husband. The psychiatrist that we found for Mark was unable to change anything. The cause of Mark’s unhappiness had to be removed, and that cause had a lot to do with Patricia.”

  Radhika bit into the pear. “I guess you’re aware that the twentieth century was the century for women and their liberation.”

  Vadim shook his head. “I don’t agree. It was the century for wars, persecution, and dictatorships.”

  “There have always been dictatorships. On the other hand … Look at Patricia, the evolution of a delicate little flower from a well-off family to a woman who is successful in a man’s world. There’s an example of my conviction that the twentieth century was the century for women.”

  “The concentration camps and the gulag had a lot more influence on the twentieth century as a whole, on its society, on its history,” Vadim explained, feverishly. He was mixing his tenses and his English pronunciation was dreadful. But there were so many things he wanted to say! He went on.“In the nineteenth century, in Russia, they freed the serfs. And now? Look at my father, my uncle, my grandfather, my mother, my grandmother. The ones who haven’t died are scarred for life. It’s like a plague. The feeling of guilt haunts the parents. The children inherit this feeling and are no good for anything.”