When I slid the paper across the table to Professor Kopanyev after class, he scooped it up and pressed it to his tweeded chest.
“I wrote about Chekhov again. I hope that’s all right.”
“Of course, of course! He’s greatest writer who ever lived.” He made a show of flourishing the loose-leaf pages and reading the title from arm’s length, “Chekhov the Radical.” Oddly, his face seemed to collapse. He stood abruptly and started stacking his folders, placing my paper on top. Men are always occupying themselves with their facial hair in Russian novels—gathering it in their hands and sniffing it. Kopanyev looked like he was trying to rip his off his face.
The following week he turned up tardy as ever, twinkling as usual, books and folders in his arms. He leaned forward and dropped it all in a heap on the table. The books were part of a set, both with unillustrated manilla covers, and those of us who were also taking Russian leaned forward to read the Cyrillic titles—two volumes of Chekhov’s letters. When Kopanyev finished tidying the mess, he announced that he himself had brought in a subject for discussion. “With apologies to Keith, who I’m sure was amply prepared and very much looking forward to guiding us through our conversation today.”
Halfway through the year, to everyone’s surprise, Keith, the punk, had blurted that his name was actually Teeth. Too late. Kopanyev never remembered. Now Teeth’s tactic was not even to reply to Keith.
Kopanyev took up one of the twin volumes, torn bits of paper stuck in its pages. “Excuse me,” he said, opening it. “I’m translating off top of my head. It’s from letter to poet Pleshcheyev from Anton Chekhov written in—” He set the book down and frisked himself until he came up with a glasses case. “1888,” he read, once the glasses were installed. “Those I am afraid of, he writes, are ones who look for tendencies between lines and want to put me down definitely as liberal or conservative. I am not liberal or conservative, not evolutionist, nor monk, nor careless about—Excuse me. Indifferent to. Indifferent to world. I would like to be free artist—and that is all. Those are Chekhov’s own words. What do you say?”
No one said anything.
Kopanyev flipped through more pages. Scraps of paper fluttered out like dandruff. “Here. Here we have a letter to editor Suvorin. Quote: Now what about us? Yes, us! We paint life such as it is—that’s all, there isn’t any more. . . . Should I go on? Here. Here. Same letter to Pleshcheyev. I consider trademarks or labels to be prejudices.”
The others didn’t understand what he was so riled about. Eyes rolled here and there. I was in shock. I was his favourite. Everyone knew I was his favourite, but now I had disappointed him. My throat felt so parched that I coughed. He swung around. “Jane! Yes! Please! Speak!”
“I feel,” I began before coughing again, “he presents the viewpoints of his characters so sympathetically that he must share them.”
“I am completely in accord!” he roared. “It seems as though he shares them. Because he is artist, not disseminator of propaganda. What about Turgenev? Who here thinks Turgenev is nihilist? Who? Hands up. No one. Yet how we feel for Bazarov! I for one weep every time he dies in my hands. Yet Turgenev himself lived like dandy in Paris and Baden-Baden. That, my conversationalists, is mark of artist.”
One of the women I’d overheard complaining about Kopanyev’s paternalistic attitude sighed now. “So what are you saying? Chekhov wasn’t a socialist?”
“He certainly wasn’t! He says so himself, though critics in Soviet Union would very much like you to believe he was!”
How grey Kopanyev’s teeth were. Normally you couldn’t see them behind the beard and moustache. He laughed a lot—he was jovial—but he never smiled. Now as he bared them in the triumph of his argument, I saw they were dingy and stripped of enamel, as though he and my father and aunt had all got them from the same store, deep in the discount bin. Communist teeth, my mother called them.
“One thing I’m trying to teach you, my dear pupils, is to read what is really on page, to respond to it with all your hearts, as human beings. Literature will make you better person. It will teach you sympathy and compassion for all manner of peoples, but not if you read it with closed mind. Not if you read to prove your closed mind is right.”
At Kopanyev’s suggestion we turned to “The Fiancée,” which most of us had read and because, he told us, it was Chekhov’s last story and the one those despised Soviet critics always cited as an example of his revolutionary tendencies. Everyone agreed that it was the portrait of a young woman’s political awakening, but not only that, Kopanyev insisted. “What is Chekhov really saying? Who stirs Nadya up in first place?”
“Her cousin?” Michael offered.
“Sasha you mean? Yes. And what happens to Sasha?”
“He dies of consumption of course. Ha ha ha!”
“Before that. Nadya goes to visit him, but she has different impression of him after her year away at university. Suddenly he seems dull and provincial. Outmoded. She has, in fact, outgrown him. And when she goes home, she sees her mother and her grandmother differently too, and town, even ceiling over her head, which keeps getting lower and lower. A year at university and she has outgrown them all. We see her at end of story longing for same elusive bright future so many of his characters yearn for. But where does it say that this is longing for revolution? Who has copy of story? Who? Nobody? I thought by now you would all be carrying Chekhov in your breast pockets, next to your hearts. Excuse me. Don’t move. I’ll return momentarily.”
He left. We sat in silence. A full minute passed before I realized this was my chance to bolt. “I thought this was his most feminist story,” the heavy woman commented as I gathered up my things.
“Yes,” said another. “She broke free from patriarchal expectations. She didn’t want to be that dope’s wife.”
Kopanyev returned as I was slinging my backpack onto my shoulder. He remained on his feet in the doorway. Blocking me in? Only when I had sat back down did he begin reading: “—it would be forgotten, erased from memory. This is Nadya thinking. She means past. The only distraction for Nadya was the small boys next door. Whenever she strolled into the garden they would bang on the fence, laugh and taunt her with the words, ‘And she thought she was going to get married, she did.’” He lowered the book. “They banged on the fence! There is that motif again!”
The night watchmen, security guards of the nineteenth century, beating out the hours. Time is passing. The future is approaching. Clang, clang, clang.
“How many times in the story does she lie sleepless listening to watchman banging out time?” Kopanyev asked. “What does it mean?”
I sat there, head down, shamed, angry.
“And here is last line of story: In a lively, cheerful mood she left that town—forever, or so she thought. What does it mean? Why does he add this or so she thought? Why? Why?”
He was yelling at us.
Finally someone spoke. Teeth. He burst out: “So tell us! Why the fuck?”
“I don’t care about politics,” Sonia told me that night as I lay convalescing on her bed. “In my opinion, that’s why we’re in this mess. And I know how you feel, Jane. I failed my practicum last year.”
“What? No! How?”
“I read them Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Do you know about her? The little Japanese girl who died of atom bomb disease? That’s what they call leukemia in Japan.”
“She died of leukemia? How old were the kids in your practicum?”
“Grade Two. I had to tell them, Jane. Through the children we’ll reach the parents. Even cereal companies understand that. My supervisor said I was irresponsible.”
“Ha! She’s the one who’s irresponsible!”
Sonia grabbed my hand. “That’s exactly what I told her!”
We helped each other like this. That was why I loved her. She supported me and I supported her. Half the time I felt exultant (we were going to move out together, we could only grow closer), the other half acutely anxious (we’d pr
obably be obliterated before that). The love reacted with the dread, and its product was a particular mood. Sadness and tedium and yearning. The lilac scent of unrequited love. A Russian mood. What if I did tell her? What if I said, Ya tebya lyublyu? I knew what she’d say. She’d say, so sweetly, “Oh, Jane. I love you too.”
I shouldn’t have written that paper. The force with which Kopanyev rejected it shattered my self-confidence. I’d write my exams but I wouldn’t go back to class for the rest of the term. I couldn’t face his tweeds, his mocking beard.
No doubt he would have loved my paper on Anna Karenina.
That spring the trees bloomed in succession, so many different kinds, each paler or pinker specimen bursting into flower just as its predecessor dropped her frilled skirt to the ground. Classes were ending and exams about to start, these spread over the month of April. We were trying to choose between a die-in outside the army recruitment office or chaining ourselves to the fence at the Boeing plant in Seattle. Belinda preferred the recruitment office action, which would involve bodies on the sidewalk outlined in chalk and fake blood splashed around. It satisfied her dramatic tendencies and was supported, of course, by Carla. But Pete argued that a recruitment centre was too general a target.
“People? Yes, we oppose all manifestations of militarism. But we can’t ignore that time is running out.”
Sonia seconded his opinion. “The watchman is clanging.”
“It’s time to stop beating around the bush. Code Blue here, right? We need to act specifically against nuclear weapons. Boeing manufactures the cruise.”
Belinda, who had a head half-filled with Medusa braids, put on a pouty face until Sonia told her, “We can still have blood. We could do burns too.”
Belinda perked up. “Burns would be neat.”
Some of us still had misgivings—about getting arrested in a foreign country, about having to rehearse an action that would take place a three-hour drive away. Some of us were Dieter, but also me, though I was much less vocal. I waffled rather than opposed. The group talked it out. We talked and talked and in the end Pete, Dieter, and Timo formed a committee that would drive down to scout the plant before we made a final decision.
“We’ll have to rent a car,” Timo said. No one imagined they would make it over the border in Pete’s Reliant.
There was one last item on the agenda that night which Carla, the facilitator, introduced by saying, “I think Isis has something to tell you.” Before we could even ask whom she meant, Belinda rose and announced she was changing her name.
“To Isis?” Sonia asked.
“To Isis.”
Everyone knew what was coming. Pete’s “Fuck” cued Belinda’s explosion. “Fuck you!” she roared. “You don’t own me!”
“Why didn’t I hear about this before?”
“Like I said, you don’t own me! God!”
Timo: “Whoah-oah. Whoah. Pete. Belinda.”
“Isis!”
“Isis.”
Pete ignored Timo. “What is going on?”
“Can you stop threatening her?” Carla said.
“I’m asking a question!”
“I just said! I’m changing my name!”
“Okay.” Pete got off his ice floe. “I have an announcement too.”
Dieter: “You’re not on the agenda.”
He stood on the coffee table. “I’m changing my name to Spot.”
Carla: “Pete! You are such an asshole!”
He stabbed a finger at her. “Spot! I demand you call me Spot!”
Timo could hardly get the words out. “I ddddon’t think this is the aaaappropriate time—”
Isis: “I want a mediator. I’m not talking to him without one.”
“Can we have a volunteer to mmmediate? Can you guys agree on someone?”
“I want Zed,” said Pete.
Isis said, “Fine. I’m fine with Jane.”
In the Chekhov story “The Duel,” Layevsky and von Koren had two seconds each, as well as the deacon hiding in the shrubbery. Five witnesses to their folly. We were three—me, huddled on the hearth, flanked by the pair of mocking garden statues.
Belinda arrived early, dressed in fatigues, more of her hair braided now. Then Pete made us wait, so long that by the time he came down and flopped in the beanbag chair the atmosphere was tense. They kept their eyes fixed on me, a proxy for their anger. I felt their glares cut through me.
Sonia and Timo had offered a compressed lesson in active listening. They said I should remain as neutral as possible and repeat back to Pete and Belinda what they said to each other, rephrasing if necessary, especially when their meaning became obscured by emotion. “So,” I said now and immediately pictured myself drowning in deep water and crying out this very thing—“So! So!” “Who wants to go first?” I asked.
Belinda signalled that she would. “I can’t be with Pete any more.”
I was taken aback. How to rephrase that? And it struck me what a terrible actress Belinda really was because none of her speeches had ever sounded as raw and pained as this. She was destined for commercials and summer stock. Tonight, though, she wasn’t performing and Pete was obviously as shocked, in shock even, all his powers extinguished. I doubt anyone had ever broken up with him before.
Belinda began to cry. After a few horrible minutes, she wiped her face on her sleeve and gestured for me to translate. “Pete?” I said. “Belinda says she can’t be with you any more.”
“Isis,” she corrected.
“Isis,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“Pete wonders why,” I said, feeling really stupid.
“You eat people,” she said.
He looked confused. “Tell her I thought she liked that.”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out.
“I mean you absorb them,” she said. “You suck them dry.” She squeezed her forehead, kneading out thoughts. “I’ve just been so in awe of you, Pete,” she said to the shag carpet. “Of your commitment and your brilliance. Everything became about you. I forgot about myself.”
“Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised. “I thought it was the other way around.”
“I haven’t grown. And I’m tired. I’m sorry to say this to you. I’m exhausted. You’re exhausting to be with.” She turned to me again and I stammered something about her feeling tired. “And tell him I hope we can still work together in the group,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to jeopardize that.”
“No,” Pete said.
“The work is too important.”
“I agree.”
Silence. My armpits were sopping but my throat was so dry I’d begun working my mouth to gather enough saliva to swallow. I dreaded that they would start screaming. Then the phone rang in the kitchen and we all straightened, alert as animals. It broke some of the tension.
“So,” Pete said. “I guess that’s it.”
“Don’t you have anything you want to say to me?” Belinda asked.
Sonia, I noticed, was trying to peep in through the doves and peace signs on the door panes. “Ask him,” Belinda said in an urgent voice. “Ask if he doesn’t want to tell me something.” “No,” Pete said.
“Nothing?”
Sonia poked her head in. “Sorry. Pete, the phone’s for you.” “Who is it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. A woman.”
Belinda, who had been leaning forward on the chesterfield, anxious for Pete to speak, fell back when Sonia said this. “Take a message,” Pete said.
“It’s long distance.”
“Take a message.”
Sonia gave me a stricken glance as she closed the door again, probably in response to the SOS I was transmitting with my eyes. As soon as she was gone, Belinda asked in a completely different tone, “Who was that, I wonder?”
Pete lifted his head and looked at her. I could see by his expression he was devastated, and now this too: confused. “Is this about sex?” he asked, like it was the last thing he would have b
lamed their troubles on.
“You slept with Ruth!”
“Who told you that?”
“Ruth did,” Belinda said.
“In what context?”
“I asked her.”
“You could have asked me.” He turned to me. “I don’t lie.” To Belinda: “Is that what you’re waiting for me to tell you?”
She rolled her eyes. “No. I already know that.”
“Should I go?” I asked and they replied, “Stay!” in adamant unison.
Pete: “I said you could sleep with other men.”
“Why, thank you.”
“I’m not giving you permission! You have the right to do what you want. Now and then I feel like sleeping with someone else. And if she feels like it too, it sometimes happens. It has nothing to do with you. I’m completely committed to you.”
Belinda tossed her snakes.
“I thought you were okay with it! You said you were!” He threw up his hands. “Christ, if this was the sixties this wouldn’t even be an issue!”
“I don’t want to sleep with other men,” Belinda said.
“Then don’t!” he shouted.
She yanked on her braids in frustration, as though she wore them as a prop. “Don’t you get it? I don’t even want to sleep with you!”
Pete sat, apparently absorbing this. After a long, blank moment, he sprang out of the beanbag. Belinda scrambled to her feet too, reaching for him, and they hugged for a long time, fused and swaying. When Pete started running his hands all over her back, Belinda abruptly pulled away and Pete lurched off through the French doors without looking back.
“God,” she said to me, lifting her arm and sniffing. “I stink, I’m sweating so hard. Can you walk me home? I need to debrief.”
Sonia came out of the kitchen as we were leaving. Belinda held up a hand to stop her from asking. No, Isis did. All that was over now. Sonia nodded; she would get the whole story from me later.
“That was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life,” Isis said as we descended the wooden front steps into dusk. “Correction. My stepfather once tried to get in my pants.”
“Oh, my God,” I said.
“This was the second hardest. Thank you.” She hugged me.
The Sky Is Falling Page 17
