And Natalia began to cry.
You held her then, because your hands were free—freed by your father’s death. It took two lives to ransom yours. Two whole lives.
But you—you slipped through, Darka.
GIRLS
TRANSLATED BY ASKOLD MELNYCZUK
Darka saw her on the bus, the sweaty, June-soaked bus, brimming with people and their smells: sweet, almost putrid—female, heavy, equestrian, yet oddly palatable, and even stimulating, sexual—distinctly male. Suddenly all the smells switched off, leaving only the girl’s profile on the sunny side of the bus, angular as a Braque: abrupt, soaring cheekbones, a fine pug nose, full lips, and a sharp, childlike fist of a chin—a capricious, fragile geometry that occasionally seeps from an artist’s pen, piercing the heart, as at the touch of a brand-new Christmas ornament when you were a child (I remember it: a blinding white ballerina, tutu frozen in an upward sweep, an inconceivable liquid legato of arms and legs, so delicate and small-fingered that touching it with your brutish five-year-old’s stumps seemed blasphemous), such faces are catapulted into the world in order to reawaken us to life’s fragility. She had the disproportionately long (instead of Braque, Modigliani) neck of a wary fawn (“Fee-fi-o-fawn,” chanted the other girls, but Darka couldn’t bring herself to say it: the fawn was simply Effie and none other, because these slopes and angles, lines pushed to the breaking point, suggested something else entirely), it was the same kind of neck Darka remembered emerging from the open collar (stiff, angular, extending over the shoulders in that style from the seventies) of the school uniform, flashing cleavage. Ah, Effie the fawn! In the chemistry classroom her spot was near the window, where the light fell on her face and neck that same way, trailing down into the shadow under the second button, which deepened as she bent over, giving the sun her downy left cheek. Only, Darka realized now that this could not be her childhood friend, that the real Effie, like herself, would be well over thirty, and yet amazingly enough, it was her, newly returned in her incomparable not-quite-twenty-year-old, eternally teenage prime: every woman’s beauty has (as every figure has its ideal size, where one pound more or less makes all the difference) its own age of perfection, one in which everything opens to the fullest, and which can change in a minute like the bloom on a desert flower or may, in happier circumstances, depending on the care and watering, last for years (so, optimistically, reasoned Darka, whose spending on watering—meaning on moisturizing, creams, and lotions—has recently begun to exceed her outlay for clothing)—Effie was intended by her gracious creator to be junior size, and who knows into what life turned her eventually? Effie: ephebus, the word exactly.
Effie-who-is-not-Effie, on the sunny side of the bus, senses she’s being watched and turns her head (the butterfly brush of lashes, her glance sharp as an elbow: Look, look, said Effie, rolling up her sleeve, See how sharp, want to feel it? And here too—she pushes down her collar, stretches her neck as a spooked beast, props forward her collarbones, Cubist honed: held breath, the gaze dead, strange, a little frightened, whether with its own daring trustfulness or because of your unpredictability: she loves me, she loves me not (or, as she played it: hold me, thrill me, kiss me, kill me)—of course it’s not her, and neither is this woman as young as she looked in profile—Darka turns her eyes away, and looks politely out the window where at this moment the monument to Vatutin rises out of the dappled green of Mariinsky Park—dull, bald, and smug, a sculptural epitaph to Khrushchev’s era: a peer, Darka sneers (the monument went up the year she was born)—and at that instant she decides she will, damn it, go to the school reunion (a stiff envelope with a gold seal, an invitation, removed yesterday from the mailbox, and uncertainly set aside—there will be time to think about it), though the prospect wearies her: what could be interesting about this pathetic act of individual self-assertion vis-à-vis one’s own adolescence, what’s compelling about the grey and the bald blissfully morphing into boys again, and the artificial, elaborately decked-out women who sneak glances at your wrinkles, hoping they have fewer themselves? But she’ll go—whatever happened to Fawn-Effie-Faron? Suddenly, she needs to know.
Darka once read an article by an American gender-studies luminary that claimed axiomatically that boys tended to be competitive, and girls cooperative. Only a boy could have blathered such nonsense so glibly. The struggle for power, not for its dividends in the form of grades (suggestive of subsequent financial security), not for success with the opposite sex (which had not defined itself as being opposed to anything yet), and not even for the applause meter spiking at the Christmas pageant (which principally feeds the vanity of one’s parents, and only later flexes the muscles of your own), but for power in its nearly unalloyed pristine form, like the sweet narcotic of pure, dry white spirit, and all the more intoxicating—the exclusive and uncontested right to lead the class either from the schoolroom to the playing field, or after school to what they called a cats’ concert, to be staged below the window of the fat girl from the front row you don’t like, the one who chews her sandwich wrapped in wax paper during the break and then leaves hideous grease stains on textbooks—to lead the class no matter where, no matter whether for good or ill, because the difference between good and evil doesn’t exist, just as it never exists in the presence of absolute power—this struggle, setting aside primitive tribes for the moment, is found precisely among girls from ages eight to twelve. Later, thank god, they develop other, more civilian concerns.
By fourth grade, when Effie appeared in their class, Darka already had the rap sheet of either a budding criminal or a future political leader (the boundary between them being vague, and heavily dependent on nurture rather than nature): at least two girls from her class had to change schools, one of them in the middle of the year, the black-haired Rivka Braverman with bluish-white starched bows in her glistening braids, whose father’s chauffeur drove her to school in her father’s government-issued glistening black Volga, and after school drove her to music lessons.
Rivka had a plump, confident ass and a disdainful mouth melding into folds of flesh. She smelled of homemade vanilla cookies, vacations at a spa in the Caucasus, third-generation antiques confiscated during the Bolshevik revolution, and a five-room apartment of the sort reserved for only the most privileged of Soviet families, in a building erected by prisoners of war for the elite. Such a start in life does little to encourage an instinct for self-preservation, so it was Darka, whom Rivka carelessly attempted to treat with all her studied arrogance toward those who had never darkened the threshold of such a five-room apartment in a building erected by prisoners of war, who taught Rivka her first lesson in survival in a society sufficiently transformed so that neither her grandfather the prosecuting attorney nor her father the chief manager were able to secure for her what was most valuable: a more bankable nationality to declare in that fifth blank on her passport. After Darka sicced on her a mob of classmates that included the red-haired Misha Khazin and Marinka Weissberg, who chased her all the way from school to the entrance of that apartment building built by prisoners of war, in one breath chanting, “Kike, kike, running down the pike”—and Rivka really did run like the Wandering Jew of all Treblinkas, her plump bouncing ass suddenly, pathetically deflated—and the next day in class the group murmured to themselves so that the teacher facing the blackboard heard only a monotonous buzz as though the room had been filled with bumblebees—Zhid, zhid, zhid, the zh’s especially greasy, thick, repulsive, until the teacher would snap—“Let the damn bee out!”—and the buzz would stop for a bit, and then would start again, so that finally Rivka leaped up and shouted, “Again! There they go again!” and ran out weeping—after this, no matter how Braverman Senior threatened the school, no matter how many parents were called in for meetings, it was no longer possible for Rivka to stay in this class with the propeller bows of her braids held high, or in any other manner.
Darka herself was shocked and frightened by Rivka’s unexpected collapse. Her hysterical crying had aborted
their game of king of the hill, and for a few days Darka herself lay in bed with an inexplicable fever. Her principal sorrow lay in the fact that Rivka, arrogant and hateful, with her muscling into the class presidency, with her hideous pouting mouth (a clear legacy from her grandfather, an agent of the cheka, the brutal secret police, a fact Darka could not have known at the time, but intuited unerringly) with which she talked her way into the coveted position of nurse’s volunteer assistant wherein she would examine her classmates’ hands and send the ink-spattered back to the washroom for a scrubbing, with her methodical nerdiness and unblemished faith in her own perfection, who had once dared to point out reluctantly that Darka too was an A student (“It’s you who’s an A student too,” Darka blurted back), with her glistening sleeve protectors, and that second pair of shoes she carried in a special pink bag, real pumps, delicate and also pink, like a little princess’s, with heels—“You don’t have any like this and you never will. My daddy bought them for me in Copenhagen”—that Rivka was abruptly revealed to be a child, just like Darka, and because of her, because of Darka, that child was screaming with grief. Darka’s parents also grew worried as she began groaning in her sleep. She’d gladly have made peace with Rivka, would have apologized, made up, cheered her up, had she only known how. Her experience of peacemaking involved only her mother and father, who, no matter what happened, always found themselves in the pastoral position: “Go and sin no more,” they’d say after a time, and it was possible to skip out with a leap, lighthearted, with quickly drying-as-in-a-sun-shower tears. Here, however, something had broken irreparably—in Rivka, in the world, in her very own self, and through the broken hole, as in a fence, there crawled a thick, hot, brown darkness, and when Darka’s fever finally fell and she returned to school, she found that Rivka was no longer in her class.
We can count among the long-term consequences of these events the mixed feelings of guilt and shame that from then on dogged Darka in her every encounter with a Jewish person, and that would only fade upon closer, personal acquaintance. The direct, immediate consequence was that Darka shrank, grew subdued, and dove deep into books (that began the period of intoxication by reading) right up to the end of the school year.
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