Then, the following year, a new girl appeared.
Darka remembered the first time she met everyone who’d played any real part in her life, even though the memory may be hidden at the bottom of her mind’s drawer—a snapshot of another-other-stranger, cut out of the chaotic backdrop that became the rest of the world, singled out by god-knows-what intuition, like a promise. Laid out with the rest of the sequence, the snapshots charted a series of various and unexpected poses, from the lightning charge of first direct eye contact, the voltaic arc of it short-circuiting (blue eyes, grey eyes, green eyes, each with the same enchanting glassy gaze of antique crystal, men’s eyes, but who knows what hers looked like in that instant?), to those taken as though with a hidden camera, when the object has not yet noticed you and not begun to suspect that he or she will soon be someone in your life, profiles, three-quarter shots, even shots from the back of the head: napes can be outrageously singular. Yet, no matter how long she rummaged through her memory, she could never find that first shot of Effie. Effie had not come from the outside; she’d unfolded from within Darka like one of her own organs. Like the dormant gene of an inherited disease.
What Darka remembered were Effie’s nylon pantyhose—most of the girls in the class still wore white and brown cotton ones, wrinkled, droopy kneed, and for some reason eternally sagging because they were made too long in the seat, oh, this damned command economy—did socialism set as one of its goals the breeding of short-legged and suspiciously tubby little girls?—with the crotch always drooping from under one’s skirt so that everyone, above all the wearer, expected that any moment they would slip all the way down, and so our childhood passed, in the Land of the Slipping Tights. First graders simply hiked up their skirts and purposefully yanked them up, and that very same fat girl from the first row (her name was Alla) did it once in fourth grade when she was called up to the blackboard, the most natural gesture, the same as rolling up your sleeves or smoothing your hair, but in fourth grade they mocked her mercilessly, the boys practically fell out of their chairs, pointing their fingers, and the treacherous girls too yukked it up, and maybe because of that Darka was so impressed with Fawn’s legs, those long, vulnerable, lanky legs of a newborn fawn, but covered smoothly, as if with a tan, with a fine transparent wrap. In the sun-drenched classroom they looked golden. It was as though Fawn had no childhood, nothing to outgrow, all the barely visible, minute feminine skills of proper self-presentation, which take one’s entire adolescence to master (and some need a good chunk of their adulthood too), all that plucking of eyebrows, trying on various haircuts (the shag, the flip, the Sassoon bangs—a chirping language already incomprehensible to boys), nail polish with glitter and flowers, until settling in tenth grade on, thank god, a reasonable color. Fawn seemed to have been endowed with everything at birth, a fully drawn, precise, and delicate gold-legged figure: Braque? Modigliani? No, Picasso, Girl on the Ball.
Effie, Effie, my love.
Darka remembers more about the legs—the unbearable internal burn that you eventually learn to recognize as jealousy when the English teacher (and really as though copied from life, from the grotesquely bland, flat-chested, formless, ageless English women of de Maupassant whom Darka was already devouring surreptitiously) makes Effie stand in the corner: teachers—that is, female teachers (there was only one man, who taught phys ed)—somehow teachers did not love her, but why? And Effie stands there in her short-skirt uniform, in front of the whole class, lightly rocking on her golden fawn’s legs, and Marinka Weissberg whispers to Darka: “Doesn’t Fawn have nice legs?” Darka cringes, this isn’t a subject for discussion, but Marinka keeps on, “Long too. Mine are twelve centimeters shorter. We measured. You know how you measure, here, from the hip”—the blow is so shocking that Darka inadvertently opens her mouth to catch a breath, and then under her breast the burn spreads with a slow fire: just yesterday she and Effie sat late at the lake in the park, first feeding the Effie-necked swans, and when the swans went to sleep, the girls watched the sun set on the burning, splintered, intense dark-purple streak of water, wide eyed as though frightened. Both gazed with Effie’s wide-open eyes: “So much beauty,” she said, her thin—so thin they looked shadowed with blue—eyelids twitching like the wings of a butterfly: “So much beauty in the world, how to grasp it all? You know, Dar, sometimes I can’t sleep all night, I keep thinking, my head goes round and round, how to hold it, this world’s so huge? And you know”—the lids dropped, along with Darka’s heart, the skin above Effie’s top lip, full as if ready for a kiss, beaded with sparkles of sweat—the effect of an extraordinary and invisible struggle inside her—“You know Dar, I think either something very beautiful or very terrible will happen to me,” her knuckles squeezing the bench turning white. “Something, some way in which I’ll finally be able to capture everything, hold everything, contain everything, you understand?” Darka trembled within, not from the cold, because her cheeks and mouth were hot, but from the feeling that in her cupped palms fluttered a butterfly, because everyone knows that if you blow all the pollen off the butterfly’s wings, it will certainly die. Never again in her life would she so desperately want to protect someone, before no one else did she feel such numbing awe as then, with Effie, all later relationships were mere shards, reflections of this sensation, like those splinters of purple fire on the water (a bit like loving a man, when you pull apart, exhausted, but then after a few minutes hungrily reach for him again because you don’t know what else to do with this flesh, impenetrable as a wall, aside from taking it one more time, because there’s no way to come together so as to never part again—but that’s coarser, more primitive. For that matter, as you grow your self-conscious flesh, everything becomes simpler and more linear, or maybe, Darka wonders now, being an older sister is an inborn instinct, like being a mother, and it was her only-child’s sisterlessness that had been an absence swelling inside her for years and at the right moment poured onto Effie, Effie who in fact needed something different)—deafened and blinded, Darka bent low over her notebook, trying not to look at Fawn standing in the corner though she smiled wanly in her direction as if she knew what she and Marinka Weissberg were whispering: that Effie yesterday entrusted to her the most precious, most fragile part of her inner self meant to Darka a kind of vow to eternal and absolute fidelity, so, aside from the shock that the beloved turns out not to be transparent, that she leads a separate life and can have secrets from you (measuring legs with silly Marinka, giggling, hiking hems to press their hips against each other—She never did such things with me, not even a hint of it)—in addition to that shock, there was the grief of injured love that demands everything at once, unsatisfied with bits and pieces, and therefore is destined to doubt that which it has actually received: Is it possible she lied to me yesterday? How is it possible to be so, so hypocritical! Darka remembered she’d used just that word: during recess, she passed by Effie in proud silence; it took her stupefied senses an entire class to recover from the shock, while at the next recess Effie herself approached her: “What’s up? You mad at me?”
“I have to talk to you,” said Darka in a tight voice she didn’t recognize herself, a lump in her throat. After school they again sat in the park at the lake, wrapped like fairy-tale heroes in a cloud, an air of Shakespearian thunderstorm, a tempest—betrayal, breakup, the parting—Effie, flashing eyes full of wobbly tears, passionately assured Darka that the thing with Marinka had happened long ago, which was supposed to mean, before Darka, that it was all silly and meaningless and didn’t matter, and Darka brightened, the sky cleared, as though pulled out from under an avalanche, yet for a while she still pretended to be offended, partly from an innate sense of form and partly out of an unconscious bartering with Effie for new concessions, new guarantees of undivided and exclusive affection, a scenario that Darka later on inevitably repeated with men except that with them it was much easier, while Effie was about as supple as Picasso’s acrobat, dodging to avoid Darka’s onslaught, from despairing rep
entance to a sudden collapse into a complete and trancelike absence and self-absorption, to half-hysterical recitals of poems meant to explain everything (that year they buried each other in poetry), until, exhausted by the endless back-and-forth, Darka heard her own voice cry: “Forgive me!” and then she was sinking to Effie’s nylon-warmed golden knees, embracing them and greedily breathing in, through tears, their surprising smell of bread, the odor of home reached after long travels: in the bedroom under your parents’ door the light pours, Let me fluff up your pillow, the tickle of her soft and living, like a kitten’s hair on your cheek, two girls cuddling under the covers, pressed into each other, whispering, sudden outbursts of laughter, Stop, you’re deafening me—the same as you, but different, that’s what a sister is, that’s what I’m embracing, tightly, so tightly that it can’t be tighter, never to let it go—two wildly intertwined girls on a bench in the park at night, her budding breasts under her school uniform thrust into yours, her lashes tickling your neck, like in that myth where the cloud of the gods rendered the lovers invisible to mere mortals—nobody walked down the path, nobody rustled the fallen leaves, there was nobody to be surprised when Effie began kissing the trail of tears under Darka’s eyes and then pressed her lips to hers and gasped, stunned for an instant, Effie’s heart thumped inside Darka’s chest and both froze, not sure what to do next, and then Darka felt between her lips something quick, wet, salty, and very large, it floated in her mouth like a naked hot fish blacking out the rest of the world and she did not immediately understand that it was Effie’s tongue but once she did, she was seized by another, incomprehensible sort of sobbing, which she gulped down together with Effie’s tongue, squeezing her skinny body even tighter: her shoulder blades sharp as wings, the keyboard of the vertebrae under the coarse uniform suddenly brought to memory her first realization of what it meant that something was alive. She had just turned two years old, and stood speechless above a basket full of tiny fluffy white rabbits, unable to step aside or turn away, until one of the adults said from above, “Would you like one?”—up until that instant she struggled to come to terms with the idea that such an astonishing miracle breathed and moved, and then with the equally astonishing news of what one could do with such a miracle: one could have it. At that most honest of ages, possession meant just one thing: it meant that, out of an excess of feeling, one should put the thing in one’s mouth and, ideally, swallow it, as one did the petals of the prettiest flowers from the courtyard garden, which you plucked and chewed, your drool turning bitter and green when you spit, and over years that original meaning of the word doesn’t change, only gets clouded over. It takes a lifetime to understand that long ago the grown-ups lied to you, that in fact nothing living, neither a flower, nor a rabbit, nor a person, nor a country, can, in fact, be had: they can only be destroyed, which is the one way to confirm they have been possessed.
“And here too,” said Effie—but this was another time, at home, before a large tarnished mirror in a dark-brown frame—she first unbuttoned her dress, exposing a double bra strap on her Cubist shoulder of protruding horizontal bones; she’d long ago begun wearing a bra, Darka had seen, when they changed before gym class, Effie’s matching snow-white underwear unavailable in any store but there, amid the smell of old, rough mats stacked up in the corner and the reek of old sweat, in the middle of it, it was just underwear, but here, when Effie, not turning her hypnotized, dark eyes—pupils dilated—away, slipped off her bra, a tender, pearl-pink nipple popped out of its cup like an outthrust tongue and at the same time Effie’s fingers, stumbling over buttons as though asking permission, cautiously unbuttoned Darka’s sweater and she saw, alongside Effie’s, her own nipple only darker, redder, like a cherry pit, here all the blood at once rushed to Darka’s head and everything grew blurred. Effie leaned lightly over her breast, and Darka felt her wet gathering mouth, and goose bumps, and her own rapid breathing, and everything began flowing, or was it Darka herself who was slipping into the unknown, something heady and hot, something forbidden and tempting, compared with which all of her will to power, being first in her class, academic triumphs, captainship of the volleyball team, all this was small and insignificant as she went down and emerged new, dark, dangerous, and big as the world—oh Effie, Effie, two girls with their shirts undone in the depths of the mirror where Effie touched her kissed breast to her own and said: “Here too,” pointing to the other one, and that was how it began.
And so it whirled, sweeping all away.
All their school recesses spent shoulder to shoulder at the windowsill, wandering through the park after class, drunken talking, talking, talking, insatiable as two mutes who’d suddenly discovered the gift of speech or infants who’d just learned words, but they really were just learning to speak, learning to translate themselves into words different from what the adults required of them, about the meaning of life, the future of mankind, will there be war, about their own childhoods, it’s amazing how much you recall at that age—when I was little—and then you don’t remember a thing until you’re old, when, they say, the sluices finally open again, you can’t even remember what those things were that you spent hours gushing at each other, so the day felt too short, except a few splinters, of poems for instance, Brodsky’s “So long had life together been” (Effie), Kalynets’s “Lady with eyes larger than asters” (Darka), but that was prompted by the grown-ups, it was the fucking legacy of the ’60s that still dripped from family to family after the tap had been decisively shut off, while all of one’s own content that filled the cup to overflowing had drained away somewhere, leaving only silt after the passing of a stream—the memory of a bench, of a windowsill in a school corridor, a memory of Effie’s concentrated face—did she know how to listen with shiny eyes and half-open mouth! and all that in the shadowy, autumnal light of sad, nostalgic longing for the long-gone unreachable heights. That whole visible daily aspect of their friendship (sixth grade: just as the kids enter the chaotic process of gluing and ungluing in twos and threes, like molecules, friendships forming and dissolving several times a year so that none of the teachers ever paid these two much attention)—it all continued, this material world, yet invisibly tightening and shrinking like dresses that now pinched in the armpits under the abrupt combustion wind of that new, suffocating, heady element of their friendship that unfolded without witnesses and demanded more and more, at least from Darka, because all their trembling embraces, all their hot kisses and more frequent, growing caresses exploded not on their own, not from a purely physical compulsion, as would later occur with boys, but each time and inevitably as the resolution of yet another emotional upheaval, a little drama, the improvisation of which they were wonderfully adept at: in the fit of peacemaking after a new argument that took them to the edge of breakup (which were as frequent between them as thunderstorms in July), in an ecstasy of reconciliation to the sound of the Doors, to which Effie would respond by collapsing onto the carpet and pounding her forehead into it, shouting, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, and Darka would gather that dear warm downy head (smelling like the fur of a kitten), her whole body trembling at the unfathomable mystery of feeling things, at how far more subtle and spiritually richer Effie was than she (that was how Darka put it in the essay titled “My Friend”: “My friend has a richly subtle and spiritually rich nature” and was stuck for a long time on the repetition: one of the two had to be crossed out, yet neither was willing to leave), really, it’s a miracle, Darka now thinks, they managed to study that year, where had they found the time for it, or, to be more precise, where had Effie found the time, since she never managed things as well as Darka, yet succeeded in passing all her classes, even earning As, and not only in music and gym (a good student, which automatically meant a good girl, or as the vice principal said during the PTA meeting about her, a girl from a well-to-do family, because that was what she was, with divorced parents who spoiled her competitively: stereo, French underwear at twelve)—where did she find it, the time and energy?
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br /> Because they also read, insatiably, with all their might, living through the work as though it were their own inner life—their own times fit them like a glove: these were the years of the book boom—years of the hunt for limited-edition books from Moscow, bound in fragrant fresh leatherette the color of dark amber, or bottle green, or marine blue, all spines gilded like the epaulets on an officer’s uniform (and looking for all that like the boxes containing expensive cognac next to which these books were meant to cohabit on Yugoslavian furniture, signaling lives of cultured leisure and the ever-expanding well-being of the Soviet people), and Darka, whose family could afford, at best, cheap mimeographed copies, and not always of the safest works, borrowed from Effie high-ranking uniform volumes of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, as well as The Master and Margarita, which Effie read first, before loaning it, rehearsing for her most of the first chapter almost verbatim up to and including the part where the head is cut off by the tram, but Darka never managed to memorize the final chapter: she was called to her first interrogation right as she was finishing the book, and that is how her childhood ended.
Much later, as a grown-up, Darka finally risked asking her mother just what horrible thing had been discovered at that point (oh, if only it hadn’t been!) and which had stormed through the entire school for over a month? To an adult, the story seemed utterly banal: the girl “from the well-to-do family,” not yet fourteen, secretly, without anybody knowing (not even me!), hung around with sexually mature seventeen-year-old boys, went with them Sundays to the deserted Trukhaniv Island, and later the mother of one of these boys (you can imagine this mother, someone should have drowned the bitch!), raised a fuss across the whole school (idiot!) because her dear little boy had the foreskin on his penis torn, or rather, bitten through (so what’s the big deal? It would heal before his wedding!). Darka’s mother was only able to tell her about the torn foreskin because for her, apparently, the story had been an unforgettable lesson in anatomy. Okay, I agree, said Darka insincerely, hoping to coax more information from her, the story’s not pleasant, certainly not for the girl’s parents, but when you think about it, there are many worse ways to lose your virginity, which don’t always lead to broken lives, and a girl with such a turbulent debut might, in twenty years, why not, surface as an affable matron with a decent academic career, while the poor mangled boy may, to the delight of his mother, yet become a PhD, an oceanographer, a selenographer, or some other -ographer, why not?
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