A Feather on the Breath of God

by Sigrid Nunez

  “And that time was really not bad,” Vadim admits. But that was eighteen years ago.

  He was still a teenager when he first met Olga. And did he want to get married right away? “Yes, of course. It is Russian style.” And Olga, with one bad marriage already behind her, and a child—

  I can see them: the tall young smiling sailor with the blue, blue eyes and the helpless fair young mother.

  Olga never loved her first husband, supposedly. She married him only because her parents, who were friends of his parents, bullied her into it.

  I ask Vadim to give me photographs and this makes him uneasy. He is afraid that I want the photographs because I am planning to leave him. This is astute: I am always planning to leave him. (Once, he said to me, “I don’t know why you love me. I am married, I am poor, I am drinker, I am drugger—” I am lunatic, the answer came to me. But I still hoped to come to my senses.)

  Here he is in black and white, in bathing trunks, tense and unsmiling, just before a race. He wasn’t lying. He really was perfect.

  It is from photographs of his daughter that I form my image of his wife, since Vadim has said that Svetlana has her mother’s face. And certainly I can see nothing of him in that pretty round face with the dark round eyes and dark flowing hair. So he chose a wife who was his opposite physically too, and not really his type. (Early on, I had said to him, “What do you want with me? I am not your type. You like blonds with big tits.” “How did you know this?” Genuine surprise. Then: “It is true. If my friends in Odessa know I love woman so small, they laugh at me, they don’t believe it.”)

  But it turns out Olga is a blond. It happened soon after they met. When she discovered that Vadim liked blonds, she began to bleach her hair. Through all the changes the marriage has suffered since, she still bleaches her hair—just as he still wears the mustache that he grew way back then, at Olga’s request.

  I am the first woman Vadim has ever known to use tampons. “In Russia women use—kak eto?” He mimes the wringing out of a wet rag. He tells me how, when he took his daughter to register for school, the woman doing the paperwork asked about Sveta’s periods. Vadim had to translate for his daughter, who was mortified. “Russian people are very shy,” he says.

  “We don’t have sex, we only have children,” Russians make fun of themselves. THERE IS NO SEX IN RUSSIA, reads a popular button.

  Vadim clarifies. “There is a lot of sex in Russia, and a lot of dirty sex, but it is all outside the home.”

  One long afternoon in bed we teach each other the dirty words.

  In Russia they say having sex with a condom is like kissing through a handkerchief.

  Cheating is known as going to the left.

  The Soviet Union: the pro-lifer’s worst nightmare, the highest abortion rate in the world. At clinics you have to stand in line for your abortion, just as you do to buy milk or bread. Not unusual for a woman to have ten or more. Vadim thinks his wife has had closer to twenty. I am surprised that he doesn’t know the exact number, but then I remember: A husband who is not there when you give birth to his child is not likely to keep up with your abortions. And why aren’t Russian men there when their wives give birth? Vadim shrugs. “Why I want to be there? This is no place for man.”

  Twenty abortions. No anesthetic.

  Russian women can do anything. Russian women are tractors. These are popular sayings too.

  Often now when I think of Olga I see her as Vadim described her that time: clutching her head between her hands, backing away, screaming.

  “You don’t have to feel sorry for Russian women.” Vadim assures me that the relationship between the sexes is much happier in Russia than in America. He with his immigrant cabbie’s view: “Here women all crazy and men all gay.”

  Homosexuality, like pornography, was illegal in the Old Country.

  If for no other reason, Olga is better off than I because she has a husband. Vadim does not believe me when I say I don’t want to marry. “What will you do when you are old? I think of you in ten, twenty years. It will be terrible, terrible.” In Russia I could have no worse fate. Never to marry, to be an old maid: the worst shame upon a Russian woman.

  Any sympathy I express for Olga amuses Vadim. “Believe me, if she knew about you she would kill you,” he says, finally achieving the conditional.

  Already she has her suspicions. Vadim’s hair has grown over his ears, and though he is usually fastidious about haircuts, he keeps putting off going to the barber. And she is sensitive to his moods. “What are you so happy about?” Standing in front of him with her hands on her hips, glaring, suspicious. I know this woman.

  But the really solid evidence is the missing money. Olga knows how much her husband ought to be bringing home, and some days he is way short. She doesn’t buy his stories about there being no passengers or the cab breaking down. That missing money can mean only one of two things: drugs or a woman.

  One day, right after she leaves the house, he calls me. We are talking, he is rustling through his dictionary, he doesn’t hear her sneaking back into the house. We don’t hear her picking up the extension in the kitchen. She holds her breath and she listens. No English, but she understands. When she can bear it no more she begins screaming in Russian. I can hear her through both phones, as if there were two of her screaming. I am about to hang up when she switches to English—“English teacher, hah!”—and spits into the receiver.

  Now, whenever their phone rings and the caller hangs up, Olga says, “It’s your American prostitute!”

  (Once, Vadim calls while I am out, and a friend who happens to be visiting me answers. “Didn’t say who he was,” she reports. “But I’d swear it was Count Dracula.”)

  Olga doesn’t want to know anything about me. She knows it all already. Whoever I am I can only be of the same low breed as he. Like to like. Who else would want him? Scum to scum. We deserve each other.

  When Vadim confesses to her that he is in love, she faints.

  I don’t see him for over a week. Later he will describe Olga’s carrying on. Crying, screaming, vomiting, fainting. Taking to her bed, calling her mother and her daughter to her. Begging Svetlana to help, to bring her father to his senses. Oh, who will save them! Vadim cries too, when he describes his daughter sobbing on his neck, his mother-in-law falling to her knees. (A man who cries readily and without shame—something I have not known before. Tears sometimes choke Vadim when we are making love.)

  He says, “My dear, forgive me, but I don’t know what I can do.” Does this mean he loves Olga, after all? “I pity her. Because it is true, she will be lost in this country without me.” And how is Olga doing now? “She is better. She tries very hard to change herself. She does not scream so much, and she is calm. Now she tries to do everything very nice for me.”

  For the first time in a long while they are having sex. For the first time in years Olga is tender.

  I pull the arrow from my breast and break it over my knee. “I can scream and faint too, you know.”

  I am beside myself when he gets his hair cut.

  He says, “Beloved, you know I want only to be with you but I cannot spit on my family. But I worry about you, what will happen to you, because I see now what you are tormented.” And: “My dear, you know I love you and will always love you, but sometimes I think maybe it were better if we never meet.”

  I want to be there when he finally gets the past conditional.

  Pity was a big word with Vadim. He was always pitying someone. Sometimes after we made love he looked at me with what I thought was pity. Or knew, rather. It was pity all right. But why did he pity me?

  He said often: “I can be very ugly.” (But never in warning; he never once threatened me.)

  He gives me a telephone number. “Ask for Sasha. He doesn’t know English, but if you say to him only ‘I need Vadim,’ he will understand, he will call to me and I will call to you.” I assumed that this Sasha was a friend of Vadim’s and could hardly believe it when I found out th
at he was Olga’s younger brother. Wasn’t Vadim worried that Sasha would tell Olga? Vadim says no, Sasha would never do that, “because he is afraid of me. You have not seen it, but he has seen it. I can be crazy. I can be very ugly.” And I remembered what Vadim had done to Sasha and Olga’s father.

  It was always hard for me to imagine how Vadim must be with his wife. One day he tells me a story that helps me to see them as a couple, and to see him through her eyes.

  He came home one night to find Olga waiting up for him. She was very upset. Earlier that day she had witnessed her son beating his little boy and she had tried to stop him. She reminded Volodya that Vadim had never beaten him when he was a child. But, instead of being ashamed, her son had turned on her and begun to berate her. She was still trembling when she told Vadim the story. If you had been home, it would never have happened, she said. Volodya would never have beaten their grandchild, and he would never have dared to speak to his mother that way.

  Was Vadim a good man? A bad man? Was he a bad husband? Was he a good or a bad father?

  In Odessa Vadim had a dog. Among the photographs he shows me is one of himself with the dog, a broad-chested Alsatian wearing a muzzle. Why the muzzle? Without it, says Vadim, the dog was very dangerous. I tell him the sad story of my own big dog, whom I had to give away, because he kept attacking other dogs and I was not strong enough to hold him. Vadim says it was because I had not trained my dog properly. “You must beat them every day when they are young.”

  Now I have a cat. He is old and mean. I warn visitors not to touch him, but some of them ignore this and end up badly scratched.

  “I like the animals and they like me,” Vadim says, stroking the cat, who has climbed into his lap.

  If I spoke the same language as that cat, I would like to tell him what Vadim told me: how, back in Odessa, whenever his own cat had kittens, he would drown them. “They don’t feel anything,” he insists. “I put them in sock and drown them in bathtub.”

  At the English language school the teachers are required to include lessons on hygiene. Students are told that Americans take showers every day and always wear deodorant. “Deadorant” is how one of my students spells it. Imagine doing the same thing at the UN, with the diplomats who come from the same countries as our students. But it is only immigrants who are assumed to need lessons in washing. In the teachers’ lounge you often hear remarks about how the students smell. I want to tell everyone that Vadim does not smell. He washes. He is clean.

  But—he throws empty cigarette packs and other trash in the street! When I protest he says, “Someone will pick up later. This is job for someone.”

  Midnight, and we are parked in his cab in front of my apartment building. Vadim is drinking a Coke. When the Coke is all gone, he tosses the can out the window. It bounces three times, then rolls clatteringly, the noise resounding in the empty street. A few of my neighbors, out with their dogs, turn and frown. Vadim is unaware. I sink low in my seat.

  And I want to sink through the ground when I find out that he cheats his passengers. Foreigners, of course, are the easiest victims. “I must do it,” he says. “I must make more money. I have to get something for myself in this country. You would do same.”

  He laughs when I tell him people are supposed to tip him at least fifteen percent. “Many people give me one nickel, one dime.”

  A cheat. A litterbug. A drowner of kittens.

  I don’t want to condemn him. I want to understand everything, imagining that the more I understand, the less he will be guilty. That old fallacy.

  When he sees someone on crutches, or an elderly person struggling along, he stops the cab and offers him or her a free ride. Very few people accept. “They don’t trust me. Because Americans cannot trust each other. Americans don’t help each other. Russians are different. Russians have a wide soul. But when they come in America, Russians change. They become like Americans. They don’t want to help. Especially they don’t want to help the new immigrants.”

  He gives change or a cigarette to anyone who asks.

  Things come back to me—things learned in the great, enchanted country of Russian books. About Russian pity and Russian cruelty and Russian fatalism. And things learned first from my mother, about Russian love of country and Russian rape. (“Every woman in Berlin. Even old women and children.”) Women and men alike fleeing before the Red soldiers at the end of the war. (And would it all be repeated in my own lifetime, when they came to bury us and took over the world?)

  The more Vadim tells me about his past, the less I want to hear. But how else can I understand him? I must know everything.

  Back in Odessa he didn’t just use drugs, he also sold them. Listening to him talk about the friends he left behind, it dawns darkly on me that he is talking not about just any circle of chums but about a gang. Dominant among them is one called Yuri. (“My best friend and a really good guy.”) Jailed for twelve years for killing a man in a knife fight; killed in a knife fight twelve years later, just days after his release. (“First time was about woman, second time about drugs.”)

  “It was life in Odessa.” An outlaw life, full of petty crime. Breaking and entering, car theft, banditry. Vadim speaks of it all lightly. “We were six in car, we stop bus, get on bus, take passengers’ money, and run out.”

  And wasn’t he ever caught? Yes, but thanks to a good connection in the KGB (an old war buddy of his father’s), Vadim never had to go to jail. (“This is how it work in Russia. It take only one phone call.”)

  Did Olga know? “Of course. My wife know everything about me.” And how did she respond? “She scream, like always. And I say her, Please, leave me rest now, because the police have broken my body.” But she still didn’t want a divorce.

  A bad man. Degenerate. Incorrigible.

  My friends want to know how I can go on seeing him. Nervous, timid me, who is afraid of everything. But I was never afraid of Vadim. I never saw him “ugly.” He never showed that side to me.

  I want to believe that he is a good man twisted—as you or I or anyone would be—by his circumstances. I want to blame everything on the bad deal life has cut him—on poverty, lack of education, Soviet benightedness, too much testosterone. He has never hit his children, I remind myself He has never beaten his wife: I find myself clinging to this.

  He takes his own fate as a victim in stride. About being mugged he says, “I can do same.” The same? My heart is pounding. Does that mean he’s going to rob people in his cab? He laughs. “No, of course not in cab.” “But—you’re going to mug people.” “No, don’t worry, I am not going to do it. I am not stupid. I don’t have green card.” “You need a green card to mug people.” A bigger laugh. “I don’t want to be deported.”

  I give it a try: Doesn’t he think that the men who robbed him were wrong, and that he was wrong to rob other people, and that the world would be a better place if we didn’t do this sort of thing unto one another?

  But Vadim has his own spin on the golden rule: Today I am unlucky. Tomorrow it is someone else’s turn to be unlucky.

  Shameless. Impenitent.

  When two apartments in my building are broken into, the suspicion has to cross my mind. It isn’t likely—it is highly unlikely—but it could have been … .

  After he is robbed a second time in his cab, Vadim gets a gun. “In Odessa knife is enough, but I see not here.”

  I study the bulletin board outside the teachers’ lounge. English teachers wanted in Japan, in Turkey, in China, and in the Soviet Union.

  A woman I know is having a baby. Another woman gives a shower for her in an apartment on the Upper West Side. I know most of the women who are invited. These are women I have worked with, women I went to school with. Friends.

  A tea-shower. Embroidered napery, a grandmother’s porcelain, an ornate Chinese teapot, like a miniature temple. Sandwiches and sweets. Ceremonious and charming. No one smokes.

  The gifts have all been opened and admired and put aside. The afternoon is almost gone
. Most of the guests have left, and among those lingering I find myself the center of attention, hot in the sunlight that pours through the window behind my chair. Here are women who are close to me, good women, friends, women who have been through things, who know what it is to be in trouble with a man, to be in over your head with a man, to love a man too much, past reason, and to no possible good to yourself. None of them has ever met Vadim, though I have shown them photographs, and I have spoken much about him.

  They say: Why do you go on seeing him? Is it the danger? Is it the adventure, the risk that attracts you? Is it the sex?

  “Is it his smell?” asks the woman who is going to have the baby (the woman with the ex-lover’s shirt in the plastic bag in her bottom dresser drawer).

  “It’s because he’s a foreigner, isn’t it. It’s because he is Russian. It’s the accent.”

  “If he were American—an American dockworker, say—you wouldn’t give him the time of day.”

  If he were an American dockworker, he would tawk like dis, it is true, and I’d be repelled. I try to imagine an American dockworker quoting Shakespeare, as Vadim has quoted Pushkin to me.

  His accent, his broken speech, his slow acquiring of English—all this has certainly been important to me. It was language that brought us together, first of all, and it has always moved me to hear him speak. I would miss following his progress, being there when he no longer has to stammer and grope, when he can say anything he wants to say in English. This is serious stuff for me. I am shocked when I meet a man who says he is about to marry an Italian woman but has no intention of learning Italian. What kind of love is that? Ultimately, I decide against registering for a course in Russian, because I know what this would mean. I have no business learning Russian. I have to leave Vadim.

  “Is it because he’s bad? Is it the toughness and the violence that excite you?”