The Caged Iguana

When I entered the dungeon, it appeared darker, smaller, more claustrophobic, in the grip of loneliness. The walls seemed to have grown muddier, yellower, and a rotten-broccoli stench emanated from the living room. Natasha was lying on the fake Oriental rug next to the iguana. Her red-rimmed eyes went through me as if I had become transparent glass. As I came closer, I heard her chortle bitterly, “The iguana is dying from insanity—schizophrenia reptilian style.” “What does that mean?” I asked, approaching the animal. “Poor thing doesn’t know she’s caged—thinks the metal bars are tree stumps and all she needs to do is just burrow through them with her teeth and nose until—well, take a good look at the carnage—for the metal never bends, the freedom never comes …” Natasha appeared drunk or high, her eyes partly closed, breathing heavily through her mouth. I could smell her and the iguana swimming in some strange communal odor. But upon closer inspection, I realized that it was the iguana’s breath whirring, spreading, sucking every last bubble of air into her heaving, malfunctioning lungs. Her blue scales were peeling, unveiling the dull gray hue beneath, her ribs were protruding, her red tongue was parched and now hung loose from her jaws. Her habitual frenetic hissing and violent purple tail appeared anesthetized. The most telling sign of her emotional state was a mangled lacerated bloody nose, fatally injured by her inexorable attempts to break free of the cage.

“She’ll die soon, poor girl,” Natasha said. “You never let her out, did you?”

“How could I—I’m never here,” I said, feeling unsteady, thwacked by guilt.

I went to my room and sank my limp body into my bed.

Two feet away, an unfinished canvas stood in judgment of me, one half stark white, the other gratuitously black. If only I could tell him this, this indicting, haunting memory, he’d understand. He’d understand why I could not go on a second longer, not splintered thus in half, my mind frayed, depleted by its own dichotomy, by this merciless invasion of two selves. This double life, which once thrilled and terrified and opened up my veins to emerald wilderness and raw possibility, had sown a prison over my head. I couldn’t wriggle any parts of me; from both sides, I was now spoken for—so that I had lost the freedom to devote myself to one or the other man. I couldn’t ride it like a wave, like an intrepid surfer, like a free-wheeling hedonist, because I wasn’t one. I had been carefully circumscribed into a moral box, abetted on every side by limitations and fear of an omniscient God. I needed to cleanse my moral palate of this debris and rot, and to do that—to do that—I was certain I had to lose both men. That ought to be the price for my sin, and yet, yet … how there was always a “yet!” If I told Alex the truth, I’d destroy the one chance I had for a happy, unobjectionable family life. And if I told Eddie the truth, I’d destroy the rare chance life handed us for truly selfish pleasure, for the kind of temporary ecstasy women remember long after they’re married and saddled by children, sipping their midday glasses of white wine, reminiscing with their female friends of that thing they did—that thing they did when they were carefree and young and brimming with reckless lust!

I reached for the phone and dialed.

“Alex, Sashenka, there’s something I must say—we need to speak in person. I need to come to Chicago,” I said.

“Wonderful, let’s activate the volcanoes, I’ll prepare the grounds,” Alex cried, and my father purchased an emergency ticket for me to Chicago.

I pushed the phone away and drifted into a dream. I must have fallen asleep because I was awakened by a loud thump at the door. With half-opened eyes, stumbling through the dungeon’s corridor, stringing together slivers of my dream, I made it to the front door and thoughtlessly unlatched it. I was wearing a white T-shirt that barely covered my buttocks and revealed the lace of my pink underwear.

“It was as if you knew I was coming!” the man said. It took me several minutes to place his face but the toad resemblance was unmistakable. Eric stood before me, clad in a shiny black suit.

“What are you doing here?” I pulled the T-shirt as far down as I could but it snapped back into place.

Within seconds he was in my hall, loosening his mauve tie.

“It’s not fair, it’s just not fair that he should get everything, fucking everything—”

“What are you talking about?” I looked around, hoping to see Natasha, but she had left. I was alone.

“Your Eddie—that fucking star—Grant is going to make him managing director soon—”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Oh everything, everything has to do with you!” His mouth curved downwards. He advanced toward me with sudden speed.

“There’s a picture of you in your element—painting—on his desk. Very pretty! I told you to dump him, didn’t I?”

“Have you lost your mind?” I staggered backward.

I stumbled into my room but before I could slam the door in his face, he was inside.

I felt my knees buckle and opened my mouth to speak, but only saliva fell out. I was five foot six and 110 pounds, and he was at least six feet, twice my weight, with muscles protruding from his chest and arms. His physique, if it were to be painted, would turn opaque on a canvas, robbed of human shadows, a one-dimensional object held together by crude black lines.

He threw me on the futon edging into our feet, his legs already in a straddle. With thick thighs, he squeezed my body and flattened me into the mattress.

“You owe me! You owe me!” he screamed. “I warned you if you don’t behave yourself, I’ll treat you like a common Russian whore! I offered you a deal!”

“What deal? I don’t remember any deal.” I replied, as if this were a sane exchange between two civilized people.

His eyes raced wildly, but he wasn’t actually looking at me. “I gave you many chances but no, you didn’t listen! No more Mr. Nice Guy! Now you owe me big time!”

I blinked and in a flash I saw it: an anthropomorphic steamroller, its weight, its height, the mass of its robotic muscle, its power grid and dirty stench, its metal inhuman fingers creeping up my legs, its front roller heading to my vagina, ripping out my hair, squashing, pulling, raiding the private parts of me. I couldn’t see through the blur of pain, pain accumulating in my ribs and abdomen, pain in my chest. I was breathing sporadically, in gusts, hiccupping, inhaling, exhaling grim loud sounds—of dread. Vomit rose up my throat and I yearned to burn him with my stomach acid, to disfigure him, bring out the ugliness I saw. But I was helpless, powerless, numbed. Each act was a quickening, a fermenting of the thing to come, a breach of more personal space, I heard a zipper open: his pants dropped. My diaphragm contracted into my back. I can’t breathe, I whispered. One arm was still loose and I pushed him up and off of me, but he sank in deeper into my lungs, until I saw it—his white boxer shorts within inches of my face and I was suffocating in it: the stench of penis and balls—a mixture of cologne, piss, and sweat—clogging my nostrils, closing my throat. At last a pool of vomit spilled out.

He noticed and laughed uproariously.

“Get off, you motherfucker! I owe you nothing!” I let out in a hoarse voice.

His expression froze, his eyes menacing.

“You know, fucking can be traumatic if you’re not wet enough. Dry and bloody! But hey, you look easy—what—a hot-blooded Russian bitch like you? A little naughty immigrant? I like all of it, all of you little multicultural bitches. And you’re so fucking pretty—how did you get to have such a fuckable face—do you want me to pummel that face in or are you going to talk nicely—with respect?”

He brought a giant fist to my mouth and chuckling, hovered it there, pretending to strike. When I reeled back in fear, he pulled his erect pink penis out and said: “Now suck it, you ungrateful bitch! Suck it!”

I lost my tongue; it hung limp inside my mouth like a cold dead animal. He grabbed my hair and pulled it, together with my head and neck, to his penis, my mouth landing painfully on its tip.

“Suck it! Now!” He screamed, pushing his dick against my closed lips and teeth.

My skin burned, my heart a wild zigzag in my chest.

NO, I screamed, rape, I screamed, how did I end up here, I screamed, No, No, No, I screamed, but none of it was out loud. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth, he’d get in.

In an instant, I was transported to my childhood, to Russia, to fleeing the KGB. Survive … escape … think … run, someone’s following you, they’re behind you, run … think, think, dumay, dumay bystreye, pridumay chto-to, I broke languages inside myself. Lenochka gde ty?

My transformation was sudden and radical. My synapses relaxed, my neck loosened, my eyes opened. I winked at him, at it. The words “Relax, Eric, relax, all in good fun” came out of my mouth. My voice changed an octave, acquired a lewd tonality. A seductive hue washed over my face. My eyes retrieved their habitual sensual blurriness, then landed on his erect penis. With the loose hand, I stroked it, moving it away from my lips.

“Nice,” I said. “I never would have guessed you’re so well endowed.”

His entire body pulled back, away from me, and the pain across my chest and breasts dissipated. I breathed again.

“Really? You like him? I call him Spiderman.”

“That’s adorable, Spiderman,” I murmured, looking only at his organ. “I think if we’re going to make this fun, we shouldn’t do it here. It’s too missionary, too prosaic! I can talk Russian to you if you like.”

“Ooooooooh, that would be such a turn-on.”

“I think we should head into the living room. More space. Better lighting. I like to look when I suck.”

“I knew it, I knew you’d be fun!” He appeared to change into a little boy, eager and excited.

“Can you put something sexy on?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, “but you go into the living room and wait for me.”

“No, I want to watch.”

I pulled a short leather dress out of the closet and stood there.

“Well, put it on, take off your T-shirt, take off your underwear.”

“Oh, c’mon, Eric. Don’t you know about the art of seduction? You Americans! Let me teach you somezhing.” I spoke suddenly with a Russian accent. “Close your eyes and turn around. I want zhis to be slow, special.”

He obeyed. My hands were shaking.

The dress was tight and difficult to pull over my head but once it stretched over my figure, accentuating every curve, it infused me with an instant jolt of power. I put on leather high heels with spikes, a miraculous find in a shop in East Village, and clicked loudly against the wooden floor.

“Keep your eyes closed,” I commanded and led him to the couch.

“When can I open my eyes?” he pleaded.

“Wait, I said, wait!”

I tiptoed across the living room to the cage and unlatched the lock. Upon rolls of dried grass and leaves, the iguana was sprawled in all her fat glory, wheezing, shrouded in sleep.

I stroked her broken nose and her right eye popped open and stared at me, watering, as if in comprehension.

“Now you can open your eyes,” I said to Eric.

I stood upright before him clad in leather and artificial confidence, my legs spread in a military stance. My time was limited: his penis had grown fully erect, and he and it stared imploringly at me, like two siblings separated at birth. I imagined the tip of his penis to be the tip of his nose—I painted the image in my head, face superimposed on a penis, penis protruding from a face.

“Wow,” he said, “you’re so hot, so fucking hot.”

I swung my hips from side to side and snapped my fingers, like my mother, like Carmen at the bonfire, raising my skirt, dancing, you’re dancing, I told myself, tapping your feet to the rhythm of this stage.

Suddenly, I heard it: an echo, a shuffling sound trailing the beat of my heels against the floor. The iguana had climbed out of the cage and was now hissing, heaving, moving sluggishly toward me. I wondered if he could see her. She was almost five feet long if you took into account her purple tail.

But he couldn’t. He only saw me.

“Enough, enough fucking foreplay!” His voice turned acrid, the muscles in his jaws and neck visibly twitched like denuded wires. “Now drop on your knees and suck my dick, you Russian bitch!”

“Of course, as you wish.”

I felt the animal at my back. I made the motion to lean down but instead I jumped away from him, sideways, in a violent jerk, tapping the iguana’s bruised nose with my sharp heel. The animal screeched and turned wild, thrashing her terrifying jagged tail, reaching wide stretches of space. The movements were so quick and bellicose that I barely had time to comprehend: the iguana’s triangular turquoise head drove directly into Eric’s penis. He let out a high-pitched shriek, but I wasn’t sure if it was from pain or shock. The animal had climbed up his leg and froze in position, its claws digging into his pants, as if she and I had planned the entire attack in advance.

“What the fuck! What is this freak show? Is this your pet or the product of a radioactive experiment?”

He tried to push the iguana’s face away but she hissed, its bottom jaw unhinging to reveal a set of perfectly aligned, ghoulishly sharp teeth.

“Get this hideous monster off of me.” His eyes narrowed, fear shone in his gaze. But the iguana slammed her tail against the floor with defiance, and amid flight, the tail’s sharp jagged edge caught on his pant leg and cut the cloth, revealing a sliver of his calf.

“Oh God, did it cut me, am I bleeding?” he whimpered, attempting to look at himself.

The animal turned her deformed face toward me, as if awaiting my command. I made two steps toward the iguana and then I bent my head to hers. The tail stopped moving; her breathing grew calm.

I stroked her head. Tears rose up my throat but I pushed them down, down into the underground of my subconscious, locking them in my secret vault of memories. I stared menacingly at Eric and waited.

“Please,” he begged, the irises of his eyes watering, “please, Emma, get this thing off of me.”

“Don’t ever return here,” I said. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Shut your mouth. I don’t want to hear you speak. Just nod once that you understand.”

He nodded.

“Next time I’ll tell the iguana to bite your dick off.”

I clicked my heels, turned toward the hallway, and began to walk. Heaving and hissing, the animal followed me into my bedroom. I could hear Eric get up after a minute and then run down the corridor and out the door. A loud slam reverberated through the apartment and pierced the walls of my room. The iguana shuddered. Then she collapsed, sinking her weary, corpulent body into the floor, nestling between my paintings, as if painting herself in. I took my heels off and stroked her bruised face and wept.

The next day I flew to Chicago, postponing seeing Alex, shortening my calls with Eddie. I’m not feeling well, I told them, I think I have the flu. My voice was hoarse, shaky: they believed me. The repetitive circle of violence, I thought, the way it chains us to its vicious circumference, from childhood to adulthood, the way it sticks like glue to our souls. I walked along neatly manicured lawns unfurling before identical luxurious red and white and yellow brick mansions, and then veered down a hill to a muddy-colored lake, our Lake Michigan in the heart of Winnetka. The wind was soft, soothing, but I felt nothing on my skin, only the nagging dull pain poking periodically at my ribs and climbing up my throat. I didn’t know whether to feel triumph or devastation. I escaped the ultimate violation, the entries from inside, his stampede into my mouth, my vagina, and yet I could not escape the feeling of having been imprisoned nevertheless: the physicality of the assault, the repulsiveness of his face, his corrosive sweaty touch, the putrid stench of him infected all my senses, as if he had been etched into my flesh, the memory of his words hurtling themselves at my head like bullets—quick, hard, repetitive.

Five days later Alex picked me up at my parents’ house because he couldn’t wait any longer. “I don’t care if you cough on me,” he said, “I have an excellent immunitet!” He was meticulously dressed in causal starched khakis and a light blue shirt that accentuated his vivid brown eyes. His skin glowed in peach hues as though it had been lightly stroked by the sun. I caught myself gaping at him, the instinct of possession overtaking me.

He gave me a rudimentary peck on half of my mouth and said, “You look exhausted.”

“Do I? I feel exhausted,” I murmured.

“It’s about time you came back to Chicago—how long has it been? More than two months? You missed my mom’s Fourth of July party!”

“I’m sorry. Are you angry about something?” I asked robotically.

“No, I’m not angry—who said I was angry—but you haven’t done anything for the wedding. Mother tells me plans have virtually come to a halt since you—since you gave some sort of ‘career’ excuse—”

“I’ve three Incompletes, Alex—I need to finish them if I ever hope to even get a master’s in this field. I can’t move forward until I finish—”

“Well, you’ve got to pull yourself together—you’ve got to get organized.”

“You sound just like my dad,” I retorted, turning away from him.

“I don’t want to squabble,” he said softly, patting my arm. “I’ve missed you and I’m so, so glad—well, that you’ve finally come around.” He pulled two tickets out of his pocket to Shubert Theater where they were staging a revival of Fiddler on the Roof.

“I love Fiddler on the Roof,” I said absently, and imagined us cuddling under a polyester blanket to watch it, not in some impersonal red-velvet theater, but on his VCR, with a steaming glass of Earl Grey at our lips, a remote control at our fingertips, and me wailing “Sunrise, Sunset” at my whim. (As an afterthought, it occurred to me that this was the type of fantasy I’d never have about Eddie.)

We drove to his house in the heart of Buffalo Grove. Small white and yellow houses were pressed against each other like identical portly companions peering from identical miniature squares of grass and dilapidated driveways. He clicked on the remote clipped to the overhead mirror several times before the door jangled upwards. We drove into a dark, cluttered space, where the stench of garbage and diesel fuel assailed my sensitive stomach, and his hand reached for my thigh. “Please, let’s get out of here,” I begged. “You’re not wearing any makeup,” he whispered in my ear as he pulled me into their kitchen and examined my face under a harsh fluorescent light. “Is that a problem?” I asked.

“Just noting that you’re still desirable,” he chirped, “—good sign for the future,” and I wondered suddenly, was he always this annoying?

The spotless white eighties kitchen opened onto a carpeted living room, where two black spheres (otherwise known as footstools) abetted a phallic-shaped glittering red leather spaceship (otherwise known as a couch). The sexual imagery was not lost upon me. A narrow staircase, leading to his room, was crowded with his degrees, awards, and gold statues for fencing competitions; an enlarged 15 x 20 photograph of his face hung brazenly on the central wall next to the bathroom, invoking comparisons to presidents.

He approached me slowly, tepidly, each move tentative, with a corollary revision to each step, indecisiveness warping his face. His hands shook as he unbuttoned my jeans and raised my black T-shirt above my head, and I let him, because his hesitation soothed me, allayed the memory of Eric’s uninvited assault on my body. His eyes were magnificent and dark, his expression stoic like that of a warrior in confining metal armor. He bit his voluptuous lower lip, as if the process of undressing me produced acute pain. His deference and beauty devastated me; I felt a pang of desire for him, desire that seemed to flow directly from the well of his fear of me. I wanted to scream: existential crisis here—woman on the verge of imploding! But, as in all good stories of confusion coupled with the act of betrayal, this intense feeling was followed by the still more intense feeling of a rope tightening round my throat and suffocating me, which could also have been a reflex to body odor, which in Alex’s case was DKNY cologne for men.

Alex robotically removed his clothes, retaining the purple Calvin Klein underwear and alas, he was practically naked. “I’m all yours,” he declared, “but before we proceed—let me serenade you!” And with that let me, Alex spread his feet shoulder distance apart, took a deep breath of air, and let out a sound. It took me a few seconds to realize that the instrumentals for The Phantom of the Opera were issuing from his stereo, and that Alex was singing, in a gorgeous countertenor, “The Phantom of the Opera is here inside your mind!” and marching thunderously in a quartet of steps to the titillations of his own voice. Only a Russian man could perform a Broadway tune and lightly tap (barefoot) without wincing, without, for an instance, worrying that he might appear gay if anything, his features strained as though he were performing massive masculine feats, such as lifting boulders or impersonating the Terminator. Still, I had to admit: like his face, so was his body proof of God’s virtuosity and commitment to perfection—and not surprisingly, Alex also had a superb voice.

Who would have guessed that he had once dreamed of the stage like Bella? That in Russia he had taken ballet and tap lessons and envisioned himself the next Baryshnikov or Godunov with a jazzy edge, that there were piano, voice, and guitar lessons woven into his daily schedule of advanced math, physics, penmanship, and German by his ingenious mother? Were we all, these children of immigrants, doomed to nostalgia for our youths when we were tiny gods, doomed to perform only in the close quarters of our lovers while longing for packed houses of adoring audiences—for their enthralled eyes and exuberant applause to placate our perennial inferiority complexes? Wouldn’t I want to be married to a man who could regale me with tunes from the Sound of Music, Les Misérables, Cats, and, most vitally, Fiddler on the Roof? How many times while lying in the arms of a boyfriend did I wish (albeit in my subconscious) that he would burst into “If I were a rich man, Yabadabadabada!”

Soon the instrumentals turned to “Think of Me” and Alex exclaimed, “Think of me—join me, join me, Lena, before I say goodbye.” Although it felt preposterous and remarkably unsexual, I jumped off the bed (who was I to resist a chance to perform?) and, hitting my mezzo-soprano, thundered: “Think of me, think of me, Alex, when I say goodbye, remember me once in a while, la, la, la if you try la la …” My clothes miraculously dissolved in an act of jolly solidarity. I was in my brassiere and, farcically enough, as if I had planned the entire thing myself, purple polka-dotted underwear. Alex’s hands were now busily attempting to rip through the complex architectural design of Victoria’s Secret’s Brassiere #5: God’s gift to virgins.

A trickle of laughter spilled from the corners of my mouth, but I held the bulk of it in and summoned an austere, properly aroused expression for to my shock—Alex’s penis had become erect!

But it wasn’t until he produced a gold-tinted condom and waved it jubilantly in the air that the horror and absurdity of this moment came to me.

His fingers crawled over my breasts and then snuck ever so gingerly between my thighs—naturally, to prepare me for his grand entrance. And what did I do, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, what did I do, mothers and grandmothers of the high moral court: what did I do? I burst into cacophonous, plug-my-own-ears laughter. I was laughing so hard my stomach turned into a trampoline that might have given him a considerable flip if he stepped on it. Thank the Lord Almighty that my underwear was still covering my vagina, and though one nipple had shamelessly popped out of Brassiere #5, the other breast was fully cloaked. I pushed the nipple back in, and oddly enough, burst into an even more crippling laughter. Oh, thou a silent mute with parted jaws and globular tears. Secretly, I hoped this would disgust Alex or scare him, or at least stop him in the midst of what appeared to be a steel-willed determination to consummate the act. He was desperate for consummation, for a wrapping up, if you will, for confirmation that he could do this and that I wanted him. But it was too late. I wanted only friendship now, only a sympathetic ear, or just an actual ear canal into which I could holler: I am in love! I don’t know why it took me so long to admit it outright, to Alex, to myself, or why I had to wait till Alex danced in the nude to Phantom of the Opera, till he was rubbing his gold member between my thighs, till the comedy of my predicament seemed to pry open my subconscious and spill its contents out like vomit triggered by overeating. So there I lay and there they lay: my feelings unfiltered through any notion of what should or should not be but simply bare, simply here, as they existed inside my mind, as they gurgled and fermented and became true despite myself. I was in love with Eddie—with Edward—with Ignatius Cyril Beltrafio. And it was not merely love caught in a moment, of the sort I felt in the aftermath of meeting Mrs. Beltrafio, which may have been gratitude for not taking her side, but the daily sort, the nagging sort, the stomach-churning sort, the smiling-blithely-and-idiotically-into-empty-space sort.

“Did I do something wrong—is something the matter, Lenochka? Maybe this was a tad over the top, I admit it, but I—I wanted it to be spectacular. Are you not aroused?” He slumped down on the bed next to me and stopped the music with a slipper that seemed handily nearby. I was thankful for this little miracle.

“Oh, no, no, no, Sasha, this is wonderful and very stimulating—you are spectacular—it’s not that—I’m just a horrible, miserable, abominable person.”

“You seem to find this very amusing—this depiction of your own character—or is it me—have I made an utter fool of myself? Tell me honestly.”

“No, it’s not you, Sashenka—it’s me—it’s all my fault. I’ve been—despicable—”

“Believe me, Elena, I’ve already forgiven you, whatever it is—”

“You’re not making this easy for me, Alex. I don’t know exactly how I arrived here—I was trying to please everyone, trying to do the right thing by everyone—by you especially! And I didn’t want to hurt anyone—well, the long and the short of it is that I’ve been—”

“You’ve been naughty!” he returned with a sudden belligerent laugh.

“What—wait—what?”

“I’ve known for quite some time,” he said, turning away from me, his laughter subsiding into startling gloom. “The worst of it, of course, is that it’s Beltrafio—that’s the worst of it.”

“How long? How long have you known?”

“Oh, I started to suspect you a while back—I’m not Russian for nothing!” he cackled, his gaze menacing. “When you stopped actively pursuing sex with me, the notion that you were with someone else began to haunt me. But that it was Beltrafio—that I couldn’t have borne on my own—”

“Oh God, oh God, that toad Eric told you—”

“You should never underestimate your enemies, Elena Kabelmacher—how un-Russian of you!”

“I thought my feelings would change, I wanted them to change.”

“A few days ago Eric called me to say he won’t be coming to our wedding—that it was morally repugnant to him. He said you’re still with Eddie—is that true?”

“Eric is a vile, vile person—”

“Answer me—”

“I thought you and I were perfect for each other. I was planning to dump him, I was planning all the time, but then I—you see—I—”

“So dump him now!”

“How can you stand to be with me? How could you take it—all that time talking to me, sharing yourself with me, knowing, knowing that I was with him—how you must have hated me!”

“Oh, I’ve never hated you. I’m a realist, moya dorogaya Lenochka, or haven’t you realized by now? I pride myself on being a postmodern man, on having serious insight into human nature, into the putrefaction of desire. I want you to dump him now. I don’t care about the past. We’ll get married as planned and never mention him again.”

What a glorious option he was giving me—saving me from myself, forgiving me, giving me what I’d always wanted in life: a clean slate. Oh, if only I could clean Eddie out—if only there were a detox program for people like me: a special spa treatment, like a man-exfoliation mask or a turning-a-new-leaf bath or just simply a laser to dull my obsessive, cantankerous, lovelorn brain. But no such spa existed nor ever will. As the case remained, the idea of never seeing Ignatius again made me sick, quite literally. I endured actual symptoms: rapid breath-depriving inhalations otherwise known as “the no-more-fabulous-sex asthma attack,” a bout of extreme stomach nervousness otherwise known as “abandoned lover’s diarrhea,” and even the old enigmatic rash otherwise known as “the incurable liar’s hives.”

“I wish that was possible, Sashenka, but unfortunately I’ve—I’ve fallen in love.”

“You just think you’re in love with Eddie because you’ve been copulating with him. Once we make love—don’t you see—we must make love!”

“But you’re too late—if only—if only then in November when I begged you …”

“Haven’t you understood why I’ve been so reticent—what a fool you’ve been! I wanted to wait, not for all the stupid reasons I gave you, not because I was afraid for you—I was afraid of you.”

“Of me—why—what do you mean?”

“I didn’t want to disappoint you and I wanted it to be special, phenomenal! I wanted you to always remember our first time, to look back on it with fondness. I had such romantic ideas but more than that, I was worried that you were experienced and I—well, I not so much.”

“You’re a virgin?” I asked with horror.

“If you must put labels on things, yes, technically I am.”

“Good God, Alex,” I murmured, “I had no idea, I thought—oh, Sashenka, I’m so very sorry! But you should have told me right away.”

“Mother always said: be cautious with women, women are very sensitive about sex—she just never prepared me for how sensitive I’d be.”

“And to think how much you argued with me! If I had only known, I might have—I might have acted differently.” I paused, choking on this possibility: I might have never looked or touched Eddie or entered La Cote Basque’s bathroom had Alex had enough sechel to be upfront with me; it would have been morally implausible to abandon him then. I thought of destiny, of its imperceptible forks in the road, a slight tilt to the right instead of the left, and with our own free will, we alter our fate irreversibly. Eddie was my irreversible fork.

“Can’t you just do it with me? Can’t you do me that favor—you owe me at least that.”

“I can’t!”

“I’m better than him in every way. I’ll be better in bed. I’ll be a feminist for you—do you want me to pledge my devotion to feminism—is that what’s holding you back?” Melancholy spread from his eyes into the rest of his face and swam there, under his skin, like a thousand muted gray fish. “I need you,” he whispered. “I need you in my life.”

“Are you listening to me? I’m in love with him; I’m so in love with him I don’t know if I’ll survive …”

“Do you seriously expect me to pity you? God! I just kept thinking, ‘this is her last hoorah before marriage, her last man before me, before our forever vows.’ I wanted to give you space, time. I thought you’d come to me with worldly understanding, with appreciation, you’d feel so lucky to have me—never, ever, in all my calculations did I ever assume you’d choose him over me.”

“You assumed too much, Alex. Didn’t you know anything about the draw sex has on a person?”

“What’s sex when the rest of your life hangs in the balance? If you try to marry him—why, your grandmother will eat him for breakfast!” He struggled to maintain civility but his voice snapped. “Weren’t you the one always thundering about what you went through in Russia—all your purported anti-Semitism? How could you ever conceive of yourself with this, this, this ignoramus?”

I grabbed my clothes and began to dress manically, laboring to get inside my jeans and shirt. Love didn’t seem to matter; love was a pragmatic notion, maneuverable, forgettable, and reversible. He reminded me of the way I had once spoken of love to Eddie: Love is a concept, dependent on our wills … spoken before I knew love, before I had fallen.

“I know what he is,” I murmured. Ah, but alas, the true blow was not in the telling but in the way a single memory, a single image of Eddie kissing my face goodbye at the airport, surfaced and thawed my face. When I opened my eyes I saw that Alex had become alarmingly white. He glared without seeming to see me, and his mouth, at first failing to emit sound, began hurtling words at an accelerating speed: “Whore! Blyat! Who does such a thing to a person? To a man? What kind of monster are you? Chyort, what are we going to tell our parents—what about the invitations? All the fucking invitations have been sent out already! I’ll look like a degenerate. Do you realize what you’ve done to me—this will ruin my mother!”

“I’m so very sorry, Sashenka,” I mumbled in fear, “you can tell her you left me—”

“Don’t you dare call me ‘Sashenka,’ you’ve lost that right; second of all, I’m not a liar like you. Oh, how you snowballed my mother, oh, how she cooed about you—Lenochka this and Lenochka that, and she may be outspoken, but she’s gorgeous and what an excellent person!” He waited for my response, but my mouth wouldn’t open. “Do you know what that asshole did—he fired me, fired me for nothing, so that he could have you all to himself! When he finds out what a prevaricating blyat you are—an egomaniac like him—he’ll dump you faster than I am going to walk out that door!” He pointed at his own door and briskly walked toward it, his beautiful bare chest still on display, and there he stood, wavering, as if there were one more score to settle, one extra tidbit of evidence to present: because he was a good person, after all, my Sashenka! “Fool—you’re a fool! Don’t you know how many women he’s been with? Traded a good guy for a bad one, you foolish bitch!” And for lack of the other slipper, he hurled a blanket at his stereo, which accidentally clicked from Phantom of the Opera to Eurythmics Greatest Hits: “Sweet dreams are made of this … everyone wants to use you!” Alex twisted the doorknob with the heavy air of a man who’s been stabbed and shot, and from across the threshold, cried, “I should have guessed that all your feminism was bullshit—you’re just an ordinary whore!” Then, as if infused with new energy, as if he could already see flames engulfing me in hell, he raced down the staircase, cackling, his contorted visage igniting in me an irrepressible urge to strangle my own neck.

I crawled across the room to his desk on all fours like a CIA field operative and, surreptitiously removing the mammoth receiver from the dinosaur-era telephone, dialed my house. To my great relief, Bella picked up.

“Bella,” I said, “I need you now! I’m at Alex’s house.”

“I smell a rat,” she exclaimed happily, for she always wanted to smell rats as a long sufferer of housewifely ennui. “What’s wrong?”

“We’re done for—broken up!”

“You’re just in time. Alla Bagdanovich and Mother just agreed—at long last—on pink orchids.”

“Oh Lord,” I mumbled.

“Relax, melodrama queen,” she said. “I’ll get you in ten minutes.” By which, of course, she meant she’d drive the twenty miles at twice the speed limit, because Bella, with her spectacular face and blonde hair, never got tickets, not even from female police officers.

Bella arrived in seven minutes, exchanged a few civilized pleasantries with Alex, who was concentrating intently on the TV, and safely ushered me into the driveway without his supposed notice.

“Confess,” Bella demanded once she locked the car doors and turned the air conditioning on full blast. “Confess all your sins to your older and wiser sister.”

“Sins, what can be my sins?”

“That you have a lover in New York you’re mad about and that’s why you won’t marry Alex.” She flashed me a wide, insinuating smile.

“How—how did you—”

“Oh, I didn’t; I was just fantasizing!” She laughed freely and unreservedly, holding her stomach, stuttering, “Oh, Grandma, Grandma will be in—ha, ha, haaaaaaaaaa—in—purgatory, and our poor, poor, poor mother, hah, hah, hee, hee, will be blamed for everything.”

“I’m a terrible person, Bellochka,” I whimpered, collapsing my head on the dashboard.

She started the engine and drove out of Alex’s driveway with a violent screech. On the highway we passed every car in our path with style, swerving masterfully around them, and rolled down our windows to feel the hot July wind in our faces.

Then looking at me from the corner of her eye, she said, “We’re all terrible people, but at least you’re taking your life into your hands and saying the fuck with everyone else.”

“Am I—then why did I get engaged in the first place?”

“Cuz we’re all alike, all trying to do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or the wrong thing for the right reasons, who knows? Because Grandma buzzes in our brains like a well-meaning bee—”

“Don’t blame her—it’s my fault—ours. She can’t change her ways, we’ve always known that.”

“Yeah,” Bella sighed, “sometimes I think I’m a lot like her. I hate men as much as she does.”

“What do you mean?”

“I laugh at them in my head. I look at them, fawning over me, making fools of themselves, but do any of them know what goes through my head—do they have any concept of how smart I am. And this lack of realization on their part—their blindness, their stupid senseless dick-driven desire—makes me want to trample them under my feet.”

“No wonder Igor has been looking like a flat pancake lately,” I said, laughing.

“Oh, him, he’s not great enough to be spoken of in such a tragic manner. You see how marriage ruins beauty; remember how he gawked at me when we dated, slobbering over me, ‘oh you’re so beautiful, Bellochka, can’t believe you’re so beautiful, I’m so lucky!’ And now five years later—does he even see my beauty anymore?

“I don’t care, Lena, you hear me—I don’t care if he never looks at me. The point is that marriage dulls the senses and your beauty means squat—your beauty that had once meant so much to you when you were young is suddenly obsolete, like an old fancy towel you’ve used so many times it’s turned into a rag.”

“So why not have an affair?” I asked.

“Because affairs are overrated—banal, commonplace, and most of all boring. Am I so foolish as to think I won’t run into the same problems with a lover as I do with my husband? Sure, they court you when you’re a mistress and sure, it’s exciting, the way jumping out of a moving airplane is exciting, but it wears off—everything wears off—everything but the stage.”

“Do you think I’ve betrayed them? Do you think they’ll think I’ve betrayed them?”

“Two different questions! Am I supposed to answer that for you, I, who picked so abysmally for myself?” she exclaimed, impaling me with her eyes. “Only one thing I’ve learned—you can’t let what people say and think affect you. If he understands half of you, then you’ve already found something rare.”

“But I’ve been lying to him—sleeping with him while still engaged to Alex—”

“Details! Look on the bright side—at least you haven’t been sleeping with the two of them at the same time! That should count for something!” She burst into a generous, soothing laugh and infected me with it. All at once our eyes were watering and our stomachs contracting, our cheeks stretching as we laughed silently and then again with gusto, as if everything in the world had become hilarious: the windshield, the dashboard, the street, Alex, Mom, Grandma, my predicament, and Bella’s sad, sad life. And as I laughed harder and harder, keeling over, wanting miserably to cry, I thought about Bella, about a young life that seemed to have spanned centuries and taught one so little.

Pushkin, Arrogance, and Beauty

Pushkin, arrogance, and beauty conspired to alter Bella’s fate at the irascible age of fifteen. She had long fantasized about aristocratic men so struck by her looks that they would leap into Tsveytaeva’s illicit verses. She felt she should have been born in culturally superior Leningrad and believed, like all good-looking children, that the world was a land of well-meaning fairy godmothers and princes who would adore her, pamper her, and relieve her of the suffering others must endure. In the year we were to receive our permission slip, Bella had been courted by just such a prince: an older man whose age was somewhat of a question mark, who may or may not have had a wife, who may or may not have been a KGB operative, and whose name may or may not have been Nicholai. He lacked the features of a prince (in fact, put together, his features invoked the likeness of a goat), but being tall and surprisingly well-built for a Russian man, as they neither worked out nor refrained from vodka and fried salo (fried bacon fat eaten with the same regularity and enthusiasm as fried potatoes), and conversant not only in nineteenth-century Russian literature, but in sexually subversive foreign texts as well, such as The Interpretation of Dreams, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Lolita, one could safely say that he possessed princely endowments.

Bella met him at my parents’ “going-away” party for the Avenbuchs. Although no one could remember inviting him, he insisted that he had met my father during Gregori Margulis’s lecture on lattices in Lie groups, and thus obtained an invitation. This explanation was so laughable that it was instantly seen as a veiled threat.

Bella and I twirled to ABBA and Boney M., shook our knees to Elvis, closed our eyes provocatively like the adults to the Doors, but when her beloved Louis Armstrong burst into “I Say Tomato, You Say Tomato” Bella fully unraveled, becoming in her wild frenzy the dance floor’s sole proprietor. Other women stepped aside to grant her dominance, and the unsuspecting men mistook her childish antics for the demands of a grown woman. They came at her, these roosters with their feathers all riled, wanting to lead, to teach, to subdue her movements under their will.

Only Nicholai made no attempt to impinge on her dancing. He was of the verbal seduction variety. Spreading his arm leisurely across the sofa, he recited an entire stanza from Marshak’s translation of Taming of the Shrew, as if at once to laud her looks and criticize her behavior (a popular Russian male strategy for winning women’s hearts). And our Bella, who imagined herself the heroine of every novel, poem, and play, dissolved. Or fell in love. Or fell into that stage of adolescence I like to call premature deflowerment. For they had done it the very night they met on the staircase of our building, her back pressed against cold brick, and although it felt “horrible,” Bella believed she was bound to him, that “something beautiful” happened—beautiful, that is, between their souls.

Normally, after such an act the man would never call or pursue the woman—her submission to him would be deemed a grave act, proof that she was a blyat. But Nicholai embarked upon a serious courtship; he brought dazzling roses and tickets to the Bolshoi for my mother, hard liquor and Italian sausages for my father, oversized jars of Beluga and pillars of vobla (a salty dried fish that could only be considered a delicacy in Russia) for my grandmother. He invited himself over to dinner. He was too moneyed, too well-groomed, too finely dressed to be your typical Russian man. Only the KGB, my mother told Bella, have imported leather coats and fragrant perfumes on their chins. But Bella refused to listen. Nicholai had proposed that she remain with him in the Soviet Union, for by then he had learned of our plans. As my grandmother would say years later in America, the job of getting the whole family out intact was not for the weak, and so she, the Hercules of the Jewish people, had to apply all her muscles to transport my sister’s lovelorn head.

Bella wept, denounced the family, and threatened to commit suicide. With tragic aplomb, she ended it a month before our secret day. By the time June 2, the day of our departure, rolled around Bella had turned into a shadow of her old dancing self: a depressed little girl deprived of her prettiest doll. Despite her supposed sexual awakening, Bella seemed sedated, drained of her vibrant sensuality and budding confidence.

My grandmother blamed my parents for Bella’s incurable state; after all, for three years before we left Russia, my parents were divorcing one another. The word—razvod—flew like a sword in the air, none of us knowing where it would land. Even after they severed ties with their lovers, even after we boarded the plane heading west, my parents were still divorcing one another in Austria and Italy.

In Vienna we were greeted by handsome Israeli officers and brought to a gated mansion, which had been a sanitarium in its finer days. There had been terrorist attacks on Russian Jews in the city, and a new security policy stipulated that we needed to be “contained” for the duration of our stay, which in real terms meant being locked in a mental health facility. We were stuffed, ten families per room with bunk beds, and guarded by large Austrian women in white robes who used to guard the mentally ill. Sometimes a husband or wife slept beneath or above someone else’s husband or wife and the rules of privacy were ignored. In the dark, when the lights were shut off, you could see the silhouette of a woman’s slip and her jiggling breasts, a man’s white underwear and his black socks reaching for his calves. Bella and I lay awake at night, huddling next to each other on a narrow bed, listening to husbands and wives fight, to infants weep, to the groans of the old, holding pain inside their mouths, to my parents quarrel about the rest of our lives.

Vienna turned out to be a strategic stopover; we were allotted five days to decide whether to go to Italy, en route to America, or to take a flight directly to Israel instead. Moved by the beauty of the Israeli men, whose glistening brown skin, lean long bodies, and dazzling blue eyes burned holes in the anti-Semitic images Russia imprinted upon our minds, whose mastery of the Russian language seemed in perfect harmony with their divine faces and the paradise they painted of life in Jerusalem, we women became ardent Zionists, with my mother leading the pack. “We should go to Israel,” she urged my father, “it is the only sure way to escape anti-Semitism—to truly embrace who we are.” “Yes, yes,” Bella echoed (the men’s flirtatious gazes became her therapy), “it’s the only way I’ll ever be able to love again.” But my father was livid: “First you tortured me with America—now Israel!” he told my mother. “I didn’t leave my mother, my job, my friends, my life so that I could live in a Jewish desert—it may be Jewish but it’s still a desert with Arabs and constant war!” When my mother continued her protests, my father abandoned the language of reason and resorted to his favorite phrase: “Over my DEAD BODY!” My mother did eventually surrender. “No one wants your dead body, after all,” she told him on the fifth day.

It was during our two-month sojourn in Italy, waiting for our visas to enter the United States, waiting for my parents to end their war, that Bella’s sexuality surfaced again—or, as my mother liked to put it, “erupted.”

Italy was a hot sumptuous interlude, a simulacrum of a vacation from the Soviet regime, with no home to return to, only the consciousness of flight. The rest of our lives hung in the air like magnificent optical illusions. We could have applied for visas to enter any Western country—England, Canada, Australia, France, or we could have remained in Italy if the Italians would take us. But after much hypothesizing and poking in the dark, we followed the original plan that first stole our hearts upon reading Yakov’s letter—America! Only America took in Russian Jews without any pre-conditions, without demands for higher education, without questions about our age or skills. Our visas to the United States were practically guaranteed, for our status—as political refugees—elevated us into Cold War’s highly charged political realm. We were human proof of Soviet oppression, the unsuspecting players in America’s strategic battles with the Communist regime. Still, there was a wait. And for a people who came from a world where a contract, a document, a newspaper, and the words “truth,” “promise,” and “fact” had long ago lost their meanings, “waiting” became a euphemism for uncertainty, a joke God played on His most audacious dreamers.

Italy whispered of forgetting, of starting anew, of abundance, of untapped possibilities, but we couldn’t embrace even these quiet hopes; we had no money, no language, and no knowledge of where we would one day end up. Our nerves, strung like poorly tuned violins and snapping from the slightest irritation, prevented us from delighting in the grand vistas of nature and the ancient ruins of the Roman Empire. We sleepwalked through the crumbling Coliseum, the majestic Pantheon, marveled absently at the antiquity and beauty of the Roman Forum. We roamed its luscious, emerald terrain like phantom beings, invisible to the loud, colorful Italians streaming past us, invisible even to each other.

Our first destination was a dingy hotel in Rome, a red-carpeted remnant of antiquity that stank of mildew, piss, and rose water, and creaked under our feet. We were given one room for a family of five, but the exquisitely carved wooden chests and wardrobes dating back two centuries tantalized us with fantasies of Western grandeur. The bathroom was the centerpiece, an open space with a resplendent boudoir and only a velvet red curtain to offer a semblance of privacy. The hotel was paid for by Jewish organizations in America, who provided us with a minuscule allowance for which we were deeply grateful but which did not prevent us from starving. Having sold our belongings in Russia to pay off the KGB, we were then allowed to take a thousand American dollars per person and survive on it for an unpredictable period of time.

My mother wanted to spend the money on travel like the other Russians were doing; she had dreamed of Venice since her romantic adolescence, imagining herself in cafes by the water, or enfolded in the arms of some handsome Italian in the Gondolas. But my father painted a grim picture of our future in America: “You shall rot in poverty! You won’t have anything to eat or a place to live in your American paradise! Capitalism,” he held sternly, “requires money.” We knew plenty of unfortunates stuck in Italy for months, their money trickling away into the abyss of Western seduction, of bureaucrats in America and Italy mixing up documents, of relatives in Los Angeles and New York forgetting to sign some obscure page and thus prolonging the wait. My father cleverly played on my mother’s fears until he scared her into complete submission. Not only did she excise all romantic getaways from her mind but she denied herself, as did my father and grandmother, the delicacies of Italy: aromatic strawberry ice cream, a divine dish called “pizza,” and, of course, our long-awaited Western prize: “Coca-Cola.”

Every morning in Rome we drank coffee and ate delectable free rolls with butter. My parents ordered nothing else, and with shame blazoning on their faces, they surreptitiously stuffed purses and bags with extra rolls, knowing they would last us all day. We did not even have water on our trip to the Vatican. As we stared in hundred-degree weather at dead popes resting in tombs behind glass walls, we politely refrained from fainting; after all, if we could survive Russia, then we could certainly withstand a little Italian dehydration.

Through the immigrant grapevine, we heard that the secret to happiness in Italy was selling. Bring your dresses and shawls, fancy linen and towels, and your lingerie if you have nothing else because that’s where the real money hid—selling Russian goods to the Italians. So on a wide expanse of grass near a major avenue, parents and children and grandparents were selling their clothes, linen, matryoshkas, handkerchiefs, shawls, and cashmere. “Quanto Costa? Quanto Costa?” the Italians would scream at us. But my parents were poor salesmen. They spoke in judgmental tones of the indelicacies of selling, of pushing and deluding customers, of the impolite nature of asking for more money than what it originally cost them, and blushed at their broken Italian. “But I’ve worn that shawl,” my mother would whisper, “it’s Great-grandmother’s—I wore it to the Bolshoi, how can I sell it? It’s dishonest.” “I can’t sell this fountain pen,” my father would say, “it’s my only memento from college—it’s priceless.” Every morning they laid out my great-grandmother’s silk black shawls painted in scarlet and pink roses, white embroidered linen, sterling silver spoons and forks, and simple gold earrings the KGB security apparently felt were worthless, and every evening they returned with all the items still jiggling in their suitcase. Nor were my parents alone in their embarrassment, for our fellow countrymen were engineers, linguists, physicists, dentists, pianists, computers scientists, chemists, violinists, writers, teachers, and doctors, who scoffed at haggling and begging, terrified that this might be a first glimpse of their future in America.

The only person who wasn’t humiliated by the process was Bella. She spoke in voluble tones of the necessity of survival and urged my parents to abandon their “girlish shyness,” “their communist views of the world,” “their persnickety habits,” and embrace capitalism with spiritedness and dignity, and feel, feel that acute sensation of being free! Grandmother championed Bella’s cause in private, but in public she only yelled at the poor Italians to stop groping her mother’s priceless linen; “Von, von poshli ot syuda,” she’d yell from behind the table as though she were dispersing a pack of wild cats. Only Bella, clad in white shorts and tight purple tank tops, lounging lazily behind the table with her long sturdy legs and full bosom on display, understood the art of selling. “Ciao, come stai,” she would say to Italian men, and the men would reply, “Bella, bella donna!” She would spread her flaxen mane on her bare shoulders and grin and nod without knowing what she was nodding to, and the men would write out phone numbers, attempt to embrace her, or propose marriage on the spot in Italian, while Bella would push an embroidered pillow in their faces and murmur “Grazie, grazie” as if the men had already purchased it. While my mother trembled at her daughter’s feats, the men flocked to our table like seagulls to fresh fish. By the end of those two months in Italy we had sold enough of our belongings to eat pizza and ice cream and drink Coca-Cola twice a week. I believed in those years that Bella could alter the state of the universe.

She had a miniature waist, womanly hips, a voluptuous bosom, and gorgeous healthy legs, Russian style: thick thighs, round knees, and tiny ankles. Not too tall, not too plump, and not too skinny, she was woman perfecto. Her features, although small and distinct, came together in almost superhuman symmetry so that she appeared at first glance, as she did on a prolonged one, to have a flawless face. Unlike my mother, whose strong voice and penetrating gaze made one feel that her features were merely the tools she used to express herself, Bella’s power was inextricably tied to her appearance. Her serene blue eyes floated beneath crescent lids, harking to the beauties of the Renaissance, and a perky nose reminded one of farm girls in the Russian countryside. Her beauty was strangely at odds with her rough-edged, rambunctious personality that thrashed like a prisoner inside a demure innocent face.

During our fifth day in Rome, a certain Veronica Rabinsky (aka Rabinovich) set her sights on our Bella. After spying on her for several days, she barged in on my parents in the midst of a tumultuous debate: Russian Jews were being transferred to two coastal towns to wait for their entry visas to the US.

“Ostya is cheaper, I heard from the Bershovskys,” my father was saying.

“But the Ladispoli apartments have better access to the beach,” my mother held.

“No, no, you mustn’t even consider Ostya—everyone from the provinces is going there!” Veronica announced from behind my father’s back. “All the Moscovites are going to Ladispoli, end of story.” My mother broke into a glowing smile and instantly offered Veronica a seat next to her.

Veronica moved like a samovar on legs, wide-armed and confident, zealously determined to control life’s chaotic trajectories. Naturally, the first victims of such zeal are one’s family members; her husband and her only child, Igor, were jammed deeply under her thumb.

“I hear all the Moscovites are off to Florence,” she said, vigorously exploiting our common bond, and failing to mention that she herself was originally from Mogilev Podolsk, a small town in Ukraine.

“I terribly want to go,” my mother murmured and threw a menacing glance at my father.

“Well, we decided to play it safe.” Veronica softened her voice, picking up on my parents’ strife. “My husband”—she pointed at a skinny gray looking man sitting next to an even skinnier boy three tables away from us—“says Florence can wait.”

“Now that’s a smart man!” my father thundered.

With that, the Rabinskys transferred themselves to our yard sale table permanently. Two weeks after our sojourn in Rome, all the Russian Jews were transferred to seaside towns to await their entry visas into the United States.

We ended up in Ladispoli together with the Rabinskys, our apartment two floors above theirs. Veronica’s pimply son, Igor, was a miniature version of his mother, only without the vitality or the charm. At eighteen, he was a surly, negative character who never spoke unless there was cause to criticize: the Italians were loud and mannerless; the people from Kiev and especially Odessa chafed at his perfect Russian; and the conditions in the apartment were below his expectations of the coveted “West.” Only Bella had the ability to brighten his complexion and raise his eyebrows into a semi-circle above his glum eyes. Besides the defect of his skin (which made his father and mother lovingly refer to him as “our leper son”), Igor had excellent features—a straight thin nose, rich brown eyes, coarse copper hair, and gaunt cheekbones. He smacked of the emaciated Jesus and the depressed Raskolnikov. During our communal excursions to the black-sanded beaches of Ladispoli, Igor trailed after Bella like a tail she couldn’t quite cut off her ass. He neither addressed her nor looked at her, but zeroed in on her breasts, which offered him solace. He would stand in perfect stillness, his feet sinking into the burning sand, his hands clamped against skinny hips, a white dry film caking on his lower lip. And she would laugh and run into the water, her breasts bopping up and down, falling out of the tiny red scraps designed to hide them. “What do you think of him,” I asked once when we were alone. “Who?” “You know who, pimply Igor, I mean, would you like him if he wasn’t pimply?” “He’s a bore, a depressing, long-winded bore,” she cried out. “You miss Nicholai?” “Don’t speak of my Nicholai in the same breath as Igor!” “Nicholai was an even bigger bore,” I told her, recalling his silly recitations from Romeo and Juliet. “You little twerp, what do you know of love, of its sublime pain!” “Nicholai raped you—is that the pain you mean? He raped you that first time, Bella, why do you pretend he was so wonderful?” I yelled but it was wasted breath—Bella would never speak of it, never admit to having been abused; such weakness of spirit was not to be tolerated in our home. She looked at me defiantly and said, “Besides, I have my eye set on a fancy American.” “You don’t know any fancy Americans,” I pointed out. “Oh, yes, I do—I just saw him on TV. His name is Tom Brokaw!”

It just so happened that we received our visas to America earlier than the Rabinskys, and despite “tearful” goodbyes and promises to reconnect in the States, I never thought we’d see Igor and his parents again. But two years later, the Rabinskys showed up at our one-bedroom apartment on Morris Lane to have tea and never left. Had my mother known that Veronica Rabinsky had planned in 1982 to marry off her pimply son to our Goddess Bella, she would have banished Veronica from our yard table back in Rome. But no one fathomed, not even my grandmother, that a woman could have that much foresight. No one imagined that Veronica’s incessant praise of my grandmother’s cooking and my mother’s excellent looks and my father’s brain were stepping stones to a successful merger—a plot devised, after all, by a provincial brain.

Besides, given Bella’s quick Americanization, we assumed she would end up with an American. High school brought Bella euphoric popularity and an infinite array of suitors. Bella dated the crème de la crème of high school: the muscle-sprouting, beer-guzzling, God-fearing, sexually advanced football players. She paraded them in our home like daggers to stick in Grandmother’s gut. With her smug smile and manicured fingers pressed under her chin, she welcomed our grandmother’s roar: “Sex—I hope you are not having any sex!” But it fell on deaf ears. Not only was Bella technically doing “it” (she did not fear Grandmother’s wrath, venereal diseases, or getting pregnant—she only feared needy men), she was enjoying it, and threatening Grandmother with a life dedicated to casual screwing, drinking, and the stage.

For Bella dreamed of becoming an actress. She would jump on my bed in her underwear and bra, cradling an invisible microphone and mouth everything Madonna, and I would brim with pride, imagining her face splattered all over US Weekly, People Magazine, and the Enquirer. She rebelled, not like other children of Russian immigrants rebelled, by smoking pot on the sly and still becoming computer scientists, or by crashing their parents’ cars into the neighbor’s fence after a drunken party and still ending up in dental school, but by doing the unthinkable: leaving.

What ensued during the year that Bella turned twenty-two would forever be dubbed in the family as Bella’s mishugas. Bella received her BA from Northwestern University with a respectable major in economics and a minor in drama. Igor was still buzzing like an irritating fly in her hair whom she swatted repeatedly but couldn’t quite kill. He endured her serial dating and indifference to his longing glances with the stoicism of a monk. He accepted, after his fourth proposal of marriage, the state of “friendship” she offered as a final peace offering, and endured as a loyal “friend” her tales of exploits. After a bevy of interviews, Bella had several offers from major Chicago consulting firms. All of her friends from college coveted these jobs, and Bella beamed at her unexpected success. She didn’t even seem to mind that Veronica Rabinsky, her husband, Kiril, and Igor came to our house to celebrate her success, or that following dinner, in the close quarters of our library, Igor prostrated himself once more with a fifth marriage proposal. Marriage, as he put it this time, would be a binding of mutual admiration between them, if not love, a statement suggested to him by his clever mother who believed that the gates of womanhood could only be broken down by dogged persistence.

That night after everyone retired to their private quarters to knock on wood in the jittery anticipation of a wedding, my sister sneaked into my room dressed in travel gear and rolling suitcase. “Don’t panic,” she preempted. “I’m going to New York. There’s a one a.m. flight. A girl I know from Northwestern said I could stay with her.” “New York,” I cried, “it’s midnight—have you lost your mind?” “Keep your mouth shut!” “But why—you can have all these prestigious jobs—what are you doing?” I was seventeen, dreaming of college, dreaming of emulating my sister’s GPA. “I’ve turned them down, every one of them—including Igor. Fuck it—fuck it all,” she said, “I’m going to be an actress—on Broadway! I’ve already signed up for classes at the New School.” “New School? I’ve never heard of it.” “You haven’t heard of a lot of things,” she chided. “Oh, Bellochka, you can turn Igor down but you don’t have to run away to New York—there are classes here. This just seems so radical, so final, as if I’ll never see you again,” I muttered in fear, “Grandma will have a fit—” “Look, if I don’t do this now, I’ll never get out. I’ll be stuck here like every other child of Russian immigrants, making money, bearing children, buying big houses, and hating my life—” “How do you know they all hate their lives?” “They may not, but I will,” she said. “Say goodbye to them for me.” She kissed both my cheeks and her figure receded into the black void of our palatial hallway.

I presented the note to the family at breakfast the next morning: “Dear Loved Ones, I’ve decided to try my luck at acting in New York. Will call from there! Kisses, Bella.” It unleashed such a foul-mouthed tirade from Grandmother, a person who had denounced profanities as the terrain of the basest simpletons and goys, that I thought a provincial demon had entered her body. My father proposed to call his contacts at Friendly Airlines (whose stock was part of his portfolio) and manually retrieve her. Grandmother, never being one to half-ass an operation, demanded that we contact the FBI. Only my mother remained calm and, if I wasn’t entirely hallucinatory, quietly elated for her daughter. “What do you want us to tell the FBI,” she said, trying to reason with Grandmother, “that your granddaughter needed to flee to another state to be free of you?” But Grandmother didn’t see the logic in this. “Freedom! Freedom!” she yelled. “What an imbecilic, idiotic, godforsaken, meshugganah word!”

A year later Bella returned from New York, silent and dour, with a new cropped hairdo, maroon lipstick, and a black ripped T-shirt in the style of eighties punk. She did not speak about what happened, and whenever Grandmother would question her, Bella would say, “Nothing happened, I just didn’t get lucky.” All Bella told us was that she shared an apartment with a girl from Northwestern, a graduate student of English Literature who loved theater as much as Bella. But she never described her auditions or talked about her job as a hostess in some fancy restaurant. We knew she barely made any money because my father incessantly complained about having to funnel money into her bank account. Although he threatened to cut her off if she didn’t come home, we knew that Bella could have stayed on—she always read our father correctly—but when her lease ran out she packed her bags and left New York on the first available flight. She showed up at midnight on our doorstep, her face drawn and fatigued.

Igor showed up a week later with a dozen red carnations, cheap and already rotting, but they had a strange effect on our Bella; she wept, welcomed him with open arms, and upon his sixth proposal of marriage, she agreed.

After they were firmly engaged, Igor began to openly reminisce about his walks in birch forests, his parents’ dacha on the outskirts of Moscow, “real” kefir, nitrate-free hard salami, and non-alcoholic beer, known as kvac. Igor turned out to be a repressed Russophile, who spoke of Russian literature as though each text was a woman he once loved, and vowed to make their future children read Tolstoy by age six. I blamed my mother and grandmother for Igor. For them, his irksome qualities were outweighed by a heavily touted resume. He ended up at MIT almost as soon as he arrived in America, placing not only out of all high school math and science requirements, but the first two years of college math and science as well. Although he struggled with English, he managed to graduate with a 3.8 GPA and entered a PhD program at Northwestern University to study artificial intelligence. During the summers he tackled the English language with something bordering on fanaticism, and after four years in America, he spoke in perfect grammatical structures with a grating accent that was neither Russian nor British, but his own brand of universal snobbism. Every time Veronica waltzed through our front door, she recited his achievements to my grandmother as though she were depositing a magic potion into Grandmother’s hypothalamus, which kept her in a state of inane ecstasy for hours.

After Bella’s interlude in New York, Grandmother became convinced that Igor was the rock that could tether Bella to the ground and keep her from falling down the bottomless pit of “the American Dream.” “I know he’s an insufferable mudila,” Grandmother would say when I brought evidence against him, “but he’ll make your sister happy! He’ll be a good husband. He’ll keep her head straight and keep her away from all those artsy ruffians without a future.” These invisible artsy ruffians were the men that Bella must have slept with, the New York men she must have met at bars and acting classes and auditions, the men who never stepped through our door, but we knew they existed, as certainly as we knew that the year Bella spent away from us existed. “Why don’t you give Igor another chance?” Grandmother would nudge me. “He’s brilliant, and he’s not bad looking.”

Igor was in fact not good looking. His face, after years of pimple therapy, was still pimply and gray, concealed from the world by oily reddish hair. His features had lost their youthful delicacy and proportion, perhaps from battling Bella for so long, and he had grown, we all had to admit, uglier over the years. He was always seized by some interesting idea about society or computers that was too sophisticated to be understood by the ignoramuses around him.

But when in Bella’s presence, Igor’s large brown eyes seemed to glisten from a secret fount of happiness. He diligently asked her about her feelings, goals, dreams. And Bella told him that she longed for the stage—an actress, a singer, a dancer—anything that would make her feel that her beauty and talents were not being wasted in life, that there was a reason behind her flawless nose and sapphire eyes and a gold mane so naturally shiny that Russian beauticians wanted to use her in their salon ads. She lamented her degree in economics, her “stupid” year in New York, and she shared Igor’s love for Russian literature, although she read most of it in English. Igor listened to Bella with such concerted admiration that she mistook it for love. “No one could love me the way he loves me,” she confided in me. “But where’s the lust, the desire?” I asked. “All you care about are looks—I’ve looked into his soul, and there’s beauty within,” she insisted. “Empty words,” I shot back, “you’re not in love with him.” “I don’t think I fall in love as easily as you,” she told me.

To this day, I keep returning to that very moment, replaying it over and over in my head. And in each reenactment, I remind her what Igor said when she confessed her longing for the Broadway stage: “You’ll grow out of it.” In each reenactment, I say decisively: Igor is a viper, uglier within than he is on the surface, he’ll eat your flesh and once he gains entry, he’ll devour your soul. He’ll lock you in his immaculate prison of intellectual puff and moral righteousness, in his intellectualisms and realisms and chauvinisms, stinking, all of them, of hypocrisy and vapidity, and then he’ll swallow the key. He will carefully plot out the passages through which you’ll inevitably walk but the doors will close, one by one, extinguishing your last flicker of hope, your plan B escape route. I scream at her: Imagine your life five, ten, fifteen years into the future. Run while you still have legs, run while you still have a will. But in each reenactment I fail to speak, or if I speak, I fail to move her. And I see that Bella’s future was strangely sealed.

Now, as we drove up to my parents’ mansion, I said, “I’m going back to New York.”

“To your forbidden lover?” She spoke with joy, her small mouth breaking into a warm glowing smile, her beauty spilling all around me.

“Yes, to Eddie,” I said, speaking his name out loud for the first time.

“Wait until tomorrow, tell them you’re leaving. You need to tell them you broke up with Alex.”

“No. You tell them. It’s my turn to run. I don’t want to talk to them anymore. I just want to pack and leave.”

No one was at home. I called Eddie and said, “I’m coming back, I’m coming back to you. Now. Today. I want to go with you to your secret cottage in the wild woods of Maine.”

Within minutes, he purchased a ticket for me to New York on that same day, and Bella drove me to the airport. As the car approached the terminal, screeching against the onslaught of traffic, we turned to one another, Bella and I, looking in silence until tears rolled out of our eyes.

“Never be afraid, never give up, derzhis!” She said what we said to each other as children, children going into battle, children hiding, children learning to survive.

Escape from New York

The city receded slowly behind us as we crawled along the George Washington Bridge. Cars grunted and grazed each other’s backsides. I rolled down a window and breathed in the diesel fuel with mysterious pleasure. I was smiling. My face burned from the glare of the hot August sun. He sped, passing every car, his eyes taking on a lion’s ferocity, his hands barely on the wheel. “I want you right now!” I said, as an empty highway unfurled before us.

I grabbed his thigh, his erection already swelling between his legs, and the sudden thrill of wanting and being able to have silenced me. You are here for me, for me, for the taking. And I, at last, am here for you.

Eight hours later we entered Acadia and the road narrowed, taking us into dark, uninhibited nature. Black mountains soared at our sides, pockmarked with yellow, orange, and red stones as if to signal the dawn of fall, and wild flowers peeked out of uneven grasslands in sweeping fuchsias, lavenders, and whites, bowing intermittently to make room for giant pines and evergreens. Brown earth unfurled at the feet of majestic orange-leafed oaks and naked birches swayed like emaciated ballerinas attempting flight. How did I get here, I wondered with a mingling of rapture and trepidation, how did I manage to grab this piece of happiness for myself—to do that which seemed impossible one year ago, one month, one week ago?

The car finally came to a halt, but there was nothing in front of us except more trees and road.

“We need to stop here because the road is too muddy up ahead,” he said.

“I love it here.”

“I knew you would—you belong in wild nature.”

“I’m practically Thoreau,” I chuckled.

“When I read him in college, I thought—that’s it, that’s what I need—nature.” He broke into a bitter laugh. “That’s why I majored in econ and moved to the city.”

He led me through the groves into a gold-speckled meadow. Overlooking a bay, nestled among evergreens, stood his cabin. Daisies and goldenrod swayed among the weeds, and a narrow dirt road led to the mouth of the ocean. Waves crashed against mud-colored sand and ringlets of foam scattered across it like blackened snowflakes. I imbibed the air and my childhood appeared, my lips parted to drink it, taste it, this brisk, clear, unpolluted air, air squeezed from the boughs of pines. I saw a tiny scrap of a girl, a blurred face and body; only my eyes retained the same lime-hued clarity and joy. The outside world emerged as those eyes had caught it: running up the rickety steps of our dacha, bringing stalks of corn for Grandmother to boil, huge sunflowers rising over our heads and our tongues maneuvering seeds out of cracked black shells, and laughter—mine and other children’s intermingling in the vines of memory with something vile, unthinkable. I grabbed a handful of brown earth with my fingers as though I were reaching for my past, and smelled my childhood through my nose. I turned to him to say, “My childhood,” when he turned to me and said, “My childhood—it reminds me of my childhood.” His eyes glinted and his mouth was parched from the long drive. Yet there was something inconsolable in his face, framing it in the softness of a twelve-year-old boy’s.

“I bought this place a few years back because it reminded me of my childhood on Martha’s Vineyard. My parents used to own a beach house before they lost their money and my brother and I would run wild in the dunes.” He pulled me toward the door, but I resisted. The memory from my childhood returned me to them at once, and I could hear Bella’s voice ring like an echo inside the trunks of ancient trees: “You must tell Mom and Grandma; you must tell them you’re serious about this lover.” My breaths grew quicker, shallower, evicting the sweet aroma of pines and salt water and warm wind, leaving me only one mordant thought: none of my other betrayals—betraying Alex, betraying Eddie, betraying myself—could compare in scope to my betrayal of them.

“C’mon, let’s go in! It’s getting cold out here,” he said, jumping up the porch stairs and opening the front door. The inside of the cabin was made entirely from wood, wide auburn planks stretching from the floor into the walls and crisscrossing the ceiling. The hue filled me with serenity and warmth, transporting me mentally into an oversized sauna. A compact, dark living room gave way to a smaller dining enclosure where three wall-to-ceiling windows brought in the evening light. I felt myself sinking into him—into a world I barely knew.

A steep staircase led down into a marvelous high-ceilinged basement he had transformed into a library; books lived everywhere—on coffee tables, peering out of corners, stacked in piles on the floor, crowding shelves built into walls. The pristine books, untouched by human hand save to purchase them, were those dealing with history, biography, presidential memoirs, trendy business texts, and sundry modern novels I had never heard of. But on the opposite wall, a walnut bookshelf with finely wrought engravings protruded into the center of the room. There Euripides, Herodotus, Plato, Marx, Kant, Mill, Weber, Smith, Descartes, Nietzsche, Jane Austen, Balzac, Stendhal, Henry James, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky greeted me like old friends, and like old friends, they had been thumbed, underlined, ruffled and bent out of shape. The lower three shelves were devoted to photography and art, fancy hardcover books that too looked stricken and aged from overuse.

Every remaining inch of wall space was covered in paintings. I recognized some abstract artists from trendy galleries and along one wall hung the Abyss by Michael Cobb, the one that in my mind brought us together. It seemed peculiar that the walls and bookshelves in his city apartment were glaringly bare, except for a few business texts he never opened. I imagined that there were two of him, and the half that lived in the cottage perfectly coalesced with my soul.

One corner of the library was devoted exclusively to his photographs. They were arranged in a chronological order to showcase his development from childhood until the college years, which was the last time he luxuriated in “the idle exercise of snapping pictures.” The earlier work displayed a view of Manhattan from a yacht, and the one adjacent to it was a study of a cluster of rocks in Cape Cod. But huddled together, protected from the rest of the room by a mammoth walnut credenza, was an array of black-and-white photographs, his last work. There were naked backs, two thighs stuck together, hands shrouding breasts, a profile flaring against a black void, and detailed palpitating lips that exhaled desire. But you couldn’t see their faces, their eyes; you only felt the chill of abstractness—the women’s anonymity.

“You’re very talented,” I said quietly. He had stood behind me as I looked at the women through the fog of my own desire. I too wanted to be watched, analyzed, photographed, my body deconstructed, limbs and neck disjointed from the torso.

“Will you photograph me? I want you to photograph me. For real this time.”

He turned away from me and walked over to the fireplace, picking up a box of matches to light a fire.

“I don’t do it for real anymore,” he said. “I used to think of myself as an artist but that was a long time ago, when I imagined I was some kind of Don Juan.”

I peeled off my shirt and jeans as if they were old skin I was shedding, and he stood askance, watching me, his hands clasped behind his back.

There among pictures of his women—I did not ask who they were—we fell together in one swoop, in one gesture of defeat onto the black fur rug at the mouth of a fireplace. At first he seemed to be barely breathing, lying spent beneath me until a fierceness overtook him, and he threw me on my back. I looked up and saw them—his women, their hidden faces, concealing stories, stories I quickly wrote for them. In this room he and I were not alone, but we—he and I and his women—were clustered together, black and white repainted in color, bodies dancing in orange, red, and yellow flames, their souls fusing with mine.

“Look at me, I want you to look at me,” he whispered, “nothing matters but you and me. No one compares to you. That’s the past, and it’s buried there behind the glass.”

I closed my eyes and laid my head upon his chest. The musty odor of the wood spiraled through my lungs and I imagined he was made of the same matter as his cottage. Stripped of his polished surfaces, his essence was built from plain, thick, wooden planks: stationary, good, unbreakable. I can invest my whole self in you, I thought, I can trust you. And then a hobbling afterthought came: because at last I can trust myself.

“What happened between you and your brother?” I asked.

“It’s ugly—I’m embarrassed—”

“That’s ridiculous,” I muttered, smiling, bringing his hand to my lips and burrowing my mouth, wet and full of feeling, into his palm. I love you, there’s no space between us now—I’ve taken all the impediments out. There’s nothing you can do to embarrass yourself. I’ll take all your secrets, your baggage, and your terrible family members, and carry them on my back.

Out loud I merely said, “It doesn’t matter, Eddie, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” as if my curiosity weren’t squeezing the very gut of me.

But that’s precisely when he let it out. “Every stupid high school cliché begins like this, but yes, there was a girl. My first love was a strange beautiful creature. For her, small talk was akin to torture. People said she was pathologically shy, said her parents were very strict—someone even told me she wasn’t allowed to date, that she was waiting for marriage. So she danced in order not to speak. Every school production gave her a solo—you couldn’t tear your eyes away from her. Perhaps if things had turned out differently she would have gone on to Julliard. She had the bearing of a ballerina too, long neck, straight back, the way she stared down at us, us—dumb horny bastards. She wasn’t popular—girls didn’t take to her, never invited her to parties, but the guys—secretly we all wanted her.

“She sat next to me in algebra. I offered to help her with math once and when she thanked me she got all red and flustered. She brought me oatmeal cookies the next day. That’s when I knew, when I saw the anguish in her face—it didn’t matter who I was—she would say yes to anyone. Anyone who made the effort. And God did I make an effort! I offered to help her with algebra every day. Every day we met for lunch. Every day I thought about kissing her. I asked her to the homecoming dance and she accepted with a silent nod. Maybe it was gratitude, maybe desperation for some sense of normalcy. But I was so in love by then, I couldn’t see straight. After that initial kiss in the October twilight, leaning against her parents’ car in the driveway, I’d feel this awful pain in my chest when she’d miss a day at school or was away at dance rehearsal or I’d see some guy talking to her in the hallway. We became an item quickly. Sometimes I’d kiss her in public—she hated that. I was always fighting for her.

“We had been together for close to a year but we hadn’t had sex: she was a virgin. I told her I’d wait forever.” He laughed. “I masturbated a lot then.”

“Who didn’t?” I said. “So did you eventually lose your virginity to her?”

“No, no, that’s the thing.” His gaze drifted, discomfort climbed across his face. “She lost her virginity to my brother.”

“What?”

“Yes, my brother, my twin, the philosopher-playboy.” He spoke with such acrimony in his voice I thought the voice itself would disappear. “He was suave, juggling two, three girls at a time. You had to be a fool not to know Andy wanted her. He always wanted virgins, always wanted what he couldn’t have. I didn’t trust him but I couldn’t imagine he’d ever make a move. Inside I did get jealous when I saw her laugh at his insipid jokes and look at him the way girls did, like they just couldn’t believe he was talking to them. And in our home too, he was my mother’s blond God. She used to call him Aries, or Augustine, his Christian name. She named us after saints but I always suspected that she named my brother after an emperor.

“He was a champion swimmer—the best diver our school had ever seen. This one ability gave him instant fame. Mother had hopes he’d win Olympic gold one day—our whole household made sure Andy ate right and slept right. But he was a dunce in school: lazy, inattentive, a clown. He needed my help in everything, except English. He saw himself as a bohemian philosopher. One day I came home and found him fucking my girl in our room, the room Andy and I shared. I vomited on the floor right in front of them. She just lay there, staring at me with her petrified eyes. Her clothes were still on her. The only thing I saw was his bare ass shining in the dark. I couldn’t understand it—my first instinct was to kill him; she looked like she was in such pain, like this was torture. But was the torture in seeing me or being with him? I didn’t know. She told me later through tears that she detested him, but felt she needed to do it with someone she didn’t care about so it’d be ‘special with us.’ ‘Special with us!’—I knew those were Andy’s words. Andy had said, ‘you’ll lose him if you don’t do it soon. Being a virgin gets tiresome for guys, don’t you know that? Don’t you know you sound like a self-righteous bitch? I can teach you. I can teach you to suck cock and act like you want it.’

“I even thought I could forgive her when I heard that. But the pain was so intense, you know, I couldn’t look at her. I probably would have forgiven her eventually if I hadn’t—hadn’t done what I did.”

“What did you do?”

“Andy and I weren’t speaking to each other for maybe two weeks when my mother decided to have an intervention, a mediation, whatever the fuck she called it. So we stared at each other with my mother between us, and I said, ‘This fuck won’t even apologize!’ My mother, who never allowed swearing in the house, said, ‘Good, Ignatius, you’re letting your feelings be known.’ And Andy looked at me and just laughed—there were no human feelings there, nothing other than self-adulation—and he cried, ‘You’re such a self-righteous prick! Serves you right to know you were hot for a whore!’ And I snapped—I reached across the dinner table for his collar and just began to pummel him. I had so much rage I couldn’t stop—I probably would have killed him if my mother hadn’t called the police.”

He stopped speaking for a moment, his voice cracked; tears surfaced, then retreated behind his pupils.

“The thing is, the thing is—Andy was in bad shape—I broke his left arm and two ribs. All I had was a bruised eye, a bloody nose, and a police warning. Mother wouldn’t let them take me to jail, though one officer recommended it to teach me a lesson. After that, we didn’t speak at all—it was as if we had ceased to exist for each other. I moved into the basement, and Andy had pot feasts in our old room, right under my mother’s watchful eye. It took him a while to recover, but when he returned to swimming, he couldn’t regain his old speed. Diving became an exercise in public humiliation, and eventually the coach asked him to quit the team—‘for everyone’s sake.’”

“God,” I murmured, “how horrible for you, Eddie!”

“Oh Emma, my story doesn’t end there,” he said, pausing for an instant, his eyes closing momentarily as if to shield me from some unspeakable horror. “At the time, there were rumors in our school that someone had cheated on the SAT exam, and we were all under scrutiny. Some guy paid another guy two thousand dollars to take the test. The problem was that I had one of the highest scores and I, not knowing this, was immediately placed under high suspicion. A month after I beat up my brother, he marched into the principal’s office and declared before the entire administration that a guy paid Eddie Beltrafio to take the SAT for him. ‘I know this,’ he said, ‘because I’m his brother.’”

“But why would anyone just believe him?”

“Andy made a convincing case—he said our family was still suffering financially from my father’s mental breakdown, said I wanted to be the head of the household, said I desperately wanted to make money to help my mother out. I was completely railroaded. I had no idea why I was being questioned or what they were accusing me of. They had found the kid who didn’t show up to the exam—Luke Wallerton—and they pulled my test score to compare it to his. The results were stunningly similar but only because we both had close to perfect scores. Luke refused to give up his coconspirator, and I—I who had studied so diligently, who had done, it seemed, everything right—had nothing convincing to say in my own defense.

“Andy made no pretenses about wanting to avenge me. His life was ruined without the swimming, without its luminous future; he was still popular but in a kind of pathetic way—a has-been—people still wanted to hang with him, girls wanted to sleep with him, but they’d never, ever consider being with him. These girls were headed to Stanford and Harvard and Yale—and Andy—where was he headed?”

“And you—where were you headed, Eddie?”

“I was suspended for three weeks from school, my acceptances from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia were all placed on hold, and I was asked to leave the football team. I became a social pariah—no one spoke to me. I was ostracized and suddenly suspected of stupid things like stealing library books or not paying for my lunch. It was horrible. I, who had been such a success, turned into a failure overnight. But the thing is I’m not sure I would do anything differently,” he stumbled, his mind seeking a way to withhold something he suddenly felt was unbearable to reveal.

“I couldn’t forgive the girl—not for sleeping with him—but for the unseen consequences of this one act—the way it ruined all of our lives. I hated myself most of all, hated my life, hated my brother, hated the memories of being in love, hated my mother for feeling sorry for him, hated myself for hating the girl, for blaming her for everything.”

I reached for his hand and held it in both of mine—I didn’t know what could be done to soothe him. But he smiled awkwardly at me. “Oh, don’t feel bad for me, Emma. I’m the only one who made it out of the mess alive. By June, miraculously enough, the true culprit came forward and I was exonerated. Of course. I lost my place in all of the schools except for one: my mother’s alma mater, Columbia. They took me in, because the Dean still fondly remembered the money my father had once donated to the school in his heyday, and I studied harder than I had ever studied in my life. I lost all ability to live—or care for anyone. I just wanted to succeed.”

“And your mother—where does she stand now—I mean whose side—”

“Andy’s, of course, but she never tires of trying to get us to reconcile.” He closed his eyes when he said this. “My brother was destroyed by the incident—his future obliterated. He got into drugs, dropped out of high school, and just failed at one career after another, until my father gracefully gave him a job at Beltrafio Movers and Shakers, where he does absolutely nothing. He married a girl he once rejected long ago, and now cheats on her regularly. But no one expects anything from him—they all just feel sorry for him.”

“But not for you,” I said, “not for you.”

“No, not for me and no thought was ever given to my girl, no care, no feeling to what she was going through.

“My relationship with my family is still classically dysfunctional. I don’t go home anymore. I’ve boycotted all holidays involving Andy. It works both ways. He hates me just as much. He’s still waiting for my apology, or so Mother says, and I—I guess I’m still waiting for his.”

I breathed through my mouth for fear of hyperventilating so incomprehensible, so terrifying this story seemed. For whatever prison I had with my own family, at least I could count on them to protect me from the outside world, at least I knew we were safe in each other’s arms.

“Do you ever want to be on speaking terms with him?”

“No,” he said, “lives have been ruined, and I can’t turn that off in my head.” He looked at me and tears streamed from my eyes, and as if receiving my permission, tears streamed from his.

“The girl never danced again,” he said, burying his face in his hands. He let me hold him in silence.

A Girl Named Sarah

He led me by the hand the way a dog guides its unseeing master into a dark palatial room. When I opened my eyes, I was confronted with a giant Jacuzzi rising out the floor like the parted jaws of a whale. The walls, floor, and even the tub were encased in a gleaming black reflective marble, giving one the unnatural sensation of being seen from every angle. Only the silver framed black-and-white images of cliffs and oceans, with their opaque white calm, allowed one’s gaze to escape self-scrutiny.

I laughed at once. “What a chick magnet—did you design this yourself or did it conveniently come with the property?”

“I like to think of it as the intellectual man’s den of sin,” he said with a self-mocking grin. “Anyways it’s not my fault—it’s from the eighties.”

He lit white candles on the windowsill and looked at me with renewed desire, his melancholy dissipating into steam. We were naked, wrapped in blankets, and we dropped them simultaneously and climbed into the black gurgling water and intertwined our legs, our bodies sliding against each other.

But I couldn’t relax. “I was just thinking something strange, something I’ve never thought about any American: my life seems strangely easy in comparison to yours.”

“I told you everyone has baggage,” he said, but in an instant, his gaze was cloaked in rage. “My family life is nonexistent. You have a rare thing—real love in your family. But for most of us, parents and children are thrown accidentally together—people who are so different from each other forced to live in unwanted intimacy. That’s what I’ve got—a terrible mismatch. I want to create my own family—”

“Oh, Eddie, don’t—don’t look at me like that—I’m an impossible case.”

“Sure you are—that’s why you’re for me, the only one for me.”

Tears gathered at the corners of my eyes. “Oh, Eddie, you don’t know me. I’m lost and confused and I’ve been broken so many times I don’t know how to put myself back together—I’ve never known how to do the right thing.”

He appealed to me in silence, waiting.

“There are things from my childhood that no one knows. There are things … I believe they are better left unsaid. And yet, yet I want to tell you—I don’t want anything to be left unsaid between us—I don’t want to keep such secrets from you.”

“I want to know everything about you, Emma, everything,” he murmured, caressing my body in the water, his fingers gliding over my wet calf.

“When I was a child, oh God!”

I looked up at the black ceiling and through a skylight saw clusters of stars sitting like conspiring deities across the glass. I covered my face with my hands, covered the tears scorching my cheeks. What else could I tell him! What else breathed with such horror, what else constricted and unraveled and explained me all at once—as I was now—as that moment when I was so happy and innocent and seven?

I began to speak but after a while I couldn’t feel myself talking, couldn’t remember his responses; the memory overtook me. I returned there, to the wild meadows, to the birch forest, to the time when I was a child at a special camp with my mother, a special camp for intellectual children or rather children of intellectuals: a camp for the progeny of writers, journalists, newspaper columnists, TV personalities, editors. A camp for the elite, where we were taught the arts and sports and survival skills, a distinctly Russian take on the ancient Greek gymnasium. Interspersed among us were the children of the KGB. Though we were Jews, my mother’s position as an editor at the preeminent Communist establishment, the Soviet Union of Writers, gave her unprecedented access—to all the coveted privileges of the KGB. In addition to the usual infusions of special passes, Beluga caviar, and an array of German salamis, my mother was offered this camp—a wonder, really, a beautiful place with a deep clear river and meadows of irises and daisies where we would gather bouquets and weave wreaths for our heads and fry potatoes and freshly picked mushrooms over campfires.

Painting #7

I cannot paint yet: I’m still piecing it together, still sifting through memory, still avoiding the explosions of color. I can’t remember which day, which hour, perhaps it was toward the end of August, on a Sunday, a day of unification between parents and children, a day I mark in memory with sunlight, heat, buzzing bees and butterflies, a day magnified in my mind’s eye by startling beauty. My mother and I are playing in a lilac meadow surrounded by a birch forest—rows upon rows of delicate white pockmarked trees ascending in straight lines, their branches holding hands with pines and ancient oaks, the generals of all forests reaching for the sundrenched sky.

I’m making a wreath from daisies for my head, when out of nowhere three teenage boys appear—I’ve seen them before at roll call. They’re smiling at me. Then a dark-haired boy says, “What a nice wreath you made—do you know what the word pizda means?” “No,” I reply, smiling back. A blond boy smiles and the others egg him on: “Do you want to know what it is?” I nod. “Because we really want to tell you but you have to come with us into the woods, just for a second,” the dark one says. I rise and follow them without any hesitation. I wonder if “pizda” is a mushroom I haven’t heard of, or a special tree. The blond boy is handsome and he puts his arm around me.

They bring me into the heart of the forest where the thin white birches are so beautiful and close, you feel your eyes water and your mind grow still. I inhale deeply as though I’m underwater.

I see her immediately in the distance tied to an old massive oak: a girl, naked, ropes round her ankles and wrists, ropes wrapping the thick brown trunk. Her face is wild, eyes unfocused as if blind. I only know one thing about her, she’s older, eleven years old, and a Jew like me. We’re not friends, our activities don’t intersect, except at night when we sit with our mothers at the bonfire, and comb the ground with our mushroom sticks.

At roll call every morning the counselors call out everyone’s name: the normal names like Petrokovsky, Yagodova, Pomidorov run though our ears like water, then ours appear like plugs. She is the butt of all jokes: Sarah Fichtshtein.

In those years, no parent names their child Sarah. Why did hers? The name itself is used to mock the Jews—pronounced Sa-r-r-ah—giving the “r” a Yiddish tint. Stalin wiped Yiddish out. All that remains is the “r” and “h” in Sarah and Chaim. You’re “Sa-r-r-ah” if you are acting too “Jewish,” or “Chhhhhhaim” if your nose is crooked or too long. The Fichtshteins came to Moscow from Tashkent; they didn’t understand the cruelties of modern city life.

The counselors cough, mix consonants, crack up as they call her name. My last name gets the same treatment. When your name is called, you say “present.” Sarah and I always whisper, and the counselors yell, “Louder, I didn’t hear you, Fichtshtein! Didn’t hear you, Kabelmacher!” I scream “present,” she screams “present,” and all the children laugh. Sometimes I’m spared on account of my mother, sometimes on account of the smile and the small-doll like features they say reminds them of Snegurochka.

But Sarah never smiles, she’s never spared; she has thick black hair and a long thin nose with a sharp tip. Her brown eyes are elongated almonds, Roman eyes with pronounced lids, full of anguish. She’s beautiful but not in the Russian sense. Hers is the face I paint, the face of my subconscious. But she envies me. “You’re lucky,” she says, “they look at you and they forget.”

God, she speaks like everyone: you don’t look It! You’re too pretty for a Jew. Too light skinned for a Jew. Nose too small for a Jew. Eyes too light, too green for a Jew. Personality too lively for a Jew. You never complain like other Jews, you’re not greedy, manipulative, dirty like a Jew. Maybe you’re not a Jew—maybe you’re a Slav or at least half of one, a hybrid, a half-breed, a trickster!

Her parents applied in 1976, people v podache—waiting for exit visas, three years later they’re refused, they’re the official refuseniks, in the flesh, in our camp. Why are they in this camp? Rumors swirl, no one knows. They’re the devoted Jews, the Jews’ Jews, going straight to Israel, not America. In Israel she’ll say “Sarah” with pride.

But Sar-r-rah is treated like a beloved scarecrow, everyone’s relief and mockery. Even the staff and camp leaders and theater directors mock Sarah. She loathes Russia and Communism and isn’t afraid to say it, but I tell her to be quiet, to keep her trap shut. Now she’s hanging from a tree, tears streaking her cheeks like rivulets of blood.

“We want to show you what a pizda is,” the dark-haired boy says. “So why don’t you take off your underpants like Sarah and then we can all play.” I’m wearing a short white summer dress decorated in tiny pink tulips. And instinctively, I pull the hem down, my mind in high alert. I want to run and get help but they surround me—the blond one and a lanky boy named Grisha.

“Where are you going, Kabelmacher,” they taunt, “isn’t that your name? What’s with you people and your unpronounceable names? Why must we mangle our tongues? You always make life so difficult for everyone, you stinky kikes!”

“But she doesn’t look like a Jew. Can someone explain that puzzle to me?” the blond-haired boy exclaims, staring down at me as though I’m an algebra equation he wants to solve. “Why do some of them look it and others don’t?”

“Probably because their moms fucked one of ours, that’s why, but they’re all the same underneath,” the dark one theorizes.

“Hey,” the lanky one says, “some of us are different.”

“We’re not talking about you, Grisha,” the dark one assures him. “Besides, your father’s the kike, not your mother.”

Grisha grins and says, “What are we gonna do with these two?”

“Well first we gotta get this cute one to drop her panties.”

“I ain’t dropping no panties for you! Get Sarah down,” I yell. I imagine myself to be a great menace. “When my mother finds out,” I shriek, shaking my forefinger at them, “you’re all going down with a good beating!”

“Ha, ha, ha, a good beating, ha?” The blond one breaks into laughter. “I highly doubt it, little fool, do you know who my father is?”

“If your mother finds out”—the dark-haired boy grabs me by the collar of my dress and lifts me in the air, his grip choking me—“we’ll kill your mother, you understand me, you little Yid?” I want to cry but I tell myself to be strong for my mother—crying is for the weak, the stereotypical Jews.

“I tell you what,” I say, “I’ll show you my—my—my pizda—if you get Sarah down and give her her clothes back.”

“So you learned some anatomy today, right there between your thighs,” Grisha says, pointing his finger toward my crotch.

“You first,” the dark one says, “show it first.”

Only the blond boy shifts on his feet, grows uncomfortable. “I think we’ve had enough fun,” he mutters, “let them go now. They’re too young. We need some real tits.”

“Oh, she’s got tits, that Jew up there.” Sarah’s wrists are blue and her sides have red scratches running along her ribs and buttocks. She has two pointy red nipples sticking out of small mounds of flesh. The black-haired boy and Grisha pick up sticks and start poking Sarah between her legs. But it’s the black-haired boy who sticks the end of one stick in, right between her thighs, into her vagina, and as she cries out from pain, I see blood drip along the side of her leg.

“That’s where the pizda is located, little one, you see that—that’s the blood of a dirty Yid,” the black-haired boy says.

Grisha drops his stick and grabs the boy by the arm: “What are you doing—you’re going too far—you’re gonna seriously hurt her!”

“What—what did I do wrong—I did her favor, took her virginity from her! Why? Are you chickening out, or are you sympathizing with your fellow Yid? Do you want to be a real man?”

“I’m not chicken,” Grisha says, “but—”

“Now I’m gonna make this little cute one lose her virginity,” the dark one announces. “Do you know what sex is, little macher kike?” he cries out, laughing, looking down at me. Then he pushes me on the ground and jumps on top of me and straddles me and laughs and laughs. “Oh, I could really start to like this little kike! Are you scared, little one, are you?”

“No!” I punch back, stare at him defiantly. I’m not afraid; I only feel fumes in my gut, fumes of loathing. “I’m going to put a spell over your head, a Yid spell, an evil eye to make you suffer! May you eat shit all your life and pee in your pants—I hope you die, you stupid weasel-brained durak!”

“And I’m gonna hang you up there like Sar-r-rah, ha, ha, ha,” he screams through laughter and I spit in his face. He wipes my spit with the sleeve of his shirt, and his face changes from laughter to hatred in an instant. He lifts my dress and tears out my underwear with a small pocket knife that seems to materialize out of nowhere. He presses the knife against my thigh and pricks the skin.

“Do you think I’m afraid of your little knife?” I say but my voice falters.

“Let her go, Vladik,” the blond boy commands, “let her go.”

“But Sarah stays,” the dark one retorts, submitting halfway, because the blond boy’s father holds a high position in the Politburo.

“Agreed,” the blond boy says, nodding. “This one’s too little. You don’t know, Vladik, she may not even be a real one.”

“Yeah, that’s true, have you seen her mom—now that’s a hot blyat! I want me some of that cunt!” It seems miraculous, but they aren’t looking at me any longer—they’re speaking with one another about other cunts they want, other girls they’d like to hang up on that tree, interspersing their desires with pragmatic subjects such as sticks better suited for picking mushrooms, their fantastically idiotic counselor, and how to elude the important Politburo father who is too strict. I can only exhale—I can’t inhale air into my lungs. I consider sprinting at the tree and somehow pulling Sarah down, but her wrists and ankles are securely tied and the boys will string me up, too, if I try. I grab my underwear and run in my torn dress through the white birch forest, tripping over stumps and leaves, falling, picking myself up again, twisting my underwear in my fingers, tears pouring down my face in a torrent. I must bury the evidence—the underwear—I whisper to myself, I must find a place to bury it, to keep it a secret from my mother. The white-black trunks blur into a mass of gray, and the leaves, so sparse, seem to expose me to the burning sky. I’m afraid of the sky, afraid to be seen by it.

In the clearing I see my mother talking to the art teacher and other girls weaving daisy wreaths. I stand still, feeling the warm breeze on my arms and goose bumps pricking my skin. I feel safe again, but only for an instant—for the fear settles all at once like a giant black cloud in which I’m forced to breathe. The sides of my legs are wet from pee, and I keep thinking what a horrible thing I’ve done. Grisha and Vladik and the blond boy will kill my mother if I talk so I need to shut my mouth, glue my lips together. When my mother finds me crying I say I fell and wet my panties and bruised my thigh and a tree stump scratched my arm. She carries me back to her cottage and caresses my hair and covers my cheeks with kisses, and says, “I told you to stay near me, but you’re a firefly, you’re always flying.” And I smile at the thought of my red wings—I’m Zhar-ptitsa.

I inhaled air as if for the first time, as if I had just been saved from drowning, and met Eddie’s eyes.

“Sarah was found late that evening by an old fireman who lived in the woods,” I explained. “She never returned to that camp.”

“You were a child—what could you have done?” he said, but I was still stuck there.

“I was a coward, been a coward ever since.”

“It’s terrible what happened to you,” he murmured, “but you need to heal.”

“How I wish—” I took in a quick breath, and went on. “I can’t be a coward again. You have to know the whole truth.”

He looked at me in confusion.

“I told you almost everything but the final, invidious little detail I meant to keep to myself—because the shame of it, the shame of it—” I felt my heart multiply in my head until there were five, six, seven hearts all thumping in different parts of my body.

“I hated it. I hated being Jewish. I couldn’t digest it, couldn’t understand it. Even the horrible boys who harassed Sarah said I didn’t look it. How terrible it was, I had thought then, not to look it and yet be punished for it. But that was no excuse for what I did—” I met his gaze in a blur. “You see what I neglected to mention was that after the incident Sarah had reported the boys to the camp authorities, and named me as a witness.”

I closed my eyes and fell down the rabbit hole, down, down into a bottomless subconscious, the putrid undergrowth of memory—surfacing, festering, ugly.

There was a tribunal at the camp. The head honchos, the men, were going to excavate the truth, dig it up from the well of lies we all lived in. They alone were going to catch it, this elusive thing with butterfly wings and a fox’s tail and a horse’s ass … In an enormous starkly painted room, ten men were seated behind a long black table, notebooks with identical pens arrayed in front of them. I was placed in the witness chair, a small wooden stool facing the men and the audience, made up of camp counselors and staff. From my perch, I could see Sarah and her mother in the empty auditorium, clinging to each other. I could see my mother watching me, biting her nails, her consternation so extreme that her features appeared to fuse together. Everything was a blur, faces merged, features swam, switched places, danced with one another, coalesced into one terrifying glob. I couldn’t figure out where I was, who I was, couldn’t remember my name. Fear with its big fat capital F invaded my senses, knocking Memory out with one hard blunt punch.

In the days preceding the tribunal, the entire camp as if in a singular magnified voice had whispered, “Did the Jew lie?”

A bald man centrally placed began the proceeding. “We begin with our witness, Elena Kabelmacher. Octobrist Kabelmacher, tell us what you saw in the woods. Speak freely and honestly.”

Everyone’s eyes were upon me. That’s when I felt it, the dirt, the grime, her sticky blood dripping through my fingers, infected with the Jew disease, blood on my hands, will these hands never be clean, and if I’m not careful, if I don’t wash hard enough, I might catch it.

I washed my hands with my replies. “I saw nothing, I did nothing, I saw nothing,” I repeated, again and again. And Sarah screamed, “No, she’s lying! They did it to her, they harassed her, they tore her clothes, they tortured her, she wanted to save me!” But the men commanded her to quiet down: “Wait until your turn, pioneer Fichtshtein.” She wept for the injustice and betrayal she endured, not in the hands of the judges, but in the hands of her fellow sufferer—in me. She turned on me. “Why are you lying? After everything we’ve been through, why are you lying?”

Don’t cry, Kabelmacher, ne plach, I told myself, don’t let them see you (dear God I was only seven), don’t let them know what a coward you are.

“The boys were only joking around,” I insisted. “Sarah just didn’t understand them.”

“Was she naked and tied up to a tree?” an older man, closest to me, asked.

“She was wearing her dress when I saw her,” I said, “and as for being tied to a tree, I do remember that there was a tree in the forest.” Everyone laughed, and I blushed. I blushed and lied some more.

“Why are you making up such terrible things?” the men demanded from Sarah. Oh, how she wept, hysterically, painfully, her entire body convulsing, tears bursting from her nose and mouth. I thought she would choke on them. “I’m not lying, ya govoryu pravdu—I speak the truth.” I heard the words muffled but clear. “Coward,” she had yelled at me as she left the room.“Coward—we, Jews, are all cowards—that’s why they hate us so much!”

I was afraid of everything: the men at the tribunal, the boys’ retribution, even my mother, but she—Sarah feared nothing, no one, not even this brutal humiliation. For afterwards, the tribunal exonerated the boys and recommended to Sarah’s parents that Sarah be placed under psychiatric evaluation.

After my mom and I returned to Moscow from the camp, I lay in my bed and drew in the new sketchpad my father bought for me. I’d heat up the thermometer and claim to my grandma that I was ill with fever. Grandmother said, “A fever is no excuse for keeping secrets,” as if she knew. She seated me on a chair in the middle of our biggest room, and said, “What really happened in that swamp for intellectuals?” She probed me for hours. “There are things you’re not telling us. Never conceal! Tell the truth, it’s the only way to recover.” We practiced therapy intuitively, Russian-family style, by pelting people with commands. The truth at last poured out of me, and for the first time since the incident, I cried. The guilt lifted for an instant, like a freight train riding off my chest. “Everything Sarah said was true,” I told my mother and father and grandmother. “The boys poked Sarah’s body with sticks, pushed sticks into her breasts, stuck sticks in there, inside her pipka, until she bled. They tore off my underwear, and said they’d tie me to the tree, like Sarah, if I talk, if I open up my big Jew mouth.”

I looked at my mother. “I lied to protect you. They said they’d kill you if I told the truth.” Grandmother groaned: “Bozhe moy, Bozhe moy, Bozhenka pomogi nam …” My mother’s face contorted and turned bright red—it was one of the few times in my life that I had witnessed her crying.

But it was only for a moment. She wiped her cheeks, and the tears disappeared. “But where was your courage? What you did you must undo!”

“But how?”

“You must find Sarah and apologize to her,” my mother told me. Sadness and disappointment swam in her eyes, and then I saw the flicker of guilt, as if it was her fault, not mine—the fact of Sarah’s betrayal.

But by the time we found their address and phone number in Moscow, we reached only Sarah’s aunt, who told us that the Fichtshteins had already emigrated to Israel. That was the turning point in our lives—that irreversible moment when the truth is revealed and can never be taken away. That was when my mother said to my father, “Is this the life you want for our children—a life where they’re forced into betrayal, where heroism is snuffed out before it’s had a chance to bloom?”

“My God, how terrible, you were so young, how could you understand these things? Such cruelty to children!” Eddie broke through my memory.

“The irony, of course, is that this incident is why we’re here,” I explained.

“What do you mean?”

“We applied for an exit visa right after the incident. My father finally agreed with my mother: that to remain in Russia would be an act of great inhumanity to us, the children.”

“Yes, well, I’m glad he did,” Eddie said, but I could see his mind drifting through my story, not fully comprehending it.

“Jews were being refused left and right in 1980,” I said, “and there we were, just beginning our wait. I don’t know how we got out—on a fluke, I suspect. By 1982 no one was being let out. But there we were. Here I am.”

I looked at him beseechingly, seeking in his eyes something soothing, ameliorating.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he said, “you have to recognize that.”

“Oh, but it was. I could have told the truth. I was a coward.”

“You were a child, Emma, a child! And you were terrified. Your mother was wrong to reprimand you.”

“I betrayed Sarah. If I was tortured the way my grandfather or great-grandmother or great-great uncle were tortured by Stalin’s goons, I would have spilled the beans before the stick would ever hit my face, before a single nail on my pinky would be pulled out. I was weak—yes, a child but already weak of heart.”

He lifted my chin with a single finger. “Look at me,” he said, “look at me. You are not weak. You are incredible and strong, and I didn’t understand—”

“No, no, you still don’t understand—the rot is in me! It wasn’t just that society that was horrible and rotten, but us—each individual couldn’t help but become infected by that disease. I got infected. The rot crawled into me and I’m not sure I’ve gotten it out yet. I too was possessed, but not just with fear—with hatred. I hated Sarah for her weakness, for crying, for revealing her feelings at the tribunal, for being so sensitive, even for telling on the boys. But I hated the boys even more—flies, I thought in my head, insects, hideous vermin, you are beneath us. In my mind, I took Sarah’s hand and we flew above them and mid-flight turned into dragons and then descended on them all—the boys, the men, the audience I imagined, our wrath spewing out of our mouths and consuming the whole room in a great purple fire. We will triumph one day, one day … That’s why I told myself I must hide, must keep silent for now, must remember and then transcend. Transcend and then what? Transcend what, whom exactly?

“Can’t you see I can’t get past this? I’m stuck in a cage, and every time I try to claw my way out, I fall right back in. And somewhere deep inside I’m not me—not the person I appear to other people, not the woman you see before you, but the child still hiding, peering out of this adult body.”

“But you don’t hide,” he gently contradicted. “You reveal yourself. You announce who you are—you are far stronger than the sum of your past events.”

“What I reveal is only a tiny fraction of what I am—”

“It’s strange, but I know exactly what you mean—the feeling of never fully sharing, never being able to fully express—”

“You and I are not the same, Eddie.”

“Look Emma, we create the cage ourselves with our bare hands to punish ourselves for the things we did and did not do, for the sake of punishment itself. You’ve got stop blaming yourself, not just for your past, but for your present—you’ve got to paint! Paint it all out, that’s your only chance to heal. Paint that scene—the child in the forest—paint it as you see it inside your head.”

“I can’t—I can’t face the possibility of failure. I can’t devote my whole self to this only to find out that I’m mediocre, that the coordination between my mind and hands is adequate at best, that the emotions bubbling within are true and deep but can never appear on the canvas as they do in my head. I am so afraid—you can’t imagine such fear—afraid that I will bleed out trying, that my failure will be the end of me. My humiliation will result in a full retreat …”

“Are you prepared to wonder your whole life what it would’ve been like to paint full time? Nothing is easy, Emma, certainly not the life of an artist, and this coordination you speak of is a matter of practice and sweat and grit. To do something with your whole self means working on these images for the long haul, for months, even years—imagine how far you could go! What’s the alternative? Not painting at all? Painting as a hobby? You’re not equipped for that—the compromise will kill you.”

“Yes—but how is it that you know this—you, who’s known me for such a short time, know the very root of me? I never thought such a man could exist!” I could feel the tears and the gratitude and the gushing joy intermingling with wonder and disbelief, all rising to the surface.

“Life is not supposed to be this easy,” I cried out. “Who said human beings are supposed to be happy? Who said I had any right to bite into this pie?”

“Americans,” he replied, laughing.

“Yes, yes, Americans, America!” I rose out of the bathtub and pressed my breasts onto his lathered chest.

“You’re gorgeous, simply gorgeous,” he said, smiling, as if relieved to return to our first, our most vital bond. Tentacles seemed to grow out of his black pupils and wrap each breast, and trace the curve of my stomach to the contours of my waist. His eyes devoured, absorbed me, infused me with confidence and power. Through his eyes I saw myself billowing, growing taller, more beautiful, and I balked at it—the male gaze—and turned the female gaze on him. His skin was brown and silky, and the water slid down his chest as if gliding on a stone surface. I traced his muscles with my fingers as though I were mapping out my creation, my sculpture, my ideal man, reaching deep into the water. Only intermittently, through his muffled moans, did I catch my own skin against his, my own whiteness against his brown expanse. The contrast was so extreme that I flinched at the sheer physical distance between us.

I was whiter than anyone I knew, white like my sister, mother, and grandmother, whiter than the underside of arms on my pale American friends, whiter than a fresh new canvas. We burned in heat on gray days, blistered in the sun, peeled and heaved with pain, our skin populated by wild rashes. It was the only physical aspect of myself I couldn’t erase—my own sense of my distinct Russianness, and when my hair darkened in the water, losing its reddish and golden hues, the contrast against my face was so extreme that my features intensified and increased in size, taking me from my Russianness to my Jewishness. And I wondered as I watched us in the marble reflection if he knew what I was thinking, if he knew how madly I desired the merging of our contrasts, if that alone—this difference in skin and features—was what drew me to him.

“I want you so much I feel like I could burst,” I said, my lips moving along his chest. His eyes glistened and he pressed me so hard against himself I felt my skin gluing to his skin.

“Marry me,” he said, kissing my face, “marry me, Emma.”

“I—I—”

Suddenly a noise erupted from my purse, a grating ring tone that I instantly recognized as my new cell phone, drawing my swelling heart out of my body like a powerful magnet and then deflating it mid-flight. In an area where cell phone service was practically non-existent and few towers had been built, that sound could only have meant one thing: Mom and Grandma had erected a virtual cell tower with their formidable Russian telepathy in order to cross state lines and yank me from the arms of the “wrong” man. Because Life, with a capital L, was not simply about the diligent upkeep of misery and suffering, but about the swift eradication of all seedlings of happiness.

“I have to get that,” I said, rising from the tub. “It’s my mom and grandma—they don’t know where I am and if I don’t pick up, they’ll think I’m dead or have been abducted by the KGB.”

“Tell them you’ve been abducted by a goy,” he cried out, laughing. “How can you leave—you can’t leave me like this.” He lay there naked and erect under the black water. As I wiped myself with a white towel, I felt a sudden desire to weep. I held the phone in my wet hand and a familiar voice said, “Lenochka, gde ty? You must come here right away—we have an absolute pandemonium here.” It took me a few seconds to place the tonality, to remember that the only person whose lilting voice could move as easily from Russian to English as my own was Bella. “They know,” she said at once, and then the line went dead.