Uncertain Weights and Measures Read online

  But you like her, said Sasha.

  I might, she said. But I’m afraid. I’m afraid of you both, afraid that you’ll denounce me!

  Oh, mother. You won’t be denounced! You don’t believe in anything. No one will denounce you.

  It’s happened to the neighbours, she said. They lost everything. It was their daughter, they say.

  I could hear the strain in her voice, I could hear the increasing pitch, the way fears build on fears, and I didn’t want it going any further so a took a few steps back down the hallway, then cleared my throat as if I’d just woken.

  Christmas Eve night, when Natasha and Mrs. Pavlovna had already gone to sleep, Sasha and I stayed up. Sasha had spent the day chopping wood, and like a child who knows no limits, he piled the fire so high with wood that it sparked and flamed in a joyful waste. He pulled the sofa close to the fire and spread blankets and pillows on the wooden floor. We had sex and then, after, pulled the blankets up over our bodies and, on a small marble board, played an unskilled game of chess. Neither of us was good, but he was better. When he had taken all my knights, he pulled a slender box out from behind one of the pillows on the sofa.

  Are you trying to bribe me? I asked.

  Wait until you open the box before you say that, he said.

  But Sasha, I said, I didn’t get you a present.

  Then you’ll have to play well enough to make me think I’m winning, he said.

  He moved the chessboard aside. The pieces wobbled when they were set down, but the game remained intact.

  The box was from the store on Tverskaya. I’d never liked receiving gifts. The expectation was too great. Someone else had thought of something that they thought you might like. They had spent money on that thing. They had wrapped it up, lovingly, lovingly, cloyingly, lovingly. While they wrapped it they thought: this item symbolizes my love. They thought: this item symbolizes recognition. The gift meant: this is how I see you. But then it was never knowing nor recognition, and yet you could never say how much it wasn’t because when you were given a gift, my father had said, you must always say thank you. You must always appreciate the thing. My mother would have said, throw the thing away, you don’t need things. I didn’t want to pretend. And now Sasha had bought me something from a store that had beautiful boxes, a store his mother would have liked, and so I felt unknown, as if he’d suddenly forgotten how to pronounce my name.

  The slender white ribbon tied around the box came undone easily.

  Sasha was watching me with the awful, hopeful happiness of a gift-giver.

  I peeled back one layer of silly tissue, and then two more.

  I wanted him to enjoy this, even if I couldn’t.

  At the core of all the layers, though, was a very small paper plane. Its paper was from an old pamphlet, the black and red block letters were letters no more, now they made abstract patterns on the wings and fuselage. I lifted it up to look closely, and there noticed a pilot and a co-pilot, their heads poking out of the plane’s body. In another life they had been silk buttons, but now they were Sasha and me flying a plane!

  Where did you get these? I asked.

  I knew you loved-hated those gloves, he said. I thought the buttons might be the part you loved.

  Did you steal them?

  I won’t be going back there, if that’s what you’re wondering.

  Sasha’s face was soft with happiness, but also with satisfaction, because he’d done the right thing.

  I hadn’t expected something so wonderful from a box like that.

  So we’re co-pilots, he said.

  He wrapped himself around me then, as I flew the two of us around to the backdrop of a raging fire.

  I’m not a cold person, am I? I asked.

  Never, he said. And then, with a gentle smile, Mostly never.

  He said he was going to leave the two of us flying the plane for a while, but eventually I’d find us somewhere else and in that place we’d be permanent.

  I liked that idea very much.

  Later that night, Sasha suggested we go for a walk in the snow.

  I guess I looked concerned because Sasha laughed at me, saying, City girl, city girl.

  Behind their home, there was more open space than I’d ever seen in my life. The moon was full and bright. Only the smallest wisps of clouds drifted across the sky. We walked without speaking so the only sound was the crunch of snow as we headed towards the hill. Every few steps I’d think I had seen something shift just beyond the range of my vision, and I would pause to look more closely, trying to discern the real threats from the imagined.

  There’s nothing out here, said Sasha, don’t worry.

  I’d try not worrying for a few steps, but then I’d see some low-to-the-ground eyes lit up behind a tree, and I’d know some small black thing was watching us.

  At the top of the hill, the wind came furiously, but we stayed there for a while, looking out across the valley to the other houses, some still lit with warm fires, others asleep for the night. I hunched down, my knees bent up against my chest, so that I could hug them and rock back and forth on my feet. I wondered if the fears I felt were the fears of all country people and whether those who lived continuously amongst the threat of the imagined and the real were people like Sasha, who had learned to yell back. When my feelings of unease returned, which they did, in waves, I tried to attribute them to the landscape and to overheard conversations, but there was more to them than that.

  You know who your Anya reminds me of? I said, looking up at Sasha.

  Who? he asked.

  Bogdanov, I said. We laughed at the thought of it, Bogdanov as a small weird girl, sneaking into churches, ingesting gold, and seeking higher consciousness. And it was funny, but true, too.

  Sasha went off to the tree line to pee. A thin slip of cloud drifted in front of the moon, making it look, I thought, like a circle with a line dividing the upper half from the lower.

  When he came back, he was smiling. He said that when he was a kid he used to come up here to yell. Sometimes he was with friends, sometimes he was alone.

  What did you yell? I asked.

  Moon! he yelled, hands high and reaching for the moon. Moon! You are cut through and through by a swordfish! Moon! That swordfish is getting you! That swordfish will eat you whole! Moon! It’s over!

  Moon! I yelled, mimicking Sasha as ferociously as I could. Moon, you are finished!

  Moon! We will eat you whole!

  The days in the country bled into each other, marked only by walks out on the fields, and occasionally into town, where I’d see the tree that little Anya had sat in with her gold-dust fingernail, her loopy higher plane. I’d pass by the town’s station, too, where sometimes I’d see a train sitting, waiting for its passengers, and I would wish I could get on it, to go wherever it was going, no matter where that was.

  One morning, we received a call at the house from the station master, who said there was a telegram waiting for me, that it had been there for some days. The same man who’d come to pick us up when we arrived took us in because a telegram seemed to require a faster response than we could muster by walking. Once we got back to the dacha, I opened it:

  Dr. Vladimir Bekhterev died of unknown causes on 24 December in Moscow stop

  I read the words but didn’t understand their meaning.

  Sasha! I said. What does this say?

  He took the paper from me. He read the lines twice and then looked at me.

  It means that he is dead, he said.

  But I don’t understand, I said. He gave a talk just days ago at Congress! What will happen to the institute? What will happen to his family?

  My voice didn’t sound like my own. It came from somewhere else. It was trying to be reasonable, but there was an unfamiliar tone to it, a kind of distortion that came from deep inside me.

  Sasha lifted me up out of the chair I’d collapsed into and held me. I was shaking.

  You will be okay, he said. He took a step back and looked at me,
his grey-blue eyes promising me just that. I didn’t believe him, felt my eyes fill up with tears and saw his, out of sympathy, do the same.

  You didn’t even like Bekhterev, I said, pulling my fist across my eyes, trying to get rid of the tears.

  But I love you, he said.

  He sat me on our bed and wrapped me in blankets. I pulled my knees up to my chest. He went away for a few minutes. I heard his mother down the hall cry out in a shrill voice and then the murmuring sounds of Sasha and Natasha trying to calm her down. When he came back to the room, he set a small table in front of me and two glasses of vodka on top. He pulled on a sweater, as if he were getting ready for a long period of stillness. Then he sat next to me and it was only then, with the warmth of his body beside me, that I realized I’d been sobbing the whole time.

  We have to go back to the city, I said.

  We’ll leave tomorrow.

  Today, I said.

  The trip back into the city had been quiet, as our mood had shifted, and the train had been empty since no one who had left the city wanted to go back before the new year. Practically every year since we’d met, Sasha and I had celebrated New Year’s Eve with Sasha’s friends at the studios. We’d planned to miss it that year, but then the news made the ritual of it seem suddenly important to us both.

  Standing in the hall outside the studio, we could hear the sound of clinking dishes and the radio on low. I was about to go in, but Sasha stopped me. Would you rather see Rima tonight? he asked. Or be with your friends rather than with mine? Do you want to go home? Whatever you want. Just say.

  No way, I said.

  Rima would want to know everything. She would want to dissect all the things that happened, she would want to talk. At least for that night, I wanted to forget it had happened at all. Sasha knew what I meant.

  Let’s get drunk then, he said.

  I thought there would be more people there — the combined friends of all the studio-mates, as there had been all the previous years — but when we walked in, the only person in the studio was Jack, and the space wasn’t even his.

  Where is everyone? asked Sasha, looking around.

  I pulled my watch from my pocket. That was why. It wasn’t even seven.

  Even though everyone had finished school by then, the studios were still a place we congregated, Sasha, Jack, and the others having moved into this very particular age group where they were admired by the current students for the fact of being older without any expectation (though this was coming) that they would have been, in some way, successful. Everyone was hoping to be the next Malevich, and if that wasn’t possible, they wanted to know the next Malevich. Sasha’s work in Rodchenko’s studio made him one of the students who had been moderately successful almost immediately upon graduation, even if he and most of the people he worked with wished they could be doing their own thing.

  You’re so early! said Jack. He was standing at the back wall beneath the window where he had been moving glasses and glass receptacles (jars, mostly) from a drying rack to a tray on top of some crates. He moved the last one over and then came over to hug us.

  We didn’t think you were coming.

  Yeah, you know. Change of plans, said Sasha.

  Mothers, right? said Jack, looking quickly at me and then back at Sasha.

  Something like that, said Sasha.

  Sasha’s painting of the boy had stayed with me, and I looked again for the boy in Jack’s twenty-eight-year-old face but couldn’t find him. What I did see was that Jack was happy, happier than I’d ever seen him.

  I looked around the studio. The section that used to be Sasha’s had been taken over by a really smart kid named Tova. Most of his art involved taxidermy — amateur taxidermy, Sasha had clarified — and most of the taxidermied creatures were birds, mice, rats, or, on the rare occasion that he found something bigger, cats. It involved chance, Tova had once explained, and one of its goals was preservation without nostalgia. His professors had called it morbid politics, but they said it with admiration. He was almost spiritual about the practice, always entering a trance-like state when he talked about the various steps he took to preserve a body in its final resting state.

  Want some soup? asked Jack.

  Jack had been alone for weeks. All he’d done was read. More Jack London? I asked.

  No.

  Look at him, said Sasha. Can’t you tell he’s been reading Akhmatova?

  Because he’s not acting like a wolf? I asked.

  Because he’s being so moony, said Sasha.

  What do you mean? asked Jack.

  The soup, said Sasha.

  A man can make soup, said Jack.

  Nope, said Sasha.

  I’m with Jack, I said, tentatively aligning myself with him.

  I wandered over to Tova’s section. Sasha’s old bed was still there, its frame having been repaired. I couldn’t imagine Tova getting much use out of it, but then it was hard to say: he attracted the strangest people.

  A large table sat in the centre of the room now, and Jack and Sasha were sitting at it, talking about a woman Jack had met.

  A real lady of the night, said Jack. She was fucking old, I mean old, I mean her tits hung down past her waist, and she’d done something to her two front teeth, so that she could whistle through the gap. Came back here and hung about for a few days, cooking on the hotplate, telling me her stories. He looked at us and shrugged, Everyone’s been away, and all.

  Sasha laughed, and then whispered over his shoulder at me, Don’t believe him.

  It’s true! said Jack.

  She had a son, said Jack. And she knew a thing about flavour, I can tell you that much. And I liked her. I mean now she’s gone and I wish you’d met her.

  Did she teach you to make soup? I asked.

  Among other things, said Jack.

  You should read Kollontai, I said. She’ll straighten you out on your ladies of the night.

  Sounds dangerous, he said.

  Eventually Elisa and Dimitri and a few others I didn’t know showed up, but the group stayed small, just a few of us passing the evening, waiting for the new year to sound, waiting for something new to start. There would be bells and fireworks. That Jack was generally happier could have explained why he was gentler towards me, but Sasha must have said something to the rest of them, because they were kind, too. Jack had made his best vodka yet. It tasted like sweet summer air, like sky blue and cloud drifty, and when I swallowed a gulp, I only wanted more.

  I went out to the central staircase to have a cigarette by myself. Someone had tacked thick canvas over the one window in the studio, making its air hot and thick with smoke, but out in the hall, a draft let in the clear winter air.

  A couple of the younger students were out there. I stood in the doorway for a moment, watching them the way you watch people just a little younger than yourself, thinking, did I look like that? behave like that? There was a girl with short cropped hair, red lips, and a silky dress that looked like a nightgown, a skinny guy with a full mop of curly hair, and a third, pudgy tag-along. They were taking turns aiming bottle caps at a bottle they’d set up towards the landing. When a cap made contact they’d whoop and holler. In between throws, they were talking about someone they seemed to have met recently, trying to situate him, drawing conclusions about his politics and his aesthetics based on the books he was reading and a few comments he’d made in class. When they’d thrown all the caps they had, I walked past them towards the landing.

  Jack was already sitting there.

  Tell me one of your stories, I said, sitting down next to him.

  He took a drag of his cigarette.

  A true story, I said, lighting a cigarette of my own.

  He thought about it for a second. Do you want a story about twins or about a woman and a chicken?

  Twins.

  Okay, he said, gathering the story together. So I met this woman, a lady of the night.

  That lady of the night? I asked.

  Well, y
eah, he said. You know she had that gap in her teeth.

  I nodded.

  Well, she had a twin sister, and both had a rare disorder that meant they passed out at the sight of blood. When they were around twenty, one of them had started having terrible seizures in the night.

  Which one? I asked. Her, or her sister?

  Her sister, he said. They lived in the same building, in rooms that faced each other across a courtyard. They didn’t have a phone, but once the seizures started, they rigged up a system that connected their windows using a rope with a heavy wooden block hanging from either end. Pulling on their wooden block would cause the wooden block on the other end to knock against the other’s window. Early one morning my lady woke up to the knocking block. She went to her window and looked across the courtyard. All she could see was the shape of her sister hidden behind the curtains and her arms flailing. Come over, the curtain yelled, and bring someone with you. Her voice was garbled, as if she’d be drinking.

  My lady asked her sister if she was bleeding, and her twin answered yes, a lot, that she had broken the mirror by her bed and cut her hand. So my lady twin went running over to help, and as soon as she walked in and saw the blood, she passed out, chipping her two front teeth in the process. The teeth cut into her lip, so she started bleeding profusely and her sister, hearing the fall and the cry that went along with it, knew she couldn’t look. She closed her eyes and made her way to the window where she started pulling on the rope again, banging and banging on her sister’s window, in the hopes that someone else would notice. Finally a neighbour did, so when she knew someone was coming, she could finally help her sister. When the neighbour showed up and found both of them lying on the floor, passed out and bleeding, it looked as if they’d had a terrible fight. The neighbour called the police, and it took a lot of explaining for the police to believe that neither was at fault.

  Funny, I said.

  She likes her teeth like that. Chipped like a vampire.