Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  Susan’s voice had caught in her throat and she fanned herself with a stiff piece of pita bread. “So then, in the middle of that state of mind, and keep in mind I’m in a hotel, not an apartment like you, so I don’t even have a kitchen to make tea in! So then, my ex-husband calls me, drunk, he’s obviously relapsed, wanting to talk to me about his business, which he is absolutely running into the ground, and he keeps saying the same things over and over again, how he’s so stupid and he’s a failure and he should just kill himself. And I’m thinking, ‘Why do I participate in this? Why is my life such that this man can call me and make me deal with this in the middle of the night?’ I’m sorry—this is too much information, I know, but I haven’t slept and, you know—don’t think I’m some melodramatic person. I could paint this all in a different light and talk about how I have to have Rick in my life because of my son, and how I try to see the best in people, and blah blah blah. I could make it look good. Or if not good, at least presentable.”

  “No,” I said, “I get it. I don’t think you’re—”

  “A crazy codependent who lets her alcoholic ex-husband ruin her life even when she is taking a vacation by herself focusing on the genocide of her own people?”

  I laughed. Susan widened her eyes, smiling now too. “Seriously, though, you don’t think that, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Thank God for that!” she cried, and pretended to wipe sweat from her brow. I refilled our wineglasses. Now that we had drunk a glass, the horrible flavor of the wine was more palatable.

  “So tell me,” she said, “how are you fucked up, dear Lucas? What’s your drama?”

  I disliked the word drama. I almost didn’t want to answer, but Susan was so frank about herself. I wanted to be like that too. “The whole situation with Kat—that’s Vera’s mother—it’s easy to pretend that we were just kids being stupid and she got pregnant by accident, but it wasn’t that. We got pregnant on purpose.”

  I let out a breath, afraid to continue, but I saw that Susan was listening, really listening, not even chewing her food or playing with her wineglass. She was just sitting there, waiting. So I told her. I told her about the secret bathroom and about Allen Ginsberg and about the maddening way Katya would eat baby food with a little spoon. I tried to explain about that night, Katya whispering in my ear, “Let’s make a baby, baby,” and about how I had wanted to, how on some deep biological level it had seemed like the right thing to do, the only sane thing to do. I told her about the road trip that summer and about the commune. I didn’t tell her about Chloe, though. In the moment, it seemed irrelevant. Like maybe Chloe had just been an excuse all along, that my real failing had been not being bold enough to love Katya, to follow that road wherever it led. I had never presented it to anyone like this before. Most of the time, I didn’t even think of it this way myself—because it was too painful to really allow myself to think of: that the thing between Kat and I had been real.

  “You can imagine Katya hated me after that,” I said.

  “Gosh, how interesting,” Susan said, and it was a relief that she was interested instead of sorry for me or judging me, almost as though it were a movie, something impersonal. “Because there are those layers of reality: the private, kind of on-the-moon reality of two lovers, and then the reality of the world, your parents, making money.”

  “But after that, I think,” I said, “I was very suspicious of the part of myself that had done that. I didn’t feel like I could be trusted, and so I tried to date only girls who were very safe and very ordinary and where no one could get hurt.” I thought of Amanda. What a crock of shit. What a liar I was. It wasn’t that no one could get hurt, I thought; it was that I couldn’t get hurt.

  “Well, you have lots of time. You could still get married,” Susan said. “It’s different when you’re my age. All the available men are fish that have already been thrown back. Everyone has gotten divorced. They have years of bad habits and resentments built up and you have to try to find someone who is fucked up in the exact matching, complementary way to your own fucked-up-ness. It’s very tiring. Excruciating, really. And all the men who want to date me are in their sixties, all the guys my own age are dating thirty-year-olds, and it’s like dating Mr. Rogers, I swear to God.”

  “Could I not be a fish?” I asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  I cleared my throat. “I would like to nominate myself as a fish.”

  She considered me. “Why haven’t you married anyone? Is it that you’re still in love with her, with Katya?”

  I considered this. “Possibly,” I said. “I think maybe there is something wrong with me, but I can’t say for sure what it is.”

  She motioned to the waitress for the check. I didn’t know what more to say, if I should try to make a joke or take it back or break the tension. But Susan just went about stacking plates and tidying our table and when the bill came, she reached for it.

  “No,” I said, “let me.”

  She shook her head, slid her credit card in the slot. “I’m going to tell you the truth, Lucas. I don’t care why you haven’t been able to commit or get married or what exactly is wrong with you. I don’t care. Right now, I just want an adventure.”

  I nodded. I wanted an adventure too.

  —

  The bar where Nikolai Azarin was going to read was tiny and absolutely jammed with people. It seemed crazy that the event had been planned in such an unsuitable venue. There was no stage, just a microphone in one corner and wall-to-wall people drinking beer and wine. Susan and I waded into the crowd, holding hands. I was amazed I didn’t see more people from the program. Almost all the people were impossibly hip young Lithuanians. Why did they know of and seem to care about the poet Nikolai Azarin? Why had they chosen to cram themselves into this sweltering, tiny space?

  At the bar, we had to wait for an eternity, and just when I was beginning to panic that we had not yet found Vera and Judith, I saw them through the window out on the street, huddled against the glass. They must have ordered drinks and then gone out there to avoid the crowd. I brought Susan out with me to meet them once we had gotten our own drinks. The relief from the noise and crush was instantaneous.

  “This is crazy!” I said. “Are we allowed to have our drinks out here?”

  “Who knows,” Vera said.

  “I don’t know if I can stay,” Judith said and took a sip of her glass of wine, which she was holding with both hands, as though it were not a wineglass but a tiny glass bowl with an annoying protrusion on the bottom. “It’s so crowded and I’m tired, and I am afraid I don’t terribly admire Azarin.”

  “You know Azarin?” I asked.

  “Oh, everybody does. He’s always at these things,” Judith said. “Po-biz! He’s one of the ones who is constantly trying to fuck pretty young things, that’s his main line of business. He sees me as nothing but an old hag, I’m sure, and when I was introduced to him on this trip he didn’t remember me, but I’ve met him at least a dozen times over the years, and of course I’ve read his work, and I’m afraid it isn’t good enough to cause me to want to stand upright in an enclosed space with a bunch of drunken Lithuanian teenagers. I find their collective blondness overwhelming.”

  Susan laughed and Judith gave her an appreciative smile.

  “So we might go home,” Vera said. She was sipping her own glass of wine, which I didn’t exactly like, even if she was voluntarily going home early. But that ship had sailed, rather brutally, the night before when she had laughed at me, her mouth filled with cheese.

  “Vera convinced me to at least have a drink and see if it becomes more bearable, and the drink is very nice, but it is not causing anything to be more bearable, I’m afraid,” Judith explained.

  If anything, things continued to get even more unbearable. An hour past when the reading was supposed to have started, there was still no sign of Azarin and there were more people crowded into the bar than ever. I kept scanning the room for Justine and Herkus, but I did
n’t see them.

  “I’m really afraid we have to take our leave,” Judith said finally, even though the four of us had been having a nice conversation standing on the sidewalk. All of our glasses were empty, though, and I understood Judith’s desire to go. If I were not waiting to meet Herkus, I would certainly have chosen to go elsewhere.

  “I’m actually going to head off as well,” Susan said.

  “No!” I cried. “What? Really? Don’t go!” I had imagined us spending all night drinking and talking and maybe stopping by her hotel on the way home that night.

  “I’m exhausted,” she said, “I didn’t sleep at all last night. I’m sorry. Those pits! But tonight I will sleep for sure. I know it!”

  I didn’t like that she was leaving, but I was glad she would sleep. There had been a steady electric current between us all night, ever more daring forays into holding hands, touching each other’s arms, leaning too close when laughing, and it was all delicious. Maybe it was good to let it be slow. Nothing needed to happen tonight. Even if there were only five days left of the trip. I accepted their empty glasses and kissed each of them on the cheek before they waved and walked away from me, a cluster of beautiful women, all roughly the same height, one young, one old, and one in between. They seemed like something from a fairy tale, as though there was symbolism in their triptych that I must decipher. But even as I was thinking this, I felt the itching need to get another beer, and as I headed inside, feeling like a sweaty bear among all these beautiful young people, I already knew that I was going to get very drunk.

  —

  When the reading finally started, I was standing in the crowd, bleary, trying to understand whether the poetry was very good or very bad. Azarin seemed at least as drunk as I was, and that made me feel kindly toward him. There was also a vulgar honesty in some of the poems that seemed slightly magical, which made the otherwise self-indulgent imagery light and playful. One poem that had gone on for some stanzas being about Putin suddenly ended with the lines, “Or perhaps I only feel powerless because so few women are willing to sleep with me. Who would want to sleep with an old goat like me? Flee from me, beautiful girls! Run away before you catch what it is I’ve got—that is killing me.”

  It was really very hard to tell whether or not it was good, but I found myself liking it anyway. When the reading was over, there was no sign of Justine or Herkus. I’d been jilted, but the bar also became significantly emptier and I was finally able to get a seat.

  “Another beer?” the bartender asked, and I nodded, though I suddenly felt extremely drunk and worried vaguely about whether or not I would be able to find my way home.

  “Lucas?” someone asked, and I turned to see that it was Justine and a man who simply had to be Herkus, so eerily did he look like a better, fitter version of myself. I don’t know why I had assumed he would be younger than me, perhaps because Justine was so young-looking, but he was easily in his forties, though he crackled with vitality and health. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing a possible future for myself. He even had the same narrow, fluted nose that I and my mother and Grandma Sylvia all shared. It was a very beautiful, Meryl Streep–ish nose, though in her darker moments my mother referred to it as “the teacup handle.”

  “We could not find you in the crowd,” Justine explained, and she and Herkus took the stools next to me. I was terrified at how drunk I was. I would never have gotten this drunk if I had known there was still a possibility of meeting them tonight. I tried to bring on the sensation of sobriety through sheer force of will.

  “So nice to finally meet you,” I said.

  “I know—so weird, right?” Herkus said, in such a sweet and goofy way that I liked him instantly.

  “So your mother was Henryk’s daughter?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Herkus said, “my mother was Sylvia’s daughter.”

  I was confused. Sylvia was my grandmother. She couldn’t also be Herkus’s grandmother.

  “I didn’t get to this part on the phone,” Justine put in. “I thought I should let Herkus explain in person.”

  “During the war, Henryk had escaped,” Herkus explained. “When his family was taken, he was sixteen and in love with a farm girl, so when he escaped from the train—his mother and he had been kept in one of the first-class cabins for some reason, they were separated out, he never knew why—she encouraged him to simply get off at one of the stops. And he did. No one noticed. He just walked right off the train. She said, ‘Will you go buy me some candies?’ And she handed him all the money she had and he went and that was that! But once he was free, where to go? So he went to the farm girl and threw himself on the mercy of her father who was a good man with no sons to work the farm and who let them marry, even though Henryk was a Pole and they were Lithuanian. So he lived out the war working on the farm outside of Vilnius. Do you want another drink?”

  “God no,” I said, covering my beer with my hands. “I’ve had too much if you want to know.”

  “Oh!” Herkus laughed. “That is okay! Everything is okay tonight! We are family tonight.” He reached over and hugged me, which made me feel like I might cry.

  “Anyway,” Justine said, helping Herkus finish the story, “somehow Sylvia in the forests hears that Henryk has survived. Her brother. And one night she arrives at the farm and she brings them a baby. That baby, Sylvia’s daughter, was Herkus’s mother. Henryk and his wife raised it as their own, as their eldest daughter. After her they had other children, of course.”

  I was having trouble processing what they were saying. “But whose baby was it?”

  “It was her baby,” Herkus said. “Sylvia’s baby that she had in the forest.”

  “I think,” Justine added, “the story you told me, that she killed her baby in the woods? I was wondering if maybe this was something she made up to tell her forest husband when really she took the baby to her brother.”

  “I think so,” Herkus said, nodding in agreement with Justine.

  “But why would she do that?” I asked. I couldn’t tell if I was failing to understand all of this because I was so drunk or because I was only finding it out now while Herkus and Justine had had hours or even days to process it.

  “To keep the baby safe!” Herkus said. “Who wants to raise a baby in the forest?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “You ask why Sylvia takes—excuse me—took the baby to her brother, and I say I think it is because baby would be safer with her brother than in forest.”

  I noticed he had begun dropping his articles, and it made me fond of him, reminded me of Grandma Sylvia, who would do the same whenever she got flustered or passionate. Justine was nodding, sipping some pink drink on ice through a tiny black straw. “But what I don’t understand,” she said, “is why she didn’t stay with Henryk and the family on the farm. Why go back to the forest?”

  “Yeah,” Herkus said, smiling and still completely lighthearted, so far away was all this tragic mess from us now, from our little grouping at the bar with our cold glasses of alcohol. “This was always the mystery my mother would talk about—because of course it hurt her, for Sylvia to go back to the forest and not stay with beautiful baby girl. Who would do it?”

  I felt like I was dreaming and I didn’t know how to make it stop. Sometimes in my dreams I would begin floating and not be able to get my feet back on the ground—I would just fall to the side, skidding through the air. But of course I remained perfectly upright at the bar. “Maybe the farmer didn’t want to take on another Polish refugee. It would have endangered them, been more conspicuous,” I said.

  “No,” Herkus said, “the farmer wanted her to stay, begged her not to go. No one had milk for the little baby, see, and they thought she would not live because she was so small, but then she did live—off goat milk!”

  “I see,” I said. I imagined Grandma Sylvia carrying her tiny, undernourished baby through the forest to find her brother. How long would she have had to walk? “Wait,” I said, “where
was the farm?”

  “Outside of Vilnius maybe fifteen kilometers,” Herkus said. I was ashamed that I was too drunk and frankly too ignorant to be able to do the metric conversion in my head, but it didn’t matter.

  “Grandma Sylvia escaped from Stutthof, but she never made it back to Vilnius—she was in the forests outside of Warsaw by the time she was with the Home Army. How could she ever have gotten all the way to Vilnius?”

  “She walked,” Herkus said.

  “No!” I cried.

  Justine nodded. “That has always been part of the story.”

  It was impossible to imagine.

  “How many miles?” I asked. “I mean, how many kilometers? Between Warsaw and Vilnius?”

  Justine and Herkus argued in Lithuanian for a minute, and then Justine said, “Maybe two hundred and fifty miles she walked.”

  “But that’s impossible!”

  Herkus shrugged. “She said it took her three weeks.”

  “All the more of a puzzle as to why she would not stay,” Justine insisted. “Why walk two hundred and fifty miles all the way back?” She used her straw to stab a maraschino cherry that was lost in the bottom of her glass.

  I thought for the first time that Grandma Sylvia must have been angry. I had never pictured that part before. The young girl, raped and set free, who would not want to take care of a baby, who would not want to be saved, but who wanted to go back into the forest and kill Nazis. The girl who simply could not bear to just be normal again, who could not fit in on a happy farm with her brother who only knew her as his little sister, not this wild, half-starved, violent thing she had become. Maybe it was a blood vendetta. A chance to avenge her sister. Maybe she just wanted to die.

  I had only known Grandma Sylvia when she was an old woman, her past reduced to a series of stories as familiar and safe as episodes from a beloved television show—I Love Lucy, or Gilligan’s Island. I had never understood the rape-birthday cake, but I thought I understood it now. She was not celebrating the rape but the fact that she survived it. To be ninety years old in Southern California, licking the thick lard frosting off a knife as you eat a cake from the supermarket, encrusted with improbable blue roses, talking happily with your daughter about the latest episode of All My Children! The extravagance and unpredictability of life was beyond comprehension. The memories burned me, were too hot to touch. I didn’t know how to explain all of this to Herkus and Justine in that strange and suddenly very dark bar. When had it gotten so dark?