Dear Fang, with Love Read online

  I loved living with Dedushka and Babushka. I loved the raisin-bread French toast that Babulya would make me that she would spread with cream cheese instead of syrup. I know you always hated Babulya, you thought she was cloying and annoying. But I loved how completely she loved me. I was addicted to that warmth. Things were always the same with Babulya. She was always interested in my homework and willing to make me a snack.

  I know you didn’t see her that way. For you she was still the pushy stage mother who wanted you to be a star, who wanted you to be in that McDonald’s commercial where the guy was a total asshole, who wanted the world to admire you even more than she wanted you to be happy. I know, and I can see your side. But my side of it is that I adored her.

  I can see why you couldn’t bear to contact my dad. I can see why you kept him at a distance. I can see why you hated him, and I can even see why you hated the parts of him you saw in me. Traces of the enemy in my genes. But my side of it is that I kind of like him. And I see what you liked in him. And I think you were kind of a shit to him. And I wonder what would have happened if you had been brave enough to try to love him.

  Is it so hard to try to love people? I feel like you always give up too soon. But we are worth loving, all of us, even though you are also right: We are ruined. There is something terrible about each of us. Dedushka, Babushka, me, Lucas. You are terrible too, you know. You are. And it is your terribleness that makes me love you so violently, Mama. It was the times you were kind of shitty to me that make me love you all the more.

  You would get so angry at me, you would have to leave, shaking, and take Babushka’s car and go on one of your drives. I asked you once what you did on your drives and you said you listened to Leonard Cohen and pretended that all of us were dead. That we had all died in a horrendous car crash and you had been left completely alone.

  You must have felt so suffocated by us, Mama.

  Or do you refuse to love us because you worry that none of us love you? Is it the weight of trying to guess what all of us are thinking that makes you wake up in the middle of the night, out of breath, and go to the mirror to sit and brush your hair, unaware that your small daughter has woken up and is watching you in the darkness as the brush makes its pass, again and again, over the black river of hair? That sound, the sound of hair being brushed in the dark, is the sound of all sadness and terror to me. You never smiled at yourself in the mirror, only stared.

  Who are you, Mama? Will I ever know?

  Maybe I am not permitted to truly know you. Maybe it is enough that I was born out of your body, that I suckled at your breasts, that I slept night after night in your bed. Even if I hardly know you, it is possible I know you better than anyone in the world. And that makes my heart absolutely break for you.

  You will never know how much I love you, Mama.

  Yours,

  V

  IT WASN’T UNTIL VERA WAS STABLE and I was beginning to go slightly stir-crazy, about six days after Katya arrived in Vilnius, that it occurred to me to wonder whether Vera had been deleting documents as well as e-mails. Already feeling slightly ill, I logged on to her laptop again. Sure enough, her trash bin was full, full of strange poetry, full of rants, full of letters she had been drafting but never sent. I read some of it, then decided not to continue. These letters were not mine to be reading.

  I don’t know why, but I think part of me hoped that Katya and I would sleep together when she came to Vilnius. It was by no means a conscious desire. But that first night, when I showed her to our apartment and we each retired to our separate rooms, me in mine, she in Vera’s, I couldn’t sleep for fantasizing that she would softly knock at my door.

  But there was no knock.

  In the morning, I woke before her and made coffee and when she finally emerged, she had big creases in her cheek from the pillow and she smelled distinctly of sleep, an intimate smell, not a bad one by any means but also one I was not familiar with, that felt foreign to me and made me understand in a new way that I had been mistaken. Katya did not belong to me. I did not know how she smelled. Her body was not mine to explore or to clasp in the night. She was her own sleepy, pink-cheeked animal, sitting there at the table, waiting for coffee.

  “Would you like to take a shower?” I asked. “Or we could go to a café?” It was difficult not to go into hospitality mode. It was difficult not to want to show off the city. Without quite realizing it, I had fallen in love with Vilnius. I wanted to take her to the Belgian restaurant that was the first floor of our building. I wanted to take her on a walk down to Gedimino prospektas and show her the store with the good amber and the Soviet war trinkets, and wooden kitchen implements, and paintings set out on blankets. I wanted to show her Užupis and explain about the empty plinths and about Frank Zappa and see if she thought that was funny. But she wasn’t here to see the city, she was here to see our daughter.

  The visit to the hospital with her the previous day had been surreal. We had just missed visiting hours, but the word mother seemed to be some kind of secret pass code, and we were taken up to see Vera directly. Maybe it was just because they were anxious about not having noticed the hives. Or maybe it was because Katya made all of her demands in a Russian that I could hear in an instant was more fluent and authoritative than Vera’s. But the nurses and orderlies and doctors all bowed and scraped to Kat in a way that seemed both baffling and unfair.

  Vera was in her room, and the hives were gone now. She did not seem to be having another bout of psychosis, if anything she seemed much more heavily sedated than I had ever seen her. She didn’t say a word when Katya entered the room, and evidently Kat didn’t need her to. She simply went over to the bed and sat on the edge of it, looking into Vera’s face for a long time, holding her hand. Finally, she turned to me and said, “I need you to go out and buy some expensive luxury shampoo and conditioner. Lotion. Body wash. Things that smell really nice. And a new nightgown. And some sweatpants or yoga pants and a top. Something like loungewear. And a brush. Her hair is tangled.”

  I went and bought everything she told me. When I returned with it, she already had Vera in a hot shower, and I handed her the bag of bath products in the steamy bathroom, feeling awkward that I would accidentally catch a glimpse of Vera naked. After the shower, Vera emerged wrapped in a fleece robe I had bought from the same store I bought the nightgown. She sat obediently on the bed as Katya got behind her and began to brush and comb out her hair. They did not speak while they did this. For most of it, Vera kept her eyes closed. But I could almost see the love seeping into her. It was a shimmer, like heat rising off a road, between Katya and Vera, that mother love.

  I didn’t feel jealous or left out. Somehow, I felt that I was necessary, too. A kind of sentinel or guard, watching over them. Keeping the room safe and quiet so that this ritual could be carried out.

  When Vera’s hair was completely detangled and then pulled back in a long, ornate-looking braid that glistened like a wet, black snake, Katya got off the bed, kissed Vera on the forehead, and told her we would be back tomorrow.

  It wasn’t until we got out on the sidewalk that Kat started crying. I tried to take her in my arms, to hold her, but she swatted me away and crouched, bent over her thighs, tears streaming down her face, gasping for breath. Eventually she got herself under control, straightened, and we walked back to the apartment.

  In our strange way, we made a good team.

  As the days passed, we fell into a routine. In the morning, we would go out for breakfast and drink coffee at a café that had Wi-Fi. I would read the news on my phone, she would read a book on her Kindle. Then we would decide on some new delicacy to bring Vera in the hospital. Shopping for this was the main event of the morning. One day we brought chocolates, another day we brought preserved artichoke hearts. When Vera asked for cigarettes, Katya started bringing her those too.

  “She’s in a mental hospital in Eastern Europe,” she said, when I voiced my tenuous objection. “If there is one time in her life when it
is appropriate to take up smoking, this is it.”

  Then we would visit her during visiting hours. On the new medication, the hives had subsided, but her face was still very swollen. She was almost unrecognizable and it hurt to look at her. We chatted about lots of things. The other patients. The nurses. One girl in the ward thought she was a vampire and had bit off the tip of her finger and spit it at Vera, whose only droll commentary was that to her knowledge real vampires didn’t try to feed off their own hands. We avoided talking about the future, about when she would be released and when we would get home and what would happen then.

  College would probably have to be delayed, but I tried to reassure myself that the delay would be only temporary. She was so smart. Her mind was so supple and wicked and quick. She would have been a delight to teach. Vera deserved to go to university. She deserved to be put through her paces and challenged and changed.

  But it was impossible to know how functional she would ever be. There was no road map. The other people with bipolar in her group therapy back home had been almost universally unmarried, still living with their parents and making do with government assistance. None of them had jobs of even the most trivial sort. Surely there were people with bipolar who were higher functioning, but they were harder to find. There was enough stigma against mental illness that they kept their diagnosis a secret and just went on with their lives. I knew they existed because occasionally one of them would write an inspiring blog post or article online, but it was still hard to believe in them. Had they ever really had bipolar to begin with? What if they had only been misdiagnosed and their “recovery” was no recovery at all? And just because people could write a cogent blog post and claim they were employed didn’t necessarily mean they were well.

  I thought about all of this constantly, and I am guessing Vera and Kat did too, but we didn’t talk about it. After visiting hours were over, Katya and I would get lunch somewhere and then take a walk through the city. Sometimes I would take her to a place Darius had shown us. Sometimes we wandered into parts of the city I had never seen before. To my knowledge, Katya had never been to Europe, had never even left the States, at least not since she had first come to America when she was seven. But if she was impressed by Vilnius, if she found it soothing or stimulating to hear Russian on the streets, she didn’t say. She played things much closer to the vest, now that she was older.

  Certain things I could tell she liked. The food, for instance. She was constantly in rapture with the food. “They have good pickles here!” she said, delighted. Once, in a café, she ordered a hot chocolate and was astounded to discover that it was not a drink like in America but a dessert, a little demitasse of molten chocolate served with a tiny golden spoon. She split it with me as we sat in the hot sun, sweating. A pair of wasps had gotten inside the sugar dispenser on our table and were rolling in the sticky white grains in ecstasy. We were trying to waste the afternoon. We were always trying to waste the afternoon. After the switch to her new medication and the lack of any psychosis, we assumed Vera would be released fairly quickly, but her doctors seemed reluctant. “Let’s see how she is tomorrow,” they kept saying. And we let them. Vera was still completely zombified. If they had released her, we would have been terrified. It did not seem advisable to take her on a plane. I couldn’t even imagine her managing the cacophony of being on a busy street or sitting in a café. She was an indoor creature now, a quiet being of blankets and showers. We were content to wait. We would see how she was tomorrow.

  “What do you want to do next?” Katya asked me, scraping up the last of the chocolate with the tiny golden spoon.

  “I kind of want to go to the Holocaust museum,” I said. “I skipped out on it when we were on the tour. I feel like—I feel like I should go before we leave.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You would go with me?”

  “Of course I will go with you,” she said.

  And she did. She held my hand as we wandered through the tiny museum, more like a house than an official type of building. The exhibits were plain and rather homemade-looking. There were maps of the various work and death camps in Lithuania and in Poland. There were lists of names: of victims, of survivors, of those who had tried to help. There were pictures of the bodies in the pits. I had not been expecting that. I did not know there were photographs. I let myself look and look and look. And I let myself understand that it was real. That it had all actually happened. I could see children among the naked bodies in the pits. I cried, and Katya held my hand and didn’t try to stop me or comfort me or force me to be presentable. She seemed to know that this was what I had come here to do and that it was better to just let me do it.

  —

  And then one day, they said that Vera could be released. It was like coming up to the surface of the water when you have almost drowned. I think we both literally sputtered in the doctor’s office as she told us, breathless with our own reanimation. There was so much to do. We had to call the airline. We had to pay the woman for the apartment. We had to pack.

  All afternoon, Katya and I worked in a frenzy. At the apartment, she called the airlines on her phone, fuck the charges; I called my mother on my phone, fuck the charges. I sat, hunched on my bed, listening to Katya’s strident Russian through the wall, as the line rang.

  I had let my mother know what was going on in the flurry of phone calls and canceled plane flights right after Vera’s episode, but because talking on the phone was so expensive, I hadn’t talked to her since, and in all the upset over the Vera situation, I still hadn’t managed to tell her about Agata or Herkus, or the red farmhouse outside of Vilnius with grass on the roof. When she picked up, I explained we were finally coming home and gave her all the latest on Vera’s condition. I told her I would e-mail her our flight information as soon as Katya had it pinned down.

  “And there’s more I have to tell you,” I said. Because it was beginning to be awkward and monstrous to have not told her about her own sister. So I told her. But something happened when I confessed about Herkus and Agata, a weird kind of logorrhea that I couldn’t stop. I just went on and on.

  “And it was really beautiful. A little girl put a pink sash on her and everyone sang, and there were all these little kids everywhere. It was such a beautiful day and I just wished you could have been there, but then Vera told me that Herkus had left his wife and three kids for this other, younger woman, the genealogist actually, and I just—I feel gross about it. He even called me because I guess he got word about Vera from the program, through Justine or whatever, but I never returned his call. He was just so drunk and I felt like—of course, of course, he’s a drunk loser just like me!”

  “Oh, Lucas,” she said, and her voice was filled with tenderness. My mother was not always tender. She could be abrasive and cold and arch. She could be anything at all, anything the moment called for. But when she was tender, there was no one more tender in the world.

  “And I never told you this,” I said, “but when I was living in New York, I found my father.” The whole story spilled out of me. Our first meeting. Our mutual love of The Tempest. The nasty things he had said about her. Everything, even the tape of himself as Iago that he had given me as a Christmas present.

  “You poor boy,” my mother said. “I’m so sorry you had to find out like that. I should have told you he was a real shit. I just didn’t want to talk bad about him to you. I wanted you to imagine any kind of father you wanted for yourself, you know? You used to say so proudly to the other kids in school that your father was a famous actor. And I was always like, what am I? Chopped liver? But still. I wanted you to get to keep that.”

  I laughed a little, not because this was funny but because I was relieved that I wasn’t going to cry.

  “I just hate that I’m related to him,” I said.

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t bother being upset with things you can’t change.”

  “But all the really upsetting things are things you can’t change!�
�� I said, almost shouting in a kind of play anger.

  She laughed. “Well, that’s certainly true.”

  We didn’t say anything, and then she made a little noise in her throat. “Lucas, Lucas, Lucas, my boy. I love you so much. I wish I could take all the hurt in the universe and swallow it so that there was nothing left for you to find, no single crumb of evil in the whole universe, and you could wander around just happy.”

  “Yeah, but I’m a grown-ass man, Mom. I’m supposed to deal with shit.”

  “I know,” she said, “but every mother feels that way.”

  —

  After Vera was discharged, and her bills were all paid, a minor nightmare in itself since we did not have Lithuanian insurance, everything returned suddenly to normal, or to some slow dreamlike facsimile of normal. She spent that night at the apartment, sharing a bed with Kat, and the next day we took a cab to the airport after ceremoniously placing the cat on the roof outside the window and shutting it one last time. At the airport before our flight, we were all three exhausted but weirdly lighthearted. We were happy to be released, just to be in an airport. Vera asked if she could buy a Russian Vogue from the newsstand, and I was overjoyed to say yes, happy to see the greedy way she read it, devouring the images of strange-looking women in bizarre clothing. Katya ate a little packet of sunflower seeds in a way that was hilariously disgusting. The flight to Helsinki was uneventful.

  On the flight back to America, I had been sleeping when something, I didn’t know what, woke me up. Vera was beside me, her black eyes open in the dim light of the cabin, though she sat still and seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. On the other side of her, Katya was asleep, her head pressed against the shuttered window.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Am I going to have a life?” Vera asked. “Those people in my group therapy—they’re—they can’t even hold jobs. No one will marry them. Am I going to be like that?”