Dear Fang, with Love Page 4

  I am going to try to google the lyrics tomorrow and see if I can find it. Because isn’t that exactly right? That we have no choice but to walk out into the abyss? Death will find you warm and cozy in your bed, or will find you in the bloody dirt-mound trenches of a war, in the first world, in the third world, in the past and in the future, death remains the same, is capable of being only itself: the darkness before there was light, the nothing before there was something.

  4. Did you know that my Russian sounds wrong here? It does. I don’t know if it is the accent around here or if the people I am talking to are actually Belorussian. But it isn’t just that, it’s me. At the reception after the concert, a man actually laughed at me because I said “drive-el,” like conjugated the English word “drive” but in Russian. My cousins do it all the time. I didn’t even think about it. And my case endings are all wrong, I know it, I sound like a child, like a toddler who doesn’t know grammar.

  I wish you were here with me. If you were here I would be too tired to give you a handie, but I feel certain you would forgive me, and instead snuggle me in my weird room where the ceiling is slanted and low. It is thundering and lightning outside. I’m sorry the Wi-Fi here is so slow that we can’t Skype, and I tried to talk to my dad about the possibility of phone cards but he acted like I was asking him to perform nuclear fission. So it is going to be old-fashioned e-mails for us. I promise there are no cute boys here and I will have eyes for no one else and I will report to you daily on my thoughts and doings so that it is like we are together the entire time, and, in fact, by the end of this trip you will be sick of me!

  With love,

  From Vilnius,

  Your crazy,

  V

  AT THE RECEPTION after the concert, which had been an unexpected spiritual ordeal that left both of us shaky and confused, Vera had a mini freak-out about, of all things, her clothes. Everything had seemed to be going fine; we were eating the cubes of sweaty cheese and chocolate-covered strawberries familiar from every reception that has ever been held in the history of time—for all I know it is illegal to throw a reception without cubes of cheese and chocolate-covered strawberries—when I somehow lost track of Vera. This worried me because she had been filching glasses of free chardonnay all night. She kept stealing them as fast as I could confiscate them.

  I saw Johnny Depp, the guy who had picked us up at the airport, and on whom Vera had an obvious and instantaneous crush, the kind that is big and painful like cystic acne. He was standing with a young woman who was evidently his date. She was radiantly beautiful and wearing an orange knit dress that made her look like an Italian movie star. She too had beautiful teeth. I imagined her and Johnny Depp bleaching their teeth together. It must be weird to be part of such an attractive couple. Why would they even watch pornography and ruin their eyes with the specter of people less beautiful than themselves?

  “This is Rūta,” Johnny Depp introduced her to me. His real name was Adam, but Vera continued to refer to him as Johnny Depp and I found myself unable to think of him otherwise.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “Have you seen my daughter anywhere?”

  “Uh, I did see her earlier, I think,” Johnny Depp said.

  “So nice to meet you,” Rūta said, in a lightly accented English that I immediately recognized as not-Russian.

  “Are you Lithuanian?” I asked. Despite being in Lithuania for almost a day now, I had mostly only met other Americans here for the history tour. Even the cabdriver and the shopkeepers I had met seemed to be Russian or Polish.

  Rūta nodded. “I am sorry if my English is poor.”

  “You sound very good,” I assured her. “I need to learn some Lithuanian. My daughter speaks Russian, which is good, but…”

  “Yes,” Rūta said, understanding immediately, “most people will understand her, but it will not…endear her to them.”

  “That’s what I was wondering about,” I said. I knew that Lithuania had been under Soviet rule and native Lithuanians must have very mixed feelings about Russians, even though they had learned the language. Lithuania had only gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, so it wasn’t exactly ancient history, either.

  “Some people still will not go to the symphony,” Rūta said and made a sour face.

  “The symphony?” Clearly I had missed something.

  “The KGB offices were right next door,” Johnny Depp explained. “They would schedule torture for while the symphony was playing so that the music would cover up the screams.”

  “My God,” I said, and Rūta nodded emphatically, all the while smiling brightly in a winning way. She had an ease and an intimacy with the idea of torture that would be impossible to find in an American woman.

  “If you see Vera, tell her I’m looking for her. It was very nice to meet you,” I said, before plunging back into the crowd.

  A woman tapped me on the shoulder. “Are you Nikolai?”

  “No,” I said, unsure if I had heard her correctly, though clearly she had not said, “Are you Lucas?” She was holding two glasses of champagne and wearing a top with many sparkly beads on it.

  “Somebody said you were Nikolai. The writer.”

  “Sorry to disappoint,” I said, still scanning the room for Vera.

  “Do you want champagne anyway?”

  A man behind us laughed very loudly. I still couldn’t see Vera anywhere. It took me a moment to register that the woman had pressed a plastic champagne flute into my hand, and I looked back to her.

  “Are you looking for someone?” the woman asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, realizing that she was rather beautiful. She had a cloud of frizzy strawberry blond hair, and she was older, perhaps in her fifties, but her eyes were a liquid brown and large. I immediately wanted to sleep with her. It was just something about her, about her skin or the way her head sat on her neck. I knew I wouldn’t because I was traveling with Vera, but it still occurred to me. “I’m looking for my daughter,” I explained. “I don’t want her to get into any trouble.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “My son is seventeen,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t have thought you were old enough to have a teenager!”

  I nodded, sipped the champagne. It was an observation I had heard many times. “I was a baby when I had a baby,” I said, my standard limp joke. There was actually something about the woman that reminded me of my mother, so probably sleeping with her would trigger some kind of Oedipal curse and should be avoided at all costs.

  “Well, I’ll keep an eye out for her,” the woman said.

  “Thank you.” I intended to go on and say something nice to make up for my rudeness, but when I turned back to her again she was gone.

  I found Vera outside smoking a cigarette under the portico, positively radiating unhappiness. She had been so happy before, giddy to be at the party, delighted to be stealing wine, that I didn’t know what to make of it.

  “I was scared I’d lost you,” I said. “You shouldn’t be smoking.”

  “Whatever,” she said.

  “What’s wrong? I thought you were having a good time.”

  It had begun to rain again, but we were sheltered by the colonnade. I worried, as I always did, that something was wrong, that she was having another episode. I was constantly scanning her for reactions or emotions that seemed off, which probably made me seem horribly distant and humorless, but I couldn’t help it.

  “I need different clothes,” Vera said. She blew smoke out of her nostrils like a dragon.

  “What?”

  “None of my clothes are right here,” she said, suddenly on the verge of tears. “I look like Rancho trash! No one dresses like this here!” She gestured to her outfit, a garment she had earlier assured me was called “skorteralls,” which was ridiculous in the first place but which looked even sadder having gotten wet and then dried on her.

  I was so relieved that her problem was not existential in nature that I
almost laughed. She was not being insane. She was just being a teenager. Which was a different and altogether more manageable form of insanity. “You want new clothes?”

  Vera nodded. She dropped her cigarette and pinched the bridge of her nose.

  “We can get you some new clothes,” I said, walking over to her. I held out my arms tentatively, afraid a hug was not what she wanted, but she practically fell against me, shivering from the hours in the air-conditioned hall. She hugged me tight and hid her face in my shirt.

  “I want to look like her,” she said into my shoulder.

  “Who?”

  “I want to look like Rūta.”

  She said this while hiccuping so forcefully she squeaked.

  “We’ll get you new clothes,” I promised her. “Tomorrow. First thing. We’ll get you new clothes.”

  —

  The next morning, I awoke with the novelist Judith Winter drinking coffee in my kitchen. Evidently she was housed in our building, just one flight down, and she and Vera had become friends the previous night.

  “Vera is out buying provisions,” she informed me. She looked oddly formal, even though she was wearing a robe and pajamas. Maybe because she had on red lipstick.

  “Is that coffee?” I asked. And like a merciful angel from heaven, she motioned for me to pour myself some from the pot on the stove.

  “I packed it in my suitcase,” she explained. “I didn’t trust the Lithuanians to have coffee up to my exacting standards. And I am very old and unwilling to compromise.”

  “As well you should be,” I said. The coffee was pitchy black and smelled glorious.

  I sat with her at the table, trying to think up some safe conversational gambit. She was writing busily in a journal and it seemed rude to interrupt her, but also strange to sit silently. She looked up. “Have you ever been on a history tour before?”

  “No,” I said. “Have you?”

  “My husband and I used to love to take history tours, especially of Jewish places of interest or historical sites. We’ve been on many, but I think this program is particularly unique.”

  “How so?” I asked. Ridiculously, I had not done any research on history programs in general, it never having occurred to me that I could use that little pamphlet as a jumping-off point to find other options. Vilnius was Vilnius, and that pamphlet had been more of a portent to me than a piece of paper. But it was turning out that there were many aspects of being on the history tour that I had not entirely anticipated. Like the fact that Vera would be the only teenager and would feel out of place in rooms filled exclusively with gray-haired, bespectacled, fanny-pack-wearing retirees. It had also somehow not occurred to me that everyone on this trip would be Jewish since Vilnius was a place of Jewish cultural interest. I didn’t mind any of this, I had just failed to realistically picture the whole scenario.

  “Well, it’s idiosyncratic. The program. The main historian who runs the tours is a preeminent scholar of Vilnius. This city is his life’s work. So I’ve heard the walking tours are just masterful. But I also think the program has a bit of a literary bent. Somehow it turned out that Nikolai Azarin, the poet—have you heard of him?”

  “I haven’t read him, no. I’ve heard the name,” I said, though truthfully I had only heard his name for the first time at the reception last night from the sexy redhead who looked like my mother.

  “Well, he’s friends with the people who run the history tour, and he visits Vilnius every summer, so he always does a reading with the program. And he sort of spread the word through literary circles about this amazing tour, so a lot of the people here are actually writers. Novelists, but also memoirists, journalists. And then, of course, you have the Owl People.”

  “The Owl People?”

  “Oh, you know, didn’t you meet them last night? That couple from Wisconsin who have those matching thick glasses that distort their eyes? And they look out of place anywhere you put them?”

  I knew exactly the couple she was talking about. They had also been wearing matching brightly colored plastic gardening shoes. “Oh, them,” I said. “I did meet them.”

  “Well, there are always those kind of history weirdos on tours like this. Nice people, but the kind who collect spoons or bird-watch or whatever. Not that there is anything wrong with collecting spoons.” Judith shrugged. “I’m just saying, most history tours are about eighty percent Owl People and twenty percent intellectuals, and I’ve heard that this tour is the inverse. Which was part of what spurred my interest.”

  “I have a terrible feeling I might be one of the Owl People,” I said.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m an English professor.”

  “No. Plus you get extra cool points for bringing your daughter,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee, which she had poured into a small bowl instead of a proper mug. “But I didn’t see many possible romantic candidates at that reception last night despite the better ratio of Owl to intellectual, so I’m afraid I’m rather blue.”

  It took me a moment to catch up with her. “Oh, so you’re on this tour looking for love?” I asked.

  “It’s been a year since my husband died. I’m not sure I’m looking for love exactly, but I’m tired of grieving. I’m exhausted from being sad. I think it’s safe to say I’m looking for sex.” She smiled at me, and I laughed. I liked Judith Winter very much.

  Vera burst into the apartment then with a huge bag of groceries, babbling about a beautiful clothing store she had seen and could we possibly go before the walking tour? I was confused by how animated and awake she was. I would have preferred to sit around drinking coffee and eating some of the appealing little pastries she had brought back with her, but this was out of the question. Vera had that look. She had seen something she wanted in that window and every second that she was not able to get back and find the thing she wanted was killing her. She was hopping around like a little kid who has to pee as Judith and I chatted.

  When we said our goodbyes, Judith asked permission to stay in our apartment so that she could “be close to the food source,” by which she meant our refrigerator, while I took Vera shopping, and of course we said yes.

  The store Vera wanted to go to was only a few sunny blocks away, but once we were inside she was transformed into a velociraptor stalking prey. She hardly noticed I was there until it came time to pay. I was just sitting on a chair as she tried things on and decided to check my e-mail on my phone. I had turned off my cell service to avoid charges, but there was Wi-Fi in the store because of the café next door. I had seven e-mails from Kat. Guilt lurched my stomach. I hadn’t called. I hadn’t called to tell Kat we got in safe. I hadn’t even sent an e-mail.

  “Did you let your mother know we got in safe?” I asked Vera through the dressing-room door, though obviously I knew she hadn’t.

  “No,” she said. “Oh my God, you didn’t?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You’re gonna be in big trouble,” she said, laughing.

  “Should I try to Skype her or what?”

  “Call.”

  “If I turn on my phone it will be like eighty bucks.”

  “Call,” Vera said.

  So I stepped outside to call. Katya was understandably furious. I let her yell at me as I leaned against a metal utility pole, which, I noticed, was plastered with a poster advertising a reading by Nikolai Azarin. There was a black-and-white picture of him, hollow-eyed and serious, on the poster. He must be some kind of big deal, I thought.

  “You are trying to kill me,” Kat said. “You are trying to give me a heart attack.”

  “No, no,” I said. “The time change just really threw me for a loop and we had to get into our apartment and then attend this concert and then we just fell asleep. But I promise—everything is fine. Vera is safe. It’s all good.”

  “No, no, no,” Kat said. “It isn’t all good. Be a grown-up. You can do that, Lucas, I know you can. Don’t make me regret saying yes
to this trip. Just pretend. Just pretend you’re a grown-up.”

  “I am a grown-up, Katya,” I said.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  It wasn’t an entirely insane question. Katya had been dropped into adulthood as though from a helicopter by Vera’s birth. Meanwhile, I had meandered my way through the prolonged adolescence of graduate school. There had been long periods of my life where my entire plan for a Sunday was to watch football from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed, at some point leaving the house to buy a rotisserie chicken and a six-pack of beer. Since I had given up on ever finishing my dissertation and had started teaching at a community college, I had at least mastered showering more regularly and showing up places on time, but honestly not much else had changed. I closed my eyes there on the street, leaning against the face of Nikolai the Writer. In the private dark of my mind there was only her voice. Just me and her.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  Unexpectedly, she laughed. “You drive me crazy,” she said.

  “Do you ever miss me?” I asked, my eyes still closed. The connection was good, just as good as if we were both in the States. I could hear her breathe.

  “Of course,” she said. I pictured the tendons in her neck, the soft, almost shiny skin over her collarbone.

  “I miss you so much sometimes,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “you miss being eighteen.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Truth. Go. This call will cost a fortune.”

  And we hung up. I stood on the street, a little stunned. Katya and I did not normally have such intimate moments. I had not heard that tone in her voice for almost eighteen years. To keep from thinking about it, I went ahead and called my mother to let her know we were safe. When I came back in, Vera was waiting patiently by the cash register. She had chosen a purple sundress and a pair of gray slacks, some little leather loafers and a couple of shirts.