Enchantment (2 page)

“The country life will be good for you, Vanya,” said Father, though the sour expression on his face suggested that he had not yet thought of a way that the country life would be good for
him
. What Cousin Marek did not have was a university within three hours’ travel. If Father was to lecture, he’d have to find a subject matter interesting to cows.

As for Vanya, though, Father was right. The country life
was
good for him. The chores were hard, for though Cousin Marek was a pleasant man, he nevertheless expected that everyone on the farm would work every day, and give full measure. But Vanya got used to labor quickly enough, not to mention the country food, the whole milk, the coarser, crustier, more floury bread they made in this part of Ukraine. The farm was good; but what he came to love lay beyond the farm. For in this backwater, some remnant of the old forests of Europe still survived.

“This is the
rodina
, the original homeland,” Father told him. “Where the old Slavs hid while the Goths passed through, and the Huns. And then they were gone and we fanned out into the plain and left these hills to the wolves and bears.” Our land. Father still thought like a Russian, not like a Jew.

What did Vanya care, at his age, about the original Russia? All he knew was that the country roads went on forever without traffic, and with grass growing where the wheels didn’t make their ruts; and the trees grew large and ancient in the steep-sided hollows of the hills where no one had bothered to cut them down; and birdsong didn’t have to fight to be heard above honking cars and roaring engines. Someone had spilled a milkpail of stars across the sky, and at night when there was no moon it was so dark you could bump into walls just trying to find the door of the house. It wasn’t really wild country, but to Vanya, a city boy, an apartment dweller, it was a place of magic and dreams, like the paintings of Shishkin; Vanya half-expected to see bear cubs in the trees.

This was the place where all the fairy tales of his childhood must have taken place—the land of Prince Ivan, the grey wolf, the firebird; of Koshchei the Deathless, of Mikola Mozhaiski, of Baba Yaga the witch. And, because he came here about the same time as his first reading of Torah, he also pictured the wanderings of Abraham and Jacob and the children of Israel in this green place. He knew it was absurd—Palestine was hot and dry, the Sinai was stone and sand. But couldn’t he picture the sons of Jacob coming back from herding sheep in these hills, to show their father the torn and bloody many-colored coat? Wasn’t it from these hills that Abraham charged forth to do battle for the cities of the plain?

He couldn’t fly here, either, but he could run until he was so exhausted and lightheaded that it felt as if he had flown. And then he grew bolder, and left the roads and tracks, searching for the most ancient and lost parts of the forest. Hours he’d be gone, exploring, until Mother grew worried. “You fall down a slope, you break your leg, nobody knows where you are, you die out there alone, is that your plan?” But Father and Mother must have discussed it together and decided to trust in his good sense and perhaps in the watchfulness of God, for they continued to allow him his freedom. Maybe they were simply counting on the visa to come and get him back to some American city where they could hide in their apartment from the gangsters’ bullets and the rioting Africans that they always heard about.

If the visa had come one day earlier, Vanya wouldn’t have found the clearing, the lake of leaves.

He came upon it in the midst of a forest so old that there was little underbrush—the canopy of leaves overhead was so dense that it was perpetually dusk at ground level, and nothing but a few hardy grasses and vines could thrive. So it felt as if you could see forever between the tree trunks, until finally enough trunks blocked the way or it grew dark and murky enough that you could no longer see beyond. The ground was carpeted with leaves so thick that it made the forest floor almost like a trampoline. Vanya began loping along just to enjoy the bouncy feel of the ground. Like walking on the moon, if the Americans really had landed there. Leap, bounce, leap, bounce. Of course, on the moon there were no tree limbs, and when Vanya banged his head into one, it knocked him down and left him feeling weak and dizzy.

This is what Mother warned me about. I’ll get a concussion, I’ll fall down in convulsions, and my body won’t be found until a dog drags some part of me onto somebody’s farm. Probably the circumcised part of me, and they’ll have to call in a
mohel
to identify it. Definitely the boy Itzak Shlomo—on your records as Ivan Petrovich Smetski. A good runner, but apparently not bright enough to look out for trees. Sorry, but he was too stupid to go on living. That’s just the way natural selection works. And Father would shake his head and say, He should have been in Israel, where there are no trees.

After a while, though, his head cleared, and he went back to bounding through the forest. Now, though, he looked up, scouting for low limbs, and that’s how he realized he had found a clearing—not because of the bright sunlight that made the place a sudden island of day in the midst of the forest twilight, but because suddenly there were no more branches.

He stopped short at the edge of the clearing and looked around. Shouldn’t it be a meadow here, where the sun could shine? Tall grass and wildflowers, that’s what it should be. But instead it was just like the forest floor, dead leaves thickly carpeting the undulating surface of the clearing. Nothing alive there.

What could be so poisonous in the ground here that neither trees nor grass could grow here? It had to be something artificial, because the clearing was so perfectly round.

A slight breeze stirred a few of the leaves in the clearing. A few blew away from the rise in the center of the clearing, and now it looked to Vanya as if it was not a rock or some machine, for the shape under the leaves undulated like the lines of a human body. And there, where the head should be, was that a human face just visible?

Another leaf drifted away. It had to be a face. A woman asleep. Had she gathered leaves around her, to cover her? Or was she injured, lying here so long that the leaves had gathered. Was she dead? Was the skin stretched taut across the cheekbones like a mummy? From this distance, he could not see. And a part of him did not want to see, wanted instead to run away and hide, because if she was dead then for the first time his dreams of tragedy would come true, and he did not want them to be true, he realized now. He did not want to clear the leaves away and find a dead woman who had merely been running through the woods and hit her head on a limb and managed to stagger into the midst of this clearing, hoping that she could signal some passing airplane, only she fell unconscious and died and . . .

He wanted to run away, but he also wanted to see her, to touch her; if she was dead, then to see death, to touch it.

He raised his foot to take a step into the clearing.

Though his movement was ordinary, the leaves swirled away from his foot as if he had stirred a whirlwind, and to his shock he realized that this clearing was not like the forest floor at all. For the leaves swirled deeper and deeper, clearing away from his feet to reveal that he was standing at the edge of a precipice.

This was no clearing, this was a deep basin, a round pit cut deeply into the earth. How deep it was, he couldn’t guess, for the leaves still swirled away, deeper, deeper, and the wind that had arisen from the movement of his leg carried them up and away, twisting into the sky like a pillar of smoke.

If that
was
a woman lying there, then she must be lying on a pedestal arising from the center of this deep hollow. Women who bumped their heads into tree limbs did not climb down a precipice like this and climb up a tower in the middle. Something else was going on here, something darker. She must have been murdered.

He looked at her again, but now many of the leaves that had blown up from Vanya’s feet were coming to rest, and he couldn’t quite see her face. No, there it was, or where it should have been. But no face now, just leaves.

I imagined it, he thought. It was that leaf—I thought it was a nose. There’s no woman there. Just a strange rock formation. And a pit in the middle of the forest that had filled with leaves. Maybe it was the crater from an old meteor strike. That would make sense.

As he stood there, imagining the impact of a stone from space, something moved on the far side of the clearing. Or rather, it moved
under
the far side of the clearing, for he saw only that the leaves began to churn in one particular place, and then the churning moved around the circle, heading toward him.

A creature that lived in this hollow, under the leaves like a sea serpent under the waves. A terrestrial octopus that will come near me and throw a tentacle up onto the shore and drag me down under the leaves and eat me, casting only my indigestible head up onto the center pedestal, where it would eventually lure some other wanderer to step off into the pit to be devoured in his turn.

The churning under the leaves came closer. In the battle between Vanya’s curiosity and his morbid imagination, the imagination finally won. He turned and ran, no longer bounding over the forest floor, but trying to dig in and put on speed. Of course this meant that his feet kept losing purchase as leaves slipped under them, and he fell several times until he was covered with leafmold and dirt, with bits of old leaves in his hair.

Where was the road? Was the creature from the pit following him through the forest? He was lost, it would turn to night and the monster would find him by his smell and devour him slowly, from the feet up . . .

There was the road. Not that far, really. Or he had run faster and longer than he thought. On the familiar road, with the afternoon sun still shining on him, he felt safer. He jogged along, then walked the last bit to Cousin Marek’s farm.

Vanya never got a chance to tell about his adventure. Mother took one look at him and ordered him to bathe immediately, they’d been searching high and low for him, there was almost no time at all to get ready, where had he been? The visas had come through suddenly, the flight would leave in two days, they had to drive tonight to get to the train station so they could get to Kiev in time to catch the airplane to Austria.

Eventually, when they had time to relax a little, sitting on the plane as it flew to Vienna, Vanya didn’t bother to tell them about his childish scare in the woods. What would it matter? He’d never see those woods again. Once you left Russia there was no going back. Even if you had left a mystery behind you in the ancient forest. It would just have to live on in his memory, a question never to be answered. Or, more likely, the memory of a childish scare that he had worked himself into because he always imagined such dramatic things.

By the time the plane landed in Vienna and the reporters flashed their lightbulbs and pointed TV cameras at them and the officials inspected their visas and various people descended on them to insist that his parents go to Israel as they promised or to inform them that they had the right to do whatever they wanted, now that they were in the free world—by this point, Vanya had persuaded himself that there was never a human face in the clearing, the pit was not as deep as he imagined, and the churning of the leaves had been the wind or perhaps a rabbit burrowing its way through. No peril. No murder. No mystery. Nothing to wonder about.

No
reason
for it to keep cropping up in his dreams, haunting his childhood and adolescence. But dreams don’t come from reason. And even as he told himself that nothing had happened in the woods that day, he knew that something
had
happened, and now he would never know what the clearing was, or what might have happened had he stayed.

2

True Love

So Father’s plan had worked after all. When they arrived in Vienna, it was a matter of a few hours’ paperwork to confirm his appointment as a professor of Slavic languages at Mohegan University in western New York, where he would join a distinguished language faculty, the Russian jewel in a polyglot crown. Soon the family was established in what seemed to them a spacious house with a wild garden that led down to the shore of Lake Olalaga—which quickly became the familiar Olya, the common nickname for
Olga
, and sometimes, in whimsical moods, Olya-Olen’ka, as if the lake were a character in a folktale.

Raised on stories of America—and especially New York—being a jumble of slums and pollution, Vanya found the woods and farms and rolling hills of western New York to be a miracle. But none of the woods was half so ancient or dangerous-seeming as the forest around Cousin Marek’s farm, and Vanya soon found that America might be an exciting place to arrive, but living there could become, in time, as boring as anything else.

Yet his father was satisfied. Vanya reached America young enough to become truly bilingual, quickly learning to speak English without a foreign accent, and taking to the way Americans pronounced his name—Ívan instead of Iván—
eye
-vun instead of ee-
vahn
—so readily that it was soon the name he used for himself, with
Vanya
surviving only as his family’s nickname for him.

His father and mother were not so linguistically fortunate—Father would never lose his guttural Russian accent, and Mother made no effort to progress beyond American money and the names of items at the grocery store. It meant that Mother’s world barely reached beyond their house, and, though Father lectured at other colleges and enjoyed his students, he, too, centered his life around his son.

Ivan felt the pressure of his parents’ sacrifice every day of his life. They did not speak of it; they didn’t have to. Ivan did his best to take advantage of the opportunities his father and mother had given him, working hard at his schoolwork and studying many other things besides. They had no cause to complain of him. And when he was tempted to protest their sometimes heavy-handed regulation of his life, he remembered what they had given up for him. Friends, relatives, their native land.

Ivan’s respite from his parents’ expectations was the same one he had found in Russia: He ran. And when he got old enough for high school athletics, he not only continued with long-distance running, he also took up all the games of the decathlon. Javelin, hurdles, discus, sprints—he was sometimes the best at one or another, but what set him apart from the rest of the track team was his consistency: His combined score was always good, and he was always in contention at every meet. He lettered three years at Tantalus High, and when he began to attend Mohegan University, he made their track team easily.

His parents and their friends never understood his need for athletics. Some even seemed to think it was funny—a Jewish athlete?—until Ivan coldly pointed out that Israel didn’t bring in Christians to fill out its Olympic team. Only once, near the end of Ivan’s junior year in high school, did Father suggest that the time wasted on athletics would be better spent refining his mind. “The body goes by the time you’re forty, but the mind continues—so why invest in the part that cannot last? It isn’t possible to divide your interests this way and do well at anything.” Ivan’s reply was to skip a day of finals while he ran all the way around Lake Olya. He ended up having to do makeup work that summer to stay on track for graduation; Father never again suggested that he give up sports.

But Ivan was not really rejecting his father. During Ivan’s years at the university, he gravitated to history, languages, and folklore; when he entered graduate school, he became his father’s most apt pupil. Together they immersed themselves in the oldest dialects of Ukrainian, Bulgarian, and Serbian. For one year they even conducted all their conversations in Old Church Slavonic, lapsing into Russian or English only when the vocabulary didn’t allow a modern thought to be expressed.

Everyone could see how proud Father was at Ivan’s exceptional performance—several papers published in first-rate journals even before he entered the graduate program—but what they never were was close. Not as Ivan imagined American fathers and sons were close. Ivan did not speak to his father about his dreams, his yearnings, his frustrations, his hopes. He certainly never mentioned that he still had nightmares about a circular chasm in the forest, where some unnameable creature stirred under the leaves.

Nor did Ivan speak much more readily to Mother—but Mother seemed to know most of his feelings anyway, or guess, or perhaps invent them. When he was in high school he would come home smitten with love for this or that girl, and Mother would know it even though he said nothing. “Who is she?” she’d ask. When he told her—and it was always easier just to tell—she would study his face and say, “It isn’t love.”

The first few times he insisted that it was
too
love, and what did she know, being old, with true love long since replaced by habit? But over time he learned to accept her assessment. Especially when, now and then, she would say, “Oh, poor boy, it
is
love this time, and she’s going to hurt you.” To his grief, she was never wrong.

“How do you know?” he demanded once.

“Your face is an open book to me.”

“No, really.”

“I’m a witch, I know these things.”

“Mother, I’m serious.”

“If you won’t listen to my answers, why do you ask me questions?”

Then, when he was twenty-four, the Berlin Wall came down. The family watched everything on television. As he switched off the set, Father said, “Now you can go back to Russia to do your research for your dissertation.”

“My dissertation doesn’t require research with sources inside Russia.”

“So change your topic,” said Father. “Are you crazy? Don’t you want to go back?”

Yes, he wanted to go back. But not for research. He wanted to go back because he still saw a certain leaf-covered clearing in his dreams, and the face of a woman, and a monster in a chasm; and for the same reason, he did not want to go, because he was afraid that the place didn’t exist, and because he was afraid that maybe it did.

So he spent the rest of the year finishing up his classwork and passing his comprehensives. Then another year of groundwork research for his dissertation and it was late July of 1991, only six weeks before his ticket back to Kiev. Naturally, that was when he met Ruth Meyer.

She was the daughter of a doctor in Ithaca, a couple of lakes away in western New York. They met at a Presbyterian wedding—the groom was a friend of Ivan’s from the track team in college, the bride a roommate of Ruth’s. They reached for the same hors d’oeuvre on a plate and within a few minutes stood outside on the porch of the house, watching a thunderstorm come in from the southwest. By the time the rain came they were holding hands.

“Say something to me in Old Russian,” she said.

Old Russian was too modern for him. In Old Church Slavonic, he said, “You are beautiful and wise and I intend to marry you.”

She closed her eyes as if in ecstasy. “I love it that you speak a language to me that no other woman will ever hear from you.”

“But you don’t understand it,” he pointed out.

“Yes I do,” said Ruth, her eyes still closed.

He laughed; but what if she
had
understood? “What did I say?”

“You told me that you hoped I’d fall in love with you.”

“No I didn’t.” But his embarrassed laugh was a confession that she had come rather close to the mark.

“Yes you did,” she said, opening her eyes. “Everything you do says that.”

After the wedding, Ivan came home to his mother and sat down across from her in the living room. After a few moments she looked up at him.

“Well?” he said. “Is it love, or is it nothing?”

Her expression solemn, Mother said, “It’s definitely
something
.”

“I’m going to marry her,” he announced.

“Does she know this?”

“She knows everything,” he said. “She knows what I think as I’m thinking it.”

“If only she knew
before
you thought it, you’d never have to think again.”

“I’m serious, Mother,” he said.

“And I’m not?”

“Don’t tease me. This is love.”

By now Father was in the room; there’s something about the mention of marriage that brings parents, no matter what they were doing. “What, you fall in love now, when you’re about to leave the country for a year?”

“Maybe I can postpone the trip,” said Ivan, knowing as he said it that it was a stupid idea.

“That’s good, marry now when you don’t have a doctor’s degree,” said Father. “Her father plans to support you?”

“I know, I have to go. But I hate waiting,” said Ivan.

“Learn patience,” said Father.

“In Russia you learn patience,” said Ivan. “In America you learn action.”

“So it’s a good thing you’re going to Russia,” said Father. “Patience is useful much more often, and you especially need to learn it if you plan to have children.”

Ivan laughed giddily at the idea. “I’m going to be such a good father!” he cried.

“And why not?” asked Mother. “You learned from the best.”

“Of course I did,” he said. “Both of you. You did the best you could with a strange kid like me.”

“I’m glad you understand,” said Mother. That wry smile. Was it possible she wasn’t joking? That she had never been joking?

During the weeks before he flew to Kiev, he spent more time in Ithaca than in Tantalus. His mother seemed sad or worried whenever he saw her, which wasn’t often. One time, concerned about her, he said, “You’re not losing me, Mother. I’m in love.”

“I never had you,” she said, “not since you escaped from the womb.” She looked away from him.

“What is it, then?”

“Have you told her your Jewish name?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Oh, right, Itzak Shlomo,” he said. “It hasn’t come up. Does it matter?”

“Don’t do it,” she said.

“Don’t what? Tell her my Jewish name? Why would I? Why shouldn’t I?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m such a fool. Now you will, because I asked you not to.”

“When would it come up? Why does it matter? I haven’t used the name since we came here. Our synagogue is Conservative, so is theirs, nobody cares if I have a gentile name.”

Mother gripped his arms and spoke fiercely, for once without a smile. “You can’t marry her,” she said.

“What are you talking about? We’re definitely
not
first cousins, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“You remember the story of the Sky, the Rat, and the Well?”

Of course he did. It was a tale she had told him as a child, and he studied it again in folklore class. A not-so-nice rabbinical student rescues a young woman from a well, but only after she promises to sleep with him. Once she’s out of the well, she insists that he promise to marry her, so that they are betrothed. Their only witnesses are the sky, the well, and a passing rat. Back home, he forgets his promise and marries someone else, while she turns down suitor after suitor until she finally pretends to go mad in order to make them go away. Then his first two children die, one bitten by a diseased rat, the other from falling down a well. He remembers the witnesses to his betrothal and confesses to his wife; she does not condemn him, but insists that they divorce peacefully so he can go and honor his promise to the young woman. So that’s how it happens that he ends up keeping his word after all. The moral of the story was to keep your oaths because God is always your witness, but Ivan for the life of him couldn’t figure out what she was getting at.

“I’m not betrothed to anyone else but Ruth,” he said.

“You think I don’t know that?” she said. “But there’s something.”

“Something what?”

“I dreamed about that story.”

“This is about a dream?”

“You were the man and Ruth was the one he never should have married. Vanya, it won’t work out. This is not the right girl for you.”

“Mother, she
is
, you just have to trust me on this.” Impulsively he bent down and kissed his mother’s cheek. “I love you, Mother,” he said.

When he stood straight again, he saw that tears dripped down her cheeks. He realized that it was the first time he had kissed his mother in years, the first time he told her he loved her since—maybe since he was eight or nine. Or younger.

But she wasn’t crying because of his kiss. “Do what you do,” said Mother softly. “When the time comes, you must trust
me
.”

“
What
time? What is this, a game of riddles?”

She shook her head, turned away from him, and left the room.

Of course he told Ruth all about the conversation. “Why shouldn’t I know your Jewish name?” asked Ruth, shaking her head, laughing.

“It’s not like it was my real name,” said Ivan. “I never even heard it until we were about to emigrate. We aren’t very good Jews, you know.”

“Oh, I know,” she said. “As I recall, at Denise’s wedding you were reaching for a shrimp.”

“So were you,” he said. “But I’m the one that got it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I was reaching for
you
,” she said. “So I got mine, too.”

He laughed with her, but he didn’t really like the joke. Their meeting was pure chance, or so he had always thought. But now she had raised another possibility, and he didn’t care for it. Was I set up? If she manipulated that, what else might she have plotted?

No, no, that was complete nonsense, he told himself. It was Mother’s weird objection, that’s what made him suspicious. And besides, what if she
had
plotted to meet him? He should be insulted? Beautiful, intelligent girl maneuvers to meet awkward, penniless grad student—how often did
that
happen? Oh, all the time—in grad students’ dreams.

Mother was so eager for him to get out of New York—and away from Ruth—that for the last week he had to keep asking her for clothes each morning because she had already packed everything. “I don’t need to take all my clothes with me,” he said. “I’m a student. Everyone will expect me to wear shirts for several days between washings.” She shrugged and gave him a shirt—but from her ironing, not from his luggage.