Forty Rooms (6 page)

He shrugs. “Heavily influenced by Tyutchev. Also, it’s not finished.”

“Yes, but—do you like it?”

He is the only one who ever reads my poems; I never mention them to anyone else. My poetry is a secret of which my mysterious night visitor is also a part.

“Oh, I suppose it shows promise. But you know what they say: The road to hell is paved with good intentions—and, I should add, with early promise.” He unwinds himself from the chair with his usual careless, feline grace. “So easy to end up trapped inside a nineteenth-century porcelain cup, my dear,” he says. “Especially for a woman, trite as that may sound.” He leans toward me—close, closer still—and the smile on his handsome, ruined face melts into a leer. Flushed, I look down. The nightingale’s song swells clear and ebullient in the sudden silence. My heart is pounding. I am seventeen years old, I am a poet, and I have never been kissed.

I expect—I do not know myself what I expect.

When I look up, only a puddle of starlight trembles on the floor.

6. My Bedroom

The Proof of God’s Existence

“Needless to say,” Lev proclaims to the ceiling, “for most of our illustrious history the so-called profession of journalism was nothing but an embarrassing joke—red banners this, grain harvests that. Comrade Vasily, kindly pass the champagne. Nowadays, though, we have a sacred role to perform, no less than that of an artist.”

Lev rolls over and, leaning on his elbow, takes a swig from the bottle, then hands it over to Nina, who is sitting cross-legged on the carpet next to him, peeling an orange.

“Well, that’s going rather far,” she says. “I like having an inflated sense of self-importance as much as anyone, but journalism just isn’t art . . . Hey, now my orange tastes bitter! And anyway, it’s lukewarm and disgusting.”

“Give it back, then. And I’m not saying it’s art, either—but you must agree, today’s artists can’t claim to speak the truth to the extent we journalists do.”

“And historians,” Anna, Lev’s older sister, mumbles. “Don’t forget the historians.” She hiccups. Alone of us all, she is attending the history department.

“Sure, historians are responsible for exposing the truth of the past, but journalists deal in current truths—so much more vital as far as the people are concerned.” Lev is sitting up now, his thin, sharp-chinned face flushed with excitement. “Just as an example, when I wrote about the polluted vegetables sold at our market—”

A communal moan escapes from everyone in the room, even Sergei and Irochka unglue their lips long enough to exchange snorts, while Nina weakly pelts Lev with orange peels.

“Yes, yes, we know all about your sacred mission of bringing hygiene to the masses.” Vasily hangs off the bed to intercept the bottle, then leans back and throws his free arm around my shoulders. Only now I notice that the record has stopped playing. Wriggling out from under Vasily’s proprietary arm, I stand up to cross the room and move the needle back to the beginning. Okudzhava’s quiet, wise voice starts up anew, singing of doors forever unlocked to welcome a stranger on a wintry night, and valiant cardboard soldiers who step into the fire, reciting a noble catechism of friendship that burns steady amidst the dangers of betrayals big and small:

And when the hour arrives to divide the spoils,

Free bread handouts will not seduce us,

And paradise will open—but not for us,

Yet all of us will be remembered by Ophelia . . .

Anna hiccups again. Sergei yawns and rises from the single chair in the room, Irochka entwined tipsily around him. “Well, people, I have a deadline tomorrow. What time is it, anyway?”

It is close to eleven o’clock. Weightless snowflakes are blowing this way and that outside the window. Two by two, my friends take their leave—Lev with his sister; Sergei with the giggling Irochka; Olga, who has dropped in without my noticing, with yet another boy whose name I will not bother to commit to memory unless I see him again. Indiscriminately I hand out damp hats and scarves in the hallway’s dimness, certain that a good half of them are ending up with the wrong person, to be sorted out in the grimy light of the lecture hall the next morning, as together we plunge into yet another heady day of epigrams scribbled in the margins of our notebooks, cigarettes bummed in the girls’ bathroom, halfhearted kisses in the shadow of the kindly bronze Lomonosov, crumbs of momentous truths unearthed, devoured, and discarded between seminars in the yellow corridors of the eighteenth-century mansion in the threadbare heart of the ancient city.

When I lock the door behind the last of them and step back into the room, Vasily is sprawled on my bed, cradling the nearly empty bottle.

“Finally,” he says. “Come here.”

My parents have gone to a premiere at the Bolshoi and will not return before midnight. Stalling for time, I move about the room, straightening things—the rug’s corner flipped up at a rakish angle, the wet mark of the bottle’s bottom on a bookshelf, a volume of Annensky left spine-up on the windowsill. Even without turning, I can sense him breathing in expectation, grinning at
my neck. As I needlessly rearrange my few trinkets (a shell from the Black Sea, a polished shard of amber from the Baltics, a statuette of Don Quixote someone gave my father years ago), I take comfort in thinking how familiar everything is here, how simple, monastic even, and how self-sufficient—the window, the bed, the desk, the chair, the hundreds upon hundreds of books, none of which ever gets dusty.

When the silence grows audible at last, I hasten to break it.

“Isn’t it strange to think that of my seventeen and a half years, I’ve probably spent at least seven years reading and doing homework at this desk? And another six asleep in this bed? That’s more than three-quarters of my entire life!”

Conscious of babbling, I stop. And yet, as I would add if I felt able to discuss such matters with him, the room never seems like a confinement, for when my door is closed and I am alone here, I am—as nowhere else—absolutely free. I have fallen into the small private habit of imagining it as a room full of windows—different, of course, from the sole window facing that eternal eyesore of a construction site, still far from completion, its gigantic piles of cement and rusty machinery now often abandoned for months at a time. No, these are other windows—windows opening into other places, other moods, other realities, which I struggle to translate into words as I pick up my pen every night. I glance toward the book I have just wedged into its place on the shelf of my special favorites. Annensky succeeded where I have failed so far; his poem has lived for so long in my mind, on the tip of my tongue, in the back of my dreams, that I sometimes wonder whether he merely captured, with angel-like precision, that elusive, vast, vertiginous
feeling that so often fills my entire being—or whether his poem has itself given birth to that feeling, has gifted me with the joyful sensation of some invisible, endlessly rich, mysterious life just a heartbeat, just a perfect word, away.

Do you not imagine sometimes,

When dusk wanders through the house,

That here, alongside us, lies another plane,

Where we lead entirely different lives?

There a shadow has merged with a shadow so softly,

There a moment will come at times

When with the unseen rays of our eyes

We seem to enter each other.

And we fear to frighten the moment away

With a gesture, or to intrude upon it with a word,

As though someone has leaned in so close,

Making us hear distant things.

But as soon as the candle is brought in,

The brittle world retreats without a fight . . .

For this is what I have come to believe in all the years spent hidden away in my bedroom, with its only window darkened by winter as often as not: that the place I live in does not matter; nor do the daily tasks I perform; nor even the people with whom I spend my time—all these lie on the surface, fortunate or unfortunate
accidents of birth and transitory vagaries of choice, which should not in any profound way affect my true essence, my only real life—my self-contained life as a poet—unfolding with its own powerful, inexorable logic, quite apart from political upheavals or career decisions or oppressive boys, in that other, perfect world whose remote starlit music and fresh springtime breezes I catch now and then through my invisible, tantalizingly cracked windows . . .

“Homework and sleep, eh? Time to broaden the spectrum of activities, I think.”

I have forgotten Vasily’s presence so thoroughly by now that his voice makes me start. He pats the bed next to him. “Come here.”

When my narrow bed is made—as it is without fail every morning—it can pass for a couch, which somewhat alleviates the awkwardness of the two of us sitting side by side on its shaggy yellow spread. I accept the bottle from him, take a hurried sip; warm champagne makes the inside of my mouth taste muffled and sour. He pulls me toward him for the inevitable kiss. I like his irreverent clowning at seminars and the clever pieces on new rock bands that he writes for the student newspaper, but I do not like his kisses. I suspect I do not like kisses in general—perhaps my blood is stirred by poetry alone—but I have no grounds for comparison. His tongue is rubbery, thick, and insistent. After an anxious lapse of several seconds, which I count in my mind (one-two-three-four-five—is this enough?), I open my eyes and find his one visible eye likewise open, slanted at an odd angle, staring into mine, almost white in the light of the overhead lamp.

Freeing myself, I glance at the clock on my desk.

“My parents may come back any minute,” I announce with barely hidden relief.

He too checks the clock, and sighs, and, drawing me toward him, speaks into my hair. “This is hard on both of us, I know, but we just have to hold out a bit longer. In March my father will get his new posting, I’ll have the apartment all to myself. Do you understand?” His voice has become a whisper, and when I try to lift my head and look at him, he presses me back into his shoulder. “Wait. Listen. We should talk about the future. My parents approve of you, and yours approve of me. It’s not too early. I’ll be nineteen this summer. I have excellent prospects. My father—”

He continues to whisper, his breath hot and moist in my hair. I sit propped up against him, stiff with sudden horror. It occurs to me that even though my daily, superficial existence may have little to do with the deep well of my poetry, any trivial repetitive actions, just by virtue of steady accretion, may with time translate into something amounting to an actual change. If I spend days and weeks and months attending a random higher-education program for the simple reason that Olga applied her inflexible will to the task of becoming a journalist while I had little interest in puzzling over possible professions and let her make up my mind for me, one morning I will likely find myself bent over a typewriter in some newspaper cubicle; and if I spend days and weeks and months kissing a random boy for the simple reason that the acquisition of such an experience seems a prerequisite for being a proper university student, one day I may find myself married to the son of a prominent diplomat, living in a cavernous apartment on Gorky Street with a zebra skin crucified on the wall above our conjugal bed. In a moment of pure panic I see my future flash before my eyes, just as one’s past reputedly does in the moment of dying—and my future is a succession of increasingly suffocating rooms.

When I can breathe once again, I become aware of a new quality of silence, tense, bordering on hostile, as I fail to reply, and fail to reply, and fail to reply . . .

“There is something I want to show you,” I say in desperation.

I slip off the bed, run over to the desk, and jerk open its drawer. The letter is lying amidst dried-up corpses of pens and half-spent erasers, still in its jaggedly ripped envelope that bears a foreign postmark. I pull out the single sheet of paper and hand it to him. Expressionless, he reads it while I stand before him, waiting.

When he looks up at me, his eyes are narrowed.

“When did you get this?”

“Last week.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were applying?”

“I didn’t tell anyone. I—I wanted to wait until I heard back.”

That is true; nor do I have the slightest intention of going—although I do not tell him that, not yet, because I am hoping to soften my impending refusal to consider what I fear was a marriage proposal by speaking vaguely of future possibilities and broadening horizons. I climb back onto the bed and attempt to nestle into his shoulder, as before, but he shakes me off, stands up, drops into the chair across from me. The empty champagne bottle, caught by his abrupt movement, rolls over the bedspread and falls onto the rug with a dull thud.

“So why
did
you apply?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Just to see what’s out there, I guess.”

And that is true also; I am not entirely sure of my reasons. Perhaps I applied because—because I had taken my secret gifts for granted for so long that I had come to doubt them and wanted to set myself a test that would have some validity in the eyes of
the outside world; or because a small part of me questioned my ability to upend my life, to move to a distant spot on the map; or because Olga, who did everything I myself considered doing, and did it better, talked of attending Harvard in the fall.

“Don’t you have everything you want here? What do your parents say?”

Every question comes at me like a stab. I have never seen him like this. He sits in the chair, rocking slightly, his fingers twirling my acceptance letter, his gray eyes pale with anger, sliding past me. There is something raw, something dangerous, in his ordinarily ironic snub-nosed face. He looks like a scorned lion, and I am startled by a faint twinge of regret at the thought that I may never touch his lips again.