The Lover From an Icy Sea (64 page)

Пишут мне, что ты, тая тревогу,

Загрустила шибко обо мне,

Что ты часто ходишь на дорогу

В старомодном ветхом шушуне.

It was his one attempt at translating verse—something he’d written to her six weeks earlier in a burst of energy and melancholy—and then promptly forgotten to send, just as he’d forgotten to retrieve the lichen. He picked it up, but continued to listen to Podbolotov’s original rendition in Russian.

With his eyes fixed on the piece of paper in front of him, but staring at it blindly, as the combination of Podbolotov’s voice and his own private reverie had him temporarily transfixed, Kit was unaware that neighbors were gathering at windows below him and across the way, turning off their television sets or radios or stereos, and shushing their children. Kit couldn’t have known that none of these neighbors spoke Russian, that none of them had ever even heard of Yesenin, much less read his poetry. None of them would therefore have known that the poet had written this poem in a hotel room in St. Petersburg—not with pen and ink as was fashionable at the time, but with his own blood, on the wall, just after he’d slit his wrists.

И тебе в вечернем синем мраке

Часто видится одно и то ж:

Будто кто-то мне в кабацкой драке

Саданул под сердце финский нож.

Ничего, родная! Успокойся.

Это только тягостная бредь.

Не такой уж горький я пропойца,

Чтоб, тебя не видя, умереть.

Я по-прежнему такой же нежный

И мечтаю только лишь о том,

Чтоб скорее от тоски мятежной

Воротиться в низенький наш дом.

Я вернусь, когда раскинет ветви

По-весеннему наш белый сад.

Только ты меня уж на рассвете

Не буди, как восемь лет назад.

Lost in his private ruminations, Kit also couldn’t have known that Hope, on the front stoop, heard the music only too clearly, understood the words perfectly, knew much of Yesenin’s poetry by heart—a heart that was now torn by a grief that was not hers, but which she knew belonged to all of them. She’d never read Donne in the original. But she had the heart of a Russian, and she understood with that Russian heart that no man is an island. And so, in this moment, this near-stranger’s pain, and Yesenin’s pain, became hers.

Не буди того, что отмечталось,

Не волнуй того, что не сбылось,

Слишком раннюю утрату и усталость

Испытать мне в жизни привелось.

И молиться не учи меня. Не надо!

К старому возврата больше нет.

Ты одна мне помощь и отрада,

Ты одна мне несказанный свет.

Так забудь же про свою тревогу,

Не грусти так шибко обо мне.

Не ходи так часто на дорогу

В старомодном ветхом шушуне.

The song came to an end. Kit got up from the window sill and was about to pick the record up in order to put it back in its jacket. He took another sip of wine and decided, instead, to allow himself one more reverie before retiring the LP back to his closet. This time, however, he’d also read his own translation as he listened to Podbolotov.

He dropped the needle and waited for the melody to start up again before sitting back down on the window sill.

Before bothering to look at his own efforts on paper, however, he looked east in the direction of a harvest moon, Queens, Long Island, the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe… and he thought of their first hotel in Paris, of the bathroom plumbing and of the couple he’d watched making love across the way… of the pool in Cabo de São Vicente and of a burning sunset over the Atlantic as he and she looked west … of Rome, of her silhouette standing behind French doors as he looked up from the piazza … of Positano, of a borrowed fisherman’s boat out in the Gulf of Salerno … of the beginnings of a garden on a tiny island in the middle of the Baltic, and of a ‘special place’ in the middle of the forest on that same island.

He sighed—and then looked down and began reading his modest attempt at a translation of Yesenin’s brilliant and evocative verse.

Hallo one last time, dearest mother of mine,

I trust that you’re keeping my bed

as white as our birches; as starched as our pine;

as clear as our sky overhead.

The rumour now runs: my old mother misses

some devil—apparently me.

That devil, in truth, remembers her kisses,

her ratty old coat and her tea.

Some evenings, I’ll wager, the vision’s perverse:

a tavern; your boy in a brawl

with sailors whose cunning eviscerates; worse:

his verse comes to rest on a wall.

Now pause for a moment to think this one through;

and tell me I’ve failed to comply

with wending what may not seem homeward to you,

but is, with a kiss, on the fly.

I think rather not—and trust you’ll make haste

to give this old rumour the lie.

The truth is I’m homesick and don’t want to waste

one swinish night more in this sty.

In spring, I’ll come running back home to your arms

outstretched, bearing handfuls of sage,

if you’ll just relinquish those motherly charms

that can’t come to grips with my age

and leave me to suffer my hedonist’s binge

on wine-baited women and song,

the better to serve them my head on a fringe

of lace—as they’ve asked all along.

But please don’t suggest that redemption and grace

can somehow be gotten by prayer;

you are the steeple I mount for the chase,

the blue-ribbon prize at the fair.

So, empty your pail full of nettles and needs,

and don’t let our cabin grow cold;

then strip your decrepit old coat of its beads

and hang it outside to be sold.

In his concentration, Kit couldn’t have known that all activity and foot-traffic on the street below had come to a halt; that even the rappers had turned off their boom boxes and now stood listening; that as distant as this rhythm, this music and this language were from their own experience, they, too, felt it with an unaccustomed poignancy.

In her perfect understanding, Hope could be of no help to any of them—least of all to Kit. While she understood with both her mind and her heart that each of them was simply “a piece of the continent,” she knew, too, that every man’s grief was ultimately his own. As she sat down on the stoop and put her head in her arms, she would’ve gladly—as her name implied—taken all of their collective grief upon herself. But she couldn’t. She had looked into Kit’s eyes; had felt his lips upon her cheek; had smelled him up close. He was in pain—that was clear—but he’d survive. He had the smell and the feel of a survivor. It would only be a matter of time, she knew, and of hope.

Chapter 79

The next day, Kit got up at his usual hour. He showered, shaved, brushed his hair and teeth, dressed, grabbed his camera and a scarf—then walked, rather than bounded—downstairs and out the front door. As he walked west along Eighth Street, he tied a tight knot in his scarf to cover the front of his neck against a chill autumn wind.

The knot was indicative—tight—suggesting caution, experience, the weariness—and wariness—of age. It was a brisk day towards the end of November, with clear skies and a bright sun: a day, Kit thought, for work. He headed out towards the “N” or “R” line to take him uptown to Madison Square.

At the intersection of Third Avenue and St. Marks Place, as he heeded the pedestrian signal and waited on the curb for a green light, he observed a limousine heading south along the avenue. As it sped past, Kit glanced at the car, then at the license plate—the digits were a wash—then noticed a head and a bob of straight auburn hair against the headrest in the backseat. The figure inside, Kit believed, was that of a woman.

*  *  *

This was not to be the last time he would see a woman from a distance and be deceived by the illusion. In the days, weeks, months, and then years to come, his world would be haunted by likenesses of Daneka: hurriedly through rear windows of passing limousines or taxis disappearing around corners; looking straight out from behind a sea of faces in a packed elevator just as he arrived and the doors closed; or making last-second exits from a subway car before he, and it, pulled out of sight—however unlikely it might be, he knew, that she’d be taking a subway. It would always be the same. It couldn’t be. She was long gone. In a city of eight million, there would be hundreds of Daneka look-alikes. She would have aged anyway, while he was stuck with the image of an ageless woman. And yet, he would always look until the limousine or taxi or subway was out of sight, or until the elevator had actually begun its ascent. If both he and the woman were on foot, he’d run to the corner. If the woman were then still visible, he’d run to a point just beside her and attempt a sideways glance to convince himself that no—this one also wasn’t Daneka.

And yet each such instance was only the beginning. He’d subsequently find himself trapped for a good part of the remaining day in reviewing the details of their affair, item by item, event by event, each item and each event holding him in the muck as he tried, in vain, to pull himself out. But the memories were like a stubborn grapnel anchor, each bill holding fast to the bottom no matter how hard he pulled or twisted.

Chapter 80

Spring, ten years later

It was a glorious day towards the end of April—in many respects, identical to the one on which a certain camera had made accidental contact with the front bumper of a certain limousine traveling south along Lexington Avenue a decade earlier.

Kit, now graying at the temples but with nothing even remotely gray in the same fiery dark eyes, was visiting his mother in Radnor. His father had died years earlier and had been buried—and so, allowed, finally, to join the other Charles Wesley Addisons in all of their knickerbockered splendor—in the cemetery just up Fletcher and off to the right down Upper Gulph Road.

Kit was in Radnor on a mission: he’d promised his mother he’d construct a pond for her garden. She wanted—she’d told him—to hear at least the sound of running water through the last of her remaining days. They’d finally decided to put it just off the kitchen terrace, right alongside a moss garden he’d already constructed for her many years earlier.

Over the years, he’d had a number of assignments abroad. From each, he’d never failed to harvest and return with a lichen or some kind of native moss—and then carefully, lovingly, to incorporate the new addition into the moss garden. The lichens and moss were, of course, for his mother; but they were also for this other woman who sat with his mother on the terrace leading off of a colonial house where they both sipped their morning coffee. Mrs. Addison read the Philadelphia Inquirer—on paper. The second woman read The New York Times—on a palmtop. Others had read and signed a certain declaration not far from this house whose construction pre-dated even that document by some forty years—on parchment.

The other woman taught young children—as much her avocation as her vocation. She and Kit had two of their own, both toddlers, with whom he now played in the middle of a yard spreading out over several acres at the corner of Fletcher and Brower.

As he was alternatively inspecting the grade of the land and watching that his children didn’t wander too far out of sight, the other woman approached him, palmtop in hand. Kit noticed a pained expression in her eyes, and he wondered what kind of news she was bringing him.

“
What is it,
Надежда
?” he asked as he abruptly stood up. She handed him the palmtop. Once his eyes had adjusted to the tiny print, he saw the headline in bold:
Managing Editor Found Dead, Alone, in Own Apartment.
Next to the announcement was a picture. Kit recognized the face immediately and took out a cigarette.

He sat back down on the grass to read the article. The cause of death would remain unknown pending an autopsy; the body of the deceased, by request of next of kin, would be sent to Denmark for burial.
The Times
had spelled the final destination “Roenne.” The Times, Kit decided, still had no special feelings for any vowels or consonants but its own—and apparently found nothing particularly sexy about “ø.” Even Daneka’s last name—Kit lamented—had been Times-sized to “Soerensen.”

Leading their two toddlers by the hand, the other woman came up behind him just as he was finishing the article. He stubbed out his cigarette and felt a hand on his shoulder. He put his own on top of it, finished reading the last paragraph, then looked up into his wife’s eyes.