The Scent of Pine (11 page)

“Can you really die of that?”

“Hedgehogs can—they are less tolerant of depression than humans,” Sasha Simonov said. Sveta looked at Sasha with interest and put the hedgehog down. Apparently, she believed in such dangers. She was just a little girl, Lena thought. And Sasha was just a little boy. And Alesha. They were little kids, funny, helpless, naïve. For the first time since Lena started working at the camp, she felt something like affection for them.

First few seconds, the hedgehog didn’t move at all. But slowly, so very slowly, he began to unfurl. There was his little nose. Black, leathery, and wet. There were his tiny paws. They looked exactly like the paws of a rat or a mouse. Then they saw the tiny beads of his eyes. And then his tongue. Lena didn’t expect him to have a tongue! A tiny pink tongue, which he stuck out like a cat lapping up milk. And a second later the hedgehog was gone. It rustled through the grass and into the bushes.

Lena couldn’t wait until the second dance. She kept changing her shirt, unable to choose between the white and the blue, and applying and reapplying her lip gloss. She tried to imagine how Danya would look at her when he saw her at the dance. How he would smile at her, walk over, and put his hand on the small of her back. All without saying a word.

But as they were about to leave for the dance, Sveta Kozlova announced that she wasn’t going, and that was that. She refused to explain why. She insisted that she was staying and there was nothing Lena could do about it. Lena could’ve asked Inka to stay with Sveta, but Inka had already left.

“Sveta,” she pleaded, “Sveta, please.”

She said, “No way!”

“But why?”

“Because the music sucks.”

“Sveta, you’re not serious,” Lena said.

Sveta said, “Yes, I am.”

“Sveta, do you realize that I have to stay here with you if you stay?”

Sveta nodded with great enthusiasm. She was hopeless.

Lena just sat down on the steps. She sat like that in silence for a couple of minutes, and then something occurred to her. She said: “Sveta, do you remember that hedgehog we saw in the woods?”

Sveta nodded again.

“Sveta, I will die of boredom and gloom if you don’t let me go.”

Sveta stared at Lena, contemplating her words, and eventually she sighed and said that she’d go.

Lena squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”

Lena saw Danya as soon as Sveta and she got up the steps to the dance floor. He was standing with other soldiers by the fence. He wasn’t looking in her direction, but he did appear to be searching for somebody. Lena thought she’d just walk up to him and say hello. But the next thing she saw was Dena crossing the floor. Dena stopped in front of Danya and made a bow. Her head plunged forward so that her bright yellow hair flew up and down. She took Danya’s hand. He stepped forward and smiled.

“This song is okay,” Sveta said. Lena realized that she was still holding her hand. Still staring at Danya leading Dena around the floor.

She couldn’t believe how much that hurt.

When Lena was about ten, she asked her mother: “How will I know when I fall in love? What are the definitive signs?” She said, “Don’t worry, you’ll know.” She had just come home from work, and she was sitting on the sofa flexing her toes, making them crack, which she always did when she was tired. She looked at Lena, and her expression was glazed with exhaustion and not friendly at all. But Lena really wanted to get the answer.

“But what if I miss it?” she asked. “What if I confuse it with something else?”

“You won’t miss it,” she said.

“Why? Why are you so sure?”

“Why am I so sure? Okay. I’ll tell you why. Do you think you could ‘miss it’ if you had been beaten, kicked, and punched?”

Lena shook her head.

“Well, then,” she said, “you won’t miss love either.”

Lena was so stunned by Danya’s betrayal that she didn’t notice Vasyok until Sveta said: “Hey, the kitchen guy is waving at you.”

“Do you want to dance?” Vasyok asked. His hands felt awkward and fat on my back. Lena glanced in Danya’s direction, but she couldn’t see him, because there was another couple blocking her view. Lena braced herself for Vasyok’s usual happy banter, but he didn’t say anything throughout the whole dance. She felt strangely, unfairly angry with Vasyok. It didn’t make sense until years later, after she’d felt like that again, when she realized she’d been angry at Vasyok simply because he wasn’t Danya and he couldn’t do anything, anything at all, to make her feel about him the way she felt about Danya.

Lena’s phone rang. A California number. She gathered her strength and answered.

Vadim didn’t question her, but Lena told him a complicated lie about her whereabouts. She hung up and continued to walk along the fence, feeling how her lie started to spread inside her like a disease. A sickening, perfectly physical sensation, which was only going to get worse. There was no end to this fence. It went on and on. She turned back and walked toward the visitor center.

T
EN

W
hen they got to the car, Ben’s phone rang again.

He didn’t check the number. He started the car and slowly pulled out of the parking lot.

Lena decided Leslie must suspect something, or she wouldn’t be calling every ten minutes. She felt a pang of guilt.

Interstate 95 turned into a narrow two-lane road surrounded by woods on both sides. More and more cars had Maine license plates. More and more had canoes and kayaks fixed to the roofs, bicycles on the racks, their wheels spinning with pointless zeal.

“Have you been together for a long time?” she asked.

“Leslie and I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we met in college. She used to date Gerry. So we spent a lot of time together. Then she and Gerry broke up and we kind of lost touch.”

He looked tired. It was as if there were a little generator that had kept him going, and now the generator was off.

“We met again six years ago. At a party. I had just gotten divorced, but Leslie was married. We started an affair, but since Leslie lived in New York, and I was in Boston, we had to go back and forth a lot. So Leslie decided to leave her husband, and she insisted that I move in with her. So now we’re together. In New York.”

“Are you happy with her?”

“Happy? I don’t know. I don’t really know how to define ‘happy,’ and anyway you can’t be happy for long. Happiness is a very acute state, it’s like a fever, you can’t take it if it goes on for too long. But it’s working, it’s definitely working with Leslie.”

Lena very nearly said, “Is it, really?”

Ben kept going. “We’ve known each other for a hundred years, we have history together, we have common interests, we have common friends. And then again, how do you define ‘happy’? How do you even answer that question? Can you answer that question? Are you happy with your husband?”

“Yes, I can. I’m not.”

Lena turned away and stared out of her window. What was so difficult about admitting that you weren’t happy? Why did people think they needed to come up with all these complicated explanations, excuses, justifications? Or perhaps they just didn’t want to admit it to themselves? Lena knew she wasn’t happy. She had known it for a long time. There was a time when she blamed herself for being unhappy. She saw it as some kind of character flaw. She didn’t believe happiness was an acute state, as Ben said. She never confused it with the euphoria of being in love. For her happiness was more like peace, contentedness, feeling that you were in the right place. She’d never had that with Vadim. Even when they first got married, she couldn’t shake off the feeling that they weren’t right for each other. She did feel affection for him, and she was moved by the very fact that he was so familiar, that they’d known each other so many years. She would pass him as he sat at his desk and inhale his smell—she always imagined that he smelled like freshly sawed wood—and her eyes would fill with tears, because this was the most familiar smell in the world for her. She never felt peaceful or contented around him, though. She kept telling herself that happiness was a luxury. She felt Ben’s hand on her shoulder, but she couldn’t turn. Her eyes were filling with tears, and she was terrified that he’d notice.

“Why don’t you go back to your story?” Ben asked. “Who was the second guy who disappeared? Danya?”

Lena sighed. Her story had obviously acquired this new function of saving them from awkward silences.

She drank some water and made an effort to collect her thoughts.

“The second guy was Vasyok.”

“Who is Vasyok? Weren’t you supposed to have a date with Danya?”

“The date with Danya didn’t work out. And Vasyok was a soldier who worked in the kitchen. A very nice guy. He disappeared after he seduced me with Hungarian salami.”

“Was he Hungarian? Is that as dirty as it sounds?” Ben offered a self-deprecating laugh.

“No! Hungarian salami was considered a great delicacy and was very hard to get. The Ministry of Defense was powerful enough to provide the camp with it, only the kids never got to enjoy it. The camp management ordered some salami for the kids along with red caviar and bananas and other delicacies, but when all those treasures made it to the camp, the staff just divided the food among themselves according to their ranks. Vedenej, the camp director, got the most, of course. Then came Yanina, and after Yanina, the camp plumber, the kitchen staff, some of the senior counselors. The soldiers weren’t supposed to get any salami, but Vasyok worked in the kitchen, so I think he simply stole some.”

“Stole? Some nice boyfriend you had! Salami thief,” Ben said.

He seemed to enjoy hearing about Vasyok much more than about Danya. And for Lena, talking about Vasyok came more easily too.

“You don’t understand. Stealing was considered perfectly fine. Everybody stole. It would have seemed strange and even indecent if you didn’t. But of course everybody stole on their own level. Vedenej and Yanina could steal something really big, like camp funds. Senior counselors stole electronic equipment. Junior counselors mostly stole bedsheets, office supplies, and toys.”

“Didn’t they count bedsheets?”

“They did. They counted everything, even soccer balls, but there was a way to get past that. You see, each unit was given a certain quantity of items, and we counselors had to sign for them. If an item was reported lost and/or missing, they would deduct its cost from our salary. At first, I took it very seriously—after the kids in my unit came back from a walk outside, I made sure to search the grounds for all the forgotten toys so that I didn’t have to pay for them. One time, I couldn’t find a soccer ball. I looked for it and looked for it, but I couldn’t find it. One of the older counselors, Galina, was passing by, and she asked me what I was doing. I said that I needed to find a soccer ball because I didn’t want to pay for it. She laughed and told me to follow her into a storage room. There she picked up a soccer ball from the shelf, took large scissors from the drawer, sliced the ball open and cut it in two. ‘See, now you have two soccer balls,’ she said, as I stood flabbergasted. ‘Go show the pieces to the inventory girl, and she will write them off as two “damaged” soccer balls. Nobody ever checks if the pieces come from a single ball or two different ones.’ I stared at the pieces in awe. We didn’t have to pay for damaged items, only for missing ones.”

“That’s brilliant! Did you steal something yourself?”

“Yes, sure. As soon as I discovered the art of damaging, I stole plenty of things. Felt pens, paints, big sheets of white paper, and a couple of pillow cases—scissors worked especially well on pillow cases. I wanted to steal an iron. I found the handle from some other iron in the garbage so I could report our iron as damaged, but Inka managed to steal it before me. Technically the iron was mine to steal, because I signed for it, but apparently Inka didn’t feel the same way.”

“That was rotten of her to steal your iron.”

Lena smiled at Ben and said, “Thank you. I thought so too.

“So back to Vasyok. We danced together at the dance, and afterwards he asked me out. I agreed, because I was upset about Danya, and because I didn’t know how to say no, but I didn’t really want to go on a date with Vasyok. He was supposed to pick me up at nine-thirty the evening after the dance. In the morning, I told Inka that I didn’t want to go.

“ ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He seems kind of stupid.’

“All morning I couldn’t decide if I should refuse Vasyok or not, and then we had a power outage. It happened around lunchtime, and they couldn’t prepare lunch, because everything in the kitchen and the cafeteria was down. After a while they sent some guys from the kitchen to distribute dry biscuits and buttermilk to the kids. Vasyok came to my unit with a box full of biscuits and a crate with buttermilk containers. He unloaded that in the lounge and then asked if he could talk to me in private for a second. There was some commotion—kids didn’t want biscuits or something—but I left Inka to handle it. We stepped outside and he led me to the bushes. There, he looked around and started unbuttoning his shirt. I was about to yell ‘What’re you doing!’ but he took out a long newspaper-wrapped package tucked under his belt. ‘This is for you,’ he said. The package had a faint smell of garlic, and something else, something smoky—my stomach rumbled.