Forty Rooms

1. Bathroom

The bathroom is the first place to emerge from the haze of nonbeing. It is cramped and smells sweet and changes from time to time. When the world outside hardens with dark and cold, the sky-blue tiles grow icy and sting my naked soles, but the pipes vibrate in a low, comforting hum and the water is hot and delightful; I dive into it with a heedless splash, rushing to slide into soapsuds up to my chin before the prickle of goose bumps overtakes me. Then the world swells stuffy and bright, and now the coolness of the floor feels nice, but the pipes lie chilled and inert; I watch the stream from a just-boiled teakettle hit the cold water inside the plastic bucket before I climb gingerly into the empty tub and wait for the sponge to dribble lukewarm rivulets down my back.

Most evenings the hands that touch me are the ones I know best, light and gentle, with a delicate ring on one finger and fingernails lovely and pink like flower petals. With the hands comes a voice, a soft, quiet voice that sings to me—though the songs themselves sound sad. Other times, the hands are harder, their fingers thick and blunt, the fingernails cut short, almost to the quick, one finger squeezed tight by a plain golden band that seems far too small for it; but these hands are never rough, and I like them just as much, not least because I am less used to them and I feel curious, and also because the voice of the blunter hands does not sing but tells jokes. The voice is firm at the edges, and the jokes are loud, large with mooing roosters and oinking cats, and a naughty gnome who comes only on Sundays to talk of messy meals and chamber pots and other things equally funny and gross, and I laugh and laugh until bubbles spurt out of my nose.

But sometimes, rarely, the hands are different—large, loose-skinned, and bony, smelling of smoke, their long fingers stiff, their joints like the bark of the old tree by the swing set in the courtyard. These hands move with an odd, crablike grace, barely touching the sponge, forgetting why they are there, emitting a faint clatter and jingle as they alight on the side of the tub; openmouthed with amazement, I watch a bracelet of pink oval stones slide up and down the withered wrist, each stone carved with a pale woman’s face, thin and elegant, glowing from within. And the voice, like the hands, is withered and straying; and it does not sing, and it does not laugh—it tells stories instead.

The passing of seasons, another winter giving way, another summer cresting, brings with it Grandmother’s yearly visit. I find myself waiting for the stories above all else.

They never have the same beginnings—no matter how much I beg for some half-remembered tale, Grandmother will not repeat herself—but they all lead to the same place, a hidden kingdom of manifold marvels. The kingdom is reached in a hundred different ways, though few ever gain entrance to it. Some stumble upon it after a lifelong search, having wandered through treacherous forests and climbed snowy mountains, while others are plunged there headlong, without any warning, without expectation, having tasted of a strange drink or chased a chance shadow around the corner or stared for a moment too long into the mirror. (One little girl with the same name as mine arrives in the kingdom wet and wrapped in a towel: she is taking a bath when she gets swept down the drain.) The kingdom is home to amazing creatures and things—candle flames that have run away from their candles, warring armies of spoons and forks, flocks of traveling belfry bells, a beautiful blind fairy, a mouse who dreams only of dragons, a knight who has lost his horse—and all the creatures ceaselessly travel along the kingdom’s many paths, some straight and simple, others twisted and full of dark adventure, all winding their way toward the kingdom’s secret heart. There, at the center of the world, where all the paths converge, grows a wondrous tree whose branches touch the skies, and there, by its vast ancient roots, the creatures halt and wait—wait for the leaves to fall.

“And why do they want those leaves so much?” I ask, as I always do. “Are they made of gold?”

“They aren’t gold,” my grandmother answers, “but they are precious all the same. One side of each leaf bears a name, and only the person whose name it is can read the words on the leaf’s other side. And only one leaf on the tree has your name on it, so if you aren’t there waiting for it when it falls, you miss it forever.”

“And what words are they, Grandmother?”

“The most important words in the world,” she replies.

“Yes, but what do they say?”

Her fingers click with impatience against the tub’s edge.

“They are different for every person, so I can’t tell you.”

I sink back in the bath. No matter how her tales begin, they always end this way: she will add nothing more. Whenever she starts, I hope that tonight will be different, that tonight she will tell me the rest. But she never does. She is a hundred years old, I think angrily to myself, and she is more stubborn than anyone I know; she likes to hoard her secrets. I sit in the bath willing myself not to cry, the skin of my fingers and toes puckered from being too long in the water. My grandmother has forgotten the sponge yet again; she is staring at the tiles above my head, and her pale red-rimmed eyes have that unseeing look I catch from time to time, like the blank eyes of the carved women on her old bracelet. And suddenly I think: Maybe she doesn’t even know how the story ends, maybe she arrived there too late to catch her own leaf.

All at once I feel terribly excited. I look at the drain. Suds are being sucked into its whirlpool, and I glimpse a slice of my pink scrubbed cheek, a corner of my brown eye reflected in its silver curve, and something else too, a tiny elfin face grinning at me, beckoning me closer with a hand like a twig before vanishing in a splash of foam. I decide that right away, without losing another minute, I too will slip down the drain, and ride the soapy waters to the mysterious depths of the hidden kingdom, and brave its crooked paths alongside dragons and spoons, and reach the tree at the heart of the world—and when my leaf falls, I will be there to read the words and tell everyone about it. But immediately I grow sad as I remember that I’m only four years old—four years and three quarters—and I don’t yet know how to read.

My mother sticks her head in the door. I feel a draft of cold air.

“Time for her milk,” she says. “Mama, you’re sitting on her towel.”

My grandmother stands up with slow, injured dignity and sails out of the bathroom.

2. Mother’s Bedroom

One evening in December, I enter my mother’s bedroom to wish her good night, but my mother is not there. A mermaid is sitting on her bed instead. I know she is a mermaid right away, even though I am unable to make out the tail under the folds of her narrow skirt of the faintest gray color, the color of morning mist above the waters of our dacha pond. She is bending, her tresses long and pale, over my mother’s jewelry box, which she holds open in her lap; I can see the silky fabric of her strange skirt stretched tight over her knees beneath the lacquered edge of the box.

I feel enchanted by the presence of the mermaid, but also deeply grieved. I love my mother’s jewelry box. It is made of shiny black wood, and on its lid two pearly girls with wide belts and sticks in their hair fan a third girl, while all around them tiny trees twinkle with rosy blossoms in a walled-in garden. It is the one object in this room filled with wonders that I long to possess, but I am never allowed to touch it. On my last birthday, when I turned six, I begged and begged until, with a small, patient sigh, my mother pulled open a drawer, maneuvered the box from under the layers of folded nightgowns and stockings, and let me marvel at the princesslike sparkling for a brief minute; but she did not show me anything closely. It makes me sad to find a stranger—even if she is beautiful, even if she is a mermaid—handling that box as though she owns it.

I am about to tiptoe out when the mermaid looks up and beckons me toward her.

“Do you want me to show you?” she asks.

Her voice is like my mother’s, but her eyes are not: they too are green, but their shifting depths lack the familiar misty softness; they glitter instead with joyous, hard brilliance, just like the brilliance I can already see trapped inside the jewelry box.

Now and then there are strange creatures to be stumbled upon in my mother’s bedroom—it is my parents’ bedroom, really, but I have always thought of it as my mother’s alone—yet the mermaid makes me uneasy. She seems almost dangerous, more unpredictable than any of the others, not in the least like the kindly plump woman in the oval painting above the armchair who rambles about Brussels lace and satin slippers at teatime, or the two yellow-winged fairies who every spring morning slide down the sunbeams onto the dresser to splash in my mother’s perfume bottles, or the man smiling with bright white teeth under a wiry mustache who used to pay afternoon calls the summer I was five. (I liked him best of all, because once or twice, just before he gently pushed me out into the hallway and locked the door behind me, he gave me a chocolate bar in a crinkly wrapper with unfamiliar letters on the side, and also because he possessed magic powers and was invisible to everyone but me. “That child has such a wild imagination,” my mother said, laughing gaily, after I mentioned the visitor with the mustache one night at supper, and my father laughed too, though not as gaily, and ruffled my hair. I felt offended at not being believed, but more than that, I regretted letting go of something that had been mine and mine alone: I found that I liked having secrets all my own. After that, I never said anything to anyone about the things I saw in my mother’s bedroom.)

The mermaid has already forgotten about me. She is staring into the box, moving her fingers over the velvet insides, as if remembering some tune she once played on a piano. I sit down on the edge of the bed, elated but wary. The mermaid begins to speak, but she is not speaking to me; she caresses this or that ring, this or that pendant, and tells long, winding tales I cannot follow.

“These cupid earrings,” she says, “have been in the family for four generations. Your great-grandmother received them as a sign of special favor from the tsar’s youngest uncle. He had them presented to her the night she premiered as Dulcinea. She had gifts from many men, of course, but this was the only thing she held on to when forced to sell off all her possessions in the civil war. One wonders why she kept them. She struggled so to feed her children, and the earrings would have brought in bread enough to last a month. But women in this family have always had their mysteries…” She pauses to take a sip from a nearly empty glass of dark red liquid on my mother’s nightstand. “Of course, it was well after her Dulcinea days that she married your great-grandfather and had your grandfather and the twins. But could there have been more to the Grand Duke anecdote? No one to ask about it now—all that’s left are two enamel cupids, half a rumor, and maybe, just maybe, a thimble of royal blood.”

“Is this my great-grandmother the ballet dancer?” I ask, confused. “And who is Dulcinea? And why is there blood in a thimble?” But she does not answer, only lightly trails her fingers over the golden fire imprisoned in the box, and goes on talking.

“And see this ring? See how the emerald is uncut, rough and enormous, like some green, misshapen bird’s egg? This came from an ancient icon, from one of those priceless frames set with precious stones big as rocks. So many were vandalized in the revolution, hacked apart, hidden by drunks in rotting village coffers. Your grandfather got the emerald at the end of the war, traded it from another soldier for a length of smoked sausage and a box of German sweets, then kept it for years in an empty saltshaker. Eventually he had it set for Elena, your grandmother—a simple pewter setting, he could afford nothing more.”

“What does ‘vandalized’ mean?” I ask. “When was the revolution?”

In the circle of soft yellow lamplight the jewels inside their dark nests shift with hidden, treacherous fire. The mermaid takes another sip of the red liquid, tipping the glass into her mouth so abruptly that some drops spill onto the blanket. In profile she seems just like my mother, but every time she moves, every time she speaks, every time she looks past me, not hearing my questions, I am filled anew with the knowledge that she is not.

“And this bracelet I’ve had since I was a child. It reminds me of all the mornings spent searching for bits of amber in the sand after the tide.”

I am pleased to hear something I understand at last. My mother’s family came from the Baltics; she grew up spending summers on the Latvian coast. It must have been there that she met the mermaid. I was wrong to ever find the mermaid dangerous, I think with relief. As I shift closer to her gleaming gray flanks, I am startled into pity by a sudden thought. “But isn’t the Baltic Sea too cold in winter? What do you do if it turns to ice?”

She drops the bracelet back into the box and glances down at me, her metallic green gaze slipping over my face with a swift, cold touch I can almost feel on my skin.

“But that’s enough, you are too little to care about the past,” she says, and while her tone seems light, the chill of the faraway sea is there, underneath.

My pity abandons me, as does my relief. Once again I am nervous.

She stands up, balancing the box in one hand and the glass in the other.

“Come to the mirror with me.”

Together we leave the reassuring circle of light and move into the graying dusk. The oval mirror over the dresser is curly and gilded. On evenings such as this, wintry and still, I like to come and look at my mother’s room nestled into its quiet pool. The mirror room is smaller than the real one and has no angles, filled instead with a fuzzy, muted, familiar warmth, so much like my mother’s soft presence. But now the two of us are reflected in it, me in my short white nightgown with green parrots, the mermaid a slim undulation of shadow behind my shoulder, and the mirror room seems different, cold and sharp-edged and mysterious, exciting in a new way, like something marvelous yet harmful, something forbidden, like—like a lollipop I once stole from the kitchen and devoured in crunching, glistening half licks, half bites in bed at night, under the covers, without brushing my teeth afterward.

“Here, let’s try this on you, this was your father’s gift when you were born, it will be yours someday,” the mermaid says as she sets the jewelry box on the dresser and picks up a chain from which dangles a prim little cross of delicate pearls. But I have just spied something else—something I like so much more. Reaching out, I close my fingers on a necklace of small round stones, each kernel of blood-red glow in its own frame of darkness.

“This,” I say. “I want this.”

Something harsh and hurt flashes in the mermaid’s eyes, and when she takes the necklace out of my hand, her movement is not gentle: she rips the strand through my fingers, scratching my palm, surprising me into a little cry. I expect her to throw the necklace back into the box, and slam it shut, and push me away; but a flush grows in her face instead, and suddenly she smiles—the first smile I see, not a kind smile, but oh, so beautiful. She smiles her strange smile, at once brittle and hard, and lays the necklace against the parrots on my gown. In the shadows of the mirror it glints stark and red, like a gash I got on my knee when I was four and fell, running, on a piece of glass.

“A friend gave it to me,” the mermaid says in a defiant voice, as if challenging someone. “A long time ago.”

We are silent then, both of us looking at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the lady in the oval painting purse her lips and turn away with disapproval, but I continue to stare at my reflection, and after a while I too begin to seem different, as if the silvery, dangerous, shimmering sea were rising within my being. Around us the evening deepens, the lamp by the bed glows brilliant and distant, and slowly the room is transformed into an immense jewelry box, the blue velvet of the night enveloping us tightly, and the mermaid’s deceiving eyes are emeralds now, and the congealed drop at the bottom of her glass a ruby, and on the dresser, just between the tray of portly perfume bottles and the clock that always shows the wrong time, there rests a treasure bright and dark, an unfamiliar, thrilling treasure filled to the brim with stories I do not yet understand, stories of guilty gifts, impoverished dancers, ruined churches, wars and revolutions, the grown-up, momentous things of pain and beauty and time.

From behind the door a sound bursts out, mechanical and persistent, like the tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker, and I swing around, startled, then realize what it is. When I turn back, the mermaid is gone, just like that, and my mother is fastening her old gray robe around her waist. “Your father is working, we must be quiet,” she says in a near whisper as she leans over me and fumbles with the clasp of the necklace under my hair. Stupidly I watch while she neatens up the earrings and bracelets in their plush compartments, closes the lid with care, slides the box back into the drawer. “And it’s time for you to go to bed.”

I want to tell her about the mermaid, to ask her a question, but something stops me—whether the flat intonation of her strangely loosened voice, or else the memory of the secret, gemlike place where things seemed at once more wondrous and more frightening than in real life. I walk to the door in silence. From the threshold I glance back at the room, and it is as always, warm and cozy and small, full of pillows and blankets and smiling ladies in oval frames, on both sides of the oval mirror. I am comforted to think that the sinister treasure is once again only a wooden box of pretty trinkets under the woolen stockings in the dresser, comforted to see my mother moving her tender, steady hands over the covers of the bed, smoothing them in a gesture I have seen hundreds of times.

I prefer things this way, I tell myself. Really, I do.

“Go to sleep, my love,” says my mother, looking up briefly, not meeting my eyes. “Your father will be wanting his tea now.”

As I walk into the chill of the hallway, I think: But maybe I don’t.

3. Father’s Study

It is just after dinner on Thursday, time for our weekly Culture Hour. My father and I are seated at his desk, he in his old armchair of cherry-colored leather, cracked along the middle, I by his side, kneeling on a stool I have lugged in from the kitchen.

On the radio, turned down low, a concerto is playing.

“Vivaldi, La Follia,” my father says after listening for a moment. “Appropriate in view of today’s subject.”

He reaches for the stack of books beside his typewriter and selects a volume on Italian Renaissance painting, which he opens to a marked page; like so many books in his study, it is bristling with slivers of green, blue, and pink paper. My father makes the bookmarks himself by neatly cutting multicolored index cards into narrow strips, perfectly straight, though he never uses a ruler (he has an uncanny ability to draw straight lines), then jots down a heading or a quotation along the strip in his meticulous, minuscule hand. The colors are not chosen by accident, either; they follow some complicated scheme of his, whose principles always escape me. As he pulls the volume closer and carefully sets the blue bookmark down on his immaculate desk, next to the framed photograph of my mother, I tilt my head sideways until I can read the words written along it: “Ideal city.”

“This evening,” says my father, “we will talk about the Renaissance concept of the ‘ideal city.’ The concept itself did not originate in the Renaissance. The first man to study it in depth was the Greek philosopher Plato—you remember, we discussed him last month. Now Plato, in his Republic—”

For the first minute or two, I do nothing but luxuriate in the smell of the study. It is my favorite smell in the world, a noble smell that I like to imagine as deep, quiet, burgundy-hued, though in fact it is not one smell but a mixture of smells, all equally marvelous: the sharp smell of shiny art volumes, a bit like wet autumn leaves; the softer, more complex smell of thick treatises on history and philosophy whose desiccated leather spines crowd the shelves and between whose pages reside entire flocks of shy dust sprites that come out to play at dusk—I used to watch them for hours when I was younger—the metallic, oily, inky smell of my father’s mechanical typewriter, which, even when given a rare hour of rest, seems to radiate the heat of its passionate staccatos; the sweet ghostly smell of my father’s aromatic tobacco, which a friend brought from somewhere far away and which he smokes only on special occasions; I know he keeps the dwindling pouch in the middle drawer of his desk, just above the drawer with a fascinating wealth of compartmentalized pens, erasers, and paper clips, just below the drawer that is always locked…

My thoughts return from their wanderings, and I study the book opened before me. There is one large reproduction on the page to the left, and three smaller ones on the page to the right, with thin rivulets of text snaking between them. They are views of various cities—or perhaps it is all one city, for, while the painted vistas are different, all four are united by a certain sameness, a kind of stiff geometrical precision, beautiful and cold. The skies are flat, distant, and pale, devoid of clouds and winds; there are no curving streets, no cozy nooks, only vast, many-arched, many-columned expanses of architectural perfection in the full glare of brilliant noonday, with not a shadow, not a blade of grass, not a flower to be seen anywhere, the ground itself an intricate pattern of pastel-tinted marble diamonds and ovals in majestic perspective. The orderly chessboards of empty spaces, the magnificent heights of deserted staircases, the sleek façades all seem unsettling, even vaguely threatening, as if something roaring and monstrous is just poised to erupt into the sunlit silence from somewhere below the horizon.

I wait until my father finishes his explanation.

“So, if this city is so ideal,” I say, “then where are all the people?”

My father thoughtfully chews on his beard, then puts on his reading glasses, and makes a careful inspection of the paintings.

“There are some people here,” he says at last, pointing.

“No, those are statues. Or if they aren’t, they are the size of ants and have no faces, so they don’t count. There is a dot moving here, which looks like a girl my age wearing pajamas, but at this distance I can’t tell for sure—it may just be a smudge.”

“Well,” my father says, “perhaps all the people are inside. They are sitting around drinking wine—moderate quantities of well-diluted wine, mind you—and discussing philosophy or creating masterpieces or whatnot. This is a perfect city, after all, so they are content wherever they are, indoors or outdoors, see?”

I look again; but the evenly spaced windows are dark and dead, and the doorways gape blindly. A while back I discovered a delightful secret—some paintings possess a deeper layer of life below their still surface: if I concentrate, then glance away quickly, I can often catch things moving out of the corner of my eye, women powdering their noses above the stiff lacy collars, cherubs tickling each other, cardinals relaxing their glum faces to yawn or sneeze.

I am certain that there is no hidden life lurking here.

“There aren’t any people,” I say stubbornly. “There aren’t even any cats or dogs. And look, there are no doors anywhere, just these open passageways. People wouldn’t live in houses that have no doors.”

“Ah, but that’s where you are wrong,” he says, smiling. “If you listened to me with more attention, you would see that everyone in the ideal city is kind and honest, and there is no need for locks and chains.” He takes off his glasses, pulls out a folded square of suede always ready in his pocket, and begins to wipe the thick lenses, thoroughly, with deliberation, as he does everything, before putting the glasses back in their velveteen case. “But perhaps you are right and there are no people there,” he adds, no longer smiling. “Perhaps that is really the point. Ideals are all very fine until you start applying them to real life, you see. Just let people into your perfect city, just wait until they make themselves comfortable, and before you know it, well—”

Vivaldi has just stopped playing, and beyond the crackling of the radio void, I can suddenly hear the ticking of the clock on the desk. My father rubs the bridge of his nose in a gesture I know so well, then glances toward the window; I see an odd, stark look cross his face, a look of not quite anger, not quite grief. In the spare darkness of the early-spring night, the enormous construction site across the road is abbreviated to mere grayish hints of fences and sketchy gallows of cranes in the sky, but I know it is there all the same, as it has been throughout the ten years of my life. The rising edifice itself is only a shapeless bulk blotting out the stars. None of us has any idea what it will be when it is completed. “Temple of the People,” my father used to say when I was four or five and pestered him with endless queries.

My father pulls the curtains closed before turning back to me.

“Never mind,” he says briskly, “I’m not afraid to admit a mistake. Perhaps this was not the most fruitful subject for tonight’s discussion. Since you seem to miss people and dogs so much, how about some Fra Angelico? Here, let me show you.”

Once more he leafs through the Renaissance volume. This time the bookmark is pink, and so, I see, are the predominant colors of these new paintings, in which roses bloom, ladies blush, and saints are ruddy with health, all against a background of pink cliffs, red roofs, and churches aglow with sunrises. I am charmed. My father has already begun to speak when, against our custom, I plunge into his steady stream of dates and names with a breathless, out-of-turn question.

“Papa, are houses in Italy really so pink?”

“I suppose it is possible,” he says. “I’m glad you like these. But to continue, in 1436, Fra Angelico moved to Florence, to the new friary of San Marco, and there—”

And there are tiny yellow flowers in the swaying meadows and tiny blue flowers on the hems of the girls’ dresses, and tiny monsters bare their pointy little teeth in the soft swell of harbors, and bells ring, and birds chirp, and everyone, everyone, has a golden halo. A few chubby monks have clumsily dropped a slab of stone onto a writhing blue imp and now stand around with guilty downcast eyes, debating how best to rescue him. A mother sits encumbered by a fat baby in her lap, and as her gaze follows the flights of some great white birds soaring toward the sun on rainbow-colored wings, her sad face brightens with the desire to leave the baby behind and fly away with them. These paintings are like fairy tales, and while the stories do not all have happy endings—I notice a number of heads freshly detached from their bodies, floating in puddles of what looks like my mother’s strawberry preserves—they make me giddy with the premonition that somewhere, somewhere out there, a place so vivid, so alive, really exists.

“Haven’t you been to Italy?” I interrupt again, too excited to listen.

My father coughs shortly.

“No,” he says.

I tear my eyes away from the book. “You haven’t been to Italy?”

“No.”

“But you’ve been to Greece.”

“No, not to Greece either,” he says.

“To France, then? And England?”

“No.”

“But—to Egypt? China? India?”

Silent now, he shakes his head. I stare past him, at the lacquered spines of the art volumes lined up in their neat alphabetical rows on the shelves, as I struggle to find the right words for the enormity of my disappointment.

“But… but you’ve told me about all these places. I thought… Haven’t you ever wanted to go there?”

“Well now, you see,” he begins, then clears his throat, and again says, “Well, you see,” and falls silent. The telephone rings in the hallway. We listen to the rush of my mother’s slippers slapping toward the sound, the lilt of her muffled voice. In the next moment the door of the study is cracked open.

My mother does not come in.

“Sorry to interrupt, it’s Orlov,” she says from the corridor. She is cupping her hand over the receiver, the cord stretched as far as it will go. “He wants to discuss tomorrow’s seminar, but I’ve told him you’re busy and will call him back in—what shall I say, half an hour?”

“No need, I’ll take it, we are finished,” my father answers, as he closes the book and rises from his armchair. “We must do better on our choice of subject next week. Perhaps Andrei Rublev?” He speaks the last words already past the threshold, picking up the telephone. “Yes, hello?”

Stunned, I look at the clock on his desk. There are still twenty minutes left of the Culture Hour. He has never done this before. All at once I am certain it’s because I interrupted him so much, and I feel chastened.

4. Kitchen

I fall asleep to bursts of laughter behind the wall to my right and wake up, hours later, with the laughter, louder and looser, behind the wall to my left; the guests have moved from the study to the kitchen. I lie dozing for a few minutes, half traversing an arched bridge between the misty shores of some dream, half listening to the hubbub of blurred voices. The loudest of them, which I recognize as Orlov’s, appears to be propounding something, while two or three others burble up in the background whenever Orlov pauses for breath. The women, though, are still in the study: when I roll over in bed and press my ear to the wall, I hear a snippet of my mother’s exclamation, a saxophone wail from the record player turned down low.

The men must have gone to the kitchen to refill their glasses.

The dream bridge recedes farther into the fog as I realize I am terribly thirsty; this evening my mother let me stay up with the guests until well past my bedtime, snacking on pickled mushrooms and cheese with garlic. My thirst makes me more and more awake, until, giving up on sleep altogether, I toss off the blanket, lower my feet to the floor, and wait without turning on the light, hoping that the men will leave the kitchen at last.

It must be very late, for the street is quiet, and the ceiling, undisturbed by the flares of passing headlights, lies indistinct in a pool of shadow. On nights when I cannot sleep I stare at it for what seems like hours, populating it with the geometry of imaginary constellations, with meandering trajectories of grotesque creatures born in the deeper pockets of darkness and fleshed out by dribbles of streetlamp illumination. But I am too thirsty to imagine anything at present, and the voices continue to crisscross one another in the kitchen, until my throat feels so dry it is painful to swallow. After another minute I hunt down my slippers, nudge open my door, and walk into the corridor.

The kitchen is flooded with light. I see the men’s backs—my father’s, Orlov’s, Borodinsky’s, two or three others’; they are crowded around Orlov, looking over his shoulder as he speaks. I am about to march over the threshold, making straight for the teakettle, when Orlov’s weighty tone, with none of his usual clowning, makes me pause. He has begun to declaim a poem, as he often does at my parents’ gatherings, but it is not one of his own humorous ditties with glib little rhymes—this poem has a measure so solemn, so stark, that after a moment’s listening I feel with absolute certainty: These words are not meant for my ears. No one has noticed me yet, so I take a stealthy step back, slip into the unlit bathroom, push my father’s robe out of the way, and stand straining my hearing, one eye glued to the crack in the door, my heart beating wildly as if I am in the presence of something vastly more important than myself.

The kitchen is now so hushed that I can hear Orlov’s voice with clarity, as I would if he were whispering in my ear, though he is reading quietly, under his breath—he seems almost embarrassed to be saying the words aloud.

He shuffles the pages. “And this,” he says.

His voice trails off, and then everyone else is silent too. From the corner into which I am wedged, I cannot catch a glimpse of anyone’s face—I see only the indistinct bobbing of gray and brown jackets, a patch on the elbow of my father’s old sweater, a flash of light on a typescript page in Orlov’s hand, and, on the wall behind them, directly in my field of vision, our old cuckoo clock, my late grandmother’s long-ago present. It is almost two in the morning. I will be in trouble if I am discovered.

Borodinsky speaks, so loudly that I start.

“This will never be published,” he announces, “and no wonder.”

“Oh, I don’t know about ‘never,’” says Orlov.

“Not in your lifetime, at any rate,” insists Borodinsky.

“I fear I must disagree,” my father says. An argument commences, or perhaps only a discussion; my father’s friends often sound belligerent and cheerful at the same time, and I am not always able to tell the difference between the two. Soon they are shouting—about the times changing or not changing, the new Party leader, some underground art show someone attended in someone’s basement, some newspaper article someone is waving about. My father attempts to stride back and forth as he talks, but our kitchen is too small for striding, and he is forced to stand with the others in an agitated clump, all of them crammed together, interrupting one another now, arms jerking, shoulders shrugging. I find it hard to listen. I feel that the words read by Orlov only minutes before have left an emptiness behind them, a dark, chilled hush as after the passage of something powerful, something immense—like the profound stillness after the tolling of a deep bell, like the blackness pooling behind your eyelids after you have gazed straight at the sun—and it needs to be acknowledged by everyone, yet is ignored. It occurs to me that they sound somehow relieved, as though glad to have dispelled the kitchen silence with such boisterous promptness, glad to be debating matters that must be important but seem oddly trivial to me.

I am again aware of my thirst. I wait, my face pressed into my father’s robe; it has preserved faint memories of his tobacco. At two o’clock, darkness yawns in the lacquered façade of our kitchen clock and the cuckoo stumbles out to take two stiff bows, one left, one right; it lost its voice years ago, but I can hear the wooden creaking of its aged joints. Through the crack in the door hinges I see my father’s elbow grow busy as he resumes topping off the guests’ glasses; then they abandon the kitchen and stomp, still arguing, into the corridor. I watch six or seven pairs of well-worn shoes stampede past me, hoping that no one decides to barge into the bathroom. A moment later the study door swings open, Orlov’s wife laughs shrilly, a heedless saxophone trill leaps into the breach, the door closes.

I tiptoe out.

The brightly lit kitchen is deserted, and there, on the table, among the jumble of my mother’s gold-trimmed floral cups, on top of my father’s newspapers, lies a forgotten sheaf of typescript pages. My heart painful in my chest, as if my rib cage has suddenly grown too tight for it, I push the cups and the newspapers aside, gather up the pages, and sit down. The type is blurry, in places almost illegible; this must be the fifth, if not the sixth, carbon copy, and the letters seem precarious and thus doubly precious, as though in imminent danger of dissolving under my very eyes into blots of thinning ink on the brittle surface of rice paper.

“Anna Akhmatova, Requiem,” is written at the top, and, just below:

I read.

A chair creaks, a cough sounds. Blearily, I look up.

A man is sitting across from me at the table.

“I’ve been watching you for the past ten minutes,” he says. “You have quite the ability to tune things out. This too may be of use to you—if, that is, you tune out the right things.”

The dazzling, terrifying, cleansing revelation of the poems releases me slowly.

I frown at the man before me. He is not someone I recognize, though I know my parents’ friends well. His face is handsome—the word “chiseled,” at which I snickered a year or two ago, during my brief Dumas obsession, makes gratifying sense at last—but he is not young, the age of my parents if not older, and the slight hints of heaviness in his jowls, of droopiness in his eyelids, of thinness in the blond hair that he wears too long, make his beauty seem disturbingly marred, unnatural somehow. Like a statue of a god with his nose lopped off, I think—or perhaps with his chin grown double, the marble gone weak and flaccid. All at once I realize I am staring, and I feel flustered.

“You were not here earlier,” I mumble.

“No, I just dropped in for a moment,” he replies, smiling. It is not a warm smile. “So, reading banned poetry in the kitchen in the wee hours of the morning, are we? You’re a poet yourself, are you not?”

“No,” I say curtly. He is studying me, his light eyes piercing. I am not in the habit of being rude to adults. I look down at the pages before me. “That is… I suppose I rhyme things once in a while. When I can’t sleep. Nothing like this.”

“Well, no, of course not,” he agrees, leaning back in his chair. “This kind of thing—it comes much later, and not to everyone.”

Idly he picks up a page from the table.

He recites the lines without once consulting the page before letting it fall back onto the stack. “This weightiness, it has to be earned, and the price is high. Not everyone, you know, is willing to pay the price of immortality.”

I should be in bed, not lingering in the kitchen in my nightgown, memorizing dangerous poetry and talking to strangers, but I speak without thinking, before I can excuse myself and leave. “I thought this hasn’t been published. How can it be immortal if no one can read it?”

“Perceptive but wrong, my dear child. It’s like that tree falling in the forest when no one is around. Rest assured, there are powers that see and hear everything happening in this world. And in any case, aren’t you reading it right now? Manuscripts do not burn, as another immortal once said—though you are probably too young to have read him just yet. How old are you, anyway?”

The jazz music of my parents’ party is coming from somewhere very far away.

“Thirteen.” I lick my dry lips. I realize that I never did get that cup of water. Battalions of smeared glasses have been abandoned in careless disorder near the sink, and from where I sit, an arm’s length away—everything in our kitchen is only an arm’s length away—I can smell the half-honeyed, half-acrid scent of unfinished wine. “The age of Juliet,” I nearly add, but say instead, “I’ll turn fourteen this summer.”

“Oh, you have some time. Not too much time, mind you,” he says airily as he glances at the clock on the wall, and as if on cue the cuckoo creaks, bowing on its perch; it is three in the morning. “Time, you know, is the ultimate limitation placed on man, and you need to be supremely aware of your limitations if you desire to become a poet. Of all the different kinds of art, you see, poetry is the one most attuned to man’s condition, and therefore the most noble and the most demanding of them all. Just as men struggle to transcend the inherent limits of geography, history, and biology to find the meaning of life, so poets strive to transcend the inherent limits of language, meter, and structure to find beauty and truth. And just as life wouldn’t have meaning without death, so poetry wouldn’t have its sublime power outside the prison of its form.” He nods at the manuscript before me: “Which makes it even more powerful when you combine the limitations of language with the repressions of history. But the opposite is true as well. Poetry diminishes in times of plenty, loses its urgency and hunger, grows flabby. People of each age get just the poetry they deserve.”

As he continues to talk, I begin to feel dizzy with the sense of utter strangeness and, at the same time, a kind of novel, intoxicating freedom. The kitchen has ceased to be the familiar place where I eat rushed breakfasts on school mornings while my mother waters her windowsill herbs and my father fumes at the day’s headlines. In this new place, at this unearthly, in-between hour, the chilled, crisp sweetness of an April night enters through the cracked window like some barely audible promise, and souls of banished words are resurrected in guilt-ridden whispers, in paling print, in a stranger’s languid, knowing drawl, to hang in the air, dark and light and eternal, mixing with the heady smell of spring, swelling my chest with some immense, nameless longing.

The man with the handsome face of a ruined god is watching me closely.

“Do you want to be immortal?” he asks.

“What?”

“It’s a simple question and a simple matter. Do you want to be immortal?”

I want to say: I don’t know what you mean. I open my mouth.

“Yes.”

He smiles again—a real, warm smile this time, though somehow cruel in spite of its warmth. All at once I think: If I lean forward ever so slightly, his breath will brush my face. I feel my skin growing hot. I do not lean forward.

The man stands, his movements fluid with loose, predatory grace. I am shocked to see bare feet protruding from the frayed cuffs of his pants.

“Well, time for a rude awakening,” he says. “I could take a dramatic leap off the windowsill, but something tells me you are not easily impressed with clichés, so let me make a more subtle exit. Time waits for no man, memento mori, and all that.”

The clock creaks on the wall, and as I look up, I see the cuckoo taking its three bows, one left, one right, one straight, which seems impossible, since it was three o’clock some ten minutes ago, unless the hands have started going backward, and then the cuckoo calls out “Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” in the hoarse voice of my earliest childhood memories, and the man with the face of a thwarted angel jauntily sidesteps the bird and disappears inside the clock, which is when I know that I am asleep, just seconds before I know that I am awake because my father is shaking me.

“And what is the meaning of this?” my father asks with severity.

My head has fallen on the Requiem typescript. I can hear Orlov roaring with laughter in the doorway.

5. Dacha Bedroom

My fingers are still sooty from the bonfire, and as I pick up my cup, I watch them leave faint smudges on the trellised flowers. We use simple cups at the dacha as a rule, thick and earth-colored, which remain rattling in the cupboard after we return to the city; but this morning my mother packed her best porcelain into starched nests of napkins, to be brought to the country along with cold chicken cuts and her famed apple pie.

I notice Olga studying the cups as well.

“Pretty,” she says. “Are they old?”

I nod. “Nineteenth-century. Mama collects them.”

“It suits you, you know. Ballet dancers, gypsy ancestors, family jewels, old porcelain. You’ll be reading by candlelight next.”

I laugh. “Are you saying I’m anachronistic?”

“I was thinking romantic. But I suppose it comes to much the same thing.”

“I see what you mean. A seventeen-year-old maiden sitting on the balcony at dusk, drinking tea made with water drawn from the village well.”

“With a full moon rising,” she says.

“With a nightingale singing in the bushes,” I rejoin.

“With facilities in the yard,” she says.

“Oh, now you’ve gone and ruined it! That’s hardly romantic.”

“But true,” she says, laughing also.

“Which is my point precisely. Truth can’t be very romantic.”

“Well, in any case. Nice cups. Sorry about the fingerprints.”

For a while I sip the tea in silent contentment. I can feel the dacha’s peaceful darkness behind my back. After driving here in the morning, laden with provisions, my parents have gone back to the city, to return three days hence; this lull of solitude is my graduation present of sorts, a foretaste of adulthood, a short spell of freedom between two anxiety-ridden stretches of last-minute cramming: the high school exams ended last week, the university entrance exams will commence next month. The June evening is blue and clear, the roofs at the end of our unpaved street stand out with crisp precision against the pale breadth of fields merging with the pale depth of the sky, and the world feels marvelously light, and I feel marvelously light too, as if I might take off at any instant, sail away in the small boat of the balcony into that luminous distance, the sweet smells of grasses and clover, the exhilarating expanse of the never-ending horizon—and splash through the slight chill in the air as through the waters of some cool, delightful stream, and catch the bright yellow moon like a leaping fish in my hand… But the balcony is moored to the rickety house by tenacious tendrils of ivy, my mother’s precious porcelain cup feels dangerously fragile in my fingers, and Olga is talking again.

“You know, I almost wish we hadn’t burned the old history notebooks. Chemistry is one thing, but all those transcriptions of Marx’s Capital, all those triumphs of the five-year plans—twenty years from now no one will believe it without the physical evidence.”

I can still smell the fire in the air. I planned it for a long time, for months, at first merely groaning in the school corridors between classes, thinking how good it would be to forget everything meaningless once and for all, wipe it all away, burn it to ashes—until slowly my futile frustration gave way to a secret purpose. This morning I stuffed my bag full to bursting with years’ worth of accumulated assignments, tests, compositions, a decade of dead knowledge, and later sat by the fire pit behind the house for nearly two hours. Olga joined me halfway through the destruction, and we took turns mockingly declaiming this or that sentence, crumpling this or that equation into a ball, laughing with theatrical abandon as we fed the flames. I had waited for the day to condense into evening, so the fire would blaze with fierceness against the sky. I had also waited for my parents to leave. I had not told them. My mother would have worried that a stray spark might burn down the house. My father would have disapproved on general principles: he believed in the preservation of history, personal or otherwise.

“No regrets on my part,” I say now, addressing my father’s reproachful voice in my head. “I avenged myself for all the time killed.”

“Still, they might have come in useful someday,” Olga interjects thoughtfully. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll write a book about it when I’m old—say, when I’m forty. My childhood in the dark Soviet times. Torments of an artistic soul in the period of oppression. That sort of thing.” She giggles. “Or not. At the very least I could have shown those horrors to my offspring: See, children, don’t complain, your life could have been so much worse!”

“Thinking rather ahead, are you not?”

“Well, children are a given, I guess. Or don’t you want them?”

After a decade of sharing dreams, fears, and long, bedbound stretches of illness, we frequently borrow each other’s quirks of speech and our facial expressions likewise often mirror each other’s, but Olga’s eyes appear more focused than mine, and there is more resolve, more ambitious drive, in her face, in the thin lips that she purses with firmness. She always knows just what she wants before I am even aware of the choices. I do not know whether or not I want children; the notion seems irrelevant to me, and I have not given it much consideration. What I do not want, I think with sudden ferocity, is a small life—a life of mundane concerns, of fulfilled expectations, of commonplaces and banalities, of children’s sore throats, of grandmother’s apple pies, of fussy nineteenth-century porcelain—a life within four walls. I set down my cup, carefully but quickly; the streaks of soot, I notice, have dimmed the gilt a little.

“I would like to go to other places,” I say with a vehemence that startles me. “New places. Strange places. Not to have a house anywhere but just travel from place to place, smell it, taste it, describe it, remember it all, then move on…”

“I want to go to America,” Olga announces. “I could work there when I get my journalism degree. Do you ever wonder where you’ll be at forty?”

I understand that one is expected to muse upon one’s future on this momentous threshold of adulthood, but all the same, this predictable question makes me feel vaguely depressed, as if casting into instant doubt the smoky, bright, liberating hour by the fire, robbing it of color and life, flattening it into some artificial rite of passage indulged in solely for the sake of future reminiscing: Ah yes, I too was young once, I too was full of rebellion and revelry, I laughed free and wild by the fire, I dreamed of glory on a moonlit summer night… For as I sit on my beloved dacha balcony, watching the translucent June light tiptoe deeper into shadows, listening to the whistle of a faraway train, breathing in the aroma of lindens, I catch myself cataloguing the world around me, coining it into pocket-size verbal snapshots (the “soft dusk”—the “melancholy train”—the “dizzying smells”), to be retrieved at a convenient future date as a prepackaged nostalgia exhibit, or worse, as well-worn currency for some insipid poem.

All at once I am chilled by the gap widening precipitously between the present moment and my experience of it. Has life somehow, without my noticing, become its own paling reflection in a self-conscious mirror, its own stilted paraphrase on a dry page? It may be only an inevitable symptom of maturity, this politely disappointing sense of distance, this perception of the world at second hand, through words alone—but if so, I do not wish to grow up.

Forcefully I stand up, brush the crumbs off my dress.

“Time to bring out the telescope,” I say. “It’s grown dark enough.”

The telescope is a small handheld model my father gave me on my fourteenth birthday; it remains my most treasured possession. I unscrew its plastic cap, gently rub the lens with a square of cloth, and lift it to my eye. The black fringe of leaves and the indistinct celestial shimmer beyond slide across my vision in a swift blur. As I lean over the balcony railing, training the telescope on this or that quadrant of the sky, Olga rattles off the names of stars and constellations.

“Vega, Deneb, Altair,” she pronounces as she sketches the Summer Triangle with deft movements of her wrist, one, two, three. “But to be honest, I don’t like looking at the sky, it makes me feel small. I imagine myself as a tiny dot in a sprawling landscape of a monstrous country on a spinning globe floating like a minuscule speck in a freezing ocean of stars… Brrr!”

She guides the telescope down, lower, lower, until it is level with the road; then she laughs. “Hey, look, they’re having a party over on that terrace. You know, this thing is more powerful than I thought. See your boy pouring wine into three, no, four glasses?”

I attempt to shift the telescope away. “He is not my boy.”

“Fine, your neighbor, then, if you prefer, Alesha, Serezha, whatever his name is, I thought you liked him.”

“It’s Tolya, as you well know. And I don’t like him, I hardly know him. We just went for a walk one time last summer, that’s all.”

I do my best to appear nonchalant, but, as so often, I am plunged into remembering that August darkness striped with denser shadows of lampposts, and the heaps of wild roses hanging over the fences on both sides of the village dirt road, their sun-warmed smells drifting across our path like shy sweet ghosts, and our steps, in perfect, effortless harmony, and our awkward absence of words, for what one talked about with older boys—or any boys—I had no idea. As we turned into our street, his hand found mine, and its feel was big, dry, and nice, not in the least like those sweaty adolescent hands I imagined when overhearing the popular girls whisper to one another in the school hallways. But already we were approaching my gate, and there, in the cone of scanty light, under the soundless whirlwind of frantic moths, the stocky shadow of my father paced the road, three steps to the left, three steps to the right, waiting for me, though it was not yet ten o’clock, though I had never been late before. Anatoly’s hand let go of mine, and the next day the summer ended without warning, for my mother had fallen ill and we had to leave for the city; and I did not know Anatoly’s phone number or, indeed, his last name.

“I know!” Olga announces brightly. “Let’s go over there.”

I am shocked by the idea. “No, no, we shouldn’t. We aren’t invited.”

“That doesn’t matter, they’ll be glad to have us, you’ll see.”

“No, no, I’d rather stay here. But—you can go if you want to.”

And as I say it, I already feel a chill of dawning excitement at the thought that she is about to talk me into doing something so wild, so unexpected.

“Really? You wouldn’t mind?” She sets the telescope down at once and begins to hunt for the powder compact borrowed from my mother, then, coming upon it, inspects her lips for stray crumbs. “I’ll be back soon, I promise. You’re sure you don’t mind?”

Snapping the compact shut, she glances back at me.

“I don’t mind,” I say after the briefest of moments. “I’m… tired anyway.”

As her steps fade away into nothing on the wooden stairs, the night reverts to its transparent silence; and so sharp, so bitter, is the taste of solitude in my mouth that I find myself wishing for the comforting warmth of my receding childhood, for my parents’ habitual presence. Only after a time do I realize that being alone here and now, on this dizzying edge of the unknown, is to me a happiness deeper, a happiness more pure, than any companionship could ever be. I clear out the saucers, rub the fingerprints off the smudged cup, then, telescope in hand, return to the balcony. The night embraces me, cool and endless, and above me the stars are tiny holes in the darkness through which the light of eternity is pouring out. I can almost sense primordial stardust flowing through my veins. People are forever telling me that stars make them feel small, and I always nod noncommittally and wonder at the stuffy confinement of their minds.

Stars make me feel vast.

I think of the day at the dacha, three summers ago, when my father gave me the telescope. “We’ll try it right after nightfall,” he told me, “though the best time to look at the stars is at three in the morning.”

“So let’s do it at three in the morning,” I said.

“But how will you wake up?” he asked, smiling. “We have no alarm here.”

“If I wake up, do you promise not to send me back to bed? Will you teach me the constellations?”

“All right,” he said with a shrug; for of course he did not foresee the need to ever keep his promise.

That night, when I opened my eyes, my room lay quiet and gray, shifting with odd predawn shadows, creaking with mysterious half-sounds. Sitting up in bed, I groped for the light switch. The clock above the armchair read a few minutes to three. As I crept downstairs, pressing the gleaming new telescope to my pajama-clad chest, I felt thrilled by the unfamiliar sense of being awake while all the world slept. The front door was unlocked. My father was out on the veranda, staring into the garden, waiting for me—or so I thought until he turned, and I saw the look of surprise on his face.

“Ha!” he exclaimed, squinting at his watch. “L’exactitude est la politesse des rois. I must say, I’m impressed. Well, come here, come here!”

For the next hour we stood side by side, gazing upward until our necks ached. When the night grew chilly, he draped his old woolen cardigan over my shoulders. He spoke of ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and Andromeda chained to a cliff, and Babylonian stargazers. He quoted early Mayakovsky:

He taught me dozens of sonorous foreign names, which I repeated after him, enchanted. “Do you know, Shakespeare writes somewhere of the futility of astronomical knowledge,” he said at one point. “How does it go, let me see…” He riffled briefly through the index cards of his prodigious memory; he knew entire volumes of poetry by heart. “Ah, yes!

His English was strongly accented but clear. “Magnificent, no? ‘Their shining nights…’” He paused to let the aural afterimage of the words linger in the air. It was so quiet that I imagined I heard a slumbering wagtail ruffling feathers in my favorite apple tree and some nocturnal creature splashing through the forest pond beyond our fence—and involuntarily I strained to catch the sound of the stars circling above in their slow, majestic, infinite river, though I did not know what they should sound like. A remote tinkling of melodious crystals? An unearthly choir of angels? A maddeningly beautiful, maddeningly indistinct poem mumbled into his beard by the unknown, unknowable God? A dry clicking, as of many precise mechanical instruments? A frozen wind howling out of one icy abyss into another?

My father went on: “Personally, as a philosopher of gnosis, I can’t quite agree with the Bard’s sentiment. Our constant desire for deeper, ever more exact knowledge, our urge to find the right names for all the things around us and thus attempt to make the mystery of life accessible somehow—these are prerequisites to being fully human, a part of what makes us know ourselves.”

I had already entered my moody adolescence, the age at which big, bloated words (as I once termed them in a fit of self-mockery)—“soul,” “God,” “truth,” “beauty”—had gotten hold of me with all the urgency of life-and-death questions demanding immediate answers. Ordinarily I would be too embarrassed to speak of these matters to anyone, of course, but that night seemed to belong to a separate, deeper place—a still, hidden pool on whose bottom weightier truths and fuller perceptions had come to settle.

“Papa, do you believe there is any meaning to life?” I blurted out.

“I do not believe,” he said sternly. “I know. The meaning of life—the meaning of a single, individual human life, since I assume that is what you are asking—consists of figuring out the one thing you are great at and then pushing mankind’s mastery of that one thing as far as you are able, be it an inch or a mile. If you are a carpenter, be a carpenter with every ounce of your being and invent a new type of saw. If you are an archaeologist, find the tomb of Alexander the Great. If you are Alexander the Great, conquer the world. And never do anything by half.”

His face, I noticed, was being released by the darkness; the sky was growing pale in the east. He too must have realized it at the same instant, for he stopped talking, and looked at his watch, and snorted into his beard.

“Four-thirty already! Off to bed with you, little sunshine. Oh, and—” His expression had turned somewhat sheepish. “It’s not absolutely necessary for your mother to hear about this, don’t you agree?”

Later I wondered: If he had not been expecting me that night, what was he doing on our veranda at three in the morning?

But mainly, I wondered about the meaning of my life.

For a while I stand on the balcony looking at the stars. A white fleet of corpulent angels passes above the village roofs in a mathematically precise formation; a bat cuts across the light of the closest streetlamp in the jagged movement of a knife slitting a throat. I go inside, hunt down a pen, a blank sheet of paper, and a sturdy volume to prop it on (Hegel’s lectures, as it turns out; books that gravitate to our dacha shelves tend to be of a thick, dry, sadly neglected bent). Returning to my armchair, I curl up in its plush nest and scribble without turning on the lamp—a useful skill I have perfected over countless school nights of pretending to be asleep. My soul feels swollen with my private certainty, immense with my private joy. For this, I know at last, is why I am here: to experience deeply, my senses a heartbeat away from exploding, then take everything I am feeling—the insignificance of being human, the enormity of being human, the intoxication of being young, the ache of being alone, the dizzy thrill of witnessing the steady rotation of the universe, the cozy warmth of a small wooden house teetering on the edge of a vast Russian forest, of an untamed Russian night—yes, take everything I am seeing and hearing and smelling, every dusty book by a forgotten writer on a shelf, every furtive mouse scurrying under the floorboards, every sneeze of the domovoi, our old brownie, sifting through my childhood clothes in the cluttered attic, every nocturnal flower unfurling in the grass, every sound, every color, every fleeting impression—and use the best words I have to convey it all, to pin it all down, to snatch one single moment from the oblivious flow of impersonal time and make it bright, make it personal, make it forever.

And as I sit in the dark, Hegel hurting my knee with his somber heft, and wrestle with words in some relentless, sleepless delirium, I see that my earlier fear of a secondhand reality muffled and diluted by words was misplaced—for it is through the power of words alone that the world can be truly captured, truly understood. Not just any words, to be sure: words can be alive or they can be dead, and dead words will dull the sharpest feeling, will turn the rarest vision into a vulgarity. I do not yet know what makes some words live and others die, but I believe I can already sense the difference between the two. And so I write, struggling to stretch the language until it bursts the stale confinement of the rhymed “nights” and “lights” and becomes something else, weighty yet plain, stark yet beautiful; and later, when I imagine the creak of the gate, the stealthy rustling of steps, the hushed, treacherous giggling on our garden bench, and two shadows bending close together, and the soft wetness of a first kiss, I gather my new sense of desolation—for I like him, I do, of course I do, I always have—and cram it raw into my half-formed poem, which I can already feel opening sonorously in the dark, unfolding its many petals of sounds, its many layers of meaning—until I wake with a start and find the room caught in a net of shifting starlight, a nightingale trilling in the forest, and my enigmatic acquaintance perched on the arm of the chair, holding my scribbles before his eyes, tapping his bare foot against the floor in rhythm with my lines.

I draw in my breath and stay very still. He has visited me a handful of times since the fateful night of Akhmatova’s Requiem, but I have not gotten used to his presence. A full minute passes. It must be very late. On the cot across the room, Olga is breathing tranquilly in her sleep. He releases the page, and it drifts to the floor.

He looks down at me then, smiling his slow, cruel smile.

Light-headed with the exhausting labor of creation, I feel brave enough to ask.

“Do you like it?”

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

“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:

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.

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.

“My parents think it’s a great opportunity. But Vasily, I haven’t yet decided—”

“This is stupid,” he spits out. “I never thought of you as stupid before. You would have a much better life here. You’re somebody here. Your family is important, my family is very important. You and I, we can accomplish anything we want. Over there, you’ll be nothing, a pathetic little immigrant, an empty space. A zero.”

I too am beginning to feel angry, but I force myself not to abandon my mollifying tone. “Look, I’m not talking of moving overseas, it’s just a four-year college. It would mean seeing a bit of the world, no more than that. Don’t you ever want to have some new experiences?”

“You can have plenty of new experiences here,” he says, and a tight, ugly smile twists his face. “In fact, I can arrange for something new right now.”

I no longer find the hardness in his eyes enticing.

Things are shifting inside me.

“I think,” I say slowly, “I think I will do it.”

He holds up my letter with the tips of his fingers as if it were something contagious, and pretends to study it, rocking the chair faster and faster. “Never heard of this place. Some dreary provincial hole, I gather. Didn’t peg you for the type who’d want to live in an Uncle Tom’s cabin among beggars, niggers, and Jews.”

For one instant I am speechless. In the next, I receive, for the first time ever, the indisputable waking proof that there is a God who watches over us—a benevolent God with impeccable timing and a twinkle in his ageless eye. My childhood chair breaks apart under Vasily in a spectacular explosion of cracks. As the seat falls in, he falls in also, his arms and legs now crammed into the wooden frame, sticking straight up. And even though I already know that in the next few months, before I leave for a college deep in the American South, there will be many unpleasant encounters—lips thinned, eyes averted—in the university hallways, awkward silences among our mutual friends, gatherings and memories ruined, for the next few minutes—three full minutes, no less, until he manages to extricate himself at last—for the next three minutes, as I watch him flail and strain and turn purple, I am certain that someone is up there, gently holding my life in the palm of his hand—and all is right with the world.