Magdalena didn’t expect the same things that Lina did, and when they went out together she wasn’t surprised to find that the nights in London ended the same way they had in Vilnius: Lina would be gone, Magdalena would find herself kissing some stranger, or sitting in a pub with him and his friends while they bought her drinks. The wall behind their heads would come rushing into focus; she’d see a spider on the wall lift and set each leg with such deliberation that she’d feel she was in a sort of trance watching the spider walk across the wall, while the person in between her and the spider was saying things to her and she was laughing.
In London the men were insurance analysts or bankers rather than the aimless students and guitar players she and Lina had known back home, and sometimes they would ask Magdalena to talk to them in Lithuanian.
“Okay,” she would say, keeping her eyes on the spider. “So listen and I will tell you what the two sisters did on the day that God walked by.”
The men would laugh like it was going to be something dirty, and Magdalena would tell them in Lithuanian about the first sister, who was too busy spinning wool and stayed indoors, while the other sister left her baking and ran out to greet the stranger without even wiping the dough off her hands. God turned the first sister into a spider and made her sit forever in dark places making thread, while the second sister became a honeybee whose arms are always covered in sweet dough, who rests in a warm hive through the winter and is loved by everyone.
Usually the insurance men would stop her before she got to the end of the story. “Just teach us the bad words,” they’d say. Back home people mostly cursed in English or sometimes Russian, so just for fun she’d teach the men the Lithuanian expressions for “bread-and-butter” or “take me to the hospital, I’m about to give birth,” writing the words down on a napkin and making them repeat after her, take me to the hospital, I’m about to give birth. The insurance men would all imagine they were being very obscene, while the spider on the wall paused, then slid down an invisible string to dangle over somebody’s drink.
But the English words across their faces that had looked so unpronounceable at first, hemmed in as they were on either side by consonant sounds, gradually took on meaning, and Magdalena began taking out her contact lenses before she and Lina went out. She’d keep her glasses in her purse, and when she went to the toilet she’d put them on, just to reassure herself that her feet still had edges, that there was a clear place where her body ended and the rest of the world began.
She had stopped wearing her contact lenses altogether when Lina met Tobias Kronen, and so it wasn’t until Lina started seeing him regularly that Magdalena really noticed him. He said he was a professional photographer—which Lina laughed at. Men were always telling her they were photographers. But this was true: He showed Lina his card from National Geographic and Lina made Magdalena go with her to look for his pictures in the magazines at the library. They were there, iridescent tree snakes and grass huts and street children in Bangkok. He was in London on an extended assignment, and he had a wife and twin babies back in Stockholm, but he liked Lina a lot, he said, and if she wanted to she could go with him to photograph some Neolithic tombs.
So Lina went with Tobias Kronen to a place where a big flat rock buzzed under your hand if the moon was right, and on the drive back Tobias showed her how to use his camera, which was not digital but the old-fashioned kind covered with dials and buttons, the kind real photographers use, Lina told Magdalena, suddenly the expert, as if she weren’t always using her phone to take pixilated snapshots of the two of them, the phone held at arm’s length so that part of Magdalena was usually missing.
Tobias thought Lina had an eye and he took her to a used camera shop. You’d never know it from the cracked leather strap, but Tobias said the one he got her was the best of the old-time cameras, and for a while Lina walked around taking photographs of street musicians and cracks in the sidewalk, recording the shutter speed and aperture in a little book.
Tobias said that when photography was first invented people believed that each picture peeled off a thin layer of reality. Like a bit of skin removed each time—too many pictures taken of a person, and that person would disappear from life and start existing only in the photographs. So Lina began taking a whole series of portraits of Tobias Kronen—Tobias Kronen eating toast, Tobias Kronen about to cross the street, Tobias Kronen packing his bags, and finally Tobias Kronen at the airport waving good-bye, because apparently she hadn’t taken enough to keep him. Lina had the photos blown up big and hung them around the apartment for a couple of days until Magdalena made her take them down. But before she did, Magdalena bought a magnifying glass and when Lina was out she went over each photograph with it, looking for the string of Swedish words that stretched across Tobias Kronen’s forehead and down his arms. But in the photographs the words on Tobias Kronen disappeared, leaving his skin as blank as the faces on billboards or the pictures of people in a magazine.
One morning Lina came home with a story about how she’d woken to find a blue-eyed boy—who, the night before, had dropped a pearl into her wine glass and then pushed her into the men’s room to do lines of cocaine off the top of the urinal while the pearl dissolved—wrapped up in string. For the first time she thought she really might die right there in that hotel room, she told Magdalena, because the string was more like a flat black cord, the kind that people are strangled with. Especially people who cannot find their clothes in time to run for the door before the person who has wrapped the cord around himself finishes rocking and chanting with his eyes closed.
The story was not so different from other stories Lina told on other mornings in their kitchen, Magdalena in her pajamas, Lina in whatever she’d been wearing the night before, Magdalena doing the dishes and Lina eating the corners off Magdalena’s toast or cracking a raw egg into her coffee.
By that time Lina had quit her job at the bar, though somehow she still came up with her share of the rent, and she had the whole night’s story to tell now that Magdalena was working two shifts and almost never went out. Sometimes Magdalena listened and sometimes she didn’t, scrubbing at a bit of potato burned onto a pan, though she knew it wouldn’t come off without soaking.
Really a boy, Lina was saying that morning. Exactly her age, his own table at such and such club, took her to one place then another, and so on—Lina was drizzling gin over the yolk floating in her coffee, then rummaging through the fridge for the cream—he was so beautiful, women put their phone numbers into his hand as they walked by, he had done something important for such and such company and they made him a such and such—Lina reached with her fingers into the jar of pickled banana peppers that had been in the fridge since Manny the Argentinean footballer, while Magdalena scraped the potato off the pan with her thumbnail.