“I fell down the stairs! Can you believe it?” She lay back down before I could answer, and the paramedics resumed their course toward a parked ambulance.
Hannah spent the night in the infirmary. I slept for fourteen hours. The next day, I went to the Army Navy Store to buy gloves. The Army Navy glove rack was dominated by giant multicolored tasseled mittens from Central America. There were also a few pairs of beautiful leather gloves, but they were both too expensive and too small. I bought a pair of blue ski gloves, and went to look at the shoes. I had been wearing the same men’s running sneakers all year. I wore a women’s size twelve, which was almost impossible to find. At the Army Navy Store I found a pair of unisex lace-up shoes manufactured in Poland out of what looked like waterlogged cardboard. Very heavy, with bulbous toes and plastic stacked heels, they were without question the ugliest shoes I had ever seen, but they were cheap and they fit.
It was snowing again the next day. At breakfast, three different people complimented me on my shoes. It felt like a dream. In Russian class we had to say what we had done over Thanksgiving. Ivan had gone to Canada.
“Your hair looks different,” Grisha told Varvara.
“Oh? I haven’t had it cut.”
He squinted at her. “I think it grew.”
We learned some irregular verbs, which Varvara didn’t call irregular. She said their irregularity did, in fact, follow a pattern, though there were irregularities in the pattern.
After class I was walking to the art building, staring at my shoes, wondering if I could lose them somehow, when I heard a voice behind me. “Sonya!” It was Ivan, extending a floppy blue slipper. “You dropped it.”
I realized it was one of my new ski gloves. “Oh, no,” I said. “It means I’m already trying to lose them.”
“You’re trying? Is it difficult?”
“I have to do it subconsciously,” I explained.
“Aha,” he said. “Sorry I interfered with your plan.”
“That’s okay. I’ll lose them later when you’re not around.”
“Just in case, next time you drop something, I won’t pick it up.”
? ? ?
When one-third of the school year had passed, I told Angela and Hannah that it was time to rotate rooms. Hannah didn’t want to move her stuff, so I moved into the single. It took two days to get Angela to actually switch places with me. I felt sorry for her, but not sorry enough.
? ? ?
The final assignment for Constructed Worlds was to construct a world. I had decided to write and illustrate a story. Like all the stories I wrote at that time, it was based on an unusual atmosphere that had impressed me in real life. I thought that was the point of writing stories: to make up a chain of events that would somehow account for a certain mood—for how it came about and for what it led to.
The atmosphere I wanted to write about had arisen a few years earlier, when my mother and I had gone on vacation to Mexico. Something went wrong with the chartered bus that was supposed to take us back to the airport, and it left us instead in the pink-tiled courtyard of a strange hotel, where Albinoni’s Adagio was playing on speakers, and something fell onto our arms, and we looked up and it was ashes. I was reading Camus’s The Plague—that was my beach reading—and it seemed to me that we would always be there, in the pink courtyard, unable to leave.
I wanted to write a story that created just that mood—a pink hotel, Albinoni, ashes, and being unable to leave—in an exigent and dignified fashion. In real life, we had been in that courtyard only three hours. I was an American teenager, the world’s least interesting and dignified kind of person, brought there by my mother. It was the very definition of a nonevent: some Americans had experienced a flight delay. In my story, the characters would be stuck there for a long time, for a real, legitimate reason—like a sickness. The hotel would be somewhere far away, like Japan. The hotel management would be sorry that Albinoni’s Adagio was piped into the halls and lobby for such a long time, but it would be a deep-rooted technical problem and difficult to fix.
? ? ?
Although Constructed Worlds was listed in the catalog as a studio art class, Gary said that studio was a waste of class time. We would have to learn to make time for art, like real artists. We weren’t allowed to use the school’s art supplies. This, too, was like life.
I went to the art store to buy supplies. Everything was too expensive. I ended up at the office supply store. I bought two reams of bright pink computer paper, and used them to cover the walls, floor, and furniture of my new bedroom. That way, I could take photographs that would look as if they had been taken in a pink hotel. Anyone who spent any amount of time in my room ended up slightly nauseated, because of all the rubber cement. Svetlana said she couldn’t imagine how I lived like I did. “You realize you are now a sick person in a pink hotel,” she said.
4. A Laboratory Romance
A tall young man was waiting outside the office. Nina saw only his back, but she recognized him immediately. “Ivan!” she cried.
The man turned. He wasn’t Ivan—at least not Nina’s Ivan. “Excuse me,” said Nina, becoming embarrassed. “I’m looking for my acquaintance Ivan Alexeich Bazhanov. But I see that you are not he.”
He smiled. “No, I’m Ivan Alexeich Boyarsky. I have the same name and patronymic, but a different surname.”
“I made a mistake,” said Nina. “Forgive me. Goodbye.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the Laboratory of Cosmology and Elementary Particle Physics in Novosibirsk.”
“That’s three kilometers away, and you have a suitcase,” observed Ivan Boyarsky. “Let’s drive in my tractor.”
People in Siberia were kind.
?
Nina knocked on the door of Ivan’s uncle’s laboratory. The door was opened by . . . Leonid, the young man from the taxi!
“Nina? What happiness! But I don’t understand. Why are you here?”
“I’m here because . . . because Professor Bazhanov is my relative,” lied Nina. “And you, Leonid—why are you here?”
“I’m visiting this laboratory to study the electrical properties of permafrost.”
“How interesting,” said Nina. “Is Professor Bazhanov here?”
“No, right now everyone is at the ice camp.”
“May I wait?”
“Of course. Please sit.”
But Nina couldn’t sit. She wandered around the room.
In the laboratory stood three desks. On the first desk stood a placard on which was written: A. A. BAZHANOV. That was Ivan’s uncle. On the second desk stood a placard with a woman’s name: G. P. USTINOVA. And on this Ustinova’s desk stood a photograph of Ivan—Nina’s own Ivan! When Nina read the placard on the third desk, she could scarcely believe her eyes: I. A. BAZHANOV. Those were Ivan’s initials. And there on the desk lay Ivan’s notebook! On the notebook lay a note:
Ivan,
I was delayed at the observatory. Forgive me. I will look for you at the ice camp.
Your Galya
Your Galya? Nina had a bad feeling.