I decided to join Svetlana’s tae kwon do class. First we ran around in circles barefoot. I had forgotten about my ankles and feet. The studio had a glass wall overlooking the pool, where a scuba lesson was in session. How did all those people know that they wanted to know how to scuba dive?
A boy with a green belt stood with me in a corner and demonstrated the first “form”: a series of dancelike motions that supposedly defended you against some theoretical assailant. I didn’t understand how a dance like that could defend you, unless the attacker also knew the dance, but in that case why would he be using it to attack you?
At the end of class, everyone sat on the floor while the advanced students took turns breaking wooden boards. The two instructors—one extraordinarily tall, the other remarkably short—held up the boards. The most advanced student, a brown belt, went last. The tall instructor stacked several planks for him to break, instead of just one. Grinning, the brown belt performed a series of decorative moves, yelled, and struck the wood with his hand. Nothing happened. He turned red and struck the wood again. On the third strike, splintering was audible. The fourth brought the planks clattering to the floor, accompanied by loud cheers. Still red, the boy bowed to the instructors and sat back on the floor.
“There’s still a few more boards here,” said the tall instructor, scanning the class. “Svetlana. Do you feel ready?”
Svetlana flashed him a sheepish smile that I had never seen before and stepped to the front of the class, brushing off her legs. “I’m going to take a few practice kicks,” she announced. With each kick, her heel tapped the board’s exact center. Again and again she repeated the same motion.
“I think you got it, Svetlana,” the instructor said, as her sturdy pink heel tapped the center of the plank.
“Now you all know about my obsessive tendencies,” Svetlana said. She stepped back and took a deep breath. Her smile vanished. Her leg shot out like a piston and the board cracked in two.
? ? ?
One morning, on my way to a lecture on Balzac, it came to me with great clarity that there was no way that that guy, the professor, was going to tell me anything useful. No doubt he knew many useful things, but he wasn’t going to say them; rather, he was going to tell us again that Balzac’s Paris was extremely comprehensive.
I went instead to the undergraduate library, to the basement where government documents were stored. This was the only area where laptops were allowed, because the clicking of keys was upsetting to non–computer users. I opened the file called pinkhotel.doc and started to write.
Nothing good was happening in the pink hotel. It was in Tokyo. A family was supposed to stay there for two nights. The father, a film director, was going to shoot a nonfiction film on a nightingale farm in the countryside. The nightingales’ nests were used to make a skin cream. After two nights in Tokyo, the father and his assistant left for the nightingale farm. But the mother got sick, so she and the two daughters couldn’t leave. They had to stay in the hotel. The older daughter was in love with the father’s assistant. The younger daughter was a pest. The story was called “The Pest”—it was sort of an allusion to The Plague. It was a really depressing story.
? ? ?
In the weeks before winter vacation, I went running every night, alone, by the river. Svetlana didn’t like to run in the snow, and she thought it was dangerous by the river after dark. But, wearing layers and shock-protected shoes and headphones, I felt completely insulated and safe. Scenery flashed by as if behind glass. On one side of the path, light from the sodium lamps shone on the half-frozen river and reflected off the low clouds; on the other, headlights in glowing pairs expanded, expanded, and rushed past.
One night around eleven, a bicycle materialized out of the darkness. “Hi, Sonya!” called the rider, and when he was gone I realized he had been Ivan.
By the time I got back and took a shower it was past midnight, but I wasn’t tired at all, it felt like two in the afternoon. I dried my hair, boiled a pot of water, steeped an envelope of “cranberry tea” from the cafeteria. I was listening to a tape from the dollar bin at Christie’s, of Khachaturian’s violin concerto, conducted by Aram Khachaturian. If you listened carefully you could hear someone, maybe Aram Khachaturian, coughing.
I read for a while. Things were going well with Nina for a change, and yet I didn’t like it that Leonid turned out to have been Galina’s ex. Why did Nina’s rival’s rejected boyfriend have to come into anything? Was that narrative economy, or was it a statement about the way of the world—about how the jilted had to suffice for one another?
At two a.m., I started cleaning up my room, even though it wasn’t that messy. From Oleg Cassini’s memoirs, which were under the bed, I learned that Cassini had also suffered from insomnia. One night, he woke from uneasy dreams with the opening of Dante’s Inferno setting off “a clangorous tumult in [his] subconscious: ‘Midway the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest.’” When I read these terrible words, chills ran up my arms. I knew “midway the journey” was supposed to mean midlife crisis. But to me it seemed that one had always been midway the journey of our life, and would be maybe right up until the moment of death.
? ? ?
I woke up at 9:07. I stared at the clock, wondering whether to stay in bed, go to breakfast, or go late to Russian class. It was weird to think that everyone was there right now—that class was going on, with everyone in the room. Now it was 9:09.
A few minutes later, a gust of wind was blowing dry snowflakes off a branch and onto my cheek, which was still warm from the pillow. I got to class twenty minutes late. Only Ivan and Boris were there. Irina was happy I came—she always liked it better when the class wasn’t all boys or all girls. She told me to stand with Ivan, and said she had an idea: Why didn’t Ivan pretend to be Ivan in the story—Nina’s Ivan? “You finally meet,” she said. “In Siberia. Do you understand?”
We said we understood, and stood there looking at each other.
“Ivan,” I said. “Finally, we meet.”
“That’s true,” he said.
Then neither of us said anything.
“Ivan,” said Irina. “Don’t you have something to tell Nina?”
“Well,” he said. He looked at the floor and then looked at me. Lines appeared on his forehead. “I have a wife,” he said. “And it’s not you.”
I knew it wasn’t real—I knew it was just a story. But my stomach sank, my breath caught in my throat, a wave of nausea rose in my chest. I realized I had been hoping to hear a justification—like that he was a spy, or was escaping from being framed for a crime he didn’t commit. I had been hoping to hear his marriage was a sham.
I told myself that nothing had really happened. Even within the story, Nina had already known that Ivan was married. There hadn’t been any news. Nothing had changed.
But at the end of class, I still felt slightly annoyed toward Ivan, the way you feel annoyed toward someone in real life after they say something mean to you in a dream. Instead of taking the stairs with him as usual, I took the elevator.