Campus felt deserted. Half the lights were out in the cafeteria, and there was only one line open, serving spaghetti and canned peaches. Our voices were tiny in the near-empty hall.
My room was incredibly quiet—you could hear the snow falling. Angela was still home with her family, and Hannah was stuck in St. Louis because of the snow. She emailed me about it frequently, sometimes in verse. I wrote back some verses, too.
Russian started the next morning. Ivan wasn’t there. We had to talk about our vacations.
I tried to work in the dorm, but it was too quiet. Every time I looked up, Einstein seemed to be looking back at me in an expectant way, as if to say, Now what?
Eventually I went to the library and sat at a fifth-floor window overlooking the Hong Kong Lounge, a windowless structure that played a big role in Hannah’s imagination. “Guess what it means if you order a red egg roll,” she often said. Next to the Hong Kong was a Baskin-Robbins, dark except for the glow from the freezers. They closed early in the winter.
The fifth floor of the library was so empty that, even though computers weren’t normally allowed, I took mine out and started to write about the people in the pink hotel.
Looking out the window, I noticed that there were two people in the closed Baskin-Robbins. All around them, chairs lay on the tables, legs up. One of the people was either very fat, or wearing a big coat.
At two in the morning the library closed and I walked home through the fresh snow. The clouds had cleared, revealing the stars. Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I’ll have reached you.
I couldn’t sleep. I read until five. At eight-thirty I went to Russian. Ivan still wasn’t there.
The airport opened and Hannah came back. She was so happy. She said that at her house you had to be quiet and always wear socks because the carpets were all white, and because her older brother was mentally disabled. I had never thought about Hannah’s home life or wondered why exactly she had to make so much noise.
6. The Power of Connections
Nina was outside with the reindeer. Suddenly, she saw a man walking quickly toward her across the tundra.
“Nina?” said the man.
“Professor Reznikov!” exclaimed Nina, recognizing her professor from Moscow.
“What happiness! Do you know, Nina, I was thinking about you! You see, I’m in Novosibirsk to visit Professor Bazhanov. He and I are working on a revolutionary experiment with scientists in Irkutsk, and we need a new assistant.”
“An assistant?” repeated Nina.
“Nina, I will be honest. I hear that you have been having some problems in your personal life. But I hope you haven’t dropped physics. I know you are talented and will be a good physicist. Will you be our assistant in Irkutsk?”
“With pleasure,” Nina told Professor Reznikov.
As a farewell gift, the workers at the farm gave Nina a fur hat. Nina promised to write letters and they promised to answer.
? ? ?
Leonid and Nina drove to the airport. Leonid flew directly to Irkutsk. But Nina returned to Moscow first, to arrange her affairs. Her father was overjoyed to see that she was safe, and to learn she had found new, interesting work in Siberia. After one week, Nina flew to Irkutsk.
Nina looked out the window of the airplane. “Siberia, again,” she thought. She thought about the new life that would begin here.
? ? ?
On Thursday morning before Russian conversation class, I stopped by the CVS to pick up the photographs of the pink hotel. I was still trying to get the envelope open as I walked into the classroom. Even without looking up I could tell that Ivan was there.
It turned out we were having a spoken exam. Two professors had come to listen to us, and there was a tape recorder. We each had to say our first and last names into the microphone—our real names, so they could record our grades.
“Ivan Varga,” Ivan said loudly into the microphone, and passed it to me. I hadn’t known his surname before.
We had to act out the beginning of “Nina in Siberia,” explaining our actions and thoughts aloud, using the maximum number of grammatical structures. I hadn’t prepared at all, but felt incredibly, unprecedentedly fluent. “Now I have to talk to Ivan’s father,” I said. “Great. He doesn’t like me. He’s never liked me. I know just what he’ll say, in a gloomy voice: ‘God alone knows.’ Oh, that’s how it always is with me.”
The professors laughed. I realized that everyone in the room was sympathetic with Nina, with her objective situation, which was so abnormal and so bad. Within the world of the story, nobody mentioned or acknowledged that things were abnormal, and so one tended to accept them unquestioningly. But if you pointed out the abnormality—if you could just state it factually—people in the real world would recognize it and laugh.
I found myself remembering the day in kindergarten when the teachers showed us Dumbo, and I realized for the first time that all the kids in the class, even the bullies, rooted for Dumbo, against Dumbo’s tormentors. Invariably they laughed and cheered, both when Dumbo succeeded and when bad things happened to his enemies. But they’re you, I thought to myself. How did they not know? They didn’t know. It was astounding, an astounding truth. Everyone thought they were Dumbo.
Again and again I saw the phenomenon repeated. The meanest girls, the ones who started secret clubs to ostracize the poorly dressed, delighted to see Cinderella triumph over her stepsisters. They rejoiced when the prince kissed her. Evidently, they not only saw themselves as noble and good, but also wanted to love and be loved. Maybe not by anyone and everyone, the way I wanted to be loved. But, for the right person, they were prepared to form a relation based on mutual kindness. This meant that the Disney portrayal of bullies wasn’t accurate, because the Disney bullies realized they were evil, prided themselves on it, and loved nobody.
? ? ?
In Constructed Worlds, we took turns presenting our constructed worlds. Ham brought in a fleet of tiny lead humanoid monsters, which he arranged on a table in some chesslike configuration that symbolized a turn in the tide of a long war they had been having. Each race or army had its own characteristics, such as life span, superpowers, and weaknesses. Some shot webs out of their legs like spiders. Others were incapable of pain. Still others were actually plants. It wasn’t clear whether this counted as a superpower or a weakness.