Dear Selin, Sonya—I had a strange dream, the message began. The dream was about the Yenisei River. Now I know you are there. I know you will cheat on me with my future girlfriend’s exboyfriend. However, I will forgive you. Without you I would not have found Barbara, the perfect teacher-machine.
Ivan asked if I could tell him the plot of Goodbye, Summer. That was a BBC “soap opera” made for beginning Russian students. We were supposed to have been watching it all semester. It was going to be on the exam. If you would tell me about it, I would forgive you for Siberia, the 150 years of Turkish invasion of Hungary, and, moreover, the horrible books about it which we had to read in school.
I had never heard of any Ottoman invasion of Hungary. As a child, I had been told that the Turks and Hungarians were related, that the Huns were Turkic, that both peoples had migrated west from the Altai and spoke similar languages. I had an Uncle Attila—it was a common Turkish name. But in Ivan’s world, our ancestors had been enemies.
I felt dizzy from the sense of intimacy and remoteness. Everything he said came from so thoroughly outside myself. I wouldn’t have been able to invent or guess any of it. He had told me a dream. He had typed: I know you will cheat on me. He said he would forgive me, twice. I hadn’t done anything against him, but the thought that I had, or would, was somehow exciting. I wanted to write back right away, but he had waited a whole day, so I knew I had to wait at least that long.
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Svetlana and I were passing through the weight-lifting room on the way to the lockers. “I mentioned to William how freaked out you were when he started talking to you about trigonometry,” she was saying. “It won’t happen again.” I felt betrayed, and then I realized that Svetlana must have a thing for William. At that moment, I saw that Ivan was in the room, sitting at a machine, pulling an iron bar attached to a cord. On the other side of a pulley, stacked weights seamlessly rose and fell. Ivan stood and released the bar, and the weights dropped with a muffled clank. It was a low-ceilinged basement and he couldn’t stand up all the way. He turned like maybe he had seen us, but I wasn’t sure. I thought about whether to say hello, but by then we were at the lockers.
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Dear Ivan, I typed. When I woke up, in Siberia, I felt so homesick. I thought the feeling might go away during the day. It didn’t go away. I said I had left Siberia and come back. Part of me thought that nothing would be here anymore—that I would come up the escalator and there would be only snow. Instead I found brick walls, Balzac, frozen yogurt, alveolar fricatives, everything just the way I left it. I felt a great need to tell him how I was surrounded, overwhelmed, by things of unknown or dubious meaning, things that weren’t commensurate to me in any way.
I started to summarize the plot of Goodbye, Summer. It was a long story and, as I wrote, I could tell that I was losing some kind of political capital. I deleted what I had written and typed instead: Sure, I can tell you the story. Now he would have to ask me again.
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Before the exam, Svetlana and I met for breakfast. “You look as if someone died,” she said.
“I didn’t sleep well,” I said.
“Don’t tell me you’re nervous,” Svetlana said.
“Whenever I’m worried about anything,” said this guy Ben, “I like to think about China. China has a population of like two billion people, and not one of them even remotely cares about whatever you think is so important.” I acknowledged that this was a great comfort.
Svetlana liked to get everywhere early and we were among the first people in the examination room—a sun-drenched historic hall with oak pews. I sat near the end of one pew, and Svetlana sat in the row ahead and turned to face me. We were talking about whether Svetlana should attend the Brodsky memorial ceremony at Mount Holyoke. At some point she trailed off, looking up at something behind me.
“Sonya,” Ivan said. “Can you really tell me the story of the BBC?”
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I told him the story, starting from when Olga forgot her textbook in Victor’s taxi. As the hall grew noisier, Ivan stepped in closer and leaned toward me. Soon he was crouched at my feet, holding the back of my seat for balance, frowning at the floor.
I got to the part where they both married other people, just as the proctor came in. “And that’s the end,” I said.
“You’re my savior,” Ivan said, meeting my eyes, and went to find a seat.
“Who was that?” Svetlana asked.
“Ivan, remember? We all used to be in the same class.”
“I don’t remember him at all. I don’t see how I could have forgotten someone like that,” she said. “Why didn’t he just watch the thing himself?”
“I guess he was busy.”
“He must have a very rich inner life,” Svetlana said. I laughed. She wasn’t laughing. “You really don’t see anything strange about him? The way he looked at you—like he was trying to look into you. Didn’t it make you uncomfortable? It made me uncomfortable.”
It didn’t make me uncomfortable.
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Ivan wrote an email with the subject line: Lenin. He said that the Russians were thinking of removing Lenin from the tomb in the Red Square. Ivan would feel somehow lonely without him. Lenin had always been present—Lenin, like the picture on my wall, wrote Mayakovsky in their fourth-grade reader, but they didn’t learn anything about why he committed suicide.
After 1990 all the Lenin monuments in Budapest were rounded up and deposited in a park outside the city limits. There they formed a wonderful community: much nicer than they ever imagined communism to be. Lenin greeted Lenin in front of another Lenin, while a proletarian—they called him the cloak-room sculpture—ran behind him with a banner: You have left your sweater, sir. The giant smiling Lenin who stood in the back had been defaced by vandals in the early eighties. Don’t smile, Ilych, you know how it works: in 150 years we became no Turks, the vandals had written. The rhyme was better in Hungarian.
Another Lenin statue, a gift from the Soviet people, had been damaged on the train from Moscow. The top of his head fell off and got lost. Hungarian sculptors hastily made Lenin a hat, carved from the finest marble. At the magnificent ceremony during which the statue was unveiled, it became apparent that Lenin had two hats: one on his head, and one in his hands.
I read the message over and over. I wasn’t sure why he had written it, but I could see that it had taken a long time, and that he was trying to be delightful. I kept thinking about the Lenins in the park, in a configuration that nobody had ever intended, but which was maybe somehow the true realization of communism. The writing style felt playful, but also serious. It was serious that Mayakovsky had killed himself.
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