My sleep life went totally off course. I seemed always to be thinking about the wrong things. Every night I went to bed around midnight, closed my eyes, thought a lot of jumbled thoughts, turned the lights back on, and read until four.
Because I wanted to understand Ivan better, I read The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The very first thing in the book was a hat-related anecdote about the absurdity of Communist rule. Apparently the Communists had erased some guy from a photograph, but they had forgotten to erase his hat. I thought for hours about this hat. I knew it was connected somehow with the hat on the Lenin monument in Hungary. But how? It just seemed to sit there: this surplus hat.
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Svetlana and I went to see Three Songs about Lenin at the Film Archive. In the third song, Lenin died. The whole end of the movie was just people crying: old people, young people, children; Russians, Tatars, Central Asians; at factories, in fields, at his funeral. There was a cut from dead Lenin in his coffin, to old Lenin smiling into the sun, and you could see all the difference between death and life. It had never occurred to me how many people had actually loved Lenin, really loved him with emotional love.
Svetlana said that when she was in the first grade, kids would torture each other in the playground by asking, “Who do you love more, Comrade Tito or your own mother?”
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On the last day of Constructed Worlds, Gary helped us arrange our finished projects in an exhibition gallery.
Sandy, whose Hungarian churches had needed more narrative, had brought six new woodcuts of the same Hungarian churches—this time with pigs on the front steps. He said the pigs had run away from the neighboring farm.
Gary laid all the prints faceup on a table, then turned a few of them over to show us how different the remaining pictures looked, depending on how many were visible, and which ones. They really did look different. It was inspirational to see that Gary was actually good at something. We all agreed on the four prints that looked the best together. They weren’t the four best individual prints—they were the four with the most tension. One had no pigs; the other three had pigs. We tried hanging them in different configurations. Everything turned out to be something you could change and manipulate. Ruby’s TV stand looked best near the fake encyclopedia that a computer-science major made. The Hungarian churches looked best in a row, but the scenes from Against Nature looked better in a grid.
I had brought in twelve photographs of the pink hotel, and the class chose six of them to display. It was funny to see which ones everyone hated. One picture showed a guy from down the hall standing with a suitcase. Everyone unanimously hated the guy and his suitcase. They liked the pictures with Hannah, and the pictures with no people. We hung the six photographs in a row. Printouts of the story were stacked on a pillar under the photographs. I had chosen a ten-point font, both to conserve paper and to discourage people from reading the story, which I didn’t think they would enjoy. Even though I had a deep conviction that I was good at writing, and that in some way I already was a writer, this conviction was completely independent of my having ever written anything, or being able to imagine ever writing anything, that I thought anyone would like to read.
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When Hannah saw the printouts, she couldn’t get over how many pages I had written, especially in such a small font. She was sure nobody else in the whole school was capable of writing such long and detailed stories, and urged me to enter the undergraduate fiction contest.
“Did you remember to enter the contest?” she asked, the next day.
“I couldn’t find the building,” I said.
Hannah, who knew the campus map by heart, walked me to the small wooden house where the literary magazine had its office. She watched me drop off a printout of the story, with my name and number on a separate piece of paper.
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Exams ended. It was time to forget all the phonetic symbols, Russian verbs, and nineteenth-century plots. During the few days’ vacation before the new term, Svetlana’s mother came to visit. She slept in Svetlana’s bedroom, and Svetlana stayed with me—she couldn’t stay in her own common room, because Fern was growing a delicate plant that had to have a bright light shining on it all night.
Svetlana’s mother took me and Svetlana to lunch at a French-Cambodian restaurant.
“Selin, this is my mom, Sasha,” Svetlana said. “Mom, this is my friend Selin.”
Svetlana’s mother stared at me. “Darling,” she rasped, “don’t you have another coat?”
I was wearing the ankle-length Gogolian garment from Filene’s. When I explained that my peacoat had been stolen, Svetlana’s mother looked stricken. “Stolen? My God! Svetlana, you must have an old jacket you could give to Selin. Maybe your purple ski jacket? It’s still at home. I can mail it to you.”
“Mom, that jacket is two years old. The arms are short on me. It would never fit Selin.”
“Oh. Yes, it’s true, Selin, you’re bigger than Svetlana. It’s a pity.”
“I like Selin’s coat,” said Svetlana.
“Oh, me too, don’t misunderstand, it’s . . . elegant. Maybe too elegant—maybe just a tiny bit ridiculous. But of course you must wear it until you can get another. You must not freeze to death.”
A clay pot was brought to the table, with something sputtering wrathfully inside in coconut milk. Svetlana’s mother reminisced about her favorite childhood holiday. “We would go to the—what’s the word? Where they are dead. Cemetery, cemetery. The Turkish cemetery. And we would dance on their graves. There would be a band, oh, not large, maybe five or six musicians, and many flowers, and the girls wore the most beautiful silk dresses. Red, yellow, white, all different colors. It was a beautiful holiday.”
“Mom,” Svetlana said, “that’s not an appropriate story to tell my Turkish friends.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It was a very sweet, innocent holiday, full of dancing and flowers. Selin won’t be offended. The Turks were a powerful, well-respected enemy.”
“Like the Serbs in Bosnia?” said Svetlana.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I just can’t believe you’re talking about the Turks, as if it’s the greatest thing in the world to be a Serb right now.”
“It’s no different to be a Serb than anyone else. I am not the one doing this ethnic cleansing. I personally wish the Bosnians nothing but the best. I wish the Turks nothing but the best also. I was only mentioning a memory from my happy childhood, so why must we always have these political conversations? Let’s be frivolous.” She turned to me abruptly. “Do you wax your eyebrows? Surely you must pluck them, with tweezers. No? They have such an interesting shape. It doesn’t quite look natural. Of course, you don’t need to do anything with your eyebrows. Well, maybe you could just clean them up a little bit, right here, but it’s not a crisis. Not like Svetlana, who won’t do anything with hers, and they make her look so angry.”