Svetlana’s common room had a Moroccan carpet, two big red beanbags, an R.E.M. poster, a Klimt poster, an Ansel Adams poster, and shelves full of expensive-looking museum catalogs and art books. A few potted trees stood by the window, and one of the three desks was almost completely covered with smaller plants: pale clammed-up buds, lurid green mosses, and inscrutable succulents in little plastic tubs.
One of the skinniest girls I had seen in my life was sitting on the floor with a soldering iron. She was Svetlana’s roommate Valerie, and she was building a radio.
“How’s Fern doing?” Svetlana asked her.
“The same.” Valerie shrugged toward one of the bedrooms. I made out a military sleeping bag on the top bunk, with a mop of curly hair sticking out the top.
“Fern? Are you awake?” called Svetlana. The mop nodded. “I brought you some tea. You really can’t go around not talking when you don’t feel like it.” She filled a white electric kettle, and poured a bag of powdered tea into a plastic mug shaped like a pineapple. “Fern, this is my friend Selin.”
“Hi,” I called.
There was no response.
“She says she can’t talk,” Svetlana told me. “She’s a botanist, her name is Fernanda so of course her nickname is Fern. It suits her because ferns are so mysterious and sort of elusive, and they can survive anywhere. You know there are ferns that are older than dinosaurs, hundreds of millions of years old. Some of them don’t need soil to grow. In Slavic folklore, if you find a fern seed it makes you invisible. Of course ferns don’t actually have seeds.” She didn’t lower her voice, though Fern was just a few feet away in the next room. She poured the boiling water into the cup and stirred it with a cafeteria spoon.
“That smells awful,” Valerie said. “Poor Fern.”
Svetlana carried the cup into the bedroom and held it up to the top bunk. The lumpy sleeping bag changed shape, revealing a round face with huge eyes.
“Thanks,” said Fern, not sounding particularly grateful.
“Drink up,” said Svetlana neutrally, and rejoined me in the common room. “Let’s go in my room so we don’t bug Valerie.”
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Svetlana’s bedroom was brightly lit, with a lava lamp, a stereo system, a bookshelf crammed with books and CDs, and an Edward Gorey poster that showed a lot of Victorian children dying terrible deaths. A plush armadillo sat on the bed. I asked Svetlana how she and her roommates had decided who got the single room, and whether they were going to rotate. She sighed. “It’s embarrassing: Val and Fern wanted to rotate, but I said it would be too much of a pain and convinced them to draw straws instead. Then, wouldn’t you know it, I drew the single, as if I’d planned it. Honestly, though, sometimes I think it’s worked out for the best. Valerie’s so nice that she doesn’t seem to care whether she has her own room, and Fern isn’t as private as you might think. She actually needs a lot of attention and stability, so Val is the ideal roommate for her. And now this is going to sound terrible, but in a way I think I’m more complicated than they are. Some people are just more complicated than others. Don’t you think so?”
“I guess,” I said.
“And privacy is more important to them.” Svetlana proceeded to describe her roommates’ family backgrounds, like they were characters in a novel. Fern’s parents had wanted her to work at their store rather than go to Harvard, even though she had a full scholarship. Her father wasn’t supposed to call her, but he did anyway sometimes, and asked for money, which she earned by working as a dishwasher in Mather, where the athletes lived, so they ate huge amounts of food and did disgusting things like mix ketchup and applesauce that the work-study students had to clean up.
Valerie was the world’s most easygoing person but was sensitive about her brother, who was only two years older than her but already a graduate student in math. He had solved some problem of cryptography at fifteen and been recruited by the CIA.
“You can imagine how hard it is,” Svetlana said. “Valerie is super-smart, but because she’s not a prodigy in any particular field, she just doesn’t know what to do with herself. Math would mean competing with her brother. On the other hand, she feels like math is the only rigorous discipline—the only thing worth studying. How can she differentiate herself from her brother if she can measure herself only by his standards?
“Now she’s in an honors physics class that only the most advanced freshmen take. Out of the top twenty-five students in the whole freshman class, she’s maybe one of the top three, but instead of feeling good about it she’s embarrassed to even be in the same league as everyone else. Because when her brother was a freshman, he was taking graduate classes.”
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The book Svetlana wanted to write together was about the sexual initiation of a failed Russian car thief in Paris. His name was Igor and he was represented by a guy sitting on a rock in a cologne ad in Vogue. Svetlana cut out his figure, glued it to a piece of paper, and drew the rest of the scene with great assurance, barely hesitating over any detail.
“I draw like a kindergartner, so don’t laugh at me,” she said. Igor was sitting under a bare hanging bulb, on a bare mattress. His feet were soaking in a tub next to an ashtray, a rotary phone, and some empty bottles. Through a door behind him, you could see a chain-flush toilet with the seat up.
Igor was feeling blue, Svetlana wrote. For two weeks he’d been living on mustard sandwiches. He stole the mustard off the table of a café.
“Wow,” I said. “And in this condition he’s going to have a sexual initiation?”
Svetlana nodded. “These things happen when you least expect it.” That night he had smoked his last cigarette and finished the last bottle of vodka that his ex-girlfriend had left at his place, she added to the story.
“He had a girlfriend?”
“Yeah, but for some reason she refused to have sex with him. Then she left. She had been Igor’s only friend in Paris, and now she was gone. So when the phone rang that night, he was sure it was a wrong number. But he picked up anyway.”
The caller, a mysterious girl, told Igor to meet her at the Zodiac Club. Igor went to the Zodiac Club, sat at the bar, and ordered a beer. There was only one girl there, drinking a green cocktail and paying no mind to Igor. Igor waited awhile, but nobody else came. So he asked the girl to dance.
But she said she couldn’t dance with anyone, because she was Hitler’s daughter.
At eleven-thirty, as abruptly as she had appeared at my room, Svetlana said she had to go to bed. “I’m kind of strict about sleep,” she said, standing up.
Back in the common room, Valerie’s radio was producing static. It was really working.
“Well, it’s about time,” she said. “I’ve been here since ten in the morning.” She did something with a wire and caught a human voice out of the air. “I am most certainly not ashamed of the Gospels,” the voice said.
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