The Lover From An Icy Sea Page 46

  Kit had already come to the conclusion in Denmark that he’d miss her in spring—and that they’d likely not have another together. But it was the fall above all other seasons, when nature symbolically bled into its second death, that he’d hoped would be theirs to share—at least once. Fall was his season—the season of his birth—and the time he least wanted to be alone. Not because the isolation made him feel lonely; but rather because the sublime beauty of the season was simply too great to be deprived of the company of another with whom he could share it. The colors; the chill in the air; the smells of desiccating leaves and burning chestnuts; the anticipation of winter—this was the season when his skin would otherwise come alive and burn for the nearness of another. Now, however, it was—like the leaves—dying.

  The sun was just setting behind the Maples in the park and rolling out a long, golden carpet down Ninety-sixth Street as he arrived at the The Fitzgerald. The doorman, whose face Kit recognized only vaguely, mercifully made no effort to stop him. Kit entered the elevator, pushed the button for the thirteenth floor and ascended.

  He stepped out, noticed that someone had recently misted the bouquet of fresh flowers in the crystal sconce next to the door, and rang the doorbell. After several seconds, he heard someone’s footsteps approaching from the other side, then the sound of a chain jangling as someone slid the latch back. He next heard someone turn the knob, which released the latch lever and moved the bolt out of the lip. When the door finally opened, that certain someone standing before him was Daneka.

  She stepped back and allowed him to enter, then looked down at his feet and asked him to remove his shoes. As he bent down to untie the laces, she closed the door and returned to her bedroom without a word.

  Kit followed a moment later to find her seated in front of her computer. She didn’t look up from the screen, but simply continued to pound away at the keys. Kit observed her in silence for a full minute, then finally spoke up.

  “Daneka, is this it?”

  Her answer after a pause was toneless—almost robotic—as she continued typing. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.”

  “Is this the end of the line for us?” Kit’s question was followed by another, longer pause during which Daneka offered nothing in return.

  “Do you think the world really gives a fuck about your magazine or my photography? It doesn’t, Daneka. Life will go on without the two of us. Your magazine will survive you. Photography will survive me. The only thing that matters—and I grant you, even it matters very little, except to the two of us, or at least to me—is our love. The world can get by easily enough without it. But I can’t—at least not at this moment.

  “I’ll survive this break-up. You’ll clearly survive it. But every little break-up in love is a break-up in the only thing that makes life worth living. There’s nothing else of any real consequence, Daneka. Not your magazine. Not my pictures—.”

  Although she’d finally stopped typing, Daneka didn’t take her eyes off the screen.

  “Listen to me,” Kit continued. “Please. Just once, and maybe for the last time. You’re not the only one who aches. I’m not the only one who aches. We’re just a pair of—”

  She looked up at him as if he’d just poured liquid kitsch into her ear. He caught the look and understood what it meant; also understood his error; also, finally, understood that he was trying to break through a wall that could simply not be moved—not now, not ever.

  “Goodbye, Daneka. If you have nothing to say to any of this, then goodbye.”

  He waited five more seconds, then slowly walked down the corridor to the front door, collected his shoes, opened the door, walked out of her apartment and out of her life, he knew, for the last time.

  * * *

  Daneka refrained from typing long enough to hear the elevator doors open and close again. What greeted her then was silence. Estrella had gone home for the weekend; there were no children or pets about; there was no music, radio or television playing in the background. Even the sound of traffic outside her window had died. There was only silence—her own Scandinavian silence. Her fingers, poised moments earlier in mid-air over the keyboard, dropped to her lap as she lowered her head soundlessly to her chest.

  Chapter 78

  Kit walked the eighty-seven blocks from East Ninety-sixth Street to his own little nest on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side, he knew, was a place of aspirants. Many would fall out along the way; many would eventually move to Long Island or New Jersey once the scales tipped in favor of space and animal comforts over raw aspiration and ambition. They wouldn’t need to be pushed or even nudged. They’d know when it was time to go.

  Kit wasn’t yet ready to scrap all of his aspirations. Tonight, he’d allow himself to grieve. He’d grieve, of course, first for himself—but he’d also grieve for their larger loss. He believed he’d found his mate; she just hadn’t found hers—and there, as they say, was the crux of the problem.

  It would take him an hour and a half to walk the distance a subway train might cover in fifteen minutes. He was glad he’d decided to walk, as the physical effort would make the emotional loss seem somehow more manageable.

  He stopped walking for a moment and allowed himself to muse upon a certain afternoon of many years earlier along the banks of a certain river—the Moika; and upon a certain Russian town—St. Petersburg. He remembered looking out over the River Moika as he could now have looked out—had he cared to walk a few blocks further east—over the East River. But he didn’t care to. At the time, the Moika had meant life; now, in contrast, the East would mean only deterioration.

  Here and now, he decided, he’d return to those magical moments along the Moika.

  * * *

  That afternoon with Svetlana had concluded—as all such afternoons must—and he’d left the apartment they’d borrowed for a few hours’ tryst and walked towards the bus-stop. As he walked, he heard a single male voice accompanied by a guitar. He approached and listened. This, then, would be the only real souvenir he’d leave with, would be the saddest thing he’d ever heard. It might’ve been the circumstances; it might’ve been the male voice or the lone guitar; it might’ve been St. Petersburg or a thousand different things. He didn’t know. He didn’t even know at that point who Yesinin was—much less Yesinin’s poem—although he was about to find out. The world he’d comfortably known was about to come undone, and the undoer of that comfortable world was, of all things, a poet.

  He’d stood and listened, and he believed nothing would ever equal that moment and that experience.

  He was wrong, of course, as youth is often wrong. Twelve years would first have to pass. The equal of the pain he’d felt that early evening along the Moika was now present as he walked down First Avenue towards home. Tonight, he decided, he’d celebrate a kind of anniversary of pain.

  At St Marks Place, he turned left. When he arrived at his address less than a minute later, he greeted his three squatters. They were, he decided, becoming something like human Kudzu. As he mounted the steps, she stopped him again. She was, even Kit had to admit, attractive—the Goth elements notwithstanding. Too bad—he was on the verge of thinking—until she stopped him short with a familiar Slavik accent.

  “Good evening, stranger.” Kit looked hard at her and wondered if she might be Tatiana of the next-door consignment café, the neighbor he’d never met.

  “Вы русская?” he asked.

  “Да,” she answered—she was Russian. That much was certain. Сто процентов.” Neither of them blinked.

  “Бесспокойной ночи,” Kit answered.

  “Бес—?” she answered. “Почему бес—?”

  “Потому что … ” and then he let it drop. She shouldn’t be expected to share his grief. She didn’t need to know why he’d just wished her an ungoodnight. “Как тебя зовут?” He at least wanted to know her name, though he wasn’t certain what difference it would make.

 
; “Надежда,” she said. “А тебя?”

  “Kit,” he answered. “Меня зовут Kit.”

  “Мне нравится,” she said with a smile that allowed Kit, once again, to admire her dental endowment. This time, he was the one who leaned down and kissed her cheek. Ironic, he thought, to be kissing the cheek of a woman named ‘Hope.’ She tilted her cheek up to be kissed, and Kit could see that she closed her eyes at the moment his lips found it.

  “Спокойной ночи,” he said.

  “Спокойной ночи,” she answered.

  He continued up the stoop and opened the front door, then took the stairs one by one to his fifth-floor apartment. It was entirely dark inside except for a few moonbeams trying to squeeze in through soot-covered windows. He opened the window. As if it had been sent to him as a gift, in error, he stared at a late-season harvest moon only partly concealed by the dark silhouettes of water-towers on the building next to his. It was enormous, pale orange, and as round as a perfect pumpkin. The reflected light was sufficient to show him everything he needed to find in his one-room apartment.

  He went first to the refrigerator to find the bottle of Tokai he’d bought months earlier in the off-hand chance that Daneka should change her mind and show up one day unannounced. He took down a single wineglass, then reached in and pulled out his little mermaid of a corkscrew. “Den lille havfrue,” she’d said. “How cute,” she’d added.

  He cut off the top of the metallic cap; inserted the corkscrew into the cork; worked the screw down into the bottle. The little mermaid’s arm once again allowed him to pull out the cork with ease. Her hand once again fit snugly onto the glass lip of the bottle. As before, he pulled slowly and carefully, and the cork came out in one, smooth motion.

  He poured himself a glass. He wasn’t working just then—and so, he decided, he’d allow himself a drink or two.

  His stereo system stood next to the open window. He went to his closet and pulled down a box of LPs. He thumbed through them until he found what he was looking for: Клён ты мой опавший, by Alexander Podbolotov. His wasn’t the voice Kit had heard that early evening along the Moika, but it would do.

  He took the record out of its jacket, placed it carefully on the turntable, found the track and dropped the needle down gently.

  Single strings of a single guitar started up out of silence, but with a background blush of balalaika. Podbolotov’s voice introduced itself as if from out of a back alley—or perhaps from out of a hotel room just large enough for one dismal occupant. Kit took a long sip of the Tokai, then sat down on the widow sill.

  Ты жива ещё, моя старушка?

  Жив и я. Привет тебе, привет!

  Пусть струится над твоей избушкой

  Тот вечерний несказанный свет.

  He looked down, took his gloves off and realized how profusely his hands were now bleeding. He reached for an old T-shirt he spotted on his work desk and picked it up for the purpose of stanching the flow of blood. That’s when he saw it—and stared at it from his position on the sill as he listened to the next stanza of Podbolotov’s song and Yesenin’s verse.

  Пишут мне, что ты, тая тревогу,

  Загрустила шибко обо мне,

  Что ты часто ходишь на дорогу

  В старомодном ветхом шушуне.

  It was his one attempt at translating verse—something he’d written to her six weeks earlier in a burst of energy and melancholy—and then promptly forgotten to send, just as he’d forgotten to retrieve the lichen. He picked it up, but continued to listen to Podbolotov’s original rendition in Russian.

  With his eyes fixed on the piece of paper in front of him, but staring at it blindly, as the combination of Podbolotov’s voice and his own private reverie had him temporarily transfixed, Kit was unaware that neighbors were gathering at windows below him and across the way, turning off their television sets or radios or stereos, and shushing their children. Kit couldn’t have known that none of these neighbors spoke Russian, that none of them had ever even heard of Yesenin, much less read his poetry. None of them would therefore have known that the poet had written this poem in a hotel room in St. Petersburg—not with pen and ink as was fashionable at the time, but with his own blood, on the wall, just after he’d slit his wrists.

  И тебе в вечернем синем мраке

  Часто видится одно и то ж:

  Будто кто-то мне в кабацкой драке

  Саданул под сердце финский нож.

  Ничего, родная! Успокойся.

  Это только тягостная бредь.

  Не такой уж горький я пропойца,

  Чтоб, тебя не видя, умереть.

  Я по-прежнему такой же нежный

  И мечтаю только лишь о том,

  Чтоб скорее от тоски мятежной

  Воротиться в низенький наш дом.

  Я вернусь, когда раскинет ветви

  По-весеннему наш белый сад.

  Только ты меня уж на рассвете

  Не буди, как восемь лет назад.

  Lost in his private ruminations, Kit also couldn’t have known that Hope, on the front stoop, heard the music only too clearly, understood the words perfectly, knew much of Yesenin’s poetry by heart—a heart that was now torn by a grief that was not hers, but which she knew belonged to all of them. She’d never read Donne in the original. But she had the heart of a Russian, and she understood with that Russian heart that no man is an island. And so, in this moment, this near-stranger’s pain, and Yesenin’s pain, became hers.

  Не буди того, что отмечталось,

  Не волнуй того, что не сбылось,

  Слишком раннюю утрату и усталость

  Испытать мне в жизни привелось.

  И молиться не учи меня. Не надо!

  К старому возврата больше нет.

  Ты одна мне помощь и отрада,

  Ты одна мне несказанный свет.

  Так забудь же про свою тревогу,

  Не грусти так шибко обо мне.

  Не ходи так часто на дорогу

  В старомодном ветхом шушуне.

  The song came to an end. Kit got up from the window sill and was about to pick the record up in order to put it back in its jacket. He took another sip of wine and decided, instead, to allow himself one more reverie before retiring the LP back to his closet. This time, however, he’d also read his own translation as he listened to Podbolotov.

  He dropped the needle and waited for the melody to start up again before sitting back down on the window sill.

  Before bothering to look at his own efforts on paper, however, he looked east in the direction of a harvest moon, Queens, Long Island, the Atlantic Ocean, and Europe… and he thought of their first hotel in Paris, of the bathroom plumbing and of the couple he’d watched making love across the way… of the pool in Cabo de São Vicente and of a burning sunset over the Atlantic as he and she looked west … of Rome, of her silhouette standing behind French doors as he looked up from the piazza … of Positano, of a borrowed fisherman’s boat out in the Gulf of Salerno … of the beginnings of a garden on a tiny island in the middle of the Baltic, and of a ‘special place’ in the middle of the forest on that same island.

  He sighed—and then looked down and began reading his modest attempt at a translation of Yesenin’s brilliant
and evocative verse.

  Hallo one last time, dearest mother of mine,

  I trust that you’re keeping my bed

  as white as our birches; as starched as our pine;

  as clear as our sky overhead.

  The rumour now runs: my old mother misses

  some devil—apparently me.

  That devil, in truth, remembers her kisses,

  her ratty old coat and her tea.

  Some evenings, I’ll wager, the vision’s perverse:

  a tavern; your boy in a brawl

  with sailors whose cunning eviscerates; worse:

  his verse comes to rest on a wall.

  Now pause for a moment to think this one through;

  and tell me I’ve failed to comply

  with wending what may not seem homeward to you,

  but is, with a kiss, on the fly.

  I think rather not—and trust you’ll make haste

  to give this old rumour the lie.

  The truth is I’m homesick and don’t want to waste