Kseniya Melnik - Snow in May

I spotted a fallen cone next to a tuft of spruce bush needles. The composition looked remarkably like a miniature palm tree, and, for some reason, making this simple connection moved me to tears. I wanted to take a whiff of the spruce, a smell I associated with magic since childhood—probably because of the New Year tree—but I couldn’t lean far enough to reach it. I stared at the petals of the cone until they began to quiver, drawers about to open into another world. I felt like I was about to faint and began to hum under my breath. “ Michelle, my belle … ” And then I heard the voices of my friends calling out my name as they descended the slope.

Somebody had already skied down to call the ambulance from the bus stop, they told me. They hoisted me onto a wooden board and tied me down with rope. Tolyan and tall Oleg picked up the front end, and the shorter Slava and Artyom picked up the back. We inched down. When they ran out of war songs, they sang the discotheque anthems of the day, liberally interpreting the English lyrics: Shizgara, yeah baby Shizgara for Shocking Blue’s “Venus” and Just give me money, that pha-ra-on for the Beatles’ “Money.” It was getting darker every moment. My pain came to from the shock and began to howl. Finally, I saw the headlights of the ambulance flash from the bottom of the hill.

The last thing I remember before the operation is pleading for the doctors not to cut my ski boot. My Yugoslavian skis and boots were my most prized possessions and had cost a month’s salary. The diagnosis was closed fracture of the fibula and tibia, spiral, comminuted. Tolyan had stayed with me in the hospital late into the night.

This all happened on March 8, International Women’s Day. We had planned to attend a big dance at the Palace of ProfUnions later that evening. While I was enjoying the post-bone-setting morphine haze, Tolyan tried to call our girlfriends to let them know what had happened. But they had already left for the dance.

Mine was Lily, a little hourglass-shaped Jewish olive, with amber-clear eyes and a bead of a birthmark above her lip that drove me crazy. She was engaged to a rising Jewish academic, which I didn’t see as a problem at the time, at least not my problem. Lily ran to my apartment every other night. Who was I to stop her?

She visited me at the hospital three times. Each time the sight of me in bed with my broken leg in traction, supported by various slings, weights, and levers, brought her to tears. Poor Lily would put her bag on the stand near the bed—although many of my other, less mindful visitors simply hung their bags right on the weight—and stand shyly by my side. Then, her hands would hover above my full-leg cast, brush against my arm, and land over her mouth. She would kiss my forehead so tenderly that a wave of itching sensations rushed down my broken leg. I would seize my metal scratcher, insert it down my cast, and poke about savagely, moaning from pleasure and pain, which would trigger another bout of tears from my beautiful Lily.

The fourth time, it wasn’t Lily who came but her mother. Our affair had come out.

“You almost ruined my daughter’s life,” her mother yelled in a deep, operatic voice. She was fat, almost a perfect square—the kind of woman Lily would probably become in her older years, after having children. “I’d kill you if you didn’t look so miserable. I’d make sure you’re an outcast in this town.”

Suddenly I wanted to laugh, though her threats were far from empty. Lily’s father had a high position in the local Party Committee. In Magadan, where everyone knew everyone’s business, reputation was important.

Lily’s mother went on detailing my lack of morals, of sympathy for a young girl’s heart, of respect for their family and my family, of respect for myself. Lack, lack, lack. But the blade had narrowly swung clear of both Lily’s head and mine, and I wanted to celebrate. My broken leg had saved my career. Moreover, it provided a blameless, romantic exit from my relationship with Lily. I knew all along that she wasn’t the girl I’d marry even if her engagement broke up, and our inevitable separation, if protracted, could have taken a much uglier form.

Tolyan wasn’t so lucky. He was smitten with Anya, an air-headed girl with a lean figure and a voice that went with campfire guitar as smoothly as vodka goes down with salted herring. While Tolyan nursed me at the hospital, Anya let herself be swayed by a former classmate of ours, a certain Seryoga, at the Women’s Day dance.

“You didn’t have to stay at the hospital. You could’ve just gone to the dance,” I said when he told me the news.

“That didn’t occur to me.” Tolyan gave me a shaming look.

“Well, she showed her true nature. Why do you need a girl like that?” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. There’re always more. Seryoga will play with her and dump her soon enough. That’s the way he is,” he said, picking up my metal scratcher. “What’s this for?” He put it in his mouth and chewed, making a disconcerting sound. “Brutal age, rough manners, nyet romantismy, ” he concluded with a quote from one of our favorite films.

I spent another month at the hospital. Tolyan and I grew out our hair, mustaches, and beards, which made us look like nineteenth-century Russian merchants. When he visited, we drank tea in character—out of saucers—and flirted with the nurses. After I’d been moved home, friends and girls stopped by to help with groceries and laundry, and to make sure I followed doctor’s orders of three hundred drops of vodka daily. I enjoyed three more guilt-free months of reading. I was a big fan of Thornton Wilder then. While reading The Bridge of San Luis Rey, I wondered, just like Brother Juniper does in the novel, whether there was any logic in who got into accidents or became the victim of various unfortunate events. Of course, breaking a leg was a disaster not on the same scale as dying in the collapse of a bridge. Still, maybe I’d been plunged into this parallel, slower life to learn a lesson. Maybe Lily’s mother was right: it was time to grow up. That meant getting married. Surprisingly, this thought no longer threw me into panic.

But I don’t want to give the impression that I suffered unduly in heavy self-reflection. Apart from a few physical inconveniences, I loved living in my favorite striped mohair robe, away from my job, which didn’t prove to be as exciting as I’d imagined when I went off to the aviation institute in Riga. I was often awake at five in the morning after reading all night to hear the first birdsong of the day. The Eagles’ “Hotel California” had just made its way to the northeast and played from the radio in every open window. Sometimes, when reading or watching soccer on TV, I’d forget about my white underwear boiling in a giant pot. The water and bleach would spill onto the stove and then the floor, and this way the whole kitchen would clean itself in minutes. Life was good.

In July, the doctors removed the cast. Later I’d find out that the fibula had grown back at a slight angle: the soles of my left shoes would now forever develop holes before the right ones even showed signs of wear. I hobbled outside on crutches to exercise my legs. The stream of friends and well-wishers thinned. Everybody had gone on vacation. Tolyan and I played Battleship over the phone, unable to do any of the things that made the cold summer in Magadan bearable. (Tolyan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find another tennis partner.) Finally, his father helped us obtain two-week passes to a sanatorium on the Black Sea and off we went to seek a cure for our bachelors’ ennui.

It was there that I met my future wife, Marina, who was on vacation with her friend Lenka. I still remember my Marina’s green bikini and the giant sagging straw hat, which was quite ridiculous, but on her seemed utterly stylish. Under the hat she had fantastic bangs. On top of it all, she was that mythical creature—an actual pianist and a piano teacher—whereas Tolyan and I, and everyone we knew then, had quit the fashionable, parent-ordered piano lessons after a year of family-wide suffering. A funny story: when I had first asked her what she did for a living, she said that she worked as an instructor. I, however, heard “on a tractor” and was considerably impressed, for days picturing her astride a tractor in the fields of golden wheat, her cheeks red and eyes shining.