Adrienne Celt - Invitation to a Bonfire

I wasn’t sure he’d be able to see me flush, given the water, the light. How loud had I been? Lev’s hands, on every part of me.

“Listen,” he said. “Just don’t let me find you here again like this. I would hate for anything to complicate your position at the school.”

“Of course.” I couldn’t meet his eye. “Thank you.”

The problem, I realized once he’d left, wasn’t the shame. My time at the Donne School was winding down in any case, so what did it matter if someone thought I was a little crazy? Unwholesome? I was going to kill a man. In the cottage, though, Vera had laughed and said no one would think to question me when Lev was gone, because I was just the flower girl. Invisible on campus, illegible within his life. Any investigation would pass right over me: true enough until the moment I called attention to myself, streaking half-naked out onto the lawn. There wasn’t an enormous chance that George Round would put the two events together. But there was, now, a chance.

I dressed hastily in the previous day’s clothes and started home to make tea; I’d gone off coffee since my night of reading at the cottage table. On the way I decided to take a quick detour into the nicer neighborhoods around campus, telling myself it was just for the pleasure of walking under the tall leafy trees, the dappled shade. Everyone was sleeping and so life seemed suspended. Birds trapped in a mailbox: I’d had that idea, once. There was a single abandoned roller skate on the sidewalk that I nudged into a flowerbed with my toe-tip, sliding it back and forth over the rough concrete before letting it go. Orange rubber, invisible in the nasturtiums. Then I was at Lev’s door.

The surprise wasn’t my presence. It was his. A part of me had been certain he wouldn’t ever show up, would just have melted away. But. I floated up the front steps expecting the same dark rooms and empty sense that the house had exuded since my return to Maple Hill. And instead found—blazing light. Every room in the house was at peak brightness, and through the window I saw a halfway unrecognizable man standing up in front of a desk and writing something (what?) that filled him with horror. Lev. His cheekbones hollow and nose rather beaky. The lips I’d so missed red and white with chap, to such a degree they seemed to be covered with pith from an orange. His clothes were askew, his beard growing in, and when I knocked on the window his eyes searched for the sound without seeming able to find my face. It spooked me, I’ll admit. There was a long moment of terror for us both, until I realized that the lamps were casting a reflection, making it impossible for him to see through the glass.

I went to the door and knocked with both hands, more a beating than an entreaty—I had to stop myself from scratching the paint. Now, it’s now , I thought. Hating the thinking. When Lev opened the door I threw myself into his arms and kissed him once, twice, again, until we tumbled into the middle of the house to the space behind the stairs and pressed our bodies together with the desperation of two people with irreconcilable ideas about what could heal our wounds.

Afterwards, Lev seemed nervous. He lit a cigarette and smoked it halfway before thinking to light another for me. I hadn’t had a single one since leaving Vera, so the first several inhalations went to my head, leaving me woozy. Lev pressed the back of his wrist to his brow and then shook it away when the cigarette embers came too close to his skin.

“Did you?” he asked me. “Did it go off?”

I had decided several days before what to say.

“Not exactly. She never showed up at the train.”

“Oh, thank god. You know, she wrote to say the trip was on but I…” He trailed off. I followed him into the kitchen for water, then up to his bedroom where he unrolled a gun from a silk scarf and laid it on the bed. “I shot someone,” he said. “In Leningrad. She was a woman and I…” He shook his hand again and sparks scattered onto the carpet. I discreetly stubbed them out with my shoe, then left my own cigarette in an ashtray.

“Lev, what happened? Did you get the book?”

“You know,” he went to the window and leaned against the sill. “I was excited when she told me about your plans, but then I got to thinking, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“She? Who? In Leningrad?”

“Oh, her .” He laughed shrilly. “You want to know about her? Well, yes, I did it, you see. Almost. I got all the way to the station—I mean the station where it was buried, and it was nighttime, and it was dark out, and I thought, this is the best chance I’m going to have. But damn them, they’d paved over the spot, or”—his voice was hoarse—“or else I forgot where it was.”

I sat down on the bed. Thinking of how he would’ve approached that place with perfect confidence. Did he even want to find it? Did he really care about the book, the way he said? Or did he just want to prove to himself that he could do something Vera didn’t want done? Give him an inch of leash , she’d told me. “We were happy, weren’t we?” I asked. “We could’ve just carried on. It didn’t need to be everything, all at once.” But I don’t think he heard me.

“I had this idiotic shovel, I mean a hand spade ,” Lev muttered. “I mean, even if it weren’t for the paving how deep could I have gotten? After how many years? Vera knew. Vera always knows. And I thought—” He turned to me, desperate. “You didn’t, did you? Tell me she’s alive.”

“As far as I know, Lev. She wasn’t there.”

“Of course, of course.” He looked down at his hands, wringing them. The way a raccoon washes and washes a piece of food in its fist, or some little gem it’s picked up off the road. “Of course I couldn’t leave it like that, so I picked a spot—I mean, I think it was the right spot—and I started trying to chip away at the cement. But it was so loud. There were actual sparks coming up where I hit.” He went silent for a moment.

“And the woman?”

“Vlad, he was my guide you know, and he kept hushing me. Tishe, tishe . And I kept stabbing at the ground, right above where I thought it was, right towards where the book should be. And then someone came along and”—his eyes were moons, so big they scared me—“she was, I don’t know, militsia ? Secret police? But so young.”

I picked up the pistol from beside me and tested the weight of it in my hand. Lev didn’t seem to notice. In that moment I had no plan. He was the love of my life, you see. Fumbling towards some truth too terrible to be spoken out loud. I kissed Daphne behind the library. You and Vera, you’re exactly the same.

“She shouted at me to put down my weapon, and I don’t know—I guess she thought the sparks were something else, but she pulled out her gun and I threw down the spade, and when the sound distracted her, I—”

The shot was more than I expected. It pushed me back onto the bed and hurt my arm, leaving my ears ringing. Lev didn’t shout, and for a second I thought I’d missed. But you can’t miss at that range. He was four feet away at most, and it went through right under his left shoulder, and the bleeding was profuse. Tears streamed down my face, and I waited for him to say something, but he just coughed. A few drops of blood spraying out and then trickling down from his mouth as he looked at me with bemusement. Or maybe it was dreadful pain.

I dropped the gun and thought, You have to go, you have to go right now . But I sat there and watched him slide down to the floor and stare his questions and confusion at me, wordless. Then I went to crouch by him, at what I judged to be the last, and brought his fingers to my lips and kissed them. I could’ve said “It was her idea,” and given him some final measure of satisfaction, but I wanted it to be us, just us again, in that room. Still, perhaps he guessed.