Lauren Groff - Arcadia

Bit says, softly, as Grete begins to speed back with a cookie raised high, I would have, if I were him.

Hannah plays with a red-and-white straw, thinking. Grete climbs up into her lap, and Hannah says, All right. Maybe not finding her there will give you something. Closure. You can live again.

Maybe, Bit says. I think I have to try.

Hannah pulls Grete to her, wrapping her long arms around Bit’s daughter, nestled and calm. Two versions of the same girl, peeping at him.

My potbellied Orpheus, Hannah says, theatrically, toward the light fixture that just came on overhead with a warm sizzle. My Orpheus descending into the underworld, whistling his gentle tune.

Grete, who couldn’t possibly understand, hears the laugh in her Grannah’s voice and guffaws, showing her tiny crooked teeth.

Bit takes the predawn train and walks through the awakening city. He likes Philadelphia, the no-nonsense hardness of the place. The day is already crisp and bright. It takes much longer than he thought it would to get to Ilya’s; he has to walk a bike path by the Schuylkill for miles to get there. The water ruffles under the wind bounding off it, blasts him with cold, whistles merrily into his ears. Sculls dart elegantly by, eights like crawling monsters muscle their way up the river. At last, he sees again the church where the schoolchildren mass in their uniforms, waiting for school. He’d come here once before, with Helle, when she took her things away from Ilya’s house and home to Bit’s. He stands in front of the brick house for a few minutes, unwilling, then knocks. The door opens.

For a moment, Bit feels like he is staring in a mirror that reflects his own future. It isn’t good. A small man, dark-haired, jaw like an andiron; but his once-handsome face is clotted, like milk left out for days. Ilya, Helle’s previous husband, reaches out a white hand and guides Bit in.

It is cold in the apartment and smells feral, and there are so many beer bottles and takeout boxes that Bit knows immediately Helle is not here. She cannot abide a mess.

They stand in the glum kitchen, and Ilya says in what Bit thinks is a Russian accent, Tell me. So. She is dead.

She is? Bit says.

I don’t know, Ilya says. I thought that is what you have come to say.

No, Bit says. May I sit?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, Ilya says, clearing a chair of newspapers. I am sorry I did not ask first. I believed you were the bearing of bad news.

No news, Bit says. I wanted to see you.

No news is bad news, Ilya says and smiles, showing briefly his brown teeth, the recessed gums. He sits also and fiddles with a cigarette and draws on it, pulling his yellow skin against his bones. When he breathes out, his face is soft again.

And so you have come to ask if Helle is here or if I have seen her. I can only say, No. To my greatest sorrow, as you understand.

Bit does understand. Helle had come to Bit just after her marriage with Ilya had dissolved. He is a violinist with the orchestra and a troubled man. Helle had told Bit about the rages, the furniture splintered on the walls, the time he held her by the throat over the upstairs banister. They had met during Helle’s last time in rehab, the time in her early thirties when she spent a whole year there. She had left Ilya when he grew so sad he tried to stab himself in the heart. He only grew sadder when he woke in the hospital to find her gone. It took him two years to emerge from the hospital and play his instrument again. By then, Helle was with Bit, and Grete was already one.

I should be happy if she were to come to me, Ilya says, now with great effort. But, alas, she will not. I am going home.

Home? Bit says, looking up. Russia?

Odessa, Ilya says gently. I am dying, and would like to die around my own. And this country has lost what has made it magic, of course. The exuberance, you know. Things, I am afraid, are soon to fall apart. The center cannot hold, all that. As it is, it is no different from Ukraine. So, to go back, in the end, from whence I come. There is a certain lovely symmetry, yes?

Bit isn’t sure what to say. A bell chimes down the hill and Bit loses count. He says at last, I am sorry you’re sick. I know we’re not friends, but it makes me very sad to hear that.

Oh, no, I am dying, Ilya says. Not sick. I am born dying. But I am not so unusual. There are many like me in the world. And you, why should you say that we are not friends? You and I are not enemies. Quite the contrary. Brothers-in-arms, the walking wounded. A connection to Helle. We are not so different.

He looks at Bit for a long moment, then looks away. However, if you ask me, and it does strike me that you have not , you might stop looking for her.

Why? Bit says.

I do not think she is alive. I have had a feeling for some time. I am sorry if this hurts you.

Well, I feel strongly that she is, Bit says.

Yes, says Ilya, we are similar in many things, it is true, but we are not the same. You have idealism still.

They sit for a very long time in the sour kitchen. There is a plastic clock on the wall that ticks and ticks and ticks.

Would you like to have my house? Ilya says suddenly.

Oh, Bit says. He imagines Grete here, space, peace, privacy, going to the school at the bottom of the hill. She could have a whole playroom: he could have a darkroom. A quieter pace, the river down the hill murmuring in their dreams at night. But he wouldn’t have his job, his friends.

The house is beautiful, he says, but our lives are in the city and I have no money.

Ilya flicks his delicate violinist’s fingers. No matter, he says. I do not need money where I am going.

Ukraine? Bit says, and Ilya laughs and puts out his fourth cigarette in the short time they have sat together.

I give you it. The house. You can sell, do whatever with it, I don’t care. On one condition, he says and seems almost hysterical with the idea in his head. He leaps up and begins to pace. His hands, loose in the room, seem like spiders, too big for his small body.

What would that be? Bit says, feeling a little sick.

You give me a photograph of the little girl. Helle’s daughter. Your Margrete.

With this, Ilya laughs and laughs, a warm laugh full of a strange dark joy.

Bit takes a moment to think. There is no harm in showing the picture. Bit would have sent photos regularly had he known Ilya wanted them. Yet somewhere within him a small beastie protests, urgently opposed. He waits, trying to understand why.

When Ilya’s smile seems about to break, Bit pulls his wallet from his pocket and takes out the most recent photograph he’d developed of his daughter, Grete holding a jack-o’-lantern, feet sturdy, her smile as broad as the pumpkin’s. There is Abe’s calm confidence in her gaze, Hannah’s lush lips.

Ilya takes the photo and stares at Grete for a long time. Bit squirms. He is just about to ask for it back, but then Ilya looks up and there are tears in his eyes. He smiles, but there is something of the crushed insect to his mouth. He shakes Bit’s hand and Bit squeezes back too hard, and belatedly remembers the tender violinist’s bones. Ilya winces, holding his hand to his chest.

I’m sorry, Bit says.

Ah. I won’t be needing the hand either, Ilya says. So. We have a deal. He shows Bit out, patting him gently on the shoulder.

Have a good trip home, Bit says. Yes, Ilya says, slowly. Yes, I think it will be good. And with a wink, he shuts the door.

Bit comes home on the clacketing train. There is a woman at the end of the car, facing him, whom he had barely noticed when he first got on, but who becomes more beautiful the more he looks at her. She has long wing-black hair and heavy brows and the kind of nose that reminds Bit of Greek statuary. Her earrings catch the glint from her overhead reading lamp, and gold coins of light dance on her jawbones. He would capture her in collodion, with its beautiful imperfections, its long, slow stare. Her hands are quick and nervous when she turns the pages of her book, and her face so sensitive and mobile that it is almost as if he is reading along with her: here a beautiful moment, here a tense one, here a release into a laugh, here a love scene. She bites her lip, and her face fills with a gladness that makes Bit know how she would be in bed, giving, soft, bird cries rising up from her throat. He could love this woman, he knows. There is nothing between them but an aisle and some seats and a quantity of air to move through; nothing to keep him from sitting down and her shy smile lifting from the book.