David Bezmozgis - Natasha and Other Stories

I noticed Rufus looking at her.

— Did I mention she was fourteen?

— My interest, I assure you, is purely anthropological.

— The anthropology of jailbait.

— She’s an intense little chick.

— She’s Russian. We’re born intense.

— With all due respect, Berman, you and her aren’t even the same species.

To get her attention Rufus leaned across the table and tapped Natasha on the arm. She looked up from her omelette and returned Rufus’s smile. He asked me to translate for him. His own family, he said, could be traced back to Russia. He wanted to know what Russia was like now. What it was really like.

With a shrug Natasha answered.

— Russia is shit but people enjoy themselves.

After that first day, Natasha started coming to our house regularly. I no longer went to pick her up but waited instead for her to arrive. Through my basement window I could see her as she appeared in our backyard and wandered around inspecting my mother’s peonies or the raspberry and red currant bushes. If I was in a certain mood I would watch her for a while before going upstairs and opening the sliding glass door in the kitchen. Other times, I would just go and open the door. We spent most of our days in the basement. I read and Natasha studied television English. When I had a delivery to make she accompanied me. Between reading, television English, and deliveries, I taught Natasha how to get high. I showed her how to roll a joint, to light a pipe, or, in a pinch, where to cut the holes in a Coke can or Gatorade bottle. In exchange, Natasha taught me other things. Many of these things had nothing to do with sex.

After our days in the basement we would listen for my mother to arrive home from work. To avoid some serious unpleasantness I made a habit of setting my alarm for five o’clock. If we weren’t sleeping, the alarm simply reminded us to open a window or get dressed. By the time my mother came home we were usually in the kitchen or out in the backyard. Chores that had been assigned to me were usually done at this time. It pleased my mother to come home and find me, spade in hand, turning over the earth around the berry bushes. Also, once it was established that Natasha much preferred to stay at our house, my mother grew more than accustomed to having her around. Unlike me and my father, Natasha volunteered to help her in the kitchen. The two of them would stand at the sink peeling potatoes and slicing up radishes and cucumbers for salad. I often came in to overhear my mother telling stories about her childhood in postwar Latvia — a land of outhouses, horse-drawn wagons, and friendly neighbors. In Natasha she found a receptive audience. They spoke the same language — Russian girl to Russian girl. This despite the fact that, in too many ways, Natasha’s childhood couldn’t have been more different from my mother’s if she had been raised by Peruvian cannibals, but there was never any indication of this in our kitchen. Only my mother telling stories and Natasha listening.

Very quickly, our family of three became a family of four. No more than two weeks after I picked her up at my uncle’s apartment Natasha became a fixture at our house. It was a situation that, for different and even perversely conflicting reasons, suited everyone. It solved the Natasha problem for my uncle. It solved the Zina problem for Natasha. It made my mother feel like she was protecting my uncle’s last chance at happiness and also satisfying her own latent desire for a daughter. It absolved me of the need to find a job and cast me in a generally favorable light with the rest of my family. And, strangely enough, Natasha’s incorporation into the household made the things we did in the basement seem less bad. Or not bad at all. What we did in the basement became only a part of who we were. There were layers upon layers. Which was why, at any one moment, I felt for Natasha the most natural and unusual feelings; to explain the feelings would be impossible, but whatever they were they were never bad.

Since I had been conditioned to approach sex as negotiation, I was amazed to discover that it could be as perfunctory as brushing your teeth. One day, after some but not too many days together, Natasha simply slid out of her jeans and removed her shirt. We were sitting inches apart, each on our own beanbag. Moments before, we had finished smoking a joint and I had gone back to Kafka’s diaries. I became aware of what she was doing slower than a sixteen-year-old should have. I looked over as she was wriggling out of her pants. That she saw me looking changed nothing. On the beanbag, naked, she turned to me and said, very simply, as if it were as insignificant to her as it was significant to me: Do you want to? At sixteen, no expert but no virgin, I lived in a permanent state of want to. But for everything I knew, I knew almost nothing. In the middle of the day, Natasha in the basement, was the first time I had seen a live naked girl. All the parts available for viewing. Nothing in my previous dimly lit gropings compared. In my teenage life, what was more elusive than a properly illuminated naked girl? And the fact that it was Natasha — my nominal cousin, fourteen, strange — no longer mattered. After spending days with her and thinking about her at night, I knew very well how I felt. And so, when she asked if I wanted to, I wanted to.

That day was the first of many firsts. With the house to ourselves and no threat of being disturbed, we did everything I had ever dreamed of doing — including some things that hadn’t even occurred to me. We showered together, we slept in the same bed, I watched her walk across the room, I watched her pee. These prosaic things, being new, were as exciting as the sex. And for me the sex was as much about the variation as the pleasure. Much of the pleasure was in the variation. I kept a mental list from position to position, crossing off one accomplishment after another. Nothing was repeated until everything was attempted. That way, in the event that I was struck by a bus, I would feel as though I had lived a full life. Most of the things we did Natasha had already done, but she was perfectly happy to oblige. If she was doing it as a favor, she never expected gratitude and demanded nothing in return.

In our quieter moments Natasha told me about the men who had taken her picture. She had never minded any of it, but she never understood why they couldn’t explain why they liked one thing over another. They had always known exactly how they wanted her to look but none of them could give her a reason. Why did they prefer her leg raised this way and not that, why squatting from behind or holding her hand in a certain position? Some of the positions had been practically identical, and yet they had insisted on them. The only explanation they offered was that it looked good, or that it was sexy. And yet she never felt that way about men. She never cared how they looked, or what side she was viewing them from.

— You don’t care how I look?

— You look how you look. If you bent over it wouldn’t make any difference to me.

I bent over.

— That doesn’t make any difference?

— It looks stupid. But what if I bend over? Does it look stupid?

— No, it looks good.

— Why is that?

— It just does.

— You can’t explain it?

I thought it had to do with the forbidden. The attraction to the forbidden in the forbidden. The forbiddenest. But it still wasn’t much of an answer.

At the same time that things with Natasha were improving my mother started to hear the first rumblings of trouble in my uncle’s marriage. My grandparents, who had been accustomed to visiting my uncle frequently, were informed that maybe they shouldn’t come over quite so often. Their habit of arriving unannounced was aggravating Zina, who insisted that she had too much to worry about without always having to accommodate my grandparents. My grandmother, although hurt, naturally made excuses for both my uncle and Zina. We were a close family, she said, but not all people can be expected to be the same way. Also, with time, as Zina became more comfortable, she was certain that she would feel differently. In any case, as long as my uncle was happy she was prepared to respect Zina’s wishes. My uncle, for his part, said nothing. The signals were mixed. There was what my grandmother said, but my mother also knew that he and Zina took a weekend trip together to Niagara-on-the-Lake and another to Quebec City. After Quebec City my uncle sported a new leather jacket and a gray Stetson. Whatever was happening between them, he wasn’t complaining.