David Bezmozgis - The Free World

— Three bouquets in one week. It’s a very refined and thoughtful gesture, Polina’s mother said.

— He’s probably going to propose, Nadja said.

Maxim had already talked seriously about marriage. But he’d refrained from making a formal proposal because they were at a “crucial point in their lives.” To make a major life decision before graduating from the institute would be rash. They would both have to pass their exams and, ideally, finish near the top of their respective classes. After that, Maxim would have to perform his military service. He would be gone for two months and be obliged to pass another exam. Neither of them yet knew where they might be posted for work.

Much later, when Polina became involved with Alec, she looked back upon her younger self, the girl who at twenty-one had allowed Maxim to dictate the terms of her life. She understood that she had made a mistake. But she also understood that, at the time, she had been incapable of acting differently. Unlike her friends who descended into infatuations, she had never had a great love. Some people’s conceptions of what was available to them coincided with what was actually available to them, other people’s conceptions did not. There were men whom she found more engaging than Maxim but they didn’t much pursue her. They found her too serious. There were many other pretty girls who fawned and laughed more easily. What put those men off drew Maxim to her.

She met Maxim at a party in her friend’s dormitory room. Polina had been sitting and talking to one of her friend’s roommates when she turned her head and saw Maxim standing beside her. Maybe she smiled at him, maybe she didn’t. As if reading from the pages of a courtship manual, Maxim asked if she would care for a drink of any kind. Polina couldn’t think of a reason to decline, and so he returned with a glass of lemon soda and installed himself at her side for the rest of the evening. He ascertained her name, where she lived, what she was studying, her opinion of her program, her career aspirations. Next he proceeded to cultural and recreational interests: movies, books, ballet, musicians, figure skating, volleyball, rhythmic gymnastics. To be polite, Polina answered his questions, and when Maxim asked to see her again she said yes because she didn’t want to say no. She then forgot all about him until he appeared one evening at her door. Her mother told her that she had a gentleman caller, and she couldn’t imagine who it might be until she saw him waiting there. Worse still, she felt panicked because she couldn’t remember his name. But she experienced her first affectionate feeling for him when he rescued her by reintroducing himself. He didn’t appear to do this because he’d inferred that she had forgotten his name, but because a person was well advised to repeat his name upon meeting someone for only the second time.

That night he took her to see a figure skating competition at the Palace of Sports. He recalled, he said, that she had expressed an interest in figure skating. She recalled having expressed only the same generic interest in figure skating as in volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics. But tickets to the figure skating competition were hard to come by, even two at the very back of the arena. After the competition he took her to a café. He opened the door for her and held her chair. He did everything with precision and earnestness. At some point someone had taken him aside and informed him that, in the civilized precincts of planet Earth, there existed certain protocols. At some point, everyone heard a variation of this same speech, but not everybody took it to heart. Maxim had. In Polina, he sensed that he had found someone who also possessed a respect for the protocols.

Polina didn’t encourage him, but he didn’t seem to require encouragement. He courted her with the measured discipline of a person climbing a long flight of stairs. There was something endearing about Maxim’s doggedness as, step by step, he insinuated himself into her life. He asked to be introduced to her parents. He brought flowers and a bottle of cognac. He also brought a gift for Nadja and subsequently invited her along on outings. She was then only twelve or thirteen. They went to the zoo. He hired a boat and rowed them on the Lielupe River. Nadja teased him in a playful way. When they were in the boat, she hopped up and down in the bow, leaned over the edge, and made a theatrical speech about the cruel, cruel world and the weedy river’s irresistible call.

— I’m going to do it, Maxim, she said. Are you going to jump in and save me?

— Don’t be silly, Maxim said.

— I’m going to do it, Nadja said.

— Polina, Maxim appealed.

— Nadja, Polina cautioned.

— Oh, it’s all just too too much for a delicate girl to bear, Nadja said, and flopped over the side.

The green water closed over her like a curtain. Polina looked back at Maxim with apology and exasperation. They watched the water and waited for Nadja to part the curtain again. Polina stole glimpses at Maxim. Just when Maxim seemed ready to plunge in, Nadja thrashed to the surface, gasped for help, then disappeared again. Maxim waited a few moments longer and then, stalwartly, as if complying with an order, removed his shoes and jumped in after her. A lesser man, Polina thought, would have let Nadja flounder until she grew bored. Another kind of man, however, would have embraced the game.

After some requisite diving and searching, Maxim found Nadja peeking out from under the keel. When they floated back into view, Nadja had her head tipped back and one arm around Maxim’s neck. Her free arm swayed dramatically above her head. My hero, Nadja sighed, her eyes half closed. Maxim endured Nadja’s performance with the consummate face of the adult: distaste subjugated to obligation.

Reason, or its pale ambassador convention, ordered their time together. It extended to everything, including sex. Before Maxim, Polina had had three encounters that had approached but never crossed the line. On two of the occasions she had halted things before they went too far. The other time, at a Komsomol retreat, she had been willing but, at the critical moment, another couple entered the barn and started climbing to the hayloft.

Polina couldn’t say that she was eager to take the next and inevitable step with Maxim, but she did wonder when he would grant himself the permission to do it. During their gropings and fumblings, she felt like a spectator, watching Maxim as he denied himself for the sake of her honor. These preliminary bouts always ended with Maxim apologizing for the liberties he had taken. Polina either pardoned his liberties or said nothing at all. They would then sit or lie together on a bench in the public gardens, or on the embankment of the river in the industrial quarter, or in the cold, shadowy entrances to public buildings, and share momentous and ostensibly soulful silences. Eventually, Maxim interrupted a bout of groping to ask Polina for her opinion and her permission. She consented with a simple All right, and waited as Maxim scrupulously tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper she had heard about but never actually seen. Inexpertly, he put the rubber on himself and then spat on his hand and pawed Polina clumsily in preparation. Polina shifted her weight from one hip to the other so as to help him and then put her hands on his chest to resist his weight. She said, Careful, because she wasn’t quite ready and she didn’t know how to explain that to him. It was the only word that passed between them. Afterward, Maxim acted as if something significant had transpired and Polina didn’t contradict him.

From then on, they repeated the act with some regularity. Polina saw that Maxim liked it and wanted it, so she obliged him. What they did, they did with no variation. For Polina, intercourse began when Maxim tore the edge from the yellow paper wrapper. She assumed that it was the same for everyone until she overheard other girls speaking about their experiences with their mainly drunken boyfriends. That was when she learned that most men went to great lengths to avoid having to deal with the contents of the yellow wrapper, and that, despite the risks, most women relented. They rationalized their actions by maligning the quality of Soviet condoms, which were known to rupture or slide off. It made little sense, they said, to put one’s faith in something so unreliable. In Polina’s experience, the condoms had never ruptured or slid off. She also thought the alternative measures the women cited — hot water, wine vinegar, urine — sounded dubious, but several weeks later, when they were alone in Polina’s apartment, her parents having gone with Nadja to attend a choral recital, Maxim found that he did not have any condoms, but Polina insisted that they do it anyway. It was not something she had planned in advance, but neither was it entirely spontaneous. It was the first time she had ever challenged Maxim’s authority, and she was as aroused by the prospect of luring him into temptation as by the recklessness of what they were doing. Maxim was sitting up on his knees when she told him what she wanted, and he wavered for a few seconds, a look of fear and doubt on his face, before Polina reached out and took him into her. After that, the fear and doubt left his face and were replaced by something insular and fierce. For as long as it lasted, Polina felt florid reverberations, as if from dense and cumbersome things thrown against her body. Gothic thoughts took shape in her mind, some of which momentarily surprised her and then mocked her surprise. Shortly before it ended, Polina hissed in Maxim’s ear that she wanted him to do it inside her. It was a sentence that had been circling malevolently in her head from the moment she had insisted that they have sex. As she said it, she knew it couldn’t have had less to do with a desire for children. And as soon as Maxim finished, Polina slid out from under him and went to the kitchen for a basin and a purple, thin-necked vase from which she had to first remove three of Maxim’s carnations. She returned to the bedroom, set the basin in the middle of the floor, and urinated into it. Carefully, under Maxim’s silent gaze, she transferred the urine from the basin into the vase, spilling several drops onto the floorboards. She then stretched out on the floor, arched her pelvis, and instructed Maxim to pour the urine into her from the vase. What they were doing was disgusting and sordid, and Maxim avoided Polina’s eyes as he carried out her instructions. He was pliable then in a way that he had never been before and never would be again. She had made him complicit in something depraved, and she expected that, in some way, she would be punished for this. Later, when her punishment was meted out, Maxim never once blamed her for what she knew was exclusively her fault.