Donna Tartt - The Goldfinch

I rubbed my eye behind my glasses. “What are you going to tell them at school?”

He cracked the beer open. “Eh?”

“Well, I mean.” The bruise on his face was the color of raw meat. “People are going to ask.”

He grinned and elbowed me. “I’ll tell ’em you did it,” he said.

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious.”

“Boris, it’s not funny.”

“Oh, come on. Football, skateboard.” His black hair fell in his face like a shadow and he tossed it back. “You don’t want them to take me away, do you?”

“Right,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause.

“Because Poland.” He passed me the beer. “I think is what it would be. For deportation. Although Poland—” he laughed, a startling bark—“better than Ukraine, my God!”

“They can’t send you back there, can they?”

He frowned at his hands, which were dirty, nails rimmed with dried blood. “No,” he said fiercely. “Because I’ll kill myself first.”

“Oh, boo hoo hoo.” Boris was always threatening to kill himself for one reason and another.

“I mean it! I’ll die first! I’d rather be dead.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

“Yes I would! The winter—you don’t know what it’s like. Even the air is bad. All gray concrete, and the wind—”

“Well, it must be summer there sometime.”

“Ah, God.” He reached for my cigarette, took a sharp drag, blew a stream of smoke up at the ceiling. “Mosquitoes. Stinking mud. Everything smells like mould. I was so starving-to-death and lonely—I mean, sometimes I was so hungry, serious, I would walk on the river bank and think of drowning myself.”

My head hurt. Boris’s clothes (my clothes, actually) tumbled in the dryer. Outside, the sun shone bright and mean.

“I don’t know about you,” I said, taking the cigarette back, “but I could use some real food.”

“What shall we do then?”

“We should have gone to school.”

“Hmpf.” Boris made it plain that he only went to school because I went, and because there was nothing else to do.

“No—I mean it. We should have gone. There’s pizza today.”

Boris winced, with genuine regret. “Fuck it.” That was the other thing about school; at least they fed us. “Too late now.”

xxv.

SOMETIMES, IN THE NIGHT, I woke up wailing. The worst thing about the explosion was how I carried it in my body—the heat, the bone-jar and slam of it. In my dreams, there was always a light way out and a dark way out. I had to go the dark way, because the bright way was hot and flickering with fire. But the dark way was where the bodies were.

Happily, Boris never seemed annoyed or even very startled when I woke him, as if he came from a world where there was nothing so unusual in a nocturnal howl of pain. Sometimes he’d gather up Popchik—snoring at the foot of our bed—and deposit him in a limp sleepy heap on my chest. And weighed down like that—the warmth of both of them around me—I lay counting to myself in Spanish or trying to remember all the words I knew in Russian (swear words, mostly) until I went back to sleep.

When I’d first come to Vegas, I’d tried to make myself feel better by imagining that my mother was still alive and going about her routine back in New York—chatting with the doormen, picking up coffee and a muffin at the diner, waiting on the platform by the news stand for the 6 train. But that hadn’t worked for long. Now, when I buried my face in a strange pillow that didn’t smell at all like her, or home, I thought of the Barbours’ apartment on Park Avenue, or, sometimes, Hobie’s townhouse in the Village.

I’m sorry your father sold your mother’s things. If you had told me, I might have bought some of them and kept them for you. When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don’t change.

Your descriptions of the desert—that oceanic, endless glare—are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there’s something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it all. The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I’m reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it’s as if you’ve gone away to sea on a ship—out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky.

This letter arrived tucked in an old hardcover edition of Wind, Sand and Stars by Saint-Exupéry, which I read and re-read. I kept the letter in the book, where it became creased and dirty from repeated re-reading.

Boris was the only person I’d told, in Vegas, how my mother had died—information that to his credit he’d accepted with aplomb; his own life had been so erratic and violent that he didn’t seem all that shocked by the story. He’d seen big explosions, out in his father’s mines around Batu Hijau and other places I’d never heard of, and—without knowing the particulars—was able to venture a fairly accurate guess as to the type of explosives employed. As talkative as he was, he also had a secretive streak and I trusted him not to tell anyone without having to ask. Maybe because he himself was motherless and had formed close bonds to people like Bami, his father’s “lieutenant” Evgeny, and Judy the barkeep’s wife in Karmeywallag—he didn’t seem to think my attachment to Hobie was peculiar at all. “People promise to write, and they don’t,” he said, when we were in the kitchen looking at Hobie’s latest letter. “But this fellow writes you all the time.”

“Yeah, he’s nice.” I’d given up trying to explain Hobie to Boris: the house, the workshop, his thoughtful way of listening so different from my father’s, but more than anything a sort of pleasing atmosphere of mind: foggy, autumnal, a mild and welcoming micro-climate that made me feel safe and comfortable in his company.

Boris stuck his finger in the open jar of peanut butter on the table between us, and licked it off. He had grown to love peanut butter, which (like marshmallow fluff, another favorite) was unavailable in Russia. “Old poofter?” he asked.

I was taken aback. “No,” I said swiftly; and then: “I don’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Boris, offering me the jar. “I’ve known some sweet old poofters.”

“I don’t think he is,” I said, uncertainly.

Boris shrugged. “Who cares? If he is good to you? None of us ever find enough kindness in the world, do we?”

xxvi.

BORIS HAD GROWN TO like my father, and vice versa. He understood, better than I did, how my father made his living; and although he knew, without being told, to stay away from my dad when he was losing, he also understood that my father was in need of something I was unwilling to give: namely, an audience in the flush of winning, when he was pacing around jacked up and punchy in the kitchen and wanting someone to listen to his stories and praise him about how well he’d done. When we heard him down there jumped-up and high on the downdraft of a win—bumping around jubilantly, making lots of noise—Boris would put down his book and head downstairs, where patiently he stood listening to my dad’s boring, card-by-card replay of his evening at the baccarat table, which often segued into excruciating (to me) stories of related triumphs, all the way back to my dad’s college days and blighted acting career.

“You didn’t tell me that your dad had been in movies!” said Boris, returning upstairs with a cup of now-cold tea.

“He wasn’t in many. Like, two.”

“But I mean. That one—that was a really big movie—that police movie, you know, the one about policemen taking bribes. What was the name of it?”