Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

“Did you even dream of living like this?” her father had asked when he visited. They were standing on her terrace together. He was short, shorter than Regina, thin wisps of his gray hair fluttering against his bald crown. He used to be a writer. “His very first short story was published in Novyj Mir !” Aunt Masha told Regina. When Regina was five years old, he went to Canada and decided to stay there, basically abandoning his wife and child. Now he lived in Montreal and taught Russian literature.

“A simple Russian girl like yourself. And look at you now — the queen of Manhattan.”

His words made Regina gag. She was neither simple nor Russian (she had Jewish, Polish, and a smidgen of French blood in her veins), and she definitely was not the queen of Manhattan. She was tired of explaining to people that Bob wasn’t that rich. When the news of the Occupy Wall Street protests reached Regina’s father, he called to ask if Bob was in the “one percent.” He was. Regina’s father couldn’t be prouder. He wasn’t nearly as excited when Regina told him about her latest translator’s prize. It was her father who had given Regina her stupid embarrassing name. He must have been hoping that she would eventually become a queen. Regina had never been very fond of her father, and now she couldn’t forgive him for the simple fact of his being alive, when her mother was dead.

She sat down on one of their pretty metallic chairs and took the first sip. The seat was still wet from yesterday’s rain, but she decided that she didn’t care. The huge letters on the other bank of the river spelled the word Lackawanna. She didn’t know what that meant, but the word fascinated her. She took another sip. The coffee hadn’t come out that well, but at least it was still hot and bitter. It was her mother who had taught Regina to drink black coffee: “Black coffee tastes like a punishment that makes you strong.”

Regina wasn’t nearly as talented a translator as her mother had been. She did her job well, but she couldn’t boast of any special gift. Her mother’s special gift was humor. She could find the smallest grain of humor in the novel and push it just a tiny bit more, so that it became suppler, brighter, but didn’t lose its subtlety. Regina had read the entire oeuvre by George Eliot in her mother’s translation, chuckling and grinning and sometimes even laughing like crazy. She was deeply disappointed when she read the novels in the original English. She found them to be rather moralistic and dull.

Not only was her mother a brilliant translator, she also seemed to have had a personal relationship with each of her dead authors. She would read all of their biographies, diaries, correspondence. She would call them by their first names and talk about them as if they were family members. “Did you know what Charlotte’s father did when she died? Charlotte Brontë?” she would ask at breakfast while stirring the kasha in her bowl. “He cut up her letters and sold the pieces to her grieving fans so that he could make more money!” And then hours later, when they were sitting at their adjacent desks working, she would cry out: “The bastard!” “Who are you talking about, Mom?” Regina would ask. Her mother would answer, “Charlotte’s father, who else!”

They’d lived in a one-bedroom flat on Lyalin Lane in Moscow. The kitchen was dark and moldy, and there were always pigeons on the window ledge, peeking in, tapping on the window. Her favorite room was the living room. At noon there was always a thick ray of sunlight coming from the locked balcony door into the middle of the room. When Regina was little, she loved to run into that ray and freeze there so that she could catch the sparkling specks of dust that flew around her like snowflakes.

There was the old sofa in the back, where her mother loved to sit with little Regina and show her family heirlooms. Photographs, letters, various old trinkets. Regina’s favorite objects were the buttons. They were kept in a large tin box, and what a treat it had been to open the lid — she had to push it really hard, as it sometimes would get stuck and then she would have to pry it with a butter knife — and plunge both her hands into a smorgasbord of shapes, textures, and colors. And then as Regina arranged and rearranged the buttons on the table — by size, by color, in ornaments, in artistic disarray — her mother would look at them and say: “Oh, I remember that one! It’s from my old blue jersey dress.” Or “This golden one is from your grandfather’s uniform.” That sofa was where Regina slept and where she spent long hours crying for Sergey. She cried so much that the wallpaper next to her pillow became damp and warped. It was her mother who nursed Regina through the heartbreak. She didn’t pester Regina with questions; didn’t say anything bad about Sergey; didn’t pressure Regina to confront Sergey, to get back at Vica, or to have a rebound, like all her friends did. She just took Regina on walks and fed her and gave her books to read, but other than that she let her be. She offered just one piece of advice: “Don’t show him how much you’re hurting. It won’t help and it will make you feel even worse.” And so Regina didn’t. She distanced herself from Sergey and Vica as much as she could, and whenever they met by chance, she went to great pains to keep it normal. And it did help. The effort it took her to pretend to be free of sorrow distracted her from her actual sorrow.

Regina learned to live in her work, to become submerged in her texts. There were days when she worked for twelve or even fourteen hours, until her vision started to get blurry and her butt would get numb and achy, pressing into a chair for so long that it felt like a frozen piece of meat. Perhaps this was the reason she had become so successful. Offers of teaching jobs followed and invitations to participate in panels and writers’ residencies. Writers’ residencies were the only places where she could have something resembling a love life.

She’d been to the French Villa Mont-Noir six times, where she drank bottomless glasses of free Bordeaux and had affairs with three different French writers.

She’d been to Swiss Maison d’écrivains at the Château de Lavigny four times, where she napped in the haunted library, ate excellent soups, and had an affair with a sweet German writer suffering from performance anxiety.

She’d visited Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland twice, where she ate oatmeal for breakfast and had sex only once (her second time there), with Ben, an American translator of Russian literature who liked everything Russian and dressed like a character from Turgenev. They exchanged letters for months afterward, mostly helping each other with puzzling cultural references. Elephant tea? he would ask. What does it mean? And Regina would explain that the author was referring to the Soviet brand of Indian tea with an elephant on the label.

There were also Bellagio Center and Bogliasco Foundation in Italy. At Bellagio she ate and drank so much that she fell asleep as soon as her body made contact with the bed. Her lover, a warty and passionate Polish artist, complained about it. He told her that he was in love with her, then confessed that he was engaged to be married.

What a pain it was to return to Moscow after these trips. To step out from Sheremetyevo International into the darkness and the cold, shivering in her light Italian raincoat. To walk down smelly alleyways, stepping over puddles, her heart skipping a beat whenever she saw a suspicious stranger. Regina would feel depressed for weeks after she returned. Sometimes she would be depressed for a period of time that was longer than her term at a residency.

Still, there was something worse than the cold and gloominess of her surroundings. Back in Russia, Regina seemed to lose her sex appeal. Instantaneously and irreversibly, as if she were stripped of a precious layer of attractiveness by Sheremetyevo customs officers. Whatever it was about her that had seemed exotic and wonderful to her foreign lovers was thoroughly unexciting to Russian men. Regina had had occasional short-lived reationships with Russians, but outside those writers’ residencies, she mostly led a monastic existence. Sometimes her foreign affairs continued in the form of intense epistolary relationships, but those either bored or distressed her. The Polish artist kept sending her long passionate e-mails, but Regina couldn’t help imagining him pressing the Send button, closing his laptop, and then going to bed to snuggle next to his wife. It wasn’t the sex, but the snuggling that made her insanely jealous. Going to sleep next to a warm familiar body, opening her eyes in the morning to see a dear familiar face.