Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

When Vica and Vadik left, he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He didn’t think he would see her again, because Vadik never kept his girlfriends for a long time, which was probably for the best, and yet he kept fantasizing about her. Then a week later he saw her in Lenin’s library by pure chance. She had come to research her paper on Pavlov. He sat next to her in the reading room while she studied, then they went to get ice cream and ended up walking around Moscow for hours. By the end of the night, it became impossible to imagine that they wouldn’t be together.

Vica broke up with Vadik right away, and Sergey was relieved to know that Vadik wasn’t too mad at him. If anything he seemed amused. “You and a girl like Vica, huh! Good luck!” He seemed to gloat a little bit too, because Sergey’s remarkably uncomplicated love life was becoming bumpy just like his.

The hardest part of it was telling Regina. It was the thought of disappointing her mother that horrified him the most. For some reason Sergey imagined that the breakup scene would involve all three of them. They would be sitting in the kitchen, just like they had during English lessons, their cups on the table with a dirty spoon, a half-eaten cookie, a crust of bread. And then Sergey would deliver his news and disrupt the harmony. He imagined that Regina would run out of the kitchen in tears, but her mother would stay. She wouldn’t say anything, she’d just stare at Sergey for a very long time. Vadik unwittingly spared him from that. He had no idea that Sergey hadn’t yet told Regina when he talked to her. She called Sergey right after to say that he disgusted her and that she never wanted to see him again. “Disgusted”—that was what she said, and the word bothered him for a long time after that. But he was with Vica, and he felt that no amount of pain or guilt could ruin his happiness. It was like this: He would wake up in the morning, go out onto the street to get to work or to the university, and find the world saturated with Vica. The trees, the sidewalks, the honking cars, the heavy buses were all somehow about Vica. The image of her seemed to bounce off every single thing and go straight to Sergey, making him impatient to see her. He’d never wanted anyone as much as he wanted Vica, nor had anybody wanted him as much as she did. She kept telling him how she loved his taste, how she missed his smell, how he could have her anytime, anytime at all—“even if I’m asleep, you can just wake me up. I won’t get mad, I promise. Always, anytime!” She was greedy and loud, but she was also fragile — something that very few people saw in her. She had this capacity to feel more intensely than other people he knew — both joy and grief. There was something raw about the way Vica experienced the world, something that always moved him, and he had always felt the need to protect her, to hug her, to shield her from the pain of living.

Hug her! Sergey thought with bitterness now. It had been a long time since Vica let him touch her. In the past couple of weeks, there were days when she wouldn’t even look at him.

He walked across Whitehall Street toward Broad Street. The skyscrapers there formed solid walls and blocked the view, making Sergey feel as if he were at the bottom of a gigantic water well. When they first came to the U.S., Sergey was thrilled by skyscrapers. He would stop in the middle of a street, throw back his head, and stare at the tops of buildings that floated in the sky against light, sluggish clouds. He would stand like that with an aching neck, marveling at how something so amazing, so impossible could exist right here, within reach, constructed by mere humans. But after 9/11 their splendor was suddenly gone; they looked vulnerable, exposed, just like the residents of the city who seemed to lose their confidence overnight. He and Vica were at home when the planes hit the towers. He had no classes that day and Vica had a late shift. They still lived in Brooklyn then. He was sitting in their falling-apart armchair that they had picked up off the sidewalk and hauled four flights up to their apartment. Sitting as if frozen, staring at the TV screen without really seeing the images. While Vica — Vica couldn’t sit still. She was darting back and forth between the TV and the kitchen, where she was cooking something red and messy (borscht? tomato sauce?) — her apron had disgusting red stains all over it. She was constantly on the phone with her mother, screaming at her that she should calm down. Then she got this idea into her head that people buried under the towers were still alive. Their bodies were smashed, but they were still breathing. She took her apron off and threw it to the floor and was crouching by their entrance trying to untangle the shoelaces on her sneakers. She had medical training! She could help! She could! And Sergey had to stand up and walk over to her, then crouch before her, take her by the shoulders, and tell her that there couldn’t be any survivors, that those people were dead. Dead, do you understand this, dead! And there was absolutely nothing either he or Vica could do about it. Then he walked back to the armchair. He needed to process his grief in peace. They had lived through the tumult of the 1990s in Russia and arrived here, in the land of stability and permanence and well-being, where if you played by the rules, a bright future was basically guaranteed. And here they were, with stability blown up just like that. Sergey couldn’t imagine what the future held for them anymore, couldn’t count on everyone playing by the rules. This was probably the only time when he found himself on the same wavelength with Americans. They felt the same thing, they were like him, he was like them. This was his country. Sergey had felt like that for a long time, all the while the trauma of 9/11 had been fresh. Then the grief faded, and he became a stranger again. Now, when Sergey looked at the city, he found it hostile rather than vulnerable, threatening and boring at the same time.

It was eerily quiet at the office. Sergey arrived fifteen minutes early, but most of his colleagues were already at their desks. Their computers were on, but nobody seemed to be working. Their fingers didn’t run across the keyboards, their eyes didn’t move over the pages. They sat staring at their screens as if paralyzed. Sergey felt nauseous with panic. He nodded at Anil and the heavily pregnant Lisi, but Anil looked away and Lisi barely smiled. There was a half-dead helium balloon under Lisi’s desk. A sad relic from her recent baby shower.

His coworkers started to disappear around ten o’clock. Every time Sergey raised his head, there would be another empty desk. And yet he couldn’t catch the act of disappearance itself. Not until it happened to the man who sat in the next cube. His name was Mehdi. He was a thin man in his fifties with large expressive eyes that reminded Sergey of those of a sad cartoon animal. At eleven fifteen a pretty young woman appeared in the narrow space between their two cubicles. She wore a pencil skirt and a thin yellow cardigan that looked so soft and inviting that Sergey longed to touch it. Mehdi tensed but didn’t turn around, as if he thought that ignoring the woman could make her go away. She tapped him on the shoulder. He stood up, moved his chair away, and followed her down the hall, all without raising his eyes. All his things were still in the cubicle: a scarf on the floor, a glass teacup with some tea in it, countless photographs of his family. Dark-haired, white-teethed — a good-looking bunch of people. Sergey was especially taken by a large photo of a young woman that stood right next to Mehdi’s computer. The woman was in her late twenties; she must be Mehdi’s daughter. She wasn’t that beautiful and she wasn’t smiling, but there was something warm in her expression, some unwarranted, undeserved kindness. She was looking away from the camera, but Sergey desperately wanted her to look at him, to see him, to have some of that warmth directed at him. He was still staring at the photo when he felt the tap on his own shoulder. There she was — the woman in the yellow cardigan. Sergey walked after her down the hall, his eyes following the pendulum-like rocking of her buttocks. She led him into the smaller conference room and disappeared. There they were: the grave David, the grave Brian, and a tense middle-aged woman from HR fingering a thick stack of papers. Sergey could barely understand what they were saying, but it didn’t matter, because it was only a few minutes before he was walking toward the exit squeezing those papers in his hands. The woman in the yellow cardigan was nowhere in sight. He no longer deserved her. Instead, there were two bulky security guys who escorted Sergey out of the building.