Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Regina didn’t feel like going to the theater or visiting any of her favorite museums either; what she did was wander around Moscow neighborhoods all day, then return to her hotel room, order dinner, and eat it while watching old Russian movies. She talked to Bob on Skype every night, but these conversations were so tame and boring compared to what they used to do when she was still living in Russia. Back then they used Skype for sex. She thought of the thrill of seeing their bodies on-screen. They both appeared to be longer, softer, more mysterious. The best part for her was watching Bob hold his breath while she unbuttoned her blouse.

And now it was more like “How’s the food?” “Is it really cold over there?” “Is the traffic as insane as it used to be?” Bob said that he missed her, but he was also too engrossed in his business to seem convincing. He had come up with an idea for an app that allowed you to find people with similar genomes in any crowd. He thought it had the existential value of breaking the void of loneliness, of making strangers feel connected. There were actually tears in his eyes when he first described the idea to Regina. He’d been talking to Dancing Drosophilae for a long time, but now it seemed like they were ready to sign the deal with DigiSly.

“That’s exciting, honey!” Regina said, even though she didn’t really understand Bob’s obsession with genetics or his pride in his supposedly Tudor lineage. Last night though, while they talked on Skype, Regina opened an image of Holbein’s Henry VIII and looked for similarities. She thought she could see some. If you mentally erased Henry’s beard, you could see that both Henry and Bob had thin lips, sharp eyes, and a perfect oval face. The padded shoulders of Henry’s royal costume actually reminded her of Bob’s old football uniform.

Regina’s phone buzzed, announcing another text message. This one was from United, reminding her to check in for her upcoming flight back to New York. Today would have to be the day to visit both Aunt Masha and the cemetery. She couldn’t possibly postpone it any longer. What she could do was try to start the day as late as possible.

Regina turned on the TV, but everything on the screen struck her as demanding and loud. There was none of that sweet pampering that American TV provided to its viewers. Russian TV aimed to goad its customers rather than soothe them.

There was nothing to do except get dressed and go downstairs to the restaurant.

The Sheraton breakfast was a buffet boasting bizarrely international offerings — miso soup and croissants vied for guests’ attention with porridge and blini with red caviar. The few patrons in the room were all grave-looking Russian businessmen. One of them raised his eyes at Regina, winced, and looked away. She was reminded once again of how utterly unattractive she was to Russian men. Regina heaped her plate with a little bit of everything and went to her table. She had forgotten how unbearably boring chewing your food was unless you did it while watching TV.

She reached for her iPad. There was a long e-mail from Sergey. The first since he and Vica had split up. Sergey apologized for avoiding her, explained that he’d needed some time to sort things out. The detailed analysis of what went wrong in his marriage to Vica followed. He started with a long paragraph meant to convey that Regina had always been the only person who truly understood him, then switched to an in-depth analysis of Vica’s person. Regina didn’t have the patience to read the entire thing; she skimmed through the long descriptions of Vica’s materialistic passions and obsession with power and prowess in most of its forms — physical, sexual, financial, although not spiritual. She was very smart. Really smart. She wasn’t well read, no, but she had this incredible ability to grasp the most complex ideas better than anybody he knew. And it would be wrong to say that she had an emotional intelligence rather than an intellectual one. Emotional intelligence was what Vica lacked. If anything, she was emotionally obtuse. She didn’t understand him at all. Sergey ended with an admission that marrying Vica had been a mistake. That he had been blinded. Blinded by what, Regina wondered, Vica’s “obsessive sexual prowess”? Which Regina apparently lacked. She half expected Sergey to conclude by admitting that he should have married the spiritual but bland Regina instead. He didn’t. Regina wasn’t sure if that made her depressed or relieved.

The next e-mail was from Vadik. He wrote that there was some crazy shit happening with Sergey and he was getting plenty sick of him, and it was time she took him off his hands.

“No, thank you,” she wrote and put her phone back into her purse.

Regina left most of her food uneaten, checked out of the hotel, left her luggage with the concierge, and went out on Tverskaya Street. She decided to visit the cemetery first, then go to Aunt Masha’s and spend the night with her. Regina checked her watch — she didn’t have to go right this minute. There was still time for a little walk.

Early November always brought her favorite weather. The trees stood bare and the air stung her cheeks, but it wasn’t bitingly cold yet, and the sun shone bright and strong, creating a dry, aching clarity that usually came a couple of weeks before the first snow. Moscow had barely changed in the two years that she had been gone, and for some reason Regina found herself reluctant to look up and savor the view. Nor did she want to look into the eyes of the passersby, because the newly increased level of anger and discontentment in the Muscovites’ expressions frightened her. She just walked and walked, circling, zigzagging, shortcutting, thrilled by the fact that she never made a wrong turn. She knew Moscow so well that its maps seemed to be imprinted in her footsteps.

Regina walked to the Moscow River, strolled a long stretch of the embankment, then turned away from water toward the city center. She didn’t realize how tired she was until she reached Chistye Prudy. She had been avoiding this area on her previous walks, but there she was — just a few feet away from her former home. Regina sat down on the bench facing the lake and stretched her legs. They ached and throbbed and all but hummed some unhappy tune. The water in front of her looked fake as if there were no depth to it, just a thin layer of mirrored glass. She had sat in this very spot so many times before. She made an effort to bring up the most intense memories of her past so that she could feel an exquisite pain followed by the inevitable release.

Here she was in her dad’s lap when she was three or four, waving to the ducks…the pleasure of his strong grip, his hand pressing into her ribs. With her mom when she was five or six and her legs were so short that she couldn’t bend her knees — her legs clad in thick winter boots stuck out at a ninety-degree angle. Her mother reciting a poem about snow: how the falling snow put everything in turmoil, and it was as if the sky itself came down like an old man in his patched-up winter coat. Regina’s face was smeared with smelly kids’ cream that protected from the frost, and her forehead itched under her woolen hat. She remembered that sensation so well, but she couldn’t remember how her mother looked as she read the poem. All she saw in her mind’s eye was her mother’s emaciated body and glassy eyes as she lay dying. As a teenager Regina would come to the bench by herself. She would sit here with a book, hopelessly homely, but desperately hopeful. Princess Maria from War and Peace was her favorite heroine. So ugly, so serious, so pious, yet she dreamed of carnal love. Princess Maria did find it at the end, with a good, solid, if a little dumb man. Sergey was anything but dumb. Regina smiled, recalling the many times when they had sat in this very spot, and Sergey wouldn’t shut up about Fyodorov while she willed him to kiss her. And when he finally did, she found his kisses too wet and kind of disappointing. As was her makeshift nostalgic therapy. The images in her mind were feeble and loose, incapable of producing enough intensity to result in catharsis.