Lara Vapnyar - Still Here

Regina got up off the bench and walked toward her old building on Lyalin Lane. When she moved to the United States, she had asked Aunt Masha to sell the old apartment and what remained of the furniture and donate the money to an orphanage. But Vadik told her she was crazy. “What if it doesn’t work out with Bob?” So Regina put the money into her bank account.

Their old street looked statelier than Regina remembered, and cleaner, too clean. Most of the buildings were painted soft pastel colors. One of the buildings had a hotel sign on it. A taxi stopped and a young, well-dressed couple got out and walked toward the entrance dragging their bright suitcases, the wheels rapping against the pavement. It was as if whatever messy marks her and her mother’s lives had made there were now removed, cleaned away, painted over. Regina didn’t feel like seeing her building anymore. And it was time to go to visit the cemetery anyway. Aunt Masha had insisted that they go together, but Regina said no. She had to visit her mother’s grave by herself.

She considered a cab, but the thought of sitting in endless traffic jams was unbearable. She walked to the subway station. At the entrance there were a couple of kiosks selling fast food and Regina bought a little meat pie and ate it right there by the kiosk even though she was still full after breakfast. The cemetery, Nicolo-Arkhangelskoye, was situated in one of the newer developments at the far end of Moscow. It was Aunt Masha’s choice, because Regina had refused to have anything to do with the funeral arrangements. She had been drugged out of her mind during the funeral — she could barely remember the ceremony or the place — so this would be like visiting her mother’s grave for the very first time.

The subway ride took forever and then Regina had to take a bus to get to the cemetery. After the first few stops the bus emptied out, with most of the passengers getting off at the treeless new residential complex. White and blue buildings, pristine malls, large empty lots with some construction equipment on them. The cemetery was the last stop on the route. The few remaining passengers on the bus were all women, sullen, withdrawn, resigned. Dutiful daughters, wives, possibly mothers. Most of them were clutching bouquets. Regina had forgotten about flowers. She wondered if it was necessary. You were supposed to either plant or put flowers on the grave, but why? As a remedy for your guilt? To make the grave a nicer place to visit? As a tradition you didn’t question? As a simple means to feel less horrible? Or was this part of some complicated ritual that allowed you a fleeting moment of contact with the departed? Regina hoped that they sold flowers by the cemetery gates. It would be crazy not to. But of course they didn’t. There was a long stone fence connecting the main entrance with the gates reserved for funeral corteges. Not a single flower in sight. “Is there a flower shop inside?” Regina asked one of the women. She glowered at Regina and shook her head. “You should’ve thought about flowers before you boarded the bus,” another woman said. She was proudly carrying a bouquet of imported roses. A younger woman tapped Regina on the shoulder: “Take a few of mine.” She had a large bunch of pale carnations. Regina thanked her and took three. “Take some more,” the woman said with a grin. “I’m sure Misha won’t mind.” Regina took a few more. She felt light-headed and empty as she went through the gates. Once inside, she saw a vast field — she estimated that it was half the size of Central Park. She didn’t remember the grounds being so big. Stone slabs rose like crops in neat endless rows. Regina took out a piece of paper where she had written down the section and lot number and went to consult the map. The map was mounted right on the fence next to hundreds of flyers advertising various services: people offered to fix your loved one’s gravestone, to take care of your grave, to say a prayer in church, to bring flowers and send you timed photographs of those flowers to assure you that they were fresh. The largest flyer warned that the fee for decorating the grave with pine branches didn’t include the cost of branches. And to the right of it was a handwritten sign that asked: “Are you heartbroken because you haven’t visited your loved ones’ graves in a while? Do you feel so guilty that you can’t breathe?” And then it reassured: “Now you don’t have to!!! GrieveForYou will take care of everything.” Regina felt a sudden bout of nausea and hurried away from the fence into the depths of the cemetery. She found her mother’s grave sooner than she’d expected; there it was in the far left corner, exactly as promised on the map. She had expected to be overwhelmed, but what shocked her was how little she actually felt. There was a black granite slab with her mother’s name on it. There was her picture on an oval ceramic plate. None of that stirred Regina. None of that made her feel closer to her mother. If her spirit still existed in some form, it certainly wasn’t there. Regina kneeled by the headstone and put her flowers on the little shelf attached to it. “Hey!” called an old woman a few feet away from her. “Put your flowers in the soil, as if you were planting them; they will keep longer like that.” Regina dug a little hole in the ground with her bare hands — the soil was cakey and cold and somehow revolting. She planted her dead carnations and secured them in a little mound of soil. They looked ridiculous standing up. “But they will keep longer,” Regina said to herself, wondering what was the point of them keeping longer. She stared at her mother’s photograph. Her mother was looking away from the camera, as if she was avoiding Regina. People were supposed to talk to the dead. Regina had no idea what to say. She cleared her throat, terrified that she would sound fake. “Mamochka,” she whispered, “everything’s fine with me. I miss you. I love you very much.”

It was only on the way back — she chose to take a taxi this time — that it hit her that these were the exact words she had texted to Bob this morning. She pressed her forehead to the cold glass of the window and started to cry, not from grief but from shame and emptiness.

Regina asked the driver to take her to the hotel to pick up her luggage and then to Aunt Masha’s.

“That’s your address?” the driver asked, pulling up to the long, moldy, barely lit nine-story building. He sounded doubtful. “Yes,” Regina said. She remembered the building well. When she was a child, Regina’s mother would take her to visit Aunt Masha every week or so. Regina was encouraged to call her “aunt” even though they weren’t related, and Regina was used to referring to the neighborhood as the Aunt’s place. “Are we going all the way to the Aunt’s stop today?” she would ask.

The driver helped her to unload her bags and swiftly drove away. Aunt Masha had told her the downstairs entrance code, but Regina had trouble entering the right combination in the dark. The elevator was all scratched and dented, and there was a stench coming from the garbage chute. She hadn’t expected the building to become so decrepit. Aunt Masha, who took a long time to open the door, looked decrepit as well, older than she was supposed to look. She wore a turtleneck and loose corduroy pants as she always did, but she seemed somehow smaller. Her white hair was shorter and thinner, with patches of pink scalp shining through. “Reginochka!” she exclaimed, pressing her skinny little body into Regina’s, her thin fingers digging into Regina’s back, her sharp chin poking into her shoulder, enveloping her in the smell of the cheap strawberry soap that Regina’s mother used to buy all the time. She immediately felt the lump in her throat and the urge to escape. At least her nightmare proved to be wrong, and the apartment wasn’t teeming with orphans.