Rufi Thorpe: Dear Fang, with Love

And yet, I know I am not well. It is not my wellness that I wish to argue over. It is that my reality has never truly mattered to you. You have been so uncurious. Your irony has been a thick protective coating keeping you from the world, from me, from any true confrontation with yourself. The character of my delusions matters to you as little as the character of my thoughts. All of it is discounted, as though I were happening in another world that is not entirely real to you.

I know and understand all of the reasons you could not be with my father. I can see your side of things completely. But did you ever stop to wonder what I would have wanted? What would have been best for me? I do not think you ever did. How could you think that nothing was better than something? Do you remember how I would throw fits in the car and refuse to get out, demanding that you find him for me, that you take me to him? Do you remember how I cried and cried, asking why he didn’t want me?

You always said Dedushka Pavel was more of an American than you were, and you would say this with such pride. You came to this country when you were seven! You are American! Certainly you are not Russian or at least not as Russian as you think, though I know that part of the reason you stay with Misha is because he came later when he was a teenager, and so he lends credibility to your narrative: the émigré fantasy. Everything is framed for you by how conflicted you feel simply to be existing. Your feelings are of immense importance to you. Nothing is as real as your feelings: not facts, not truths, not even the existence of other people with their distinct points of view. Sometimes I imagine that being you is like being a fly, where the world can only be seen in fragments by your giant compound eye which turns everything into a peculiar reflection or distortion of your own pretty face.

And on the other hand: your pretty face. If you knew how much I missed you, it would break your heart. How much I long for the intimacy we shared when I was a child. You would let me sleep in your bed, the two of us in T-shirts and underwear. I remember exactly the warmth of your skin, the smell of the bed, the slithering sound of your hair on the pillowcase. Back then you had that brown duvet with the feather patterns on it that was impossibly soft. You threw it away because it got moth holes, I think, but it was the best duvet cover in the history of the world, and every time I see a bed, what I think about is how inferior the duvet cover is compared with that duvet cover.

I loved living with Dedushka and Babushka. I loved the raisin-bread French toast that Babulya would make me that she would spread with cream cheese instead of syrup. I know you always hated Babulya, you thought she was cloying and annoying. But I loved how completely she loved me. I was addicted to that warmth. Things were always the same with Babulya. She was always interested in my homework and willing to make me a snack.

I know you didn’t see her that way. For you she was still the pushy stage mother who wanted you to be a star, who wanted you to be in that McDonald’s commercial where the guy was a total asshole, who wanted the world to admire you even more than she wanted you to be happy. I know, and I can see your side. But my side of it is that I adored her.

I can see why you couldn’t bear to contact my dad. I can see why you kept him at a distance. I can see why you hated him, and I can even see why you hated the parts of him you saw in me. Traces of the enemy in my genes. But my side of it is that I kind of like him. And I see what you liked in him. And I think you were kind of a shit to him. And I wonder what would have happened if you had been brave enough to try to love him.

Is it so hard to try to love people? I feel like you always give up too soon. But we are worth loving, all of us, even though you are also right: We are ruined. There is something terrible about each of us. Dedushka, Babushka, me, Lucas. You are terrible too, you know. You are. And it is your terribleness that makes me love you so violently, Mama. It was the times you were kind of shitty to me that make me love you all the more.

You would get so angry at me, you would have to leave, shaking, and take Babushka’s car and go on one of your drives. I asked you once what you did on your drives and you said you listened to Leonard Cohen and pretended that all of us were dead. That we had all died in a horrendous car crash and you had been left completely alone.

You must have felt so suffocated by us, Mama.

Or do you refuse to love us because you worry that none of us love you? Is it the weight of trying to guess what all of us are thinking that makes you wake up in the middle of the night, out of breath, and go to the mirror to sit and brush your hair, unaware that your small daughter has woken up and is watching you in the darkness as the brush makes its pass, again and again, over the black river of hair? That sound, the sound of hair being brushed in the dark, is the sound of all sadness and terror to me. You never smiled at yourself in the mirror, only stared.

Who are you, Mama? Will I ever know?

Maybe I am not permitted to truly know you. Maybe it is enough that I was born out of your body, that I suckled at your breasts, that I slept night after night in your bed. Even if I hardly know you, it is possible I know you better than anyone in the world. And that makes my heart absolutely break for you.

You will never know how much I love you, Mama.

Yours,

V

IT WASN’T UNTIL VERA WAS STABLE and I was beginning to go slightly stir-crazy, about six days after Katya arrived in Vilnius, that it occurred to me to wonder whether Vera had been deleting documents as well as e-mails. Already feeling slightly ill, I logged on to her laptop again. Sure enough, her trash bin was full, full of strange poetry, full of rants, full of letters she had been drafting but never sent. I read some of it, then decided not to continue. These letters were not mine to be reading.

I don’t know why, but I think part of me hoped that Katya and I would sleep together when she came to Vilnius. It was by no means a conscious desire. But that first night, when I showed her to our apartment and we each retired to our separate rooms, me in mine, she in Vera’s, I couldn’t sleep for fantasizing that she would softly knock at my door.

But there was no knock.

In the morning, I woke before her and made coffee and when she finally emerged, she had big creases in her cheek from the pillow and she smelled distinctly of sleep, an intimate smell, not a bad one by any means but also one I was not familiar with, that felt foreign to me and made me understand in a new way that I had been mistaken. Katya did not belong to me. I did not know how she smelled. Her body was not mine to explore or to clasp in the night. She was her own sleepy, pink-cheeked animal, sitting there at the table, waiting for coffee.

“Would you like to take a shower?” I asked. “Or we could go to a café?” It was difficult not to go into hospitality mode. It was difficult not to want to show off the city. Without quite realizing it, I had fallen in love with Vilnius. I wanted to take her to the Belgian restaurant that was the first floor of our building. I wanted to take her on a walk down to Gedimino prospektas and show her the store with the good amber and the Soviet war trinkets, and wooden kitchen implements, and paintings set out on blankets. I wanted to show her Užupis and explain about the empty plinths and about Frank Zappa and see if she thought that was funny. But she wasn’t here to see the city, she was here to see our daughter.

The visit to the hospital with her the previous day had been surreal. We had just missed visiting hours, but the word mother seemed to be some kind of secret pass code, and we were taken up to see Vera directly. Maybe it was just because they were anxious about not having noticed the hives. Or maybe it was because Katya made all of her demands in a Russian that I could hear in an instant was more fluent and authoritative than Vera’s. But the nurses and orderlies and doctors all bowed and scraped to Kat in a way that seemed both baffling and unfair.