Rufi Thorpe: Dear Fang, with Love

Still, as we waited for our bags in the Vilnius airport and looked around hopefully for the person from the program who was supposed to meet us, part of me thought that if Vera could find in herself that hardness, that ability to lick the frosting off the knife, maybe she would be better able to play the hand that life had dealt her.

Vera redid her messy, rat’s-nest bun, and said, “Hot Jewish Johnny Depp at two o’clock.”

“What?” I asked. I had just spotted her Hello Kitty suitcase tumbling down the chute and onto the baggage carousel.

“I said the hottest guy I’ve ever seen is walking over here right now. Don’t tell him you’re my father.”

“Are you Vera and Lucas?” asked Johnny Depp, his voice stunningly American and reassuring in the midst of so much susurrus murmuring. He was wearing a fedora and flashed glaringly white teeth. There was an air of fate about his swagger, as though we had stepped into an absurdist film. I could already feel reality shifting.

“Yes,” I said, touching Vera’s shoulder. “I’m Lucas. And this is my daughter, Vera.”

Date: 7/7/2014 11:43 PM

From: Vera.Abramov@gmail.com

To: FangBoy76@hotmail.com

Subject: Fairytale on Jew Street

Dear Fang,

Already my neurons are like tragic little fireflies trying to find a mate before they die, that is how fucking tired I am, and the apartment I am in is weird and smells like tea bags and plastic that has been microwaved, and I am a pathetic, puffy, bloated creature who has not pooped in, I swear, like three days, and who got rained on, and then went to a weird concert, and then got a little tipsy off free chardonnay in plastic cups, and then had a heart-to-heart with a really old lady who wanted to buy pot, and OH MY GOD FANG it is weird here, it is so so so weird, and yet it is kind of wonderful. I thought this whole trip to Lithuania was going to be a drag because, well, reasons, but I have this feeling in my guts like when a plane takes off or when you have just shoplifted something, only I can’t figure out what I have stolen or what part of me is about to be launched into the air.

1. The buildings here all look like wedding cakes and the streets look like alleys. The street our apartment is on is called Žydų gatvė, which means “Jew Street,” or, I guess, “Jewish Street.” Because the people of Vilnius are mad straightforward like that. I don’t know how to describe what is both creepy and beautiful about this town, Fang. It’s surrounded by forests and swamps, and in the middle of, like, WILDERNESS there is suddenly this little medieval town with all these quaint buildings. Only it doesn’t feel old and ramshackle but instead very modern and European and civilized, except that amid bicycles and taxicabs there will suddenly be a babushka selling mushrooms out of a red handkerchief. I would not be surprised to meet a Nobel Prize — winning scientist in a café, nor would I be surprised to encounter a gnome. It is just that kind of place.

2. I’ve decided that the problem with my dad is that he is trying to be likable all the time. Inside his head there is some sinister laugh track going on that either guffaws or boos, and no one can hear it but him and he lets it rule everything he does. God forbid someone not like him. That’s the tragedy he is constantly trying to avoid. I’m going to try an experiment of just being excessively nice to him and praising him for everything he does and see what happens.

3. The concert we went to was possibly the most insane event I have ever attended, and yet it was totally normal. Here is what happened: We had to walk there, getting totally lost, through the rain, without umbrellas. By the time we got to the concert hall, we were soaked and then it was really air-conditioned in there, so sitting through the music was kind of like a specialized torture technique. The music itself was just a pianist and a singer, and the singer was an incredibly short fat little man who was shaped just like a teapot, only he was wearing a tuxedo. He must have had it specially tailored. He was really the most oddly shaped man I have ever seen, and he wore shoes polished to a mirror shine. But Fang, his voice. It was like bronze and chocolate melted together and flung through the air in spangles. It was like something stretched impossibly taut, a piece of silk against the sky, and then something that sags, soft and dead, the belly of a shot fox, the clicking jaw of a dying mink.

He was singing in Yiddish, but it didn’t matter that I couldn’t understand because I was still almost crying through every single song. So was my dad. It was the first time I have ever seen him cry. He does not cry gracefully. He looked like he had an eye infection. Anyway, the teapot man kept singing song after song and, keep in mind, we had just flown for like twenty hours, I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours or so, we were freezing cold and shivering and wet and this tiny little teapot man is FLAYING us alive. Anyway, during the last song this old man next to me completely loses it and begins sobbing and then he says sorry to me and asks if I can understand the words, and I whisper no, so then he kind of translated for me, just the chorus really, but it was a lullaby about a mother and child whose house has just burned down and the mother is telling her child that they must walk into the fields, but the fields are dark, are an abyss. God, like a horrible interstellar wind, is pulling them into that darkness, intent on erasing them and the whole world. All that is civilization is ash. She is telling her child to be brave. They have no choice but to walk on into nothingness. She says not to worry. She says little birds are singing, attending them as they walk toward death.

I am going to try to google the lyrics tomorrow and see if I can find it. Because isn’t that exactly right? That we have no choice but to walk out into the abyss? Death will find you warm and cozy in your bed, or will find you in the bloody dirt-mound trenches of a war, in the first world, in the third world, in the past and in the future, death remains the same, is capable of being only itself: the darkness before there was light, the nothing before there was something.

4. Did you know that my Russian sounds wrong here? It does. I don’t know if it is the accent around here or if the people I am talking to are actually Belorussian. But it isn’t just that, it’s me. At the reception after the concert, a man actually laughed at me because I said “drive-el,” like conjugated the English word “drive” but in Russian. My cousins do it all the time. I didn’t even think about it. And my case endings are all wrong, I know it, I sound like a child, like a toddler who doesn’t know grammar.

I wish you were here with me. If you were here I would be too tired to give you a handie, but I feel certain you would forgive me, and instead snuggle me in my weird room where the ceiling is slanted and low. It is thundering and lightning outside. I’m sorry the Wi-Fi here is so slow that we can’t Skype, and I tried to talk to my dad about the possibility of phone cards but he acted like I was asking him to perform nuclear fission. So it is going to be old-fashioned e-mails for us. I promise there are no cute boys here and I will have eyes for no one else and I will report to you daily on my thoughts and doings so that it is like we are together the entire time, and, in fact, by the end of this trip you will be sick of me!

With love,

From Vilnius,

Your crazy,

V

AT THE RECEPTION after the concert, which had been an unexpected spiritual ordeal that left both of us shaky and confused, Vera had a mini freak-out about, of all things, her clothes. Everything had seemed to be going fine; we were eating the cubes of sweaty cheese and chocolate-covered strawberries familiar from every reception that has ever been held in the history of time — for all I know it is illegal to throw a reception without cubes of cheese and chocolate-covered strawberries — when I somehow lost track of Vera. This worried me because she had been filching glasses of free chardonnay all night. She kept stealing them as fast as I could confiscate them.