Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“Don’t you have everything you want here? What do your parents say?”

Every question comes at me like a stab. I have never seen him like this. He sits in the chair, rocking slightly, his fingers twirling my acceptance letter, his gray eyes pale with anger, sliding past me. There is something raw, something dangerous, in his ordinarily ironic snub-nosed face. He looks like a scorned lion, and I am startled by a faint twinge of regret at the thought that I may never touch his lips again.

“My parents think it’s a great opportunity. But Vasily, I haven’t yet decided—”

“This is stupid,” he spits out. “I never thought of you as stupid before. You would have a much better life here. You’re somebody here. Your family is important, my family is very important. You and I, we can accomplish anything we want. Over there, you’ll be nothing, a pathetic little immigrant, an empty space. A zero.”

I too am beginning to feel angry, but I force myself not to abandon my mollifying tone. “Look, I’m not talking of moving overseas, it’s just a four-year college. It would mean seeing a bit of the world, no more than that. Don’t you ever want to have some new experiences?”

“You can have plenty of new experiences here,” he says, and a tight, ugly smile twists his face. “In fact, I can arrange for something new right now.”

I no longer find the hardness in his eyes enticing.

Things are shifting inside me.

“I think,” I say slowly, “I think I will do it.”

He holds up my letter with the tips of his fingers as if it were something contagious, and pretends to study it, rocking the chair faster and faster. “Never heard of this place. Some dreary provincial hole, I gather. Didn’t peg you for the type who’d want to live in an Uncle Tom’s cabin among beggars, niggers, and Jews.”

For one instant I am speechless. In the next, I receive, for the first time ever, the indisputable waking proof that there is a God who watches over us—a benevolent God with impeccable timing and a twinkle in his ageless eye. My childhood chair breaks apart under Vasily in a spectacular explosion of cracks. As the seat falls in, he falls in also, his arms and legs now crammed into the wooden frame, sticking straight up. And even though I already know that in the next few months, before I leave for a college deep in the American South, there will be many unpleasant encounters—lips thinned, eyes averted—in the university hallways, awkward silences among our mutual friends, gatherings and memories ruined, for the next few minutes—three full minutes, no less, until he manages to extricate himself at last—for the next three minutes, as I watch him flail and strain and turn purple, I am certain that someone is up there, gently holding my life in the palm of his hand—and all is right with the world.

“Hey, you’re that Soviet girl, aren’t you?”

I raised my eyes from the page. A bear of a boy in a rainbow-colored shirt was leaning on the corner of my desk, setting my towers of books to a dangerous wobble.

“I prefer ‘Russian,’” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Russian. So, how do you like it here?”

“I like it very much,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

“Oh,” he said. “No, I didn’t mean…” He seemed vague, amiable, good-looking in a bland, healthy, entirely forgettable way. “I meant, how do you like America… You know, what do you like most about it?”

I smiled politely.

“The library,” I said. “It’s quiet. And it stays open all night.”

He had something written on his shirt. For a moment I puzzled over the meaning of the words, then grew impatient, and glanced at my book.

“Well, anyway, you’re studying. Sorry to have disturbed you,” he said.

I turned the page, heard his steps retreating into the silence of the stacks.

In the past few months I had been asked many things—whether it was true that Soviet children marched to school in formation and were one and all atheists, and did I know Tatiana in Leningrad, and how did I like hamburgers, fraternity parties, and freedom of speech—and while I set much stock by good manners, I did not feel the need to answer every question in the obliging spirit of upstanding national representation. That was Olga’s concern. Upon arriving in the States, she had found herself an unwitting celebrity of sorts—something to do with her timing, her being the first-ever Soviet student in the country, or maybe the first in an undergraduate program, or perhaps just the first on the East Coast—some statistical fluke, in short, which nevertheless meant that she would spend her entire fall giving interviews and visiting local schools, posing for photographers, assuring everyone that she adored freedom of speech, complaining in private that she had had by far more freedom in Russia and that the burden of being the “face of the country” was dulling her complexion.

I suspected that she was enjoying herself.

My own entry into my small southern college had passed unnoticed by comparison—a few lines in a student publication, mild curiosity from my fellow freshmen; enough to be recognized now and then and asked about hamburgers, not enough to feel that I stood for anything larger—anything other—than merely myself. For that I was grateful. It was all very well for an aspiring journalist like Olga to inhabit a political essay. As for me, I had never given much thought to the current affairs of the world.

I wanted to live in a timeless poem.

I returned to my collection of Silver Age verse but soon found my concentration flagging. I was tired, of course—it was past midnight, and I had subsisted on very little sleep for a long time—but also, I felt oddly bothered by the encounter with the boy. Had I been unnecessarily short? Rereading the same two lines over and over, I thought of the look that had settled on his face, apologetic and offended at once. When, a wasted half-hour later, I heard footsteps approaching through the stacks, I was relieved at the impending interruption. I would be friendlier when I saw him next.

But when the bookshelves parted to reveal the nearing shadow, it was not the boy in the rainbow shirt—it was the secret visitor of my Russian adolescence, strolling nonchalantly down the aisle, coming to a stop before my desk.

He was not smiling, nor was I pleased to behold him.

The last time I had seen him—well over a year before—we had quarreled. For weeks I had been studying ancient Greek tragedy till the wee hours, my mind gloriously full of heroes, oracles, and monsters. He stormed into my bedroom one night just before sunrise, wrapped in some absurd billowing sheet. I felt disturbed and elated—I was certain he would kiss me at last—but instead he pontificated about Aeschylus, quoted reams of Pindar at me, and ended by pronouncing himself the god Apollo, here to inspire me. I was appalled at how pompous he had become of late, and told him so. He threw his laurel wreath to the ground and slammed the door behind him, his only conventional exit in my memory. “Pompous and unimaginative!” I shouted in his wake.

Frowning, I considered him now.

“Asleep in a library cubicle, how embarrassing,” I muttered. “Am I drooling, I wonder. Even snoring, perhaps? Did I collapse with my face in the book, and will the print of some poem transfer to my cheek? I hope that boy doesn’t pass by again.”

“You’ve been thinking about irrelevant matters too much,” he said, and, unceremoniously sweeping the corner of my desk free of books, settled on top of it, swinging his leg. He sported a neat new haircut and was dressed in a dapper suit of spotless white linen; yet in spite of his jaunty appearance, he looked somehow diminished—smaller in the way childhood rooms seem smaller to an adult returning home after half a lifetime’s absence.