Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“Hey! What are you doing there?” Inka yelled.

“A hedgehog, a hedgehog! We found a hedgehog!” the kids yelled back.

“Bring it here!”

Inka and Lena sat up to have a look. One of the kids, probably Sveta Kozlova, was holding it in the palms of her outstretched hands. Other kids followed her as if in a holy procession. Lena had never seen a hedgehog before. She was sure that seeing it now was somehow connected with Danya.

The hedgehog was curled up and trembling. It didn’t look like an animal at all, but rather like some alien creature—a spiky vibrating ball.

“I want to draw it,” Sasha Simonov said.

“No. Put it down,” Lena said.

“No! He’ll run away.”

“So he will. We can’t take him with us anyway. He’ll die of boredom and gloom.”

Inka looked at Lena as if she had gone crazy. She could have been right. But Sveta Kozlova took her words very seriously.

“Can you really die of that?”

“Hedgehogs can—they are less tolerant of depression than humans,” Sasha Simonov said. Sveta looked at Sasha with interest and put the hedgehog down. Apparently, she believed in such dangers. She was just a little girl, Lena thought. And Sasha was just a little boy. And Alesha. They were little kids, funny, helpless, naïve. For the first time since Lena started working at the camp, she felt something like affection for them.

First few seconds, the hedgehog didn’t move at all. But slowly, so very slowly, he began to unfurl. There was his little nose. Black, leathery, and wet. There were his tiny paws. They looked exactly like the paws of a rat or a mouse. Then they saw the tiny beads of his eyes. And then his tongue. Lena didn’t expect him to have a tongue! A tiny pink tongue, which he stuck out like a cat lapping up milk. And a second later the hedgehog was gone. It rustled through the grass and into the bushes.

Lena couldn’t wait until the second dance. She kept changing her shirt, unable to choose between the white and the blue, and applying and reapplying her lip gloss. She tried to imagine how Danya would look at her when he saw her at the dance. How he would smile at her, walk over, and put his hand on the small of her back. All without saying a word.

But as they were about to leave for the dance, Sveta Kozlova announced that she wasn’t going, and that was that. She refused to explain why. She insisted that she was staying and there was nothing Lena could do about it. Lena could’ve asked Inka to stay with Sveta, but Inka had already left.

“Sveta,” she pleaded, “Sveta, please.”

She said, “No way!”

“But why?”

“Because the music sucks.”

“Sveta, you’re not serious,” Lena said.

Sveta said, “Yes, I am.”

“Sveta, do you realize that I have to stay here with you if you stay?”

Sveta nodded with great enthusiasm. She was hopeless.

Lena just sat down on the steps. She sat like that in silence for a couple of minutes, and then something occurred to her. She said: “Sveta, do you remember that hedgehog we saw in the woods?”

Sveta nodded again.

“Sveta, I will die of boredom and gloom if you don’t let me go.”

Sveta stared at Lena, contemplating her words, and eventually she sighed and said that she’d go.

Lena squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”

Lena saw Danya as soon as Sveta and she got up the steps to the dance floor. He was standing with other soldiers by the fence. He wasn’t looking in her direction, but he did appear to be searching for somebody. Lena thought she’d just walk up to him and say hello. But the next thing she saw was Dena crossing the floor. Dena stopped in front of Danya and made a bow. Her head plunged forward so that her bright yellow hair flew up and down. She took Danya’s hand. He stepped forward and smiled.

“This song is okay,” Sveta said. Lena realized that she was still holding her hand. Still staring at Danya leading Dena around the floor.

She couldn’t believe how much that hurt.

When Lena was about ten, she asked her mother: “How will I know when I fall in love? What are the definitive signs?” She said, “Don’t worry, you’ll know.” She had just come home from work, and she was sitting on the sofa flexing her toes, making them crack, which she always did when she was tired. She looked at Lena, and her expression was glazed with exhaustion and not friendly at all. But Lena really wanted to get the answer.

“But what if I miss it?” she asked. “What if I confuse it with something else?”

“You won’t miss it,” she said.

“Why? Why are you so sure?”

“Why am I so sure? Okay. I’ll tell you why. Do you think you could ‘miss it’ if you had been beaten, kicked, and punched?”

Lena shook her head.

“Well, then,” she said, “you won’t miss love either.”

Lena was so stunned by Danya’s betrayal that she didn’t notice Vasyok until Sveta said: “Hey, the kitchen guy is waving at you.”

“Do you want to dance?” Vasyok asked. His hands felt awkward and fat on my back. Lena glanced in Danya’s direction, but she couldn’t see him, because there was another couple blocking her view. Lena braced herself for Vasyok’s usual happy banter, but he didn’t say anything throughout the whole dance. She felt strangely, unfairly angry with Vasyok. It didn’t make sense until years later, after she’d felt like that again, when she realized she’d been angry at Vasyok simply because he wasn’t Danya and he couldn’t do anything, anything at all, to make her feel about him the way she felt about Danya.

Lena’s phone rang. A California number. She gathered her strength and answered.

Vadim didn’t question her, but Lena told him a complicated lie about her whereabouts. She hung up and continued to walk along the fence, feeling how her lie started to spread inside her like a disease. A sickening, perfectly physical sensation, which was only going to get worse. There was no end to this fence. It went on and on. She turned back and walked toward the visitor center.

When they got to the car, Ben’s phone rang again.

He didn’t check the number. He started the car and slowly pulled out of the parking lot.

Lena decided Leslie must suspect something, or she wouldn’t be calling every ten minutes. She felt a pang of guilt.

Interstate 95 turned into a narrow two-lane road surrounded by woods on both sides. More and more cars had Maine license plates. More and more had canoes and kayaks fixed to the roofs, bicycles on the racks, their wheels spinning with pointless zeal.

“Have you been together for a long time?” she asked.

“Leslie and I?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we met in college. She used to date Gerry. So we spent a lot of time together. Then she and Gerry broke up and we kind of lost touch.”

He looked tired. It was as if there were a little generator that had kept him going, and now the generator was off.

“We met again six years ago. At a party. I had just gotten divorced, but Leslie was married. We started an affair, but since Leslie lived in New York, and I was in Boston, we had to go back and forth a lot. So Leslie decided to leave her husband, and she insisted that I move in with her. So now we’re together. In New York.”

“Are you happy with her?”

“Happy? I don’t know. I don’t really know how to define ‘happy,’ and anyway you can’t be happy for long. Happiness is a very acute state, it’s like a fever, you can’t take it if it goes on for too long. But it’s working, it’s definitely working with Leslie.”

Lena very nearly said, “Is it, really?”