Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

Lena’s phone made a single plaintive beep. She started in her seat and reached to take her phone out of her bag.

“Don’t worry,” Ben said. “It just means that we’ve gone out of range. Now we are officially cut off from the world.”

She looked at her phone—there were no bars. Instead of feeling nervous that she was cut off from civilization, out in the wilderness with a man she barely knew, Lena just smiled. She felt as if the loss of connection made it easier to breathe somehow.

A few miles past Bangor they exited I-95 onto a smaller road. There were just a few cars going in their direction; all of them with Maine license plates, most of them pickups sporting large dogs sitting either in the back or in the passenger seat, looking contentedly out the window. The scenery became sparser, with open meadows, uncut grass, occasional farms surrounded by thin low woods.

“We’ll need to stop at one place,” Ben said, “to get the keys. There’s this guy, Mike, who’s been keeping an eye on the cabin while I’m away.”

The road seemed to go on forever, but finally they saw a trail of wood shavings on the road and the figure of a life-sized plywood moose, followed by a pack of bunny-sized plywood bears, and right after that a big clearing with a one-story house, very small, very neat, painted bluish-gray, surrounded by more animal figures, big and small. To the right of the house was a large shed with a workbench in front and a variety of half-finished wooden animals on the grass.

Mike’s car wasn’t in the driveway, though. They knocked on the door of the house, but there was no answer. There wasn’t anybody in the shed either, but they saw a big box on the ground with a slit on the top and a handwritten sign: “Be back soon—leave your orders here.”

Ben groaned. “I told him I was coming. He said he’d be here all day.”

He took out his phone to try Mike’s number, but of course there was no service. “We’ll have to wait,” he said.

They walked behind the shed along the little path that led to the thin birch grove.

Ben took his jacket off, spread it on the grass and sat down, leaving a space for her. Lena sat down next to him. The setting sun lent a rosy glow to Mike’s house, to all the wooden moose and bunnies, to Ben’s face. She wanted to touch him, which shouldn’t have been difficult considering what they had already done, but for some reason she couldn’t. She wondered if Ben felt the same.

“Time for the next installment of your story,” he said.

“Okay. Where was I?”

“You were talking about the heat wave and how it made everyone engage in some sort of pornodance.”

“Oh, yes. Lambada! Okay, so, the next day it was even hotter in the camp. We could barely get up in the morning. Throughout the day everybody talked about the heat wave, how stuffy it was at night, and how sweaty we were, and how stinky our clothes were, and what were the best foods to eat when it was hot, and how awful the soldiers must feel in their uniforms, and all the possible ways to stay cool—actually there was just one—to stay in the shade and splash yourself with cold water from time to time.

“The cafeteria smelled of burning fat that day. The first course was already on the tables—steaming bowls of lamb soup, dark brown with gleaming yellow circles of fat. The kids started to make gagging sounds. All those ‘Yucks!’ and ‘Blehs!’ and ‘Urgghs.’ They were so good at it that we missed the moment when Sasha Simonov started to throw up for real. Inka dragged him outside, but it was too late, and Yanina’s aunt came and mopped up the vomit, cursing and looking at me as if I’d been the one to make the mess.

“ ‘Are they kidding?’ Inka said when we saw that they were serving meat dumplings as the second course. I don’t know if this was Sasha’s fault or not, but nobody wanted dumplings. Most of the kids sat breaking them up with their forks, until Alesha Pevtcov discovered that dumplings were just perfect for tossing, especially if you put them on the tip of a fork, and hit on the dumpling-free end of the fork. Other kids followed suit, and it caught on with the kids from the other units. I exchanged panicky glances with Inka—we had absolutely no strength to deal with a food fight, and then, by a stroke of luck, Alesha hit Sveta on the face. She charged forward, grabbed Alesha by the collar and said that if he threw one more dumpling, she would take the whole pile of them from the kitchen and shove them down his throat, one by one, until he died. Alesha turned red and started to cry. Other kids froze. Even the kids at the adjacent table grew silent and stopped throwing dumplings. I couldn’t think of anything to say or do, but Inka could. ‘Shut up and stand up!’ she yelled. ‘We’re going back to the unit.’ Her face glowed with power. Or maybe her face just glowed because of the heat, but I still admired her.”

Ben yawned and lay down on the grass.

Lena fell silent.

“No, no, don’t stop,” he said. “I love listening to you.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Listening?”

“Of course! Do you mind if I close my eyes, though?”

Lena smiled.

“When they got back to their units, Myshka asked Inka what she did when she went on a date.

“ ‘Not much,’ Inka said. ‘We walk, we talk.’

“ ‘Do the boys kiss you?’

“ ‘Shut up, Myshka.’

“ ‘So they do. And what do they do then?’

“ ‘Nothing.’

“ ‘Nothing? Really? Don’t they fuck you? Not even a little?’ ”

Ben stirred and mumbled, “Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.”

“And then there was the performance of Sveta Kozlova.

“I was in the girls’ bedroom stripping the beds, when Inka ran in choking with laughter. ‘Open the window, quick, you’ve got to see this, Sveta is doing Yanina!’

“There was a circle of kids by the porch. Sveta was in the center apparently waiting for a cue. Then, Alesha opened his mouth very wide and began to sing the lambada. Just ‘A . . . Aaaa . . . ’Aaa . . . a’aa . . . aa’a’ like this, but he carried the tune well. And Sveta pressed her hand to her chest and sighed deeply, exactly like Yanina did. Then she began to move. The resemblance was simply amazing. She even looked like Yanina a little. The same beefy little body, the same flush on her plump cheeks. At the end she raised her arms up just like Yanina did, only Sveta didn’t pretend that she did it to snap her fingers. She put her arms in a circle and moved them up and down as if she was hugging somebody.

“ ‘Yasha, my darling, kiss me, kiss me,’ she said, and made some loud smooching sounds to the delight of the kids.

“ ‘Who is Yasha?’ I asked Inka.

“ ‘Don’t you get it?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘Yasha . . . Yakov . . . Ring a bell?’

“ ‘No! It can’t be!’

“But Inka gave me a meaningful nod.

“There was only one Yasha at our camp. The camp director. Yakov Petrovich Vedeneev. I started to laugh. Yanina and Vedenej? No, this couldn’t be true.

“ ‘Oh, Yasha! I love you so much,’ Sveta continued. ‘Fuck me. Fuck me, please. Just a little bit.’ ‘Wait, Yanina Ivanovna, wait, let me get it out of my pants, it must be stuck.’ ”

Lena looked at Ben. She expected him to laugh, but he only smiled without opening his eyes.

“Inka flung the window open and yelled that Sveta must stop and shut up. Amazingly, Sveta stopped right away. She must have felt satisfied that she had done enough damage.

“Later that day, when we went to the laundry room with the pile of dirty sheets, we asked Galina if there was any truth to Sveta’s playacting.