Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“It was such an enormous relief to get out of the headquarters. We were all walking down the path that led from the headquarters to the rest of the camp in silence, together but separately, as one big disjointed herd.

“But once we swerved onto the main path, and the headquarters were no longer in view, everybody stopped as if on cue.

“ ‘Well, I guess it’s clear about the guy, but who the fuck was the girl?’ Svetlana asked.

“ ‘Could be anybody,’ Galina said.

“ ‘Could be you!’ Nadezhda said to her.

“ ‘I’m happily married!’

“ ‘Oh, right! I keep forgetting.’

“ ‘Don’t fight, girls,’ Volodya said. ‘And anyway, I wouldn’t be so sure that the guy was Vedenej.’

“But when nobody paid any attention, he shook his head and walked away.

“The rest of us continued gossiping.

“ ‘Listen,’ Svetlana said. ‘Where is Natasha?’

“Everybody looked around. Natasha wasn’t there.

“ ‘Was she at the meeting?’

“We couldn’t remember.

“ ‘But she is a nurse,’ Inka said. ‘She probably couldn’t leave her office.’

“ ‘Natasha? No way!’ Galina said. ‘She’s not even that pretty.’

“ ‘Remember Anya from last year? And that—what’s her name—that really skinny girl from the year before? Were they pretty? And look at Yanina!’

“ ‘Yeah,’ Nadezhda agreed. ‘Vedenej has weird taste.’

“ ‘Anybody noticed how Natasha hangs around the phone booth every night?’ Inka asked.

“ ‘Yeah, but why would she want to call Vedenej? He’s right here.’

“ ‘But they can’t really talk, because of Yanina. So she comes to talk to him on the phone every night. He’s in his office, like ten feet away from her. And he can see her in the booth through his window. Isn’t it romantic?’

“But nobody had a chance to contemplate the beauty of the situation, because right at that moment we heard a blood-curdling scream. We stopped talking and froze. The scream was followed by silence—I heard nothing but the thumping of my heart.

“Everybody rushed to their units. ‘It’s coming from the swimming pool!’ Nadezhda said, and we all ran there.

“And then a series of screams, not as bad as the first one, but still scary.

“A small crowd had already gathered by the pool. We couldn’t see anything behind the backs of other people, but then somebody moved and we saw our own Myshka, squatting at the shallow part of the empty pool. She was screaming and swinging her head right and left. Inka reached to pull her out, and Myshka jumped into her arms. She was shivering.

“Later that day, after Myshka had calmed down, we managed to coax out of her what had happened. She claimed to have seen the aliens. She said she was walking back from the club with the other kids—they were watching a movie during our meeting with Yanina—and she was lagging behind, because her shoe wasn’t right. Then, all of a sudden, she said she saw a round metal object swishing by. No, not like a saucer, but like a ball. She ducked her head but the object hit her on the shoulder. It vanished right after. She got scared, ran to the pool, and jumped in. The swishing ball was obviously an alien ship.

“ ‘Many alien ships are shaped like footballs,’ Sasha Simonov confirmed with great authority. ‘It was a good thing that Myshka screamed.’

“ ‘Why?’ Inka asked.

“Sasha sighed loudly, having explained this all earlier: ‘Because aliens can’t stand high sounds. Their molecules fall apart. But they really appreciate music, only if it’s not high-pitched. If you want to have an encounter, sing in a low voice.’

“ ‘Everybody knows that!’ Sveta added.

“It was strange, but other than providing us with details, the kids seemed to be pretty much indifferent about the aliens. By the end of the day, even Myshka seemed to have forgotten about her encounter.

“Inka was the one who got the most excited about it.

“After lunch she went to examine the area around the pool. She came back even more excited. She didn’t see anything resembling an alien soccer ball, but she saw patches of burnt grass on the edge of the woods by the pool. She could swear that the grass was freshly burnt. Then she asked if I knew that when a person had an encounter with aliens, she would usually receive a gift of special wisdom? I shook my head. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. I used to make fun of people who claimed that they saw aliens, but now I was simply annoyed, with aliens, and with Inka and her crazy interest in them.

“That night all I wanted was to go to sleep and forget about all that stuff. But Inka couldn’t fall asleep for a long time. She tossed, and turned, and moaned. And of course, in the middle of the night there came a poem. Which was the longest and by far the most expressive of her poems. I still remember it.

“I woke up with a terrible headache and thought, ‘Aliens, please, take her. And do it soon.’ ”

Ben drove deeper into the woods as the road became more crooked and narrow. The car swished past the bushes, twigs crunching under the wheels, until it swerved sharply to the right onto another dirt road that seemed even narrower and more crooked. Random patches of woods singled out by the headlights rushed at them, and then past. Coarse pine trunks, smoother birches, delicate hemlock leaves. Lena half-expected to see a goblin or a troll peeking out from behind a tree.

The car made another sharp swerve and there it was, the cabin. It stood in a partial clearing in the yellow cone of headlights, hemlock, low bushes, and tall weeds. Gray and stern, it was strangely asymmetrical. On the side facing them, there was a single window and a door with a small stoop and large rusty padlock.

They shivered as they got out of the car. It was bitterly cold, and the wind came at them in hard gusts that smelled just like snow. She cuddled up to Ben as he struggled to get his key into the right hole. He let her walk in first. It was even colder inside the cabin, and dark except for the light from the car that came through the opened door and unwashed window. Lena fumbled on the wall trying to find a light switch. “No lights,” Ben said casually. “There’s an oil lamp, I’ll get some oil and light it.”

“What do you mean, no lights?”

“The cabin doesn’t have electricity.”

“No electricity! Don’t tell me there is no running water!”

“There is no running water.” Lena thought she could see Ben smile.

“And the toilet is just the woods?”

“Oh, no. We have excellent facilities here. There’s an outhouse—roomy and clean, or at least it was clean when I last saw it.”

“Nice, Ben. So first you lure women here, and then you tell them that there is no toilet?”

“I warned you it was rustic.” Ben’s eyes glowed with amusement as he lit two lamps and put them on the table, which immediately attracted a swarm of moths. There was only one room in the cabin, with a woodstove, a table and a couple of chairs by the window, and two bookcases in the corner forming a tiny makeshift bedroom. Everything looked rough, dusty, homely and exposed. Lena found it moving.

“I love it,” Lena said. “If only it weren’t so cold.”

“I’ll start the fire in the stove,” Ben said, “but it’ll take a while to heat the cabin. We can make a campfire outside in the meantime. Go to the bedroom, look for something to wear—there should be plenty of old jeans. I used to be thin once, you know.”