Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“The End.”

“Black sausage?” Ben said. “Black sausage?”

“Yeah, black sausage. The image worked wonders with the kids.”

“It is a memorable image, I agree. As powerful as it is indecent.”

“Indecent? How?”

“Black sausage? Come on!”

“Stop it! Nobody except for you has ever had dirty associations. Didn’t you like the story?”

“I liked it. I did. It’s weird, but it’s good. It’s just something bothers me about it.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

Ben prodded the smoldering logs with a stick and cleared his throat.

“Black sausage . . .” Ben said, staring into the water.

“What about that sausage bothers you so much?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t shake the feeling that I’ve heard it before. I thought it reminded me of some folktale, but the part about the aliens is something else.”

“I swear I made it up!”

“No, no, of course, I believe you.”

“I mean, I didn’t even have to make it up. The story is based on what really happened.”

“What really happened? An alien black sausage came out of a car?”

“No. What happened was this. Inka and I went to the spring for water. On the way back we saw something bizarre in the sky. A fiery disc significantly larger than the sun and moving in a strange way. I guess it could’ve just been the sun, and it could’ve seemed to move because the clouds moved very fast that day. But we did think that it was an alien spaceship. You know, with all that talk of aliens in our camp, I was scared out of my mind. And Inka really wanted to have an encounter. Yes, she did beg them to take her. But then the sun went down, and we went back.”

Ben prodded the burning logs with a stick and cleared his throat.

“But what about the car and the man in the officer’s uniform?”

“That’s true too, except that there was a real man in the car, and not a black sausage. The man was Major Vedeneev. He was coming back to the camp and he saw us on the road, stopped the car, and offered us a ride. Vedenej sat in the back. Behind the wheel, there was a new soldier. Grisha Klein. Inka perked up. He’d only appeared at the base a couple of days before that, and Vedenej had made him his designated driver. He always topped the speed limit and Vedenej loved him for that. Grisha Klein was a philosophy student who’d been expelled from Moscow University for his ideas, or so they said. He was short, thin, slouchy, with a long nose and wiry hair, jumpy and fidgety at all times. Inka thought that he looked like Pushkin. I thought that he looked like a blinking, crackling lightbulb. Inka hurried to climb into the passenger’s seat next to Grisha. I had to climb into the back seat, careful not to splash my water. I thought Inka would start talking about our extraterrestrial encounter, but she kept silent. She just kept looking at Grisha, trying to catch his gaze. Grisha was staring straight ahead, whistling a weird potpourri of opera and underground Russian rock. His right knee trembled and shook really hard. The car kept jumping up and down, and I thought this was not because the road was bumpy, but because of the vibration created by Grisha’s knee.

“ ‘Your dress is wet,’ Vedenej said. I said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and immediately thought that this was an idiotic thing to say.

“He pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket, put it on my knees, pressed down with his palm, then moved his hand away. When we got out of the car, I saw that the handkerchief was stuck to my dress, I peeled it off and gave it to Vedenej. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

“ ‘Vedenej has a crush on you—it’s disgusting,’ Inka said to me later that day.”

“See?” Ben said.

“What?”

“Inka said Vedenej’s crush on you is disgusting. Clearly, she had a crush on you herself.”

“She didn’t! You should’ve seen her looking at that boy, Grisha Klein!”

“I don’t know. She could’ve used him as foil.”

The blast of wind from the lake made Lena shiver.

She turned to Ben and said, “Let’s go in.”

“Go ahead,” Ben said. “I’ll be there in a second.”

Inside the cabin, the smoky warmth came in patches. She would enter a cold area and then move to a warmer spot, just to lose it a moment later. The bathroom was the farthest away from the stove, so there it was almost unbearably cold. But the bed wasn’t that warm either. Lena felt the chill on her feet as soon as she took off her shoes. She dove under the blanket to take the rest of her clothes off. She pulled her jeans off. Her sweater. She smiled because they were in fact his jeans and his sweater. She took her socks off. They were, of course, his socks, big and lumpy, the tips hanging over her toes.

She must have dozed off, because she woke up when she felt Ben’s freezing limbs next to her. Poor Ben, she thought, and pulled him into the warmth.

“You didn’t come this time either, did you?” he asked a few minutes later.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Fuck, I thought I’d last longer this time. I thought I’d dodge it, but no, it got me.”

She laughed.

“What got you?”

“You know what! Coming.”

“Oh.”

“Okay. Let me rest a couple of minutes. And we’ll do it again. And I promise it will be much better.”

Lena yawned and turned onto her stomach.

“Or we could just go to sleep,” she said.

“Really? Thank you,” Ben murmured.

“Thank you?” “Really?” Lena thought, but a second later she was asleep.

The next morning Lena was the first to wake up. There was an uncertain pale light in the window. In contrast to last night, it was very warm in the room.

Lena wrapped herself in a towel and went outside. This would be the first time she saw the lake and the surrounding woods in the daylight, except that this was hardly daylight. Everything was damp and white, the grayish-white color of skim milk. Farther away, the fog was so thick that Lena felt the urge to reach and squeeze it with her hands or run her fingers through it. The sky and the lake were the same color, it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. She could see the vague contours of the pines behind the cottage, but nothing on the other shore. Nothing at all. No shore. No cellular reception. As if the life that she used to live had stopped or made a pause.

The water was very cold, she thought as she tested it with her toes, but she decided to plunge in anyway. She felt a shocking chill against her breasts, a cold current reaching between her legs, and pleasantly cool water rolling off her butt. “My butt must be the coolest part of my body,” she thought quickly, and then she got used to the water and didn’t think of the cold or her body anymore. Lena swam slowly and quietly in the direction of the sun, a pale yellow circle bobbing uncertainly behind the mist, too weak to break through the white. She felt disoriented and strangely happy.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt this way. Well, actually she could. In the camp. In the camp’s pool. Bobbing in the cold water, all mixed up and bewildered, and strangely, stupidly excited.

They had filled the pool with water a few days before Parents Day. Parents Day was a big deal. Apparently, some of the parents held pretty important positions at the Ministry, so Yanina went to great pains to make sure everything was perfect. She made the soldiers and the staff scrub everything. And she put the counselors in charge of a really complicated entertainment program that included games, contests, the kids’ concert, and, of course, the pool.

Ironically, the heat wave had already passed by then, and the temperature wasn’t even warm anymore, let alone hot. They were supposed to open the pool on Tuesday, but they didn’t open it until Thursday, and even then they had a “soft opening” for counselors, staff, and older kids. She and Inka went while their kids were in the club watching the movie.