Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

Nobody was swimming. The sun was securely stored behind the clouds, and the breeze was chilly if not very strong. And the smell wasn’t that inviting either. The water was muddy-brown and stank of chlorine.

A few kids stood on the wooden walkway around the pool, shivering in their bathing suits, shying away from the water. Some would come closer to the edge and test the water with their toes and spring away. The girls were scrunching their noses and saying that the water smelled like poop and frogs. Counselors hadn’t even changed into their bathing suits. They sat on the long bench on the right side of the pool and urged the kids to jump in. The soldiers who were still fixing things around the pool urged the counselors to set an example. Lena immediately noticed Danya in the back painting the pool fence dark blue. She hadn’t seen him since that dance, but she had never been able to stop thinking about him. Seeing him made her both stirred and upset, but she decided it would be best to ignore him, and she immediately felt some discomfort, like a nagging toothache.

There wasn’t space on the bench, so Inka and she sat on the plastic stools by the entrance.

The girl in the red bathing suit was the first to approach the water. Her bathing suit was a couple of sizes too small and kept riding up her butt, until one or another of her girlfriends would pull the rim of the suit back down. A boy in blue briefs ran up to her and splashed some water on her. Her girlfriends screamed something like “Yuck! Poop! Frogs!” The girl in the red suit jumped away from the boy. He wanted to splash her again. She started to run. He started to chase her. They were running around the pool. Then they were fighting and pushing each other into the water. And finally the girl was in. Thrashing with her arms and squealing like a piglet.

Inka laughed and prodded Lena with her elbow to remind her to laugh as well. Inka’s excitement was heightened by the fact that her brand-new love interest, Grisha Klein, was at the pool, scrubbing a long wooden bench with two other soldiers. She kept looking in his direction, and even though he didn’t seem to have noticed her, his mere presence made her want to laugh, shriek, and squeal.

Other girls started to run around the pool squealing, even though nobody was pushing or chasing them. But it didn’t take too long for the boys to take the cue, and soon many girls were in the water. Some girls would slip and fall on the boards and the running boys would jump right over them. The cold and the smell of poop didn’t seem to bother anybody anymore. The boy in blue briefs, who had started all this, ran up to the bunch of squealing girls and froze for a second while determining which one to pick, and then he turned away from them, ran up to the counselors’ bench, grabbed Dena’s hand, and before anybody could react, pushed her into the pool.

“I’m wearing my watch, you fucking idiot!” Dena yelled when she climbed out of the pool.

“My watch! You ruined my watch!” And she shook her wrist in the air. But nobody was interested in her watch; everybody was staring at her chest. At the dark contours of her breasts under her wet shirt, and at her nipples that looked as if she wasn’t wearing anything at all and were sharp and long like erasers on the tips of pencils.

Dena followed our stares, gasped, screamed, covered her breasts, and started to laugh like crazy.

It was then the soldiers stopped what they had been doing and joined the game. Other soldiers started to chase the counselors. Most of the counselors jumped off the bench and were now running around the pool with the kids. The more practical of them removed their watches first and left them on the bench. Soon it was a stampede of people, big and small, dressed and undressed, boot-clad and barefoot. The boards creaked under all those feet.

Lena looked for Danya, but he was still in the back, still painting that fence.

“Come on! They’re gonna get us here!” Inka screamed as she jumped off the chair and ran. She didn’t run away from the pool, though, but rather toward the soldiers, closer to the action.

Lena stayed put.

“So we now have the pool, right?” Vedenej asked. He had this amazing skill of materializing out of nowhere and sneaking up on you.

Lena nodded.

Vedenej surveyed the scene.

“The kids are having fun?” He squinted at Lena as if unsure that he’d said the right thing, or that he’d grasped the situation correctly.

She nodded again.

And then Inka came out of the pool. She was spitting water, her hair was flat and sticking to her head, mascara smeared all over her face. But who cared? Everybody was staring at the wet moving mass of her chest. Grisha Klein dropped the wire brush he had been holding and stared at Inka’s chest too. He looked spellbound, as if he’d never seen breasts before. It was love at first sight. Well, at first sight in the right direction.

Then somebody whistled. Other soldiers joined in. Inka squealed and ran to the bench. Vedenej finally looked at her. His eyes popped. Only then did he get what the fun was all about.

He chuckled, obviously unsure what the appropriate reaction would be. He wrinkled his forehead, trying to pick the right one out of a variety of different reactions. Then he chuckled again and looked at Lena with great determination.

Lena saw in his eyes that he was going to throw her into the pool, but she didn’t believe it. Not Major Vedeneev! Not the camp director! She still couldn’t believe it when he walked up to her, and when he leaned over, and when his hands were on her waist, and even when she was lifted in the air. All that time she’d thought that this was some kind of a joke and in the end he’d let her go. And then she broke through the pool surface with a great big splash, which she couldn’t hear, and felt the deafening water closing above her head, and the cold, and then, when she emerged and took a deep breath, the smell of rotten frog poop all around her face.

Lena swam to the ladder and tried to grab the railings, but her hands were shaking from the shock and she couldn’t get a good grip. She was just hanging there in the water when she saw Danya squatting by the edge of the pool. “Do you need help?” he asked, and the next instant she was in his arms. She remembered how enormous she felt after her first meeting with Danya. This time, she didn’t feel enormous at all. She felt rescued for a second, but the next instant she felt very small, and helpless, and exposed, and she wanted to cry.

“Are you okay?” he asked Lena as she stood shivering by the edge of the pool. She nodded and ran to the bench to get a towel.

Inka was waiting for her there: “Look, somebody’s in trouble!” she said. She pointed toward Yanina, who had appeared at the pool out of nowhere and was scolding her husband. But Lena didn’t care. Her encounter with Danya was all she could think about.

She saw him later that day, during the kids’ naptime, as she sat by her unit with a book.

“Hi,” Danya said.

She said “hi” too.

“I wanted to check how you were doing,” he said.

She said that she was fine.

He sat down across from her at the table. He wasn’t saying anything. Lena wasn’t saying anything either. She just kept opening and closing her book. They broke the silence at the same time. He said: “So how’s camp life?” and she said: “So what’ve you been—”

He chuckled and said that he’d been busy at the base, but now Yanina had summoned him back to prepare stuff for the concert. Mostly drawing bunnies and hedgehogs.

He said he loved to draw people, but not animals, because all the animals in his drawings looked freeze-dried. Lena said that her favorite animal was a pig, but she’d never seen a piglet up close. He said that he’d seen many piglets, when he visited his grandmother in Ukraine, and told me how they ran around in packs, and how he tried to feed them carrots. Lena said that she used to imagine that icicles were magical crystal carrots that could grant you any wish. Danya said that he wanted to go to the Arts Academy, but they didn’t accept him. He was planning to try again after his army term was over. Lena said that she was heartbroken that they didn’t accept her into acting school. Danya said that his favorite novel was Heinlein’s Door into Summer . Lena had never heard of it. He said there was this cat in the book who hated cold and snow, there were twelve doors in the house and the cat would go from one door to the next, hoping that at least one of them would open into summer.