Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

“Is that Yanina?” Ben asked.

Lena said, “Yes.”

“She’s very attractive,” Ben said. “I pictured her as this ugly old woman.”

“She probably seemed old to me back then, but she was younger than we are now. Was she attractive? I don’t know. She was red-faced and beefy—I couldn’t see past that. And then I was so terrified of her that I mostly saw her as a monster.”

“Well, Sasha clearly saw her as a very sexy woman. And, look, this soldier seems to be crazy about her.”

There was a soldier next to Yanina in all the frames. He wasn’t dancing, but just staring at her. Lena couldn’t understand how she hadn’t noticed that before. He had a beautiful, chiseled face and bright blue eyes. Startlingly blue eyes. He looked remarkably like Danya. But Lena didn’t have time to ponder that, because Ben had already flipped to the next page.

“Whoa!” he said.

There were drawings of people engaged in every kind of sex and sexual position imaginable. Everything took place at night, outdoors, in the moonlight. All the couples were half-hidden behind the trees or bushes, but since there were more couples than appropriate vegetation, some trees gave shelter to two or three couples. Yanina had a whole tree to herself. To herself and her lover, a blue-eyed soldier. He wasn’t Danya, was he? He couldn’t have been Danya.

“Do you think he actually saw some of that or this comes purely from his imagination?” Ben asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think he saw anything. The kids didn’t really go out at night. I think it’s based on rumors.”

“And then the aliens came,” the next caption read.

Ben seemed to be enthralled by the drawings of flying saucers and purple sausages, but Lena could hardly follow the narrative. She couldn’t stop thinking of Danya and Yanina, and the more she thought about them, the more plausible the whole scenario became. Danya had an affair with Yanina. Vedenej found out about it and pulled some strings to transfer Danya to the North. It made sense. It made much more sense than her own idiotic femme fatale theory. She had nothing to do with Danya’s transfer. She wasn’t a femme fatale. She wasn’t a romantic heroine. Well, she was, but only in her own dreams and the fantasies of a ten-year-old boy.

“Wait, who is that?” Ben asked.

There was a drawing of Lena talking to the blue-eyed soldier outside of the unit. They were holding hands. Lena was smiling and trembling. She was actually drawn in trembling motion lines. And Sasha was right there watching the scene with a bleeding heart. The heart was drawn over Sasha’s white T-shirt, dripping blood.

“Isn’t that the same guy who was with Yanina?”

Lena stared at the drawing in silence.

Ben took her hands in his and asked, “Is that Danya?”

She said, “Yes. Yes . . . This is Danya. I had no idea.”

She freed her hands, took the book from Ben, and flipped through the rest. A series of frames about Parents Day, the detailed story of Sasha’s disappearance, Lena’s departure, Sasha’s guilt when he found out that she was fired because of him, Sasha’s grief. The last picture depicted a sobbing little boy drawing a hedgehog in shaky lines.

Lena shut the book. So that was how it was. The only one who had truly loved her was the little boy, Sasha. Danya didn’t love her. Not then, not at the camp. He was attracted to her. He liked her. He loved talking to her. But it was Yanina he was crazy about. The awful Yanina. If he were to tell his own story about their camp, Lena would have been just a minor character. She didn’t know if that newfound knowledge changed anything for her, but it hurt. It hurt a lot.

She started to cry.

Ben took her into his arms and stroked her back with such tenderness that it made her cry harder.

“Do you think that was how it happened?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m sure that was how it happened. Sasha might be wrong about small details, but everything else adds up.”

Her face was pressed into his chest, so her words came out muffled. She had felt awkward about reading the book with Ben, but now she was deeply moved by the fact that Ben was there with her as she was learning what really happened in her camp story. She had told him her version, but they had discovered the real version together. It was he who gave her the book, the book that had been in his car the whole time they were driving to Maine, hidden between the pieces of Ben’s past, witness to everything that happened between them, and to Lena’s delusional interpretation, the way those misunderstandings had affected the rest of her life.

He was so warm that she felt that if he continued to hug her, she would melt.

She raised her face and said, “I have to tell you about Danya now.”

Ben nodded.

Lena took one of his hands and pressed it against her face.

“He did write to me. It took him six months. At first I was waiting for the letter like crazy. I would come down to the mailbox every morning and linger before opening it, prolonging the expectation that the letter would be there that day. Then I was hoping rather than waiting. Desperately hoping. Once, I even had a dream about getting the letter. And then I started to forget Danya. I thought of him less and less. There were days when I didn’t think of him at all. Then there were weeks when I didn’t think of him. After a while, I stopped thinking about him altogether. It was then that I finally got the letter. Danya wrote that he had been transferred to an outpost close to the Arctic Circle. He wrote that it was very cold and quiet there, but he’d gotten used to the cold very quickly, and he liked the quiet. He’d seen the Northern Lights, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen. The trees there were very low—knee high—and the animals were all white.

“He didn’t ask me any questions. He didn’t mention anything about the camp. He didn’t say that he missed me. He signed it ‘Danya.’ Just ‘Danya,’ not ‘your Danya’ or ‘love, Danya.’ The whole letter was less than a page. I cried for an hour and wrote my reply. I wrote that I loved college, that I was studying ancient languages (we were supposed to study some Latin, but not until the next year), and that he must paint the Northern Lights, that it would be a shame if he didn’t, that it was such a rare opportunity for an artist to see something like that. He didn’t write me back.”

“You never saw him again?” Ben asked.

“I saw him about four years after that. By pure accident. On a subway train in Moscow.”

Lena took a few sips of tea. The story of her past was getting closer and closer to the present. Closing in on her.

“He called my name, and when I looked up from the book I was reading, I saw him standing right next to me. He was smiling. But he looked different. I wasn’t sure how. Less boyish? I was so surprised to see him that I screamed, ‘Danya!’ He winced and said that he hated that name and that nobody called him that since the army.”

Ben wanted to ask Lena something, but she ignored him and continued talking.

“We got off the subway together and went to have ice cream in a little café in the center. He said that he thought about me all the time, but he was too depressed to write. He said that being in the army, especially on that base up North, really screwed him up. He said that he got some very rough treatment on that base, but he wouldn’t elaborate. Not then, not ever. No matter how much I begged him. I asked him about his art. He said that he’d quit art school and was studying math. He said that he thought that painting was stupid. We talked for an hour or so, and then I had to run to my class. He walked me to school. He acted like he was really happy to see me.”