Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

They pulled out of the driveway onto the path leading through the woods. Lena kept turning back, looking at the cabin, once again marveling at its asymmetrical shape, and how lost and lonely it looked among all the pines and bushes. The car bounced up and down on the tree roots. She hit her shoulder against the door handle. She didn’t remember the road being that bumpy.

The fog was lifting off the surface of the lake in patches. Where it had already cleared, the lake was a deep festive blue. And the sky was bright blue too. It was shaping up to be a really nice day.

When they drove onto the highway, their phones beeped to indicate that the wireless signal was back on. They were now officially getting back to their lives.

Lena checked her phone. There was just one text message, from Inka. She wrote to say that she was flying back to Moscow, that her plane was about to take off, but she was really hoping that they’d stay in touch. She wrote that she had been thinking about Lena these past four days. She promised to write her a long letter as soon as she got back. She sounded sincere, and Lena allowed herself to wonder if this time they really might stay in touch.

There were no calls from Vadim. It was still morning in San Diego. They could be still asleep. Vadim in the upstairs bedroom painted butterscotch, with all those bright oil paintings on the walls, alone in that enormous white bed. Misha and Borya in twin beds in the downstairs bedroom. A tiny room facing the garden. She wondered if her mother-in-law’s famous roses were in bloom now. She hoped not, she hated how they peeked inside the window, thorny branches scratching against the glass. Borya often had nightmares when he slept in strange places. She had an urge to hug her kids, to kiss them on the tops of their heads, to smell their hair.

There was little traffic, letting her forget about the road. She thought that she had never felt lonelier.

Lena looked at Ben’s thermos in her lap. His old thermos in a ragged leather case. She had a vivid image of Ben as a child skiing with his dad. Freezing, exhausted, frightened, reaching for his cup of hot tea with gratitude. For some reason she imagined that he looked exactly like Sasha Simonov. He probably did look like him as a child. And even behaved like him. Ben used to be obsessed with death. Lena was sure that Ben used to be “afraid of where he was going when he fell asleep.”

Then she had a vivid image of Ben fixing the leak the other night. The way he’d stretched and reached for the ceiling, and how he’d stood there looking at the drops as if counting them. Lena’s deep and ever-growing affection for Ben had turned into a fleeting certainty that this wasn’t over between them. It was unbearable to imagine that they wouldn’t see each other again.

She put her left hand on the nape of his neck, pressed down with her fingers. Ben moaned and closed his eyes for a second before focusing again on the road. She dropped her hand and buried her head in his shoulder so that her hair touched his neck.

It was slowly getting foggy, as if somebody kept closing curtains over the road. One gray opaque curtain after another. Lena felt like peeling the curtains off, and she wanted to tell Ben that, but she didn’t know how to put it into words.

“I’m afraid to fall asleep and wake up when we get there,” she said.

She reached for a bottle of water under her seat and splashed some on her face.

“Ben.”

“What?”

“Tell me a story.”

“I don’t really know any stories.”

“Tell me something. Anything.”

Drops of water were dripping down her forehead, all the way to her eyes, and farther down.

He scrunched his nose and ran his free hand through his hair.

“Have I ever told you how hedgehogs fuck?”

“No.”

“Do you know how they fuck?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Weren’t you ever interested in finding out?”

“Not really.”

“Their backs are covered with spines, right?”

“Yes, so?”

“So, they can’t do it the usual animal way, because the male can’t get past the spines.”

“Oh, right, right. How do they do it then?”

“They have their own special way.”

“Hedgehogs’ way?”

“Yes, hedgehogs’ way. What they do is this. The female lies on her back.”

“Can they even do that?”

“Do what?”

“Hedgehogs. Lie on their backs.”

“Of course. They do it all the time. She picks a comfortable spot on the ground—a soft mossy patch is the best. She lies on her back and spreads her little hind legs as far apart as possible and she raises her front legs up. And the male comes and mounts her, but very gently. He doesn’t really mount her but lies on top of her.”

“But that’s just missionary position.”

“Yes, but in the animal world missionary position is considered the most sophisticated.”

“Oh. Have you seen hedgehogs fuck many times?”

“Are you kidding? Hedgehogs are extremely private animals. Naturalists have to spend months waiting to catch them in the act. But I saw a video of them doing it three times. Once on the Discovery Channel, once on PBS, and once in an empty movie theater in the natural history museum in Springfield, Massachusetts. The whole act is very tender, because they do it ever so slowly and gently. One wrong move and a hedgehog gets hurt.”

“I imagine that they rub against each other first. Their bellies are covered with very soft fur, and they get really warm when they rub against each other.”

“Yes, you’re absolutely right—they do that. But so lightly that you can barely notice they are moving at all. To the untrained eye they just lie on top of each other. But they rub, up and down and sideways until their genitals meet, and his dark hedgehog’s knob enters her tiny pink hole.”

“Pink? Is it really pink?”

“Why not?”

“Yes, you’re right. Why not. Do they make any sounds?”

“Yes, yes, they do. They pant, and sniff, and grunt. Actually, I don’t know if you can call it ‘grunt’; maybe oink like pigs but not quite in the same way.”

“Pigs are rude and they oink rudely.”

“Hedgehogs are anything but rude. They oink very softly and tenderly.”

“Yes, softly and tenderly. Did you know that every so often the female reaches with her little paws and strokes the male’s snout?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“They didn’t show it in the video?”

“No.”

“Well, she does that. She strokes him. So very gently. She can’t see his face, because her head is thrown back. She can’t see anything, so it’s very important for her to be able to touch him.”

“Yes, yes. I know.”

She fell asleep by the time the Boston skyline rose on the horizon. She sat awkwardly slumped in her seat, with her head leaning against the car door. He reached over with one hand, picked the sweater up off her lap, and carefully secured it between her neck and the door.

© MASHA RUMER

LARA VAPNYAR is an award-winning Russian-born author living in the United States. Born in 1971, she moved in 1994 from Moscow to Brooklyn, New York, with her husband. Knowing little English other than a few phrases she learned in school, Vapnyar quickly picked up the language and was soon writing in it. Her first English-language work was published in 2002. Her stories have been published in such magazines as The New Yorker and Harper’s . She is the author of two story collections: There Are Jews in My House and Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, and a novel, Memoirs of a Muse . She lives in Manhattan with her family.