Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

She read off the titles of presentations printed on little sheets of paper and clipped to the doors, marveling at how stupid they sounded and how transparent their metaphors were. “Closed In.” “Stilted Bodies. Stilted Souls.” “The Magic of Prison States.” Yet, people laughed and applauded. Lena caught the word “masturbation” as she was passing “The Magic of Prison States,” and she stopped by the open door to listen. She had thought the speaker used “masturbation” as some kind of metaphor, but no, it turned out he meant it in the literal sense. He was talking about graphic novels set in oppressive societies. The speaker had a soft, pleasant voice, a calm and confident manner. Not a trace of an accent. He had no business talking about prison states. What could he possibly know? There were notes of warm amusement in his tone that suggested that he understood whatever there was to understand about it. She had lived in America for thirteen years, and she didn’t understand it at all. Where did this arrogance come from? Holding the door, she peeked into the room. The speaker was a tall man with stooped shoulders, restless, a little awkward, seemingly too aware of the impression he was making. Lena couldn’t see his face. There were just a few people in the audience. Six. No, seven—an old man slumped by the window. He looked like he was asleep. Lena heard notes of anxiety in the speaker’s voice that she hadn’t caught before. She felt something like compassion for him. As she leaned against it, the door made a screech, and the man turned toward her. Lena recognized him right away. The fact that he had caught her eavesdropping combined with the fact that he had seen her in the intimacy of the pool made her intensely embarrassed. Lena walked from the room.

The stinky, squeaky floors of the hall made her cringe. The linoleum was a frightening canary-yellow, with a pattern that reminded her of the floor in the camp headquarters where they had their weekly meetings with Yanina. Black swirly lines and brown specks. Lena had been so frightened of Yanina that she would sit staring at the pattern on the floor the whole time.

At the first meeting there were tea and sandwiches. They entered a square room with tables and chairs and two soldiers in the corner pouring the tea from a big vat into thick glasses. The tea was for them, as were cheese sandwiches on a big tray. “Help yourself!” one of the soldiers said. He had brown squinty eyes that seemed to say: “Girls! You don’t know how lucky you are.”

Some women were sitting on the chairs by the wall. One said that she was the camp nurse; another said that she was in charge of the supplies. Natasha. Galina. Nadezhda. Svetlana. Zhenya. Lena forgot which was which right away. She felt as if they were in a theater, the play was about to start, and the actors were already on the stage, but they didn’t know who among them would be the principals and who would be mere extras.

A girl next to Lena whispered: “Thank God, Vedenej isn’t here!” Lena asked who that was. “Major Vedeneev, the camp director. Everybody calls him Vedenej.”

Yanina walked into the room and didn’t take a sandwich. In retrospect, this was the first thing that had alarmed Lena about Yanina. The other woman took a chair and moved it away from the table to the middle of the room. She sat down, her thick legs wide-set and firmly planted on the floor. She looked the girls over, one by one. She seemed to be studying them, even testing them with her stare.

Lena had put her glass down when Yanina walked in, but she didn’t know what to do with the big piece of crust left from her sandwich. She couldn’t finish it—everybody else had stopped eating, and she didn’t want to leave it on a table—she didn’t want anybody, especially Yanina, to think that she was so spoiled that she didn’t eat crust. So she just sat there with the piece of crust clutched in her hand.

Then Yanina started to talk. Her face was meaty and red—her cheeks, her chin, her nose, her forehead, even her ears. Her thin yellow eyebrows looked indecent and scary against all that red, which became deeper and deeper as she talked. Lena decided that it would be safer to stare at the floor. Yanina’s voice was low and sharp, and she seemed to hammer her sentences right into their heads.

“If the property of a unit gets stolen or lost—you’re responsible. If a kid gets sick with food poisoning—you’re responsible. If a kid gets lost in the woods—you’re responsible. If a kid from our unit falls and breaks his neck—you’re responsible. If something bad did happen, in the best-case scenario, your college would be notified and you would have a bad record forever, and in the worst-case scenario you would go to prison.

“By the way, are you aware of the dangers of masturbation?”

In 1989, perestroika, and the sexual revolution, had yet to reach summer camps and pedagogical colleges.

Yanina proceeded to give the girls a lecture on how hormones were our worst enemies, and how all sexual evil started with hands under the blankets and gradually led to rape and pregnancies, and how almost every camp had some incidents every year. And how it was the counselors’ responsibility if anything like that happened here.

The schedule and the long list of our specific tasks followed—everybody was too stunned and intimidated to listen properly—and then Yanina announced that each unit would be assigned to two counselors, and they could choose the age of the children.

“We’ll take the littlest! The littlest!” Inka yelled before Yanina even finished her sentence. The girl who sat next to Lena whispered to her that “the littlest” were the most work, but it was too late.

After Yanina assigned the rest of the units and dismissed the girls, one of the women, either Zhenya or Natasha, asked if Major Vedeneev was going to greet the girls, but Yanina waved her hand. “He will greet the girls some other time,” she said.

Lena’s head was spinning as the girls walked out of the room one by one, clutching the typed papers with the daily schedule and the kids’ names. She felt as if she was about to faint. She was sure that every single horrible thing that Yanina mentioned was bound to happen, and that she and Inka would be severely punished. She turned to Inka, hoping that she’d reassure her and maybe even mock her for her fears, but Inka looked just as scared. After the meeting they went into their unit, found the tiny room designated for counselors, and started to unpack. Lena felt uneasy taking her clothes out in front of Inka, because she was afraid that they would somehow give away the fact that she was a virgin. She decided to leave them in the suitcase, and pushed the suitcase under her bed. Inka looked at her and shrugged. She must have thought that Lena was a slob. But being considered a slob was so much better than being considered a virgin. Inka proceeded to hang some of her clothes on hangers and put others in drawers. Her clothes looked very serious and adult-like. Blouses. Skirts. Sundress. More blouses. White panties. Flowery panties. Whoa! Huge bra! Bigger than Lena’s mother’s. She then filled her nightstand with all kinds of bottles, and jars, and containers of hair spray and deodorant, and huge curlers and hairbrushes. All the jars were closed, but a sweet chemical smell filled the room. Inka plopped onto her bed, stretched, and scratched one foot with the other.

The conference reception attracted Lena with all its busy noise and hectic movement. She felt entertained for a minute or two, watching all those people, choosing food to put on her plate, enjoying the sweet chill of Riesling on her tongue, and half-listening to the merged-together buzz of the conversations.