Lara Vapnyar - The Scent of Pine

When they arrived at the lobby of the hotel, however, it was so brightly lit by contrast that Lena felt like closing her eyes for a moment.

“Will you wait for me?” Lena asked Ben. “I’ll be right down with my paper.”

There was loud piano music coming from the bar, and he had to lean closer and ask her to repeat. His heated breath on her skin made Lena dizzy. She repeated her question.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll be at the bar.”

Upstairs, Lena gave her paper a quick once-over. There was a typo on page 3. A long winding paragraph on page 6. A stupid joke and two more typos on page 7. Lena knew that the quality of her paper didn’t matter, but by the time she made it to the bar, she was sick with anxiety.

She couldn’t find Ben right away. She finally spotted him at the back of the bar, sitting across from the fat red-faced man whom she recognized as Gerry Baumann. Lena smiled and waved at Ben, but Ben shot her a pleading look and shook his head. She stopped. Gerry’s meaty hand was now on Ben’s sleeve. He was kneading Ben’s arm and pushing him down toward his bar table.

“So, how’s our little Leslie, Ben? Are you treating her well?”

“She’s fine, Gerry.”

“Glad to hear that. When is your wedding, then? Are you planning on inviting me? Wouldn’t it be monstrous if you didn’t?”

Lena turned and walked toward the elevator. As the elevator doors closed, she saw Ben desperately looking in her direction.

Up in her room, Lena shoved her paper back into her bag, changed into her nightgown and plopped onto the bed. She couldn’t believe how upset she was.

There was a missed call from Vadim on her phone. Lena dialed his number, but he couldn’t talk because he was busy with his parents, and she felt relieved that she didn’t have to talk to him, and spoke instead to her children. Her six-year-old Borya asked if he could bring back a lizard from California. He was pretty sure he could catch one, they were really fast, but you could catch them while they were eating a piece of banana, he would’ve caught one today if he’d had something to put it in, he would go back with a paper cup tomorrow. Her eleven-year-old Misha didn’t know what to say—like Lena, he was never any good on the phone. He must be lonely there; she had the feeling that the intensity of his California relatives frightened him. She imagined him hiding out in one of the empty rooms—her in-laws had a huge sprawling house—with a book or a videogame, lying on his stomach on the bed, propped on his elbows, feet in the air. Thin legs sporting white socks. The socks must be dirty by now. And Borya, who was healthy and square, built more like his father, would be running around the house looking for his brother. He was so cheerful and lively all the time, but what if he felt lonely too? She felt an urge to hug them both. To protect them, to be protected by them. It was strange how affection and pity went hand in hand. How, whenever she felt true affection, her heart would ache with compassion, even when there was no obvious reason for it. She’d learned that while dealing with the children at camp, though it had taken her a while.

At first Lena didn’t even see the kids as human beings with their own feelings, fears, and problems. She thought of them as creatures specially designed to provide counselors with work and to create problems that would get them all punished.

As they waited for the kids to arrive, Lena kept checking her watch and silently praying that maybe they wouldn’t come at all, that maybe a war would start, or a sudden epidemic of plague, or a nearby nuclear plant would explode, and the camp would be canceled before she started to work there. And then, an hour later, the buses started rolling in, sending clouds of dust into the air. One, two, three, four . . . “You go meet bus number eight, your kids are in there,” somebody told them. The doors opened and, one by one, the kids started to get out. Little kids between the ages of eight and ten, smaller than Lena’d expected, wearing shorts and dusty sandals and summer hats, carrying their labeled suitcases, tired after a two-hour bus ride, terrified of the camp, terrified of the counselors, terrified of each other, some restless, some looking as if they hadn’t woken up yet, some crying because they had been tortured by bullies during the ride, some crying because they were already missing their mothers, some crying for no reason at all. Lena realized, with a start, that she had no idea how to deal with children. She was supposed to tell them what to do, and they were supposed to listen. But what if they wouldn’t? And then she heard Inka’s voice: “Okay now, kids! Pick up your things and let’s go to our building. Go!” Lena could hear an unmistakable note of fear in her voice. Lena had read somewhere that dogs could always feel your fear and that they would tear you apart when they did, but kids apparently didn’t work that way. They picked up their things and followed Inka.

The first few days swirled by in a nonstop storm of big and small tasks. Wake the kids, take them to the bathroom, yell at them so they wouldn’t splash each other, search for missing toothbrushes, search for toilet paper, chase a slippery piece of soap on the floor, yell at the kids some more, take them back to the bedrooms to dress, search for missing socks, search for missing pants—how can you lose your pants?! Help them make the beds, look for missing sheets—how can a sheet go missing?! Take the kids to assembly, make sure the kids stand straight and don’t talk, hiss at them since yelling is not permitted during the morning assembly. Take them to breakfast, distribute the bread and butter cut into little cubes, have thirty seconds of peace while gulping down some tasteless kasha with a cup of weak tepid coffee, yell at the kids who smeared butter on their chairs, at those who smeared butter on their knees, and especially at those who threw butter cubes at one another, yell at the kids who don’t want to finish their kasha, yell at the kids who finish too soon and are now bothering other kids. By the time they took the kids for the scheduled three hours of playing outside, Lena and Inka could no longer yell. They would just yank them by their sleeves or grab them by the collars of their shirt if they started to fight or tried to run too far.

But what got to Lena the most was the constant counting. Counting the kids before going to breakfast, during breakfast, after breakfast, before letting them play outside, as they played outside.

What soldiers? What romantic walks? The whole universe seemed to shrink. The geography became limited to the distance from their unit to the cafeteria, from their unit to the club, from the club to the headquarters. The complex system of sensations and emotions that Lena had possessed before was reduced to just two: anxiety and exhaustion. The world of numbers shrunk to 29—the number of children in their unit. Lena could barely distinguish between them, except for those who gave them the most trouble. They were the only ones whose names she still remembered.

There was Myshka (Katya Myshkina), a mousy little girl with a creepy fondness for older men. Whenever she saw a soldier walk past, she would run after him and try to hug him or offer him candy. She and Inka had to keep an eye on her at all times. Alesha was a blond, sweet-looking suck-up who could suddenly turn into this screeching, red-faced little devil, ready to kick, hit, crush anything he could get his hands on. You couldn’t reason with him, or yell at him, but he did yield to physical strength. Sveta Kozlova, on the other hand, was only eleven but already as tall as Lena, and thicker than she was. Sveta had no qualms about hitting a counselor, which she demonstrated with Inka, or even squeezing a counselor and lifting her off the ground, which she demonstrated with Lena. Inka called her Brunhilde. The only way to control her was to appeal to the kindness of her heart. “Sveta, please, I know you can do whatever you want, but I’m going to be in so much trouble if you’re not there for the morning assembly.” Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. Still, the worst one was Sasha Simonov. Most of the time, he seemed to be pretty harmless, a scrawny, quiet kid who loved to draw. He usually sat peacefully in a corner somewhere with his notebook and crayons, until his inner demon took hold of him and he would start crying and sobbing, and eventually have a vomiting fit. Plus, he wouldn’t sleep at night. His eyes stayed wide open and Lena could see the horror in there, so much horror that it gave her goose bumps. He couldn’t be comforted—he was too afraid of “where he was going when he fell asleep.” He stayed awake long after the other kids fell asleep, with his hands buried under the folds of his blanket. When he woke up, there would be a wet spot on his bed that went all the way to the mattress.