I was out in the night on the brick veranda, having one of the first cigarettes of my life, trying to explain my Lara-situation to Nat and Masha. My Lara-Situation. It was a hefty percentage of everything I had lived through so far. Both Nat and Masha were straight, as was, we had always assumed, our host Galina, until her new and inexplicable fixation on a lesbian love story of a movie, namely Mulholland Drive, which, now that the opera season was over, Galina had invited us all over to her house to see. She had bought a projector for the occasion and left the curtains to the veranda billowing, the very veranda where I now sat to discuss Lara.
Of our usual little crowd at the opera house, Nat, Nadya, Galina, and Masha all were acquainted with Lara also. They were appalled by what had been playing out that summer: how for the past six weeks or more I, nineteen at the time and on my first break from university, had come to spend my days, though, crucially, never my nights at Lara’s house in one of the most boring suburbs south of the city. Lara was the first friend I’d had with her own apartment that I visited solo. As Masha said: Lara being thirty-two, that should come as no surprise. Still, the whiff of adulthood—of having a close, adult friend—felt liberating. Lara’s apartment was quiet, sat on the ground floor of a small complex, contained her own table, her own glasses, even her own bathroom tiles. I would lay on one side of the couch, and Lara would lay on the other, in her reddish-splotched buxom glory, perpetually soft and exuding droplets of perspiration like a piece of fruit that had been recently taken out of the fridge. I could barely look at Lara’s body without blushing. Beyond the corners of my vision, Lara’s breasts stretched the material of her blouse. I knew, or I envisioned I knew, when I was with her as much as when I was alone, the exact weight and density of those breasts upon my palms, and their mere presence left me in a shocking confrontation with whom I was becoming.
It was the summer of the first heatwaves and record-setting temperatures that would only accelerate during the forthcoming decade. Lara allowed me to stay indoors during those tedious daytimes, with all the windows open and the blinds down, and together we would sip wine mixed with mineral water and ice-cubes. Then Lara would tell me the details of her past sexual adventures: there was the puzzling story with a massage therapist, or the married man who sent coded messages about penetrating her anally. Instinctively I knew that telling me these stories excited Lara. And consequently, I became so aroused that on my way home I could barely walk. I’d make the route from Lara’s house to the train station along the tall, fenced-in Juniper bushes in a humiliated, bothersome agony, feeling, I thought, not unlike the way Alfredo may have felt in the opening act of La traviata. I would listen to this part of La traviata on my headphones, swelling in the horniness of the music. How did Alfredo get Violetta to fall in love with him just by loving her alone, from afar? Why was he so much luckier than me? Why did this only happen to men? On the train, I would make sure to sit far away from the other passengers, worried I was emitting a smell that disclosed the obscene activities I had just undertaken, activities that, given my virginity, seemed somehow more perverse.
I was not alone in my plight. Galina was still married then, in her house within view of the Danube and the ripening apricot tree. My friend Nadya was in love with her.
“Nothing makes me feel more like a boy than being with Galina,” Nadya told me on the way back from Galina’s house on another night—“…the way I love Galina on these unbearable afternoons,” –as we walked down one of the sleepy streets of square gardens sprinkled with rubbery gnomes between Galina’s house and the subway, the final subway stop before the northern edge of the city, both of us feeling unsuccessful in our own ways, me because Lara hadn’t written that day and her because Galina had not kissed her. Nadya made me take a longer route that led us closer to the flood plains. The air here was ripe with the smell of forlorn, damp apricots on the ground, the oddly empty smell of poplars and mud. Nadya suddenly startled: “does that mean that a man might make me feel more feminine? Should I try to start sleeping with men?”
We had no way of talking about wanting sex, we barely could think of it ourselves. And some woman at a bar had recently put that stupid thought into Nadya’s head: that if she bought herself expensive lingerie and wore it in front of a mirror, she would eventually feel more confident and manage to develop an attraction to men.
“I don’t think you should do anything you don’t want to do,” I said, careful to remind Nadya that sleeping with men was always an option, because what if Nadya really was bisexual?
I wanted Nadya to avoid all my mistakes; for instance, I wanted her to avoid a situation like the one I was in with Lara. But I also would have felt disappointed if Nadya were to find a girlfriend, or a lover, quicker than I did. And the worst idea, as much as I wanted it for her, was that before I get to sleep with Lara, Nadya manage to sleep with Galina, who seemed not at all as out of reach as Lara, Lara who loved men and could not stop talking about men, and whom I had recently made the mistake of introducing to my father, which was a whole other topic.
“Why would Galina show us Mulholland Drive?” Nadya asked, having asked the same question all night. She used me to decode every message she thought Galina might possibly be sending her. And then Nadya stopped: “…here, this is where it happened!”
We had come across an old willow tree, growing not far from a pretty row of birches, close to the banks of the Danube. “This is the We had come across an old willow tree, growing not far from a pretty row of birches, close to the banks of the Danube. “This is the willow tree—she stood, well, as close as you are standing now…” Nadya held onto my arm and stepped close to me. I was a little taller than her, and in the streetlight could see her lashes fluttering. She turned her face to me. “She stopped here, and grasped me by my arms like this,” she gripped my upper arms as if she wanted to draw blood, “just like this…”
And that was it. Nothing. Nadya leaned her head against my shoulder. Her sigh tickled my collarbone. “It’s so stupid,” she said.
“They’re crazy,” I said weakly, “they’re just pathetic. Nothing in their lives turned out as they wanted. They have nothing going for them, so they like us around. You and me. Because we still feel things. They like to make us suffer the way we used to squeeze our dolls for the gross squeaking noises they’d make.”
Lara liked to sometimes laugh at me and call me the “Fuzzy One,” for the thickness of my eyebrows and the hair that grew on my lower arms. Her other nickname for me was “Monster Baby.”
When I told Galina about the nicknames, she shook her head at me. Nobody liked Lara.
“It’s nice,” I protested, “Lara means it in a nice way.”
“What she should be telling you is how beautiful you are,” Galina said, “both you and Nadya should be told, many times.”
“Did she really say that?” Nadya said later, on the night we were on right now, as we were walking home down the dark streets lined with suburban hedges and poplars and willow trees.
“Well, it’s true,” I said. Why else did we get so much unrelenting attention from men, on the subway, in bars, on the street, and such ambivalent attention from straight women, who invited us into their homes, their sofas, even, eventually, maybe, as would perhaps happen to Nadya with Galina, their beds?
Lara said other things to me that anyone else might consider unkind. There was the way she spoke about a primary sexual act between a man and a woman as “a relief for both sides,” in a way that seemed oblivious to the torment it caused me: “you shove it in, and both will feel a kind of relief, automatically. A vagina just happens to be shaped so that a penis will fit inside it.”
Galina laughed at that: “What does she know?”
Galina’s response here, which I read only as nurturing and kind, returned to me once more when I told Nadya, that night as we were walking to Galina’s for Mulholland Drive—a movie that conveniently illustrated the shortcut we wanted: that a beautiful, grown woman would appear in our home, her past as delicious as a movie we wanted to see, and want nothing but to have sex with us.
Nadya immediately cried out: “What does she mean, what does she know?”
This incident would become one of the many fragments of evidence Nadya nursed in her own mind, wearing them smooth under the weight of her own longing, evidence of Galina’s sexuality being something just a little other than what we called “hetero.”
The final thing Lara mentioned that confused and pained me was how the married man she had sex with could get her pregnant. It was not what she wanted. But it was a possibility. A narrative option that made Lara’s romance with the married man so much more exciting. This danger was omitted completely from whatever women could achieve with each other, Lara would say, thereby sex between women was sanitary and uninteresting.
Galina calmly declared this statement was ridiculous also: “…because you mention how much Lara enjoys anal sex with this married man. I have never heard of anal sex producing babies.”
And another time she said to me about Lara, again about the pregnancy topic, “I know you are infatuated with her, but this object of your infatuation lacks the imagination you have.”
I objected. “I understand the pull of danger,” I said.
Galina made a hissing sound.
“Why would anyone want the capacity for such an STD?”
Even in the dark I could tell Nadya bit her lip when I told her all of this. She did not say it, but I could tell she was thinking, as I was, that Galina was so wonderful, overall, and not just like Lara in the details. Subsequently, there had to be a downside (as we knew from Mulholland Drive). We could not yet tell what it was, but it was coming for us. Would she one day grow sick of us and leave us out in the cold? Or was there a side to Galina that we could not know, a shrewd, cold side, one that she cultivated only for her husband and daughter? Why, after all, did she allow us to be friends with her, when all we could give her was our misguided, virginal worship?
We had our own illusions of what it would mean to have sex with a woman, based on Mulholland Drive for instance, in which sex seemed to be no more than a series of accumulating caresses that grew and ebbed and yearned for an ever-elusive climax, like Richard Wagner’s music, but the way Galina had said this one thing—“What does she know,” meaning Lara knew nothing—made Nadya and I both agree that Galina had in her life had sex with a woman, not once but possibly several times, and certainly knew about it a great deal more than we did.
Galina had brought out more white wine and cut up her apricot cake. It was nearly one in the morning, but no-one made any attempts at leaving: it was the rare night where Sasha and Yuriy, the daughter and husband who usually kept Galina so pinned to her misery, were off on a hike, and we all loved to be around Galina, whether we loved her the way Nadya did, or the way Nat and Masha and I did. Masha, who, like Nadya and Galina, was technically Russian, was still all mixed up in the creepiness of the movie. For her it had been more of a thriller than a love story. The obvious plot—the romance between hapless Naomi Watts and the glamorous movie star she covets—had escaped her, and she now wanted to share with us only a story from her childhood, of how once she and her mother had encountered a monstrous creature-thing on the road.
“Our mother was a scientist,” she said, “a physicist, clear-headed, but even she couldn’t explain what happened. That day we were driving somewhere. My sister and I were in the back seat. It was noon, a day in summer. I remember there was barley in the field, and gravel on the asphalt. At first, we thought we had seen some larger road-kill, a deer or a sheep. We looked up and saw our Mother gazing at the rear-view mirror, gazing with such an expression we had never seen before, so we climbed around in our seats to look out the window in the back. We found ourselves looking at the thing, lying in the road behind us, a thing that was no more than a lump in the road, like the back of a dead cow, and then slowly it moved upright, and we saw it whole: it had the head and body of a horse and stood on its hind legs like a man.”
“With hooves and all?”
Nadya, who had had quite a bit to drink, gasped, “could it have been a satyr?”
“Satyrs don’t exist, silly,” Galina said, and wrapped her large hand round the back of the girl’s neck, the tips of her fingers caressing Nadya’s jawline, so that Nadya looked embarrassed and satisfied all at once, like a kitten being petted against its will.
“Maybe it was a costume,” Nat ventured.
“Our mother stopped her car, and then suddenly,” Masha made a jerking movement with her arms, “this thing started moving towards us. And oh, it was so fast! And so tall! Imagine that body of a horse, how threatening and enormous that is, but imagine it walking like a man, his knees bent backwards. Our mother stepped on the gas pedal, and we shot forward, and this thing would have almost caught us, but we just went faster and faster until… eventually the thing just stopped, in the middle of the road, and on we sped… I turned around one last time and, in the distance, could make out only a humanoid figure on the road, with that terrible horse-face…”
“Terrifying,” someone concluded.
We sat there and everyone grew quiet. Maybe some of us were picturing the strange horse-thing’s face, or others were going over what stories of the unexplained they could tell. I thought of the bit of gossip Lara had told me, about how her gynecologist was the same as that of a famous opera singer we all adored, Nadya and I especially, and how the gynecologist had disclosed a confidential piece of information about the singer to Lara that had shocked me, although, as I thought about it, why would any of that have happened? I realized in that instance Lara must have been lying to impress me. But I could not muster the energy to tell the others. I did not want Lara to look bad or even insane. Instead, I looked on into the distance.
Beyond the apricot tree, I noticed how a cluster of birch trees in Galina’s backyard marked off her property from the flood plains beyond. I watched them now as I listened to the women murmur: I love the birch trees, I thought, because they resemble Galina, the regality she carries everywhere. I suppose I was a little in love with Galina myself, looking back, we all were, but I was too sympathetic towards Nadya and too besotted with Lara to see that.
When I glanced over at Galina, I could tell she had been watching me.
“Birch trees in the dark,” she sighed. “I always thought they looked like petrified princesses. I knew a girl once who looked like a birch tree come to life.”
We all shifted in our seats, as if we had just sat through an overture, only waiting for the actual story to begin.
“Actually, I had a bit of a terrible thing happen with that girl,” Galina said, as if she was only just remembering. She furrowed her long and elegant eyebrows, the corner of her mouth rose the way it does in people who try to grimace instead of crying, and she said, “Good god, it really meant something to me. So you know,” she swallowed. “I did love a girl once, maybe not so differently from the way you two—” she gestured at Nadya and me, “you know, love girls, but I was not, I was never—” she waved her hand, “I am not a lesbian, of course. But still, there was that girl who reminded me of a birch tree. I loved her the way I love that part in the Prince Igor overture…” Galina brought up the Prince Igor Overture constantly. She particularly liked a horn solo in the middle, with a theme that gets swept up into the string section, offering the searing kind of joy you might feel at the start of a journey, when the train is drawing out from the station and you catch a glimpse of a new and larger landscape to move through, and if you were to listen to it right now, you would understand everything completely.
There was a story I had known as a little girl about the origin of birch trees: how they had been girls once too, princesses, and they had been trapped by an evil spell. Then a village girl—curiously a girl, not a boy—swam to the bottom of a lake and asked the lady of the water for help, and the birch trees turned back into maidens… The story was written up in a fairy tale story book, called “A Russian Fairy Tale,” (it was a book of Fairy Tales of the World), and the princesses and birch trees had been so lovingly illustrated, with black eyes, in white-blue gowns that exposed their chests, just looking at them had made my skin prickle forebodingly. In the real world, the girl in Galina’s story had been what Galina called “mysteriously green-eyed.” Galina had equated these green eyes to godliness, and I dimly recalled, from school, that perplexing song by Bulat Okudzhava, in which he, if I am not mistaken, refers to God as his green-eyed one…
“Where is she now?” Nadya’s hushed voice was that of someone about to reach the ultimate pinnacle of her desires (that Galina might finally admit she was, in fact, a lesbian). I glanced at Nadya and thought to myself, it’s a good thing she and Galina have not had sex, would not have sex, because if they did, Nadya might just spontaneously combust.
Galina waved a response, “You have to know, I almost killed her. I was so young, and I felt like I did…”
“Surely,” Masha said, “the dude” (Masha liked using this English word, Dude) “…who knocked her up was responsible for all that?”
Masha clearly knew more of this story than we did.
“Yes,” said Galina, “well…”
She shook her head as if to say there was nothing left to be said. Then she sighed, “there are elements of a ghost story, of course. Maybe it will be interesting enough…”
Galina and her female roommates, back when she was a student in what had just recently again become St Petersburg, liked to play that game where each girl placed two fingers upon the bottom of an upturned glass. Then the glass roamed across the linoleum floor of the tiny room they shared between the four of them.
“Like the Ouija board,” Nat said, being half-American.
“Sort of,” Galina eyed Nadya and me, “you should never do this yourselves, much less in the room you are sleeping. We got all kinds of things that winter. We got a woman who drowned in a river nearby, and voices speaking in Old Church Slavic…”
It was midwinter, which on a summer night as this one was so hard to imagine, “the most beautiful winter of my life,” Galina said. “Beautiful, though it was always dark, in the way things are only when there is that mystery of the other person, and even if you do not know her well you know you are willing to lay down everything. Like I said, I loved this girl. I would have been happy if nothing had happened between us at all. I felt majestic with my love, ennobled, like that pause for a horn solo in bit of loud symphonic music.”
The students’ building regularly froze over, to the point that windows and doors froze shut and locked the girls inside. Accosted as they were by the wind, the ice threw crystal patterns across the glass of windowpanes. Radiators in the tiny student apartment were turned to their highest setting, and whatever was piping through them made a whistling sound. The girls—there were five of them total, the residents of the girls’ room, as well as a friend, and in the dark of the night I could picture them clearly, saw them as analogous to the group we were sitting in now: Galina, Nadya, Nat, Masha, and me—sat huddled close to the radiators, and wrapped their shoulders in blankets, since for some reason and despite the rattling radiators it was still cold, especially in their room, but with friends the cold was somehow bearable.
The séance on this night yielded more information than usual. A chatty girl from Smolensk had joined the apartment in the fall, and she could divine the meaning of cards when they were laid out and knew by heart the characteristics associated with each sign of the zodiac, including Chinese and Indian astrology. This night, whatever was speaking to them displayed a good mood.
“I think it’s laughing,” the girl from Smolensk said, “Or barking. It’s happy to talk to us, whatever it is.”
“Did you die violently,” ventured one of the roommates, a black-haired Siberian girl who had lived in the apartment, quietly and surly, for a whole year before Galina moved in and who had the kind of mangy haunted face a supermodel might, but with a glowering melancholy that made her not only hard to look at but difficult to be around.
“Shh,” said the friend from the neighboring apartment, as if such a question could be too personal to a spirit. When no answer came, the girls shifted in their spots, recrossing their legs. A part of the lace curtain, brown with age, which the girls used to shield the glass radiating the outdoor temperatures, was caught in the regulator, and Galina remembered watching the curtain billow slightly, thinking of how the billowing and the long shadows she and the girls cast created the appearance of a person sitting there.
Legend had it, according to a story passed on from girl to girl who had each lived in this tiny apartment in the former Leningrad suburbs, that this corner of the room was haunted. The spirit of a vile monk sat there, waiting, watching. It liked having girls around. In the curtain’s perforations, Galina thought for a little while she could make out a face. Same as, she thought, while she lay awake at night in the top bunk listening to the thick milky sounds of the other girls sleeping, the wallpapers took on the outlines of people. Later that night she sat up in her bunk—the lights in the room were out and the others oblivious—and watched the corner again for a long time. There was nothing there, just the flickering dark and the pulsing sound of the radiator, the wind blowing against the glass, and the soft breathing of the girls in their bunks.
Back in the middle of the séance, which was still progressing, the spirit had gotten more irritable. The little glass did a funny circular dance, the girls cried out, even the Siberian girl let out a weary moan, and then the glass bounced, dragging the girls with it. I am in the walls, the spirit was saying, and I can see all of you. I can climb into you and your bodies will allow me to move around. When you leave the house, I leave with you.
Galina looked at the Siberian girl, whose eyes were half closed.
You think I’m lying? the spirit in the glass said. Then let me show you—
“One of you is a pervert,” the Smolensk girl, translating, shrieked a sound that intersected a gasp with a giggle. “Who,” cried Masha (not the same as our Masha on the brick veranda). Several of you, responded the glass, in its jerking, obnoxious little movements, but one more than the others. Better watch out for her.
Then, as if perfectly filled to the brink with spite, the spirit came for each of them: Masha was useless and dumb, the neighbor-girl had a nose so ugly it belonged in a museum (it was a very particular nose), the Smolensk girl was, as the glass said, a victim. The Siberian girl with the somber face was a slut (“That’s right,” the Siberian girl muttered). But before it could reach Galina, the little glass gave a horrible squeak on the floor, stopped, and toppled to its side.
“So that means you’re the pervert,” the Siberian girl said dryly. Her name was Anna, or Anya, Anyushka, depending on everyone’s mood. Anna yawned and stretched, and then they all went to wash up and change before bedtime.
Long into the night, Galina lay awake and watched the curtain billow and dance. Her eyes wandered to the others sleeping in the room with her. Briefly she saw the girl from Smolensk watching her with shiny eyes, laying as she was in the top bunk. Was she awake? But with a muted huff, the girl from Smolensk (her name was Larissa, but that is neither here nor there) rolled away and faced the wall, and Galina rolled onto her back and tried to sleep. Somewhere in the building, a group of students was drinking and dancing to an American pop song. A neighbor roared in the stairwell, and there was the sound of something metallic knocking and rattling against an iron railing, but none of the sounds would have been connected. Upstairs, a water faucet turned on and off. Galina startled up from a brief doze feeling cold and climbed off her bunk to find the red wool blanket they kept in the kitchen. The light was on. A single naked lightbulb made a shuddering, singing noise. Anna, the Siberian girl, was sitting by the stove smoking a cigarette. She was wearing pink and turquoise leggings and clutched a Manga comic to her chest.
“Hi pervert,” she said. “Are you waiting up for the monk?”
“How do any of us even know about the monk?”
“The neighbors in the adjoining apartment,” Anna stubbed out the cigarette in a porcelain ashtray decorated with scenes from Grimm’s fairy tales. Her almond-shaped eyes were small and sleepy, which only made her prettier, “they see him too, on the other side of the wall. They say he’s been here for more than three hundred years, kicking dogs and drowning cats and raping young girls. Since before this building was built, and before they laid out the city and all of this here was just some marshland with a few spare birches…”
Galina pictured the monk living in the marshland, by a wooden church. His evil, taking the form of a disembodied slime, climbing the façade of this building, window by window, until he landed in this girls’ room, with the brown and cream-colored wallpaper that may have been pretty once, and the little drawings of flowers and horses on the walls which some other girl-student might have left there long ago.
“They say the monk possessed a girl, one who was living in our room. An older girl at the conservatory told me my first year. This girl became vicious and ravenous, and she corrupted every single girl in the apartment.”
“Corrupted, how?”
“You know,” Anna said, “sexually.”
“How do you mean?”
“By the time they left, her roommates were no longer virgins.”
“Do you mean she grew a penis?”
“Now that’s an interesting idea…” Anna lit another cigarette and watched Galina intently.
“Do you really have a boyfriend?” she asked, but she said it like a statement.
“Yes,” Galina had been going out with a young man at the conservatory named Ivan Pavlovich, who worked construction sites in his spare time, “his name’s Ivan Pavlovich.” (“We all know Ivan Pavlovich,” Nadya groaned, and we do. He has appeared in Galina’s other stories.)
“Well,” Anna said. “Pity. Good night then.”
She said the “Pity” in such a way that Galina couldn’t make out what it was in fact that Anna pitied—whether it was that Galina was going out with Ivan Pavlovich, or that Ivan Pavlovich was going out with Galina.
Galina that night had a crude dream in which she was sitting in a tree at dusk, a purple dusk across a vast sky, and she knew she was at a gas station, one she knew with the certainty we have only in dreams to be in the USA. She was wearing tight jeans—Levi’s, or how she imagined Levi’s felt—and there was a thickness in her pants that needed out. She climbed down from the tree, feeling and seeing the large ridges of the bark underneath her fingers, unzipped the bulging pants, and peed standing, holding a large heavy thing. She remembered looking down at it. That for some reason she could see folds of skin, like in the jeans, and the veins. There was no astonishment. It was simply there. She woke up feeling extremely aroused and ashamed. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and rolled onto her stomach, her face in the pillow, and relished the warmth of the blanket, the mildewy scent coming off her pillow and clothes, the sweet private smell of her breath and her body.
Later at the conservatory, she thought of the dream’s thickness again while she stood in the girls’ bathroom line, the girls who in their big winter sweaters were hiding their thin and occasionally see-through blouses. Now that she knew what it had felt like, in the dream, felt as if she possessed a whole new organ, Galina knew that it was not merely for relieving herself. It was for doing other things, specifically to women. That thought came to her, standing in the bathroom line with all the girls, and then suddenly the door to the bathroom swung open, and Anna walked out. She registered Galina. Anna was wearing glasses that day and her green eyes seemed accentuated, but her expression did not change. Galina blushed so fiercely she forced her gaze down, at the grey linoleum of the hallway floor, and Anna walked by, down the hallway, then came back, came very close to Galina, and whispered hotly in her ear, “keep it in your pants, dummie.”
Galina made sure to get up again the next night, to fetch the red blanket from the kitchen where Anna sat reading and smoking. Her eyes again were half-closed from sleepiness.
“Come to bed, silly,” Galina said, it felt sweet to call Anna by a nickname, and Anna coughed a little on her smoke.
“Can’t,” she said, “I know what you’re up to. I’m worried about that.”
The day before the third night, they walked in the snow together. There were no trees within their housing complex, only patches of lawns with benches, all of which were now of course covered in snow. Galina never liked these apartment buildings, and never would. Even when I, in a fit of misplaced Soviet Nostalgia, travelled to St Petersburg and took photos of the playgrounds with their sad-looking animal figurines, the black windows and pathways that looked threatening to me, the monuments that instilled only a solemn futility in the Westerner, she shook her head at me as if disappointed. Not long after was when Galina and I gradually stopped talking, she had grown tired of me, she was, as Nat put it, “going through a lot,” which was annoying to hear for everything the sentence withheld, how it insinuated Galina was going through a divorce, or gravely ill, or leaving the country, and then, like driftwood entering the current of an open river, everyone in our group moved apart forever. But back in her story, Galina and her friend Anna were still walking through the snow. Their eyes and cheeks stung from the cold. In the window of an apartment many floors above them, a small boy was playing a melancholy little song on a recorder. Even from behind the glass, the music echoed all over the dark courtyard and shimmered in the light reflecting off the ice. Galina and Anna stopped to watch him, and when he noticed, he paused and took the recorder from his mouth.
“Don’t stop!” cried the girls, and the little boy turned from the window and ran away.
“He must have seen what you are,” Anna said sadly. “He must have seen the evil of the perverted monk in your eyes…”
But the joke had worn itself out. In the same way, Galina could no longer have called Anna a slut, because the word did not seem to fit the shape of her face or the elegant curve that ran from the back of Anna’s head down her neck and over her shoulders, all of which was currently hidden under a thick woolen scarf but which Galina had seen often enough.
“You must have been born from a birch tree,” Galina said as she thought this.
“That’s right,” Anna responded, and instantly her sigh appeared in front of her as a cloud of icy mist, “from right over there…”
Over by the banks of the frozen river, on the outskirts of the housing units, stood many a dozen birches. In the dim glow of the streetlights, they lit up like delayed starlight. They were, apart from Anna, the only beautiful sight in the whole district. But they were also hidden away, like Anna, who spoke casually to Galina but only gently revealed any details about herself: she was Siberian indeed but also an orphan, and truthfully, she had grown up with her aunt in the old city of Novgorod, a city Galina did not know. There had been no other relatives, just Anna, and her aunt, and the historic city. At the university, armed with this new information, Galina went to the libraries to look at color photographs of the city of Novgorod. Infused with Galina’s idea of Anna, the cathedral with its onion domes weighed more heavily, more meaningfully. Thousand-year-old wooden icons with large mournful eyes made Galina shiver, and here there were bronze bracelets worn by the Vikings. Had Anna visited these artifacts as a child with her aunt? Was that where the look in Anna’s eyes came from, impressed as it had been by this old city?
The sad little song started again in the window above. A streetlight flickered and went out. The girls walked on through the snow. Both thought how high up above, the windows of their tiny apartment looked black and repellant. They quietly turned up the heat and let in a bath, then they took off their clothes and got in the tub together. Galina had closed the door and hung up their towels in a row, for privacy. Anna had made a sugary tea. In the tub, they shared a cigarette. Somehow now that she was wet, wet on her arms and wet on her chest, with the bruised red of her frozen cheeks burning as brightly in the dark as a newborn planet, Anna seemed even prettier to Galina. This, Anna could tell. She unfolded her arms and placed them on the sides of the tub so that Galina could properly look at her. With a funny little expression, Anna stretched out all the way, and slowly sank her body into the water and out of sight.
“You know I sleep with dudes for money,” she said when she came up for air.
Galina felt for a speck of tobacco stuck between her teeth, and retrieved it with her fingers, feeling embarrassed, like her open mouth was more private than the rest of her naked body.
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s not a big deal, I don’t really care. I think I would if I was fucked up in the head like you, though. Like a dyke.”
“Stop,” Galina said, “I’m not a dyke. I really, really like men.”
“Okay, sure. I just mean that it’s not that bad. The men I go out with, they’re clean, they have good connections. I don’t mind them. I feel like I can make them blush like chicks. It’s not bad. The thing I was thinking about was that I could get a steep bonus if I brought in another girl. They sometimes ask about that, you know. Two girls together. And it really grosses me out. I don’t want to kiss just any girl, no matter how pretty. But with you, I don’t think I’d be so annoyed.”
“We all kissed girls,” Galina said, “in high school. It’s not a big deal.”
“Yeah, and it was gross. But you’re not. I like you. You were always cool, aloof, smart, and then this evil monk thing really bothered you, I liked that. It’s sexy. I can hear you moaning at night, you know. When the other girls are asleep. Oh, you’re really something.”
“Fine,” Galina said. “But I’m not sure about the men being around when we do it. Do you ever go out with women?”
“You’re an idiot,” Anna said, “a real pussy with ears.”
They dried, shaking from the cold, and ran to their bedroom, where they climbed under the blankets of Anna’s lower bunk. It smelled personal, and warm. The dry and comforting smell of soap emanated from their bodies, and then there was the delicious feeling of how their limbs slid together. They tried different things until late into the night, in quiet. Listening now and then for the deranged neighbor who spoke to herself loudly in the concrete stairwell, or the footsteps of Larissa and Masha. Unbeknownst to them, the downstairs doors had frozen shut, and several residents had to go all the way to another building for help, which gave the girls a whole evening in the bunk together, a whole miraculous stretch of shifting limbs, sighing, whispering, and changing positions. There was a moment where Galina and Anna pressed both their sexes together in a way that felt like a shock, like they were using each other’s bodies in ways that seemed impossibly efficient.
“Do you feel that,” Anna whispered, and Galina, who thought she would die, could only gasp and nod.
It was not clear who was fucking whom, it was not clear who was sliding in and out of whom. The way it went brought tears to Galina’s eyes. Anna pressed her palm down on Galina’s lower belly, and then Galina took Anna’s breast in her mouth, which made Anna exclaim something, probably “My God,” in a voice so shaky it seemed to rip a hole in space, and they clung to each other and kept on going. When they decided to finally stop, pull on their woolen sweaters and socks, go wash their hands, it was many hours later. In the mirror, under the yellowish bathroom light, their faces looked different, even insane—bloated from sleepiness, their lips swollen. They laughed. Who were these aliens from outer space? They hadn’t had supper. Galina lit a cigarette, and they sat dozing and smoking until finally they separated and crawled into their respective bunks.
We were still out in the garden, with the lightning bugs and the hovering mosquitos that made us slap our legs with angry little movements. I had stopped looking at Nadya, it was impossible.
“It’s hard to remember those days when we were constantly cold,” Galina said to us, pouring mineral water into her white wine, “especially now, on a night like this. Why am I telling you this story again? Oh, because you made me think of it,” she pointed at me, “when you were telling me about how Lara insisted sex between women was somehow less important, because between the two of you, you can’t conceive a baby…”
Galina and Anna went on having sex in Anna’s lower bunk. They did this in the late afternoons, before the other girls came home, or in the late mornings, pretending to sleep in and skipping their morning classes. Never again did they have a whole stretch of time just to themselves, but it didn’t matter, because they now knew very well how they liked it. Outside their window, the light changed. Days grew longer. Thaw set in in April, but only barely. A shrinking snow pile a few blocks from their building revealed the body of a drunkard missing since early March. Anna returned to the apartment one afternoon and packed her things. Saying nothing close to a good-bye, she would break off her studies, break her lease, and go back to live with her aunt in Novgorod, where not long after, Anna had a totally professional abortion that would have been fine but for one freakish infection that made Anna so grievously ill, it kept her from returning to her former studies. Galina, receiving the two or three postcards Anna sent to her, understood only that faced with a near-death experience, Anna had changed her subject from music to engineering, and eventually moved to a university in Yekaterinburg.
“You have to understand,” Anna said to Galina that evening in early April, which was also the very last time they saw each other, when Galina was accompanying Anna to the bus stop that would lead her to the subway station and from there to the train to Novgorod. “I won’t think of it much and it’s not like I’m a homosexual. But I can’t deny that it went deep. In fact, if you were to ask me: which of the dudes I’ve fucked did it? I would have to say none of them went as deep as this girl did. If I didn’t know anything, if I was the first human, with the first human experience of sex and impregnation, I would have to say it was you who got me pregnant. Or maybe it was that fucked-up Byzantine monk behind the curtain.”
They hugged good-bye. It was nothing particularly dramatic. Anna’s green eyes looked steady, caring, not unusual. Walking back from the bus stop, Galina felt the dawning possibility of sadness, a breath of the loss she would never quite be able to fathom, but she did not yet know this had been the last time she had seen Anna. Dusk was approaching, it was a Saturday. No-one would be home. Galina decided to take the path along the river, passing the birch trees, as though this route could prolong the walk she had so often shared with Anna. From a distance, lit up in the slanted sunlight, above the painful blue of the frozen river, the trees looked to her like dancers on a foreign moon, and later this very memory would change a little, so that it had been at this moment that she had realized that Anna had gone and joined these haunted princesses, not just in Galina’s mind but truthfully herself, gone into being a sorrowful birch tree, like something that had been lost and petrified and would never come forth again.