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“My mother makes them every day,” she whispered. “She writes nonsense-fortunes, whatever she is thinking about when she's baking: The fog is too thick today! Jiangxi Province had proper mist. I am allergic to milk, that sort of thing. People think she's crazy, but they buy the cookies by the dozen.”
“What do you think?”
Xiaohui shrugged. “She's my mother. Jiangxi Province did have nicer weather.”
November glanced down at the scrap of white paper in her hand. It read:
Is not my daughter sweet?
But she was not, November found, when she kissed her outside the restaurant, under the washed-out constellations. She tasted like flour, flour and salt. Their breasts pressed tight together between two fog-dewed overcoats, the ache of it half-painful and half-pleasant. Xiaohui took her to a little apartment above a grocery store, and they fell together just inside the doorframe, awkwardly, like great beasts too eager for niceties. She bit November's lower lip, and there was blood between them then.
“You need me,” said Xiaohui breathlessly, pulling November over her, sliding hands under her belt to claw and knead. “You need me.”
“Don't you mean ‘I need you’?” whispered November in the girl's ear.
“No,” she sighed, arching her back, tipping her chin up, making herself easy to kiss, easy to fall into, easy to devour. “You'll see. You'll see.”
As Xiaohui drifted to sleep, one arm thrown over her now black and honest eyes, the other lying open and soft on her thin student's sheets, November stared up into the dark, awake. This was not such a new thing in her ordered world—relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting. This was better, the occasional excursion into Chinatown, into the city of St. Francis, who after all watched over wild and wayward animals. This was better, but she slept fitfully afterward.
November stroked the inside of Xiaohui's thigh gently, a mark there, terribly stark, like a tattoo: a spidery network of blue-black lines, intersecting each other, intersecting her pores, turning at sharp angles, rounding out into clear and unbroken skin. It looked like her veins had darkened and hardened, organized themselves into something more than veins, determined to escape the borders of their mistress's flesh. In her sleep, Xiaohui murmured against her lover's neck, something about the grain yields of the farms in fourteenth-century Avignon.
“It looks like a streetmap,” November whispered, pressing her hand tenderly against it, so that Xiaohui's pale skin seemed whole and unbroken.
THREE
THE DREAMLIFE
OF LOCK AND KEY
There was nothing in Oleg's apartment that was not locked away, safer than treasure, safer than a heart. Even the thin light from a tall and dusty lamp, tinged brown at the edges like an old apple, was bound and locked, a key turned, bolts slung firm. It could not leave this room, it would shine only here, for Oleg, and only for him.
Oleg was a locksmith. He had always thought the term overwrought, implying that he spent his days torturously pouring molten brass into molds banging out locks on some infernal anvil. It implied a burlier, more archaic man than he. Anyway, most of his public business was in keys, not locks. His private business was collection.
Keys did not really fascinate him, though he collected them as well, matching them carefully, not to the lock that was made for them, modern to modern, brass to brass, keycard to slot, as a common locksmith might, but to the ones he felt they yearned for, deep in their pressed metal hearts. He possessed a rusted iron key with an ornate lion's grimace at its head, slung alongside a gleaming hotel's card-slot lock, its red and green lights dead. He had laid an everyday steel housekey against the rarest of locks, real gold, with lilies raised up on its surface, a complex system of bolts and tumblers concealed within. Only Oleg had heard their cries for each other. Only Oleg knew their silent grief that they could not join.
He remembered Novgorod only vaguely, where he was born, where he had been a boy, briefly. It did not seem to Oleg that he could have been a boy long. Surely he would remember more of it, if it had been an important time. He had only images, as though he had once gone on vacation there—snaps
hots, postcards, souvenirs. He was born, properly, when they left, wafting like tea-steam through Vienna, Naples, and into New York. They had gone silently from those places, trying hard not to disturb the air. In his memory he searched for a single word his mother might have said to him on the trains and ships between the two mismatched slabs of his life. He could only summon her cold white hands and the aquamarine that hung from her neck on a golden chain, clear and hard, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train. Snapshots. Souvenirs.
Yet Novgorod hung in his heart, an alien thing, hidden as a key. He could recall dimly the quicksilver bleed of the Volkhov River, pale cupolas under the snow like great garlic bulbs. But those churches were all nameless to him—he could not pluck the saints who owned them from his forgetful heart, and for this sin he did guilty penance among his locks. Everything was white and gray in that Novgorod-of-the-mind, even the violinists on Orlovskaya Street, men without blood, playing fiddles of ash. This white pendulum swung within him, even as he bent with his tools to locks more beautiful and complicated than memory.
He lived in New York, but the New York of Oleg Sadakov was not the New York of others, and he alone ministered this secret place, stamped onto the back of the city like a maker's mark. He crept and crawled through it, listening, for Oleg could listen very well, better than rabbits or horses or safe-crackers.
The trouble was, New York was famous. Oleg had even seen it in Novgorod—a city so often photographed, filmed, recorded that there was truly no one who did not know its name, its outline, the shape of its body. So many books had been written about it, so many people had loved it and lived in it until their clothes smelled of its musk, so many had eaten its food and drunk its water and extolled its virtues like a gospel of the new world, that it had, with infinitesimal slowness, ceased to be, melted into vapor and dust. What rose now on the island of Manhattan was no more than the silver-white echo of all those millions of words expended on its vanity, the afterimage of all those endless photographs and movies which broadcast it to anyone who might live ignorant of its majesty. A monster, a fairy-tale mirror, glittering but false, a doppelgänger, a golem with New York City engraved roughly on its forehead.
No one had noticed.
Oleg retreated from the broad limbs of this new metropolitan giant and saw only the locks. He let people into places both secret and obvious, places they owned and places where they trespassed, into lovers’ hallways and grocers’ shops, into hotel rooms and abandoned buildings. Oleg did not care. He only wanted to touch the locks and find the keys for whom they wept. He saw nothing but the infinite city of locks, turning and winding through and around and behind the monochrome behemoth, and when the hours were very late, he often felt as though he could look through one lock and see all the others lined up behind it, opening up into forever, into a hundred thousand houses, into the Hudson, into the Atlantic. He could almost see the whitecaps breaking.
Oleg had only once confessed to another soul that he knew the secret of what had happened to New York. He felt foolish about it later, but he could not help it—her name was Lyudmila. It was not his fault that that simple thing instilled so much trust in him, so much instinctive, automatic familiarity. Lyudmila had locked herself out of her tall, narrow house, where her cats mewled in panicked sopranos from within.
“That was my sister's name,” he said softly as he put his eye to the lock in her brownstone, his lashes falling just inside the old metal.
The woman spoke to him hopefully in Russian. This occasionally happened, and he dreaded it. He could speak no more than a few words now, those snow-slushed consonants and swallowed vowels having receded into the same icy mist as Novgorod. He stopped her, blushed, admitted his forgetful-ness. She only smiled, her hands white and cold, her blond hair swept heavily to one side of her face, spilling over the collar of her blue coat.
“It's all right,” she said. “Remembering is very hard work. Not everyone is built for it. I asked if your sister lives in the city?”
Oleg shook his head, opening his tool casket. “She drowned, in the Volkhov, before I was born. She was wearing a red dress and black stockings—it was a cold day. My mother was pregnant with me, she closed her eyes for only a minute, to rest, and she always said she heard the splash in her bones before she heard it in her ears.”
