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“I'm sorry,” said Lyudmila, pulling up her collar as if to stave off icy waters a continent and a half away.
“These things happen,” he sighed, and the lock released its grip on the house with a loud click. Oleg felt as if his heart echoed with that click, unbuckled with it, bled out over the threshold of the door. His forehead was warm, his chest ached. It was only his third lock of the day, his service hardly even begun. He looked up at Lyudmila, the Lyudmila who was not his sister, who wore a topaz ring and had terribly long eyelashes.
“Invite me in, Mila,” he said, the boldness of the lock in him.
She looked alarmed for a moment but nodded slowly and ushered him into her small kitchen. As though it was his own house (and truthfully, as he had done in many houses that were not his before he had discovered a virtuous use for his passion), Oleg spread butter and salmon roe onto thick bread, sliced salted fish, filled two glasses with cold wine. Lyudmila let him, reclining placidly on her chair. She opened her mouth to speak several times, but instead simply watched him move, watched his hands on the bread, the fish.
They ate without conversation, and Lyudmila seemed to burn in the middle of the pale blue room like a little sun. She finally removed her coat after they had eaten, and Oleg saw a thing like a spider on her neck, black and blazing, a mark sending up tendrils along her jaw, which her long hair had hidden, brachiating lines like streets and alleys, so vivid and dark they seemed to pulse with her heartbeat.
“It's a birthmark, or something like that.” She laughed shortly. “Or would be, if I had been born last year.”
“I don't mind it,” he said softly.
“I've never been to Novgorod. I was born in Odessa. It is so warm there, so warm and the buildings are so white. When I remember it, I only remember the whiteness. And the seabirds. I am cold here all the time. Sometimes I wake up and I think I can still smell the Black Sea. How lucky you are, that you remember so little.”
Oleg moved his hand over hers—it must have been the turn of the lock, how easily it had come open in his hands, how flushed he had been with success, with its little sigh of relief that only he could hear. Only that could explain how he could dredge up courage to touch her like that, so soon, without permission. His blood beat too high, too fast. He was a shy man, he spoke little, after his mother's habit. But he heard the key in her, weeping old, rusty tears.
“It's usually harder than this,” she said quietly, looking down at their joined hands.
“What is?”
Lyudmila shut her eyes and her mouth together, pressing lids and lips tightly, as though to keep her whole self inside.
“To touch a person… to sleep with a person… is to become a pioneer,” she whispered then, “a frontiersman at the edge of their private world, the strange, incomprehensible world of their interior, filled with customs you could never imitate, a language which sounds like your own but is really totally foreign, knowable only to them. I have been so many times to countries like that. I have learned how to make coffee in all their ways, how to share food, how to comfort, how to dance in the native ways. It is harder, usually, to find a person who wants to walk the streets of me, to taste the teas of my country, to… immigrate, you could say Especially… well.” She gestured at her painted throat.
Oleg touched her neck, the black lines there, hot and moving slightly with her pulse.
“I think I would like your country,” he said shyly. He said nothing of his own, too full of the dead and the locked.
He took her into his arms, holding her golden head to his chest—how cold she was! Her skin was frost-dry and he thought he could hear seabirds inside her, flapping at the freezing joints of her shoulders.
Lyudmila, who was not his sister, lay her arms around Oleg's neck like a child. He could not bear to breathe, but he kissed her blighted jaw.
“I'm married,” she said simply, casually, an announcement of no more importance than her address or height. She did not move from him.
“It doesn't matter,” he said huskily, his voice sliding from him like the skin peeled from a black fruit. He took a long breath and whispered into her hair, “This is not a real place. Didn't you know? Didn't you guess? Everyone looked at it and looked at it, never blinking, working so hard at remembering, taking pictures and writing novels, and never stopping, even for a moment, and when you look at a thing like that, you kill it, like the ant and the magnifying glass. There is no Manhattan left. We float in the black, and see the Empire State Building where there is nothing but void. What does it matter what we do in a place like that? Who we marry? If we lie?”
Lyudmila kissed him then, and in her mouth was the void, and in his throat was the void, and in the dark of dead Manhattan he lifted her up against the pantry door, and the jars of jam rattled within, raspberry against currant against plum.
When he returned home, his own lock relieved and welcoming, his sister was sitting in the kitchen with her hands clasped in her lap, staring at him with great dark eyes. He tried not to look at her.
“I missed you, Olezhka,” said the dead mouth of the other Lyudmila, her red dress far too small now, the weeds of the Volkhov still throttling her neck.
FOUR
THE BOOKBINDER'S WIFE
The pads of Ludovico's fingers were scored with paper cuts like lines of longitude and latitude. They had long since gone the murky gold color of expensive glue, the kind one can be absolutely certain has its source in rendered beast—perhaps, if one is fortunate and paid a great deal of money, one as interesting as a camel or lynx. Ludo used those murky, malevolent glues almost to exclusion—he was interested in them, in tools, in origins. He liked to think that he bound his books with the sinew of a Chinese tiger. He liked to think that while he slept, the endless spines stretched and growled, licking the typesetting with wide, rough tongues.
Ludovico's wif
e did not hear the prowling of the feline volumes in the dark. Lucia slept soundly, the form of her like a little hillock in his bed, her green nightgown barely rising, barely falling, part of the landscape of his house, so embedded in the soil of him that he often expected a flower to sprout from her shoulders, or wind up between their lips when they shared their morning kiss, as simple and necessary as a cup of coffee. Ludovico considered himself a contemplative man and held such thoughts as proof. The flowers that grew lightless in his skull were many and pale.
Lucia was not Catholic, rather, a hybrid: half atheist and half classicist. This had once given him pause, in the days when he, a good Roman boy, visited St. Peter's and Trajan's market with equal and untroubled reverence. She scorned the flat coin of his St. Isidore's medal, hanging faithful and constant against his chest—what kind of man is beholden to a saint no one remembers? He's not even Italian! And though he loved her he could not explain that St. Isidore, though in no official capacity did he serve men of Ludovico's persuasion, seemed to him the great saint of books, haloed in bumblebees who demanded at least two full columns devoted to their sociology in the saint's Etymologiae, that massive compendium of medieval knowledge, the first encyclopedia, possessing the whole world between its boards.
When Lucia descended into such contrary moods, Ludo simply kissed the place where her soft black hair faded into the skin of her temple, and recited to her Isidore's thoughts on the contrary nature of the chimera. For that was Lucia—his chimera, his composite beast, his snarling, biting, kissing thing.
But how intricate and sweet were the figures she inscribed in the margins of his books! What sort of bookbinder could he have been without her, her infinite variation, her obsessive knowledge of ink? She did not hear the tiger-books, but she smelled the trees of India and the terror of cuttlefish in her finger bowls full of black and violet and brown, no less vivid than oil paint. Together, they rarely needed to speak as he cut the pages and wrapped the boards in coppery silk, as he set the type in their ancient printing press: a truculent old dragon in the corner of the kitchen where they had had the stove removed to make room for it. It ate paper and excreted books, and Ludovico loved it, while Lucia, hands on her hips, shamed it into yet another year of groaning, protesting service.
