Nikola

by Yulia Zepp

The martyrs of the Great White Winter are weary and tired, wandering through the woods, waiting for the ground to thaw, so they can settle themselves into their graves and emerge again once the gods of the underworld are done with them and the frozen rivers beckon. At the end of every winter, they take with them that which has kept us restless during the freezing darkness—fear of death—and they die so we don’t have to. 

It is too bad that where you live spring will never come again. I wanted to tell you about the cherry blossoms and how the balmy sun feels on the skin of the eyelids. Do you remember: The trees that don’t have needles can grow green leaves that pirouette in the wind, as if ballerinas at the Bolshoi, and glimmer in quiet mornings after the thunderstorm? The beauty and terror that come with inchoate spring make for a rich conversation, though what is the point of initiating it if, soon enough, all that gets said will be but a fable?

The unending grayness of this past winter, I must admit, made me quite homesick. Is there a word that describes a longing for the specific sensation of severance; what is grieving the very memory of grief? I’m sure the Germans would have something, but neither you nor I can speak this language. Where you live the people in charge turned the clocks back once and never fixed it, and so it became time that separates us instead of miles. When a lousy plane took me across the world, westward, twelve hours were put between us, enough distance to make all that is real split into two and grow, like the shadows of ivy climbing the walls in opposite ways. Where I am, it is day, and where you are, it is night, and vice versa, in perpetuity.

Over the last ten years here, my Russian has gotten rusty, and it is taking me quite a bit of effort to articulate any new things well, but I can still wax poetic about the past. I’m sure the cat that bit my tongue will release it if I allow myself to read any book written with the words I grew up speaking, but lately, I have been avoiding books like the plague. “Too many big ideas for such a small head,” as you used to say.

At some point, we used to understand each other well in the unspoken. A look of fury or terror was enough to convey and convince; even with your back to me, I could feel your vertebra stiffen as your eyelids froze half-squint. It’s been about a decade since we sat down for dinner, since I told you anything about the movies I loved. They are shooting one outside my window, and I considered walking into a frame on the off chance my cameo would make it into the final cut, and you could, if not see me, at least look. But where you are, this movie, they’ll never show it to you. And what if I were to somehow find a way to slip a telegram under the barbed wire fence? If I manage to push my fingers through the razor-sharp steel unnoticed, without crying out in pain as the spikes cut through my skin, perhaps you could make out the words of a foreign language and recognize the blood stains on the crinkled white paper to be the same color as your own. “Meet me at the New York Philharmonic,” I would put on the telegram, and I would save you a seat there at every performance for an entire season, hoping that witnessing beauty that only belongs to a time and a place would help you understand how I have chosen to move through this world. I imagine that the cellist would look up and see me there every night, always sitting next to an unoccupied chair, never applauding him but transfixed by his instrument, entirely ghostlike. He would wonder why anyone would choose to listen to the same hours-long composition so many times. The members of the orchestra would entertain themselves with whispers about the apparent purposelessness of my compulsion to relive the same night over and over. Mad rumors, snowballing, would haunt the dressing rooms of the concert hall for decades to come. They wouldn’t realize that the chair next to me is always empty because the clocks are wrong. We keep missing each other.

The spring will never come where you live, but seasons will change because no regime can defy the beauty that comes true in her own transformations. When the ice breaks on the river outside your house, you will see that it has turned blood red and get mad that someone has painted the glass of your kitchen window. I cannot find it in me to judge you for choosing to see it this way. There was a winter once, back when the clocks were right, in which the skies showered us with fresh packing snow, and you taught me, with great patience and love, how to make a snowball. While I was preoccupied with molding a handful of snow into something that resembled an awkward yam, you launched a sneak attack, landing snowballs all over my hat and jacket like a sniper. I started to run around in a zigzag, laughing joyously, dodging only a few of them and only by sheer luck. I didn’t know how to play war games then. Before we went home to dry my soaked jacket, we built a snowman and named him Nikola. You stuck a carrot in the middle of his face, making him complete, perfect. He was the best thing I had ever seen.

Every time I notice a shoe lying on the street, I think about sudden death. “It was a horrible accident, he was struck by that car so hard that his shoes flew off his feet,” you said quite matter-of-factly to Helena when she was over for tea one day, taking a bite out of a madeleine. “Died instantly.” Death is quite casual gossip there.

The next morning, you sent me to buy bread. When I arrived at the store, I saw a woman drop to the floor. She began to shake and foam at the mouth; people were holding her down, someone was asking if there was a wooden spoon or something else sturdy they could stick in her mouth to prevent her from choking or breaking her jaw, I was not sure. I remember being frightened but watching calmly, transfixed by her left shoe and its undone lace. You were angry that I took so long, and I told you that a woman died at the store. When you asked how, I shrugged—“Instantly”—biting into the fresh loaf still in my hand. She was alive, of course, when I left the shop, but seeing her shoelace untied, I figured death was where all that was going.

I am writing this listening to soft jazz and drinking an easy vintage white, one of the few still remaining in the wine fridge. There are fresh bread and oil, for dipping—my lunch. You never were one for indulging in small joys, and every time I speak of delightfulness as an idea, you are so perplexed by how you managed to raise a romantic.

Someone you will never know, Mary Oliver, wrote in a poem: “I would rather die than try to explain to the blue horses / what war is. / They would either faint in horror, or simply / find it impossible to believe.” Nikola was a blue horse. I could not find it in me to tell him that because he was beautiful, he was hunted, that kids around there destroyed things like him simply because they felt bored, that his fate, likely, was instant death, and that if he were wearing any shoes, someone would probably find them, days later, on the other side of the road. I would return to him every day, to keep watch, marveling at our creation, tending to any cracks within him. Delicate restoration was hard to manage with bulky mittens, and I dreamed of one day having a pair of leather gloves just like yours. I have owned several pairs of leather gloves since—one I left behind in a taxicab, another at some fancy French bistro downtown—and every time it happened, I was left feeling so distraught, defanged, and rootless that I would get tangled up in some sort of trouble. I never told you about any of this trouble, to protect you, just as I never told you about any of my loves to protect me.

At the airport, when I was leaving, you gave me your leather gloves. That was the first pair I ever owned and the first pair I ever lost. Everything comes with its inherent sacrifice, I know now, but did you, then? I remember you on your tippy toes, sticking your head over the crowd to watch me go through security until eventually I disappeared into the terminal. Tears were streaming down your cheeks—you were ignoring them stoically—and I felt a lump in my throat about to burst. You never liked to see me crying, and so I did not until you were out of sight, breaking down in the waiting lounge, hands gripping onto the cold, perforated aluminum, turning blue. You were crying because you were worried that I would forget your face. How could I, ever? He was at the airport, too, but I had forgotten his face after I killed him.

You were young then, in your thirties, slender, and fabulous, chain-smoking Parliaments, your gaze always wandering over to the horizon, and your eyes, I remember, either sad or completely blank. You drove a Mercedes, wore fine Italian leather and a lot of mink, and, on one of your birthdays, cut your hair into a pixie and dyed it red. The haircut made you look like a teenager—only the cigarettes and your posture, weighed down by gravity over time, gave away your true age. Your day began in the afternoon; bedtime was often accompanied by birdsong. He was up at six in the morning, went to bed around nine. Another case of mismatched clocks—but whenever your arrows on the tableaux overlapped, the crossfire was deadly, and I hid. 

You knew that he could not be trusted and that he was a rowdy drunk, but you left anyway and where, I do not recall. Some business trip, or a holiday with Helena. Wherever it was, I just hoped that it would teach you what it is like to be free, perhaps make you hungry again. I remember very little of Helena now. Her arms were covered in tattoos, one of them in English, reading, “Kiss slowly, farewell quickly.” It was translated wrong: in Russian, the words “forgive” and “farewell” are pronounced the same. She always brought madeleines and a box of tea from somewhere abroad. Her life had something to do with the arts. Helena was around a lot until she disappeared suddenly and completely. I didn’t understand if you hated her or loved her. I think I know now that you didn’t understand it either.

“You are beautiful and so you are hunted,” I repeated to myself in hysterical whispers in an attempt to calm myself down, my face hidden in an old T-shirt that was quickly soaked by the blood gushing out of my nostrils. He was mad that a bag with shoes inside it was left in the hallway, making it look unkempt. I used to think of him as a big man, and a strong man, but there is no way to know just how big and how strong a man is until he throws his boots at you, as if you are a stray coyote, and you catch it with your face.

Hiding from him, I thought about Nikola and his perfect carrot nose. Every day, when I used to go to see him, I was afraid to find it in pieces and the sticks that made his arms on the ground snapped in half, stomped on. Every day that I arrived and saw him whole, my heart would slow and relax. When you returned and you looked at my face, you asked no questions because it was also your face. Eventually, you inquired where the white T-shirt I so often wore had gone. Earlier that day, I had seen you pull it out of one of my book drawers and examine the huge bloody stain before throwing it in the trash.

On the next trip, you took me with you. We were at the seaside for a week, and I could see the light return to your eyes because the air was salty, and the shopping was good; they had the sales. Italian leather half off. “Like those rubes would know the difference.” You did not think much of your neighbors, but you dressed for them anyway. I built sandcastles and read Orwell, and you liked to swim and tan. He was far away, and we were peaceful.

There could have been a different life, one in which there was no him, no child, no barbed wired town. After all, you could have stayed after graduating or moved somewhere else. A degree in meteorology suited you—you were always looking out of the window. Though studying weather in Saint Petersburg is a gothic, grotesque idea, just think how dreadful the conditions always are there. It is a shame to have so many people live among such beautiful architecture and choose to throw themselves off the golden Baroque roofs because they have never seen any sun reflected off of them. Saint Petersburg is a true Russian beauty, austere and gelid. She brings people to their knees, commands them to love her, and then kills them for trying. On the beach, you told me about your life there and how simple it was then on a student stipend. On the first of the month, when the grocery tokens were distributed, you walked down Nevsky Prospect to buy a ponchik. A ponchik is a simple donut covered with sugar powder, you explained, something I was not allowed to have because, “It will make you sick.” After snacking on it and having a cup of tea, you lined up for potatoes at the produce truck and, sometimes, splurged on a cake from a bakery by the Kazan Cathedral before sneaking back into your dorm and having that cake for dinner.

I wanted you to take me there one day, so I could have cake for dinner with you. But you did not like to return there, perhaps because it reminded you of what could have been had you not met him. He was a dancer and charming—had a full head of hair then—and was the only way to escape your mother, whose main pleasure in life was to suffocate yours. She was a hideous monster, like the ones at the bottom of the ocean, with teeth missing and eyes an excrescence growing on the backs of their heads. At the bottom of this ocean, under the gaze of this monster, you thought I would be safe from the cross fire. Her apartment was small—a room, a kitchen, and a bathroom—and smelled of roach spray. There were always heatwaves in the coastal town, and she was often nude, her sense of conviction triumphing over that of logic. She is long gone now, but I have to contend with her in the dreamworld. Last night, she made me play chess, her naked body spilling over the sofa, saggy breasts knocking the figurines off the board; they rolled downward and disappeared inside the folds of her stomach. Seven consecutive summers there taught me everything about you, and I can see you completely without having to understand you at all. One thing your mother taught us both, however: A cockroach, once killed, releases a pheromone that attracts other cockroaches, an invitation to a cannibal feast. One tyrant dies; another emerges.

You knew he could not be trusted behind the wheel, but you asked him to pick us up from the airport anyway. He was overtaking a car, speeding down the opposite lane, and I was in the middle of the back seat, staring at a truck that was about to swallow the Lexus he bought with the money you earned. Three human bodies soon to become one with metal scraps. I was quiet and calm, and so were you, as he slammed on the brakes and cowered back to his lane. Other cars stopped to make room, and the truck slowed down and swerved off the road. Sudden death flew by an inch away, grazing my ear and yours and his. Nobody talked throughout the rest of the two-hour drive. He was speeding because he was hungover.

Every time I went back to visit, I asked you to come get me at the airport alone. Sometimes you would bring Chekhov with you. He was little enough to sneak into the waiting area where they didn’t allow dogs; he looked like a blob of ink and was easy to hide under your black coat. Eventually, he got too old and couldn’t contain his excitement, started peeing all over as soon as he would see me approach. You said it was stressful for him to only see me once in a blue moon and that you would stop bringing him, worried about his failing heart—but he died before you could follow through on this promise, and, besides, by then I had stopped coming.

It was the day when I turned the same age you were when you had me that we were no longer speaking—twenty-seven. Early winter, cue the thick layer of fresh snow on the ground glowing dimly in the reflection of the street lanterns, which were turned on every evening at exactly 19:45 and not a minute earlier, in a military town situated in the deep middle of Siberia, we arrived into each other’s lives, our meeting splitting the month of November exactly in half.

The town, to this day still surrounded by barbed wire, didn’t appear on the map until about a decade prior because the chemical plant it sprouted around dealt with uranium and plutonium, supplying Moscow all the components necessary to meet the ever growing demand for worldwide devastation. Twenty-blocks wide and sixty-blocks long, with three main avenues, for forty years, it was a secret place bounded by a river on the west side and a dense taiga forest on the east. Anybody who lived there and wanted to exit or enter faced camouflage-clad men with rifles stationed at one of the three checkpoints to examine identification cards that proved that you had an address on the inside.

There it is not unlike any other Soviet construction that emerged in the stifled tumult of the Cold War. A statue of Lenin sternly looks over the main town square, his bronze goatee pointing, in what is perhaps an act of unintentional irony, west; grandiose government buildings loom large over uniform gray apartment blocks that seem to be made out of cardboard and painted over with a thin layer of white gouache. There is a puppet theater that the locals visit enthusiastically during the winter holidays, and a small market where merchants sell produce from nearby farms, and far too obvious fashion knockoffs imported from China. At the north end of town: surprisingly, a zoo, home to its star residents, a camel and a polar bear. I used to love that zoo. When he took me there one time, a llama spit right onto his head, and I had never laughed so hard in all of my life.

This town is a vortex of insignificance among the great vastness of the Russian landscape, a single grain in a black-and-white photo. A hundred thousand lives that exist in service of just one cogwheel out of great many in a conveyor that makes, with deep devotion, a promise of eventual nuclear winter. Everyone’s days resemble one another’s yesterdays and tomorrows, and the town gossip repeats itself—unexpected pregnancies, unexpected romantic pairings, theft and betrayal, bearing the fruit of the same lessons cycling through generations, unlearned. There are four restaurants, each one more hideous than the other, a cinema that only shows blockbuster hits. Everyone’s flats look vaguely the same, and everyone’s haircuts, too. This is not the result of imposed dystopian authority, but rather the consequence of the emphasis on the value of function and the respective distribution of resources. The hairdressers that work in this town are three, the furniture stores are three, the streets suitable for strolling are three: Communist Prospekt, Lenin Street, Pobeda Street. The fates available to the citizens of this town are also three: be an engineer, serve an engineer, or, for the lucky ones, leave. You almost left.

What is it about the landscape you grow up in that keeps you on a leash always, as if an umbilical cord is wrapped around your neck and starts choking you if you stray too far? When he broke the wall in the apartment in a feat of drunken rage, you promised we would go far away, but I begged you not to. I knew I could not give him my blood back, but I didn’t realize that you could. You never admitted it until years later, half-yelling, half-whispering into the telephone because he was sleeping in the next room, “None of this would be happening if it wasn’t for you.” When Nikola was still whole, I did not know how to play war games, but by now, I have learned. When I woke up that morning and heard the news—another feat of drunken rage, another broken wall—I lit up a Parliament and, for a long time, stared at the city skyline, motionless. I was the same age you were when the light left your eyes. Your face, my face. His face I could barely remember.

I dialed his number to kill him. The phone conversation lasted only five minutes. I knew exactly what to say to a man who is most afraid of his own face. His face: eyes, completely void of any intelligence or tenderness, gaze inverted, looking only inside of his own self. He never told anyone, but he was the way he was because what he saw was every hollow space, from his throat to his ribcage to his intestines, infested with cockroaches crawling all around. Sometimes you could see them behind the retinas, and in certain moments, I was sure I saw them travel up and down the veins on his arms, after he would release his fists.

I told him I knew. His big secret about the roaches. Said that I had found a way to give his blood back to him, cleared myself of him completely, forbade him from uttering my name out loud again. He said I had no right to hate my own creator, but he wasn’t my creator, you were, and regardless, he was wrong: to despise one’s creator is one’s birthright. The words flowed into his veins like a lethal injection, each deadlier than the last. I could feel his shoelaces getting undone, unfurling like snakes out of their nest. When I heard them hiss, I hung up.

You were surprised that you managed to raise a romantic, but were you surprised that you also managed to raise a monster? When you told me he started drinking at eight in the morning, I knew what I had done was real, and I was disappointed by how predictable he really was. Had I realized earlier, perhaps there would be a chance at a different life. He died a slow and painful death, drinking himself into his grave. Melted away, like Nikola.

When it happened, the first thing you said to me was, “What have you done? Now I am all alone. Everyone has left me.” I said, “Meet me at the New York Philharmonic.” Thinking that now, perhaps, you would take the clock off the wall, put the arrows in the right place.

I would not be telling you all this—what is the point in regurgitating the past, good or bad, you used to say until all that you had had become the past—if it wasn’t for a stranger at a bar who asked me, in broken English, what home was instead of where. I told her home is a symphony conducted by a wand made from a tree, which grew on a small patch of grass in a faraway town when a carrot fell off a melting snowman and decomposed in the ground.

You asked me twice whether I planned to return home, not knowing that every night for an entire season, I did. Right before the cello solo, I closed my eyes on the balcony of The Philharmonic and saw Nikola’s crooked face and your hands, red from the wet snow. My hands, tiny, holding your big, gentle, frozen hands close to my mouth in an attempt to warm them, covered in steam of my exhaled breaths. 

“What is the word to describe a home that never existed until it became a memory?” I asked the stranger back. She answered, prepared as if a ghost waiting to be asked this very question, “Whichever word you use to make a promise that you know you will break.” “Please come,” you said, the connection either unsteady or your voice breaking, half-pleading and half-demanding, full of anger or terror, and, somehow, I no longer could tell the difference.

At 19:45 in the evening, in the month of November as it was split exactly in half, we were free of each other. One of my favorite movies, quoting one of my favorite poets, neither of which you know, or ever will, ends on this line: “Freedom begins with remorse.” It was a night I spent in a haze of flickering red-and-white lights, the floors vibrating underneath my feet. Imagine the music of your childhood, and mine, collapsing in on each other, assuming the form of a symphony. My eyes, folding in on themselves in complete ecstasy. I was witnessing shirtless men, their mouths melting in unbearable heat bouncing off of concrete walls, their tongues exploring the depths of each other’s throats as if their lust was everything that they would ever have—committing to beauty that only belongs to a time and a place, unanchored and in a free fall. Another world war started outside of this building, missiles crossing continents to destroy the inhospitable city. Would you have offered your daughter to the mob to prevent the only world you knew from collapsing? Only a handful of people could tell the truth.

A woman with her arms covered in tattoos stood coyly, leaning against the wall across the room. When I approached, I discovered a spelling mistake in one of the quotes a needle burned into her skin decades ago. I told her about a tree outside my window. In its full bloom, its branches get weighed down by pink petals that look like they belong on a cake and how they reach out to me, as if a palm asking to be held. Every time I look at it, I feel a desire so overwhelming that I am never sure whether I want to paint the tree or eat it. You would have liked this tree. It would have reminded you how a spring should be. But the chair beside me at the Philharmonic is empty still, and outside your window, the Red River still flows undammed, and still, you can’t tell time by weather.

The morning after, I knelt in front of my toilet, disoriented completely, retching violently. When I could focus my gaze again, I took an inventory of what might have made me sick: the vintage white, the sourdough, and a cockroach, flailing, drowning in stomach acid. His face jumped into my memory. A pathetic attempt at a haunting—it’s nothing that can’t be dealt with, just needs a healthy amount of bug spray. A mental note to call the landlord tomorrow morning. The apartment is small, so it won’t need that much. The roach struggled until its brown body reached the edges of the toilet bowl, and jumped out onto the checkered floor tiles, moving across the squares like a pawn. Did it despise its creator, knowing that this minute was all that it had left? I could not see it in the black, but when it reached the white, I stomped on it. 

Yulia Zepp is a publicist and a writer based in Toronto, Canada.