Palimpsest

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 Cityengraved 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 forgetfulness. 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.”

“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 a

“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?”