The Foreigners (22 page)

She scanned the men in her mind. Enrique? “Yes?” she said.

“I'm on the board of the Arts for Children committee. Do you remember, we exchanged a word the other day at the board meeting at Alicia's?”

She had a vague sense of who it might be, an older man with smooth white hair. He had asked her a few questions about her town in Austria. She had been vague, as she didn't like to reveal much about her past. But there had been a number of older men there. Maybe it was a different one.

“Hello, are you there?”

“Yes, yes,” she said.

“Pardon me for calling your cell phone like this. It's the only number I was able to obtain for you. I'd be delighted if you'd accompany me to the art fair tonight.”

She couldn't discern his motive. But she must do it, she told herself—pretending she was reluctant, though of course she wasn't—if it had anything to do with finding a job.

“Oh, well, yes, that would be fine.”

“May I pick you up?”

She gave him her address, hung up. The apartment rippled before her eyes, as if consumed in haze, then righted itself.

Okay, good, she had an escort. Now what to do about her hair? She looked in the mirror again. She knew. She'd wear a headband, a wide black cloth one framing her face, covering the roots. It gave her an elegant, wealthy look. Yes, that was the answer, at least for now. She wouldn't dye her hair today.

I really needed a haircut and a wax. I also wanted to hear how Vera was doing. I got on that same bus I'd taken before, meandering through the city, a long woozy ride. We passed through the medical zone, an area full of hospitals and research centers. We passed the National Institute of Microbiology. Gabriel had told me about this place, a monumental building in the neoclassic style, designed by immigrant Italians. Inside were large quantities of snakes in crystal cages. They were brought in on the railroads—a big railroad station was nearby—so as to extract the venom needed to make vaccines. “Venom, like blood, can't be reproduced artificially,” Gabriel said. He remembered vividly going there as a child. His friend's uncle, an employee, took the snakes out of the cages so they could touch them. “They were so cold,” Gabriel said. In neighboring cages were the furry animals, rats and rabbits, reserved for the snakes' meals.

I got off the bus, pausing on the bridge as I walked over. It was near the end of the day. The light was hazy and warm and seemed to contain spores rising and falling. Or else it was pollution, I couldn't tell.

Vera was speaking in Belarusian to another woman when I arrived. I waved and sat down in the waiting area, flipping through the magazine
Gente
until Vera called me. She explained that the other woman was her friend and always did her waxing here.

“Her boyfriend's Muslim. He treats her really nice. She always takes all the hair off down there. She said that's what most Muslims do.”

But Vera looked different. It was partly that she was tan.

“I called and you were at the beach,” I said.

She was dressed up more than usual. She had earrings on. But it wasn't just that. She had a slightly harder look, maybe it was the eyeliner, black, right on the bottom rim of her eye. The jewelry also looked hard. She told me she had moved out. “A woman needs to be made to feel like a woman,” she said. “I'm not talking about just having sex, but by the way he treats her. With my first husband, because of his illness, it became hard to have sex, but he still always made me feel like a woman.”

By now, I had taken off my pants and was lying on the bed, which was covered with a sheet of paper. Vera was preparing the wax as she talked.

“How do you mean?”

“It could be anything. The touch of a hand as he was passing by.” She was stirring the wax, thinking. “But maybe I idealize him.” She swiped hot wax on my legs. “My daughter says I do. Something happened once. There was a hairdresser's on the ground floor of the apartment building where we lived. One time my husband told me he was going out to see a movie. This was strange. He never did this. But I was completely absorbed in the children, so I didn't care. Then a few weeks later my mother-in-law called me. We were good friends. She told me my husband was seeing a woman who worked at the hairdresser's. ‘He's there now,' my mother-in-law said. ‘Go find him.' I went. He was just leaving. But he lied and said that a woman there was the girlfriend of a friend of his. He'd had to give her a message. I believed him. But the next week I went to the hairdresser's myself to get a haircut. There was a pretty girl there working. I said, ‘My mother-in-law says you're seeing my husband.' She pointed to the other girl beside her, who was ugly. “That's Tanya, not me.' I began talking to Tanya. She told me that my husband had lied to her, saying he was single. She had a lot of problems. She was single and had a daughter. They needed things. My husband had bought them for her. Then they'd gone out for coffee, started dating.

“After I was finished with my haircut, I invited her to come back to my house with me, so we'd both be there when Dima came home. Together, we packed up his things in a suitcase and waited there in the kitchen for him.”

I laughed. “That's funny. Revenge.”

“Of course.” Vera looked at me quite seriously. “It's very important to take revenge. In the right way, of course. It doesn't mean you have to hurt anyone. But you act in a way that lets you keep your self-respect.”

Yet another thing I'd never considered doing in my life, taking revenge.

“When Dima got home, we told him that his suitcase was all ready and he had to go. He went crazy. He lied about everything. Then Tanya left and he went after her. I found out later that he'd told her that he loved her, he wanted to be with her and didn't want to be with me. She said, ‘No, forget it.' He came back and told me that he loved me and he didn't love her and all he wanted was to stay with me. The next day, I went to the hairdresser's again to talk to Tanya. She told me what he'd said, that he didn't want to be with me.

“That night, Dima came home. He said he wanted to do something very special, to have a special night together. He took me to the movies. Then he bathed me and made love to me, like never before, but I knew it was a lie. Later that night, when he was asleep, I went to the kitchen and took some pills, a lot of them. I didn't know how else to get out of the situation. He found me, passed out, and called an ambulance. I spent three days in the hospital, but they saved me. The doctor was furious, my daughter was still nursing. ‘You were going to abandon your children for some man,' the doctor said. A psychiatrist came and told me to say I didn't want to kill myself, I just did it to scare my husband. Otherwise I would lose my job.

“That whole year, I was not myself. I didn't smile or laugh for a long time. My husband was really worried. He wouldn't even pass by the hairdresser's anymore. He'd take a bus on the other side of the building, wave as he was coming and going. I used to always be eating nuts. He would call me his squirrel. Now he would plead with me, saying, ‘I want you to be like you were before, my little squirrel.' But I couldn't. To have been lied to like that was something I couldn't understand. Finally, I came out of it.”

“You were able to forgive him?”

“I don't know if I forgave him. I just forgot. I became myself and we went on.

“A few years later,Tanya died. She'd had a kind of prostitute life. We wanted to adopt her baby. It was my idea. We tried, but it didn't work out. I don't know what happened to her.”

Suddenly, she was laughing.

“Why are you laughing?”

“I'm just remembering, it was that year, the year that I started feeling better again, that the practice of blow jobs was imported to Belarus.”

“What do you mean?”

“Yeah, no one did that. But then our friend Ludmila went to Poland with her husband, whose business had sent him there, and came back one day and told us about kissing everywhere on the body. None of us could believe it. I thought it was so disgusting that for months I couldn't eat off of Ludmila's plates. Just the thought of her eating off those same plates made me sick. Then little by little, we all started trying it.”

The botanist wrote me. He was even more excited. The latest news was that they were launching a massive counterattack on the
Iris pseudacorus
invasion, a measure known as biological control.

In a biological control scenario, natural enemies such as insects, fish and pathogens are purposefully introduced by scientists to weaken and suppress invading plants. In order to find the right biological control agent, scientists travel the world in search of the target plant's natural enemies. Once found, the weakening agent is imported to the host country and placed in a quarantine laboratory. There, meticulous experiments are carried out to ensure that the organism will affect only the invading species and will not impact native or crop species.

Next the enemy agent is released into its new habitat to prey upon the invader. Classical biological control relies on numerous generations of the enemy agent to suppress the invading species over a long period of time. Another method, inundative biological control, functions through vigorous and swift counterattack, with enemy agents released en masse.

In this case, inundative measures were being taken.Vast quantities of mottled weevils had been released in the wetlands. Simultaneous intergenerational damage was hoped for with the adults feeding on the leaves, where they would produce characteristic feeding scars, and the larvae tunneling in the petioles and crown of the plant. While the plants would not be wiped out immediately, their vigor would be considerably compromised, with the youthful irises suffering particularly.

 

 

I called Leonarda. “Whatever happened with that dinner with the Beast?”

“Really? You want to do it?”

“Why not? I'm hungry.”

“Okay, great.”

I knew it would be something absurdly laborious, baby ducks steeped in wine for several days prior, then cooked low for twelve hours. Whatever. The perfect aperitif, wine, digestif. I relished all this preoccupation.

We settled on that coming Thursday at 9:00 P.M. I snuck into the back garden a bit before that, positioning myself against the wall by the kitchen window, pressed into the jasmine.

Inside, there was an immense amount of fastidious bustling. Leonarda was wearing green corduroys with a short skirt on top. She disappeared for a little while and came back transformed, the skirt alone, little heels, a blouse with a ruffle.

I knelt there, breathing in the jasmine. At 9:30, she called me. I was holding my vibrating phone in my hand.

“Hiiiiiiiiii. We're waiting for you.”

At 10:00, she said, “Where the hell is she?” She was angry and flounced petulantly around the house.

“Let's start anyway,” Miguel said from the stove.

“I don't want to start,” Leonarda said.

He had already poured them aperitifs.

He turned back to the stove. He was stirring. “Well, the risotto can't wait. It'll be ruined.”

Suddenly, he looked agitated. He started moving his feet up and down, as if the floor were too hot.

She glanced over with a look of scorn. “What's wrong with you?”

He pulled the pan off the fire. He was quivering, seemingly in a state of uncontrollable fury. This, at least, was amusing. She laughed. She went over to look in the pan.

“It's already ruined,” he said. The tendons on his neck and forearms were standing out.

She dipped her finger in, tasted, wrinkled her nose in an awful way.

He threw his hands up violently in the air, turned and left the room.

She called me again. The phone vibrated outside, stirring the jasmine, right at my wrist. It was 10:30.

She walked into the living room where he was wobbling on the couch, smoking his pipe, visibly strung out.

“This is weird. I think something's up. I'm going to her house.” She had put short boots on instead of her heels.

She left.

A moment after the door closed, he got up. He went into the kitchen and threw the risotto out. He took the ducks out of the oven, poured himself some wine and ate some snails. Then he put a DVD into his computer and sat down at his desk to watch it. Leonarda had told me that he liked to watch American TV series, like
Sex and the City
. He gradually relaxed. Every now and then he laughed.

I closed my eyes and rested the back of my head against the wall.

After a little while, Leonarda returned. Now she was the one in a state. “What the fuck? She's not there. I went inside and everything.”

“You went in?”

“Yeah, I have the key.”

He set about warming up the meal. “Let's eat,” he said.

She flung herself down at the table.

“Have some wine,” he said.

She didn't touch her wine. I was enjoying this. She hardly touched her food, pulled the snails out of their shells curiously, as if it were an experiment, and left them lying there on her plate.

“I'm not hungry,” she said after a while. She got up and left the table.

He didn't say anything, though his silence seemed to require considerable control, poured himself some more wine, finished his meal.

My mouth was watering as I watched. Finally, he got up and walked down the hall toward the bathroom. She was nowhere in sight, must have retreated to the kid's room.

The window by the table was open onto the garden. She had hardly touched her baby duck. Dare I? I leaned in and plucked the bird off her plate. I carried it across the grass to the little bench in the far corner of the garden, where I sat down and ate it swiftly with my hands.