The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko (27 page)

“Romantic.”

“Would you like to hear a story?”

“I would.”

“It's about my dad.”

“Assistant Professor of Piano. University of Lviv, 1992–2004.”

“Yes.”

I could see that Polina's eyes were turning luminescent due to some flavor of melancholy.

“Don't waste your time telling stories you don't want to tell.”

“No, I want to tell this one.”

“You may proceed.”

“He taught me how to play piano. He was my hero. He was perfect.”

“Standard little girl.”

“They sent us home from school early on the day Lviv flooded. When I got home, he was fucking one of his students on our piano. The one he taught me on. She was eighteen. I was twelve. She scrambled to grab her purse and panties. My father scrambled to cover up his
Hui
.”

“What did you do?”

“I stood there, shaking. I couldn't look at his eyes. I remember there was a tiny piece of wallpaper peeling off the wall, so I stared at it. He tried to touch me, and I yelled. He offered me anything I wanted. He told me he loved me more than anything in the world. All the standard shit. Though, when you're twelve, it doesn't feel all that standard. He said that there was no limit to what he would do to make it right. I said, tell Mom. He said, except that. That it would ruin the family. He asked me if I loved the family. I said yes. So I let him bribe me. Whatever I wanted for the next two years. I almost started to forgive him.”

“Almost?”

“Déjà vu two years later. She was sixteen, and her tits had just started to bud. It was also the day before my fifteenth birthday. The apologies started all over. How he would do anything to make it right. So I pretended that everything would be okay. I would take the gifts. But I kept the panties, which were blue. Then when my mom came home, the words burst right out of my mouth. She didn't believe me. I was dubbed a storyteller. Until I showed her the blue panties. Luckily, neither of us had blue panties.”

“What did she do?”

“She left. For approximately three hours. Which was just enough time for my dad to knock a tooth out of my mouth. But the worst part is that my mother died that day. Not her body—she still had a heartbeat and everything—but after that day, she was like a piece of driftwood. And every day since, I've blamed myself for killing her.”

“You did the right thing.”

“I'm not looking for absolution. This isn't a confession. I was absolved when I got cancer. Dying is nature's purification. You should try it.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Because we're all going to hell, Ivan. Except maybe you.”

“You don't even believe in hell.”

“That's irrelevant.”

“What makes me special?”

“Because you've been severed. You're a karmic anomaly. It's why I risked everything to tell you. You're free.”

“I don't feel free.”

“That doesn't make it untrue. There's a safety in the trap. But when Mikhail locked up your file and made a new one, one that says that your parents could be anyone in the universe or no one at all, you were severed from him. You were cut from history. You're not required to live out someone else's sins. That's something I'll never know. But you, you're a vacancy. Starting yesterday, you get to write yourself to life.”

“If I'm free, you're free. His sins aren't your sins.”

“I played my own part in everything. I participated. Not that it matters much at this point. I just know that after they died, I looked at my father and then at my mother. And it was in their eyes. And then in mine. They seeped into me. I knew we would be tangled up forever.”

Polina stopped to adjust a few twigs in her cabin and remove the leaves from the top so that she could see inside.

Then she said:

“You're not tangled up with anything.”

To which I said:

“I'm tangled up with you.”

To which Polina lifted her head and smiled 12 percent, which made me ask:

“Have I told you how surprisingly pretty you are for a bald person?”

Polina dropped the twig she was fidgeting with and crawled over to me, presumably because that was all she could do. Then she took my face into her hands and kissed me for the second time. But this time felt different from the last. Counterfeit could not live in that kiss. I'm not sure whether at that moment she was possessed by some imperial and selfless charity, or if she, like me, was caught up in the fantasy that I wasn't a hideous creature, but I didn't care. I felt the addictive grandeur. I leaned in and kissed her moist mouth back, even harder. I had no idea what I was doing, but the more primal currents in my body took over and attacked her lips in a way that I can only imagine resembled what a passionate kiss should look and feel like. An impulse arose to pull away and see where her eyes were and attempt to assess her reactions through her facial expressions. Before giving in to it, I considered whom I was kissing, succumbed to the ensuing avalanche, and sucked her upper lip. I got to enjoy that lip for a few delicious seconds, and then the moment soured, literally. I tasted familiar metallic bitters, which probably meant that Polina was bleeding into my mouth. When I pulled away I saw bloody streaks oozing from the corner of her eyes. Without thinking, I used my white T-shirt to wipe them up. Polina looked down in alarm, saw the bloody smears, and cried hysterically.

“Let's go back,” I said.

She tried to stand but fell back into the autumn ambrosia.

“When I sat here, I knew I wouldn't get back up again,” she said.

“Not an option.”

I tried to yank Polina onto my lap, and she tried too. And after a few minutes of flailing, we proved that two halves of a person equal a whole. Eventually, her body fell over mine, and her fingers clung to my bloody T-shirt, while I started rolling at a drip. I didn't know how long my one arm could push two people or whether there were things dying inside of Polina that were going to make her never come back, so I screamed for help. I screamed for Katya and Lyudmila and Elena, even though I never asked them for help before, because Polina taught me that there is no room for stubbornness in death. I screamed for them until I sanded down my vocal cords to nothing and the screams turned into air. And still I screamed some more. We were five meters from the forest when she started to convulse. We were twelve meters from the forest when the bleeding in her mouth turned to a thin little red river Styx accumulating on my shorts. We were eighteen meters from the woods when I saw the blurry blue scrubs burst out of the hospital. We were twenty-one meters from the woods when Nurse Katya and Nurse Elena each took hold of an extremity or two and carried her back half-dangling into the hospital.

“Are you trying to die?” I heard Katya ask her.

They left me back in the field, wheeling away like a one-armed fiend through the six-inch grass. The sky was like solid granite, like on every other November day in Belarus. Flecks of rain started to appear on my face, while I expended caveman-like effort, only to inch along at a speed that was not commensurate with that effort, while my beloved bled out bad blood from most of her orifices.

Three minutes later, I was back inside the hospital, which was like a ghost town. All the mutants were put away into their rooms, and all the nurses were in the Red Room huddled around Polina's bloody gums. I wheeled up close to the door and watched them all do a particular job. Nurse Elena wiped the blood from her teeth and her eyes. Nurse Katya slapped her cheeks. Nurse Lyudmila connected plastic tubes to her. My job was to pay better attention to the process of someone dying than I ever did before. Until that job wasn't enough and I started shouting at the nurses to take more of my blood.

“It won't help, Ivan,” one said.

“She'll just bleed it out,” said another.

“We took two of your pints in three days,” said the last one.

“It'll kill you,” said the first again.

And it was true, it might. I felt like a vodka IV was dripping into my bloodstream ever since they took the second pint. But I hated feeling null.

“How long now?” I asked.

“Hours probably,” said another.

“Now leave,” said the last one.

Which of course I didn't. I wheeled back a few inches so they couldn't see me. And I went into a coma. But really I was listening to everything. All the jargon ricocheting around the room, mixing right along with all the memories in my head. And then the commotion inside the Red Room stopped, and everything was silent except for the chirp of each heartbeat. The nurses filed out one by one, passing my comatose body. When they were all gone, I wheeled back into the Red Room and held her sedated hand. Her eyes were fluttering under the skin of her eyelids again, and I felt brokenhearted because there was no dream she could possibly be having that was happy. So I held her hand tighter, subtly hoping that the pressure would find its way through the neural wires and let her know that she wasn't alone. Then it occurred to me that it didn't matter because dying is the loneliest event in life. Polina could be surrounded by a village, each resident tending to a different need, each one reminding her of why she mattered, and she would still die alone. Because when it finally comes, you take that step into the black by yourself.

Some blurry hours later, Nurse Natalya showed up for her night shift.

“Take more blood,” I said, aborting her attempt to pull me into her bosom.

She rolled her eyes.

“Please?” I said.

She crossed her arms.

“I implore you.”

“It could kill you.”

“It won't.”

“You don't know that.”

“I feel strong.”

“It won't make any difference. She's leaving now, Ivan.”

“It could give her another day.”

“You will always want one more day.”

“Yes, but on this day, I didn't get to say good-bye.”

Apparently this touched the right organ, because she was suddenly elbow deep inside of a drawer getting a syringe and bag.

“Give me your arm,” she said.

And I did, and the needle slipped in, and she took more blood, and immediately my brain stopped working and my vision blurred. Nurse Natalya gave me a few good slaps on the cheek.

Stay here, Ivan.

Stay here.

I didn't.

 

DAY 3

The Suitcase Day

I woke up in the middle of the night, shortly after 3:00 in the
A.M.
The first thing I noticed was a large bruise on my forehead and also my nose, which hurt and felt swollen and slightly crooked according to my fingers. The second thing that I noticed was that I was still in my chair and still in the Red Room. Polina was asleep, or in a real coma, or whatever. I didn't even know if the last transfusion happened. All I knew was that now tubes were coming up and over her ears and into her nose to help her breathe. I also noticed that when I looked at anything for too long, it felt like my head was attached to helicopter blades. So I decided to lay my head back down next to hers and make it stop. I remember feeling her few returning fuzzy hairs tickling my cheek as I laid my face against her otherwise bald head. And then the helicopter blades stopped and everything went black again.

Then I woke up at 5:00 in the
A.M.
, to some jostling by Nurse Natalya.

“Ivan, can you hear me?”

“Unfortunately,” I said.

“I have to leave now. Eat this Tula bread. It will help.”

“Help what?”

“Help you keep your head up.”

“You took my blood?”

“You begged me.”

“And you gave it to her?”

“Yes.”

“Will she wake up today?”

“I don't know.”

“Don't leave.”

“I need sleep too,
moya lyubov
.”
*

“You can sleep here.”

“Where?”

“In my room.”

“Never. I know what happens there.”

“Will I see you tonight?”

“Of course.”

Natalya went home, and I took a bite of Tula bread, which made my head stop spinning for a second. I took the opportunity to look over Polina, who was illuminated by the summer morning light coming in through the barred windows. By now most of her skin was purplish black, as opposed to the innocent porcelain she donned when I first saw her walk into the hospital. And where the skin wasn't purplish black, it was smeared with occasional brushstrokes of blood. Her bones were like tiny hands trying to push through her face and shoulders, and her knees were like the pictures that they sometimes show of Auschwitz residents. Her mouth hung open vulnerably, and her teeth were orange from the slow diffusion of blood from her gums, and incidentally, so were the half-moons just beneath her eyes. Her breathing was short and shallow and sounded like her lungs had been replaced by birthday balloons. I could go on, but as it is I'm sure you'll never get this picture out of your head, Reader. I traced some of her bruises with my limited fingers, laid my head next to hers, and went back to sleep.

The next time I woke up, it was because of Polina, who was trying to kill me in my sleep again. I gasped for air to save my life, and she started laughing like an insane person.

“There's something very wrong with you,” I said.

“We don't have much time, so I'm going to have to ask you to go to my room and look under my bed,” she said.

“What?”

“Wheel yourself into my room and look under my bed.”

“Why?”

“Ivan, I'm going to die waiting for you to do me this one small favor.”

“Okay.”

I turned around and wheeled my way through the three halls and two turns required to get to Polina's room. When I opened the door, I noticed the faint smell of mold light up my nostrils. As quickly as I could, I dismounted from my chair and writhed under her bed, where I found an old-style portmanteau. I writhed back and awkwardly dragged it out from under the bed. Then I unlatched each of the two latches on either side and opened it up. The first thing that caught my attention was a stack of rubles, which after counting amounted to about ten thousand.
*
The second thing I noticed was a large folded map of the Mazyr metropolitan area, with several key locations circled in red ink, including restaurants, alternative health care locations, and notable city landmarks. Also included were six packets of cookies, some crackers, two bottles of water, a small knife, an umbrella, a combination lock, a watch, a compass, several books by Russian masters, including
Lolita, The Master and Margarita,
and
Crime and Punishment,
and Polina's journal. I put the journal in my shorts, packed up the rest of the suitcase, pushed it underneath the bed, and wheeled myself back to the Red Room.