Vaclav & Lena (12 page)

First, dinner. Rasia puts her bags from the grocery store in the kitchen and takes a stained and heavy Tupperware container from the freezer. She runs hot water over the Tupperware until the frozen borscht block is ready to slide out, and then shakes it loose until it bangs into the pot on the stove. She decides, as the icy block begins to melt and shift in the pan, and the first thawing dribbles sizzle on the hot metal, that she will knock on Vaclav’s door to inquire if Lena is staying for dinner, and then will demand that Vaclav and Lena help her put away the groceries. This plan will get Vaclav and Lena out of the bedroom and away from whatever it is they are doing, and it will get her some help with the groceries, which is a relief, because she feels so exhausted, even inside of her bones and in her stomach and in the back of her throat.

Standing outside of the closed door to her son’s room, Rasia hears tiny voices in a perfect rhythm, in a tiny little call and response, his voice high and scratchy, Lena’s voice with its deep Russian full-mouthed color. Without knocking, Rasia opens her son’s door and is very surprised at what she sees.

Vaclav is kneeling on the ground, completely absorbed in his project, surrounded by scraps of black electrical tape and cardboard. He does not notice that his mother has entered the room, and he continues to talk to himself, carrying on a conversation with an imaginary Lena. Rasia is so sure that she has heard Lena’s voice from outside of the room that it takes her a moment to really accept that he is playing both parts.

“Where is Lena?” she asks, breaking the spell of her son’s concentration. Vaclav looks up, startled, and tries to hide behind his back the secret project he has been working on, wondering if his mother heard him practicing the act with invisible Lena.

“She is sick, maybe,” Vaclav says.

“She was in school?”

“No,” says Vaclav.

“No?” asks Rasia.

“Probably she is sick,” says Vaclav.

“Probably she is sick,” says Rasia, and she thinks for a moment. “I am going to go to check on her at her house. I’ll be right back,” she says, then she grabs her purse and rushes out the front door before she even puts on her coat.

Vaclav is relieved that his mother is going to check on Lena. He wishes for a second that he could go with her, but there is so much to do for the act.

Vaclav gets back to work on his top hat. His mother seemed not to have noticed at all the top-secret preparations for the act, which is lucky. He thought, for a moment, when she came in, that she would know what he was planning, and then the show would be ruined.

Half an hour later, when Vaclav investigates a terrible smell coming from the kitchen and finds the borscht burning on the stove, he realizes that his mother is still not home.

Oleg comes home, which means it is nearly time for dinner, but still Rasia is not home.

Vaclav calls Lena’s house, but there is no answer.

Vaclav and his father wait an hour. Vaclav calls Lena’s house again; still no answer. He is very worried.

“Where is Mom?” Vaclav asks.

“I don’t know,” Oleg says. “What did she say when she left?”

“She said she was going to check on Lena,” Vaclav says.

“So she is going to check on Lena,” Oleg says.

Later, Oleg brings matching mugs of cold burned borscht into the living room, and they eat dinner together while they watch Russian television.

It is dark outside, and nothing is the way it should be, and Vaclav is starting to feel that something is terribly wrong. Oleg does not tell Vaclav that he must go to bed. Maybe this means that Oleg cares a lot about him, and maybe this means that Oleg has forgotten about him. Either way, Vaclav feels that he could not possibly go to bed, with the circumstances being what they are, which is missing Lena, missing Mother, and the big day of the show on the Coney Island boardwalk only hours away.

The night before the big show, the young magician falls asleep very late, next to his father. His face, which is pressed to the black leather of the couch, is illuminated by the Russian sitcoms his father watches on satellite television, beamed in from across the world.

SECRETLY HE IS AWAKE
…

A
t a time late in the night, so late as to actually be the morning, Oleg wakes up, still on the couch, and knows because the TV is still on, and because he and his young son are both sleeping on the sofa, that his wife has still not returned home. If she had returned home, she would have clucked at him and taken their son to bed and turned off the TV, and he would have acted annoyed as he stumbled down the hallway to resume his snoring in bed. If she had returned home, he would have acted as if he minded the interruption, but really he would not have minded at all. He feels so lonely waking up on the couch to the TV and no wife clucking at him.

First he turns off the television, and then he does something he has not been able to do for several years, something he has not realized he has been missing.

He scoops his son into his arms and carries him, still sleeping, to his bedroom and tucks him in.

Secretly, Vaclav is awake. But he too has missed being carried to his bedroom, and so he pretends.

THE DAY OF THE SHOW
…

R
asia comes home from the police station at five in the morning, just as her husband is rushing off to work.

“Where have you been?” he asks. “I worried.”

“You would not believe,” she says.

“I am late already; we talk about it later.” He kisses her once on the forehead and is about to head for the door, but then he stops and kisses her again.

“Everything will be okay,” he says, and then he goes.

She checks on her sleeping son, just to remind herself that her family is okay. Later, when he wakes up, she will have to tell him about what has happened to Lena, and she doesn’t know what she will say, what bad parts to take out, what good parts to put in. When Vaclav wakes up, she will make him pancakes and they will talk.

Rasia goes into her bedroom, takes off her shoes, and falls asleep on top of the covers in an instant.

When she wakes up, it is eleven o’clock, the latest she has slept in years. She expects to find Vaclav eating a bowl of cereal in front of the TV, or in his room, working on his tricks. But when she sits up in her bed, everything is quiet. Quickly she gets out of bed and runs through the house. Vaclav is not in the kitchen, not in the living room. She checks the bathroom, pulling back the shower curtain, and finally Vaclav’s room, his closet, and under the bed, but he is gone.

Rasia knows that her son has kept secrets from her many times but that he has lied to her only once, and she thinks about this time now, and she knows exactly where he has gone.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN
…

W
hen Rasia buys a ticket for the famous Coney Island Sideshow, she is surprised at how familiar the little red ticket stub has become, how it looks to her, even as she sees the man tearing it off the big roll of hundreds of identical tickets, like a personal thing. She remembers the first day with Lena at Coney Island, the day when she knew her son had lied to her, the day when Lena became the most important person in his life. She remembers going through his tiny pockets that night by the washing machine, finding the red ticket stub, remembers reading the words. She remembers the sink of her stomach when, after he told her they had gone on a ride, she found, in his pocket, two ticket stubs to the sideshow. The sideshow!

Now, as she walks into the sideshow’s theater, through the dark hallway, through the black door, she hopes that he will be there and that he will not be there, and she tries to breathe a little bit into the spaces around the awful thing she has to tell him.

HEATHER HOLLIDAY
…

I
nside the sideshow’s theater there is an audience of only one person, one boy magician. He is wearing his black electrical-tape-and-cardboard top hat, he has covered his sneakers in silver aluminum foil, and his hands, inside his white magician’s gloves, are folded politely in his lap.

When he sees his mother come into the theater, he is surprised and confused about how she knew to find him here, and then afraid that he is in trouble, but mostly he is relieved. It has been very bad, very scary, to sit alone in the dark theater, knowing that something bad has happened to Lena, something terrible that would stop her from coming on the day of the show. He does not feel nervous for being in trouble with his mother for sneaking out. He guesses correctly that today is a day during which there is no getting in trouble for the normal things that usually get you in trouble.

Rasia comes and sits next to him, and she puts her arms around him, and he starts to cry. The lights go down; the show is about to start.

“Do you want to go home?” Rasia whispers.

“No,” Vaclav whispers. “I want to stay.”

Rasia is glad, because she is still unsure of what to tell Vaclav, and she is curious about the sideshow. Vaclav wants to stay to see the show because he is afraid of the day moving forward any more, and he knows that soon the day will move into a new time, and the time before, the time he spent sitting alone in the theater, not knowing anything, will be gone, and he will know something. There is no going back once you know something, because from then on, you always know it.

Together, they watch Insectavora climb the ladder of swords, then they watch the glass eater eat glass, and they watch the human blockhead hammer nails into his nose. Vaclav stays nestled under Rasia’s arm, and even when the Great Fredini comes on and does a magic act that is both astounding and hilarious, Vaclav cannot keep the tears from coming into his eyes.

When the lights in the theater go down, just before the last act, Vaclav knows what is coming next.

Heather Holliday is very tan, not like she is tan from the sun but like she is a person who was born with skin that is already tan, and her hair is two different colors, light blond and black, and it is done in a hairstyle like a lady from black-and-white television. She has cheeks like a little girl’s, and a silver loop through her nose. She smiles without showing any teeth, and her smile is like a wink.

She is wearing the golden bikini.

There are things about Heather’s golden bikini that make Vaclav sad about Lena.

Heather Holliday’s bikini is very small, and a lot of her skin is showing, but she does not look naked at all. The skin that is showing, the skin of her belly and the tops of her thighs, does not look like private skin. She is wearing black fishnet stockings on her legs, and her legs look strong, like the legs of a superhero, not like Lena’s tiny legs. Also, Heather wears white high-heeled shoes, but she wears them like she could run in them, like she could do anything in them. Lena’s feet look shy, always trying to hide behind each other, even in sneakers.

The best thing about Heather Holliday is the way that her arms are hanging casually at her sides, like she is holding someone’s hand or holding a grocery bag with just a candy bar in it, when what she is holding are two big, long, shiny swords, like a knight in medieval times.

She takes the center of the stage, and she stands there, with her big winking smile and her feet in her white high heels slightly pigeon-toed.

At first Rasia is appalled: The girl can’t be older than twenty-five, she’s wearing almost nothing, and she has in her nose a ring like a bull—disgusting. But the way that she walks to the center of the stage and curtsies, and the way she smiles, is elegant. When she lifts her chin and tilts her head all the way back, Rasia wants to rush up on the stage and stop her from hurting her tender, exposed neck, to tell her that this is not something for such a nice girl to do, that she could easily find work as an administrative assistant; Rasia could help her. Heather opens her mouth wide, and Rasia is finding the whole performance terrifying, but she can’t look away.

When Heather actually swallows the sword, she makes it look easy. Rasia is surprised to think that this sword swallowing is lovely, and that when Heather pulls the sword out, it doesn’t look like it hurts at all. Rasia thought that it was going to be disgusting, but aside from a little bit of slobber on the sword after she pulls it out, it is actually pretty.

Heather swallows three more swords and then leaves the stage all of a sudden without taking her bows, but she returns a moment later with the man who hammered nails into his nose.

Heather pushes a box on wheels onto the stage. The man explains that she will contort herself to fit in the box, and that he will then drive swords through it from every angle. He announces that the audience must be quiet and to focus closely on this trick, because it is extremely dangerous. Vaclav has never seen this trick performed before, but he has read about it in
The Magician’s Almanac
, so he is very interested. He thinks that this might be a perfect trick for the magic act, that Lena is the perfect assistant for this trick, because she is so small.

The nail-nose man helps Heather step into the box and watches as she folds her feet and legs under her, and then adjusts and readjusts and squishes down so that she is completely inside the box. Without warning, the man plunges Heather Holliday’s long sword into the side of the box. Rasia gasps loudly, and Vaclav thinks he heard a tiny squeal from inside the box in Heather Holliday’s voice.
She’s been hurt
, thinks Vaclav. His mother grabs his hand and holds tightly.

The nose-nail man seems not to have noticed, and he plunges another long sword into the side of the box, perpendicular to the first. A small wheezing cough comes from inside the box. Rasia expects, at any moment, to see blood dripping to the stage from the bottom of the box, and as the man lifts yet another sword and prepares to stab it through the box, she again fights the urge to rush forward to the stage. She is sure at once that Heather Holliday is dying slowly, losing blood inside the tiny box, and sure just the same that it is all part of the trick.