The Scent of Pine (14 page)

“It worked. The kids shut up and picked up their pace.

“We felt so tired, so wiped out throughout the rest of the day, that we could barely wait until bedtime, so we could just get the kids to bed, go to our room, and maybe read the
Art of Cinema
a little or just go to sleep. The second day of the heat wave fell on Friday, the day of the third dance. It had been so hot throughout the day that nobody felt like dancing, but we couldn’t possibly miss the dance. And so we dragged the kids to the dance floor.

“I saw Danya and forgot about the heat and exhaustion for a second. He didn’t even look at me. He stood by the fence staring ahead. Most of the people just stood by the fence, reluctant to move. Even the DJ, Volodya, seemed sluggish and bleary-eyed. So you could imagine how stunned everyone looked when Yanina took the mike from him and announced a new dance.

“ ‘Lambada!’ ”

“Lambada?” Ben asked.

“Yes, lambada. You don’t know it?”

“No. What is it? Something Latin?”

“Yeah. It’s like salsa, only simpler and dirtier. It was so big in Russia in the eighties! At the camp everybody went crazy over it.”

“Dirtier than salsa? Sounds good.”

“It’s really very simple. You put your legs very far apart, bend your knees just a little, so that your spine remains straight, and you make dance steps while rocking and swirling your hips. Not your waist, or your ass, but your hips. It looks as if you’re about to straddle someone.”

“That is dirty!”

“I know.”

“So you’re saying they allowed this dirty dance at the camp with the hands-over-the-blankets policy?”

“Only because it came from Yanina herself.”

“Uh-huh. Well, go on.”

“Volodya hurried to put the new tape in. And then the music started and everybody seemed to come alive. Sveta Kozlova, who had been engaged in torturing Myshka—coming up to her and breathing into her face—left Myshka alone and screamed: ‘Lambada! Lambada.’ We all knew the tune—it had been playing on TV a lot, but nobody seemed to know how to do the dance. People kept looking at Dena—but she only shook her head.

“Yanina walked to the middle of the floor and yelled to Volodya: ‘Turn it up!’

“She was dressed in a tight polyester dress covered with prints of birds, flowers, and dragonflies.

“She pressed her hand to her chest, took a deep breath, and started. She danced alone. Her legs were very short, and she spread them very far apart, which looked really indecent, almost obscene, but also oddly beautiful. She rocked and swirled her hips really hard, but she managed to make her movements really smooth and elegant. But the most amazing thing was the expression on her face. She looked shy and nervous like a young girl in love. And sometimes she would blush and smile as if at an imaginary partner.

“All eyes were on her.

“I looked at Danya. He moved away from the fence and was staring at Yanina as if hypnotized.

“The song came to an end. Yanina stopped, stomped her foot on the floor, and snapped her fingers. Everybody erupted in applause.”

Lena’s phone made a single plaintive beep. She started in her seat and reached to take her phone out of her bag.

“Don’t worry,” Ben said. “It just means that we’ve gone out of range. Now we are officially cut off from the world.”

She looked at her phone—there were no bars. Instead of feeling nervous that she was cut off from civilization, out in the wilderness with a man she barely knew, Lena just smiled. She felt as if the loss of connection made it easier to breathe somehow.

A few miles past Bangor they exited I-95 onto a smaller road. There were just a few cars going in their direction; all of them with Maine license plates, most of them pickups sporting large dogs sitting either in the back or in the passenger seat, looking contentedly out the window. The scenery became sparser, with open meadows, uncut grass, occasional farms surrounded by thin low woods.

“We’ll need to stop at one place,” Ben said, “to get the keys. There’s this guy, Mike, who’s been keeping an eye on the cabin while I’m away.”

The road seemed to go on forever, but finally they saw a trail of wood shavings on the road and the figure of a life-sized plywood moose, followed by a pack of bunny-sized plywood bears, and right after that a big clearing with a one-story house, very small, very neat, painted bluish-gray, surrounded by more animal figures, big and small. To the right of the house was a large shed with a workbench in front and a variety of half-finished wooden animals on the grass.

Mike’s car wasn’t in the driveway, though. They knocked on the door of the house, but there was no answer. There wasn’t anybody in the shed either, but they saw a big box on the ground with a slit on the top and a handwritten sign: “Be back soon—leave your orders here.”

Ben groaned. “I told him I was coming. He said he’d be here all day.”

He took out his phone to try Mike’s number, but of course there was no service. “We’ll have to wait,” he said.

They walked behind the shed along the little path that led to the thin birch grove.

Ben took his jacket off, spread it on the grass and sat down, leaving a space for her. Lena sat down next to him. The setting sun lent a rosy glow to Mike’s house, to all the wooden moose and bunnies, to Ben’s face. She wanted to touch him, which shouldn’t have been difficult considering what they had already done, but for some reason she couldn’t. She wondered if Ben felt the same.

“Time for the next installment of your story,” he said.

“Okay. Where was I?”

“You were talking about the heat wave and how it made everyone engage in some sort of pornodance.”

“Oh, yes. Lambada! Okay, so, the next day it was even hotter in the camp. We could barely get up in the morning. Throughout the day everybody talked about the heat wave, how stuffy it was at night, and how sweaty we were, and how stinky our clothes were, and what were the best foods to eat when it was hot, and how awful the soldiers must feel in their uniforms, and all the possible ways to stay cool—actually there was just one—to stay in the shade and splash yourself with cold water from time to time.

“The cafeteria smelled of burning fat that day. The first course was already on the tables—steaming bowls of lamb soup, dark brown with gleaming yellow circles of fat. The kids started to make gagging sounds. All those ‘Yucks!’ and ‘Blehs!’ and ‘Urgghs.’ They were so good at it that we missed the moment when Sasha Simonov started to throw up for real. Inka dragged him outside, but it was too late, and Yanina’s aunt came and mopped up the vomit, cursing and looking at me as if I’d been the one to make the mess.

“ ‘Are they kidding?’ Inka said when we saw that they were serving meat dumplings as the second course. I don’t know if this was Sasha’s fault or not, but nobody wanted dumplings. Most of the kids sat breaking them up with their forks, until Alesha Pevtcov discovered that dumplings were just perfect for tossing, especially if you put them on the tip of a fork, and hit on the dumpling-free end of the fork. Other kids followed suit, and it caught on with the kids from the other units. I exchanged panicky glances with Inka—we had absolutely no strength to deal with a food fight, and then, by a stroke of luck, Alesha hit Sveta on the face. She charged forward, grabbed Alesha by the collar and said that if he threw one more dumpling, she would take the whole pile of them from the kitchen and shove them down his throat, one by one, until he died. Alesha turned red and started to cry. Other kids froze. Even the kids at the adjacent table grew silent and stopped throwing dumplings. I couldn’t think of anything to say or do, but Inka could. ‘Shut up and stand up!’ she yelled. ‘We’re going back to the unit.’ Her face glowed with power. Or maybe her face just glowed because of the heat, but I still admired her.”

Ben yawned and lay down on the grass.

Lena fell silent.

“No, no, don’t stop,” he said. “I love listening to you.”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Listening?”

“Of course! Do you mind if I close my eyes, though?”

Lena smiled.

“When they got back to their units, Myshka asked Inka what she did when she went on a date.

“ ‘Not much,’ Inka said. ‘We walk, we talk.’

“ ‘Do the boys kiss you?’

“ ‘Shut up, Myshka.’

“ ‘So they do. And what do they do then?’

“ ‘Nothing.’

“ ‘Nothing? Really? Don’t they fuck you? Not even a little?’ ”

Ben stirred and mumbled, “Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.”

“And then there was the performance of Sveta Kozlova.

“I was in the girls’ bedroom stripping the beds, when Inka ran in choking with laughter. ‘Open the window, quick, you’ve got to see this, Sveta is doing Yanina!’

“There was a circle of kids by the porch. Sveta was in the center apparently waiting for a cue. Then, Alesha opened his mouth very wide and began to sing the lambada. Just ‘A . . . Aaaa . . . ’Aaa . . . a’aa . . . aa’a’ like this, but he carried the tune well. And Sveta pressed her hand to her chest and sighed deeply, exactly like Yanina did. Then she began to move. The resemblance was simply amazing. She even looked like Yanina a little. The same beefy little body, the same flush on her plump cheeks. At the end she raised her arms up just like Yanina did, only Sveta didn’t pretend that she did it to snap her fingers. She put her arms in a circle and moved them up and down as if she was hugging somebody.

“ ‘Yasha, my darling, kiss me, kiss me,’ she said, and made some loud smooching sounds to the delight of the kids.

“ ‘Who is Yasha?’ I asked Inka.

“ ‘Don’t you get it?’

“ ‘No.’

“ ‘Yasha . . . Yakov . . . Ring a bell?’

“ ‘No! It can’t be!’

“But Inka gave me a meaningful nod.

“There was only one Yasha at our camp. The camp director. Yakov Petrovich Vedeneev. I started to laugh. Yanina and Vedenej? No, this couldn’t be true.

“ ‘Oh, Yasha! I love you so much,’ Sveta continued. ‘Fuck me. Fuck me, please. Just a little bit.’ ‘Wait, Yanina Ivanovna, wait, let me get it out of my pants, it must be stuck.’ ”

Lena looked at Ben. She expected him to laugh, but he only smiled without opening his eyes.

“Inka flung the window open and yelled that Sveta must stop and shut up. Amazingly, Sveta stopped right away. She must have felt satisfied that she had done enough damage.

“Later that day, when we went to the laundry room with the pile of dirty sheets, we asked Galina if there was any truth to Sveta’s playacting.

“ ‘Come on, girls,’ Galina said, ‘Vedenej and Yanina? They are husband and wife. They don’t exactly publicize it, but everybody knows that.’

“Nadezhda peeked from behind the shelves.

“ ‘Vedenej and Yanina? I can’t believe you didn’t know!’

“More counselors were coming in with their laundry and joining in the discussion. It turned out that everybody who had been to this camp before knew the story. Some knew just parts of the story, but others eagerly supplied missing links, as well as their opinions on the story. It went like this: a new pile of laundry unloaded onto the floor, a fresh bit of info added to the story. But the counselors didn’t leave after they dumped their laundry, they stayed to listen to what the others would say, and to correct them in case their info or their opinion was wrong. It seemed like the story expanded along with the pile of laundry on the floor. And the voices got louder and louder trying to outshout the drone of washing machines and each other.

“The story went like this.

“ ‘They met here six or seven years ago. Vedenej was married then. You should’ve seen how Yanina was throwing herself at him! Well, Vedenej used to be very into her as well. Must be the sex stuff. Yanina must have done something—you know—that a decent woman wouldn’t do.’ (
Last Tango in Paris
! Butter! flashed through my mind.)

“ ‘But when the summer was over, Vedenej called it quits and went back to Moscow to his wife. He thought he got off easy. Right! Yanina looked up his home address—pulled some serious strings at the Ministry—and went straight to his apartment. Nobody knows what she did, whether she enticed him or threatened him, but the fact is that he divorced his wife and married Yanina. The main problem is that Vedenej is getting sick of Yanina now. He comes to the camp, he wants to fuck somebody else—there are so many temptations, Yanina watches him all the time.’

“And then one woman said: ‘I think he still loves Yanina. If he cheats on her, it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love her.’ And then she started to cry.

“Inka and I exchanged glances.

“Love seemed to be this grim, hard, confusing thing.”