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Olga Grjasnowa

ALL RUSSIANS LOVE BIRCH TREES

Vershinin: Why should you care? Here there’s such a wholesome, bracing Russian climate. A forest, a river … and birch trees here too. Dear, humble birches, I love them more than any other tree. It’s a good place to live. Only it’s odd, the train station is over thirteen miles away … And nobody knows why that is.

Anton Chekhov Three Sisters

part one

1

I didn’t want this day to begin. I would rather have stayed in bed and kept sleeping, but the laughter of the fruit vendor and the rattle of the streetcar invaded our bedroom through the wide-open window. Our apartment wasn’t far from the central station, which basically meant that in our neighborhood there were streets better left avoided, with discount stores and huge erotic cinemas. Here—between an old Chinese Laundromat and a left-leaning youth center, whose visitors often mistook our front door for a urinal—was our home. Our apartment was ramshackle and rundown, but cheap. Every morning at about five o’clock, fathers, brothers, and cousins unloaded their vans beneath our windows. They slammed their doors and assembled their stands, drank tea, roasted corn on the cob, and waited. They waited for the street to fill so that they could advertise their fruit in automated singsong voices. I tried to follow their conversations, but mostly just understood a bit here and there, or fell asleep again.

Elias was lying next to me: stirring, lips slightly parted, eyelids fluttering, irregular rise and fall of his chest. “Fucking pig faggot, I’ll kill you!” yelled a drunk under our window. The fruit vendors laughed at him and spit sunflower shells onto the street.

Elias woke up and turned toward me. Without opening his eyes, he rested his head on my stomach.

His hands followed mine. We stayed there, wedged together, until someone else’s alarm clock went off behind the wall and my hand grew numb beneath his weight. When it went completely numb I climbed out of bed to take a shower.

The kitchen was crammed with yesterday’s dishes. Pots and pans with crusty rims, plates and half-full wineglasses were stacked on top of each other on the counter. The air smelled like exhaust and stuck to my skin like syrup. It was going to be the hottest day of the year.

Elias was sitting at the kitchen table. In his right hand was a spoon full of granola. Crumbs were scattered in front of him. Half a roll sat on a plate, covered in a dark red layer of jam. I took a seat facing him, reached for the newspaper, and then, instead of the paper, studied his face. He had high cheekbones, gray-blue eyes, and dark lashes just a little on the short side. Elias was little-boy-pretty. His good looks annoyed him—people would never remember him as a person, but as someone resembling an actor, whose name they never quite remembered. It wasn’t his beauty, but rather his intuitive politeness that gave him the effect he had—on impatient cash register ladies, who suddenly forgot to check their watches, on giggling schoolgirls, medical assistants, librarians, and me. First and foremost on me. The gifts of a con man, my mother said. But she loved him, because of those gifts especially, and because Elias, for whatever reason, knew how to behave around an Eastern family.