Ekaterina (excerpts from a novel) by Donald Harington

But Dr. Elmore had very little to say to you, that evening or later. At the supper table (Kenneth Junior, "Little" Kenny, the only sober person at that late hour, cooked and served a supper of cheeseburgers and french fries), Dr. Elmore casually remarked, not looking at you, "I have the greatest respect for dissidents, particularly those against the Bolshevik ideology," but in a voice so hoarse and weak that Loretta had to repeat the words for you, slowly, and yelling at her husband, "SHE HAS TO LOOK 'EM UP!" while you successfully found "ideology," which sounded pretty much the same in Russian, with a different accent. Then the three Elmores, including smiling Kenny, waited for your response to that remark.

"Dissidents," you said, "are being...excuse -- " you looked up a couple of words " -- successful only if famous. Like Solzhenitsyn. I, not famous dissident. I, nobody know."

Loretta yelled this at her husband, and he smiled politely, and shook his head in sympathy, or in disavowal of having heard, you could not tell which.

You were not drunk, and neither, precisely, were Dr. and Mrs. Elmore, although all three of you had consumed large quantities of, respectively, vodka, Scotch and bourbon. You were out of practice, and a quantity of vodka that would have given you only a pleasant buzz in Tbilisi or Leningrad now rendered you a bit stuporous and stuttering and inattentive. Each time Loretta got up to refill your glass, her son would whine, "Mom!" and roll his eyes in disgust, and give you assorted facial contortions of disappointment, pity, concern, and beseechment.

At one point during the evening, Loretta observed that your unusual name was difficult, to put it mildly, and she delivered herself of the opinion that you ought to pick one of the many American translations, Cathy perhaps, or Katy, or Cassie, or Kitty, or perhaps just Kay. At the very least, Catherine. "What can we call you?" she wondered aloud. Without wishing to be unfriendly or in the least aloof, you announced: "Ekaterina Vladimirovna," dropping, at least, your unwieldy surname.

Finally, when Dr. Elmore seemed to have withdrawn entirely into himself and was making no effort to respond to his wife's shouts of "SHE WANTS US TO CALL HER EE COTTERINA VLAH DEEMER ROV NAH!," Kenny said to his mother, "Can't you see she's tired?" and Loretta suggested that maybe it was time that Kenny showed you up to your room, and the boy leapt at the chance.

Kenny had already taken from his parents' apartment a table lamp and a reading lamp, which he put upon your desk and plugged in, and turned on. Then he struck a match and lit the gas heater embedded in the exterior wall, and showed you how to adjust it. The same exterior wall had five tall windows interspersed with mirrors, four of the windows with a view of the busy avenue, now traversed by many carlights, and one of the windows (as Kenny, pulling aside the heavy drapes, showed you) had an oblique view of the illuminated window of your neighbor, Professor Ogden. He had not drawn his blinds, and his undraped window revealed a dim glimpse of his person, supine upon his couch, one arm flung over his face to shield his eyes or comfort his head. ("That old nerd's really, really sick," Kenny said. "I mean he's, like, barfy and gross, you know? He oughta be in the hospital, but Mom can't make him go.")

The furniture of your room consisted of a small circular dining table with three simple dining chairs (two for company, said our Thoreau, and a third for society), a sofa like the one Ogden was confined upon, a spacious desk with desk chair, a comfortable stuffed armchair, two empty bookcases waiting for you to fill them up (you possessed at this point only three volumes, including the Russian-English dictionary: the other two were a fragment (less than half) of a coverless, torn, much-used Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the only thing you'd been permitted to read in camp, where books were forbidden and this fragment had served several inmates as a toilet-paper supply before falling into your possession, as if Anangka wanted you to learn a little about the language you would be using for the rest of your life, even in its Middle form, and even without any help from a Russian-English dictionary; and a slim hardbound of Günter von Büren's Protomycetaceae of Switzerland, which the KGB man had permitted you to browse for and purchase cheaply under his suspicious eye at a Zurich bookshop before driving you on to the airport), a chest of drawers waiting for your undies and socks and such, once you acquired some, and a pair of what we call "occasional tables": good for ashtrays, magazines, clocks, spare change, TV dinners (your room had no TV). In fact there was a clean crystal ashtray already upon one of them, and you looked wistfully at it and asked your boy guide: "Thou do not objection if I take... papirosa, cigarette, no?"

"It's your room," Kenny pointed out, and, looking around him, noticed the door was still ajar, and closed it. "Can I have one too?"

It's ironic, my Kat, that you who had already throughout the long dull course of exchanging civilities with the Elmores amused yourself with elaborate plans for a soon seduction of this lad, now scrupled against "corrupting" him by letting him have a cigarette. You studied him and his eager face for a long moment before shaking your head. His face fell. His face, you realized, was much more mobile, expressive, mercurial, than Islamber's. But you hadn't shaken your head in denial of his request, only in the realization of your corrupting him. A cigarette is as nothing compared to what I am going to give you, you thought, but in Svanetian, not English. You held out the pack of Virginia Slims (its colors had attracted you, and you'd smoked two entire packs since leaving New York, thinking of the coarse shag makhorka that you'd only occasionally been able to smoke in camp), and his face lit up all over again, and the two of you lit up and smoked.

There was one essential piece of furniture missing from the room, and you wanted to ask, but did not know how for the simple reason that the tiny word for it eluded you, that basic appurtenance which was laqvra in Svanetian, logini in Georgian, postyel in Russian but less than half as many letters in English. You could have tried to look it up, but you would have felt a certain embarrassment in mentioning it, so soon, to Kenny. Staring at the sofa, you supposed that either that was it, or even perhaps the sofa was convertible for sleeping...and seduction.

And then...it was so uncanny the way he seemed to read your thoughts, or perhaps Anangka, bless her, was on the job and sending messages to him, Kenny hit himself on the brow (not with the hand holding the Virginia Slim) and said, "Hey, I almost forgot!" He moved to the wall, and grasped two of the tall mirrors by crystal knobs attached to them, and the mirrors swung out like doors, revealing a recession in the wall containing a contraption which you recognized even in the instant that he began to pull it out and down. "Your Murphy bed!" he said, when he had it fully in place on the floor. It was almost a double-bed, you realized, as you filed the word murphybed into your vocabulary, but the mattress was bare. Again, as if reading your thoughts, he declared, "I guess you'll have to buy some sheets and stuff, but I could, like, snitch you a pillow and some stuff from downstairs, just for tonight. Soon as I finish this." He indicated his cigarette. Suddenly he laughed uproariously at some thought, you hoped not the same thought you were teasing, and he said, "Listen, have you ever heard of Murphy's Law?"

You knew coleslaw but not murphyslaw. You shook your head.

He said, "It goes, like, 'anything that can possibly go wrong is sure enough going to go wrong.'" He studied you. "Get it?" You nodded, although you were not certain of the connection between the murphyslaw and the murphybed. Or was he insinuating something, subtly? Perhaps that your attempt to love him would go wrong. He said, "I'll be right back," and put out his cigarette and left the room.

Within minutes he was back, bringing a pillow, blankets, sheets and pillowcase. "Oh, ivasu khari!" you said. "Thank thee!"

"I nearly got caught," he declared, proudly. "But if you ever need anything, hear, I'm your man." You smiled, enjoying that expression, and thinking in English, Thou art my man, and you wondered how you could possibly tell him at this point, with your limited language, what you most needed. He began to make the murphybed for you, and you searched for words to protest, but could not find any. There are no good words to tell somebody to permit one to make one's own bed. Finished, he looked around the room, as if searching for other hidden doors behind the mirrors to show you anything else he had neglected to show you. "Well, I guess that's it," he declared at last. "I hope you're comfy and all. I hope old Professor Ogden doesn't bother you. Sometimes he, like, makes a lot of noises in the night, coughing and stuff." The boy made facial expressions of both wonderment and annoyance. "But," he said, "maybe his noises will, like, keep you from hearing the other noises." He waited to see if this had registered with you before he went on, "I hate to tell you, but this place is haunted."

"Excuse," you said, and took up your paperback. "'H'" you said, "'O,' 'N....'"

"'A,''U,' 'N,'" he corrected you, and you found it quickly, your fingers getting better and nimbler in their constant turning of the pages.

Finding it, learning it, you closed your eyes for a moment in ecstasy. "O sakvrel Anangka!" you uttered, which is to say, Oh marvelous Fate-Thing. The boy's announcement was, as we like to say, too good to be true. But it was true. I, who am a ghost of sorts myself, and have to be, to get this strange story told, can tell you: Lawren Carnegie, the cousin of Andrew and the man who built this mansion in 1893, a man who had made his fortune supplying his cousin with coal from mining interests in West Virginia, on the night in 1901 when the Titusville mine disaster took the lives of 187 of his employees, tried to put himself to sleep with cognac, but, being a corpulent man, required two whole bottles just to make himself drowsy, drowsy enough to consume a third, which deprived his physical entity of its involuntary functions, such as respiration and heartbeat, and his "spiritual" entity has been vacationing behind these mirrors ever since, sometimes clumsily causing scrapes and screeches and an occasional clank to echo between the glass and the wall.

"You hear what I'm saying?" Kenny wanted to know, his eyes big and his eyebrows high. "There are ghosts around."

You did not need to look the word up, it was so close to the Germanic Geist, even if far removed from your Svanetian lanchal. In Svanland you had known many a splendid lanchal. "I love ghost," you told Kenny.

He stared at you in disbelief, his stare slowly shading into one of tentative dislike, as if, smitten with you but reluctant to give you his heart wholly, he had to search for a flaw, which he had found at last. He did not know what to say. At length he said, "Well, if you're not jacking me around, you'll sure be happy here, I guess. If you meet the ghost, just tell him to stay away from me, okay?"

You smiled and said, "I tell him," and then, suddenly, you were overpoweringly weary and wanting to sleep. How does one bid farewell best in the English? Lishdobe, lishdobe. You tried a bit of sign language: you touched your hands together as if in prayer and lay them beside your cheek as if in slumber. "I am needing rest," you said.

"Oh, yeah, sure!" he exclaimed, and made to leave. "I'll see you tomorrow."

"Night, tomorrow," you promised, "we talk. We play game. I tell thee stories. Thou like story?"

"I'm kind of old for that," he said, thinking perhaps you had in mind the bedtime tales he hadn't heard since his old father stopped telling them seven years before. "But yeah, we could, like, play games. Do you know chess? Aren't all Russians real good at chess?"

"Am not Russian," you declared firmly. "Mushwan. Shvan. Can thou say 'Svan'?" He tried. It was not easy, and sounded more like Swan than Svan, which was all right. You told him, "But I play chess, ya. So we play chess. Thou have...?" your fingers pantomimed the pieces: pawns, royalty, clergy, horsemen, crenelated mansions.

"No, but I know where I could snitch some," he declared, and turned again to go. "Well, good night I guess." But he hesitated. "Could I -- ?" he tried. "Could I stay and watch you take off that scarf?"

You gave him your very best smile, and, dear Kat, even your middling-to-fair smiles are a wonder to behold, but you slowly shook your head. How did you tell him: Not yet? Or, It is too soon? Or, Comfort yourself with the thought that soon you'll see all of me, but not tonight. But you knew a word, ugly, without looking it up. "With no scarf," you said, "I am looking very ugly."

"You couldn't," he said. "You couldn't if you tried. You are the prettiest lady I ever saw."

You blushed, knowing that adjective too. You had learned from him a farewell: "Good night," you said.

"What color is your hair? I mean, what color was it?"

You touched your eyebrows, which were still all there, perhaps too much, because you would never pluck them. "This color," you said.

"Sorta like mine," he said, and his hair was, in truth, very like yours had been: an ordinary brown, a common brown, the color of mice, or of nuts, or, according to your Chaucer at least, "broun as a berye," or, best of all, of the forest floor that nurtured the mushrooms that were your singular overriding interest in this life. "Good night," he said again, and reached out and took your hand and shook it. The handshake was the first time you had been touched since evil Bolshakov let go of you.

Before putting out your lights and climbing into the murphybed, you spent a good hour in the cozy, easy company of your paperback book, looking up poison, bourbon, dope, billy-goat, cheers, borrow, wrong, etc., etc. Some of the words, e.g., sucks and gross, did not have the meaning that apparently had been intended, whereas other words, slammer, snitch, nerd, barfy, jacking around, could not be found at all.

And one simple word gave you the most difficulty. You were still thinking about its possible multiple meanings or usages when you drifted off to sleep: like.