Nick Rattner
You should make yourself a fire
When I met Anya, she was visiting my friend Olga at the small liberal arts college in the town I was living in. The bar where we all happened to be that night was the only place in town where you could dance. After a few hours of vodka tonics and dubstep, we went back to Olga’s and stayed up talking for hours after everyone else had gone to bed.
I love Wittgenstein and New Wave films.
The inexpressible inside the expressed kind of thing.
Yes, exactly.
I had seen Breathless, probably, but these things Anya actually knew about.
Did we have sex that first night? It sounds ridiculous, but I only remember that on my way home the sun was splintering between the trees and not yet high enough to burn my tired eyes.
The following morning Anya returned to Ridgefield, Connecticut, where, she told me, her mother lived with a bald American software engineer named Bill. He had introduced them both to donuts. Aren’t donuts just incredible?
The day after eating donuts with her mother and Bill, Anya returned to China, where she ran an English-language journal for expats about Chinese art.
No one knows what anything is worth. No one knows if a painting or sculpture is complete shit or total brilliance.
The Wild West.
I don’t know what that is, but maybe. As far as they’re concerned, I define what is good and what is bad over there.
That’s a lot of responsibility.
Not really, it’s fun.
*
For the next four months, I wrote Anya a letter per week on an Underwood typewriter given to me as a birthday present by an ex I’d dated for five years. To be honest, I didn’t just type the letters out. I wrote them in a notebook and reworked each sentence for a week. A few friends chipped in suggestions, lines they would hope to read in a letter if someone ever sent them one.
I considered myself a writer, but I had been too embarrassed to say that to anyone before Anya. I worked harder on the letters than I had on any piece of writing to that point. In one letter, I told Anya about how important freedom is to a writer, a territory one had to discover, a clearing in the mental woods (a friend of mine was getting his PhD and had a comic book rendering of Heidegger’s essential arguments in his living room that I would leaf through between bong rips).
Taped to the wall above my desk was a scrap of paper on which was written a series of Chinese characters. Her address. I copied them onto an envelope, stuck five or six stamps on it, then dropped it in a mailbox outside the bar where Anya and I met.
On the wall next to the scrap was a postcard that read: If you’re going through hell, keep going.
Two months after sending the first letter, an envelope with Chinese postal stamps showed up in my mailbox. At the time, I was living in the middle of the woods with no internet or cell service. These were the years I wore a smoking jacket and rolled my own cigarettes.
For the next thirteen months, Anya and I sent letters back and forth. A letter took at least a month to reach its destination, so a direct response to anything in a previous letter was pointless. Instead, we traded impressionistic sketches from our lives as a way of mapping out the role of the artist.
One day while I was smoking outside the bar where Anya and I met, Olga walked by.
Are you going to see Anya while she’s here?
What?
She asked me for your phone number.
The next day, smoking outside the bar where Anya and I met, Anya called. She asked if I could meet her on the bottom floor of the college library right now. She was in a corner cubby of the art books section, leafing through a folio of George Ault paintings. She stood and we kissed. Then she steered me into her chair and sat on my lap. She asked if we could go back to my house.
*
We had sex in the narrow, not especially clean, modular shower unit of the basement apartment I was renting. On the one hand, I could barely see any daylight between my actual life and a famous artist biopic about my life. On the other hand, Anya’s very loud moans seemed like a performance of pleasure more than an involuntary response to it. We got water all over the floor.
I made a fire in the small cast-iron stove in my living room and laid a few blankets on the floor. We read there for an hour before we got hungry and headed into town for dinner.
We spent the rest of the evening at the bar where we had met. Then she went over to Olga’s to sleep on her couch. The next morning, Anya returned to Ridgefield. The morning after that, she had donuts with her mother and Bill and flew back to China.
*
For another year, we exchanged letters. In one letter, I asked Anya if she thought love was something universal and timeless or if it was a cultural manifestation particular to late-stage capitalism. Do people fall in love in the U.S.S.R? How is it different in post-Soviet Ukraine?
Because it was pointless to respond to questions in each other’s letters, in her next and final letter, Anya said nothing about love only that she was coming back to Connecticut for good.
*
A week after arriving at her mother’s house she called, and I drove down the next morning (I didn’t have a job at the time). While we sat in the living room, Anya leafed through a volume in her set of the complete writings of Kant and got up to put on a Johnny Cash album. Her mother told me it was fine for me to stay the night.
Anya and I made out in the downstairs bathroom, in the hallway, in the garage, wherever we could steal a few minutes.
After dinner, Anya informed her mother that we were going for a walk. She led me to a playground alongside a narrow lake with pencil-grey water. She sat on my lap as I sat on a swing. I told her I was in love with her. She smiled but said she was surprised.
In some of your letters it seemed like you didn’t really like me.
I’m just not a very good writer.
Even so, people wind up saying what they mean.
There was a man, hidden from our view, working in a low stone house that served as the facilities station for the park and nearby docks. The door was slightly ajar and a light the yellow of all public lighting spilled out. Every couple minutes, a piece of equipment would come flying out of the door: life preserver, small plastic shovel, mangled beach chair.
Anya led me to an old stone wall of the kind common to New England and undid my pants. This time Anya was quiet and seemingly so far inside pleasure as to be elsewhere, as though she had entered an invisible enclosure. Who knows what the man in the stone house saw.
*
The next morning, over donuts, I was informed we would be spending the day checking out the Russian Orthodox church that Anya’s mother attended and that Anya would be returning to now that she was home. Important relics had been displayed there during a tour of Orthodox churches in the States in the early 1990s, including the coffin of John the Romanian and the hand of John the Baptist. That these sacred objects had resided even momentarily in the church meant that clergy could be ordained there. The building had sustained a major fire shortly after the reliquary tour, and, seven years later, was still undergoing repairs. The blaze, rather than scaring people off, had only increased the dedication of the congregants.
We set off before noon in Anya’s mother’s 92 Volvo. While snaking through the hills (if one can snake in an early 90s Volvo), Anya would pull over from time to time so we could make out. She asked me about the letters I’d sent her while she was in China, and she told me how happy her mother was to have her back home.
Some of your letters are cold.
You must mean sentimental and naïve.
You might be a little cruel.
Why would I keep writing?
Out of habit. Or a sense of obligation.
I wouldn’t feel any obligation if I didn’t want to see you again.
This is what I mean. Everything outside your focus makes me shiver.
We continued through hills and dense New England woods on a narrow road that ran parallel to innumerable old stone walls. After half-an-hour or so, Anya slowed and pointed to a hand-carved wooden sign, its faded yellow minaret the only part discernible from the sodden earth and forest in which it stood.
A dirt driveway wound through a thick stand of pine until a large white church that could easily have been mistaken for someone’s house came into view. The driveway curved sharply and split, sending us to the right and up the hill. Dense greenery on all sides seemed to fold in on the structure giving it the aspect of a lotus blossom. There was no minaret to be seen.
The Father was descending a set of plywood stairs as we closed our doors. Please, he said, this is your home, always, please. His right hand swept from the church into the sky, extending his welcome to the entire clearing and, it seemed, to the enclosure of God’s great kingdom. Then he turned his back and walked off toward the vicarage. Your home, he said over his shoulder.
We walked around the building’s perimeter before stepping through the frame of a side door on the upper slope. The church was lit only by what sun made it through the forest and by oil lamps hung on long walls and in icon corners, so we had to squint to make our way. Singed timbers and new planks were stacked together in a confusion of building and demolition, and the going was treacherous.
Anya took me by the elbow and walked me to what at first seemed to be a living room but was, in fact, the nave. She unbuttoned her pants and then mine, and she took my right hand and pressed it down the front of her underwear and grabbed my cock as we slumped against the back of a splintered bench. For the next five minutes, we tried to get each other off. Her arm fell asleep. I went down on her and cut my right knee.
The fire had destroyed whole sections of the building. Repairs had been taken up, free of charge, by an Estonian émigré known for his skill with outmoded electrical wiring and the émigré’s son, who, at the urging of his father, had apprenticed with New England’s most well-respected carpentry restoration specialist, knowing one day he would be lowered by his father into the charred pit that once held the wood-burning stove responsible for the church’s immolation.
Anya led me toward the pit, testing the charred planks with her red, open-toed flats as we neared the edge. Ten or fifteen feet below where we stood, the basement floor had burned away completely, leaving open the foundation, an alarmingly deep pit into which sawdust and dust motes traveled in a funnel. It will be a crypt, said Anya. The Fathers here, the exile priests, we expect them to be canonized.
Between us and the future crypt, the émigré’s son sat in a harness, suspended by a coarse rope. As he swung, almost imperceptibly, the flashlight on his helmet shone into a region of the basement we couldn’t see. He didn’t look up at us, nor did he appear to be at work or deep in thought, nor did he look down to the abyss below. He just rocked ever so slightly in his harness.
His father stood on the far side of the pit from us and without prompting told us the history of his work on the church. You know, no money, small crew, so many pieces, small things, really, must be built by hand. The coffins of course. Each Father, his own sleep. Just me and my son. Studied with the best. But only one down per time, in the hole, really. Someone got to pull you out.
Anya took my hand and led me through the rest of the church, pausing in corners to examine painted fabrics and to explain the story of this or that icon and why the recess that once held a scrap of Saint George’s saddlecloth was now empty. I told her that when my grandmother died, she’d left me a small prayer book with scrimshaw for its front and back covers. For a few months, I’d tried saying the prayers at night, hoping they would feel as beautiful as the book, but I felt nothing. The day I packed up my things at college was the day I realized I had lost the book. Anya looked stunned.
We walked out the front of the church onto an unfinished cedar porch. Anya explained that the congregation would have Wednesday dinners here and on Sundays they would gather for the entire day.
This is how we celebrate the body, she said.
The Father had returned from the vicarage and was sitting in a plastic deck chair munching on a piece of crusty Italian bread. I’m not sure he noticed my sheepish smile. It wasn’t until we were in back in Anya’s mother’s Volvo that we realized how heavily we smelled of sex and burnt wood.
I never took you for a church person.
What do you mean?
Prayer, taking communion, rise, kneel, eat this, drink that.
The obedience confuses you?
What about Kant and Deleuze, the stuff you were reading this morning?
I’m not going to stop reading Kant because I eat dinner and pray here one day a week.
And what about what we just did inside?
If you had a sacred place, you wouldn’t allow sex there?
*
The next morning, Anya informed me that she had to take me home.
If we aren’t getting married, I can’t ask my mother to let you stay here any longer.
We stopped at a trucker gas station on the way. Before we got out to use the bathrooms, we made out. I asked Anya why she’d come home.
When I was in Beijing, she said, I realized no one could see me. People attributed everything I did to me being a foreigner. At some point, I decided that if I was a freak, I would start to act like one. God sees freaks, you know. Freakish behavior is a holy passport. The people who smuggle themselves across borders hidden in their own skin. This was the way of the early Christians.
I decided to see how far I could take it. I started to dress only in lingerie. At first, I’d wear a jacket, this jacket, actually, you know, buttoned, a sash, no one would find it odd to keep it on. But then I decided to leave it open, and then finally I got rid of the jacket and would ride to the gallery or the club on my bike in sexy lingerie.
You weren’t afraid?
No, not at all. No one noticed me. Men had no idea what to do with me except to go partially blind. I did crazier and crazier shit until I became invisible. But because life is the continual collapse of paradoxes, once Beijing taught me how to become invisible, I became incredibly homesick. And then an image of the church appeared in my mind.
*
In the gas station bathroom, I washed my hands with orange ZAP and splashed water on my face. My reflection seemed further away than normal. When I stepped back into the winter air, my hands stung. I had scrubbed them nearly raw.
Anya was in the car, gloved hands resting on the wheel. She smiled when I entered her plane of vision though I could tell she wasn’t really looking at me. I imagined her mind as a series of unfinished walls, singed floorboards, an empty crypt being readied for the preserved corpses of saints. I pictured myself down in the pit, plinking away on my Underwood in the background, beams of a flashlight bringing me out of and returning me to darkness.
When I sat in my seat, I felt the air in the car shift. We didn’t speak more than five words for the two-hour drive to the center of my town.
When we arrived at the bar where we had met, Anya smiled at me without making eye contact. I got out. I waved to her through the open passenger window.
It’s snowing, I said.
Yes, she said. You should make yourself a fire.
Nick Rattner lives in Houston. Recent work has appeared in / will soon appear in Fence, Colorado Review, The Cortland Review, Sixth Finch, Pleiades, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill, and Asymptote. At present, he is translating the work of Spanish poet Juan Andrés García Román.