The movie was too long, she thought. Most movies are about an hour too long. She had been folding and unfolding her program, the paper corners curling. This one was a film about two gay German farmers finding love amidst the cornfields. It was classified as an art film, not porn, so they could still show it for the film festival, even with the new laws. Why did gay love always need to be portrayed in the most artistic and esoteric way possible?
It was the coldest winter in a century, but he had been born in St. Petersburg and was accustomed to the freezing wind and the ice-blanketed streets. The city was supposed to resemble Paris, an homage to Europe in the place where river meets gulf and East meets West. It was the most beautiful city in the world, probably. But beauty rarely exists without some painful flaw.
The theater was emptying out as the audience gathered their overcoats and bags and began to depart. It was about 9pm on one of the shortest days of the year. It had already been dark for hours. Across the room, she saw him. That familiar chestnut hair was what she noticed first. Then the curve of his Roman nose. His brown-black eyes, shiftier than usual. Vova! Was he alone? She raised a hand and tried to wave. He turned and left the theater at a quickened pace, filing past solemn moviegoers who were putting on their winter layers in the half-light of the aisles. Having reached the exit, he shook hands with an usher and kept walking, disappearing from sight.
She had to catch him. The urgency of it lurched into her mind, a hansom-cab horse departing for some ancient, doomed party. It had been three years since they said goodbye on Christmas Eve in that same city, in that quiet, slanted apartment he shared with four other students from the philology department. He had been thinner then, paler. Waxy skin and sunken features. His hair was too long and curled around his ears, wavy and unkempt in a way that is attractive on a man only when he is already distressingly handsome. That exquisite nose, a rudder on his waxen face, had been even more prominent then. A hundred years after the revolution and the aristocrats still hide their features under greasy hair and zip-up sweatshirts.
At twenty, she had been madly in love with him, the idea of him. A slim, sensitive man who studied Pushkin ardently and smoked French cigarettes. He was prettier than her, which she loved because it meant she could adore him. And she did. He held the answers to so many intractable problems, then. They would sit in a bar on the same side of the booth, holding hands under the table, looking straight ahead, and saying nothing. Then, after a sufficient number of drinks, two or three, they would walk the half dozen blocks in swirling wind back to his apartment and undress silently. Layer after layer, shirt and pants and socks removed and placed on a chair, as slow and methodical as a pair of elderly women preparing for their daily swim at the Y. They would slip under the covers and lie together side by side.
He had seen her, sitting alone near the back of the theater with a stack of festival programs. Their eyes met and a flash of something—recognition? surprise? pain?—had skittered across her face. Time to go. He made his way to the exit, his long spidery legs taking the steps two at a time. Out to the street, brace of cold wind and swamp vapor in his ears, eyes, the exposed part of his neck.
She ran out of the theater, keeping her arms close to her body in a gesture of deference. It’s impolite to run in crowded public places. Dangerous, even. The voice of an old teacher was in her head: “No running in the halls!” But no matter. Soon enough she was out in the dark damp night, determined to catch him, looking for a sign to appear. A glimpse of chestnut hair thirty paces away, moving quickly. She walked quickly towards him, but with careful steps, not wanting to frighten the buck.
“Vova!” she called again, as she had across the theater. He heard her but kept walking.
Eto ty? she asked, her voice rising on the second syllable in Russian to express everything she was feeling: question, surprise, delight. Is it really you? She looked up at him. They were quiet for a minute as they stood on the sidewalk. She could see her breath floating in the air. She could hear the sound of footsteps on the cobblestones as people walked by. An inscrutable cloud of emotion passed over his face, obscuring those familiar features. A second too late, he recovered himself and said, with sudden brightness: “How are you?”
Skol’ko let, skol’ko zim, she replied, matching his false cheer, trotting out a line from second-year Russian. As if they were playing some icebreaker game, trading favorite colors and birthdays. As if they did not know each other at all. How many summers, how many winters it’s been!
He smiled in that closed-mouth smirk that is popular among Russians. Revealing nothing. “Shall we go for a drink?” he suggested. She agreed, relieved that he had shown some mild sign of interest in her.
She took his arm in the old familiar way, her hand on his wrist, his hand in his coat pocket. They walked to some unknown cafe on the Petrograd side of the city and sat down. This time, for the first time, across from one another. She wanted to look into his eyes, to find some kind of answer, to get something like closure.
Selfishly, she wanted to ask the painful, obvious questions. The ones that she knew would hurt him. The ones that language made impossible for her to ask delicately. He had always been reserved, unassuming, secure in himself. It was something she admired in him.
Why are you attending queer film festivals alone, and watching prurient art flicks about gay German farmers? Are you gay? Have you always known, in the way that I have always known about certain preferences? Do you still fuck women?
She picked at a paper napkin instead. They spoke of other things. His father, his studies at the university, the new apartment he had just moved into along the embankment. It was quieter there, he said. He liked to live alone.
Rachel Jay Russell is a writer in the MFA program at Columbia University. She lives in New York. You can read more of her work at racheljayrussell.com.
