Bobcat and Other Stories Read online

  Our guests left soon after, leaving behind this woman at the door, who would stay and stay. I gave the guests some marzipan boats, to eat on the subway, or save for another day. Susan bit into one right away and thanked me for a wonderful party. But she knew. She put her hand on my shoulder, and her eyes let me know, Just crouch down, hold tight, there’s a little bit of pain for you, but not too much.

  The Banks of the Vistula

  It was dusk; the campus had turned to velvet. I walked the brick path to Humanities, which loomed there and seemed to incline toward me, as God does toward the sinner in the book of Psalms. It was late on a Friday afternoon, when the air is fertile, about to split and reveal its warm fruit—that gold nucleus of time, the weekend. Inside, up the stairs, the door to Stasselova’s office was open, and the professor lifted his head. “Oh,” he said. “Yes.” He coughed, deep in his lungs, and motioned me in. He had requested this visit earlier in the day, following class. His course was titled Speaking in Tongues: Introductory Linguistics. Stasselova was about sixty-five and a big man, his torso an almost perfect square. Behind his balding head the blond architecture of St. Gustav College rose into the cobalt sky. It looked like a rendition of thought itself, rising out of the head in intricate, heartbreaking cornices that became more abstract and complicated as they rose.

  I was in my third week of college. I loved every moment of it, every footfall. The students resembled the students I’d known in high school, Scandinavian midwesterners like myself, whose fathers were all pastors or some declension thereof—but the professors thrilled me. Most had come from the East Coast and seemed fragile and miserable in the Midwest. Occasionally during class you could see hope for us rising in them, and then they would look like great birds flying over an uncertain landscape, asking mysterious questions, trying to lead us somewhere we could not yet go.

  I wanted to be noticed by them, to distinguish myself from the ordinary mass of students, and to this end I had plagiarized my first paper for Stasselova’s class. This was why, I presumed, he had called me to his office.

  The paper, titled “The Common Harvest,” was on the desk between us. I had found it in the Kierkegaard Library. It was a chapter in an old green-cloth book that was so small I could palm it. The book had been written in 1945 by a man named Delores Tretsky, and it hadn’t been signed out since 1956. I began to leaf through it, and then crouched down to read. I read for a full hour; I thought it beautiful. I had not once in all my life stopped for even a moment to consider grammar, to wonder how it rose out of history like a wing unfurling.

  I had intended to write my own paper, to synthesize, as Stasselova had suggested, my own ideas with the author’s, but I simply had nothing to contribute. It seemed even rude to combine this work with my own pale, unemotional ideas. So I lifted a chapter, only occasionally dimming some passages that were too fine, too blinding.

  “THIS IS AN EXTRAORDINARY paper,” he said. He was holding his coffee cup over it, and I saw that coffee had already spilled on the page to form a small, murky pond.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It seems quite sophisticated. You must not have come here straight out of high school.”

  “I did,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, good for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You seem fully immersed in a study of oppression. Any reason for this?”

  “Well, I do live in the world.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And you say here—a shocking line—that a language must sometimes be repressed, and replaced, for the larger good. You believe this?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think that the Eastern-bloc countries should be forced to speak, as you say here, the mother tongue?”

  Some parts of the paper I had just copied down verbatim, without really understanding, and now I was stuck with them. Now they were my opinions. “Yes,” I said.

  “You know I am from that region.”

  “Is that right?”

  “From Poland.”

  “Whereabouts in Poland?” I asked conversationally.

  “I was born on the edge of it, in the dark forest land along its northeastern border, before the Soviet Union took it over completely, burning our towns. As children we were forced to speak Russian, even in our homes, even when we said good night to our mothers as we fell asleep.”

  This was turning into a little piece of bad luck.

  “When did you write this?” he asked.

  “Last week.”

  “It reads like it was written fifty years ago. It reads like Soviet propaganda.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Did somebody help you?”

  “Actually, yes. Certainly that’s all right?”

  “Of course, if done properly. Who was it that helped you, a book or a person?”

  “My roommate helped me,” I said.

  “Your roommate. What is her name?”

  “Solveig.”

  “Solveig what?”

  “Solveig Juliusson.”

  “Is she a linguistics scholar?”

  “No, just very bright.”

  “Maybe I can talk to Solveig myself?”

  “Unfortunately, you can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “In what way?”

  “Well, she’s stopped eating. She’s very thin. Her parents were worried, so they took her home.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We both sat silent. Luckily, I had experience lying in my adolescence and knew it was possible to win even though both parties were aware of the lie. The exercise was not a search for truth but rather a test of exterior reserve.

  “I’m sure she’ll be returning soon,” I said. “I’ll have her call you.”

  Stasselova smiled. “Tell her to eat up,” he said, his sarcasm curled inside his concern.

  “Okay,” I said. I got up and hoisted my bag over my shoulder. As I stood, I could see the upper edge of the sun falling down off the hill on which St. Gustav was built. I’d never seen the sun from this angle before, from above as it fell, as it so obviously lit up another part of the world, perhaps even flaming up the sights of Stasselova’s precious, oppressed Poland, its dark contested forests and burning cities, its dreamy and violent borders.

  MY ROOMMATE SOLVEIG WAS permanently tan. She went twice a week to a tanning salon and bleached her hair frequently, so that it looked like radioactive foliage growing out of dark, moody sands. Despite all this she was very beautiful, and sensible. “Margaret,” she said, when I came in that evening. “The library telephoned to recall a book. They said it was urgent.”

  I had thought he might check the library. “Okay,” I said. As I rifled through the clothes on my closet floor, I decided it would have to be burned. I would finish the book and then I would burn it. But first there was tonight, and I had that rare thing, a date.

  My date was from Stasselova’s class. His name was Hans; he was a junior, and his father was a diplomat. He had almost auburn hair that fell to his neckline. He wore, always, long white shirts whose sleeves were just slightly, almost imperceptibly, puffed at the shoulders, like an elegant little joke, and very long, so they hung over his hands. I thought he was articulate, kind. I had in a moment of astonishment asked him out.

  The night was soft and warm. We walked through the tiny town, wandered its thin river. We ate burgers. He spoke of Moscow, where he had lived that summer. I had spent my childhood with a vision of Russia as an anti-America, a sort of fairy-tale intellectual prison. But this was 1987, the beginning of perestroika, of glasnost, and views of Russia were changing. Television showed a country of rain and difficulty and great humility, and Gorbachev was always bowing to sign something or other, his head bearing a mysterious stain shaped like a continent one could almost but not quite identify. I said to Hans that I wanted to go there myself, though I had never thought
of the idea before that moment. He said, “You can if you want.” We were in his small, iridescent apartment by now. “Or perhaps to Poland,” I said, thinking of Stasselova.

  “Poland,” Hans said. “Yes. What is left of it, after men like Stasselova.”

  “What do you mean, men like Stasselova?”

  “Soviet puppets.”

  “Yet he is clearly anti-Soviet,” I said.

  “Now, yes. Everybody is anti-Soviet now.” The sign for the one Japanese restaurant in town cast a worldly orange light into the room, carving Hans’s body into geometric shapes. He took my hand, and at that moment the whole world seemed to have entered his apartment. I found him intelligent, deliberate, large-hearted. “Now,” he said, “is the time to be anti-Soviet.”

  ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, IN class, Hans sat across from me. We were all sitting around a conference table, waiting for Stasselova. Hans smiled. I gave him the peace sign across the table. When I looked back at him, moments later, Hans’s hands were casually laid out on the table, palms down. I saw then, for the first time, that his left hand tapered into only three fingers, which were fused together at the top knuckle. The hand looked delicate, surprising. I had not noticed this on our date, and now I wondered if he had purposely kept me from seeing it, or if I had somehow just missed it. For a brief, confused moment, I even wondered if the transformation had occurred between then and now. Hans looked me squarely in the eye. I smiled back. Stasselova then entered the room. In light of my date with Hans, I had almost forgotten my visit with him the previous Friday. I’d meant to burn the book over the weekend in the darkness at the ravine, though I dreaded this. My mother was a librarian, and I knew that the vision of her daughter burning a book would have been like a sledgehammer to the heart.

  Throughout the class Stasselova seemed to be speaking directly to me, still chastising me. His eyes kept resting on me disapprovingly. “The reason for the sentence is to express the verb—a change, a desire. But the verb cannot stand alone; it needs to be supported, to be realized by a body, and thus the noun—just as the soul in its trajectory through life needs to be comforted by the body.”

  The sun’s rays slanted in on Stasselova as he veered into very interesting territory. “All things in revolution,” he said, “in this way, need protection. For instance, when my country, Poland, was annexed by the Soviet Union, we had the choice of joining what was called Berling’s Army, the Polish wing of the Russian army, or the independent Home Army. Many considered it anti-Polish to join the Russian army, but I believed, as did my comrades, that more could be done through the system, within the support of the system, than without.”

  He looked at me. I nodded. I was one of those students who nod a lot. His eyes were like brown velvet under glass. “This is the power of the sentence,” he said. “It acts out this drama of control and subversion. The noun always stands for what is, the status quo, and the verb for what might be, the ideal.”

  Across the table Hans’s damaged hand, spindly and nervy, drummed impatiently on the tabletop. I could tell he wanted to speak up. Stasselova turned to him. “That was the decision I made,” he said. “Years ago. Right or wrong, I thought it best at the time. I thought we could do more work for the Polish cause from within the Red Army than from outside it.”

  Hans’s face was impassive. He suddenly looked years older—austere, cold, priestly. Stasselova turned then to look at me. This was obviously an issue for him, I thought, and I nodded as he continued to speak. I really did feel supportive. Whatever army he thought was best at the time, that was fine with me.

  IN THE EVENING I went to the ravine in the elm forest, which lay curled around the hill on which the campus was built. This forest seemed deeply peaceful to me, almost conscious. I didn’t know the reason for this at the time—that many elms in a forest can spring from a single tree. In this case a single elm had divided herself into a forest, an individual with a continuous DNA in whose midst one could stand and be held. The ravine cut through like an old emotional wound. I crouched on its bank and glanced at the book one last time. I flicked open my lighter. The book caught fire instantly. As the flame approached my hand, I arced the book into the murky water. It looked spectacular, a high wing of flame rising from it. Inside, in one of its luminous chapters, I had read that the ability to use language and the ability to tame fire arose from the same warm, shimmering pool of genes, since in nature they did not appear one without the other.

  As I made my way out of the woods and into the long silver ditch that lined the highway, I heard about a thousand birds cry, and I craned my neck to see them lighting out from the tips of the elms. They looked like ideas would if released suddenly from the page and given bodies—shocked at how blood actually felt as it ran through the veins, as it sent them wheeling into the west, wings raking, straining against the requirements of such a physical world.

  I RETURNED AND FOUND Solveig turning in the lamplight. Her hair was piled on her head, so unnaturally blond it looked ablaze, and her face was bronze. She looked a thousand years old. “Some guy called,” she said. “Stasselova or something.”

  He called again that night, at nearly midnight. I thought this unseemly.

  “So,” he said. “Solveig’s back.”

  “Yes,” I said, glancing at her. She was at her mirror, performing some ablution on her face. “She’s much better.”

  “Perhaps the three of us can now meet.”

  “Oh,” I said, “it’s too early.”

  “Too early in what?”

  “In her recovery.” Solveig wheeled her head around to look at me. I smiled, shrugged.

  “I think she’ll be okay.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ll give you a choice: you can either rewrite the paper in my office, bringing in whatever materials you need, or the three of us can meet and clear this up.”

  “Fine, we’ll meet you.”

  “You know my hours.”

  “I do.” I hung up and explained to Solveig what had happened—Stasselova’s obsession with language and oppression, my plagiarism, the invocation of her name. Solveig nodded and said of course, whatever she could do she would.

  WHEN WE ARRIVED THAT Wednesday, the light had almost gone from his office but was still lingering outside the windows, like the light in fairy tales, rich and creepy. Solveig was brilliant. Just her posture, as she sat in the narrow chair, was enough initially to chasten Stasselova. In her presence men were driven to politeness, to sincerity, to a kind of deep, internal apology. He thanked her, bowing a little at his desk. “Your work has interested me,” he said.

  “It is not my work, sir. It’s Margaret’s. We just discussed together some of the ideas.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, the necessity of a collective language, a mutual tongue.”

  “And why is that necessary?” Stasselova leaned back and folded his hands across his vast torso.

  “To maintain order,” she said. And then the sun fell completely, blowing one last blast of light across the Americas before it settled into the Soviet Union, and some of that light, a glittery, barely perceptible dust, settled around Solveig’s head. She looked like a dominatrix, an intellectual dominatrix, delivering this brutal news.

  “And your history in psycholinguistics?” he said.

  “I have only my personal history,” she said. “The things that have happened to me.” I would not have been surprised if at that declaration the whole university had imploded, turned to liquid, and flowed away. “Besides,” she said, “all the research and work was Margaret’s. I saw her working on it, night after night.”

  “Then, Margaret,” he turned his gaze on me, “I see you are intimately connected with evolutionary history as well as Soviet ideology. As well, it appears, you’ve been steeped in a lifetime’s study of linguistic psychosocial theory.”

  “Is it because she’s female,” Solveig asked, “that she’s made to account for every scrap of knowledge
?”

  “Look,” he said after a long, cruel silence, “I simply want to know from what cesspool these ideas arose. If you got them from a book, I will be relieved, but if these ideas are still floating around in your bloodlines, in your wretched little towns, I want to know.”

  I was about to cave in. Better a plagiarist than a fascist from a tainted bloodline.

  “I don’t really think you should be talking about our bloodlines,” Solveig said. “It’s probably not appropriate.” She enunciated the word “appropriate” in such a way that Stasselova flinched, just slightly. Both he and I stared at her. She really was extraordinarily thin. In a certain light she could look shockingly beautiful, but in another, such as the dim one in Stasselova’s office, she could look rather threatening. Her contact lenses were the color of a night sky split by lightning. Her genetic information was almost entirely hidden—the color of her hair and eyes and skin, the shape of her body—and this gave her a psychological advantage of sorts.

  STASSELOVA’S LECTURE ON THURSDAY afternoon was another strange little affair, given as long autumn rays of sun, embroidered by leaves, covered his face and body. He was onto his main obsession again, the verb—specifically, the work of the verb in the sentence and how it relates to the work of a man in the world. “The revolution takes place from a position of stability, always. The true revolutionary will find his place within the status quo.”