The Man
Who Collected Souls
Who Collected Souls
A RURAL WINTER LANDSCAPE APPEARS ASLEEP, covered with a milky goose down duvet that bloats with every snowfall. Any attempt at pulling down that coverlet is a startling reminder of the alabaster hardness of it all. The countryside in spring can be a cruel revelation for people with secrets.
The taxi driver, a Somali man—Cheshire-cat grin, dull yellow eyes sunk into a raw-boned, eggplant-colored face— searches Ludmila Leskov’s expression. She’s lashed over the front seat like a Siren, guiding him all the way from the bus station in Freehold, New Jersey, until she urges him forcefully to a stop along Brick House Road.
“Here?” he asks warily.
She nods.
He swivels in the driver’s seat, looks across the road to
posted woodland—a fenced-off danger zone—some kind of military complex. He turns back to the shred of an entrance, just off the main road, that disappears into more forest. There is no mailbox, no sign, nothing. Just the rusted bones of a bicycle on its side, pedals stiff from disuse, like an old horse gone to its reward.
“Don’t pull into the drive. You’ll never get out,” she says. “You sure, Miss?”
“Yes. Yes. Of course I’m sure. I lived here!”
Hurried and vexed, she overtips him. Which makes him
more ill at ease.
“Okay,” he says, popping the trunk. He pockets the bills.
She is out of his cab before the meter spits out a receipt. She yanks her backpack from the trunk and tosses it to the side of the road. The driver emerges halfway from his cab, catches her eye and retreats. She wrestles with the wheels of a zebra- patterned suitcase and slams the trunk closed.
The car speeds away, leaving Ludmila enveloped by the silence she remembers of the place at certain times of the year. It is a mystical stillness, grand in the absence of snow blowers and the whipcrack of a deer hunter’s rifle. On that Monday morning, commuters have already shot through the tolls heading for Manhattan. Soon enough, gardeners, contractors and the weekend roar of the neighbors’ manic obsession with the Rolls Royce of lawn tractors will infiltrate that silence.
Ludmila steps a few feet in from the road, adjusts her backpack, before running her fingers through a boyish crop of auburn curls. She is tall, like her parents, and slender. They called her Lud as a child. She was a tomboy then and still adopts that attitude. Her girlfriend, Carmen, calls her Luddo. Her face is makeup free, her skin translucent. Her cheeks redden naturally in the country air.
The property—some twenty acres—is at the edge of the Pinelands. Sandy soil has its limitations, but seems never to hinder the forest growth of pine and oak. Holly grows everywhere, rooted in prickly insistence. In summer, mountain laurel appears in delicate clusters of pink and white, like miniature cupcakes at a tea party.
Chill morning air makes her shiver. She wears a dun-gray, short-sleeve t-shirt. On the front are two black ravens, heads turned away from each other. There’s a hoodie in the suitcase, but she will wait to unpack in the house. Deer country means ticks. Her black jeans may have been a bad idea, though it’s still early in the season.
The driveway is nothing more than an extended, overripe dump in early April, lashed by the seasons and ruined by unknowable, regretful years. Her memory, still to be disturbed, relies on an inborn compass. Her stance is battle ready, knees slightly bent for lift off. She regards her Doc Martens—her foot armor—and grabs the handle of the suitcase.
Sodden earth gives way as she plunges up the drive, towing the suitcase behind her. Crunching underfoot are metal, glass, and plastic shards reduced to an indecipherable mosaic that will eventually disappear in the undergrowth. The sound is of a broken-toothed maw sucking as hard as it can to slow her down.
A brownish furred lump darts across her path, stopping her. She blurts after the startled groundhog, “He’s dead!”
From where she stands just before the bend in the drive, Ludmila knows the return will be painful. That every memory—like every broken tree branch and every bit of poison ivy, every tick that sucks the lifeblood, every chigger that bites through remorse, every flea that irritates the itch that cannot be reached, and every downed power line lurking in the undergrowth—means there had once been a very different life here.
“I fear there will be zero fucks given,” she grumbles, pounding through the muck.
At the top of the drive, a massive boat blocks her view of the house. The sight of it brings Ludmila up sharply. It appears to be shipwrecked atop a chaotic assembly of iron railings and wood planks. Yellow caution tape, like an inert serpent, is strung around it.
The prow of the yacht soars with the conviction that glory is possible, recalling a demented character who angered the gods in a Werner Herzog film. If there are gods to be appeased, Ludmila is damned if she knows who they are.
A moan escapes her and ricochets off the surrounding forest. “Why me? Why, why, why....”
She ducks to the side of the towering castaway. Behind it stands the house, her father’s house. Its multiple windows— mismatched nearly to a one—peer down at her with schizophrenic disregard for convention. Rough patches cover the exterior in various stages of wear. Orange and gray cinderblocks are exposed in some places. Mortar is frozen mid-ooze between the blocks. There are balconies— constructed from odds and ends, secured to the sides and front of the house—that no sane human being would dare chance. The house looks back at her as if to say, “This is how we Russians do it. We scavenge.”
Ludmila approaches from a narrow tear of dirt, between broken flowerpots and a battered wheelbarrow pooled with stagnant water, slumped in defeat. She skirts an assortment of bicycle wheels and something that looks like an industrial vacuum. She pushes at one of a trio of rusted metal drums that slosh with god-knows-what. Split logs lie like desiccated limbs, piled under a blue tarp. “He had heat at least,” she murmurs.
From where she stands just before the bend in the drive, Ludmila knows the return will be painful. That every memory—like every broken tree branch and every bit of poison ivy, every tick that sucks the lifeblood, every chigger that bites through remorse, every flea that irritates the itch that cannot be reached, and every downed power line lurking in the undergrowth—means there had once been a very different life here.
“I fear there will be zero fucks given,” she grumbles, pounding through the muck.
At the top of the drive, a massive boat blocks her view of the house. The sight of it brings Ludmila up sharply. It appears to be shipwrecked atop a chaotic assembly of iron railings and wood planks. Yellow caution tape, like an inert serpent, is strung around it.
The prow of the yacht soars with the conviction that glory is possible, recalling a demented character who angered the gods in a Werner Herzog film. If there are gods to be appeased, Ludmila is damned if she knows who they are.
A moan escapes her and ricochets off the surrounding forest. “Why me? Why, why, why....”
She ducks to the side of the towering castaway. Behind it stands the house, her father’s house. Its multiple windows— mismatched nearly to a one—peer down at her with schizophrenic disregard for convention. Rough patches cover the exterior in various stages of wear. Orange and gray cinderblocks are exposed in some places. Mortar is frozen mid-ooze between the blocks. There are balconies— constructed from odds and ends, secured to the sides and front of the house—that no sane human being would dare chance. The house looks back at her as if to say, “This is how we Russians do it. We scavenge.”
Ludmila approaches from a narrow tear of dirt, between broken flowerpots and a battered wheelbarrow pooled with stagnant water, slumped in defeat. She skirts an assortment of bicycle wheels and something that looks like an industrial vacuum. She pushes at one of a trio of rusted metal drums that slosh with god-knows-what. Split logs lie like desiccated limbs, piled under a blue tarp. “He had heat at least,” she murmurs.
She drags the suitcase up cement stairs that look like hardened oatmeal, onto broad weathered planks—what passes for a front porch—and stops to peer at two time-darkened windows. A memory flap opens and closes before it can strike a note. She moves clumsily among garden tools barely recognizable in their oxidized state. She steps around coils of razor wire. Plastic buckets of indeterminate material stand like sentries at the front door.
Ludmila forces the front-door lock with a skeleton key. Applying her shoulder to the door, she presses it hard. She chills at the notion that on the other side is memory’s resistance to her return.
The smell hits her right off, pungent, yet still sweet: rotting vegetables, dead animal, mold, cat food and cat piss. Pipe tobacco—the kind her father smoked—evokes caramel and honey and vanilla.
The resistance, it turns out, is a sea of detritus swept up against the front door. Ludmila leaves her suitcase on the porch. She has to pee. Rethinking her bladder, she retreats to the bottom of the porch stairs, slips behind the log pile and lowers her jeans.
Relieved, she steps carefully into a dark entrance hall. The door to the room on the left is nailed shut. A wooden ladder leans against it. The stairway to the floor above is on the right. Cardboard cartons jammed with books, all kinds of picture frames—some empty, some bordering squally seascapes—spill through another doorway into a larger room where computers and keyboards are tossed about as though a dry hurricane has ripped through it. She makes her way, looking for a kitchen table she remembers, and discovers it to be there still. Its surface is piled with camera bodies, video equipment and lenses. More than a dozen tripods—maybe two dozen—crowd around the table, tilted as if laid for a bonfire.
The room she remembers to be the kitchen is in the rear, beyond the table, darkened and crowded with shapes she cannot discern. It is nothing she wants to tackle just yet.
A glance into the main room means she will leave further exploration until later. The atmosphere is muscular and unsound. She needs fresh air, but the windows are blocked by odd bits of furniture, mismatched chairs in a towering display of single-mindedness, and heaps of crockery that will come crashing down with one wrong move. The windows are winterized with bubble wrap, giving the room a hive-like feel.
Ludmila forces the front-door lock with a skeleton key. Applying her shoulder to the door, she presses it hard. She chills at the notion that on the other side is memory’s resistance to her return.
The smell hits her right off, pungent, yet still sweet: rotting vegetables, dead animal, mold, cat food and cat piss. Pipe tobacco—the kind her father smoked—evokes caramel and honey and vanilla.
The resistance, it turns out, is a sea of detritus swept up against the front door. Ludmila leaves her suitcase on the porch. She has to pee. Rethinking her bladder, she retreats to the bottom of the porch stairs, slips behind the log pile and lowers her jeans.
Relieved, she steps carefully into a dark entrance hall. The door to the room on the left is nailed shut. A wooden ladder leans against it. The stairway to the floor above is on the right. Cardboard cartons jammed with books, all kinds of picture frames—some empty, some bordering squally seascapes—spill through another doorway into a larger room where computers and keyboards are tossed about as though a dry hurricane has ripped through it. She makes her way, looking for a kitchen table she remembers, and discovers it to be there still. Its surface is piled with camera bodies, video equipment and lenses. More than a dozen tripods—maybe two dozen—crowd around the table, tilted as if laid for a bonfire.
The room she remembers to be the kitchen is in the rear, beyond the table, darkened and crowded with shapes she cannot discern. It is nothing she wants to tackle just yet.
A glance into the main room means she will leave further exploration until later. The atmosphere is muscular and unsound. She needs fresh air, but the windows are blocked by odd bits of furniture, mismatched chairs in a towering display of single-mindedness, and heaps of crockery that will come crashing down with one wrong move. The windows are winterized with bubble wrap, giving the room a hive-like feel.
Holding her breath, Ludmila backtracks through the salvage and heads up to the second floor.
The stairway is narrow, uneven, and steep. She has to step sideways in her graceless boots. The stairs lead to another large room where she skirts a jumbled pile of careworn hats dropped among orphaned and maimed gloves. She kicks aside a disfigured snarl of shoes. She tears bubble wrap from its tape moorings and jerks open a window. Chill terrarium air oozes into the stale-smelling room.
Sliding her backpack from her shoulders, she plants her elbows on the windowsill. From above, the boat looks smaller, meaningless. A token among many tokens she knows exist in the house and around the property. Her father had the monopoly on useless things. That boat below. She’d already passed “go” on the front path when she found the wheelbarrow. She knows there is more. She is sure to unearth an old-style boot. She does not expect to come upon a Scotty dog. Her father loved cats. He was never without cats. With a start she bolts upright, banging her head hard on the window sash.
Ludmila scans the room looking for a cat, any sign that there have been cats. Certainly there is strong evidence of something animal in the stench. She dares not think that her father had been that far gone. But what does she know? She doesn’t have a cat. Maybe it’s a raccoon, or god-knows-what under a hillock of quilts in a gloomy corner of the room.
A far off pinging startles her. Like the sound a black box makes from the plane wreckage at the bottom of the ocean. She stares blankly until she realizes it’s her cell phone. Retrieving it from her backpack, she sees it is her lover, Carmen.
“Hey, babe. I was just thinking about you.”
Carmen snorts. “No, you were not.” She laughs—a deep, tantalizing whoop that conjures strawberry-shortcake martinis and bullet shots of Jameson. “Seriously. Is everything okay? Are you there? How was the flight? What shape is the place in? Have you met—?”
“Hang on,” Ludmila cries, and then shrugs off annoyance at Carmen’s persistence. Carmen is an army of one, a force to be reckoned with, a fun house on legs and all Mexican heart. Today Ludmila is relieved to hear her voice.
“Luddo? You okay? ¿Qué onda?”
“Nothing much, yet. I’m fine. Well, I just smacked my head. Got here a little while ago. I want to walk over the property while it’s still daylight.” She searches for a light switch. Flips it rapidly on and off. “Cool. The electricity is on.”
“I can fly out any time, babe. Just say the word.”
Ludmila imagines for a few seconds Carmen’s reaction to the scene. “Nah. I’m good. Gotta go. Lots to do.”
“When are you coming home? I miss your monkey arms.” “Soon. Very soon,” Ludmila says.
“Be careful, okay? Watch your head. Love you, Changa—.” “Yup. Will do. Talk tomorrow.”
She needs air. What little comes from the open window at the top of the stairs hardly makes a dent in the sensation that something in that room has died.
Making her way carefully, Ludmila missteps, animating a nest of wind chimes into clangorous objection. Panels lie separated from a white drop-leaf table, abandoned halfway through IHIVKEA instructions. Periodicals and newspapers tower in stacks of oddly configured columns circling what looks like a miniature church. It turns out to be a vintage radio missing its knobs. She manages to get the balcony doors unstuck. A dubious-looking beach chair sits stranded atop tarpaper that curls like wavelets on a winter sea. There is no railing. She is not tempted and retreats into the room, leaving the doors ajar.
Acutely aware of fatigue, she needs to sit. The drive from San Pedro to LAX had followed a lethargic crow; twenty-five miles had become a bloated hour and a half of stalled freeway. Carmen, at the wheel, was happy as a mothering clam— reassuring, and at the same time assuredly foreboding. She has a chimerical gift for sniffing out the tragic wrapped in the ordinary and then cheerily expounding on that. Ludmila has lost count of the hours she’s been in transit—the overnight flight, the subway to Port Authority, then a bus and a cab.
She shoves aside bits of clothing—limp corpses drained of their organs—on a couch pushed up against the stair banister. She unearths a black-and-red plaid wool jacket. It will do for a blanket. She unlaces her boots and kicks them off. Anticipating a restorative nap, she sinks into the funky-smelling cushions. She thinks she hears a gnawing sound.
...
LUDMILA WAKES IN HALF-LIGHT the color of honey, trapped in amber. A fitful dream disappears. She is aware of a walloping in her chest—her heart—a small animal beating against the bars of its cage. The manly scent of the wool jacket, like smelling salts under her nose, brings her back to life. She grips the jacket, her father’s jacket. Maxim. Never called Max. She remembers the light switch and rises stiffly.
There are messages from Carmen on her cell.
Carmen and Ludmila’s relationship—what Carmen thinks is love and what Lud loosely calls extended coupling—has lasted nearly nine months. They are an odd couple. Resourceful ghostwriter. Procrastinating poet. West Coast. East Coast. Short. Tall. Mocha. Vanilla. Hot. Cold. Day. Night. Lesbian. Undecided. Ludmila never had a female lover until Carmen, and she was forty before that happened. Carmen, who was nearing fifty, said she knew the first time she saw Ludmila at the poetry reading in San Pedro that she was the one. Ludmila still does not know.
She’s had only one other extended coupling. Ben was an actor in a big hurry to get out of New York. His friend Gottfried was the artistic director of the Players Workshop in San Miguel de Allende. Ben invited Ludmila to join him in Mexico. He described a charming town in a temperate climate, hidden courtyards and cobblestone streets. Little houses awash in primary colors, the lively sounds in markets and shops. That there was a week-long poetry festival nearly won her over and though she had conflicted feelings about the Beats—loved Ginsburg, hated Kerouac—she was oddly persuaded when Ben told her that Neal Cassady had partied there and then died on the railroad tracks on the outskirts of the town. She liked the sound of expat artist. She would stop wearing black.
Three months later she had had enough of mariachi music, artisan shops and galleries, and watching expat retirees navigate the inescapable cobblestone. Couch surfing played havoc with her back. In a place lousy with writers and poets, she had tried and failed to write anything of worth, or anything at all.
She returned to the city, rootless, on the scent of one roommate wanted situation to another, one hourly-rate job to another. Christopher Street, the now anorexic arm of Greenwich Village, had lost its pulse and its identity. Williamsburg—and the whole Brooklyn enterprise—scared the shit out of her, with its noisome bearded-and-tattooed army barreling through the streets, cheek by jowl alongside hordes of entitled tourists armed with slick designer shopping bags of contempt. Astoria still had no bookstores of any worth.
Ludmila had been considering, for some months, a pressing overture from her mother, Elena, to reclaim her old room uptown, in Columbia University housing where they’d lived after they left Freehold.
At odds with her mother, she felt they had abandoned her father, and that her mother had given up. Elena once thought she’d be the one to tame Maxim. She pursued him until, lathered in white lace, she waltzed up the aisle to a gilded altar in a Russian Cathedral in Howell, New Jersey. She never seemed pained by the breakup and sometimes referred to his girlfriends that had come before her. They were smart, educated, beautiful professionals: a writer, a psychologist, a literature professor, an architect, and a filmmaker. They all enabled Maxim’s eccentricity. Ludmila’s mother never thought of herself as beautiful, but she was strong-willed. She was, in fact, Garbo gorgeous.
Their wedding icon hung in Elena’s bedroom in Morningside Heights: a bearded man with an impassive, hooded gaze, a two-fingered salute raised to his fate. The Virgin eyes the infant on her knee, thinking, “I’m not entirely sure how you got here.” Ludmila’s parents were first cousins. Not that it mattered to their daughter. Ludmila turned out all right.
Elena was employed as a career counselor at Columbia University before retiring on a comfortable pension. There, Ludmila had once had a haphazard relationship with scholarship. Free tuition had done nothing to steady her aimlessness. She bounced from one subject to another. She left before she was asked to leave.
And then her mother died, leaving a respectable inheritance to her only child, but nowhere for her to live. Lud wrote to her father, hearing nothing. She was antsy and needed a change from rewriting the same poem. She shared a birthday with the poet Charles Bukowski, whom she had only lately discovered, and in early August, she flew to Los Angeles to pay homage to the man on whose headstone was engraved: “Don’t Try.”
At odds with her mother, she felt they had abandoned her father, and that her mother had given up. Elena once thought she’d be the one to tame Maxim. She pursued him until, lathered in white lace, she waltzed up the aisle to a gilded altar in a Russian Cathedral in Howell, New Jersey. She never seemed pained by the breakup and sometimes referred to his girlfriends that had come before her. They were smart, educated, beautiful professionals: a writer, a psychologist, a literature professor, an architect, and a filmmaker. They all enabled Maxim’s eccentricity. Ludmila’s mother never thought of herself as beautiful, but she was strong-willed. She was, in fact, Garbo gorgeous.
Their wedding icon hung in Elena’s bedroom in Morningside Heights: a bearded man with an impassive, hooded gaze, a two-fingered salute raised to his fate. The Virgin eyes the infant on her knee, thinking, “I’m not entirely sure how you got here.” Ludmila’s parents were first cousins. Not that it mattered to their daughter. Ludmila turned out all right.
Elena was employed as a career counselor at Columbia University before retiring on a comfortable pension. There, Ludmila had once had a haphazard relationship with scholarship. Free tuition had done nothing to steady her aimlessness. She bounced from one subject to another. She left before she was asked to leave.
And then her mother died, leaving a respectable inheritance to her only child, but nowhere for her to live. Lud wrote to her father, hearing nothing. She was antsy and needed a change from rewriting the same poem. She shared a birthday with the poet Charles Bukowski, whom she had only lately discovered, and in early August, she flew to Los Angeles to pay homage to the man on whose headstone was engraved: “Don’t Try.”
When she moved in with Carmen, at her lover’s urging she wrote once more to her father.
That pinging sound pricks her again. She rues the iPhone Carmen talked her into, but it’s easier to do the texting thing. Carmen is a talker. She wakes up talking. Ludmila loves the sound of voices, but hates talking on the phone, or anytime, really. She prefers to be on the outside of a conversation, listening in.
She recalls her father’s voice as floatable, yet brimful of sarcasm. When she visited he always seemed surprised that he had a daughter. It had been over five years since the last time. There were fewer and fewer phone conversations, such as they were. He might make sarcastic comments about the interlopers, as he called them: Donald Trump buying the Colts Neck Golf Course or the pizza baron whose newly built mansion looked like a shopping mall. In the next town over, Bruce Springsteen was harvesting his organic garden. In breeding season, the background noise on the phone was deafening. “I can’t move them,” he’d shout, referring to the frogs.
“They’re protected.” Some calls elicited nothing more from him than, “I think I have a family of wild turkeys I must look out for,” and “Hummingbird in the feeder this morning.”
He accused her once of being captious and she had to look it up. She called him back and asked what he meant by it. He had no idea what she was talking about. In their last conversation, Ludmila was her usual ambivalent self, unwilling to respond to his questions about her writing, her prospects, her love life. “You don’t give a fuck about anything,” he said.
Whatever a genius is, he was that. As a girl, she remembered him and his best friend, Misha, “inventing” things, like the “talking” fax machine. He lost that friendship, but he gained a computer—many computers—and entrance into the vast world of the Internet. Yet he eschewed Skype. He ignored e-mail. He was writing a novel. Or he’d been working on patents that would radically enhance an off-the-grid lifestyle. Once he alluded to having written a program that would revolutionize the stock market. There were hints in their conversations that there was something of value buried on the property.
She unfolds a letter from its padded envelope. It’s been read countless times. A single page, it still has the indentation of the skeleton key that was enclosed.
That pinging sound pricks her again. She rues the iPhone Carmen talked her into, but it’s easier to do the texting thing. Carmen is a talker. She wakes up talking. Ludmila loves the sound of voices, but hates talking on the phone, or anytime, really. She prefers to be on the outside of a conversation, listening in.
She recalls her father’s voice as floatable, yet brimful of sarcasm. When she visited he always seemed surprised that he had a daughter. It had been over five years since the last time. There were fewer and fewer phone conversations, such as they were. He might make sarcastic comments about the interlopers, as he called them: Donald Trump buying the Colts Neck Golf Course or the pizza baron whose newly built mansion looked like a shopping mall. In the next town over, Bruce Springsteen was harvesting his organic garden. In breeding season, the background noise on the phone was deafening. “I can’t move them,” he’d shout, referring to the frogs.
“They’re protected.” Some calls elicited nothing more from him than, “I think I have a family of wild turkeys I must look out for,” and “Hummingbird in the feeder this morning.”
He accused her once of being captious and she had to look it up. She called him back and asked what he meant by it. He had no idea what she was talking about. In their last conversation, Ludmila was her usual ambivalent self, unwilling to respond to his questions about her writing, her prospects, her love life. “You don’t give a fuck about anything,” he said.
Whatever a genius is, he was that. As a girl, she remembered him and his best friend, Misha, “inventing” things, like the “talking” fax machine. He lost that friendship, but he gained a computer—many computers—and entrance into the vast world of the Internet. Yet he eschewed Skype. He ignored e-mail. He was writing a novel. Or he’d been working on patents that would radically enhance an off-the-grid lifestyle. Once he alluded to having written a program that would revolutionize the stock market. There were hints in their conversations that there was something of value buried on the property.
She unfolds a letter from its padded envelope. It’s been read countless times. A single page, it still has the indentation of the skeleton key that was enclosed.
April 1, 2015
Dear Ludmila Leskov,
You do not know me. I was your father’s friend. I am very sorry to tell you that Maxim Leskov died in the early morning of the first of this year. Your father wanted you to have the house and the property. He took care of things a few years ago. Please come as soon as you can. I will explain everything.
I will explain everything. There is no signature. No return address. She folds the letter back into its envelope.
There is still time for a quick wander around the property. Ludmila wedges her feet back into her boots. The atmosphere is deceptive—humid and cold at the same time. She looks for her leather jacket and remembers it is gone.
Carmen knew the jacket was Lud’s favorite article of clothing, her security blanket. “Take this,” Carmen said. “Looks like a late spring in New York. Gonna be chilly, Luddo.” She always laughingly pronounced the city in an exaggerated imitation of a native. “Noo Yawk,” she’d say.
When she was a girl, Ludmila had found the jacket in the attic of the house in Freehold. Her father told her it was German-made. Late forties, he thought. He wasn’t sure whose it had been. The jacket hung to her seven-year-old ankles. It was double breasted and had a neat diagonal zipper pocket on the chest. She lovingly caressed the belted cuffs and leather buttons. Later it draped her lean adult frame like a second skin. The removable wool lining had long since disappeared. Her mother hated it. They left Freehold and her father that summer.
Ludmila had forgotten how stuffy it was underground in New York. On the subway ride from the airport she slipped out of the jacket. Now she pictures it in forlorn abandon, left behind on a seat on the A train.
She hurries downstairs. She kicks a little path to the front door and tugs at a string that lights a bare bulb above the entranceway.
In a space under the stairs are makeshift shelves crammed with the stuff of preppers: a hand-cranked radio, loads of batteries of all sorts, a first aid kit—a few of them–gardening shears, sun hats, thickly coiled rope and a tool belt. There are compasses and packets of iodine pills. Maps crammed into an open tin box. She grabs a flashlight, checking that it works. On the porch, she pulls up the collar of her father’s jacket and starts down the steps. She reconsiders and shoves the suitcase inside the front door.
With the fast-disappearing light the air chills markedly. Ludmilla is grateful for her wool cocoon. Making her way carefully, she heads down a ragged path, swinging the flashlight like a klieg at a Hollywood premiere, under the great unfolding canopy of night. The air is dense. Like a sponge it sucks what little pluck she has left.
She rounds a trampoline covered with a toupee of dead leaves and sets off for the woods surrounding the house. She remembers there were a few outbuildings on the property and tries to situate them in her head. In the lowering gloom she recognizes the closest bungalow, where her fiercely tenacious great-grandmother lived with her schizophrenic daughter. Ludmila approaches, catching her breath.
She peers through a window coated thickly with erstwhile grit. Tree branches have punctured other windows. Cracks have grown outward from the impact, like veins on the face of a wizened ancestor.
Night falls swiftly, the curtain on a staged denouement. What she sees spooks her. What she hears in the now-dark forest sends her scurrying back to the main house.
Ludmila taps out a message to Carmen on her cell: Are you there?
Carmen rings her immediately. She hollers over top-down traffic where it is still light. “Just left a client. Everything okay, babe?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Ludmila barks. “Get off the phone while you’re driving, for crissakes. Talk later.” She ignores the incoming text from Carmen.
Closing the balcony doors, she heads for the couch. Hungry and tired, she slumps against the cushions. It is not yet eight o’clock. “This is ridiculous,” she mutters, forcing herself upright. She has a lot to do, though unsure of what that is exactly. The room burns brightly from the overhead fixture and the lamps scattered about. It’s as if she cannot get enough light. She managed earlier to drag her suitcase upstairs, and the sight of its zebra striping is oddly reassuring. Carmen gave it to her. You’ll spot it easily, she said. There are provisions in the case: coffee, tea bags, a jar of peanut butter, boxes of crackers, some energy bars, a few cans of tuna and bags of trail mix. There is a spoon and a fork and bottled water. Ludmila has packed a hoodie. There are few other items of clothing because she does not expect to be in Freehold for very long. She retrieves a pair of clogs, the hoodie, bottled water and a couple of energy bars. She needs to close her eyes, just for a bit.
...
IN THE MORNING, LUDMILA ROUSES slowly in a kind of passive resistance to circumstance. She remains perfectly still. Her eyes are slits. It’s just before seven. Her phone warns her of half a dozen missed messages. First thing, she turns off all the lights. Then she wolfs down nearly half of the crackers she’s spread thickly with peanut butter. She chugs from a bottle of water, making her way across the main room, looking for the bathroom. The sink is stained with rust-colored flume. The toilet flushes. There is an absence of toilet roll. Rags and newspapers are wedged under the sink. The tap allows a weak stream of water. She imagines being in an abandoned asylum. Tiles on the walls are broken or missing. On the floor is a sizable sinkhole of neglect. There is a small patch of window out of reach, darkened by vines. A bathtub is crowded with things that don’t belong there: an engine of some sort, paintbrushes stiff with resentment and moldy volumes of hardcover books.
To the left of the bathroom is her father’s bedroom. The back of the house is in forest shade. Old-fashioned boots peek from under the bed. Swathes of bed sheets lie dune-like on top of the mattress in the darkened room. Her bedroom had been an enclosed porch on the ground floor at the front of the house, converted for privacy and warmth.
Outdoors, the chill revives her.
Ludmila looks back at the house, as if someone has called her. To the left of the front door are two oblong rectangles, windows with shades half drawn that appear to recognize her from hooded eyes. She imagines her small face, her expression tight with indifference, peering from those bedroom windows.
She lived among men and women she called uncles and aunties—Russians in various stages of aging, disrepair and alcoholism—sitting around a kitchen table covered in oilcloth. Shouting was the norm.
They lived frugally, though a ceramic bowl filled with cherries the color of garnets always sat alongside freshly baked black bread or potato bread. Yogurt was made weekly. Glass jars of newly made yogurt were removed from an overnight stay in an unlit oven to the kitchen counter. A confluent haze from pipes and cigarettes hovered above the scent of fresh dill. The property was home to hens and roosters, a communal garden that gave them tomatoes and radishes and nearly all of the produce that came to the table. There was a bathhouse and a bunker-like building that she was warned to steer clear of. A hulking jerry-built garage housed tractors and pickup trucks. The uncles clamored over engines, wielding tools in damaged fingers, creating a metallic symphony that rang through the forest. In the fall, they caulked windows. The basement was filled with canned fruit, jars of boiled cabbage and beets, and dusty bottles of weird alcohol.
Ludmila was the only child.
She senses she is being watched. Gripped by the woodland hush, she looks back, stifling a gasp. A young buck eyes her from a distance. He sniffs the air with his hockey-puck nose. His antlers are not fully regrown. He resembles a doe-eyed Carmen Miranda more than Bambi’s majestic father.
They step cautiously from each other. The angriest she ever saw her father was when her mother called in hunters to decrease the deer population. Maxim moved out of the house. He took up residence in the Airstream trailer at the back of the property, where he stayed until his wife and daughter moved to New York. Lud’s mother claimed they left before the authorities intervened, to get Ludmila registered in a real school.
Everywhere she walks, Ludmila must do so carefully. Panes of glass tip against tree trunks and layer like ice floes in the undergrowth. China plates and cups stack in unlikely places under trees, beside a cement mixer, in the pickup of an old truck, proof that the party never happened. Cables drip from trees. She can make out the orange striping around her father’s old trailer. Thick underbrush has already claimed the front end of it.
At the cottage where she was spooked last night, a massive tree has tipped into the roof like a drunken giant. She peers through the window into the kitchen. Curtains hang like old, dried tears. Spider webs knit into corners of the room. The table is set. There is the ironing board upon which her great grandmother slept. Having lived through a time of great deprivation—hiding in dense forests before they could escape to America—she’d felt undeserving of the comfort of a bed. The only person who thought this was nuts was Ludmila’s mother. Scattered around the floor are record albums of classical music and opera. The door to a small oven is open.
Ludmila ventures further into the woods, ducking under a clock face hanging on a chain from a tree limb. She stops for a moment at a bruised-cherry red pickup truck. Windshield wipers lie powerless under composted leaves. There is a classic blue-and-white diner coffee cup on the dashboard. Ludmila circles the vehicle. The truck bed is crammed with doors never to be opened into inviting rooms.
Another cottage, this one an exhausted wreck, has shed most of its shingles. The front door hangs from one hinge. Windows and more doors lie about in sepulchral disorder, lacerated by unyielding vines. She peers into the gloom and makes out what looks like a pyre of bicycles. She can’t recall who lived in this cottage. Stacked against a still-standing side of the house are stereo speakers, nine or ten of them. The speakers, with their black holes, are apparitions caught in a silent chorus of alarm. Birds have left nests in some of them, adding to the grim feel of remains in empty sockets.
The chicken coop that was behind the cottage is a weedy foundation fending off encroaching forest. Ludmila bends at the waist, imagines plucking an egg and forgets that chickens make her anxious. She looks up and sees a pale blue water heater on its side and rusted in spots, like the carcass of a pinto pony.
Behind that is a sizeable mound of earth—as tall as she is—which she has never recalled seeing before. Two slender black locusts shoot up from the mound, looking like chopsticks stuck in brown rice. There is another mound, free standing, bigger than the first. It reminds her of something ancient, something sacred.
She starts back. Gingerly at first, then picking up speed. Spongy earth barely gives underfoot, like the footprint of a ghost.
Ludmila remembers a conversation with her father when he was, finally, the lone occupant. She stood with Maxim on the balcony outside his bedroom. They were all gone, starting with his fragile mother who was followed by his grandmother and the aunts and uncles. There was never a funeral, or at least none that she knew about. Why were there no photographs?
Another cottage, this one an exhausted wreck, has shed most of its shingles. The front door hangs from one hinge. Windows and more doors lie about in sepulchral disorder, lacerated by unyielding vines. She peers into the gloom and makes out what looks like a pyre of bicycles. She can’t recall who lived in this cottage. Stacked against a still-standing side of the house are stereo speakers, nine or ten of them. The speakers, with their black holes, are apparitions caught in a silent chorus of alarm. Birds have left nests in some of them, adding to the grim feel of remains in empty sockets.
The chicken coop that was behind the cottage is a weedy foundation fending off encroaching forest. Ludmila bends at the waist, imagines plucking an egg and forgets that chickens make her anxious. She looks up and sees a pale blue water heater on its side and rusted in spots, like the carcass of a pinto pony.
Behind that is a sizeable mound of earth—as tall as she is—which she has never recalled seeing before. Two slender black locusts shoot up from the mound, looking like chopsticks stuck in brown rice. There is another mound, free standing, bigger than the first. It reminds her of something ancient, something sacred.
She starts back. Gingerly at first, then picking up speed. Spongy earth barely gives underfoot, like the footprint of a ghost.
Ludmila remembers a conversation with her father when he was, finally, the lone occupant. She stood with Maxim on the balcony outside his bedroom. They were all gone, starting with his fragile mother who was followed by his grandmother and the aunts and uncles. There was never a funeral, or at least none that she knew about. Why were there no photographs?
“I am still surrounded by them,” he said. “Nature has its own memory.” He bit down on his pipe stem. “This is Rupert Sheldrake’s theory, of course, but it makes sense.” He pointed to a squirrel on a tree limb, staring back at them, undecided. “His memory is the memory of all the squirrels that have come before him.”
She remembers the silence, staring into the lowering dark. “What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Footprints,” he said.
“Right. There’s nothing down there.”
“Keep looking,” he said.
She wants to talk to Carmen. She needs to talk to Carmen. “Babe, you don’t do emotion. What’s up?”
“I just wanted to hear your voice. Sorry about the missed
calls. I’m—.”
“S’okay. Want to hear about the widow?”
“Sure. What are you eating?”
“Some warm Indian dough balls.”
“Tell me more,” says Ludmila.
“M-m-m. Fried dough balls in rose syrup. Tastes like the most divine doughnuts drenched in yes.” “I’m starving.”
“If you were here, changa, I’d share.” “You’ll get fat.”
“Hips. That's what holds yer pants up, kid. Ha ha. My hips could hold up the fuckin’ planet!”
Ludmila laughs, relieved.
“There should be an “opt out” clause for women who don’t have the chillins. Boobs and hips, want to keep them or not?”
“I’m gonna hang around for a while,” Ludmila says.
“I hate you. How while?”
“Dunno. Until the daylilies bloom or the mystery neighbor shows up?”
“I hate you even more,” Carmen retorts.
Ludmila is silent.
“OK. I don't hate you.”
“How’s the book coming?”
“I interviewed her today, the grieving widow. Um, excuse me, the poet’s widow. She talked a lot about Sean Penn and Bono and how they don’t return her calls. We sat in her garden smoking a joint. Very unprofessional, I know. I know. That garden cost a mil, at least. Little Buddha heads everywhere. Paid for by the Japanese translations.”
“But you’ll do it?”
“I’m a ghostwriter. Of course I will,” Carmen replies. “I’m a ghost...I gotta go.”
“You know what the old man says, Changa?” “What?”
“Hold.”
...
SHE WAKES AGAIN IN A BRIGHTLY LIT ROOM, in her father’s bed, to the sound of a dull motor. The strapping ginger cat on her chest breathes hotly into her face, purring loudly. The cat kneads Ludmila’s shoulder with muffin-sized paws. She lowers her hand, gently stroking its back. “Well, hello. Where did you come from?” Her phone says nearly 2:00 a.m. No messages. Moths flit around in undecided suicide mode.
She addresses the cat. “Are you hungry?” She swings her legs and rises stiffly. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
Ludmila steps out on the balcony, testing its backbone. She pulls a tab and drops the opened can of tuna. She stands for a while looking up at the stars, chewing an energy bar. Night is pitch dark here. Stars are like chalk scratches on a blackboard. The boat glows from below in reflected light. Everything beyond has disappeared for a comforting while. The cat slurps the fish, punching the can with its nose.
“Night, night, big orange cat,” she says. And then giving him a once over she adds, “Night, night, Bricks. See you in the morning.”
“I’m a ghostwriter. Of course I will,” Carmen replies. “I’m a ghost...I gotta go.”
“You know what the old man says, Changa?” “What?”
“Hold.”
...
SHE WAKES AGAIN IN A BRIGHTLY LIT ROOM, in her father’s bed, to the sound of a dull motor. The strapping ginger cat on her chest breathes hotly into her face, purring loudly. The cat kneads Ludmila’s shoulder with muffin-sized paws. She lowers her hand, gently stroking its back. “Well, hello. Where did you come from?” Her phone says nearly 2:00 a.m. No messages. Moths flit around in undecided suicide mode.
She addresses the cat. “Are you hungry?” She swings her legs and rises stiffly. “Let’s get you something to eat.”
Ludmila steps out on the balcony, testing its backbone. She pulls a tab and drops the opened can of tuna. She stands for a while looking up at the stars, chewing an energy bar. Night is pitch dark here. Stars are like chalk scratches on a blackboard. The boat glows from below in reflected light. Everything beyond has disappeared for a comforting while. The cat slurps the fish, punching the can with its nose.
“Night, night, big orange cat,” she says. And then giving him a once over she adds, “Night, night, Bricks. See you in the morning.”
