Bobcat and Other Stories Part 2

Throughout the cla.s.s Sta.s.selova 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 Sta.s.selova 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 gla.s.s. "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. Sta.s.selova 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 impa.s.sive. He suddenly looked years older-austere, cold, priestly. Sta.s.selova 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. "Sta.s.selova 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-Sta.s.selova'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 Sta.s.selova. 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?" Sta.s.selova 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 sc.r.a.p 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 Sta.s.selova 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 Sta.s.selova'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.

STa.s.sELOVA'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."

"And this is why you joined the Russian army in attacking your own country?" This was Hans, startling us all.

"I did not attack my own country," Sta.s.selova said. "Never."

"But you watched as the n.a.z.is attacked it in August of 1944, yes? And used that attack for your own purposes?"

"This night I was there, it's true," he said, "on the banks of the Vistula, and I saw Warsaw burn. And I was wearing the fur hat of Russia, yes. But when I attempted to cross the Vistula, in order to help those of my countrymen who were escaping, I was brought down-clubbed with a rifle to the back of the head by my commanding officer, a Russian."

"That's interesting, because in accounts of the time you are referred to as an officer yourself-Officer Sta.s.selova, of course."

"Yes. I was a Polish officer though. Certainly you can infer the hierarchy involved?"

"What I can infer . . ." Hans's voice rose, and then Sta.s.selova's joined in, contrapuntally, "What you can infer . . ." and for a moment the exchange reminded me of those rounds we sang at summer camp. "What you can infer," Sta.s.selova said, drowning out Hans, "is that this was an ambiguous time for those of us who were Polish. You can't judge after the fact. Perhaps you think that I should be dead on those banks, making the willows to grow." Sta.s.selova's eyes were shot with the dying light; he squinted at us and looked out the window momentarily. "You will stand there and think maybe certain men in certain times should not choose their own lives, should not want to live." And then he turned away from Hans. I myself scowled at Hans. So rude!

"And so I did live," Sta.s.selova said finally. "Mostly because I was wearing my Russian hat, made of the fur of ten foxes. It was always Russia that dealt us blows, and it was always Russia that saved us. You see?"

THE NEXT DAY I was with Hans in the woods. We were on our stomachs in a clearing, looking to the east, from where the rain was stalking us through the trees. "What I want to know," Hans was saying, "is why is he always asking for you to see him?"

"Oh," I said, "he thinks I plagiarized that first paper."

"Did you?"

"Not really."

"Why does he think so?"

"Says it smacks of Soviet propaganda."

"Really? Well, he should know."

"I agree with him-that you're judging him from an irrelevant stance."

"He was found guilty of treason by his own people, not me-by the Committee for Political Responsibility. Why else would he be here, teaching at some Lutheran college in Minnesota? This is a guy who brought martial law down on his own people, and now we sit here in the afternoon and watch him march around in front of us, relating everything he speaks of-comma splices, for Christ's sake-to his own innocence."

"Yet all sorts of people were found guilty of all sorts of meaningless things by that committee."

"I bet he thinks you're a real dream-this woman willing to absolve the old exterminator of his sins."

"That's insulting," I said. But I realized how fond I'd grown of this professor in his little office, drinking his bitter coffee, night descending into the musky heart of Humanities.

And then the rain was upon us. We could hear it on the tiny ledges of leaves above us more than feel it. "Let's go," Hans said, grabbing my hand with his left, damaged hand. The way his hand held mine was alluring; his hand had the nimbus of an idea about it, as if the gene that had sprung this hand had a different world in mind, a better world, where hands had more torque when they grasped each other, and people held things differently, like hooks-a world where all objects were shaped something like lanterns, and were pa.s.sed on and on.

MONDAY WAS GRAY, WITH long silver streaks of rain. I dragged myself out of the warmth of my bed and put on my rain slicker. At nine-forty-five I headed toward Sta.s.selova's office. "h.e.l.lo," I said, knocking on the open door. "I'm sorry to disturb you outside your office hours." I was shivering; I felt pathetic.

"Margaret," he said. "h.e.l.lo. Come in." As I sat down, he said, "You've brought with you the smell of rain."

He poured me coffee in a Styrofoam cup. During our last cla.s.s I had been so moved by his description of that night on the Vistula that I'd decided to confess. But now I was hesitating. "Could I have some of this cream?" I asked, pointing to a little tin cup of it on his windowsill.

"There it is again," he said, as he reached for the cream.

"There is what again?"

"That little verbal tic of yours."

"I didn't know I had one," I said.

"I noticed it first in cla.s.s," he said. "You say 'this' instead of 'that'; 'this cream,' not 'that cream.' The line people draw between the things they consider this and the things they consider that is the perimeter of their sphere of intimacy. You see? Everything inside is this; everything inside is close, is intimate. Since you pointed at the cream and it is farther from you than I am, 'this' suggests that I am among the things you consider close to you. I'm flattered," he said, and handed me the creamer, which was, like him, sweating. What an idea-that with a few words you could catch another person in a little grammatical clutch, arrange the objects of the world such that they bordered the two of you.

"At any rate," he said, "I'm glad you showed up."

"You are?"

"Yes. I've wanted to ask you something."

"Yes?"

"This spring the college will hold its annual symposium on language and politics. I thought you might present your paper. Usually one of the uppercla.s.smen does this, but I thought your paper might be more appropriate."

"I thought you hated my paper."

"I do."

"Oh."

"So you'll do it?"

"I'll think about it," I said.

He nodded and smiled, as if the matter were settled. The rain was suddenly coming down very hard. It was loud, and we were silent for a few moments, listening. I stared beyond his head out the window, which was blurry with water, so that the turrets of the campus looked like a hallucination, like some shadow world looming back there in his unconscious.

"This rain," he said then, in a quiet, astonished voice, and his word this entered me as it was meant to-quietly, with a sharp tip, but then, like an arrowhead, widening and widening, until it included the whole landscape around us.

THE RAIN TURNED TO snow, and winter settled on our campus. The face of nature turned away-beautiful and distracted. After Christmas at home (where I received my report card, a tiny slip of paper that seemed to have flown across the snows to deliver me my A in Sta.s.selova's cla.s.s) I hunkered down in my dorm for the month of January and barely emerged. The dorm in which most of us freshman girls lived was the elaborate, dark Agnes Mellby Hall, named after the stern, formidable virgin whose picture hung over the fireplace in our lounge. As winter crept over us, we retired to Mellby earlier and earlier. Every night that winter, in which most of us were nineteen, was a slumber party in the main sitting room among its ornate furnishings. There, nightly, we ate heavily, like Romans, but childish foods, popcorn and pizza and ice cream, most of us spiraling downstairs now and then to throw up in the one private bathroom.

On one of those nights I was reading a book in the sitting room when I received a phone call from Solveig, who was down at a house party in town and wanted me to come help her home. She wasn't completely drunk but calculated that she would be in about forty-five minutes. Her body was like a tract of nature that she understood perfectly-a constellation whose movement across the night sky she could predict, or a gathering storm, or maybe, more accurately, a sparkling stream of elements into which she introduced alcohol with such careful calibration that her blood flowed exactly as she desired, uphill and down, intersecting precisely, chemically, with time and fertility. Solveig did not stay at the dorm with us much but rather ran with an older pack of girls, feminists mostly, who that winter happened to be involved in a series of protests, romantic insurrections, against the president of the college, who was clearly terrified of them.

About ten minutes before I was to leave, Sta.s.selova appeared in the doorway of the sitting room. I had not seen him in more than a month, since the last day of cla.s.s, but he had called a few times. I had not returned his calls, in the hopes that he would forget about my partic.i.p.ation in the symposium. But here he was, wearing a long gray coat over his bulkiness. His head looked huge, the bones widely s.p.a.ced, like the architecture of a grand civic building.

The look in his eyes caused me to gaze out across the room and try to see what he was seeing: perhaps some debauched canvas of absolute female repose, girls lying everywhere in various modes of pajamas and sweats, surrounded by vast quant.i.ties of food and books. Some girls-and even I found this a bit creepy-had stuffed animals that they carried with them to the sitting room at night. I happened to be poised above the fray, straddling a piano bench, with a book spread in front of me, but almost all the rest were lying on their backs with their extremities cast about, feet propped on the couch or stretched up in the air at weird, hyper extended angles. We were Lutherans, after all, and unlike the more experienced, secular girls across the river, at the state college, we were losing our innocence right here, among ourselves. It was being taken from us physically, and we were just relaxing until it fell away completely.

Sta.s.selova, in spite of all he'd seen in his life, which I'd gleaned from what he said in cla.s.s (the corpulent Goering marching through the forest, marking off n.a.z.i territory, and later Stalin's horses breaking through the same woods, heralding the swath that would now be Soviet), still managed to look a little scared as he peered into our sitting room, eventually lifting a hand to wave at me.

I got up and approached him. "Hey," I said.

"h.e.l.lo. How are you, Margaret?"

"It's good to see you. Thanks for the A."

"You deserved it. Listen, I have something for you," he said, mildly gesturing for us to leave the doorway, because everybody was looking at us.

"Great," I said. "But you know, right now I need to walk downtown to pick up Solveig at a house party."

"Fine," he said. "I'll walk you."

"Oh. Okay."

I got my jacket, and the two of us stepped into the night. The snow had arranged itself in curling waves on the Mellby lawn, and stuck in it were hundreds of silver forks, which, in a flood of early-evening testosterone, the freshman boys had placed in the earth, a gesture appropriate to their s.e.xual frustration and also to their faith in the future. Sta.s.selova and I stepped between them. They looked spooky and lovely, like tiny silver gravesites in the snow. As we walked across campus, Sta.s.selova produced a golden brochure from his pocket and handed it to me. On the front it said, in emerald-green letters, "Ninth Annual Symposium on Language and Politics." Inside, under "Keynote Student Speaker," was my name. "Margaret Olafson, 'The Common Harvest.' " I stopped walking. We paused at the top of the stairs that floated down off the campus and into the town. I felt extremely, inordinately proud. Some winter lightning, a couple of great wings of it, flashed in the north. Sta.s.selova looked paternal, grand.

THE AIR AT THE party was beery and wildish, and the house itself-its many random rooms and slanting floors-seemed the product of a drunken adolescent mind. At first we could not spot Solveig, so Sta.s.selova and I waited quietly in the hallway until a guy in a baseball cap came lurching toward us, shouting in a friendly way over the music that we could buy plastic gla.s.ses for the keg for two dollars apiece. Sta.s.selova paid him and then threaded through the crowd, gracefully for such a large man, to stand in the keg line. I watched him as he patiently stood there, the snowflakes melting on his dark shoulders. And then Hans was on my arm. "What on earth?" he said. "Why are you here? I thought you hated these parties." He'd been dancing, apparently. He was soaked in sweat, his hair curling up at his neck.

I pointed to Sta.s.selova.

"No kidding," Hans said.

"He showed up at my dorm as I was leaving to get Solveig."

"He came to Mellby?"

"Yes."

"G.o.d, look at him. I bet they had a nickname for him, like the Circus Man or something. All those old fascists had cheery nicknames."

Sta.s.selova was now walking toward us. Behind him the picture window revealed a nearly black sky, with pretty crystalline stars around. He looked like a dream one might have in childhood. "He is not a fascist," I said quietly.

"Professor!" Hans raised his gla.s.s.

"Hans, yes, how are you? This is a wonderful party," Sta.s.selova said, and it actually was. Sometimes these parties could seem deeply cozy, their wildness and noise an affirmation against the formless white midwestern winter surrounding us.

He handed me a beer. "So," he said rather formally, lifting his gla.s.s. "To youth."