Evidence of Absence
Published in Nimrod 50.2 (2007): 30-39.
The word is gone. Perished. Lost. That has been destroyed or ruined, especially morally or spiritually. Without a chance of being found, restored, compensated, replaced. Kisa is leafing through the scrapbook of her memory, searching in the filaments of her brain, and can’t remember a single thing, a gesture, a smile, a smell, perhaps, that attracted her to that gigolo-boy in the first place. The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. She knows that. Has known for quite a while. Her favorite history professor, a wizard-lady with a helmet of short, bluish-gray curls that encompassed her head in perfect symmetry, used to open her lectures with that statement, asking her students to support it with an example, illustrate it through a well-known historic or scientific event. ‘Think of Moses,’ she once said, reaching up, touching her curls. ‘There was no evidence found that Moses and his people ever walked through the Desert of Sin or crossed the Red Sea. Not a single chip of a bone or remnants of a skull, a tooth. But somebody somewhere must’ve believed that such a journey had taken place, crafting the scene in exquisite detail for us to know and recognize today and accept the indisputability of the fact that has never been proven.’
Kisa, now Kseniya Igorevna, returned to Moscow State Pedagogic University five years after graduating and has been teaching Russian Language and Literature ever since. Faces have supplanted faces. Students come and gone. The walls remain. Still the same moldy, livid color. Still naked, cracked and fissured. Cobwebs pad the corners. Spiders shiver on long legs. Textbooks are burdened with information that hasn’t been updated since she was a student. She used to fight. Used to bear an opinion, a mettlesome desire for a change, some kind of improvement. Nobody listened. Not a soul responded. They pretended not to hear her, waving her off like they would a pestering fly buzzing over a plate of stone-hard cookies or an open jar of thickened, last-year’s jam. ‘You either go with the flow, or you drown,’ a colleague admonished, hooking an earring through her earlobe in front of the bathroom mirror. ‘Good luck finding another job after they fire you.’ She shook her head, the earring glinted.
The word is luck. Good fortune. Success, prosperity, or advantage coming by chance rather than as a consequence of merit or effort. Something that every Russian longs for from puberty. But luck, too, though innumerable and incalculable, is limited, circumscribed. Quantity is restricted by quality. She understands that. Always has. And long before the gigolo-boy entered her classroom, brushing his loose bangs away from his big, puppy eyes, remorseful for being so unforgivably late, bowing his head. A smile split her dry lips, the same stupid grin that would adhere to her face for months.
People talk. Always. They believe it’s their constitutional right. Freedom of speech. Not at professional meetings, where to have your own opinion can cost you your job. But after or in between. At social gatherings, parties, during breaks. While smoking in bathrooms or outside. Blowing the wisps of gossip through their protruding lips. They inhale then cough and cover their mouths. They look away, into some vague, indefinite distance that becomes the measure of your guilt, the hallmark of your shame. ‘You don’t sleep around where you work or live,’ the colleague warned her, peeling a shiny-pink wrap from a tampon. ‘Personally, I understand. Young body. Strong hands. Hard all night long. But….’ Disappearing behind the partition, locking the door. ‘But you’re married. And you’re swimming in a kiddies’ pool. You’re old enough to be his mother.’ The commode flushed. The water gurgled, gurgled.
The word is married. The word is old. The word is mother. Married. Old. Mother. Mother. Married. Old. Old Married Mother. OldMotherMarried. The word. It gets out. And she can’t bring it back. Because back is where her eyes avoided his, in the onerous privacy of her office cluttered with books, papers, photographs of her family and posters of Mayakovskiy disguising pipe leaks in the walls. Because back is when his hand landed on her shoulder, squeezing it with teenage impatience and lustful urge. His lips blew at the coils of hair on her temple as she sat at the desk, opening and closing folders, moving them, pretending to look for something she bloody well knew wasn’t there. Her eyes strayed from Mayakovskiy’s pert lips clamping on a cigarette to her daughter’s frowning face in the black-and-white photograph her husband took ten years ago, where everything but the kitchen curtains has since become unrecognizable.
Her daughter Lara is twenty-three and no longer needs her mother. She’s dating a man twice her age, calling him SB, Security Blanket. Lara is too young to know what Kisa does—security won’t come with men, money, or age, if ever. With age arrives the awakening, the acceptance of things that you can’t change or things that you’ll never have and the wisdom of letting them go. Of letting your dreams fall at your feet like rusty, dry leaves, of learning to step over them and ignore that heinous, crepitating sound.
SB is gracious and suave. He burdens them with gifts, things that neither Kisa nor her husband can afford, even if they stop eating for a year or two. When Kisa asks her daughter what her boyfriend does for a living, Lara laughs and says ‘business.’ The SB things that claim their apartment—a microwave, a dishwasher, an answering machine, a coffee-maker, a video camera, a Polaroid—are like mirage objects Kisa never saw on TV or in magazines when she was growing up, only in movie theatres, when she would skip a math class and run off to watch some foreign film about some decaying capitalist country that always aimed to attack and conquer Russia, turning all the people and bears into slaves.
Of course, now everything has changed and continues to change with the speed of light. New names, new technology, new era. Each time Kisa leaves the university and walks to the subway station, she acknowledges something different—another store, a repainted billboard, a just-opened restaurant, a cafe or a casino. Who could’ve thought that Russia, too, would aspire to become one of those decaying capitalist countries it once feared?
Kisa hadn’t been teaching at the university but for a few years when the putsch commenced. She woke beside her husband, who stared at the long table of calm, impudent faces on TV, sucking on his pipe, maundering that freedom was over, glasnost and democracy were flushed down the toilet, Gorbachev was dead meat. Shivering, she tramped to the kitchen and fried eggs over sliced hotdogs, listening to their hissing sound and peeping out the window at the pink-and-purple quilt of sky. On her way to work, she noticed that people were eerily quiet as they strode down the street, keeping their eyes on the muddy ground, like stray dogs nosing for food. At the university, no one talked either, afraid to say the wrong thing without knowing what the right one was. Kisa suggested that her colleagues, everyone, join the protesters in Red Square, to fight for the better future, so her daughter, their children, could live in a safer place. Nobody volunteered. Not a voice concurred. They looked at her as though she was an ancient Babylon whore ready to strip her bedraggled attire and expose her sagging, abused flesh to their arisen bewilderment and disgust. The silence and gesticulation, sighing and smoking by the cracked-open windows lasted until Gorbachev bequeathed the office to Yeltsin, and tanks began to abandon Red Square, rambling down the Moskva River quay. Classes resumed. Life went on, on.
The word is sex. Copulation. Coitus. Physical contact between individuals involving erotic stimulation of the genitals. Intercourse. When the gigolo-boy pulled a condom out of his pocket and waved it in the air like a pack of sugar, its golden wrap scintillated in a pool of night-light by the sofa-bed in his one-room apartment. ‘Don’t want you to get pregnant or nothing,’ he said, smiling, ripping the pack with his perfect, white pearls of teeth. And even though Kisa had already begun to settle into her menopause years, she didn’t reply but nodded, burying her smile of nebulous excitement and sprouting embarrassment as she shed her shirt and skirt and pantyhose on the floor.
It’s not about sex. Never is. Nor is it about love but gratitude, gratitude for being noticed once again, for being distinguished, individuated from the crowd, for becoming more than an aging, aged woman en route to work or home with grocery bags in both hands, weighing you to the ground. It’s about being uncomfortable again. When you undress for the first time in front of a young lover, aware of all your imperfections, all your extra weight, finger-thick veins, flabby breasts, enlarged moles that he’s about to discover with his eyes and hands. When naked is the last thing you wish to be and yet the only thing you desire. When everything, starting with the room you’re in and ending with the skin you’re about to touch, is as new as first snow that turns the city—an incorrigible whore at night—into a coy virgin by dawn.
Guilty as charged. She didn’t deny it. Not when her husband peered into her face over dinner, holding a glass of wine to his lips. Nor when her colleagues, mesmerized, blinking with ruptured curiosity, examined her nakedness in the picture someone, not the gigolo-boy, no, she refused to believe it, had posted on the Internet and linked to the university web-page. New era, new opportunities, new games. She hadn’t accounted for that when she caught him snapping a shot at her during those furtive minutes of stolen bliss, after his soft lips marked a tortuous path of her bulging vein from her inner thigh to the back of her knee. He kissed away her ugliness. He caressed her age. She refused to believe it.
‘Mom? Is that true? What a jerk ,’ Lara exclaimed as she entered their apartment with yet another gift from SB, a laptop. Kisa backed against the wall, seared with shame. ‘How is Dad?’ Lara hoisted the box onto the kitchen table and began to pry it open with a knife, bending her head. ‘He’ll get over it. You did, didn’t you? When Aunt Rimma made a pass at him? I remember.’ She pivoted on her toes, face to face with her mother. Stretching her free hand, she preened Kisa’s hair, combing her short, red-tinted curls behind ears, just the way Kisa did when Lara’s first boyfriend, her DB, Dearly Beloved, had dumped her for a girl with a dacha by the lake and a DVD player in her parents car and much, much longer hair. ‘By the way, ‘Lara said as she walked toward the door, ‘SB will take care of the whole thing, if he hasn’t already. He’ll make sure the boy gives back that picture. He might even pull a few strings, so they won’t fire you.’
‘Too late,’ Kisa answered, freeing her curls. ‘I quit.’
Rimma is thirteen years younger than Kisa. She’s their mother’s last attempt at happiness. A cry for love. The first time Kisa had noticed her sister’s infatuation with Karl was at their tenth-anniversary party, which they celebrated at a restaurant, where Rimma, perched on top of one of the tables, swayed her hips and jerked her arms in a drunken limbo, flaunting the barely covered parts of her lissome eighteen-year-old body in front of Kisa’s husband’s flushed face. Their mother tried to hide her embarrassment by starting a conversation with one of the waiters about the cost of caviar and later to justify Rimma’s rakish behavior by saying that she had too much wine and was too young to know what she was doing.
Rimma and Kisa haven’t spoken for an eternity, since that night, a few months after the party, when Rimma blustered into their apartment, claiming what she said should’ve been hers anyway—Kisa’s husband and all his shirts and ties. After Kisa informed their mother about what her beloved child, her nonpareil dream-baby had done, their mother kept silent for a minute and then cut Kisa off with the one and only excuse she knew. ‘She’s her father’s daughter, what can I say? Just like him, she’s attracted to everything new, shiny, and that belongs to somebody else. She doesn’t understand, I’m afraid.’ That was it. The family gatherings stopped. The how-do-you-do calls, too. Each pretended that the other didn’t exist or existed somewhere as far as North Pole. Falls faded into winters. Springs bumped into summers, and Kisa lost their count, as well as the roles of being someone’s daughter and someone’s sister.
The word is fear. Phobia. Apprehension. The painful emotion caused by the sense of impending danger or evil. Dread. Dread of waking up in the middle of the night to find no one beside you. Of realizing that everything you’ve gone to such trouble to get or build has lost its value or meaning, has gone to waste, putrefying. Of not caring to lift an arm, a foot, a finger to change what once mattered, to salvage what no longer is. Karl, has always admitted his guilt, his sad, unremarkable infidelity, his mortal sin. But then he would reiterate a hackneyed folk-saying—‘If a bitch doesn’t jump, a man won’t hump’—at the end of each fight that somehow always started in the car, where they, trapped inside the rusty, chugging box like half-dead chickens inside a crate on their way to a slaughter house, were forced to cohabitate, compelled to sustain some kind of communication.
Collecting her things. That’s what she was doing when she heard a shy knock, an apologetic thud on her office door. The gigolo-boy sauntered in. Like a cute, mischievous dog who knew that he’d committed something he wasn’t supposed to and yet didn’t understand the blame he carried, the degree of hurt his pranks inflicted. His chin dabbed at his chest while his eyes registered a rubbish of papers on the floor, at her feet. ‘Sorry,’ he said, approaching her desk as she pretended to scribble a note to somebody she most certainly knew didn’t exist. ‘I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. It isn’t you. You’re nice.’ Getting closer to the desk, laying the photograph on a heap of folders. ‘It was a stupid bet. I bet a hundred bucks that I’d sleep with you. I took the picture as the proof. I didn’t put it on the Internet, I swear. Somebody must’ve borrowed it from my jacket at the party. Sorry.’ Without diverting her eyes from the note, she reached out and grabbed the glossy photo—her shame, her crime, her blissful anguish—and ripped it in two, and in four, trashing the remains into the box, over Mayakovskiy’s crumpled face.
The word is sorry. Pained, distressed, sad, penitent. Expressing apology or regret, sorrow. A trivial acknowledgment of minor guilt. A disposable platitude. Sorry is not what she needs or feels. Karl has slipped into a state of unremitting bonhomie and inexplicable complaisance, kowtowing all week long, evincing his understanding and whole-hearted support, a sincere desire to be a part of her infidelity, her fall. He has wanted to make love to her since he found out. She’s up late every night, drinks a lot of tea, and waits, waits before slinking into the bedroom, hoping that he’ll be long asleep when she climbs under the comforter and stays on the edge of the bed, so that even her curved spine, dressed in heavy cotton, doesn’t osculate with his.
A friend brushed it by her that Rimma remarried last summer. No children yet. Something doesn’t stick. Her eggs are too thick, or his sperm is too weak. A not-so-rare form of sexual malfunction, some kind of reproductive discrepancy. Rimma is running out of tears and time, her mother out of prayers and folk remedies. Kisa knows that she should call, but the phone is in another room, ostracized by the wall, the wall.
She discovered her former professor’s address a few days ago, while playing with the new laptop, clicking through the university archives on the Internet. The piece of paper is still in her pocket. She checks the address, shouldering into her coat, as she leaves the apartment and treads down the steps.
Taganka is a humming flux of nonchalant faces and ossified backs. Cell-phones are pressed to ears. Lips move and pucker and stretch. Shoulders jerk. Kisa’s eyes flash through a succession of shop-windows, where perky mannequins, uncompromised by the paucity of clothes on their pale, flawless bodies, advertise spring fashion, abetting a perpetual human urge for change, some kind of transformation. Scrawny linden trees flank the opposite side of the street. Their leafless limbs reach up, up to the gray, seamless sheet of sky. Rooks loop through the March air redolent of melting snow, cats, rain, hormones.
An hour later, when Kisa arrives at the apartment and rings the bell, a woman Kisa’s age or older greets her with an estranged smile and continues to wipe her hands on a linen towel, answering Kisa’s questions. Yes, her grandmother is still alive but receives no visitors other than immediate family, whom she ceased recognizing years ago. Well, except for the cat. ‘But you can come in, if you’d like,’ the granddaughter says, stepping aside, draping the towel across her shoulder.
In a wan-lit room, where the floor and walls are dressed in worn Uzbek rugs, Kisa views a tall bed and a chalky, ghostly lady with bluish moss for hair, reposing on a cloud of pillows. A fake pine tree is wedged into the corner by the window, facing her. ‘She likes holidays,’ the granddaughter remarks as she ushers Kisa into the room and pulls a chair by the bed. ‘We keep the tree decorated year round. Please, sit down.’ She turns the tree lights on. They blink and go off. The ghost-lady stirs but gives no sign acknowledging Kisa’s presence.
Silence.
‘How long will you stay?’ the granddaughter asks.
Kisa has no idea. ‘Does it matter?’
Yes and no. ‘If you stay a while, I’ll go to the grocery store. Otherwise, I’ll have to wait until the evening when my mother replaces me. But they might be out of eggs by then.’
‘I’ll stay.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
After the granddaughter is gone, the first minute passes in silent contemplation of a cuckoo-clock on the wall above the bed and its brass pendulum counting off seconds, swinging away time.
The ghost-lady doesn’t turn her head but raises her hand, supporting it at the elbow, as if a student in a classroom. Not knowing how to respond, Kisa nods and nods again, giving her only student permission to speak.
‘What’s wrong?’ the ghost-lady asks. Her voice is cold and hard, like icicles thrumming the outside of her window.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Mean?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Ask what?’
‘What’s wrong.’
‘I don’t know. Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Something is wrong with me, too. But they won’t tell me. They keep it a secret.’
‘They want to help.’
‘How do you help somebody who doesn’t want to be helped?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You leave them alone.’ The woman switches her ghostly, liquid eyes to Kisa. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Kisa.’
‘Cat? They call you Cat?’
‘Well… yes.’
‘You look like one. A stray I used to feed every morning. It’s gone now.’
Kisa folds her hands, one inside the other, pushing down on her knuckles.
‘Are you my daughter?’
‘No.’
‘Granddaughter?’
‘No.’
‘Sister?’
‘No…just a friend.’
‘I want to go home. Will you take me?’
Silence.
The ghost-lady blinks, blinks again, and closes her eyes. Her soft, worn eye-lids flutter like petals in the light wind.
The clock makes a flipping sound. The big hand shifts and aligns with twelve, lingering. The tiny doors above burst open, and a brown bird springs out, raising its plastic wings, and begins to cuckoo, cuckoo.
By the time the granddaughter returns from the store, the ghost-lady has been asleep for an hour, and Kisa washed all the dishes in the sink and has a string of lights unwound from the tree and spread on the kitchen table. She unscrews each tiny bulb and holds it up, to the ceiling light, in a feckless attempt to detect the one that burnt out.
The granddaughter unloads the groceries on the table out of a bloated tarpaulin bag. Bread, kefir, frozen fish, mandarins.
‘No eggs?’ Kisa takes her eyes from the light bulb in her fingers.
‘No.’
‘How come?’
‘They’re out. Or so they say. Probably holding them in the back, getting ready to jerk up the price tomorrow.’
‘The absence of evidence…’
‘...is not the evidence of absence.’ The granddaughter’s eyes rest on Kisa’s face. ‘That’s a good one.’
‘Isn’t it?’ Kisa pushes the lights to the side of the table, against the wall. ‘You might want to replace the whole string.’
‘Yes, some time. It’s hard to find tree lights now.’
The granddaughter stoops to arrange the groceries inside a short refrigerator plastered with faded pictures of famous writers cut out of newspapers and magazines. ‘Do you want tea?’ she asks, ducking out, glancing above the open door.
Kisa would love to, but it’s getting late. ‘So, I better go,’ she says and rises from the chair. ‘And I need to drop by my mother’s.’ Adding, as if to explain. ‘She might know where to find cheap eggs.’
‘Here, take some mandarins for her.’ The woman holds the soft orange orbs in her hands as Kisa drags her coat off the hanger.
‘Thanks.’ Kisa slips the mandarins in her pockets, turning toward the door and turning again. ‘I’ll come tomorrow, early. Yes? I might have an extra set of lights at home. I can stay for a few hours. And you can go and look for eggs. Or cheese. Or whatever. A man.’ Kisa smiles, a little, with the corners of her mouth.
‘Just eggs.’ The woman smiles, too. ‘I’m afraid I won’t know what to do with a man. But eggs I can always fry for dinner.’
The word is friend. A person joined by affection and intimacy to another. A sympathizer, helper. A near relation. An acquaintance, an associate, a stranger whom one comes across or has occasion to mention again.
“Evidence of Absence” appeared in Nimrod 50.2 (2007): 30-39.