a character the character i love loves/hates...

It was toward the end of February of 1919 when Vera jumped, the trapeze artist who ultimately could not fly. She had been a friend of Sasha’s sister and it was Sasha who got her the job as a chorus girl at the Stray Dog after the circus shut down, over many more suitable girls who could sway their hips, spread their legs and give their clients the hungry, indifferent gaze of a whore Vera would never learn. She jumped on a cold night when the stars hung without pulleys and the air whipped around the faces of the city’s buildings like a horse-trainer gone mad. In the morning her body was a poppy on the ice, black center and red petals unfurled.

I take the phone call early that morning, then I wait for Sasha to get up, he will know what to do, what arrangements to make, I half-believe, and do nothing until he wakes. All morning I wander about our rooms, sit down to read, get up to clean, abandon the bucket of dirty cold water, cut bread for breakfast, pick up my abandoned reading, and then the gypsy children make their rounds and I open the window to watch them zigzag their way from courtyard to courtyard, sculpting snowball that won’t stick in this cold. Finally I throw open the curtains and Sasha rolls over and grins at me, a sleepy, sated grin. Come here, he mumbles into the pillow and looks at me with lust and dumb satiety.

What is it? Come here I said.

Something’s happened. It’s Vera. They found her dead this morning.

Good god, not another one, he moans into the pillow. A beat. Then: What did she do?

She jumped from the Troitskiy bridge.

Another beat.

God, the circus madwoman. Pity she couldn’t really fly. Come here, there’s nothing to be done anyway.

Sasha, be decent. We might have to help make arrangements.

I’ll be decent later. Come here first.

I let him pull me down next to him, his body is warm and smells of vinegar and soap and fresh sweat. I let him cradle me in his arms, my back to him, his breath hot and sleepy on my neck. He slides his hand under my shirt and presses his palm to my belly, steady boy, the gesture circus trainers use on the flanks of their panicked horses. I respond and the more I hate myself for it, the more I resist, the more aroused I become. My sadness, heavy and cold on my skin this morning, the image of Vera’s broken body on the ice, evaporate at his touch, or rather his touch transforms it into a desperate, famished lust that has no bottom and no joy and is all the more intense for its joyless, guilty pleasure.

Please, Sasha, not now, Misha needs you to call.

He pulls away and hovering over me his face is impassive, he sizes me up, his eyes narrow and grow clear for a moment before he strikes me hard across the face and my ears ring as he whispers in my ear, Not another word out of you about that whore.

He pins me to the bed with the weight of his body, my face is pressed into the sheets, and through the fever of our choreography I hear the gypsy girl who lives in one of our street’s doorways, this song I’ve never heard that breaks my heart, “I have no place, I have no landscape, I have no country.” I love him most at that moment, for he takes me as hard as he wants a home he will never have and the more violent our sex, the more desperately I know he is searching for this nomad’s home.

Afterwards I go down to bargain with Masha for firewood. I return to find Sasha in the hallway, his lanky body collapsed on the stool that looks too incongruous to hold his weight, a clown’s prop. He stares blankly at the phone as though it were a bomb or an oracle. His face is in dark profile against the open bedroom door and the cold slate light of February casts his figure in a cinematic, flat luminescence. Only then do I notice his shoulders shaking.