On Moreno Drive the only sound is the echo of a woman’s leather boots hitting the ground. Lemons, grown too heavy for their stems, have rolled down the steep blocks and lie caught along the crags; sun steeps them as they rot to a nutty brown. Dogs watch her—some bark—as she walks past, but other than that there is only silence. Due to the marked absence of sidewalks in Silverlake, she is accustomed by now to walking in the middle of the road.
]In the dining room, she is smoking a cigarette while arranging peonies in a vase; through its vitreous surface she watches a fresh wind tear across a pale blue sky. Her hands clasp and unclasp the edges of the table and she knows serpents of smoke are slithering towards the ceiling without having to look. Behind her, a man sits at the counter, sipping at a half cup of tepid coffee and nibbling on a triangle of toast. His eyes like murky green pond water have tadpole pupils that dart around the room, as if to scan for prey.
He would spend the days painting portraits of her, one on top of the other, year after year as she evolved. A woman like a film with an ambiguous ending, eyes emerged from dark eyes; the texture of her skin seemed to change, but not quite. He had the same dream most nights: he was God; everything began in him and would end in him; he alone understood the mysterious plan. He liked to wake up at four A.M. and imagine her then. It was the time when he could catch hold of her. At four A.M. people are doing nothing; they are sleeping, he thought. Her chipped teeth, the garlic and literature she reeked of. At this hour, these were the parts of her which revealed themselves to him.
———
In the beginning, night veiled the streets. Their coats swelled with wind as they roamed the city, a flame-colored spaniel pulling Imogen’s body ever forward with his leash. They had met at a café where shelves of glasses laid shadows on the floor. Imogen was sounding out songs to herself, not very discreetly. Tuesday had left the taste of ashes in her mouth, and so she sipped vichy water poured from a carafe. The menu was dry and fragile as dead leaves in her hands.
“Onion soup,” she remarked, gazing not at the waiter’s pinkish pallor but towards an amorphous blue space which hovered slightly above the bay window. The space seemed to mock her with its trembling, daring her to look away. Already accustomed to its distortions, however, she continued to follow the soft movements: it was as though, if she were to avert her eyes, the space would vanish altogether.
A man in a loden coat sat down beside her, taking a cigarette from his metal box (it was the color of pewter) to examine her hands with a violent intensity. She wore an aluminum ring forged from the fuselage of a drowned American plane, and her nails were so short she could only have bitten them. He said his name was Montag (“Monday, in German”), and wanted to make casts of her hands for one of his sculptures. The way he perceived fascinated her: his cheek resting gracefully in his palm, and his eyes now gentle, now laughing, but behind it all in perpetual concentration, as if he were already translating what he saw into clay.
She glanced grayly at him, agreed to come to his studio tomorrow as long as it wouldn’t take longer than an hour. When she left, the air filled with a prickling sound, and questions flooded like moths to flame as he stared at the threads of his coat, waiting until the café closed for the night.
———
His large room opened onto autumn. The shadows of oak trees fell across the lawn; their dead leaves slipping into the room, driven by wind under the curtained windows. Sounds of children rose from the neighbor’s yard. Imogen came towards him in her black skirt, with her white blouse rolled up on her tanned arms, her hair loose, her face like the prow of a ship. She sat down at his table, where he was using an egg-beater to mix alginate powder with water in a silver bowl, until it turned firm and faintly redolent of seaweed. When it was ready, he took her hands and submerged them in the mold. He asked her what she was doing with her life. Her mouth became a parallelogram as she opened it abruptly to say she was trying to be a writer and was working on a novel inspired by Elizabeth Bowen. But she glanced at her scarf, horrified there were no hands to pull at it, and succumbed to the substance which swiftly hardened around them until they were irrevocably immured, as if interred to the bier.
———
Now the quiet in this space is a sound in itself; it is as if she has been watching a silent film for the past five years of her life. Sometimes she rearranges the furniture in the living room of her mind: it is a spacious, low-ceilinged room with faded blue walls; open bottles labeled with names ending in “-pam” are hidden behind the bookshelves. In New York, she would lunch at City Bakery every Tuesday. In New York, her mother donned a suit with bone buttons as she counted rubles at the dining room table. Her mother’s chamber lay at the end of a z-shaped corridor, twelve heartbeats from Imogen’s bed, and the cats which by day slunk around the parlor floor, lying in each other’s shadows, by night slept draped over her head like a karakul shapska. For Imogen’s childhood had not been unlike the Russian boxes her mother kept on her bureau; their black, glossy surface depicting either historical or mythological scenes (she could never be sure), and beneath those, their crimson interiors.
Twelve years old: she had lived across the street from a church of red sandstone, the color of dried blood, where pigeons sipped from the grey-blue puddles at the crosswalk. In the winter, the naked branches of ash trees lining the block obscured the words “Sacred Heart Church of Faith” which were painted on the building’s exterior in spindly letters. She hated being young; hated the old fears like pills stuck dry in her throat. Her father, with his propensity for smashing crockery and furniture when mildly-vexed. The sensation of salt blossoming in her lungs as he pushed her down, down beneath the waves. When she woke in the mornings, slashes of trees through her window and dust motes danced before the sun.
The first death Imogen remembered was a fox’s. Hollow, its eyes already picked out, she found it by the side of the road (she had to drag herself through the underbrush of her memory to reach it, that cool April evening in the country; ants were crawling over its pink paw and the lilacs were pouring out their numbing scent as dusk flooded the meadows). Years later in an alleyway, she would be told she looked like Juliette Binoche by a man with a jagged scar on the back of his neck, and it was as if space were closing up like a coffin. All she could see was the emptiness where those eyes had been, dark and endless in the dust.
Imogen dreams in the house on Moreno drive; her hands, clenched into little fists as she sleeps on the chaise-longue. Sunday sounds of rain and church bells permeate the air. She is her age; however, her parents are young; through the French doors softly oozes string music, and beneath that, the hum of talk from groups of men shrouded in a haze of cigar smoke (either Montecristo #2’s, her father’s preference, or alternatively Romeo & Juliets). They speak of Petersburg and of Russo-American relations. She can make out their voices; she thinks she sees their shadows on the tinted glass of the doors. She clenches and unclenches her fists, then rises to her feet to walk towards the doors, quickly, and then more quickly, as though she already knows they will be gone, as if she is Miss Clavel hurrying ever forward down the hallway, yet never reaching the room. She thrusts her hands towards the handles and flings open the doors. All that remains is a table veiled in a mist of smoke and across its surface, samovars and empty glass decanters which were once filled with cognac.
And so the church bells clang in her head every afternoon; and so she holds the receiver to her ear and listens to the long, insistent, and utterly hopeless ringing. There are days now when she can’t recall the precise hue of her mother’s eyes. Life is like a statue, the nose or hands of which centuries have crumbled, unearthed, and having to be deciphered, divined. Rousing herself in the mornings, Imogen rises and shuffles to the bathroom. Water is muddled where Montag has been washing his brushes, one and then another, until the liquid nears the porcelain sink’s precipice. The zellige tiles are cool on her bare feet, cool and smooth and each time piercingly reminiscent of how as a girl she would slip her icy hands into the large pockets of her father’s dark lambskin coat when they walked home with muffled steps through the snow, huddled together against the wind on those frigid February evenings after having dined at the Turkish restaurant down the block (perhaps, she thinks to herself, running a toe over the crevice between two tiles, perhaps this was the only warmth he could offer against the cold––not human warmth, but animal skin). Brushing a stray strand of hair from her cheek, she turns the faucets to hear the rush swiftly disappear down the drain.
———
Hours on Moreno Drive are shrouded in red and grey and Imogen’s skin glistens like a piece of pottery glazed with celadon. On her bureau she still keeps a Russian box, the only remaining one of her mother’s. A knight, his armor tarnished, sits upon a white horse who bows her head in the tall grasses, the tips of which have by hues begun to orange with autumn’s return. His narrow lance slants down; its tip, not unlike the tip of a nib, points towards the carcass of a cow, long dead as evidenced by its sun-bleached bones. His face, concealed by the silver of his helmet, gazes towards the notched stone engraved with the words “жцвунебь НЕмЬлути.” Life of the sky, don’t be stupid. The rest of the phrase has deteriorated, though Imogen is uncertain whether it is the time within the illustration or the time within her own world which has obscured their meaning. Signed канцмсаь Шуьоь, the varnished wooden top peels back to reveal its contents; even after decades, the odor of her father’s brilliantine still lingers in the interior, jasmine and chrysanthemum the way he slicked back his thinning black hair each morning in the bathroom mirror on east 63rd street.
All that’s inside is the broken shards of a champagne flute and one photograph. Red beauty and barren boughs: her mother in St. Petersburg, the focus blurry, the tint sepia. She is wearing a pink scarf coiled tightly round her neck (slim, like a birch tree), slender hands slipped inside the black pockets of her coat. She stands cut off at the knees on what appears to be a bridge. Beyond her waters gush. 4.0 aperture fades baroque architecture to the background, and the fall of frost on pavement is like the sound of translucent insects dropped upon one another. As a child she was loath to part with her mother and thus each morning before school intentionally attempted to tangle locks of her hair in the buttons of her mother’s wool coat, for if she was attached, she would never be able to leave. Yet one morning in her eagerness to see December’s first snow she forgot, foolishly, never to see her mother again. And so recently Imogen feels her mother is simply waiting for her to pack up her things and come join her on that bridge, buttons caught in hair once more, to watch the world dissolve to dusk.
But Russia drains from her mind and Imogen closes the bathroom door. She likes Moreno Drive, Imogen tells herself, likes the porcelain sound the cat’s water bowl makes when she places it on the kitchen tiles. She walks the halls until she sees Montag, still at the counter, peeling a tangerine with hurried precision. With a parabolic movement of his eye he looks her up and down; she places her hand, her leaden hand he interred, upon the counter’s surface. The marble is slick as a medical-grade hospital gown and she doesn’t know what to do with her fingers so she removes her hand from the surface and places it once more in her pocket. He etches her tongue speechless with his artist’s trick of undressing her with his eyes.
Palpable is the silence; the room is nothing like Imogen’s childhood. Even in her classic haze of valium, when her mother was busy in the kitchen she could often be heard muttering and swearing in French and slamming cabinets, and yet through the simple act of walking into the dining room she would become another Asiya, in three footsteps shifting to her elegant, austere self, setting a plate of neatly sliced smoked herring, lightly sprinkled with chopped scallions, upon the table without a sound. Two rooms away a melancholy waltz could be heard; her mother’s contralto voice insinuated itself into its cadence, calling Imogen and her father to supper.
They sat down upon the wooden chairs, her mother in her décolleté with her dark eyes making unwavering contact, her father rubbing his temple (he never rubbed his face with open hands, but with closed fists as a cat does with its paw as it bathes itself). His garments hung loosely about him, as though they had been borrowed, unespousing of his body like a man in a faded lithograph. He opened his mouth to speak; his teeth jaundiced by time and tobacco. “Have you received any news of late from the family?” His umbrous eyes were crinkling towards Asiya as he inquired (in his solemn voice; a voice of bronze, as they say). Imogen was gazing beyond the window, at a gust of wind that ceaselessly blew the fragile leaves off their branches. The candles wept her their wax, dripping red and glowing upon the table. Asiya spoke swiftly, interlarding her Russian with phrases of French, of the failed business in Suwalki, of her brother in the Red Army. She was gripping her fork tightly with pale deft hands. “But we must believe in humanity,” Imogen said, so earnest and sure of herself. She had slipped her rings off and they lay on the oak of the table, glistening in the evening’s frail lamplight. For she wanted to be an unfound forest, or a cupola with many different windows; still a child at that time, each morning she was up at six with her eagerness to live.
———
The sidewalks of that other place still remember her footsteps. Imogen recalls the earthy flavor of rye bread, the women clad in dark colors, the sun licking her flesh. She turns, steps out of the kitchen. Thunderclaps. Veins are crawling their way across the sky this evening. Time is a track with broken lines and so she throws the clock at the wall. His gaze blazes ochre and fire. Leaden hands and a tartan scarf, she left him, the man with eyes of such pale green that the sockets at times appeared almost hollow, as in ancient statues of marble. For centuries of shadows create a single night.
