The Scent of Pine Read Online Free

there was something intimate about the experience, awkwardly stirring, almost indecent. Lena thought that she’d better get out. She climbed out of the pool, walked to her chair, put on her flip-flops, picked up her bathrobe, and headed toward the door. The man swam to the edge and pulled himself up. He looked as if he was about to say something, but then changed his mind and dove in.
    At 9 o’clock, Lena found her way to the main building where the lectures were taking place. The room that was assigned for Lena’s talk was a large lovely room, with big windows, and two green armchairs on a stage. Though the talk was supposed to start in five minutes, there was nobody there. She sat down in one of the two armchairs and waited, with her paper on her lap. Across the hall from her room was the breakfast lounge. The smell of fresh coffee wafted in, and she watched the waiters pass her door with trays of colorful fruit and baskets of gleaming bagels. Since it looked like she had some time before she’d have to begin her talk, Lena was tempted to run across the hall to pick up a bagel or a piece of fruit but knew she’d be too nervous to eat anyway.
    At about 9:25 the moderator popped in and said that she shouldn’t worry, people were often late for morning events. Lena waited. Nobody came. A blond woman with a long nose and long loose hair peeked in, looked at Lena, and walked away. Lena stood up and walked to the back of the room so that nobody else who happened to peek in would guess that she was a lonely presenter.
    At 9:35 the moderator came back, sat down in the back row next to Lena, and made an attempt at conversation.
    “Sleepyheads, huh?” she said.
    Lena nodded.
    The attempt at conversation failed.
    The moderator looked at her watch, sighed, and stood up. She shook Lena’s hand and said how sorry she was.
    Lena went back to the breakfast room, completely empty now, littered with stained coffee cups and half-eaten bagels, with overflowing trash containers. She ate a little of everything that was left on the trays, then some more of everything, took a cup of coffee and went outside. She sat down on a bench surrounded by flowerless lilacs—it must have been pretty a couple of weeks ago—and dialed Vadim’s number, wondering if he’d be awake. He was. He asked about her talk. Lena said that it had gone fine, better than she’d expected. Nice crowd, interesting questions. She didn’t feel like telling the truth, yet lying left her feeling a little angry, not with herself but with Vadim for some reason.
    Lena contemplated whether she could skip the rest of the conference, pack her things and go, but instead she plunged into the masochism of walking down the corridor and listening to the sounds of laughter and applause coming from other rooms. Back in Russia, she used to imagine America as something like this campus—a country with many buildings and many paths leading from building to building, a building with many rooms and many corridors leading from room to room. Nobody came to her room. Nobody cared to listen to her. And yet other rooms were filled with people and voices and laughter. Speakers spoke, listeners reacted to what they said. As if everyone around her was engaging in some sort of a chemical reaction, from which she was excluded. Lena was suddenly seized by an acute feeling of being a stranger in America.
    She’d lived here for thirteen years, and in that time her relationship with her adoptive country had gone through several stages. Originally, she had imagined America as a land steeped in adventure, which filled her with panicky adoration. Then there was the incomprehension and dejection which characterized her first months in America, when everything had seemed so strange and hostile: the scenery, the climate, the people. Mostly the people. Everybody seemed to participate in a complicated game based on very particular rules. But eventually, she stopped looking at Americans as a unified mass.