The Scent of Pine Read Online Free Page A

They were all lonely to a certain degree, they were all strangers to a certain degree. Some were accessible, others were not; some were interested in her, others were not. This led her to an acceptance of America and Americans that she had enjoyed for the last few years. But recently, with her career going nowhere and her loneliness getting greater and greater, she’d started to feel the onset of panic again.
    She read off the titles of presentations printed on little sheets of paper and clipped to the doors, marveling at how stupid they sounded and how transparent their metaphors were. “Closed In.” “Stilted Bodies. Stilted Souls.” “The Magic of Prison States.” Yet, people laughed and applauded. Lena caught the word “masturbation” as she was passing “The Magic of Prison States,” and she stopped by the open door to listen. She had thought the speaker used “masturbation” as some kind of metaphor, but no, it turned out he meant it in the literal sense. He was talking about graphic novels set in oppressive societies. The speaker had a soft, pleasant voice, a calm and confident manner. Not a trace of an accent. He had no business talking about prison states. What could he possibly know? There were notes of warm amusement in his tone that suggested that he understood whatever there was to understand about it. She had lived in America for thirteen years, and she didn’t understand it at all. Where did this arrogance come from? Holding the door, she peeked into the room. The speaker was a tall man with stooped shoulders, restless, a little awkward, seemingly too aware of the impression he was making. Lena couldn’t see his face. There were just a few people in the audience. Six. No, seven—an old man slumped by the window. He looked like he was asleep. Lena heard notes of anxiety in the speaker’s voice that she hadn’t caught before. She felt something like compassion for him. As she leaned against it, the door made a screech, and the man turned toward her. Lena recognized him right away. The fact that he had caught her eavesdropping combined with the fact that he had seen her in the intimacy of the pool made her intensely embarrassed. Lena walked from the room.
    The stinky, squeaky floors of the hall made her cringe. The linoleum was a frightening canary-yellow, with a pattern that reminded her of the floor in the camp headquarters where they had their weekly meetings with Yanina. Black swirly lines and brown specks. Lena had been so frightened of Yanina that she would sit staring at the pattern on the floor the whole time.

    At the first meeting there were tea and sandwiches. They entered a square room with tables and chairs and two soldiers in the corner pouring the tea from a big vat into thick glasses. The tea was for them, as were cheese sandwiches on a big tray. “Help yourself!” one of the soldiers said. He had brown squinty eyes that seemed to say: “Girls! You don’t know how lucky you are.”
    Some women were sitting on the chairs by the wall. One said that she was the camp nurse; another said that she was in charge of the supplies. Natasha. Galina. Nadezhda. Svetlana. Zhenya. Lena forgot which was which right away. She felt as if they were in a theater, the play was about to start, and the actors were already on the stage, but they didn’t know who among them would be the principals and who would be mere extras.
    A girl next to Lena whispered: “Thank God, Vedenej isn’t here!” Lena asked who that was. “Major Vedeneev, the camp director. Everybody calls him Vedenej.”
    Yanina walked into the room and didn’t take a sandwich. In retrospect, this was the first thing that had alarmed Lena about Yanina. The other woman took a chair and moved it away from the table to the middle of the room. She sat down, her thick legs wide-set and firmly planted on the floor. She looked the girls over, one by one. She seemed to be studying them, even testing them with her stare.
    Lena had put her