The Counterpart

Aleksey Alexandrovich Smoletkin - the former Gorky Professor of Arts and Letters at Leningrad State, the father of a twelve-year-old daughter in ribbons and brown uniform in Moscow, the destroyer of a beautiful old grand piano, the owner of a first edition of Pushkin’s The Stone Guest, the renter of a garage apartment in the Massachusetts house of Todd Elkin, the recipient of a Writer’s Union silver medal, the beneficiary of hickeys the purplish-chestnut colour of Tatiana Elkin’s hair, and the reluctant overseer of a bulbous nose whose presence had made him first the laughingstock of his old petty-noble family and later the butt of anti-Semitic remarks to which it had been useless to protest his Christianity. That nose! One winter morning in 1991 Aleksey Alexandrovich Smoletkin woke to discover that this last and least valuable of all his possessions, like so many of the others, was gone.

He needed no mirror, no hand feeling the flatness, the simian holes through which he now breathed, for confirmation. He knew in the way he’d known his wife would leave him for the idiot Cossack Malkov, with his yearly trips to Lenin’s tomb “to feel the history in my gizzard,” before his wife had even met that blathering Slavophile. He knew in the way he’d known he wouldn’t get tenure at Thomas Paine University, though he hadn’t guessed at the reason – according to the dean, his criticisms of students’ work was hurting their self-esteem. He knew but he didn’t want to know, so he looked for a mirror, prepared to shake off this strange idea as he had shaken off so many others.

No force had been involved in the taking of his nose. The flesh where it had been was childishly smooth, small-pored, and pale. He stroked it with a hairy finger and found it no more or less sensitive than the skin on his cheek. His brain, that tired telephone operator, had unplugged from emotion and intellect both, willing only to connect him to his sen­ses. As when he made love (in English), or occupied himself with sex (in Russian), he breathed heavily through his great stomach.

Abruptly, he hit the mirror with the flat of his hand and the telephone operator came to life. What had he done last night? What had they – he and Tatiana – done? Standing in his loose briefs, scratching at the hair around his bellybutton, Aleksey could remember no injury, no pain, and of course it would not have healed so quickly. Two empty bottles of Polish vodka stood on a wobbly pile of dishes and paper towels, idiot twin brothers, still around the morning after, panting to tell stories about how much he’d had. Chekh­ov and all those country doctors had used vodka to dull the pain of operations.

There was a method by which he could discover what happened. A list must be written, or perhaps a chart on his computer. Best not to get over-ambitious; best to open one of the fourteen legal pads with which he’d absconded from Paine.

1. Translations. Before Tatiana came over, Aleksey had been doing another translation for the Russian publishing house Uyutniy Dom, or Cozy House, not that either he or Tatiana had any qualms about interrupting his work. Here in the United States, Aleksey himself was translating Gone with the Tesseract, which featured the adventures of a time-travelling Southern heroine with “a husband in one century and a lover in another,” a convenient arrangement. The husband was a civil-rights lawyer; the lover, a Confederate soldier; Aleksey, the unfortunate conduit through which “Oh, my sweet baby” became, in its nearest Russian approximation, “My darling crumb (moya dorogaya kroshka).”

2. Tatiana – over – 8 prompto. Todd Elkin had an evening seminar: Edgar Allan Poe and the Absurdity of Fear. Tatiana came to his room wearing a red skirt and wooden beaded necklace that left bruises on his chest when they embraced. She had brought over some new drawings she’d done of herself nude, slightly shapelier than she was in actual life, her legs splayed hither and thither.

“This is the last time you’ll have to do this,” Tatiana had said, throwing the pages of Gone with the Tesseract on the floor. “After tomorrow, you’ll be a powerful biznessman.” By this, she meant he’d be a real estate agent like herself. That way, they could see each other during the day, with less of the sneaky-sneaky. And they’d have money, and would go to conferences together, and swim naked in the hotel pools. Sex in the water, Tatiana had said, was like sex on cocaine. Aleksey had never tried either one – what a linty, boiled-chicken life he’d had until now, never even invited to a single one of the famous geology department orgies back in Leningrad!

3. Tatiana = barber. In preparation for his real estate interview, Tatiana had shaved Aleksey’s beard and cut some of the shagginess out of his head, leaving a bowl-like arrangement of waves that reminded him of a children’s puppet, meant to represent Anna Karenina’s husband, that he’d watched with his daughter and wife in Leningrad.

4. Salad and napoleon; vodka commences. Tatiana was trying to lose weight.