They Know Not What They Do Read online

  ‘Everything’s still up in the air,’ Alina said, turning away. She was sure things would work out for the best, she added.

  Julia nodded. Her son Jimi, a dead ringer for Alfred Hitchcock, was already on his third diaper-change of the movie. ‘Things always do.’

  ‘It all depends on Joe’s work, really.’

  Julia said she admired Alina, about to fly off to a foreign country, game enough to start all over again. As she listened to Julia, Alina saw herself through her friend’s eyes and was suddenly pleased to be going, to be the adventurous woman living life on her own terms. Moving began to sound intriguing, even enviable, and when Julia didn’t seem to question it, Alina gradually managed to convince herself that this was the way things were now, and this was, if not optimal, then at least tolerable. This was her life, and she had chosen it, and there was a price to pay for every decision, as well as for not doing, not going and not agreeing to anything. And the price for that was often the highest.

  It had been a challenge for Alina getting the stroller into the bathroom. After working it in through the narrow doorway, she stood in the fluorescent glare, unsure of what to do with herself, then washed her hands and waited. A little later, when she thought she heard the girl’s footsteps in the corridor, she laboriously maneuvered the stroller back out.

  Joe was alone in his office. They embraced tentatively; Alina got the impression that he didn’t feel comfortable hugging in his professional persona, even with no one around to see. The building felt as deserted as a shuttered factory.

  She looked around. Except for the girl’s side of the room, Joe’s office was exactly the same, which suddenly struck Alina as incomprehensible. Their home had undergone a complete transformation. The crib had taken over the bedroom’s lone unoccupied wall, their bed had moved from its former place, a diaper table had been drilled in where the second bathroom cabinet used to be. The basket of toys and baby bouncer formed an encampment – evidently a permanent one, although that hadn’t been the intention – in the middle of the living room. The girl had claimed half of Joe’s office and the baby half their home, but Joe’s desk, bulletin board, and bookshelf appeared untouched.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ he asked.

  ‘I just forgot what it looked like in here.’

  Joe hitched his trousers and lined up the pens on his desk as if he found the slightest disorder disturbing. Alina was struck by the sensation that they were meeting to discuss some unavoidable but unpleasant arrangement.

  She’d been a student here too once upon a time. It seemed hard to believe now. She tried to recall the material from her textbooks that had seemed so essential then, the minutiae that pretentious boys in ponytails had argued about in the cafeteria that had been of zero relevance since.

  ‘Well,’ she said, after they had sat in silence for some time. Joe looked at her and smiled.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Um… are we just going to stay here?’ Alina said, meaning his office.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ Joe asked.

  ‘Go?’

  Alina blinked. She’d imagined that he would want to show Samuel to his colleagues, some of whom she knew too, or at least had known. Hadn’t that been the point of the visit? Did Joe think she didn’t have anything better to do with her day than kill time in her husband’s office? Or was he waiting for Samuel to wake up? Alina started to wonder if she was perpetually leaving the most important part of what she wanted to convey unsaid.

  Suddenly something indescribable and heavy washed over her and she had to sit down, but the only chair free was the girl’s.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Joe asked.

  ‘I just feel a little dizzy.’

  It’s probably dehydration on account of the breastfeeding, she was on the verge of saying, but then the office door opened.

  The girl was standing by the open door. She was twirling an unlit cigarette between her forefinger and middle finger as if trying to signal something to Joe. Alina thought, Is she going to smoke in a room where there’s a baby?

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry,’ the girl said in English, and the twirling stopped. ‘I didn’t realize you were still here,’ she added to Alina in Finnish, somehow managing to avoid her gaze. ‘I was just heading out for a smoke,’ she said to Joe, and shot a quick glance at her cigarette, as if it had appeared there of its own accord.

  The girl’s lips were red, freshly painted.

  ‘But you don’t smoke,’ Alina commented to her husband.

  The girl raised her artfully plucked eyebrows at Joe: really? For a second, Alina thought she would burst out laughing.

  ‘To keep me company,’ the girl explained to Alina, in a mocking tone, it seemed.

  ‘I’m kind of busy today,’ Joe said in an unfamiliar, formal voice.

  The girl raised her eyebrows again as if to say: let’s get back to this once that woman is gone, spun on her heel, and left.

  Alina looked at Joe inquiringly.

  ‘I go along sometimes to stretch my legs,’ he said, and coughed. ‘If I have the time.’

  ‘You can smoke for all I care,’ she told him. ‘I’m just surprised.’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘I meant that if you did, I wouldn’t mind.’ She tried to smile and lighten her voice. ‘What’s her name?’

  Joe’s expression remained serious.

  ‘Aleksandra.’

  Alina had only gone to Italy because she felt guilty. The memory of it, though, still set her heart hammering. She would let her thoughts wander back to the trip whenever she felt like she hadn’t experienced anything in life.

  She had been so young. It had only been a year and a half ago, but still: she had been so young.

  She hadn’t wanted anyone else to learn about her abominable master’s thesis, let alone give a presentation on it. But Wallenberg had implied it was part of the deal.

  ‘P. Wallenberg would be pleased to welcome you to his team,’ he had announced, which would mean her doing a dissertation. Even at his most casual, Wallenberg spoke in a formal register. It was an attempt at humor, which Alina found touching: a sixty-year-old professor, still so inept. There was no one else on Wallenberg’s team. The students knew that he tried to lure someone from every cohort into continuing his work, his unique line of research in danger of dying with him.

  In a way, the trip was Alina’s apology for not having the nerve to say she had no interest in writing a dissertation or rescuing Wallenberg’s life’s work from extinction; for even implying she was still giving the matter serious consideration.

  As hundreds of conference participants surged into the main exhibition hall to meander through the poster presentations, Alina stood alone in front of her poster, praying no one would stop. They could all tell she was a fraud. She was ashamed of her study, its results, and the last-minute way she’d thrown the thesis together. The poster’s dimensions had been specified by the organizers but struck her as brazen. She still found it hard to believe that the university press had printed the big, black-and-white announcement just for her, for this. It must have cost hundreds of marks.

  She did her best to look preoccupied and lost in thought, and to her relief everyone stepped briskly past. The people around her were discussing their research; she melted into her bland poster and felt her pulse rate gradually normalize.

  Only fifteen more minutes, Alina thought, trying not to glance at her watch. She could hear the Spanish girl at the next stand explain her research for the thirtieth time. She repeated her spiel word for word for every new listener, down to the jokes Alina now knew by heart. I can cover for you if you need a bathroom break, she thought as she looked over at the approachable girl people liked listening to, laughing politely at the appropriate moments.

  Suddenly Alina envied the girl everything: her research design, less sophisticated than Alina’s; her conclusions, over-confident in light of the data; her English, clumsier than Alina’s; the ease with which she presented her wor
k. An audience had gathered around her, and the men in particular looked as if they had been waiting their entire lives for this encounter.

  Alina snapped out of it when she realized someone was studying her poster. A brown-eyed, friendly-looking, non-Finnish man had stopped and asked her to describe her research to him. Walk me through it, he said. There was something touching about the expression, and suddenly Alina felt exhausted and bored of being so repressed and uptight and taking her ridiculous thesis and everything else so seriously, and so she briefly reported what she’d done and what she thought about it, as if the impression the man formed of her and losing her final shot at academic credibility didn’t matter – and, astonishingly, at that moment they didn’t. To cut him off before he could point out all of the study’s flaws, which made it impossible to draw any conclusions from it, Alina wrapped up by insisting how poorly the whole thing had been done from start to finish.

  But the man frowned in disagreement. But listen: those were the words he’d used. And just like that, the moment was the opposite of what she’d envisioned: she was critiquing her own study, while a credible – that is, real – researcher who was not from Finland was defending it, as though it made perfect sense.

  The most important thing is to ask the right questions, the man said, sounding so convinced that Alina wanted to believe him. Behind them, a group of distinguished-looking middle-aged men in sport coats were laughing at the beautiful Spanish girl’s joke, the one Alina had heard thirty-one times now and the brown-eyed man twice, and they looked at each other and could tell that they’d both picked up on this. They suppressed smiles, and the man rolled his eyes up to the ceiling to indicate he thought the joke was lame, too, and Alina started hoping he wouldn’t leave just yet.

  The man thanked her and continued on to the next person – a pudgy, wheezy kid so poorly dressed he must have been some sort of child prodigy – and once the man was gone, Alina realized she was standing in front of her poster in a different way than before. Now when someone walked past, she looked them in the eye and smiled, and people paused and scanned her poster, which meant more and more people paused, and Alina described her conclusions to all of them as if they were valid and she justifiably proud of them, and to her surprise none of the people who stopped questioned this. Interesting, they said, and: Thank you. And: Are you planning on publishing the results? Could you send me the paper? And Alina was annoyed that she didn’t have a one-sheeter, the kind everyone else was handing out and that people were suddenly asking her for. She caught herself hoping that the time allocated wasn’t about to run out because she was just getting started. For the first time, the idea of joining Wallenberg’s team seemed viable, and she found herself momentarily envisaging a new life for herself.

  As the session ended and she removed the thumbtacks from the easel, she thought about the brown-eyed man and his friendly smile, remembered the words he’d used to describe her study: methodologically sound. She wondered if he’d meant what he said or if that was just the way Americans talked, saying something nice to everyone even when it wasn’t true. She thought about the man’s name, Joe, and that of the university where he worked in the United States, which Alina recognized from the newspapers and the movies. She tried to imagine what his life must be like, and felt a momentary sadness that she wouldn’t be starting a dissertation, or coming to conferences like these and meeting polite, intelligent foreign men like Joe, ever again.

  She rolled up her poster, slid it back into the cardboard tube she’d bought at the art supply store, and tossed the strap over her shoulder. Then she saw the man walk back into the exhibition hall: he seemed disoriented, but a second later noticed her and looked pleased.

  She never did find out if Joe had returned because of her or for some other reason, but when he asked her to dinner, she accepted gladly.

  I have to bring it up again, she thought, two weeks after the previous attempt. Maybe things would go better this time. Regardless of what happened, they needed to try.

  But in the evenings, when it crossed Alina’s mind and the moment was right, the girl would be lying in their bed, smoking a cigarette. She’d offer one to Joe, and he would set aside his Masters of Chess and take it, and then the girl would pull back the covers, lean languorously on her elbows, and offer herself.

  Alina would close her eyes and try to sleep, but she couldn’t help hearing the silver bracelet bang rhythmically against the headboard with every moan. The girl was lying beneath Joe in a studio apartment where the tables weren’t covered in baby clothes but glossy interior design magazines; he was lifting the girl’s firm buttocks against the wall of a filthy service station bathroom, or an empty lecture hall late at night, after everyone else had left. The girl was sitting, bare-breasted, on Joe in a musty hotel room or their darkened office, and she moaned and moved in a way he had always hoped Alina would but had never asked her to: like a cat.

  Occasionally the girl would show up in the middle of the day; one time, she arrived dressed in an evening gown. Open to the small of her back, it revealed a small, tasteful tattoo on the girl’s shoulder blade. Alina had never seen a tattoo on a young woman before, only on sailors and convicted criminals. The girl took a seat next to her while Samuel was napping and Alina was watching a television series set in a British hospital, where the doctors didn’t tend to patients but lovesick nurses. The girl glanced at the television screen and then at Alina. Good, you think? the scornful look said.

  Joe and I have so much to talk about, the girl’s arrogant body language signaled. Her victorious eyes demonstrated that the deal was sealed; the practical arrangements were just lagging a little behind, the way they always did.

  Alina felt a constriction in her heart.

  The girl already viewed herself as Joe’s true partner, imagined she’d rescued him from cosmic loneliness. You could see it in her serene, sated bearing; I wonder if you fully grasp what you look like, the girl’s raised eyebrows had asked that time Alina visited the office. I’m the only one Joe can discuss his work with, her judgmental eyes had said, challenge himself with: share his life with.

  That’s why he doesn’t want to leave Finland anymore, the girl’s quivering lashes had telegraphed, although Alina hadn’t been able to interpret this message correctly back then.

  Things are going so well for us.

  Before long, Alina started to see the girl outside the house, too, while walking down the street with Samuel in his stroller, at a trendy restaurant with another childless, carefree friend.

  Why did the girl always have to show up and spoil things? Alina would have done anything to get rid of her, anything at all.

  This is absurd, she thought, as she pushed the stroller into motion again and the girl waved to her cheerfully through the restaurant window, smiled with her perfect, plump lips, revealing flawless, beautiful teeth. I need help, Alina thought, psychoanalysis, the longest and most miserable kind.

  Initially she’d held back. You were supposed to say no, at least at first. And that’s what she’d done, too, in her mind – up until the moment the waiter refilled their glasses and asked if they’d care for dessert. The longer they sat in the restaurant, the harder it became to resist the dim lighting, the wine’s warmth, Joe’s attentive questions that demonstrated how highly he thought of her.

  In contrast to everything she’d imagined about herself, she mentally succumbed during the cab ride. She knew exactly what she was doing when, after that one last late-night glass of Calvados, she summoned up an innocent tone of voice and, heart pounding, asked Joe in the hotel hallway if he wanted to come to her room for a nightcap.

  The next morning, when she told Julia over the phone, cheeks blazing, about the American and insisted there was no way she would ever do anything with him – only a few hours after the wine-mellowed early morning when she’d rolled a condom onto him with a surreal naturalness – Julia had said: everyone should have at least one vacation romance during their lifetime.

  A
lina had spent the last two nights of the conference in Joe’s bed. Italy in September had been so hot that they’d had to sleep with the windows open, the crickets’ chirping outside soft and foreign-sounding. Early in the morning, she’d scampered barefoot down the carpeted corridor, on the off chance Wallenberg knocked on her door before breakfast.

  During the return flight, he had asked Alina if she was happy she’d come. Alina’s cheeks grew hot as she thought about what had happened, and that she was the one it had happened to; this time, she wasn’t the one hearing about it.

  Alina had never had a one-night stand before, but she knew what was expected of her and was proud she’d been able to act appropriately. She knew she’d never see Joe again. You were supposed to let the other person go, disappear. That was part of the excitement, what men craved.

  But when he suggested it, she’d agreed to a long weekend that fall in London, where he was attending another conference. ‘Again?’ Alina had blurted into the phone, and Joe had laughed heartily at the joke, although she had asked the question in all seriousness.

  To pay for the trip, she had taken out her first and only student loan – and, to her surprise, without the slightest hesitation. Initially she didn’t even tell Julia, to whom she told everything, because her going would reveal who she’d always been, deep down inside: openly naïve, secretly slutty, or both. She was surprised, eventually, when on confessing she didn’t encounter the faintest trace of disapproval; instead, her friend’s voice echoed with surprised delight, like a mother whose toddler has finally dared to dip her toe in the water. For a fleeting moment Alina wondered if that’s the way things had always been, that you really could do whatever you wanted with your life. Her exhilaration was short-lived, however, stifled by the suspicion that Julia had, for as long as they’d been friends, seen Alina as repressing her womanhood.