Divide Me by Zero Read online

  There was another strange thing that I noticed. Since this was the very beginning of the affair, we both tried to impress each other, claiming obscure films and books as our favorite, dropping names of especially dense philosophers, spouting nonstop intellectual insights, but at the same time the process of falling in love made us too vulnerable and overwhelmed to maintain cerebral cool.

  One time B. was in the middle of a complex argument about Bergman’s lack of sentimentality when his eyes suddenly filled with tears.

  “Do you remember that shot at the end of Wild Strawberries, where the elderly professor is sitting next to his ancient mother?”

  I didn’t remember it.

  “He is an old man. But he’s also a child at that moment. A lonely child. Nobody can understand true loneliness, except for children and people approaching death.”

  B. choked on his words and couldn’t speak for several minutes.

  I think it was the “talking like mad” rather than the “kissing like mad” that made it so hard for us to face our respective spouses afterward. I hadn’t loved Len for a long time before starting an affair with B., but I still cared about him, and what filled me with unbearable guilt was that I couldn’t force myself to listen to Len with genuine attention, no matter how hard I tried.

  Ever since I was a young child, love was something that I badly wanted. This was what my parents had. I knew that that was what they had, before I even knew the word “love.”

  Here is how the story goes.

  My mother and father met at a party in somebody’s crowded apartment. Within an hour, they sneaked out and spent the rest of the night walking along the streets of Moscow. It was summer, my mother was wearing a stiff sleeveless dress and a pair of too-tight sandals. She mentioned those sandals every time she told me the story. They made it to the Moscow River embankment and walked along the river until my mother’s feet were chafed raw. Then they sat down on the bench facing the Kremlin. They wanted to see the sunrise, but it was too cloudy that night, and by the morning a warm drizzle started, so they couldn’t really see anything. My father pulled the Pravda newspaper out of his briefcase, checked the sunrise time for the previous day, subtracted one minute, and proposed to my mother exactly then. She thought it was a joke and started to laugh. She wouldn’t stop laughing. He said he was completely serious. She still wouldn’t stop laughing. She said, “Fine, I’ll marry you.” He said he needed this in writing. She asked: “What do you want, an official document?” He nodded. My father had a pen on him, but no paper, so he had to tear off the corner of Pravda’s front page.

  “I, citizen Nina Kopeleva, promise to marry citizen Daniil Geller. Signed and registered.” There are also the words “Workers of the world, unite!” printed in huge letters in the background.

  My father lived in Sevastopol, a town on the Black Sea, famous for its bloody military history, vast pebble beach, and the ruins of an ancient Greek town called Chersonesus. He was an oceanographer, employed by a lab that specialized in studies of the ocean. Because of his job, my father couldn’t live anyplace else, so it was my mother who had to leave everything behind, including her job at the Ministry of Education, and move to Sevastopol to be with him. She told me that she didn’t mind. She had just published a very successful math textbook for children, and she hoped she would be able to work from home and earn her living by writing more textbooks.

  This was the peak of the so-called stagnation period in the Soviet Union, when people were allowed to live and work in peace, unless of course they tried to stir things up. Those ended up fired or exiled (if they were very lucky) or locked in psychiatric asylums (if they weren’t). I wonder if this was why both my parents found fields that were timeless and infinite, to exist beyond politics, like the Ocean and Math, so they wouldn’t be tempted to stir things up.

  In Sevastopol, my father had to spend a lot of time away, crossing the oceans and seas on specially equipped ships, gathering data, making up formulas for the activity of the currents, but also watching those currents live, how they shifted and breathed, making the whole mass of the ocean move and rise and fall. The ocean was his curved space, magical in its enormity and disregard for human concerns.

  My mother stayed home, where she worked on her books and took care of me. We would go to the beach every day, even when it was chilly, and do math with pebbles. One of my first memories of my mother is our doing math with pebbles. I was only three, I think. The pebbles were all cold and rounded, but of different sizes and colors, so you could do all kinds of mathematical operations with them. You could count them up, you could arrange them from smallest to largest, you could build various geometrical shapes out of them.

  “See?” my mother would say. “This is a square. Now let’s make a triangle.”

  Her black curly hair flew in all directions in the wind, falling over her eyes, which were brown and gleaming like the eyes of a horse. Everybody said that I had the same eyes.

  The cold often made my nose run, and my mother would wipe my face with a sandy handkerchief that felt scratchy against my skin. All of our things were sandy, because we spent so much time on the beach.

  Every time my father came home from a trip, we would go to the port to meet him. My mother would hold me by the hand, and her hand would be sweaty and throbbing because she squeezed mine hard when we had to push through the crowd. She kept craning her neck and rising on her toes to see above other people’s heads. Her lips were painted bright pink, and she wore so much perfume that every time a gust of wind blew in my direction, it felt like being slapped across the face by a bouquet of flowers. One time, when I was about four, my mother left me in the crowd. She couldn’t spot my father for a long time, and when she finally did, she dropped my hand and ran toward my father to jump into his arms. I was scared, but I wasn’t mad at my mother, or at least I don’t remember being mad.

  When my father was home, we would take long walks on the beach. I remember one of our walks well. I was five, still small enough to be hoisted up onto my father’s shoulders. He taught me how to spot ships that were far away, tiny shimmering spots on the horizon, indistinguishable from seabirds. I remember thinking that if the ships on the horizon were that tiny, that meant my father had to turn into the tiniest speck to fit in there. The ships would reach an invisible line and then disappear beyond the horizon. “Look, another one vanished!” I would point to the empty space where we had just seen the ship. “They don’t vanish!” my father would say, chuckling. “They go beyond your line of vision. If you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it’s not there.”

  He died two months after that.

  His sister Rosa had immigrated to Israel, and my father’s Communist Party membership had been revoked. Then my father had been summoned by a KGB officer assigned to oversee the lab. My father was told that he wouldn’t be allowed on overseas research trips, because he wasn’t trustworthy anymore. “But this work is my whole life!” my father pleaded. “You should’ve explained this to your sister,” the officer said.

  My father had a heart attack and died within twenty-four hours. He was only forty. I was only six. My mother was only thirty-six.

  Her hair turned gray overnight. There is proof of this in the photos. Here she is at the funeral, leaning against a brick wall, sparse gray tufts sticking out from under her black scarf. And here is a photo taken just a few days before, where my mother is posing on the beach with a full head of black curly hair.

  There was a box with their letters and photographs. My mother gave it to me when I was eighteen, during a time of true and intense friendship. I was recovering from my first heartbreak and I was reading everything I could find about love (novels, memoirs, essays, poems). I thought that if I could study love the way I used to study math, the knowledge would arm me with some power against the colossal incomprehension and fear I was experiencing.

  Most of my mother’s photos from our time in Sevastopol turned out to be of her striking silly poses on the beach.
There were two or three photographs of my mother and father together. They don’t really look glowing with passion in any of them, but rather at ease with each other. Each perfectly comfortable in the other’s space, each absolutely sure that he/she is with the right person, each wearing the sly, smug expression of somebody who is sure of being deeply loved.

  There were also letters. Tons of letters that my parents wrote to each other while my father was away.

  I was disappointed at first. Neither of my parents was a good writer, and neither of them employed the grand words of love. But then I saw something else, something more important and powerful than grand words: genuine hunger for each other’s presence.

  My dear and dear and dear and dear Danka!

  You asked me to tell you about my day minute by minute. Unfortunately, I had to spend many minutes standing in line to buy underpants. It was worth it though. They are made in Poland and have these little blue flowers all over them. I think you’re going to love them!

  I’m worried about what you eat on that ship! Every time I cook something delicious for Katya and me, I feel sad that you can’t eat it. Things with the new book are still tough. The artist failed to submit the illustrations by the deadline, and now everything has to be postponed. It’s not like he’s a good artist either. He mostly draws little pigs. I can’t have every problem be about little pigs. There are other animals, you know!

  I’m still having trouble falling asleep without you. The empty space on your side feels wrong. Luckily I know math, so I just stretch diagonally to minimize the empty space.

  Love you, miss you, kiss you!

  Your Nina

  Nina, Ninochka, Nochka!

  I don’t sleep very well either, I keep dreaming of you and reaching for you and wake up on the very edge of the bed about to fall down. Food is actually pretty good here. The cook makes borscht with ham and sausage, it’s really good, nothing like yours though. I agree that math problems should employ different animals. Kids should be able to count sheep and cows and goats. Counting pigs alone won’t make them ready for the real world. Speaking of animals, I think I saw a whale yesterday. I wanted to take a picture for you, but it was gone before I got the camera. I have to go to a meeting in a minute.

  You can’t imagine how much I want you right now.

  Your D.

  Note to a squeamish reader. No, I didn’t find the sexual innuendos in my parents’ letters embarrassing. I found them heartbreaking.

  There was one more item in that box. The note scribbled on the yellowed corner of the Pravda front page: “I, citizen Nina Kopeleva, promise to marry citizen Daniil Geller. Signed and registered.”

  A love letter in the language of Soviet bureaucracy written on the corner of a Soviet newspaper.

  I came to think of that note as my talisman and my written oath. What my parents had was real love, and I promised myself not to settle for anything less.

  In 1994, my mother and I immigrated to the US. Most of our letters and photographs were lost in the process, but that note survived, because I had it tucked between the pages of my passport and never touched it, except one time, in 2010, when I’d started seeing B. By then the note was forty years old. Forty years old, can you imagine that! Completely yellowed and so thin that I was afraid it would crumble in my fingers. I stroked it, choking with a mix of emotion and being embarrassed by emotion, and put it back.

  THREE

  Our apartment in Sevastopol belonged to the lab, and they wouldn’t let us stay there after my father’s death. My mother and I had to move back to the Moscow apartment she used to share with her parents. My uncle Grisha, my mother’s younger brother, came to help us pack and take us back to Moscow.

  The train wasn’t full, so we got the entire compartment for the three of us. Grisha slept on the upper berth, and my mother and I slept on the lower ones.

  My mother spent most of our journey in the compartment, lying on her berth with her back to us, howling into the pillow. She would sit up only to drink tea from a thick glass in a massive metal holder. And she would stand up only to wobble down the corridor to the bathroom.

  I spent most of the time crying too, but my grief wasn’t absolute like my mother’s. It was possible to distract me. I had never been on a train before, and there were many exciting things that managed to steal my attention. It was exciting to lie on the narrow berth with my ear pressed to the pillow, listening to the rumble of the wheels, or to sit balancing that huge glass holder in both hands. It was thrilling to get off the train when it stopped at the little stations—to jump off the stoop into my uncle’s arms. He was very handsome—he had the same eyes and the same thick black eyebrows as my mother, but on him they looked better somehow, and I loved it how people turned to follow us with their eyes.

  The most fun though was to watch the changing scenery and occasional animals through the window. Once I saw a fawn chasing another fawn across a field, and started to clap and laugh. I stopped myself right away, but it was too late, everybody heard me. My mother heard me. I touched her on the back and I said that I was sorry, then I started to cry from embarrassment.

  “It’s okay, dear,” Grisha said. “It’s really okay, to laugh, and to play, and to have fun.” I wasn’t sure if I could trust him. Especially since my mother didn’t laugh or play or have fun.

  My first impression of Moscow was that it was humid and smoky, with crowds of people hurrying, pushing, shoving each other, while eating ice cream. It seemed like every single person was eating ice cream. Licking chocolate squares on sticks, nibbling on waffle cups, biting into whole bricks of ice cream, staining their chins and their hands. I wanted ice cream, but I didn’t ask for it, because I thought it would be awful of me to ask.

  The neighborhood where my grandparents lived was on the outskirts of Moscow. It had been a village two decades before, then all the little houses were demolished to make space for high-rises, but the gardens stayed. My grandparents lived in a long nine-story, ten-entrance building (buildings like that were nicknamed “supine skyscrapers,” and they did resemble skyscrapers lying on their sides) that along with other identical buildings formed a half circle around a school and a kindergarten. There were fruit trees in front of the buildings, behind the buildings, and between the buildings. Apple trees, peach trees, plum trees, and cherry trees. They would bloom every spring and bear fruit every summer. The fruit from the neglected trees wasn’t good enough for eating, but people would go and pick it for jams and compotes. Late August was the time for apples. The year my father died was a crazy year for apples. Everybody said they had never seen so many.

  The first thing I noticed upon entering my grandparents’ place was that it was very hot and reeked of rotten fruit.

  The apartment was a small one-bedroom. My grandparents gave the bedroom to my mother and me, claiming that they would be perfectly fine on the sofa in the living room. My mother’s bed was moved to the wall, and a narrow foldout bed was bought (from the neighbors) and placed at a ninety-degree angle to my mother’s bed, right next to the bookcase. I was six when we arrived in Moscow, and I slept on that foldout bed for sixteen years, until I married Len and left for Saint Petersburg.

  As soon as we entered, my mother marched into the bedroom, got into bed, and stayed there for what seemed like months.

  I was left in the care of my grandparents, whom I hardly knew and didn’t love.

  What the three of us did every day was pick apples and make jam out of them.

  I would sit at the Formica folding table across from my grandfather, and my grandmother would stand at the stove. I was a child of six, so I wore nothing except for my little underpants. My grandmother dressed in her sleeveless housecoat. Her body was all jittery and lumpy, as if thick soup had been poured into her skin. My grandfather dressed in his old boxers and a wifebeater, and his limbs looked crumbly and dry like discarded firewood.

  Sometimes they would even exchange insults in what I took for a funny made-up language (later
identified as Yiddish).

  My grandmother was “Nafka!”

  And my grandfather was “Khazer!”

  My job was to sort the apples—good ones were for jam, bad ones for compote. I would pick better apples and push them toward my grandfather, and he would take them from me and cut them up and pass them to my grandmother, who was stirring the bubbling sputtering matter in aluminum washing basins at the stove. The process was really boring. I tried to entertain myself by engaging my grandparents with math the way my mother did with me, but it didn’t work out, even though I picked the easiest possible problems for them.

  “Look, Grandpa, there are five apples in the bowl. If I take two, how many would be left?”

  He wouldn’t answer me at all or would give a deliberately wrong answer, like “a thousand fucking apples.”

  His disrespect for math was shocking, but it was better than my grandmother’s indifference. She wouldn’t even try to solve my problems, or she would say that I was “a poor little orphan” and start to sob.

  When the fruit season finally ended, my grandparents took to spending their days either reading or going to the store.

  They lay on their foldout sofa, side by side, two pairs of feet facing me. My grandfather’s clad in carefully mended socks, my grandmother’s bare, crooked, and yellow. There was hardly enough space for both of them so they would grunt and push each other off their assumed sides.