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  the girl, the dress, and the leap

  lara vapnyar

  I bought my wedding dress in a tiny shop on one of the damp, gloomy streets of old St. Petersburg. The woman at the counter put down my name, the name of the dress (Princess 4), the price (the equivalent of $16), and asked for my phone number. “Two three eight,” I said, “then seven two…no…seven eight…no… fifty eight.” The woman raised her eyes at me. I started to cry. She got up, came out from behind her counter, and smothered me in a big sweaty hug.

  Through the tears and frequent hiccups, I told her that I'd moved to St. Petersburg only a couple of weeks ago, and that I hadn't memorized my phone number yet, that I didn't know anybody in St. Petersburg except for my fiancé and my future in-laws, that all my relatives and friends lived in Moscow, that my mother wouldn't see my wedding dress until the wedding, that my best friend didn't even know that I was getting married, and that just a week before I didn't know that I would be getting married myself. The woman assumed that I was pregnant, and I didn't try to dissuade her, because the real story was too complicated.

  About a year before, my uncle, who lived in New York, had offered to help my mother and me emigrate to the United States. It was 1992, a time when the Soviet Union was about to collapse, the uncertain future wasn't too promising, and everybody who had a chance to emigrate was eager to do so (people who didn't have a chance were even more eager). Neither I nor my mother was completely sure if we wanted to move to the United States, but everybody said that only an idiot could pass up this opportunity, and so we agreed. My uncle filed the application for us, but since we knew that it would take a very long time for the documents to get processed, and there was no guarantee that we'd ultimately get a visa, we decided not to talk about it until we got a response.

  For the last week of the summer break I went to St. Petersburg, where I stayed with some family friends in their centuries-old building that didn't have an elevator. I met Dema, my future husband, on the staircase. He was climbing up; I was skipping down. He couldn't see me, because somebody had screwed out the lightbulb the day before, but he said that he liked the cheerful sounds of my steps. We spent the three remaining days of my vacation walking the streets of St. Petersburg, ignoring the beautiful sights, talking about physics, calligraphy, popular psychology, and the rare animal named Przewalski's horse after the man who discovered it. In November, Dema came to Moscow and we spent another three days together, ignoring the beautiful sights of Moscow this time. When apart, we sent each other letters. My letters were detailed and pretentious (Why on earth did I write that my favorite writer was Joyce, when I couldn't move past the first couple of sentences of Ulysses?). Dema's letters were honest and wonderful and full of grammatical mistakes. In December, when he came to Moscow for the second time, we decided that it was best to ignore the beautiful sights without leaving the apartment. On the last of the three days Dema asked me to marry him. I said, “Yes!” I don't know if he had seriously pondered what it meant to be married or explored the idea of something being for the rest of his life. I certainly hadn't. What we had was here and now, and it was mind-blowing. I couldn't imagine my life without it or beyond it. At that time I strongly believed in leaps of faith. Everything wonderful required a leap, and the greater and more impossible the leap was, the greater the happiness was to be achieved in the case of success. It didn't occur to me to imagine what happened if a leap resulted in a fall.

  We ran out to a subway kiosk, bought a bottle of champagne, and opened it as soon as we came home, without waiting for it to chill. Then, feeling shaky and slightly nauseous after a glass of warm champagne, I told Dema about our papers making their uneasy journey through U.S. Immigration offices even as we spoke. “Are you thinking of leaving?” he asked. I said that I would never leave without him. Nothing else mattered.

  We decided that I'd go to St. Petersburg to spend my two-months-long winter break there. When the break was over, I planned to return to Moscow and stay there three more months until my graduation, and after that I would either move to St. Petersburg permanently and look for a job there, or Dema would find a job in Moscow and move in with me. Neither of us cared for the official ceremony of a big wedding. We didn't see why we'd need the marriage certificate, a mere piece of paper certifying that we belonged together. We knew that we belonged together. Nor did we see the point in the idea of a stranger prodding us to say some big words in front of a big audience. His vows were implied in his proposal; mine, in my acceptance. Neither of us particularly cared about the sprawling feast, where the guests would get so drunk by the middle of it that they'd forget what they were celebrating. And that revolting money question with the parents of the groom arguing with the parents of the bride over who spent more, and who gave more gifts or more expensive gifts, and who had more guests and whose guests ate more! Weddings had always seemed to me a sure way to kick romance out of the marriage. The only thing that I kind of wanted was a wedding dress. A magical white gown, an ethereal headdress, flowers. The only chance I'd ever get to feel truly beautiful. The only chance for my husband to see and remember me that way. I told this to Dema. He laughed. He said: “Women are so silly, they think that the dress or the hair makes all the difference.” He didn't get it. It was the first time I became annoyed with him—not for long, though. We hadn't yet developed a capacity to become really mad at each other.

  “We're getting married!” I said to my mother. She slumped onto the couch and started to cry, but she more or less calmed down when I said that we weren't going to make it official. I think she saw this as a cue not to take the whole affair seriously.

  My first days in St. Petersburg felt like a child's game. I was playing the part of a young married woman. I went shopping with a big checkered bag, I bought bread, I bought onions, I bought rice and buckwheat, I bought meat—I'd never bought meat before. I called my mother several times a day to ask how to stew meat or clean buckwheat. I made sure to have dinner on the table by the time Dema came home from work, even though he didn't seem to care. I went to lunch with my new in-laws. I bought myself a wallet, because I thought that keeping money in a crumpled wad in the pocket of my jeans like I used to do was unfitting for a married woman. I bought myself a nightgown, because I thought that pajamas were just as unfitting. Everything was exciting and new and not completely serious.

  The seriousness struck one morning, when my mother called to say that she got a letter from the INS. The U.S. Embassy scheduled the interview with immigration officials for us. She said that if we failed to appear, we couldn't apply ever again. And that my uncle would be so angry that he wouldn't bother applying anyway. We weren't sure if we wanted to emigrate, but we were afraid of losing the opportunity to do so irrevocably.

  That night Dema and I had the first serious conversation of our marriage. We discussed our plans for the future and whether the United States was a good place to realize them. Our goals turned out to be simple, clear, and blissfully alike. We wanted to:

  be together

  have exciting and meaningful jobs

  see foreign countries

  possibly have children one day

  It looked like all of those things should be obtainable in the United States, and so we decided to try to go there. The prospect of emigration frightened me amazingly little, probably because I concentrated not on departing, but on arriving. I didn't think of the place I had to leave, of all the things that were dear and important to me that I would lose forever. I thought of the new place, and new life, and all the new and exciting experiences that were stored for me there. In short, I thought of emigration like the great adventure, much like my marriage. I had jumped into marriage without thinking and it was working fine, and there was no reason to suppose that the emigration wouldn't. And as with marriage, the idea of it being permanent somehow escaped me. In addition, I thought that I knew what emigration was all about. I'd just emigrated from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Every morning after Dema left for work I would cho
ose a different route to walk toward the center, marveling at how the architecture was nothing like Moscow's, taking in all the wonderful foreign details, from the way the streetcars were painted to the way people dressed. Even the Russian language wasn't the same in St. Petersburg. People used other, more interesting, words for bread, rye bread, and newspaper stand, and had subtle, appealing accents. Immigration to St. Petersburg was beautiful; there was no reason to think that immigration to New York wouldn't be. I sat down and wrote a long letter to fax to my uncle, in which I begged him to find out if it was possible to include Dema in our immigration application.

  My uncle handled the matter much like the son-in-law in a popular Russian joke of those times. In the joke, a woman asked her son-in-law to arrange that she be buried in the Red Square Wall along with the top Communist Party officials. If he was a good son-in-law, she said, he would find a way to pull it off. And so the next day, he came home, tired, but happy, slumped into a chair, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and said: “I did it, Mother. The funeral is tomorrow.” My uncle told a similar thing to my mother. “I did it,” he said to her on the phone. “I pulled all the needed strings. They will include Dema in the application, but only if they register their marriage and send me a copy of the marriage certificate within two weeks.” My mother was crying so hard when she told me all this that she had to hang up in order not to waste the expensive long-distance call. She felt that she, my uncle, and the nasty U.S. immigration were all pushing me to marry somebody I hardly knew. “But, Mom,” I said, “it doesn't matter. We're already as good as married.” As for marrying somebody I hardly knew, I thought that I knew enough of Dema. Love was not science like physics or biology. Love was more like art. You saw a painting and you knew whether it worked right away; you didn't have to stare at it for years.

  There was a law that required a period of at least thirty days between the filing of the application and the actual registration of the marriage, but everybody said that there were plenty of marriage-registration officials who would give us a green light in exchange for a reasonable sum of money plus flowers or a box of chocolates (to make it look less like a bribe and more like an expression of gratitude and respect). It turned out that our friends were too optimistic. The officials didn't accept bribes from just anybody, but only from the people they trusted. We asked all our friends if they had any connections and visited a lot of marriage-registration places in person, trying to persuade the wary officials that we were honest and trustworthy bribe-bringing citizens. All in vain. The week was coming to an end and we had almost lost hope, when Dema's camping buddy remembered that he knew some guy in the St. Petersburg Police Department who used to be chummy with the director of one of the Wedding Palaces. I don't know what kind of relationship he had had with the director, but we didn't even have to give her money, just a big box of chocolates. The director blushed at the box, murmured that we didn't have to do it, and shyly put it away in one of her desk drawers. She said that she could squeeze us in for the two p.m. slot the following Thursday and offered to take us on a tour of the palace.

  For some reason I'd assumed that the palace would be some pompous Soviet-style monstrosity, all marble and gold, velvet and mirrors, crystal candelabras over busts of Lenin, and oil portraits of Yeltsin. And there was indeed plenty of marble and gold, and a red velvet carpet and crystal candelabra, but everything was tasteful and beautiful, with quiet classical music playing in the background, evoking the atmosphere of nineteenth-century ballrooms rather than Communist Party assemblies. Before the Revolution, the building used to belong to some famous Russian count or prince, and they must have kept or re-created the original furnishing. The place looked just like I'd envisioned the room where Natasha from War and Peace danced at her first ball. I saw a wedding party in the hall. The bride was standing by the tall gilded doors waiting for the cue to enter. She was wearing a long white dress just like Natasha's, and she looked just as anxious and hopeful, her fingers squeezing a small bouquet, her feet treading the deep velvet of the carpet. “She stood with her slender arms hanging down,” Tolstoy wrote about Natasha, “her scarcely defined bosom rising and falling regularly, and with bated breath and glittering, frightened eyes gazed straight before her, evidently prepared for the height of joy or misery.” I identified with Natasha's readiness to make a leap, and with her belief that whatever happened to her would be the height of either joy or misery, not something bland in between these two states. If a magician asked me to choose one scene from all world literature where I would want to be transported, it would've been Natasha's first ball from War and Peace. And a simple twist of fate gave me a chance to get as close to this fantasy as I ever would. On Thursday, it would be me mounting the brightly illuminated stairs. My feet would be treading the lush red carpet. My reflection in the long white dress would be gracing the majestic gilded mirrors. I felt exultant, I felt vigorous, I felt ecstatic, until I realized that I didn't have the dress.

  That night Dema and I had the first serious fight of our marriage. He refused to understand why it was absolutely necessary to have a long white dress. We never planned to have a big wedding, did we? We just needed the marriage certificate, didn't we? He didn't see anything wrong with the only festive outfit I had brought with me and had just worn to his birthday party. The outfit consisted of a dark green silk blouse, black belt, black leggings, and lavender pumps. Yes, he read War and Peace. No, he didn't remember Natasha's first ball. He might've skipped that chapter. He might have skipped the Peace sections and only read about War. It was the first time we turned away from each other in bed. I spent the rest of the night crying and wondering if I was making a mistake. What kind of a person could skip Peace in War and Peace? Everybody skipped War! Did I really know Dema? Did I really want to marry him? Did I really want to emigrate? I thought of the strange and scary double doors in St. Petersburg's subway, of the people frowning at me when I asked for directions, of the sharp northern wind thrashing my flimsy Moscow coat. And this was Russia, my own country, where people spoke my own language even if they used the wrong words for bread, rye bread, and newspaper stand. Moving to the United States suddenly seemed terrifying, as did marriage. How could I assume that my marriage would be a happy one? Had I ever witnessed happy marriages? Didn't I know that living together always became either boring or ugly with time? What gave me reason to believe that Dema and I would outwit the statistics and stay deliriously happy for the rest of our lives? The fact that we didn't really know each other? I remember lying in bed on my back, clutching the blanket, staring at the ceiling in horror, until the image of myself in a long white dress worked itself into my mind. The dress was light and translucent, like a wispy cloud, covered with delicate embroidery, sprinkled with tiny diamonds that reflected the candlelight. I was demure and radiant, walking up the marble staircase to the serene music in the background. The dress was my good-luck charm, my guardian angel, my key to happiness. I fell asleep with a hopeful half smile on my face.

  And so it went on for days afterward. Every time I would become seized by fear and doubts—and as the wedding date neared it would happen increasingly often—the vision of my wedding dress would relieve the anxiety, but every time I would happily plunge into the world of my dreams, the reality of not having the dress would infallibly yank me out and make me feel the fear and the doubts with renewed strength.

  “You really have to have the dress, don't you?” Dema asked one day. He had just sold his collection of miniature car models to buy two thin and simple wedding rings. He gave me the leftover money, the equivalent of twenty dollars, and asked if that was enough for a dress.

  I spent the following couple of days trying to find out what twenty dollars could do for an aspiring Natasha Rostova. Twenty dollars wasn't enough to buy a sparkling imported dress in one of the subway kiosks. Nor was it enough for ordering a dress from one of the big wedding dress shops (and there wasn't enough time to wait until they made it). Twenty dollars was enough for borrowing
one of the bland, yellowed, too large, and too long dresses from the Wedding Palace's rental shop. And twenty dollars was more than enough to buy a white blouse, a beige skirt, and cream-colored pumps in a department store. The bad thing was that each of those items could single-handedly ruin my War and Peace fantasy and simultaneously my chance at happiness.

  I was walking home from the department store, stooping to protect myself from the wind, clutching the collar of my coat to keep it tight, feeling cold, sad, and angry, angry at the saleswoman at the department store, at the St. Petersburg weather, at the ugliness of the damp run-down buildings along the canals, at my uncle, at U.S. Immigration, at the brides who had beautiful dresses, at Dema, at Tolstoy, when I saw a couple of wedding dresses in the window of a tiny shop. They didn't look anything like the high-waist, Empire-style dress that Natasha would wear, but they looked both elegant and inexpensive, and so I rang the bell. The woman who ran the shop told me that they usually made wedding dresses to order, but there were a few ready models I could try. All the dresses had different names: Princess, Sleeping Beauty, Svetlana, Nadezhda, Spring, Summer, and some came in different versions—there were Princesses 1, 2, 3, and 4, Svetlana 1 and 2, and six Summers. That didn't mean that they differed according to their names. They all looked alike, all made out of cheap tulle over heavy linen, all decorated with tiny beads, buttons, and appliqué. Svetlana 1 didn't look more like Svetlana 2 than, say, Summer or Spring. I liked Princess 4 because it had tiny iridescent metal disks instead of beads; I thought there was something magical about the rosy glow they sent over the appliqué leaves and flowers next to them. Two other reasons why I liked Princess 4 the most were that it fit, and that it cost only $16. “You'll be okay,” the woman at the counter said to me after I stopped crying and blowing my nose into her embroidered handkerchief. She packed the dress, the headdress, and the gloves together, wrapped them in coarse brown paper, tied the package with a string, and gave it to me. I said, “Thank you.”