Alena: A Novel by Rachel Pastan

like some?”
    “Wouldn’t say no.”
    I held the door and he came in, looking around at the kitchen in silence as I poured coffee for him and more for myself, adding the milk he’d brought. The swirl of white descending through the dark liquid soothed me. “I hate to drink it black,” I confessed.
    “I’ll take it any way I can get it. On the boat we drink it out of thermoses, three days old.”
    I put away the milk and bread, bacon and butter, bananas and cans of soup, and the sweating bag of mixed frozen vegetables he’d brought. Noticing the broken drawer, he crouched down and peered at the cracked wood. “What happened here?”
What happaned hee-ah?
    “I guess I pulled too hard.”
    He frowned, opening and shutting the other drawers. “I’ll come back later and fix it. And anything else that needs. I’ll take a look around. I can get you a dehumidifier for the damp, not that it’ll do any good if you have the windows open. Can’t dry out the whole Atlantic Ocean, can you?”
    “I guess not,” I said. “Sorry, you’re a fisherman? A handyman?”
    He stood up straighter, the green swirl in his eyes glowing almost fluorescent as his springy eyebrows lowered. “I’m the head preparator,” he said. “I install the shows.”
    “Oh!” I said. “Bernard didn’t— Head preparator, then. How nice of you to think of bringing . . . of fixing . . .” I couldn’t seem to finish a sentence, they broke up or trailed away, leaving acid bubbles of anxiety floating in the damp air. I wished I was dressed at least, not wearing my old robe with its pattern of red hibiscus and yellow canaries, a Christmas gift from my aunt Bet in Green Bay.
    “Bernard asked me to come by. He didn’t say? Sometimes he forgets, he gets distracted. And he’s impulsive. Well—I don’t have to tell you!” He laughed, a bright clap of mirth that took me by surprise. “Who else would skedaddle off to Venice and come back with a new curator in tow?”
    I flushed. It seemed crazier all the time—that he had chosen me, that I had come. One of these days I’d have to fly out and deal with my apartment and my things, but not yet. Not yet. I looked up shyly into Roald’s broad face with its tracery of lines like the surface of fired clay. “I keep wondering about the last curator,” I said. “The one who . . . Was this the beach she would have swum out from? Right here?”
    Roald’s face shut up like a clam and he looked away out the window where a bird twittered mindlessly in a bush. “Who knows? Probably. She often swam there.” He drank his coffee. I stood very still, my bare feet cold on the gritty linoleum.
    “And her body was never found?”
    “They looked for a long time. Boats, nets, charts of the currents. At first it seemed just a matter of time until they found her. But time kept going by.”
    “So no one really knows if it was an accident or not?”
    “What else could it have been?”
    “I just thought—maybe she could have run away?” I didn’t want to say that I wondered if she had killed herself.
    Roald turned his blue and green marble eyes to me. “Sometimes,” he said, “I try to convince myself of that. She was Russian, you know. Her family. She came here when she was five, but she remembered things. The cold, the sky. The shimmering gold domes they have there, on their churches. She wanted to see the Ural Mountains, the Amber Room, Lake Baikal. She always said . . .”
    I waited, trembling, for him to tell me what she always said. It was the first time, I think, I understood that she was real. Alena.
    “What?”
    “She said she was too big for this country. She said Russia was big enough,
free
enough.” He laughed, more darkly this time. “Isn’t that a joke? Russia, free!” He put his hands together and cracked his knuckles. His ring finger was missing on his left hand, a pinkish stump marking the place it should have been.
    “What happened to your finger?”
    “Accident,” he