Vaclav & Lena by Haley Tanner Page A

the gulag.
    “Okay, so where are we? There is a princess, and this princess, she likes wandering around the markets, dressed in a ratty shmata and some ugly pants like a peasant, because like most princesses in a story, she sometimes hated to be a princess, and she didn’t know how lucky she was. She liked to pretend that she was not a princess, because it made her feel like a normal girl.
    “One nice sunny day, she was wandering around the market, and she bumped into a boy. Really, she was so busy staring at the blind old lady selling boiled eggs out of a bucket, because she was appalled that anyone would buy eggs that the old woman had touched with her dirty, knobby fingers, that she walked right into this boy. She fell, and there was a horse and cart coming by just at that moment, and it almost went right over her head and smashed it like a melon, but the boy, he grabbed her hand and pulled her to him and saved her life. Of course, she fainted in his arms.
    “When the princess woke up, the boy was kneeling over her, with his face right almost touching her nose, and she was afraid of him for one second, and the next second she wondered what his name was, and the next second she wondered everything about him, and the next second she was terrified that he would go away forever and that she might lose him. She was in love with him, plus he had just saved her life. He was in love with her already, because she was a princess, even though he didn’t know she was a princess. This is how it always is with princesses, boys love them for no reason.
    “Next the princess and the boy did what everyone does when they fall in love: They sat in some crummy place, on some buckets turned over in a cold alley by the market, something like that, and they didn’t care that they were hungry and that they were thirsty and that they were tired, and that their mothers were wondering where they were, and they told each other everything that they had ever known and everything they liked and everything they didn’t like, and all of their favorite colors and books, and what kind of rain was their favorite, sprinkles or downpours.
    “And then the princess told the boy that she was a princess, and he told her what she already knew from his raggy clothing: that he was a peasant.
    “She told him, with tears coming out of her eyes, that she had to go back to the castle.
    “She told him, with her stomach twisted into terrible knots, that they could not see each other, that her father, who was a nasty old king, would not allow it.
    “He told her, ‘Don’t worry. We will run away together.’
    “She was confused, because she loved him, but she also really, actually loved being a princess, and she loved her mother and her sisters, and she had never lived anywhere but the castle, and she was not sure if she could really run away forever.
    “He told her she could have some time to think about it.
    “He told her that every night for one hundred nights he would stand outside her window, at the foot of the castle, and wait for her, and that if she came out on one of those one hundred nights, they would run away together. If, after one hundred nights of waiting, she did not come out, he would have his answer, and he would leave her alone.
    “She went back to the castle. That night, he waited at her window.
    “She did not come.
    “The next night, he waited at her window.
    “She did not come.
    “Every night, for ninety-nine nights, he waited, sitting like a bug outside her window, and she did not come.
    “On the one-hundredth night, the last night, he did not wait outside her window, because he could not bear to know that the princess would never be his, that she did not love him enough, not as much as he loved her. He thought maybe it was better to not know.
    “On that hundredth night, the night that he did not wait outside her window …”
    Lena interrupts the story with a mighty snore from beneath the blankets. The snore startles Rasia, who