“I have to talk to you,” said Darka in a tight voice she didn’t recognize herself, a lump in her throat. After school they again sat in the park at the lake, wrapped like fairy-tale heroes in a cloud, an air of Shakespearian thunderstorm, a tempest—betrayal, breakup, the parting—Effie, flashing eyes full of wobbly tears, passionately assured Darka that the thing with Marinka had happened long ago, which was supposed to mean, before Darka, that it was all silly and meaningless and didn’t matter, and Darka brightened, the sky cleared, as though pulled out from under an avalanche, yet for a while she still pretended to be offended, partly from an innate sense of form and partly out of an unconscious bartering with Effie for new concessions, new guarantees of undivided and exclusive affection, a scenario that Darka later on inevitably repeated with men except that with them it was much easier, while Effie was about as supple as Picasso’s acrobat, dodging to avoid Darka’s onslaught, from despairing repentance to a sudden collapse into a complete and trancelike absence and self-absorption, to half-hysterical recitals of poems meant to explain everything (that year they buried each other in poetry), until, exhausted by the endless back-and-forth, Darka heard her own voice cry: “Forgive me!” and then she was sinking to Effie’s nylon-warmed golden knees, embracing them and greedily breathing in, through tears, their surprising smell of bread, the odor of home reached after long travels: in the bedroom under your parents’ door the light pours, Let me fluff up your pillow, the tickle of her soft and living, like a kitten’s hair on your cheek, two girls cuddling under the covers, pressed into each other, whispering, sudden outbursts of laughter, Stop, you’re deafening me—the same as you, but different, that’s what a sister is, that’s what I’m embracing, tightly, so tightly that it can’t be tighter, never to let it go—two wildly intertwined girls on a bench in the park at night, her budding breasts under her school uniform thrust into yours, her lashes tickling your neck, like in that myth where the cloud of the gods rendered the lovers invisible to mere mortals—nobody walked down the path, nobody rustled the fallen leaves, there was nobody to be surprised when Effie began kissing the trail of tears under Darka’s eyes and then pressed her lips to hers and gasped, stunned for an instant, Effie’s heart thumped inside Darka’s chest and both froze, not sure what to do next, and then Darka felt between her lips something quick, wet, salty, and very large, it floated in her mouth like a naked hot fish blacking out the rest of the world and she did not immediately understand that it was Effie’s tongue but once she did, she was seized by another, incomprehensible sort of sobbing, which she gulped down together with Effie’s tongue, squeezing her skinny body even tighter: her shoulder blades sharp as wings, the keyboard of the vertebrae under the coarse uniform suddenly brought to memory her first realization of what it meant that something was alive. She had just turned two years old, and stood speechless above a basket full of tiny fluffy white rabbits, unable to step aside or turn away, until one of the adults said from above, “Would you like one?”—up until that instant she struggled to come to terms with the idea that such an astonishing miracle breathed and moved, and then with the equally astonishing news of what one could do with such a miracle: one could have it. At that most honest of ages, possession meant just one thing: it meant that, out of an excess of feeling, one should put the thing in one’s mouth and, ideally, swallow it, as one did the petals of the prettiest flowers from the courtyard garden, which you plucked and chewed, your drool turning bitter and green when you spit, and over years that original meaning of the word doesn’t change, only gets clouded over. It takes a lifetime to understand that long ago the grown-ups lied to you, that in fact nothing living, neither a flower, nor a rabbit, nor a person, nor a country, can, in fact, be had: they can only be destroyed, which is the one way to confirm they have been possessed.
“And here too,” said Effie—but this was another time, at home, before a large tarnished mirror in a dark-brown frame—she first unbuttoned her dress, exposing a double bra strap on her Cubist shoulder of protruding horizontal bones; she’d long ago begun wearing a bra, Darka had seen, when they changed before gym class, Effie’s matching snow-white underwear unavailable in any store but there, amid the smell of old, rough mats stacked up in the corner and the reek of old sweat, in the middle of it, it was just underwear, but here, when Effie, not turning her hypnotized, dark eyes—pupils dilated—away, slipped off her bra, a tender, pearl-pink nipple popped out of its cup like an outthrust tongue and at the same time Effie’s fingers, stumbling over buttons as though asking permission, cautiously unbuttoned Darka’s sweater and she saw, alongside Effie’s, her own nipple only darker, redder, like a cherry pit, here all the blood at once rushed to Darka’s head and everything grew blurred. Effie leaned lightly over her breast, and Darka felt her wet gathering mouth, and goose bumps, and her own rapid breathing, and everything began flowing, or was it Darka herself who was slipping into the unknown, something heady and hot, something forbidden and tempting, compared with which all of her will to power, being first in her class, academic triumphs, captainship of the volleyball team, all this was small and insignificant as she went down and emerged new, dark, dangerous, and big as the world—oh Effie, Effie, two girls with their shirts undone in the depths of the mirror where Effie touched her kissed breast to her own and said: “Here too,” pointing to the other one, and that was how it began.
And so it whirled, sweeping all away.
All their school recesses spent shoulder to shoulder at the windowsill, wandering through the park after class, drunken talking, talking, talking, insatiable as two mutes who’d suddenly discovered the gift of speech or infants who’d just learned words, but they really were just learning to speak, learning to translate themselves into words different from what the adults required of them, about the meaning of life, the future of mankind, will there be war, about their own childhoods, it’s amazing how much you recall at that age—when I was little—and then you don’t remember a thing until you’re old, when, they say, the sluices finally open again, you can’t even remember what those things were that you spent hours gushing at each other, so the day felt too short, except a few splinters, of poems for instance, Brodsky’s “So long had life together been” (Effie), Kalynets’s “Lady with eyes larger than asters” (Darka), but that was prompted by the grown-ups, it was the fucking legacy of the ’60s that still dripped from family to family after the tap had been decisively shut off, while all of one’s own content that filled the cup to overflowing had drained away somewhere, leaving only silt after the passing of a stream—the memory of a bench, of a windowsill in a school corridor, a memory of Effie’s concentrated face—did she know how to listen with shiny eyes and half-open mouth! and all that in the shadowy, autumnal light of sad, nostalgic longing for the long-gone unreachable heights. That whole visible daily aspect of their friendship (sixth grade: just as the kids enter the chaotic process of gluing and ungluing in twos and threes, like molecules, friendships forming and dissolving several times a year so that none of the teachers ever paid these two much attention)—it all continued, this material world, yet invisibly tightening and shrinking like dresses that now pinched in the armpits under the abrupt combustion wind of that new, suffocating, heady element of their friendship that unfolded without witnesses and demanded more and more, at least from Darka, because all their trembling embraces, all their hot kisses and more frequent, growing caresses exploded not on their own, not from a purely physical compulsion, as would later occur with boys, but each time and inevitably as the resolution of yet another emotional upheaval, a little drama, the improvisation of which they were wonderfully adept at: in the fit of peacemaking after a new argument that took them to the edge of breakup (which were as frequent between them as thunderstorms in July), in an ecstasy of reconciliation to the sound of the Doors, to which Effie would respond by collapsing onto the carpet and pounding her forehead into it, shouting, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, and Darka would gather that dear warm downy head (smelling like the fur of a kitten), her whole body trembling at the unfathomable mystery of feeling things, at how far more subtle and spiritually richer Effie was than she (that was how Darka put it in the essay titled “My Friend”: “My friend has a richly subtle and spiritually rich nature” and was stuck for a long time on the repetition: one of the two had to be crossed out, yet neither was willing to leave), really, it’s a miracle, Darka now thinks, they managed to study that year, where had they found the time for it, or, to be more precise, where had Effie found the time, since she never managed things as well as Darka, yet succeeded in passing all her classes, even earning As, and not only in music and gym (a good student, which automatically meant a good girl, or as the vice principal said during the PTA meeting about her, a girl from a well-to-do family, because that was what she was, with divorced parents who spoiled her competitively: stereo, French underwear at twelve)—where did she find it, the time and energy?