The following piece was written by Jeremy Stern '11 in Oct. 2016.
Six months after joining the military, I went AWOL to confess my love to a woman forty years my senior. A mutual friend called early one fall morning to tell me she was leaving forever. I left Fort Lee before sunrise and drove for five hundred miles until I found her. She still lived near the remote hilltop in northeastern Ohio where we’d met eight years earlier.
I escaped through Fort Lee’s west exit on a road that hugs Petersburg National Battlefield, where 70,000 troops died as Ulysses Grant ground the Army of Virginia down for nine bloody months. More Black troops fought at Petersburg than anywhere else in the war. The base is now named for the man who lost it.
On most Saturdays I ran the battlefield’s trails, surrounded by memorials to Chaffin’s Farm and Burnside’s Crater and other graveyards of devotion. Such sites stir the imagination. “Now you belong,” the battlefield seemed to promise, “to something larger than yourself.” I’d never crossed it without pause.
On this Saturday the hallowed ground of Petersburg looked to me like so much grass and pavement in the way of my escape. I sped by it and out the gate, unsure if I would return before someone noticed my absence. At the time it hardly mattered. Professor Olshanskaya was leaving the hilltop and never coming back. I needed to get to her in time to tell her I loved her with an unspoken intensity that wouldn’t abide her departure.
We met my first year at Kenyon College, the school atop the hill. As a freshman I was forced into a foreign language requirement thanks to poor grades in high school Spanish. I’d been menaced with the imperfect subjunctive long enough and opted instead, in my wisdom, for Russian.
From far down the narrow corridors of Ascension Hall, Professor Olshanskaya was heard before she was seen. Her leather boots struck the ground with alarming purpose, announcing her arrival like heralding trumpets. Eventually the classroom door swung open violently, smacking the wall behind it and reverberating awhile, as Professor Olshanskaya in the same motion glided into the classroom, her eyes flashing with contempt.
"Well!" she began just our second day. “I am flattered to see you all looking so tired and unhappy already. Now, to the pronunciations! Who will recite them to me beautifully and not make me cringe with pity?”
Tall, elegant, patrician, with bobbed red hair, an aquiline nose and polar blue eyes, immaculately clad in silk and mink (even her handbag and boots had fur), she stood out from her colleagues and students like a pine in a valley of weeds.
For my first midterm I memorized a simple poem by Pushkin. Sure in my rhythm and elocution, I stood up to recite it. As I tenderly consoled the air in front of me for loving it no longer, I noticed some distance beyond it Professor Olshanskaya’s face contorting. Her brow furling, her mouth twisted and agape, she slowly outstretched her palm as if to ask, “What am I meant to do with this steaming plate of crap you are serving me?” I hacked at Pushkin’s corpse for a line or two longer and sat down. I was promptly informed that I spoke like a peasant, that my mistakes were offensive, and that I seemed to enjoy speaking so poorly. She spoke in a high-pitched, honeyed voice that was somehow both brusque and girlish.
During that first semester I felt myself the object of a particular cruelty, but also of special affection. When I was called on to speak she stared me down as if to do battle. I was invariably crushed, but she was a magnanimous victor; never averting her eyes, she guided me from error to wisdom. Her mercurial gaze guided my every movement. When other students demonstrated their own stupidity she would often giggle, cover her smile sheepishly with her hand and glance, to my amazement, at me. What secret understanding she thought we shared, I didn’t know. But I was entranced. I began to feel as if she was building a glass wall, the two of us on one side peering amusedly at everyone else on the other.
One frigid afternoon that February, with the icy wind whistling through the woodframe windows, she pulled me aside after class. “Come to my office, my dear,” she said, almost in a whisper. I felt my heart pound. “We will discuss what a mess you are making of your life.”
A few minutes later I knocked on the door to her small, sparse office. A massive map of Russia hung opposite a wooden bookshelf. We began with the grammar exercises I was struggling to master. She helped me along until all my questions were answered. Then she closed her book and commenced my deposition.
“My dear, what is your plan for after you graduate?”
“Well, I’m considering a PhD, but I also want to travel, or maybe do something totally different,” I said breathlessly, “like volunteer for a microfinance organization in Asia, or work on an organic dairy farm.”
She looked at me like my grandmother beheld a baffling new piece of technology. “And with your Ph.D. you will get what job?” she asked mockingly. “On whose money will you save the benighted peoples of the earth? You will use this expensive degree to deliver me milk?”
“I don’t know what I want to do,” I conceded, “but I want to see the world before making any decisions.”
“My love,” she pleaded warmly. “Do me a favor. Please consider law school.” This was out of the question, but she preempted my refusal. “You remember Ellie, one of my best students. She is getting a JD at the University of Chicago, and now she has real job offers with real salaries. She will make actual money and actual people want to marry her.”
“I’ll consider it.” I rolled my eyes and stood up.
“Please my dear,” she pleaded again. “Don’t become a drifter. Drifting is for stupid people and ugly people, and you are neither.” I nodded and left.
“Law school! What vulgar, insulting nonsense,” I thought, indulging my delicate self-image. “She thinks I’m out for money and status and a wife. What I’m looking for is meaning.” I felt I had bested her aristocratic bunk just by having the thought.
I found her charming but imperious. She seldom voiced strong academic opinions and never inserted herself into any of the campus political drama on which I thrived. But somehow she found time to be a prolific critic of my judgment. Her reproaches gnawed at me. That summer, I thought of her often.
The following year I stuck with Russian, mostly to prove I wouldn’t drift. I didn’t help my case when I pledged a fraternity, and attended her class one day during the infamous Hell Week rather sleep deprived. Class had barely begun when I lost the battle to stay awake. Afterward she gave the order to meet outside her office in five minutes.
There I found her with a raincoat on, umbrella and car keys in hand, her sharp chin high and eyes disapproving. She led me to the exit and we stepped out into the rain. Even the metal ribs of her umbrella seemed to snap into place with unusual purpose. I made the mistake of not walking under it and got soaked. I felt her stare.
“So it is not enough that you fall asleep in my class? You must give us all pneumonia too?” She pointed to her car: “Get in.”
She drove me to her home. From outside, the unassuming white façade with green trimming was indistinguishable from the others in the middle class housing development where she lived. (Fitting, she admitted, for a Soviet immigrant.) But inside was a different world: lacquer, china, crystal, porcelain, artifacts from every continent, and cream-colored carpets that looked like they’d never been stepped on. A balcony overlooked a small lake.
She showed me to a bed. “You see that? You will sleep in it. I will be back in three hours.”
“I’m technically not supposed to sleep,” I said.
“Do you know the consequences of not sleeping, Jeremy?” I didn’t try to answer. “Death. It is death. You could die. But you will not. You will sleep. And then you will lie about it.” She smirked and winked. In a moment I lay prostrate on the bed, eyeing her silhouette in the doorway. She shut the light. Before I could thank her, I was asleep.
The following Saturday I was back at her home, this time for lunch with my classmates. A redoubtable hostess, she served a constant torrent of food: bliny, borscht, pelmeni, pirog, pirozhki, olivier, vinegret, syrniki. We ate so much we couldn’t speak; silence was interrupted only by a remonstrance not to stop. Eventually we retired to the living room, conversing in Russian and relaxing in English. We gossiped like yentas. One student brought a guitar and played songs from Ironiya Sudbyi, a kind of Soviet It’s A Wonderful Life. We sang them together. It was heaven.
Sitting in one of her courtly armchairs, I glanced over at Professor Olshanskaya, taking and replacing dishes. She looked at me with an anxious smile. I joined her again on the other side of the glass wall. “You see all this?” her eyes inquired. “None of it is inevitable. It’s as brittle as glass. You can’t bum around forever.”
That summer I left for Russia. Professor Olshanskaya kept all my possessions for me in her basement while I spent the year in St. Petersburg. One day she wrote to ask for permission to open one of my boxes to investigate a strange beeping noise. I replied with my consent, which she said was good because she had already opened it and smashed my alarm clock to bits. She also wrote to ask how I was getting on, to gossip, and to hold my Russian host-mother to standard. I wrote her with questions about books, about movies, and about Russian girls. Across six thousand miles I still felt we looked on the world together from behind our glass wall.
Eleven months later I returned and wrote a thesis under her close supervision in the language with which I’d fallen in love. We spent hours in her office, debating translations, gossiping and peering nervously into my future. By this time I could speak Russian without being asked to sit instead. Our last class I rose to recite a final poem. A glare from the window played off the arctic hue of her deep eyes, which she narrowed suspiciously and locked with mine. I elicited a small grin and recited in Russian,
Listen,
if the stars are lit
it means — there is someone who needs them.
It means — there is someone who wants them there,
that someone calls those droplets of spittle pearls…
The night before graduation, Professor Olshanskaya invited my family over for champagne on her balcony overlooking the lake. It was windy and warm. She was dressed in white, sporting a filigree brooch my parents gave her as a token of appreciation. They asked questions about her life and journey to America. Born in Odessa to the generation that knew famine and the Holocaust, she was denied an exit visa for as long as the Soviet Union stood. The year after it fell, she escaped with a briefcase to Scotland, then to Virginia, and finally to the Midwestern hilltop where she finally found peace.
Hands and legs crossed in a regal posture, her white shirt and red hair slightly moving in the wind, the setting sun reflected in her gold bracelets, her assertive eyes scanning the lake, I wanted to reach across the table to press her hands and tell her everything: that she was the principle author of the person I became; that she was the ballast on which I stood; that from a self-important daydreaming child she wrung a deeper passion for life than I ever thought possible. That it wasn’t Russian I had fallen for so much as her.
Instead I remained silent, awaiting an invitation to join her on the other side of the glass wall. It never came. Her eyes stayed on the lake.
The next time I saw her was four years later, one Saturday last fall. Nikola, another former student, called me at dawn to tell me she was leaving. I immediately resolved to appear before her and make my confession. I slowly gathered that Nikola in fact had the same confession to make and the same intense desire to make it. I was also informed that some students had already been to see her off.
Ten hours later I met Nikola in her driveway. It was one of the crisp fall evenings against a violet sky that makes the total isolation of life in Gambier, Ohio not just bearable but sacred. Professor Olshanskaya’s husband Don, a tall, mustachioed professor of French, greeted us with a smile and showed us to the living room where she was seated. We gave her a kiss and sat opposite her on a couch. Don assumed his wife’s former role, constantly serving food, taking dishes, cleaning them, preparing new plates for more food, chastising us for not eating enough.
We spent several hours talking and telling stories. Professor Olshanskaya explained that private conduct affects the stature of an author’s work, and thus Dostoevsky is a sanctimonious windbag, whereas Chekhov is a saint. She was bewildered by my decision to join the Army and insisted I use the G.I. Bill for a law degree. She spoke of students and colleagues she loved, and a few she didn’t. Nikola and I spoke of the Saturday afternoons at her home, some of the happiest of our lives.
“Yes, but never again,” she said through tears. It shocked me to see her cry. “Stupid,” she exhorted herself. She addressed her husband in her high, dulcet voice: “Don, why am I crying again?”
She cried a few more times that night, never for more than a moment, growing less inhibited with each outburst. By a small mercy, ALS does not sap the victim’s mental capacity. Her personality was wholly intact, if indeed her mouth was faintly less prone to a smile.
Eventually, by now late at night, she told us to leave. “You look tired, boys. It was crazy of you to come all this way. Go visit Kenyon and then go to the hotel and sleep.” She looked at Nikola and then at me. Her hair was thin, her face swollen and her skin sallow. Feeling was all but lost in her limbs. She began a slow blink. On the other side of it was the hint of a grin.
“I know you made us all feel this way. But I felt special. Was I?”
“What did Chekhov say, my love? You were a glint of light on broken glass. You all were.”
“And what did that make you?”
“The moon, of course.”
We rose to shake Don’s hand. He had the tired and humble look of a man doing God’s work. We thanked him and turned to Professor Olshanskaya. I could hardly see her through my tears. Nikola and I took turns leaning down to hold the back of her head and kiss her cheek.
“I love you, Natasha,” I confessed, the only time I ever used that name. “Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for everything.”
“I love you, boys,” she wept.