Bobcat and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF

a week to a tanning salon and bleached her hair frequently, so that it looked like radioactive foliage growing out of dark, moody sands. Despite all this she was very beautiful, and sensible. “Margaret,” she said, when I came in that evening. “The library telephoned to recall a book. They said it was urgent.”
    I had thought he might check the library. “Okay,” I said. As I rifled through the clothes on my closet floor, I decided it would have to be burned. I would finish the book and then I would burn it. But first there was tonight, and I had that rare thing, a date.
    My date was from Stasselova’s class. His name was Hans; he was a junior, and his father was a diplomat. He had almost auburn hair that fell to his neckline. He wore, always, long white shirts whose sleeves were just slightly, almost imperceptibly, puffed at the shoulders, like an elegant little joke, and very long, so they hung over his hands. I thought he was articulate, kind. I had in a moment of astonishment asked him out.
    The night was soft and warm. We walked through the tiny town, wandered its thin river. We ate burgers. He spoke of Moscow, where he had lived that summer. I had spent my childhood with a vision of Russia as an anti-America, a sort of fairy-tale intellectual prison. But this was 1987, the beginning of perestroika, of glasnost, and views of Russia were changing. Television showed a country of rain and difficulty and great humility, and Gorbachev was always bowing to sign something or other, his head bearing a mysterious stain shaped like a continent one could almost but not quite identify. I said to Hans that I wanted to go there myself, though I had never thought of the idea before that moment. He said, “You can if you want.” We were in his small, iridescent apartment by now. “Or perhaps to Poland,” I said, thinking of Stasselova.
    “Poland,” Hans said. “Yes. What is left of it, after men like Stasselova.”
    “What do you mean, men like Stasselova?”
    “Soviet puppets.”
    “Yet he is clearly anti-Soviet,” I said.
    “ Now, yes. Everybody is anti-Soviet now.” The sign for the one Japanese restaurant in town cast a worldly orange light into the room, carving Hans’s body into geometric shapes. He took my hand, and at that moment the whole world seemed to have entered his apartment. I found him intelligent, deliberate, large-hearted. “Now,” he said, “is the time to be anti-Soviet.”
    ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, IN class, Hans sat across from me. We were all sitting around a conference table, waiting for Stasselova. Hans smiled. I gave him the peace sign across the table. When I looked back at him, moments later, Hans’s hands were casually laid out on the table, palms down. I saw then, for the first time, that his left hand tapered into only three fingers, which were fused together at the top knuckle. The hand looked delicate, surprising. I had not noticed this on our date, and now I wondered if he had purposely kept me from seeing it, or if I had somehow just missed it. For a brief, confused moment, I even wondered if the transformation had occurred between then and now. Hans looked me squarely in the eye. I smiled back. Stasselova then entered the room. In light of my date with Hans, I had almost forgotten my visit with him the previous Friday. I’d meant to burn the book over the weekend in the darkness at the ravine, though I dreaded this. My mother was a librarian, and I knew that the vision of her daughter burning a book would have been like a sledgehammer to the heart.
    Throughout the class Stasselova seemed to be speaking directly to me, still chastising me. His eyes kept resting on me disapprovingly. “The reason for the sentence is to express the verb—a change, a desire . But the verb cannot stand alone; it needs to be supported, to be realized by a body, and thus the noun—just as the soul in its trajectory through life needs to be comforted by the body.”
    The sun’s rays slanted in on