She would always start our private study
sessions with a lesson in grammar and end with a lesson in life...
“A Farewell to Lara”
a short story by
L.
J. Lundblad
May 2013
Most boys part ways with their first
love the summer between high school and college. The summer between high school
and college I fell in love for the first time. In May I graduated and turned
eighteen. In June I began college because my parents thought it was a good idea
for me to get a head start on my studies with a summer class. Back then I
thought it was a terrible idea for me to pack up my childhood belongings two
months earlier and for us to drive hours out west in June. In retrospect it was
the best idea my parents have ever had. It was a language class and the teacher’s
name was Lara. Lara became my first professor and she was my first love. For
eight weeks of an unusually hot summer in southern Oregon Lara greeted me with
a smile every day of the week. It was the summer I read Doctor Zhivago for the first time in an English translation. I
never thought then I would one day read it in the original but then I did think
my Lara was as enigmatic and beautiful as the Lara of Doctor Zhivago. Doctor
Zhivago and I had plenty in common when I was eighteen years old: we both wrote
poetry and we both wanted to dedicate our lives to the practice of medicine. We
also both traveled to the Urals and we both loved Lara there among the cold of
the snow and in the heat of the revolution; the snow and the revolution was a
historic fact and geographic reality for Doctor Zhivago as was the Urals – for me
all three were imaginary and personal yet no less authentic. My Lara had come
to Oregon from the University of Perm several years before our paths crossed
but it always seemed to me that she opened the door to another time and place
every time she stepped into the class room. She brought Russia with her wherever
she went. That summer she brought it to me and my life was never to be the same
again.
I never did become a medical doctor and
I hold Lara responsible for that. Instead she thought I would become a good
writer one day. I think she was right about that.
The greatest man I have ever known was
not a man but a woman and she was not great in physical stature; when I was
eighteen she reached me almost to the shoulder and then I didn’t know I had a
few more inches left to grow. It was perhaps the first time I realized you can
look up to someone in a figurative sense even though she is looking up at you.
Despite her small frame it seemed to me that she contained everything that is
wonderful about the world and everything that is magical about knowledge and
that there was no end to the things she could teach me. Lara was an abyss of
life experience waiting to be shared and circulated and in that sense she was
bigger than anyone I have ever met since. Of course she was a pretty young
woman as well and as an eighteen year old boy I noticed this before I noticed
anything else about her. I never knew her age that summer but I always guessed
she was approximately ten years older than me. This made her an old wise lady
in my childish eyes and I memorized all her stories without knowing why. Maybe
I thought they would one day come in handy. I think I was right about that.
It was not love at first sight. If there
was anything at first sight there was desire: sexual desire within the awkward
body of a teenage boy still trying to figure out how all the parts function. Probably
she had not come mean to me what she did if it had not been for those long
summer evenings when the sun set slowly in the west and I sat outside in one of
the cafes on campus trying to do my homework. One evening in early July she sat
down at the table next to mine with a book and a cup of tea. I was hiding my
copy of Doctor Zhivago under a
dictionary for when vocabulary practice was over but she saw it and decided she
wanted to talk about it. That decision marks the beginning of a journey without
an end. “I also read this novel when I was eighteen,” she said and then smiled
as if to apologize: “and that was already my third year in college.” I told her
I was reading it only after I had finished my homework for the day. Then a
sudden rush of bravery came over me and I asked her why she went to college so
early. “It’s a long story,” was her answer as she once again smiled at me. “But
maybe we have time for long stories this evening?” she asked, took her book and
her cup of tea and moved over to my table. “Do you know what you want to be when
you grow up?” she continued. I told her I wanted to become a doctor. “I had no
idea what I wanted to become when I went to college. Because I was fifteen.
Nobody knows what they want to become when they are teenagers, right?” I told
her I had known since I was in sixth grade. “I met my first husband when I was
in sixth grade,” she laughed. I didn’t say anything. “Do you want to hear a
strange story from a real lived life?” she asked. I nodded.
Lara never had a father. Lara lost her
mother when she was twelve years old. Due to a lack of relatives who could take
care of her she found a new home with foster parents, a middle-aged couple of university
professors without children of their own. When she was thirteen her foster
mother passed away in cancer. “So it was just me and the old professor left in
the family and he devoted every moment of free time he had to make sure I
excelled in every subject taught at school,” she said to explain how she came
to graduate from high school and be accepted to the university when she was
fifteen. “My first degree was in history even though I wanted to study
languages but I couldn’t because the old professor was in rhetoric and he thought
it might be a conflict of interest,” she continued. She never provided the old
professor with a name in her narrative. I did not foresee the twist she had in
store for me. Lara married the old professor when she was eighteen. “I was your
age and I didn’t know anything about anything. Least of all I knew about
marriage. He was forty years older than me,” she said and quickly corrected
herself: “He is forty years older
than me.” On that summer evening in early July Lara left the story of her life at
that enticing moment with a simple conclusion: do not get married too young.
Throughout the summer I pieced together
the story of her life during many warm evenings at the same table in the same café.
She would always start our private study sessions with a lesson in grammar and
end with a lesson in life. Lara painted a vivid picture for me brush stroke by brush
stroke of the kind of life I only thought was possible in movies and novels; from
a teenage girl who married her foster father and graduated college before
turning twenty to a young woman who went as a volunteer to an orphanage in
Siberia for six months and ended up staying in the country for six years. “Somewhere
along the road we divorced but I don’t remember when exactly that was anymore,”
she said. “I was a child who grew up too fast and the old professor was a man
who always wanted a daughter but fell in love with her instead. It wasn’t
anybody’s fault but our own.” Through her stories Lara came to haunt my
thoughts, my feelings, and my fantasies that summer. Lara did not know it then
but she became the eternal feminine who pays a visit of respect whenever I
write a short story or a novel. The image of the old professor – the nameless
man who was only once referred to as my
first husband – visits me as well even though I have had to furnish him
with an exterior of my own. Her stories contained little depiction. Lara described
events and she narrated experiences; she did not sketch people nor provide them
with comprehensible biographies. In my mind the old professor looked almost as
I imagined myself some fifty years later as a distinguished doctor: a tall man
with silver strokes in his black hair, wearing black framed glasses and a dark
brown suit with a green bowtie. She was always the same in all my imagined
flashbacks of her: a delicate girl with curly brown hair and big green eyes who
refused to wear high heels even though it might be a wise choice. “I’m probably
too short to wear flats but no man has ever minded it,” I remember her saying
and I remember her also adding: “Even though I always was only with tall men. I
think I must like it that way.” When I was eighteen I thought this was her subtle
way of showing approval of my awkward height and I blushed. Now I think it was
just something she said and that it had nothing to do with me. But still it was
exciting for me to imagine that also I had something in common with the men in
her life. She only mentioned them in passing as if they were unfortunate
occasions but I remembered each one of them and the circumstances of their chance
encounters with Lara. None of them were given a name.
On the last day of classes we both
lingered in the class room as the other students made their way out the door. “Arvid,”
she said to me and she rarely addressed me by my name, “I hope you will
continue with Russian.” I said that I would. “And even if you don’t I just want
you to be happy with your choices. Always make sure that these choices are your
own.” For many years to come I regretted that my first love came and went
without a first kiss.
Instead of a simple conclusion in the
style of Lara I will give you the complicated ending. I did continue with
Russian; I studied the language throughout college and I took classes on
Russian history and literature until the subject went from being my minor to becoming
my major and I graduated not only with honors but also with a stipend to study
for a year in Saint Petersburg. While I was in Russia I took the train to the
city of Perm. I found neither Doctor Zhivago nor Lara there but the journey itself
was worth more than its destination. When I came back I went to Harvard for
graduate school and eventually I found myself in the same place where I had once
found Lara: I was teaching a summer course on Russian language. A year or two
later I attended a conference where I saw a familiar name on the program: Lara
was giving a paper in the section before the one I was presenting in. By then I
had long ago grown into my tall frame and mastered the growth of facial hair –
something I had yet to accomplish when I was eighteen years old and it was
summer in southern Oregon. I was no longer the same young boy with too long
arms and bony legs and a few black hairs above my upper lip. Lara was still the
same when I saw her at the podium: she brought the same smile and the same
presence of another time and place with her to the conference. Only this time
the place was Oregon and the time was the summer between high school and
college. Lara recognized me and nodded. Afterwards she approached me and gave
me a hug. Lara had never hugged me before.
My first love did not remain without a
kiss. After the reception on the same evening we found ourselves alone outside on
one of the balconies. “Arvid, did you know I was so in love with you back then?”
she said and took a sip from the glass of red wine she held in her right hand. “It
would have been unprofessional of me to tell you,” she continued, “but you were
and you remain my favorite student.” I leaned in for a kiss and she raised her
face slightly up towards mine. “I always knew, Lara, I always knew,” I said
even though I of course had never known anything up until that moment. The
following morning was the last day of the conference and she left my hotel room
for the airport before I could offer her breakfast. It was perhaps the first
time I realized that the outcome of certain choices of your own is worth
waiting for.
I haven’t seen Lara since but she still
pays me a visit once in a while. For example, while I was writing this.