Letters from Novosibirsk Read online

Letters from Novosibirsk

  by Mark Saba

  Published by Mark Saba

  Copyright 2014 Mark Saba

  Table of Contents

  Preface

  First Chapter

  About Mark Saba

  Other Books by Mark Saba

  Excerpt from The Shoemaker

  Connect with Mark Saba

  In the ancient town of Vydrino, in New Siberia, an imaginatively alluring thing had happened: all of its residents were either dead, or had left. After the August Revolution life had become even more unbearable for the local population, and anyone who had survived the course set by the October Revolution found himself even less fortunate immediately following the August one: delivery trains and trucks disappeared, winters seemed to grow more severe, and party functionaries lost their paychecks. Even Vydrino’s old widows, who had survived everything imaginable, threw in the towel and headed with their sons and daughters for bigger places, places where larger numbers could commiserate and collaborate in building a new social order.

  Those who simply would not budge grew restful and thin, nearly ascetic in appearance, though full of the town’s memories, memories that had spanned revolutions and brainwashings, memories with roots deeper than life itself.

  But they too finally expired, and in time the staggered lines of empty dachas, the unpaved alleys, the church’s unfettered interior, and every other place of historical congregation grew thick with the charred remains of Vydrino’s departed souls. There was Nura Kalaushin bending over a well to fetch water, Alexei Semianov lighting an Armenian cigarette while surveying his cucumber patch, Zofiya Kundrat giving birth to her fifth son, and Sergei Brochin leading a band of angry young men to the home of the Kazakh army officer who stole his wife.

  These souls would pop up at random all over town, gray and white and black smudges in the air; sometimes offering a recognizable countenance, even showing up in their period costumes, though never lingering long enough to enter into conversation with any of the town’s newest inhabitants.

  They would not converse, but they did stare. Sometimes the new folks didn’t even know they were being surveyed. Most of them had no interest in ghosts, anyway.

  The new inhabitants of Vydrino (renamed Novosibirsk-38, but known simply as “Novosibirsk”) were, in fact, completely self-absorbed. They had colonized Novosibirsk as a means of escaping what they considered to be the dull, the unaware, the unenlightened and brain-deadened societies from which they came. Each of the colonists had brought along a perfect sense of purpose and conviction, along with an eagerness to throw off the yoke of a pervasive, questionable, post-industrial euphoria which had resulted from a more perfect materialism.

  From Novosibirsk the colonists, who had come from places as diverse as Texas and Frederikshavn, kept a timely record of their beliefs and accords as a mini-society. They lived and worked largely in self-appointed confinement, without any unecessary distractions, comingling more often in their thoughts as they were laid down in their holy publication: each could draw and benefit therein from the enlightenment of the others. Theirs could not be called a perfect society, they were willing to admit, though they did wish it to be known simply as the most forward-looking one.

  Their monthly journal, Letters from Novosibirsk, was published and distributed world-wide, electronically and otherwise, by others outside Novosibirsk—the more sin-stained adherents of their self-proclaimed order—in hopes that one day the writers would be able to leave Novosibirsk and travel freely to any town on Earth, and there find the self-evident ideals they cherished alive among its inhabitants.

  In the meantime, however, they remained holed-up in Novosibirsk, which had been declared an Economic World Free Zone by the United Nations, a place where anyone could settle and do as they pleased (though most preferred to avoid it completely). There they practiced their near-perfect lives, solitary crusaders writing their historical papers which would surely finally change humankind for the better, while continuing to neglect the existence of the spirits of Vydrino, who were biding their eternity among them.

  1. THE STATISTICIAN

  Good news about Lake Baykal from Wynnet Lee, in this my third report of the year, 2081.

  Another 2.5% of the lake has been proclaimed pollution-free. This means that a new total of 68.7% of the lake’s water holds less than 30 ppm of man-made pollutants when passing through a Ryzhkov aquameter at gravitational force. And, what’s more, another 16 trees (of age 39+) have been saved from termites infesting its south south-western shore.

  But this is hardly encouraging, since more than 58% of the world’s population still owns at least three pieces of furniture made from natural wood. However, the incidence of termites, especially Chinese termites, has been in decline.

  In other matters, General Ford has announced in Tahiti that its new coconut-driven GV (the “Palmetto”) will be ready for marketing next spring, provided enough American writers are on hand to assist in the local harvest. The milk disperses without a trace of exhaust excluding of course the Piña Colada aroma that has already lifted the spirits of engineers working on the project.

  About one-third of the population of Tahiti has left in recent years because of the 80% drop in their tourist industry. People would much rather lounge on the shores of the Neva or Thames now that the palm has been successfully transplanted to northern Europe as a result of the continuing warming trend.

  Tahitians have been known to be aggressive in tight cities, and it is my recommendation to the World Population Density Council that no more than six be allowed to congregate in any city of more than four million. Their dwellings should be placed between seven and ten kilometers apart, and the number of Pacific palms in their backyards should be limited to two (one female, one male) because they have been known to violate international noise laws during certain swinging rituals involving the trees.

  In a related matter, the town of Chester, Connecticut, now home to more than 750,000 Palestinians, has declared itself a shutter-free zone. They say that the region’s historical black-and-white colonial homes are an insult to their religious heritage, an obvious reference to the black-and-white pattern of their head wraps. The Cambodian population of Dream Lake, Minnesota is watching the case closely, since the new Dream Lake shopping complex, already flying in shoppers from half the hemisphere, bears an 80% resemblance to Angkor Vat. (In unrelated but 75% significant developments, Kenya has been chosen as the site for the coordination of next year’s Root Conference and Survey, and 31% of all Gypsies living along the Danube now speak nothing but American. Seven out of eight mountains are nice to look at, most of them are in Tibet, and reading has been proven by the World Confederation of Medical Practitioners to be unrelated to intelligence.)

  Nura never quite belonged in Vydrino, even if she had been born and raised there. She’d spent the best years of young adulthood in Moscow, and the effects of it had never left her, though she’d already been dead seventy-nine Earth years. But Vydrino filled her substance more than Moscow did, for it was Vydrino’s light that she had seen before any other, and Vydrino’s light that had been her last.

  For Nura, time passed as swiftly as a twirling leaf, and she enjoyed her new house guests more with each passing year. Years themselves of course meant nothing to Nura now, unless they were observed in conjunction with her latest inhabitants, presently one rather thin, woolly-headed, needle-nosed American named Wynnet.

  Nura’s favorite pastime was blowing some of Wynnet’s scribbled ledger sheets into the waste basket, or jamming the news from Irkhutsk, or better still, clouding the bathroom mirror just as Wynnet tried for an even part in his hair.

  They did have a brief encounter once, though Wynnet would n
ever have admitted to it. It happened on a Sunday afternoon, when Wynnet, against his better judgment, sat down in his twice-reupholstered brown chair and almost fell asleep. This was something he did not normally do. But the day had been warm and damp, and the morning’s review of statistics had taken too heavy a toll on his eyes. He looked into the fireplace and saw last year’s coals, dark and dusty, too tired to wonder how they had come back to his summer hearth.

  The coals became darker still; the andirons and stone receded like an eclipsed sun, and their heavy silhouette locked into Wynnet’s occluded pupils like a great black key, unlocking a series of shadowy visions he never knew he had: black birds hovering about the room, ex-girlfriends perfuming the stale, late-summer air, his mother telling him bedtime stories, tree branches and dark hills from his past teasing his selective memory. And there before the forgotten fire,