Letters from Novosibirsk Page 14

  *Infoline terminated until tomorrow a.m.

  “But I didn’t terminate!” Wynnet exclaimed, before turning around quickly to see whether his shadow was—but then all the room had turned to shadow: the computer terminals flashing gray lights within darker gray rectangles; the furniture newly flattened, two-dimensional; even the window frames flickering between dove gray and nothing. The soft light pouring into the room hit nothing and cast no shadow, for all its objects were already shadow. And as Wynnet passed by a dull, gray mirror he saw that he had no face, no clothes, no dimension that would give him any kind of depth. For he, too, had become nothing but shadow.

  “Singular,” he muttered. But he was used to odd occurrences by now. He passed by the shadows of Kolya and Nura, side by side on the mantelpiece, and thought nothing of them. There is more to life than dreams, thought he, floating over the room like spilled mercury, on his way to the kitchen for his mid-morning snack.

  15.

  Kolya had been busy. His encounters with Wynnet and Omar left him feeling quite mature and experienced in the ways of ghosthood. But he preferred not to relate these feelings to the other ghosts, just yet. Rather, he would cherish them the way the living cherished their adolescent awakenings to the finer points of human experience, such as jealousy and love—things Kolya could only have dreamt about for eternity, never having experienced them while alive. But that too would soon change.

  It was in the midst of these never-ending dreams that Kolya found himself when Nura summoned him to a gathering. Kolya stayed near her, but remained fixed in his imagination as the others shared their latest perceptions. Nura began:

  “The soul of Omar has been presented to himself, in part, by Kolya. Wynnet and that monarchist, what’s his name, have also seen glimpses of themselves. And the one who had lost her children, from a Nordic land, has had a part of her soul charted too.”

  “Let’s not forget that parts of them have been presented to each other,” Zofiya interrupted, “that they may dwell more in each other, as we do.”

  To this Alexei responded:

  “Here, here. Three cheers to our young soul cartographer.”

  Kolya was radiant, but kept on dreaming. “And maybe we can become more like them,” he privately mused. Nura, however, was too involved in her own thoughts to pick up his:

  “I know our little Kolya is enjoying his encounters, but why should he have all the fun? We can all act together to make Vydrino as exciting a place as it was in our days.”

  “I’m too old for such pranks,” Alexei returned.

  “Now you’re talking like one of them,” she hurled back. “You know it only takes the slightest effort, old ghost.”

  Zofiya commanded:

  “Let each of us do what seems appropriate. Isn’t that the way with us?”

  “Here, here,” Alexei agreed. “I’ll watch.”

  Nura couldn’t resist: “Still a fool, after all this eternity…”

  Elsa sat reading. She often read the lives of female saints (drawn by the suffering they endured) and imagined living in their distant times, wondering whether anyone in her time was really any different. Could she have been different? Could she have suffered so? Would she have been forgetful, or her mind work with more clarity, more purpose?

  She might never have known what it meant to be a saint, though she did know what it meant to be excluded, because she had excluded herself. And for no apparent reason. She put her nose back on the scent of Saint Catherine of Siena, for involving herself in another life prevented the need of understanding hers.

  But strangely, the more she tried to read, the less the book interested her. Instead she felt herself swimming through a flood of images from her past: images of her life as it was lived, and images of how she had planned her life to be.

  Elsa had been a scientist. In the long days before coming to Novosibirsk she worked in a laboratory in Copenhagen, identifying early fetal malformations in spontaneously aborted tissue. She often collaborated with the genetic research team across the hall, and felt that she was doing something toward the perfection of humankind.

  During those days Elsa was not aware of very much, except eating and her work. She knew that every minute counted, that she was in a race against the big, evil, ticking clock of nature. Nature had had her way for thousands upon thousands of years, destroying innocent babies and dashing the hopes of honest young couples. And they were all depending on Elsa to work their revenge.

  So she worked, and then she became pregnant again. The unexpected death of her first baby had left her cold and uncertain about the fragility of life; this pregnancy put her into a deep freeze.

  She continued working, but instead of saving all those innocent, anonymous parents she was saving herself. Her work grew more and more feverish: if anything should go wrong, she must know how to correct it. The dark winters of her homeland only encouraged longer hours in the lab. Helgje was gone; her old life was gone. All that was left was the pact she had made with herself. And after she had driven herself to inaction that too was gone. It was no wonder that she decided to make the new baby go away.

  With everything gone, her exile had begun. She felt voluntarily and involuntarily detached from the world she had known, from her past, from life.

  These thoughts recurred to her as she sat reading the life of Saint Catherine of Siena. She had run over the scenario many times in her mind since moving to Siberia. But never had she let her imagination go further: imagining how her second child may have looked.

  She saw him, a boy, standing under the strong sun, his hair infused with its golden light. His eyes were fixed on hers, though the spirit that moved those eyes was lost. It was a spirit without a history: one never given over to time, with no Earthly memory. Elsa wanted to touch him; she reached out and felt his soft hair, like pale dandelions, and felt the contours of his puzzled face, and the light draining out of him, until all that was left of him was a translucent shadow in the air, a memory.

  During the next two hours the sun set, and the room gradually lost its color. Elsa moved through the sitting room as if cutting through something unbearably light, as if she were walking right through him. She found her way to her bed and lay down, feeling that she had been intimate with another world, the world of her infant’s dreams.

  16.

  Omar awoke to a day of no maps. Usually there were maps in the cracks of his bedroom ceiling, maps underfoot in the wood grain of the floors, maps in the cracked porcelain tub. He moved through his house as if discovering new zones of the earth, until his work began, and he lost himself in redrawing them.

  But today the light on his ceiling was bright and diffused, like the glare on a sandy beach. The floors had lost their character and become one, dull hue. Even the refrigerator—usually bursting with topography—seemed only an unappealing jumble of cartons, sloppy jars, and ill-preserved leftovers. Omar was bewildered, but not anxious. It must be an illness, something temporary, probably brought on by too much work.

  He made himself a glass of tea, and went for a short walk down Wild Goose Lane, holding the silver handle carefully in front of him. He tried more than once to conjure up plans for new projects, but the fine day, the birds, the light clouds and tea told him nothing could be more important than his walk. Once or twice he caught the sunlight glinting off the filigreed work of the glass holder, lighting up the features of a face. But he did not heed it, or think it abnormal. Sunlight on fine days was apt to play such tricks.

  To Elsa, also taking a little walk that morning down Wild Goose Lane, the sun seemed to turn every soaring bird white. Birds flew above and before her, as if leading the way; birds with rich, thick feathers that nearly sparkled. They gathered on dead branches and flew like lace over the sun, so that Elsa felt as if the late-summer world of Novosibirsk had been suddenly overcome by snow.

  Omar’s glass holder sparkled white, too, and the birds that had encircled Elsa surrounded him; though he, too, was so completely overcome
by the mood that he failed to see the spectacle clearly.

  Then, as if all those birds had joined together, Elsa saw a pair of giant, ruffled wings descending before her, bringing a child down to Earth. It was the child of her daydreams, the boy with golden and silver hair, locking its eyes into hers. He fell closer and closer toward her, until they met, and Elsa fell to the ground.

  Upon rising and brushing herself off, breathless, she found that the white world had disappeared. Before her now were the black eyes of Omar.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I don’t really know what happened.”

  “Neither do I,” Elsa answered, still blinking and regaining her balance. “But the sun is extraordinarily bright today.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  He noted the light in her eyes.

  “I was just out for a little walk,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say.

  Omar was even more intrigued by her blue eyes, so unlike those of his native people that he felt he had discovered a new aboriginal race of the earth.

  “Why don’t we walk together?” he said.

  She agreed, and felt safe under the tall shade of his body, the calm dark of his eyes. They walked until the sun became hot, and Omar’s cottage came near.

  During the next couple of hours neither of them could quite believe what happened, for they ended up making love, both feeling a rushing-in sense of