Letters from Novosibirsk Page 2
At first he thought it must be someone he’d met at a grocery store in Grand Rapids. Such visions of faces he had happened to find interesting sometimes did recur, but his attitude toward them was one of total distrust and condescension. A vision of some inconsequential acquaintance from his past could not be allowed to mean anything.
Well, Nura was not from his past, though she was from his home’s past, a fact that even Wynnet had little trouble discerning, judging from the clothes she wore. And by now he could not bring himself to disregard her; the great black key that had opened his eyes was not as readily available to close them.
He had not altered his position in the tattered, comfortable chair one inch. His legs extended firmly, set apart, before his slumped torso; one open hand supported his head as an elbow dug into one soft brown arm of the chair. He tried to speak, but a gust of wind put the words back into his mouth, though nothing else in the room had been touched by it. It was a cold wind, not simply fresh, but directly from the opposite season’s iciest midnight. But this too he wrote off as an extraordinary chimney draft, perfectly natural, and unremarkable.
And then, he thought: Who am I talking to? There was no longer anything in the air, though he wasn’t quite sure now that there had ever been anything. What could he do but get up and go to the kitchen for his favorite Sunday afternoon treat: a glass of hazelmond-chocolate milk.
2. THE NUN OF NOVOSIBIRSK
Elsa’s arrival at Novosibirsk had turned more than one head: who among the town’s more seasoned inhabitants could have missed her soft, arching eyebrows, settled blond hair, or even the careful way she carried herself? Her arrival had spoken of things beyond Novosibirsk, of ways that been discarded by its hermits. There was even something of the child in her, so natural and unassuming she seemed. To everyone’s surprise, though, she quickly adopted the guarded life of their town. She had been there five years without thinking once about returning to her native Denmark; her days there had become as benign as anyone else’s.
That morning she was sitting before her triptych mirror applying eye shadow. She did not wear make-up every day, but when she did, she wore it meticulously.
She was known for doing things meticulously.
There was the time she gave a proper tea for the residents of Tarragon Lane (which gave access to her dacha) and spread the most magnificent table anyone had ever seen: embroidered linens, English china, teas from Thailand and Georgia, home preserves, and Elsa’s own twelve-grain bread. The whole room seemed to exist only for this four o’clock tea, its decor and arrangement of furniture bowing to the celebrated table. The guests arrived exactly on time; the day was bright, and her cat had found a cozy corner to hide in for the duration of the event.
After the obligatory mingling, her guests seated themselves, and Elsa beamingly pronounced the tea’s commencement. Bread was passed, jams spread, and napkins arranged on laps. But an alarming silence soon spread over the group, for someone had gone for one of the delicately painted teapots, and found it to be empty!
Elsa had forgot to boil the water.
This was the story of Elsa’s life—the bitterness of detail always upsetting her otherwise pure and far-reaching plan. Even that morning, while applying the highlight color of her eye shadow, a metallic jar of moisturizer sitting at one corner of her mirror caught the reflection of her nose, or elbow, or something, and invaded her ability to concentrate. After a couple of false starts, with her brush smearing the make-up over her temple, she was ready to throw the damn jar out.
But instead she took the jar and threw it into an open drawer, took a deep breath, and began again with the eye shadow. This time she applied a perfect stroke above the left eye, but when she started in on the right one another disturbing thing happened: she noticed that her face had multiplied a thousand times in the bevelled edges of the mirror.
One of the faces, however, was not hers. It was the face of a child.
Elsa was the oldest of four, all girls. She was actually quite the oldest, because there were ten years between her and the next sister. So you might say that she had understood motherhood long before being a mother: there was always a younger sister to watch, or clean up after, or hold, or take to the park. Always. Elsa’s father would have nothing to do with such things, and Elsa’s mother did what she could when she wasn’t at work.
Such was the effect of the twenty-first century resurgence of interest in having “big” families.
Elsa had no intention of having a big family; she had no intention of having any family. But, as often happened with her firm intentions, this one lost its power in the face of more spontaneous feelings and events. The spontaneous feeling and event in this case was a man named Helgje, who was actually not Danish, but Norwegian.
Their first child was born out of wedlock, which was no uncommon thing, though its death was. Elsa had therefore been surprised by detail again, though this detail would remain walled-off in her heart so that it sometimes pounded in pain, reminding her of that distant surprise, and making her nearly tremble with the thought of her son trembling into death only a few minutes after he had been born.
But such was the feeling between Elsa and Helgje that another child was soon on its way, and Elsa paid particularly close attention to this pregnancy, imagining once that its limbs stopped growing, or that its blood drained out, or its mouth grew shut. Too many horrible things began to surface in her imagination, too many cues that something was about to go wrong. So she stopped the pregnancy. She did it without telling Helgje.
This was of no consequence to Helgje, because he had lost interest in the whole thing (Elsa, her pregnancies) anyway. At this point Elsa vowed never to have another child; they were part of the intractable betrayal of men.
In fact, Elsa had felt betrayed by not only Helgje, not only men, but by all of Danish society. No one, not even her mother, had much to say about either child’s death. And she began to wonder whether society meant anything at all in the twenty-first century. It seemed that everyone had become so self-sufficient, both materially and socially; there was little time or inclination left to empathize with another because of misfortunes, especially misfortunes of the worst kind.
Elsa felt that she too had become estranged from humanity; her role as a research scientist had blossomed irrevocably in its narrow direction, following twelve years of graduate education and fellowships. She never doubted the importance of what she did, only why she was doing it—for whom?
Shortly after her thiry-eight birthday an odd journal showed up in the lab among the more familiar others: a copy of Letter from Novosibirsk. Without thinking, even feeling as if she were being directed, she picked it up and turned the cover. On the first printed page she found a short manifesto, an explanation of the reasons for the journal’s existence:
We few have come to realize that our world, because of the uncontrollable speed of evolution brought on by mass communication and pan-globe economic development in the last two centuries, has fallen deeply into an incontrovertible chaos. The human race has become more and more educated, but the kind of education pursued has resulted in more and more restriction of its ability to retain an awareness of one another. The very concept of “society” has disintegrated; we are all left hyper-specialists without regard for anything but our own narrow pursuits. Therefore we have come to found this colony in New Siberia, a place of extreme natural cycles that retains somewhat of the purity of the earlier ages, in order to reflect on our time and our world. We are non-denominational, though our lives will be similar to the lives of monks and nuns of those earlier ages, and we offer our thoughts purely in this journal, that readers everywhere may reconsider their positions and one day consider building a new social order. We say this though our own social order is restricted: we are merely a microcosm of our contemporary world. We care not for noise or interruptions of any kind, including the interruptions that procreation can bring, or the interruption of long conversation. We a
re here simply to think, write, and share, without reward.
Founding Independents of the Colony of Novosibirsk-38, A.D. 2072
Elsa could hardly believe that she had not written the letter herself. Within two weeks she had packed a very few belongings and left Frederikshavn for New Siberia, feeling exactly what she had been wanting to feel her whole life long: a purpose, a direction, a reason for thinking and being.
She therefore became one of the most reclusive inhabitants of Novosibirsk: a place with no schools, no puppet shows, no parades or carnivals; a place with no chance that she might ever see another child. She spent her days writing letters more often to her mother than anyone, though she did contribute to the town’s journal more than once.
But a child’s face looked calmly at her now from the bevelled edge of the right mirror. It had almond-shaped brown eyes, delicate ash-brown eyebrows, and a thin, sickly mouth. Elsa, used to these impetuous appearances by now, resolutely turned her eyes directly on it, but the child had gone.
The mirror warmed over as the sun reached higher into the mid-morning sky; and Elsa sat half-dressed, half-conscious, and half-made-up, before her bevelled-edge, triptych reflection. When she