Letters from Novosibirsk Page 5
Kolya, silently bewildered but charged with a near-Earthly excitement, set off accordingly, for spending more time among them might allow him to realize another goal, one that he dared not mention to the others, but that he had set his little soul on long ago.
Omar had just finished hanging his last map (a rare treasure, the Visigothic Empire of Western Europe) above the sitting room’s fireplace. He was about to begin his next project (Antarctic trade zones of the mid twenty-first century) when Kolya arrived.
Omar sat ready with his blue ink in hand, ready to delineate the major aquatic passageways; Kolya sat on the pen’s tip, tilting it every so often in a direction that Omar didn’t recognize—sometimes trailing off to Australia, other times encroaching on Argentina’s territorial waters.
“What’s this?” Omar whispered in dismay. “A rare nervous disease I’ve contracted?”
Hardly. He dropped the pen to stretch his right hand’s fingers slowly out, then in, then in again. His concentration and coordination had never felt better—
Until he picked up the pen and began again. This time he drew a line straight into the ice. “Why, a ship can’t go there,” he wondered. The pen directed his hand again, slipping over the pole and heading out to sea again, in the direction of warmer waters.
Then he felt the chill inside him. Kolya let off, and Omar took a break. “There’s more to cartography than this,” thought Omar. “I must understand what it’s like to live in a frozen land. Perhaps I shall take a walk and imagine the winter Siberian landscape.”
Outside, Omar found summer in full August force, though a slight breeze carried a tinge of Arctic air down with it, which met the current draft inside him. There he felt what he saw: a dark plain that receded equally on all sides, unbroken by dotted, dashed, or textured lines. A wind that swept down over it, and continued to the edge of the land, to the sea, to the night and then day; a wind that never stopped, only paused to garner strength.
During this walk to the outskirts of Novosibirsk he imagined his Arabic homeland, how the borders had changed even in his own lifetime. He remembered an impromptu trip he had made as a young man to the Caliphate of Tripoli. In his eyes and in his ears he remembered the trip as if it had never ended, as if his life had only been a series of short, diversionary rests away from a trip he carried inside him.
In those days one could still rent a vehicle for singular passage. Omar remembered making the decision on a Friday and leaving the following morning. There was no one at home to tell about it.
The first thing he noticed was a herd of camels at a watering hole near Bir el Rabia, on the Libyan Plateau. “Camels are dangerous,” he thought to himself. Though he could not even imagine why. He had seen camels all his life (all nineteen years of it) and he had always considered them to be life-saving, at the least. But all this solitary driving had encouraged his thoughts to wander outside of their more predisposed confines. Having no one with whom to interact, he was lent to interacting with himself, and inclining to a less favorable view of camels was something that seemed to come naturally to him after having spent a lifetime of blindly considering them “good.”
So what else might he be inclined to think during a solitary ride on the desert’s fringe? A few miles to the north he could easily have taken the coastal highway, with the lushness of green spread like his boyhood’s bed quilt around him.
But he chose instead to take old roads, or no roads at all—whatever his ancient RV could handle. And he remained, faithfully, within the desert’s walls. It was not until his arrival at the Great Sand Sea that he decided not to go to Tripoli at all, but rather to the city of Sabha, deep within the sands of the northern Sahara. His head-long dive into the desert was a head-long dive into his own confines, for he had spent his whole life in a city that grew desert around it, as a whirling planet throws off nothing but dead space, and now he must see the boundaries that had been set for him at birth.
Kolya held fast to Omar’s memory—the only way to chart Omar’s soul was to allow him to see glimpses of it in his past. Kolya would not draw boundaries, or illuminate landmarks, that weren’t already there. Perhaps he could urge Omar to see what parts of him lingered outside of time, and help him see how these parts made up the true, timeless Omar: a difficult mission for a young ghost.
Now at the boundary of Novosibirsk, where an old wooden church stood awaiting its fate, Omar tested the wind once again. It is a sweet wind, full of pollen and wild manure. The wind laid everything low in this Siberian plain; the sands of the Sahara rose under the wooden grasses and groves of thin white birch.
The ride to Sabha seemed at first to be a ride through eternity, the void that Omar had always felt lay just outside of Cairo. He was drawn to this void, because little by little he recognized that the landscape was not as unchanging as it appeared to be. In fact, he began to notice little changes that soon turned into big changes, and a whole new look at the sand-filled world fell deeper and deeper into his eyes.
Remembering these changes was what Kolya was there to see him and help him do. These changes made up the timeless Omar, the landscape of Omar.
For in place of the tireless sands Omar began to see the shapes of wind-swept dunes. In fact there were tracks on some of these dunes, tiny insect tracks and big RV tracks, tracks from past wars, and tracks that told stories of things that went on as he had been growing up in Cairo.
A breast-shaped dune with a pinkish tint recalled one of his earliest adolescent preoccupations.
A double-tipped, tubular dune became the hillside he had gazed upon from the second storey window of his grammar school.
An irregular, snake-like dune resembled the stray cat lying curled under an ancient stone, the cat he had tormented and then nursed back to health in order to make a present of it for his young niece.
But the tall, erratic dune—the one chopped like little waves on its top and sides, this one was his dear friend Gabriel, the Maronite from Lebanon whom he’d left behind in the world beyond Novosibirsk. Gabriel was not a cartographer, but he understood the need for mapping things out, and knowing where you are going. He would say things like, “You’re going to fly to Madrid? It’s much more interesting to fly into Lisbon, and take the overland route. Stop at Toledo and soak in El Greco’s view.” He was not speaking from a tourist’s point of view, but from the point of view of one who cared deeply for a landscape. They had fought together for the Arab Union, slept in the desert under the stars, and helped to rebuild Cairo after the wars. Omar missed him.
Other dunes were older friends, other pets he had gathered from the Cairo suburbs as a boy, even a great-grandmother whom he had met only once, as a three-year-old. Somehow these characters made up boundaries that were not drawn; they delineated yearnings in his heart that had gone with him from one country to another, over land as well as sea, their indelible images the only landscape he could see during one-third of his life, in dreams.
The arctic-driven breeze stopped. Omar took a good look around him. He breathed, felt foreign, thought he’d felt this foreignness before, that he’d felt it even in Cairo. That he had never left Cairo. Or that others would always see it in his face.
After the lonely walk back to his study he picked up the ink pen again, ready to draw in the old, affected way, ready to draw lines around other people’s lives, around their places of living.
And Kolya flew off, letting Omar’s hand go where it would.
6. THE ACTIVIST
(or, SELF-APPOINTED COLLECTIVE CONSCIENCE)
One day as Wynnet was walking to the fruit and vegetable warehouse to pick up his weekly staples he tripped over a hole in the road which hadn’t been there for fifty years. Luckily, nothing slipped out of his wallet; it would have taken him the better part of the morning to reorganize it.
Soon a woman appeared before him; she ha
d turned the corner just as he had finished brushing himself off. It was his next-door neighbor, Karyne, whom he had never encountered on the street before.
“Hello Wynnet. Nice day, isn’t it?”
“Nice enough.”
“I hope you’re not buying the parsnips this year.”
“I’ve already heard. You’re speaking of the latest WGC report on genetically engineered Siberian root crops?”
“That too? Well, no, I was thinking of the Ukrainian exploitation of Chechens and Ossetians.”
“Root growers?”
“For centuries. I won’t touch another sugar beet, carrot, turnip, or parsnip until their rights have been restored.”
“Luckily I don’t like them.”
“You’re no better than those Ukrainians! How can you say that?”
“No, not Ossetians. Parsnips. I don’t like parsnips. The last two times I tried them, six months and five years ago, I had indigestion for three and a half hours, I drank six ounces of SLB-30 and finally had to skip my evening exercises.”
Karyne stared blankly at him.
“They are a local staple. You really should try to immerse yourself in the local culture more.”
“I thought we were the local culture. There are only three native inhabitants of Vydrino left. And they are all cats.”
“But their culture still stands, and