Letters from Novosibirsk Read online
Page 6
besides, Vydrino’s surrounded by it. There’s a wooden church straight down the road, less than three kilometers from here. Have you ever been in it? I’ve heard that it might be destroyed because it harbors bats. The decision rests with us, the Council of Novosibirsk. We have to preserve that church!”
“We could do without the bats. And I make it a point never to join councils. I didn’t even know it existed, fortunately.”
“Wynnet! You’re just like the rest of them.”
“Which rest of them?”
“The rest of them out there.”
“Ah, you mean the world. Please. I had thought you were a bit more perspicacious—it’s obvious that I’m not like the rest of them, or I wouldn’t be here. That’s very simple. Even for a native Californian.”
“That’s a bigoted remark. Californians are no less intelligent than anyone else. In fact, more Californians are college graduates than people from any other…”
“Ah, ah, ah. That hasn’t been the case for seventy-eight years. The leader now is Oklahoma, uncontested. In fact, California has the third highest rate of college drop-outs in the area of our former United States. And also as a matter of fact, Californians have scored in the bottom third of the Creative Logic part of the National College Pre-examination Board’s standardized analysis for the last six years.”
“Well at least you didn’t say standardized test.”
“So I may say with supra-relative certainty, dear woman, that your former comment to me fell quite within the range of a typical Californian’s thought processes.”
“Oooooooooooh!” Karyne shrieked. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Buy turnips if you don’t like parsnips. And then fart yourself to death.”
As she maintained her usual goose-stepping pace away from him she heard only the first words of his muttering:
“Yet another typical remark. Nothing surprises me. Hmpf.”
He ducked into a small alleyway to follow a different route to the market, feeling self-satisfied and tireless, a state that Nura could not bear to see him in. She must have some fun:
The alley had been there for three hundred years, and already it had begun to smell of overuse. Gray wooden gates hung in tatters on their encrusted hinges; dirt piles marked the rear entrances to cottages. Laundry fluttered about the fenced-in yards, and black birds spread about like large ashes—floating and descending, then rising again.
The scene, however, made no impression on Wynnet, who had occupied himself since Karyne’s departure by mentally collecting all manner of California-borne phrases. However, a cloud seemed to hang before his eyes the minute he remembered where he was, or where he was heading. The road could have been from Babylon, Detroit, or Calais. The backs of cottages were only shadows to his eye; their roofs, towers to commerce and religion. Now wait. Was he not born and raised here? Did he not walk this lonely road a thousand times before, perhaps on his way to school, or to the hologram store? And now it was the wretched week he’d spent in Amsterdam (mostly in his room) with rain outside and not a soul on Earth he could trust, waiting for his rescheduled flight to Moscow. And then the trees opened up to the Hausatonic River and his first canoe trip, in his new white canoe, nobody but he; and then the death of a favorite grandmother, and the community service to see her off—the white canopy, the name of the shuttle that would release her ashes… He relived all these places at once, behind a milky white veil. Then the veil flew off. A wide, white owl lifted into the clear sky: it must have passed right in front of him, occluding his vision, or forcing him to think about who he had been.
And Nura flew into the nearest grove of birches, losing herself in their speckled white, while Wynnet kept his mind on every pace, trying in vain to remember his shopping list.
Zofiya was not considered a banal witch among the others; her habits were developed not only enough to earn her the title, but to maintain a mastery of the art that few others would ever attain. She had been at it much longer than less seasoned ghosts, like Nura.
One thing that gave her the greatest pleasure, as well as satisfaction in carrying out her witchly duties, was reaching her living communicants during those moments of just falling asleep, or early awakening. It was an all-too-typical Siberian winter morning, a Saturday, that beckoned her to the site of Todd’s bed:
He lay perfectly back-straight, arms crossed over his chest, blanket tucked under his chin. This was exactly the way she had found him the last time; it drove her mad with delight to see his habits so progressed. It would only aid her design, which after all could only benefit the poor boy in the long run. The first thing she had to do was plug in to his dreams, dull as they might be:
Todd found himself the inheritor of a Late New Age mud-and-stone cottage, set on the desert plains of southern New Mexico, a place he had once seen as an adolescent. From his front door he saw only a charged light, a light that let itself in through the house’s many small windows, but never enough to penetrate the interior’s even grayness completely.
This was, then, the dream: a place, a feeling the place had given him. He had had this dream before.
A slit in his Siberian curtains told him another light had arrived: the light of wakefulness, but he would not leave his stone home. He shut his eyes again, completely, and let the new day pass.
The room had only furniture that was unattainable: Renaissance chairs, a Georgian chest, King Louis IV gilded mirror—things that brought an order to his soul, things he had been amassing mentally over his lifetime. And here was the moment of enjoyment; the timeless, perfect fulfillment of his yearning. And here was where Zofiya must come into play, tripping up his half-awake mind like a good crop of spring potholes on a favorite road:
The room is not as cold as the other. Not as cold as you think: a stream of paper ribbons flying in from a carnival to disrupt the stillness of a sterile place. The Renaissance stripes offer certain comfort, then fly away in the face of the cold opening up, opening up to the walls behind walls. To real homes, full of the lives of those who live, but do not ponder…
He must sink back into the dream, the euphoria of a realized history of dreams. He was the monarch in the dwelling of his dream, surrounded by the artifacts that had surrendered to him, that served him in dumb simplicity. And that was as it should be. Everything was now finally as it should be. Until the eternal daylight comes through again, a stream of misguided thought awakens you; you become one of them again—now, you, a member of democracy half-hidden away but keeping a vital tie from the correspondence you keep with them. Them. Them.
Todd rolled over, burying his cheek in the soft pillow. The lights went out again. He was filled with a Sunday evening feast, sitting at the long, long table with friends all about, each friend refined in taste and elegant in appearance. And it was his banquet: he had chosen the menu, the china, the wines. Afterwards they would stroll in the sculpted gardens, along pink and gray gravel paths, to the fountain’s spray against the rising moon. They would talk about the price of ham, and the World Council for Social Welfare. The price Nigerians are paying for their cheap labor in their newly irrigated fields. Talk about a hole in the curtains that won’t go away, no matter how you arrange them. A walk to the store and meeting Karyne on the way—if only she’d take on another crusade: his. If only the birds would stop singing so early in the morning, and Letters from Novosibirsk would drop that pedestrian format. People would take it more seriously. Take his newest article, to be written today…
Enough of writing letters to the unenlightened. What matter was it to them? There were those who recognized sublimity and those who wouldn’t know it if you…. No use bothering about it. Let them grovel about in their centuries-old pop culture excuse. This is why I exist—to relish the refined, to surround myself with the height of man’s aesthetic achievements, to be a living example of how one should live, and live to guide others…
It is enough, thought Zofiya, to have planted a seed. She often worked that way. She would let him wake up now, and the waki
ng would be part of the lesson. And then all day, while remembering his lovely dream, Todd would be prodded with a sense that there really was more to it than he had imagined.
7.
Kolya knew how to tell another ghost’s presence: there was an even disturbance in his defining space. Such disturbances could be gauged to sense the arriving ghost’s death-age, sex, and personality traits, even before communication had been reached. So Kolya was nearly knocked senseless by the arrival of Rimpon, who had been dead nearly three thousand years, but who had first attained a very high level of knowledge about the immaterial during his Earth-life. He sensed that Kolya was a little overwhelmed by his presence:
“There’s nothing unusual about me, but that I am a little older than you.”
“But you’re older than great-grandma, and she died three years after I did!”
“I came to you because I thought you might understand.”
“Understand what?”
“What I am about to ask you. You are young and delicate; your presence is least likely to be detected. And I have followed with great admiration the work you’ve done with Vydrino’s new residents.”
“I’m just having fun…”
“You are acquainted with Omar, the cartographer?”
“Of course! There aren’t
“We could do without the bats. And I make it a point never to join councils. I didn’t even know it existed, fortunately.”
“Wynnet! You’re just like the rest of them.”
“Which rest of them?”
“The rest of them out there.”
“Ah, you mean the world. Please. I had thought you were a bit more perspicacious—it’s obvious that I’m not like the rest of them, or I wouldn’t be here. That’s very simple. Even for a native Californian.”
“That’s a bigoted remark. Californians are no less intelligent than anyone else. In fact, more Californians are college graduates than people from any other…”
“Ah, ah, ah. That hasn’t been the case for seventy-eight years. The leader now is Oklahoma, uncontested. In fact, California has the third highest rate of college drop-outs in the area of our former United States. And also as a matter of fact, Californians have scored in the bottom third of the Creative Logic part of the National College Pre-examination Board’s standardized analysis for the last six years.”
“Well at least you didn’t say standardized test.”
“So I may say with supra-relative certainty, dear woman, that your former comment to me fell quite within the range of a typical Californian’s thought processes.”
“Oooooooooooh!” Karyne shrieked. “Do me a favor,” she said. “Buy turnips if you don’t like parsnips. And then fart yourself to death.”
As she maintained her usual goose-stepping pace away from him she heard only the first words of his muttering:
“Yet another typical remark. Nothing surprises me. Hmpf.”
He ducked into a small alleyway to follow a different route to the market, feeling self-satisfied and tireless, a state that Nura could not bear to see him in. She must have some fun:
The alley had been there for three hundred years, and already it had begun to smell of overuse. Gray wooden gates hung in tatters on their encrusted hinges; dirt piles marked the rear entrances to cottages. Laundry fluttered about the fenced-in yards, and black birds spread about like large ashes—floating and descending, then rising again.
The scene, however, made no impression on Wynnet, who had occupied himself since Karyne’s departure by mentally collecting all manner of California-borne phrases. However, a cloud seemed to hang before his eyes the minute he remembered where he was, or where he was heading. The road could have been from Babylon, Detroit, or Calais. The backs of cottages were only shadows to his eye; their roofs, towers to commerce and religion. Now wait. Was he not born and raised here? Did he not walk this lonely road a thousand times before, perhaps on his way to school, or to the hologram store? And now it was the wretched week he’d spent in Amsterdam (mostly in his room) with rain outside and not a soul on Earth he could trust, waiting for his rescheduled flight to Moscow. And then the trees opened up to the Hausatonic River and his first canoe trip, in his new white canoe, nobody but he; and then the death of a favorite grandmother, and the community service to see her off—the white canopy, the name of the shuttle that would release her ashes… He relived all these places at once, behind a milky white veil. Then the veil flew off. A wide, white owl lifted into the clear sky: it must have passed right in front of him, occluding his vision, or forcing him to think about who he had been.
And Nura flew into the nearest grove of birches, losing herself in their speckled white, while Wynnet kept his mind on every pace, trying in vain to remember his shopping list.
Zofiya was not considered a banal witch among the others; her habits were developed not only enough to earn her the title, but to maintain a mastery of the art that few others would ever attain. She had been at it much longer than less seasoned ghosts, like Nura.
One thing that gave her the greatest pleasure, as well as satisfaction in carrying out her witchly duties, was reaching her living communicants during those moments of just falling asleep, or early awakening. It was an all-too-typical Siberian winter morning, a Saturday, that beckoned her to the site of Todd’s bed:
He lay perfectly back-straight, arms crossed over his chest, blanket tucked under his chin. This was exactly the way she had found him the last time; it drove her mad with delight to see his habits so progressed. It would only aid her design, which after all could only benefit the poor boy in the long run. The first thing she had to do was plug in to his dreams, dull as they might be:
Todd found himself the inheritor of a Late New Age mud-and-stone cottage, set on the desert plains of southern New Mexico, a place he had once seen as an adolescent. From his front door he saw only a charged light, a light that let itself in through the house’s many small windows, but never enough to penetrate the interior’s even grayness completely.
This was, then, the dream: a place, a feeling the place had given him. He had had this dream before.
A slit in his Siberian curtains told him another light had arrived: the light of wakefulness, but he would not leave his stone home. He shut his eyes again, completely, and let the new day pass.
The room had only furniture that was unattainable: Renaissance chairs, a Georgian chest, King Louis IV gilded mirror—things that brought an order to his soul, things he had been amassing mentally over his lifetime. And here was the moment of enjoyment; the timeless, perfect fulfillment of his yearning. And here was where Zofiya must come into play, tripping up his half-awake mind like a good crop of spring potholes on a favorite road:
The room is not as cold as the other. Not as cold as you think: a stream of paper ribbons flying in from a carnival to disrupt the stillness of a sterile place. The Renaissance stripes offer certain comfort, then fly away in the face of the cold opening up, opening up to the walls behind walls. To real homes, full of the lives of those who live, but do not ponder…
He must sink back into the dream, the euphoria of a realized history of dreams. He was the monarch in the dwelling of his dream, surrounded by the artifacts that had surrendered to him, that served him in dumb simplicity. And that was as it should be. Everything was now finally as it should be. Until the eternal daylight comes through again, a stream of misguided thought awakens you; you become one of them again—now, you, a member of democracy half-hidden away but keeping a vital tie from the correspondence you keep with them. Them. Them.
Todd rolled over, burying his cheek in the soft pillow. The lights went out again. He was filled with a Sunday evening feast, sitting at the long, long table with friends all about, each friend refined in taste and elegant in appearance. And it was his banquet: he had chosen the menu, the china, the wines. Afterwards they would stroll in the sculpted gardens, along pink and gray gravel paths, to the fountain’s spray against the rising moon. They would talk about the price of ham, and the World Council for Social Welfare. The price Nigerians are paying for their cheap labor in their newly irrigated fields. Talk about a hole in the curtains that won’t go away, no matter how you arrange them. A walk to the store and meeting Karyne on the way—if only she’d take on another crusade: his. If only the birds would stop singing so early in the morning, and Letters from Novosibirsk would drop that pedestrian format. People would take it more seriously. Take his newest article, to be written today…
Enough of writing letters to the unenlightened. What matter was it to them? There were those who recognized sublimity and those who wouldn’t know it if you…. No use bothering about it. Let them grovel about in their centuries-old pop culture excuse. This is why I exist—to relish the refined, to surround myself with the height of man’s aesthetic achievements, to be a living example of how one should live, and live to guide others…
It is enough, thought Zofiya, to have planted a seed. She often worked that way. She would let him wake up now, and the waki
ng would be part of the lesson. And then all day, while remembering his lovely dream, Todd would be prodded with a sense that there really was more to it than he had imagined.
7.
Kolya knew how to tell another ghost’s presence: there was an even disturbance in his defining space. Such disturbances could be gauged to sense the arriving ghost’s death-age, sex, and personality traits, even before communication had been reached. So Kolya was nearly knocked senseless by the arrival of Rimpon, who had been dead nearly three thousand years, but who had first attained a very high level of knowledge about the immaterial during his Earth-life. He sensed that Kolya was a little overwhelmed by his presence:
“There’s nothing unusual about me, but that I am a little older than you.”
“But you’re older than great-grandma, and she died three years after I did!”
“I came to you because I thought you might understand.”
“Understand what?”
“What I am about to ask you. You are young and delicate; your presence is least likely to be detected. And I have followed with great admiration the work you’ve done with Vydrino’s new residents.”
“I’m just having fun…”
“You are acquainted with Omar, the cartographer?”
“Of course! There aren’t
Letters from Novosibirsk