Praise for… SALT OF THE AIR
“. . . Cautionary, sensual stories of love, reversal and revenge upend fairy tale conventions in Nazarian’s lush collection. . . . Sumptuous detail, twisty plots and surprising endings lift these extravagant tales.”
—Publishers Weekly
“These are beautiful, haunting confections, reminiscent of Tanith Lee’s erotically charged tales in Red as Blood and elsewhere. . . . And while Nazarian thus strikes fresh notes off old vessels, she provides the template of sword-and-sorcery with new glitter, new power. . . . Fine shades of emotion, mythic grandeur, crystalline prose, sharp revisionist intelligence: these are Vera Nazarian’s hallmarks, signs of a strong emerging talent. Salt of the Air is her best, most representative book so far.”
—Nick Gevers, Locus
“She writes with an elegance and grace that is at times ethereal, picking out other worlds in soft watercolors with an impressionist’s brush. At other times, her writing is penetrating and sharp, piercing to the heart of a concept or a theme. Or you. . . . I recommend savoring Salt of the Air. Leave it on your bed stand. Each night, perhaps with a nice cup of tea, delve into one of her stories. Enjoy them slowly, even skipping a night or two here and there to make the collection last longer. Let the reflections and worlds contained in each story creep into your brain. Then dream remarkable dreams.”
—Deborah J. Brannon, The Green Man Review
Salt of the Air
Vera Nazarian
Published by Norilana Books at Smashwords
Copyright © 2006 by Vera Nazarian
Introduction Copyright © 2006 by Gene Wolfe
Cover Art:
“Phoenix,” Copyright © 2009 by Ahyicodae
Cover Design Copyright © 2009 by Vera Nazarian
Ebook Edition
November 14, 2011
Discover other titles by Vera Nazarian at
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/Norilana
Epub Format ISBN:
ISBN-13: 978-1-60762-098-3
ISBN-10: 1-60762-098-7
This book is a work of fiction. All characters, names, locations, and events portrayed in this book are fictional or used in an imaginary manner to entertain, and any resemblance to any real people, situations, or incidents is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
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The Young Woman in a House of Old
Absolute Receptiveness, the Princess, and the Pea
The Stone Face, the Giant, and the Paradox
SALT OF THE AIR
Vera Nazarian
Introduction
by
Gene Wolfe
Quote
“The World is shaped by Two Things—Stories told
and the Memories they leave behind.”
—from Dreams of the Compass Rose
by Gene Wolfe
Fantasy is the least understood genre. Horror is nearly as bad; give it second place. Science fiction fans quarrel endlessly over exactly what constitutes science fiction, but everyone knows. Call it a weak third. Mainstream, romance, mystery, and western are all well understood.
But what is fantasy? Must it have elves? Unicorns? Are ghost stories fantasy? Some people feel utterly and unshakably certain that any story with a witch in it is fantasy—yet I have had witches give me their business cards.
What has all this to do with the book you’re holding? Nothing, perhaps. You must decide.
Vera Nazarian wrote this book. I once wrote one whose cast included a witch and a private investigator, and was told very firmly that I could not do that. Witches and private investigators did not belong in the same story. I protested that there was an unemployed salesman in my book, too. That was all right, my inquisitors said. Salesmen were real, some were unemployed, so I could have one in a book that included a witch.
The yellow pages of any big-city telephone book will supply column after column of private investigators, and one of my daughters is a former private investigator.
Fantasy, you see, is really about things that are not believed; and the reality or unreality of those things has nothing to do with it. Ghost stories are fantasy as long as you do not believe in ghosts. If you see a ghost—but do not believe it—ghost stories remain fantasy. For you. As long as you reject the thing you saw.
If I could compel you to read the stories in this book in whatever order I chose, I would compel you to read the first story first. Its title is “Rossia Moya,” and it is a very good story indeed. I would compel you to read it first not for any benefit Vera or I would derive from your act, but for your own good. Let me tell you a story.
“Once upon a time there was a boy who was very smart in school but was often ill. One year it happened that he was ill on the very first day of school. When he was well again and came to school, he found there was a new subject that he could not grasp. He read and reread his textbook, questioned the teacher, and questioned other students. He could not understand the textbook. Nor could he understand the teacher’s answers, nor understand the answers he got from other students.
“Eventually he realized that something had been said on the first day of school which he had not heard, and indeed that he had never heard in all his questioning or read in all his reading.”
Try to remember my story, please, although it will not be numbered in this introduction. You may call it Story Zero.
The second story in this book—the one that follows “Rossia Moya”—is “Beauty and His Beast.” Although it is not the story of Sleeping Beauty, it recalls it because it is a story of the same kind, a story told by mothers (more often by their mothers) to teach young men something they should know. You are advised to read it; if you are young and single, male, and given to reflection, you are advised to think about it a great deal.
The third story is “The Young Woman in a House of Old.” When I had read half of it, I wished that I had thought of its idea myself. When I had finished it, I was glad I had not. Vera handled it better than I could have, and every good story deserves the best possible handling. Do they still sing Old Soldiers Never Die in the U.S. Army? I doubt it, but hope I am wrong. This story made me recall that song.
The story that follows it is a retelling of “The Princess and Pea.” It is a rape story, and a good one. Good rape stories are very rare.
The next story is “Bonds of Light,” but I am not going to tell you about it. It will be much more fun for you to read the stories and compose your own capsule description of each. What I am going to do instead is tell you why this excellent book is so good. There are two reasons.
The first has to do with the nature of fantasy. The background of nearly all our fantasy is Western European. We draw on familiar fairy tales, Greek and Roman myth, Norse myth, Celtic myth, and so on. We do not believe in Morgan le Fay, in Woden, or in Minerva. Vera Nazarian was born in Russia, and her mythic background is Eastern European, not Western. She does not believe in different things. (It is a troublesome concept, but try.) That is the first of the two things I mentioned.
The second is Vera herself. Could another writer from the same background have written this book? Absolutely not. Could another writer from that same background have written one as good? It is possible—Russia has produced some superb writers—but highly unlikely.
We are come at last to the closing paragraphs of this too lengthy introduction. Here I was going to explain the significance of the story of the boy who was ill, of Story Zero. I had planned to illustrate the parallels between a book of stories and a course of study. And so on. And so forth.
Upon further reflection, I will not. If you do not understand why I told that story already, no explanation I could provide would help.
I trust you do.
Gene Wolfe
“Russia is dead!” cried the old beggar woman, looking at me. “Ti shto, baba? Zachem priyehala?”
Why had I come indeed.
I stepped off the last rung of the detachable rolling staircase that was docked with the transcontinental airplane, using my right foot to make the first step onto land, for good luck.
Underneath me, underneath the concrete, ancient Moscow earth.
Fifty years stood between my last step and this one. Fifty years ago, as a girl of eight, I had taken a similar step, right foot first, upon the superstitious urging of my mother, onto an old Aeroflot plane. At the height of the Cold War, I was leaving the country of my birth forever, with all its stagnation and rancid Soviet decay.
And now, here I was again, at the time of Closing.
The land beneath me was still the same, the one from which I had sprung.
But the desolation was different.
Yes, I had prepared myself psychologically, knowing what lay ahead, knowing what to expect. I had taken the inoculations. I had brought the extra protein-rich rations, and the chemo-chlorine for the drinking water. The water I had been told to avoid, and to consume only bottled imported liquids.
I had also calmed myself with the hypnotic self-induced trance of indifference that I had practiced during the long flight, the visualization of things through a fine inner film of apathy.
I stood now, and felt a moment of vertigo, as the land spun beneath me while the milky sky stood still—or was it the sky spinning? For a moment I couldn’t tell, because the long stretch of concrete between the plane and the airport building was charcoal gray, spotted with puddles of the recent rain, and the sky was lighter slate, so that the two blended.
Early fall. . . .
The old woman just before me, holding out her palm in automatic supplication, had come out of nowhere, and was ignored by all passengers descending from the plane.
Maybe I had been the only one who momentarily glanced her way. Or maybe she could tell that I was the only one of all those people who was actually Russian?
Whatever it had been, she homed in on me and uttered her tirade, then stood aside, her palm still outstretched.
“Pomogi chem nibutz . . .” she added quietly.
Help me.
“I am sorry,” I said, averting my eyes. I switched automatically into Russian, feeling oddly self-conscious about the manner in which it slid off the tongue. “I am sorry, I don’t have much. . . .”
Bullshit.
I had everything. It was just the sudden panic coming over me, the old habit dying hard. Refusing beggars is a habit they teach you inadvertently, a habit of fear. Whether you have something to give or not, just mumble anything and step away. Or else pull out some coins or a bill, and hand it to them with the superiority of those who can afford it.
But not here. Here was different. There had been no beggars in the memory of the 8-year old girl that was myself. Or rather, she could still remember two separate shocking instances, the sight of human beings covered with an unmistakable sheen of gray, of dirt, sitting on the street, wallowing in it, while all around, busy feet of pedestrians, and her father’s cautionary voice explaining in her ear, “These are neeshii. These people have no home. . . .”
There had been no beggars in Russia, officially, under the Soviet regime. Everyone was guaranteed a home no matter how crowded or poor.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the latter part of the twentieth century, chaos came to reign, for the repression-pustule had burst, and with sudden freedom, all screaming hell had come loose. Beggars became the norm, as the doctors and engineers and scientists, all members of the intelligentsia, joined the factory workers on the Mafia-ridden streets and openly asked for handouts from the pitying foreigners, though rarely from their fellow countrymen.
Hell had come to Russia and as months and years went by and workers were living on IOUs with no salary in sight, the ruble rode waves of devaluing fluctuation, and food became scarce, even in the form of relief aid from the West.
And after that, the negative birth rate took its toll. Together with the despair, the unrelieved hunger, and the children being born with severe birth defects from malnourished parents, the population started to decrease at an alarming rate. In the year 2000, when other countries merely worried about technological compliance, Russia was on the brink of a down-spiraling irreversible trend.
And the following several decades did not change the rate of extinction.
And then. . . .
And then became and now. The times have swept through me, and with the memories emerged shame and wonder at myself, at what I still carried inside after all these years.
“I am sorry,” I said again, this time locking my gaze with the watery eyes of this nameless stranger. “I am very sorry.”
And then, I stood aside, allowing the stream of passengers to walk past me to the airport building, while I put down my carry-ons, rummaged through my purse, took out several bills of International Market Currency and handed them to the woman. She was not that much older than me, maybe in her early seventies. And she was dressed decently, not like a beggar at all.
She took the IMC, without a thank you. It would not be of any use to her after what was going to happen in three weeks—we both knew—but for now it still had significant value. She then turned, and I expected nothing more, for it had been her right.
And yet, the woman had stopped and stared back at me, and her lips moved, as though with a muttering.
I was not sure if it was a curse or a blessing.
Or maybe it was just a wetting of the lips.
I was stopped at the customs check-in window, like all the other incoming passengers, by two officers. They were young boys, in my opinion, with pink sickly spots on their sallow faces, and the same watery eyes. They checked our papers, and put stamps on passports, and then asked the same question.
“What is the purpose of your visit at the time of Closing?”
Everyone’s answer was: “Business.”
They were all here to close their bank accounts, finish deals, remove belongings, do any other number of last minute chores, before the final Closing of the country to the rest of the world.
My reason was personal. But, “Business,” I lied to the soldier-boy. Only no, he was not a soldier—times blurring again—he was just a youth in a civilian government uniform, wearing the drab colors of an impotent nation. A glorified clerk.
He did not look at me twice, but stamped my papers, turned to his fellow and said, “Yeshe odna po delam.”
One more on business.
And yet, maybe my reason was not so personal. Maybe I had unfinished business to complete, just like all the others.
The second customs worker glanced at my passport, and then, noticing my name, said to me, “Vi russkaya?”
“Da, molodoi chelovek,” I said. He reminded me of my cousin, fifty years ago, fresh out of the Soviet Airforce Cadets, with a chin nicked from clumsy shaving, and the acne of a boy.
“Zachem vi zdes?”
Again, that question. Why am I here? Why?
“Business,” I said again, this time coldly, this time in English. “These are all my papers. I will be leaving again in exactly two weeks, just like it says here, a week before the Closing.”
He did not look at me again. He simply showed me to the door leading inside, to the rest of the airport.
To the rest of Russia.
Around me, tall buildings of at least five stories, and of several hundred years—greenish tan, beige and pale brown, aged cream and dusk, rusty brick or deep-baked mauve, with ornate fronts, doorways topped with sculptured reliefs, with fleur-de-lis, and windows framed with carved panes—in the venerable heart of Moscow. I took an old creaking trolley bus directly to a dilapidated hotel with an old rusty-red front and faded gold trim. There, I left my bags in a dimly lit room with a musty smell of several centuries, a combination of czarist and Communist and post-Soviet scent that was imbedded permanently in the patterned paper of the walls.
And then, still walking in a trance, I came outside. I stood breathing the air after the rain, early evening, with the sun that had eventually come out, hitting the glass of the windows in the houses around me with sharp violent blots of golden orange glow.
The glow fractured, and triggered memories of a painfully sweet newness, of a time when I had a fresh cavity within me and bubbling faraway futures ahead, when my mind was young, a clean white vista of hope, and I could see only tomorrow . . .
You notice, I hardly mention people.
Yes, they were there, but like drab peculiar shades, ghosts already. They walked the streets, pedestrians and occasional cars turning corners, running on the last of the hoarded old-style gasoline. I tried to ignore them, avoided looking at their emaciated faces and their pale Slav eyes, because I knew that if I did look, if I did stop and pause, something within me would be displaced, like a changing of a gear.
And so I ignored the people. . . .
Let them walk past me, take my bags, obscure my sun for a moment, displace the air molecules around me. Let them move in their coats and with their ushanki over reddened ears and flax hair. Let the old women in patterned flower-shawls and huge furrows of wrinkles cutting up their faces hurry past me, carrying rope-sacks of potatoes, just like they did fifty years ago. Let the young street punks with heavy makeup and untreated acne wander aimlessly in their skin-tight or baggy jeans and leather miniskirts showing thin high-heeled legs, and imported Western jackets with corporate logos advertising products most here had never seen. Let the occasional bareheaded member of the criminal underground saunter lazily and stand outside the doorways, waiting for a classic obsolete Mercedes to roll up grunting on dwindling gasoline, choking on exhaust fumes. . . .
They were all dead. None of them real. None of them from the same world as myself. I say this figuratively, and yet, the psychological door was shutting already, even before the formal act of Closing—the formal political recognition that there was nothing more the world could do for Russia, that the global community, otherwise linked into one vibrant entity, was powerless to avert the extinction of a people.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, when Pyotr Pervii, known in the West as Peter the First, the Great, carved a so-called window into Europe and opened uncouth Russia to the rest of the “civilized” Western world, it was thought he was committing an irreversible act.
And now, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the window was closing up again. And it was taking all the centuries of clamor with it. . . .
I began to walk aimlessly along the street. One block, three, thirteen. I moved forward because there was a need, and no one paid attention to yet another middle-aged woman in drab foreign clothing—they all wore it, the clothing of the West, the last vestiges of Western humanitarian aid. I may have stood out only in the slow confident carriage of my straight back, but they did not observe too closely.
At the corner of Kropotkinskaya I hailed a cab, raising my hand to wave in the old Muscovite manner, not with the American thumb. Eventually a private vehicle stopped—cabbing was a second income for many—and I was given a cool stare, and a “Kuda?”
“Novoslobodskaya,” I said, giving him a rolled up wad of IMC bills, “near Butirskii Val.”
I got in the car, and was not surprised to find it a European model. But it was the old gasoline-engine kind, since Western compu-electrics had not been financially feasible in this place of encroaching decay.
I had also forgotten how noisy the gasoline engines were. We drove, rattling north past Sodovoe Koltso, and finally onto the street I had specified, and I stared, and searched my memory, and recognized absolutely nothing. Finally, the cabdriver dropped me off, and then took off into the long shadows of encroaching evening.
I was crazy to be here alone, with night coming on.
And yet. . . .
This was the moment it all slammed into me, the enormity of it. I stood on the washed-out pavement, across the road from the corner with a six story house that led off into a small side street, lined with tall deciduous trees, golden-orange with the ruddy fall.
I am supposed to know and remember that side street, that pereulok.
I was born here.
All I had to do was cross the street, and walk past approximately three buildings, and on the left would be the five-story building where I had lived my childhood. Across from it would be the tall deep red-brick housing complex with glass windows that I would stare at as a small child and see brilliant reflected sunlight. The sidewalk itself may still have traces of the hopscotch game the children would draw on it with colored chalk, and then jump on one foot to navigate a hockey-puck or shaiba, or even a shoe-polish can, through each of the ten cells. And if I walked along the sidewalk before my building, there would be the tall maple trees on the edge of the pavement, and the earth underneath them would be littered with a thick detritus of fallen leaves, sienna red, orange, pale yellow, variegated shades of autumn.
I used to rummage through the leaves, and kick them up with my little shoes, and watch them rise up like flimsy paper and then settle down again. Underneath, the earth would be moist and cold. And if this were spring or early fall, there would be bumps and small cracks in the rich black soil, where I knew mushrooms were rising—mushrooms that I would proudly dig out, and bring back home so that my mother would add them to a buttered pan and fry them, sizzling and fragrant.
I stood frozen, and watched the street corner across the intersection. Then, instead of crossing the street, I started to walk in the opposite direction toward the grounds of the abandoned women’s monastery which had been converted to a public park.
“Mama! Mama! Smotri, eto ne vorobei!”
I sat on an old park bench, feeling the cold hard slab of stone through my pants and coat, and watched the little girl point out to her mother a small unidentified bird flitting through the orange leaves of the nearest tree.
Overhead, the sky was milk-gray, darkening. Before me was the round rim of a dried-out pond. The shallow concrete reservoir of the pool had just a puddle of rain water on the bottom, and was instead filled to the brim with the leaves of fall. At the center of it was an old rusty fountain spigot, but I had never remembered the fountain working, not even as a child.
However, the bench underneath me was familiar. I just didn’t remember it being so small.
Everything—the park, the trees—they were so small. . . .
The little girl with a reddish-blond braid ran ahead, splashing through the fallen leaves, and her mother stood watching her tiredly. The girl was no older than six. The woman was young, probably in her early thirties, and wore a simple beige coat with a wool shawl covering her hair. She never looked at me, and instead focused vacantly ahead of her. She was clutching a small bag in her hands.
They were pale, emaciated, her hands. Just like the sickly color of her skin. Her sunken face.
The little girl was thin too, pale and bleached out like a doll. And yet she was alive, smooth, full of energy, as she thundered through the clearing between the trees and the walkway.
At one point she neared me, and smiled, and I smiled back at her, and said, “Kak tebya zavut?”
“Lena . . .” she replied, a little shyly.
“What a beautiful name you have, Lenochka,” I said, while times blurred around me, and I remembered another child with that name, also with a golden-orange braid, a little girl I used to play with.
I was about to say something else, but the little girl was already gone, having run off toward her mother.
Overhead, the small grayish bird flitted through the trees.
I never did go to see the house of my childhood. Instead I had returned to the hotel and gone to bed that night. But first I had made a phone call to America, using my credit card, on an old-style phone without a video display. After three bad connections and hangups, I finally heard John’s familiar voice through the crackle on the other end, telling me to come home, that he was worried for me, worried there might be travel complications related to the Closing, and that I had gone at such a bad time.
“Not a bad time, but the last and only time,” I said, with a smile. “Besides, you always worry. Please tell Andrew and the other kids that all is well. I feel great, no arthritis flareups. Everything’s okay and I’ll be back soon. I just had to do this, you know. Early retirement gift to myself. The way things are going, it’s now or never.”
“I still wish you’d let me come with you,” he said.
“No, it’s better this way. I need to be alone to do this.”
“So, did you see it? Your house?”
“Not yet. . . .”
“Why are you doing this to yourself?”
No need for a video display. I could imagine his tense expression so well, knew it like the back of my hand.
“Don’t worry about anything. Enough. Love you, and see you soon,” I said, and hung up before I could start feeling.
The next week I spent wandering Moscow. And I mean, wandering, on foot, dragging myself aimlessly along Tverskaya which used to be called Gorky Street for a while during the Soviet days, past the half-empty storefronts. Here, I could see slightly out-of-style Italian, French, and American fashions through the window glass, that no one could afford to buy, and other luxury items gathering dust.
I passed by bookstores with gaudy displays of translated Western thrillers, the so-called “blood and porn” boyevik videos and books with topless bimbos and guns on the covers, and noticed, huddling in the back, old unwanted classics. Occasionally, there were cafes with big commercial neon signs of western soft drinks, and inside, one or two customers drinking tea or coffee before stand-up counters.
My eyes paused on one young bleached-blonde woman with heavy makeup marring her attractive face, dressed in a fake leather jacket. She was having tea from a tall glass at the counter, and I watched her skinny throat move as she swallowed. With a flash my vision blurred, and her throat became smooth and adorned by a glittering choker, while her features superimposed upon another face, without a blemish or a trace of artifice, a young bare-shouldered woman in a dress of Ekaterina’s court, with her powdered hair gathered in a twisted beehive crown above her forehead, with sculpted locks and flowing folds of silvery satin over a wide flaring crinoline skirt. . . .
Something was happening to me, and I had no words for it.
Instead, I blinked it away, gathered myself, and followed Tverskaya haphazardly on to the Red Square.
Here, I stopped and stared at the grand expanse of empty open cobblestones beneath a pale blue-white sky, and my childhood pierced me so strongly that for a moment I felt dizzy.
Times blurred, and the rose and brick-hued stones fell into a mosaic at my feet. I stared at the patterns they made before my eyes, and for a moment saw shadows of old giant banners of Lenin’s face hanging from the Kreml walls in the distance, and the huge seal of the Soviet Russian Republic with the braided wheat pattern over the sickle and hammer, serp y molot.
High noon and strong wind. The square was nearly empty, except for some bedraggled gypsy-beggars, a couple of peddlers of the last of Western imported goods, with small carts, and occasional hurried passerby. I saw a tall young man walking fast, in an old worn-out army uniform. Once again the odd stupor came upon me, and I blinked away the vision of him as a soldier in the White Army over a century ago, an elite guard of the Tsar—an image which was immediately superimposed by another one of the Red Army green uniform, and a decorated World War II soldier, and then a disenfranchised unemployed soldier of the Commonwealth.
I continued staring, drunk with the high cool wind in the square, and watched his quickly receding back, and he was still morphing before my eyes, falling in and out of time.
Before me in the distance, Sobor Vasilia Blazhennovo, the ornate cathedral with its rainbow-colored zigzagging onion domes, like a great gingerbread and jewel toy. All around, Kreml walls of rose-hued brick, crenellated on the top. Off to the side was the old Mavsolei building.
I never did see the embalmed corpse of Lenin lying in state, never had been inside the Mausoleum, even as a girl. “Some other day,” my parents would tell me. “Today the line is too long.”
But the line had always been too long, and so I had to satisfy myself with watching the changing of the guard, as every fifteen minutes they marched before the Mausoleum like clockwork soldiers.
There was no honor guard now, nothing to protect in the small rose brick building. The Mausoleum had been converted into a bland museum of Sovietica circa the year 2007.
And today, only pigeons circled the expanse overhead, and there were hardly any visitors to the old sites.
I ate one of the ration packets I had brought with me, while watching a Vremya newscast on the flickering hotel-room TV. They were speaking of the Closing, of the measures the country was taking to stay afloat in its imminent complete isolation. Not a word about American or European reactions. Preparation was discussed in isolationist terms, as though the Closing had happened already—in terms of heightened economic production, of a self-contained ecosystem of supply and demand. Images of factories and farms and corporations were interspersed with faces of emaciated peasants in the small remote towns, as they were shown plowing their tiny plots of land with borrowed archaic tractors.
Chewing the unpleasant protein-rich canned food, I considered momentarily what might happen were I to go downstairs and buy some simple bread and cheese in the grocery store from across the street. Would I get sick immediately?
I stared at the can of imported soda sitting on the table before me, and longed to try some hot tea. Indeed, I craved hot tea. The one Russian thing that had truly stayed with me, even after all these years, was my love of plain black tea. I’d been given it in a baby bottle! And even as a refugee, I never switched to coffee.
But to drink it, I would first have to chemo-chlorinate the water. Blech.
So I tried not to think about it, and finished my meal.
Tomorrow would be another day. I had already spent plenty of time walking, and now would try something new.
Tomorrow.
I took a ride in a small kater, one of the cruise boats that moved relentlessly along the brown-green waters of Moskva Reka, or Moscow River. There were only a few passengers on the boat with me, mostly families with small children, wearing American sports jackets, and huddling from the chill autumn breeze. I watched the swampy waters churning, and the high banks on both sides, the occasional swooping ducks and swans.
“Nu shto ze budit posle Zakritiya?” one woman in the boat was saying to her husband, what would happen after the Closing?
Zakritie. That word was translated as Closing, or a shutting down.
The man proceeded to say he had no idea, that maybe phones would not work and they couldn’t call outside the country, that computer networks will be severed, and planes would not fly except across Russia. There would be no more imported food or clothing, or technology and machinery. No more humanitarian aid.
At that last bit, the woman sucked in her breath sharply, maybe because that was the only thing that really sunk in, the only thing that mattered to her, was understandable, personal. All else—computers, worldwide networks, high tech—all else was abstract and remote. It did not affect her or her children directly.
Or so she thought.
I wanted to say something to these people, but had no idea what it was. What had I to offer? Sympathy?
Instead, I kept quiet.
After the cruise was over, I got off the riverboat and wandered some more, this time taking a taxi to one of the Metro stations. For the rest of the day I would ride the Moscow Metro, and get off at every stantsia and look at the fine inlay mosaic decorating it, and the gorgeous rows of lanterns that were different at each themed stop.
“I don’t like this at all,” John was saying to me on the phone, “Listen, come home early, please. There’s bad stuff going on, you should hear what’s on the news here, the kinds of sanctions discussed. Congress is withdrawing all diplomats even from the surrounding countries, the little ones immediately bordering Russia. Obviously extreme measures, but still—”
“Not yet,” I said, “I haven’t seen my house.”
“Why the hell not? You’ve been all over town for more than a week now! What’s wrong with you, really? I don’t understand what you could be thinking at a dangerous time like this.”
“I am a little scared,” I said. “If I see it, and if what I see is different from what I remember having seen, it would upset me. I don’t know. I will do it soon. Today maybe.”
“Do it! Promise me!”
I nodded silently, forgetting we were not on videophone, then said softly, “Yes, okay.”
And so I took a taxi back to Novoslobodskaya and Butirskii Val.
This time I steeled myself, became absolutely calm and apathetic, and I crossed the street, and entered the pereulok or side-street of my birth.
It was one of the last clear days of fall. Overhead, the sky streamed outward with a warm autumn glow, and the tree crowns were high and still sparsely full of gold and orange leaves.
I walked and counted houses.
It would be on my left.
A tall five-story housing complex, painted bland off-white, with five or six podyezdi or front entrances. Our apartment had been on the first floor, in the third podyezd. In front of each would be a long entrance, and a bench or two on the side, where the old women, our babushki, would congregate every evening when it was warm enough, until the sky became indigo and twilight enveloped all. We kids also used the benches to plan our games, to gather and count off and decide that one of us was “it,” and then we’d go running like the wind, and hold our breath while we hid in the hedges and bushes lining the house, or around the corner in the back—which was a whole different play world—or inside the different podyezdi under staircases. . . .
There it was.
My house.
As I approached it at the corner, I glanced for a moment to the left, to the place where there were a couple of tall trees and then beyond it the backyard area. The tallest tree that still stood immediately before me, after all these years, used to hold one of our makeshift swings. Once, someone had climbed up and drawn a tall rope, and from it we hung a wooden cross bar, and then eventually an old car tire, so we could swing on it. The old babushki would come yelling at us to stop, telling us we would ruin the beautiful tree, and that we were little barbarians who broke branches and pulled leaves. And so we’d take down the rope, and then when the old women were gone, we’d bring it back again, and swing like monkeys, until the next warning.
Memories came falling like blocks upon me, slamming. . . .
I walked on the sidewalk before my house, and saw that its paint was peeling, and had not been refinished. It was merely young or middle-aged, in house years. But it was as old as I was, nearly sixty, built in the same year as I was born, just months before.
I counted three entrances, each one raised up about three stairs. Then, I stopped.
I stood facing the first window on the left, half a flight above ground level. There were pastel curtains on the other side of the window pane. And underneath, the flowerbox had something colorful growing—not like our own had been, empty, with just a couple of chive onion bulbs. . . .
I stared relentlessly at that wooden flowerbox, and the peeling paint.
After a while, water came streaming out of me.
It pooled in the corners of my eyes, while pressure built inside, and I was holding it, still and poised for something. My features did not move, but the waters were running, running. . . .
At some point, the doorway of the podyezd opened, and a little girl of about seven came outside, carrying a jump rope. She had short chestnut brown hair and a round face. She hopped down the last two stairs, then started to move away, and suddenly saw me.
She paused, staring at my face.
“Tyotia, shto takoe?” she said.
What’s the matter, aunt?
I looked at her, feeling my face in that instant loosening, suddenly collapsing into a quivering mass. And then I drew a paper tissue out of my purse, and I put it over my face. I hid beneath it for a second, wiping away the water and the contorted expression that had broken through for one second only.
“Oh, nothing, my dear,” I said. “I am only a little sad, because I am visiting here from very far away, and I used to live here long ago, when I was a little girl like you.”
“Really? You lived here?” said the girl with a genuine look of wonder. “Where?”
“In that first apartment, right here. See this window?”
“Oh!” she said. “That’s my home! You lived in my home? How weird! Do you wanna come inside?”
My heart, my head, my breath, all was spinning. . . .
“If it’s not too much trouble,” I said.
“Of course not! Pozhaluista, come in! My mother and grandpa are home, and you can have some tea. . . .”
Sitting in the room with familiar greenish-tan wallpaper with a tiny pattern of fleur-de-lis, looking at strangers—a tired woman, an old man, and a little girl’s welcoming faces—I put the glass to my lips, and swallowed.
I didn’t even think twice.
The water was hot, nearly scalding, untreated with chemo-chlorine. It tasted like a shock of reality, an immediate quenching of a forgotten need. Water had been shed, and now it was being replenished. The pungent aroma of plain, freshly brewed tea leaves struck me with an essence that was deeper than any other thing, any memory.
I was tasting it again, the water of my Russia.
Rossia moya.
I was home.
“What the hell are you talking about?” screamed John’s voice on the phone. “You are crazy! Absolutely insane! I knew I shouldn’t have let you go there all alone, vulnerable like that! I blame myself—”
“Listen,” I said. “My dear, dear sweet one. It’s really something that was going to happen one way or another. Besides, these are silly precautions. Silly, idiotic, uncalled for. It’s been two days, I am still perfectly healthy, and there was nothing wrong with that water.”
“You were damn lucky there was nothing wrong! But that’s not the point! The point is, you’re supposed to be leaving tomorrow, coming back, getting on the plane, and now they’re not going to let you! They’ll scan you and find local contaminants in your system! Do you know what that means?”
“Yes, I know. They will keep me here for a couple of extra days, that’s all. There’s plenty of time.”
“There isn’t any time! In less than a week is the goddamn Closing!”
He paused, and I could hear his stifled breath coming in gasps on the other end. I felt vaguely guilty for causing him to be worked up like that, knowing how easily he could get excited, how much it hurt him. . . .
“That’s it,” he resumed, catching his breath at last. “I’m coming to get you! I’ll be on the next available flight to Moscow—”
“No!” This time it was I, breathing shortly, madly, swallowing air. “If you do that, then I am not coming back at all! Ever! Let me be, John!”
I heard a shuffle on the other end, other voices arguing. Then there was Andrew on the line, my son.
“Mom!” he said. “Please, come back! I don’t know what happened, okay. I don’t know if you and Dad have a problem, I had no idea—but please, you’ve gotta come back home, okay?”
“Andy,” I said, “there is no problem. None at all, you hear? This has nothing to do with me and Dad, nothing. All is and has always been perfectly fine—”
“Mom, please . . .” Andrew was suddenly crying, his man’s voice cracking. Hearing it made me go cold and hot in flashes. “Mama! Mamochka! Please!”
He had switched to the Russian I had taught him, the couple of words of his childhood. . . .
“I’ll be home,” I said, hearing him through the fabric of a dream. “I promise you I will be.”
And so I was.
Today was the day of Closing.
John’s fears had been justified, and after a customs health scan had come out positive for certain substances, I was officially delayed. Not for a couple of days, but indefinitely.
Which now meant forever.
I had not called them again. It was no use hearing their agony. But oddly, I felt no guilt. Something had happened to me. Indeed, something. Ever since I had drunk the water.
Today, exactly at six at night, the international phone lines will be shutting down. And with them, the planes will stop. The computer servers will terminate interlinking nodes.
In the morning I had gone to a still functional ATM at an international bank and converted several thousands of IMC in my personal savings account to the Russian local equivalent, the almost worthless ruble. What I was going to do with it, with myself, somehow did not matter.
I spent the afternoon wandering the streets, listening to people talk, and gave away my remaining IMC bills to random beggars, who I knew would rush to convert them before the end of the day.
The day was not cool, once again, a remainder of the early fall. The wind blew fresh in my face, and there was an odd singing in my blood. Surely, a madness.
I paused before Pushkin’s monument in the square of the same name, gazing at the statue of the famous beloved poet, the one who epitomized the fathomless soul of Russia, just like Shakespeare in the West.
Legend has it, Pushkin’s great grandfather had been a man of royal Abyssinian descent, and was honored at the court of Pyotr Pervii. Even now as I looked, the vibrant pliancy of the African heritage was pronounced in his otherwise Slavic features, in the tight curly locks of his hair, in his sultry eyes.
The statue spoke in my mind, and I was dizzy. Spots of color began to dance before my eyes, superimposed against the clear blue sky.
I thought I heard verses of poetry, immortal words of childhood.
U lukomoria dub zelyonii.
Zlataya tsep na dube tom.
I dnem, i nochiu, kot uchennii,
Vsio hodit po tsepi krugom. . . .
At the shore of the sea stands a green oak, sang the words, and on the oak, a great golden chain. Night and day, a clever learned cat walks round and round upon that golden chain. A cat who sings songs and tells ancient tales. . . .
Legendary words, the heart of the Russian fairy tale.
Every child knew this poem, and the elements it evoked. It was a kaleidoscope of all the figures of ancient Russian folklore, unforgotten through the centuries, older by far than any of the reforms of Peter the Great, older than the Communist blot upon the history, older than the millennium.
I continued to look, and Pushkin’s statue opened its eyes in mischief, and winked at me.
I blinked, but again, it was but solid cold stone.
The time was late afternoon, past four.
Two hours before the Closing.
There was no guilt at all inside me. I was a monster. I checked myself, looked for it earnestly, wanting to feel it, wanting to be wracked by it, torn to pieces, savaged, for abandoning those I loved.
I walked past groups of people huddled around small boombox radios, listening to the last international transmissions from the outside. Soon, a sonic interference barrier would be put in effect, and only crackling silence would come.
“Umryom mi vse! We’re all going to die!” someone cried.
I walked, not looking back, and heard some shots ringing out, from illegal handguns, even now contraband.
But mostly, people were serene.
I moved, seeing peaceful emaciated faces, tired receptive eyes. They were ready for anything, the people of Russia. They had always been. Ready for anything, resigned to it all.
I took a taxi back to the street of my birth. And then at the corner I once again walked in the other direction, to the old monastery grounds, and that little park where I used to play.
I wandered past an old metal swing, which surely was the same one I played on, and then found the stone bench before the old dried-out pond.
Here I was not too surprised to find the same little girl and her mother, walking along the path.
The woman greeted me this time, with a light smile, and the girl waved and started to run, kicking up leaves.
After a minute or two, the woman came back toward me, stopped, and sighed.
“Nu, vot, Zakritie uzhe sluchilos,” she said softly, tiredly.
The Closing has happened.
“I know,” I replied. “I am sorry.”
“It’s all right.” She shrugged. “Really. We can manage on our own—Russia always has. I think nothing has changed. We’re still the same, aren’t we all? The sun shines. The children run and play. See, my little girl. . . .”
And she smiled.
And indeed, as I looked, the thin pale little girl, Lena, ran with hands upraised, like a bird, and giggled, and made noises.
There was a high wind, a gust.
Somewhere in the distance, I thought I heard the sounds of the bells in the Kreml Watch Tower.
Only, it couldn’t be. It was much too far from here. The sound would never carry.
“Can you hear it?” the woman said. “Odd, isn’t it? But now, I am sure, it is really six o’clock.”
“Oi! Mama! Smotri!” suddenly cried the little girl. She had stopped running and was frozen, pointing with her finger up at a nearby tree.
We turned, her mother and I, since we heard a fluttering, a beating of heavy wings.
“Smotri! Zhar-Ptitsa!”
A bolt of lightning-flame, orange and persimmon and gold, like a small dislocated sun, had erupted from the very fabric of the air, and burned in the branches of the old maple, so that for a moment I thought someone had set it on fire.
At the heart of the fireball, was a white incandescent outline of a bird. The bird swept its wings, beat once, twice, then suddenly burst forth and rose from the branches like a meteor, an impossible sight.
It rose just over our heads, and then circled the park, while sparks of colored fireworks came down from it, sparks of legend, of a non-scalding fire raining over our heads.
Zhar-Ptitsa.
The firebird.
“Oh my god!” gasped the woman, crossing herself. “Ghospodi pomilui, look at that! What is that?”
But before she could say another word, the air shimmered on the other end of the park, and a golden chain appeared, glowing with impossibility. An unnaturally great black cat, the size of a panther, sprung forward, like an animated creature, and balanced along the golden links, swinging lightly. . . .
And immediately all the other trees started to creak, to ring like gentle bells. And out of nowhere, faerie female voices arose with a clamor, as rusalki of lithe pale skin and long wood-brown tresses were suddenly visible among the branches. And there was a whisper of leshii of the forest, a movement of gnarled muscular limbs. . . .
Then, behind us I heard the sounds of a horn blowing, and a tall white horse came galloping upon the leaves. Mounted upon it was a bogotyr, a warrior knight out of legend—great, blond bearded, with sky-eyes of an earnest dream. Immediately behind him came the ghostly rumble of other approaching horses, a great army.
“Mi sdes, matz svyataya Rossia!” He brandished his spear and cried in a bass that burst through my head and made my ears ring. “We are here, holy mother earth, mother Russia! Never again will you be alone, for we are with you, unto the end, and now at last you’re free!”
“Then go forth, and God be with you,” said the giant black cat suddenly, shockingly, in a quiet rational voice of power. It blinked once, widened the slit of its golden eyes into a warm sphere of intensity.
And as I stared, caught up in the unreality of this, the little girl reached up with her hands high above her, straining, while the firebird arose higher and higher, circling over the park, lighting up the early-evening sky of indigo like a phoenix rising out of the ashes. . . .
My Russia was alive again.
Somehow.
Rossia Moya.
She would watch them, sideways out of her cold clear eyes, the lovers walking with hands and gazes entwined, among rose-briars and thick verdant foliage of the gardens. These were her gardens, and they, the ardent young trespassers, were now and then made aware of her, when she allowed it to be. It was but a reminder, lest they forget, that this marvelous idyll, this wonder of a natural Eden, was but a small place within her abode, a place she chose to share. And the lovers, many of whom often came here at a whim, knew in the back of their minds that upon any random turn of the meandering path, beyond any thicket revealing a secret niche, they might come upon her, grimly horrendous and shadowy, the dark queen they all came to know as the Beast.
The gardens—lustrous eyelashes around a glittering eye—sprung forth in abundance to encompass the Palace of the queen. This queen, an oddity, was of such an acutely noble ancient lineage that due to an unpredictable genetic quirk she had been born a monster. She was, at the age of twenty-three, and at the time of her coronation, exactly six-and-a-half feet tall, hunchbacked, her muscular and fleshy hominid body covered head to toe by a thick growth of dark bristly hair—including the face—and her head was misshapen and oversized like a boulder. The head grew sable hair which fell in a fearful mane from the scalp to her waist. Amid the thicket her facial features were hardly distinguishable—indeed, no one ever ventured close enough to try. But her eyes, those were bright, coldly intelligent, human.
When she spoke, her voice also was frighteningly human, rich and deep and plush as ermine. It carried also tones of remarkable education—faultless really, except for the occasional moments when a hollow wheezing would overcome her—for the queen suffered from a chronic and inborn lung ailment.
The queen inherited her full rank at the moment of her father’s death, then proceeded to institute major changes. The now-deceased king had been a grim shadowy man—although physically normal by all means, as human beings go. In his day, the kingdom lay under the miserly clutches of gloom and decay, under a strict control. With his passing, the gloom and decadence suddenly took a different form, emerging as creative energy. A new pulse-beat was given to the land by the beast-queen. But the control remained. For, she was strong, strong as a Minotaur, by the sheer force of her will contained in the horrendous body.
Brought up and educated as a normal girl-child of her position, the Beast with the given name Vinnaea (which no one cared to use behind her back), held a fine court in her opulent Palace. She was a connoisseur of the Arts and Sciences, patron to those who excelled in such. And she was above all, a subtle lover of beauty.
And this, of all things—some speculated—was the reason for the open gardens and the opulence and the exquisite people surrounding her. They said, the queen wanted the harmony of line and sound and thought to envelop her completely. They said, she wanted to drown in it and lose her self, and cease being the Beast—for she knew very well what people thought of her.
When appearing to the court, the Beast wore voluminous robes to cover as much of her grotesque form as possible. And always, the grand chandeliers were raised, and the hall dimmed before she would make her presence.
The bright lights, it seemed, hurt her abnormally sensitive eyes.
In the rich thick darkness of the gardens, the queen would find peace more often than elsewhere. She spent her days here—when the sun burned overhead, she would hide in a grove of maples, or near the weeping willows by the brook, or would lose herself in the artificially sculpted thicket of the Maze. When it rained, she crouched, reading in one of her favorite grottoes, books of philosophy, or else, jotted down acutely beautiful thoughts in her leather-bound diary, with her clumsy black-maned hand.
At other times, when the sun spilled itself in an amber sunset, or clouds came to shadow the horizon, the Beast would watch those who strolled in her gardens.
They were beautiful, those young men and women, as perfectly formed to her as any amber sunset, and even more alive. The Beast loved to observe them strolling in couples, whispering to each other words of intimacy (which she would guiltily overhear, while a new feeling—one she could not verbalize to herself, but one that appeared persistently—would insinuate into her inhumanly innocent heart. It, this feeling, lingered there and occasionally made her soul-sick). But their presence here, no matter that it stirred alien longings in her, made her oddly content.
Until one day, a youth plucked a single bright crimson flower from her most treasured place, and thus there was to be no peace for the Beast.
“Oh, how pretty! How large that one is, I want that one!” cried Aysnera, pointing to the lush exotic flower whose name she did not know, growing larger than the rest on the branches of the tree.
“I’m not sure, lady,” Moere said thoughtfully. “I don’t know if it would be right to pick the flowers here.”
“Why not?” the lady cried, in her petulant lovely voice. “There are so many here, who would notice? Or care? Or are you afraid of her?”
Moere colored lightly. So easy it was to observe the changes on his fair light skin, fine and delicate as porcelain—each blush, each faint blooming of veins under the cheeks, left his face flaming as the dawn, and then, as quickly, pale again. Aysnera was not the only one charmed by his exquisite sensibilities, his curling honey-locks, and his gentle introspective eyes. In their circle of friends, he was affectionately teased with the nickname “Beauty,” by both the ladies and the young noblemen.
“Well then,” lady Aysnera said. “I will pluck it myself!” And she proceeded diligently to make the attempt, stretching up her bejeweled hands for some time, and finally gave up, saying: “This stupid bush! It’s too tall for me! But oh, how nicely that bright red thing would sit in my hair. If only you were kind to me, Moere! You’re tall enough.”