Axiomatic

by Maria Tumarkin

  16.

  Those photos from 2008, I deleted them. I would have gladly cut you out and kept you but it’s a bad omen. It’s my face I can’t bear to look at. My face twisted by the pain of that time.

  17.

  ‘Hello, my friend. The cold is back. About minus five outside and inside plus fifteen, no more. In the kitchen and bathroom—plus ten. Getting undressed and washing yourself is a heroic feat. Once it hits minus ten outside it’ll be twelve inside and eight in the kitchen. You have to beat the shower gel out of its bottle then warm it in the palm of your hand with your breath. The house is impossible to heat. A metre-long space under the kitchen floor is colonised by the travelling wind. The pocket under the floor should have rocks, gravel, but it’s been left empty. I’ve come up with a little trick—when I feel frozen to the bone, I go to the kitchen for ten/fifteen minutes. Coming back into “the warmth” of the room is such a relief. The contrast does wonders, not for long but for long enough. I haven’t been scared of death for a long time unlike my mum who is regularly transmitting her fear—can’t stand it when she does it. The fear I feel is that of the meaninglessness of my time here. Like, what the hell has this been about?’

  18.

  Friday nights my son goes to his father. What if he doesn’t come back? I really think like that. Five years of Fridays. I tried: drinking, sleeping, working, walking. We get him back on Monday, by Wednesday/Thursday he is finally at peace. Friday rolls in like an army.

  Saturdays are the worst. All the fears and worries fall on me like a wad of snow. It’s been like that for ten years already. This Saturday I was in bed all day, couldn’t even wash my hair. Got up once in a while and trudged to the kitchen, swaying side to side, for some tea. Spent all day watching war movies. Still, I’d rather feel like an ‘empty bamboo’ than a ‘bowl of semolina porridge’.

  19.

  You recommend poet Vera Pavlova. From her notebook (published, transl. in English)—

  ‘Reader: So you want me to feel as if I were reading a letter addressed to someone else?

  Poet: I want you to feel as if I had read a letter addressed to you by someone else and am shamelessly quoting from it.’

  I recommend poet Wislawa Szymborska.

  20.

  ‘Friends reveal who they are in hardship’—imbibed in infancy, absorbed pre-cognitively. You too, right? Sits there like a brick in your head. Along with ‘the cat knows whose meat it has eaten’. And if you’re not sure vis-a-vis a particular person, take them ‘high into the mountains’ [V.S. Vysotsky]; also, once off the mountain, remember to go jointly through a ‘pound of salt’ [people, volk]. Note how it’s salt—white poison—not grains, say, or life-extending sorrel, and high in the mountains, by the way, the scrutinised are allowed to act annoyed and withdrawn as long as, when you start falling, they ‘moan’ [V.S. Vysotsky] but grab arms, legs and hold tight. And if not up in the mountains, then down into a forest with partisans we go—Alexievich says the only language we know how to speak is the language of war—can you trust this person with your life? Do a mental experiment and you’ll know. Is this normal? Too late for me, regardless. The most I can muster is a grain of salt about the pound of salt (surely with certain people you know quicker, quickly) but to B, when she comes home and declares happily ‘I just made friends with a shop assistant at this shop’ (they won’t see each other again), is it best I say nothing?

  The dream I had last night: we are swimming in a river, a pretty dirty river, probably Nile, famous for its impurities… Just as we’re running out of strength an empty boat floats towards us. We requisition it, even though we know they’ll kill us if we get caught. We sail on quietly till robbers begin chasing us. You and I are not champion rowers, let’s be clear, and they close in. I shout, ‘We are taking off,’ and start quickly lifting myself into the sky. You hesitate a moment, then you follow me. And now we are flying in the sky except we can’t keep going for much longer at this height. I see a plane at full speed and jump into it hoping you’ll do the same… But you miss the turn and start plummeting. To where the robbers are waiting for us. I stick my head out the plane door and shout hysterically, ‘Up!!! You need to fly UP!!!!!’ I wake screaming. It’s 3 a.m.

  21.

  The Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine provides daily updates regarding ceasefire violations/shelling and civilian casualties/the withdrawal of weapons/armoured combat vehicles and anti-aircraft weaponry in the security zone/interrupted water supply/mines, a mine hazard sign, booby traps and unexploded ordnance (UXO).

  You can read them freely online. No clearance required.

  Last night I stayed at a friend’s place. She had to go away and had no one to look after her boys. In the night a terrible storm started. Thunder too and vertical lightning. It was impossible to sleep and then after 3 a.m. came hail. Stas, the younger one, who is eight, said in this resigned way, ‘Are we being bombed?’ (the unlucky child, victim of cable TV ). Vlad, the ten-year-old, wasn’t having a bar of it: ‘If someone ordered for us to be bombed, we would have been done for by now.’

  22.

  U/10s soccer match, Lord Reserve, ‘I am a human shield’—that’s my son at centre-back, to no one in particular.

  23.

  I have no memory of other people being with us that day. I thought it was just you and me. Before we met you texted, ‘Happy birthday. Let’s not see each other again.’ We have form when it comes to birthdays, no?

  I’ve lost all of your letters, all photographs from before 2005. When I was moving between one place and another a bag of photo albums disappeared. As if on purpose. As if the whole past was cut off me in one go.

  24.

  Jamala, “1944”, 534 points. Any chance you are watching?

  25.

  Good morning. The pants fit me like a glove (proof’s attached). Thank you a trillion, and wow!!! Classy, classic. They make—you make!—my arse look not boundless like our unvanquishable motherland but lean and elegantly bookended like Holland by Belgium & Germany.

  Thank you for your New Year wishes. One slight ‘but’—‘a little bit of earthly love’ is not for me. I need something rare, almost magical, and not a little bit of it either.

  26.

  Seventy-five—my mother’s age, my mother’s life—years ago and I don’t need to tell you how much has happened since, how many more sieges, but it’s still there, not as though it happened just yesterday, but as though there could never be enough time (in the world?) to separate us from it.

  Watched everything YouTube had on it. The grip on me—physical, not just psychological. In one of the films people were fighting over a frozen sparrow that’d fallen to the ground. The ‘victor’ made a sparrow soup for her sick son.

  27.

  When the train started moving, at first slowly as if anticipating people’s inability to let go of each other, you and I grabbed on to each other’s clothes—do you remember?—and closed our eyes as tight as we could. And if both of us behaved as if we were drowning, it was because we were drowning, and now that we know how long it took us till we saw each other again I am surprised we ever let go. I had a lot of mascara on.

  Day of departure… my sixteenth. yellow roses from you to me… We stuck one of the roses in the snow beside the entrance to your apartment block on Garshina, in memoriam. When the train moved I ran along the rails, in front of everyone, people seeing you off and strangers seeing strangers off. Ran screaming DON’T LEAVE. Horrible running—hysterical, frantic. Then someone brought me back to the platform and three of us ended up going to your flat to pick up records of Grebenschikov you’d left for me and a Young Scientist Chemistry Lab pack.

  Somebody told me to put it on because it’d stop me crying too hard. You didn’t use make-up then. Those subsequent photographs in which your face was painted always struck me as weird. You had the natural beauty even though we were taught that Jewish girls like us could be ‘striking’ or ‘attractive’ but never ‘naturally beautiful�
��. Those Slavic girls, those human birch trees, they had it. We didn’t. Except you did.

  That yellow rose spent the night in the snow outside the door of your apartment block. ‘Your’ apartment block.

  28.

  I have no memory of other people that day. I know it couldn’t have just been you and me.

  ‘Immigration is your guts on the pavement. It is harakiri’: we watch Dina Rubina’s interview on the same day. You/me (t) here.

  29.

  We were best friends. I wrote about us. I wrote—thank you for not dying. But this was to you only, in private correspondence.

  30.

  Did you ever end up reading this?

  ‘It rarely lends a hand

  in uphill tasks,

  like moving furniture,

  or lifting luggage,

  or going miles in shoes that pinch.

  It usually steps out

  whenever meat needs chopping

  or forms have to be filled.’

  31.

  ‘Let me explain to you how it works. (Hello, my little one.) Let’s take a person of thirty-five and return to her the consciousness of herself as a fifteen-year-old. They say it’s possible for that fifteen-year-old to then “remember” her life for the next twenty years. OK, this is not brilliantly explained but did you get it? Almost? Anyway I decided I was going to make myself twenty-five so I could “remember” my life for the last nine years. So I went through a long corridor, smoke everywhere, light somewhere ahead; finally, a push and I materialised in a room (all covered in a see-through, enveloping smoke). Inside, a feeling: in a moment now I’ll see everything and… You do that too, OK? See if you and I will be in the same room again? Hey and forgive my terrible (most likely) handwriting. Lounging on the bed. What a stupid letter this ended up being, but it’s OK, right?’

  32.

  Before we met you said, ‘Let’s not see each other again. There is no need. No point.’ I said, ‘Give me an hour.’ I didn’t mean an hour. I meant the rest of times.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In Russian we talk of the ‘deepest bow’ to speak of an overwhelming sense of gratitude. Head-to-toe gratitude. You can also translate it as the ‘lowest bow’ because you’re bending forward and down as fully as you can, except in English, though not in Russian, lowest bow has slight undertones of servility.

  My deepest bow is to you whose lives and worlds I write about—in a chapter, in a sentence, doesn’t matter. I won’t line you up here, list you all in one breathless sentence, because a few of your names have been changed or used sans surnames or fully scrubbed out to keep things safe, so my little parade won’t feel right. I followed some of you around for years, read your diaries, asked you questions about the worst of times (the best of times too, I hope), we talked and talked and talked, and then I took so long to write this book that most of you, at one point or another if you still remembered this thing I was doing, were convinced it would never happen. There is a sorry there in my deepest bow.

  I have had eye-opening conversations while researching this book and have tried to bring most of them into the book. I hope you, my wise guides, will recognise yourself in these pages and feel my respect and gratitude for what you have shared and shown me.

  Sam Cooney, my publisher—I want to say that you and your allies and colleagues at The Lifted Brow and now Brow Books are the future of publishing in this country, but of course you’re already the formidable present. I am thrilled to be your eldest author, so far. And big thanks to Brett Weekes for designing and typesetting this book, including over Christmas. I am probably burning bridges here (I don’t mean to, as my children would say) but yours is the first book cover of mine I like.

  My friends who read me: Melinda Harvey, Ellena Savage, Zoe Dzunko, Billie Tumarkin* (*daughter), Geordie Williamson who was going to be my publisher for a while there but first I was late and then you needed to get back to writing your own books—thank you in a big way for… reading me. It’s the greatest service you could offer.

  Thank you to my agent Clare Forster of Curtis Brown. Some writers more than other writers are dud clients (it’s not like I have TV series on the go) but you have been in my corner all the way through, honest, smart, clear-headed and ready to bail me out if things get messy, and with me things get messy.

  I received a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship in 2013–14 and a Creative Victoria grant at some point too. No money=no books. Sidney Myer was a particularly incredible reprieve. Two years of not worrying about money, can you believe it?

  Thank you, dear Rai Gaita—I owe so much of my ability to survive with dignity as a writer and a thinker in this world to you.

  My friends Alexandra Anenska, Jessica Little, Nina Purdey, Deb Anderson, Aneta Podkalicka, Sarah O’Donnell, Katia Margolis, Perrie Ballantine, Jen Vuk, Jo Case, Emily Potter—thank you for your friendship. What’s the point of anything, and I include books here, without friends like you?

  In 2016 I started work in the creative writing program at the University of Melbourne. I have never worked with a better group of people. I know that sounds vague, and like I am ticking things off some list. How about this: everyone is real and kind and gifted and funny and committed, no bullies, no predators, no passives-aggressive, no bureaucrats, people are working their arses off yet remain magnanimous and brilliantly collegial. Thank you, colleagues. Please don’t let it ever change!

  My dear astonishing family—thank you for bearing with me—Billie, Miguel, my parents Marian and Svetlana, and my aunt Lina. Charlie. Oh you all did so much more than bearing.

  My husband (we’re not married) and my editor Christian—acknowledgements tend to get soggy when writers talk about their significant others. Too intimate and smug at once, bring in the violins, I always look away when I get to this point, second-hand embarrassment is what it’s called I think, not that I read other people’s acknowledgements that much. Christian, the point is that you’re a genius writer and a genius editor and you have given so much to me and this book that I wish (you’re totally against this idea and will try to edit this line out as well, it may get ugly, a tussle…) I could put your name on the cover too. In whatever way this book floats and stumbles through the world, for me it is and will always be ours, not mine.

  MARIA TUMARKIN is a writer and cultural historian. She is the author of three previous books of ideas, Traumascapes, Courage, and Otherland, all of which received critical acclaim in Australia, where she lives. Her most recent work, Axiomatic, won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award.

  Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities. Visit us online to learn more about our forthcoming titles, events, and opportunities to support our mission.

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