by Alex Preston
Moroz knew something was happening early on because the trains started running without sticking to their timetable. And in the spring of 1917, when the snow began to thaw, drivers brought gossip that the Tsar had given up the throne and soon after that a new leadership had taken over the country. It was hard to know what was gossip and what was real, though Moroz understood that things were changing fast when Zossimov turned up one day and told everyone who would listen that he was no longer a soldier in the Imperial Army but had been appointed to oversee the redistribution of land.
That had not gone down well with everyone, as was clear when they found Zossimov hanging from a tree one evening, stripped to the waist. Moroz snapped to it and made for the city as quickly as he could. When he got there, he quickly learned that the best thing to do was not to hang around the markets or town squares trying to find out the latest news, but to look, dress and sound like one of the new leaders. He gathered up bundles of notices and orders handed down from on high and made himself useful, and visible. Rather than taking part in the looting of shops and houses, he took to sitting in on the meetings that ran late into the night and often well past dawn, discussing in fevered voices how the revolution would spread, and how joyful it was that the workers had finally been awakened.
He soon got used to the way they spoke, memorising and then parroting words about class struggle and the terrors of capitalism, learning the names of those whose works enabled him to claim intellectual high ground – even though he knew next to nothing about them. He did not mention how proud he had been of his uniform from Lozova and his role in helping Tsarist Russia run to time; instead, he talked of exploitation and the suffering of the ‘people’, without going into detail about who these people were.
Infected by a combination of enthusiasm, self-aggrandisement and the realisation that alongside the mantras of equality were the realities of new hierarchies forming, Moroz had abandoned his characteristic apathy and became a zealot. Armed with a revolver and a Swedish-made black leather jacket, he had been dispatched into the countryside to seek out trouble-makers. For several years, he took pride in identifying them, even when he knew they did not exist. He learned quickly that making an example of those who were admired in their communities was a way to break the resolve of all. Doing so made him feel powerful; not once did he feel guilty about what he’d done, because Moroz knew this was not about ‘justice’ or ‘fairness’. It was about sacrifice: and why worry or think about those who were being martyred for a lost cause? He performed an occasional riffling of faces through his mind, some guiltier than others, none worthy of what he’d done to them, but none worth mourning either.
Moroz had seen some horrible things and was responsible for many of them. Nothing had been as bad as Ukraine in the early 1930s. He had been to one house where three generations of a family had starved to death, more than twenty of them huddled together in a single room. Then there was the time he had ordered his men to murder the inhabitants of an entire village because he needed to believe they had been hoarding grain. He knew in truth that the harvest had failed because of locusts and that the targets set from above were designed to be impossible to meet. But he had said and done nothing.
When they finally came for him, Moroz shouted, kicked and screamed. It was a misunderstanding; he demanded to know who was in charge. Then, most desperate of all, he asked if they knew who he was. The OGPU, of course, knew who everyone was. After a night in the cell, when his ribs were broken, one hand crushed and several teeth lost, he stopped trying. He knew how this worked. It was not about what was fair or right. It was not about being sorry or trying to repent. It was just how it was.
He assumed he would be shot after confessing that he had collaborated with the Ukrainians. Instead, he had been put on a windowless wagon to Karelia, the northern province bordering Finland that stretches like an arm into the Arctic Circle, crammed alongside forty, perhaps fifty others. Ten of those loaded with him didn’t wake up when the train stopped at Monchegorsk, frozen solid or too weak to survive the journey.
Monchegorsk and Murmansk, a hundred miles further north, were going to play a crucial role in the war that would set the world free from capitalism. That was what the Camp Commandant pompously told the new arrivals when they were taken off the train and made to stand upright in the snow to be formally welcomed. Comrade Kirov, the most popular man in the Soviet Union at the time, had said the Kola Peninsula was the jewel in the Soviet crown, a ‘severe, barren, useless wilderness’ which had turned out to be ‘the richest place on earth’. Its mineral wealth would propel the country and its industry into the future. It would be extracted by men with few skills, little experience and no advantages, other than the fact that they had been categorised as being part of an infinitely numerous body of labour, and therefore expendable.
Because most had been classified as criminals, regardless of whether they had done something wrong, or, like Moroz, because time had simply caught up with them, there was no point bothering to look after them. There was a never-ending supply of men who could be rounded up and dispatched north whenever they were needed. They were put in rows of huts which had gaps in the floorboards, broken windows, beds with no mattresses and, instead of blankets, towels that had once belonged to the Black Sea fleet.
Moroz understood his lot. That made it easier for him to accept it. He recognised that the decision to leave trees standing in the centre of Monchegorsk and thus provide shelter from the wind was done to improve the lives of the officials – and that the reason trees had been cut down along the routes to and around the mines was to remind the condemned that they had earned their suffering. So much for being equal: even here, it was all about hierarchies.
Moroz had never been an extrovert and had never sought out the company of others, even in the old days. He had never settled down, found someone he enjoyed talking to into the small hours, never thought that he might like to have children of his own. He had always been a man who adapted to his surroundings, who looked for the course of least resistance, someone who thought hard about how to survive. None of this made him a good man. But living each day, each hour and each minute at a time gave him a certain strength. It helps to be numb if you think there is nothing to lose, and nothing to gain.
Moroz looked down, picked up his hammer and walked slowly through the mouth of the mine. One more day; one more day.
NO TIME TO WRITE
Yan Ge
I DECIDED to write a story to explain why I literally have no time to write. I think it’s important to make official my no-time status so it can be comprehended, interpreted and remembered.
First of all, of course, time is an invented notion. It was introduced by the Power System so that we ordinary people could regulate our destructive primitive urges and find meaning on a day-to-day basis. Nonetheless, it’s fake. So when I say I have no time to write, I neither have nor haven’t time. In other words, time is not an order I choose to submit myself to. Or I question the very notion of order. Because if we consider ourselves as particles in the universe, we must acknowledge that the universe exists only in chaos. As explained in the second law of thermodynamics, our universe is a system where randomness is bound to increase. Any attempt to erase randomness and to create order is ultimately futile.
So when I am typing up these words on my laptop, I’m fundamentally a nameless object floating in the lightless universe. And my laptop, too, is another insubstantial object whose trajectory happens to be brushing against mine at this particular moment. And very soon, our collaborative effort towards generating order will be disrupted by the formidable power of randomness. And then we will be forced apart, orbiting, moving and brushing against other objects respectively.
This is why my writing will and has to stop. It is not because of the lack of time or any elaborate personal decision. It has to happen because of randomness.
I worship randomness.
Some less interesting facts:
I was born in
Singapore in 1982 to Irish parents. We moved to Hong Kong when I was just six weeks old because my father was needed there for a big merger. My younger brother was born three years later. When I was eight, my family moved to Shanghai where my father built the branch office of the company he worked for from scratch. I spent the majority of my adolescence in China before my family moved back to Ireland in 1999, when my father was asked to step down from the Shanghai office. I attended Trinity College in Dublin, studied Linguistics and Philosophy as an undergraduate and Post-Colonial Theory for my Masters. After graduation, I taught in a language school for four years and dated two East Asian girls. In 2008, when the language school had to cut back on its staff, I travelled back to Asia myself, freelancing and backpacking in Cambodia and Thailand. Then, this September, I returned to Dublin to my parents’ house in Castleknock, and have been staying with them ever since.
Like everyone else, I’m troubled with my life but cannot really pin down my problems. I was once accused of being self-absorbed. Another girl I used to go out with told me this. ‘You think you’re a woman,’ she said. ‘But no, you are just a man trapped in a woman’s body and horrendously straight. Cliona, you are shifting your sexual identity at your own convenience – so you can slip in and out of relationships. It’s ridiculous and . . . exhausting.’ She closed her eyes and tears escaped, sliding down along her cheeks and then vanishing beneath her brittle chin.
It was sad, and to an extent moving. But she was wrong. My biggest problem is I’m neither a man trapped in a woman’s body nor do I have trouble committing to my sexual identity. My biggest problem is I don’t believe in any of these preconceptions. Man/woman. A stable and non-fluid relationship. Gender identity. Cultural identity. And, to add to this list, time.
My father says I’m too smart for my own good. My mother says I’m just an ungrateful little brat.
‘Won’t you just get your bloody life together, Cliona?’ she says, usually when she sees me in the kitchen, looking for food. ‘Just get out of the house and get a life, for Christ’s sake.’
‘She has just come back, Fiona,’ my father speaks up.
‘From a bloody five-year-long holiday!’
My mother swears a lot at home. It is quite unusual considering she is a well-educated, middle-class woman whose life has been nothing but comfortable. She is all right when there are other people around, but if she is just with us, the poor woman can’t help but spew out streams of obscenities. My father says it’s just her way of releasing energy. ‘We all need to find a way to let it out,’ as he puts it.
I understand. Years of relocating and dislocating have injured each one of us in this family. Everyone except my little brother Ian. Ian lives in Porto with his girlfriend Sara and is as happy as a goldfish.
In response to my mother’s accusation, I’m actually trying to get my bloody life together. It is one of the reasons I want to write.
It happened in Chiang Mai, just a few weeks before I returned to Ireland. It was near dusk and I was sitting on the rooftop terrace of Sunset Lodge with Mama Mei, me drinking a bottle of Beer Lao, her smoking. It was my favourite time of day, when the temperature had finally cooled down and the city below had gone quiet. The nuns in the nearby convent were chanting some Buddhist sutra while pigeons circled in the coral-purple sky, aimlessly.
‘Doesn’t this feel extremely repetitive, so repetitive that it’s almost, like, eternal?’ I said to Mama Mei.
‘Oh, not now, Cliona, not another round of your philosophising. It’s been a long day for me.’ She shook her head and took a drag.
‘Fine.’ I shrugged. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘Although I do like what you said the other day about the brushes,’ she said.
‘Not brushes. I was saying we don’t really engage, we are just brushing against each other. It’s all superficial,’ I corrected her.
‘Yes, yes.’ She nodded with a smile. ‘So you and Junjun are over?’
I shrugged again.
‘What was wrong? She is a very nice girl,’ she said. ‘And you too.’
I drank a mouthful of beer. ‘She wouldn’t like to be called “a very nice girl”. She’d probably say nice is a stigma for women and go on for hours – but no, nothing is wrong. It’s just not working any more. Have you ever had this feeling, that we can’t really be with another person even when we are physically with them? We’re essentially dealing with ourselves all the time. And it’s all repetitive. It haunts me, this idea that I’m just an object and she’s a distorting mirror through which I increasingly see all the absurdity in myself . . .’
‘You’re thinking too much,’ Mama Mei said.
‘That’s true,’ I agreed. ‘There is too much going on here. It’s like the bus to Bangkok.’ I pointed at my head.
Mama Mei laughed. ‘You have too much energy in you,’ she said, ‘thoughts, ideas, memories . . . You have to let go of them. It’s important to forget. Forgetting is a gift.’
‘I know.’ I sighed. ‘Memory is the perpetual curse. Such a drag. It is colossal, ambiguous and changeable. I think about the past a lot. And every time I think of it, I essentially create a new version of it. It’s an endless loop. A panopticon. I’m just trapped—’
‘Why don’t you write it all down?’ Mama Mei interrupted me. ‘You know, just like I keep a book for the Lodge. Who checks in when. Who drinks how much beer. I write everything down so I don’t need to remember it all. On paper, out of head.’
‘On paper, out of head,’ I repeated.
‘Exactly. Now, if you excuse me, I need to go get dinner. Do you need another beer?’ She finished her cigarette, stood up and went down to the kitchen.
It was the end of August, the tourists were fleeing Thailand and people in Ireland began to realise the summer was over. ‘Your mother wonders if you will be home for Christmas,’ my father wrote in his email and said he’d love to book the ticket home for me.
It was the first time this offer had come up since I was fired from the language school for dating students and, that same night, told my parents I was gay. I flew back to Dublin. My father came to pick me up at the airport. ‘Welcome home, Cliona,’ he said with a broad smile as he took my luggage.
‘How is Mam?’ I said.
‘She’s cooking you a full Irish at home. We’re both very glad you’re back,’ he said.
Ever since, I’ve been living at my parents’ house. My sole mission is to write, to go down into my memories like a miner, get my hands dirty and get the nasties out. I stare at my computer screen and type down words, sentences, paragraphs. Things that happened. My opinions about the world. Terms, explanations, distinctions. And then I realise: I am actually not able to write.
One of the reasons could be Gemma. It had always been like this since we were in secondary school. Gemma wrote poetry. I replied with broken sentences.
The last time I met her was in Paris. I had just handed in my thesis for the postgraduate programme and I flew there on a fifteen-euro Ryanair ticket.
I stayed in this miniature hotel room not far away from the Sorbonne and texted to tell her I was there. For four days she didn’t show up, saying she was busy with her deadline. Every day, I walked up and down Boulevard Saint-Michel for hours in the whooshing February wind. I remembered she’d mentioned once she got the bus from somewhere on Boulevard Saint-Michel to go to the university and I was hoping I would bump into her somehow. It didn’t happen.
The fifth day she emerged. After ‘pulling two all-nighters in a row’ she looked as glamorous as a unicorn. ‘Hi, Cliona.’ She smiled when she saw me and reached out her arms. I walked up and hugged her. She was soft and smelled like fresh apricots.
‘How’s life?’ she said.
‘Not bad,’ I said.
‘And how’s Fiona and Anthony? How’s Ian?’ she asked.
‘They’re all good,’ I assured her.
We then stopped talking. It was very cold. I looked at the top of my boots.
�
��Burgers?’ she suggested.
‘Sure.’ I nodded.
Gemma was obsessed with American fast food when we lived in Shanghai. She’d usually skip dinner at home and go to McDonald’s with me. She could eat five spicy chicken burgers in a row, no problem.
That night in Paris we went to a Burger King near Luxembourg Gardens where we ate six double cheeseburgers and countless chips. Afterward, we walked across the road to a McDonald’s and bagged ten discounted chocolate croissants to go. We shared the croissants as she walked me back to my hotel.
‘This could be Shanghai,’ I said.
‘Shanghai forever,’ she said in a singsong voice, as if we were in a TV commercial.
We were both hiccuping when we arrived outside my hotel. It was numbingly cold so I asked her if she wanted to go up.
‘Sure. I think I need to puke,’ she said. ‘You do have a bathroom in your room, right?’
‘Yes,’ I said. We went upstairs. I pointed her to the bathroom and gave her a fresh towel. And then I sat on the bed, listening to her gagging loudly behind the door. It sounded like she was throwing up a baby.
She’d had bulimia for years. I thought she probably still did. Having missed it for quite a few years, I was slightly nauseated by the noise.
Eventually she came out. She looked very pale and sat down on the armchair.
‘Can I have some water?’ she asked.
I poured a glass and gave it to her.
She drank. ‘Believe it or not, I haven’t done this for ages.’
She started to sob. Her face was in her hands and she said: ‘Why are you here?’
‘Well.’ I felt my throat was excessively dry. ‘I miss you, I miss us.’
She snorted out half a laugh and raised her head. ‘It’s just nostalgia, isn’t it? Last June, I had an abortion and I thought about you a lot, the way you always talk about those big deep ideas, your scepticism and the way you said, after we slept together for the first time, that you wished you were never born and the things about your parents . . .’