Every student was supposed to write three stories per semester. And to rewrite, for improvement, each story at least once. This means that during my time teaching there, I read five hundred and forty short stories. And reread them. By the end of my sentence, all the delicate passageways by which I found access to aetherial worlds had thus become clogged with nonbiodegradable plastic waste. Full of ennui, I’d pick up the next one: “Susan felt a strong connection with George. They preferred the same brand of toothpaste, they both enjoyed listening to the Smashing Pumpkins….”
During this entire time, I had only two encounters out of the ordinary. There was one girl completely free of any storytelling constraints and conventions—the others all eyed her with fear. She wrote a story about how much she liked shoplifting: both to ease things when cash was low and for the intrinsic joy of it; how, when planning to shoplift cheese, she’d put on a thick sweater with wide sleeves and traipse through the store with the most carefree expression, bending casually over the cases with prepackaged triangles of formaggio as if searching for something, but then, surreptitiously, with her sleeve held taut, she’d scoop up a package of Roquefort, or something just as expensive, never actually touching it, and holding something else in her other hand as a decoy. If someone bothered to look, they wouldn’t even notice. Once the cheese slid down to the elbow, she had only to lift up her arms, as if to fix her hair, which had deliberately been left disheveled. At this stage the cheese would pass through the armhole and into her baggy sweater, securely cinched at the waist.
This wasn’t even so much a short story as it was an étude, a study, yet it was more than any of the others—the lazy and the diligent alike—were capable of. They couldn’t feel what the trick was, and I didn’t know how to explain it: a culture that makes blanket pronouncements such as “Yes means yes and no means no” and orients itself squarely toward a puritanical ethic fails at parsing metaphors and acknowledging paradoxes; it fears play and runs from even fictive sins. I grew attached to this girl, who though from a wealthy family enjoyed shoplifting and lying precisely because, with nothing denied her, she was bored. She’d look into thin air and see visions. She yearned for different worlds and, by her own admission, had a way to reach them. She had a mild form of epilepsy, and every once in awhile she’d have a seizure, petit mal—almost unnoticeable by others. And as we know—from Dostoyevsky, for example—other worlds opens up right before an epileptic seizure. Everything around you begins to make sense: the workings of the universe, all causes, all meanings, everything. But then a dark veil descends and you thrash about in convulsions, and when you come back you don’t remember anything. She told me that as a little girl, whenever they gave her anticonvulsives, she’d purposefully not take them, so as to be “elucidated,” “to keep things interesting.” Oh, how I envied her! Sure, I was also able to go there, but not deep inside and not without effort; there was no elucidation or convulsions, the key to the entry gates being tears. Or, occasionally, love.
The second exception was a lad who, in his standard academic classes—and this was an academic institution after all, albeit one of liberal arts—was widely considered an idiot. His looks didn’t help—the physique of a potato sack, a backwards baseball cap, a rumpled white sweatshirt, coarse features and heavy tread. His parents, farmers, apparently belonged to some reclusive religious sect. It seemed that prior to college, the most sentient being he had come across was a cow. I suspected he was autistic.
When I saw his writing, I couldn’t believe my luck. I can’t reproduce it now and the manuscript has been lost—those New Jersey floods finally did reach my basement, annihilating my entire archive—and to be honest, I don’t even remember what the story was about. But there was something wondrous in its brute savagery. A brother and sister. She’s sitting at a wooden table, eating pea soup. He throws an ax at her. He misses. I don’t remember why. The atmosphere is downright Bruegelesque. It wasn’t so much the plot—but the smell of stables, peas, and smoke veritably emanated from the pages and I could just see those people, slow-moving and oafish. This bumpkin was possessed of an inexplicable ability to glide effortlessly through walls of words to those subterranean fields where intentions are sown, where the winds of meaning blow, and where motives rustle. But his story didn’t end. It simply stopped.
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know yet what comes next.”
We were sitting in an empty auditorium; no one was disturbing us.
“What if you lift it here and pull this way?” I asked carefully, and pointed with my finger. He looked.
“That could work,” he said after some thought, “but won’t it sag there?” He also indicated.
“Yes…but if you pad right here, la la la, maybe four lines or so, no more, and then trim the beginning?” I couldn’t, I simply couldn’t believe that this was happening.
“Yeah, I see it! And then thread it through like this.” He chuckled with delight. “I got it, I got it! That works! And then I’ll add some heft right about here.”
He pressed his finger into the paper, as if adding weight.
“I’d get rid of this phrase…or maybe move it. Seems too pink, and right here, it’s too smoky.”
“No, I need that. I’ll move it into the shadows. And, and…and I’ll add a J, it’s nice and graphite.”
I was completely besotted. An astral twin had been sent to me in the form of a potato sack. I could have spent hours next to him, although not eye-to-eye—there wasn’t much to look at—but voice to voice, so that we, like Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, could read any book, sifting it with four hands as if it were sand from the ocean, laughing with the joy of little kids who, when the grown-ups weren’t looking, had snuck in through an unlocked door that leads to Eternity.
“What are your plans after college?” I asked him.
“I want to apply to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.”
“I’ll write you a recommendation letter.”
“But I haven’t even finished my story yet.”
“But you know that you will, because the story is already there, it just isn’t visible yet.”
The potato sack brightened and nodded his head. We were speaking the same language. Then he gathered his pages and walked out, treading heavily, blending in with the wall.
I don’t even remember his name. It was a square one. Maybe Carter? Let’s call him Carter.
Every Wednesday I drove back home from the college. It was the same commute as on Monday, but in reverse. The sun took a long time to set, the sky grew darker, early twilight washing out the surroundings before darkness fell; the main thing was not to crash my car and flip over—Sing, Boris, sing, help me out. A long road through the cliffs, then the wide highway, then a country road, and then the final stretch, almost by feel—from unseen hills into unseen valleys, then hills once again, past sleepy villages and lonely, dimly flickering farms. And I was daydreaming about how, who knows, perhaps inside one of those gloomy houses—maybe that one, or possibly this one—another Carter was sitting, his heavy hands resting on the wooden table, the clock ticking as he lowered his heavy ear to the ground, listening to the pea pods sleeping under the snow, and thinking of how a cow is staring at the wall, about how the wax cloth smells, about how the night flows.
And he won’t say anything to anyone, because no one will ask him.
* * *
§
Meanwhile, my family quietly fell apart—dried out with time, everyone going their separate way. My kids had families of their own. And nobody needed my house anymore—not the green door with the round brass handle, not the off-white walls, which I painted with my own hands, nor the birch parquet, which began to shine like old gold after I, on all fours, scrubbed it clean of all kinds of crap with a special American oil formulated for scrubbing the parquet clean of all kinds of crap. I also had a glass table, which allowed one to examine one’s knees, an interesti
ng endeavor. And I had purchased an old china cabinet at a flea market; it was the color of dark cherry, with curlicues on top. One of its drawers contained an unexpected bonus: a green-felt-lined case containing two protractors. The unknown, long-gone owner had possibly drafted something—perhaps he’d sketched a patio for his house. And so I decided I too would add a patio to the house, just as David intended.
I went down to the municipal building expecting long lines, misery, inexplicable restrictions, and insurmountable obstacles, but there was nothing of the sort. I paid all the necessary fees, the inspector came and, measuring my house, he gave the patio his approval. He also gave me a list of licensed carpenters, pointing out which ones charged more and which ones less, and advising me against hiring someone just off the street. That was because a licensed carpenter knows that the most important thing about patios is the distance between the balusters. It can’t be less than a certain number of inches, or some kid is bound to get their head stuck in there. The year before, the inspector told me, they’d made the standards stricter, reducing the distance further. Apparently the average American head had grown smaller. And all the licensed carpenters have been notified about this. When the patio is finished, the inspector will come and survey the job.
That’s how simple and boring this process turned out to be. Where were the bribes—the sliding envelope, the lowered gaze, the anxiety that it won’t be accepted or that he’ll take a look and deem it too little? Where were the nervous jitters about removing stolen goods from a warehouse, as I had done in Moscow? I remember how, early one July morning, the construction workers I’d hired took me to a yard near Myasnitskaya Street, to a door, and behind that door were rolls and boxes of supplies; the workers gesturing to it all: Choose whatever you want.
“What is this?” I asked
“A warehouse. Go ahead.”
“Whose warehouse?”
“The military prosecutor’s office. It’s Sunday, so go ahead! But quietly…”
We loaded up on tiles and parquet flooring as well as rolls of mesh, its purpose unknown: I asked, but the workers had no idea, they simply took some because it was there. They found some sort of yellow, bubbled glass and offered some to me as well; the temptation was great, but my renovations did not call for bubbles, so it stayed behind, about which I still feel pangs of regret, and God, what year was it?—1987? Yes, I think so. The early-morning pedestrians were scurrying down streets made wet by watering trucks, July was waking, fresh and luxuriant, life was in full bloom. We stole quite a bit that day, cleared out the prosecutor’s office quite nicely; I still feel the thrill and gratitude.
My Moscow construction guys were certain that I was an actress; all protestations to the contrary were dismissed—they knew better. Hair to the waist, red lipstick, unstructured behavior—must be an actress! In the end, I suppose it didn’t matter, but the problem was that having fallen into a kind of proletarian cultural paradigm I was expected to act the part, though of course I couldn’t possibly live up to standards I wasn’t familiar with. I could see that this offended my workers; everything I did defied their expectations. What, oh what, did they want from me?
Another heroine from their proletarian folklore was the General’s Wife, a character that existed primarily in the fantasies of such men. The myth of the General’s Wife was basically that she—of Yugoslavian negligees and German bubble baths, surrounded by rugs and lacquered dressers, and bursting with passion—is waiting for him, a simple worker, a plumber. She would leap into his arms, perfumed and ready: Take me! I’m yours!
The General is obviously “in the field,” so to speak.
Women, too, were conduits for this lore. Take Galina, who, by the way, hung my wallpaper upside down. She surmised that her crew’s last job had been for a General’s Wife. There was air freshener in the loo—it had to have been a general’s shitter.
“Just imagine: plop—whoosh—orange blossoms.”
Unfortunately, I was already familiar with all the details of Galina’s personal life, her complicated relationship with her lover and his mistresses, none of whom, of course, could hold a candle to her.
“I told him—you listening? I told him: ‘Fine, I’m a slut, I’m a whore, I suck cock, but I am still a WOMAN.’ Was I right or was I right?”
As an actress I was expected to have an artistic opinion: about a woman’s dignity, about the craftiness of men, about fashion.
“Ain’t too bad, right? Sewed it out of two shawls.” Galina was examining her skirt, but, secretly, of course, she was admiring her wizened fifty-something legs. The skirt wasn’t half bad. Galina and her team weren’t even planning on working: they positioned some wooden scaffolds around the room, climbed on top of them, and were playing cards while incessantly and virtuosically cursing. They’d send the elderly Kostya to go get booze, and I should note that Kostya, as a parquet artisan of the highest caliber, consumed only cognac.
“When will you be able to finish hanging the wallpaper?” I’d bleat.
“Can’t do it now! The spackling hasn’t dried! Notice how damp your apartment is? Takes time to dry. And by the way, actress! You owe us two hundred rubles.”
“Two hundred? For what?!”
“Prepayment!”
Around the twelfth century BC, Mycenaean civilization was obliterated by flooding and fires. The fire baked some of the clay tablets that contained accounting notes, thus preserving them. When in the twentieth century AD these tablets were excavated and painstakingly decoded, what wisdom of the ages had scholars discovered? “Carpenter Tirieus didn’t come to work today,” and such like.
Exactly! The eternally flaky carpenter is fickle and unpredictable. A Russian carpenter (or plumber, tile layer, spackler) stretches out his arm to his Mycenaean brethren across millennia: Workers of the world unite, if not in space then in time. Anyone who decides to build or rebuild their home knows that they are entering into a different world, one full of instability and surprise, and that there can be no knowing that the work paid for will be finished, or indeed even started. Just as with Schrödinger’s cat, there is only the probability of this event happening. And in my case, I didn’t even have that.
The spackling paste had been drying for the second month when I concluded that my workers had no intention of getting on with it. They considered my apartment, which had suddenly fallen into their lap, to be their private den of debauchery, and here they would drink themselves silly in three shifts; at some point a harmonica even entered the picture. Of course, I tried to get them to leave by appealing to their conscience, even bringing in my husband and father-in-law as reinforcement—but all was futile in the face of this construction gang. Whenever other people came to the apartment, the proletariat would do an energetic impression of activity: they’d furiously run the paint rollers up and down the walls, move boxes of parquet from corner to corner, struggle hauling buckets of cement, bang the ceiling with sticks, as if to loosen the old plaster. But as soon as my visitors had gone, the fuckers would jump back on the scaffolds, where a feast was already set: canned sprats, salami, beer, vodka—food for every taste—and the crème de la crème of parquet layers would be off and running to buy the most expensive of cognacs.
“It’s still drying! It’s all part of the process. No way can it be rushed. We even turned on the space heaters.”
I had stopped paying them long ago, but therein lay the rub: “If you don’t pay us, we won’t leave.” Basically, this has been the modus operandi of our entire country for the past six hundred years.
Finally I gave up and asked my older sister, Katerina, for help. She was a formidable woman. Formidable! I explained: This and that, they think I’m an actress, a subhuman, they’re not working, they are bleeding me dry. Anything you can do?
“Who’s in charge there?” asked Katerina after giving it some thought.
“Galina.”
I brought Katerina to my apartment. She threw the door open and walked up to the scaffolds with a deliberate, slow, and heavy step, her feet firmly and widely planted, as if wearing a pair of shiny general’s boots. With the low rumbling voice of a herald, Katerina bellowed:
“Galina! I vanquish thee and cast thee the fuck out of here!”
Galina grew apoplectic on the wooden platform.
“What the hell? Who are you?”
“I’m the Devil.”
There was a silence in response, and, for a second, the platform gang froze. Katerina darted into the corner, lifting her hands up, each forming a set of horns. She declared:
“I call upon the forces of darkness to unleash the evil eye!!! Everybody—out! One…two…”
Sure enough, they jumped off in unison and made a run for it, shoving one another and cursing under their breath as they bounded over the creaking floorboards; Galina’s wizened legs carried her the fastest, as she hollered shrilly: “The Devil, the damned Devil!” as if she’d met Him before and knew that she’d run up a tab with Him. I never saw any one of them again.
“What did you do?” I asked. “How?”
“It’s the proletariat. You can’t talk to them in any other way,” shrugged Katerina.
* * *
—
But the American carpenter was not “the proletariat”; he didn’t nap in his parka with his mouth open, did not indulge in riotous fun at the job site, attempted no entry into aetherial worlds with the aid of moonshine and a processed cheese product; a hot and bothered Venus disguised as the General’s Wife did not haunt his dreams—mythopoeic power bubbled up inside him not at all. And so he approached building the patio drily and diligently. He didn’t try to pad the bill, instead charging me the agreed-upon amount; he didn’t belatedly discover that the terrain was somehow unruly, or that the logs were unusually difficult to work with and so it was only fair to add a little sumpin’ sumpin’. For that matter, when the time came, the municipal inspector didn’t cast an eye on the ceiling and indicate with a polite cough that it wouldn’t hurt to have a drink, nor did he suggest that I invite a priest and a cat—the priest to christen the new space, the cat to absorb the negative energy. No, he simply patted the beams with his hands, measured the distance between the balusters to ensure that some average American kid’s head didn’t get stuck there, and that I, as owner, wouldn’t get sued for triple the value of the house on account of someone else’s microcephaly.
Aetherial Worlds Page 13