Oneiron

by Laura Lindstedt

  Total: 22 meters, 7 centimeters. Which would yield about 30 square meters.

  Nina lifts the sleeves of the long-sleeved shirts. They will add a few dozen more centimeters.

  Next they have to make a decision: one larger room or two smaller ones? They want one big room. The kitchen. It is simpler to be either outdoors or in. Movements between rooms could be problematic: Why did she go in there, with her, and what did it mean? What did a second room signify in general? Could it belong to someone? The thought of two rooms arouses so much concern that no one wants to take the risk, even though there would be undeniable benefits to a two-room version. Dividing rooms (kitchen + bedroom, for example) would have provided the possibility for some amusing routines. They could sit and imagine a delicious, candlelit dinner. Afterwards they could all go sleep on the floor, closing their eyes and imagining a shared dream. But if they used the rooms wrong . . . If cliques formed . . . If two nations formed . . . If a war started . . .

  The women begin to arrange the clothing in a rectangle around the sable couch and the wig fireplace. Then Polina thinks to ask whether they should change the couch to a long bench, since kitchens didn’t have couches, at least not her kitchen in Moscow. The others are not enthused by the idea. Long benches are hard and the fur is soft, regardless of whether they feel its softness or not. They can see the softness all the same—the sable fur is fluffy in a way that a bench could never be, so the thought is impossible, period.

  But Polina doesn’t give up so easily. Could the fur be a rug then? It could be an oriental rug! Or a flying carpet! A flying carpet in the kitchen. Polina doesn’t think there is anything strange about that, unlike a couch, which doesn’t belong in a kitchen, period.

  No one reacts to Polina’s suggestion. Let’s vote, Nina exclaims, clearly worried about the increasing discord. Who wants the fur to be a couch? (Everyone except Polina and Ulrike raises their hands.) Who wants the fur to be a rug? (Only Polina raises her hand.)

  And what about that fireplace? There aren’t fireplaces in kitchens! They can have old-fashioned wood-burning stove tops or baking ovens. But not fireplaces! Polina is angry. Why don’t we make a living room then, she screams, if you don’t want to turn the couch into a rug and the fireplace into an oven? A couch and a fireplace belong in a living room!

  Nina, who wants to complete her brilliant idea, places her hand calmingly on Polina’s shoulder. Would it be OK, she asks in as gentle a tone as possible, for each of us to think of this room exactly as we please? For some, she continues, like me, the idea of a kitchen is extremely important. Extremely important. And in my kitchen under these exceptional circumstances there can be a couch and a fireplace. I’ve already become used to them, and so I’d prefer to hold onto them. Anyone who’s bothered by this can imagine a living room instead of a kitchen. Would that work for everyone?

  Polina grits her teeth and accepts Nina’s suggestion. Defiantly she decides to think of a flying carpet, only and exclusively that. To hell with rooms.

  But building continues. And the farther construction proceeds, the greater their joy grows. Nina and Shlomith look at each other and smile. Hostilities could be suppressed after all. Fangs could be sucked back into gums. It was as if morning had been waiting for them somewhere. A gentle, bright morning that wakes sleepers with light. Morning, the scheduled beginning to the day: was it the walls that did it? Did walls make it feel as if they could almost rise from their beds, brush their teeth, and jump in the shower? That if they turned, they might find the breakfast table set behind them? Coffee, juice, toast, eggs, and marmalade . . . A newspaper, sensible sentences concerning the world . . . Le Monde, The New York Times, Komsomolskaja pravda. Salzburger Nachrichten. Le Soleil, De Telegraaf. A world full of real problems, but what did that matter when they were inside. They were safe! At home!

  The bustling continues within the clothing foundation. Each labors in her own spot, on her knees, straightening and flattening the trousers and shirts to increase the room area as much as possible. The three full pairs of shoes make excellent corners when placed in Chaplin position. The fourth corner is made of Shlomith’s fuzzy slippers. Polina’s orphaned boot receives a place of honor as the door. The tapered tip of the boot is the clasp that locks the door. Once it is set in its proper place, no one outside has any business coming in any more.

  It feels better, Nina says repeatedly, and to the rhythm of this slogan they make themselves at home. Maimuna sits on the sable fur couch, Polina on the flying carpet. Nina, Ulrike, and Shlomith sit down in front of them. Wlibgis lies in front of the fireplace and sets her head right next to the wig. There is enough rebellious spirit in her that she uses her fingers to put the ends of the wig on her forehead. They don’t feel like anything, not on her fingers or her forehead, but she manages to prod the wig until the orange fibers fall over her field of vision.

  Wlibgis closes her eyes. She sees herself in the spring on a muddy street in the center of Zwolle. She walks with determination, bright and ablaze. She feels herself walking a few centimeters above the surface of the ground, and no wonder, because she is hurrying toward her greatest love. The girl is waiting for her a few blocks away, her plump hand in her mother’s gaunt one. The girl will soon receive her first ice cream of the spring, and in the meantime her mother can get her weekly dose of buprenorphine. Vanilla, chocolate, pistachios; cherries, a paper umbrella, and whipped cream; sprinkles, chocolate chips, strawberry sauce; whatever Melinda can think of to ask her grandmother.

  POLINA’S LIQUOR WINDOW

  The women barely have time to get comfortable and each stray into her own thoughts when with no warning a story begins on the flying carpet. No one is prepared, and no one expected it. Well, I’m Polina, Polina suddenly says (confusing everyone, because of course they already know), and I’m an alcoholic.

  No one had known this. They didn’t know what Polina had been like. Polina talked a lot but not about herself, except once. Once she had talked about herself. She had briefly related how her dying mother had refused to die right up to the end, how her mother had taken her final, suffocating breath with a look of shock on her face, and how at that moment Polina had decided to settle her accounts with life. But she had said little to broaden the fundamental impression of a woman who devoured books. She was just Polina, who had worked as chief accountant at Zlom, the Moscow Central Agency for the Dramatic Arts. Although she said her work wasn’t always pleasant. There had been a lot of gossiping behind her back that she’d had to treat with a maternal but slightly restrained attitude. So Polina had told them. She said she had to remember that this had nothing to do with her in persona, that it only had to do with her role at work. (She had lied, but the women didn’t know that either.)

  Now, inside this brand-new clothing house, on a sable-fur couch that had turned into a flying carpet, but which for some is still a couch, Polina reveals something entirely new about herself. This is Polina in persona, and she is an alcoholic.

  What Polina does not say is that she was uttering this statement for the first time in order to try out how the admission felt when it no longer had any consequences. She doesn’t feel like drinking here. Here there is nothing to drink and no reason to drink. In order to drink she needs certain props, which were found in the old world, in her home in fact. There it was possible to drink properly. More than the drinks, Polina misses a place to drink where she had everything she needed within reach. She had acquired an armchair for this specific purpose. A deep, soft armchair with a graceful three-legged table next to it. What was atop the table varied: a grog glass, a wine carafe, one night’s serving. There she sat, sipping and sitting, and all the bad things stopped. Day-Polina went away and Night-Polina flooded into her place with every drink.

  In her own home, Polina believed she was free and independent. Someone else might have disagreed, but no other thinking beings were inside the flat (her cat, Begemot, did not count, although he must have thought in his own feline way). Polina told herself sh
e was relaxing. “I’m relaxing, because otherwise I can’t shut off and I’ll go crazy. Otherwise I’d be doing salary calculations, shadow budgets, reports, tax plans, and bookkeeping at ten at night at Zlom. At three in the morning I’d still be sitting on the sixth floor. I might even be there when the others came to work in the morning. Before long I’d end up on sick leave, and that wouldn’t do. There has to be more in life than numbers!”

  In theory, Polina’s method worked. Each week she drank enough that she could go to work in the morning without agony. Half a bottle or as much as a bottle of decent wine, a couple of glasses of cognac, herbal liqueur if her throat was sore, raspberry liqueur if she felt like something sweet.

  Polina lived in a fourteen-story yellow-brick building on the top floor, at the place where Pokrovsky Boulevard turned to Yauzsky Boulevard. The bedroom window and balcony gave a handsome view of the city, dominated by Stalin’s Tooth, one of the seven architectural wonders of Moscow built by Stalin. Those Seven Sisters, as the buildings were called, slightly resembled the skyscrapers of Manhattan, but they were too rambling and lonely. Their towers made them medieval, or neoclassical, or maybe, perhaps, baroque? During the day, with clear weather and binoculars, from the window of Polina’s home one could catch a glimpse behind Stalin’s Tooth of the roof of Zlom and the red banner flapping there with the embroidered injunction, Love the art in yourself not yourself in the art, which could not be seen unless the wind was stiff and more or less in one direction, so that the flag flew straight as an arrow.

  There was Polina’s daily life: a kilometer from Yauzsky Boulevard to the other side of Stalin’s Tooth and from behind Stalin’s Tooth one kilometer back to Yauzsky Boulevard. Polina enjoyed walking. Now and then in the mornings, when she glanced at her reflection in a display window (yes, she did that too, all people do), she didn’t check her hair or posture. No single detail interested her. She was only checking that she was there, more or less complete; that she had legs, arms, and a head, even if it didn’t feel like it. Unfortunately she needed all of these things to be out among people.

  There was also another kind of window, one that didn’t open from Polina’s flat, not from the kitchen, the living room, or the bedroom, which all faced different directions and offered views and details for spotting through binoculars but which Polina had already grown tired of. Her very own secret window opened when an alcoholic beverage was poured into a glass. The first snifter of cognac, the tilt of the glass, the strong, brown liquid flowing into her mouth and beginning to work there. Polina breathed through her nose while the liquid was still in the concave dish of her tongue, and then, abracadabra, her whole body filled with fresh air, with an otherworldly gust, with promises and expectation. This was her real life. She had permission to take up her books when this window opened. She had permission for anything for a moment, to be a philosopher, a mass murderer, a princess, or maybe even a horse. Without a glass the books were mute to her, and that was a bad thing, because she loved books. She just had to open them first, and to open them she needed a special torsion arm, one that cranked her up out of the endless circle of numbers, from the addition, subtraction, and multiplication. She liked that too, but in a very finite way. Business was dealt with on the sixth floor of the Agency for Dramatic Arts without the agony of creativity, which she encountered almost every day in the canteen downstairs. There was always some Dimitri or Vladimir shouting, some wounded artist with visage downcast, and it was amusing to watch. Especially when the production was rubbish, in no imaginable way worth all that shouting and sulking. At those moments Polina felt a malicious schadenfreude. She would walk out of opening night at intermission smiling from ear to ear even though she knew the production would cause losses for the theatre.

  Yes, numbers were good. Nodding acquaintances but not lovers. Only books were lovers. But it was a long journey to them, much longer than from Yauzsky Boulevard to the other side of Stalin’s Tooth, and Polina’s mind did not open to the words printed on the paper through only the power of perambulation.

  Polina usually came home after seven o’clock, ate, and settled in for the night. She didn’t turn to a book until everything else was ready, when nothing else stood out in the wrong place. Even the tassels of the oriental rug had to be straight. “Begemot, my kitty, come to Mamotška’s lap and let’s read,” Polina said. The cat also liked books, or at least being in her lap. All the distractions and bustling were done for the day. The lady of the house took to her reading chair and extended her hand toward the graceful three-legged table, where the day’s estimated serving was at the ready, which could be refreshed if necessary, and usually was. But there were reasons for that. Polina wanted the books to really mean something. Otherwise reading them was pointless. She didn’t read frivolous books, the kind you could talk about at work to make yourself approachable. She only read the crème de la crème, and only when intoxicated.

  Polina read for herself. She was not, for example, waiting for the man of her life, into whose ear she would pour whispers of the honey of her sophistication, because she knew well enough that in Russia there were roughly ten million more women than men and that the best had already been skimmed off the top. She had abundant empirical evidence of this fact. She wasn’t just looking for Anyone. No drunk, unemployed losers, dependent carrion crows, abusers, or thieves. She read for her own sake just as some women really do dress up only for themselves. They brush on mascara first thing in the morning after polishing their faces, even if they don’t intend to step outside all day or let anyone else inside. Polina at least didn’t intend to let anyone inside. No one was coming. She also never, EVER, approached the Dimitris and Vladimirs to share her thoughts—what would she have said to them? She preferred to socialize with liqueurs, cognac, and wine. Each beverage type had its own place in the bar cabinet. The liqueurs were on top, the cognacs in the middle, and the horizontal, symmetrical hollows were reserved for the wines. There was also the decanter, which Polina used assiduously and filled on her wine nights. On cognac nights there was a moka pot full of espresso next to her, and with sweet liqueurs she would have a few salt biscuits to ward off the sugar high. Alcohol did not fatigue Polina, except when she gave it permission to fatigue her. She drank either to be inspired or to fall asleep, and the god in the glass usually obeyed her commands. She had a notebook where she sometimes scratched ideas that the texts she read aroused, because perhaps one day . . . one fine day . . . in retirement . . . ? Well, perhaps in few years . . . The great synthesis of her erudition! The book she would pour her whole self into!

  Polina didn’t feel much guilt over her drinking. She’d gained amazing knowledge that she would have missed without it. The books wouldn’t have sung to her without this wondrous secret window, which sometimes nearly flew off its hinges. That was worth any side effects. The moment when a book began its raging storm. When it began to surrender in a silken symphony, when all the voices of all the instruments were individually and collectively audible: the French horn, the oboe, the contrabass; irony, context, intertextuality. If only she could share this some day . . .

  It wasn’t as if Polina had never talked about what she read with anyone. There had been situations in her life, parties for example, where people chatted in a way she experienced as meaningful. Not just trivial tongue-wagging or, even worse, flirtation concealed as conversation, which could begin out of nowhere, on any topic, even Chekhov. The rules of that game were not at all clear to Polina. Once at a premier she’d stood dressed to the nines with a glass of champagne in her hand along with the rest of the audience, in the company of a man she knew a little and a woman who was a complete stranger, and imagined that they were talking about The Cherry Orchard. But the conversation wasn’t really about The Cherry Orchard.

  Apparently she was supposed to realize this and then immediately excuse herself with a bow before retreating to another corner of the hall and slipping out of the party, but she had frozen in place, as always. She made the mistake of
thinking the moment would pass—that was what an ignoramus she was—believing that soon the conversation would return to the way it had been. There they had been just a moment ago, the man, the woman, and her, and Chekhov in all his glory. She had actually begun to warm to the conversation, and her cheeks had burned with excitement as she returned to the adaptation they had seen on stage two hours before, to the blackness lit by only a sea of candles. Candles as snow-white cherry trees in bloom and buckets of tears, of weeping, such deep sorrow that it couldn’t help infecting the audience . . . And then suddenly the woman and the man weren’t there any more. Some strange membrane had appeared between her and the two of them. They didn’t even see her.

  Was the fault in her? Had she said something foolish? Did her breath smell bad? The man and woman spoke to each other, quoting the play from memory. “Did you eat the frogs?” “I had crocodile.” It was absurd. “It smells of patchouli here.” How did they suddenly decide to repeat all the lines about smells? “Who here stinks of herring?” It was irritating, but they seemed to be endlessly amused. “Go, my dear man, you reek of chicken,”—were they mocking her? They sang to each other like birds, chirp, chirp, fiuuuu-druip-druipdruip, and she found she couldn’t move any more. “I can smell the cognac on you, my darling,” “my little cucumber,” and her cheeks began to burn with shame.