Oneiron

  Fortunately there was plenty of champagne served at these parties.

  At another, more high-brow frolic she managed to take the baton. An emeritus professor of history from Nantes University in France gave her a tip. “Read Swedenborg,” he suggested as they discussed Christianity and mysticism. Polina took his advice and read. That could have turned into something if another event the gentleman said he would attend hadn’t been canceled due to a hostage crisis that occurred in the House of Culture of State Ball-Bearing Plant Number 1.

  Polina was left quite alone with her Swedenborg. She never saw the French gentleman again. She had completely forgotten his name (you know how little names mean when a conversation is flowing), and no one in her circle of acquaintance seemed to know whom she meant when she went fishing for information afterwards. No one knew whom she was talking about when she described a man who looked disconcertingly like an old Jean-Louis Trintignant with a red scarf around his neck—could she have invented him entirely? In any case, Polina had a sticky question for him about Swedenborg that it now appeared would go permanently unanswered.

  Here in the new home, sitting on the flying carpet, Polina knows she has finally found a suitable audience, an audience who won’t initiate any brazen, erotic merrymaking before her eyes, who won’t retreat into the washroom or disappear without a trace because of an unlucky terrorist attack. Polina knows she could try anything, so she decides to give it her best. She tosses out a slightly more precise sentence than before: My name is Polina Yurievna Solovyeva, and I am an alcoholic. After the final word she snaps her mouth shut in satisfaction, like a cat who’s just licked the last drop of cream from a plate. She just didn’t lick her lips.

  Oh, the confusion her confession arouses! Everyone is as quiet as a mouse. They stare, appearing to wait for her to continue. Polina, who sprawls imposing and lumpy next to trim, thin-legged Maimuna, knows that her moment has come. She has taken control of the situation. Soon every one of these women will be eating out of her hand.

  The silence continues. Polina surrenders to the pleasure of savoring a moment of a sort no one had ever really allowed her before, so quick people were to trade words, first one sentence, soon another, and instantly a third, regardless of the content, just so long as the speech continued and a wicked glint remained in their eyes. But here Polina makes a mistake. She hasn’t given a moment’s thought to how her story will continue, to what she actually wants to say. That she liked drinking wine, cognac, and liqueur at home in the evening?

  Polina’s silence has unpredictable consequences. There are silences, and then there are silences. This silence, which gradually spread through space like fire, was of the latter sort. It destroyed the nub of her story, burning it to ashes, despite how appetizing the subject was. Too late Polina realizes that the pleasure of expectation cannot be dragged on forever.

  Here on the other side, however, measuring the length of silences is impossible. A minute or a year—who is to know? When nothing around changes, when the sun doesn’t rise or fall, when nothing within any of them moves or makes a sound, when no heartbeat counts pace and no breathing raises their chests, what would they do with time? There is no such thing. It is only a word. A stomach complaining of hunger is a clock. A pulse is a clock. Pain is a clock. Now everything else is gone, everything except words. Conversation, no matter how clumsy it is, no matter how loaded with misunderstanding, maintains time, nurturing them, helping them remain people in some incomprehensible way. Talking, prattling, even arguing: it isn’t a question of entertainment. Words offer them safe chains, something to keep them afloat, causes and effects, although not yesterdays or tomorrows, which have become meaningless expressions, but continuums, continuums all the same: that is what speech gives them. The evergreen groves of memory, from which they can draw both the feeling of the past and the expectation of the future. And if anyone can’t keep up, at least she has the melodies: Shlomith’s deep, somewhat hoarse tones; Ulrike’s bright, sharp voice; Polina’s squeaky, nasal speech; Nina’s soft, slightly childish elocution; and Maimuna’s eager, gushing, and quickly ebbing energy.

  Why doesn’t anyone ask Polina anything?

  Polina, what triggered your need to drink?

  How much did you really drink?

  When did you realize drinking is a problem for you?

  Did you lose your job?

  Did you die of drink?

  Silence, this particular silence, is eerie, although no one except Polina seems to notice it. Apparently the others think there is something arresting in this silence, in these mute, dead calm moments that have escaped the orbit of time. Something they want to throw themselves into, despite the fact that with a few small follow-up questions they could turn all of this into the best, most realistic, most tragic, and gut-wrenching story ever told here.

  So is the issue, once again, with Polina? Had Polina’s opening, even in these conditions, been too heavy, too dumbfounding?

  Polina lets her gaze move from one woman to the next. Wlibgis dozing under her wig, Maimuna hidden under the arm of the sable fur, Nina nodding behind her mound of flesh, Shlomith meditating in the lotus position, Ulrike lying on her side . . . How impolite they are! Good manners mean saying something, even just sighing sympathetically, when someone offers up a confession like this. It is downright indecent that they have all gone silent at once like this, with their eyes closed no less!

  Polina feels a familiar gate begin to open. How, with trembling legs, offense shoves its muzzle through the hole, pushes it wide open, and, shaking its numb limbs, joyfully strides onto the flat spring pasture. This isn’t about her alcoholism. This is, once again, about her in persona! A beautiful woman can lob whatever sleaze she wants into the world. “I’m Ulrike from Salzburg, and I’ve been mainlining heroin for five years.” People want to listen to beautiful women, without exception. “I’m Maimuna from Senegal, and I’ve been selling my body since I was sixteen years old.” For the first time in this otherworldly emptiness, a feeling resembling bitterness flickers within Polina. For Ulrike and Maimuna everything is still possible. Even death hasn’t made them equal.

  Death.

  Death?

  Shlomith, Wlibgis, Nina, Ulrike, and Maimuna are all strangely frozen, unusually absent. What if it isn’t that this has anything to do with her, with Polina? Could this all, somehow, be about something much, much more . . . fatal? And what if the women are traveling right now? If their souls have gone wandering? And soon they’ll be gone entirely—like Rosa Imaculada!

  Polina makes a lightning-fast decision. She doesn’t want to be alone. She closes her eyes. Not lightly but squeezes shut hard, because instinct tells her to keep them open. But what does she care about instinct? She wants to be where the others are. She doesn’t want to be left to watch them disappear!

  Then something begins to appear on Polina’s closed eyelids that deviates from the normal light-gray opacity. It is a yellow color, as if the sun had risen. As if light were coming from somewhere, as if day had dawned, as if summer had begun within her eyes. If you place your hands cupped over your closed eyes, if you turn toward a bright light and then drop your hands, you can get some sense of what began to happen on Polina’s eyelids. When your closed eyelids are turned toward the bright light, at first a yellow glimmer appears, then red splotches, then small, black, oily moving circles. Or even more peculiar things if you rub your eyes. (Eye doctors always warn against this: “Don’t rub your eyes! You can do permanent damage!” But they never tell you what can happen. What would break, what could never be made whole again? In fact, the eye doctors are lying. Eyes are made of exceptionally flexible material: you can even poke your fingers in an attacker’s eyes—this is one of the first self-defense techniques women learn—and you won’t end up in court because your attacker’s injured eye will be sure to heal. Unfortunately. Your attacker will still be able to watch his future victims: you, your sister, your mother, your daughter, your best friend; your attacker will stil
l be able to follow the next woman he chooses and wait for her to reach the darkest part of the underpass . . . wait for the moment when you are, when your sister is, when your mother, your daughter, or your best friend is most vulnerable . . . And then: the attack: the assault: the rape: remember the perpetrator’s eyes then!) If, despite your doctor’s warnings, you still decide to rub your eyes, it’s possible to see almost anything: a sunny yellow that thickens to orange and blood red, great, dark, moving blobs; Rorschach blots, thunderclouds and lightning. Wasp nests, helium balloons released into the air. Rainbows. Tremulous bullets. Gyrating hex nuts. The entire universe, your worst nightmares, all on the safety of your very own eyelid silver screen!

  To Polina’s surprise, the bright yellow begins to crumble after blazing momentarily. Like a smashed mirror in slow motion. Broken shards billow about as if they’ve been shaken hard in a closed box, zigzag, zigzag, and then they begin to settle, to settle like powder.

  Suddenly Polina feels as if someone has pulled the rug from beneath her feet. As if something has turned upside down under her. Or is she herself hurtling toward something, toward . . . grains of sand? Is she lying on her face in sand?

  Polina begins to make out bulges and hollows, wind-formed waves, dunes. She lifts her head a little more and sees a vast expanse of sand shimmering in the heat, which should burn her cheeks, her hands, her chest, her stomach, her thighs. Cautiously, as if testing whether her vertebrae work, she begins to turn her head to the left. She doesn’t feel her neck move but, led by some unknown force, she finds her gaze focusing to the side, up and back.

  At that moment the whining of a motor begins to reach Polina’s ears, as though someone had pressed the volume button of a muted television set. She notices a beat-up jeep stuck in the sand behind her. The vehicle’s tires spin as the engine revs. It howls, then croaks, then gathering strength again it utters another tortured howl.

  Polina gets up on her knees. Next to the jeep stand men with rifles, scarves covering their faces and shoulders tense with rage. Two men crouch on the ground, hands clasped behind their heads. Before them lies Maimuna, with her familiar yellow dress rolled up to her buttocks. Five buckskin belts are spread out on the sand. One of the men wearing a scarf has the barrel of his rifle buried in the curls of Maimuna’s hair.

  It is like a pose. The press photo of the year.

  And then. The women! Wlibgis, Shlomith, Nina, Ulrike, and—Rosa Imaculada! And Maimuna! Maimuna too, not just on the ground, her dress rolled up, but also in the air, once again in her underwear! All are in their panties except Rosa, lucky Rosa in her modest clothes, her magenta pique shirt and beige shorts. There they stand, next to the jeep, like any old guardian angels. They stand but don’t stand. They float a few dozen centimeters above the surface of the ground, a little crooked, swaying somewhere around the rear bumper at the level of the exhaust pipe. They are somehow disconnected from the image, as if under cellophane, flickering, without any depth.

  Rosa Imaculada begins to gesture eagerly at Polina. Nina gives an embarrassed smile, Ulrike looks tense, and Shlomith seems to tap her foot impatiently. Wlibgis leans on the spare tire bolted to the back of the jeep, though without touching it. The Maimuna in the air is calm. The Maimuna in the air looks at the Maimuna on the ground.

  Polina feels a desire to join the others. She stands up, already seeing herself as a continuation of the line, next to Rosa, who stands farthest from the jeep, perhaps even arm-in-arm with the Brazilian . . . And then, and then—what then? What will happen when she stands beside the other women?

  DEATH REHEARSAL NUMBER 2 (ACCORDING TO SWEDENBORG)

  Polina’s eyes snap open. The desert disappears. Once again everything is harsh, shadowless, painfully white. Maimuna still sprawls the way she did a moment ago, face under the sleeve of the sable fur. Wlibgis lies on her back with the wig’s bangs on her forehead. Ulrike, Nina, and Shlomith each sit in their own familiar style in front of her. The women’s eyes are still shut tight, but their mouths are all open a crack. Even Wlibgis has her lips parted.

  Oooon . . .

  Slowly, vibrating like a meditative om-syllable, that frightening word begins to form in the women’s mouths. Soon, it is clear, they will all disappear. They will move, in one way or another, perhaps in stages like Rosa, perhaps all at once, to the desert by the jeep to escort Maimuna over the frontier, to witness Maimuna’s death. All except her, Polina Yurievna Solovyeva. She isn’t going anywhere!

  As the R is rolling on the women’s tongues, Polina opens her mouth and screams, screams as only a person can scream when the train hurtling at her has to be stopped, or an airplane rushing at the ground has to be lifted back into flight; like you have to scream to wake up from the nightmare, when bullets whistling through the air have to be forced to change direction. Polina screams the scream of a person falling, a wordless, rising cry. She wants to stop death. It can’t be Maimuna’s time yet!

  Polina’s scream has an effect. The dormant women’s eyes snap open like automatons that have been recently serviced, almost at exactly the same time, right after hearing her voice. They seem astonished, maybe even a little startled, all except Maimuna, who lifts her head from under the sleeve of the fur and looks annoyed, perhaps even angry. Quickly she shuts her eyes again in protest, but Polina doesn’t care. She has just saved the ingrate from certain destruction! At least she has postponed the girl’s final moments, if that’s what this is about, if a person really can die twice.

  Wild thoughts besiege Polina’s mind. What would Swedenborg, with his obsession with visions of heaven, say about all of this? If only the professor from Nantes, her very own Jean-Louis Trintignant, had been her companion for longer!

  Listen up, ladies! Once there was a mystic . . . Polina begins, because she wants to put the world back on track, and the best way to do that is by talking. The possibility that by opening her eyes and shouting she has prevented something important, perhaps even essential from happening, didn’t even cross her mind. Swedenborg now leads Polina like a ram on a rope, and she spares not a thought for the possibility that her act might have slowed some sort of progression.

  Polina didn’t allow questions of this kind into her mind. As perspicacious as she was, she succeeded surprisingly often in avoiding what was most essential; in losing track of the crux of what she had been on the cusp of discovering, of what could have begun leading her to the light. She circled her prey, peeling the onion layer by layer, but then something would happen in the heat of the moment and she would get lost, straying into detours she took for shortcuts.

  Alcohol could have played a role. Polina, if anyone, should have known that in the final analysis, truth is a very simple thing. She wouldn’t have needed to search for it in all those hundreds of books if she had had the patience to take a moment to focus, for example, on her cat, if she had abandoned herself with all her heart to playing with it for a while. Then she would have learned indispensable things. But Begemot was left to purr his deep secrets alone. His mistress certainly cooed at him but was probably speaking more to herself than her cat. When she stroked her pet, she was really stroking and nurturing herself. Begemot was terribly dear to Polina, as warm as cognac, as homey as liqueur, as irresistible as a medium-dry Shampanskoye. He was a sweet fellow, but he could have been so much more: a four-legged lesson on the Essential Things of Life. If Polina had stopped to listen occasionally to what Begemot had to tell her, she could have poured her drink down the drain and remained in the book of the living a little longer.

  “Listen up! Once upon a time there was a mystic who was also sometimes called a philosopher,” Polina says in her squeaky voice after clearing her throat. “He described the afterlife in a way that slightly resembles where we are now. Yes, well. Ehem.” Polina pauses, confused. She has thrown out the hook, and the bait dangles on said hook, this, their so-called situation. The women sharpen up, becoming more alert, just as she had anticipated. Well, they aren’t quite licking their lips with excitem
ent, but a feeling of expectation is palpable. With a cough, Polina opens her throat and lets the words flow.

  “Emanuel Swedenborg, a wise, mad penitent, lived a respectably long life for his age, in total eighty-four years. He was, depending on one’s perspective, a mystic, a philosopher, or an occultist; an eccentric, an epileptic, or an erotomaniac; a hypochondriac, hysterical, or schizophrenic; the Great Dreamer, a flatulist, or, in Balzac’s words, the Buddha of the North—a beloved child has many names. This baroque, rambling character was born in 1688 in Stockholm and died in London in March of 1772. As an amusing detail let it be mentioned that Swedenborg’s skull, like the skull of Descartes before him, was lost for a short time subsequent to his death. The skull was found, don’t ask me where, and the earthly remains of the mystic were moved in 1908, with much ceremony, to his final resting place in Uppsala Cathedral.

  “Before we move on to the actual subject, i.e. Swedenborg’s visions of heaven, which are the main topic of our lesson, we ought to review a few facts. The reputation of Emanuel Swedenborg is, undeniably, dubious. Following his death, the poor man was left to the mercy of many stripes of lunatic: somnambulists, mesmerists, illuminati; practitioners of animal magnetism, Rosicrucians, alchemists, and kabbalists . . . And let us not forget the Freemasons. Even though he was a scientist. Who, in truth, it must be admitted, didn’t care much for the empirical and preferred to socialize with angels. That was more or less how he described his own field in the preface to one of his latter works, Arcana Caelestia . . . ”