by Неизвестный
When I was a little girl, I never believed there was such a thing as foreign water, for I had always thought of the globe as a sphere of water with all sorts of small and large islands swimming on it. Water had to be the same everywhere. Sometimes in sleep I heard the murmur of the water that flowed beneath the main island of Japan. The border surrounding the island was also made of water that ceaselessly beat against the shore in waves. How can one say where the place of foreign water begins when the border itself is water?
2
The crews of three Russian ships stood in uniform on the upper deck playing a farewell march whose unfamiliar solemnity all at once stirred up the oddest feelings in me. I, too, stood on the upper deck, like a theatergoer who has mistakenly stepped onstage, for my eyes were still watching me from among the crowd on the dock, while I myself stood blind and helpless on the ship. Other passengers threw long paper snakes in various colors toward the dock. The red streamers turned midair into umbilical cords—one last link between the passengers and their loved ones. The green streamers became serpents and proclaimed their warning, which would probably only be forgotten on the way, anyhow. I tossed one of the white streamers into the air. It became my memory. The crowd slowly withdrew, the music faded, and the sky grew larger behind the mainland. The moment my paper snake disintegrated, my memory ceased to function. This is why I no longer remember anything of this journey. The fifty hours aboard the ship to the harbor town in Eastern Siberia, followed by the hundred and sixty hours it took to reach Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, have become a blank space in my life which can be replaced only by a written account of my journey.
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Diary excerpt:
The ship followed the coastline northward. Soon it was dark, but many passengers still sat on the upper deck. In the distance one could see the lights of smaller ships. “The fishermen are fishing for squid,” a voice said behind me. “I don’t like squid. When I was little, we had squid for supper every third night. What about you?” another voice asked. “Yes,” a third one responded, “I ate them all the time too. I always imagined they were descended from monsters!” “Where did you grow up?” the first voice asked.
Voices murmured all around me, tendrils gradually entwining. On board such a ship, everyone begins putting together a brief autobiography, as though he might otherwise forget who he is.
“Where are you going?” the person sitting next to me asked. “I’m on my way to Moscow.” He stared at me in surprise. “My parents spoke of this city so often I wanted to see it with my own eyes!” Had my parents really talked about Moscow? On board such a ship, everyone begins to lie. The man was looking so horrified I had to say something else right away. “Actually I’m not so interested in Moscow itself, but I want to have experienced Siberia!” “What do you want to experience in Siberia?” he asked, “What is there in Siberia?” “I don’t know yet. Maybe nothing to speak of. But the important thing for me is traveling through Siberia!” The longer I spoke, the more unsure of myself I became. He went to sit beside another passenger, leaving me alone with the transparent word through.
4
A few months before I set off on my journey, I was working evenings after school in a food processing factory. A poster advertising a trip to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railroad transformed the immeasurably long distance to Europe into a finite sum of money.
In the factory, the air was kept at a very low temperature so the meat wouldn’t go bad. I stood in this cold, which I referred to as “Siberian frost,” wrapping frozen poultry in plastic. Beside the table stood a bucket of hot water in which I could warm my hands at intervals.
Once three frozen chickens appeared in my dreams. I watched my mother place them in the frying pan. When the pan was hot, they suddenly came to life and flew out the kitchen window. “No wonder we never have enough to eat,” I said with such viciousness even I was shocked. “What am I supposed to do?” my mother asked, weeping.
Besides earning money, there were two other things I wanted to do before my departure: learn Russian and write an account of the journey. I always wrote a travel narrative before I set off on a trip, so that during the journey I’d have something to quote from. I was often speechless when I traveled. This time it was particularly useful that I’d written my report beforehand. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have known what to say about Siberia. Of course, I might have quoted from my diary, but I have to admit that I made up the diary afterward, having neglected to keep one during the journey.
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Excerpt from my first travel narrative:
Our ship left the Pacific and entered the Sea of Japan, which separates Japan from Eurasia. Since the remains of Siberian mammoths were discovered in Japan, there have been claims that a land bridge once linked Japan and Siberia. Presumably human beings also crossed from Siberia to Japan. In other words, Japan was once part of Siberia.
In the Atlas of the World in the ship’s library I looked up Japan, this child of Siberia that had turned its back on its mother and was now swimming alone in the Pacific. Its body resembled that of a seahorse, which in Japanese is called tatsu-no-otoshigo—the lost child of the dragon.
Next to the library was the dining room, which was always empty during the day. The ship rolled on the stormy seas, and the passengers stayed in bed. I stood alone in the dining room, watching plates on the table slide back and forth without being touched. All at once I realized I had been expecting this stormy day for years, since I was a child.
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Something I told a woman three years after the journey:
At school we often had to write essays, and sometimes these included “dream descriptions.” Once I wrote about the dream in which my father had red skin.
My father comes from a family of merchants in Osaka. After World War II, he came to Tokyo with all he owned: a bundle containing, among other things, an alarm clock. This clock, which he called the “Rooster of the Revolution,” soon stopped running, but as a result, it showed the correct time twice each day, an hour that had to be returned to twice a day anyhow. “Time runs on its own, you don’t need an alarm clock for that,” he always said in defense of his broken clock, “and when the time comes, the city will be so filled with voices of the oppressed that no one will be able to hear a clock ring any longer.”
His reasons for leaving the land of his birth he always explained to his relatives in a hostile tone: “Because he was infected with the Red Plague.” These words always made me think of red, inflamed skin.
A huge square, crowds of people strolling about. Some of them had white hair, others green or gold, but all of them had red skin. When I looked closer, I saw that their skin was not inflamed but rather inscribed with red script. I was unable to read the text. No, it wasn’t a text at all but consisted of many calendars written on top of each other. I saw numberless stars in the sky. At the tip of the tower, the Fire Bird sat observing the motion in the square.
This must have been “Moscow,” I wrote in my essay, which my teacher praised without realizing I had invented the dream. But then what dream is not invented?
Later I learned that for a number of leftists in Western Europe this city had a different name: Peking.
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Diary excerpt:
The ship arrived in the harbor of the small Eastern Siberian town Nachodka. The earth seemed to sway beneath my feet. No sooner had I felt the sensation of having put a border, the sea, behind me than I glimpsed the beginning of the train tracks that stretched for ten thousand kilometers.
That night I boarded the train. I sat down in a four-bed compartment where I was soon joined by two Russians. The woman, Masha, offered me pickled mushrooms and told me she was on her way to visit her mother in Moscow. “Ever since I got married and moved to Nachodka, my mother has been behind Siberia,” she said. Siberia, then, is the border between here and there, I thought, such a wide border!
I lay down on the bed on my belly and gazed out the window. Above the outline
s of thousands of birches I saw numberless stars that seemed about to tumble down. I took out my pocket notebook and wrote:
When I was a baby, I slept in a Mexican hammock. My parents had bought the hammock not because they found it romantic, but because the apartment was so cramped that there was no room for me except in the air. All there was in the apartment was seven thousand books whose stacks lined the three walls all the way to the ceiling. At night they turned into trees thick with foliage. When a large truck drove past the house, my Mexican hammock swung in the forest. But during the minor earthquakes that frequently shook the house, it remained perfectly still, as though there were an invisible thread connecting it to the subterranean water.
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Diary excerpt:
When the first sun rose over Siberia, I saw an infinitely long row of birches. After breakfast I tried to describe the landscape, but couldn’t. The window with its tiny curtains was like the screen in a movie theater. I sat in the front row, and the picture on the screen was too close and too large. The segment of landscape was repeated, constantly changing, and refused me entry. I picked up a collection of Siberian fairy tales and began to read.
In the afternoon I had tea and gazed out the window again. Birches, nothing but birches. Over my second cup of tea I chatted with Masha, not about the Siberian landscape but about Moscow and Tokyo. Then Masha went to another compartment, and I remained alone at the window. I was bored and began to get sleepy. Soon I was enjoying my boredom. The birches vanished before my eyes, leaving only the again-and-again of their passage, as in an imageless dream.
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Excerpt from my first travel narrative:
Siberia, “the sleeping land” (from the Tartar: sib = sleep, ir = Earth), but it wasn’t asleep. So it really wasn’t at all necessary for the prince to come kiss the Earth awake. (He came from a European fairy tale.) Or did he come to find treasure?
When the Creator of the Universe was distributing treasures on Earth and flew over Siberia, he trembled so violently with cold that his hands grew stiff and the precious stones and metals he held in them fell to the ground. To hide these treasures from Man, he covered Siberia with eternal frost.
It was August, and there was no trace of the cold that had stiffened the Creator’s hands. The Siberian tribes mentioned in my book were also nowhere to be seen, for the Trans-Siberian Railroad traverses only those regions populated by Russians—tracing out a path of conquered territory, a narrow extension of Europe.
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Something I told a woman three years after the journey:
For me, Moscow was always the city where you never arrive. When I was three years old, the Moscow Artists’ Theater performed in Tokyo for the first time. My parents spent half a month’s salary on tickets for Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
When Irina, one of the three sisters, spoke the famous words: “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow . . . ,” her voice pierced my parents’ ears so deeply that these very same words began to leap out of their own mouths as well. The three sisters never got to Moscow, either. The city must have been hidden somewhere backstage. So it wasn’t Siberia, but rather the theater stage that lay between my parents and the city of their dreams.
In any case, my parents, who were often unemployed during this period, occasionally quoted these words. When my father, for example, spoke of his unrealistic plan of founding his own publishing house, my mother would say, laughing, “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow. . . .” My father would say the same thing whenever my mother spoke of her childhood in such a way as though she might be able to become a child again. Naturally, I didn’t understand what they meant. I only sensed that the word had something to do with impossibility. Since the word “Moscow” was always repeated three times, I didn’t even know it was a city and not a magic word.
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Diary excerpt:
I flipped through a brochure the conductor had given me. The photographs showed modern hospitals and schools in Siberia. The train stopped at the big station at Ulan-Ude. For the first time, there were many faces in the train that were not Russian.
I laid the brochure aside and picked up my book.
A fairy tale told among the Tungus:
Once upon a time there was a shaman who awakened all the dead and wouldn’t let even a single person die. This made him stronger than God. So God suggested a contest: by magic words alone, the shaman was to transform two pieces of chicken meat given him by God into live chickens. If the shaman failed, he wouldn’t be stronger than God any longer. The first piece of meat was transformed into a chicken by the magic words and flew away, but not the second one. Ever since, human beings have died. Mostly in hospitals.
Why was the shaman unable to change the second piece of meat into a chicken? Was the second piece somehow different from the first, or did the number two rob the shaman of his power? For some reason, the number two always makes me uneasy.
I also made the acquaintance of a shaman, but not in Siberia; it was much later, in a museum of anthropology in Europe. He stood in a glass case, and his voice came from a tape recorder that was already rather old. For this reason his voice always quavered prodigiously and was louder than a voice from a human body. The microphone is an imitation of the flame that enhances the voice’s magical powers.
Usually, the shamans were able to move freely between the three zones of the world. That is, they could visit both the heavens and the world of the dead just by climbing up and down the World-Tree. My shaman, though, stood not in one of these three zones, but in a fourth one: the museum. The number four deprived him permanently of his power: his face was frozen in an expression of fear, his mouth, half-open, was dry, and in his painted eyes burned no fire.
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Excerpt from my first travel narrative:
In the restaurant car I ate a fish called omul’. Lake Baikal is also home to several other species that actually belong in a saltwater habitat, said a Russian teacher sitting across from me—the Baikal used to be a sea.
But how could there possibly be a sea here, in the middle of the continent? Or is the Baikal a hole in the continent that goes all the way through? That would mean my childish notion about the globe being a sphere of water was right after all. The water of the Baikal, then, would be the surface of the water-sphere. A fish could reach the far side of the sphere by swimming through the water.
And so the omul’ I had eaten swam around inside my body that night, as though it wanted to find a place where its journey could finally come to an end.
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There were once two brothers whose mother, a Russian painter, had emigrated to Tokyo during the Revolution and lived there ever since. On her eightieth birthday she expressed the wish to see her native city, Moscow, once more before she died. Her sons arranged for her visa and accompanied her on her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But when the third sun rose over Siberia, their mother was no longer on the train. The brothers searched for her from first car to last, but they couldn’t find her. The conductor told them the story of an old man who three years earlier, had opened the door of the car, mistaking it for the door to the toilet, and had fallen from the train. The brothers were granted a special visa and traveled the same stretch in the opposite direction on the local train. At each station they got out and asked whether anyone had seen their mother. A month passed without their finding the slightest trace.
I can remember the story up to this point; afterward I must have fallen asleep. My mother often read me stories that filled the space between waking and sleep so completely that, in comparison, the time when I was awake lost much of its color and force. Many years later I found, quite by chance, the continuation of this story in a library.
The old painter lost her memory when she fell from the train. She could remember neither her origins nor her plans. So she remained living in a small village in Siberia that seemed strangely familiar to her. Only at night, when she heard the train coming, did she feel uneasy, and sometimes she even
ran alone through the dark woods to the tracks, as though someone had called to her.
14
As a child, my mother was often ill, just like her own mother, who had spent half her life in bed. My mother grew up in a Buddhist temple in which one could hear, as early as five o’clock in the morning, the prayer that her father, the head priest of the temple, was chanting with his disciples.
One day, as she sat alone under a tree reading a novel, a student who had come to visit the temple approached her and asked whether she always read such thick books. My mother immediately replied that what she’d like best was a novel so long she could never finish it, for she had no other occupation but reading.