Shootik

by Aleksya Sokol

  She worked at home part of the time. In her small apartment, her working place was everywhere, not only at her desk. That was how she liked it most, sitting at the kitchen table reading her post, lying in the bath following her thoughts, cutting the vegetables and suddenly dropping the job to pick up a piece of paper to make a note. She needed this freedom and the flexibility of her working hours to be creative. At a regular job in an office she would feel pressed down, caught. Nevertheless, she enjoyed the weekly meetings with the rest of the staff and her boss at the publisher’s place. In fact, she looked forward to them, bringing her own stuff, bringing it into discussion, prepared at the same time to have some bits and pieces cut out of it or slightly modified in the end by the editor, to fit the tone of the magazine, as he said, and not to disturb too much the faithful readers who paid their subscriptions.

  Anna-Solveig was at peace with the way her contributions were received; with respect, interest and critical examination, from which she also profited. Rarely could she express her views in a totally uncensored manner. At peace with that, she reserved them for private writing, a kind she practiced as artistry; not to please anybody and not having to fit anywhere.

  She remembered how she came to work for this publisher. How it all happened by itself…According to the calendar, it was seven years ago. She had left Jurij…by simply not returning to the boat. She stayed away in this city in which he had business to attend, leaving him a note of farewell. Don’t wait for me, it said, I am gone. That was it. After more than a…lifetime! So it felt. They had been together since adolescence, he only one year older than she. Now, in her early forties, she saw it as though it were a film. A film starting with their journey on the river, the journey into life, as they called it. Leaving behind the place where it appeared to have been destined for them to meet. Both of them not being natives of that place, the village, it turned out to be a welcome refuge for the rest of their childhood years and the beginning of their youthful life dreams. Then came the World War.

  War makes all things new…by destroying all connections, all links with what has been…Solveig thought now, as she was brewing her coffee. It was weekend, time on her schedule for this kind of thought, which she had neither to justify nor explain to anybody. The new was not necessarily the better, this slogan being carelessly used in advertisements. New life…Had they not also tried to begin it, Jurij and she, so many times? A new boat included. It was a beautiful yacht, the one she had walked out of seven years ago, never to return. She sipped her coffee as though she were sipping her memories of that time, letting them appear in full size on the screen of her mind. She had only her handbag and some money in it when she left. To take a suitcase with clothes and other belongings would not have been possible without causing a disturbance. Besides, she did not want to take anything material with her which had been part of his lifestyle. Not hers. He would trust her to be back before dark from her shopping in the city. Back as usual. Not this time, however.

  The first thing she did when she was on firm ground was to buy a newspaper. To look for a place to live and for a job. She found the job before she had a place to live!

  Solveig walked out into the spring air on her balcony to look at the surroundings. From the top floor on which she lived, she could see the turning of the road and the bridge which led into the street where the publisher’s office was situated. A little bit more of a turning and she would be able to see the roof of the house, an old three-floored house, in a street called the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam.

  She had studied the ads page for quite some time, trying to make some sense of the Dutch language, thinking at the same time of the kind of job she might be capable of doing. What could she do? She had no profession. Sitting at an outside table of a small café, she kept on reading the advertisements. Then she came across one written in English. A small publishing company…Before she finished reading what it might be looking for, Solveig knew what she could do: write! She tore the ad from the paper, called the waiter in order to pay for her coffee and asked him if he knew where that street was: Prinsengracht. The waiter knew it well and he also spoke enough of English to give her the right directions. Sooner as soon off she was.

  And now, seven years later, she saw it all happening: ringing the bell, the door sprang open and she walked through a long corridor towards voices which came from a room on the right. It was a mixture of reception and lounge, with glass doors opening on to a courtyard full of plants. Somehow it felt right from the beginning. A woman came towards her with a smile on her face and what happened next…just happened, effortlessly. She showed the advertisement.

  "Oh yes," said the woman, “come in, take a seat!”

  She pointed to a couch and a small group of people sitting in a sort of circle, chatting. Coffee was offered and a tin of biscuits was passed around. Then a man came in, in his fifties, must be the boss, she thought, sat beside her and asked where she came from.

  Where she came from? Oh dear! Copenhagen was the last place they had stayed…and before that, Stockholm…Oslo…So many places.

  “Copenhagen,” she responded.

  "Are you Danish?" the man asked.

  "Norwegian," she responded.

  “And, your name?”

  “Solveig.”

  “Solveig…?”

  “Yes.” It appeared to be sufficient.

  “Well, what do you do, Solveig?”

  “I…write.”

  “That’s good,” the man said and his eyes sparkled with a real smile. “We like people who write, don’t we?”

  He looked into the circle, fishing another biscuit out of the tin.

  “What do you write then?”

  “I…Eh…write children’s stories, fairy-tales and so on…” Who was suggesting this to her?

  “Very well then, how about you bringing me one of your stories one of these days and then we’ll talk further?”

  This was a now or never decision, which she had to take at that particular moment, knowing that it would never come back.

  “Could I write it right now…and here, I mean…if you just give me some paper…?”

  With amazement in his eyes, the man beckoned to a woman from the group and asked her to provide paper, a place to write, and a typewriter, he added, if she needed it.

  Once upon a time…she started writing, putting a pen to paper, not using the typewriter, and a story came flowing from somewhere through her hand to her pen, sequence after sequence, in an endless series of images composing themselves into words…

  It was late afternoon when she finished it. Half in trance, still under the influence of her own writing experience, she handed the sheets of paper to the woman who had stayed behind in the office, obviously to see her out. The rest of the people had gone without her noticing it, immersed as she had been in her writing. Having delivered the sheets of paper into the hands of the nice looking woman, the same who had greeted her when she came into this room, Solveig was prepared to leave, turning already towards the door. She was still half-way in that other place, from which the story came, when she heard being asked where they could reach her; her address and telephone number? This question brought her back to ordinary reality. She had no address yet and it would be unwise to say so.

  “May I call you, please?” she asked, "I may not be easily reachable for the next few days."

  “Okay, my name is Hannah, you can call me at this number.” The lady smiled and gave her a business card.

  That was it. Enough for a day. Now find yourself a place to overnight in the first place, Solveig said to herself as she was walking back – back to where? – Over the same bridge which she had crossed on her way to that address.

  The bridge. A valid metaphor for the step she had taken. Standing on the balcony of her apartment now, she also recalled how all took its course, as if it were guided by the invisible hand of destiny after the first night spent in a cheap hotel in this city, a place so very different from the luxurious accommodati
on on Jurij’s boat. The receptionist, a young man with an Indonesian face, measured her up suspiciously when she asked for a single room. No luggage, not even a coat, but expensive clothes and shoes…this, of course, was intriguing. They, however, must have been used to ‘ladies’ being on their own in that part of the city, and when she took out her purse to pay for the night in advance, the young man smiled and handed her a key.

  The night was anything but comfortable and on the next day, a warm, sunny day fortunately, the same expensive outfit, still in good condition, paid off, when she rang another bell of a tiny furnished apartment for rent which was announced in the paper. The proprietor, a huge Dutchman, who lived in the same building, had no doubts about her credibility. Her personal luggage would come in a day or two, she assured him, it would be shipped from…Copenhagen! The place was an attic with a built-in kitchenette and a bathroom, but the view out of the windows on both sides was fantastic. She had a new home! The next day she called the publisher and got an appointment to see him. Her story, he told her, was scheduled for publishing in one of the next issues of the magazine. And she had a job!

  From nothing comes nothing, it’s said…but the nothing which she had faced when leaving the boat was different. It had come from leaving everything behind. She had to change her name too, at least for publication purposes. Solveig must appear nowhere, she decided. Then it came as if it were ordered: a column entitled Write to Anna, the publisher inviting her to take over that name. This pleased her to no end. Anna was her mother’s first name, a good omen! It would be her pen-name.

  Anna felt down-to-earth and that was all she needed to deal with her new reality: living in a city. She liked being in a city and with firm ground under her feet. A city has place for everything and for everybody. It does not matter where you come from or what you have come to do. A city is quite generous, really. It is not just an agglomeration of buildings in a network of streets and avenues. It is a being, a real thing. The soul of a city can be felt. A city has a beating heart too. It is a place where everything grows, expands, breathes, produces…

  Now she remembered another city to which the bus brought them after their leaving the village. It was not difficult to find a small apartment for rent. Two nice young people, the owner thought. Just married, as he was told and with jobs already in view, they told him. Paying two month’s rent in advance, the formalities were soon completed and they could move in. So easy…she thought, here they were, in their first home.

  There were some things she did not like to remember, but they kept coming up. Also in stories she wrote. Disguised, of course, each story had a part of her personal experience in it. Could it be different? Could one be objective at all? Write about a thing in itself as though it had nothing to do with oneself? Sometimes, it felt as though the words were just coming through her. Effortlessly. Like that first story she produced for the publisher, her employer now. Once upon a time…it started, there were a boy and a girl, who lived in a paradise…

  Storytelling was about making it real. Happening now. And making things complete. It was not the end of a story which mattered. There was no end to real stories…those which run through people’s lives. Therefore, their end was open and not to be measured by the passage of time. The boy and the girl who once were there…and young, were also here…where they were getting older. And they were also somewhere else, there…where age had neither face nor meaning. They were eternal, just passing by in this ephemeral world.

  Altered states of consciousness are experiences beyond all ordinary measures of time. They take you into timeless spaces which cancel, in retrospect, any belief in things happening one after another, in a sequence of cause and effect. Pulled into such a state, the rational mind loses its orientation. Or it finds itself among a variety of events still happening, which on the level of historical time, may have long since passed. In non-material fields, the reality of who you are falls apart, or expands into a much larger dimension of being.

  On material level Solveig was of Norwegian birth. She lost her mother when she was seven. In the end her grandparents took her to live with them in their bungalow in the village. There she met Jurij, a boy of Slavic/Swedish origin, a fact which saved his life during the World War. He had been brought to live with his father’s sister, a matron who took care of him when his parents divorced. Jurij, aged thirteen, and Solveig, twelve, two adolescents joined by the loss they suffered, summoned to write a different chapter of life for which the loss itself was creating a space. Two young people yet to be initiated into navigating the river of life.

  On the metaphorical level, Solveig saw this quite clearly now: the river is the moving life force within one’s being. The vessel, one has to build oneself.

  As fictitious as all characters in the stories she wrote were said to be, they were all recognisable figures in the fields of life’s affairs. None could be dismissed, since each of them had its role and task to be fulfilled. People must find this out by and through their own experience. There is no other way. Also the fact that each person is instrumental for the other, in manifold and often mysterious ways.

  Third Picture

  This time Shootik crept out of an intricate shell, which suddenly appeared on the Old Man’s desk. Stretching his limbs, he pointed with his finger at this natural work of art and asked:

  “What do you think of this?”

  “This what?”

  “This thing!”

  “It’s a shell.”

  “Who made it?”

  “You could call them superior powers, nature or gods if you like…”

  “What’s the difference between this thing, a shell as you call it, and other kinds of things which people make? Are people also gods?”

  “The difference is…that material things are inanimate objects whilst people, well, some people at least, are alive.”

  A material thing is an end-product and as such already sentenced to death, the Old Man thought to himself. It cannot develop itself further because it is not aware of itself. “People are potential creators,” he continued, “gifted with capacities to deal with life as it confronts them. They can give every state or condition a different quality and influence the course of events. With these capacities they have a kind of superiority in relation to nature. With these capacities they can play the way they like.”

  “Play?”

  “Yes play, in a good or an evil way. The superior powers, we may call them gods, may have accepted the risk that human creatures can do a lot of damage to nature and all things created.” He paused to look at the shell.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “This what?”

  “This shell.”

  “From nowhere. I just thought it…!”

  Staretz shook his head: “I should have known, of course!”

  “If people can think things into existence, why can’t I? Inanimate, you say? Just watch it!”

  Slowly, the shell moved itself, changing position.

  “Things are not what we think they are, and we want them to be what they are not…” The Old Man’s thoughts flew far away into his past.

  Chapter 3

  A Turning Point

  Jurij changed from the moment he met a VIP who called himself A. “Just A,” he said. A was at the head of the Green Dolphin Enterprise, a branch of a larger multi-levelled corporation, operating in the pharmacological industrial fields.

  A was a businessman and that was how he liked to be called. Just A. Solveig found this odd but did not ask further. Jurij was to be a salesman. Of what? Oh…there would be quite a lot of things, he was told, mainly equipment, medical equipment, high-tech, latest developments of that branch of industry…To be sold to hospitals and specialised clinics all over the world. That was all the information he gave her on that memorable occasion, she remembered. But how, on what kind of qualification or knowledge, she asked, was he to deal with this? That would be provided, he assured her. Of course, he would need to be trained, and A
would take care of this.

  He did. Jurij was often away, a couple of days in the beginning, later for longer periods. On a course or a seminar, as he said. And then there were A’s women, his assistants, and Jurij’s colleagues. They were called Syl, Mag and Barb, abbreviations of their real names: Sylvia, Margaret and Barbara. Jurij’s training started with these ladies instructing him and then he had to be away for several days, somewhere. On returning from one of such events, he announced with a bright smile that things were going the right way, and now they could afford to buy whatever they needed and soon move into another house. Soon came sooner than Solveig had imagined, and the spacious apartment he took her to visit, in a nobler district as he described it, had in fact a lot of space to be filled, as it was in no time, with expensive furniture. Paid by the company, Jurij informed her, as an investment in their joint future.

  A joint future…Solveig still had no clear idea about what kind it was supposed to be. The next thing was her wardrobe, which needed to be adjusted, Jurij said. They would be receiving some very important people from time to time, and therefore, she needed to be more fashionable. A’s recommendations, he added, and a courtesy from him: a credit card issued in her name. She could choose what she liked, irrespective of the price. Frequent visitors in their new home were the three sisters as she named them, Barb, Mag and Syl. Barb, who seemed to be in a leading position, used to appear at short notice and stay for a day. She travelled a lot. Jurij collected her from the train-station or the airport. Then there was quite a lot of talking in his home-office, their voices mingled with the computer’s typical noises. Talking business. All confidential, of course. Solveig knew that it was nothing for her to be concerned with. It was only at the end of the third year of these activities that she paused on the many whys.