Hamilton Stone Review #23
Fiction
Lynda Schor, Fiction Editor
Lori Horvitz
Feminist Christmas Tree Farm
On my thirtieth birthday, a week into my residency at a feminist Christmas tree farm, I asked Amelia and Jane, two other residents, if they wanted to split a dose of "magic" mushrooms a friend had given me. I'd done this sort of thing a handful of times, not for years, but it was my birthday and it was autumn in Upstate New York and I was with two new friends. We mixed the stinky-foot-smelling dried flakes with strawberry yogurt and then walked outside, taking in the leaves trembling crimson on aspen trees. I held out my arms and said, "Look at the sun! Look at the trees, they're saying hello!" Amelia laughed, asked if I was for real. We walked to the pond, located next to the resident quarters and I slithered my body onto a chaise lounge and watched Sue, a poet who had a fondness for fixing Snapper mowers, slink out of the pond. She then placed each leg through an underwear hole as if she rehearsed it a thousand times before for my silent camera. I laughed tears like I never saw anything funnier.
The owner of the farm, a well-known feminist who bought the land with money made from her best-selling book of feminist criticism, asked if we had seen the farm manager. I couldn't speak. Instead, I giggled. Jane stuttered something about seeing the manager in passing. The famous feminist walked away, shaking her head.
The sunny sky darkened. Amelia and Jane disappeared. Alone in a strange place, with strange women drifting in and out of sight, I walked to the back deck of the resident's house, high on mushrooms and sat Indian style in the drizzle. And I cried huge tears, tears that wouldn't stop. For what seemed like hours, I thought about my mother. Four years earlier, she had been killed in a car crash. Since that time, I mourned the loss of a mother I wish I had known better. The mother I remember was off in another world--watching television, out shopping, singing the Israeli National Anthem to Cindy, our black miniature poodle. To make matters worse, at the time of her death, I was backpacking in Italy and no one knew where to find me. When I finally heard the news, my mother had already been eulogized and buried somewhere in New Jersey. I wondered why she had once looked at a silkscreen print I made for her and said, "I would have liked gold hoop earrings instead." Why, when I was a child, she had shopped for carnival glass and trivets in antique stores for hours on end while I cried, pleading for us to get out of those dark, musty shops piled high with ornate armoires and ticking clocks and antiquated dresses worn by women long dead. Why she was afraid to throw anything away--our two-car garage was stacked to the ceiling with newspapers, baby clothes, broken bicycles. Why she'd bring home leftover milk containers from her kindergarten class until our refrigerator and freezer were jammed with them and when I opened the freezer, the parcels fell at my feet like little landmines.
And now it was my thirtieth birthday, and I was alone, weeping, saying to myself, I'm so fucked up. I need to go to therapy. My life is a mess and my mother's dead. Why, now, had her presence loomed so large? I prayed my father wouldn't call to wish me a happy birthday, because then he'd say something about how there was still time to sign up for the postal clerk test, or that I should become a speech pathologist or a psychiatric nurse.
I had read three autobiographical books by the famous feminist and admired her gutsy, honest writing about bisexuality, art and love. So when I learned about her farm, I applied for a residency. In exchange for working five hours a day--trimming trees and painting and mowing--residents received free room and board and time to work on their own creative projects. Before leaving for the farm, I sublet my New York apartment for six weeks and boarded a train en route to an idyllic wonderland full of smart women and sweet-smelling balsams, a place where Simone de Beauvior had visited before she died, a place where I could write poetry. Yet after working in the fields for five hours each day, I didn't have much energy to write. But I did learn about astrology from Amelia, a recent Harvard graduate. She made Japanese lanterns from thick paper, thin pieces of wood and watercolors. At times Amelia made me nervous, in a good way, when she stared at me for a second too long, or touched my shoulder when she talked to me. Maybe she liked me. Like that. I wasn't sure if I liked her back, like that, but I did like the attention.
One night I told her about my mother, so she deliberated upon my mother's astrological chart, calculating years and moons and suns and seventh houses. At last she jerked her head up and looked me in the eye. "It makes sense," she said. "She was meant to die when she did." She caressed small circles on my back. I didn't want her to stop.
On the first night of my residency, after a dinner of steak and potatoes and wine, I sat in on a conversation between Amelia and Jane, a striking Italian-Chinese Columbia University graduate who brought her husky named Sacco.
"Where did you go to school?" Jane asked me.
I told them about the small state school I attended, located just north of Manhattan.
"Never heard of it," Amelia said.
They continued their conversation about Ivy League schools and social registers. About Ivy League friends they might have had in common. Never fully conscious of class difference before, I felt intrigued by these Ivy Leaguers, and at the same time, shunned for being a middle-class kid from Long Island whose parents weren't fancy lawyers and doctors but schoolteachers who taught in Queens.
Two weeks into the farm experience, Amelia rode her Snapper mower up to mine. Over the rumbling engines, she screamed, "Do you have any water?"
I turned my Snapper off and handed her my bottle.
She swigged the water, looked at me, turned her Snapper off and handed the bottle back. "I have a crush on you," she said.
A gnat buzzed around my head. The idea of a relationship with Amelia terrified me.
I said, "I like you too. But I think we need to keep this a friendship."
"Okay," Amelia said. She started up her Snapper. We both drove off into the midday fields to mow lush green pastures.
With short dark hair and perfect posture, Amelia had a presidential wife's aura like Jackie Kennedy, the type of girl every Ivy League mother would love her son to bring home for Thanksgiving. But she never had a girlfriend and I didn't want to be her experiment. Then again, maybe I was my own experiment since secretly I yearned to be swept off of my feet by a man. Or maybe that's what I thought I should do. It had been five years since I'd even kissed a man.
Back on the porch, still high on mushrooms, I wondered if my mother would approve of my relationships with women. She came of age in the fifties and went to Hunter College for art, where she studied with the abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell. In one photo I have, she's with a gaggle of women friends in the college cafeteria, smiling, a natural smile, a sketchpad and milk container on the table in front of her. In a later photo I took, she's sitting next to my father, the black poodle on her lap. Her smile is fake, strained.
My mother and I had one thing in common--our love of travel. But we traveled differently--I'd get a standby flight and roam foreign territories without a plan she signed on for seven or ten-day package deals. With great reluctance, my father accompanied her. And every time they returned, he said, "The woman is wild. Always running. Clomping like a horse."
Instead of pursuing the life of an artist and rebel like the famous feminist, my Brooklyn born and bred mother got married, gave up her art, had four children, moved to the suburbs. Depression set in. She wasn't part of any consciousness-raising groups, but she was active with Hadassah and ORT, two Jewish women's organizations. For both groups, she headed the rummage sale committee.
For a good portion of the time, the famous feminist was out of town tending to her dying mother, but the farm manager, Patty, a fifty-ish heavy drinker and smoker who lamented over a biker chick who stole her heart ten years earlier, took over the helm. She lived in a trailer just left of the pond, and it was in this trailer where Jane, Amelia, Patty and I watched the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas trial. Jane, who had considered applying to law school, gave up-to-the-minute assessments. "I can't believe it's come down to pubic hairs on coke cans!" she said. "Clarence Thomas is clearly guilty."
Patty nodded her head in agreement and broke open a new bottle of Smirnoff to mix with her tonic water.
When she did come back to the farm, the famous feminist brought with her a cloud of paranoia, fear and guilt. At the dinner table, she often obsessed about money. One night, she ripped open the heating bill. "How could we have used this much gas in one month?" she asked. "Who's turning the heat up?" We all looked down. "I'm going to have to charge for room and board."
We all knew part of the reason for the exorbitant bill. While the heat blasted, Jane left the front door open. Her dog liked it that way.
Later that night, the residents sat on Jane's bed in the chicken coop to discuss the famous feminist's treatment of us. "It's not like we're freeloaders," said Sheila, a woman who just finished her Ph.D. in plant biology and, on the first night, accidentally wiped herself with poison ivy after peeing outside. "We all work hard. She's getting free labor!"
"It's like she's an intruder in our blissful world," said Amelia.
"And she makes us feel like we're the intruders!" Jane said.
"Maybe she's just stressed about her mother," I said.
"Maybe she's not taking her drugs," Sheila said.
"I'd rather be here than in Manhattan," I said. "It's beautiful."
During one meal, the famous feminist said, "I did my part in the feminist movement. Now it's your turn."
We lowered our heads, feeling ashamed that we hadn't started up any activist organizations.
I enjoyed the attention Amelia gave me; she critiqued my writing, cut my hair, asked me to teach her guitar chords. Together we sang the farm manager's favorite country song, "Come Next Monday." We danced around with power tools singing, "I've Got the Power."
So the day Amelia rode up on her Snapper and said she had a crush on me, I wasn't surprised. But after I rejected her, she barely acknowledged me. When I spoke at the dinner table, she hummed and stared out the window. Like my mother.
A week later I gave in. We kissed. Amelia and I took walks in the fields and watched deep crimson and yellow leaves flutter to the ground. She said, "You're my woman." I smiled, not sure what to make of the situation. After all, Amelia never had a girlfriend. She wanted a girlfriend and there I was. As long as I held my heart at bay, Amelia tugged at it, refusing to accept only part of it. "You need to let go and trust," she said.
I squeezed her hand. Afraid of exposing myself, of getting hurt, I couldn't let go. I looked up at the Douglas Firs. "How long does it take for a Christmas tree to grow?"
When I returned to Manhattan, Amelia stayed with me in my small one bedroom apartment, then found a four-month sublet on the Upper East Side. Through a friend, I found freelance work at a publishing company, designing and laying out textbooks. Despite the recession, perfect-postured Amelia had no problem finding high-paying computer work.
Amelia, who spent her childhood on a farm in Vermont, felt overwhelmed by the city's crowds, siren shrills, and desperate men in ragged coats begging for spare change. On several occasions, she cried for these men. She cried for the bearded homeless woman who wheeled around a huge canvas cart filled with old newspapers and ragged clothes, topped off by a live duck. And she cried for what she perceived as our relationship in a past life. "We were married," she said. "And you were a man. We had a terrible argument and then you were killed in a car crash."
And she cried when we held each other, when she looked into my eyes and said, "You're holding back. You need to let go. You're not giving me your whole heart."
Two weeks before Christmas, as a favor to the famous feminist, Amelia and I returned to the farm to help sell Christmas trees. A constant stream of customers showed up with saws in tow, ready to cut down a tree of their choice. In the sub-freezing weather, we greeted families, offered them hot cider, pointed them to fields of full-grown Christmas trees to inspect. Despite my blue fingers and toes, I felt pleased to see the fruits of our labor pay off. At night, with other former residents and friends of the famous feminist, we ate a hearty meal of turkey and stuffing and sweet potatoes, celebrating a day of hard work and record tree sales. Just before we clanked our wineglasses together and toasted to the famous feminist, I wondered if my mother would have felt comfortable at the table.
When we had gotten together, Amelia came out to family and friends. With her prodding, I began to open my heart. I told her about my fears of abandonment, of living as a gay woman. Yet with each offering, Amelia backed away. That's how it worked. An exhausting game of push/pull. And then she told me of the demons that haunted her, how she wanted to go to India and pray at a monastery. One day, while sitting on my futon, she broke down and wept. "I'm from another planet," she said. "From Uranus."
"Huh?"
"I need to talk to a psychic," she said.
I ran to Enchantments, a new age witch store down the block and found a newspaper with advertisements for psychics. Amelia spoke to one in Colorado who, at one point, asked to speak with me. "Imagine a bridge made of diamonds," she said. "Connect it from your heart to Amelia's."
Even a bridge made of diamonds couldn't keep us together. As soon as I gave Amelia all of my heart, she became obsessed with k.d. lang and moved to San Francisco. Perhaps subconsciously, I knew that the more I gave, the more she'd pull away. And if I gave all of my heart to her, she'd finally free us both.
I visited Amelia in San Francisco. On our last night, she broke up with me. She wanted to be on her own. She needed to work on father issues. She needed to work on past life regression. I held her and cried, just like I did a month into our relationship, when we had driven up to her grandmother's farm in Vermont. Once there we had walked in the woods and snapped photos of each other by Amelia's favorite willow tree. We looked at old family photos with her grandmother. That night, in a small farmhouse bedroom, we lay next to each other. Amelia turned the light off. Five minutes later she asked if I felt anything weird in the room. I knew that she meant ghost-weird. I clutched her body and started to shake. "No," I said, attempting to deny any strangeness that might have been in the room. "What do you mean?" I said, tightening my clutch.
"Don't freak out," she said, "but I think your mother is trying to speak to you through me."
While I shook and sweated and gripped Amelia's body in that Vermont farmhouse, she told me that my mother wanted me to know that she was okay, that she loved me, that I'm going to be okay, that I shouldn't worry about her. Following a long pause, Amelia asked, "Do you want to say anything to your mother?"
"Tell her I love her."
"Anything else?"
I continued to tremble and cry.
A few moments later, Amelia sighed. "It's gone," she said. "The presence is gone." She turned the light on. "That was really weird."
I looked at her face, her dilating brown eyes, wanting so much for that encounter to have been real. Maybe it was.
Now, while we held tight to each other in San Francisco, our last night together, I lifted my head from Amelia's shoulder, wiped my snotty nose and thanked Amelia for leading me to a world where the dead don't care who you love, a world where I could imagine my mother--the artist and traveler--at the table, celebrating another day of communal spirit and record sales at the feminist Christmas tree farm. We'd pour wine and hold up our glasses. My mother would clank her wineglass against mine. "L'Chaim," she'd say. "To Life."
Corey Mesler
Talk Show
The ex-president's son stood in the shadows backstage, hoping no script-boy or stagehand or grip recognized him. No one did. He slunk behind trashy backdrops, across white linoleum diagrammed with rivery black cables, and found an unoccupied lounge. He sat down on a purple chair, leaned over a plasticized coffee table, and began to pick his cuticles.
What was making the ex-president's son so nervous? His father had been a bland, stand-in president. He had done nothing major in office; he had been serene, stable and sane. A leveling force, some said. That he had also been notoriously clumsy and publicly silly was not on the ex-president's son's mind.
He was concerned about a fellow guest on the talk show he was about to appear on. Why had he agreed to this insipid show? I am a nobody, he thought, a computer programmer from Nashville. One hundred and sixty-first in my graduating class at Vanderbilt. But they want to hear about life in the White House. They want backstairs chitchat, oval office insights. They want personal contact with power. Why am I so bitter? he asked himself, as he pulled a long sliver of skin off one thumb until a pinpoint of blood appeared.
The other guest on the talk show was a rotund actor and former boy wonder. When younger his audacity and charm and technical skill made him one of the most famous men in Hollywood. Now, his talk show banter and beautifully enunciated pontifications were in constant demand. TV loved him. He was early success turned fat, turned lazy but perspicacious. His face was as familiar as Aunt Jemima's. His voice was as soothing to the average Joe as a glass of warm milk.
The ex-president's son was creating a mental dress rehearsal of the show. The rotund actor and former boy wonder loomed threateningly into his mind and he concentrated harder on a particularly tricky hangnail on his pinky.
The ex-president's son remembered once when he was in college facing a potentially embarrassing situation with his date at a mixer. She was a loquacious co-ed, daughter of a female novelist. His date's low-cut dress was sprouting small wisps of tissue from a well-packed bra. On the way home, as she laughed a horsey laugh, more tissue appeared. The more she gesticulated the more obvious the packing job became. When it appeared as if a wisp was about to waft into the air between them, the ex-president's son jammed the brake and made as if to grab the errant padding. But his date was thinking the ex-president's son was intent on something more salacious.
And soon she was holding him and moving erratically and gurgling.
She wanted to be the president's daughter-in-law, he suspected, reminiscing. Where was she now? Someplace more peaceful than backstage at a talk show.
The ex-president's son was afraid that the rotund actor and former boy wonder would bring up the pardon. The actor was an infamous wag and baiter and the ex-president's son was casting about for clever repartee. He wanted to be able to defend himself without appearing to defend himself. He wanted to show the pompous windbag that he could joust, too, that he was no stranger to talk show thrust and parry. But his head felt as though it were stuffed with grits. I'm thinking in crayon, he said to himself.
Suddenly a bright, youthful face--not unlike his own--appeared in the doorway. "Oh, there you are," the face said. "We're ready to go."
The ex-president's son smiled a trooper smile, stood up and trotted behind. He was led to the stage area and shown his seat. But first he was placed in the wings where a man with a headset held him back with a hand lightly on his chest. In five minutes he was walking onstage to the surprisingly enthusiastic applause of a studio audience.
The host was loud, humorous, sweating like a pig. As they spouted seemingly rehearsed inanities the ex-president's son was obsessed with the quantity and quality of the host's perspiration. Lord, he thought, this man can sweat.
A commercial break was taken. Had they said anything yet? The ex-president's son couldn't remember if he had spoken yet or not. The host patted the ex-president's son's knee.
"Good job, buddy-boy," he said.
When the rotund actor and former boy wonder was introduced the ex-president's son was so tense he broke wind. The host's eyes darted sideways quickly and then back. The actor shook hands. His applause seemed much louder.
Soon the actor and the host were deep into a conversation about women in the media. The ex-president's son was not listening--he could not concentrate--but the words "pantyhose" and "mixmaster" seemed preposterously emphasized. The ex-president's son's mind may as well have been on Venus. He was thinking a comfortable thought: perhaps my part is over. It doesn't matter what I do now.
"And I am sure America would like to know, as well, what you have to say about that." The host was looking now at him.
The audience laughed.
"Yes, you do remember that your father pardoned the president who preceded him?" the rotund actor and former boy wonder said, rolling an enormous cigar between enormous fingers. "A president who came as close as any president in history to being run out of the White House on a rail."
The audience laughed.
"And tarred and feathered to boot," he finished and the audience and the actor laughed.
"Well," the ex-president's son began, clearing his throat. "I mean, I think that what Dad did was, well, healthy. I mean, he put the spectre of criminal wrong-doing behind us. He put us, as a nation, back on a positive track. I think that's what he had in mind with the pardon. It was, well, healthy."
There was some applause.
"I can't imagine anything healthier," the rotund actor and former boy wonder pronounced, savoring the moment, sitting forward a bit in his chair, "than showing the American people that no man is above the law."
The audience thundered. It was a storm, a damning storm.
All the blood drained from the ex-president's son's head. His fingertips were numb, his skin prickling. If he had been able to form a clear thought it might have been: am I have a heart attack?
When the ex-president's son was back in his hotel room with a cold cloth across his forehead the telephone rang. He answered and a voice said, "Good show, buddy-boy. Good TV. You ok?"
The ex-president's son mumbled a reply.
"Little stage fright, huh?"
The talk show host, when not on camera, talked like a fag, the ex-president's son thought. The connection crackled with silence.
After he hung up the ex-president's son took off his clothes, turned on the TV and dropped back on the puce hotel bedcovers. On the evening news the new president was making a speech about unemployment.
"What we need is jobs," the new president said, "and for there to be jobs there needs to be work to be done." The new president smiled. It was a trust-me smile, a pat-on-the-back smile.
The ex-president's son watched the TV somberly. He did not find the new president's smile infectious. He doubted he would ever smile again.
He got up and changed the channel. On another channel a chimpanzee was being hugged by a buxom young blond woman while a famous comedian stood by and leered and mugged.
The ex-president's son lay back on the hotel bed. As the chimp buried his face in that ample and well-displayed bosom the ex-president's son began daydreaming about college, of a certain loquacious co-ed daughter of a female novelist, and the co-ed's car-seat passion, of her flashing eyes, her violent arm, and of her tender, crazy hand.
Anna Jaquiery
Vicious Dog
My name is Muunokhoi, which in my language signifies Vicious Dog. In truth, I am more like the sheep, docile, accepting of its fate. Olga, my wife, says that the second part of my name suits me well. She says, you are like the dog that brings slippers to its master when the master gets home. Then you sit and wag your tail, with your tongue hanging out, until someone says Fetch!
These days she is always saying things like this, and lately I have stopped hearing it. There is something to be said for the dog. Its experience is in the present. It has the ability to focus fully on just one thing at a time and shut out the rest. While Olga speaks I eat and drink, I play with my daughter, I pack my furs for the next journey.
You ask how I obtained my name. Two years before I came into this world, my mother gave birth to a baby girl. She died a week later. By calling me Muunokhoi, my mother hoped to avoid misfortune: with such a name, the evil spirits would not want me.
I always disliked my name and Olga knows this. It is no coincidence that she uses it to taunt me. I wish I had been given a strong name like my grandfather's. Sansar-Huu. Son of the Cosmos. He would say, your name is who you are, try to live up to it. How? I'd ask. I don't need to tell you! He would say. You'll know and if you don't I can't help you. He wasn't a patient man. Often he would sound angry, and I would fall silent rather than ask any more questions. But I knew he loved me.
I am a trader. During the cold months I travel on the Trans-Siberian to Moscow, and sell my furs in the Russian capital. Then I travel back to Ulanbataar with medicines and clothes, and sell those in the Mongolian markets. During those two weeks each month, I am a nomad, no longer the domesticated pet that Olga compares me to. My favourite times are when I am neither here nor there, and the waste that clutters my mind falls away. Instead my mind photographs what it sees, the greys and greens, the colours of my country, and black and white, the Russian landscape.
Over the summer, I pick up odd jobs where I can. Sometimes we have very little, but we manage.
My wife is Russian, Together we have one child, and it is enough. Olga's parents are both deceased and my mother passed away last year. My father lives with us on the outskirts of Ulanbataar, on the 12th floor of a tower block. He sleeps on the sofa in the living area. Olga and I share our bed with our daughter Narantuyaa. The place is small but better than the shantytowns that spread across the city in the 1990s, after the Soviet empire dissolved.
Mongolia, our country, was cut adrift and now we must rely on ourselves. I am not interested in politics, but I can see that things are not necessarily better than they were before.
At night sometimes I can't sleep, so used have I become to the train's movement across the tracks. When I have just returned from a journey, I am restless for several days. Olga tells me I am like a caged animal, pacing the small rooms back and forth. It takes a few days before I am back to my usual, accepting self. Meanwhile I drink more than I should, until I stumble into bed. Olga sleeps as far away as she can, shielding Narantuyaa from me as though I were diseased.
I sometimes wish her parents were alive so she could go to them once in a while. I would have some peace and quiet at home. Although my father would still be there, with the television turned up high, shuffling back and forth to the kitchen to fill up his glass. And I know very soon I would miss Narantuyaa and wish her home.
For 40 years, the Party was my father's life. What is there for me to do now? He often says. He drinks too much and rarely leaves the apartment. Most of the time he sleeps, watches tv, reads the newspaper, which gives him an excuse to complain about the way things have turned out. He still believes in Communism and speaks with regret of the days when the Russians held us in their orbit, saying they turned Mongolia around and gave us a place in the world. For my part I cannot agree, but I don't know what the answer is. To me it seems our identity as a people has fragmented since 1990. It is in pieces and no one seems to know who can build it up again or what can replace it.
I know my grandfather would have spat on the ground to hear his son praise the Russians. They fought about this, almost coming to blows on more than one occasion – until my grandfather chose to ignore his son and only communicate with me.
At night, when I am awake, I wander into the room where my father sleeps so as not to wake up my wife and daughter. He often goes to sleep drunk and nothing can wake him up then. I look out the window and picture beyond the starless, smog-filled night, beyond the tower blocks, beyond the sounds of toilets flushing, televisions, and children shouting, the plains where my grandfather spent his life.
He was a herdsman and lived with his family in a ger which was raised and folded again every time the community moved to a new settlement. His days were guided by the changing light, glowing pink at dawn and darkening at dusk from blue to black. He and my grandmother only had one child, my father, though they desired more. This made my grandfather bitter later on in life. He felt cheated. His son was nothing like him and sometimes, he told my father, he wondered whether they were related.
Grandfather tended yaks, horses and sheep. At times he travelled for days on end across territory so empty he had nothing to guide him except the sky, which yielded little. For all he knew, he may have been going around in circles. One day he set forth across the undulating grasslands and didn't return. I wonder whether he got lost in the end, or chose to disappear.
In my own way I too am a nomad. I am often away. You see me now, sitting across from you in this compartment, and you will see me in this same spot a month from now. This train is full of people who do what I do for a living. Chinese, Russians, Mongolians, spending days, weeks and months on this train, hawking their wares, buying and selling, haggling. You see their faces in the markets, the Russians, surly or exuberant, depending on how much they've had to drink, the Chinese – I find it hard to trust them – and us Mongolians.
In the markets, we leave our deep-rooted mistrusts aside. We are equal. We can taunt each other and laugh, make jokes we may not otherwise get away with. Sometimes we drink together at the end of a busy day, with our feet propped up on our bundles, rubbing our hands together to get the circulation going again, the alcohol warming our blood. We speak a jumble of languages and somehow we understand each other perfectly.
If you have any questions, simply ask. I know this route by heart, I have memorised every detail of the landscape: the grasslands, the blank expanse of Siberia in winter, where people appear occasionally, like blots of ink on an empty page; the birch trees, filing past like emaciated soldiers. Lines cross each other, the plains, the trees. I tend to forget what day of the week it is. Only the snow on the ground and the nakedness of the trees point to the time of year and remind me of the seasons.
In here, of course, it is cramped, and with each passing day the over-heated carriages feel more enclosed. You get used to it though. Nowadays I hardly notice the three people sharing my compartment – forgive me, I do not wish to be rude when I say this. Most of the passengers are carrying so much luggage, packages and bundles and food for the journey, that we struggle to move in and out of our compartments, and down the aisles. After a few days the toilet becomes clogged and the stench in there is unbearable. Some passengers wait for the train to stop to run out and relieve themselves on the tracks. This too I have got used to. So many people one grows intimate with, even though we may never exchange a word. But we smoke and drink together, and mutter apologies when we bump into each other, again and again, keeping balance as best we can against the train's rattly movement. Squatting on the tracks, queueing for the toilet, I have grown familiar with their feet, so many shapes and sizes. Slippers and socks and the cheap grey shoes you can find in our street kiosks, imported from China.
The sheets on these bunks are hard, they are starched to the point where they might break. By the time the train arrives in Ulanbataar from Beijing, it is already full of Chinese travellers. I keep a close eye on my bags. I can't afford to lose any of it. Olga has packed bread and cheese, oranges for the trip. I have added bottles of vodka. It is too warm, too crowded. But soon the train will begin to move and everyone will relax a little, and the pravodnika will come and knock on the door, bringing cups of sugary, steaming tea. She never smiles – she is Russian, after all. But she is helpful.
I remember my grandfather telling my father, these Russians are nothing like us. They have no understanding of our culture, our beliefs, But when I am travelling across Russia, and I see the villages we pass through, I feel the people who live there cannot be so different. They too are poor, and locked away from the rest of the world. When I read in the papers about America, or Europe, it seems so far, like another universe. The houses in these villages are sinking. Every spring the snow melts and the houses sink a little more. The young have left, only the old people stay behind.
I wonder what my daughter will become in this new world, sometimes I cannot bear to think about it. Here it is hard for a man, but harder for a woman. I try to picture her as a worker, as a mother, and what I see in my mind is Olga, with her sharp tongue, her biting comments, or standing still at the kitchen window, not saying a word. Narantuyaa, with her full, rosy cheeks, her sparkling eyes, always asking, wanting to know. Why is it like this and not like that? Most of the time I tell her. It just is. I can see this answer is unsatisfactory.
Do you have children? No? My greatest joy is Narantuyaa. She is six years old. Each morning when I am home and not travelling, we walk together to her school. She asks questions all the way. Once she asked why her mother and I are so unhappy. She said, "when you are away, she becomes happier. And when you come back she is angry." I think about it and feel sad, for Narantuyaa mainly but also for Olga and I. I don't answer, although I can see she wants a proper response, instead I squeeze her hand and keep walking. At school she gives me a hug that is meant to comfort. It should be me doing the comforting but what can I do. Some things can't be helped. Fate guides us, nothing else.
Olga certainly expected more from life. When I first met her she was beautiful. When she started coming to the apartment I shared with my father it was as though she had opened a window in our place, let some fresh air into our lives. She was always happy, although she complained about her job and how boring it was. She worked in a bakery, rising early to start and coming home late, because she had to ride a bus across the city. It was a temporary job, Olga said. She talked about becoming an air-hostess so she could travel the world. Then Narantuyaa came along and she wanted to stay at home. I used to give Olga my best furs and tell her she looked like a movie star when she wore them, which she did. I said we would move into a bigger place once business picked up. But it didn't happen.
My father is afraid of her but when he and I are alone, he grumbles that she is useless at keeping house, although to be fair it is a challenge keeping our small place tidy and clean, with four people sharing the space. I wonder what my grandfather would have thought of her. I have a feeling that, if he had chosen to point the finger at anyone, it would have been at me.
As a child, I stayed with him for weeks at a time, when my parents were both working. Together we would lead the livestock to pasture. My grandfather would light a cigarette and look at the sky. At night, I was allowed to stay up with him. We sat by the fires, my grandfather smoking, me stifling a yawn, watching the embers fade to a dull orange. They sky was full of stars, not like the smog-filled darkness over the tower blocks.
Grandfather would say, Muunokhoi, remember what distinguishes us from animals is that inside we are free. Free to think, free to travel, in here. He would tap his finger against his skull. I don't know what sort of world you will grow up in, he would say gloomily. But if you can remember that you'll be fine.
My grandfather saw the universe as a circle. Everything, he said, goes around. He believed he would return to the earth only to live again and again.
When I am on this train, sometimes, the old man is very near. I see his face, carved deeply with the lines of age. I imagine he is here with me, although it is hard to picture him, tall and lean, putting up with the cramped compartment and my noisy fellow passengers, hacking and coughing, laughing loudly and talking in half a dozen languages. It is easier to picture he and I out there, travelling the unbroken plains, saying very little and comfortable with our mutual silence. He, Son of the Cosmos, and I Muunokhoi, leaping, unfettered, free.
Curt Eriksen
Just So
There it is, the phone ringing again. But there's no way I'm going to answer that now. They should have known better than to mess with me. They should have buttoned their lips and minded their own goddamn business. How dare they suggest that I ingress myself, that I commit myself, like a fucking lunatic? You've got enough money now, that's what they said, to pay for 'rehabilitation.' We only scattered Mom's ashes the other day--what was it Monday, Tuesday? What's today? Hell, who cares? The point is she's gone now, and there's nothing but the three of us left. The three fucking musketeers, that's what we're supposed to be: one for all, and all for one! But then they go and tell me, with their dippy wives signing on, that they're concerned about me, they're worried I might destroy my liver, just like Dad did. Hell, I'm only topping off. And it's red wine, for Christ's sake, some vintage Malbec that he used to drink and she would never touch, being a white wine lady herself. While Tom and Joe were upstairs going through the closets--with Susan and Patty already bickering over the pearls--I found a case covered with fly shit in the basement that must have been there since we buried Dad, fifteen years ago. It'd only go to waste so I decided that it might as well be part of my inheritance. Tom won't touch anything stronger than Diet Coke and Joe's a beer man himself, hence the gut (I didn't mention that when they cornered me, but I could have done!). And besides, it's past noon already, nearly three o'clock. I thought I might stroll over to Plain View and take a look at the magnolia they said they were going to plant in Mom's memory. Those were the good ladies from Trinity, the same ones who looked at me all cockeyed when Tom whispered in their ears after the service. I remember staring down at the glass in my hand and getting so angry all of a sudden at the shame they were suggesting, so fed up with it all, that I drained the port in one swallow. I don't suppose they ever stopped to think how much they contribute to a man's paranoia, what with all their secret conversations and pseudo-trickster-psychology. They're just waiting to trip me up, that's all, hoping I'll fall on my face and make a fool out of myself so that they can feel self-satisfied and wholly justified in having condemned their big brother to a life of lonely destitution. Or maybe it's my share of the trust they're after? That's it! They're driving me to drink, they say they care about me but what they really want me to do is keep on chugging away until I drop. Well, I got news for them. Starting tomorrow I'm giving it all up, I'm going to jump on that wagon and thumb my nose at big-belly Joe. I'm going to outlive all of them, and in the end I'll be wearing Mom's pearls around my neck and drinking Perrier when we tamp down the earth on the last of them, including the hens. But first I'm going to finish that case of vintage Malbec, in Mom and Dad's memory. He was always telling us how to do things anyway, "just like this," he'd say, "just so."