Татьяна Толстая - Aetherial Worlds

Exactly! The eternally flaky carpenter is fickle and unpredictable. A Russian carpenter (or plumber, tile layer, spackler) stretches out his arm to his Mycenaean brethren across millennia: Workers of the world unite, if not in space then in time. Anyone who decides to build or rebuild their home knows that they are entering into a different world, one full of instability and surprise, and that there can be no knowing that the work paid for will be finished, or indeed even started. Just as with Schrödinger’s cat, there is only the probability of this event happening. And in my case, I didn’t even have that.

The spackling paste had been drying for the second month when I concluded that my workers had no intention of getting on with it. They considered my apartment, which had suddenly fallen into their lap, to be their private den of debauchery, and here they would drink themselves silly in three shifts; at some point a harmonica even entered the picture. Of course, I tried to get them to leave by appealing to their conscience, even bringing in my husband and father-in-law as reinforcement—but all was futile in the face of this construction gang. Whenever other people came to the apartment, the proletariat would do an energetic impression of activity: they’d furiously run the paint rollers up and down the walls, move boxes of parquet from corner to corner, struggle hauling buckets of cement, bang the ceiling with sticks, as if to loosen the old plaster. But as soon as my visitors had gone, the fuckers would jump back on the scaffolds, where a feast was already set: canned sprats, salami, beer, vodka—food for every taste—and the crème de la crème of parquet layers would be off and running to buy the most expensive of cognacs.

“It’s still drying! It’s all part of the process. No way can it be rushed. We even turned on the space heaters.”

I had stopped paying them long ago, but therein lay the rub: “If you don’t pay us, we won’t leave.” Basically, this has been the modus operandi of our entire country for the past six hundred years.

Finally I gave up and asked my older sister, Katerina, for help. She was a formidable woman. Formidable! I explained: This and that, they think I’m an actress, a subhuman, they’re not working, they are bleeding me dry. Anything you can do?

“Who’s in charge there?” asked Katerina after giving it some thought.

“Galina.”

I brought Katerina to my apartment. She threw the door open and walked up to the scaffolds with a deliberate, slow, and heavy step, her feet firmly and widely planted, as if wearing a pair of shiny general’s boots. With the low rumbling voice of a herald, Katerina bellowed:

“Galina! I vanquish thee and cast thee the fuck out of here!”

Galina grew apoplectic on the wooden platform.

“What the hell? Who are you?”

“I’m the Devil.”

There was a silence in response, and, for a second, the platform gang froze. Katerina darted into the corner, lifting her hands up, each forming a set of horns. She declared:

“I call upon the forces of darkness to unleash the evil eye!!! Everybody—out! One… two…”

Sure enough, they jumped off in unison and made a run for it, shoving one another and cursing under their breath as they bounded over the creaking floorboards; Galina’s wizened legs carried her the fastest, as she hollered shrilly: “The Devil, the damned Devil!” as if she’d met Him before and knew that she’d run up a tab with Him. I never saw any one of them again.

“What did you do?” I asked. “How?”

“It’s the proletariat. You can’t talk to them in any other way,” shrugged Katerina.

But the American carpenter was not “the proletariat”; he didn’t nap in his parka with his mouth open, did not indulge in riotous fun at the job site, attempted no entry into aetherial worlds with the aid of moonshine and a processed cheese product; a hot and bothered Venus disguised as the General’s Wife did not haunt his dreams—mythopoeic power bubbled up inside him not at all. And so he approached building the patio drily and diligently. He didn’t try to pad the bill, instead charging me the agreed-upon amount; he didn’t belatedly discover that the terrain was somehow unruly, or that the logs were unusually difficult to work with and so it was only fair to add a little sumpin’ sumpin’. For that matter, when the time came, the municipal inspector didn’t cast an eye on the ceiling and indicate with a polite cough that it wouldn’t hurt to have a drink, nor did he suggest that I invite a priest and a cat—the priest to christen the new space, the cat to absorb the negative energy. No, he simply patted the beams with his hands, measured the distance between the balusters to ensure that some average American kid’s head didn’t get stuck there, and that I, as owner, wouldn’t get sued for triple the value of the house on account of someone else’s microcephaly.

My patio—the deck of a ship that’s stuck on earth—was finished. What next?

I spent summer evenings there, reading and smoking, as the sun set, and as the filigreed lilac leaves of the Liquidambar blended with the twilight, and as a deer roamed the woods, or maybe it was a unicorn—who’s to say?

Can’t make out the words on the page anymore.

Every person has their own angel, for protection and compassion. The angel comes in different sizes, depending on the circumstances. Sometimes he’s the size of a dachshund—if you’re visiting a friend or if you’re in a crowd; sometimes he’s the size of a person—sitting in the passenger seat of a car, if you’re hurtling down the highway, shouting and singing; sometime he comes in his full size, approximately as tall as one telephone pole atop another, and hangs quietly in the air, the stuffy and empty evening air of a pointless July in a year unknown. In a certain light, with your peripheral vision, you can glimpse the micaceous glint of his wing.

You can talk to your angel. He’ll sympathize. He’ll understand. He’ll agree. That’s his way of loving you.

What next? you ask him. What comes next? Exactly, he’ll agree, what next? You love and love someone and then you look up and the love is gone, and if you feel sorry it’s not for him but for your feelings—you let them out for a walk and they come crawling back to you, all bruises and missing teeth. Yes, yes, he’ll agree, that’s how it is. And also people die, but that’s just nonsense, isn’t it? They can’t just disappear, can they, they still exist, you just can’t see them, right? They must be up there, with you? Yes, yes, they’re here, all here, no one’s disappeared, no one’s been lost, everyone is well.

A transparent sort, hard to make out, like a jellyfish in water, he hangs in the air and undulates as fireflies pass right through him; and if starlight is refracted when piercing his aetherial body, it is refracted just a little.

Almost all the money that I was earning at the college was going toward the upkeep of the house. And working at the college was killing me. Only a few years before, I had the ability to see through things, but now a mental glaucoma descended upon me, dark water, as they say, and I needed to put an end to it and to go home—to my old apartment, to Moscow, for instance. Or to Saint Petersburg. Okay. Once my contract ends, I’ll leave.

I allowed tenants to move in. I rented out everything but the magical room to an elderly Russian couple. They were kindred spirits—he was a theoretical physicist, she was a journalist—such kindred spirits, in fact, that I felt uncomfortable taking their money. Every Wednesday evening, when I returned from the gulag up north, I’d climb out of the car, my legs weak, and see them already waiting for me, table set with a bottle of wine; they were happy to see me, and I them, and we’d sit around discussing everything we knew, even my knowledge of quantum mechanics, pumped into my brain via books on tape during long and grueling journeys north.