Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“At the risk of being smacked by this Goliath of an English–Russian dictionary, I will brave the question. How do you like America?”

His voice was dry, but I saw that there would be no mention of our last encounter, and was glad, and tried to thank him by giving an honest answer.

“I like it very much,” I said after a moment’s thought. “I like the sense of anonymity. Living here is like—like being just a story among other stories, so I have time to read my own story without peeking ahead or skipping any words, if you know what I mean. And I can access an entirely new range of experiences and feelings, and these feelings are larger somehow, as if I can now see myself and the world simultaneously from two separate vantage points instead of one—a bit like gaining entry to a new dimension… But you know, I wasn’t being glib earlier—I mean with that boy—I really do love the library the most. I more or less live in this cubicle. They let you stay all night, did you know? Actually, it wasn’t until I spent my first night here, back in September, that I realized what I’d been missing. Have you ever been to the library in Moscow? You fill out a form, then take your place at one of these communal tables in a gigantic marble room that makes you feel dwarfed, and wait until the book you’ve requested is produced from some unseen depths of the building. When your turn comes, you are summoned to a tiny window and the book is slid over to you on a tray. Of course, they have everything there, but you always have to know exactly what you want beforehand—there are no surprising discoveries, you see, no sense of exploration, no browsing . Oh, one day I’ll write an Ode to Browsing—it’s such a delightfully American concept! It’s what I do here: I walk the aisles, alone, at night, and when something catches my eye—anything new, anything exciting, anything unpredictable—I grab an armload of books, as many as I can carry back to my desk, then stay up until morning reading about Mayan glyphs, or Arctic expeditions, or the art of stained-glass windows in medieval France, or underwater archaeology in Egypt, anything and everything, but always poetry, poetry first and last—” I glanced over at him, and stopped abruptly. “Am I boring you?”

“You are being unusually loquacious tonight, my dear,” he said, staring off beyond me, into the white electric glare of the shelves. “Personally, I dislike libraries. They smell of death and oblivion. True poetry isn’t meant to be stashed away in pitiful little volumes catalogued on moldy index cards, then buried in the communal grave of the Dewey Decimal System, to be exhumed once every few years by some pimply graduate student scratching out a tedious paper that no one will ever read. True poetry is meant to be recited—or better yet, sung—thundered to the sky—danced to—made love to—celebrated… It should pulsate in your ears and your heart, but all I can hear in these repositories of dust is the clamoring of the forgotten dead on their neatly catalogued shelves, begging each visitor to resurrect them, to bring them into the light, if only for a few pale moments, grateful even for such sorry scraps of attention—”

Suddenly I laughed. “The grateful dead!”

“What’s that, my dear?”

“Oh… nothing.”

A petulant look crossed his face.

“There it is again—you are thinking about boys too much. You must be careful.”

I felt his presence to be an acute disappointment. He belonged to my Russian childhood, to the otherworldly realm of fairy tales, secrets, and revelations that—even at my eighteen years of age—was so quickly receding into the distance of both time and space that I could already see myself believing someday that half of it had been real, or perhaps half believing that all of it had been real. Here, under the even, artificial light of humming lamps, in my brand-new, rational life of class schedules, advisor meetings, and black coffee, I no longer felt the need to be gentle with my persistent dreams.

“You sound like my mother,” I said.

“Hardly. I don’t care about your getting hurt. As Catullus proved early on, wretchedness is rather good for poetry. Very few, in fact, are capable of writing well while happy in love—or indeed content with life in general. It takes a special kind of greatness to write about happiness, and, just between us, Horace himself smacks too much of a self-satisfied philistine. One might even argue that the poet’s primary function is to make the misery of the human condition more bearable by converting raw pain into the orderly music of verse… But no matter. I mean something else altogether.”

Nimbly he leapt off the desk and stood looking down at me.

“In the beginning was the Word, remember? Now, generally speaking, I’m not fond of those simpletons, but old John did know a thing or two. Listen. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ” His voice rose, gaining in strength, cutting through the hush of the well-lit windowless night, multiplying in echoes, until a chorus of mighty voices seemed to be booming from everywhere around me. “The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”

He fell silent, and for some moments the silence continued to widen like circles upon waters closing over a crashing boulder.

“Walk with me, my dear,” he then said mildly.

I rose, obeying the unspooling of the dream, and together we made our way into the harshly illuminated stacks, straight and orderly as hospital corridors. He walked a step or two ahead, not glancing back at me, talking all the while.

“Everyone is born as a light, a naked spirit, a pure longing to know the world. Some lights are dimmer, and some brighter; the brightest ones have the godlike capacity not only to know the world but to create it anew, time and time again. The light shines at its purest in your childhood, but as you move farther into life, it begins to fade. It doesn’t diminish, exactly, but it becomes harder to reach: every year you live through calcifies around your soul like a new ring on a tree trunk until the divine word can barely make itself heard under the buildup of earthly flesh. None of this is anything new, of course—just read some Gnostics while you go about your browsing.”

As we walked, the stacks became darker, the static humming of lamps more remote. Here and there deeper patches of twilight lay on the shelves, the book spines growing less distinct, melting into one another, escaping the alphabet’s confines.

“Unfortunately for you, my dear, a woman’s flesh tends to be… oh, shall we say, more insistent than a man’s—and thus her choices may be harder. For every human being, no matter how brilliant, has only a predetermined capacity for creation, and a child, you see, is no less a creation than a book, albeit of an entirely different order and often less lasting. Well, naturally, that depends on the book and on the child… Back in the days of Queen Elizabeth, I used to visit her namesake, one Elizabeth Heywood. You’ve never heard of her, of course, but who is to say that today you wouldn’t speak of her in the same breath with Shakespeare had she not chosen to birth, raise, and bury a child for nearly every one of his great tragedies? On the other hand, one of those children was John Donne—so one never knows how this sort of thing will turn out. There are different kinds of immortality, after all. Choosing the spirit or choosing the flesh is ever a private matter.”

We should have reached the far end of the stacks long ago, but the shelves went on stretching before us into what was now a murkiness of densely shifting shadows.