Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“About?”

“Not anything in particular. Just things. Did I ever tell you about this seminar I went to in my first month in America?”

“Yes. Possibly. No.”

“I don’t remember now what the subject was, but it was one of those workshops where everyone sat in a circle, and the professor had us write down our ‘strengths,’ what we were really good at, you know, on a piece of paper, and then we went around the circle, and everyone read what they’d written. It’s the usual stuff, right, everyone has done it dozens of time, in interviews, and class discussions, and church meetings, everyone here always talks about their strongest points, their weakest points, and the answers are all a given—‘I’m creative,’ ‘I excel at multitasking,’ ‘I’m good with languages,’ ‘I’m a great team player.’ Except that I had never done it before, so I had no ready pat formulas in my head. I remember sitting there for the first minute, absolutely mortified, not having any idea what to say. Then I thought about it, I mean really thought about it, and wrote this long, earnest paragraph. I wrote that I believed I could sometimes sense the essence of things—houses, books, faces, moments in time—that I sometimes caught a whiff of their innermost souls, their unique smells, and that what I was hoping to do with my life was to render these impressions in words so vivid, so precise, that others could feel them too. Then the five minutes were up, and we started going around the circle, and all the long-haired boys said they were creative and all the foreign-exchange girls said they were good with languages. By the time my turn came—it was toward the end—I had caught on perfectly, so I too said I was good with languages. I remember feeling so relieved that I had not been the first one to give my answer… But I wonder now… It’s like life, you know: the more you learn what is expected of you, the more you fall into these patterns, these grooves, these ruts, the less unique your experiences become, the less unique you become yourself. If you didn’t know, for example, that people got married at a certain age and had children at a certain age and retired at a certain age, would you know to do any of those things, or would you do something else, something entirely different? Because it can’t all be pure biology. I mean, I know you pride yourself on believing only the things you can see, and I love that about you, it’s so reassuring, but—but don’t you have this sense sometimes that our life is essentially just the tip of the iceberg, and if you stop clinging to your puny bit of ice in fear or out of habit and just dive into the water, you will discover this luminous mass going down, deep down, and meet creatures you can’t even imagine, and have thoughts and feelings no one has ever had before… That is really why I came here in the first place, and why I stayed here, you know. I mean, I told you I stayed because of that relationship I was in at the time, and that was part of it, I suppose, but mainly, I knew what was expected of me in Russia, and I thought that here I would be able to escape it, escape having a predictable life… Well, that, and the language, of course. Because languages are like that too, you know? When you are first learning a language, you are swimming in this glorious sea of possibilities—you feel that you are free to take all these little specks of meaning floating around you and combine them into the most fantastical, gorgeous, dreamlike structures that will be yours and no one else’s, amazing castles, cathedrals, entire cities of words rising out of chaos. But then you start learning the rules, the grammar, what goes with what, and then, worst of all, all these common expressions and mass-issued turns of phrase start impressing themselves onto your brain, so that when you say ‘time,’ you think ‘valuable’ and ‘waste of’ and ‘waits for no man,’ and when you say ‘love,’ you think ‘star-crossed’ and ‘blind,’ and when you say ‘death,’ you think ‘kiss of’ and ‘bored to’ and ‘dead as a doornail’—and before you know it, your words have become these prayer beads strung together and worn-out through countless repetitions, and what original meaning there was is completely obscured… Perhaps the longer you use the language, the more in danger you are of becoming gray and trite and shallow, I thought, but if you learn a new language, you can start all over again. And I feel, I really do feel that there are these great big truths out there, or no, not truths, exactly, just these pure slabs of… of meaning, of feeling, these monumental things we contend with as humans—you know, love, death, beauty, God—and I thought, if I come to them clean and childlike and with my mind free of preconceptions, or else if I come to them using two roads at once, both the front door of my native language and the servant entrance of my adopted language—or is it the other way around, do you think?—in any case, maybe then I will actually stand a chance of stumbling upon some vast reservoir of poetry just waiting out there in the universe… Because I write poetry, you know. Whenever you see me scribbling and I tell you these are just thank-you notes or grocery lists, they aren’t really. Well, you’ve probably figured it out for yourself by now, but I wanted to tell you anyway. I wanted to tell you for a long time, but I was being… superstitious about it. I guess I felt I needed to keep my poems secret from everyone until I was ready to share them with the whole world. And I’m still not ready to do that, but I’ve been thinking about something my mother said right after our wedding, and, well… I just wanted to tell you. Because I feel happy, you know, happy about us, and the baby, of course, but I’m also scared about the baby, and so sad about Papa, and sometimes—and please don’t be upset now—but sometimes I feel a little lonely, too, so I just thought, if I told you… Hello? Hello? Oh, gods, I’m talking to myself again, aren’t I? Paul? Are you asleep?”

“What? No. Well, yes, I’m afraid I was. But I heard you saying something about a seminar and that you were good at languages… Oh, and did you say you wanted to name our son Mustard, or did I dream that?”

“Yes, actually, Mustard is an old family name on my father’s side, so I think it would be nice… Ah, you should hear your silence right now. You dreamed that.”

“Phew, I was worried for a moment there. I think I can stay awake now. Sort of. Do you want to try saying it again? Whatever it was you were saying?”

“It was nothing, really. Just go back to sleep.”

“You should get some sleep too while you can. Only three more weeks now.”

When the screen door banged behind them and they entered the covered veranda, her initial impression was of something narrow, gloomy, and tired.

It had appeared different the night before, when they had driven along the street for the first time, the baby asleep in the backseat. The sign “For Sale” had flashed in their headlights, and beyond it, they saw three arches aglow in the dark. The house itself was barely visible behind the trees, just a low bulky shape against the paler blackness of the sky, but the lights on the veranda made it seem cozy and warm. “Slow down, slow down!” she cried, but they had already passed. He turned around, and they crept along the street for the second time. It looked even more welcoming then, that yellow light glowing through November drizzle.

At the end of the block they realized that another car had been forced to a crawl behind them for an entire minute.