Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“It’s always forty,” her mother replied, snipping, smiling. “Forty is God’s number for testing the human spirit. It’s the limit of man’s endurance, beyond which you are supposed to learn something true. Oh, you know what I mean—Noah’s forty days and nights of rain, Moses’ forty years in the desert, Jesus’ forty days of fasting and temptation. Forty of anything is long enough to be a trial, but it’s man-size, too. In the Bible, forty years make a span of one generation. Forty weeks make a baby.”

“Oh,” she said. “I see.”

They were silent for a minute. Her mother would not stop her puttering, her back bent, her hands always moving, strands of white hair falling over her face, so she could never see her clearly, could never meet her eyes directly. In the evening stillness, the gardening shears went on making sharp little sounds, unpleasant like the clicking of teeth, the scraping of claws. Bits of greenery rained onto the floorboards.

“You’ve made a terrible mess of my little garden,” her mother said at last, not altogether kindly, as she stepped back to survey the plants. “You are at an age where it would do you good to learn some particulars about the world. Making things grow is a kind of immortality too. But that’s the trouble with people who prize words above all else—you don’t know anything practical, anything useful. Your father is just like that too. Philosophy this and truth that, but I don’t believe he could ever tell a cactus from a begonia. The world becomes obscure and remote when you look at it through a mesh of words, you know. Like those semi-transparent sheets of paper they used to put over illustrations in old books, to protect them—it just ended up turning the picture all hazy so you could barely make out what it was supposed to be in the first place.”

And this was just like her mother too—she had never seemed to comprehend the urge to create things that had no tangibility to them, things that were not flowers or feasts or offspring.

“Words don’t make things hazy,” she said, feeling defensive. “They clarify.”

“Well,” her mother said tranquilly, “I suppose that depends on the words. The words that clarify don’t seem to be your kinds of words. Too small for you, aren’t they? What is this plant called, for instance?”

She looked at the spiky monstrosity in the pot, almost hoping that its name might pop into her head of its own accord, as if the name was its perfect essence, the summation of its nature, to be revealed to those who studied it closely. Hadn’t Adam and Eve guessed at the right, God-given names of all the creatures and plants in the Garden through mere contemplation?

“I don’t know,” she admitted at last.

“You see my point,” said her mother triumphantly. “Not everything is soul and love and art and happiness . In fact, very often, the bigger the word, the smaller the kernel of substance within it—it’s been rubbed flat, worn-out by all the use. Maybe that’s why it’s harder to be a great poet than a great novelist. A novel can be full of little words, as fresh and particular and unlike one another as a meadow of forget-me-nots.”

“I bet Olga would agree with you there,” she mumbled, all at once disconsolate.

“Who?”

“Olga. You know. My best friend in Russia.”

“Every other girl in Russia is named Olga,” her mother remarked with a shrug, and turned her attention back to the plants.

She sighed, recalling how distressed she had been a year before by the very same conversation, the first sign of her mother’s rapidly nearing senility: the first sign of many to come. She had mentioned Olga in passing over dinner, and her mother claimed not to have known her. “But you must remember!” she had cried in exasperation. “She came over scores of times. The two of us even spent three or four days at the dacha right after high school graduation, you and Papa drove us there, remember?” Her mother had given her a withering look. “Aren’t you a bit old for imaginary friends?” she had said. “I remember perfectly well. After graduation, you went to the dacha alone. We dropped you off. That was your present—you told us you wanted a taste of adult life. I was against it, but your father said fine, it would be good for you. There was some boy you liked across the street, so naturally I worried, but nothing came of it. I remember. I’m not yet senile.” Her mother’s insistence had made her very upset; she had even gone up to Eugene’s room to retrieve a couple of Olga’s novels she had seen on his shelf, but the novels had gotten somewhere, and her mother had acted so stubborn and tight-lipped about the whole thing that she had quickly dropped the matter, just as she hastened to drop it now.

The shears continued to click, click-click, click-click, beginning to sound like the ticking of some rusty old clock. She wanted to ask her mother so many questions—about God, and death, and life, and whether she had ever been truly happy with Papa—but the sun sank lower and lower until it was gone from the sky, and as the halo around the borders of things dulled into shadows, her mother seemed to fade ever so slightly, and then a bit more. She was still there, fussing and clucking, humming under her breath, but now it was possible to see her only out of the corner of one’s eye, moving on the very edge of one’s vision, for when one turned to face her directly, she quietly passed out of sight, like the flame of a candle at the moment of flickering out, only to appear again, a vague afterimage of a frail old woman in green gardening gloves, when one looked away.

She kept very still, her face averted, to prolong her mother’s faint presence.

“Do you mind if I snip off a bit of parsley?” her mother asked.

Her voice too was growing more distant, coming in and going out.

“What?”

“Parsley. I thought I’d make your father some roasted chicken when I see him in a couple of weeks—you remember, don’t you, it’s his favorite dish. I’m afraid the parsley’s wilted, but it will have to do. Do you mind?”

Surprised, she turned, and her mother was gone. She rose, walked over to the row of plants. There were no snippets of leaves on the deck, and the darkened water was still standing in the pots, already beginning to look stagnant, to smell of decay—and yet she felt comforted, almost joyful, as if the world made better sense, after all, than she had any right to expect. For maybe, just maybe, the world is really like that, she thought, the way we imagine it as children, before we stop seeing : now it may seem only a mundane, finite place, but there are things moving just out of sight, at the very limits of our adult vision, and these things are every bit as real. And maybe big words do obscure ordinary things, but for these other things—the hints of things, the elusive presences of things, the great things we can’t easily define—for these kinds of things, only big words will do. Maybe that is precisely the magic of true poetry: it looks at these retreating things directly and pins them down with big words before they can dart out of sight, making them visible, if only for the duration of a few verses. And maybe, after all my decades of blindness, I too will be able to see them at last—to see them again: maybe I just need to complete my own trial, my own forty—oh, not forty years, I’ll be fifty-five next month, it’s too late for that, and in any case, my trial would not be carried out on such an epic scale, it would be small, like my small life, a life within four walls… So perhaps—yes, wasn’t there something about the average person inhabiting forty rooms in his lifetime? And didn’t someone close to God, some saint or prophet, say that the soul has many rooms? So perhaps that is the desert through which I am destined to wander—forty rooms, each a test for my soul, a pocket-size passion play, a small yet vital choice, a minute step toward becoming fully awake, fully human; and by the time I have crossed my own wilderness of forty rooms, I too will be able to see the world as it really is—