Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

With a start, she woke up from an unpremeditated nap on the deck of a large house, or else a small mansion. Her back was sore, and she was groggy from her dreamless sleep. She rose from the chair, walked over to the table with the herbs. The water, she saw, was still standing in the pots. Obeying some vague impulse, she took the plastic container with parsley in her bejeweled hands, rubbed the dying herb, smelled her fingers—and, amidst the chill of desolation, felt an inexplicable bloom of comfort.

Setting the parsley down, she wiped her eyes, and went inside to finish packing her mother’s cheap, synthetic dresses, to be picked up by a local charity in the morning. When she was done, the clothes had not filled even half a suitcase. Prompted by another dim impulse, she flew to her own closet, scooped up, without looking, as many hangers as she could carry, and stuffed her own glittering garments, all the silk, all the velvet, into the suitcase as well, until it was crammed full. The zipper caught on something—a dress, or was it a skirt, of peacock-blue taffeta—but she jerked once or twice and freed it.

The suitcase zipped, she stood still for a moment, thinking, then ran to get another, bigger suitcase and returned to her closet.

She was dozing in her favorite armchair, a volume of Pushkin and a half-knitted scarf in her lap, when he strolled into the room. She had heard no approaching footsteps: one moment she was alone, the next he was there. She had forgotten him decades before, and, in the years since, had forgotten that she had ever forgotten anything at all; it took her a long, squinting moment to place him. He was still the same age as when she had seen him last, around forty, give or take a millennium; from the vantage point of her fifty-seven years, he appeared surprisingly young. He was dressed in nondescript clothes—gray jeans, a grayish shirt, graying sneakers; he was also rather less good-looking, less dangerous-looking, than she remembered, his features bland and smooth. He moved uncurious eyes over the imposing bookcases that lined the walls, nodded at her in a casual manner, as though they had parted only yesterday, and sat down in the armchair across from hers, throwing one leg over the other, crossing his arms behind his head.

“So,” he said, “have you figured it all out yet?”

“I suppose I’ve figured out some things,” she said mildly.

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “the last time we saw each other, you chose not to go back home, so you could be free. You were oh-so-eager to escape a conventional life. How did that work out for you?”

She smiled, secure in her elderly wisdom, happy with knowing her limitations at last. “Well, it didn’t work out as I expected, but it worked out fine all the same. I believe I would have had this kind of life—an indoors kind, you know, marriage, children, home—no matter where I ended up. And yes, there were times, in my twenties, in my thirties, when it felt claustrophobic. The endless encroachment of stuff, it felt like, at times—things to take care of, people to take care of, the relentless thickening of matter… I used to wonder: Does it happen to others as well—do their lives change bit by bit, a new table here, a new baby there, until one day they wake up and look around and recognize nothing of their past in their present? But I grew into it. Learned to count my blessings. Learned to appreciate the small things. In fact, the older I get, the more I suspect that what we mistake for small things are really the things that matter. A child’s happy smile on Christmas morning, that sort of thing. And it’s not ‘settling’ if you are truly at peace.”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “Do remind me, though—unless I’m getting you confused with someone else—didn’t you want immortality or something?”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” she said, “but those talks we used to have—oh, it was heady stuff for a girl of thirteen, but at my age I find that kind of fortune-cookie philosophy rather… hackneyed. Someone once wrote that the memory of man was the most likely location of heaven. If so, a mother of six is ensured her place among the angels, at least for a generation or two. And beyond that—well, no one who isn’t Homer or Shakespeare has a right to hope for more anyway.”

“All possibly true. Still, I thought you aimed a little higher than half a page in a grandchild’s photo album.”

She wondered whether she would tell him; she felt reluctant to revisit the follies of her youth. “Do you remember that time when I burned all my poems?” she asked at last, sighing. “Almost forty years ago?”

He nodded noncommittally, sprawled in the chair, his eyes half closed.

“It was only a dramatic gesture, you know, because I remembered them word for word. But I never wrote them down again. I believed them engraved upon my soul and I thought I would never forget them. But memory is such a funny thing. I did, of course—I forgot them with time, forgot them entirely, give or take a few lines. And as gradually as I forgot the words, I began to believe that they had been something special.” She glanced at him for a reaction, but he appeared to have fallen asleep. “All the poems I wrote later, after my little bonfire, never felt quite… quite in earnest . When I looked at them with their ink still fresh, I always made excuses for myself: they were drafts to be reworked later, or mindless doodles, or prefabricated magnetic jingles, or rough translations from the original Russian. Oh, I knew myself capable of absolute brilliance, of course—the poems I had burned, now, those—those had been amazing…”

She was silent for so long that he opened his eyes and looked at her.

“Well?”

She studied her hands in her lap. “Well, after my mother’s death, I finally got around to sorting through her things in the garage. I found two bundles of poems in a shoebox. Turns out my parents had saved the poems I had sent them while I was in college—”

“Ah, yes. On the Other Side.”

She cringed. “Yes. So I sat on the floor of the garage and read through them right there and then. And see, I had remembered them as something luminous, something rare, something so much more than the sum of mere words on a page. But they were just stringent, hysterical, derivative little verses about nuns and angels and devils. And here is the truth: I was never very good, was I? I was nothing special.” Again she looked over at him for a sign—a confirmation, or maybe, just maybe, an objection—but he only watched her politely, one eyebrow cocked, expecting her to go on; so, ignoring the slightest ache that had started somewhere deep in the hollow of her chest, she went on. “Which seemed a painful discovery when I first made it, but in the end, it’s a relief, of course—I would hate to have wasted something real. As it is, my life has turned out to be just the right size for me—it simply took me a while to recognize it. Now that I’m too old to believe myself the center of the world, I’d much rather be a happy woman than a mediocre poet, and it’s enough to know that the world is full of beauty made by others.”

She nodded at the volume of Pushkin in her lap.

“Didn’t you say there were two bundles of poems in the shoebox?”

“Yes. The poems in the second bundle weren’t mine, but those—those were beautiful. Quiet, and wise, and—heartbreaking, really. They were about ordinary things: falling in love, falling out of love, children, death… They were in my mother’s handwriting.” She paused. She wanted to tell him how certain she felt that they had been written by the mermaid she had once met in her mother’s bedroom, but his exaggerated nonchalance stopped her. He was inspecting his fingernails, seemingly indifferent to what she was saying. Something caught in her throat.