Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“You know, I almost wish we hadn’t burned the old history notebooks. Chemistry is one thing, but all those transcriptions of Marx’s Capital , all those triumphs of the five-year plans—twenty years from now no one will believe it without the physical evidence.”

I can still smell the fire in the air. I planned it for a long time, for months, at first merely groaning in the school corridors between classes, thinking how good it would be to forget everything meaningless once and for all, wipe it all away, burn it to ashes—until slowly my futile frustration gave way to a secret purpose. This morning I stuffed my bag full to bursting with years’ worth of accumulated assignments, tests, compositions, a decade of dead knowledge, and later sat by the fire pit behind the house for nearly two hours. Olga joined me halfway through the destruction, and we took turns mockingly declaiming this or that sentence, crumpling this or that equation into a ball, laughing with theatrical abandon as we fed the flames. I had waited for the day to condense into evening, so the fire would blaze with fierceness against the sky. I had also waited for my parents to leave. I had not told them. My mother would have worried that a stray spark might burn down the house. My father would have disapproved on general principles: he believed in the preservation of history, personal or otherwise.

“No regrets on my part,” I say now, addressing my father’s reproachful voice in my head. “I avenged myself for all the time killed.”

“Still, they might have come in useful someday,” Olga interjects thoughtfully. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll write a book about it when I’m old—say, when I’m forty. My childhood in the dark Soviet times. Torments of an artistic soul in the period of oppression. That sort of thing.” She giggles. “Or not. At the very least I could have shown those horrors to my offspring: See, children, don’t complain, your life could have been so much worse!”

“Thinking rather ahead, are you not?”

“Well, children are a given, I guess. Or don’t you want them?”

After a decade of sharing dreams, fears, and long, bedbound stretches of illness, we frequently borrow each other’s quirks of speech and our facial expressions likewise often mirror each other’s, but Olga’s eyes appear more focused than mine, and there is more resolve, more ambitious drive, in her face, in the thin lips that she purses with firmness. She always knows just what she wants before I am even aware of the choices. I do not know whether or not I want children; the notion seems irrelevant to me, and I have not given it much consideration. What I do not want, I think with sudden ferocity, is a small life—a life of mundane concerns, of fulfilled expectations, of commonplaces and banalities, of children’s sore throats, of grandmother’s apple pies, of fussy nineteenth-century porcelain—a life within four walls. I set down my cup, carefully but quickly; the streaks of soot, I notice, have dimmed the gilt a little.

“I would like to go to other places,” I say with a vehemence that startles me. “New places. Strange places. Not to have a house anywhere but just travel from place to place, smell it, taste it, describe it, remember it all, then move on…”

“I want to go to America,” Olga announces. “I could work there when I get my journalism degree. Do you ever wonder where you’ll be at forty?”

I understand that one is expected to muse upon one’s future on this momentous threshold of adulthood, but all the same, this predictable question makes me feel vaguely depressed, as if casting into instant doubt the smoky, bright, liberating hour by the fire, robbing it of color and life, flattening it into some artificial rite of passage indulged in solely for the sake of future reminiscing: Ah yes, I too was young once, I too was full of rebellion and revelry, I laughed free and wild by the fire, I dreamed of glory on a moonlit summer night… For as I sit on my beloved dacha balcony, watching the translucent June light tiptoe deeper into shadows, listening to the whistle of a faraway train, breathing in the aroma of lindens, I catch myself cataloguing the world around me, coining it into pocket-size verbal snapshots (the “soft dusk”—the “melancholy train”—the “dizzying smells”), to be retrieved at a convenient future date as a prepackaged nostalgia exhibit, or worse, as well-worn currency for some insipid poem.

All at once I am chilled by the gap widening precipitously between the present moment and my experience of it. Has life somehow, without my noticing, become its own paling reflection in a self-conscious mirror, its own stilted paraphrase on a dry page? It may be only an inevitable symptom of maturity, this politely disappointing sense of distance, this perception of the world at second hand, through words alone—but if so, I do not wish to grow up.

Forcefully I stand up, brush the crumbs off my dress.

“Time to bring out the telescope,” I say. “It’s grown dark enough.”

The telescope is a small handheld model my father gave me on my fourteenth birthday; it remains my most treasured possession. I unscrew its plastic cap, gently rub the lens with a square of cloth, and lift it to my eye. The black fringe of leaves and the indistinct celestial shimmer beyond slide across my vision in a swift blur. As I lean over the balcony railing, training the telescope on this or that quadrant of the sky, Olga rattles off the names of stars and constellations.

“Vega, Deneb, Altair,” she pronounces as she sketches the Summer Triangle with deft movements of her wrist, one, two, three. “But to be honest, I don’t like looking at the sky, it makes me feel small. I imagine myself as a tiny dot in a sprawling landscape of a monstrous country on a spinning globe floating like a minuscule speck in a freezing ocean of stars… Brrr!”

She guides the telescope down, lower, lower, until it is level with the road; then she laughs. “Hey, look, they’re having a party over on that terrace. You know, this thing is more powerful than I thought. See your boy pouring wine into three, no, four glasses?”

I attempt to shift the telescope away. “He is not my boy.”

“Fine, your neighbor, then, if you prefer, Alesha, Serezha, whatever his name is, I thought you liked him.”

“It’s Tolya, as you well know. And I don’t like him, I hardly know him. We just went for a walk one time last summer, that’s all.”

I do my best to appear nonchalant, but, as so often, I am plunged into remembering that August darkness striped with denser shadows of lampposts, and the heaps of wild roses hanging over the fences on both sides of the village dirt road, their sun-warmed smells drifting across our path like shy sweet ghosts, and our steps, in perfect, effortless harmony, and our awkward absence of words, for what one talked about with older boys—or any boys—I had no idea. As we turned into our street, his hand found mine, and its feel was big, dry, and nice, not in the least like those sweaty adolescent hands I imagined when overhearing the popular girls whisper to one another in the school hallways. But already we were approaching my gate, and there, in the cone of scanty light, under the soundless whirlwind of frantic moths, the stocky shadow of my father paced the road, three steps to the left, three steps to the right, waiting for me, though it was not yet ten o’clock, though I had never been late before. Anatoly’s hand let go of mine, and the next day the summer ended without warning, for my mother had fallen ill and we had to leave for the city; and I did not know Anatoly’s phone number or, indeed, his last name.

“I know!” Olga announces brightly. “Let’s go over there.”

I am shocked by the idea. “No, no, we shouldn’t. We aren’t invited.”