Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

And as I sit in the dark, Hegel hurting my knee with his somber heft, and wrestle with words in some relentless, sleepless delirium, I see that my earlier fear of a secondhand reality muffled and diluted by words was misplaced—for it is through the power of words alone that the world can be truly captured, truly understood. Not just any words, to be sure: words can be alive or they can be dead, and dead words will dull the sharpest feeling, will turn the rarest vision into a vulgarity. I do not yet know what makes some words live and others die, but I believe I can already sense the difference between the two. And so I write, struggling to stretch the language until it bursts the stale confinement of the rhymed “nights” and “lights” and becomes something else, weighty yet plain, stark yet beautiful; and later, when I imagine the creak of the gate, the stealthy rustling of steps, the hushed, treacherous giggling on our garden bench, and two shadows bending close together, and the soft wetness of a first kiss, I gather my new sense of desolation—for I like him, I do, of course I do, I always have—and cram it raw into my half-formed poem, which I can already feel opening sonorously in the dark, unfolding its many petals of sounds, its many layers of meaning—until I wake with a start and find the room caught in a net of shifting starlight, a nightingale trilling in the forest, and my enigmatic acquaintance perched on the arm of the chair, holding my scribbles before his eyes, tapping his bare foot against the floor in rhythm with my lines.

I draw in my breath and stay very still. He has visited me a handful of times since the fateful night of Akhmatova’s Requiem , but I have not gotten used to his presence. A full minute passes. It must be very late. On the cot across the room, Olga is breathing tranquilly in her sleep. He releases the page, and it drifts to the floor.

He looks down at me then, smiling his slow, cruel smile.

Light-headed with the exhausting labor of creation, I feel brave enough to ask.

“Do you like it?”

He shrugs. “Heavily influenced by Tyutchev. Also, it’s not finished.”

“Yes, but—do you like it?”

He is the only one who ever reads my poems; I never mention them to anyone else. My poetry is a secret of which my mysterious night visitor is also a part.

“Oh, I suppose it shows promise. But you know what they say: The road to hell is paved with good intentions—and, I should add, with early promise.” He unwinds himself from the chair with his usual careless, feline grace. “So easy to end up trapped inside a nineteenth-century porcelain cup, my dear,” he says. “Especially for a woman, trite as that may sound.” He leans toward me—close, closer still—and the smile on his handsome, ruined face melts into a leer. Flushed, I look down. The nightingale’s song swells clear and ebullient in the sudden silence. My heart is pounding. I am seventeen years old, I am a poet, and I have never been kissed.

I expect—I do not know myself what I expect.

When I look up, only a puddle of starlight trembles on the floor.

“Needless to say,” Lev proclaims to the ceiling, “for most of our illustrious history the so-called profession of journalism was nothing but an embarrassing joke—red banners this, grain harvests that. Comrade Vasily, kindly pass the champagne. Nowadays, though, we have a sacred role to perform, no less than that of an artist.”

Lev rolls over and, leaning on his elbow, takes a swig from the bottle, then hands it over to Nina, who is sitting cross-legged on the carpet next to him, peeling an orange.

“Well, that’s going rather far,” she says. “I like having an inflated sense of self-importance as much as anyone, but journalism just isn’t art… Hey, now my orange tastes bitter! And anyway, it’s lukewarm and disgusting.”

“Give it back, then. And I’m not saying it’s art, either—but you must agree, today’s artists can’t claim to speak the truth to the extent we journalists do.”

“And historians,” Anna, Lev’s older sister, mumbles. “Don’t forget the historians.” She hiccups. Alone of us all, she is attending the history department.

“Sure, historians are responsible for exposing the truth of the past, but journalists deal in current truths—so much more vital as far as the people are concerned.” Lev is sitting up now, his thin, sharp-chinned face flushed with excitement. “Just as an example, when I wrote about the polluted vegetables sold at our market—”

A communal moan escapes from everyone in the room, even Sergei and Irochka unglue their lips long enough to exchange snorts, while Nina weakly pelts Lev with orange peels.

“Yes, yes, we know all about your sacred mission of bringing hygiene to the masses.” Vasily hangs off the bed to intercept the bottle, then leans back and throws his free arm around my shoulders. Only now I notice that the record has stopped playing. Wriggling out from under Vasily’s proprietary arm, I stand up to cross the room and move the needle back to the beginning. Okudzhava’s quiet, wise voice starts up anew, singing of doors forever unlocked to welcome a stranger on a wintry night, and valiant cardboard soldiers who step into the fire, reciting a noble catechism of friendship that burns steady amidst the dangers of betrayals big and small:

Anna hiccups again. Sergei yawns and rises from the single chair in the room, Irochka entwined tipsily around him. “Well, people, I have a deadline tomorrow. What time is it, anyway?”

It is close to eleven o’clock. Weightless snowflakes are blowing this way and that outside the window. Two by two, my friends take their leave—Lev with his sister; Sergei with the giggling Irochka; Olga, who has dropped in without my noticing, with yet another boy whose name I will not bother to commit to memory unless I see him again. Indiscriminately I hand out damp hats and scarves in the hallway’s dimness, certain that a good half of them are ending up with the wrong person, to be sorted out in the grimy light of the lecture hall the next morning, as together we plunge into yet another heady day of epigrams scribbled in the margins of our notebooks, cigarettes bummed in the girls’ bathroom, halfhearted kisses in the shadow of the kindly bronze Lomonosov, crumbs of momentous truths unearthed, devoured, and discarded between seminars in the yellow corridors of the eighteenth-century mansion in the threadbare heart of the ancient city.

When I lock the door behind the last of them and step back into the room, Vasily is sprawled on my bed, cradling the nearly empty bottle.

“Finally,” he says. “Come here.”

My parents have gone to a premiere at the Bolshoi and will not return before midnight. Stalling for time, I move about the room, straightening things—the rug’s corner flipped up at a rakish angle, the wet mark of the bottle’s bottom on a bookshelf, a volume of Annensky left spine-up on the windowsill. Even without turning, I can sense him breathing in expectation, grinning at my neck. As I needlessly rearrange my few trinkets (a shell from the Black Sea, a polished shard of amber from the Baltics, a statuette of Don Quixote someone gave my father years ago), I take comfort in thinking how familiar everything is here, how simple, monastic even, and how self-sufficient—the window, the bed, the desk, the chair, the hundreds upon hundreds of books, none of which ever gets dusty.

When the silence grows audible at last, I hasten to break it.