About the girl behind the blog

This is the beginning of a slide show I decided to call: "a Russia of my own - about the girl behind the blog". I only got as far as to the fall of 2006 but I promise to continue... [Yes, this is procrastinating on a high level].

Russian Women

…is the name of the long poem by Nekrasov out of which we today at Ural State staged part I: “The Princess Trubetskaya”. It is indeed that time of the year – the time when the foreign students of Ural State perform Russian classics with an unmistakably odd but still cute accent. Caleb [USA] and I did a good job, just like the four Chinese kids that played a scene from Gogol’s “The Inspector General”.

Don’t get me wrong, I love acting. Especially I like the part when I get to put on an adorable 19th century style dress and have my hair done for an hour. But this past week was crazy and today it feels so good that we’ve done what we promised we’ll do – give Ural State our best and show our love for Russian literature in the process – and that it’s over now. This week I passed three tiny finals [they’re called «зачёт» and it means the mark is only a ‘pass’ or ‘no pass’ without any real grade] while we practised this play almost every day. I didn’t have any time to work because I was writing an essay and on Thursday only my home girls – Nadia, Ksenia and Marina – showed up for Swedish class so we went for cherry beer instead. Marina received a scholarship to study the spring semester of 2010 in Sweden – with a little help from a recommendation letter written by her teacher, i.e. me! It feels a little unreal to be sending my first student on a scholarship, but on the other hand it also makes me feel very proud of her. She really is a great student and she deserves it. Except for school and rehearsals and cherry beer nothing of importance has happened lately. And I don’t expect anything extraordinary to happen in the near future – my first exam for the class “History and Methodology of Linguistics” is on Tuesday. I’m very nervous. I’m mostly procrastinating.

The other day it hit me that I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up. It occurred to me that I’m getting close to an age in which most people make up their minds in regard to what they want to do in life, but that I right now feel like I’m getting more and more undecided. Partly this could be due to the fact that I’ve already done very much – pretty much everything I planned on doing. I published a novel – not in a real book, but still – and now I, strangely enough, feel relieved because I know I can do it. I know I can do very many things. What I don’t know is what I am going to do next.

I got an offer by a Russian director who’s a friend of mine to play in his short movie. I think I’ll do it, even though he wants to have the meeting on Sunday evening when what I should be doing is studying… Oh well, what don’t we do for arts? Because art is, in my strictly personal opinion, the next best thing to science. Or was it the other way around? The more time I spent with science, the more I come to realize that it resembles art so much that it’s almost impossible to know where one ends and the other one begins.

Here’s part 9 of my novella “Ten Shades of Kindness”. Yes, you probably thought I had forgotten all about it, but as it turns out – I haven’t! Enjoy!

9.

A year later it was summer yet again in the provincial town we had come to call our home. Raphael and Gabriel celebrated their first birthday in May, Mikaela was almost three years old and I returned to my work at the hospital. One afternoon in June I came home and found Erik sitting in the communal kitchen with an illustrated children’s book in his hand and a troubled look on his face. I had just spent an hour waiting in line outside the grocery store to buy oranges, and placed my precious catch on the table in front of him with a victorious smile on my lips. I sat down across the table from him and started pealing an orange. He opened the brightly colored book on the first page and pointed with his finger on the first sentence of it.

“What letter is this?” he asked.

“B.”

He frowned, moved his close to the open page and looked at it for a long time in silence without saying anything. I gave him half of the orange I had finished peeling and he started eating it.

“Mikaela asked me today why the story in this book is always the same when you read it, but always different when I do it. And I couldn’t tell her it is because her mother can read but her father can’t.”

I looked at him without saying anything.

“Martina, I think I have to learn how to read,” he said. “I don’t want my children growing up with an illiterate parent like I did. I want to learn how to read and write. Will you help me?”
“Of course,” I answered. “I’ve always thought of offering to help you with that, but I guessed that you didn’t want to because you never ask me about it.”

He blushed. “For 36 years I have pretended that I didn’t want to, that I didn’t need to know anything more than I already knew. But now I’m finally brave enough to admit that I know nothing. And I don’t want to be a bad role model for my children. Because if I can’t read then they might grow up to think it’s alright for them to do the same.”

The next day I went to the book store and bought a children’s book about how to learn to read and write. Every night after tucking our children into bed we sat together at the table in the communal kitchen while he learned both to read and to write the alphabet letter by letter. In the beginning when the other people living together with us in the same apartment, with which we shared the kitchen, asked us what we were doing he was too embarrassed to admit to it. He mumbled that he was ‘brushing up on some basic things’. But as he grew more and more confident in himself he told them frankly and plainly that he had been illiterate upon until a few days ago. Every afternoon when I came back from the hospital, as he worked the night shift and was always at home at that time of day, I found him always sitting with a book in his hands. By the fall that year he felt sure enough of himself to begin leaving small notes in my bag the night before, notes that I always found when I opened it around lunchtime to retrieve my lunch bag from it. They consisted out of nothing but a few sentences in the beginning, but became longer and longer the colder it became outside. During the winter his tiny notes had turned into real letters – love letters.

It must have been around New Year that I became pregnant for the third time. By March and the international women’s day I found out that I was expecting twins again, which led me to think about having an abortion, something that I had never ever considered before in my life. My salary as a doctor at the hospital had been steadily increasing during my two and a half years there and was together with his paycheck just enough to support the five of us financially. I was not sure that our humble family budget, with me on maternity leave for another year with two more children, could stretch that far without leading us into outright poverty. When I told Erik about my doubts and tried to dress the option of abortion in as delicate and kind words as possible, he bluntly answered:

“I’ll take on an extra shift and work three days straight instead of two.”

On the 2nd of September when I was 32 years old and he was 37 our fourth and fifth children were born – two twin boys which we named David and Daniel. During the year that I stayed at home and took care of five small children Erik was offered to begin studying at a night school and take engineering classes there. The classes were for free and a part of a state program aimed at giving workers who had been deprived of higher education a chance to receive instruction in different professions. He attended classes three evenings a week instead of going to work, and the hours he lost there were subsided by the state.

“Now you can’t tell me that this country was better before,” he said with a wide smile on his lips when he came home and showed me his first diploma in early June after finishing one year of studies.

Thanks to his newly acquired proof of education he was given a job as an engineer at the same factory and no longer had to work the nightshift. Not only did he work during the day from this point on, but he also received twice as much in payment. After my year on maternity leave I didn’t go back to the hospital for two reasons. The first was because I found out that I was pregnant again and the second because it proved impossible to find room in one and the same kindergarten for five children at once. On the 20th of April I gave birth to my sixth child – a baby girl that I convinced Erik we should name Erika, even though he protested in the beginning. After he saw that she resembled him in character more than any other of our children he was much content with my choice. Erika became his favorite. I didn’t have any favorites, but I suppose that could’ve been because they had all been inside of me and none of them reminded as much as me as Erika did of him. Even though she was the smallest of our children already at birth, and never grew to be taller than me – which all of our other children of course became, especially the boys made the most of their fathers tall genes – her personality was an immediate reflection of his. She possessed all of his subtle humor, his splendid ability for keeping secrets and always got into fights both in kindergarten and later also in school. She always came home with scratches on her knees and elbows and was the only one of our children to receive poor grades for behavior.

But Erika’s fighting spirit had yet to surface when I turned 34 and he turned 39 and we celebrated Mikaela’s sixth birthday by taking our first summer holiday together as a family. The provincial town in which we lived was located a few hours north of our country’s largest lake, and we traveled by train to the south of it to spend three weeks by its shore in a tent. When I brought him and the children to the beach on the day of our arrival, I was afraid that I had forgotten how to swim. I stepped out into the water and felt the coldness surround my legs, at first I hesitated, but then I suddenly threw myself into the glittering blue lake.

“You can swim?” Erik asked as he still stood on the shore holding Erika in his arms. Next to him in the warm sand Daniel and David were playing.

“I used to swim in the sea when I was child,” I answered. “My parent’s always rented a house by the shore every summer.”

“And I learned how to swim in the river by our house in the village where I grew up…”

While I swam and swam in the cool water he remained by the shore with our children. When I came back – perhaps a whole hour had passed by without me noticing it – he dived into the water himself and swam away for a while. I watched him from the shore and he waved back at me.

Post-Tomsk

Here I am in action at the conference on Thursday afternoon last week in the great city of Tomsk. For those of you who don’t speak Russian – I’m talking about the first translation of F. M. Dusty’s ‘Siberian Notebook’ into Swedish [my own translation]. I received third place! Just like last year…

All in all, this was yet another good trip to Tomsk. Nothing ever goes wrong in Tomsk; Tomsk is cool. On Tuesday I took the train to Novosibirsk and in Novosibirsk on Wednesday I caught the [five hour] commute train north to Tomsk. The city was cold, but this I had foreseen on weather prognosis for next week and therefore I was prepared and not lost to freezing in Siberia. The journey there went smoothly and I was met by my professor Aleksey’s friends – Nina and Sergey – at the train station on Wednesday evening. In their apartment a gathering of Russians ‘generation older’ were drinking wine, vodka and singing Russian traditional thief songs. It was wonderful. On Thursday I went to the conference’s opening and it was nice, but I noticed that it wasn’t as big as last year. As I walked around the exhibition with the foreign students’ works I looked or my scientific work – which I didn’t find anywhere – and then I saw a woman sitting reading an «альманах» [’literary miscellany’]. So I asked her where I might find my book in Russian: “In All Your Rooms”. She gave me a wide, bright smile and said: ‘So you wrote this?’ holding up the thick journal with poetry, essays and prose written by foreign students in Russia. In it I found almost 100 pages out of the 170 pages dedicated to publishing my Russian novel: «Во всех комнатах твоих».

I am a published writer! In Russian! In Siberia!

After this I think I was in chock for the following two days that the conference lasted and I am still having problem dealing with the reality of having published a novel. Okay, so not in a ‘real’ book, okay, so only in a journal made by and made for foreign students in Russia, but still! I’m amazed. I can’t believe this has happened to me.

The conference was interesting, but I didn’t do as good a job as I could’ve done and I’m not really content at all with my performance. Yet I received third place. Also I scored two diplomas in the nomination for ‘A New Reading of Russian Classics’ both for my scientific work and for my novel. I am guessing I’m the only one in that nomination anyhow.

In general I enjoyed Tomsk. I went to the philosophy faculty of Tomsk State University and met up with all of my friends from last year. Dina had made me a doll (!) with her own hands. Dina makes dolls these days. I can’t really explain the doll, but she’s awesome! Maybe I’ll post a picture or something, or I’ll keep Marfa to myself. Yes, the doll’s name is Marfa. Marfa is wonderful. Dina and I hung out and on Friday night we even went to a club and listened to rock music. Dina knew the singer in the band from Moscow and she asked him to sing a song for me and he did! We even danced!

On Saturday at noon I got to fire a canon ball from the highest spot in Tomsk. I got to dress up like a Russian 17th century lady and fire it with a burning stick. It was a lot of fun.

All the Russians in Tomsk advised me to take the bus from Tomsk back to Novosibirsk on Saturday, which I did and it was almost death. The road was thin and terrible and the bus made half a century ago and had since then only traveled the roads of death in Siberia.

On the train from Novosibirsk to Tomsk I ended up in the same train as this man – Martin – from Switzerland. When I told him where I’m from he almost laughed his head off. Why? It’s an insider joke that only people from Sweden and Switzerland can understand because in Russia they always confused our countries and Swedes get praised for chocolate and Swiss for ABBA. Martin and I talked until midnight last night and then we talked the whole day today in the train. I didn’t see it coming but I apparently had a lot of things I want to say. I couldn’t stop talking and he didn’t mind listening. It was fun to talk to someone who’s much older than me and still doesn’t treat one as a child. He’s a physicist. On his was back from a conference in Beijing by train to Switzerland.

My body seems to think it is still on a train. I am all stuck in the train motion… Well, this was my trip to Tomsk 2009. As always a pleasure, Siberia!

8.

Mr. L. lived, lives and will live forever! [Hope not, comrades…]

Clearly, I should be doing something. I have two big essays to write and I can’t decide which one to start writing first. Clearly, I’m only loosing time doing what I’m doing as we speak [or rather – not doing at all], i.e. being unable to decide what to start working on and thus not reading up on nothing at all when I could be doing something. Also I’m really, really tired. I don’t even feel like writing “Word of the Week: «Победа» [Victory]” for my other blog. All I feel like doing is sitting in front of my computer and play with my hair and watch the hours go by. I’ll probably call my parents tonight, though. Before Tomsk. I can’t do anything before Tomsk it seems like. I can’t even decide what to wear on the conference. I had the perfect outfit picked out, but that’s a summer outfit, and the Siberian weather forecast for next week promises little summer. I’m completely lost at what to do. Today in the supermarket it hit me that I must buy food for the train trip and found myself lost at what to buy. I’m pretty filled with apathy at the moment, I think. On Friday, during a hilarious and over six hour long MSN-conversation with my awesome friend Annie, I joined a Swedish online ‘dating’ community called VildaWebben and left it twelve hours later. Clearly, there was nothing there for me to do. Whoever it is I’m looking for, he’s not there, and if he was there I would conclude that he is – after all – not meant for me. The site was appalling mostly because it revealed how terribly low the knowledge of correct Swedish orthography is in my home and native land. And I can’t, clearly, date a man who doesn’t know how to spell.

Last night I watched a good Ingmar Bergman movie: “Efter repetitionen”. I think I’m starting to like Bergman. The horror! Also I’m addicted to Pernilla Andersson’s latest album “Gör dig till hund”. Her lyrics are wonderful. I intend to use at least one of her songs in my teaching, this academic year or maybe next. But I’m too consumed with apathy at the moment to think about preparing Swedish lessons tonight. I have a new idea for a short story in two parts but as I tried to start writing it last night I just kept falling asleep. I want to stretch my writing to another level but right now all I can think of is sleeping. I don’t even have much of an appetite at the moment. I have the Ural’s greatest stash of junk food in my room – you name the snack, I’ve got it – but I don’t want to eat anything but a «сметанник» and I arrived too late at the grocery store today to buy one. This week’s number of «Русский репортер» was surprisingly good and interesting. Everybody I know in Russia reads “Russian Reporter” right now.

Some times I feel like everybody’s moving forward in life while I’m being left behind. People are having long-term relationships, my cousin’s getting married in September, and I’m just… dragging myself along the road and taking the day as it comes and staying up far too late at night and not doing half of everything that I should be doing. I feel like taking a break. From everything. Tomsk could not have arrived at a better moment in my life than next week.

I haven’t heard from the Swedish Institute yet. About next year’s scholarship. Don’t know if I’ll receive it or not. For the first half of May this worried me much, but tonight I find myself indifferent. I think I’ll sleep on this. Take Shalamov with me to bed and drift into his wondrous world of GULAG camps on Kolyma.

Here’s part 8 from my novella “Ten Shades of Kindness”. I’m probably the only one who reads it but I like it very much. I’ve decided to write whatever I feel like writing starting a few months back and not be ashamed of the way I view the world. If you don’t like it then I’m probably not something you should be reading. For those of you, who hold a different opinion, enjoy:

8.

During my last year at the Medical Academy I lived not in the student dormitory, but in Dr. Solomon’s apartment, in his library which he had declared my room after the summer. In the beginning of August Erik moved to the small town where his friend had a promised him a job. He started working at the furniture factory and after two weeks he was given a room in a communal apartment located in a building where only workers from that factory lived. In late August I brought Mikaela and all of her things with me to that town and left her there with him. At first I had thought I would be unable to leave her there the day before the 1st of September, but as I saw him that morning holding her in his big, safe and kind hands I knew it was my duty to leave. In the communal apartment were four rooms; in the three other rooms lived three other families, and two of those families also had small children. Erik worked the nightshift at the factory. During the night Mikaela was constantly under the observation of the young mothers in the other families, who also gave her breakfast in the morning and cared for her until lunchtime when Erik usually woke up. Every Saturday evening I took the commute train from the capital to the small town and he came to meet me at the station with her in his strong arms. Every Sunday morning I awoke in Erik’s small room in a double-bed with Mikaela sleeping between me and my husband. Every Sunday evening I took the commute train back to the capital and in that manner my sixth year at the Medical Academy passed by quicker than initially imagined. With every month Mikaela grew bigger and bigger, with every month her light blonde hair turned darker and darker, and on her first birthday she had brown curls and brown eyes. Yet she had been born blonde with blue eyes.

Mikaela’s birthday was celebrated with Dr. Solomon’s family in his apartment in the capital and marked the last time I spent both there and in the capital. Upon finishing the Academy I, like everyone else in those days when finishing higher education, received my first work placement as a doctor in a hospital from the state. My placement was at a hospital located in a provincial town in another end of our large country, over five days with train away from the capital. I, like everyone else receiving such government placements, were ordered to remain at my first work for no less than five years. I left with Mikaela and we took the train to the faraway province in the end of June. Erik had promised to follow us as soon as he was allowed to resign from his work at the factory.

Many, many years later he told me that he remembers me best as he saw me on the day of his arrival in that provincial town when I was 29 years old and he was 34. He said to me that in his memory I will always remain as I was on that day when I came to meet him one late September evening in dusk.

“My train arrived about half an hour early at the station. You hadn’t made it all the way there yet then but I knew the street where you lived, and I asked a fellow passenger who also got off at that station where it was. Then I directed my steps in that direction, hoping I would meet you half-way. It was a warm day, almost as warm as if it had still been summer, and completely without any wind. It didn’t feel like fall yet. The sun was still far from setting as I walked down the main street with two large bags hanging from each shoulder. I departed from the main street’s broken asphalt onto a smaller dirt road, lined with small wooden houses, some of which were very old but well-taken care of, others of which were not but almost falling apart. Everywhere was this certain provincial stillness; there were no people around, only lights in the windows. I could tell both on the ground underneath my feet and by the smell in the air that it had recently rained. The ground was muddy and the air was fresh with a sweet smell of someone’s wood stove burning. There were many chickens and cats strolling around on the street, farther away I passed by a few cows, as I walked and walked farther down the long road. Then I saw you coming from the opposite direction. You were dressed in big green rubber boots that reached all the way up to your knees, with a white cotton nightgown underneath a far too large knitted brown cardigan. It was open and hung almost all the way down to your knees. You had rolled up the sleeves a couple of times as they would have been far too long for you otherwise. And there you walked up to me with your long blonde hair let out, it hung down along the sides of your arms in long, straight locks that glittered in the day’s last sun rays. And I thought to myself when I saw you coming toward me that everything about this little woman is beautiful – those naked, tiny knees, that small button nose, those full lips around your slightly open mouth, and that determined look in your silver grey eyes that looked more and more up at me the closer you came. And I will always remember you like that – with spots of mud both on your boots and on your knees and on your white nightgown… I took you into my arms and lifted you up and thought to myself that isn’t it wonderful that so much can fit into such a little body, that everything I love can be so light and tiny that I can lift it up and spin it around and kiss it everywhere,” he said. “And I came to love you more, every little piece of you, the more I saw how petite yet strong everything about you were… Some might call that passion, some might call that pure physical love, the feeling I experienced every time I placed my hands against yours and the difference in size between them seemed so natural, essential and beautiful. But I call it love between a man and a woman.”

But his memory of that day came many years later. Now was still that same fall, our first fall of living together. He found work as a guard in a factory in the provincial town that was much bigger than the small town outside the capital where he had lived with Mikaela before. It had almost half a million inhabitants and not only a theater, but also three movie theaters, a couple of museums and restaurants, five or six markets, many schools and even a few institutions of higher education. I worked in the central hospital during the day and he worked twelve-hour shifts for two days and then rested two days. During the days when he worked Mikaela was in the kindergarten by my hospital but when he didn’t work he always stayed at home and took care of her. The week before New Year I found out that we were expecting a second addition to our family, which arrived in late May in the form of twin boys. As a working member of society the state granted me a year of leave from the hospital to take care of the babies.

Erik came in a car that he had borrowed from his superior at the factory and picked us up at the hospital when I was allowed to return home after giving birth. The whole way back home to our apartment, which consisted of a small bedroom, an even smaller kitchen, but no bathroom as the building lacked plumbing, Erik had an odd, enigmatic smile on his broad lips. He said very little during the whole journey back home along broken asphalt and dirt roads. The reason for his secretive smile was explained when I entered our bedroom and found two cribs made out of wood standing next to each other by the only window.

“Did you…?” I began my question, but didn’t finish it. I walked up to the cribs and put down the boy in my arms in one of them. There was still plenty of room in it. I tucked him into to it, softly covering his body with the white wool blanket.

“Yes, I did,” he answered and placed the other baby boy in the other crib.

Later that night, when Mikaela had fallen asleep on the sofa, we sat next to each other on our bed in the dark bedroom and looked at our children. The room was silent and yet not completely; slow, even breathing from three pairs of lungs could be heard in the dark. And he placed his head on my shoulder and looked up at me.

“What do you think about Gabriel?” he asked.

“I think Gabriel is a very good name. For that one? The bigger one?” I pointed at the crib closest to our bed.

Erik nodded.

“What do you think about Raphael?” I asked.

“That’s also a very good name. For the smaller one? The one who came out second, or I mean, third?” he smiled at me.

I nodded.

That night we didn’t go to sleep for a very, very long time. First he sat with his head resting on my shoulder, then he laid down and placed it in my lap, and all the while we listened to the breathing of our children. Both hoping one of them would wake up and cry and at the same time hoping they wouldn’t.

Сентенция

This is Henrik, the newest addition in my bed. Here he is looking out of the window on a sunny afternoon wearing his favorite pieces of jewelry: the St. George bow and an earring with Sweden’s and Russia’s flags. Some folk say he’s being such a copy-cat of my tattoo Raskolnikov, but people are – as is the general rule – wrong. Henrik is a mouse, not a cat.

«Сентенция» is 1) a short story by Varlam Shalamov [the last short story in his second collection of “Stories from Kolyma” called “The Left Bank”; it is dedicated to Nadezhda Mandel’shtam – yes, she was the purged poet Mandel’shtam’s wife], and 2) the Russian way of writing the Latin word ‘sententia’ which means a) feeling; b) opinion; thought; c) vote; d) sentence. Coincidentally, this word will also become my next tattoo. I plan on doing it once I’ve 1) tested my love for Shalamov for at least six more months to see that it will last, and 2) passed all the three state exams [Russian literature, philosophy, English] of the master’s program I’m currently studying at. This means I will have a new tattoo some time in February next year. I’m thinking it would fit nicely somewhere on the lower half of my left leg.

It will, obviously, be a symbol for Russian 20th century literature. My friends told me that ‘no one will get that reference’ but what does that mean to someone who already has a symbol for Russian 19th century literature tattooed on the back of her right shoulder that nobody understands? Everybody always says only “Crime & Punishment” and that’s about as far as their thinking goes. My new tattoo will be in Latin. My friends also said that if I get to live long enough then I will have symbols for many centuries of literature on my body… and then I could work extra as a «шпаргалка» during finals at institutions for Slavic languages & literatures!

Today was a good day. I bought my train ticket to Tomsk today – I’m leaving for Siberia on Tuesday at about 2 pm. I’ll probably be back on Sunday evening or Monday morning, depending on what train back I’ll get tickets for. I’m excited about going back to Tomsk again. I’m sure that both the conference for foreign students in Russia and meeting all of my friends from Tomsk State’s philosophy faculty will be great. Also I’m looking forward to the riding the train again. I bought a little more expensive ticket this time, and I’ll be traveling in «купе» instead of «плацкарте» as I deem myself a little too old and my nose a little too sensitive for the ‘barn wagon’, especially in May when Russia turns into a very hot country.

Today I – finally – had the courage to start a conversation with my old friend A. [calling him just a ‘flirt’ would be unfair to both of us because it was more than that – we were more than that – he taught me to love this city during our long walks late at night and for that I will always be grateful to him] at the university. During this whole academic year we’ve avoided so much as looking at each other, though we meet every week at the faculty, and we haven’t said even a single word to each other since ‘it’ was over last spring. I don’t know why I spoke to him today. I was sitting and looking at him and I realized that he is as a matter of fact a very good man and that I’m not the same girl as I was last year and why should we ignore each other when we could be friends since after all we’re so much alike? In the beginning of our conversation he seemed not very keen on talking to me. He even had a stab at hinting at our previous ‘connection’ but I ducked like a good girl and switched the subject. He did that because he is after all a little bit like me and can be just as mean as I can. During our conversation he even smiled a couple of times and it hit me – after all he still has the looks and the brain of a man in my taste. The only thing that turned me off was that he wasn’t wearing glasses. But you can’t have everything, right? Today I at first thought a lot about how mean I was to him a year ago. Then I began thinking of how mean he was to me a year ago. I think we’re too alike to be a couple, but it could work for being friends. Or at least saying hello to each other when we meet. After all we’re not strangers; as a matter of fact few men on this planet have had their tongues as far down in my throat as he had.

Also I met another old friend today at the faculty – Julia, the German woman who works at the consulate! Julia, Julia, Julia! It was great to see her again. What can I say? Life can be simple sometimes, days can be good, but this can be hard to notice when you’ve got four difficult exams to pass within a month and no desire at all to sit and study when the sun is shining outside and all you want is a man to take you for a walk and ask to hold your hand…

7.

My stomach began to show growth only in January. During the spring, as I took the train to visit Erik on the last Sunday of every month and turning up bigger and bigger with each time, we always spoke of and guessed at what would come first: the birth of the baby or his release from prison. Both of them turned out to happen on the same day – on the 18th of July when I was 28 years old. A month before I had managed to finish my fifth year at the Medical Academy with only one year left before I was to receive my diploma and become a real doctor. As soon as I found out that I was pregnant I was forced to tell Dr. Solomon of my condition and he proved to be a very understanding man in such delicate situations. Dr. Solomon had three children of his own, but only one of them still lived at home with him and his wife in their rather spacious apartment in the center of the capital. Apart from teaching at the Academy he ran a small private clinic from his home in the afternoons. He was one of the few doctors still permitted to do so in those days, and besides this was only a couple of years before he was required to give up both the apartment and his home clinic and move into smaller living quarters, loosing all of his patients at once. Private work was frowned upon by the state. It was decided once and for all that medical care was to be provided only for free at hospitals run by the state. But that was still in the future when Dr. Solomon invited me to stay with him and his family in their apartment after giving birth. He promised that he would furnish his library with a couch that could be made out into a double-bed and provide with enough room both for me, my husband and the new addition to our little family.

I gave birth to a baby girl early in the morning on the 18th of July, a rather cold and rainy summer day in the capital. Later the same day Dr. Solomon came to visit me and remained with me until the evening. At first he played with the baby for a long time; made her both laugh and cry as he made funny faces and different strange sounds. Then we talked for a long while and in the end he remained sitting next to me with his silver-framed small, round glasses on the tip of his pointy nose as he read the paper. Dr. Solomon enjoyed reading the paper and commenting articles out loud, which he was doing when Erik turned up in the door. Erik was wearing strange, old-fashioned clothes that seemed as if they had come straight from another time and another world; it took me a while before I gathered that this must have been what he had worn upon entering prison almost eight years ago. Eight years ago then were indeed another world. Nobody wore such black hats or such shiny boots made out of brown leather anymore. He took off his hat and remained standing almost in embarrassment in front of us both. Dr. Solomon raised himself up from the chair next to the bed in which I was lying, holding the baby in my arms, and gave my husband his hand to shake. They shook hands.

“Good evening, sir,” Dr. Solomon said in a manner that was no longer acceptable in our new society but fitted Erik’s current appearance perfectly.

Erik bowed his head slightly. “Good evening, doctor.” Then he looked at me with eyes that showed he was not sure if he had enough courage to walk up to the bed.

“Please, have a seat,” Dr. Solomon said and invited him to sit down on the chair. “I’ll go out for a smoke.” After saying this he left the room.

Erik sat down on the chair and bent his head down toward the baby in my arms. She was wrapped tightly in a white blanket and her pink, soft face was the only part of her body available to public viewing. “Is this…?” he whispered, and I lifted her up toward him.

“Here. Take her and hold her.”

He took her into his hands and held her close to his chest, right under his neck, as if he didn’t know how to hold a baby but wanted to keep her as near to his face and body as possible. Most likely he didn’t know how to hold a baby yet then. “It is a girl?”

I nodded. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

He looked at her and smiled. His eyes became wet and it seemed as if he was about to cry. But he didn’t start to cry that day in the hospital. “She’s the most beautiful child I have ever seen in my life. Have you chosen a name for her yet?”

I bit my lip. “Not yet, but I have a suggestion. Do you want to hear it?”

He nodded.

“Mikaela,” I said.

“Mikaela? Why?”

“You don’t like it?” I asked, and he wanted to object by starting to shake his head, but instead of letting him speak I decided to give a foundation for my choice. “My father’s name was Michael and my mother’s name was Mikaela, and ever since I found out that they both died during the war I’ve wanted to name my first child in honor of one of them. And since she’s a girl she should be named in honor of my mother.”

“That’s a very good idea, and a very good choice for a name,” he smiled first at me and then at the child in his arms. “Welcome to the world, little Mikaela. Martina, I never knew my mother. She died when I was only four or five years old. I remember very little of her. I grew up with my father and my two older brothers in a small village far, far away from here. You probably never even heard of it, that’s how tiny and insignificant it is. When I was in one of the camps I heard that it got completely destroyed in the war… My father had a farm there and I never went to school when I was a child because we all had to work on the fields or take care of the animals,” he looked up at me and blushed a little. “I can’t even read. I have memorized a few words by the way they look and I’m pretty good at numbers and counting, but that’s as far as my education goes.”

“I thought they teach illiterate prisoners to read in prison these days?”

He blushed even more and confessed: “If you admit that you’re illiterate, that is. If you don’t, then they won’t.” He stroked with one of his big, rough fingers along the soft cheek of the little child in his arms and smiled at her. “I want it to be different for her. And it will be different for her because she will have you. I bet you weren’t born in a village, and that both your parents had higher education?”

“Yes, my mother was a history professor at the university and my father was a surgeon,” I answered.

“And I won’t let you become anything less but a doctor too,” he said. “I’m going to take care of Mikaela during the first year of her life while you finish the Academy in the capital. I promise you that.”

I hesitated. “Are you sure?”

“I have a friend in a small town about an hour north of the capital, he’s the director of a furniture factory there and he’s promised to give me a job and help me find an apartment. And while we live there you can come visit us every weekend. The job won’t give me much money, but it will be enough to live on and we won’t at least starve,” he said and bent his head down to kiss Mikaela on her forehead. Then he looked at me for a long time without saying anything, as if he was searching to find something in my face, within my eyes, to see what they had once seen. He frowned a little bit after a while and asked: “In the apartment where you grew up, was there a chandelier in the dining room?”

I nodded.

“And you were their only child?”

I nodded again.

“Had it not been for that camp I don’t think we would have ever met,” he concluded.

I corrected him: “Had it not been for that war, we would’ve never have met.”

Dr. Solomon knocked on the door carefully before entering into the room again. Erik was already informed that we were allowed to stay with him in his apartment, but I wasn’t to be let out of the hospital yet for a few days, and thus the two men left me alone with Mikaela about an hour later. They both promised to come back the next day.

I held Mikaela in my arms and looked down into her big, blue eyes. The world that I had been brought into had been different just as the childhood that awaited her would differ from the childhood I had experienced. She would not eat breakfast at a little café in the morning or drink hot chocolate there in the afternoons after school, and there would be no chandelier with lit candles over her head at dinner time. She would not come to know the summer trips to the sea that I had taken every year with my parents; the sea shore was far from the capital and belonged to another country now. One thing would, nevertheless, be almost the same – one of her parents would be a doctor. The other would not be a professor but an illiterate former thief, but I supposed that could be considered only a tiny detail when thinking of the big picture. I wondered if she would come to believe me in the future, if I were to tell her that there had been another way of living before, a life in which the highest ideal had been kindness.

Баня

Today is time for another entry in the ‘fashion section’ of my otherwise very nerdy & literary blogg. Here is a picture for all of you who a) have always craved to find out what the restrooms at Ural State look like, b) want to see just how cute my new white top from Esprit that I bought on Saturday is. [The little pink thing that can be seen underneath the top is my iPod – yes, I always carry it in my bra since most of my miniskirts lack pockets…] Today was a warm and sunny day here in Yekat and I’m very proud of this outfit – even my academic guidance counselor Aleksey complimented me on it! [I would’ve never bought a top with this much cleavage had not Ksyusha insisted that I must.]

Yesterday was also a sunny and warm day here in Yekat. Only Ksyusha, Nadia and Andrey showed up for our Swedish movie club in the evening, so we decided to not watch “Ondskan” but go and drink cherry beer instead. [Andrey was, however, not invited because he would’ve probably declined such an invitation anyway.] I drank cherry beer together with the girls at the Old Dublin pub, on their ‘uteservering’ downtown, and it turned out to be a most cozy and comfortable Monday evening, even though Nadia was most upset to have missed “The Cruelty” as she believes it could teach her a thing or two necessary to know in life. Then I stayed up until 3 am finishing my latest academic article – a splendid little analysis of intertextual connections with Dusty’s chapter «Баня» [“Sauna”] in Shalamov’s short story «В бане» [“In the Sauna”]. I got so caught up in the process that I found it hard to stop myself and tell myself that enough is enough, after all 11 pages is more than the 10 minutes I get to read the article in class on Thursday. I love analyzing literature. I love literature. I love Dusty. I love Shalamov so much that I downloaded every single picture of him from the official Russian site about him and then sat for hours just envying the women next to him in the pictures. Neither of his wives were very pretty, I must admit. But his last love was [and still is, probably] not just pretty, but actually beautiful. Good for you, Varlam! But what about me? Clearly, I am losing my mind. The other day I swear I saw Shalamov on the street. Obviously, my mind was gone long before this and what is leaving me are the last scraps of my sense.

Since I went to bed so late I also woke up with less than one hour to eat breakfast, put on my make-up and arrive in time for classes at 2 pm. Gosh, it was tight. But I managed. Tonight I will continue my quest into the art of Shalamov and start ‘a philological analysis’ of one of his shorter short stories. It will become an essay for this class in linguistics that I have to pass [why?] and the great thing about it is that it should be about ‘everything’ in the text. And translating from ‘philology language’ into normal language this means that an analysis of a one page short story should be at least ten pages long. I can’t wait! I’m such a nerd. But it wasn’t until about a month ago that I started to finally get the hang of things, to understand literary theory and literary analysis. Now I’m addicted. Who knew there could be so much in such few words? Whoever says literature can’t be studied scientifically is just a party pooper, comrades, in my strictly personal opinion.

Here’s part 6 of my novella. The war is over, and we’re more than half-way to the end, and yet – the hardest things to overcome are still ahead of us. Enjoy:

6.

The telephone number of the prison was listed in the catalogue and I called it to find out when it would be possible for me to come visit Erik. I was told that the only day when visitors were allowed was Sunday, which was good for me because that was the only day of the week when I didn’t have classes at the Academy. The last Sunday in October I took the train from the capital to the small town to visit him. I didn’t tell my professor, Dr. Emmanuel’s close friend Dr. Solomon, that I was going out of town that weekend. I had managed to save up some money during August when I was working and could pay for the train tickets there and back on my own. The same Sunday I bought a dark pink lipstick and put on the only dress I owned at the time – light brown in color and made out of a far too thin fabric to be worn so late into the fall. I made sure that my hair was newly washed and didn’t put it up in a pony tail. It was still before noon when I arrived at the train station and walked by foot from there to the prison. I asked for directions and it only took me about twenty minutes to walk there. Upon entering the prison I showed my new passport – when I applied for it, something that was made possible only after I was officially rehabilitated, I had wanted to ask them to put Erik’s last name on it, but such a request proved unnecessary. My last name was automatically changed to his. I was led by a guard to a room on the second floor in the prison’s main building, in which I was told to wait. The room was rather large; the walls were white, there was a couch standing along one of the walls in front of which was a low coffee table. The room had one window that was taller than it was wide and lacked curtains. I walked up to it. Outside the sun was shining: the morning had been cloudy but now the sky had cleared. The view from the window was the least inspiring – all that could be seen where other brick buildings and a part of the concrete wall.

The door opened and I turned around. He bent down his head slightly as he walked through the door and stopped. The door closed behind him. He was wearing a light gray shirt and pants of a darker gray shade – usual prison ware, to which I had become so used by then that I hardly took any notice of it. He seemed much bigger than I had remembered him being, but that could have been in part due to the fact that he had gained back almost all of his initial weight and in addition to this put on some muscles since our last meeting. Either he had a physically demanding work at this prison or the prisoners here were allowed to do sports and lift weights in their free time. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. His brown hair was cut short, his eyes – of the exact same color as his hair – showed hesitation as they met mine.

We stood facing each other on a distance of a couple of meters for a long time without saying anything. Neither of us moved at all and I began doubting my reasons for coming to visit him. I looked at him and saw a stranger in front of me – a stranger with whom I had shared a few brief and amusing conversations every morning and every evening during one month’s time almost five years before. I was thinking it would probably be best for the both of us if I just left him, and the memories of him, there in prison and forgot all about it – when he walked up to me and grabbed a hold of my right hand. He took it in both of his hands, as if warming it at first, then opening up the palm of my hand and stroking his thumb across it. He lifted my hand up and placed it against his cheek. When he felt the touch of my hand against his cheek he started to cry.

“I remember this,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Come, let’s sit down on the couch,” he said.

We sat down next to each other on the couch. He still held my hand in his.

“You’ve been released?”

I nodded. “I had served almost all of the five years I got before I found out that my sentence was defective in the first place.”

“You were a political prisoner?” he asked and I nodded. “I didn’t know. But I think there are many, many things I don’t know about you, even though you and I are husband and wife… Do you know how I found out we’re married?”

I shook my head.

“After the trial in camp, do you remember? When I was sentenced to another ten years? I’ve been cleared of those charges now, though. And after the trial, when they gave me the documents to sign, I saw your number written there in them under ‘spouse’. I don’t know who wrote it there, and I didn’t ask.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? When we met in the other hospital? I didn’t know…”

“Back then I was in no state to speak of anything serious at all.”

“I only found out recently, at the same time I found out that I was to be rehabilitated…”

“Congratulations,” he said. “Martina, I’m not a political prisoner. And I’m older than you, not by much in years perhaps, only five years older, but much older in experience, life experience. Do you know why I’m here?” he asked and I nodded. “I was a professional criminal, a thief and a robber, before. I was sentenced to ten years for breaking into a house to steal and accidentally murdered two people there – an old couple.”

“Accidentally?”

“I didn’t plan on doing it. I had never killed anyone before in my life. I didn’t think they were home…” he hesitated, swallowed and let go of my hand. “I killed them with my bare hands. With these hands. I’ve been fighting my whole life, and when you’ve fought your whole life it is hard to stop and not fight anymore.”

“Don’t stop now,” I said.

“You don’t understand what I’m saying to you, do you?” he looked at me and I couldn’t understand the look on his face. It was unlike anything else I had seen before, yet I had seen so much before. It could have been disappointment, but it could also have been the look of a man who was trying to force himself to stop believing in something he had believed in for a long time. “I can’t ask anything of you. I can’t ask you to come visit me here every month, I can’t ask you to wait for me until I’m released next summer. I can’t ask you to remain my wife. You know the truth about me now. You must understand that we can’t be together. I can’t ask such a sacrifice of you.”

I nodded in silence, looking down at my feet on the floor. He sat next to me without touching me, without trying to take my hand again.

“You’re the only one I’ve got,” I whispered, not knowing these were the words that were going to come out of my mouth when I opened it to say something. I hardly even knew myself that I was going to say anything at all in that moment. But I had spoken.

He moved closer to me on the couch. He put his arms around me, and I placed my head against his chest. He stroked his hand over my hair, pulling me closer and tighter, tighter and closer to him. He kissed me on my forehead, and then I turned my face up toward his.

“I like your lipstick,” he said, smiling. “I haven’t seen a woman wearing lipstick for many, many years…”

I smiled.

“Can I kiss you?”

He kissed me. He held me tight and kissed me again and again and again. And it seemed to me in that moment that it wasn’t our first kiss, but that I had been kissed by him many, many times before and that I had been so tightly wrapped inside of his arms many, many years before. When he removed his shirt to reveal his naked chest, on which were tiny curls of brown, soft hair and a cross made out of silver, it seemed to me that I had already touched all of this skin before. When he pressed his body close to mine, after also I had slipped out of my dress, it was as if I had already felt the cold touch of his silver cross against my chest long before… I lost myself inside of his embrace and only woke up to reality when a guard opened the door and told us it was time for me to leave. I left and he remained.

Desire

This is me outside «Театр Коляды» [Kolyada’s Theather] earlier this evening. The picture is published for two reasons: a) to prove to my mother that I’m still a ‘full-figured woman’, and b) to show three items that I bought yesterday when I and Ksyusha went shopping all Victory Day long: the red skirt, the brown shoes, the brown leather bag. I am very much in love with my new bag – it is so soft and spacious!

Two weeks ago one of my students, Lena, who is actually more a friend than a student to me, told me that Nikolay Kolyada, a local playwright and theater director here in Yekaterinburg, is a genius. She told me that I should be ashamed of myself for living almost three years in this town without ever going to see one of his plays. I didn’t like the idea of missing out on a neighborhood theatrical genius, especially since I not only love theater, have played many roles in many plays, but in fact studied for three years on the theater program at the gymnasium back in Sweden. I also consider my current work as a teacher to be an instantaneous expansion of my previous education as an actress. Said and done, Lena and I bought tickets to the next not sold-out play, which turned out to be a Russian version of Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire” on the 10th of May, which was today. Since I had never been to a play directed by Kolyada before I didn’t know what to expect, except something clearly ingenious – and that expectation proved correct from the very first scene to the last. [No, I haven’t seen the movie with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando from 1951, but I plan to do so in a not too distant future.] It was marvelous! There are not even enough words in the English language to explain how wonderful a play it was, how inventive and creative the whole stage set-up was, every little detail was thought-through, disturbing and lovely at the same time, yet, of course, very emotionally strong. Lena is indeed right when she says that one can only watch one Kolyada play every six months. You can’t handle more than that emotionally, because his plays turn your soul inside out [which is actually a very, very good thing and rare to come by in our day and age]. I especially liked the acting of the woman who played the lead role of Blanche, though the star of most of Kolyada’s plays, the man who played Stanley, was also very good. But the woman who played Blanche played it so well she has me convinced that tonight I won’t find her sitting at home drinking tea with her husband in the Urals, but at a mental hospital somewhere in the American South in the 1940’s. When I watched the play I kept thinking to myself: ‘this is the kind of theater I always dreamed of, this is just the kind of theater I always wanted!’ I felt such an enormous urge to go and watch each and everyone of his plays, something that will probably be more than a little difficult, as the season is close to an end now and because the theater is very small [it has only about 60 seats] and almost every show is always sold-out far in advance. I must also write a few words about the theater in itself – it is located in an old wooden house just a few minutes walk from Ural State’s main building, and this old house has only one little stage, about the size of an average living room, with two doors, and that gives the play itself a highly interesting dimension. The smallness of it all, the intimacy of the setting, creates this special atmosphere of being right there in the middle of play, as if you’re a part of it, and going through of all the emotions depicted on stage only a meter away. Also Kolyada’s solutions for changing the scenery between scenes were impressive, and just the way I had always wanted them to be. No closing of curtains, and no needless explanations for things that can’t be explained… anyway. I am full of respect for Kolyada, and can’t wait to see a play that he has written himself. I think that would be even better. All in all, I am impressed and happy to have had the chance to experience such high quality culture for the tiny price of 400 rubles. The exact same amount as I paid for my new shoes on Saturday!

I am glad that people like to read my blog. I consider it not only a window into my life, but also into my soul/brain/heart, which is filled with an abundance of different things that can’t always be explained without using an excessive amount of words. I love words, though. I think in words more than in images, I think. But living the way I do – using three languages in different capacities on a daily basis – creates much confusion when it comes to words. I sometimes name things in Russian first, and other things in Swedish, whereas there are some things that I can only name in English. Weird. There was a time when I tried to figure out in which language I think, but that made me even more confused than before so I stopped trying to figure it out. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m loosing my native language, because I don’t get to use it as much as I would like to, and each lesson is always a difficult switch for me. And now that I don’t have Jen around to speak English with every day I have noticed a decline in that language as well. The more I surround myself with Russian – and the better I know this language – the worse off my other languages become. But I can’t be perfect. Thus I admit that my three dictionaries are my most reliable friends and that Word’s spell-check is a necessity in my life I cannot be ashamed of.

Here’s part 5 of the short story previously known as “Ten Shades of Kindness”, currently under the working-title of “Overcome” [note to self: inform Anya of this first thing on Tuesday]:

5.

When the war ended in June I was 27 years old. After the war many prisoners were given amnesty, especially political prisoners, among whom I was one. We were released early from prisons and camps alike. Dr. Emmanuel kept his promise, and as soon as I had received all the necessary documents I was allowed to leave camp and my work at the hospital. Upon leaving I brought practically nothing with me, except for memories and medical experience. Memories I tried to hold on to hard in order not to forget anything and such medical experience that I hoped I would never have to use it again. In my hometown I tried at first to find out what had happened to my parents during the war. I took a bus from camp into town to find the street on which we had lived and the three-storey brown house on it in which we had lived on the top floor. The building had had a small café on the ground floor. Before the war I often had breakfast with my parents in that tiny café as they had been on friendly terms with the owner, a passionate, loud but kind man living on the second floor of the house with his large family consisting of five or six children. Sometimes after school the owner had treated me to a cup of warm chocolate for free while I waited for my parents to come home. In the café there had been large, wide windows with red curtains and its name written on them in big golden letters. Neither the street nor the house or the café had survived the war. I spent two weeks in my hometown trying to find out anything about my parents, sleeping wherever I was allowed to – mostly I spent the night in the apartments of kind people who were friendly enough to let me sleep on their couch and give me a meal in the morning. In the end I found out what had happened to my parents, after standing in long lines at many different state offices for hours and hours. My parents had been arrested not long after my arrest; my mother had been brought to the same female prison where I was at the time, though I don’t recollect seeing anyone even resembling her there. But, on the other hand, that was long ago now and there were many prisoners there. She didn’t survive until the transport to the camp but was shot in prison. My father ended up in a camp straight away. He remained there for two years, what happened to him after that is unclear. Most likely he got sick and died, or he could have been executed. The options are, after all, far from abundant.

In July I took the train to the capital and went to the Medical Academy, where I was greeted warmly and kindly on account of Dr. Emmanuel’s recommendation letter. In the dormitory I shared a room with three other female students, out of whom I was the oldest. In order to earn some money to live on I started to look for a job, even though one of Dr. Emmanuel’s good friends – a professor at the Medical Academy – helped me out greatly in the beginning, both by inviting me to have dinner with him and his family every evening and supporting me with countless interesting conversations on medicine and philosophy. Thanks to him I found a job as a nurse in one of the smaller hospitals in the same area of the capital where I was living. I worked there until the fall semester began.

It wasn’t until October that I was called to a hearing about my rehabilitation as a former political prisoner. I had not given my rehabilitation any thought since my release, as no formal document of this kind had been necessary when I was accepted to the Academy, which was otherwise always the case with former political prisoners. The hearing was most interesting. It took place in one of the many rooms of the large main court building in the capital, and the only people present were two lawyers and one guard. The room was small and I was asked to take a seat in front of the table in the middle of it. I sat down. On the table there were two files; one was rather thin whereas the other one was much thicker. The lawyers sat down in front of me at the table and opened the thinner file. The guard remained standing at the door. The room had no windows. The walls were painted a bleak shade of gray. The two lawyers explained to me that I was going to be rehabilitated. Rehabilitation meant being cleared of all former charges against me and receiving all of my civil rights back. The two lawyers spoke to me in gentle voices as they explained everything the state was going to give back to me.

The only thing they didn’t offer me back was those five years of my life I spent in prison and different camps.

“Now let’s talk about your husband,” one of them said as he closed the thin file and opened the thicker file. Inside of it were many papers of different colors.

“My husband?” I asked, not sure if I had heard it right.

“Yes. It says here in your documents that you are married to this prisoner,” and he said Erik’s number. “Also your number is stated in his files under ‘marital status’. You are aware of the fact that he is not a political prisoner, and will not be given any amnesty after the war?”

What could I answer? All I did was nod slowly.

“He was sentenced to another ten years in prison while he was in one camp, of which I’m sure that you are aware, but that case has been reopened and already dismissed as faulty. What remains for him to serve is only one year, as he had already served two years of his first sentence when the war began. He was originally sentenced to ten years for robbery and manslaughter, but I think with the times being what they are these days, and considering his otherwise exceptionally good behavior in prison, that he’ll be released next summer.”

I didn’t know what to say. “That’s good,” I said.

“After his release he will not be allowed to live in the capital, a rule of which I am sure that you are aware,” said the other lawyer.

“And I’m certain that you would like to know the whereabouts of your husband at the present moment?” the first lawyer asked.

“Very much so,” I answered.

They explained in which prison he was currently kept, close to which city it was located – it turned out to be only three hours away from the capital outside of a small town.

“And now you’re probably wondering if you are allowed to visit him?”

I nodded.

“And I can delight you with the following information – you are allowed to visit him once a month for two hours,” said the first lawyer, smiling a broad smile and showing all of his large, white teeth as if this information was the height of kindness that could be shown both to me and to him under the existing circumstances.

“Thank you,” I said.

I walked out of the room and out of the building with a new piece of paper in my bag – a piece of paper that proved not primarily to the world, but foremost to our state, that I had never been neither a member nor a founder of any secret student organization.

Graphomania

Meet Dusty, world famous writer with a beard worthy envying. Here he is standing in Mayakovsky Park in Yekat, but for some reason Mayakovsky wasn’t enough for this park. The love for literature is so strong there that they have a whole alley with heads of Russian writers like the one pictured above – Pushkin, Griboedov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Lermontov, Gogol’…

As I’m publishing part 4 out of 10 of my short story “Ten Shades of Kindness” here today I must use a little disclaimer: ‘The short story needs a new name’, says Anya. Anya has read it all and says that she likes it, but that there are only shades of kindness in the beginning, then the focus switches and something else appears. I understand that Anya is correct. The short story is not about ten shades of kindness; it is about kindness in general and maybe not really about kindness that much really, but actually a ‘family saga’, as she identified its genre. I proposed to her that I would rename it “Kindness in a Cruel Century” but she said that’s not a very good idea. I haven’t come up with a new name yet, but when I do you’ll be the first to find out, comrades. Maybe someone else has any suggestion? I think “Overcome” could be a good name… but I must first tell Anya about this, I think.

Yesterday evening I decided – for the fun of it – to read through my own blog from beginning to end. The impression is shattered. I have written very much here, much more than I thought, because I always feel like I’m short and sweet and not a ‘graphoman’ at all, but that I spend my words sparingly. Yesterday evening this thesis was proved faulty. I must suffer from a very troubling and disturbing form of graphomania, comrades, because most of my own posts were to long for me myself to even read through them. Some were fun to read again [like the post when I rhyme Russian cities pronounced with an American accent with naughty sexual actions] but very many seemed tedious and boring to me. The post where I watch Tolstoy and Dusty fight in the ladies room was alright, I guess. I have come to conclusion that the best thing on this blog is that ironic comments to the pictures. And that’s not too bad, I guess. The most important in life are, after all, the smaller things.

Tomorrow is Victory Day, and I plan to go shopping with friends for summer clothes and new shoes since the heat has finally arrived in the Urals and I have realized that I have nothing to wear. I love Russia because it can go from snow one day to 25C and sunshine three days later. I also love Russia because here you can go to the library and take out a book that was published in 1923 and it will say that it was published in ‘Petrograd’. I went to the library today and spent a couple of hours there preparing for next week’s literary seminary on psychoanalysis in literature. I’ve always been against that because I read Freud and he was off the walls, let me tell you, with thinking every novel or short story or poem is a result of repressed sexual emotions concerning wanting to do one’s father or mother. Today I read Karl Gustav Jung and realized that if Freud had been off the wall, then Jung was right on the spot. The Russian translation of his German book was so good that I got completely lost in it and realized many important things that I should’ve known long ago. Currently I’m almost always sweating not only because it is hot hot hot outside, but mostly because the exams are less than a month away. While I’m downloading answers to different exams from Russian websites [I heart the Russian internet – you can find anything and there are no rules] I keep thinking of ways to escape the madness that is about to take place. I’m not worried about my two exams in literary theory, because that’s interesting and I don’t mind learning what I need to know for that, but what’s wanting me to fake a strong Swedish accent are my two exams in linguistics. I have come to the conclusion that I must relay on my fellow students and steal their notes. Or I could run away and hide under a stone somewhere in Ufa and hope they won’t come looking for me. Yes, I think the last option is the one I prefer most. I have to write an essay about a contemporary paradigm in linguistics for one exam, and the problem is that I am still unsure as to what a ‘paradigm’ actually is. I brought up this with the teacher and she sighed deeply and said: “You should probably stop by my office some day and I’ll explain it to you.” That was almost two months ago. Conclusion: it is still not too late to go run away and hide under that stone…

Other than this nothing has happened. My life is utter stillness right now. I haven’t had a date with a man in almost four months. I don’t want a relationship, and I don’t think I want to have sex that much, only a little bit, but what I really want is that feeling in your stomach, you know, the excitement, the tension, someone to think about… If not then it is only a matter of time before the closest monastery will call me up and ask if I shouldn’t stop kidding myself and join.

4.

After two years in my first camp I was relocated to another camp. This happened not long after my hometown had been reclaimed by our country, and this other camp was located outside of that same city. The reason for my relocation was immediately connected with the doctor I had worked with in the first camp – Dr. Emmanuel – who was designated to be the head doctor of the hospital at the newly opened camp there. Dr. Emmanuel stated that he wanted to bring two of his best nurses with him to help organizing the work at the new hospital; I was one of them. The other nurse was not a prisoner like me, and thus I was not allowed to travel with them, but had to be transported in a train with other prisoners that were also being relocated. In the second camp my life was much the same as in the first one: I slept in a barrack with all the other female prisoners, in the morning I went to work in the hospital, and in the evening after work I returned to the barrack for dinner and sleep. In this hospital, which was rather big, we received not only sick or injured prisoners from our own camp, but also the worst cases from other camps and even soldiers that had been wounded in the war. We were often swamped with grave and difficult cases, and even though my main function was that of a nurse, I sometimes had to work as Dr. Emmanuel’s personal secretary. He taught me many things I had not known before, even though I already knew much even before entering the Medical Academy in my hometown – my father had been a doctor, a surgeon. Although Dr. Emmanuel agreed that a talent for medicine can come with heritage, he also argued that it depends equally much on attentive eyes and kind fingers. He said I had been blessed with a combination of the three.

It was an early summer morning when I was sitting by the desk of Dr. Emmanuel filling out documents with information about different patients. I had worked there about two months then. Dr. Emmanuel rarely checked up on new patients himself, unless their state of health was in a very poor condition. That morning a nurse came in to tell him that three prisoners had recently been brought to the hospital, and that he had been asked by another doctor to take a look at them himself. These prisoners came from one of the worst camps – we never used the word ‘death camp’ back then – and were dying from hunger and pure physical exhaustion. Dr. Emmanuel left in haste. About an hour later he popped his head into his office, where I was sitting, and asked:

“Martina, what’s your husband’s number?”

I told him Erik’s number. I never forgot it; I still haven’t forgotten it. Of all the many things that happened to me during the war, of all the things I was forced to see during those years, I managed to forget most. But not his number, never his number.

“He’s here,” said Dr. Emmanuel. “Come with me.”

I followed him to one of the rooms in the same building were sick prisoners were examined by doctors before being registered as new patients. I had anticipated seeing Erik in an appalling shape and poor health, and yet, I could not have expected what I found lying on the examination table in the middle of the room. It was Erik, but only half of the man I had known two years earlier remained of him. What I met was a wounded, ailing and miserable piece of human body, consisting of nothing but what seemed like a big pile of discolored skin stretched over bones. He was awake, but far too weak to even raise his head up from the table when he heard someone entering the room. Dr. Emmanuel allowed for me to walk up to him. I took his big, bony hand in mine, and looked into his watery brown eyes. At first he seemed not to recognize me, so I bent down closer to his face, permitting him to see my face more clearly at a close distance.

“Is it you?” he asked.

“Yes. Is this you?”

“Almost,” he answered.

Dr. Emmanuel walked up to the table on the opposite side. “We’re going to bring you back to life,” he said, “don’t you worry about it. Your wife will help you. Won’t you?”

“I will,” I affirmed, stroking with my other hand over Erik’s cheek, then I turned to the doctor and said: “Could you please see to it that he’s put in a bed big enough to fit him? That’s always been a problem. I think you understand.”

Dr. Emmanuel nodded. “If we can’t find such a bed then I’ll see to it personally that we make a bed for him out of a couple of thick, soft mattresses on the floor.”

The doctor remained true to his word. A bed was made for Erik in one of the rooms on the third floor of the hospital, in which there were five instead of six beds as one bed was missing on the spot in front of the window. On this very spot right under the window a comfortable sleeping place was made for him, and I went to see him there in the evening as soon as my shift was over. He was sleeping. I sat down next to him on the floor. I corrected the two blankets he had been given and made sure that both his feet were covered well. At first I sat up straight, looking at his face in the dark, but later I laid down next to him as there was still a little room left on the wide mattress provided for him. He came to for a while as I held his hand, constantly touching it softly with my thumb.

“Are you still my wife?” he asked.

“I’m not still your wife,” I answered, “I can’t be, because I never was. What do I know, maybe you already have another wife somewhere out there…”

“No.”

“You don’t?”

“I’m unmarried, I have never been married,” he answered. “You’re my only wife.”

That night I fell asleep by his side. I only woke up in the sunrise, as the first bright rays warmed my face enough to wake me. I crept out of his bed and went straight to work. I don’t think anybody – except for maybe Dr. Emmanuel – found out about our first night together as husband and wife. Never again did I fall asleep by his side in that hospital.

Erik’s health improved slowly but steadily during the first month. He gained back a lot of weight, though of course far from all of the weight he had lost to begin with. After the first month Dr. Emmanuel suggested I should accompany Erik on a walk in the tiny park outside the hospital. This park was nothing more than a couple of paths around some small spots of grass surrounded by four different buildings belonging to the hospital, but there were many trees there. It was still summer: they were still green when we went for our first walk together. In the beginning he leaned on me with his arm on my shoulders as I steadied him with my arm around his waist. After three weeks he was strong enough to walk without my help. Suddenly one day he stood up straight, and I backed away. He took a few steps. The first were unsteady as his legs were still weak, but the next ones were braver and more secure, as he walked farther and farther away from me. He stopped about ten meters ahead of me and turned around, holding out his right hand toward me.

“Take my hand,” he said. “I want to walk hand in hand with you.”

I walked up to him and took his hand.

“We’ve never walked hand in hand before,” I said.

“It feels nice, doesn’t it?” he smiled. “And there are many, many more things we haven’t done, even though we’re husband and wife…”

“Can you promise me something?”

He nodded.

“Promise not to forget me when this war is over.”

“When this war is over, Martina,” he began, “I’ll find you. Tell me your number and I promise that I will search for you until I find you.”

“You’re not mad at me for telling them I’m your wife?”

“You saved my life,” he said.

“It is only my duty,” I said.

“And what kind of duty is it this time?”

“My duty as a future doctor.”

One week after this conversation, when he walked on his own for the first time and I held his hand for the first time, he was declared healthy and dismissed from the hospital. He was not sent back to the camp from where he had come, but to the prison from which he had been removed initially to the first camp in which we met. Dr. Emmanuel was with me when he left the hospital, and stood with me on the steps leading up to the main entrance of the hospital while we watched the black truck drive away. In it were Erik and nine other prisoners, all declared healthy.

“I often watched you and him walking together in the park from my office,” said the doctor. “And I was always curious, always wanted to ask you, doesn’t the height difference bother you? How can you manage to talk to each other when you’re not even tall enough to reach up to his shoulders?”

“It is not too difficult,” I answered. “You get used to it. You only really have to talk a little bit louder, that’s all.”

“He has eight more years to serve in prison of his last sentence. But you’ll be out of here within eight months. What do you plan on doing?”

“I want to continue my studies and become a doctor,” I said.

“I was hoping you would say that. I’ve seen you work both here and in the old camp, and I can tell that you would make a very good doctor. I can recommend you to best Medical Academy in the capital, if you would like that. I think I can arrange it with them to take you on for free and give you a place in their dormitory, also without payment. I’ll write a letter of recommendation for you. It would be a great loss for medicine if you weren’t allowed to become a doctor.”

“Thank you,” I said and smiled at Dr. Emmanuel.

Как носить Георгиевскую ленточку [How to Wear the St. Georg Ribbon]

Now let’s answer today’s important question: «Как носить Георгиевскую ленточку?» [How to wear the St. George Ribbon?]

«На куртке» [on your coat; jacket]. Doesn’t Dostoevsky (he’s on the little pin) look good next to orange and black?

«На сумке» [on your bag].

«На Чебурашке» [on your Cheburashka].

«На голове как бантик!» [on your head like a bow!] This is as patriotic and peace-loving I get :)