I.
March 30th 201*
Dear Ellen,
it feels so strange to be here, in Adrian’s house in Tobolsk, especially considering the peculiar circumstances of his strange and untimely death (he was only 37, wasn’t he?) a month ago. Therefore you must forgive me for not writing to you already yesterday. I know you asked me specifically to write to you as soon as I arrived in Tobolsk, but yesterday so much happened that I simply didn’t have the time nor the strength to sit down and write a letter to you in the evening. Yesterday I was even unsure if I should write to you at all. At first I didn’t know how to tell you about what I have found out from Arkady, Adrian’s only (seemingly) friend in Tobolsk and the director of the local pedagogical institute where he was allowed to teach after his release from prison almost two years ago.
But I must tell you, not only because I am your sister (and sisters have to be honest with each other) but also as I am your only source of information here. Promise me to not take all of this too close to heart. Remember the choice you made seven years ago. Now I understand that you made the correct choice. You could not have done anything else but divorce this mad man.
Arkady told me that he first met Adrian while he was still in prison. Arkady was teaching some classes there for the prisoners on basic subjects such as literature and language, and the two men once got to talking after class. He found out that Adrian had been a teacher of mathematics at the university in Yekaterinburg, and as the pedagogical institute was looking for a teacher of mathematics he offered to hire him after his release. He was of course never hired officially, due to the nature of his sentence, but unofficially he worked there for almost three semesters after his release up until his death in early March. And at the same time the two men became close friends, according to the words of Arkady.
Sometime last fall, in early October perhaps, Adrian was seen as having a relationship with a much younger woman. They were first noticed walking together on evenings in the town’s central park, and about a month later the woman moved into his house. This woman was supposedly a student at the pedagogical institute, but Arkady says she was never officially enrolled and that nobody here even knows her name. Because the woman looked to be no more than seventeen years old, Arkady warned Adrian of the consequences his relationship with her might have on his career as a teacher. But he refused to listen and said that his personal life has nothing to do with his professional work.
This would have been nothing but a smaller error in judgment, of course, had Adrian not allowed yet another suspicious figure to move into his house in early December. This time it was a much older man about which nobody seems to know anything, expect that his hair was black and that he wore a bushy moustache. Whenever questioned about these people Adrian refused to answer and always left the room. The last months of his life he spent living as if it were in seclusion with these two people and only showed up at the institute to teach.
As I’m sending this I don’t even know myself what more to write along with it. I came across a strange piece of text in Adrian’s desk earlier today, and I’m sending it to you. I’m convinced that it will speak for itself and that you will see clearly that in the last months of his life he was clearly suffering from some kind of mental illness. Maybe this decease was the reason at to why he one day suddenly decided to step out in the middle of the street and have his life taken away by a car accident…
Arkady also told me that the girl and the old man were present on Adrian’s funeral. They have not been seen since, not by anyone in all of Tobolsk. From the look of the house they didn’t take anything with them when they left. Everything is intact and looks untouched. Tomorrow I will meet with a lawyer and together we’ll start the process of selling Adrian’s house.
Now I leave you with Adrian’s own words.
Stay strong, sister. Tell your daughters I love them very much and that I am doing all that I can to help you through this difficult time.
Love,
Gabriella
II.
“My Best Friend God”
a poema by Adrian V.
The shame, the shame, oh the shame – it always stays with me and it cannot leave ever for I’ve come to regard it as a friend of mine, a trustworthy companion on dark, hard, lonely days of cold and snow – always this cold and always this snow – and in it I find comfort and even pleasure: in feeling the shame, the shame, oh the shame… On the last morning, or maybe it was the first morning – the first morning of something else entirely – and not at all the last morning of the life I had lived before, yet this is not for me to decide – who will decide then, if not I, you ask? This is not the time to make decisions. This is the time for shame, the time for unraveling of memories, for undressing of the past, for looking back as we run forward without even knowing to what and where and from whom but our feet must always keep moving for without their movement we cannot see the past behind us become more and more distant and the past must inevitably eventually become distant. Or else the future is impossible and an impossible future is filled with sadness and hopes and crushes the soul that feeds on it. The poor human soul feeds on it when it is filled with shame, the poor human soul puts its last hope to an impossible future when the past – the now distant past – seems also filled with shame, and filled with shame it must be for without shame there would be no pleasure in remembering nor running and only while I run can I remember…
It was as if she knew; it was as if she could feel that this was to be our last morning together – or my first morning of a life on my own, on my own being synonym to ‘without her’ – yet we didn’t speak nor utter as much as a word to each other and when I came up on her from behind while she was standing by the sink pouring water into the coffee pot, I placed my arms around her and she was silent. And I held her. I hugged her from behind. I felt her head fall back on my chest; I felt her warm, soft, small body become a part of my cold, hard, big body – and yet, yes, yes “and yet”! – nothing that had happened during the night before or even on the days leading up to this morning had told her that her husband would not come back home ever again, and that she should make an effort and try to be tender this one last time and that she should place her head against his chest and let his hands hold her tightly one last time for this will never, never be repeated again.
If I try, if I close my eyes hard, if I think back and thinking back is filled with pain – the pain becomes pleasure the more I feel it, but in the beginning of the feeling it is nothing but pain and thus I must have patience for without patience there can be no pleasure, only pain and even though pain is not a bad feeling in itself, it can never compare to pleasure – I can see my children on the first morning of this other life, this new life filled with nothing but me, me, me. I can see them sleeping in their beds in their room. I can see my three little girls sleeping, I can see the light of a new day coming into the room underneath the curtains, from behind the curtains; in the still dark room I can barely make out there faces – the faces of three sleeping girls aged five, four and two. These girls will never know their father. Their father stands in the door of their room, their father is dressed in one of his boring, strict, grey suits, and their father looks at them one last time before he leaves – he always steals a last glance before going away – and this was indeed the last glance before I went away. These three girls are now twelve, eleven and nine years old. If they saw their father on the street in Yekaterinburg – but their father will never leave Tobolsk, their father will die here and his grave will be here and they will never come visit it, well, perhaps one day in ten years time, when they are twenty-two, twenty-one and nineteen will they come here and find it and ask themselves why they had to grow up without him, why their memories of him are so small and insignificant and bleak – if these girls saw me on the street they would not recognize me but pass me by laughing, smiling, talking to each other. Never will they know that the tall, dark, lonely man in the boring, strict, grey suit walking by them is their father. And maybe their own father will not recognize them, but keep seeing them – as he does even now, even here – in three other young girls without a father walking down the street…
The shame is the worst feeling for it cannot be made into anything but shame. It was shame and it stays shame and that is the end and the beginning of shame.
I knew that I would remain in the school. I knew that I wouldn’t go home again. The minute the door opened and the second I saw the rector’s face – already then did I understand that it was over; that life as I had known it was over, that the days had been counted and the minutes were up and no more time remained for me. You ask me: “What happened, Adrian? What happened to you, Adrian? What are you so ashamed of? What is the reason for all of this shame?” And I would like to laugh you in your innocent, trusting, loving faces – but I don’t laugh, I can’t laugh, all I can do is sit and look down at my knees – bony, bony knees – today, just like I did on that afternoon when I didn’t go home, when I waited for the police to come, when I lingered in the teachers’ lounge and waited for fate to come in and take over. But this image doesn’t please you, this is not a satisfactory answer in your eyes, and you keep asking me: “But what did you do, Adrian? What was it that you did that was so horrible?” So horrible that going home again was not an option?
But what if nobody ever finds out?! What if I will never tell a human soul? Yet the answer is on my heart, and the words are already placed on my pen, and out they must pour sooner or later for no later than soon was this moment and this moment was late yet it came not one second too soon. People asked me – for I was a university teacher of mathematics – why I gave extra lessons at a local school in my neighborhood in the afternoons after my work at the university was done for the day. I told them – I lied a lot – that it was for the extra money. That the extra lessons brought in extra money. I was the father of three small children and my wife didn’t work and so people always believed this answer and yet it was always a lie and if I was to repeat it today it would not be any less of a lie but even more a lie as there is no reason left for it to be repeated ever again. Now that answer is a part of the past. It has no place in the life which is filled with me, me, me. I did it for I was lying to myself.
Yes, yes, yes I lived a lie! It began and it ended with a lie just like it began with shame and ends with shame but don’t confuse the shame as coming from the lie for the shame is independent and comes even when there is nothing but honesty left in a man’s heart. And now there is nothing left in my heart but honesty. I did it for the girls – not my girls as in “my daughters” – but other girls. Are you pleased now? Are you content now? Are you disgusted now? Do you want to put away these papers and run to the bathroom and throw up now and scream at me as you run away: “Oh Adrian! Oh Adrian! How low can a man steep?!” That’s an interesting question: exactly HOW low can a man steep? I’ve steeped pretty low in my life. I’ve been on the very floor of life; on the lowest level of the building of human existence, I’ve crawled in the dirt and I’ve licked the ground and I’ve pressed my face against the concrete and said to myself as if in prayer: “Oh God! Listen! I pray this is all they’ll ever know! If I can only ask for one thing God, then I will ask You this – don’t let them find out about anything else! Or everything else for that matter!” And by confessing this prayer to you – as you are hunched over the toilet throwing up (don’t worry, if I wasn’t me but someone else I would most likely have been doing the exact same thing as we speak – expect that then not WE would have been speaking, but WE would have been listening to someone else and this someone would have disgusted us both) – I am also confessing to a line of crimes that starts when I was twenty years old and ends at the age of thirty for at the age of thirty I was condemned to five years in prison. Everybody knows that there are no under-age girls in prison. Unless it is a prison for under-age girls. I didn’t go to such a prison. I went to a prison in Tobolsk.
Haha! But what AM I saying: “I went to a prison in Tobolsk” – as if I had anything to do with where I went! I didn’t go anywhere. I was sent here. It was not my choice. At the time I didn’t have any choices and I was relieved by this fact as I didn’t want any choices at all because I had already made all of my choices and faced the consequences of them and served the consequences and didn’t want to make any new choices for the fear of having to face and serve more consequences. One time of facing consequences is enough for me. Maybe you lift your heads up from the toilet now to ask me: “Why are you telling us this, Adrian? Why are you writing this? What is the point of it all?”
I do not claim to know the point of it “all”. I do, however, know why I’m telling you this, why I’m writing this. I wanted to write about my best friend. But even before I began writing I was overtaken by shame and had to elaborate some in order to give a strong foundation for this shame for without such a foundation you would not understand anything of what I will write about my best friend. Not that I pretend to think that you will understand. Most likely you will not understand. But that’s alright; it is okay for you not to understand for understanding is not all it is cracked up to be but as a matter of fact not at all something to strive for in this life.
In this life we’re better off without trying to understand each other. It is better to listen. To listen and to read. And if listening and reading doesn’t please your eager, hurt, angry heart – then writing will also work. Writing can be a way of forgetting. Of forgetting after remembering. First we must remember. After we can forget. And forget that we were never understood… Forget everything – and go on, go on into eternity with our heads held high. Or in whatever manner you would rather prefer to go into eternity. Freedom of choice – that is the only human condition I trust, I believe in, I have come to make my peace with.
Now about my best friend and how I came to meet her. The title should not confuse the reader – only poor titles have as their purpose to confuse the reader. My title may be poor but if that is the case I can always defend it what that it was without purpose.
It happened on a regular Monday (as if there were any “irregular Mondays”!). I was alone in the teachers’ lounge of the pedagogical institute where I was making a meager living as a teacher of mathematics. I was smoking my usual after-class cigarette and staring out the window at nothing in particular outside of it for there was nothing worth noting outside of it and I knew this view so well that I could have been looking at it even if I had been staring into the wall instead of looking out of the window. Everything outside was grey and it was raining, if I’m not mistaken. There was a knock on the door. I didn’t think that the person on the other side could possibly be looking for me, so I didn’t answer. Then the door opened and a girl entered. She walked in and closed the door behind her. Immediately I thought her to be a student; she looked to be around seventeen years old, mainly I made this assumption because of her small, frail frame and childishly round face surrounded by long, curly red locks. She was pretty because of her innocent, soft, light youth, but by then enough time had passed for me to learn from previous mistakes and so I didn’t even look twice at her. I continued to stare out the window or into the wall – it makes no difference. She walked up to me and sat down on the windowsill about a meter from me.
She kept looking at me but without saying anything so eventually I asked her:
“Are you looking for someone? A teacher?”
“I’m looking for the mathematics professor,” she said.
“I’m not a professor.”
At this she smiled: “But you teach mathematics?”
“At this particular institution of higher education – yes.”
“What’s your name?” she asked.
I found such a question both sudden and strange, so I said: “You’re looking for me but you don’t even know my name?” She didn’t answer. “Are you a student here? I don’t think I have you in any of my classes…”
She shook her head. “I’m not a student.”
“Okay then. My name is Adrian, what’s yours?”
She stopped to think for a while, and then suddenly she started to laugh and laughed for a long time before she said: “I’ve never got that question before!”
I started to get annoyed by her youthful looks and petite presence so near my own stern, aged and in addition to this also rather large body, and also rather angry with her for wasting my after-class cigarette smoke break so carelessly.
“Stop laughing! Tell me who you are or get out of here!” I screamed at her.
She turned serious quickly. “I only know what people call me.”
“And what do people call you?”
“People call me God,” the girl said and held out her right hand as if waiting for a handshake to take place between us. This didn’t happen, though.
Perhaps at that point I should have doubted her and yelled at her to get out of the teachers’ lounge and stop wasting my precious time of an eternity spent in lonely shame. But for some reason or other I didn’t doubt her. For some reason I didn’t think anything of the sort. And I didn’t yell anything at her. I was silent for a while, looking at her and trying to gather up enough strength in my voice to ask her the obvious, naïve and almost awfully silly question: “You’re God?”
The girl nodded.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“I wanted to come earlier, Adrian, believe me, but I was kept too busy… Before I could stop by on Earth once every twenty years or so, but during the 20th century it was simply impossible. First you guys had a world war, and then you managed to have another one, and we were swamped with work up at the pearly gates for decades after that. And it wasn’t until now that I finally felt like the load had lighted a bit, and that I could go without having to worry about what’s going on upstairs.”
“And this,” I said, pointing to her tiny female body with my cigarette pack as I was preparing to light another one, “is your human form?”
She looked puzzled: “You mean, the way I look?”
“The last time I checked, God is a man and supposedly he wears a beard…”
She shook her head with a smile on her lips. “This isn’t my human form. That,” now she pointed at me, “is your godly form.”
“God looks like this?”
“You were created in my image, remember?”
“But I’m a man,” I argued. “And wasn’t man created first? If the Bible is supposed to give an accurate description of how it all went down in the very beginning?”
She nodded. “Man was created first, but Adam wasn’t made entirely in the image of me, but rather in the image of the Holy Spirit”.
“So the Holy Spirit is a man?”
“Yes. Does that surprise you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t think anything can surprise me at this point.”
“Good, Adrian! That’s the spirit! People always get surprised at first, but very few can actually come to terms with this surprise. Unless given some time, of course. And it’s good that I won’t surprise you anymore, because I’ve come to have a look around. And get to know some people. You know, do some simple field work and try to address some current issues,” she said.
“But why come here? To this… excuse my expression, God-forsaken country and God-forgotten tiny town of Tobolsk? Why not go somewhere important?”
“It is not for you to say what is important and what isn’t important, Adrian.”
“Why me? Or do you walk in on all members on humanity and tell them during the first five minutes of conversation that you’re God?” I asked.
“No.”
“Why me?”
“I don’t understand the question?” she looked at me, and it really seemed to me as if she was sincere in her not understanding this question.
“There are plenty of more worthy candidates for you to get to know out there. There are billions of humans around,” I tried my best to explain my peculiar situation to her. “You could have picked anyone of them. But not me. I’m not even sure I believe in God…”
“I don’t think this is a question of believing, Adrian,” she said calmly. “I’m not asking anything of you, I’m simply saying that I want to get to know you.”
“And I’m saying that you picked the wrong person.”
“That’s interesting… I’ve never been wrong before,” she smiled.
“Do you know that I’ve been to prison?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Do you know for what I served five years there?” I asked.
She nodded.
“I’m the least fitted human for your company, God,” I decided.
She disagreed: “I remember what you thought on the evening of your arrest, I remember how you got down on your knees on that first night in the cell and prayed to me… And you kept asking me to not let them find out about all the other times, to let this be the only case they’re allowed to find out about, that you’ll only be sentenced for this and for nothing else,” she placed her hand on my shoulder. “I listened to you then. I always listen. And I granted your prayer to be answered. And nobody ever found out that it wasn’t the first time you had relations with a minor during your time as a teacher, now did they?”
I looked at her hand on my shoulder. “No…”
“Trust me.”
“I lost everything anyway.”
“And I knew you would,” she said.
“My wife never forgave me. I haven’t seen my daughters for almost six years now…” and at that point I was close to tears.
“I am not a cruel god, but I am the honest God,” she said. “You will never see your three daughters again. But in this you must not find misery, but search for something else instead. Take a look around and find joy in other places, not just sadness and despair for what you have lost, but anticipation of what you still have to receive.”
She wasn’t my best friend then – don’t make assumptions, don’t jump to conclusions, don’t read too much into advertisement you see on large street signs – this was not the moment when we made friends at all; this was nothing but the first time we met and the first time we spoke and the first time in almost six years that someone had touched me by putting their hand on my shoulder. When she placed her small hand on my bony shoulder I didn’t want her to remove it for hours and hours and days and days and years and years to come and she let it remain on my shoulder until my cigarette smoking break was over.
III.
In the evenings I had made a habit of spending my time in two opposite manners: chain smoking in my cabinet (why I bought a house? With two floors and not only two bedrooms but also a cabinet and a living room that I never used? I don’t know) and taking long walks in the central park. Both of these ways of spending my time was spending time on my own. During the hours in my cabinet, when I devoted myself to ruining my health – I didn’t have much health left anyway so I figured it didn’t matter much what I decided to do with the remains of it – by chain smoking, I would also work on difficult calculations or different formulas and write a university textbook on mathematics which I knew would be impossible to publish and yet I kept working on it and it didn’t bother me much that it would be impossible to publish for most of the time I also realized that it was a meager, poor, out rightly terrible textbook anyway. I went on long walks in the evening for the purpose of improving my health. I only went on walks on the evenings when I started to choke from all the second-hand smoke in my cabinet. Sometimes I would go and visit my friend Arkady – I had only one friend, but he had many other friends, and when I came over to his house he would pretend that his friends were also my friends and I would play along in this game of make believe and pretending. It didn’t bother me for it was the only time in my life of me, me, me when I wasn’t consumed by shame or ruining my health or trying to improve it knowing that I could not do anything anyway to improve it for it was so little left of it that it was senseless and madness and utterly pointless. Arkady would read his poetry out loud to his friends when he had dinners for the same friends and his wife was a lovely woman with a large bone structure who looked very good when she wore green. Disappearing in their company once or twice a week was the perfect escape from shame – and in a way it was also the perfect way for shame to grow for the shame was always at its largest when I left their house at midnight to walk home alone to my house where I would get into bed alone and fall asleep alone and think to myself: “Oh the loneliness, oh the loneliness, oh this horrible loneliness!” But that’s another story.
The second time I met God was on a Thursday evening in October when I was taking a walk in the park and thinking about my shame and pretending to see my daughters everywhere – one of them or two of them or all three of them – in unknown girls that passed me by everywhere in the park. When I saw her approaching me; for I saw her approaching already from afar – I thought to myself: “God wears black high heeled boots?” And when she came up to me the first thing she said was:
“Yes, she does.”
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know much, Adrian,” she smiled. “It is a lovely evening, don’t you think?”
“I think a lot things, very rarely ‘what a lovely evening it is’, but I guess that you in this aspect are correct, for it is indeed.”
“Will you hold my hand?” she asked and held out her hand for me to hold.
I took her hand and said: “Because I am gentleman.”
She laughed: “You are anything but a gentleman!”
“What am I then? Surely you must know?” I asked, feeling the warmth of her tiny, fragile hand spread into all of my large body and with it a sudden lust to laugh and smile and forget everything and consider this moment to be the only moment that had ever taken place in my life and that everything that had been before it had not been at all for it was forgotten and what is forgotten cannot be proved. Unless by others; never by oneself. Hence forgetting is a blessing.
“You are a weak man, you are dishonest with yourself and this makes you embarrassed but you are also dishonest with other people but this you take pride in. You are incapable of making decisions, you’re afraid of speed and heights, you often have headaches in the mornings and you are not a good drinker for you never get drunk but only hung-over and when you were younger this caused you much unpleasantness and made you feel uncomfortable around other people your age who were good at drinking,” she said with a smile, turning her face up so that she could look me in the eyes. God’s eyes were green.
“I agree. Do I have any good qualities?”
“You’re tender and careful and you don’t swear. When you were a child you had a dog and when it died you cried for eleven days and your parents didn’t want to buy a new one and yet you kept crying, thinking your tears could change their mind. You’re good at taking responsibility and sometimes you laugh at yourself, when you think nobody’s looking,” she laughed. “And I like it best when you laugh at yourself!”
“What do you think of my sins?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders: “I don’t think that much about your sins.”
“You don’t keep a track of them, you don’t collect them, you don’t have a list of them somewhere? Perhaps only in your head?”
“No.”
“How can there be forgiveness if God doesn’t know my sins?”
“I never said I didn’t know them. I simply said that I don’t think much about them. If I was to constantly be thinking of your sins, and the sins of everybody else, then that would leave me very little time to do anything else, and what I mainly do is something else.”
“You’re a misunderstood God then?” I smiled.
“I would be, if my intention was to be understood,” she also smiled, “but thankfully, that was never my intention.”
“What was your intention?”
“I have to have an intention?”
I stopped. She also stopped. I started asking questions, tripping over my own tongue as I went: “But surely there must be a meaning behind it all? Surely there must be some kind of reason for everything, some kind of logic to explain all the absurd? You must have had a plan? You must have been thinking something?”
“The Holy Spirit would tell you that I did it all out of loneliness and boredom,” she answered. “He says I am to blame for all of the boredom and loneliness that humans suffer through in life, because I was selfish enough to create them in my own image – though I would have it that you were created in OUR image, but The Holy Spirit doesn’t agree to this for he thinks he has enough as it is and doesn’t want more to handle than he already has for he is always tired and always sighing and would prefer me to be the sole leader, but I’m not entirely the leader anymore – for making you like me because I was feeling like you are feeling now.”
“Some would comment on that by saying that you make God sound human,” I said.
“And once again I would like to remind you that it is not I who am human, but you who are godly…”
“I’m not religious,” I began and noticed a park bench standing not far from where we had stopped and invited her to sit down on it next to me which she did, “but I have something that I would like to show you.” I opened my coat and took up the chain that was hanging on my chest and around my neck underneath my shirt and showed it to her. It had an icon on it – a small silver icon. “I’m not religious, but I bought this in the prison church on my first Sunday there. I would go to the sermon sometimes…”
“…to say the things to me that I love to hear,” she completed my sentence in her usual strange way.
“It was the talk of a mad man,” I concluded.
“I love the madness most of all because in your madness you are the most human, and when you are the most human, you are the most like me, and when I see myself in you, I smile and I’m content,” she said and touched my icon. “Maria? Only the Holy Mother of God? Where’s the baby Jesus?” she asked.
“I’ve always felt closer to women,” I answered.
“Can you promise me something, Adrian?”
I nodded.
“When you die, can you leave this icon to me?”
I nodded, but after a second of thinking, I uttered almost in a whisper of agony, of realistic revelation, of cold realization: “I will die?”
She didn’t say anything. She turned her face away and held my hand harder, squeezed harder and harder. She didn’t say anything for a long while. When she spoke, I at first didn’t understand her words for they will only make sense in the end and not in the beginning: “Soon, Adrian.”
IV.
To make a long story short (it is not entirely clear to me, though, if this is a long story or not, sometimes it seems to me that it is not long at all but could be told with three words and using three words only, yet I am not good enough a writer to make it only three words, but need more words, perhaps entirely useless words but nevertheless – my words): she moved into my house – settled in the second bedroom and slept on a bed which nobody had slept on before her and which purpose had been ambiguous and strange to me before she moved into my house and settled in the second bedroom and started sleeping on it. It was in November. We would still go for walks in the evenings together in the park and one evening I taught her how to skate and she fell and fell and fell and I screamed at her: “Even my four year old daughter is a better skater than you are!” She laughed at me even when I screamed at her and sometimes she would eat ice-cream and some of the vanilla ice-cream ended up on her nose and she would let me remove it with one of my fingers while she laughed and laughed. She told me of many things but most of what she told me has no relevance to anybody else but myself; for what we spoke of was not entirely what a human being should be discussing with God. I didn’t ask her about the stars when we looked up at the sky at night. I didn’t ask her about heaven or even hell on those nights. I didn’t ask her about anything of importance; I only asked her to turn off the lights when leaving a room to save electricity for I care about our planet and then she would also laugh and start playing with the light – switching it on and off, on and off, on and off – until I grabbed her and started yelling at her and she escaped from my hands and out of my embrace and forced me to chase her around the house – up the stairs and down the stairs and out into the snow-covered garden where we would tumble around and return inside with our coats dripping all over the floor as the snow melted.
In December we were joined in my house by The Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was an old man – a large old man, and much taller than me which was strange and didn’t seem to make much sense but by then I wasn’t searching for sense anymore – with black hair who wore a mustache and tight, slightly old-fashioned jeans and smoked a pipe and one afternoon he was sitting in my kitchen when I came home from the pedagogical institute where I was earning a meager living as a teacher of mathematics. He didn’t stand up when I entered the kitchen, he continued smoking and looking at me with a tired face and there was no smile to be found anywhere in his strict lines or on his large nose. He only sighed:
“So you are Adrian.”
Later the same evening God joined us for dinner and I made the following joke:
“Now if Jesus were here I would be having all of the holy trinity over for dinner! Now that would be something to write home about!”
The Holy Spirit shook his head and sighed again: “You don’t want Jesus to come.”
God agreed: “People in general don’t want to Jesus to come, so I usually tell my son to have patience and wait for it.”
“But I think that if I can handle the two of you, then I could probably handle Jesus, too. After all, he’s human just like me.”
God smiled slightly: “Not exactly. But okay, let’s settle for that kind of interpretation. Adrian, have you heard about The Second Coming?”
I nodded: “Sure.”
“Which is also known as The Apocalypse?” The Holy Spirit added.
“Oh.”
“You don’t want Jesus joining us for dinner,” he concluded, “trust me.”
One evening – I think it was in January – I couldn’t sleep for all of these strange, strangely familiar feelings I was having, that were visiting me against my will; it was the old, usual, common shame that was returning to me, it was coming like a thief in the night and there was no cure for it anymore and it didn’t allow for me to sleep, it demanded that I stay awake so as to feel it, so as to find pleasure in the pain that it brought into me and my life of me, me, me. I sat up in my bed, I placed my feet on the floor, I stood up and soon walked out of my room, I moved slowly and silently through the corridor… I looked into my cabinet – The Holy Spirit was sleeping on the couch in there as usually. He was holding the pipe in his hand that rested on his chest and even in his sleep he looked tired and as if he was about to sigh at any minute now. I looked into the second bedroom – God was sleeping like a tiny child in her bed, all curled up in a small ball rolled up tightly near the pillow, all completely covered under the soft and thick cover – for it was a cold, snowy night in January – and I decided to walk up to her. No, I didn’t decide anything. I walked up to the bed and stood next to it, looking down on the little ball under the covers which was weirdly enough also the center of our universe. I could see a little bit of her red hair. I couldn’t see her face. I sat down next to her on the bed. I waited for a while. I waited for a while before I lifted the cover and uncovered her face lying there in her sleep on the big pillow. I saw her cheek and as I saw it I bent down and almost placed my lips against her skin – but no, no, no! What was I thinking!? Was I thinking at all? What had I almost done? What had happened to me? Who was I? What had brought me to her bed, in the middle of the night, what had made me sit myself down, and bend my face down to hers, and almost place my lips as if in a kiss on her skin? I jumped up and grabbed a firm hold of my head and screamed inside as I ran out of the second bedroom, as I ran through the corridor, as I ran down the stairs and into the kitchen where I threw myself on the floor and curled up in a ball myself.
The shame, the shame, oh the shame! Now it was all clear to me! Finally it had arrived – clarity, oh clarity come! I had thought to have seen not God in that bed, but my wife in that bed; she had looked like my wife, in the bed she had been so similar to my wife, so similar that my head filled with shame had not been able to make out any difference and I had wanted to kiss not her, not her at all, least of all her – but my wife, my wife, my wife! Oh my wife! Oh the woman I had betrayed since the first time I laid eyes on her! Oh the woman I had surrounded by lies and nothing else but my own weakness since that day in church when we were married! Where is that woman now? Where is the bed on which she is sleeping now? She isn’t sleeping in my house, she is not here, for here is only I and I am only on the floor and the floor is cold and hard and my body is heavy and big and losing all grip of reality for who – what sort of person? – would live with God and The Holy Spirit for months and months and do nothing but laugh and laugh or go for walks and sometimes skate on ice and scream at the center of our universe for falling? You must be screaming now as you read this: “What sort of person had you become, Adrian? Who had you been? Who were you now? What sort of person does a thing like that?” And I can hear you and I try, because I must, to defend myself in the only way I know how – through shame…! There was nothing left of me but shame! And the shame wasn’t shame anymore – for the shame was me and I was shame…
Suddenly I felt, and suddenly I saw – when I opened my eyes – someone sitting next to me on the cold and hard kitchen floor. And this someone placed my head in her lap, took a firm hold of my head and put it on her knees, stroked with her tiny fingertips across my cheeks and this someone let her hair – her long, long and red, red hair – fall all over my face and thus cover me entirely. I was closed within a veil of hair and trust and friendship… but it wasn’t I who said it, for she said it first:
“But we’re friends, Adrian,” she said.
“I want to be your friend, God, only your friend…” I whispered.
She bent herself down toward me, placing her head so close to mine that her nose touched the tip of my nose when she also whispered: “You’re my best friend, Adrian…”
V.
April 3rd, 201*
Dear Ellen,
Adrian’s house is sold now. You can rest assured and know that this part of your life is over. Tomorrow I’ll take the train back to Yekaterinburg from Tobolsk – my deed here is done. I must only tell you one last thing before I leave, a sort of anecdote, I presume, about a strange meeting I had yesterday. A visitor came to the house, which was strange in itself for nobody except for Arkady has even so much as knocked on Adrian’s door since I arrived here. It was a young girl, and I think it was the same girl that Arkady told me of before, the girl that had lived with Adrian during his last months. She said that Adrian had left something for her, and started talking about some kind of “last will” that was supposedly in an envelope lying under his pillow. I hadn’t really been that much in Adrian’s room, and certainly I hadn’t gone through his bed. That would never even have crossed my mind. I told her to wait downstairs as I went upstairs to have a look under the pillow. And indeed I found an envelope there on which was written: “My Last Will”. I opened it, but in it there was nothing in it, no letter, nothing but a tiny icon on a silver chain. I brought it to the girl and she turned around to leave straight away. I stopped her out of curiosity and asked: “Are you…?” I didn’t have more courage than that, I’m afraid. The girl said: “This is not your burning bush, Gabriella”. She left and only about ten minutes later did I realize that I hadn’t told her my name.
Love,
Gabriella
