Жоня, напиши роман!

My sister and I laughed a lot when we read “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” out loud together in May during dinner on Brännö.

Three pivotal scenes remained outside of my recent short story “The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship” or maybe they weren’t left out at all but rather they came to me at a later point – as a matter of fact it was the day after I had finished the story when I couldn’t help but remain with the people I had so recently written about – and I wouldn’t have admitted to their existence had it not been for K.’s letter to me today, i.e. her reaction to the story, which was to be expected as a) I asked for it explicitly, even in writing; and b) I dedicated the whole thing to her – she’s the real “fellow philologist and my friend” – thus almost reassuring myself that a grateful and careful close reading of the text from her was to follow. As K. final verdict was «Жоня, напиши роман!» [“Zhonia, write a novel!”], I could not help myself but to give in to the three scenes I had not written in the story but which had haunted me ever since its completion. In order to understand my train of thought here, you must imagine the whole thing not as a piece of literature, but rather as a film for the scenes I am about to discuss came to me in the form of images, and not as written texts persay – rather these scenes are moving pictures of people and places with sounds or without sound and all the while I kept thinking to myself that this was what I failed to write. I see these scenes; I don’t hear them inside of my head – even though sometimes I hear things. Perhaps this was to be expected: I finished the short story but I remain with the people inside of it and that is a terrible, awful, scary sign of something being unfinished, something else still longing to be said, to be expressed, something more that was untold which I didn’t think I would have to tell but you can’t always tell what is to be done for life and art and the meaning of it all may come upon you like a thief in the night and you begin to think, to question, to analyze yourself and your thoughts and your behavior until you are all alone with your greatest fear in a small tiny corner of a big dark room and someone puts a cold gun to your head as they whisper: “But you write novels, don’t you?” Pretentious people write novels; smart and ugly folks with ridicoulous ambitions write novels – and you, button, are none of these things.

This first scene would be the last scene if this was a movie: Ilona returns from Kolyma, from Soviet Union, from some sixteen years in the camps, she’s older than she’s ever been before, her face is worn but still retains some of her intial beauty, her cheekbones are prominent, the blonde hair cut short and turned grey – there have been years and they have passed without mercy. Katya seems much younger. They meet in the airport in San-Francisco. It is the mid-1950s and everything is plastic and clean and nice and seems so remote from these two women and their story – one in her new American clothing and the other in her worn Soviet clothes. They embrace, put their faces up against each other, eye to eye, nose to nose, rest their foreheads against each other – Katya and Ilona were the same height but about this nothing was ever said – and they begin to talk, they converse, we see their lips moving but there is no sound. Somebody smiles; the smile of understanding. Yet we, those watching, understand nothing. This isn’t something we’re allowed to understand. This is a closed relationship, this is the ultimate secret: friendship between two women. There is music coming from somewhere in the background. And then all of these separate scenes from their life together are shown like pearls on a necklace: how they’re making fun of each other at the university in Kazan, the first time they met, and how they began to talk even though they didn’t know each other and they didn’t understand why they should understand each other and yet they did for something else, something more brought them together and this something more, something bigger was too strong for words and can it at all be told about? What is female friendship anyway? What role does it play in the life of a woman? Why do we need the friendship of our fellow woman? Why is it that we can talk for hours and it never seems like we can ever talk enough? This is what I was thinking about when I wrote the story of Ilona. I wanted to write about female friendship; what I ended up writing about is not for me to say but for the reader. Anyway, there are scenes from all of these different stages in their life together: they sit in the window of the communal apartment in Moscow, it is winter, there is snow coming down outside the window, they are both reading a book, their toes touch each other, suddenly they look up at each other and they smile. Then they’re playing in the snow together, they’re cooking soup together, they’re sitting at the same desk and writing their scientific works together and all the time you can sense that these are two people who cannot be without one another. There cannot be any words in this scene. We go back to their reunion in California: Katya is sitting in a sofa, Ilona is lying on the same sofa with her head in Katya’s lap, there’s this soft sun light coming from the window, the walls are painted in some kind of powdery pastel – and then she’s dead. Katya in a trench coat walking alone through a big cemetery somewhere and it is raining. She’s holding nothing but an umbrella. We don’t know what she’s thinking; we don’t know what it was that she shared with Ilona. For Ilona was not intended as a likable character; she was intended as someone the reader wouldn’t like and couldn’t understand. Who leaves their daughter? What kind of a woman does something like that? And never looks back? “She never asked about you”, Katya later writes to her daughter in New York. It is hard to believe and yet somehow we believe that this was what happened.

It is to be the untold female tale of the masculine twentieth century.

The second scene comes earlier: Katya has just had dinner with Ingmar at his apartment in Stockholm, she’s getting ready to leave, he’s walking her out through a long corridor with these white walls and somewhere there are candles burning on side tables and there are some mirrors with golden frames as well and all of the sudden he grabs her, pushes her up against the wall, forces himself on her, kisses her, she tries to fight it, she tries to escape but it is impossible – he is much stronger. The man is always physically stronger than the woman. That is one battle we will never win. He takes her into the bedroom and while he rapes her, Katya looks at the door and Ilona’s daughter, the fifteen-year-old Ilona, is standing there and looking at her with this look of fear, this face of compassion, but also with an expression of relief, of some kind of strange gratitude. Only another woman would understand what these girlish eyes were saying. Later – Katya is already out of the apartment, she’s putting her coat on as she’s rushing down the stairs, her hair is disheveled, she’s out of breath, and then after her comes Ilona, the daughter, running down the stairs and throws herself into Katya’s arms and she’s crying as she asks in Russian: “Will you come visit us again?” Katya holds her and comforts her and in the next scene after that it is already morning and Ingmar walks into Ilona’s bedroom to find Katya lying fully dressed next to her; she has her arm around her as if to protect her. He understands just as well as anybody else why Katya married him. One woman, already grown and independent and her own person, sacrificies herself so that another woman, young and innocent and full of hopes and dreams, may be able to live her own life without having to have sex with her father. In the short story it was never clear why Katya married Ingmar, why she “stole” his last name through marriage, why it never seemed to be her own, and what it was she meant when she said she “had raised a daughter”. But she placed herself in the position of Ingmar’s lover. As women we must live with men, among men, around men – we cannot escape this. They surround us and we realize our fate is made by them and that the power they hold is real and to taste some power ourselves, we must give in and give up and fight yet somehow. But here the most important thought is the sacrifice: one woman giving up herself in order to save another woman. Women can help each other. Women can understand each other. And that is an important thought. Over this scene the words of Katya to her young student: “I didn’t know much about Ilona’s first life while we were in Kazan. Most of what I know I learned from Ingmar when I met him again in Stockholm in 1934”.

The third scene comes somewhere between first and second: a moment from Ilona’s life in camp on Kolyma. She walks out of some barrack late at night, there’s a starry sky above her, and we see that the barack she just has left clearly belongs to some kind of boss, though nothing of the sort is ever spoken of course, but we know who might be in such a barrack; it is cold and the snow is white and everything else around her is black, she removes the knitted scarf from her face to reveal disheveled hair – as if after intercourse – and then she takes out a loaf of bread from her pocket and starts to eat, eat, eat… Everyone wants to live; everyone wants to survive. A scene with no morality, only mortality. It was done by many at the time. Ilona was no exception, perhaps she didn’t even think of what it was that she did – the same way she had survived, had lived so many times before in her life – always with men, among men, together in their game, playing by their rules.

Can a woman in the 20^th century love a man?

I’m afraid of writing another novel. There are many things to be afraid of: first of all, I don’t know what language to write in. It has been a long time since I wrote anything in Swedish and with writing in Swedish comes many sacrifices. I cannot share it with many people that I would want to share my writing with. I cannot publish it here on the blog. It seems I am also afraid that I no longer possess the language to write a novel in Swedish and besides I said I wasn’t going to write anymore novels ever. I used to do that and I sacrificed a huge chunk of my youth to writing and I’m not sure I am ready at this point to enter into such a large and consuming project. To write a novel is to sign up for living in another world for an unlimited amount of time for nobody knows how long it might take to write a novel. And if I write it in Swedish, it will be a part of a literature I know very little about and also this scares me. I don’t know the context. I don’t know if I’ve got enough to write something long. You can study and write but you cannot study and write and be with a man. Either you have a novel or you have a man. It would be silly to believe it could ever be otherwise. Some people may manage but those people are lucky and I envy those women who can share their writing with their men. The last time I was writing a novel while in a relationship with a man was in 2007 and that was a time when he did all sorts of stupid things so that I had to come rescue him instead of writing quite often. This is not something I aspire to again. If you choose to write, you must not choose something else. There is always something that doesn’t get chosen. And I have all of these voices in my head telling me that if I spend a year or two writing a novel at the end of it I will have produced a novel but that is not something one might bring home and show their parents and it will not hold your hand and look pretty when confronted with relatives and society’s expectations. This might be nonsense but these thoughts are often present in my head. Like I once said to K.: if you have a baby and a husband, everybody can see that when you take them for a walk in the park on Saturday afternoon but if you’ve defended a doctorial dissertation, nobody can tell when you go for a walk in the park on Saturday afternoon all by yourself. And then you begin to wonder what is more important: personal happiness or professional achievement? Yes, so I should write a novel. Perhaps there is not point in fighting it at all. This story remains with me and somewhere inside I think I’m a bit excited even for it has been very long since I felt like I wanted to say something in this epic format. The novel is dead. Yet it continues to live. Writing makes me a very happy person but also a very isolated person for when you’re writing, when you’re inside of a book, nothing else seems to be all that important. I want to write the story of the 20^th century we are not used to. I want to write the lives of people that weren’t supposed to have a biography. The ones that came before us and the ones that left a mark for us to trace along. They say everybody is writing a novel – the great American novel when it comes to this country – and I envy them because they are all so cool about it. I don’t even have a language to begin with. I think this has kept me from writing a new novel after I finished the novel in Russian two years ago. This seems a lifetime ago now. It consumed me. I’m afraid of becoming consumed once again. Perhaps I am also curious to find out what my voice sounds like in my native language now that I am much older. This time I want to write something funny. But tragic at the same time. But mostly it needs to be filled with humor. I think I’m a funny person. I don’t now why what I write is so seldom funny. I think I want to play a bit, fool around a bit, and see what comes out of it. My novel will be the great novel about female friendship. My mother once told me that she’s sick of all these male narratives. I’m also sick of them. I want a female narrative – by a woman, for women, about women. There can be no commercial success in that but this I am perfectly fine with. I don’t write for publication – when it almost happened to me as a child I almost shit my pants and then I screwed everything up big time – but rather for a reader. Who will read my novel in Swedish? I will read it. And maybe some other people if I am on my best behavior and ask real nice.

Sometimes I think I’m both blessed and cursed simultaneously: I have all of these options, all of these choices, all of these opportunities – and I wish there was less. Yet perhaps there needs to be gratitude felt for this abundance of realities surrounding me for without them what could I possibly have to write about?

I have been granted some of the greatest female friends a woman can ask for. I have also known several great men and I’m thankful for that, too. But in the end, I’d rather have my own return be that silent scene of reunion with a female friend together with whom I had lived a long life of deep mutual understanding – than recieve from some guy the final kiss that seals the deal.

Oh and I like totally made it to a third date with S. – by the look of things, we’re headed for our fourth…