Aetherial Worlds

Nowhere

N. has died.

He and I had something akin to a flirtation, bordering on—but never quite materializing into—an affair. He was hopeful, and I, for some reason, kept leading him on. Being nineteen, it all seemed oh so fun, but not without its dangers: What if he latches on and won’t let go?

Me, personally, I was interested in the Real Thing, in Grand Emotions. But someone else’s feelings? Eh, not so much.

Perhaps he had suspected me of treachery, of playing a dirty game, but nonetheless persisted in his gentle yet tenacious wooing. He invited me to his country house, which was at the farthest end of the railway line, an hour from Leningrad. I was torn: the invitation implied a romantic liaison, and I didn’t want one. Yet one can’t just go around discarding admirers, right? You never know. And so I promised to come, thinking I’d just figure it all out when I got there.

It was the end of May, warm. I boarded the train and rode for a long time, and then walked for a long time to reach his small, wooden dacha. All the while, I was plagued with doubts—Why am I doing this? Is it the right thing to do? Perhaps it’s best to turn around? It was as if some dour, unpleasantly moralistic being had materialized from thin air to give me reproachful looks: Turn around, girl; this isn’t right, this isn’t right. It wasn’t the first time that I’d felt the presence of this moralizer, this third wheel, and he pissed me off. “What’s it to you?” I replied into the ether. “What? I’m curious. I do what I want. So buzz off!” That’s what they used to say back in the days of my youth—“Buzz off!”

A light was on in the window. I carefully made my way through the wet, versperal grass and peered in. There was a brief moment of darkness during this white night in May. He was sitting at a table—kitchen? dining room?—reading a book propped against a teakettle and nibbling on a piece of something hanging off his fork. His face was slack and purposeless, as is often the case when someone is reading. I took in his—let’s be honest—handsome profile, his chin, his neck, his hands. I didn’t love him. My heart didn’t beat any faster, my breathing was unaffected, my eyes didn’t brim with tears. Silly, pompous words—the kinds that are embarrassing to remember later—didn’t bubble up in my brain. Grandiose, impossible plans didn’t crowd my imagination.

N. was having tea and waiting for me. I stood beneath his window, surrounded by stinging nettle; he didn’t sense my presence. I quietly moved through the underbrush and walked away—back to the station. As luck would have it, the last train for the night had already departed, and the next one wasn’t due until six in the morning. Dangerous-looking drunkards were milling about—staying here was out of the question.

I walked back to N.’s dacha but decided not to knock. In the garden I spotted a large shed, and I gingerly climbed into its loft. There was some hay there—or what was left of it, anyway—gathered at an unknown time and for unknown purposes. In the corner there sat a pile of old newspapers dating back to the 1940s, probably from when the dacha was built. I lay down in the hay, lining it with the newspapers, and bundled myself up in my sweater. My legs remained uncovered, and they were feasted upon by mosquitoes. The temperature dropped; I was shaking from the cold. Never before had I slept in the loft of a shed; I was a good little homegrown city girl. My parents were probably at their own dacha and they surely presumed that I was home in the city, getting ready for my exams. My Big Unrequited Love, too, had no idea of my misadventures. Not a soul, including N., knew of my whereabouts. I was nowhere.

It’s the most important place in the world—nowhere. Everyone should spend time there. It’s scary, empty, and cold; it’s sad beyond all bearing; it’s where all human communication is lost, where all your sins, all your shortcomings, all lies and half-truths and double-dealings emerge from the dusk to look you in the eye with neither disapproval nor empathy, but simply and matter-of-factly. Here we are. Here you are. “And filled with revulsion, you read the story of your life.” And you make decisions.

From all corners of the garden, nightingales chirped and whistled. I’d never heard them before, and always assumed their song sounded more operatic—aaah, aaah, aaah, aaah. But still I recognized them. From time to time I’d crawl to peek through the cracks in the loft walls: N. stayed up reading for a long while, then the lights went out. I tossed and turned and languished till morning. At five I got up, disheveled, my hair full of hay, my neck itching from dust, reports of Soviet witch-hunt trials imprinted on my thighs and calves. Wrinkled and unwashed, with confusion in my heart, I dragged myself to the train station, to the rattling train, away from here.

Nothing happened afterward; I didn’t explain anything to him. What was there to say? And now a lifetime has passed, and he’s dead.

I thought of him late last night, while waiting for a trolley at a filthy, noisy intersection in the center of Moscow. At a construction site right next to it, quite improbably, a tree was still growing, all in white bloom—hard to tell in the dark exactly what kind of tree it was.

And in the midst of this urban stink, these dangerous drunkards, the cops nearby, and all this nonsense and hopelessness, a flock of nightingales were singing from within the white flowers.

Have they no shame? Singing as if there were no tomorrow.