Aetherial Worlds

Father

Father has a new habit of turning up in a rabbit ushanka and a coarse black wool coat; a hint of his torn and scratchy red-checkered scarf can be made out from under the top button. Or perhaps there is no scarf. Then it must be his prewar silk shirt, periwinkle with white stripes. They had an amusing way of sewing shirts then: in the back, between the shoulder blades, they’d pleat the fabric so one could move one’s arms more freely. The shirt would billow out like a sail—clearly a slim silhouette wasn’t the goal.

I found this shirt recently while going through old suitcases—you know, the kind with leather patches on the corners, the ones that are heavy even when completely empty, just by themselves. There were wonderful things inside, simply wonderful: pants with wide cuffs made from lovely tweed, clearly not of Soviet fabrication. Their outward color was gray, but, tweed being tweed, if you look carefully, bring it close to your eyes, then you see not only gray but also some green thread, some red dots, and something sandlike; you sense the creaking of the oars, the oily sheen on the river Thames, the sound of splashing water, and the runny, flickering glow of a streetlamp on a wave; the air is damp, and the mold on the logs of the dock is silky to the touch. But I digress.

So. Pants made from scratchy wool, and the faint, lingering smell of a mothball. Nowadays, moths wouldn’t be bothered by such nonsense, they’d simply feast on the pants and have the mothball for dessert. Moths these days are impudent and pushy, their stare watchful and harsh. But back in the years when these pants were packed away in the suitcase and the suitcase was shoved into the attic, there lived a different kind of moth—clean and tidy, meticulous, with old-fashioned manners and self-respect, and, one would surmise, concerned about the health of its young: Don’t go there, children, there’s naphthalene there! Let’s go look for another suitcase!

So, pants; and then pantaloons—hilarious stuff. With ribbons, with ties! In the front—cross my heart—three white horn buttons, cracked and chipped. A boy’s blazer—poorly sewn, with a half belt in the back—also of tweed, but less fancy. Somebody’s eight-panel red wool skirt. Two shirts: one periwinkle striped, the other coffee colored, also striped.

I fell in love with the periwinkle one, although the coffee one was just as good. I fell in love with the blue, and that’s why he keeps turning up in it, I bet. Although I can’t be sure; he never takes off his coat—a coarse wool one, just like what he used to wear before his death. The rabbit ushanka is also from his final years.

He looks to be about thirty-five. It’s hard to make out his exact age in the half-light of my dreams, but this postwar gauntness and general scruffiness, this casual carelessness or, as he’d put it, “nonchalantness,” those glasses with round frames—the very glasses that were probably the first thing I saw on his curious face when I was brought back from the maternity ward and instantly loved forever—all this points to his being thirty-five. He’s younger than my children.

Of course, they only remember him as an old man with chronic back pain, saggy skin on his face, and remnants of gray hair on his head—God, how he hated this about himself! He’d look in the mirror after shaving and straightening his hair with a wet comb, angrily waving himself away—“Ah! Can’t stand to look at this!” And off he’d go, king of kings, tall and heavy, to have some coffee, followed, perhaps, by a trip outside to deliver a lecture at the university, or maybe simply for a walk in that awful rabbit ushanka of his, cane in tow.

They knew him as an old man. They thought: Grandpa. But I remember him as a young man, agile, loud; I remember him, a glass of red wine in hand, laughing at dinner parties at home with his jovial young friends. I remember how he would tuck me in and tell me all about the universe. About the orbits of electrons. About waves and particles. About the speed of light. About how, owing to the fact that all bodies have mass and that mass increases with acceleration ad infinitum, we can never travel at the speed of light. Bodies can’t, but light may.

I was around ten years old when I asked him: But what is the world really made of? From what kind of stuff? As if one could truly answer that question. Father would tell me about gravity, about energy, about the theory of relativity, about the curvature of space-time, about forces and fields, but none of that would do it.

“What is the world made of, Daddy?”

He’d patiently sigh.

“Okay. What if I tell you that it’s made out of copper—does that suit you? Or from cabbage juice? No? Look, there is something called the magnetic field…. You asleep already?”

I remember him happy, laughing, of course, but I also remember him angry, unjust, gloomy. He was afraid of death, and the thought of its inevitability would put him in a foul mood, as if it were an execution that had been scheduled for tomorrow, with no stays granted. I was an adult by then, I knew how to express myself, and I’d tell him that there is no death, there is only a curtain, and that behind that curtain is a different world, beautiful and complex, and then another, and another; there are roads and rivers there, wings, trees that rustle in the wind, spring with white flowers: I’ve been there, I know all about it, I promise. He argued, he refused to listen, he wouldn’t believe me. He’d say: Unfortunately, I know how the universe works. There is no place in it for what you speak of. And I’d respond with what I had memorized in my childhood: Bodies can’t, but light may.

A month before his death, he decided to believe me. Somewhat embarrassed—after all, it’s all such nonsense—he told me that, since it appeared that he’d die before me, he would send me a sign from the other side. A particular kind of sign. A certain agreed-upon word. Telling me what it was like.

He never lied to me. Never. And he didn’t lie to me this time.

In my dreams, he appears as a young man; he arrives wearing his wool coat and his rabbit ushanka, clothes from his future, yet-to-happen final years. Apparently, he doesn’t much care. Under his coat—a red-checkered scarf, but maybe not. It could be that periwinkle shirt, my favorite. He has the gaunt, triangular face of a wartime goner, and round-framed glasses. The soles of his shoes don’t touch the ground, as if he were levitating, undulating, although I can’t be sure—it’s dark and hard to see. His gaze is attentive and friendly. I know that look, I recognize it in the living and in those who appear in my dreams; I’ll always respond to that look, get up and walk toward it.

He wants to say something, but he’s not saying it; wants to explain something to me, but he’s not explaining it. He appears amused. Perhaps it turned out that the universe really is made out of copper and cabbage juice, packed away in a suitcase with leather patches on the corners and interspersed with tiny little mothballs. And that this prevents nothing—not the unrelenting light of a billion diamantine stars, not the curvature of space-time, not the splashing of waves, not the stillness of time, nor the roads, nor the love.