“Where are you going?” “To Moscow, but anything’s a help.” “Sure, hop in.” The driver, a young, pleasant guy, nods. Familiar rock is playing on the CD player and that makes me happy. I open the door and say, as I’m clambering in, “Just a moment, there’s my friend too.”
“Aren’t you on your own, then?” “No.” I look out the window. Sergey is sitting in the grass, oblivious. I can’t hear the flute because of the loud music in the van. “Okay, where’s your friend? There’s room for everyone.”
It really is a spacious van. In the cab, between the driver and passenger seats, there is access to the rear area, which has enough room to swing a small cat. I look quickly round in the semi-darkness and again look out the window.
Sergey is sitting motionless, by now looking at the van. He does not budge and seems totally bewildered. He is back to looking like a square peg in a round hole. I suddenly feel a great urge just to say to the driver: “Okay, let’s go”. He can carry right on sitting there if he can’t even work out that our lift, our one and only lift which can be right here and now, has arrived. The road has smiled upon us and we need to respond in kind. Let him stay there. He wanted to learn all about hitchhiking. How better than on his own?
“Right, shall we go?” the driver asks. I look at Sergey, and still hesitate. Then I open the door and call him. He runs up, climbs in, and immediately goes in the back. He is so out of it, he even forgets to say hello. The van shakes and moves off. I look in the rear-view mirror as, shaking like the picture on a broken TV, the scene recedes and our piece of road disappears behind a bend.
“Let’s get introduced then, since we’re going to be together till the small hours,” the driver says, turning the music down. “My name is Sasha.”
Quiet, dark, chilly Yakimanka. Your days are passing and fading. Roma Jah is sitting at the piano and inscribing new rules for you in felt-tip pen on a piece of wallpaper.
“Roma, there’s nobody here yet. Who’s going to read that?” “They’ll come, Titch. They’ll come.” I sigh. The piano gleams dimly in the light from the bare lightbulb. “Roma, did anyone ever play it?” I ask. “Other than Sonya?”
“I remember my mother playing, when I was little. My grandmother played it well, but that was before my time. It belonged to her.” I want to ask more about them, his forebears who once occupied these rooms, this house, but I keep quiet. The silence of Yakimanka quells me, so I lie and listen to its corridors.
I seem to be walking through them. They are dark and ghostly, and as I walk I see that all the doors have been thrown wide open and the slanting light from street lamps is falling on the black floor. There are no people, no memories of them. The furniture is shrouded in white dustcovers, but then I hear a tune. Our piano is sighing — sad, slow sighs.
I go to where the sounds are coming from, to the open door of our room. The window is open too and the piano has been moved to the middle of the room. It is gleaming and out of its ghostly white keys Cara flies up and perches near the ceiling on the window frame and caws, swaying, “It’s Me, Car-ra, the last dream of Yakimanka.”
I shudder and open my eyes.
“Well, Titch, dozing off?” Roma asks. “Quite right, it’s bedtime. I’ll switch off the light and lie down too.”
The piece of wallpaper lies on the piano covered in writing and a corner has curled up towards me. In large red letters I read the final admonition of The Rules, which have changed a little:
“ALL OF YOU, LOVE ONE ANOTHER.
MAY JOY BE YOURS, AND EVERYONE NEAR YOU BE HAPPY.”
Translated by Arch Tait
Tatiana Mazepina
TRAVELING TO PARADISE
To Egypt by Land
“There are two ways to live: it is entirely proper and respectable to walk on dry land — to measure, to weigh, to look ahead. But one can also walk on the waters. Then one cannot measure or look ahead, one must only have faith. Lose faith for an instant — and you begin to sink.”
Mother Maria Skobtsova, 20th-cent. Christian ascetic
I had left the house hundreds of times, walked past the pond with its little central island, down the overgrown crooked lane to the light-rail station. I had left the house hundreds of times on my way to university, to work, downtown… Today, 29 December, I am leaving it once again but this time I have a different purpose. I walk across the small square in the direction of the pond; the weight of my backpack forces me to look down but at the same time it gives me wings. I lift my head and it seems to me that I see, or maybe I really do see there, beyond the horizon, the sharp minarets of mosques rising proudly and invitingly heavenward. Pale blue, lavender, grey. I can already hear the muezzin’s call to prayer.
I am going to the Middle East. Eastern Turkey, Kurdistan, Syria, Jordan, Egypt…
Step by step, day by day, country by country I will walk along and come to mosques and minarets that I can see even now. To come walking is not the same as to come by plane. And even though I won’t be walking very much, my chosen means of transportation will afford me the opportunity to not just fly by, dash past or drive through, the opportunity to experience my journey to the fullest. I’m going by random cars: hitchhiking.
To live as our Lord commanded, even just for a short while, even for not very long, even for only a month, to place everything in His hands, everything, my very being, really everything I have. To give myself completely. To accept the priceless gift of His care, to accept that His will is upon everything. What is free will anyway when you place everything in His hands…
But it’s time to begin my story.
Chapter I. In a Turkish family
Early in the morning, the ferry brought me from Russian Sochi to Turkish Trabzon.
At night, the ferry still on the home shore, I look towards the line that separates sky and earth, towards that other world that I want so irresistibly to reach but still do not dare believe I will. I had spent five days in Sochi waiting for the ferry that, like everyone else, was celebrating the 2009 New Year. And every day brought the same disappointment: my call to the port was invariably answered with “There will be no ferry today. Call tomorrow.”
I got on the ferry in the end, but was nearly convinced that my native land would not let me go, that it would keep me tied to itself just as it held the boat, and that the dream of minarets in that other world would remain only a mirage.
But this morning I’m on deck breathing in the salty sea air with great pleasure and that other world is already in sight! The horizon parts — in front of my eyes lies the land of Turkey.
I am standing in line for a visa. With my big backpack I am a conspicuous presence among the crowd of identical suitcases on wheels. Masking her shyness with arrogance a Russian woman asks me:
“Where are you going?”
“First to Erzurum, then to Diyarbakir.”
The woman’s seriousness changes to surprise and she exchanges glances with her grown-up daughter.
“Are you traveling alone?!”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you know that it’s very dangerous to go to Diyarbakir now?”
“But maybe not as dangerous as they say on TV,” I say, expressing my usual skepticism towards the media.
“It is, of course, only right that you should wear a kerchief,” she notes with a studied air of expertise, and she turns back to the other women, a more grateful audience for her fantastical creepy tales.