One day, as she sat alone under a tree reading a novel, a student who had come to visit the temple approached her and asked whether she always read such thick books. My mother immediately replied that what she’d like best was a novel so long she could never finish it, for she had no other occupation but reading.
The student considered a moment, then told her that in the library in Moscow there was a novel so long that no one could read all of it in a lifetime. This novel was not only long, but also as cryptic and cunning as the forests of Siberia, so that people got lost in it and never found their way out again once they’d entered. Since then, Moscow has been the city of her dreams, its center not Red Square, but the library.
This is the sort of thing my mother told me about her childhood. I was still a little girl and believed in neither the infinitely long novel in Moscow nor the student who might have been my father. For my mother was a good liar and told lies often and with pleasure. But when I saw her sitting and reading in the middle of the forest of books, I was afraid she might disappear into a novel. She never rushed through books. The more exciting the story became, the more slowly she read.
She never actually wanted to arrive at any destination at all, not even “Moscow.” She would greatly have preferred for “Siberia” to be infinitely large. With my father things were somewhat different. Although he never got to Moscow, either, he did inherit money and founded his own publishing house, which bore the name of this dream city.
15
Diary excerpt:
There were always a few men standing in the corridor smoking strong-smelling Stolica cigarettes (stolica = capital city).
“How much longer is it to Moscow?” I asked an old man who was looking out the window with his grandchild.
“Three more days,” he responded and smiled with eyes that lay buried in deep folds.
So in three days I would really have crossed Siberia and would arrive at the point where Europe begins? Suddenly I noticed how afraid I was of arriving in Moscow.
“Are you from Vietnam?” he asked.
“No, I’m from Tokyo.”
His grandchild gazed at me and asked him in a low voice: “Where is Tokyo?” The old man stroked the child’s head and said softly but clearly: “In the East.” The child was silent and for a moment stared into the air as though a city were visible there. A city it would probably never visit.
Hadn’t I also asked questions like that when I was a child? — Where is Peking? — In the West. — And what is in the East, on the other side of the sea? — America.
The world sphere I had envisioned was definitely not round, but rather like a night sky, with all the foreign places sparkling like fireworks.
16
During the night I woke up. Rain knocked softly on the windowpane. The train went slower and slower. I looked out the window and tried to recognize something in the darkness…. The train stopped, but I couldn’t see a station. The outlines of the birches became clearer and clearer, their skins brighter, and suddenly there was a shadow moving between them. A bear? I remembered that many Siberian tribes bury the bones of bears so they can be resurrected. Was this a bear that had just returned to life?
The shadow approached the train. It was not a bear but a person. The thin figure, face half concealed beneath wet hair, came closer and closer with outstretched arms. I saw the beams of three flashlights off to the left. For a brief moment, the face of the figure was illumined: it was an old woman. Her eyes were shut, her mouth open, as though she wanted to cry out. When she felt the light on her, she gave a shudder, then vanished in the dark woods.
This was part of the novel I wrote before the journey and read aloud to my mother. In this novel, I hadn’t built a secret pathway leading home for her; in contrast to the novel in Moscow, it wasn’t very long.
“No wonder this novel is so short,” my mother said. “Whenever a woman like that shows up in a novel, it always ends soon, with her death.”
“Why should she die. She is Siberia.”
“Why is Siberia a she? You’re just like your father, the two of you only have one thing in your heads: going to Moscow.”
“Why don’t you go to Moscow?”
“Because then you wouldn’t get there. But if I stay here, you can reach your destination.”
“Then I won’t go, I’ll stay here.”
“It’s too late. You’re already on your way.”
17
Excerpt from the letter to my parents:
Europe begins not in Moscow but somewhere before. I looked out the window and saw a sign as tall as a man with two arrows painted on it, beneath which the words “Europe” and “Asia” were written. The sign stood in the middle of a field like a solitary customs agent.
“Were in Europe already!” I shouted to Masha, who was drinking tea in our compartment.
“Yes, everything’s Europe behind the Ural Mountains,” she replied, unmoved, as though this had no importance, and went on drinking her tea.
I went over to a Frenchman, the only foreigner in the car besides me, and told him that Europe didn’t just begin in Moscow. He gave a short laugh and said that Moscow was not Europe.
18
Excerpt from my first travel narrative:
The waiter placed my borscht on the table and smiled at Sasha, who was playing with the wooden doll Matroshka next to me. He removed the figure of the round farmwife from its belly. The smaller doll, too, was immediately taken apart, and from its belly came — an expected surprise — an even smaller one. Sasha's father, who had been watching his son all this time with a smile, now looked at me and said: “When you are in Moscow, buy a Matroshka as a souvenir. This is a typically Russian toy.”
Many Russians do not know that this “typically Russian” toy was first manufactured in Russia at the end of the nineteenth century, modeled after ancient Japanese dolls. But I don’t know what sort of Japanese doll could have been the model for Matroshka. Perhaps a kokeshi, which my grandmother once told me the story of. A long time ago, when the people of her village were still suffering from extreme poverty, it sometimes happened that women who gave birth to children, rather than starving together with them, would kill them at birth. For each child that was put to death, a kokeshi, meaning make-the-child-go-away, was crafted, so that the people would never forget they had survived at the expense of these children. To what story might people connect Matroshka some day? Perhaps with the story of the souvenir, when people no longer know what souvenirs are.
“I’ll buy a Matroshka in Moscow,” I said to Sasha’s father. Sasha extracted the fifth doll and attempted to take it, too, apart. “No, Sasha, that’s the littlest one,” his father cried. “Now you must pack them up again.”
The game now continued in reverse. The smallest doll vanished inside the next-smallest one, then this one inside the next, and so on.
In a book about shamans, I had once read that our souls can appear in dreams in the form of animals or shadows or even dolls. The Matroshka is probably the soul of the travelers in Russia who, sound asleep in Siberia, dream of the capital.
19
I read a Samoyedic fairy tale:
Once upon a time there was a small village in which seven clans lived in seven tents. During the long, hard winter, when the men were off hunting, the women sat with their children in the tents. Among them was a woman who especially loved her child.
One day she was sitting with her child close beside the fire, warming herself. Suddenly a spark leapt out of the fire and landed on her child’s skin. The child began to cry. The woman scolded the fire: “I give you wood to eat and you make my child cry! How dare you? I’m going to pour water on you!” She poured water on the fire, and so the fire went out.