I just walked out. I didn't want fight anymore. It was dark already and I thought that I would walk until I can. But instead of walking into the woods I walked along the road and the cars were passing me by. I don't feel the cold, not at first....
The nights in Fairbanks have that "low fat" milk mixed into the darkness. It must be the ice fog, but you can't see the sky and the starts. There were no northern lights, only the street lights.
I am drinking now. Never mind the smoking. I should notice when it began. I didn't. When we went to the family counseling, she said to this $100 an hour woman that she was shocked when I said to her that I am not happy. Then when we met I wasn't happy, but what can I say when after so many years I was back where I started from.
I didn't drink then. She didn't drink. I should know that things between us went wrong.
Too late now.
I didn't know how to finish it. I couldn't step into traffic, even when I knew that the cold got into me. Why should I make a trouble for others....
.... [ Is it Joseph Campbell who compares the American Journey Myth (Western) with the traditional stories, when hero leaves home and returns back? My journey is of American style. I do not know where is my home to return. Is it because Americans travel in time and not in space? No home run for light, light has difficult relations with space. Where is your home, nomad? Well, the place you stay tonight.
Did I ever have a home? Under the communism we had state apartments, nothing was ours, not even ourselves. I have to go back a several generations to arrive to places, which were owned by my family. It's all gone and never saw them. Did I have hometown to leave for a journey? Moscow.
What does it mean, Dr. Campbell, the "Western" model? Come on, Anatoly, you saw it so many times! The cowboy and shooter comes from nowhere, saves the good folks and kills the bad -- and gets on his horse to leave into sunset again. We like night traveling. Yes, he leaves a woman behind. I know the story. I don't know the end of my story. The place, where my life ends. On the top on a hill or even a mountain. The river runs below. The mountain ridge at the horizon. Silence. The grave with the sticks-cross. Looks like Alaska. But who would place this cross over my grave?
]
Oh, if you let me, I would write about New York and New England, Vermont and Virginia, Hawaii and ... I have to have some discipline, I can't write in all my twenty years in America. This is for another book.
I have to stop myself.
I have to restrict him, the writer.
I have to leave it alone, the America I live and write about. Now you see why "Second Death" was the title of this book.
I am not about to become American. I am not even sure that I will ever live in America.
I do not know much about my own future, friends. It's the most difficult subject of all.
"I could not sleep at all this night. Your poem about the woman in the morgue... it became to me not about Esther, but about American women ---not only women who were born here but women who came here, what happens to them in American culture. Woman who will not, and so cannot, give birth from her body, but the children must be taken by an operation. Woman who will not, and so cannot, feed her own baby with her own milk,who choose university degrees and corporate jobs over holding their family together. Woman for whom it does not matter if they are in a morgue, because already they fell to a kind of death-in-life. In all your writings you almost never write about Woman, but it is terrifying, like Dante's dream of the siren in Purgatorio."
I didn't see it. Maybe I did force her -- and the children were cut out of her body, which had no milk for them, because she wasn't ready. I knew that she was in deep shock, she still is. Because of the experience in Ethiopia or in America, or both? I talked about it, she didn't. She didn't talk about many things and at the end it became the end.
In "Self" I tried to examine it.... but I always stop before crossing the final line. What can I say about my children? Do I have them? Are they mine? What does it say about me? No, that is not how I dreamed about them, not what I saw, what I wanted to see. I am in the same deep shock and this is why I can't write real books. I take the words out of my mind with the force....
What is this shock? When without wars and revolutions your life is destroyed and it gets destroyed every time you try to rebuild it. When everything that was normal and usual becomes unattainable and impossible to reach. Only the words are left. What kind of grandfather am I? It's just a word. Father, husband, man. Words, words, words.
Please, do not do it, Anatoly....
And I didn't. I didn't search for her diary. She didn't keep it anymore. There was nothing about me in her heart. I was gone long ago. Like many she saw me the way I am, not the way I see myself. A little man, who didn't get it. Who won't get it. Who lost, but doesn't know it.
We were in the car outside of her McDonald's. Smoking. It was the day before the Thanksgiving. And there was a man with the bicycle. The mall, bright spring day, the snow, the cars -- and the old man with the bike. He left it at the stairs and went to the drive-trough window. He stood there, next to the wall, so they won't see see from inside. And then he went back to his bike. I drugged it up a few step and went back to the entrance.
"What does he want?" Esther said.
The kids were behind us in the car. And the old man was this type, you know, who wanted to keep it up, who didn't give up on himself yet. So he went back to his bike and was ready to leave.
"He wants food," I said.
And then a boy, ten or so, got from the minivan at the drive-through-window, ran to the old man and gave him money. For a few monents it looked as if the man didn't understand the boy -- and he didn't... But he took it, the money, and the boy went back to his mother in the van. He was happy, the boy.
Of course, I didn't say what I was thinking about. I didn't want to scare them. I didn't want the children to think about it. I didn't want them to know that it was me.
There are a lot of people like that.
I didn't know how to finish it, I still don't know.
.... "I do not want anybody to touch my body; only you," I said.
I always thought that I will die before her, I never thought that we both will die, like in a car accident. I thought about it before -- and all those pictures would run through my mind, the phone calls, faces -- and who would take care of you, kids. It didn't happen, that car accident -- we must very lucky. We must be blessed. What else can I say what think about the daily news.
And I want her to be that little old lady with the white hair. Never mind that nonsense about my dead body, it's really nothing. It's not even my business. The birth, not the death is the real event and blessing. But this is in another book, my last book....
I was siting in snow waiting for it. I couldn't feel my feet anymore and was thinking about the Jack London's Alaska stories, I read when I was ten or eleven. My father bought me the full London, seven or more nice books, the hard cover edition with the photos of Jack London. I touched my legs, because I didn't feel them, soon I will know, if Jack London was right and I am about to feel warm and fall asleep.
The hands. I don't feel them. Alaska. How strange. Why not Siberia? If they would get me defecting, I knew that I have to kill myself. 15 years of the hard labor? My sentence in absentia. Too much. I remember Norilsk. You spit and your hear the click. Your saliva becomes ice before reaching the ground. Alaska is not that cold. If the prison, then, twenty years ago, I would walk out naked and get in the snow grave. I took off my T-shirt. How long did it take me to get it off? I was tired. I had lay on my back watch the sky. The fog was gone, many stars, so many... I have to count them... All... Ah, lights... Northern... Lights... Dancing... I lost it... I must start it over... One... Two... Three...
.... The rest of the story of that night and after is in SELF.
...
2008 -- The Book of (American) Fool (Elections'08)
