from The Once and Future King by T.H. White

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn."

—T.H. White, The Once and Future King

from 'Different Seasons' by Stephen King,

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” 

—Stephen King

© Nick Bantock

from 'Don Quixote' by Miguel de Cervantes

"Remember that there are two kinds of beauty: one of the soul and the other of the body. That of the soul displays its radiance in intelligence, in chastity, in good conduct, in generosity, and in good breeding, and all these qualities may exist in an ugly man. And when we focus our attention upon that beauty, not upon the physical, love generally arises with great violence and intensity. I am well aware that I am not handsome, but I also know that I am not deformed, and it is enough for a man of worth not to be a monster for him to be dearly loved, provided he has those spiritual endowments I have spoken of." 

— MIGUEL DE CERVANTES, Don Quixote

 

Monument to Miguel de Cervantes, Plaza de España, Madrid, Spain

"I never met a man who wasn't in love with her..."

     “Olya…” she wiped her nose, “poor little thing, like a bird with a broken wing she was.”

Madame Solovyov moved to leave, lifting her purse and adjusting her jacket as she made her way to the aisle.

      “You know,” she said, addressing Dmitri her back still toward him, her gaze fixed upon and lit by the setting of the sun, “I never met a man who wasn’t in love with her. Not one.” She sniffed lightly. “Not until I met you.”

Her eyes closed in contemplation. Dmitri remained motionless but felt a surge of heat beneath his overcoat.

     “To think,” she mused, her eyes cold and dead, “the one man she truly gave her heart to treated it like a rag.” She readjusted the lace at the collar of her bodice, “What men would’ve done for a scrap of her love…” then, giving him a sobering stare, “What you did with a diamond.”
      “But I have done nothing.”
      “Indeed,” she said.

She eyed him over her shoulder, before glancing once more upon the grave then disappearing into the mist of the morning.

Newlyweds

Grigory had tried. He really had.

Eva, being the premature bride she was, had been given the benefit of the doubt more times than her wonderfully patient husband cared to recognize; and patience came easily, for her overall manner was so utterly mild, agreeable, pleasant.

But all of this turned to mud when it came to the matter of her appalling cooking. It stands to reason that all Jewish women live and breathe to cook, yes? They never get tired of stirring and peeling and kneading and chopping. They go to sleep at night spooning the crock-pots, and awake each morning to find a skillet under their pillow and a rainbow arching serenely, magnanimously, over the stove. But the truth is, there were many days when Eva would have done anything to avoid the culinary perils of her kitchen. Anything. Hit-herself-over-the-head-with-the-aforementioned-skillet-from-under-the-pillow anything. Anything.

For the first few years of their marriage, Eva had many of those days. At first, she thought it was because of her recent run of bad secular recipes: she had trouble with preparations, non-kosher foods that seemed not only foreign but forbidden. She felt pornographic palpitations when handling dairy and meat on the same chopping board, and lost concentration removing the tails from shellfish, or chopping fine pieces of streaky bacon. Her palpitations notwithstanding, she jumped in with both feet, (for, as her mother had always said, if one is going to eat pork, one might as well eat a belly-full). Nonetheless, it was a challenge to feel enthusiastic about cooking after she had botched a number of meals in a row. And, by a number, one means to say, all.

Grigory, however, bless his sanguine heart, believed that she was still capable of redemption, and went about staging something resembling an intervention. He told Eva, quite simply, that she had to stop buying loaves of bread and pre-prepared vegetable dishes from the green-grocer and passing them off as her own. Eva nodded solemnly. Not long after, she successfully made her very own loaf of dark rye. The next day, she made soup[1]. Progress.

* * *

Eva’s challenges were not simply cultural and dietary; she had considered herself to be the passive victim of Sarah's natural ease in the kitchen, and, having identified her deficiency quite early, had somehow always skillfully managed to hand the majority of actual cooking duties over to her sisters. Eva claimed she was more of a food preparation sort of a creature: she cut the carrots, kneaded the dough, chopped the onions, slyly handing these things over to those who knew what in the world to do with them.

She thought her approach stealthy, and believed it would serve her a few more years, and indeed it might have. Had she remained in the shtetl, these shortcomings would have revealed themselves in due course, and their ever-insistent mother would have, with vigorous severity, whipped her flightiest daughter in to a cook one could at the very least describe as solid. Unfortunately for everyone’s sanity and general digestive health, Mother never got that chance. And perhaps regardless of missed opportunities, Mother’s efforts might have been in vain, because for Grigory, it was Eva’s knowledge of exclusively Jewish cuisine that proved the initial barrier during their first few months together.

First off there was cholent. This combination of noxious gases had been the secret weapon of Jews for centuries, and the unique combination of beans, barley, potatoes, and bones or meat was meant to stick to your ribs and anything else it came into contact with. His wife attempted something unusual for their first house guests: She made cholent “steaks” for Sunday night supper. The guests never came back.

Next there was kugel, which, although usually considered a dessert of some description, Eva chose to prepare as a savoury main dish. “The very first kugels were savoury, you know!” she informed him, proudly plopping the heavy dish down before him, expectancy in her eyes. The dish heaved a plethora of noodles, onions and salt and was, apparently, meant to be edible at room temperature, which, Grigory discovered to his grave disappointment, was not entirely the case. As the weeks progressed, Eva, inspired, skipped the noodles, and substituted everything from potatoes, to matzah, to cabbage, carrots, spinach and even to cheese for the base. Grigory soldiered on, with love.

Finally, there was kreplach, which sounded much worse than it tasted. Eva informed him with a certain frenzied air that it could be soft, hard, or soggy, and the amount of meat inside its sturdy folds depended upon whether your mother or your mother-in-law had cooked it! She laughed maniacally at her own joke, but Grigory was too frightened to laugh—both at his wife and the soggy mess before him. Yet, despite Griogry’s attempts at pretense, and despite Eva’s valiant efforts, he never succeeded in fooling her, and she never succeeded in feeding him. Every meal ended with an emotional meltdown.

The truth was, Eva longed to provide for Grigory, to be his perfect partner in life. So complete was this longing that she focused her overall value to Griogry exclusively on her command of the kitchen, forgetting her virtues entirely in favor of the crippling solitude of self-flagellation[2]. She would therefore burst in to a fit of childish temper if he attempted to assist, teach, or comfort her.
It was beyond them both.
He didn’t have a prayer.


[1] Eva made Ukha soup. Ukha is a warm, watery fish dish, though calling it a “fish soup” would not be completely correct. Beginning from the 15th century, fish was more frequently used to prepare ukha, ergo creating a dish that had a distinctive taste, but Ukha as a name for fish broth was established only in the late 17th to early 18th centuries, prior to which the name was given to thick meat broths, then later chicken. Today it is more often a fish soup (prepared with preferably freshwater fish), cooked with potatoes and other vegetables. Chava’s attempt at Ukha, for what it is worth, was tremendously noxious and tasted of feet. At least she had tried.

[2] Well, you can take the girl out of the shtetl…

The Visit

Moscow,
September 1910

That night, she dreamed.

Lying next to a fitful Maxim, she became aware of the unmistakable briny smell of the ocean air. Moments later, she felt Mikhail sit beside her on the floating bed, and then, in an instant, she knew he was there. She felt his gaze on her like the heat of sunlight through their shabby window. She opened her eyes and smiled at him. He smiled back.

“Gorky?” he chuckled.
“Well…” she shrugged.

He looked so well: as vibrant and rosy-cheeked and healthy as he ever had in life. His skin had a lustrous glow, as if a lambent flame deep within him was radiating a brilliant light of serenity, warmth and comfort.

“So,” she asked, smirking a little, “How is it?” she was overwhelmed with joy in seeing him.
“It is everything you hope it is.” He paused and thought for a moment. “That is all I should say…” He inclined his head, smiling, surveying her face, regarding her with love.
“I delivered the document, Mikhail. I succeeded.”
“I know, my love” he nodded.
“The journey was so treacherous. Thank God Dmitri found me in that alleyway, I never would’ve survived.”
“Well,” he glimmered “he had some help…”

And then they sat there a while. She bathed in his light, basked in his luminous presence, while he appraised her with a compassionate distance that simultaneously discomfited and soothed her. He was changed. But the change suited him. The signature resolve, the fight and pluck that so accompanied Mikhail’s every gesture seemed quelled; as if his fight had not been extinguished in death, but won.

She had kept her promise, and here, in her dreams, he was keeping his. How she missed him. Sorrow and yearning began to well up within her, and she turned away for a moment, allowing tears to fall down her neck and onto the pillow. Then, as if he had read her mind, he placed his hand on hers, and she felt a sudden, quiet, serenity. Turning back to face him she recognized there was heat and energy, but no weight or pressure in his touch.

Suddenly she felt herself rising, her vision sharpening, a wakeful consciousness pushing away the foggy mists of sleep. She wanted to sit up, alert, to be with him in waking life. But when she tried to move her she was frozen still, her limbs locked to the mattress. She fought and struggled to rise.

“No, Shura…” he whispered.

But she willed it to be. She pressed on, pushing through delirium with a wild force of love. His hand still on hers, his eyes locked on her struggling frame, he spoke easily, but his voice echoed from a far away place, as if in a tunnel,

“Look for me, Shura…” he counseled.

“Wait! Mikhail!” and she shattered through her paralysis, breaking through the immobilized cloud with a great force and sat up, breathless, at last.

Strikingly sober, she blinked the moisture from her eyes as they swept the room, observing with a great, clean, waking clarity, every corner and shadow as the first light of dawn began to caress the horizon. The hand he had touched was gripped atop the pounding of her heart.
He was gone.

Slowly, deliberately, she placed her hand on the spot where he had been and  and drowned in the ribbons of silence. Nothing remained save the cold of the dawn, the distinct scent of ocean air; and, fixed to the palm of her steady hand, a small collection of salt.

Zoya's Goodbye

It was moments before dawn.

Shura's eyes blinked wearily. The light from the sky was a dark, heavy blue, scarcely light enough to see the contours of his face. Zoya lay beside her fully clothed, wrapped tightly in a scarf held in place by an unfamiliar fitted overcoat. Propped upon his arm he gazed down upon her, the familiar sad smile spread across his beautiful face.

    “Another trick, my Ochi Chornya,” he whispered, brushing hair from her face and kissing her forehead. He moved to the corner where his packed magician’s trunk was resting upright and taking it up, he moved it across the room and nestled it inside the now vacated wardrobe.

Stepping inside the wardrobe himself Zoya turned toward her. He smiled gazing at her from inside, his eyes flickering. “Now you see him…” His nimble hands tossed her a small purple parcel which she caught and instantly examined. Velvet and tied with a small red ribbon, she swiftly pulled and emptied it’s contents into the palm of her hand. Inside was a card. It read, simply, ‘…now you don’t…’

Confused and bleary, Shura looked up to him for his explanation. But when she glanced upon the wardrobe he, and indeed any trace of him ever having been there, had vanished.  Gathered in sheets she shot up from the bed and searched frantically around the room.  Then she saw it.

There, upon the floor of the starkly empty wardrobe was another card. She stooped to pick it up and read the words scratched in Zoya’s child-like scrawl:

    ‘Farewell, Shura.’

Just like that, he disappeared.

The Passage of Time

Time, it seems, has a funny way of imprinting itself on your memories. The grey land of Nerchinsk, with its worn roads, its forests, fences, and horizons laced with countless metallurgical operations—all of it had altered.

Or perhaps it hadn’t.
 Perhaps it was merely their perception, altered.

The sky, once leaden was now a luminescent blue—heavy as eyelids fighting sleep. Clouds of smoke came belching up from little chimneys in great billows, where once there had been only threads, fading into night. The already stark landscape of the taiga with its muddy hills and lonely trees, obliterated into swamp and shrub and an undergrowth of rubble. The barrack sheds and village shacks once only smudges of blackened wood, now betrayed faded shocks of color—window shutters, painted doors and makeshift murals. Silence had been pumiced by sounds of picks and carts and heavy hammers, creaking gates, cows and chickens, silverware and screeches. Above all, the wailing whistle as the train approached from the parallel tracks of the ever-growing Great Railway.

Eastern winds that once wafted smells from deepest Asia, now blew only minerals from the ever-expanding mines: the sour sickness of sulfur, the sharpness of silver, and the harshly cleansing scorch of salt that burned the nostrils as you searched to define it further.

Not to be forgotten, was all of them—memories, shadows and friends alike. They had been rubbed down, they lay worn and raw like scraps of glass washed up upon the shores by the frigid waters of the Nercha. One could see what could never have been seen before: that Nerchinsk indeed held good men, and dark ones, and those so torn apart by madness they scarcely knew themselves. Time leached all that was impure from the companions until all that remained was the world-weariness, the churlish tempers, and the intricate psychological scaffoldings, which could not be kept up or down under the pummeling of Siberian days.

It was these little things.
Nothing can compare to the first moments one realizes that time has more than simply “passed,”
     but indeed, that things are older.
And they were.
Older.
Days passed and grew to weeks, weeks grew to months, which succeeded each other one after the other, and swiftly grew to years.

They were nearer to ash, to dust, to eternity, than they have ever been before.

Clinging to her

Mikhail could not tell if she was truth or figment, but as he stirred, he found himself clinging to her.

He brought his hands to his face;
          thought he might smell her upon them—
          the hope of it alone made him quicken.


He was astonished by how inexperienced he felt in her presence, and laughed like a boy in ecstasy, that things could be as clear as this.

He loved her.

He loved her because nature willed it.
Because they were somehow already united, and of one body.
The bare flesh on every part of him already belonged to her,
          and the scent emitting from her skin was his.

There could never have been a creature like her before. 
He was certain of that. 

When Mikhail first laid eyes upon her, he was terrified.
An unsettling heat radiated from her eyes—an intelligence that seemed innate.
It transfixed him.

She had no knowledge of her beauty really, not the full extent of it,
           making her all the more inescapable.

The length and ravishing curve of her form,

          and intoxicating presence of her hair, its color all miraculous. 

The look that stopped his heart. 

And, of course, the sagacity of her mind. That mind which contained within it a knowledge of him so beguiling,
          he felt himself fill up,
          fill like a well surging, from the deepest and most secret crevices of a universal love.

He had been no stranger to lust.
He had surrendered to it countless times before,
          could write an atlas of the female form.

But in his search for triumph (or, perhaps, for comfort),
          all he had ever acquired was worthlessness.
Nothing more.
All he received was the compliance to an utterly indifferent gratification.
He was left only with his own debasement.
A bitter emptiness.

Oh Shura, he murmured as his mind rose from the reverie, all women before you have turned to ash…

The Book of Dmitri

Dmitri Pavlovich Petrovsky had been born with twines of music lodged tight about his heart.  Like a rusted barbed-wire, it clutched at him and the harder he struggled, the deeper the barbs would cut.  The wounds festered, encased in the pus of his dead imagination. 

Coming from a family of folk musicians in a city as bright as Petersburg made no difference whatsoever to a boy so innately fraught by the simultaneous demands and admonitions of a world in which he felt he did not belong. Depression blanketed the boy from the time he could remember, though his family was quick to dismiss it all as “family flair” or “histrionics.” His father, mother, and two older sisters were kind people of fair-complexion, tall, warm artistic types with open faces and straightforward values.

    “Mityushka, zheezn’maya, doosha’maya[1] !” They cried, “Nyezh-naya Mitya[2]!” They did not, they could not, know what to do with him. Nor did he know what to do with himself.

Dmitri’s personage had always been a shroud of mystery—broad shoulders hunched over a lanky body as if to protect the heart that ached within. His face beautiful, but tender and surrounded by a mop of dark, messy curls. Large expressive hands with long fingers worked up into fists plunged deep within his pockets, or else wringing, itching to be used to play his cello. His small but ferociously intelligent eyes held all the world at arms length, shielded further by the spectacles he’d worn since childhood. 

If the truth of a man lies within him, then it stands to reason one might then be able to simply open him up and grasp at that truth the way one carves into a carcass to extract the tenderest cuts of meat.
But there are certain men whose inner truths are far too delicate, and whose constitutions far too strong to penetrate. In such a case, one must simply wait for the truth within to creep out of its own accord, like a creature that may break apart if pressure is put upon it. Perhaps it was so with Dmitri.

How could the shackled heart, and the poetry that mocked within him; how could the stench of fear,  the cacophonous clamor of uncertainty, and the darkened depths of spirit; how could any of it ever be expressed?

It was the cello, in the end, that set him free. That gave him peace. Inside the chords and notes and arches of melody, he found an expanse of space where all of what he longed to be could fit— that unnameable, unknowable self.

He tagged along, of course, to play in the city venues with his family— folk songs soared and crowds cheered as his father lead with accordion, his mother on balalaika and sisters on violins.
He was grateful to his family for the instrument itself (handed down from his grandfather), and for the ability to play it. But his family, however musical, could not hear his music at all.



*


To look at him before Nerchinsk one would think Dmitri Petrov had no reason for pain. His curls, his higher education, and lovely family—of course one would think he had no agonies. But there are pains and there are pains.

Once in Nerchinsk, no cold, no labor, no punishing treatment, no single thing could mar him more than the love that raged within his breast for her. The love he felt but could not utter, which he knew with every scrap of his being to belong not to him, but to the only man he admired, the man he respected above all others. If only he could say what everyone already knew to be true. Everyone, that is, but her.

He felt that ancient barbed twine unravel itself and come between them, it lodged itself into Shura without her knowledge, and once enmeshed it yanked and ripped at his already riled heart, and made it throb in agony. One moment he would revel in her scent, the next he could weep with guilt.

When together, the three of them were such a happy triangle. But Dmitri recognized he was the  hypotenuse in a shape perfectly right without him—an attachment, not at all unlike a third wheel on a cart— excessive, unnecessary for it to function, but somehow with its presence the entire structure had better balance. Countless times he nearly spoke, nearly moved to kiss her; Tell her! His mind bawled, Take her in the arms you know were designed to enfold her within them! But every time, he thought of what would happen if he did. Crippled by loneliness, fear penetrated his love—the alchemical result was aloofness. Or often, viciousness.

He knew that he could never be alone with her without wanting desperately to touch her. Could not touch her without wanting to posses her, to make her his own. So he barely spoke to her at all. He would waste his life away beholding a painting upon the wall of a locked house he would never be allowed to enter…

    “…Mityushka! Zheezn’maya, doosha’maya…Nyezh-naya little Mitya!”

There was nothing to be done.
Nothing he could do but honor them.
And play of course.
He could play his cello.
Every strand of aching music, every forlorn concerto, for her.



[1] Жизнь моя, Душа моя, “my life, my soul!
[2] Нежная, tender Mitya

The Cello Sang

The cello sang from the corner.

Dmitri’s hands had been aching to play whilst waiting several weeks for his fingers to heal after the long winter had ravaged them.  Now, in the flushes of Siberian spring the men sat idly about Shura and Mikhail’s open front room within the Volosnikov house as they were want to do most Sundays. Grigory Boleslav smoking in one corner, Anatoly and Yevgeny playing cards in another. Andrey Tenderov lay prostrate, legs sprawled blithely in the center of the room thumbing through a pile of novels and pamphlets, thoughtlessly adding his own  melodies to Dmitri’s concert.

    “Oh Mitya do play the Bach Suites—number 3, the Sarabande, please, it is my very favorite. Oh, say you will.”
    “Yevgeny,” sighed Dmitri Petrov, “I cannot do the 3rd, my thumb is still healing.”
    “The second then. Even just the Prelude. Come! No one does mournful cello better!”
    “Yevgeny, I am almost as weary of the Bach as I am of you. Now be still, stop nagging, and don’t let Anatoly beat you with a pair of fives yet again.” Anatoly smiled broadly at this—he loved to win.
    “I wouldn’t know a Prelude or an Allemande if it jumped up and bit my arse but I like the sound of Sarabande—is she spoken for?” joked Tenderov not even looking up from his books still sprawled upon the ground, his hair gleaming even in the ambient light. The men chuckled approval. Yevgeny was unfazed.
    “Please…” he pleaded, head inclined, eyes batting, smiling with his signature endearing influence.
There was a very deep sigh from the corner.
    “Oh very well,” he grumbled, agreeing only to silence his nagging, though the sincere light in Yevgeny’s face was, admittedly, charming, “but the Second—and only the first movement.” They cheered at the predictable delights of the mismatched bunk-mates.


There was a lull in the air in anticipation. And then at last Dmitri began to play.

There are times when we witness a creature being essentially itself—it happens when we watch beavers build their dams, when birds launch into the heights of the open skies, or as mothers feed their young. In this we witness a kind of glory, not with our senses but with something else entirely: the essential parts in us respond to it, our nerves tremble, and we are ignited with a kind of knowing.

So it was when Dmitri Petrov played his cello.

There was no visible shift in the men. They soaked in long strains and mournful chords as they continued to sit and read and stew and smoke. But the shift was there; real and present, the Cellist crying out to the essential with these inessential men.

The Gentleman's Daughter

On some days Shura was ordered to clear the courtyards, other times she was made to haul logs, draw water, or to hew wood for kindling and stack them uniform as soldiers; and if the logs were not hearty, the water not clear enough, the wood not placed sufficiently in tight, symmetrical piles, she was ordered (in a tone colder than the temperatures she endured) to do it again.

Shura worked. Slogged. Waited.
Waiting was another hell of the convict.
It had its many depths.

Recently, however, Shura had been turning in her hard labor and working many a late night in The Gentleman’s office.

*

Shura knelt scrubbing mold from the lavatory basins when The Gentleman approached her from behind.
    “Hello” he said, in his distinctive, quiet voice.
    "Good day, Sir."
He was holding a pamphlet he shook lightly as he declared,
    “The guards say your Russian has become quite impressive, Shura.”
    “I have always had a talent for language, Sir.”
Shura saw language like a puzzle to be put together, her instincts always leading her to the absolutely correct next piece as it locked into place.     
    “—And that you do not merely speak, but read and write. Is that so?”
    “I do not think that my husband," she smiled, "would have it any other way.”
It was true, Mikhail made certain Shura could speak, read and write Russian, not merely for her own good, but because he could not have quelled her insatiable questioning if he tried.
The Gentleman stepped closer and handed her the pamphlet,
    “Would you care to demonstrate?”    
   

*

She would work while moths, beetles, snow and wind all beat against the November-colored windows as she transcribed, scribbled and translated. The hours were long and loathe at passing, but despite that she was of course quite comfortable in comparison to her prior tasks of drudgery. Besides, The Gentleman always provided her with hot tea, a fire, and, though modest in appearance, a cushioned chair. Yet even as she finished and put away each paper, there always seemed to be something else — just one more task in need of completion.


She shared the tasks with another girl whose name she understood to be called Sarangerel (she learned to be the Mongolian for 'moon-light,') though was always known to everyone simply as, Ana.

Ana always sat beside The Gentleman’s desk at a squat little table of her own; posture determinedly upright as she wrote endlessly on page after page of import and export, entry and discharge documents in handwriting as precise as religion and just as scrupulous. She was small, body rigid, relentless in its productivity, with a manner so reserved she seldom spoke.

Ana was in fact none other than The Gentleman’s daughter.

Perhaps it was due to his overly protective stance that she remained so silent — he kept her close and unvisited, forbidding anyone to speak to her; not only the prisoners but to fellow sentries, guards and keepers; and soon she had managed to learn a life of silence so effective she scarcely seemed fussed by the conversation kept from her by a imperceptible paternal boundary.

Shura had heard whispers that Ana was a mix of local races, and she did indeed possess a composition of features Shura had never seen before in her life, had never known possible! So unusual were her qualities that at times she could not help but stare upon her workmates’ tawny skin tone, her small, flat nose, the height of her cheeks, the prominence and beauty of her bones. Her face was shaped like a heart and clothed in a light headscarf—not as Shura would have worn secured beneath the nape of her neck, but wrapped under and below her chin in what the Russians called the babushka (or "grandmother") style.

The night was dark as tar. And quiet, still as anything. Shura thought she could hear her heart beating beneath her shawl when all at once Ana looked up and nodded silently toward her, unsmiling.

A scrap of blackest hair was swept across her forehead resting like a perfect leaf, as her lean brows framed her completely foreign eyes — not only foreign, but ferocious: articulating a universe of strength and intelligence, and so piercing a blue they betrayed in every way the blood connection to her father...

Oh judicious blood, thought Shura, to select so striking a quality…

Awakened

Mikhail lay slumped over his work, fast asleep.

Remnants of tea kissed the bottom of his glass, papers sprawled and candles snuffed out. Somehow the objects captured the current essence of Mikhail himself.

Day after day, the men descended down a a coffin-like staircase into the bowels of the earth, the only light from flaming lamps and the mouth of the mine above their heads. The fact that he had his wits about him was more a miracle than a blessing.

Shura gazed upon him now— overworked, worn. It was late, and, as was usual for the last few months, Mikhail had returned from the mines only to spend the remainder of his waking hours poring over his papers.

It was becoming more and more difficult to deny that he was physically withering. His nose bled constantly, his extremities always cold, the skin all over his body had lost elasticity. He was growing progressively more lethargic, and sometimes, at night, he would riot against the cramping in his extremities—his limbs wriggling as worms might fight a hook.

But still, she gazed upon him and stared, breathless for a moment. What was it about Mikhail as he lay curled at his desk, enveloped in the mining shirt of coarse, tarnished linen and fraying trousers? What moved her so as she saw him sleeping there; his visions sprawled before him, laid out like a map of the universe? Drawings, diagrams and plans, everything he aspired to build, invent or create, set out before him in neatly coded piles.

Her nightdress had fallen open slightly, and she gathered it around herself as she tread lightly over weighty volumes, candles that had extinguished down to nubbins, and endless sheets of scribbled, coded papers. She was careful not to startle him.

Mikhail’s left hand was outstretched, having fallen almost elegantly atop his notebook like a small sculpture, as if he had collapsed into this slumber in the middle of a thought. The fingers were still holding his pencil, the side of his palm blackened with lead as it always was from the hours of writing from left to right in Russian—he always preferred to write in Hebrew for that very reason and she smiled to herself at these details that made up their marriage.

Her eyes moved toward the hand and she could not help but peak at the smudged scrawl below it. It was a coded telegram from the West which Mikhail had decoded lightly below the type. It simply read:

Empirio-criticism.

Below it, in his own hand Mikhail had made a note:

The People are Important.

That was all it said. She could hear the steady throbbing of his heart, the quiet purr of his breathing, and she was at once torn apart with tenderness, unable to keep from pressing her ear to his back to listen.

     “What?” He sat up suddenly, “What is it?” He was at once alert.
     “Darling, you must come to bed…” She carefully marked and folded his notebooks.
He glanced out the window into the inky blackness,
     “What is the hour?”
     “I don’t know. But you must rest. Besides,” she smiled coyly, “I am freezing all alone in there…” and extending her hand to him. He placed his lead-smudged hand in her own and she kissed him as she helped him rise, shifting her hand into his trousers. He clutched her, and, with defeat, he moved away.
     “…I can’t.”
This was another recent, more devastating development.
     “It is alright, my love…”
But it wasn’t. Not for him.
     “—This letter. I must finish. It is important.”
     “Tomorrow, Mikhail. It can wait.”

Thus, he followed his wife to bed.

The Trick

My professional life has been a constant record of disillusion, and many things that seem wonderful to most men are the every-day commonplaces of my business.

 -- Harry Houdini

In hon(u)or of the great, revolutionary and inspirational Harry Houdini's 137th birthday, a special magical excerpt. And, like all good magicians, I couldn't possibly give away the very end...

*

     “Christoph?” she called to him one evening entering around the screen that marked his bedroom. “Madame S has restored the embroidery on your waistcoat and asked me to bring it to you. I told her I would…” She smiled, “…with pleasure… ” she added

     “Place it on the trunk thank you,” he grunted, eyes closed in trance, unmoving. She did. Meditation? She asked herself, or another mood of his? Remarkable how changeable he is, she thought, I do wonder if he is the victim of some sort of addiction.

She beheld Christoph hanging upside-down from the edge of his bed like a kind of bat immersed in the depths of a dark, capsized meditation. More remarkable to her was how little she cared. Her flirtations with Christoph were nothing more than an amusement, a way of filling the days, of passing the hours. When she searched her heart, she was almost astonished to find it utterly empty and her conscience utterly clean. Curious, she observed, before apathetically moving on.

But before she reached the doorway his voice cut through the air, “Shura!” His voice was a thin, sharp blade, “You would like me to teach you one, wouldn’t you?”

     “What?” she asked, turning. He was still mystically inverted.

Christoph crunched his body upward and sat upright, promptly staring at her. His hair was long these days, dark and wavy, his massive torso complimented by the stark ivory tone of an undershirt revealing the curve of his Adam’s apple, the irresistible depression of his throat. His expression was penetrative. Something told her he was meditating on her. At this she clasped her hands behind her back, her face suddenly coy and playful like a little girl. “Oh,” she coaxed with her eyes and stood gazing at him in this manner.
     “No thank you,” she replied. She meant it.

     “Something then,” He stated it plainly. His voice even and firm. “I shall tell you something…”

     “Alright,” she agreed, “something…” and with that, he indicated she sit beside him on the cot. It was time. But how secretive he was. How protective. He reached below his cot and presented her with a small, red, wooden box, hand-painted red upon the lid was a haunting image of a tiger.

     “Open it. Take a good long look.”

She examined what appeared to be a very ordinary box, but deeper and with greater space within it than appeared to be possible from the outside. She blinked and placed her hand inside to feel it’s depth and was shocked to discover that the bottom of the box was not real at all but fixed with two tiny mirrors to create the illusion of depth.

     "You didn't see the illusion because you weren't expecting one," Christoph said. "You believed I was not misleading you and that this box was actually a normal box. Those beliefs serve you perfectly until you walk into a wall. Now close the lid, think of the illusion, and open it again."

She did as she was instructed and as she opened the painted lid was shocked by a double trick— the mirrors were gone, the box no longer appeared to have such depth and not only that, the box contained her hair ribbon, neatly folded as if it had nestled there of it’s own accord.

Christoph watched her as she tried in vain to figure out how it was done. He relished her confusion. "Do not worry, Ochi Chernye [1], I once showed this box to Leon Herrmann and he could not figure it out either." Unless Christoph witnessed your mouth agape, eyes widened, pupils dilated—he apparently did not consider the trick a success.

     "Illusions work only because magicians know, at an intuitive level, how we look at the world. Even when we know we're going to be tricked, we still can't see it. Perhaps we do not wish to see it. Magic is a deception, Shura. Our minds don't see everything—-the world is too vast, too full of stimuli. Therefore the mind creates little shortcuts, constructing a reality for they way we want and need things to be, for what things are supposed to look like. Magician’s capitalize on that petty little humanity,” he smiled.  Something in his expression altered. “Magic as an art reveals the everyday fraud of perception. People soon become aware of the tension.”

Christoph clapped his hands together, and began drawing them apart.

     “This tension exists between what is…” he said, revealing a seemingly suspended playing card, rotating between his fingers, “and what appears to be…” and he clasped his hands together again, revealing his empty palms with a final flourish. "...and, after all, is that not the story of the world...?"

*

[1] Russian: literally, "black eyes," often translated as dark eyes, also a hauntingly beautiful traditional Russian Gypsy song, and a phrase used as an affectionate pet name

The Broken Spectacles

It was impossible at this point to ignore his eyes: deep set, large and a ghostly blue, the skin around them was dark and sallow, outlined perfectly by a brow at times delicate, at others severe. She could not help but stare.

It was not until this moment when he gazed at so close a proximity that the constant barrier, the screen-like barricade across his gaze the glass provided became intolerably evident. He met her stare: and suddenly the screen fell, his eyes were unadorned, and the unexpected intimacy of his expression made her quiver. His eyes were exquisite. Piercing. Deeply pained.

And filled with love.

She looked quickly away, busying herself once again with the broken frames, clicking the heavy glass back into place with a definite clack. She could feel the unbridled intensity upon her, and despite the chill in the November night, she felt at once hot and nervous.

She was unsettled, but still greater than her disquiet was her astonishment. And greater than either of those was her despair. “There you are,” she announced with false self-possession, “all fixed.” She held the frames out sideways, arm fully extended, and subsequently, she caught the nakedness of his look, which she held for a lingering moment before his “thank you” abruptly broke the spell as cleanly as the break in his now repaired spectacles.

He reached for them now, and the momentary brush of his calloused fingers on hers made her swelter once again. And then, as if replacing a coat of steel armor, Dmitri placed the frames firmly back upon his face, and they were once again at ease.

The Salt Mines of Nerchinsk

It was political prisoners used to work the mines, which was foolish of the system, for what better place to discuss rogue political ideals with like-minded thinkers, than deep within the cavernous infinity of Siberian darkness? It would not be a foolish assumption to think the eventual Revolution began within the frozen salt mines of Nerchinsk katorga.

Katorga labor was, in those days, generally used for mining lead ore, salt and silver. Also in foundries, wine-making and salt-processing factories. This particular katorga, also known as a frozen work-camp of the Russian Empire, had been in operation since the 18th century, and was located in the Nerchinsk okrug of Transbaikalia, between the rivers Shilka and Argun near the border to Mongolia. This was the most remote prison camp in European Russia, and since the establishment of the Nerchinsk Katorga Administration, this particularly brutal base had been reserved for the tortuous vassalage of political prisoners, keeping them as far away from the major cities of Moscow and Petersburg as it was possible to get.

Prisoner 90137 wiped his brow. His face was sore and tight, his hands cracked, his lips flaked and bleeding, all from the salt in the cave’s atmosphere. Residual salt. Skin peeling, falling away. Salt in his lungs, his hair. In his eyes and filling his nose with a stinging dry, agony. He exhaled and began again.

“Mikhail!” rasped a voice from down the shaft, “Do you have a sip, brother?”

He did.
Liquid was at a premium here in the caves, as dehydration was the leading cause of death among the salt miners, and liquid that would not freeze was more valuable than gold. He rummaged through his knapsack and slid the regulation flask down the shaft where the faceless worker’s withering hand reached out from within the darkness to clutch it.

“Thank you, brother,” the voice rasped. And with that, Mikhail took up his pick and began again.

*

As he returned from the mines and stood at the entrance of their barracks, he caught a glimpse of Shura washing herself in a basin, her beautiful hair unraveled and flecked with the thawed light of the wasteland that would always be imprinted upon his mind as their first home. He bathed in the autumnal light of this hazy evening, and realized he had asked Shura to be his wife just over a year ago. Light, he thought, has a funny way of imprinting itself upon your memories. He was suddenly stung with regret. How quickly things had altered.

For all his talk, for all his rhetoric, his dreams and visions for the future of The People were minute in comparison to his dreams and visions of a future for Shura. He loved her and all that she was more than he had ever loved anything. And his commitment was not a promise to honor her throughout his life, no, it was, more than anything, a commitment to opening his unpracticed heart. To endeavor to give her, not all that he had, but all he knew she deserved.

She felt him enter and her body responded to his presence. She moved towards him with a knowing tranquility. Half dressed and hair unleashed, she wrapped herself around him. And he tasted, as he did every day, of salt. Her embrace revived his weary muscles, his cracking, knotted bones. His body felt older and more pickled every day, but her touch revived him like a cool, soothing wash of water. Every glance, every touch revived and buoyed him.

But Shura’s love was not in her glances, or her touch; her love was the palpable warmth of feeling behind these things. In the still of the bitter nights he would enfold her while they talked, and they would make plans and dream. She would lie in the circle of his arms, leaning into him while enclosing his hands.

After a day in the mines, he would come to her for a few moments of sanity, to talk long in to the night, to listen, to have his life held in her sane and discerning mind; to hold hers, to provide some semblance of helpful commentary, and to bask in a contentment that felt like the warmth and strength of a divine hand upon his chest.

She placed her cheek against his, and a flood of emotion rose within him; swollen, bursting, like the waves of an inner ocean. It was this surge of feeling that moved him to kiss the palm of her hand with a covetous thirst, as if drinking in her very essence. The salt of Nerchinsk may indeed have been slowly preserving him, but it purified him too. He was falling, dissolving into her. He relinquished himself to the ebbing pull of her tide, dissolving like a grain of salt in a body of water.

“Shura,” he whispered in to her neck, “Shura, I love you.” He held her with his crumbling fingers, and inhaled deeply the scent of her hair.

She did not need to reply, for the devotion in her eyes and her steadfast grip on his face said it for her. She kissed his mouth, tasted the salt and smiled.

“Your kiss makes me think of King David,” she said.
“King David?” he asked.
“Yes. From Scripture. The salt covenant. Every time we kiss you taste of salt and I think of it. Papa always said salt signified permanence, loyalty, fidelity. It is a symbol of unchanging, incorruptible purity.” Her face formed a small, quiet smile and she kissed him again.
“ ‘Should you not know that the Lord God gave the dominion over Israel to David forever, to him and his sons, by a covenant of salt?’ Chronicles.”
“Yes.”
“Every kiss is a salt covenant?” he asked, smiling.
She grew very serious, “For us. Yes. The unbreakable promise.”

And suddenly, he was overcome. She was in every way his equal, his partner in life. He had found a person who was a reflection of all he cherished, and it was with her sense of life, her way of living, that he had fallen in love. It was reflected in her tiniest gestures, her way of seeing the world, her distinct, irreplaceable Self. He adored her with both his spirit and his reason, and it was the greatest reward of his life. It was not, in any way, a sacrifice; it was the transmission of life. Yes, he thought, Yes. He clung to her for a lingering moment, then lifted her up, and took her to bed.

Everything he could do for her now was about love.

“Should you not know that the Lord God of Israel
gave the dominion over Israel to David forever,
to him and his sons, by a covenant of salt?”
- 2 Chronicles 13:5