Natalia A.

The Grandmother

There was once an old woman whose only joy in the world was her grandson. The old woman’s sons and daughters had all gone their own way, and only the boy stayed behind. He grew up handsome and good-natured. The old woman worked hard to keep him well-fed and well-clothed, and the two were happy. Sometimes, the old woman ached for something – but what it was, she couldn’t say. She looked, at those moments, to the west (why the west? She wasn’t sure), and sighed with a slight rattle in her throat, and went back to the tasks ahead of her.

the old woman

There came a time when the old woman noticed that her grandson no longer smiled as he did before. Most of his free time he now spent looking out across the valley of his birth, as if searching for something. Sometime, he cocked his head to the side and listened intently, although to what, the grandmother couldn’t fathom.

When questioned, the boy told his grandmother of a tale being whispered on the wind. The voice made his insides ache as if he had guzzled down a pot of boiling water, but when it quieted down, he ached even more. The old woman tried to soothe her grandson, but he would not be consoled, and, while she slept one night, slipped out of the door and followed the strange call that only he could hear.

Weeping, the old woman went to the village elder – a woman even older than she. The elder smoked a rolled-up leaf and stared at the old woman with her milky, unseeing eyes. The elder opined that the disappearance looked like the work of a witch that lives on a hill surrounded by a swamp. The witch was rumored to feed on human hearts.Continue reading “The Grandmother”

The Inheritance

There lived once, on the outskirts of a kingdom that no longer exists, a girl who lost her parents.

Her mother died while giving birth to her, and as for her father, he was taken by cholera when the girl was twelve.

The girl’s mother had been a gifted seamstress. She left for her child a chest full of dresses – dresses made of gold thread and silver thread and many other threads. The girls’ father had been a carpenter. He left for her the house she lived in, as well as a wooden doll with bright blue eyes.

The father’s sister moved into the little house following the cholera outbreak, and though she claimed she was doing it out of the goodness of her heart, she soon turned the girl into a servant. The girl scrubbed the floors, cooked the meals, repaired clothing, fetched the water, and tended to the garden. The aunt lived off her dead husband’s inheritance, and lived rather well, but rarely could spare food or clothes for the insufferable orphan who didn’t have the good grace to be carried away by cholera or some other illness.

When the girl turned fifteen, the aunt found a new use for her. “Times are lean,” she announced, “and my estate won’t feed us both. You never bothered to learn a trade or get an education [the girl tried to say that she had not been allowed to learn, but the aunt waved her off]. You will earn a living in the only way that’s open to you.”Continue reading “The Inheritance”

Christopher Pike

I started learning English in earnest with the books of R. L. Stine. I started learning about myself when I, at thirteen years old, picked up Christopher Pike. The first book I read by him was Road to Nowhere. It had a garish cover – my mother was aghast. She had raised me reading Pushkin and O. Henry! What was I thinking?

I was thinking that Teresa, the protagonist of Road to Nowhere, wasn’t that different from the fairy tale heroines I had encountered as a child. Willingly, she had entered an Other World (because, in fairy tales, we always have a choice about these things – even if the choice was not entirely obvious), and was being tested – severely – and with no points of reference to guide her. Her guardian angel looked like a demon, and vice versa.

What I’ve always admired about Pike (and it’s amazing how few people talk about him these days) is that he never treats young readers like idiots. You aren’t coddled – there’s death, there’s sex, there are the human dilemmas that you will end up facing for the rest of your life, however long or brief it may be. Most importantly, there are consequences. Although Pike is a great writer of thrillers and twisted fantasies, his feet are planted firmly in a moral, albeit cold and vast, universe.

Sometimes, Pike’s books end up tagged with various ideologies. Whisper of Death – a journey into an uncanny universe that’s part Stephen King and part Kafka – comes off as an anti-abortion book. However, it seems as though there is a whole lot more sinister message behind the plain “teens, don’t have sex (or, if you do, at least find a condom) and get abortions!” that many people picked up from it. I didn’t like the ending, but the book has stayed with me for many years.

The Midnight Club deals with the absurdity and injustice of dying young. The book cover suggests a thriller – which couldn’t be farther from the truth. The first line still runs through my mind sometimes – “Ilonka Pawluk checked herself out in the mirror and decided she didn’t look like she was going to die” – it floats out of the sound of creaking bus-brakes, it rings in my ears in the line at the movie theater. It haunts me, perhaps, the way that Ilonka’s past lives haunt her. The book is hopeful, but not comforting.

In terms of pure ingenuity, Scavenger Hunt is probably the most bizarre Pike book I have read. The action swiftly descends into a kind of acid flash-back, but it’s a journey you can thankfully follow. Reading this, you are reminded of the seemingly fickle-minded, sadistic gods of Greek tragedy. The ending leaves you with few clues, and so you try to come up with a more detailed identity for the beings that populate the book (which was also the case with the Blair Witch), an activity best left for the daytime.

Pike’s plots accurately capture the helplessness of being acutely self-aware, but too young and inexperienced to escape trouble. Like many of the good fairy-tales, his stories are often concerned with the idea of growing up. Arising from the same tradition as pricking spindles, Pike’s monsters drag their screaming victims into adulthood. Survive, and you become that much stronger.

Nikita Mikhalkov’s “12” is the Best Movie I’ve Seen All Year

Most of the English-speaking world knows Nikita Mikhalkov as director and star of “Burnt by the Sun.” I used to think this was an excellent thing. Now I am not sure. This has to do with the fact that I want the English-speaking world to also know (and love) Nikita Mikhalkov for “12” – the movie that deserves an Oscar no less, if not more. Just so more people can see it.

“12” is a loose adaptation of “12 Angry Men.” Although modernized – (here comes my only major criticism of the movie) it is nevertheless suffering from a dearth of female characters. Women are in the margins of the picture. At one point, a peripheral (but, as we come to find out, important) character is accused of acting on “jealousy typical of a female.” This is very Russian. Very dramatic and exclusionary. Very Mikhalkov. The film could have used an injection of Inna Churikova’s famed eccentricity, or Olga Ostroumova’s charm. Testosterone is Mikhalkov’s poison and, no matter how he would respond to these words if he saw them (not that he isn’t busy and important), female jurors would have improved the integrity of the film. An all-male jury seems almost Jurassic. Though the fact that Mikhalkov doesn’t have a terrific track-record wherein female characters are concerned (Julia Ormond in “The Barber of Siberia” was, I believe, a victim of poor decisions on Mikhalkov’s part – despite a few terrific scenes, he nevertheless appears to be more skilled at developing a man’s inner world) is a story best left for another bedtime.

In all other aspects, meanwhile, this film is a masterpiece.

A Chechen teenager who keeps terrible memories is accused of murdering his adopted father, a retired Russian officer. “Uncle Volodya,” as the kid calls him, was a friend of the Chechen’s slaughtered family. The case seems simple, but the doubts of one man gradually begin to reveal its inconsistencies; revealing also, in perfect symmetry, human tragedies as modern and immediate as life in Moscow, and as old as the world.Continue reading “Nikita Mikhalkov’s “12” is the Best Movie I’ve Seen All Year”

Love letters, part two

Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.

– William Shakespeare.

I breathe on the window and my breath condenses. I step away, and the foggy film shrinks back on itself. The glass remains unchanged. I can see the street again, and the marmalade light of the lamp shining on a gray-haired woman hastily tying up her boot before putting her arm through the arm of a gray-haired man. They walk out of sight, past the old cemetary behind whose concrete, Soviet-era fence starving worms burrow through tree-roots in the rapidly cooling soil. Winter is coming.

When I’m alone without you at night, I make up my own lullabies. I imagine myself in a shoulder-wide canoe, embraced and closed in on all sides, running along in the blood-warm river of sleep. The hilt of my invisible sword is cool against my abdomen. Soon the water will thunder down and take me with it and then, only then, will I be asleep.

When I am awake without you in the day, I touch my skin in the absence of your touch. I am bones and fat and muscle, capillaries and veins, jelly and joints – and I love you. Who has wrought this contradiction? Nature or God? Neither or both? When the eyelashes that have fluttered against your cheek fall to dust, when the voice that quoted boring books for you and begged you to pick up your goddamn socks dies and dissloves along with the slackened vocal chords that produced it – the soundwaves getting farther and farther into the uninhabited reaches of space, what should happen to that which we have tended? Will it still grow and flower somewhere, in spite of the battering of interstellar winds and all?

When we were born, a raven was circling the hospital. Under the warm black wing, stars were scattered, bright and still (full fathom high the raven flies, out of its feathers we are made, those are stars that are our eyes). It plucked the worm like a musical string.

Or so I dreamed, anyway. When I’m without you, my dreams become stranger and stranger.

I breathe on the window and write your name.