by Ann Bogle
My handwriting, slow in coming over many years, is good for lists, but I don't want to read sentences or write in it. Amber is on a list I wrote of things I want to remember of Russia: Rasputin's death and Peter the Great (6'7”). One of my lists I read as a poem in the Bronx. A woman named Svitlana asked to translate it to Ukrainian. I know that if I were willing to write stories in longhand that better stories might result, yet I stay unwilling, realizing how stubborn it means I am, as when I pretended to have read Gulag Archipelago for the hell of it. Woiwode recommended Gulag to the workshop, had come close to requiring it, but decided to trust us by suggesting it instead, and everyone (except me) did it and didn't speak of it but nodded his and her head silently in the hall or coupled over it. I jabbered away as usual. I said, “Write short talk long, write long talk short.” Years later, I wrote in an essay called “Hoss Men”--I didn't know where to send it--write short, die young, write long, die old. I might have gotten a paying job had I read Gulag. It was the one fatalistic thought I'd had about recommended reading, not the one time I failed to read something recommended.
I had read Russian literature in translation though only a story or two by Solzhenitsyn before I went on the Russian cruise. The Kempinski was home in St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg has thirty sunny days in a year; I was there for three of them. That was the end. Moscow was the beginning. The Volga and the seas were in between. Looking at bookracks in St. Petersburg affected me like being lost. The English translation section, though the bookstore was large, was meager. Nothing I tried to find had been translated. What had been translated seemed obscure except a tiny book of one-acts by Chekhov. The world did not exist in English there, as it does in some places; once I even snapped at someone who didn't understand my request for directions. It was frustrating, even a little frightening, to be in Russia and unable to read the alphabet. I could make nothing of the words. We took a week of lessons in Russian on the ship, and I realized my brain had grown too old to learn a difficult language. The boy from Eton already knew the alphabet and many phrases. His grandfather, Sal, said his grandson was a world-class genius whose musical compositions had been performed at the New England Conservatory though he was only 16.
A tour group from Switzerland spoke German, and I listened to them. These Swiss were very sexy people, by land and sea, where we met them, not only because they were Swiss--I wouldn't know about the Swiss aside from euthanasia--would euthanasia make a people sexy? These were rich Swiss people in middle age, sexier than Americans and Russians: one woman wrapped her head in a diaphanous black scarf and flicked her legs jauntily in belled slacks and one of the men looked like the Professor on Gilligan's Island. We were visiting islands and later in New York when T. got his hair cut, I said he looked like the Professor on Gilligan's Island. One of the Swiss men asked me to take off my clothes and join them in the hot tub on Mandrogi. I smiled and thanked him then strolled the island with the widows in my group. T. ran up a $2,000 bill calling the ship from Manhattan.
I tiptoed out of the dining room in the evenings with one of the widows, a woman from Turkey, to smoke on the deck. Smoking was allowed and cheap in Russia. Our group of mostly Yale Alumni frowned on tobacco but sipped vodka at the piano recital. The Serbian bartender recommended Imperia vodka instead of Beluga, and the Turkish widow and I sat on stools and drank Imperia and smoked cigarettes. The Swiss smoked and drank vodka before meals, wine with meals, and vodka in the afternoon and at night.
A retired feminist literary agent named Jackie and her boyfriend, Jock, were on board. Jock was kind as one might expect of a man traveling with a feminist, and Jackie was happy yet stern. She mentored me one day over lunch. She said I had to push a novel to get an agent. She said I'd ruin my life if I got married without a book. I thought I'd ruin my life if I got married without a child. Novel as dowry. I didn't mention my prose poetry chapbook while we were sailing Stalin's Reservoir: XAM: Paragraph Series published by a couple of anarchists farming in rural Wisconsin. I'd seen a Russian anarchist shot to death in a play set in Chicago; his girl committed suicide. Russia with its furs in tents and vodka huts and painted icons: my novel?
. . .
On the flight back from Frankfurt a six-foot-tall black woman sitting behind me asked me not to recline my seat. She was American, a youth activity director, fit as an athlete, also returning from Russia. Since we were both tall, I agreeably understood. Russia seemed mostly white and a little Asian and not very mixed. An estimated fifteen million people live in Moscow, yet I saw only one black man there--dressed in a Revolutionary War costume.
I had taken leave of the widows when they went to their seats in first class. I thought T. might have thought of that when booking the ticket: to seat me with Yale ladies on the plane. My legs swelled on the flight. Then in the middle of the night in New York, a large painful lump formed in my breast. I spent the next several weeks in doctor appointments and ended up with a partial mastectomy. The lump had been some sort of infection, not cancer. The scar mostly healed, and T. said it had healed. One of the widows on the trip, Phyllis, returned to New York to learn she had pancreatic cancer, and though we called and wrote emails, we never saw each other again.
The day I flew back to New York from St. Petersburg, Solzhenitsyn died. T. was personally affected since Solzhenitsyn had been his neighbor in Vermont, and Solzhenitsyn had met T.'s dog, James. I wondered if the obituary were the cure for not reading Gulag. If I submitted old stories to major houses--something I had avoided in the 90s in favor of submitting less old but cold stories to smaller houses, who later claimed not to want short fiction--I might call them “early” or “neglected” and still find a job.
Two friends solicit me for prose poetry or something like the Bronx list. It's turning me suspicious that they can't get through anything longer than a few words unless they wrote it or the writer is famous, famous like Solzhenitsyn? Prose poetry is for rebellion, I say.
A mystique has settled on my sister's hair. My sister is an artist. Rather than feel bad, if she and her friends are going to feel sorry, for her uncle the psychiatrist or her sister the writer for having bipolar, she mythologizes her kinship to them--whatever that is, she says.
11
favs |
2133 views
19 comments |
1264 words
All rights reserved. |
I dedicate this story to Deb O.
I remembered after I wrote this that Chuck Palahniuk's books were for sale in the English-language section of the bookstore in St. Petersburg.
This is the title story of my ebook, Solzhenitsyn Jukebox, published by Argotist Ebooks, 2010.
Ana Verse posts composed in Russia:
http://annbogle.blogspot.com/search/label/russian%20cruise
To read a revision of this story, see:
http://fictionaut.com/stories/ann-bogle/solzhenitsyn-jukebox
This story has no tags.
like the ramblings of an oddball diety, a russia of the mind, a poetics of remembrance
Fascinating voice here. This narrator is very compelling. Loved "looking at the bookracks in St. Petersburg affected me like being lost." Also "would euthanasia make a people sexy?" Like the G-Spot said above, ramblings of an oddball deity, with longing and pop culture references thrown in. I like how you wrap it up.
cool and striking, a manifesto
Ann makes it seem easy but do not try this on your own without a backup crew and support staff. Only trained professionals can walk a ledge so narrow.
i loved this one. each scene so separate, kind of anti-incremental and still a wonderful wholeness here. this is wild. great work.
Magnicifent.
And also magnificent.
Nice how the formal journey aligns with the journey being told about.
Funny how you pick on poor Solzhenitsyn, a "great and important" writer who you might well want to skip if there ever was one.
There's a certain glamour about your writing that is touching, as your narrators well know the energy they're expending to achieve it. A classic feminine conundrum.
the voice runs counter to top-down elitism
You should teach memoir, Ann. These are brilliant gems, star in the sky! xox
Thanks for your inspiring comments. I've been sleeping a lot since I wrote the story last weekend. I wanted to put a steak over my eye the first day (a Solzhenitsyn hangover) and bought a steak and a cucumber for that purpose but ended up putting the steak in the freezer. I've been sleeping and waking and remembering things that belong here (such as a visit to the hair salon on the ship) (five-course meals and the fish: the herring)(Romanov palaces). I am asking whether the goal is to write an exhaustive list or to frame an encounter with a country. I am interested in a blurry line between fiction and autobiography here. I want to follow the path of a lived story and keep the symbolic importance of words. The word "autobiography" reminds me of Robert Stone (whom we met before he'd written an autobiography), and "memoir" reminds me of dream. One memoirist is Lillian Hellman and her book, Maybe. Little, Brown didn't label it as a novel or as memoir; it's called "a story" and is a great little book.
"Novel as dowry."
I'm not sure why, but that little sentence fragment made me very sad.
A strong piece. I really like the voice in this. Great work.
Thanks, Sam. I see we may have similar influences in contemporary poetry.
I love the whole paragraph with 'A mystique has settled on my sister's hair.' What is that? Makes me wonder!
I had an affair with a woman who had bipolar. A great time in my life. I fell in love with her years later.
This has classical form. The tense framing giving it that tenor of nostalgia. The paragraphing is fine. The voice is neither particularly feminine nor masculine. Rather its - how can I put it - not beholding to its author's gender.
Minor rev's 9/21/10.
"Prose poetry is for rebellion, I say."
Solzhenitsyn Juke-Box is a revolution, I say.
*
Steve, I hear Russia is very corrupt, something a tourist would not see en route to the Hermitage or even shopping near the Red Square in Moscow. The joke at the shopping mall was that the prices were as long as phone numbers, and they were -- very expensive. No one, even in our wealthy tour group, bought anything. I liked Moscow. It is bleak and somber and stately. There is a great weight to it rooted in land soil, in history. Petersburg was lighter. The buildings were yellow and I was fortunate to be there for three of the few sunny days.
Thanks, Bill.