The Day When You Phone the Dead by German Sadulaev

 

Translated by Anna Gunin

 

Published in Red Pyramid (Rossica 19), Academia Rossica, 2009

 

 

 

I awoke as dusk was falling. There was no one in the whole house. I went out onto the veranda and into the yard. No one was there. I realised that I’d been left on my own. Everyone had left me all alone, forever. Why had they abandoned me? Where had they all vanished to while I slept? What had I done? Where was everyone? Things were strewn around as though they had left in a hurry. Left before I could wake up. How long had I been asleep, and why had I only woken now, towards evening?

 

Mother, Father, Sister, Uncle – they had all disappeared. How would I ever cope alone? How would I manage?

 

In the barn a cow mooed. It is milking time, I thought, but I can’t milk, don’t know how to, the cows were always milked by my sisters. I can feed the cows, I can rake out the manure, but I don’t know how to milk! Which means she will carry on mooing miserably. Mooing miserably, miserably mooing. And her mooing will make me miserable. Oh no!

 

 

Suddenly the cow stopped mooing, I heard a ting, the kind that only occurs when a jet of warm milk hits the enamel pail placed under the udders. That meant someone had stayed behind! Someone was milking the cow!

 

 

 I ran to the barn, opened the door and peered inside. I saw our cow being milked by Auntie Mariya, our neighbour. Auntie Mariya was a stout and ruddy woman from Omsk, where her kith and kin remained. She came here when she married, then she bore five children. They were our closest neighbours, just across the flimsy fence. Our verandas were joined, and we never locked the door between them. Auntie Mariya would come and visit, she brought us milk when our cow was dry. And when our cow was in milk, Auntie Mariya came once a week to milk her dry, out of pity, because my sisters weren’t skilled at milking, and they didn’t milk her dry, which could make the cow ill. Also, Auntie Mariya’s relatives in Omsk used to ring her on our phone. We would run and fetch her, and she’d come running joyfully.

 

 

I remembered that Auntie Mariya had died two years ago, and I woke up.

 

 

I was terrible thirsty.

 

 

I walked around the house and came to the tap in our yard, at the back of the house. Near the tap was a metal mug, I could take a drink of water, cold and pure. Delicious. The water pump stands right by the spring, at the source. I walked round the corner of the house and saw the Teacher. 

 

 

 The Teacher was there. And I fell over backwards.

 

 

He said there was no need to bow to him like that, falling flat like a stick, in order to express my reverence. Because I was a layman, and for lay people that was quite unnecessary. I told him that I felt like bowing to him like that. I was guilty, I had let him down, all was lost and I felt awful.

 

 

He said that I had not let him down and all was not lost, I had done everything that I was meant to do. I’d already done everything, I’d fulfilled my purpose. And now I was simply living out the rest of this life. That was why it was so dull. He said that it happens to many people. They fulfil their purpose, complete their mission, perhaps in one year, perhaps in two, and then they simply live, they live out this life. For years and years, sometimes reaching a ripe old age. Depending on your luck. It’s like if you travel to another city on an important task. You do what you went there to do. Then you wait for the train. You sit on a bench, you pace about the platform. Or you pace the streets, looking into windows. Perhaps you go to the cinema. There’s nothing else to do here! The train home doesn't leave until the time shown on your ticket. You could have a long wait.

 

 

He was terribly kind, the Teacher, and I felt better. I wanted to ask him something, but woke up.

 

 

For some reason I wasn’t at all thirsty, yet I got up and forced myself to swallow half a glass of lukewarm boiled water from the electric kettle in the kitchen. The water tasted unpleasant.

 

 

I felt better. The water diluted the alcohol in my organism, and a new dose entered my blood and brain. I don’t get hangovers. I always feel fine the next morning. I only get hangovers when I’ve had nothing to drink the night before.

 

 

 Lately I have seldom had have hangovers of that sort. 

 

 

All I need is to take enough fluid in the morning. Up till lunchtime I have to drink copiously, in order to water down the internal alcohol.

 

 

Outside it was not too sunny, in fact it was cloudy and dull, but I put on my dark sunglasses. I always wear dark sunglasses in the morning, unless I have a hangover. I feel good in dark glasses, the bright daylight doesn’t hurt my eyeballs as it does if I take off my glasses. In sunglasses it always feels agreeably dusky.

 

 

 These dark glasses must make me look like a drug addict. A girl outside the metro handed me a leaflet. A leaflet about the dangers of heroin. About what awaited me should I start using heroin. According to the leaflet, the price of the heroin high was insomnia, pancreatitis, gastritis, rotting teeth, impotence, depression and premature aging. I took off my glasses for a moment and checked my reflection in the dark glass of the metro compartment. I had insomnia, which I was treating with alcohol, pancreatitis, which I wasn’t treating at all, gastritis, which I was aggravating with spicy food, rotting teeth, no matter how much I had them treated, impotence, simply because I couldn’t get it up, depression, and hardly surprising when life was such shit, and old age, though I was not yet forty.

 

 

And I had never injected heroin in my life.

 

 

So I had lost out big time. 

 

 

Why, I could have jolly well enjoyed heroin’s high! All these years!...

 

 

 

I didn’t even start drinking until fairly recently.

 

 

Just five years ago I seldom drank. And if we go back twelve years, then I didn’t drink at all.

 

 I could drink for a good while yet. Because I know how to drink. Oh yes, I approach the process rationally. The important thing is to take plenty of fluids in the morning, and it’s a good idea not to eat anything. You can eat at some point in the afternoon. But you have to drink constantly. Ayran is a great help – a yoghurt drink which the warriors of Genghis Khan used to drink. In the Yassa, the code of conduct left to us by Temuchin, it says that you can get drunk once a month. But then again, you can drink once a day, if not as copiously as once a month. And ayran will help the next morning, it has always helped – since the times of Genghis Khan.

 

 

I think I must be a Genghisoid. I am one of the descendants of Temuchin. I have good reason to be his spitting image when I grow a long beard and moustache! There are thousands, millions of us Genghisoids on this earth. Because plenty of clans died out, leaving no descendants, while Temuchin’s clan conquered the earth. Temuchin had one hundred children, and each of his children had ten of their own, giving Temuchin a thousand grandchildren. His great-grandchildren numbered ten thousand, and within three generations the tally of Genghis’s descendants exceeded a million.

 

 

We are all Genghisoids, and we ought to live according to the Yassa, which we were given by our leader. Get drunk once a month. Or every day if you like.

 

 

Because we have already conquered the world, and now we simply have nothing left to do. Mission accomplished.

 

 

 I went into a shop, without taking my glasses off, and asked for ayran. “A bottle of ayran a day keeps the doctor away!” I announced, and the sales assistants smiled. They too were slant-eyed and angry, like Genghisoids.

 

 

 

 

Then I thought about my dream.

 

 

Once long ago, when I was small, I had an epileptic fit. That day remains the most vivid memory in my life. It was summer, I woke up late and there was no one at home. Everyone must have been out working in the vegetable patch. The sun shone through the windows, the green branches of the trees swayed in the gentle breeze, the birds sang and chirruped. I walked barefoot across the warm floor of the veranda. And all at once, a wave of warmth and brilliance penetrated me, I opened up my eyes, I even raised my arms, I felt life, and happiness, and the entire universe, and it was perfect, the most splendid of worlds, and the harmony knew no bounds or limits, and all this together was love, bliss, and God was with me and held me in His palms. And I wanted to express this, to sing of it, I wanted to shout for joy!

 

 

But I couldn’t shout, because I couldn’t fill my lungs with air. My rib cage was paralysed, my shoulders froze like stone, my diaphragm wouldn’t move.

 

 

Then I wanted to scream with fear, I wanted to call for help, but I couldn’t breathe and again I couldn’t shout. I just wheezed feebly and collapsed unconscious.

 

 

They found me on the veranda, alive, they managed to bring me round and took me to hospital. I stayed in hospital for a whole month, maybe more. They treated me for “fluid in the lungs”, although the analyses and x-rays failed to confirm the diagnosis. Then they simply discharged me.

 

 

In the hospital I knocked a boy out for the first time with a single hook to the face, I read a few adventure books, at the garden fence I built models of some famous battles, assembling armies of mock soldiers – dry sticks of assorted colours, I formed a tepid friendship with a curly-haired Georgian boy and experienced mildly erotic feelings towards a girl in the ward next door. She looked pale, delicate, noble and romantic – she was being treated for kidney failure.

 

 

The second time an ambulance came for me was when I was 25 or 26. The fit caught me at home. At first it wasn’t exactly a fit. I had aches, vomiting, fever. Perhaps I’d caught a cold or a tummy bug. But it triggered a fit, and once more I could not breathe and lost consciousness. 

 

 

My wife called an ambulance, the ambulance took me to casualty and dumped me on a bare couch in a cold room. It was winter. I was half-clothed, the temperature in the room was barely above zero, I was feverish, and lay shivering on the couch. An hour passed, a second, then a third. When I was almost on the point of death, a trolley came for me and took me to an upstairs ward. It was warm in the ward, I had a bed with a blanket, they injected me with something pleasant and I fell asleep. Happiness exists, after all.

 

 This time the doctors decided that something was wrong with my stomach, and they began investigating. The tests were inconclusive, so they performed a gastroscopy – for anyone who knows what that is, the mere mention will make you shudder. You swallow a tube so a doctor can look inside your belly. 

 

 

The doctor didn’t find anything. And the tests showed nothing. They could not establish a diagnosis, yet all the same they treated me for something. They inserted drips and gave me injections.

 

 

Once my friend came and brought me a couple of apples. 

 

And once during the whole time I was there, my wife came. My wife didn’t bring any food, but she brought our child in her arms. She said she couldn’t find anyone to leave the child with, and that was why she couldn’t come to the hospital more often. And she had brought no food because there was no food. She asked if I had any money, because hers had run out, and she and the child had nothing to eat.

 

 

I didn’t have any money, all my money was at home, I hadn’t thought it would run out so fast. In any case, it was only a small sum, we lived from hand to mouth, we had no savings.

 

The next day I left the hospital. I wasn’t discharged, I didn’t even tell the doctor. I went down the stairs to the back exit, got changed and left. I went straight to work and soon made a little money. 

 

 

I haven’t been back to hospital since. But when I got some money for a German translation, I put it in an envelope, sealed it and set it aside in case of sickness or death. 

 

 Recently I had a fit again, though only a minor one. I was getting ready to go to work, I’d managed to take a shower and then collapsed in the doorway. I couldn’t breathe. 

 

When I was a child we used to tell a joke about the dinosaurs dying out because they forgot how to breathe. Now I suffer from the same.

 

 

I’m talking about the epilepsy. Or para-epilepsy, as some doctors consider it. There is generally much debate on this topic. But whichever. Later I learned about the “sacred madness”, and its usual “forerunners” – the euphoria before the fit. Many great men suffered from this illness. Dostoyevsky did, and Gogol. Napoleon and Genghis Khan, of course, too. And also a neighbour who lived on our street when I was small. That neighbour, true, had no other claim to fame. He was humble and dull. But he regularly fell on the pavement and started foaming at the mouth, and people would run up to pull out his tongue so he wouldn’t choke. 

 

 

 Here’s what all this has to do with my dream. The dream begins in the empty house, no one is there, I go out onto the veranda. This is the scene of the first fit, and this theme recurs continually in my dreams. Then come fear and loneliness. And further still – a feeling of guilt, which is removed by the Teacher. The redeeming third “I” in the structure of my personality. This is roughly how it can be understood.

 

 

Though it can be interpreted another way. 

 

For in this dream there were cows. And Auntie Mariya. 

 

 

 

Suddenly I realised this was the day. The day when you phone the dead. 

 

 That morning I had been sitting on the edge of my folded down bed in my flat, holding my head in both hands. I held it to stop it splitting down the middle like an overripe watermelon, and also to stop it snapping off my neck like a pumpkin snaps off the shrivelled umbilical cord of its stem, creeping across the autumn vegetable patch. 

 

 

Then I decided to busy myself and picked up my telephone. I urgently needed to put things in order, and I didn’t have enough energy to tidy my room. So I decided to tidy my mobile phone. I deleted all the text messages in all the folders. The photos taken with the unsteady and blurry built-in camera. And I started on my list of contacts. 

 

 

Delete. Are you sure you want to delete this contact? Yes.

 

 

Delete. Are you sure you want to delete this contact? Yes.

 

 

Delete. Are you sure you want to delete this contact? Yes.

 

 

Delete. Are you sure you want to delete this contact? …

 

 

What the devil, yes, yes, yes! I am sure I want to delete it, to hell with it! 

 

 

I nearly selected the option “delete all”. 

 

 

But at the next contact my finger froze above the button. 

 

 

“You’re sure you want to delete this contact?...” 

 

 

Oh here we go again… Stop!... Who said that???? 

 

 

Talk of the Devil – and he will appear! 

 

 

I turned round and saw: he swung his feet (?) onto the bed and peered over my left shoulder into the display of the telephone. 

 

 

“Do you want to delete this contact?”

 

 

Silently I nodded. 

 

 

“Why?” 

 

 

“He’s dead.”

 

 

“In what sense? He’s disappeared, doesn’t call you, doesn’t answer your calls, doesn’t answer your text messages?”

 

 

“Well yes, that too. But that’s not all. He has died. This person is truly dead. For good.” 

 

 

“Ah!” 

 

 

“Yes, that’s right…” 

 

 

“And what, do you have many of these… dead contacts?”

 

 

“I don’t have all that many yet. But as the years go by their number will grow. That is, unless I myself become a dead contact in someone else’s mobile phone.” 

 

 

The Devil nodded with an understanding look and started strenuously scratching his shaggy head, as though it were infested with lice. Then he said, unceremoniously and somewhat nonchalantly: 

 

“Don’t delete it.” 

 

 

“Huh?” 

 

 

“Wouldn’t you like to ring them, at least one more time? Haven’t you thought for hours on end about what you didn’t have time to say to each of them, to your dead ones?” 

 

 

“Huh?” 

 

 

“Blockhead.” 

 

 

“Who are you calling a blockhead? Me?” 

 

 

“Look, my tongue got the better of me. Yes, you are a blockhead, who else?” and the Devil walloped me round the back of the head, though more to taunt than to hurt. 

 

“Hey, you… keep your hands off me!”

 

 

“Hands??? Do you see any hands?” and the Devil showed me his paws, clawed and hairy, first palms down, then palms up, the way children show they’ve washed their hands before eating. 

 

 

“That’s sophistry.” 

 

 

The Devil wearily waved, as though to say he’d had enough of this topic of wallops round the head and arms with paws, and that wasn’t at all what he’d hoped to discuss. 

 

“You must have heard that once a year an unloaded rifle will actually shoot?” 

 

 

“Sure. And ferns flower, too.” 

 

 

“Nope. About the fern – that’s all a load of cobblers. The fern family multiplies by spores, like fungi do, they do not have flowers. Any botanist will tell you that. Or even just a schoolboy, unless, of course, he’s a straight-D student and a blockhead…” 

 

 

“Don’t even think of walloping me again! I know mantras which would instantly on the spot turn you into a heap of ashes!”

 

 

“Oh must you… ” the Devil put on a semblance of looking away with wounded feelings, while furtively rubbing his paws together. “Deary me, what a sensitive soul we have here! Well, ferns do not flower once a year. But an unloaded rifle really does shoot each year. Many people die as a result, apparently by accident, but there is no such thing as accident, you know, it is karma. And the telephones ring too. Once a year. Even the phones of the dead.” 

 

 

 The Devil moved nearer and embraced me, though cautiously, glancing at my lips, checking they weren’t whispering a mantra, and my hands weren’t forming a mudra, a sacred ritual gesture. 

 

 

“Take you, for example. Do you enjoy it when people phone you? Do you look forward to it?”

 

“I used to love it. I couldn’t wait. I used to wait for the phone to ring and for my friends to say: Well, come on now, that’s enough… we miss you, and all that. We can’t do without you. We desperately need you. I waited a long time. No one rang. And I stopped waiting. Now, when the telephone rings, I don’t get excited. Of course all these people who ring me also need me. But not in the same way, not for the reason I dreamed of.” 

 

 

The Devil sighed, expressing sympathy and understanding on his mercurial mug. The room filled with a sulphurous smell. Involuntarily I screwed up my face. The Devil noticed and pulled out from somewhere a packet of “Hell’s Breath” chewing gum. He showed me and grimaced: as if to say, They make me chew this muck. It goes with the job!

 

 

And here he shifted his expression to a romantic, wistful one: 

 

“But do you know what it’s like to wait for a phone call there! They carry their mobile phones everywhere they go. Well, there they have absolutely nothing to do for ages on end! They don’t even have anything to read. Only their old text messages, though they already know them by heart. And they wait and wait for somebody, some day, to call them. But no one calls. Even on the day when the telephones work.” 

 

 

“But how can they work… there?” 

 

 

“Ah… roaming calls!” 

 

 

“Oh, right, I see.” 

 

 

“Yup.” 

 

 

“Roaming.” 

 

 

“That’s the one.” 

 

 

“I always thought so.” 

 

 

“What?...” 

 

 

“About roaming. That it’s the name of a demon who carries words through the air across long distances. Carries them between worlds even, it turns out. Yes, and the entire cellular network consists of nothing but little devils, shuttling about between the handsets. And aeroplanes, too – how can they fly without waving their wings? I get it: they are hauled through the skies by special demons.” 

 

 

“You know too much. You must find it hard to live.”

 

 

“I know.”

 

 

“But think about it, why do you automatically assume it must be devils… it could be those, what do you call them, oh, angels, for example?...”

 

 

“I see.” 

 

 

“So, then. On an ordinary day, if you ring up a dead person, you’ll be met with long beeps. Or music, if he managed to put music on his phone instead of beeps. Or a specially trained girl will tell you that the handset is out of range. Or the number you have dialled is no longer available or is not in use. Or the number has not been recognised. Just occasionally the call will be answered by someone else entirely. Because people don’t take a dead person’s SIM card away, they place it in the coffin, bury or burn it along with the deceased, as they used to bury knives, urns and other items essential to man. But on the day when Roaming works… you just dial the number and Connection takes place… and you can hear a voice from the other side.”

 

 

“But how will I know?!” 

 

 

“Know what?” 

 

 

“How will I know when that day has come?” 

 

 

“Well, you’ll know, somehow or other… maybe you’ll have no one else left to ring, no one from among the living. Maybe you’ll encounter your dead person on the street, he will flash past, and you will think: Was that him? And you will think: Should I phone? Or here’s another example: do you often dream about… say, cows?” 

 

 

“Cows? What cows?” 

 

 

“How do I know what cows? They are your dreams and your cows. And your dead people.

 

What, do you think I know all your cows by name?” 

 

 

“No, hardly ever. To tell the truth, practically never.” 

 

 

“Well, then. This time you’ll dream of them.” 

 

 

“Why cows?” 

 

 

“Well I just chose them for illustration. Perhaps it won’t be cows at all…”

 

 

 

Time taught me to talk with the dead. It happened when “midway through life’s journey, I found myself in a gloomy forest”. Yes, at around 35. That is half a lifetime. No one seriously expects to live to a hundred. And when your distance from the starting point grows greater than your distance to the finish, when you become nearer to death than to birth, nearer to the dead, then you start to hear their voices, and they hear yours. 

 

 

Before, I had heard nothing. And didn’t understand. When I visited the cemetery, I felt bored and puzzled to hear the adults talking with crosses or gravestones, stroking the grass as though it were hair, filling saucers with water and the whole time talking and talking. About what had happened to whom, who’d got married, who’d given birth to a daughter. And who had passed away, so you’ve probably met up already…

 

 

When they buried Ilya in Moscow, I could not get to the funeral. It all happened so quickly. His body was sent from England, from the hospice where he passed away. His friend who was with him to the end said that Ilya had embraced Islam on his deathbed. His widow and some other people insisted on Christian rites. A civil funeral was held. 

 

 

I arrived in Moscow several days later. I rang someone who used to work in Ilya’s publishing house which had since closed. She told me which cemetery to go to and where to find the grave. 

 

 

It was winter, the earth was covered in thick, deep snow. And there was snow on the grave. Snow and wreaths. A metal rod with a plaque. There was no gravestone. They don’t erect gravestones straight away. First the coffin and corpse must rot and sink down, the grave must settle. Only then is the gravestone erected, to avoid it sagging. That is how it is always done. People are practical, they even arrange things securely for their dead.

 

I walked into the snow, added two carnations to the snow-coated wreaths. Then from my coat pocket I produced two quarter-litre bottles of vodka. I opened both. One I placed at the grave – Ilya, I don’t know, maybe you can’t drink vodka if you embraced such a faith? Then again, maybe now there are no restrictions on you. Well, either way, I’ll drink up. Drink with you and to you. 

 

 

I knocked back a quarter of the bottle and chased it with a gulp of cold air. 

 

 

Look, here’s what I wanted to tell you, Ilya, when you were in the hospice, I really wanted to phone you, it’s the truth!... Each day I thought, I’ll call today! 

 

 

Thus I failed to notice that I had started talking to a grave, which I’d never done before, hadn’t been able to. Hadn’t understood and couldn’t hear. Probably because I was far away. Now I am much closer, now I hear.

 

 

No it’s true, honestly, I was meaning to phone you! I just wondered what I’d say to you. Something like, Hold out, brother, everything will be all right! And … get well soon?!. Get well soon, when secondaries had spread… You know, I couldn’t lie about such things, couldn’t cheer you up, and all that. I mean maybe I believed that everything would be all right. In fact that’s exactly what I believed! It’s just that I have a different idea of what all right means. And it is not in the slightest disturbed by death. Rather, death is a part of the plan through which later on everything’s certain to get better. Ilya, when I was small, whenever anyone upset me, or I simply felt sad, I would think to myself: It doesn’t matter. None of this matters. Because in any case I’m going to die. 

 

 

And it would all immediately become so light and calm. Everything else was so trivial, so paltry. I would think, So I got a grade D… But I’m going to die! Why worry about a grade D!

 

And it’s such optimism, really! It’s just people don’t understand. They think I am a gloomy pessimist. But I don’t understand why. If I am glad that I am going to die, then where is the gloom in that, where is the pessimism? I really will die in any case! And when I don’t feel happy about it, then more’s the sorrow! That really is doom and gloom! But if I think about it, then why am I glad that I’ll die? Well, because I know that after death I’ll live forever! 

 

While people who think that they’ll die straight after death, and there’ll be nothing more, and they’re frightened of death, and they say, No, no, not yet! – they are the pessimists! 

 

I know, what I’m saying is all muddled up. I’ll drink a bit more, to help the words come out more coherently… 

 

 

So I drained the bottle and gulped some biting air.

 

I have long noticed that people don’t understand me. For example, they don’t get my jokes. I said to my dentist, “Could I have a false tooth fixed to my root?” She says, “Let’s fit an implant, implants last forever!” I replied, “I don’t need eternal teeth. I don’t plan to live forever.” 

 

 

Good joke, don’t you think? 

 

 

But she was embarrassed: What are you talking about, you’re so young… 

 

 

What did I say? Surely it’s true that I will die? Then why would I need eternal teeth? Why do I need anything eternal – here, when I will be eternal somewhere else? 

 

Then that’s where we ought to amass riches, open savings accounts and deposit accounts, purchase shareholdings, acquire real estate and even have tooth implants.

Eternal ones.

 

 

But you understood! You were like that yourself, only better! I could tell you anything I thought. But… all the same I was afraid of something. Yet I should have tried. Tried to start speaking, and then… then it would have happened all by itself… and it really was that simple! Here it is, your number, still in my telephone. Only no one will ever answer it now. No one will pick up the receiver. The handset is out of range. Out of action. Outside the network. It has broken free. 

 

 

Why didn’t I ring you, Ilya?... What a moron I am, forgive me Lord!...

 

 

 

Well, then, I must have already said everything. And he already answered. He continues to speak to me: through the lines of his songs on the radio each day. Shimmering over us, shimmering, diamond roads. To walk in the footsteps of gods, you need feet of gold. 

 

Things aren’t that simple.

 

 

You need feet of gold! 

 

 

There too you need feet to follow the gods and leave footprints on diamond roads. 

 

Well then, I must have asked, and he answered – a long time ago. 

 

 

So I didn’t phone him. Instead I dialled another number:

 

 

 

2-11-36. I generally have a poor memory for numbers. I don’t remember the number of my house or the apartment where I live. I don’t remember my own number plate. I’m no good at memorising phone numbers. But this number I memorised for life. 

 

 

2-11-36. The telephone number of our house. In Shali we had a small telephone exchange. Five-digit numbers sufficed. We had our own telephone. Our number was 2-11-36. I memorised it. Now you’ll remember it too. 

 

 

Our house no longer has a telephone. They blew up the exchange long ago, no wires or posts remain. It doesn’t matter. Now everyone has cell phones. Yet all the same I so badly want them to install a landline again, to extend a cable, from far away, from the distant past, and to make sure they restore our number: 2-11-36.

 

 

I dialled this number, after the code, from a long-distance call centre near Palace Square. An eternally hungry and freezing student. I used to go there by foot, at night, from the hostel in St Petersburg’s Petrograd district. Waited my turn to be called to the booth. To dial the number and hear home, hearth, and love. 

 

 

Almost twenty years have passed, and once more I am dialling this number. Why? For the same reason: to hear home. Hearth. Love. No codes, just five digits. I will be connected. If today really is the day. 

 

 

 

When I heard “hello” from the other end, I began sobbing again. Silently, without tears, just a numb throat, and shaking shoulders. As I did that evening. 

 

 

…The doctor says she’s getting gangrene. If they amputate both legs… the blood is infected anyway and… well, then she could have another six months…

 

 

“Mama, my dearest, beloved Mama, please! Have the operation! Don’t leave us! We won’t be able to… I… I can’t carry on living if you… if you… Maaaaamaaaaa…” 

 

 

This went into a telephone receiver one-and-a-half thousand kilometres away, while at the other end my sister’s muffled lamentations could be heard in the background. Then, with unexpected cold and calm: 

 

“You will be able to. It’s nothing, everyone can do it, including you. But my time has come. And just as I came into this world, with two legs, so I will depart from it, whole. What, you want me to die one part at a time? Have my legs buried in one place, and the rest of me in another? How will they assemble me on the Day of Judgement, pull me out of the earth in different places? Who will do this? Are the archangels going to haul my bones about?... No. I will rise by myself, the same as I always was.” 

 

 

Then, already vexed: 

 

“That’s enough, I am tired of talking.” 

 

Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu. Tu…

 

That was the last time we spoke… 

 

 

 

 Today she is still just as young and plucky: “Hello! Hello, who’s there?” But in the background, geese cackle. A tape is playing. A besom broom sweeps the yard – shoo, shoo, shoo. I know: it’s Mama, standing in the white sitting room where the telephone is, at the window, and the window is open, the geese are in their pen, and my sister sweeps to the music: Saturday postman, bring me a letter… 

 

 

 Mama! It’s me!... It’s me, you know… that vase which broke… dammit, oh it wasn’t me who smashed the vase, it was little Volodya Ulyanov from the book who did it, then honestly owned up. I don’t mean the vase, it’s just that I did the same. I deceived you about something important. 

 

 

About the fact that… I grew up? The fact that I didn’t save you from death? And didn’t die with you?

 

I left you, I went in search of God and eternal life – but for you, Mama! For eternal life. You thought I betrayed you? I didn’t! 

 

But I ran out of time. Or I didn’t find it. And time passed, I became a grown up. Like all the others – just another Genghisoid on this earth. You thought I would always be yours, always with you. But I deceived you, I grew up. 

 

 

And I deceived you about the fact that I didn’t grow up. 

 

 

I never did grow up. 

 

 

But you did everything right, Mama… you lived proudly and died proudly. While I can’t… I’m like… here… as you can see… I rang you because… in order to say, so that you would know that I… 

 

 

“Mama, who is that?”

 

 

“I don’t know, son. I can’t hear anything. Just hissing and crackles, as if from very far away. Maybe they’re calling for Auntie Mariya, from Omsk?...”