—Due to the abysmal weather conditions, the flight to Tulubaika is delayed. Passengers are asked to be patient and think about something else, something unrelated to Tulubaika, for example, read a book. Please, at least for a moment, distract yourselves already.
Our heroine inhaled the stale airport air and melted into her chair. If it were a proper port, it would smell of ship fuel and dead fish, but instead... it smells of halva and coffee from the pseudo-café nearby.
Can't imagine how people can read for hours, she wondered. During that time, so many thoughts accumulate in my head that they simply start tumbling out of my ear canals, perch on them and (whoosh!) slide down as if from a hill; and they fly, fly, fly one after another, perch, slide, fly in an avalanche flow, like a crowd rushing for the festive shopping, stick together, fly, fly, fly, stick together and continue to fly and stick together, layering like a snowball, until you simply furrow your brow and put the book aside. You just need to distract yourself, but not so much as to change context, do something else or clear your head, no, not like that at all; you need to distract yourself from the very act of reading because thoughts become too many and continue to become only more until you process them like that washed laundry that lies on the chair and waits for someone to fold it, but at some point it starts falling from the chair, and that's when you realise—it's time. The residents of the modest abode shrug and go to fold it, what else can they do? The very act of reading rather pulls you into some spiral whirlpool than helps you relax. Few things help to relax at all, reading certainly isn’t one of them. It's a kind of work that brings pleasure, but pleasure not in following the plot and unravelling its tangles and tangles of characters' lives, but the kind you get from intently observing nature, the sea, a crowded street, scenes of carnal love, scenes of platonic love, stars, birdsong, tits drunk on fermented frozen rowan berries and singing their avian chanson. You sit, eyes bulging, ears spread wide, a joy to behold, blimey, what a delight. Each word, phrase, sentence, plot twist seems to program you for something, and you feel yourself becoming programmed. They, these units of text, units of the author's thought, awaken in you your own uncountable thoughts, which gradually emerge from darkness, from being extras they become main characters and occupy all attention, sit on sleds and slide down the slopes of ear canals, fly, fly, fly, squinting, until silence settles in your head.
—Come on, let's go walk around duty-free, my sun,—said our heroine’s husband, her hero.
No one has yet described our sun exactly like that—using our heroine as a metaphor for it—although it, the sun, has existed for billions of years, it was, is, and will be, and has been described over all this time in all imaginable ways. It doesn't even realise that once it didn't exist and someday it won't exist, because it exists for too long to be aware of such things, too long for such things to matter, just as those who exist too briefly don't realise these things either—they simply don't have time for realising anything whatsoever. There are mayflies (most of the common butterflies), they live for a day. There are some that live only for a couple of hours. Do they have time to languish in an airport and think about the eternal? Their eternity is of a completely different size.
—My arse is going numb now...—he added, fidgeting on the chair.—A new café opened here. Right there behind us. They serve waffles with black sesame cream, with black sesame ice cream, sprinkled with roasted sesame oil, probably white. They say the coffee comes out very tasty with sesame and cream.
—Too fat, isn't it?
—And sweet. They pour honey in there in litres.
—I don't like sweet things, I like tasty things. When I feel completely bleh, I just want something tasty, I don't even want to eat, I just need something tasty.
—That's reasonable. Fatty things are precisely what's tasty. Shall we go?
He didn't even realise that they were flying to the funeral of our heroine's grandmother—she didn't tell him, it wasn't necessary for him to know about it yet. Well, necessary, of course, but she just couldn't structure the conversation in such a way as to tell him about it. Everyone, both he and her relatives in his mind, had already prepared for meeting each other, prepared gifts, rehearsed speeches and poems, dressed up and so on and so forth, and to introduce a suddenly deceased grandmother into that mix would mean destroying the blooming and fragrant idyll.
—Finally, you'll see my native Tulubaika.
—I can't wait, when?
—Very soon. You'll like it. But there's one nuance.
—What's that? Is it too cold there? We didn't bring down our parkas?
—No, not that at all. It's cold there, of course, but not too much, we'll manage without parkas. Things have changed. You see, my grandmother died, there in Tulubaika, so now we're not going to celebrate your acquaintance with my roots, walk around the village, enjoy the ancient, almost untouched by human landscapes, but to a memorial service, not even a funeral, can you imagine? She was Tatar, so she was buried the same day. That happens.
It's nonsense, isn't it? What kind of dialogue is that? What could be more absurd? Of course, the fact that only upon arriving there, he'll learn that he's, all of a sudden, also coming to a memorial service.
—Surprise, darling.
—What kind of surprise, my sun?
—A memorial service!
Her own cynicism was twisting her up. Or maybe it wasn't cynicism, but a jester's instinct, which simultaneously both hindered and saved her from taking anything seriously. Sometimes it happens like this: you perceive something unwittingly, hope for the best, but alas—the perceptron malfunctions. I'll tell him later, she thought, I love consolation, especially his consolations, they would definitely help me, but not right away, right away I wouldn't digest them, I haven’t yet decided how I feel about it myself.
—You go,—she said to him,—and I'll go to the bookshop. God knows how much longer we'll be waiting... Maybe I'll buy something in the local tongue. As a keepsake.
Reading is sadomasochism for many reasons, starting, for example, with disconnection from reality, complete and irreversible immersion from the physical world filled with other people into your own world where among people, apart from yourself and the author, there is no one, causing inner loneliness to become embarrassed, its cheeks to redden and it to go far away, so as not to see the two of you, you and the author, anymore. You upset it, this puritanical loneliness, with your loose behaviour, because how can one be so obsessed as to let another person into her temple, that is, into her brain, be it a man or a woman or even thinking rock. It's less indecent, by the way, when you read something composed by thinking rock, because there is no metaphysical connection of minds, but only the connection of one mind with emptiness or the thickness of emptiness that arose through the connection of many minds—the collective mind, anima mundi. It's like hearing voices in a cemetery, which all at once, all without exception, begin to talk to you through a narrow bottleneck. Boo! Here you are walking through a cemetery and thinking, who are all these people, and why should I listen to them? They're dead, but they all talk and talk, and then sing and dance, like in Indian films or musicals. Not all, of course, but some of them, those whose voice hasn't faded. Not because they shouted too loudly (although there are such ones), but because they broadcasted on their frequency, which no one has yet occupied, where there's less noise, and neither dictators with their thought police prohibiting communication on generally accepted frequencies nor all sorts of tech bros with their social media can reach.
—Good afternoon. Hello. Is there anything to read?
—Of course. You've come to the right place—a bookshop. There's plenty to read here. Can I help you with something?
The old man behind the cash register resembled a dishevelled Gandalf with Chekhov's pince-nez that had flown in from somewhere and settled on his nose (he couldn't be Chekhov, Chekhov died young); a wonderful old man, in a word, the kind you don't usually encounter in life, only in Miyazaki's cartoons or accidentally in an airport, when life stops “being” and plops into “non-being”, like a barely sighted kitten into a bowl of milk. Gandalf, if our heroine remembered correctly, was her first crush. She generally considered that the archetype of a man is not a sword, but a lantern, and when Gandalf changed from grey to white and began to glow, she understood everything about this life and men. Such was she, our heroine, perceptive from an early age.
—I'm thinking and I can't decide between reading news on the internet, looking at the departure board, keeping track of how much longer my flight will be delayed, and reading a long, long book to distract myself, you understand?
—I understand. You need a book.
—I can't wait any longer, you understand? Sometimes it feels like I've spent my whole life waiting in an airport. Or rather, not like that, but like this: right now, at this moment, it seems to me that I've been waiting precisely for it, this moment, and I don't seem to remember life before it. It's like good literature—not about what it seems to be about. All these three hundred pages that I've already read, in fact had no meaning at all, it was just the author amusing herself and entertaining us. She needed to invent these three hundred pages to somehow justify the existence of this single sentence that came to her mind when, perhaps (or perhaps not), she was making love, riding the tube, talking with a friend, listening to an absolutely shameless presentation at work in absolutely shameless corporate jargon. You understand?
—There's some irony in this.
—You think so?
—I'm a book seller in an airport, miss.
—Ah, yes, I had already forgotten. I need something painful. When I read, I feel physical pain. But it's not painful, rather pleasant. That kind of pain. I can't read if it's not painful in any sense. I need to feel how connections are forming in my brain, if there is, of course, anything to form connections with. Like pyramids, Egyptians building pyramids from rocks.
—You know, I'll tell you a secret, but this anthropocentrism is getting on my nerves, miss. I've seen so many people—a bookshop in an airport is bonkers—that it really seems to me that it's not ants that live like people, but people that live like ants. Ants were there first, after all.
—You think so?
—You know, scientists recently managed to create a complete map of the brain of an ordinary fly, the one that sits on shite. They were able to find out which neurons are responsible for what when it smells the shite.
—Wonders...
—Indeed. Now when you talk about the formation of neural connections in your head, do you feel exactly where they are forming? Yogis say you only need to concentrate to understand this, and then everything will become clear. But I agree with you. So many people come to me, so many people... it's like a revolving door here, miss. No book surprises me anymore. And allowing yourself to be programmed—sadomasochism.
—That's exactly what I'm talking about. Isn't it lovely? How well you understand me... But my husband is waiting for me. He understands me even better. Sometimes even without words. In such moments, when we understand each other without words and cackle like mad at how absurd everything actually is, I wonder that all this reading is such nonsense, and these books—such gibberish. He, by the way, loves everything with sesame. Sesame for him is like a drug. Halva, tahini, sesame oil, sesame brittle—all those things. What do you think, who reads more, men or women?
—I believe that men should read only women, and women only men—that's when harmony will come to the world. I've been doing so all my life. I read only women.
—Amazing. And I read everyone. Indiscriminately. When I see a foreign name, I don't always know or care if it's a man or a woman or both.
—What haven't you seen in women's novels, and what haven't I seen in men's? It's like living in a changing room—swinging genetalia of your own kind all around. By the way, have you chosen something yet?
—No, my eyes keep glazing over the covers, over the titles, but they can't catch onto anything.
—You won't believe it, but I worked in a hospice once, in the library, and I was engaged there in recommending terminally ill people their last book. Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing the same thing now.
—What are you hinting at?
And indeed, everything here is somewhat half-dead. People, being here, seem to live new short lives, like butterflies. You live in the cocoon of the airport for several hours, then suddenly discover in yourself a talent for flying, fly, fly, fly, and find yourself on the other side of the world. And so, this new short life ends as soon as you step from the gangway onto the earth. Butterflies, by the way, don't emerge from caterpillars, or rather, caterpillars don't turn into butterflies. Caterpillars are actually building material, food for the future butterfly. The caterpillar dies—the butterfly is born. No inspiring transformation, just the death of one for the sake of another. Not even for the sake of, but just because or nonbecause, for no one asks or informs about its sad fate.
—Maybe you're right,—our heroine said quietly to the old man, almost whispering.
—I would ask you to be a bit more precise. In my life, I've been right about many things, and I've been wrong about many things.
—About this damned anthropocentrism. Someone crawls and fights like an ant, someone doesn't fly like a dragonfly, someone lives like a butterfly, and someone thinks like rock with a brain of a fly that has sat on shite and smells, smells, smells, smells. And only now, after all these years, we are beginning to understand this.
—Here,—said the old man,—this book will suit you.
And he took out from under the counter and handed to our heroine a volume of a thousand and one pages, soft cover. She showed her boarding pass, thanked the old man, went back to the waiting area, to wait.
People around were either arriving or departing. A revolving door. In order not to be distracted by their presence or absence, our heroine sat facing a huge window overlooking the runways, where, accompanied by rain, colourful little planes were either arriving or departing. She looked at them, without opening the book, because she had changed her mind about reading. The flight is 8 hours, I'll read on the plane, she decided and sat watching the figures of little planes maneuring around, as if she were only a couple of months old again, lying in a cradle, and someone was playing with her.
—We regret to inform you,—something yelled right above her ear,—that the flight to Tulubaika is still delayed and will most likely continue to be delayed. But don't grieve and don't mope! This is normal, because along this route something is constantly delayed. Just wanted to remind you, good luck, and have a nice day!
—Yes, fuck...—whispered our heroine.
Here, right in front of her, a hand extended a paper cup with a latte.
—Sleeping?—asked her hero.
—Nope. How's the sesame?
—Sesamely.
Our heroine tried to smile and took a sip of coffee.
—Tired?
She nodded, swaying with her whole body, as if she didn't have enough strength to nod with just her head.
—Sleep.
—I'll sleep on the plane.
His coffee smelled of halva, as if he was drinking liquid halva—la dolce vita, as they say, only in Turkish, but in Turkish it's tatlı hayat. Everyone's life is somehow sweet, both Italians and Turks, so sweet that even flies stick to it, fly, fly, fly as if to jam, but in Tulubaika it's not sweet, and has never been sweet, yet flies still fly and stick. Why such injustice? In Italy, Spain, Greece and other Mediterranean destinations for permanent and temporary life, it's always sweet. You arrive, enjoy, fly away, or maybe stay for longer, but from Tulubaika you only want to fly away, yet you still fly there. You walk along these semblances of half-empty streets, collect all the puddles, all the shite of stray dogs (“Should have worn black boots…”), listen to Shostakovich, string quartet number-8, allegro molto, hardbass rendition, and don't understand whether you're in the proverbial “home”, which you can never wash off your boot and for some reason, after all these years, continue to call it so. Or whether you're in the sets of a Tarkovsky film, and right in front of you in the field, a gathering of local men will now start burning the village's last remaining cow, and the gossip-mongering old women will sing along something folk, or maybe simply read Dostoevsky aloud, as you did in the sixth grade. The cow will moo in despair, howl echoing throughout the area, suffer from fire in hellish agonies, for the men, and the old women too, need to listen to it, the cow, listen to how it sing. Such a sound can't be found anywhere else. Afterwards, it can be put on the radio. Russian misery porn, in a word.
—"The blow landed right on the crown of her head, facilitated by her small stature,—read our heroine in a voice trembling from an unclear emotion.—She cried out, but very weakly, and suddenly sank completely to the floor, although she still managed to raise both hands to her head. In one hand she still continued to hold the "pledge". Here he struck with all his might once and again, all with the blunt side and all on the crown. Blood gushed, as from an overturned glass, and the body fell backwards. He stepped back, let her fall and immediately bent down to her face; she was already dead. Her eyes were bulging, as if they wanted to jump out, and her forehead and entire face were wrinkled and distorted by a spasm."
—Thank you, our heroine. You may sit down,—said the teacher to her, a woman with a very soft, almost cosy appearance, but a very firm character, not at all cosy due to the teacher's tempering.
Our heroine bowed, closing her eyes. The class applauded her. She read naturally, with expression, very literarily, as literary as possible, but she didn't want to see these applause. She was already perfectly aware of her literary ability and the magic of her voice trembling from an unclear emotion. Another routine reminder of this was not digestable. She would have covered her ears too, but that would have been completely improper. Ah, if Fyodor Mikhailovich had lived in Tulubaika, thought our heroine, he would have written something even more intense, he would have written something that would have made the whole world turn black upon reading. And they wouldn't worship him in the West, but fear him, but would still read him, for he is a great Russian writer, and the Russian soul is mysterious, and everyone loves mysteries, simply adores them, but they would be afraid to discuss him, not from fear and horror (sadomasochistic pleasure can't be eliminated) but because such things are not discussed in polite society. And Dostoevsky's ghost would continue to torment the population of his mysterious homeland and squeeze from them the cries of cows engulfed in flames. Indeed—mysterious it is, the homeland. But our heroine never liked such mysteries. You can solve them yourselves, sit in the evenings and solve them, like crossword puzzles, if you like that. The further our heroine moved away from her homeland, the less became her desire to solve these crossword puzzles, and the more idealised became her image of it, until it turned into something ephemeral, if you will, into a meme and a myth, a mythical Tulubaika, which she invented and created for herself, seized by something like literary nationalism—love for the literary tradition and hatred for everything else. In her new Tulubaika, everything was not as bad as in that old reality from which she fled, although neither that nor this Tulubaika had much to do with actual reality. The same was true of relatives. As she physically and temporally moved away from them, they began to marbleise even while alive.
—Long, of course, very long,—said our heroine, finishing her coffee.—While you wait, while you fly, while this, while that, no relatives will remain.
—That's for sure,—added her hero.
—You know, there are advantages. In your head, they're as if always alive and will remain so, like statues.
—As if they just went to winter at a resort. Like in childhood. Did they tell you that?
—What?—she asked, as if having lost the thread. He constantly spoke in fragments and hints. Riddles, emerging from his mysterious soul. They, although sometimes irritating our heroine, were a convenient tool to continue the dialogue.
—Where does the budgie go, or the cat, or the budgie unalived by the cat. Or Uncle Epiphan.
—Also unalived by a cat?
—Well, no one would say it like that, of course. They would say, “He moved. He lives there, happily, without us.”
—“And will he write letters?”
—“Maybe. But budgies can't write, can they?”
—“And send photographs?”
—“That's unlikely. They don't have cameras there. Probably.”
—“And where is it? Where did he move to?”
—“Far away, love, very far away.”
—“And will we go to him?”
—“I hope not, daughter. Later, when we get old, like him, then maybe we'll go. Maybe we won't go. All sorts of things happen in life.”
—“But maybe he hasn't left yet, maybe he's sitting in the airport, waiting for his flight, Uncle Epiphan. Let's go, let's go to the airport. What if he's still there? Please…”—finished our heroine and lay on her hero's shoulder.
—Looking at how everything is arranged here...—he smirked, stepping out of the role.
—You know, we're not just going there for no reason. There’re a few reasons, in fact.
—Of course, I wouldn't go there without a reason.
—I wouldn't go there without a reason either. No one goes there without a reason.
Grandmother had long ago become a statue texting her awkward messages. One doesn't yearn for statues, one looks at them and admires them. She didn't know if other people understood what it was like to feel that you don't feel, to be sad that you're not sad, to mourn that you don't mourn, because it simply physically doesn't happen, even if you really want it to, while the obligation to feel something sits and watches you.
—That geezer is staring at us,—he said to her.
—Which one?
—That one.
—This one?—our heroine's gaze fell on the old man standing behind the bookshop counter.
Pretending to be unaware, her hero looked at her eyes and calculated the trajectory of her gaze.
—Him, yeah. Standing and staring at us.
—At me. Why would he stare at you?
—I'm handsome, that's why. Prince Charming, my arse.
—I was in the bookshop. That's why. He's strange. We were talking about flies.
Her hero frowned.
—Want me to go and fuck his face up?
—Go ahead.
—Seriously?
—Of course not. So that they kick us out? Then we definitely won't fly anywhere.
—I'll go anyway.
—Stop it.
—I'll just look at the books. Tell him not to stare.
—You won't say anything, I know you.
Her hero for some reason always wanted to get into some fight, not by himself, but in such a way that this “some fight” came to him, for he himself would never get into any fight.
—We can just move,—she said.
—Where? Our gate is here. I'll go stretch my legs.
And he left. Meanwhile, the absolute cuntastrophy on the display board was approaching biblical proportions, and the inaudible bad weather outside intensified. Planes were becoming fewer and fewer, and people around more and more dissatisfied, began to cackle like geese, quarrel like dogs, howl like cows.
—But wh-y-y-y-y!
—How is this po-o-o-o-ssible!
—It's impo-o-o-o-ssible!
—Miss, is this seat free?
—No, my husband sits here.
—I'll sit until he returns. My knees hurt.
—Well, all right, but he'll be back soon. There, you see? He's standing talking with that old man over there.
—I see. He's talking quite actively.
—He's a good communicator, my one. He can talk anyone's ear off. Even me, he's constantly talking me into things. Look, he talked me into marrying him. Can you imagine? Now I've talked him into going to Tulubaika. Taught me to his own detriment, silly.
—Oh, you're going there too.
—I am. And you?
—Me too. Taking my children to see their little homeland. Where their roots grow from.
—And troubles in the head.
—Oh, don't get me started. If it were up to me, I wouldn't go anywhere. But one must.
And her hero stood there, talking with the old man, talking and talking, rehashing some topics. Oh, he laughed. That means he won't fuck his face up, although it would have been hilarious, and she wouldn’t have had to explain anything to him. He would have punched him, even after laughing, but he's not a psychopath, he's far from being a psychopath, although he himself sometimes tells our heroine, more often when they've been drinking something, that in childhood, when everyone was being dealt out character traits, they didn't, unfortunately, dole out psychopathy to him, they shortchanged him, cheated, or maybe they simply forgot, but in the end, they didn't give him any at all, though a little, at least a tiny drop of psychopathy would have been handy, so he said. She took out her phone, wrote, “so when are you fucking his face up?” He saw the notification on his watch, distracted himself from the old man, hunched for half a moment, holding back laughter. And he talked and talked and talked, the chatterbox. And he took out his boarding pass, paid for something. A familiar notification came—nine ninety, the recommended price. And he returned, happy as a Labrador.
—Can this woman sit here? She has knee pain and troubles in the head.
—Yes, please. Hello, woman. Do you really have troubles in your head?
—Who doesn't these days?
—(addressing the woman) That's true. (addressing our heroine) And I, um... bought a book. Look at this one.
And he thrusted before our heroine a volume of a thousand and one pages, soft cover.
—I'll read too.
And the woman blinked her whiskers-like eyelashes and then took out of her bag exactly the same volume with exactly the same thousand and one pages, soft cover.
—Oh, I have the same one. What a coincidence.
—And I do,—added our heroine.
—Popular reading, it seems.
—Quite popular, indeed.
—You can't buy anything else in the airport. It will help pass the time. No one knows when they'll make an announcement.
—Oh, don't mention it, it's awful.
—A nightmare.
—The world's bonkers.
Thunderstorm, hurricane, whirlpool, volcano eruption—this must have happened, the weather became completely unsuitable for flying, if one to believe the announcement over the loudspeaker:
—So-so-so, passenger A go there, passenger B come here, and, by the way, today's plane to Tulubaika is cancelled. There will be no more flights to Tulubaika at all. The last one was a week ago, and the one before that was two weeks ago. That's how they used to fly—once a week. And now, from this moment, all because of the bad weather, they stop flying. That's how it is.
—Yes, fuck…—our heroine murmured.
She sighed, shrugged, stood up and went to fold the laundry from the chair into the wardrobe. Immediately her hero followed her and began to help. And suddenly she took and told him everything. Just like that. Took and told everything. Absolutely everything. In complete calmness. Without hitches in breathing, without a throat clenched and stale air in the lungs, without extra weight on the heart and electricity wandering through the fingers. And her hero immediately understood everything, as Gandalf would have understood, only better.