REFLECTION. Michael Blekhman
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p>There were so many shooting stars in the sky that I ran out of things to wish on them. Someone shook them off his big, cold hand and they started descending quietly, creating sleepy, sugary snow mounds or writing on my window-pane funny and complex symbols of an unknown alphabet. It was as if that same someone used them to wish merry Christmas to our city and after that decided to find his reflection in my window, look into my notebook, and read the last lines of my recently finished novel.
“Who first called it a snowfall?” I reflected, striving to decipher the main idea behind these symbols. What was the connection between them and my novel? Were they each other’s reflection or did they represent two different alphabets of the same language?
“A snowfall?” I asked myself, crestfallen. “Is that how snow falls? Or is it, rather, what it feels like when things befall you? Or when you fall for a cold-hearted woman? Or when a friend’s coldness causes your downfall? Or when a critic lets the gavel fall – more on his work than on mine? But actual snow doesn’t fall like this at all.”
“But if it weren’t for my notebook, would you make any sense at all?”
“Anyways, why am I talking to you about sense? In the place you descended from this is hopefully a lot better understood, even though – and this is what I fear – in a completely different way.”
“Then who needs this alphabet of mine if you have one of your own? And you will always descend, regardless of my wishes.”
“… And you will keep descending onto the city that just celebrated Christmas and is preparing for New Year’s – an entirely new year…”
“… Not even noticing that in the new year there will be someone completely different on this side of the window from the person who was here before. And you will not even inquire where the one who was here before went.”
Is there anything else I can say in my notebook that you haven’t heard before? Anything you haven’t seen and haven’t touched yet?
I sighed, rapped my fingers on the notebook’s cover which still didn’t bear the name of my novel, opened the notebook on a random page, on a Roman numeral, and looked out of the window once again.
“In any case, you are here, even though you are on the other side of the window, since a window doesn’t exist for you. Let it be non-existent for me as well, then you will be able to translate the contents of my notebook into your other-worldly – or not? – language.”
“… And we will find a name for my novel together.”
If you came here to see me, it means my downfall can be postponed. In case, of course, the window doesn’t suggest a different kind of fall…”
“You see, and I almost lost all hope.”
Books were staring at me out of bookcases, trying to catch a glimpse of what my still nameless notebook contained. The notebook was filled with words that were hardly capable of saying anything and with the almost meaningless Roman numerals.
Books were staring out of bookcases: the old volume in a mother-of-pearl cover that was deciphered for me but not by me, as well as these, my favorite ones, which don’t help me but at least – and most importantly – they don’t get in the way. And this one… I still don’t understand its role completely but by the time my notebook is finished I hope I will… Otherwise, writing in my notebook would have been a risky business and who even knows if it would have been justified?..
Still, was I the one who wrote it? I was looking past my notebook and thinking that, of course, it had already existed and all I had to do was find it. So I set out in search of it – like the medieval Admiral who set out in the search of an old world that turned out to be a completely new one.
“I must be more fortunate than many of my fellow-explorers because I did find it and now the only thing my notebook lacks in order to become a book is a title,” I thought contentedly. Of course, I could leave it as is. If one can write a poem without a protagonist, why can’t one write a novel without a title?
No, I should still give a name to my novel. I will definitely give it a name and they will help me since I have removed this window that has been separating us.
Otherwise, how will a cold-hearted woman, a cold-blooded enemy and a cool-headed critic manage to decide for themselves and inform the world that my notebook doesn't deserve to be read? If the author has a name and his work has a specific title, it is easy to say that nothing else needs to be known. In the absence of a name and a title, though, one will have to read the book in order to be able to proclaim that it is not worth reading.
It's true that often a novel's beginning is so similar to a title as to replace it… My novel, however, needs a title because its opening lines don't substitute or predict it. They actually do the exact opposite.
At first, the city prepares for New Year's and only after ringing it in it will start getting ready for Christmas. Instead of making wishes at a speed matching that of the shooting stars falling on her city, she kept thinking that, in all truth, she had no more wishes left to make. And if old-fashioned snow stars descended onto the city instead of the usual gloomy haze, there would be nothing for her to wish on them.
"It's funny," she thought while she was getting into a trolley and checking perfunctorily on her handbag. "It's funny how nature helps those who have nothing else to wish for. If I had any more wishes, shooting stars would have come at once."
She was lucky in that the trolley was almost empty and her usual seat was free.
"Turns out I did have a wish," she smiled and pressed herself against the window that protected her from the street. Now, she could look more calmly at the hospital and its fence which remained behind the closing doors and the locked windows of the trolley.
"I remember the wish I wanted to make."
She opened a book that looked exactly like my notebook although it seemed to have a title already. She took it everywhere she went. Every now and then, she looked out of the window without really interrupting her reading. She liked seeing snow mounds that looked incredibly similar to cotton wool and that could have fallen off from a huge Christmas tree right before that. The frozen, eggnog-colored lamplights looked drab against this background.
"Or is that eggnog?" she asked herself sternly but had no time to think of an answer since she noticed a couple walking towards the hospital at an uneven pace. Samuil's face was the same color as these unnatural snow mounds. Klara was moaning and trying to bend to the ground. Her full-term pregnancy was getting in the way, even as it was the only thing that kept her grounded.
"I need to rest!" she moaned, sitting down in a heap of snow.
"Klara, my love," said Samuil while trying to raise her. "You'll catch a cold, let's go, we are so close already."
They would get up and walk several more steps before she subsided into the snow again in order to catch her breath even though the breath refused to be caught. As bad luck might have it, Klara had gone into labor in the small hours when not only a cab was impossible to find but even hitching a ride on a road that was incredibly white for such a dark time of the night was out of the question. So they set off on foot towards the maternity ward.
They had been walking for over an hour, stopping, sitting down, and getting up again. The snow was blinding them, but Klara's vision had clouded over back home when she tried to get dressed and her back felt like it was crumbling into pieces in the manner of a stale bagel. The pain made both walking and sitting equally impossible. Klara's fur-coat kept her warm but its weight kept dragging her down into the snow mound and the only thing she wanted was to give birth already and finally go to sleep, not having to think about giving birth any more. Inside her furry mittens, her fingers were sweaty and so swollen that she couldn't clench her fist any more. Her kerchief slid away and for the first time in her life she felt wrinkles gathering on her forehead. If she could see herself in the mirror, she would be terrified of this change in her appearance. Now, however, she had no energy left to feel fear just like that time when she was drowning in the Dnieper all those years ago.
"God, when will the baby finally come?!" I moaned while clutching Senya's hand and subsiding into a temptingly warm snow mound. "Poor women, why do they suffer so?!.. Jesus, why do I say 'they' if I'm one of them?"
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