Moscow but Dreaming

Yakov’s knees shake and he feels sick to his stomach. “Come back,” he screams. “Please come back!”

His foot slides from under him, and his arms flap like wings. Then, it’s only the exhilaration of the flight and the pinch of frozen air.

People gather around the dead body, clucking their tongues and telling each other to call the police. They are too busy to see a dozen crows that circle high above the square building, cawing.

HECTOR MEETS THE KING

“I never was good at saying goodbye, and you were never good at letting go. So it starts, between me and you, and so it will end. I and you, inhale and exhale, a sigh and a kiss into a flat, adenoid face of the world.

“I know, I do not look much like a hero nowadays—gravity, the eternal bitch, has me in its hold, my fingertips are stained with ink, and my shoulders wrap around my chest as a pair of wide, anemic wings. But believe me, I am a hero.

“There are ties in the world, son. Nothing binds more securely than another’s pain. I watch your mother sleeping, her translucent skin flushed with dreams, her stately knees drawn at the pit of her stomach. I would have loved her even if she were short of leg and black of tooth; even then hurting her would not be a possibility. Mediocrity is the only painless state in the world, or so I thought.

“There is a finite, immutable amount of pain in the world, and what you spare others you must swallow yourself. I swallowed my pride and my honor. I did not walk through the gates that day, unable to hurt her. I would rather be a coward than a torturer. The legends lie—they tell the story as it should have been, they tell of Hector felled in the spray of warm sticky blood and splintered bone, they tell of his body dragged behind a chariot, of his orphaned son. The truth is sadder. Hector lived to see his son grow up. He watched him through the shroud of swallowed shame, and his eyes teared, as if from acrid smoke of burning Troy. And so it ends.”

I sing of what has not been sung before. I sing of Hector and his sacrifice, I sing his unlamented mediocrity. I sing his cowering, and I sing his end.

I sing the dry wooden rain of arrows that drummed on the roofs of the palace and the hovels, monotonous, growing too familiar to be noticed. I sing the braying of donkeys in their stables, the crowing of rooster at dawn, and lowing of oxen. Smells of manure and hay. Incessant gnawing of saws and hacking of axes outside the city walls. The siege. I sing guilt like manacles.

Hector took off his helm with horsehair crest that had scared the infant. With this gesture he dispensed with the heroism forever. He took his son into the crook of his arm, and his wife—by her hand. He was familiar with the labyrinth of narrow streets, and with vast open space by the city walls.

As Cassandra’s mad cries hung over the city like a cloud, he led them to the well-hidden entrance into an underground tunnel that took them outside, into the thicket of scrub and hazelnuts. Swift, straight branches—future arrows—lashed their faces as they walked away from the doomed city.

I sing Hector, as he cranes his neck surveying a tall, gleaming building, and I sing his new job, I sing eight hours at the office, every day, excepting the holidays and two-week vacation. I sing the plastic smile of the receptionist that greets him every morning, as the elevator spews him forth, in the crowd of other overheated bodies. I sing Hector’s sacrifice.

I put on my helm, the horsehair crest of it moth-eaten and ready to fall apart into dust. I fold the note addressed to my son and leave it on the kitchen table. I do not dare to kiss Andromache, for fear of waking her and letting the yoke of her white arms hold me back again.

I find my spear in the back of a coat closet, and my arthritic fingers close over its smooth, cool shaft. I do not even attempt to put on my old armor—my girth is too great now, and my back is too bent and weakened by years at the desk to bear its terrible weight. But I brush my fingertips against polished bronze of the breastplate. I pick up my shield and strap on my sword.

I pause in the driveway, thinking whether I should take my car. I decide against it—it seems undignified somehow. I let my feet carry me past and out of the sleeping development.

I pass green lawns and neatly trimmed hedges; somebody’s dog follows me, its docked tail wagging in tentative friendship. I do not know where I am going, but I am certain that I will find it, and all mistakes of the past will be rectified. I think of what will become of Andromache, of her delayed widowhood. I find comfort in thoughts about pension, Social Security, life insurance. With all that, she won’t have to do any more telemarketing, and she will drop her pretense of happiness. As I think, I do not notice as I arrive here, at the miniature golf course.

Hector stopped, the trimmed grass soft and submissive under the soles of his scuffed brown shoes. He surveyed the battlefield from under drawn greying eyebrows. His eyes squinted against the lashings of the wind and hardened to narrow slits.

A windmill chopped the air into thick, humid slices, and the wind whistled between its four wings. A giant ape, its low forehead wrinkled with malice, grinned with bright wooden teeth and shuffled its massive foot back and forth, exposing and covering a narrow pipe, just wide enough for a golf ball. A dinosaur reared up as its mouth opened in and closed in silent screams of presumed pain.

These were the only worthy adversaries, and Hector hefted his spear, choosing his target. The ape seemed the most malignant of all, and he shouted his challenge to it. The ape grinned and shuffled in one place, too dumb or too conceited to take cover.

Hector’s arm felt weak as he raised his spear and hurled it toward the ape. The spear hit its shoulder and sunk into the wooden flesh, trembling from impact. The shaft swayed, and the spear fell to the ground.

The ape roared and cowered for a moment, and then stood to its full height, its fists the size of millstones pounding on its chest. It swung at Hector, but he ducked the blow. The giant fist passed inches over his head, and his grey hair ruffled in the wind.

Hector ripped his sword from the sheath, and lunged for the ape’s unprotected side. The gash his blade left dripped with ichor the color of papier-mâché, and the ape howled in pain.

Hector retreated, waiting for his chance to strike, as the enraged ape chased after him, its cries piercing like Andromache’s tears. Hector was running out of breath, weighed as he was by age and manacles of guilt. He remembered the ape’s name: King Kong. It was too young and too strong for him, and he retreated until the back wall of the windmill blocked his passage—he could feel it with his shoulder blades. The ape’s fists swung in an easy rhythm: king-kong, sigh-kill, maim-kiss.

Hector’s sword slashed across the ape’s knuckles, making it cry out again, but inflicted as little damage as a toothpick. He still waved his weapon about as the ape picked him into one of its fists, as his ribs cracked, as his world narrowed to a swirling, rolling singularity of darkness.

In his last moments his thoughts sped up so that his short time of lingering lucidity between blindness and death stretched forever. Hector dreamed of Achilles, guilt, and ape, of the forces that grinded him into a bloodied, limp husk, of the destiny of loss and defeat. He dreamed of Andromache’s peppy voice traveling over the telephone wires, “Have you considered switching your long-distance provider?” He had spared her degradation in the Grecian hands, he had saved her from a lifetime of slavery. She would be grateful.

And he thought of his son, of his legacy, of a sigh and a kiss. He would graduate from college and enter a law school, and become a king—like King Menelaus, King Priam, the King o’Cats, King Kong. And Hector smiled.

CHAPAEV AND THE COCONUT GIRL

I discovered that my mom left for Indonesia (Bali, to be exact) on her birthday. I called to wish her a happy one, but my dad answered the phone instead and informed me that she was traveling. To Bali. “She told me to tell you that she is in paradise,” he said.

“Give her my best,” I said.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m thrilled for my mom to be able to travel like this, because really, for people of her generation and ethnic disposition (she was born in 1942, in German-occupied Lithuania) life never promised anything remotely tropical or whimsical. Yet, I was a little troubled as I had been since 1989, when the world shifted askew cracking the foundation of our existence, and the cracks spread all over the formerly impenetrable and imaginary air bubble that surrounded the then-USSR. I found myself among those who somehow slipped through those cracks, like a goldfish in a temporary prison of a plastic bag, right into the cold and big world—or a fish tank; not that it made that much difference. And this was really the crux of the issue: people like me left so that the change around them would be explainable by travel and culture shock rather than by the impossible overturning if the world which suddenly folded, did a little flip, and pulled itself from under their securely planted feet. Travel lets you pretend that the world didn’t really change, that you just chose your terms. My terms include working in an AI lab at MIT; could be worse.

My parents stayed behind then, as they still do every time I visit, and when I leave them at the airport, I always look back, at how small they are, and my heart fractures anew. So I’m thrilled now that mom is getting to travel a little, and she doesn’t feel quite as abandoned to me when she does. She gets to do some abandoning of her own, and I console dad over the phone. Of course he can cook his own dinner, but he appreciates the sympathy. I think he does—at least, as effective as sympathy across the Atlantic can be, conveyed by sighs whispering through the impossible length of telephone wires.