“Love, in essence, arises in solitude when its object is not around, and it is directed not so much at the one or two people you love as at an image constructed by the mind, loosely connected to the original.”

— “Chapaev And Void” by Victor Pelevin

There you are — trudge through the city

all around skyscrapers sprout.

Behind, ever so distant, lies Tulubaika.

Ahead, ever so near

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — bloody hell knows what.

On and on the avenue winds, its endless venue astretch, bound to snap like an old string, slash your cheek raw and leave a scar beneath your eye (the sight’s still there, thank you very much) so you’d torture your memory over that melody never mastered.

Primordial soup of concrete, metal, and glass fills the surrounding space of this chaotically ordered universe and takes shape as walls, ceilings, floors, staircases, windows, benches, poles, stretches of tarmac.

Upwards it grows

downwards it burrows

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ as wires and pipes and metro mole-tunnels.

outwards it swells and scatters

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ to an infinity infinitely large

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ until the little human within

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ finally recognises himself as

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ an infinity infinitely small.

The proportion of natural light shrinks with unnatural greed, cars move ever louder, yet slower, people walk ever denser, yet faster.

Hum, hubbub and hullabaloo, the noise of tyres and soles merges into the background — sea sound, wave roar, storm forest hour — a monolithic din beckoning one into trance.

No brain-squeezing fear remains, no anxiety lingers, no claustrophobia caused by the sheer quantity of everything; instead

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — awe before civilisation’s new element:

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ earth, water, air, fire, aether...

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ city.

The ancients built pyramids for egoists; we raise them for thousands of souls to make birds envious, pharaohs dead jealous, and children of tomorrow marvel at our grandeur.

In that village of mine, rooftops are a hand’s throw away; here you won’t spot them without binoculars.

There void holds its reign

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ pure fields, grass unmown

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ pure sky, stars starving for glances

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ houses askew from sheer emptiness.

As for colours: late autumn, winter, early spring — mere shades of grey, no kaleidoscopes of carnivals, no all-intipsifying psychedelia, just dust, decay, and cavity, bubble, geode.

Yet, it’s lovely at times:

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ dawn layers agately

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ night shimmers with amethyst

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ birchwood drowns in citrine

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ firmament glows with blue chalcedony.

In the metropolis, though, void has voided

collapsed fractally into itself

no room for it here no more

& ceaseless secretion fills all manner of vacuums.

Nature abhors a vacuum

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ & the nature of vacuum abhors

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ itself.

With bewilderment micros glow

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — cosmos & chaos.

Wet asphalt and concrete shimmer in sungleam, once pale grey, now dark. Clouds are thin, have almost finished their cry, and the hopeful light penetrates them. It reflects in the countless cars’ mirrors, in the buildings’ glass, in protruding phone screens that balaclavaed cyclists in black snatch from hunched passersby who but shrug and keep shuffling onwards, no umbrellas in hand, no bother for dripping warm drizzle, for a pleasant phenomenon, this mushroom rain, as my granddad would call it.

Soon, winds will lift human spores up in the air and disperse them around the city. They will rise in trainloads from under the ground, and their presence will flood over pavements, squares, roads, and streets, all those venues of avenues.

Lo and behold —

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ off they trot, some to their jobs

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ some to jobless affairs:

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ to museums, cinemas, galleries

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ theatres, bakeries, libraries

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ reading rooms, skating rinks

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ swimming pools, plazas and promenades

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ food halls, concert halls, dance floors

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ comedy clubs

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (or perhaps karaoke)

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ rooftop bars, kinky clubs

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ cosy corner cafes

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ observation decks, prayer rooms

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ botanical gardens, arcades

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ hidden speakeasies, markets and malls

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ parks and playgrounds

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — centres for everything

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ or simply to wander, you know

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ stretch their thoughts and restore

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ to their legs their original purpose.

— From Brandenburg Gate station tha rides to Tower Bridge station — there tha changes to t’grey-brown-raspberry line1, and heads towards Brighton Beach till terminus. Take t’last carriage and t’moment tha hops off, leg it straight to t’exit. But don’t get lost. Bloody ‘ell it’s packed there — can’t squeeze a mouse through. Then half an hour on the movinn stairs and bob’s your uncle. Easy, — says the navigator on my phone.

Sunwards I point my face, mightily I squeeze my eyes shut, all watery from fumes aloft and borrowed sleep.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (Debt collectors are on the way!)

The sun’s reflection leaps off the glass building and floods the street with light.

The city throbs, breathes, digests its tenants, and gently mocks its guests.

Go on then, run along, no point standing there gawping — you’ll catch a fly or some affliction of sorts.

Yet here I stand

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ arms spread wide, straight as a rod

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ alone in a meadow barren and broad.

Grumbling passersby jostle; gentle breeze; traffic noise sounds like wind through oats ripened for harvest.

O shall I leap upon my steed of two-wheeled pedal breed!

O shall I race along those roads

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ trailing dust and childhood yarns,

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ teenage fables, youth’s swift whispers!

O shall the sun tousle my freckles

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ shall the wind shove my hair into my eyes

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ & shall the chain chew grease-stained trousers

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ & shall zoom onwards I.

O shan’t I give a toss, or even “a fuck”

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (as I’d say with my grown-up permission).

— Give me change! — a hoarse voice shouts to me. — Change, I beg you, urgent matter. Or I’ll leave. But first I’ll show you the entire intimate essence of mine! Oo! Oo-oo! — so he moans, hands reaching for his fly.

— Won’t give any! — says I. — No change to give, nought to share: not a toss, not a fuck. And I always pay by card!

— Ah, card shark! May the govs torment you!

— Eh? — says I, playing the fool.

— Here’s your carte blanche for my essence!

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Oo! Oo-oo! Oo-oo!

— ¡No hablo inglés! — I yell back and hurry

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ to part ways with the stranger

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ my mind dismissing this most peculiar mishap.

I descend underground to tunnel away. Still I stand.

In my ears — Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 8, allegro molto, breakcore flip2.

In my head — a bit of a do.

In my soul — the nobility of feelings ignoble.

In my eyes — local adverts: bits and bobs for home and body, this and that for business, everything from top to toe, from alpaca winter socks to lacy knickers, from Chekhovian theatre to torture by TikToks of feline brainrot

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (oo ee ee ah ee oo ee ee ee ee ah ee)

from attempts to sell desires to secretly flog me some memecoins protected by nought but cryptography.

Here, underground lies half of the city, be it rail transport, car parks, or shopping malls going down and down

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ while in Tulubaika

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — only the dead.

Here, I’ll slip into another world in an hour

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ in Tulubaika

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — into Tulubaika itself for the umpteenth time.

Here, the air’s full of suspension

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ in Tulubaika...

Well, none of that’s there, in fact, only clean air, pure water and pure starry sky, pure as the consciousness of a fresh victim of gnosis.

Inwards and outwards voices fuse: whispers from within meet the clamour of the crowd.

— Ey up, I’m done in, mate, proper done in. Laid me low, this influenza.

— All sorts of bubonic drebbeden3 goinn round t’village nowadays. Mowinn down folk left and right, young uns and old uns alike, and they keep shufflinn about, breathinn in and out their miasmas! Unbelievable!

— Tell me about it... Them city folk rabbitinn on...

— Put mask on then, tha shabootnous4? Get thy jab and all.

— Aye, reckon I might do just that!

— Aye, right then, do it then!

— Cough once and they eye thee like tha’s broken loose from some leper colony.

— At home tha stay, don’t walk away. Get on with t’times, t’stance, t’circumstance, t’happenstance. It is what it is. Autumn. Weak immunity. Muck and mire. Khondria5...

— Stop thy khonderinn then! Everyone’s now a hypochondriac! Get thyself pumpkin latte.

— Eh up, pumpkin hodgepodge now? What young uns won’t think of next, eh?

— ... It’s coffa6 with milk, granny... “Latte” is Italian for “milk”.

— Whatever keeps young uns happy. Long as it ain’t henbane7 latte.

— Undoubtedly, the characteristic patterns of urbanised environments, featuring high population density, intensive social interaction, and developed transport infrastructure, create favourable conditions for exponential growth in the transmission of infectious agents within the population.

— Just don’t breathe then. Might solve all thy troubles with them acute respiratory viral agents and their sleeper agent network.

— Take thy vitamins, C and D, maybe Omega-3, might shift that flu of thee.

— Think I got no sense to spare? With all the wit I have to bear?... I can tell a plum from pear, know what’s foul or fair.8

— Pale as death on antibiotics, tha is.

Train arrives, empties its carriages, into its innards invites us. Rather stuffy inside, one must say. Rush-hourous travellers are stockpiled like sprats. Proper and pensive we stand, ears plugged, eyes on phones

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (absolute suicide to be without one)

or on newspapers passed around unwanted, except to crack up at the latest debates between vegetarians and lotus-eaters. Hot — sweat gathers on my solar plexus, between my shoulder blades, deep in my armpits. Departure’s announced, doors close, snatch my scarf, and the train, with the populace of several Tulubaikas, creaks and plunges into the depth of tenebrous tunnels. Our faces’ reflections amuse us in windows convex. We breathe down each other’s necks, nudge each other with backpacks, cough politely.

Time hovers, spirals, spins its wheel, threading through my ears and eyes, tickles my nostrils to sneezing point.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Tra-la-la

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ tru-la-la.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ I never get bored

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ not ever, not I.

There’s this tool against boredom that will bail you out without much faff — called “thinkering”. One might languorously daydream, head in clouds, become an armchair philosopher, estimate the x’s and y’s of the world mathematics, become a professor in asymptotology or syllogismatics, sit at a round table with a king and a jester and other facets of lyrical I to establish an anonymous society of knights, witnesses of solipsism, and wander from door to door, from one’s own to another’s, preaching that exact schizoid thinkering.

Thus it was, thus it shall be, from dawn till dusk, from dusk till dawn, till kingdom come.

Location matters not

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — it’s all in the noggin

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ not in the village or the city.

— Well... Never been fond of modern bookshops, if I’m honest... Don’t want to pretend. Especially in the airports.

— Well... And why’s that?

— Well... Just so. Can’t stand the smell of new. They should smell of old: dust, yellowed paper, pressed flowers forgotten between pages. Not of factory glue.

— Well... Wouldn’t have had any bookshops back in the village.

— Well... Suits me fine. Library was plenty enough, never had much use for a shop.

— Well... Libraries and graveyards are rather alike.

Somewhere there, beneath birch crowns old and dear

a lone comrade major9 moonward howls his sorrow

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ longing for how far we’ve strayed.

O thou shalt not ask for papers no more

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ shalt not hit our door with thy boot

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ shalt not hit us with thy baton

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ shalt not huff and shalt not puff,

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ shalt not trace our IPs.

O we’re out of range, unavailable. Leave thy message on Signal, not after it10.

We’re no longer “there” yet not quite “here”

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ just as “there” isn’t quite there any more

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ & “here” isn’t really here yet

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — we wade through liminal bogs.

As you name your ship, so shall she sail.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Exile?

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ By no means.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Escape?

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ As they say, you can’t flee from your planida...

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Now, “mission”...

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ O “mission”, that’s a noble name.

Where spatiotemporal clothes once pinched the shoulders, these new ones from exodus-sale racks now embrace like a straitjacket — sleeves unbound, afloat.

— Mummy, dear mummy. I shan’t wear this. What a frightful thing, what a cut!

— Stop moaning, give it a bit.

— But mummy... This seam’s proper scratchy, like sandpaper it is.

— Sort it out we will, that seam.

— And this bit’s all pokey.

— Wear it a while — it’ll stop.

— It’s so prickly! Like a rose bush, mummy, honest.

— Gets everyone, that. You’ll manage.

— I don’t want to! And this button inside keeps bothering me.

— Once we’re home, we’ll snip that button right off.

— Mummy, dear mummy, what if I grow up?

— Here’s hoping you will, love.

— It won’t fit then, will it?

— We’ll get you new ones then, won’t we?

— But mummy... still, is it really the time?

A “WAY OUT” sign, moving stairs, turnstile gates

until a ray of welcome light reveals our path.

Joyful we leave to see the lovely things which Heaven bears

& hail the op’ning glories of the stars.

Bit gloomy, this

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — dense fog weaves patterns all around. In proper weather, a building tall would loom before me, but now I’m lucky to observe five storeys up. The view’s absolutely smashing, they say, whole city served up on a proper plate

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (indeed)

not just the city — the world itself, no vantage point higher there exists, and even the horizon watcher shall have libido satisfied.

Crowds bustle through the square. I squeeze between them, heading straight inside. I’m ready, building, ready to serve my sentence in the most dismal line.

It ends, the queue.

I flash my QR code to the attendant, then hop into a lift for twenty souls. And thus we stand in silence embraced by the sound of Satie mixed with crickets, musique d’ameublement.

& lo! One hundred and eight floors later, we are up top

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (before one dares to blink).

Now, prepare to greet me, elevation!

All yours, I’m here, take me!

Across the roof towards the wall of tempered glass

I walk and squash my cheek against it

eyes open wide with all their might.

& what do I see?

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ The entire world spread out!

I never knew

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (yet I confess — expected)

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ it would be only fog:

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no buildings tall, no peopleants

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no traffic jam in sight

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no Ararat with Fuji side by side

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no paints, no flowers

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no roofs, no pipes, no spires

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no birds, no towers,

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no bridges, no weather vanes gone mad

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no balloons, no pigeons

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (flying rats, more like)

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no colourful umbrellas

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no sun in puddles, no cats on windowsills

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no laundry flags, no mother’s pastries

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no chalk on asphalt, no “CLOSED” signs

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no sparks from trams, no balaclavaed cyclists

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no soap bubbles, no tunes from windows

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no whiff of pumpkin spice

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no wedding rings on traffic lights

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no swings, no paper kites

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ no hankies waving last goodbyes

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ In a few words

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ — all proper grey

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ like homeland in winter.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ & “here” isn’t there

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ & “there” isn’t here

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ ⠀ only betweenherethereness.

& Thus we stand — daft tourists in a castle in the sky

trying to comprehend the zen of Fate’s provision

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ (tickets gone to fuck).

But! Actually, no “buts” about it.

⠀ ⠀ ⠀ Time to descend.

This story is a part of our serialisation of Tulubaikaporia, in particular, Episode 4: about microcosmos & microchaos. Previous Substack instalments available here. You can also purchase the whole book — it’s already out, and readers are writing reviews!

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The episode is set almost entirely in two places: a dacha and a non-dacha (proverbial “somewhere else”) that cannot co-exist and be inhabited simultaneously and yet our heroine attempts to be in both! Not that she wants it — she has no other choice — that’s how her mind works, for better or worse. It is, to an extent, magically unique to be physically in one place and metaphysically in another with a risk, of course, to never fully be in either. Thus is the magic of dacha / non-dacha plane and many other “planes”! One of which is the obscure plane of Russian internet memes that must be learned by an international reader. International memeology is an underappreciated field, after all.

The Altushka and the Skuf

— I’m just all dreamy, mysterious, unapproachable, with a special aura of alt girlie, quiet but with volumes of Nietzsche and Machiavelli in my little black rucksack.
— I’m just a simple guy, you know? Not like those other guys. Want to come over and watch me play Counter-Strike while I drink beer from the can? I’ve got frozen pizza.

Such could be an imaginary dialogue of altushka (alt girlie) and skuf, which are explained by the footnotes in the book as follows:

Original uses “альтушка” (altushka). Even though it’s borrowed from English “alt girl”, the Russian metamorphosis of the term carries a distinctive sonic quality by adding an affectionate-yet-mocking diminutive suffix “-ушка”, hence “girlie” instead of “girl” in the translation as an attempt to convey the same tone. The “alt girlie” phenomenon became a meme around 2020-2021 in Russia and was nominated for “Word of the Year.” “Alt girlie” isn’t just any girl with “dyed hair and combat boots”, but a specific social archetype. In internet culture, the “alt girlie” became the object of desire for a particular type of man called a “скуф” (skuf), thusly creating one of Russia’s most widespread memes of 2024. The “skuf” represents men around or over 35 with unkempt appearances, dead-end jobs, and a lifestyle revolving around beer, TV, and video games, essentially the polar opposite of the aesthetically conscious alt girlie. The apogee of the meme was the appearance of the advertised possibility of finding your “alt girlie” on government websites, as well as a visual novel game called “Альтушка для скуфа” (“An alt girlie for a skuf”) that became a Steam bestseller.

“Skufidon” (скуфидон) is the final form of “skuf.” It’s a portmanteau of “skuf” and “Cupidon”, the Russian word for Cupid.

Every internet culture sooner or later ripens its own archetypes, and these archetypes can tell you everything you need to know about our culture. The skuf is simultaneously a derogatory label and a genuine typology, a state, a modus vivendi & operandi: let himself sit in his flat all day, drink beer, play “tanks”, and everything’s jolly good. The altushka is simultaneously an aesthetic identity, a performance, and a specific object of desire, the skuf’s, in particular. Both are, in a way, simply types of people and subcultures with seemingly nothing in common, memes in their own domain, yet in combination producing a new megameme / metameme / suprameme / whatevermeme. The internet needs a pair, needs a plot, needs drama, needs comedy, and someone (the “internet” itself as an entity in a noöspheric vacuum) decided that a balding bloke-gamer with a defrosted pizza and a girl with dyed hair and a volume of Nietzsche tucked under her arm make a perfect couple. And was right!

The skuf’s closest relative in the Anglophone internet is, probably, the incel. Unlike the passive, lives-in-his-own-world skuf, the incel feels sorry for himself, gets ideologically radicalised, constructs an entire cosmology to explain why nobody loves him, a big beautiful cosmology, designed to relieve him of all responsibility. The incel is, above all, devoid of a sense of humour, and therein lies his fundamental tragedy, because if he could laugh at himself he would cease to be an incel, but he cannot, because all of this is very, very serious, of course. The equally devoid of sex and undesired skuf, however, conducts himself differently: quietly goes bald, puts on weight, bloats, dresses poorly in the same tracksuit and wife-beater, occupies himself exclusively with drinking beer, playing [the most masculine video game in existence], and consuming frozen pelmeni or pizzas.

The difference between the incel and the skuf is that where the incel’s arse is on fire, the skuf simply shrugs, the incel scribbles manifestos, the skuf opens another beer, the incel blames women for not wanting him, the skuf, in some murky inexplicable way, understands that he has let himself go and finds this fact mildly amusing, not cosmically unjust, just sort of, well, that’s how it is, that’s him, sorry — cosy Russian fatalism. At the same time, the skuf is a memento mori for Gen Z, what comes after their twink death, the man you’re afraid of becoming when you hit thirty-five.

The entirely unexpected pairing of skuf with the altushka happened when Milonov, the most meme-worthy politician (often absurdly so), proposed creating a government dating site for skufs and altushkas on Gosuslugi (probably to solve the declining population and fertility rates), and nobody could tell if he was joking or not, including, one suspects, Milonov himself. First someone mocked up a fake portal page, then a visual novel appeared on Steam, Altushka for Skuf, became a bestseller, memes flooded every social network, and then both, altushka and skuf, became something larger than mere memes, as happens with all the best (most memetic) elements of internet culture.

The Anglophone equivalent of the altushka is harder to pin down, because the archetype is represented by the “e-girl” (close, but too performative, too online, too aware of her own commodity value as a “unit of content”), the “art hoe” (overlaps aesthetically but lacks the Russian subtext, the provincial yearning to flee to Petersburg and marry Dostoevsky, for example, and looks rather “normal”, without subcultural markers), and the original “alt girl” (the nearest ancestor, but she seems to lack the highbrow Nietzschean vibes the altushka carries, possessing only the “looks”), yet none of them, nor all of them together, quite add up to “altushka”, largely thanks to the suffix “-ushka”, which makes the word simultaneously affectionate, mocking, and oddly tender, the way Russian treats everything it cannot take seriously.

The image of many altushkas is built on traumatisation (sometimes due to the absence of a parental figure, e.g. father but not limited to, or their painful presence), on a hypersensitivity that is likewise not the result of a good life but of a nervous system once calibrated for survival in chaos that never managed to recalibrate back. The bright, nonconformist, often emo-reminiscent appearance, as with all subcultures, is a way of signalling “I am not yours”, plus, of course, “I am not like the rest / far from the normies”. But behind the appearance (as behind a shield) there usually hides a girl who is well-read, educated, genuinely passionate about something not entirely mainstream: philosophy, art-house cinema, poetry, psychology, sometimes all at once, sometimes in combinations that from a normie’s point of view look impossible, e.g. Nietzsche and tarot, Kafka and astrology, Tarkovsky and K-pop. The altushka, unlike the e-girl, does not merely look interesting, she IS interesting, and therein, really, lies her problem, because most men who approach her are interested in her appearance, not her bookshelf.

What none of the Western archetypes have is the pair. The incel and the e-girl do not form a meme couple; they exist in separate, hostile ecosystems and want nothing to do with each other. At some point, these two became two halves of a single fantasy, and a rather touching one at that: somewhere out there, in the depths of the internet, an apathetic, balding, paunchy middle-aged man with a beer in one hand and a gamepad in the other and a young, hypersensitive woman, an “aristocrat of spirit”, might actually find each other. Many of today’s skufs were nonconformists in their youth and perhaps that is why they gravitate towards altushkas rather than “normie women”. The skuf is what happens to an aristocrat of spirit when he gives up: opens a beer, sits down at the computer, and nothing hurts any more, or it does hurt, but dully, like a tooth under anaesthesia (beeraesthesia, so to speak).

Troubles in the Head aka Clogging in the Noggin

An Internet-Russian idiom. There’s the Orthodox TV show “Беседы с батюшкой” (lit. “Conversations with the Priest”). If we modify the original title by removing a few letters, from “conversations with the priest” we get to “troubles in the head”. Thus it became a meme. It is often accompanied by the modified title image of the TV show overlaid with semi-transparent images of psychiatric hospital employees. It gained popularity in 2020 as a response to unhinged online rants.

Dacha Aesthetics

A Soviet and post-Soviet phenomenon of a small summer house outside of the city with a garden to grow vegetables and fruits, hang out, have shashlik, and “enjoy” the summer weeding the seedbeds.

Visually, when we think of a dacha, most, on contrary to the grand dachas of Chekhov and Turgenev, imagine the standard-issue Soviet type: somewhere outside of the city, a small wooden house on few hundred square metres, a garden with some berries, a mangal in the yard, unreliable facilities i.e. constant blackouts of electricity and water, annoying neighbours who build massive fences and spoil the view, stray dogs, cats with endless supply of kittens that, by the by, have to be drowned (alas! such is life of a dacha cat), plus parents and grandparents enjoying free child labour used for gardening. For the American / British readers, the vibe is closer to an allotment with habitation or a lake house with a garden, in other words, allotment + lake house.

Into her eyes, the wind drove smoke and ash from a poorly kindled mangal and made the sky dissolve.

Into a gigantic cup with a heavy bottom poured the so-called world-famous “fragrant dacha ambrosia”, a sweetened chai drink made from mint, gooseberry and blackcurrant leaves. She wanted to remember this taste.

On this note the extras for Episode 3 are over, we sincerely hope you enjoyed them and they were indeed complementary and in a way parallel to the main book experience!

Now, we bow away,
Beams of appreciation,
nova·nevédoma

TULUBAIKAPORIA

“Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.”

— “Ulysses” by James Joyce

Into her eyes, the wind drove smoke and ash from a poorly kindled mangal1 and made the sky dissolve. Celestial bodies rolled about like billiard balls, be it the stars, the moon, or satellites and the ISS. Our heroine felt them upon herself, their brightness, their weight, their distance, both physical and metaphorical. The sky above the dacha2 was clear. Visibility stretched far, so far that one’s eyes rippled at its magnificence. Too beautiful, she thought. Such beauty ought not to exist. Such beauty could drive one beyond one’s wits. Such beauty should be outlawed, denied legal counsel, stripped of the presumption of innocence, for it, this unattainable beauty, is the prime cause of all human joys and woes. Yet, for some reason, no one else paid any attention to it at that moment; instead, they looked at each other, and not just looked (”Would be terribly awkward, wouldn’t it?”), but interacted, conversed, socialised. Was their interest genuine, or was it all a game with unspoken rules that everyone pretended to play? The people around were far from celestial, not yet anyway (”Touch wood!”), and far from luminaries, except perhaps in the sciences3 (”Fingers crossed”), but it was pleasant to share the same space and time with them, to observe them, to analyse their Chekhovian-Beckettian dialogues for meaning, while remaining silent herself. She could crack a joke when appropriate, throw in a sharp remark, answer a question directed at her. Yes, there were oddly many of those — she had suddenly become interesting (”Suspicious…”). For hours, she could wait, listen and re-listen, all while drifting somewhere else. Always this “somewhere else”; there’s no escaping it. It’s celestial, visible yet untouchable, impossible even to give it a proper name, for words are never enough to describe what you’ll never see. Some things have no name at all and cannot have one, so we call them names foreign to them to give them some semblance of form.

— Are you here? — Alyona smirked and sat beside her.

Me? Oh, if only I knew, she thought. Seems I’m here — here I sit, getting by without a sigh, nothing but skin and bones. How are things? As white as soot, no offspring to report4, watching the stars, warming myself by the mangal, listening to Kolya’s mediocre yet rather sweet guitar playing, but am I here? Perhaps. I’m just all dreamy, mysterious, unapproachable, with a special aura of alt girlie5, quiet but with volumes of Nietzsche and Machiavelli in my little black rucksack (”The straight-A student aura has long become boring to cultivate; straight-A students aren’t interesting to anyone and possess no mystery, except perhaps the ability to irritate those around them”).

— Uh-huh.

— Not cold?

— Nope.

— Want a throw?

— Won’t say no to a throw.

— Back in a sec, — Alyona smiled and vanished into the dacha house.

From there, laughter could be heard, loud music was playing, something from the charts, some nameless, thoughtless, worthless, mechanical repetition of three notes (”Sometimes fewer”) and lyrics about nothing of substance. It didn’t let her think, yanked her out of “somewhere else”, so she couldn’t hear anything but the music, neither others’ voices nor her outer voice nor her inner voice. A waste of time and eardrums — only pure, imbecilic decibels, or in other words, music for dimwits. Even Kolya’s guitar, though imperfectly tuned, had some soul and sincerity.

Alyona returned with a throw and draped it over our heroine’s shoulders. She also brought a bottle of wine and plastic cups with her.

— Beautiful, isn’t it? — she said, looking at the sky.

Our heroine nodded. They sat, silent. Silence is pleasant; you can observe it meditatively, like fire, the only difference being it doesn’t crackle.

— Well then… Ripe for some6? — asked Alyona, shaking the wine bottle.

I’m not an apricot, thought our heroine. “Ripe…” Why does everyone use this phrase? Ripe for what? Ripe for wine? Ripe for a husband? Ripe for children? Being a ripening apricot would be far more interesting, for you can extract cyanide from its core. “Ripe” indeed… This phrase in another context would seem like an attack, but from Alyona it sounded soft and unobtrusive (”No cyanide for her”). She probably wouldn’t have suggested wine to our heroine at all if she herself hadn’t already been “ripe” for four glasses (”No, I’m not keeping track. The girl’s grown up”).

Everything from Alyona always sounded soft and unobtrusive. Suspicious, as it seemed to our heroine at first (”Truly suspicious”). Usually, if someone were that kind and courteous, friendly and glowing with interest, it meant they wanted something from her.

— Maybe we could go somewhere? — they would say.

— Looking good today, you. Nice skirt, — they would say.

— May I borrow your essay? No, I won’t copy. It’s for inspiration. I’m having writer’s block or such, — they would say. — I know it’s about personal feelings, but isn’t personal universal?

— It’s five minutes to midnight on the doomsday clock, — they would say. — The geopolitical situation is complicated. Our predicament isn’t predetermined.

— You’re the smartest girl in the class, — they would say. — Did you know that?

— Oh, we were born on the same day! — they would say.

— I’m a foreign businessman with a very, very big black Lamborghini and hair transplanted from my arse. Pleasure to meet you. Want to see my cock? Though why am I even asking... here you go!

— Massive, indeed, like your mum, — our heroine would answer.

— I’m just a simple guy, you know? Not like those other guys. Want to come over and watch me play Counter-Strike while I drink beer from the can? I’ve got frozen pizza, — a skufidon7 would say.

— I’m honest, I’m always honest with you, — they would say. — No, my sincerity isn’t ephemeral. It actually exists. No, why are you saying it? No, I don’t have “an ulterior motive”. That’s your “motif”, that thinking. I just want to be friends.

— Oh, please, — she would say. — Spare me, won’t you?

With Alyona, with Kolya, and the others gathered at the dacha, there was none of that. They needed so little from her that it became suspicious. They, like her, enjoyed sharing the moment, gossiping about professors falling asleep during lectures, deans running corruption schemes, discussing anything but studies, laughing at her politically incorrect jokes, except those about comrade Yehoshua (”May his memory be blessed”), for Alyona took her baptism too seriously (”The girl’s grown up”).

Our heroine didn’t notice how all slow rationality abandoned her, and something inside her decided that she was ripe and grown up, too.

— Really? — Alyona couldn’t believe it.

Our heroine and alcohol were supposed neither to be mixed nor to be shaken, not invited to the same party, kept apart in every way possible; even putting them in the same sentence wasn’t recommended, or else one might receive a witch’s wrathful glare, a disgruntled feline hiss, accompanied by “I’ve already said I don’t drink”, “Well, maybe you’ve changed your mind?”, “Maybe I haven’t changed my mind?”, “Well who knows, maybe you have changed your mind after all”, *threatening screech of rolling eyes*.

— Pour before I change my mind.

She felt coldness on her neck.

The wine appeared winely; she knew well what it looked and smelled like. At every family feast, there was always cheap cardboard box wine for the ladies and vodka for the gentlemen. In respectable company, the type of alcohol wasn’t important, for everyone got sloshed in the same manner and practised the same disgusting behaviour each in their own way and did and said things they wouldn’t do or say otherwise.

— She can drink already. She’s here at the table with us grown-ups. It’s just a spoon anyway, isn’t it? No more than a spoonful of cough syrup.

— No, she can’t, she’s only a girl.

— Oi! Look at him, ha-ha. Face in a salad.

— I wash my rug every week. They say so in the news.

— Capital punishment is what we need.

— You, uncle?

— Well, not we, the country.

— Why would you wash your rug every week? What’s the point?

— Look at her, grown up everywhere, in every way, a fine girl, I must say. Can’t believe she’s only fifteen, can you?

— Wasn’t your grandfather executed by the KGB?

— There was no KGB back then.

— There was, has always been.

— I just use washing powder, there’s no secret.

— You blink, and she’s married, just wait. The girls are nasty these days. You’ll babysit your grandkids soon, I’m telling you. Look at her.

— Do you know Galina, a friend of mine? Her son, Denis, they spent a week with us when you were three, got all As.

— I heard he’s also grown up everywhere, in every way. Back from the army, he is.

— No, mum, he and his brother have one brain between them.

— Don’t say that. Why would you say that?

— He’s an idiot, mum, it’s no secret to anyone, is it?

— Listen to her. Young but already cunty.

— Language! She’s a teenager.

— Should it be whitening washing powder?

— I heard they just use soot because why not?

— Why not indeed.

She would crawl into the wardrobe in her room, plug her ears, wait for it all to end. If there were no wardrobe, she would just sit, ignore everyone and everything around her, and be “somewhere else”, somewhere where she had all the bitterest remarks to every dimwitted dialogue.

— Well, how’s the wine? — asked Alyona.

— Like wine, I suppose.

— Tasty?

— Strange. Sweet.

— Georgian.

— Thought it would be bitter.

— There’s bitter wine too. Probably.

— Like what?

— Like bitter wine, I suppose. Ha.

— Like wallpaper paste?

— Wallpaper paste??? What does wallpaper paste taste like?

— Very, very, very bitter.

— Did you taste wallpaper paste?

— Accidentally. I was bored when everyone was putting up wallpaper. I was five.

— What was the wallpaper?

— Like in a hospital. White.

Alyona smiled. She had a beautiful smile. She could sing too, did ballet, had fair hair, but was no friend to mathematics, wouldn’t have managed without our heroine — in other words, her complete opposite.

— Really never drank before? — Alyona asked.

Our heroine shook her head.

— Nope.

— You’re having me on.

— Nope.

— Everyone drinks.

— I don’t.

— Never?

— Not in my memory.

— Why?

— First it wasn’t allowed, then didn’t want to, by inertia, then read “Brave New World”, and well… you know me, — she finished the phrase and took a few sips.

Besides sweetness and the taste of surrounding smoke, she felt little else. It burnt her throat slightly, like cough syrup. That was all. How much does one need to drink to get drunk?

— What would a female Savage do? I mean, what if the Savage were a woman? — asked Alyona.

— Anything but suicide. Why all that drama? She’d fly off to a retreat on a quiet island in the Pacific, get into numerology, write a book, “How I Escaped Toxic Consumer Society and Found Myself”. Or just marry some City trader and open a yoga studio.

Alyona laughed with her mouth full, spraying wine on the throw.

— What? — Our heroine smiled.

— A bit cynical, that.

— You know I’m cynical.

— You’re not, though you want to be. Not everyone’s an influencer these days.

— Not everyone, but even Tolstoy would have a TikTok about life in the village and shagging peasant women.

Alyona’s laughter was ringing, almost childlike, unlike our heroine’s.

— Crudish.

— Prudish.

— A toast. We need to drink to that. This one’s on you.

— My first glass, and you want a “toast”. I’ve no experience in the matter. I don’t play games I cannot win.

— Well, learn first, then win.

— People probably spend years learning before winning.

— You’re clever. You can learn quickly.

That our heroine couldn’t deny — she was at a dead end. She didn’t want to think about anything, for thinking meant being “somewhere else”. To think means to immerse oneself in one fantasy, which leads one to another fantasy, and then to a third fantasy, and so on, spiralling down or up through that fantasy helix. Yes, respected teacher? Where am I? I’m here (”Actually, I’m somewhere there”). I’m not distracted at all. No, I’m not thinking about boys. Cross yourself!8 Do you think I’m a stupid girl? A nymphomaniac? I think about great things, Tamara Alekseevna. If you think about men, it doesn’t mean everyone’s like you. How dare I? Well, I’m a student — you asked, I answered. You won’t give me a failing grade anyway, even for bad behaviour; I behave well, or rather “not at all” — behaviour interests me little, and you can’t reproach me for unfinished homework, unlearned verse, failed test. I know everything, sometimes even more than you (”Right, what was I… ah yes, toast!”)

— To all this fuckery!

— Ha. Straight off like that?

— Well, why not? I don’t know what people usually drink to. To health? To love? To peace? To friendship amongst nations? To a bright future after dictatorship?

— Sometimes you can drink to “all this fuckery”, I suppose.

— Well then, to all this fuckery.

They raised their glasses and clinked, though plastic against plastic doesn’t create an authentic experience. Our heroine emptied her cup in an instant.

— Well, you’re going for it, girl.

This was purely intellectual interest and pathological curiosity. The expected sensations of intoxication weren’t there for some reason, and our heroine wanted to understand what was wrong with her again and what would happen when/if suddenly these sensations appeared, what they were like, what would become of her, and what of her “somewhere else”. The cat sits on the mat, mother sees Spot run9, father drinks beer, mother scolds, father hits, mother cries, our heroine hides, first in the wardrobe, and then, when the streams of spirits reach it and begin to seep inside through the gap between its doors — in “somewhere else”. Advanced problem: when she starts drowning in wine, how will Gandalf come to the rescue: on eagles, on a blue helicopter, on a yellow submarine, or on an ark?

— Want more?

— Don’t know yet.

— Who knows, maybe you’re wild.

— Me? Wild?

— Maybe you’re wild and we never knew.

— Anything but wild.

— Shy and quiet, but then, all of a sudden, wild — your real personality revealed.

— People better not see it, my real personality.

— We don’t know that yet. Maybe she’s nice and not wild at all. Tell me, what do you feel?

— Nothing, — she said with a shrug.

— Stand up, walk around. Get your blood moving. Stand up, it’ll go straight to your head.

Wrapped in the throw, our heroine rose and began taking big steps along the garden paths laid with blackened boards, to the fence, around the mangal and back (”Hmm… Not even wobbling a bit”). The sky was clouding over and the celestial bodies started fading.

— Nope. Nothing.

— And nothing in your head?

— Nope.

— And your mood? Happy?

— I wouldn’t know — I’m always happy.

— Oh, sure…

— Well yes.

— Comédienne.

— Secret happy personality.

— That’s for sure.

— Pour more. I reckon I’d be more drunk from kefir10.

— Truth is in wine.

— In vino veritas.

— Lush.

Why do people always dissolve into ethereal substrates over time? *Poof!* — and gone as soon as you stop reminding each other of your existence.

— We must see each other, — they would say.

— Let’s keep in touch, — they would say.

— If you’re in Tulubaika ever again, write to me, — they would say.

— At least post them stories from your Europes, — they would say.

— You know I post nothing.

Well, good riddance, but where do they go? Were school friends even real? Some managed to drink themselves to death, get hooked on drugs, go to prison, become family people (”Not sure which is worse...”), a rare few flew abroad, even rarer were those found hanging from an old birch in Victory Park after what was presumably an unsuccessful escape either from fascists or from antifa or both of them, or who were simply marathon runners. Got carried away, you know, ended up in the wrong area, stumbled with a neck on a rope, hanged themselves, didn’t even bother to soap it, didn’t even invite me to the funeral... What kind of person does that? Eh… Friendship is tested in troubles, unless it’s troubles in the head11. (”Oh, seems like the fingers on my hands are starting to pulse!”)

— I’ll step out.

— Go ahead.

In the mirror above the sink, she still saw a familiar face: no red eyes or red swollen nose, only ears… ears slightly reddened and a bit of a blush on her cheeks. She ran her fingers through her hair to push it back. The skin on her head was tense, a tad less sensitive than usual, yet more pleasant to touch. The experiment was going steadily; the subject was normal: no sudden desire to dance, nor to pour out her soul to those around or punch someone in the face; neither a straitjacket nor an adrenaline shot was required; quite the opposite — mental activity was bubbling. She wanted to think, think more, think about everything, think about the past, about the future, about thinking itself — to metathink, if you will — about the best moments, about the worst moments, about the best moments that became the worst, about the worst moments that turned out to be quite all right. Should have thought earlier, now you can’t think it all in a couple of hours, girl. Think, think, think, think, or you’ll drown. Weave a raft from thoughts, or you’ll drown. Think, think, think. No, don’t think, don’t think, don’t think, or think about how to stop thinking, think yourself out of this thinking somewhere far away. Enough thinking for you, you’ve thought enough, philosophesse. Rain began drumming on the toilet window. How frightening, how frightening to be under control, and oh how frightening, how frightening to lose that control, but how terrible is the desire to act uncontrollably, having seized chaos. No, she wouldn’t lose these friends as she had lost childhood ones — they weren’t just ignorant infants seated together at the same desk by the whim of planida12 but adults who had consciously chosen each other’s company. That’s different.

The rain drove everyone to the table. They settled inside on old wooden benches covered with throws to avoid catching splinters.

— Are you all right? — asked Alyona.

— Yeah.

The bottom of the hot three-litre teapot inadvertently stuck to the plastic tablecloth, making it shrink and crease. The perpetrator of this mishap couldn’t be identified.

— Want some wine?

Our heroine’s face wrinkled. She shook her head and nodded at the teapot. Into a gigantic cup with a heavy bottom poured the so-called world-famous “fragrant dacha ambrosia”, a sweetened chai13 drink made from mint, gooseberry and blackcurrant leaves. She wanted to remember this taste. Soon, in a few days, she’ll have views of the Mediterranean Sea from the office on the twentieth floor, unlimited espresso, seagulls crying in unknown languages, perfectly paved and treed streets, galleries, museums, theatres, and all such cultural things (”And the sun will shine more than once a year...”). In foreign lands, over the hill, over the border, in strange parts, in the West, there will be no muddy pavements, no road potholes, no stinking buses that momentarily transform ordinary street puddles into Hokusai waves and drench you head to toe. It won’t still be dark at eight in the morning and already dark by three in the afternoon. But they won’t be there either, those very people, across whose faces her gaze jumped, to and fro, to and fro, as if recording how they distribute under- and over-grilled meat onto plates, serve improvised salads, cut and pass home-baked bread, wave forks, knives, napkins, make toasts, “clink” glasses, drink, laugh, make toasts again, “clink” glasses, drink, laugh, play guitar, sing, make toasts, drink, laugh, laugh, laugh, chat, take pictures, drink, laugh, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, take pictures. Cosy, strangely cosy, but at the same time suspenseful, as if she needed to be on guard, as if everything were unreal and out of time, not an event, not an occasion that was in her calendar and was about to end, but simply a non-phenomenal phenomenon, a fragment of life into which she had stumbled by accident, and where she shouldn’t have been, for she had always wanted to be somewhere else, but now, for some reason, did not.

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This story is a part of our serialisation of Tulubaikaporia, in particular, Episode 3: about all the fuckery & beyond. Previous Substack instalments available here. You can also purchase the whole book — it’s already out, and readers are writing reviews!

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Of all stories in the book, Lingus Venus is the most distant to Tulubaika in many senses: geography, comprehension, writing, language. It was one of the first stories written for the book even before it became a book, and it is one of a very few stories originally written in English, as the result — not many footnotes. At the same time, it’s the closest to Tulubaika because precisely here, for the first time, we meet our heroine as a mysterious Sophiaesque figure. The reason is (if the reader can believe that) she’s possibly the book’s main heroine / protagonist! In this episode, however, her inner world is attempted to be seen through the narrator’s foreign eyes, so, if she = main heroine, then again, perhaps, in this story we’re farthest from Tulubaika. Much confusion! We’re just spiraling around! (Ah!)

Together with our heroine, a lot of concepts central to the book appear in this episode for the first time, all of which will be developed later. What follows is sensory satellites that shed light and orbit the episode…

Tulubaikaporia

Music & Sound

The playlist might not be music that directly appears in the episode, yet nevertheless it reflect the core mood of the text, or at least the author while he was listening to them while thinking / writing:

Binker and Moses — Accelerometer Overdose (a nod to the lament of a dying elephant) · YouTube · Spotify · Bandcamp

Kiltro — The Drunk · YouTube · Spotify

La Femme — Où va le monde · YouTube · Spotify

Rap&Vogue — Hotel Europe · YouTube · Spotify

Then, of course, playing throughout the episode in the background, we have the cicadian orchestra, in fact the loudest of any insect and comparable to a chainsaw, yet, while the latter is typically a sound of death, cicada’s chorus is a divine song of immortality, at least it was for the Greeks, who told the stories of muses transforming music-enchanted oblivious men into cicadas.

In a fraction of a millisecond… the cicadian orchestra starts its fierce symphony. Out of nowhere, a series of omnipiercing vibrating shrieks, like those of a spinning chainsaw or aroused starlings, takes over the space. BzzzzzZzzzZ BzzzZZZZzzz BzhzzzzZZzzZZZzzzZzZZZzzzZzzZzzzzzzzz and so on…

The City

Before us — an arcade, a long illuminated corridor with beige brick walls and a few dozen glass doors under an arching glass roof. The shops and restaurants are closed and dimly lit, the lights of melon-sized bulbs hanging sadly above empty counters.

We’re traversing a piazza, a concave square made of thousands of thousand-year-old convex stones polished by time and soles. In the middle of the piazza is a fountain with a statue of Venus.

The unnamed and rather dislocated / liminal city of Episode Two, with its arcades, piazzas, canals, cobblestones, and seafood terraces under plexiglass, is located somewhere between Amsterdam and Rome, Venice and London, but it should look most like a Giorgio de Chirico painting, metaphysical cityscapes, which he painted in the 1910s and 1920s, depict exactly this kind of space: empty arcades casting long shadows, deserted piazzas with lone statues, a pervasive atmosphere of mystery suspended between dream and waking.

The very first painting in this style was The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon(1910). The painting depicts a part of Florence’s Piazza Santa Croce with oversimplified details. The main things we see are the almost empty square, the plain facade of the Basilica of Santa Croce and the headless statue right to it. De Chirico painted it during his recovery from a serious illness which made him see the piazza differently, as ill as he was. So he painted the piazza with that in mind, not focusing on the Basilica or any other objects per se, but focusing on his perception and vision of it instead.

None of the paintings depict night, when the Episode Two happens, and yet they map onto the episode’s mood and setting almost perfectly:

Venus

Look. This is Venus, — she says, pointing at the bright slightly pulsating dot on the sky.

Good thing about her is that once every 584 days she floats as close to Earth as she can and you can see her even in the city. Today’s that day. Today she’s as bright as you can see her from the Earth.

Venus is one of the episode’s thematic anchor’s, both the planet that bookends the night (visible at dusk as the evening star and dissolving at dawn), the headless goddess in the piazza fountain, and, well, the mythical queen ruling the episode.

Over eight Earth years (2,922 days), Venus completes roughly 13 orbits around the Sun (13 x 224.7 days ≈ 2,921 days). During those eight years, Venus passes between Earth and the Sun five times. These five points of closest approach, plotted against the zodiac, trace a near-perfect pentagram, sometimes called the “Rose of Venus.” The pattern shifts by roughly 2° every eight years, completing a full rotation over about 1,200 years. When we plot Venus’s geocentric orbit (its position relative to Earth over those eight years) the five loops of closest approach produce a five-petalled flower, the trace of its dance around us. The ancient Babylonian Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa— a 7th-century BC cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, copied from observations dating to c. 1650 BC — records Venus’s risings and settings over 21 years, making it the oldest surviving planetary astronomical text. The pentagram was Inanna’s sign, the Sumerian goddess who was Venus, whom the Akkadians called Ishtar, and five-pointed cuneiform star represented her orbit.

In the middle of the piazza is a fountain with a statue of Venus. The statue has no head, the head has no eyes and no mouth, the figure has no hands and the hands have no fingers, it has no legs, no torso, nothing, the statue doesn’t even have itself, but it’s still there, visible, looming a few metres high over the piazza, dropping its shadow in all directions, overlooking the paused fountain, now filled with coins from all around the world — tributes to the goddess of love.

Orchids

Suddenly, I find myself alone in an orchid garden, a garden that is the whole world, a grandiose, boundless construction built to feature but one orchid elucidated in the cosmic glow… At its centre emerges the labellum, sensuous and pink, its lobes frilled with intricate ruching and folds.

This (unambiguous) orchid vision, hallucination, or dream, or all three, is what inspired the book cover and many imagery in the book throughout. It dominates the whole composition looming over it, pink and resplendent, so whenever you hold the book in your hands and look at the cover, you know what’s staring back at you.

~ ~ ~

Various Imagery

While the fish-headed waiters shout at each other in an unrecognisable tongue…

Arcimboldo built human portraits out of objects, e.g. his “Water” is a face made entirely of fish, crustaceans, and marine life: not exactly the waiter’s face but vibe-wise close enough!

On the porcelain plate right in front of me lies a slightly charred squirming tentacle of an ancient god, drizzled with saffron aioli.

Twenty rock oysters rest on the mountain of ice right in the middle of our table.

Around us, there’s a narrow and long public garden where, lanterned, grow various flora: camellias, roses, daffodils, lavender, hydrangeas, peonies, daisies, tulips, ferns, climbing ivy, jasmine, rhododendrons (lots of ‘em), wisteria, azaleas, chrysanthemums, lilacs, marigolds, irises, begonias, violets, cyclamens, heather, foxgloves, pansies, sage, more-of and more-poisonous yew, cypress, rosemary, juniper, fuchsia, dahlias, petunias, anemones, aster, zinnias, cosmos, verbena, and maybe some others I can’t recognise, for I’m not a botanical expert.

One of Tulubaikaporia’s features is it can be read episodically in random order skipping some of the episodes and still be enjoyed and understood at that layer. There’re, however, more and more layers!

In the introduction to “The Teacher of Symmetry”, which is framed as a translator’s commentary to the text translated from other language, Andrei Bitov, the author, writes this:

Each chapter of “The Teacher” can be read as a separate work; the reader is free to give preference to one or another as an independent story, but if they masters all in succession and hear the echo spreading from the previous to the next and from each to each, then they will discover its source, that is, they will read the novel itself, not a collection of stories.

We only discovered it in the late stages of writing Tulubaikaporia but it does seem to describe its organising principle perfectly, a principle that isn’t at all foreign to contemporary Russian literature as you can see.

The story today is one of the first written for the cycle and one of the few written in English. It’s also one of our all time favourites! And it can indeed be read as a separate story.

Meanwhile, new reviews:

“I am a myth. And you create it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​“

— “Palisandria” by Sasha Sokolov

Among the timber tables run decrepit demon dogs, all ulcerated, their mouths bleeding, bubbling with an alabaster foam. I couldn’t care less about them, though. There’s me and there’s her, though for me, there’s only her, my heroine; nothing else matters, not even these weird creatures. The air smells of candle wax and balsamic vinegar someone has spilt at the table next to us. While the demon dogs are dead set on pinching anything off the tables, while the copious happy people around mumble, while the fish-headed waiters shout at each other in an unrecognisable tongue, while somewhere in the bushes right behind the restaurant cicadas compose a cacophonous lullaby, while branches of yew with red holey beads scratch the plexiglass roof of the terrace, my heroine, only my heroine, remains the sole focal point into which my decaying reality funnels, and while a fly drowns in my wine, I drown in her iridescent eyes. Those round, furtively blinking orbs are either grey, the hue of smoke or a thick morning fog, or green, the hue of jade, possibly faded a tad from overexposure to overattention. Around her dilated pupils, a ruby lattice of tiny capillaries has grown; masterful jewellery, her eyes now. Is this the third bottle this evening? C₂H₅OH and some other substances; the transmutation of the evening into the—

— This is secret ingredient of transmutation from evening into night, — my heroine says in broken tongue.

— What kind of ingredient, though?

— Secret ingredient.

— O-o-oh, I see. A secret ingredient.

— Secret ingredient, yes. You know what that mean?

I shake my head, lips arched up.

— This means I not tell you what is this. Did you think I tell you?

— You must tell me, though. My mother taught me not to take strange substances from strangers, especially strangerettes, which perfectly describes the situation I’m in right now.

— I understand. Mother word is law.

— I wouldn’t ask otherwise.

— Well, too bad, I still not tell you. Somewhere, somewhen, I am someone’s mother. Therefore, on a grand scheme of things, my word is law, “though”.

My heroine stretches a sly smile and takes a sip from her glass.

— But not now?

— You are so fixed on “now”. I not— I don’t understand.

My heroine keeps staring at me. She doesn’t blink, or perhaps we blink at the same time. It happens sometimes; people blink at the same time and never see each other with eyes shut, or blink in turns and never see each other with eyes open. I try to blink unevenly, at random times, so that doesn’t happen, but still never see her eyes shut. It is a state-of-the-art mesmerisation, no more, no less.

— I am. I won’t argue with that.

— Well, then don’t. Simple, da1?

— I won’t, but I thought it would benefit the evening a little bit and perhaps speed up the “transmutation” process if we build some trust.

— Such silly thing to say! I trust you. You’re crazy and naive enough to take pills from “strangerette”. You’re harmless. Harmless people trust everyone, you did that, so I think you “trust” me, in odd way. But why it matters?

A faceless waiter with five eyes, a peaky nose, and a Cheshire mouth under a Dali moustache walks by carrying on a plate a festering dog head sprinkled with parmesan and basil, the aroma of which overpowers the dog’s smell, as if it were pasta.

— Well...

— If you are afraid from falling, then fly. Or baituut. We said this in my village.

— Doesn’t make any sense to me, I’m afraid.

— You shouldn’t be afraid. You should turn on brain. Make it think, da?

— I’m afraid of “turning it on” to think about something like that.

— You see? You not understand. Risk of falling is not real if you already falling. It is in past and it is zero percent and hundred percent in same time, which in reality means it not relevant, which then means it not exist. Flying, on other hand, is w-a-ay more risky because risk of falling is still not zero — you can just fold wings! That is that.

— Didn’t know you were a risk manager.

— Maybe I am. Maybe I am not. I prefer to stay a strangerette. Maybe I will poison you, rob you, give you syphilis or something worser.

— Do you do that to many men?

— No, only to pretty ones. Rest I just rob.

— So I’m in grave danger then.

She scans me, head to toe, as much as the table between us allows, shrugs.

— Nah, don’t worry. I think you very safe.

— Very safe?

— What, I say not correct?

— No, I just thought I’d come back home with syphilis. I already dreamt of that.

— Well... no?

— I’m thankful.

— You should be.

— So, tell me, am I flying or am I falling?

— We will understand this soon.

On the porcelain plate right in front of me lies a slightly charred squirming tentacle of an ancient god, drizzled with saffron aioli. Shoggoth? Yog-Sothoth? I don’t want to know. The suckers on it stare at me by the hundreds of tiny eyes, not with pity, not with interest, but rather with irony, as if the tentacle is about to eat me: jump off the plate, wrap around my neck, squeeze until it cracks, and then, when my last breath leaves my lungs, crawl into my brain through a nostril and occupy my body.

— Maybe we should do it in the hotel.

She scratches her chin.

— Why?

I expect her to add “I do wonder” but she’s silent. My brain has started finishing her lines long ago.

— No, I mean... I am afraid I will start doing weird things soon.

— Weird things? For example?

— I wish I knew in advance, but no, I don’t know. Just weird things, stupid things, things you won’t like and I will regret...

— You have previous experience of doing weird things? I could make prediction about it. Maybe there’s trend...

— Are you an analyst now?

— Maybe I am an analyst...

— Like... I could start fighting with the waiters and then they would throw me in the canal and I would drown in there and die.

— No worry, I will pull you out from there. Did that happen before?

— Except the last part. Though I’m not sure about that sometimes... You don’t like your oysters?

Twenty rock oysters rest on the mountain of ice right in the middle of our table. My heroine’s order, untouched.

— I never ate oysters.

— You haven’t? I don’t eat oysters. They sometimes...

Here I think of how oysters, upon entering my body, would try to occupy it too, and I myself become an oyster, waking up in a rock shell the following morning.

— Well, I won’t spoil it for you.

— How do you eat them?

— You just, um, slurp.

— Slurp? What is slurp?

I kindly demonstrate the slurp sound.

— Ah, “slurp”. Okay.

Multiple signs of cunning surface on my heroine’s face: a smile, a squint, a long, thorough lip lick. She plots and executes, my heroine: takes an empty tap water glass, takes an oyster and pours it into the glass, setting aside the shell.

What are you doing?! I could’ve asked, but my curiosity suggests not to ask stupid questions and prefers to observe. My heroine takes a second oyster, a third, a fourth, ..., ..., until they all end up in her glass. Then, as I expected, she drinks them all (!), just like that, in one big slurp. Impressive. Somewhere in the back of my mind, one of my thoughts is already looking for where nearby one could buy an engagement ring in the middle of the night.

— What? — my heroine asks, a slight shyness in her posture.

— No, nothing. I am, well, I am, I must say I’m rather impressed.

— Rather?

— Rather, yes.

— I did something wrong?

— No, you did everything perfectly. Not sure I’ve seen anything closer to perfection.

— I can read irony.

— I know you can, that’s why it wasn’t irony.

My heroine smiles.

Next to us, in the artificial river locked into three walls of brick and concrete and one wall of light-polluted city atmosphere, among dark green algae, cigarette butts, and crumpled cans, a school of fish learns to fly. Do they fly or do they think they fly? Or do they fall horizontally? What do the fish feel at this moment? Where are they going so free, so aimless, so hopeful? Straining their fins, they travel to the spawning grounds where they, like zergs, in sin, will multiply in quantity, and then come back to hooks and nets, to fridges and freezers, to pans and plates, to fish and chips, to someone’s mouth. Mine perhaps. Or my heroine’s. Her pink lips, glistering with grease, unfold like an orchid in bloom and her red tongue licks the tartare sauce from her knife and her... Wait! My parents taught me never to lick a knife. It brings bad luck, it’s tempting fate, it’s bad etiquette, it’s basic sharp object safety. But she... For her... For her it’s a transference of energy or life force of the knife’s victim to the person licking it. She lovingly pierces a chip with her fork and starts chewing it, her sharp jawline going in zigzags. She is a rare species of orchid-flycatcher and I’m a not-so-rare species of fly who can’t decide between flying and falling. I can feel her chewing my head off with glee, or rather neutrally, in a manner of habit. My skull cracks open like a chocolate egg and the brain yolkly tries to escape this tragic transgression yet fates out like the fish. Then my heroine picks up a dried bucatini from her cocktail and, using it as a straw, performs one rapid succinct sip from my skull — *slurp!* — it’s gone! I’ve lost my head, I’ve lost my brain, I’ve lost my mind — I’ve lost everything.

— You never said it was so strong.

— You never said you were so weak.

— I’m not weak. I’m vulnerable to deception and drugs, like anyone else.

— Well, I am not vulnerable to whatever.

— Of course you’re not... You seduced me, fed me your weird pills and now my mind is melting. I see things I wish I couldn’t see. I think things I wish I couldn’t think.

— That is good description of my whole life. Strange that you need pills for that. What are you?

— I feel like, erm... (I wouldn’t tell her I saw her eating my head. That would ruin the romantique) My brain is made of malleable paraffin and it’s melting now, trying to escape this tragic transgression but fates out like the fish and my fish-fate appears predetermined, circumscribed by an insurmountable metaphysical aporia.

— Sometimes I don’t understand what you are saying.

— Just listen to the words.

— Is not fun to listen to the words when you can’t understand them, da? I could just listen to cicadas instead. Maybe I understand them better.

— What do they say?

— Cicadas?

— Yes, cicadas.

She scans her surroundings, squints intently, and, shrugging, returns her gaze to me. Those eyes again. I’m disappearing, flopping inwardly.

— Not sure. I don’t know much about Cicadian, or is it Circadian? Anyway, I know it even less than your tongue.

— Do they sing? Can you hear them singing a song?

After a short intermission of silence, the conductor hiding in the vegetation, its tailcoat fluttering in the wind, its eyes closed, its mind concentrated into a single dot, a dot that’s about to explode with music, spreads its little cicadian limbs and, bursting with pompousness, drops them down in one sharp stroke, cutting the air and, who knows, the whole world, the whole universe into two halves. In a fraction of a millisecond (which some oddly label “immediately”), as if the “start” signal was transmitted to them with no consideration of time, telepathically, the cicadian orchestra starts its fierce symphony. Out of nowhere, a series of omnipiercing vibrating shrieks, like those of a spinning chainsaw or aroused starlings, takes over the space. BzzzzzZzzzZ BzzzZZZZzzz BzhzzzzZZzzZZZzzzZzZZZzzzZzzZzzzzzzzz and so on... The orchestra, perhaps, consists of all living cicadas, all cicadas that have ever lived, and all cicadas that will ever live. The symphony, simple yet complex, discordant yet meticulously composed for maximum deafening effect, angelic yet demonic, rhythmic yet arrhythmical, turns the air around us into gelatin. Everyone and everything feels it. Every flower, petal, leaf, grass, poisonous yew berry, every glass and utensil on every table, the plexiglass roof of the terrace, every eardrum, every hair in every cochlea — everything trembles, neither from fear, nor from awe, nor from pleasure, but from belonging to something greater, to something shared, to something universal, as if now the vibrations emanating from the orchestra do not just touch everyone, but merge with them, propagated deep down to the innermost essence of every being and thing. It’s a rock opera. It’s jazz but with a billion “z” at the end of the word. It is a torrent of joy and agony combined into a hitherto unknown bittersweet sensation, a feeling of nostalghia for every fraction of a moment passed and every moment to come. Between the moments, if you tune in, you experience an eerie sense of quiet, like the universe has just pressed the mute button, and you have fallen through into a transient void. You feel its texture. You feel what the world really is, described in the cicadian tongue.

— ... That is how cicadas reveal to us the underlying vibrations of the world — through their music, through their unequivocal art, and they are just humble tree crickets. I can’t imagine what a human could do, — thus I finish my speech.

My heroine bursts into applause.

— Wow, I mean... Okay, it probably was too strong on you.

— Did you hear all my thoughts? The whole thing?!

— Yes, but because you said it out loud. And let go of my hand. I don’t mind it but your grip is just too tight, like a child handcuff.

I remove my hand from hers and look around. The dizziness takes over, and every person on the terrace, every guest and host (no dogs; they are gone, luckily), now has auras comprised of vibrating doppelgängers, their appearances multiplying before my eyes, each body fanning out into a cluster of blurred copies, as if the shutter speed of my mind-camera has gone snail.

— Sorry... Can you say something in your tongue?

— Like what?

— I don’t know. Something. I need to hear something I don’t understand because now, I reckon, I understand too much.

— You are ill? Here, drink water.

She moves her glass towards me and I pour it whole down my throat, together with ice. It feels like embers crawling down my oesophagus.

— We can leave? Have some fresh air.

— No, please just say something. Words, I need words.

— Such as? What do you want to hear?

— I don’t know. Just words. The whole thing I just thought... or said. About cicadas. Translate it to me. Please. I want to hear your native tongue.

— Okay.

I sit straight and look into her eyes. Mimicking everything else around, they multiply into dozens and hundreds as if she’s Argus now. I close my eyes and prepare to listen.

— Erm... well... it’s, ugh, kaiabtuluulbaiakkatu.

She’s silent. The only thing I hear is the cicadian orchestra.

— Wait, that’s it?

— Da.

— Is that what it means? The whole whatever-that-was translates into... that? Just... what? One word? Two words?

— My tongue is very expressive. And it’s not a word, there’s no such concept in my tongue.

— Where are you from?

— It’s called Tulubaika.

— Tooloo-what?

— Tulubaika.

— Toolookai- no... I can’t do it.

— Tu-lu-bai-ka.

— Too-loo-bai-la?

— No!

— I think you’re making it up. The wicked tongue. Everything. It makes no sense.

— No, I don’t. Why make up? World has enough things already.

— Yes, you’re making it up. I can see that in your eyes.

— You think I lie?

— No, not lie. It’s different. You’re making it up.

— No, I’m not. Why would I do that? I can’t invent nothing.

— I don’t know. To play me?

— I don’t play games.

— What was it again? Tooloobulu-something.

She’s laughing, I can feel she’s laughing, inwardly, she’s making fun of me, taking the piss.

— Tulubaika. Is Tulubaika.

— No, it can’t be real. This can’t be serious.

— It’s all very, very serious. Everything is serious.

— I don’t mean to sound impolite but is it some... I don’t know... rare unknown indigenous place? Is that where you are from?

— Tulubaika.

— But what country?

— Asking woman where is she from is worse than asking age, mister. You can guess my accent.

— I don’t know. I’m bad at accents. You’re extraterrestrial.

— Yes, good idea. I like it.

— I mean it as a compliment, by the way.

— I know. Now I say I am alien from Venus. Tulubaika is village on Venus. The only one maybe. How does this sound?

— Alright. I see. Venus. Well... Okay. I mean, why not. Describe it to me.

— Describe?

— Yes. I want to know what it’s like, Tooloobaila, Venus.

— Tulubaika! It is small, very small village, da? There isn’t nothing to describe, “I’m afraid”. It is very quiet and peaceful. There’re fields around and nothing else. We have a few small houses and we have orchid gardens.

— Orchid gardens? For real?

— Da.

— In a village?

— Yes, just one.

— An orchid garden? As in a garden with orchids?

— See? You don’t believe me, whatever I say. You don’t trust me. This is your problem. You must trust people. This is how society work.

— In Tooloobaila?

— Everywhere.

Tilting, I watch her eyes multiplying on her face.

— We’d better get some fresh air.

Along the cobbled path, high above the surface, run four legs, from them two bodies holding hands grow gradually, entwined into one drunken silhouette that chuckles, bursts with laughter — the silhouette’s only language. The words, the real words composed of morphemes with attached hints of meanings and history of the evolution of hundreds of tongues, have ceased to exist, dispersed into individual sounds, and these sounds, in turn, have dissolved into the air like vapour billowing from an air humidifier, and instead of them there now exist only glances, touches, emotions, laughs, the smell of hormones and alcohol, basil and garlic stuck between teeth, the waves of twisted electricity hopping joyfully from neuron to neuron, from brain to brain, liberated, given to themselves. Words are no longer necessary, necessity itself is unnecessary; it simply is, everything simply is. The memory that has been and memory to come, the coordinates of seconds, minutes, perhaps hours, and any sense of continuity are — *snap!* — gone. They are lines on paper filled with numbers and ticks that our brains cannot read. Chronology is not a property of time but a science that studies it, a pseudoscience for pseudopeople.

My heroine’s hand is cold and wet. She smells of wine and sweat. We’re traversing a piazza, a concave square made of thousands of thousand-year-old convex stones polished by time and soles. In the middle of the piazza is a fountain with a statue of Venus. The statue has no head, the head has no eyes and no mouth, the figure has no hands and the hands have no fingers, it has no legs, no torso, nothing, the statue doesn’t even have itself, but it’s still there, visible, looming a few metres high over the piazza, dropping its shadow in all directions, overlooking the paused fountain, now filled with coins from all around the world — tributes to the goddess of love. The gusts of wind soar at the piazza, whistling around us as we escape the space behind us. We’ve abandoned our shoes and every stone in our cobbled path now feels like a little mountain. We’re flying above the mountains, thousands of little peaks, and suddenly hear the mus—

— Sound like someone is beating an elephant! Let’s go and see what is it!

Her hair all over her head, face and shoulders, my heroine pulls my hand somewhere, without waiting for my response.

— Beating an elephant? lol, I mean LOL.

— LMAO even, look!

Before us — an arcade, a long illuminated corridor with beige brick walls and a few dozen glass doors under an arching glass roof. The shops and restaurants are closed and dimly lit, the lights of melon-sized bulbs hanging sadly above empty counters. In the middle of the arcade, a saxophone produces a wildfree melody that its lone player attempts to tame. Her eyes closed, she doesn’t see us, and as we approach her, she keeps blowing, ordering the disorder of the air into melancholic vibrations, an elegant sequence of transient voids exquisitely arranged and timed together, weaving the empty space of the arcade into one single thick thread that leads us to... Where to? No idea. We tighten our collective grip, freeze and listen to the saxophonistess. We feel her wordless speech not with our ears but with our whole bodies as all the little hairs on our napes, hands, and legs rise, after the cold, refreshing, sobering and tickling sensation travels from our eardrums to our toes and fills our whole bodies with ecstatic charge. The song abruptly ends and the saxophonistess gives us a blissful smile.

In unison, we ask:

— What’s the song called?

Frowning, she replies:

— It’s not a song.

In unison, we express our persistent curiosity:

— But what is it called?

Upon a momentary pause, the saxophonistess answers:

— Let it be “A Lament of a Dying Elephant.”

Awed, quite so (myself, especially), we ask again (we must be very annoying):

— Has it died?

The woman seems amused by the conversation:

— Who? The elephant? I don’t know.

She shrugs, and we clarify:

— No, the song.

She’s almost laughing now:

— Ah, probably you can say that. I don’t think I would play it again.

— Why wouldn’t you?

— Because I have no idea or memory of what I’ve just played.

The song has passed from the physical world, for it stopped vibrating it and thickening and entangibilising its fabrics, but in our world, which is far from physical, it still sings. Inside our brains, it’s tattooed as a long sequence of notes, filling every convolution in dense calligraphic graffiti. It is a code, a program, an instruction, a spell, something that’s now running continuously on our joint brainware in a magical, metaphysical manner, despite having no repeated elements that our ears could catch. Hypnotised by (as everyone agreed) “A Lament of a Dying Elephant”, we dig coins from our pockets, tributes to the goddess of music, and transfer them into the saxophonistess’s hat resting in front of her like a loyal dog, and flee the makeshift concert hall.

Around us, there’s a narrow and long public garden where, lanterned, grow various flora: camellias, roses, daffodils, lavender, hydrangeas, peonies, daisies, tulips, ferns, climbing ivy, jasmine, rhododendrons (lots of ‘em), wisteria, azaleas, chrysanthemums, lilacs, marigolds, irises, begonias, violets, cyclamens, heather, foxgloves, pansies, sage, more-of and more-poisonous yew, cypress, rosemary, juniper, fuchsia, dahlias, petunias, anemones, aster, zinnias, cosmos, verbena, and maybe some others I can’t recognise, for I’m not a botanical expert. We stroll through the labyrinthine collection of flowers and read the names from the plaques beneath. The little pebbles that cover the road prick our bare feet. The ground is still underneath, existing, and we, in fact, are not flying. I can’t name the colour of my heroine’s eyes anymore. In the dark, they are just two shiny obsidians of cooled lava. A carefree and ironic smile rests across her face. Her hand squeezes my palm, plays with my knuckles, rolls them hither and thither. Here we are, two people surrounded by sleeping beauty.

It’s wrong but I want you tonight.

Say it.

No, can one even say that to someone in a park at night?

Can I argue with my inner voice? Does it even hear me back or is it just a monologuing entity?

Say it.

We stop. I grab both of her hands and look into her eyes.

— It’s wrong... but I want you tonight.

— To khnight you? (my heroine laughs) I mean, sure. On your knees, please.

My head’s overflowing with blush. The awkwardness condenses into one sloppy and scratchy lump and dives down through my throat. Left with no choice, I fall on my knees and bow to my heroine, my newfound queen.

— Are you ready?

My queen clears her throat and commences her speech:

— Before you rise, you must understand the very big responsibilities that come with this… well, impronto khnighthood.

— It’s “impromptu”.

— Da? “impromptu”-whatever khnighthood...

— It’s “night-hood”, you don’t say the “k”. Sorry... please continue.

— Khnight is good with valour, with justice, protects the innocent, and more so, speaks Istina2 even when it is total bullshit. You swear to do all that?

— I swear.

“My queen.”

— So, remember, you are not just any khnight; you’re my khnight for tokhnight. Your duty is to be present, to be yourself, and maybe even to enjoy this weird world we share. All good?

— It is, absolutely, yeah.

— Swear then.

— I do; I swear.

— So, with authority given to me and by virtue of stars and planets and Venus and all that we cannot see because we’re in this city and sky is not clear, I “hereby declare” (he-he) you my khnight. Stand up and not forget — names and titles are only words, just don’t be dick. Okay, we’re done. Rise, rise, my khnight.

Something’s definitely rising at this moment. I shake the dust and bits of leaves off my knee. She smiles, grabs my hand and drags me further through the never-ending garden.

In front of us, there are exit gates. The pillars are made from rough beige stone and topped with dome-shaped caps. Quite antique, actually. Between the pillars are wrought-iron bars with gilded ornaments and figures of flowers and leaves. Below the archway appears a monogram, a crest on which five hearts are arranged in a checkerboard pattern. The light from the lanterns illuminates the curvilinear elements of the gates and plays with shadows behind them. It’s not simply gates, not a door, not even a portal. It’s a piece of art, and it is, of course, closed. With sweaty fingers, we wedge between the bars and start climbing upwards. Foot. Arm. Foot. Arm. Foot. Arm. At the top, thank the architects, no thorns, no spikes, no spears, no barbed wire, and no other anti-human or anti-pigeon attributes are installed; instead, there’s a smooth metal branch that grows from the pillar towards the centre of the gate, where the two doors meet above the coat of arms.

We land. Under us — a narrow pavement, in front — a motorway going approximately forty-eight (or forty-nine) lanes in each direction. Hundreds and thousands of sparks drift by like an asteroid belt: a boiling river of light, noise and exhaust fumes. Don’t inhale them. Don’t look at them. Don’t count them. Look forward, onto your path. My heroine squeezes my hand and leads me forward, then slows down, turns around, circles me, changes her hand, drags me forward again, circles me again on the other side, and so on, spinning around me, spinning me around herself, waltzing. Thus we khorovod3 along the motorway and before another bend, the pavement ends. Grimacing, she examines the asteroid belt and the glimmering sea on the other side.

— I think we need to cross it.

— Do what?

— Cross this thing, the road.

My heroine’s seriousness has acquired physical qualities.

— Why?

— I don’t know. For the plot? It is a character development event.

— In some absurdist tragedy? That’s a dumb way to die.

— Imagine you are in a story and you want to make it as interesting as possible to readers.

— What if I’m a secondary or just a background character? An NPC even? Or a narrator whose job is only to narrate the story of his heroine?

— Then your goal is to become hero! Protagonist, da?

— Da?

— You swore to be my khnight for tokhnight.

— Yes, but...

— Classic yes-but situation. I see.

— You don’t have to jump onto the motorway to test my knighthood. And I certainly don’t want to jump in there.

— But you want, my khnight. You just not know that. Not yet. Let me show you.

My heroine frees my hand and in a gracious feline trajectory jumps over the guardrail right into the road and dances off to the other side across all the lanes while honking cars whiz by until she climbs over the concrete divider in the middle of the motorway and disappears from my sight.

— Oi! Lady!

Breathe. The falling stars fly by in trembling curves, their blazing trails etched briefly against the dark. The coarse grit of the asphalt grinds into my bare feet, sending shocks of heat up through my legs with each footfall, and the world becomes a blur of hypnotic colours. The hungry herd of headlights speeds by, trampling all in their orbit. A whoosh of hot wind blasts my face as a streak of red screams past just inches away. The space stinks of burnt rubber, carbon dioxide, and adrenaline. The pawn moves towards the queen. The pawn crosses the thin line between the known and anarchy, terra firma and the abyss. The pawn realises it has a ribcage, a ribcage that has something inside that now starts reminding of itself. The path is laid with asphalt and perpendicular splashes of white paint. The pawn is electric. The pawn is electricity. It’s a leap of faith or fall of faith or flight of faith — depends on the coordinate system of choice. The asphalt’s infernal. Step. Jump. Step. Run, run, don’t stop and don’t close your eyes, you pawn. It’s the lament of a dying pedestrian. The great diesel beast stretches itself towards the pawn, distorting from a pinprick to a swirling giant, then collapses back to a singular point as it flies past. The pawn sees how a few metres ahead a ghostly figure of his heroine dances through the veils of exhaust. The pawn’s limbs shake, his eyes never close, the pawn doesn’t dare to blink. The pawn hauls himself over the same concrete divider, collapsing onto the blessedly cool pavement beyond it. There, under the trees, the pawn sees her, his heroine, waiting for him.

On a sandy pebbled beach, we lie and listen to the waves washing the green dirty lumps of algae off the shore and our feet. This is how the sea talks to you — via gentle strokes of water when it’s calm and via heavy blows when angry. Now, the water is cold, and every time it soaks our naked heels, our bodies respond with goosebumps.

— Now what?

— Now we wait.

A coy breeze brings smells of fish, algae and salt and immediately carries them away, as if teasing us. The waves murmur like a dozen cats falling comfortably asleep, ebb, rattle the pebbles, and run away. Somewhere behind us, hidden in the leaves of the trees, cicadas play their symphony; a little further away the motorway roars; and somewhere deep in my head, elephants sing an infinite song and die one by one until sonic elephanticide ends with no elephants left. A little closer, beside me, I hear my heroine’s heavy breath and see her breasts rising and falling as she thirstily absorbs the sea air. Her eyes are closed. Just like mine, her lips dry in the breeze, and now and then she licks them. Before me, the stygian sky, illuminated by the city behind us, and on it, either by satellites or by faint stars, the outlines of her face slowly emerge, and the reality around me fades, as if everything but the vision of her face has lost its already minuscule significance. I roll over onto my side and lie watching the movements of her arched eyebrows, her nose greedily lusting after the atmosphere, her crimson lips... and, trembling, I reach for them until she, hearing my movements and sensing my ragged breath, draws towards me, our bodies merge in a clumsy kiss and begin to roll sideways, flipping over and over, on top of and underneath each other, again and again. Suddenly, I find myself alone in an orchid garden, a garden that is the whole world, a grandiose, boundless construction built to feature but one orchid elucidated in the cosmic glow, a glow born in a complex chemical reaction somewhere thousands and millions of light years away just for this resplendent orchid. It stays on the podium in a little white pot and stares at me, its petals softly curled outward. At its centre emerges the labellum, sensuous and pink, its lobes frilled with intricate ruching and folds. I reach for it with my lips and feel its wet silky petals and finally hear the words in the tongue we can both understand, the tongue of lo—

— You’re snoring. Wake up.

My heroine’s shaking me by my shoulder, chuckling.

— What happened?

The garden is gone, as if it never existed; what’s left is darkness, the cold, passionless void.

— I listen to cicadas and you snore.

— Bonkers. I never snore.

— You do. You snore, “bonkers” or not. No idea what you saw in your dream, but you snored like cicada.

— Very funny.

— He-he. You almost missed everything.

— I didn’t sleep.

My heroine sighs.

— Look. This is Venus, — she says, pointing at the bright slightly pulsating dot on the sky.

— How do you know it’s Venus?

— I know.

— Are you sure?

— I’m very sure it is Venus, we call her “Ullalulla”. Good thing about her is that once every 584 days she floats as close to Earth as she can and you can see her even in the city. Today’s that day. Today she’s as bright as you can see her from the Earth. Baitu’katu’aktu’Ullalulla’tull.

— What does that mean?

— A lot of things. Maybe hundred words in your tongue. I can’t explain.

— You could try.

She pauses and looks at me.

— You don’t want to hear it. It’s a boring story. Very boring.

— It’s fall or fly, da?

— Don’t use my weapon against me. You swore not to be dick.

— I won’t judge or anything. Whatever you say I’ll just listen and nod like a good knight is supposed to. A nodding knight.

— Ha-ha. Okay. But if you say even one word, I will drown you.

I adopt complete numbness, having cast a ziplock spell on my lips.

— Good. I told you it’s boring. So... — my heroine takes a deep breath. — When I was a little girl, I lived in Tulubaika, little village, before moving away later. In that village, when you go out, you would see woods, mostly birches, and sky, mostly stars, as if it was a sieve through which something magical flowed down to the Earth. Imagine that beautiful sky, every single night, full of shiny dots. Not sure if you ever saw it, Milky Way and all that — not all people know you can see it, apparently... but anyway. When I moved to that big city, first thing on night sky I saw was Venus. There were moon, satellites, planes and other “celestial bodies” maybe, but I remember only Venus. I felt instant nostalghia even when I saw her first time. Then I didn’t know she was Venus. Of course, for me she was just “star”. Later I learned her course and how she dances together with Sun, but before that I just saw her becoming dimmer and dimmer every single night. So, “Baitu’katu’aktu’Ullalulla’tull” means something like, “soon, you see her again, every time she be same, same beautiful planet, but you be new person, slightly different, maybe more mature, coming to her with new challenges passed and new acquired, and despite them, or rather in spite of them, every time she would remind you that there’s something constant, something that gives you hope, something that fades and flashes, something that teaches you how to find comfort in chaos”. So, yes, there’s more things but it’s just brief summary for you.

Her eyes have welled up, and I see the reflection of Venus in them. She smiles and moisturises her lips again. Should I start talking or shouldn’t I? I don’t know what to say. It feels awkward, more awkward than the restaurant, than the knighting and the dream (it’s all been rather a downward spiral of awkwardness), as if I realise she’s told me too much and I’m expected to tell something of the same grade in return, but I can’t, I’m not that interesting and my thoughts keep panicking, running, stumbling, hiding from me, like three little piglets who’ve just seen a wolf, and I can’t find anything remotely worthy of sharing.

— Do you want one more? — my heroine asks.

She stretches out her slightly sand-dusted palm to me with a shiny pill, half red, half blue. Silent, I shake a nay, and she stashes the pill back into her pocket. We keep lying in silence.

— You know, I translate myself my whole life and I don’t even remember what it’s like to talk to someone in my tongue. Often I want to meet someone who would be able to learn my tongue.

I point at myself. She frowns.

— It is not just a tongue, da? Maybe you can learn it but you still won’t be able to really think in it, I mean, “really”. You’ll still count in your own tongue, your dreams and subconscious will use it to talk to you. Universe will use it as well because that’s simple and more easy way to reach you.

Her tongue clicks and she pauses.

— Look. You’re a very nice and fun young man, but imagine if we were more than friends. Despite what I would say to you, there will always be so much more of me that you can never see, there’ll always be so much more of what I can never translate, and even if I can, you will never be able to understand it. You would be looking at this image I spend so much effort to create and I will spend my life translating to you all my emotions and feelings. Even after you “learn the words”, you’ll never see my innermost self, who is a far more interesting person, by the way, she’s very funny.

Holding our hands behind our backs, we slowly stroll back along the motorway as the cars whoosh by our side. I feel calm, almost sober, yet something bitter at the root of my tongue is drying out my throat. I look at my heroine as she toewalks, balancing. I smile, she notices it and smiles back. The world is playing a trick on me: a bad feeling that something beautiful is about to end grows in my head and soon engulfs it. The inky indigo of the night begins to yield as the hazy purple gradient creeps from behind the horizon, painting the sky with pools of radiant pink and orange, like swirls of different sorbets bleeding into one another. The sea catches the nascent glow and shimmers like a mirror fragmented into a thousand shards. Upwards, beyond it, the gulls cry and follow us to the city gleaming through veils of illumination like a mirage. The city is getting closer but I don’t want it to; I want it to always stay where it is, frozen and distant. I try not to look at it and instead look at my heroine, the sea, and the sky. I just want to be here, staying and not walking, because with every step, time crawls through me, ferociously, and pulls me forward against my will.

Meanwhile, the blazing sphere of the sun breaches the waterline and Venus dissolves in the sky.

We go through the same public garden. It all feels like a dream, a blurry and dimly lit dream. Now, the gates are open. Everything’s out of place, like someone’s been messing with my dream: different flowers bloom, different smells float in the air, different birds sing. There, in the middle of the park, on the path parallel to ours and separated from us by a long bush, a bald man in an orange garment and a Zen face trims that bush. A monk! He looks at us and we look at him, and at that moment I feel a throbbing urge to ask him about life. He must know, he’s a monk, a disciple of wisdom, he’s been studying the Universe and Self for years, perhaps millennia, his knowledge is far beyond my comprehension, just like the tongue of my heroine. If I had just one question to ask him, what would I ask? What would I so desperately want to know that could make my life take a sharp turn as if it’s on a hinge that needs just a little nudge to move, and what would this man, this bald peaceful monk, know the answer to? What would he say to me? Yes, yes, I know what I should ask (or rather must). But what would he say? Would he say it’s something you don’t learn but feel, or that it’s all chemicals in our brain? Or something else? I don’t care, I just need an answer. So, I clear my throat of bitter mucus and approach him, leaning on the bush.

— Excuse me, dear mister. If I may ask just one question... What is the language of love?

The monk barks out a caustic laugh.

— How the fuck would I know? It’s 5AM. Go get sober, mate. And don’t touch the bloody bush.

I nod meekly, hearing my heroine’s suppressed chuckle behind me. She takes my hand, says something to the monk, and pulls me towards the exit.

Everything seems old, shabby, as if all the electric charm has been sucked out of it, as if with the sunrise all the slovenliness of the city that was hidden at night has now been revealed: the pavements littered with rubbish, the buildings with dark stains, peeling paint and long meandering cracks with little lizards scurrying between them. Everything has become monotonous and drab, the colour of old, the smell of old, the feel of old. We cross the same arcade with a glass roof, yet now it feels shorter, just a few buildings deep, and emptier, for no one now is torturing elephants, the phantomic melody of which has escaped my head, leaving no trace. We enter the same cobbled piazza that, like everything else before, appears much smaller now, as if new buildings grew overnight, a few rows of them from the periphery to that fountain in the centre where we find our abandoned shoes. We put them on and continue our way along the canal, to the river, next to the empty seafood restaurant with the tables flipped over on the terrace under the plexiglass roof, still being scratched by the poisonous yews. We enter the same hotel where we met last night, and, even though it’s not night anymore, wish each other good night, part ways and ascend to our rooms.

After a short but deep sleep, my consciousness resurfaces at noon. I go to the reception and see her in the same clothes, in slippers, with a suitcase, standing facing the desk while returning the keys.

— Hi, — I say.

— Hi, — she says.

I don’t know what to say, and she, wearing a mellow melancholic expression on her face (which also could be read as “tired”), doesn’t seem to know either, as if last night we spoke in a different tongue.

— What a night, huh? — I say.

— I was going to thank you for it, by the way. It was fun, — she says.

— Fun, yes, — I say.

Prolonged silence, as if nothing, a sheer void, can be prolonged and become tense and dense, thick and vibrating.

— You didn’t say you were leaving today, — I say.

— I didn’t say I will stay. I was here for one night only. My plane was cancelled, and well…

— I see, okay. I’m leaving tomorrow, too.

— Good! One more day, yay! Have fun.

— Thank you. I will. It won’t be that fun, though.

— No, it won’t. That only happens once every 584 days.

I wish her a safe flight, we say goodbye to each other, and she leaves. I watch how she exits the hotel through the automatic door dragging a white wheeled suitcase with a luggage tag hanging from its handle, the case covered in coloured stickers with flowers, flags and landmarks from various countries, and, instantly, in a furious flurry, the words for “goodbye” in their respective tongues pop up in my head. In French, they say “au revoir”; in German, it’s “auf Wiedersehen”; over in Japan, it’s “sayonara”; in Italian, they say “arrivederci”; in Spanish, it’s “adiós”; in Mandarin Chinese, it’s “zàijiàn”; in Hindi, it’s “alvida”; and in Arabic, it’s “wada’an”; in Swahili, it’s “kwaheri”; and so on — it’s always one or two words, but what she said to me was “Tu’baika’lu’ikatu’lui’baikatu’ika’lubaituka’lu’ikabai’tu’lukai”, and I have no idea what and how much it actually means.

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The first episode is, as any first episode should be, a fugue that rehearses and contains, in a way, the whole novel within itself, introducing many of the repeated symbols and imagery, but also the general unified tone of the work. Like the book, it follows “poetic logic” instead of traditional narrative logic. A lot of things are contained and at least attempt to happen in the episode, linked together by association rather than by cause through a spiral / whirlpool / montage of various sensory imagery, then this microcosm is scaled up to the whole book.

One of such features / techniques of Tulubaikaporia, at least in its English translation, is commentary comprised of footnotes by yours truly. As a translator, it was tough to decide what I should talk more about and what less and what I should completely ignore and let the reader figure out and what is a necessary “Russian context” that, even though it’s not essential for reading and comprehension, can enrich the experience beyond just text, so the novel, for better or worse, also plays as a little encyclopaedia for a particular strata of Russian reality. They are, however, not just academic explanations of particular terms and phenomena but indeed a commentary that, as I hope, have their own voice and tone and sometimes turned out to be as digressive as the main text often is, even turning into mini-essays once in a while, which was, well, a lot of fun! Look at these few from the Episode One, a footnote for “Slavoslav Slavoslavovich” and what’s avos’:

As we read through the book together I thought I’d share some additional materials and commentary, including music, paintings, and photos that couldn’t make it to the footnotes, so you could IMMERSE yourself into it even more, using other senses. Some of these concepts and imagery are crucial to the book and appear in the later episodes as well, so knowing how some things “look” and “feel” might only make you more Tulubaikan, which is the endgoal, ngl.

Music

Two songs are woven through the entire chapter: Yegor Letov’s “Ophelia” and Pink Floyd “Wish You Were Here” that fuse into one at the end of the episode, using the rhythmic patterns of Letov’s song with Pink Floyd’s lyrics with some borscht inflections.

The episode also shares my translation of “Ophelia” with one missing second stanza. Below — genuinely exclusive — full translation:

Distant Ophelia laughed in her sleep:
A pot-bellied thrush, a shaggy deer
The habitually last year's painted snow
Easily, lightly and cheerfully crunches on teeth.

Dressed-up Ophelia flowed over the brim:
A serpentine honey, a raspberry poison
A rubber little tramcar, a zinc-coated May
An expired little ticket to the show's rerun

Enamoured Ophelia drifted far away
The night was bright, the earth did ring
Hastily hurried, without hiding from view
The clock to its foolish, comical land

Obedient Ophelia floated to the east
A wondrous captivity, granitic delight
A lemony pathway to an orange grove
Invisible lift to a transcendent floor

Distant Ophelia laughed in her dreams:
A weary demon, a willow bush
Gifted ponies scattered at dawn
To the four winds — try to catch them now—

The translation’s aggressively-literal but I don’t think you can or should translate Letov’s surreal adjective-noun game and grammar-as-surrealism game (the way he stacks up modifiers and scatters idioms without logical hierarchy) using any other approach, more so, not sure one should translate Letov at all but, alas, I did already!

How Letov described the making of this song in an interview:

…It [creative work] comes about like a waterfall, a fountain, but only after you've been knocking at the door for a very long time. Just like that, if you're not doing anything, nothing comes about. I, for instance, from about '98 to 2000 did absolutely nothing — just gave concerts, drank, lived for my own pleasure — and nothing got composed whatsoever. Only when a particular urge arises, when you start to sort of… professionally (that's probably what professionalism actually is) knock at certain doors… track things down…

Take for example, how did "Ophelia" come about? I had this rough poem about Piter — that is, I was composing a little poem about the blockade in Leningrad — "In blockaded Leningrad the clocks are in no hurry…" — about what is NOT yet happening there, and what is happening. Wrote it for a long time and realised something was off about it. And at a certain moment, when I was walking about and searching… hunting, like a professional hunter… I generally hold the view that all of us — those of us who compose things — are not in fact authors. We are some sort of conductors of something that exists somewhere… everywhere. For this you need to muster a certain courage and sign up for the fact that you agree to pay for plugging into this and doing this thing. The payment can sometimes be very cruel and severe, judging by the way artists die all around… As a result of which you grab hold of the thing, and through you passes a kind of current.

Ophelia Paintings

Millais’ “Ophelia”, depicting Shakespeare’s Ophelia floating among wildflowers as she — serene, oblivious, beautiful — drowns, was the painting that directly inspired Letov to write the song that made it into Tulubaikaporia. In the Episode One, however, Ophelia drowns not in a stream but in a pot of borscht.

How I wish, how I wish you were here
Ophelia drowning in a borscht bowl, year after year
Running over the old ground, what have we found?
The same old fears, I wish you were here.

Despite Millais’ painting being seemingly the most famous, many other artists over the years painted Ophelia, too. John William Waterhouse was so obsessed with the lady that he painted her three times in different settings, here’s the best one:

Then we have a by no means exhaustive variety of other Ophelias: the most dramatic by Alexandre Cabanel, the most symbolist by Odilon Redon, and the most drowned by Paul Albert Steck:

And to close the Ophelia parade, the AIphelia drowning in the river of borscht:

Chort

A significant figure in Russian literature, this guy. Sometimes he’s more folkloristic (Gogol), sometimes more religious (Dostoevsky), sometimes more secular (Chekhov) but it’s always the same guy, a supernatural satyr-like trickster who leads humans into the darkness through the means of cosmic irony, in a sense, a minor Faustian Devil figure who deceives humans for the love of the game. In the Episode One, he (almost) emerges from the fridge:

Here the powerless fridge under the cat could have suddenly turned on, hummed, shaken, its door could have swung open and out he’d come — the sly one himself, looking like a chort, hairy, with polished horns and hooves. And we’d sit together with him, and knock back pure Tulubaikan samogón and chase it all down with toasted bread with demonic amounts of garlic, of which he, the sly one, wouldn’t be afraid and would have prepared it for us in the fridge converted into an oven. But no, life isn’t like that. Alas

One of the best canonical descriptions of chort that inspired Vanechka can be found in Chekhov’s story, A Conversation Between a Drunken Man and a Sober Chort:

Do you know what a chort is? It’s a handsome young man, with a mug as black as his boots and with red expressive eyes. On his head, although he isn’t married, he has little horns… and a hairdo à la Capoul. His body is covered in green wool and smells like a dog. At the bottom of his back dangles a tail ending with an arrowhead… Instead of fingers he has claws, instead of feet he has horse hooves. Seeing the chort, Lakhmatov became somewhat troubled, but then, remembering that green chorts have a silly habit of appearing to all generally tipsy people, he soon calmed down.

I dared not translate “chort” and render it as it is, because, well, typical translations like “demon” or “devil” are rather ambiguous. The devil has clear Satan connotations, and a demon isn’t distinct enough, while a chort is Slavic folklore creature. Russian: чёрт, Belarusian and Ukrainian: чорт, Serbo-Croatian čort or črt, Polish: czort and czart, Czech and Slovak: čert, Slovene: črt. So introducing the term directly to English is more than fair, given it’s so easy to read and pronounce, too.

You won’t believe it, but a short story featuring a chort began the idea of writing about Tulubaika even though it didn’t make it into the book eventually, for it belongs to a different cycle. We will, however, still re-feature it on nova·nevédoma soon!

Various pictures of chort for your enjoyment (don’t go blind):

Borscht

Various imagery

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich finishes wiping the bottle with a towel decorated with firebirds. The birds absorb the bubbles of cava and fly off tipsy to winter in Tahiti. Whoosh! And they’re gone. There they hustle, stay and live, have children, and never return either to Tulubaika or to the surrounding villages.

— One every day, — says my doctor, his fake clownish moustache turning him into Felix Dzerzhinsky. — Best in the arse cheek. Right or left — you pick. But I stick it in the left — I fancy commies, you know. Go on, give it a go.

Before him, as in a fairy tale, appears a slightly rusted but clean Opel Kapitän Cabrio, coloured like Schutzstaffel uniform, full of rounded forms, equipped with bug-eyed headlights and a distinctive radiator grille, that very legendary car on which Slavoslav Slavoslavovich’s grandfather drove from Germany in nineteen forty-five, fuming home victoriously to Tulubaika, minus one ear and two fingers on his right hand that were scattered around Europe.

— Complete jamais vu, comrade…

— A function discontinuity… — Alephtina mutters and winces from an apparent attack of her mathematical synaesthesia.

— Flush it down, — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and gives her his freshly prepared portion of Tsar Cannon (thus we call our concoction).

A boozer uncle of mine in Tulubaika once had his hands so scratched up by his cat that my aunt thought he’d tried to cut his wrists, called the shrinks, who somehow packed him into a straitjacket and carted him off in a white bukhanka to the yellow house.

By copper’s will and Alephtina’s wish, the vessel brims with cava and samogón’s swish.

Thank you for reading and watching and, well, being with us!
Until next one!

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Reviews on the book have already started to pop up, which may or may not convince you to pick up a copy too (they should though):

tulubaika.com

OPHELIA: What means this, my lord?

HAMLET: Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.

OPHELIA: Belike this show imports the argument of the play.

—“Hamlet” by William Shakespeare

A dream’s a rogue, a phantom, a goal’s beyond our grasp; the throwback’s doomed — the past is a chimera, a monster caged and clasped.

*Boom!*

Rockets the cork with a thunderous roar and punches a hole in a white panel of suspended ceiling. And there’d been a kitty hiding. Squealing, he darts and dashes around in primordial panic until one of the panels beneath him caves in and the kitty flies right onto our kitchen table, muzzle and front paws plunging into an immeasurable pot of borscht, the immensity of which could have solved planetary hunger almost forever. We laugh, pick up the borschted Meowbius and carry him to the bathroom for a wash whilst he licks the soup off his muzzle. If he’d pulled such a stunt in my parents’ house, they’d have grabbed him by the tail and carried him to the vet whilst he mewled, scratched, begged and tried to convince them of his innocence, that he was just doing his job, just catching the universal Mouse above that ceiling as he was destined to, or even exaggerated and said that there were swarms of them, those little grey parasites, who at night drum on the ceiling with hundreds of their little paws and don’t let his esteemed and dear owners sleep. My parents wouldn’t listen, would still bring him to the vet and, holding him by the tail, get him castrated on the spot so he wouldn’t be so rowdy any more. A castrated village cat as a metaphor: lazy, fat, with eyes either like those of an Alexandrian philosopher or a Tibetan monk, having convinced himself of the superiority of mind over phallus, living his best life where he needn’t kowtow to his libido, but can simply eat, sleep, meditate on dancing flies, sunbeams, and sparrows. But a metaphor for what? Ponder later.

— And you… when was the last time you were in Tulubaika?

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich1 is now a balding, paunchy copper. His blue eyes have turned navy to match his uniform, his golden mop got tired of sitting on his head and sprawled all over his body. I want to have a proper chat with him, but there’s nothing to talk about. Not because he’s bald and paunchy, and not even because he’s a copper (though such treachery, I must admit, is hard to forgive, even harder not to joke about, and impossible to weed out of your head), but simply because too many chaotic moments have occurred between the past and present, which, as in an old black-and-white cartoon, magically lined up into a huge interpersonal wall, propped up on both sides by rusty cast-iron pillars. “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control.” We live in different strata of reality. I’ve been to Berlin and seen the wall, and he hasn’t, which is a shame. He probably can’t even leave the country, which is also a shame. We speak different languages whilst using the same words and grammar. Life is morphology, a birdly fall into the ocean, but not for fish. To die? Oh no, to reach the depths. What depths? The depths of understanding existence through the study of forms. For there, in the darkness deep, down at the bottom, is a window, and in that window — transcendental visions, perhaps a fat learned cat2, waving its paw at sparrows, lies. No longer walks he round the golden chain, instead, turns over a chimera-thought in his lil’head, ponders how young he used to be, how he leapt among tall grass all dewed. Hop-skip, hop-skip — to the call of rustling wraps, pantherly homewards I bounce, mug cobwebbed — quick-quick-quick — for dry cat food shan’t wait for my arrival, shan’t ever eat itself! For who am I if not the most dangerous animal on this planet, a violent creature filled with hateful thoughts and a lust for blood and empty boxes?

What to say?

— Can’t remember. Ages ago, I reckon. And you?

We’re calculating the distance to a place that barely exists. It’s sort of there but sort of not and quantum mechanics has nought to do with it. Now, let’s take a ruler. A trophy Opel Kapitän sets off from point A to point B, but halfway to point B the engine coughs tubercularly and the car stops. The driver gets out, fixes it, continues the journey, but after travelling half of the remaining half, the car stops again, and so on, half after half. The task: knowing the speed, distance, repair time, and everything else (see Appendix), calculate when the trophy Opel Kapitän will reach point B.

— Every year I plan to but never quite manage it, — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich replies, shrugging. — Work…

— And how is it there these days, do you know?

— Oh, they say it’s good…

— That’s good that it’s good.

— Yeah… Good is always not bad… Much rain these days, they say.

— Well, there’ll be mushrooms then.

— There will be… For sure…

— I could do with frying some chanterelles right now.

— Or pickling them… Or going fishing…

— Naaay. I don’t like fishing.

— You used to like fishing.

Oh, I used to like all sorts of things, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich. I wouldn’t even pick mushrooms myself now — I’d buy them from an old lady on the road to support the local gross product per capita, because you can’t order that sort of thing on any internets.

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich finishes wiping the bottle with a towel decorated with firebirds. The birds absorb the bubbles of cava and fly off tipsy to winter in Tahiti. Whoosh! And they’re gone. There they hustle, stay and live, have children, and never return either to Tulubaika or to the surrounding villages.

— I still go… Both winter and summer… Mm… — continues Slavoslav after a long pause.

— Where to?

— Fishing, of course…

— Ah, fishing.

— Yeah, there’s a lil’lake not far from here… Not quite Tulubaikan but still decent… We could go, you know… I caught an ide recently, — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich hints modestly.

— A big one?

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich smirks, as if I’d doubted his fishing abilities, and in the air, in addition to the alcoholic fumes, there now hangs a sensation of the unstarted tale about the ide, the tale that no one will ever begin or finish, but nevertheless the tale that lingers, begging with all its being to be let out, and we, mere mortals, don’t let it, for we don’t need it — we already know what kind of tale it is, for tales like these can be told with just one look, so much so that Tolstoy himself would grow thin3, our dear Leo Nikolaevich, may he rest in peace and no war. Our dialogue with Slavoslav Slavoslavovich is built exclusively on such tales. They are the pillars of creation of the universe of our communication, unshakable strongholds, understood with just a brief stoic nod, man to man.

— You bet! Bloody enormous. Wanna see the video?

Some tales express their essence through a phone screen, just as stoically, phone to phone.

Go on then, I think to myself, I’d like to see this ide, and Slavoslav Slavoslavovich immediately draws his phone from its sheath and shows me the video of that ide thrashing about on the grass in hysteric waterlessness. Bloody enormous, indeed.

— You speak true, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich, such a biggie.

He nods and starts the video again.

— Thought the line wouldn’t hold, but luckily we managed. Had to call a lorry, though. The whole village ate that ide afterwards.

— Ukha4?

— Nay, tiddlers would be enough for ukha… Smoked.

The smoky flavour on my tongue, a whiff of smoke in my nose, and my mouth’s turning into a saliva reservoir. I watch the ide flap its tail to and fro, bouncing, and think: I’d like to give this a proper like, man to man, I must, so I scan for the heart icon, find it at the bottom of the screen, and immediately tap it. Slavoslav Slavoslavovich nods approvingly.

— I feel sorry for it, — I say, — the king of the lake waters.

— Sorry not sorry, but what can you do? It’s nature. A cat wouldn’t feel sorry for it.

— Well, we’re no cats, you and I, we’re hoomans, oh-ho-ho and what kind.

— We’re worse. A cat’s at least honest in its intentions. A cat’s an unprincipled hunter. To it, a mouse, an ide, or borscht — it’s all the same, all prey. But we… Eh…

I try to absorb the philosophical substrate and rummage through my lexicon in search of a good word to form a response, shaking my head for a long time, vibing to the music playing from the next room. According to ancient beliefs, our parents listened to this music, and now we listen to it, too. What was cringe has become nostalghia, and so it is with everything. There, behind the wall, are endless ghostly laughter and voices of several more classmates, all mixed into one voice babbling something in an incomprehensible language, even more incomprehensible than the one Slavoslav Slavoslavovich speaks. Let them sit there, behind the wall; we’re fine here. The kitchen is the temple of any party; the kitchen is where truth flows. Had I my will afree — a human will with a speck of divinity — I’d transform with one wave of my hand all gatherings, parties, events, the whole world into a small table pushed against the wall in the kitchen with three chairs around it and people casually consulting each other about crises of various grades: existential, spiritual, creative, financial, political, ecological, even approaching midlife ones. Thus we’d sit in the wafting wisps of a wakened, wined wonder and talk, talk about this and that, about everything, about bits and bobs, the infinite and finite, in particular about how to achieve harmony of cosmos and chaos in the process of cooking borscht, and why borscht might be the key to understanding dialectical materialism and metaphysics as a whole. Real borscht, like real life, isn’t cooked by the book, but by intuition, by eye and by avos’5, and the correct dialectic occurs to you only when your head cracks along the welding seams in the morning. The main thing is to remember that in a true dialectical borscht there’s always room for thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, and, of course, smetana6. Where would we be without it? For smetana is the symbol of unity and struggle of opposites, Gogol once said to Hegel. Only in such a kitchen confessional, in this cabal of souls desperate and splattered with borscht, can something real, something alive be born.

Here Alephtina finally returns, alone and without Meowbius, looks at us, at the ceiling, at the pot, shakes her head, sighs.

— Please eat the borscht.

— With the cat? — I ask.

— What do you mean “with the cat”? Should we throw it out now?

— Well, there’s no need to throw the cat out… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich smirks.

— Our cat’s clean, we wash him every week.

— And he licks his cat balls every day.

— He’s got nothing to lick, don’t worry.

— He licks anyway, though. Thoroughly, with hope. One never knows; they might come back.

— He probably doesn’t even know they’re gone. That’s how you live your life, with balls, and then — bam! — no balls, but the habit remains, — adds Slavoslav Slavoslavovich.

— Yes, they both exist and don’t exist until he looks “down there”. This sort of thing often happens with cats, — Alephtina giggles.

As a child, Alephtina read Borges and thought that “Aleph” was about her. With age, however, she understood that it was, is, and will be about Tulubaika. At the moment when this Truth revealed her sacred orchid before Alephtina, she decided to abandon her previous endeavours and become a scientist. Now Alephtina is an asymptotologistess, application-oriented, studying ley asymptotes, a special type of ley lines (world-connecting curves) which one can approach indefinitely without ever reaching them. In Tulubaika, according to widespread theories, there is a place where these lines intersect at one point, thus forming the most unreachable point on the planet.

— For a function f(x), the line y = g(x) is an asymptote if lim[x→∞] |f(x) - g(x)| = 0, — Alephtina explains, while I ladle borscht into bowls, and Slavoslav Slavoslavovich dilutes our cava with artisanal samogón7 of mysterious potency, distilled using an ancient Tulubaikan recipe left to us, they say, by the Mongols themselves. — In the case of Tulubaika, however, we’re dealing with a multidimensional space, where each dimension represents a separate aspect of reality. Imagine a function T(x₁, x₂, …, xₙ), where n tends to infinity. Tulubaika might be a point containing all points of the universe, a kind of singularity in this multidimensional space.

Alephtina takes a deep breath and continues:

— In mathematical terms, this is a place where the function of being T(x) doesn’t just tend to infinity, but undergoes a discontinuity of the second kind. In other words, lim[x→Tulubaika⁺] T(x) ≠ lim[x→Tulubaika⁻] T(x), and both these limits can be equal to infinity, but with different signs. Just imagine!

Slavoslav Slavoslavovich grunts into his moustache, which he doesn’t have and never has had, and pours more samogón into the cava.

— Moreover, — Alephtina continues, helically stirring the borscht in her bowl, — if we consider Tulubaika as an attractor in the dynamic system of our reality, we’ll see that it possesses a fractal dimension. It isn’t an integer, which explains the impossibility of fully comprehending it. Formally, this can be expressed as: D = lim[ε→0] (log N(ε) / log(1/ε)), where N(ε) is the number of n-dimensional cubes with side ε needed to cover Tulubaika, and in practice, — she adds, sipping her borscht, — this means that the closer we try to get to the essence of Tulubaika, the more details we discover, and this process is endless. As Poincaré said, “Science is a continuous approximation to Truth. It’s an eternal chase, but not after a chimera, rather after an asymptote”.

— White noise… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich mumbles.

— They don’t teach you this in cop school?

— No, they don’t, and for that thanks to our comrade Major Yehoshua, may his memory be blessed, — he adds sarcastically. — No need to dilute our Orthodox thought with your foreign sciences. For such heresy, we could lock you up for fifteen days8, citizenette9.

We all laugh heartily. Alephtina leaves her spoon in the bowl and eyes the glasses, clapping her hands in anticipation.

— Tell me, what have you concocted?

— So, mademoiselle, we wished-s10 to concoct a refined from-over-yonder cocktail, following a most esteemed French recipe. Alas, upon inspection, we discovered-s that our Champagne is from Spain, and the English gin is nowhere to be found. Therefore, if it pleases you, we shall substitute-s it with the Tulubaikan samogón traditionnel, forsooth.

— Oh indeed, messieurs, that is how great discoveries are born, isn’t it? — says Alephtina and picks up her glass.

— Well… shall we? — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich.

— We shall, indeed.

We raise our glasses and clink them.

— Wait-wait, what about helixing?

— Right you are, mademoiselle.

— Not for nothing you’re a scientist now, citizenette.

We swirl our faceted Soviet glasses until little whirlpools form, following Alephtina’s advice to create a stochastic process in the drink and enrich it with oxygen. We sip. The spirit rushes through the body in spirals, warming the corporeal and the incorporeal. My chronic déjà vu immediately intensifies, and my forehead fills with a hot-cold sensation that we’re sitting exactly as we sat ten and twenty years ago, and everything around is nothing but a nostalgic dream staged by a radical art-house theatre troupe—

— One every day, — says my doctor, his fake clownish moustache turning him into Felix Dzerzhinsky11. — Best in the arse cheek. Right or left — you pick. But I stick it in the left — I fancy commies, you know. Go on, give it a go.

In my hand — a syringe, pearlescent goo shimmering inside it. As if I’m about to jab myself with a vial of glitter.

— And then boom, it’s all gone?

— No booms, compadre. It’ll be gone gradually.

— Maybe there are pills?

— The pills are bitter as olives from the tree. You might get asphyxia (and not an erotic one, mind you). Then, of course, everything’ll be gone with a boom.

— Is there perhaps a stronger dose? Like, one-and-done, fixed for good?

— No, compadre patient, be patient. Chronic déjà vu is incurable, I’m afraid. You’ll be on jabs for life now. I suffer from it myself but I jab it regularly and it’s fine — no bother. But if you ever want it like before (ha-ha), skip a couple of days and everything will be back to square one. Will you give it a go now?

— My wife will “give it a go” for me at home. I’m afraid to do it myself.

— I could “give it a go” for you.

— I’m fine, thank you very much.

The doc nods understandingly.

— Better before dinner, this one.

I stand up, adjust my shirt with rolled-up sleeves, shake the doctor’s poisonously blue rubber hand, and head for the door.

— Doc, what about the centrists? — I ask before fleeing this torture chamber.

— Ah, those… They use rectal suppositories, so it dissolves inside. It’s uncomfortable to sit at first, though. The suppositories aren’t small, mind you.

We nod to each other stoically, man to man. I exit, slamming the door—

On trips, I give it a go myself, contorting in front of the mirror in the hotel bathroom. I alternate right and left, just in case, to avoid jinxing it, but I reckon I forgot to dose up today and yesterday. So here we are, flare-up time.

— Oh, how lovely! — Alephtina exclaims, polishing off her glass. — This is what I’m getting at. How’s your car, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich?

— Well, I took a taxi here. It’s a piss-up, after all.

— What do I care about your taxis, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich? The Opel, I’m asking about your trophy Opel.

— Ah, the Opel… It starts up.

— Does it run?

— Runs it does. Not quite factory-fresh, mind you, but goes like the clappers. Bit of a rattle here and there but that’s nought. More “authentic” that way, as they say.

— Will you give us a ride?

— Well… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich clams up.

— For old times’ sake. When else will we get a chance to ride in a trophy Opel?

— Well… There are still a couple of parts to replace… Can’t seem to find the right paint…

— Just tell us which one you need and we’ll sort you out.

Every evening after work, and sometimes on weekends, all year round, Slavoslav Slavoslavovich escapes from his family for a rendezvous. He walks along dark streets, encountering stray dogs and the absence of asphalt on the way, but such nuances are like smetana to a cat for him; he’s a copper, with a gun. Reaching the coveted garage — one of the endless alleys of them, planted by Stalin himself back in the days of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich opens the gates. Before him, as in a fairy tale, appears a slightly rusted but clean Opel Kapitän Cabrio, coloured like Schutzstaffel uniform, full of rounded forms, equipped with bug-eyed headlights and a distinctive radiator grille, that very legendary car on which Slavoslav Slavoslavovich’s grandfather drove from Germany in nineteen forty-five, fuming home victoriously to Tulubaika, minus one ear and two fingers on his right hand that were scattered around Europe. At one point, the totality of parts that had fallen into disrepair in this Opel amounted to about a hundred per cent. Slavoslav Slavoslavovich managed to replace some from local sources, some I sent him from overseas. Question: does the old grandfather’s Opel remain the same trophy Opel if every original part in it has been changed several times? One might accidentally become a Volga that way.

For a split second it darkens, either in the world or in my eyes, but immediately after that, the night illuminates the kitchen with lightning. She’s looking for sad people, the lightning. Hail begins to bombard the balcony windows and door, in a minute filling the balcony itself to the brim with icy tennis balls until they start spilling over the edge. Thunder drowns out the music, but the squeals and gasps of those gathered for the piss-up are still louder.

— That’s some weather!

— Did you clock that?

— Fuck me sideways…

— This has never happened before and here we go again!

— Blazinn oodles!

— I hope my greenhouse is still standing…

Flash number two. Scratching the linoleum on his way and bumping into every doorframe, Meowbius, electrified after a hairdryer ordeal, bursts into the kitchen and, with one precise leap onto the fridge, begins the ritual of summoning the sly one12.

— Ekekekekek tenebris princeps, audi vocem meam, surge ex abysso, miau, et appare coram me! — he could have shouted, and we all could have chorused “amen” at the end. We could do so much more that it’s unclear why we’re not doing it, at least “for the plot” it would definitely have been worth doing.

The light in the flat goes out, someone in the next room yelps, someone laughs, an unknown piece of crockery breaks.

— “Let there be light!” the handyman declared and snipped the power dead!13 — announces one of the guests.

The frightened cat’s orbs begin to glow with hellfire. Around his fur gathers a sparkling aura. Oh no… Oh no… Oh no, no, no, no, no.

— Miau! Nunc est bibendum lac! Ekekekek — Meowbius could have howled. — Audi me, serve humane! MIAU!

Here the powerless fridge under the cat could have suddenly turned on, hummed, shaken, its door could have swung open and out he’d come — the sly one himself, looking like a chort14, hairy, with polished horns and hooves. And we’d sit together with him, and knock back pure Tulubaikan samogón and chase it all down with toasted bread with demonic amounts of garlic, of which he, the sly one, wouldn’t be afraid and would have prepared it for us in the fridge converted into an oven. But no, life isn’t like that. Alas.

Alephtina wants to pick up Meowbius, but he hisses, kicks, flails his paws chaotically, so that with one careless blow, Alephtina would be walking around with an eye patch. A boozer uncle of mine in Tulubaika once had his hands so scratched up by his cat that my aunt thought he’d tried to cut his wrists, called the shrinks, who somehow packed him into a straitjacket and carted him off in a white bukhanka15 to the yellow house16. What they did to him there remains a mystery, but he returned sober and never drank again. Note: treating alcoholism with a cat.

— Leave him be… He’ll shred you to bits, — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich tells Alephtina, leaning back slightly.

— He’s got no claws, — Alephtina replies, trying to wrangle the cat.

— No balls, no claws… What a life…

— He’s just scared. Look, he’s calming down already, — she nods at Meowbius purring in her arms.

With grace, electricity returns to our chambers. To the accompaniment of copper pipes17 and the whole orchestra joining them, those gathered burst into applause, whistles and sincere thanks to Ionius, the overlord of electricity, and the master of all free ions in the universe, who, to become free, had to protest against universal darkness quite a bit.

Someone, whose seasoned face I haven’t yet recognised, quickly pops into the kitchen, asks whether we are bored sitting in the kitchen all by threeselves (cats don’t count as conversationalists, not even ones like Meowbius), offers to join everyone else, to which we unanimously no-no, offers a joint, which we also prefer to no-no (for now, though), then, shrugging us off, grabs a random bottle of alcohol and, bowing out, leaves the kitchen temple.

Alephtina goes to the fridge with the disgruntled cat, opens it with one hand, takes out milk and pours it into a bowl. Meowbius, jumping down from her arms, begins to lap up the feline holy water, smacking his lips. She, meanwhile, takes out an hourglass standing on the corner shelf under a portrait of her smiling wrinkled grandma in a headscarf. Inside the hourglass, instead of sand, is nothing other than the ashes of the said old lady, who was rumoured to have possessed extremely supernatural abilities (at least by Tulubaikan standards). Sighing heavily, Alephtina sits at the table and places the hourglass in front of us. In a thin stream, Grandma Nüra seeps from the upper part of the hourglass into the lower.

— How long does she last?

— That I haven’t figured out yet, to be honest.

— We could just flip it over, — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and reaches for the hourglass, to which Alephtina lightly slaps his hand.

— Hands off or I’ll flip your head over; better pour us some. You’re performing your duties poorly, Comrade Captain, — Alephtina declares sternly, yet with an indecent amount of irony, and pushes her glass to the centre of the table.

By copper’s will and Alephtina’s wish, the vessel brims with cava and samogón’s swish18. I, meanwhile, lean towards the hourglass to observe Grandma Nüra’s descent.

— Look here, — Alephtina intones, after first rinsing her mouth with the drink. — There’s very little left.

We, pretending to have understood everything, nod in unison, men to woman.

— We need to go there sharpish, — she enunciates, taking a sip.

— Where to?

— Where do you think? To Tulubaika.

— To Tulubaika?

— Oh.

— You do come out with some bangers sometimes, Alya19. “Sharpish!”

— I’ve found out that, with a margin of error of three point four per cent (dead accurate, I should mention), Tulubaika will vanish as soon as Grandma Nüra runs out.

— Vanish? — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and I ask, taken aback.

— Vanish.

— Just up and vanish, like that?

— Precisely like that. A spacetime singularity will occur and the village will collapse into itself. Flop and gone. Well, that’s in theory.

— Well, blow me down… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich drawls, scratching his bald bonce. — Like in the Bermuda Triangle?

— No, for real. No fairy tales. Poof! And no Tulubaika.

— How’s that?

— Just like that. You know how it was in childhood? Your grandma asks you to help. “Go fetch some bread,” so she says. You agree, toddle off to the kiosk, but it has run out of bread. What a pity, right?

— Too right.

— So you think: I’ll go to the next village then, can’t let grandma down, can I? You walk for an hour through fields, through birch groves burning with golden flames, triumphantly buy the last loaf of white bread in the only shop called “SHOP” in the neighbouring village, walk back, get bored, hunger awakens in your belly, you forget everything in a childish way…

— For a moment of total transcendence…

— Exactly. You start eating this bread, just biting the loaf straight from the bag — it doesn’t matter where you’re taking it or to whom, it’s still warm, crusty, the most delicious fresh bread you’ve ever tasted.

— Wouldn’t mind some fresh bread now, I must say…

— So you walk, head in the clouds, grasshopping, admiring nature, maybe accidentally stumbling over an asymptote (they say children can still trip over them, and some can even jump over them like a skipping rope, fancy that), and there you are; you return to the village, but grandma’s gone — she died; they took her away in an ambulance straight to the cemetery in a coffin prepared at home, cobbled together for a bottle of vodka by John the carpenter from the boards of the old collapsed Communist Party hut. What can you do? She was old, took three nostalghin pills every day and suffered from chronic déjà vu like everyone in our parts. And there you stand thinking: what now? I’ve already eaten the bread.

— Been there, done that… — Slavoslav Slavoslavovich nods. He looks like he might fall asleep any moment.

— It’ll vanish completely. It will for us, and we will for it. If we arrive too late, we will not even recognise each other, — says Alephtina.

Time in Tulubaika always dabbled in certain dilations, like on that planet in “Interstellar.” You seem to have already graduated from university, gotten married, travelled the world, changed a dozen jobs, gained muscle and intellect — practically ascended to Apollo and Dionysus in one person, but in Tulubaika it’s as if nothing has changed, yet everything is completely different.

— That’s why I don’t want to go and won’t go, — I tell them straight.

They, Alephtina and Slavoslav Slavoslavovich, suddenly turn to me, having sheathed all their alcoholic intoxication, and ask in unison:

— And why’s that then?

And I look at them and don’t recognise them, as if my chronic déjà vu has again metastasised into chronic jamais vu. Déjà vu, jamais vu… Even a sober tongue would tie itself in knots, not to be untied. The world’s a splash from fish tails gliding through void’s vast sea. Splash! And chimeras flee the present, troika-harnessed20, clasping throats of forms and images, devouring all they see. Memories entwine in wreaths, from mind flee silently, sprawl languidly on graves. These people I (don’t) remember, their faces (un)familiar to me, their voices (not) known to me, a ghostly similarity is all my wretched thought can find, reflected in their plea — eyes hungry for my words, awaiting eagerly.

Somewhere in the beautiful distance, lightning flashes, and the sound of rain and thunder gently-nostalgically taps on the membranes of our ear shells. I sit, watch, unwind a thoughtful thought — the answer won’t construct itself, just like communism over and over again, while in the next room the lads get out a guitar and start singing Yegor Letov21:

Distant Ophelia laughed in her sleep:

A pot-bellied thrush, a shaggy deer

The habitually last year’s painted snow

Easily, lightly and cheerfully crunches on teeth.

— Jamais vu, — I finally answer after a pause as long as two pauses (or three).

— Jamais what?

— Huh?

— Jamais vu. Like déjà vu, but the opposite. You look around and everything seems like it’s for the first time. I’m afraid that I’ll arrive in Tulubaika like this and… What will I see there? Neither grandmother’s baking, nor fishing with grandfather, nor the cat Dulcinea engaging in mouse-catching and obscurantism, only the creaking junk in the form of a windmill that echoes throughout the area, trees grown to the skies and fields overgrown with shrubs and weeds. Jamais vu, in a word.

— Complete jamais vu, comrade…

— A function discontinuity… — Alephtina mutters and winces from an apparent attack of her mathematical synaesthesia.

— Flush it down, — says Slavoslav Slavoslavovich and gives her his freshly prepared portion of Tsar Cannon22 (thus we call our concoction).

The theatricality of the musical performance in the neighbouring room intensifies manifold and begins to sound from inside my skull:

Enamoured Ophelia drifted far away

The night was bright, the earth did ring

Hastily hurried, without hiding from view

The clock to its foolish, comical land

Obedient Ophelia floated to the east

A wondrous captivity, granitic delight

A lemony pathway to an orange grove

Invisible lift to a transcendent floor

— So what’s the point of going then?

Alephtina rolls her eyes.

— All the more reason. That’s the whole point. We need to go.

— I don’t want to go anywhere.

— Consider Tulubaika as a quantum system T(ψ). If we can describe the attempt to return with the equation T’(ψ’) = M[T(ψ)], where M is the measurement operator changing the state of the system.

— White noise…

— Returning to Tulubaika is equivalent to finding a fixed point T(ψ) = M[T(ψ)], but the existence of such a point is not guaranteed, because Tulubaika is not only a point in space, but also a continuum of states described by the statistical ensemble of our memories and expectations.

— I second that, — I say, then nod towards Slavoslav Slavoslavovich. — But the noise is still too white.

— In short, the past Tulubaika is asymptotically unreachable by definition. Consider it gone already… (Alephtina hiccups) And it won’t be back. But some version of it still exists…

We sit, silent, hiccupping, in one ear — a guitar, in the other — Meowbius’s purring, sprawled on the floor by my right foot, the very one with a hole in the sock, causing the big toe to stick out and provoke the cat to bite. Ekekek he goes, ekekek. The borscht has already cooled; in it, the smetana has spread in white lumps, cosily gathered around oval drops of yellow fat that now tends towards a solid state. Meanwhile:

Distant Ophelia laughed in her dreams:

A weary demon, a willow bush

Gifted ponies scattered at dawn

To the four winds — try to catch them now—

— You see, compadre, chronic déjà vu, — the doctor tells me, — is not just an obsessive feeling but a whole syndrome of temporal dysfunction. If left untreated, there occurs, so to speak, an inversion of the perceptual continuum.

— Huh? — I exclaim.

My brain is about to melt and flow out of my ears.

The doctor exhales all the air from his lungs and, gesticulating like a juggler, continues to broadcast his cerebral ambrosia:

— Imagine the brain as a huge hourglass where the grains of sand are your memories. With déjà vu, this hourglass works as it should but with a small glitch when sand from the lower bulb, by a miraculous coincidence, seeps back into the upper one. But if no measure is taken, it can get worse, and the sand will start to get stuck. First in the narrow neck, then in the bulbs themselves.

— I see…

— By looking at you, I don’t think you do. The danger is: when a critical mass of memory-grains gets stuck, your brain is no longer able to make sense of this petrified chaos of memory, and begins to perceive everything as new, even though you remember everything. This is jamais vu. You look at your wife and feel like you don’t recognise her. You come to your home village and feel like you’re seeing it for the first time. You read a book you knew by heart, and each page is again a revelation to you. But the worst thing, compadre, is that you stop recognising yourself.

The doctor falls silent, thoughtfully stroking his fake luxuriant moustache. Quite dramatic, that chap.

— Even suppositories won’t help there. Regardless of their size.

Biting my lower lip, I nod and once again shake the doctor’s poisonously blue rubber hand—

In the dewy morning, after the roosters hoarsely greet the dawn, we (plus grumpy Meowbius), sobered up, slightly gloomy, charged with ibuprofen, nostalghin and melancholin, will sit in the trophy Opel Kapitän and, puffing and rattling, collecting potholes and chort-knows-whats, across the boundless field between oat dunes, in the shade of birches blazing with golden fire, with rotting leaves wrapped around the wheel, mixed with the rotting remains of bad news from newspapers, which you’d only use to wipe your arse with, will head Tulubaikawards.

But for now, we’re still sitting, watching gravity pull Baba Nüra’s23 ashes into the lower bulb of the hourglass, finishing off the dialectical borscht reheated in the microwave, and listening as, somehow keeping the chords and rhythm, behind the wall in which there isn’t a single brick, Pink Floyd together with Ophelia drown in the raging streams of borscht…

How I wish, how I wish you were here

Ophelia drowning in a borscht bowl, year after year

Running over the old ground, what have we found?

The same old fears, I wish you were here.

If you liked this story, you’d be happy to learn there’re 22 episodes in Tulubaikaporia, a book that’s already available for you to read in its entirety:

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