Forty Rooms Read Online Free PDF Page B

dead knowledge, and later sat by the fire pit behind the house for nearly two hours. Olga joined me halfway through the destruction, and we took turns mockingly declaiming this or that sentence, crumpling this or that equation into a ball, laughing with theatrical abandon as we fed the flames. I had waited for the day to condense into evening, so the fire would blaze with fierceness against the sky. I had also waited for my parents to leave. I had not told them. My mother would have worried that a stray spark might burn down the house. My father would have disapproved on general principles: he believed in the preservation of history, personal or otherwise.
    “No regrets on my part,” I say now, addressing my father’s reproachful voice in my head. “I avenged myself for all the time killed.”
    “Still, they might have come in useful someday,” Olga interjects thoughtfully. “I don’t know, maybe I’ll write a book about it when I’m old—say, when I’m forty. My childhood in the dark Soviet times. Torments of an artistic soul in the period of oppression. That sort of thing.” She giggles. “Or not. At the very least I could have shown those horrors to my offspring: See, children, don’t complain, your life could have been so much worse!”
    “Thinking rather ahead, are you not?”
    “Well, children are a given, I guess. Or don’t you want them?”
    After a decade of sharing dreams, fears, and long, bedbound stretches of illness, we frequently borrow each other’s quirks of speech and our facial expressions likewise often mirror each other’s, but Olga’s eyes appear more focused than mine, and there is more resolve, more ambitious drive, in her face, in the thin lips that she purses with firmness. She always knows just what she wants before I am even aware of the choices. I do not know whether or not I want children; the notion seems irrelevant to me, and I have not given it much consideration. What I do not want, I think with sudden ferocity, is a small life—a life of mundane concerns, of fulfilled expectations, of commonplaces and banalities, of children’s sore throats, of grandmother’s apple pies, of fussy nineteenth-century porcelain—a life within four walls. I set down my cup, carefully but quickly; the streaks of soot, I notice, have dimmed the gilt a little.
    “I would like to go to other places,” I say with a vehemence that startles me. “New places. Strange places. Not to have a house anywhere but just travel from place to place, smell it, taste it, describe it, remember it all, then move on . . .”
    “I want to go to America,” Olga announces. “I could work there when I get my journalism degree. Do you ever wonder where you’ll be at forty?”
    I understand that one is expected to muse upon one’s future on this momentous threshold of adulthood, but all the same, this predictable question makes me feel vaguely depressed, as if casting into instant doubt the smoky, bright, liberating hour by the fire, robbing it of color and life, flattening it into some artificial rite of passage indulged in solely for the sake of future reminiscing: Ah yes, I too was young once, I too was full of rebellion and revelry, I laughed free and wild by the fire, I dreamed of glory on a moonlit summer night . . . For as I sit on my beloved dacha balcony, watching the translucent June light tiptoe deeper into shadows, listening to the whistle of a faraway train, breathing in the aroma of lindens, I catch myself cataloguing the world around me, coining it into pocket-size verbal snapshots (the “soft dusk”—the “melancholy train”—the “dizzying smells”), to be retrieved at a convenient future date as a prepackaged nostalgia exhibit, or worse, as well-worn currency for some insipid poem.
    All at once I am chilled by the gap widening precipitously between the present moment and my experience of it. Has life somehow, without my noticing, become its own paling reflection in a