The Scent of a White Lily Petal

This is the prologue, and it isn’t connected to the main plot.

Recently, I started translating my novella. This is the first time I’ve translated such a large work, so sometimes I feel a bit lost and probably miss some things along the way. The novella is written in a postmodern style and tells the story of the 1990s in one of the former Soviet republics. Sometimes I even feel that an American reader might not be able to understand everything in the same way I do. I’m going to share an excerpt and would really appreciate any feedback you can give me, as it would help me in my further work on the translation.

A thousand times, every night, like a worn-out film, I see the same dream, seeming frightening and bleak when I'm asleep, and silly and pointless when I'm awake.

I see a one-story house with a glass-enclosed terrace, with its window frames painted white. There's something extra-domestic about it, reminiscent of those old houses where people lived for decades, constantly adjusting and renovating. Where every corner is so lived-in that everything seems eternal and unchanging, where nothing should be moved or even shifted.

There, in a dream, one could find words to describe it, but here, in reality, it's very difficult. Perhaps this house is simply a childhood memory, when all houses were one-story, and people didn't travel endlessly from place to place, but lived and died in their homes, sometimes managing to live to a ripe old age. And their children continued to live there, and so on.

I see it every night and know that I'm not there. And I also wonder whether I should be happy about it or... or sad? No, not at all - not sadness, not sorrow, not melancholy, but rather a mad horror that can only be experienced in a nightmare.

I enter the door and walk across the terrace. At the entrance stands a stroller with twin babies. They wear blue caps and are covered in a white pique blanket. One is crying - the other is laughing. You can tell by their faces, because no sound breaks the eternal silence. This silence has always been, and these children have always been. They are a decoration, they simply exist along with their stroller and that's it.

On a wooden table there's all sorts of dirty dishes, scraps - but not a single object can be moved. It simply exists. A rigid form that, God knows, secures what, what meanings or signs of the unreality of my consciousness. Everything that is here is solid and unchanging, and therefore resembles tombstones under the vaults of a cathedral or the endless halls of a columbarium.

However, there is one thing here that moves. It's a little girl in a red floral dress, an ugly apron, and pigtails sticking out like an old doll's. She's sweeping the floor, silently present in every room at once. I know that she is in all of them. I see her - she moves, but she is as constant, solid, and eternal as everything else. I'm terribly afraid of her - she's different. I feel her alienness with all my senses. She doesn't threaten, doesn't speak, doesn't attack, but I'm almost more afraid of her than the greatest fear lurking in this house.

That fear is in the farthest room, cluttered with all sorts of junk. I know where it sits and always find it without fail because I make this journey a thousand times - and always find it. Fear is a large glass chest. As soon as you lift the lid, toads begin to form spontaneously at the bottom, they endlessly self-generate, jump out, and stick to clothes, hands, and faces. I tear these slimy, cold bodies off myself with disgust and know that if I don't manage in time, the toad will grow together with you - and that's terrible and disgusting.

But, of course, I'm lucky and cunning, I always manage to escape in time. To rush in panic through the enfilade of eternal rooms, and, at the limit of my emotional strength, to be frightened one last time by the clean girl in an apron. To run, run past the stroller down the wooden steps and the stone path. To run as if someone is chasing me. To scream and not hear my own voice, and not feel my feet, and not be able to fly, although I used to be able.

That's when I meet this person. I don't know him at all, but something about him doesn't sit right with me, and then I cunningly send him into the house. I know he won't come back from there, and I eagerly await the moment when my conscience starts to torment me. But then I suddenly realize that I'm waiting for this in vain, and my conscience will torment not me, but the one who was in this house with my eyes, the one who opened this chest and was afraid of the girl. The one who sent the stranger to his death. It's his memory, not mine. It's he who will return to the house and perish with his victim because his conscience will torment him. And I will only be left with the bitterness that another episode was not lived by me, and my day was once again wasted, I fell out of my life - faceless and pale, neither joyful nor sad - nothing.

I do something, but not what I want, but only what anyone can do.

Some people are destined to live and create situations. Others - to listen, see, and think.

And I love peace. That's why I removed myself. No one will know who I am or what I am. Just a unit or, as is customary in scientific literature, an outside observer. I just listen, think, and keep quiet.