The Human Nightmare Trilogy

When I return…
And when I return?

A.Galich, the Russian poet,
exiled to France in the 70s. Perished in the accidental fire.




‘Farewell Of The Slavic Woman’



I play this march every day although it is not for the CD. It is a railway march and it needs an orchestra in an open air. The old country was a railway country. The first sound I remember as a child was a train whistle. Nobody played that march at the station on the day of our departure and there were no crying women or soldiers waving hands through the doors. The evening was cold and we were standing under the overpass in a frozen silence. At least there was an electric light there and we could see each other. The mist crawled from beneath a train, red and black from the sparks and coal- fed heaters of the carriages. It enveloped us, took us in and pushed us towards the river as if not just the train but the whole platform was on the way to the great bridge, the only one leading to the capital, to the gate abroad, out, away, to the unknown.
People hovered in the mist, angry, tired, scared, whispering curses through their teeth. The railway bell chimed while the distant radio voice announced arrivals and departures. The whispering started to fade as people boarded the train and when the doors closed it was only darkness, rain and distorted faces glued to the greasy windows. Then the music started somewhere inside the train; maybe one of the passengers was playing an accordion. The train slowly pulled away from the platform and while it made its way through the station district and further on through the woods until the bridge appeared in front of us as a mechanical mass of inevitability, the music still played inside following the beat of the wheels. After we crossed the bridge the lights dimmed and the music stopped. The mist passed us though, and in the morning it met us on the way to an airport.
In the airport we were standing in the lighted circle in the middle of the hall and the customs people rummaged through our things. No money or documents were allowed; only private jewelry like wedding rings and earrings were permitted. I had a lot of books, permission and all. They looked through each of the books page by page, slowly, methodically with the persistence of a mentally disturbed. They didn’t talk. We were not worthy of talking. Weeks ago we surrendered our passports and other IDs and became invisible. They didn’t have to see us. The crowd watched us from the dark and the eyes of the people glimmered as if the hall was filled with wild animals.
That hall remembered the times when it hosted the privileged foreigners. Some of the sofas still stood there: ragged, with remnants of the expensive upholstery hanging from the sides. People didn’t sit on them anymore; they were buried under the mountains of suitcases. There were several hundred people in that hall, quiet, secretive, murmuring in the dark. Those murmurs rustled through the hall, bounced at the walls hitting each other, reaching us in pieces. Ethnic Germans were leaving after 500 years of residency and their ancient, archaic speech filled the space with the gothic aura. They were there for weeks. The government of Germany delayed the entrance visa and they waited patiently, quietly, with that eternal dignity retained through hundreds of years. Everyone was neatly dressed, clean, men were shaved; all children were attended to. They waited the same way they toiled their soil every spring awaiting for the mystery of a harvest. Maybe it will come and maybe not; all in Gods hands.
When we passed the last checkpoint I looked back through the glass wall. A tall, blonde woman dressed in a long, smooth dress with ethnic embroidery was standing on the other side looking straight at me. She seemed distracted; her glance was unfocused, directed somewhere through me, further on through the airfield towards the border far away, that invisible line on the other side of which was rest, clean linen, warm bed and life of hope. In about two hours we will cross it the way the birds cross it every season, knowing that they will return. Only we will not return. And neither will they.
She smiled at me and blew us all a kiss. At that very moment I heard the music again; that powerful and tender march to stay with me forever through the years of exile.





In Your Heart


They blocked the road with the cement blocks and caged the entrances of the buildings the way Universal Studios caged the entrance to the Jaws attraction. The line crawls endlessly towards the revolving doors. It begs for the overhead TV with newsreel or the corporate morning update. The PR guys must be hungry for the new ideas; should I give them a call?
“May I have a teaspoon with the cake, please? And a porcelain cup for my coffee. Thank you.” This is my last line of defense since they replaced the metallic utensils with the plastic ones. I know that the defeat is inevitable. They will soon discontinue the porcelain cups because no one asks for those but me. Bringing the utensils of my own? Who wants to be branded as an OCD? It took me five years to dissolve the suspicion about me being gay just because I always eat alone at the corner table. I didn’t want to see the cake cobwebs hanging through the teeth of numerous forks. That could induce the Pavlovian vomit response even in the compulsive extravert.
My grandfather in the old country used to drink the railway tea. The color was deep red, and there was a distinct aroma, so strong that when you dunk the raw cube sugar it came out as a tea- candy. That candy could last for a day and a taste of fresh tea stayed with you much longer. My granddad always drank his tea from a special glass placed in the silver holder. The thin glass revealed the color and transferred every bit of taste when the hot drop touched the tip of your tongue. I tried to recreate that ever since but the taste of that tea remained on the other side of the Ocean as well as the railways with their glass holders, cube sugar and endless Pullman passages. What kind of taste do you expect from the tea- bags? When I opened one the stuff inside looked like ashes after multiple cremation. Porcelain helps only that you don’t carry the feeling of the rough paper edge with you. This is a temporary solution though.
It is a magnificent fall, the time of the Johnny, The Appleseed and Halloween demons. No chestnuts for me. I haven’t seen a horse chestnut tree in full bloom since we left for good. Every morning on the way to work I stop in the remote place to inhale. It is the smell of my childhood that I crave. On the Park Alley above the big river many years ago there was nobody except the old chestnut trees and me. The leaves were big with golden- brown petals, shining even in death. The chestnuts would fall right on your head in their spiky shells filling the air with the unbelievable smell, a mix of wine, vinegar and touch of mushroom, the smell of Mother Earth itself. I put the fresh chestnuts into my backpack and kept until they began to rot. We threw the rotten chestnuts in handfuls into the boiling tar pots where they exploded and the smell of tar mixed with gas guided us into the adolescence. It is here with me all right.
After I park my car among the beat-up trucks I enter the revolving door to the airless territory. The internal walls of our cubicles are made from a sound & flow- absorbing material. I tried several times to excite an air movement in the hallway to no use. Minotaur could roam around in the glowing bright lights without being asked for a batch. People snooze under the neon lights in front of their computers. They wake up only at the meetings. Around the corner, in the tight enclosure a speakerphone barks orders to a group of greenish- pale employees around the desk. It is Charlie talking to his angels. Bald angels they are.
There are no sentences, just words. With every new word the heads nod in agreement the way the cuckoo- clock chimes the time. What if there’s no one on the other side, just some old record spitting out the meaningless blubbery? They would still nod their heads and the coffee- mugs would clink melodically in unison, the same way they clink in the hallways whenever a group converges. Not a word comes from those clusters of human psyche; they stay there in circles with mugs in their stretched hands frozen in an everlasting greeting ritual as long as their coffee supply lasts.
The afternoon comes to you only if you wish it to come because there are no windows. When the draft from several open doors replaces the clinking sound I sneak quietly out through the broken emergency exit. In the parking lot the lights of my car glow warmly through the mist as I climb in and turn on the CD with the songs of my fathers. Back home at last.

The Door

It is cold. Was it Roald Amundsen, a polar scientist who said, “A human being cannot get used to the cold?” I can touch the glowing red dot on the door and feel its warmth. One man in the control room can watch hundreds of us. That’s called cost- effectiveness. Funny thing when no one cares for the cost anymore. It feels warmer to cuddle in the corner. Those gray, cement walls suite the skies. When the rain stops it becomes very humid and water drops roll down the walls to the rug on the floor. The rug was burgundy - brownish at its birth but now it is of the same color as the walls, the skies and the door. The spiders, yes, they like the place. Maybe it is because of the walls being so rough. Or rather they like the crumbs. I haven’t seen any flies lately so that should be the crumbs.
In the morning I will go to work. I work on the other side of the river at the big plant. Don’t know what it’s producing and where does it go. Don’t want to know that either. They assign rations per hour of work. I am strong. I can work long hours and get good rations. That’s where the crumbs come from. It’s not that I like spiders very much. But at least they are alive.
At night it is very dark. Most of the buildings around are empty and the shadows loom like fantastic monsters. Some people live there. I meet them every morning on their way to the stream except in winter. They move somewhere else then. I wonder how they do that because the only way to move somewhere is by train and trains… no one remembers a moving train anymore. A skeleton of the airplane is stuck between the two buildings on the other side of the road. It just dived into the ground. There were no survivors because there were no passengers.
There are no birds. We did something to defend ourselves from the enemies and all the birds are gone. They say the enemies had lured our birds to their countries forever using some kind of magic or maybe an ultrasound. There are no newspapers, no media of any kind except an occasional radio broadcast. Nobody knows where the speakers are. I tried listening once and felt as if I forgot my language.
In winter, when the heating system works the walls become very warm. There is no glass in the windows. It hadn’t been much snow for some time. Instead we have a slushy stuff which doesn’t fall. It floats in the air and slowly seeps down the window hole. That stuff is poisonous. We gather it with rubber gloves and throw down below through the drain tubes. They don’t use water anymore; some chemical flows down the street towards the scavenging areas. In daytime these poodles are covered by plastic sheets. At night, when the sheets are removed, the mist covering the streets gets a boost and slowly crawls around as if it is alive itself.
Darkness soothes. Especially I like the Moon when it appears. That doesn’t happen very often with thick clouds and muck in the air. But once in a while there is a window and the Moon comes by with its silvery light, so close you can touch it. At that moment we all look up onto the sky and howl. We howl in chorus as if we are not people but some mutant animals who are attracted to the Moon, the stars and all those things up there which will never become ours. The gas masks make sure we don’t see each other. Thus we howl until the clouds come back and there are only holes in the walls and empty spaces with shadows.
The Door squeals. I look at it from my corner.
“Sleep,” says the voice. I don’t know what that means.