In the late, dark afternoon of the Siberian winter, I lingered in Galya’s banya. It smelled of cedar and wood smoke and was so hot. I broke the ice on the caldrons of water, mixed it with the hot water from the boiler and poured the clear water of Lake Baikal over my head. I don’t remember how many times I poured water over my head… my skin slick and warmed from the wetness. I could not get wet enough, as if in water there is life. I washed my clothes and hung them on the line in the banya and lay down to sink into nothingness… the heat a force against the cold outside. I remembered the woman in the picture as I drifted.

“A beautiful young woman stands in front of an ornate mirror reading a book. On the table below the mirror, there is a huge bouquet of wild flowers. She is not aware of her reflection in the mirror. She is not aware of herself at all. Her beauty lies in the unconsciousness of her life. What would she feel if she became conscious of her life? Would she be happy, sad? Angry at her awareness? Would she feel as if she is waking from a dream? Or, would she simply enjoy the wildflowers on the table? Would it be wise to leave her, as the artist did, in her blissful unconsciousness?”

I wrote that after I had studied the three woodcuts in the Shanghai Art Museum. The prints had drawn me back to them. Like a trail of breadcrumbs left in the path for me, in the short space of an afternoon, they had given definition to a small, but significant chapter in my life. Now, I was here on the edge of Lake Baikal in quiet Listvyanka.

Ruddy from the heat, I dressed and went back to the weathered, wooden house with its blue shutters. I trudged up the steps, stamped the snow from my boots and took them off at the door. Galya’s kitchen… small, simple, cooking smells from my childhood, a slow, hot fire in the oven that was such a part of old, Russian stories. I imagined Uncle Vanya and Sonia in a different play… one long past tea from the samovar as the leaves fall in the dappled sunlight of the autumn woods… a winter play… long, slow conversation pulled from the deep as from a well… the house warm in the cold darkness, the light soft and low, but, illuminating enough to see in a moment the one truth that always seems to elude us. I ate Galya’s berry and rhubarb pie… berries plucked from the mountain brush in summer time, left my revisions of Chehkov and had long conversation with Sergey instead. The night was full of stories about Siberian shamans… the moments lush and fully formed as I drank cup after cup of Russian tea from a cracked mug.

I caught sight of myself in the kitchen mirror on the way to bed. The reflection in the mirror was not of a beautiful young woman. There was no book. There were no wildflowers. The mirror was not ornate. It was the kind of mirror that a woman looks into absentmindedly touching her hair into place as she rushes out of the door. What I saw was a middle-aged woman traveling. Life conscious of itself, but I did remember the young woman in her green plaid school girl’s dress and a birthday…pink ribbons around her neck. That woman left behind so long ago who lives in the conscious world no longer. I enjoyed the memory of her… I smiled at her… quietly left her unaware.

 

 

I slipped between the soft, worn, mended sheets. I wished there had been a duna to pull over me. I lay with my hand on the warm pipe… the oven still circulating heat through the house. I fell asleep… and for the space between night and day, lived life unconscious of itself. Perhaps I dreamt of Uncle Vanya and Sonia. Perhaps there lives in my unconscious world a truth pulled from the deepest centers of their longings.