A boxful of images and words
Words are a soft and pliable material, almost like damp clay. Words can be used to build, paste, fix - even knit things. A ligature of words in able hands can easily be transformed into images, stories, parables, and sketches.
Olena Sybiriakova has recounted the book The Trajectory of an Event. Yes, she recounted it because the texts in it are light, transparent, and often deliberately frivolous. This book belongs to a special genre.
After the first couple of pages the impression is that the words and stories in this book were first placed in a box from which, now and then, the author retrieved a tale or an experience. She must have dropped the box once. It opened, and the author had to pick up the stories scattered on the carpet and put them together. She did so meticulously and with care, placing tales and stories about travels separately.
The result is a book that invites the reader to open it and start communicating with it. It has a strange adult childishness about it. The entire surrounding world of the two authors is cleansed of evil and tragedy. Adults behave like children - actually, there are no real adults. The artist is always referred to in the upper case, and he is always in love. Everything that happens is filled with a romanticism that cannot be violated by the routine nature of daily life because there is no routine in the lives of the heroes and heroines. When the heroines set off on a trip to Tunisia, Jordan, or elsewhere, they happily romanticize the daily routine of the foreign locale. A cup of coffee in a cafe somewhere in Aqaba leads to a conversation with a young Arab and then to flirting. This heroine is not certain of her desires, so why not dream a bit and imagine what can and could happen. She is not prepared to refuse herself this. In exchange for her polite “no” to the undemanding young Arab, she receives a silver bracelet.
“What do you have to say about love?” Anna asks her employer, an artist, in the short story “Hour of Triumph.” His reply does not matter. What matters is that to her he remains “an enigmatic and great personality.” She is just a cleaning woman in his studio where he constantly brings long-legged “muses,” and he is simply unable to fall in love.
Also incapable of love are the childish men in the short story “The Little Hussars.” This is why they “act like hussars,” playing Russian roulette and eventually, like children, they step over their friend who has lost. From the standpoint of eternity, the activities of all these adult children make no sense and have no meaning.
In contrast, more ephemeral objects and concepts in Sybiriakova’s other fairy-tales stories are suddenly invested with flesh. Shadows distance themselves from humans, especially if these people sit down at a campfire at night. Silence suddenly becomes the language of lovers. The author can turn all sorts of trifles, inspired (or not very) into an active or inactive face of her fantasies. It is up to you, readers, to smile pensively and ask whether these male characters have real prototypes. Does the author always see herself in her main heroine? Which of the events she describes have actually happened to her?
This book will not drag you into the depths of philosophy. It will simply distract and entertain you. It will make you look into a mirror another time and ask yourself: “What if all this is really about me?”
So just take your time, brew some tea, preferably green tea with jasmine, and then start reading.
