Dedication- by Olga Zilberbourg
I read the dedication only after finishing the last word on the last page of the book. I’ve gulped the novel down in one sitting, assisted by the uninterrupted nature of the trans-Atlantic flight and a poor selection of in-flight entertainment. I’ve read it almost too quickly; with half an ocean to go, I am by no means ready to part with the story and its characters. The novel is thought-provoking: after the main character is abandoned by his secret lover and witnesses the collapse of the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris, he runs away to a remote Greek island to work as a fisherman and search for meaning.
Lingering with the pages of the book, I’ve read the author’s notes and postscript, in which he explains his naming strategy and claims that all similarities to real people and events are purely coincidental. I flipped back to the beginning and read the editor’s introduction, from which I’ve learned not only that the novel is based on real events, but also that the narrator’s words represent the voice of my own generation. Then, I read the dedication. It’s rather elaborate: the author thanks each individual member of his family; his mentors and editors; some friends in the hope that they would remain so in appreciation; his research assistants; people who gave him the grant to finish the novel; the owners of the B&B who kept feeding him breakfasts while he worked on the final chapters; and me.
“And last but not least, from the very bottom of my heart, I thank Zoe Olsberg, an unforgettable night with whom helped to germinate the idea for this novel.”
The creepiness of finding my own name in the book is thoroughly punctuated by the plane’s encounter with an innocuous air bubble that nonetheless causes several of my neighbors to scream in terror. When the cabin stabilizes, I read the page over from the “eternal gratitude to my mother” to “I thank Zoe…” This sends an odd sensation down from my back to my toes. I adjust my chair into the sitting position and flip the book over to look at the name on the paperback’s cover. The book is a loan from a senior engineer who explained the United Nations’ interest in the highway construction project in Macedonia over lunch before I headed out to the airport; she had just finished reading it and recommended it as good airplane fare.
“And it’s set on a Greek island!” she added, as if Macedonia and Greece were one and the same thing.
No matter how long I stare at it, the name on the cover reminds me only of the author’s popularity. I am 99.9% positive I’ve never met anybody from Greece by the name of Max, much less spent the night. Did my co-worker see the dedication and give me the book knowingly? After all, she has always taken an interest in my love life, and sending me out on construction projects in the countries usually devastated after decades of war, always offers tips on what I should be doing “for fun.” Then again, nobody can accuse her of being shy: had she noticed the name, she would’ve surely brought it up. Who ever reads long dedications, anyway?
My name is still there, printed in the standard serif on thick, grainy paper. I turn the page over. The trouble with gulping down novels is that they tend to evaporate from memory almost as soon as they are consumed. I reread the first page as if I had never seen it before. The words on the page seem familiar, yet, oddly so: not as though I have seen them eight or so hours previously, as the airplane reached cruising altitude above New York; instead they come from a distant memory, a thought that once flashed through my mind and never developed into anything solid.
“Distance,” says the man. “Distance between me and every other human being. It’s increasing. Every new person I meet, I am less and less able to talk to. The words don’t form phrases. And the things they tell me, I never know what to answer back. I always try to be the first one to say ‘Hello’ to people in the morning, because if they say it first, they use my word, I don’t have anything left to say. I used to have friends… I have friends now, but nothing to tell them. I meet them, we talk, I talk, talking has become a compulsion, I have to be always talking, but I never quite get to it. Look at me now, my eyes are watering, I am about to cry, I am in tears, as if I haven’t spoken to anybody in years. But talking is all I do, ask me a question, and I tell you anything you want to hear, much more than you want to hear, ask me a question, and you will be my new best friend. It is awkward to meet people, there’s always this distance that makes me so awkward, not me but my words, my words are always so awkward, it’s because I don’t really have anything to say. I’m not telling stories, I am repeating the stories I’ve told over and over again. There’s nothing original nor unique, there’s nothing authentic about me, it is all just language, words upon words, strung together, and not even pretty or coherent. Look at me, I’m seriously crying, and I’m completely sober, I didn’t have anything to drink, and I’m a mean drunk, imagine what would’ve happened if you poured me a drink. I’ll be thoroughly embarrassed in the morning, no getting around it for sure, it’s like a disease, words pouring out of me, words, and tears, and who knows what else…”
The man keeps talking to me in English, clear tears streaming down his bearded cheeks, and although he says a lot, he never seems to come to the point. He speaks in curt, broken half-sentences that strangely seem to run on and on in never-ending speech. There’s clearly an accent, but Greek, Czech or German, I cannot tell. He’s middle aged and well dressed, he’d fit much better into the business class cabin than here, at the back of the ferry, among backpackers and local families. Admittedly, it was I who started a conversation, taking him for a local and looking for advice about lodging at our port of call. And I did get a few useful tidbits from him (do not stay in Fira, go to Oia; do not agree to more than 25; check the shower) before our conversation was overrun by the stream of his badly put together confessions…
I reread the page several times before a plausible memory of a predawn conversation with a stranger in a Paris airport starts to emerge. In my mind’s eye, I am several years younger and only recently joined the ranks of traveling civil engineers. Unused to all the eventualities of air travel, I fell back on protocol when the unexpected occurred. If my transatlantic flight arrived in Paris in the middle of the night, I felt myself under obligation to wait at the airport for the early morning connection. Trying to save the agency money and time, I deprived myself of sleep. Even though I had not slept in more than 24 hours, I would still be unable to doze because of the close to freezing temperature at the empty terminal. There was one working heat lamp, and I paced around it through the night, swearing to myself that in the future I would not let my managers put me in this situation. Closer to dawn, a youngish man, the collar of his light sports jacket turned up, straggled his way up the corridor and joined me under the lamp, apparently the only heat source in this wing of the sprawling complex. In my reconstructed memory, he had a British accent. I would have said a lot of different things to him that night: talking is a great way to keep warm.
It would have been a very strange conversation between me and that man, especially since my perception was severely altered by the lack of sleep. I was en route to Belgrade or to Kathmandu or to some such place where I would have to interact with people in sign language. This added significant stress to my job, and caused discomfort even when my partners spoke some English. I could never be sure that they understood me, even when it came to the mission-critical tasks. Perhaps because I stayed on edge throughout the conversation, I would have talked wildly, pushing on him my ideas about literature; and he, falling in with my passion, described his dream engineering projects. Both of us would be talking of ways to overcome distance. In my state of heightened awareness, I could have shared with him my idea about how literature was the best way to travel, to traverse the space between places and people. In a novel, one crosses the Atlantic in a space of a sentence. Writers, I complained, are always overcomplicating things: why invent time-travel or space-travel, when essentially every novel ever written does that already? I shared with him my wish to have somebody focus on the distance that exists between people that could not be minimized despite any effort.
“Describe the distance,” I had insisted.
Side by side we would’ve walked in circles around the heat lamp, and only occasionally I would turn my head to see the silhouette of his back, the upturned collar of his jacket, his long black hair in the red light.
There is a face framed by strands of black hair printed on the back of the paperback, and it’s not at all difficult to imagine the straight long nose and high cheekbones belonging to the stranger in the airport. My sensation is that of a quasi déjà-vu recollection: the man talked about bridges. Flipping again through the pages of the novel I find nothing to confirm this almost-memory. The image that my mind draws has my chance companion speaking about bridges with fascination: an entirely new variety of bridges, flexible, floating constructions built on the water surface. They were to be built in sections and could move up or down at the will of the traveler or in an automatic reaction to natural stimuli. Because they would be floating in water, they did not have to be very thick, but could be very long. He imagined enormous Plexiglas bridges over oceans, trains zooming back and forth between the continents in the matter of hours.
“Why can’t you design that? Travel doesn’t have to take days,” he insisted.
The flight attendants serve our last helping of peanut snacks, which means we are going to be landing in Paris within an hour and a half. I turn over the pages of the novel warily, desperately trying to find any reference to the bridges floating on water—but in vain. My memory of this brief encounter at CDG is so fluid, without any beginning or an end; it seems much more like a dream than anything that could have occurred in that place of steel and glass. The next episode of that dream or a chance encounter disintegrates into a nightmare. The sun rises and the airport quickly fills with people. Two airplanes roll up to the terminal almost at the same time: mine, ultimately destined for Belgrade or Kathmandu and his to Athens. We watch them park at the adjacent gates, when suddenly there is a shudder, a sort of an earthquake, and then the steel beams that support the brilliant glass roof of the building folded as if the metal had been a hollow sheen. And in the next moment, my chance companion and I are thrown rudely and painfully into each other’s arms.
Olga Zilberbourg is a fiction writer residing somewhere between San Francisco, CA and St. Petersburg, Russia. A collection of her stories was published in St. Petersburg in 2006. In English, her stories have been published in Thema, Faraway Journal, The Writer’s Eye, ezra: journal of translation and others. A longer story is included in a recent anthology from the Drollerie Press entitled Things That Go BUMP in the Night. She is also a Story of the Week editor at Narrative Magazine.