Season of Wonder

by Paula Guran

  “Me? I thought I was going to miss you so much I wasn’t going to have any fun, but I found a friend, and she gave me a couple presents. No, not Josie! She’s at her folks’. I know you don’t like it if she’s here when you come, so we set it up before I knew you weren’t . . . ” He glanced at Matt and frowned, shrugged. “No, this is a kid. Actually, an elf.”

  He smiled again. “I wish you could have been here. She made the kitchen dance and the couch dance. I gave her these little cars, because I thought she was a boy, and she made them run all over the coffee table even though they don’t have motors in them. I think she works for Santa Claus.”

  Matt slipped her hand into a coat pocket and touched the hat he had given her. It was soft like cashmere. Maybe he worked for Santa Claus. It had been a long time since she had had a Christmas of her own instead of borrowing other peoples’, and this was the first one she could remember where she was actually really happy.

  “You’re too old to believe in Santa?” he said. He sighed. “I thought I was, too, but I’m not anymore.” He listened, then laughed. “Okay, call me silly if you like. I’m glad you’re having a good Christmas. I love you. I’ll see you when you get back.” He laid the phone down with a faint click.

  Matt grinned at him. She liked thinking of herself as an elf and an agent of Christmas. Better than thinking she must be some kind of charity project for Jim, the way she had been at first.

  Stranger still to realize she was having a no-peek Christmas, alone in her own head.

  She thought of families, and, at long last, of her sister Pammy. How many years had it been? She didn’t even know if Pam were still alive, still married to her first husband, if she had kids . . .

  “Can I use that?” she said. He handed the phone to her. She dialed information.

  “What city?”

  “Seattle,” she said. “Do you have a listing for Pam Sternbach?”

  There was a number. She dialed it.

  “Merry Christmas,” said a voice she had not heard since she had lived at home, half a life ago.

  “Pam?”

  “Mattie! Mattie? Omigod, I thought you were dead! Where are you? What have you been doing? Omigod! Are you all right?”

  For a moment she felt very strange, fever and chills shifting back and forth through her. She had reached out to her past and now it was touching her back. She had put so much distance between it and herself. She had walked it away, stamped it into a thousand streets, shed the skin of it a thousand times, overlaid it with new thoughts and other lives and memories until she had thousands to choose from. What was she doing?

  “Mattie?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “How are you?”

  “How am I? Good God, Mattie! Where have you been all these years?”

  “Pretty much everywhere.” She reached into the coat’s breast pocket and fished out one of the little cars, watched it race back and forth across her palm. She was connecting to her past, but she hadn’t lost her present doing it. She drew in a deep breath, let it out in a huge sigh, smiled at Jim, and snuggled down to talk.

  Sarban (John William Wall) was, in 1939, appointed Second Secretary to the British legation in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. As in the story, the very small European community tried to maintain holiday customs such as caroling as mummers. The Yolka (Russian for “spruce tree”) the White Russian exile Masseyev mentions was a New Year tree—the Russian equivalent of a Christmas tree—a tradition dating back to a 1699 decree by Peter the Great that New Year was to be celebrated on January 1. Russian Yolka and New Year’s celebrations were banned in 1916 during the first World War as a German tradition. The Soviets continued the ban until politician Pavel Postyshev published a plea in Pravda in 1935 to reinstate Yolka and New Year celebrations.

  A Christmas Story

  Sarban

  I will tell you a Christmas story. I will tell it as Alexander Andreievitch Masseyev told it me in his little house outside the walls of Jedda years ago one hot, damp Christmas Eve.

  It was the custom among the few English people in Jedda in those days to make up a carol-singing party on Christmas Eve. For a week before, the three or four of us who had voices they were not ashamed of, and the one or two who had neither voice nor shame, practiced to the accompaniment of an old piano in the one British mercantile house in the place: an instrument whose vocal cords had not stood the excessive humidity of that climate any better than those of some of the singers. Then, on Christmas Eve, the party gathered at our house where we dined and, with a lingering memory of Yuletide mummers in England, arrayed ourselves in such bits of fancy dress or comic finery as we could lay our hands on; made false whiskers out of cotton-wool or a wisp of tow, blackened our faces, reddened our noses with lipstick supplied by the Vice-Consul’s wife, put our jackets on inside-out and sprinkled over our shoulders “frost” out of a little packet bought by someone ages ago at home and kept by some miracle of sentimental pertinacity through years of exile on that desert shore.

  I am no singer, but I always had a part in these proceedings. It was to carry the lantern.

  Our Sudanese house-boys served us with more admiration than amusement on their faces, and the little knot of our Arab neighbors, who always gathered about our door to watch us set out, whatever the occasion, gave not the slightest sign of recognizing anything more comic than usual in our appearance. We made our round of the European houses in our Ford station-wagon; I holding my lantern on its pole outside the vehicle and only by luck avoiding shattering it against the wall as the First Secretary cut the corners of the narrow lanes. Fortunately, except for our neighbors, who never seemed to go to bed at all (or, at least, didn’t go to bed to sleep), the True-Believers of Jedda kept early hours, and by nine or ten at night the dark sandy lanes were deserted but for pariah dogs and families of goats settled with weary wheezings to doze the still, close night away. Poor Jedda goats! whose pasture and byre were the odorous alleys; pathetic mothers of frustrated offspring, with those brassieres which seemed at first sight such an astonishing refinement of Grundyism, but which turned out to be merely an economic safeguard—girdles not of chastity but husbandry; with your frugal diet of old newspapers and ends of straw rope, to whom the finding of an unwanted (or unguarded) panama hat was like a breakfast of ’Id ul Futr; how many a curse and kick in the ribs have you earned from a night-ambling Frank for couching in that precise pit of darkness where the feeble rays of one paraffin lamp expire and those of the next are not yet born!

  From the façades of the crazy, coral-built houses that hem the lanes project roshans—bow-windows of decaying wooden lattice-work—and on the plastered tops of these bow-windows the moonlight falls so clear and white this Christmas Eve that to the after-dinner eye it seems that snow has fallen.

  Our first call was always at the Minister’s. There, in the paneled hall which, but for its bareness, might have been in England, we used to range ourselves and, in comparatively good order, deliver our repertoire while the Minister, in his study above, turned down the wireless for a few minutes and his Lady and family listened from the staircase. We always gave the meteorological data of Good King Wenceslaus with feeling, perhaps more conscious than at other times of our prickly heat and the sweat trickling down inside our shirts. Then the Minister’s Lady descended to congratulate us, kind-heartedly, on our singing and, spontaneously, on our disguises, while the mustachioed Sudani butler brought wassail on a tray. After our own Minister, we used to go to the American Legation and then to the Dutch Chargé d’Affaires where, also, loyalty to tradition had its traditional reward in the Red Sea equivalent of the wassail-bowl. That used to be about as far as our organization was capable of maintaining a good custom with coherence. A touch of the strayed reveler used to creep in after that. But, while most of the party had still not lost their papers of words and while two or three were still agreed on the tune of any one carol, the Vice-Consul’s wife used to insist on our going out to the Masseyev’s. We were all always agreed tha
t we wanted to go there; the argument used to be about the order it should take in our round of calls, for at this stage, the length of our stay at any particular house was unpredictable. However, the Vice-Consul’s wife always won. So, letting in the clutch with a jerk, the First Secretary would roar round by the town wall and out of the Medina Gate and along the tire-beaten track to the hut-suburb of Baghdadia.

  Years and years ago, before even the Vice-Consul came to Jedda, Alexander Andreievitch Masseyev, sometime a lieutenant in the Tzarist Navy, exiled by the October Revolution, had ended a pilgrimage through the Middle East by accepting the post of instructor to the Arabian Air Force.

  When I knew him, he and his wife, Lydia, lived in a little white-walled house with a tiny courtyard before it between the straggling suburb and the sea a mile northwards from the Medina Gate.

  There, then, we arrive this Christmas Eve. We are expected, but pretend not to be. We shush each other a good deal, and everybody shushes the Vice-Consul, and after the Vice-Consul’s wife, being in conspiracy with Lydia, has caused the courtyard door to be opened we tip-toe in and range ourselves round, or some of us, upon a flower-bed the size of a pocket handkerchief, and let fly with “Christians Awake”; then, after a lot of fierce “all-togethering,” render “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” and, as a concession to the Vice-Consul, who thought that was what we were singing to begin with, “Good King Wenceslaus” once more. Alexander Andreievitch and Lydia appear in their lighted doorway, smiling, not quite understanding, but smiling because this is something Christian with a faint affinity to white winters far away. With loud “Merry Christmases” we crowd into their little sitting-room, while Lydia exclaims at our daubed visages and disarray, and chatters in a mixture of broken French and English, and Alexander Andreievitch, beaming all over his broad face, brings out bottles and glasses and tumbles his six words of English out at us. He and the Vice-Consul understand each other in what they call Arabic—but it would puzzle an Arab.

  Lydia has made a cake. The Vice-Consul’s wife has brought a bottle of wine for a present; we have produced a bottle of whisky, and the Vice-Consul is discovered to have brought a bottle of rum on general principles. There are little dishes of salted almonds and olives, slices of well-matured sausage, and even bits of ham procured from Yanni, the Cypriot grocer in the Suq (at a price that would make the Black Market look like a bargain counter). It is hot in the little room; burnt cork and lipstick trickle down the plump face of Bartholomew, our sole representative of British Commerce; the First Secretary props open the door and fans himself; but Moslem Arabia is shut out beyond the courtyard walls: we are but fifty miles from Mecca and the desert between us and Bethlehem is ten times as wide, but we settle ourselves on the few chairs or the floor and, every Christian glass being filled, sing “God rest you Merry, Gentlemen!”

  On the wall there is a faded photograph of some prospect in St Petersburg, and there hang from a nail a prismatic compass and an aneroid barometer in stout though worn leather cases, once the property of the Imperial Navy, which Alexander Andreievitch has saved from the wreck and managed to preserve through all these years. Alexander Andreievitch is a short, squarely built man with short, iron-gray hair and a broad, deeply-lined face that does not often smile. His heart is not so good now as it once was. He no longer flies in the two or three temperamental old Wapiti aircraft that constitute the Arabian Air Force. His job now consists mainly in trying to keep the saleable stores of the Air Force from seeping away into the Suq; in endeavouring to explain to the Nejdi camel-rider who commands the Force that the principles of aerial navigation are not explicit in the Quran, and in petitioning the Minister of War for arrears of pay. He has never announced any notable advance in any of these directions.

  I sit near Alexander Andreievitch and pledge him in Russian, at which he smiles, then, with an exclamation as if suddenly remembering something, gets up and fumbles in a little cupboard in the wall. He brings out a strange-looking bottle which he proudly shows me. The label is one I have not seen within a thousand miles of Jedda. Then I remember that some months ago Alexander Andreievitch went to Baghdad.

  There, by a lucky chance, he has lighted on a bottle of Zubrovka, smuggled down, I expect, from Tehran or Tabriz. I am the only one in our party who knows what it is. The others prefer whisky or rum. Alexander Andreievitch sets out two little glasses and fills them. Back go our heads: do dna! We perform this exercise a good many times while the others are sipping at their longer glasses. Alexander Andreievitch smiles frequently now and talks all the time, in Russian.

  The label of the bottle has always interested me. My Russian is not so copious that I can see the connection between the name Zubrovka and the picture of the European Bison which seems to be the Trade Mark. So Alexander Andreievitch explains and adds a word to my vocabulary. “Da . . . ”, he says, with a melancholy drawing-out of the syllable. “They are all gone now. There were a few in the deep forest of Lithuania until the Revolution. The Tzar preserved them.” He sighs. I too remember, when I was a little boy, I saw an old, high-withered, ungainly beast with matted hair hanging on it like worn door-mats leaning against the rails of an enclosure in Regent’s Park: a huge, tired, solitary beast hanging its heavy head with half-closed eyes, while a grubby fist thrust monkey-nuts under its muzzle and cockney voices wondered what it was.

  “Did you ever see one?” I ask Alexander Andreievitch. He shakes his head so sadly and looks so full of the irrevocable past that I am led to see a symbolic correspondence between him and the Zubor, between them both and Imperial Russia, and the weight of what’s gone beyond recall lies heavily on my spirit until we have lowered the level of the Zubrovka below the Bison’s feet. Then we cheer up a little and I suggest: “Perhaps . . . Who knows? Russia is very wide . . . There are untrodden forests still . . . ”

  Very gravely Alexander Andreievitch nods his head. “Da, v Rossii . . . Yes, there are rare things in Russia. I have seen—listen, Meester—will you believe I have seen something, oh! far away beyond the forests, something that was not a Zubor?”

  “No? What then?”

  “No. Not a bison, not a reindeer, not an elk. I was a hunter when I was a boy. I know all those things. Once, it was in 1917, I was on board a cruiser, the Knyaz Nicolai, and we were ordered to Archangel. From there we cruised eastward in the Arctic Ocean to the mouth of the Yenessei River. It was summer, naturally. Why we went there no one knew. It was 1917. Some of us thought our orders were to go through the Behring Straits to Japan. We were young. We joked about going ashore in Siberia to chop firewood when the coal ran out, the same as the troops did on the railway. That shore in summer looks just the same as these Hejaz mountains, brown and bare. The Knyaz Nicolai carried a sea-plane, an English machine. That was a very new idea then. The English had thought of doing it. We Russians did it. We made experimental flights in the fine weather up there in the Arctic Ocean. The pilot was my old friend Igor Palyashkin. I was his observer. It was a revolutionary idea. I think the Russians were the first who practised it, though the English no doubt thought of it.

  “Well, there was a little station near the mouth of the Yenessei River, far, far away from anywhere. A few Russians kept the station and collected furs from the natives; there was also an officer of the Imperial Navy. He did not collect furs. He just drank. The Knyaz Nicolai was ordered to call at this station—it was called Kamyenaya Gora—and deliver some provisions. We approached, but the winter that year began early. Already, when the sea should have been open for another month, ice was forming. We met fields of ice that stretched as far as the eye could see; thin ice, you understand, which the cruiser could break through. But it was dangerous, for in one day or so of sudden hard weather that thin ice will become solid and lock you in immovably; then it begins to squeeze. The Knyaz Nicolai did not reach Kamyenaya Gora. We returned to open water, but because we were so near our captain decided to send the sea-plane with a message. It was something that had never been done before. We were to circ
le the station, drop our message and return and be picked up on the open water.

  “We made our calculations, Igor Palyashkin and I, and we took off. It was very fine weather; the last, still, clear days of the Arctic summer. We could not see far; the circle of our vision was bounded by a blue wall, but beneath us we saw the sea quite clearly, without waves, for it was covered with a thin skin of ice, but moving gently as if it breathed; and a little further on we saw the land, brown with streaks of snow. We flew a long way over the land. It is a mournful land, and empty! Ah, emptier far than any you have seen even between here and the Persian Gulf. We flew so far over the land that I thought our calculations must be wrong, but we found that little station, Igor Palyashkin and I! It was the first aeroplane they had ever seen, those people, I think. We saw them running out. We went very low and I waved and dropped the message, then we headed back for the cruiser again. We were the first men who had ever flown in the Arctic Circle, Igor Palyashkin and I.”

  Alexander Andreievitch refills our little glasses. Bartholomew and the Vice-Consul are singing “Good King Wenceslaus” again, but merely, I gather, to settle an argument about something. The Second Secretary is leaning against the wall behind the door. He appears to be asleep.

  “Da,” says Alexander Andreievitch, as he sets down his glass on the tray, speaking softly to the Bison. “They shot him afterwards, the Bolsheviki. But we were the first, Igor Palyashkin and I.” He shakes his head and I wait.

  “You understand,” he says, “our calculations were not quite right. We saw the land, oh! land on every side. Brown land with streaks of snow, and when we came low we saw the forests of little gray bushes and the mournful marshes, all the wide taiga on every side. But we did not see the sea. And then the blue wall which had been all round us between the sky and the sea turned gray and came very close, and soon we could see nothing at all but gray mist unless we flew very, very low. So we came down very close to the land, just over the tops of little fir trees and gray bushes and over the surface of desolate pools, black and glinting like steel. Up above there was no sun and no sky, and on every side there was only the mournful gray taiga.