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Date Posted: 14:42:17 02/19/10 Fri
Author: celtgirl
Subject: Here's a wee glimpse of Jamie- it's only a snippet as it's part of a larger piece that isn't done yet, but hopefully it's whole enough in and of itself that it won't feel like being presented with a wall in a narrative pathway. :) >>>
In reply to: E 's message, "It's so quiet here. No wonder Aer Lingus offers such great fares this time of year. Really cold and lonely here at the Cottage. I'll be happy to bring in more wood for the fire, should anyone happen to drop by." on 06:33:54 02/18/10 Thu

copyright 2010 Cindy Brandner

He had long believed that novels had a life of their own, far beyond that of an individual reader. For a good novel lived on in the minds of hundreds, perhaps even thousands or millions of readers and thus became another entity outside and beyond the rough-cut pages and black-type words. This became more true as he told stories each night near the pot-bellied stove. His memory had always been an unreliable sort of fellow when it came to certain events in his life, mercifully perhaps, for there were things it shielded him from that he suspected he did not need, nor want the details of. But books he remembered with a near photographic clarity, that served him well in his role of storyteller.

He pulled from the well of memory other stories, ones he himself had invented, during an adolescence that had been both unbearably dark and incandescent to the point of scorching his spirit. These stories he changed, for he was not that boy anymore, and did not see things in the same light. But it gave him a feeling of grounding himself here in Russia, as though by saying words he had written down long ago, he had rooted the lodestone of his soul.

Memory, however photographic, was like water, in constant flux and change, so that one perceived things differently depending upon the angle one approached it from, or, as the case might be, the age. Some things flitted beneath the surface, flickering, a flash of scale and fin, and others tore the surface of that still pool, glittering and arcing, spraying a thousand other droplets of time and remembrance. So it was for him with tales, finding something different with each telling, another layer through which to peer or sink wholly, depending upon the angle from which he viewed the story, or the mood, easily sensed, of his listeners that particular night.

And so he became the camp seanachai, which bought him extra rations of bread, small bits of chocolate and favours when he needed them. He thanked God for his fluency in the Russian tongue, between Yevgena and Andrei, he could speak it as though he were a native. He knew many Russian stories and could recite Eugene Onegin from memory- he was also familiar with many of the other great Russian poets- Blok, Pasternak, Akhmatova and others. He gave them the poets of his own world too- Yeats and Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth, Keats and Rilke and the stories that sat closest to his soul- Les Miserables, The Idiot, The Inferno, Ulysses (that was a challenge and a half in Russian- his brain felt like a pretzel twist during the telling), Dr. Zhivago and the whole lovely world of Trollope’s Barchester Tower series. He told Dickens in installments, just as the great man had written his stories, instinctively knowing where to leave off to create the maximum anticipation for the next story session.

He knew if they were caught, he was likely to be punished severely. Western literature had long been banned in the Soviet Union. But he knew to take a peoples' stories was to kill something in their soul, to strand them on a far shore where nothing seemed familiar, for people were their stories and the re-telling of them in all their facets had the power to keep a man sane.

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