First of all I’m pleased to see that the little diatribe I posted here on Wednesday is doing well. The reception has exceeded my expectations (although I suspected as I wrote it that I was on to something and was articulating- however provisionally- something that needed to be said and isn’t said often enough).
Anyway. The reason why I wrote that piece, and the reason why I started this STSC venture in the first place was to try and build a platform so that excellent writers like
here could find the audience that they deserve.What he has given us today is a truly excellent short story, made all the more remarkable by the fact that English isn’t his first language. Amazing stuff. After you’ve read this I highly recommend you check out
’s Substack, especially this amazing conversation on ‘Writing Between Languages’ that he recently published with the equally gifted polyglot .Enjoy.
TJB.
I only noticed the noise a few weeks after we settled in and stuffed all the cabinets and cupboards with duvets, old kitchen appliances and even Katerina’s old study notes – thick spiral-bound notebooks filled with indecipherable scribble, her own Linear A to be discovered by our grandchildren, if we ever have any. It was one evening when I came back from downtown slightly tipsy. I couldn’t hold it in so I relieved myself in the bushes behind the basketball hoop, fertilizing the poor plants that, by municipal order, were destined to survive another winter.
I first thought the high-pitched sound flickering in the silent evening to be the current passing through the wires up above. The syncopated twittering pulses reminded me of the transmission towers lined neatly between the two patches of forest, powering the villages and cucumber greenhouses down in the valley of my childhood. They served as milestones on the footpath my grandmother and I took through the lupine fields below the high-voltage lines. Birds perched atop chirped about the weather, which was always grand on our walks, turning into bouts of hide and seek and even the rare game of tag. It all seemed like a long time ago, because it was, and the days were now not as sunny and careless as they were back then.
It took a while to realise there were no wires hanging between the light poles and buildings in the neighbourhood. Power came through underground cables, all communications bundled together – gas, electricity, fiber optics. The only wires were those of trolleybuses, and those did not chirp. They’d light up on winter nights with blue sparks, when passing trolleybuses eradicated hoarfrost with high voltage. They’d drone, too, but there was nothing mystical about the buzz, nothing moving, nothing enchanting. Even with the backdrop of the full moon, and the few stars that defied light pollution, the sound was nowhere as alluring as the chirping that penetrated the darkness and filled it with something beautiful.
We bought the flat with our savings after her grandfather, a less nostalgic figure than my grandmother, passed away leaving thirty acres of woodland. My part was symbolic but we never quarreled about fairness as there is nothing fair about people dying, let alone dying and leaving a modest fortune to be parceled out between family members. I wasn’t one hundred percent into the place, but I felt that I didn’t have much of a say in the decision. So, I tried to look for positives, a habit I acquired a few months into dating her. No smell of boiled cabbage in the stairwell was a massive upgrade over our rental. The chirping was another added bonus, a signature of the neighborhood. A reason to linger aimlessly before dialing in the entrance code. A background for counting to ten backward.
The noise, although it would be disrespectful to call it that, but “sound” sounds so empty, was patternless, unlike the bird songs which we'd only get to hear in the woods on our walks that grew shorter and shorter, as our schedules got tighter and tighter. Even the crows croaked in a certain rhythm, and you could guess the next caw if you were counting crows. Same story with the cuckoo, who always started its countdown on days when none of us had any coins in our pockets. We'd count the cuckoo-cuckoo silently, hoping for a long string, never knowing whose remaining years on Earth were being counted down. Isn't it curious how you never hear two cuckoo birds calling at the same time? When other birds go on shouting sprees and rap battles, cuckoos go solo, as if to impress us, humans. Patterns, patterns everywhere. But not with the chirping, no. Pure randomness, like that of a pinball launched between buildings, knocking on every window yet not seeping inside at all. Believe it or not, I tried many times, but you could not get the sound to permeate the room, breaking the invisible surface tension of the open window.
"It's a good thing we're close to so many shops. And my manicurist is just a few stops away." was one of the many things Katerina told me when counting the advantages of the new place. This positive self-mantra was a technique she resorted to when talking about things she couldn't change or control.
I wonder if this is the reason people in relationships get a dog. To be able to stand in the darkness under two sycamore trees and just listen to the twittering sounds that break through the city’s noise pollution. A dog lets you do that. You’re no longer an anorak, you’re the neighborhood’s friendly dog walker treating your furry pal to their daily dose of walkies.
We never got a dog, because of my stupid allergies. I used to think that allergies in adults lay in the same category as dietary preferences. And that you could just snap out of it. Like many things I believed in, that one proved to be false, and I learned it the hard way, after we took in Katerina’s friend's golden lab for a weekend, back when we were still renting. We ended up taking the poor fellow to a dog hotel. “But if we did get our own dog, we’d have to worry about where to put her when we’re away. So maybe it’s best that we don’t have a dog.”
It was a dog walker who alerted me to the true nature of the chirping I was hearing.
“Flying depositories of mumiyó, those are,” he said, pointing upwards with the palm of his left hand, his right hand tugging at the leash of his beagle.
“I’m sorry what?”
“Mumiyó was this cure-all in my time.”
I must have looked puzzled, as he quickly followed with: “It’s basically bat shit. A Siberian cure. Or scam. Can’t really tell who to trust these days.”
He moved on, without saying goodbye, leaving the conversation open-ended, forever unfinished, continuing in our heads. But it got me thinking. Of course, those were bats! Flying around, shooting their sonic waves across our buildings. Wonderful, miraculous bats. I went straight home, animated, as if I had cracked the Enigma code or won the lottery. Bats!
“Honey, what if we got a cat?” Katerina’s voice reached me from the bedroom as I was unlacing my shoes. “Sandra found this cute kitten…”
Such a beautiful voice, despite everything that was said that day.
“Can we call him Bat?”
“Bat the cat?”
“Bat the cat!”
She waltzed into the corridor with a big smile, something I missed dearly. The next night, the sound outdoors was gone, maybe the bats went to some cave to hibernate. But I didn't need them any longer.
Quality