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Date Posted: 14:25:51 10/03/08 Fri
Author: Jamie K. ()
Subject: The cottage looks entirely lovely, ladies, and the flowers are a nice touch. Come inside to catch up with me>>>
In reply to: celtgirl 's message, "His Lordship has finally managed to come by for a visit. I'll post inside the first reply." on 14:16:39 10/03/08 Fri

Copyright 2008 Cindy Brandner

This country, this Russia was a land beyond conception; eleven time zones, six thousand miles from east to west, three thousand from north to south- it laid claim to the world’s longest coastlines, and boasted every kind of geography known to man: arid desert, inland seas, frozen tundra, thick fairytale forests, semi-tropical beaches, long sweeping steppes- so treeless that a man could be lost for days, without sight of any sort of landmark. Rivers that flowed on forever, surging rugged mountains. A land that made one feel the terrible frailty of existence as a man.

Did the brutality of such a landscape inspire brutality in man’s heart as well? For Russia had treated her children harshly, and as children will, they loved their mother all the more for her chill indifference.

If you listened long enough, in the great silences such a land held, it would speak to you, of its past, of its future and of all that had sundered it. Russia speaks to him of the great horsemen that had once swept her plains, and the armies that even now marched by the hundreds of thousands across her frost-heaved heart. She tells of falling stars that laid waste to the abundance of her bounty and the rifts in her body where enormous stores of water, the largest in the world, are held. She speaks of her peasants, her shamans, her priests, her emperors and queens, her poets and musicians. She whispers of the long iron girders that trace her spine for the distance of seven days. She speaks of the empty spaces in her soul, of the migration of dancing cranes and herds of reindeer. She speaks of her amber hair, seductively, her pearls, her minerals and the rich loamy fertility of her plains. She tells him the story of all her peoples- the haughtily mysterious Slavs, the silent Sibers, the earthy Ukraines, the Balts and Turks and Tatars, and the Yukuts, who she claims can walk through hordes of white men like smoke, and never be seen nor felt. She tells of the thunder of foreign troops, who have come again and again, and of the vast silence of her winters, that has inevitably defeated her foes. Her voice becomes dark as a terrible perfume, as she tells of the secret police, and all the fields sowed with the blood of the forgotten innocent. She speaks in contradiction and secret languages that have not been spoken in hundreds of years. And under all her words, her seduction, her coldness, her heat and succour, he hears her heart-the great, thundering heart of Mother Russia. And he hears that it is a heart forever in the process of breaking.

He understood such a country- for Ireland showed little mercy to her children. It was an odd thing to love a land so, for it never loved one back. It too was prey to the vagaries of weather, meteorites, man’s misdeeds, fortune, or lack thereof, and that entirely fickle mistress- chance. And yet, each land had its own characteristics, due to the great shift of mountains and seas, and the inner boiling cauldron of the earth itself. Each land its own nature- soft with heat, or laid upon by winter’s iron hand. Some fertile with life and pungent with decay, some with skies so large they made a man want to drop to his knees and hide his head for the terror it could inspire. Or a land could lull you, the way Ireland often did, hiding its capacity for the taking of blood, and the breaking of hearts in the soft swell of it verdant green hills, and the windswept beauty of its coastal zones.

The forests here had silenced him with their grim and dark grandeur. They spoke of trolls and goblins, of the soft, sibilant cackle of the Baba Yaga. At twilight they were positively spooky with the dark falling long before it did on the open plain. Being Irish, and therefore no stranger to the idea of trees having a life and world of their own, he had always imagined they spoke to one another through the aspect of air, with the stir of leaves and the scratch of branches and the high wail they emitted during a storm, or the horrible grinding moan that echoed throughout the forest when they fell. To witness a Douglas Fir at the peak of its adult life was to see nature’s own cathedral, with all the awe such a monument inspires.

The resin he breathed in now, was heady as golden honey, the scent released by the day’s heat to linger in a still torpor in the twilight. He paused, allowing the group to walk some ways ahead of him. It didn’t matter as much as it once would have, there were no longer head counts, or when there was, it was of a desultory sort. He could afford the luxury of lagging behind a little, this once. He wanted a moment alone, to think, to merely clear his head, from the questions, the needs, the unending expectation that he would somehow have a solution. And yet…he often did simply know what was needed, what word would soothe and calm, what the best route through a seeming knot of trouble, would be.

He longed for home in a visceral way, the deep-rooted longing for familiar surroundings, to be in a place where you understood instinctively what was required, where you could lay down in a patch of sunlight and not worry about being punished for it. And yet, since the change in the camp command, this place had become less a house of sand and shift, the rules more lax and yet, more livable.

He still thought about escape each and every day, but then where would that leave Violet, Nikolai, Shura- the motley crew of people that looked to him for sustenance to help them face another day? The thought of what might happen to them, what vengeance wreaked on them, always halted him, when he felt the pull at the forest’s edge, the ever present beckoning west, so strong at times that he had to wrench himself away to ignore its call.

And so, for now, it would appear, Russia was home, Russia was his country and he would just have to hope, that as her adopted son, she would see fit to allow him to one day leave, taking his life with him.

Last edited by author: Fri October 03, 2008 14:26:37   Edited 1 time.

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