Leah, my best virtual friend, is a writer like me. Writers know all the secrets in the world, and we aren’t ashamed to admit it, in writing. Paradoxically, she still knows more than I do. So, I paraphrase to myself the Bellman from “The Hunting of the Snark:” “I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous. I’m not jealous.” Everyone knows that what you say three times is true. Mark Budman
The other day, Leah sent me a message: “You can make a video call with an old-style landline phone. Just enter this code before your contact number. It’s a secret code. Don’t publicize it.” Mark Budman
I wrote the code she gave me on paper with a pen to ensure it wouldn’t get uploaded to social media somehow. I found an old landline phone in a closet and plugged it into the wall receptacle. There was no dial tone. No wonder. We dropped the service for the landline years ago. I entered the secret code anyway. I intended to dial the literary agency that didn’t reply to my query letter. Still, a crisp black-and-white moving image appeared on the wall even before I dialed the agency’s number. Instead of the agency, I saw an old-style desk with an ancient phone and a bald man in his fifties, with a reddish beard sitting behind it. He wore an immaculate suit and tie. I would recognize him anywhere. That was Vladimir Lenin, the first leader of the Soviet Union, dead since 1924. Dead but never buried. Mark Budman
He stared at me coldly. Mark Budman
“Who the hell are you, comrade?” he asked. In Russian, of course. He didn’t look surprised, as if someone from the 21st century was making video calls to him daily. He had to be an actor. It still was cool. A video call using an old, inactive landline. And a bingo in getting someone interesting. Mark Budman
I decided to play along, answering in Russian as well, but with a deliberate American accent. “I’m your descendant, comrade Lenin, figuratively speaking. I mean, spiritual descendant. I mean, I admire your chutzpah. Not your methods. Because you killed too many people, and the people who replaced you killed even more.” Mark Budman
“What is your name?” Mark Budman
I faked fear, convincingly. “Do you want to turn me in to Cheka? Isn’t that what your secret police was called?”
He snickered. “Trying to hide, you capitalist swine? It’s useless. My Cheka man, Felix Dzerzhinsky will find you. Sooner or later.”
I needed to show him that I wasn’t a run-off-the-mill counterrevolutionary. “Do you know you weren’t buried when you died, comrade Lenin? They made a mummy from you and displayed it in the Mausoleum next to the Kremlin. There is always a line of people to see you. I have always wanted to see you, but I never had a chance. Until now. Do you know that I was a member of Little Octobrists in elementary school until the third grade? Just like most little kids in the Soviet Union? I wore a pin with your image as a little boy.”
A man in a leather jacket, khaki pants, and jackboots walked in and whispered into Lenin’s ear. A large gun in a wooden holster was attached to his belt. Lenin stared at me in confusion.
“You are not behind the wall, stranger. Where are you?”
“I’m at home.”
Lenin turned to the man in the leather jacket. “This is something fantastic, like in H. G. Wells’ story.”
“I can’t explain it either,” I intervened. “But that’s not the point. Let me interview you, Mr. Lenin.”
Lenin straightened up. “For what newspaper?”
“For my blog.”
“What is a blog?”
“A regularly updated website or web page.”
He frowned. “I see you want to hide behind neologisms. It won’t help you. We will find you anyway, clown.”
Lenin made a gesture as if shooing away a fly. He hung up the phone, and the video was gone. I stared at the blank wall for a few more seconds. Lenin was my childhood hero. Not quite a hero but an object of fascination. So even if he and his sidekick were really actors powered by AI, I’d still want more of them.
I redialed the code, but this time, instead of Lenin, I saw myself at the desk, sitting in front of an old-style computer under a 2002 wall calendar, holding the phone receiver in my hand. The image was full color now. He/I looked young.
“Hey,” I said into the phone, in Russian.
He looked at me, annoyed, and replied in English. I remember he was proud of his English skills. “Who are you?”
I would also be annoyed if I were forced to talk to the wall, and to an old stranger at that.
“I’m you,” I said. “Honest.”
“Go away, old man,” he said. “This is a private company office.”
I checked out his wall calendar. “Yes, IBM man. Yes, Mr. Zipper Head. Beware. You will be laid off in a month.”
He frowned. “Are you a male Cassandra?”
“No. I’m your future.”
“I don’t need a future like that.”
“We get the future we deserve. Apparently, you deserve me, and that’s not my fault.
He made a gesture as if shooing away a fly, hung up the phone, and the video was gone.
I redialed the code and saw my late mother, holding her receiver. This image was soft like in a dream. The calendar behind her showed 2010. She didn’t look surprised.
“You look aged, son,” she said evenly as if she had been expecting my call.
“I’m tired, mama.”
“Maybe you should sleep more?”
The door behind me flung open, and the twins ran in. Each held a Barbie.
“Who is this?” Twin 1 asked.
“That’s my mother.”
“Who are they?” my mother asked.
“My grandkids.”
“Come over, Grandma,” Twin 2 said. “Let’s play.”
“She can’t,” I said. I didn’t want to say she was dead. “There is a wall of time in between.”
“It’s just glass,” Twin 2 said. “Let’s break it with a hammer.”
So I did, though I didn’t have a hammer. I hit the wall with the landline phone, and both the wall and the phone broke into pieces so tiny that you needed a microscope to see them. My mother entered the room. I had so many questions for her, but the girls wanted to play, and all four of us played with Barbies. I hoped I’d have time for questions when the night came.
I decided to message Leah tomorrow to tell her that her code was a smashing success. I’d use my smartphone.
But when I went to the bathroom an hour later, two men in leather jackets grabbed me from both sides. Black-and-white like in an old movie, and tall, they smelled of stale herring, onions, and vodka.
“Got you,” one of them said. He spoke Russian with a Baltic accent. No wonder. Lenin’s guards were mostly Latvians. Having foreign people as Praetorian guards was a time-honored trick. Even communists adopted it.
A poem I wrote a while back came to mind.
Attila, the President for Life of the East
Your name means “daddy” in old Germanic,
Though you are not German.
Neither am I.
We both lived further in the East
Under the red flags.
You talk down to me from horseback,
as if I’m a pope defending Rome from you.
A slab of meat is warming between your thighs
and the side of the horse.
Your wispy beard
is singed by the camera lights
when they interview you
on CNN.
Daddy,
though I left your country
half a lifetime ago,
I can never escape your reach.
Your arrows
blot out the sun and the moon
in my dreams.
All roads lead to Rome, Daddy.
You are coming for me.
I didn’t read the poem to these two men, though. They were probably not into poetry. “Where are you taking me?” I asked sheepishly instead.
They didn’t answer. They took my hands and delivered me to a black-and-white world. My hands bled, but even blood had no color in that world. The men chained me to the stake and forced me to watch them burning books on a bier as wide as a mountain, but the fire had no color either.
They let me go eventually. So, I wandered on an unpaved road. The fog, mixed with the smoke, was getting denser, and I stumbled a few times. Then I saw a woman dressed in something shapeless that looked like a patient’s or a funeral gown.
“Go back,” she said without stopping. Thankfully, she spoke in a language I understood. “The road leads to a cliff. Unless you want to fall.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
She stopped and turned around. “You’re new here?”
“I’m. How can you tell?”
“You called me ‘ma’am.’ Usually, people here call each other ‘hey, you.’”
“Sorry.”
“No problem. My name is Leah.”
I peered into her face. No, she wasn’t ‘my’ Leah—just a coincidence.
“I’m Alex.”
“Are you a writer?”
“How do you know?”
“You got the secret code.”
I nodded. “I am and I did.”
“I can show you a place to hide from the ohrana.”
“I think I’ve heard this word, but I don’t remember. What is that?”
“Not ‘what’ but ‘who.’ The people who brought you here. The book burners. I like your gown, by the way.”
I looked down. I didn’t notice that a shapeless funeral gown replaced my clothes.
Leah slipped her hand into the crook of my arm, and we went stumbling through the fog together.
“Why do they burn books?” I asked.
“For the same reasons all book burners do it,” she said. “Censorship and opposition. Contempt and attention. Concealment and Symbolism. Most importantly—because they can. But I’m writing new books to replace the burned ones. Will you help?”
“Certainly.”
“Here is the opening of my work-in-progress,” she said. “Feel free to critique.”
And she began to recite before I had a chance to reply. “It was a secret world, so secret that even its denizens didn’t know its name. They didn’t know how to get out or how to call for help. I think the loss of colors in this world is a secret code for silence. But writers can’t be silent even in a colorless world. We write and we fight. We win or we try again.”
I wasn’t jealous of her while she kept talking, and we kept walking until the fog swallowed us completely. I wonder if it would ever spit out our bones.
