Cover design: Irina Novikova
Photographer: Maria Taykova
Makeup artist: Galina Zhelenkova
© OJSC Ves Publishing Group, 2020.
Time Comes to a Standstill
It all took place in the distant past roughly 100 million years ago. No-one knows the precise date but that does not matter. When it comes to events that happened so long ago that it is impossible to conceive of their remoteness in time, it ceases to be relevant whether they took place eons ago or relatively recently.
When we look up at the stars, we don’t consider the fact that their light has taken millions of years to reach us. As far as we are concerned, the stars simply exist in the here and now. It is the same with events of the past, even those lost in the depths of millennia. In the moment that they are recalled, either in memory or in storytelling, it is as if they were here right now.
Although, in truth, they are not fully here right now. So how far do the depths of millennia stretch? The earth and the sea extend downwards, and the sky stretches upwards but in what direction does time go? And where does it come from?
Space is quite straightforward. It approaches from up ahead and ends up behind us. When it comes to time, things are just as straightforward, at least until you start to really think about it: what has already happened is gone and what is yet to happen is yet to arrive. But where did what happened yesterday go, and where does what will happen tomorrow come from?
As soon as you start trying to understand the nature of time, things get much more complicated. When you stop to think about it, if you cannot say where yesterday went and where tomorrow will come from, you have to conclude that yesterday and tomorrow might not exist after all and contemplate the possibility that only today exists – the present.
So, if yesterday no longer exists and tomorrow has not yet come into being, time cannot be anything at all as it doesn’t go anywhere and it doesn’t come from anywhere. Are we to assume then that time is simply an abstract notion or might not be a physical phenomenon after all?
Future time is an ephemeral concept. The past, however, must be real not least because archaeological excavations testify to its existence. Yet shards of pottery and human remains are really just another obsolete present. When we talk about the past, we are usually referring to a series of events and in this regard, the question is, where are those events now? Where are they stored?
However unlikely it sounds; you can actually see the past. The starry sky is visual proof of that. We see the stars light up, shine and burn out in the present moment, however long ago those events took place. When it comes to the stars, we can see what happened on Earth millions of years ago, so, should we assume that the past is preserved in rays of light and nothing more?
Mysteries such as these are best left to the philosophers. Some things in life are not meant to be explained. They are better recounted in stories… And so, once, something mysterious happened. Time froze and the world came to a standstill.
Until this particular moment, everything had carried on as normal: one royal dynasty replaced another, one civilization followed another and the statues of forgotten gods became riddled with cracks and veiled in layers of sand… Things came and went but nothing ever stood still.
Although, who knows? Maybe this was not the first occasion that time came to a standstill and the Universe assumed a state of limbo. After all, if time was set in motion for a reason, then maybe there is a reason for its coming to a standstill. And the pause itself could have lasted for a single moment and it could just as easily have lasted for an eternity because without movement, there can be no time.
So, in that limitless moment of non-existence, when nothing was supposed to happen, strangely, there was one place where something did happen.
* * *
Priestess Itfut was trailing the boundless blue desert talking to herself. An eccentric figure, it was impossible to tell which country or era she belonged to or even how old she was. She could have been twenty, but she could just as well have been forty. She was dressed in an ankle-length, dark-blue, black velvet dress with a neck collar studded in diamonds. On her left hand, she wore a ring inlaid with a crystal with the same dark-blue sheen. Her face was covered in scarlet ritual paint, her cheeks bones dotted with white spots. She had green eyes and black hair cut into a bob. What else could one say about her? For all the harshness of her appearance, she was beautiful.
How she was able to move through frozen reality was a mystery. Indeed, it was a mystery to the priestess herself, as she had not the faintest idea where she was, nor could she remember how she had ended up there.
“Oh, Gods, rulers of the world! Take me home!” Itfut’s protest was expressed more in capricious indignation than a helpless wail. “Where are my servants, my subjects? If you don’t show yourselves right now, I’ll order you to have everyone beheaded!”
These words were probably spoken for effect as the priestess did not have the reputation of a cruel or bloodthirsty ruler.
“Right, if this is some sick joke everyone will suffer for it! And believe me, suffer they will!” Itfut was exhausted but she still had the spirit to behave like a capricious princess, at least in some circumstances! One had to admit, the priestess had a brave heart. Anyone else finding themselves in her shoes would already have become hysterical or fallen into trance, not least because the landscape was frighteningly surreal. Everywhere, the same, monotonous, blue waves of sand stretched as far as the horizon. There was not the slightest whiff of a breeze in the air. It was neither hot nor cold. The sky that held no sun glowed with a yellow shimmer and in contrast the sand was blue.
“Okay, okay, get with it, thinking – what is this, a nightmarish horror or a horrible nightmare?” Itfut had the habit of repeating herself.
“This kind of thing shouldn’t be happening to me. I’m the one who creates the nightmares and the horrors that make everyone else tremble! This is your last warning! If I’m not returned to my temple this instant, I’ll get angry, and you know how terrifying that can be!” Itfut fell to her knees in despair. “Oh no, I think I’m going to cry.”
Then it suddenly came to the priestess that she could barely remember who she was or where she was from. Vague fragments of memory were tangled in her mind. She recalled that she was a High Priestess and ruler… she had a temple, ministers, a Teacher but she could not recall the details. She could not even remember her name.
“Oh! Gods, who am I?”
No sooner had she spoken than a whisper appeared in the emptiness flicking from one direction to another like an unsettled wind:
“Itfut, Itfut! Priestess Itfut! Priestess, priestess!”
“Strange, that is kind of like my name, and at the same time, it isn’t…” the priestess muttered while looking around for the source of the voice. “Who’s there?”
“Threshold, Threshold!” the whisper responded.
“Threshold of what?”
“Time, time!”
“Where are you? Show yourself!”
But the whisper faded just as suddenly as it had appeared and did not respond.
“Right…” sighed Itfut, not waiting for a reply. “This must be a bad dream. Either I’m about to wake up, or I’m going mad. Either way, I can’t take this anymore.”
Then, she suddenly remembered something her Teacher had taught her: to return to reality from a dream you have to be consciously aware of who you are, who you really are.
“That’s not me,” the priestess declared. “This is me!” But the priestess’s incantation did not help. Nothing happened. ‘So, who am I? What will happen if I never remember myself fully?’ thought the priestess. ‘Even the name the whisper spoke somehow did not quite feel like it was her real name. And what did that mean, it did not quite feel real?’
“So, what are we going to do, Itfut?” the priestess asked herself. “Ok, my name is Itfut, my name is Itfut. What next? There is no point in walking any further. There’s just sand and nothing but sand as far as the eye can see. Hang on a minute. What else did the Teacher say?”
The fresh memory gave the priestess a glimpse of hope. ‘Wake up in the dream and you can take control of the dream. To do this you have to look very carefully at all that surrounds you and then ask yourself whether everything is as it should be, or whether something is wrong, and if so, what exactly. Learn to see your reality.’
“No, everything is wrong with me and my surroundings. Everything is wrong! And what is there to see here except sand? And, by the way, why is it blue?” Itfut sat down and began pouring sand from one hand to the other.
“Sand, this is not sand. Sand is sand!” she said trying to see the unusual essence in ordinary things as her Teacher taught her to. “What is unusual about it aside from the color? It consists of grains and pours like sand.”
In that moment, the sand in front of the priestess began to rise up like smoke turning into a huge vortex and charging up into the sky. The priestess screamed at the terrifying spectacle and tried to run away but it was futile. Wherever she ran, the sandy spiral appeared in front of her. The shoes Itfut was wearing were not meant for running in and she stumbled and fell.
The priestess was almost on the verge of great despair, but she pulled herself together again and managed to calm herself a little, telling herself that the whirlwind was not doing her any harm at least.
“Okay, okay. I’m really scared now; I couldn’t be any more scared. So, if things can’t get any worse, then that’s good – they’re about to get better. But I’ve seriously had enough of all this. My fear is now separate from me, and I am separate from it. I don’t want to be with it anymore. I’m going and leaving my fear in my shoes. They’re no good here anyway. Away, away, get away from me!” The priestess kicked off her shoes and flung them straight into the whirlwind.
“That’s it. I’ve gone and I’ve left my fear here!”
The shoes disappeared into the whirlwind which twisted even more powerfully now with an increasing roar.
’This is bad,’ thought Itfut. ‘I need to take more effective measures otherwise this is not going to end well.’
“Right, Itfut, Itfut, priestess, priestess, you need to see this damn reality, work out what it is, or this is the end. This isn’t just sand and that isn’t just any old whirlwind. What is it? Think, quickly, quickly now, hurry, hurry!”
And then it dawned on her.
“It’s a sand-timer!” she exclaimed. “It’s a sand-timer! I see you, devilish reality!”
In that moment, the whirlwind stopped twisting, the roar was replaced with a glassy chime, and the gigantic funnel came crashing to the ground. The sand acquired a natural yellow color, and the sky shone blue again. The sun was the one thing still absent from the sky.
Synthetic Maid
At the same time but in a different era and in a different place…
How it is possible for something to be ‘at the same time but in a different era’ – we will explain later. Movement through time and space is not always linear, at least within the limits of what can be seen and understood. And just because something lies beyond the limits of our comprehension does not mean that it does not exist.
In order to move from the point in time and space where we left priestess Itfut to the new place of action, the observer is required to undertake a rather elaborate journey.
Imagine that you are flying up through the sky. Itfut transforms from a figure on the sand to a tiny speck. The earth appears to move further and further away until it resembles the lines on a map, and you are lifted higher and higher until eventually, the blue of the sky is replaced by the black of the cosmos.
Now you are flying through the black abyss, but it is not dark because of the stars and Earth is still visible like a blue ball moving away in the distance. And soon Earth is nothing more than a dot and your movement is no longer visible. There comes a point when you are frozen in this position, surrounded by stars in the blackness, nothing but stars.
Then, one of those stars suddenly transforms into a tube. It draws you inside a glowing tunnel, pulling you through it for what feels like an infinity and at the same time you are travelling incredibly fast.
Finally, the speed slows down, you are pushed out of the other end of the tube and again find yourself floating in black space filled with stars. One star begins to increase in size, and you realize that you are no longer hanging there suspended, you are moving.
Then the star transforms into a ball which gradually expands before you into a blue planet. It is the Earth but in a different epoch. You enter the Earth’s atmosphere and blackness is replaced by blueness; it is as if you are drowning, falling through the clouds. You find yourself floating in a gray fog for a while before being plunged back into darkness this time because, in this epoch, the sun has already set.
Below you can see the lights of the city at night. You plane downwards drawing ever closer to the flickering lights. You fly across motorways with cars whizzing past, squares filled with people, rivers, bridges, luminous apartment blocks, houses, until finally, you dart in through a random window.
Now we can say that it is the same time only we are in a different epoch and a different place, specifically a theater, in which a film is being made of the musical ‘Finished Clown’.
Why a clown and in what way ‘finished’? Finished as in passed away or finished in the sense of hopeless, incorrigible, done-for? The film crew did not appear to know either as they were still in the so-called ‘creative process’.
The auditorium was immersed in half-light. Abandoned belongings and coats lay thrown across chairs. A handful of people were sitting in the auditorium, one dozing and another staring at the brightly lit stage, where theatre types rushed about busy preparing for a rehearsal. The stage was set up as a semi-cylindrical transformer with images and lighting effects projected onto the floor and walls.
The director was standing in the middle of the stage, an emotional figure cursing wildly.
“It won’t do. None of you will do! Are we shooting a musical or a funeral? Get lost, fools! Get lost! Come back different!” What he meant by this and in what way they should return different, the director did not bother to explain. But the members of the film crew, a motley crowd dressed up to the nines, were not going to hang about to find out and fled in all directions.
“Right, where is my diva? She’s the only one who inspires me. Bring me my diva! Max, will she be long?” he asked turning to his operator. “Go and find out.”
The operator ran behind the wings and quickly returned. Max was a young man with a stutter, and he had the habit of taking a long time to prepare before saying anything:
“Victor, we… We-e…”
“We what? Who we are and what we are is a complex philosophical question. Spit it out!”
“Matilda is being difficult again.” Max finally managed to say.
“Just get her here!” yelled Victor (which was what they called the director) in an intimidating voice.
“Victor!” A woman’s voice could be heard behind the wings. “Here she is, I’m here!” Following on from the voice the woman herself appeared. The instantly created the impression of being a highly eccentric individual dressed as she was in a dark-green jumpsuit and huge pink platforms, as well as donning a shock of light-blue hair strewn with light-purple highlights. You could say she was a ‘blue blonde’.
“Come here, Tili, my darling, my angel!” Victor approached the eccentric woman throwing his arms wide open. “Ok, turn around. Aren’t you beautiful!” and abruptly changing the tone of his voice, he said, “What are you doing here still not made up! Skedaddle back to the dressing room, quick!”
“I don’t want to. It takes so lo-o-o-ong!” Matilda had the habit of extending her vowels. “It’s only a rehearsal anyway!”
“I’m the one who decides whether it’s a rehearsal or a film shoot. Get out of my sight!”
“I want a sweet! You promised me chocolate-coated cherries.”
“What a b…” Max stuttered, trying to join the conversation. “B, b…”
“You’re saying I have such a beautiful what? Hurry up!”
“What a banal choice – chocolate-coated cherries!” said Max, finally managing to finish his sentence.
“Oooh, but I want some!”
“Diva, you know the rules. If you don’t do a take, you don’t get a treat,” said Victor. “Do it, and you’ll have your treat. Now get lost all of you! No, wait, let’s rehearse your curtsy again.”
Matilda stepped to one side and gave an affected curtsy.
“Oh, how vulgar!” shouted Victor. “Come on, again. Do it as you were taught to, hands to the chest and… not on the chest, to the chest, and with feeling, with dignity! It should be light, not buffoon-like! What am I going to do with her? That’s it, get out of here, you monster, or I’ll shoot you myself!”
Matilda turned on her platforms and was about to make a run for it.
“No! Stop! Tili, darling! Come back here!”
Matilda turned again and waited expectantly.
“Sometimes, you say something, out of the mouth of a babe. Seriously, what would be the best dance to use in this shot, street or house?”
“It needs the twist. The twist is what’s needed.” the diva answered him.
“What, what, what? Why?”
“Because all your go-go and R&B totally sucks. It’s all old hat.”
“What? What? What do you mean, old hat, it’s contemporary dance.”
“Because it’s all so boring! Boring – that’s why!”
“Right, great explanation. But why the twist? That’s retro.”
“New is the forgotten old. You can make a new fashion out of anything that’s been forgotten.”
“That’s a th… th-th… That’s a thought.” said Max.
“Agreed. We should try it.” said Victor. “Ok, go and get made up, there’s a smart girl.”
“I’m clever with or without my makeup!” Matilda retorted and ran backstage with a happy skip.
Victor beckoned the wardrobe-mistress and whispered something in her ear, after which she disappeared.
“Right, now the rest of you talentless, retards, take a good look at yourselves and quickly assume a genius state. Go on, go on, I can see you beginning to shine already! Max, you and the other bird-brains! We need to decide on the music and effects. Time, time! We’re running out of time! Let me know as soon as Matilda is ready.”
The stage was once again a whirl of bustling preparations. After some time that as always, ‘was and was not’, Victor began giving directions.
“Right, all set! Max, where is Matilda? Ah, here she comes, all happy and radiant.”
Matilda made for an impressive sight. In addition to her turquoise colored hair, her face was covered in blue face paint and her eyes were made up so that there was no doubt, the diva was a total diva.
“Okay, come on! Come here, my darling! Turn around!”
Victor beckoned to the wardrobe-mistress, who was holding a huge pink bow, the kind those women used to wear on the backs of old-fashioned dresses.
“Just a second! We’re just going to dress you up a bit!”
Scarcely having glimpsed the bow, Matilda jumped backwards waving her hands about.
“No, no! Are you mad?“
“You don’t understand! Look at it! It’s huge, pink and beautiful!” said Victor admiring his invention. “It matches the color of your shoes. It is perfect!”
“I’m not wearing that… gaudy thing!”
“But we’re dancing the twist. Now you’ll have something to twirl!”
“It stinks! What am I, a doll?”
“Of course! You’re my living doll!”
“Stand still.” Paying no attention to the diva’s moans, the wardrobe-mistress fastened the bow to the belt just above her bottom. The other actors surrounded Matilda, trying to calm her down.
“Don’t worry Matilda, it really suits you!”
“It looks really interesting!”
“It’s fantastic!”
“Gorgeous!”
Eventually, they managed to convince her.
“Tili, sweetheart, you look very, very beautiful!” Victor said, still trying to persuade her.
“Very, super-very?”
“Yes, yes. And you’re so clever!”
“What is it you want from me now?”
“We’re having a teeny-weeny problem. We can’t decide on the special effects for the floor and walls. Nothing is quite right. Any ideas?”
Despite the fact that the diva gave the impression of being frivolous by nature, she had an extraordinary mind and saw many things from her own unique point of view, sometimes too much so.
“You don’t need any special effects. Let’s just have a mirror floor and make the walls mirrors, too. They’ll give a reflection of the whole dance group…”
“Your bow too!”
“Stop it. That was not what I meant. If everything is in mirrors, something interesting might happen.”
“Ok, we’ll try it. Max, run the transformer, we’re turning the whole stage into a mirror.”
“A… A-all of it?”
“Yup. the floor, the walls, everything. Ok, attention people, in your places!” said Victor turning to the others. “Ready? Jugglers, acrobats, go! Music, go! Cameras, let’s go!”
And at that, the previously chaotic, motley crowd suddenly came together transformed, moving smoothly and stylishly, as if the scene had been rehearsed a thousand times before. And of course, the diva was at the very center of the action, charmingly twirling her bow.
La-la, lalalala-la, lalalala-la, lalala.
If you’ve never been
To our bright city,
Never dreamed till dawn
Above the evening river,
If you have never strolled with friends
Down the vast avenues,
You have never seen
The best city in the world.
Ta-tada-tada-da!
The song sets sail, and my heart sings,
These words are about you, Moscow…[1]
In that moment, all the mirrors seemed to sparkle simultaneously and Matilda, on whom the camera was focused, was lit up in a flash of bright light. She continued moving to the beat of the music as a green mist engulfed her from all sides. Dumbfounded, Matilda stopped dancing. The mist quickly dissipated but the space around her was filled with a mirage of blue sand and yellow sky. Matilda’s eyesight seemed to go dim. She was alone inside the mirage which was slowly floating right through her. She could hear music playing somewhere in the distance. Then the mirage dissolved and in its place, Matilda was surrounded by gray figures, moving about as if dancing the same dance that was being performed on the stage just moments ago. The figures were dressed in gray, shapeless, hooded robes, their faces obscure and blurred. The music faded and was replaced by a glassy chime. The figures froze and stared at Matilda perplexed. Matilda looked back at them in horror.
* * *
Emerging from their stupor, the gray figures rushed at the poor woman shouting.
“Synthetic maid! Synthetic maid!”
“Eat heo! Eat heo!”
Matilda’s legs buckled and she fainted before the figures had time to pounce.