remembered where she was she no longer saw herself clearly, for the mirrors had clouded up. But slowly, unevenly, they regained their clarity: smudges remained in long, broken chains like mountain ranges, and tall letters faded in and out among them, spelling T-I-B-E-T, before disappearing completely. All day long, then, Elsa saw that child’s face, as well as a fading map of that unfamiliar country—a country that had never, until now, given her a second thought.
3. THE MONARCHIST
It has been brought to my attention by many of you that I have never described the process of my enlightenment, in order that those of you who wish to join a new generation of monarchists may recognize the impulse that lies in you and bring it to fruition.
You will undoubtedly come from diverse backgrounds, and your own stories will likewise differ from mine. But the conclusions we reach will not differ: that democracy has failed us, and that we must no longer support a failed system.
I have come to Novosibirsk in order to collect my thoughts most clearly, unfettered by our gnawing institutions (which take steady, even bites from our consciousness), and to record them most humbly, here, for you.
My grandparents were victims of the Great Cataclysm of the early twenty-first century, uprooted from their homes in Ruthenia and seeking, like everyone else, a solution to their problems in the Coastal States of America, repeating a pattern that had already been set a century earlier. They settled in its capital of New York. But the Coastal States, newly independent and drained of her resources, had little left to offer them but slick advertising and credit cards.
They accepted the offer. She cleaned houses and he painted them. Together they managed to keep an apartment and have two children. My father, their first, became an attorney, passing the bar shortly after my grandfather’s death. His sister, my aunt, never married and remained childless.
I, being the eldest, was then expected to carry the family up to the third tier: a profession either in politics, academia, or the arts.
And I did start out as a history major. I studied every government that ever existed. I studied the ways people lived under those governments. And as I studied, I became too smart. I wasn’t expected to do that: it was not in my family’s American lesson plan. But it did happen. I started to question the society I had been reared in; I started to question the course that pure democracy had come to take—the course that I was supposed to take.
Over a hundred years ago a phenomenon called pop culture was widely celebrated. The remnants of that culture have instilled a sense of cultural inertia in nearly everyone today. Those who resist it, in hopes of maintaining a more engaging thing called art, are certain outcasts. For most of the population of my former country (and much of the world) can no longer be engaged. Democracy has numbed the common soul.
I believe it is possible to overcome cultural inertia. To do it you must have mentors, or keepers of the most refined cultural heritage. These mentors will instill a sense of awe in those who, for all their toil, have little or no time to uphold refinement in the arts of living and in the creative arts. A steady, enriched form of government must be able to back these mentors, so that the inertia of the population does not rise and overcome them…
(Todd’s pen dropped. There had been a mental interruption, an internal scratching of his head.)
Alexei had been living with Todd for a little less than two years. Alexei’s idea of a Sunday afternoon was to hang under the eaves watching the light change, while Nura’s (after another edifying encounter with Wynnet) was to drop into Alexei’s living room and help herself to the newspaper, or artifacts.
What artifacts?
Just these: an exact replica of Catherine the Great’s crown, her ruling scepter, an array of Louis IV wigs, Kaiser Wilhelm’s pipe, Chief Sitting Bull’s best ceremonial deerskin, a Hapsburg dinner plate, a plaster model of Hadrian’s lover. While Alexei tolerated these sorts of things, Nura couldn’t wait for more. But she never bothered with the house’s current living inhabitant, because she believed it was really Alexei’s prerogative to establish communication with him. Anyway, she found the man dull.
The man was Todd Darnet (neé Oberling), an American who had spent the early part of his childhood in Germany, where he took many long walks with his sister, Greta, through the castles of Saxony. Those castles stayed forever in his mind, coming up during his commute to work, during lunch with his mother, while watching Illinois cast its votes in the presidential electorate, or cuddling his baby cat as she slept.
Todd felt he knew just why these castles had been built; that is, he felt he knew the need for them, a need that, he maintained, never left.
Todd often sipped a raspberry brandy (after the fashion of the czars) while writing his contribution to Letters from Novosibirsk. His first letter read like this:
To the unfortunate, the robbed, the inequitably deceived of all democracies:
Be it known that there is one among you who breathes new hope into our stagnant, polluted, stinking planet. What I am offering you is already known to you, but it must be rereleased. Then I am certain that our planet will flourish again, being in harmony with its most gifted offspring, whose lust for intervention in her natural ways has allowed them to sink in a sweetless mire.
I am speaking her of our penchant for “correctness,” and of our obsession with our own intellects. I am speaking as one of many here at Novosibirsk who have come bearing more degrees than a thermometer; hyper-educated, hyper-opinionated, ever hyper decision-oriented! I am speaking of the birth and death of democracy. For democracy was borne not of this Earth, but of human intellects, and we can not…be so kind as to take your foot off the floor—it’s the spot where my daughter took her first steps…
(Todd stopped writing, blinked, and finally scratched out the last line.)
We can not let our intellect surround and subdue the deepest historical parts of us. We must let ourselves breath free in the unencumbered air of our ancestors! We must bring back the slippers I wore, the catalyst for her first move. For some reason she always went after them, even when they were on my feet!
(Todd became angry, but gathered his wits and continued–)
We must bring back the monarchy!
Oh no, excuse me sir, but that would be a great mistake. It’s true that complacency doesn’t bother me that much, but, now do you know what that would mean?
Just think of your own uninspired neighborhood. What wouldn’t you do to see a little castle overlooking your home?
(He now began fidgeting in his seat, shaking his pen and tapping it once or twice on the pad.)
It would be fine to see a castle overlooking my home, just not overlooking what goes on inside it, the sense of security and dignity there. Think of it as a fortress there to allay your fears.
And then there’s the vulgar and false privilege of voting. Who votes nowadays anyway? There are enough of us around to tell the voters how to vote. Our voice is heard, but no one heeds it. I can still hear the hooves of the czar’s horses coming to Vydrino so his men could post another decree. How tiresome it was for us to be pulling them off; how then can anyone believe that a vote is worth anything? I say: Let those govern who govern best, who have been trained in the art, who have grown up with it and take their apprenticeship by birth. A royal family will do more to sit and watch everyone else work to pay for their balls and horses and summer dachas and jewels.
(Todd threw his pen into the waste basket and pulled a new one from a drawer.)
What could be more corrupt—and ugly—than a democracy? I’ve seen it in the streets of New York, as well as in post-socialist Russia. When everyone and everything is equal, nothing and no one ever rises above. The human landscape turns to ashes, and the death of all beauty ensues, like the chance our czars gave us to rise above our birthrights, I suppose, or to learn to read and write, or expect a time every year when we may have a break from our toil?
Todd had had enough. He abruptly closed his notebook and turned off the lamp at his desk
. He moved to another room and thought about making some strong coffee to dispel the unpleasant morning dreams that had been clouding his otherwise pure thoughts. There was so much more he must write about; certainly many others were out there who shared his convictions. It was his duty to reach them and tie them together.
But for now he would make the coffee, and play a game of chess with himself.
Alexei, however, had no intentions of convincing anyone of anything, though he was sometimes naturally inclined to give his opinion when the need was so obvious. What else could an old ghost do? It was rather like muttering to himself, exposing ideas that had been ingrained in Vydrino’s inhabitants for centuries, instead of those of its most recent, fleeting years. So when Todd returned to his screen two hours later he found the following trailing off from his closing phrase:
Even then, just after the Socialist Era, there were trips to heroic sites, places that had witnessed the defeat of Fascism—that is, the western aggressor. The Goddess of Victory raised her sword high over busloads of Siberian visitors, and we all felt that this great statue had never abandoned us, that this would always be a place for celebration. Even I—Alexei Maksimovitch, a nineteen-year-old villager of New Siberia, born at the heals of the new revolution—could