Blood Red, Snow White Read Free Page B

he made a decision as wise as it was foolish. He left. As Tabitha lay sleeping he kissed her goodbye, and walked from the house to the train.
    He didn’t leave just the house, he left the country. He caught a train, and a boat and another whole series of trains, and one day he got off a ferry in a harbor in a distant land.
    A land called Russia.
    And if it seems extreme to go all the way to Russia to get away from someone, he knew it was not.
    For ivy clings.

 
    FANCY WOODEN BOX
    THE YOUNG MAN STEPPED TIMIDLY onto the quayside and looked about him, and breathed Russian air for the first time. Did he know then that that air would never leave him? I think he did. I think he did.
    You already know what he carried; a battered leather suitcase in one hand, and a small but sturdy wooden box in the other. He had learned something already in the course of his journey. If you carry a closed wooden box, people want to know what is in it. All the way across Europe strangers had laid a hand on his shoulder and asked him in a variety of tongues what he was carrying. He thought how funny that was. No one ever asked him what was in his suitcase, though that was every bit as shut as the box. But they could guess. Clothes. Toothbrush and comb. Razor and pajamas. Tobacco and pipe.
    But the box. What the hell was in the box?
    Once or twice, he made up something outrageous, just to see their reactions.
    A snake. A pair of doves. Pearls and diamonds!
    Most of the time, he told the truth, and would even open it to show he wasn’t lying.
    There. A typewriter. A portable typewriter.
    The young man, you see, was a writer.
    The typewriter was a marvel of miniaturization, made from steel and rubber and ivory. A simple enough thing, though to him, a miracle in itself, for in that box was the potential to write everything that could ever be written. Every word, every sentence, every thought that could ever be, was waiting to be made from the machine in the box. Every single idea ever was in there. And that in itself was a wonderful idea.
    One day, he thought, I’ll write a story about a closed wooden box.
    So it was a woman who sent him to Russia. A woman and fairy tales, both hers and his.

 
    O, RUSSIA
    ARTHUR. THAT WAS THE YOUNG WRITER’S NAME . If I’m to go anywhere, Arthur thought, I’ll go to Russia. He may have left Ivy in order to escape her stories, but he came to Russia to find stories of another kind.
    Fairy tales.
    Like all writers, he had been a reader first, and he thought Russian fairy tales were the best in the world. People back home didn’t know these stories, and he wanted to tell them. They might know Cinderella, and Beauty and the Beast, and Snow White with her raven-black hair, but he thought they ought to know about the Fool of the World, the Little Silver Saucer, and Baba Yaga, the witch, in her hut with chicken legs.
    He came to Russia to find these stories, but before he could, he had to learn Russian. He bought a book, one that a Russian child would learn to read from, and he taught himself to read it. And when he had managed that, he picked a harder one, and learned it, too, and so on and so on, until one day he picked up a Russian newspaper and read as though it was written in English.
    It was a clever thing to do, and his new Russian friends were impressed and amused by it all at once.
    *   *   *
    Arthur came to the city and found himself a job and somewhere to live.
    He also found himself in the middle of a story beyond anyone’s imagination.

 
    RESURRECTION
    THE BEAR SLEEPS. Somewhere it lies in the darkness of its cave, its heart almost still, its blood crawling through its veins. If you looked from across the sea, from across the country, from just outside the cave even, you would think it was dead, but it truly is only sleeping, waiting for the time to wake.
    The time is not yet. Things have to happen first, before the bear can wake. And while the bear sleeps, the Tsar and the Tsarina