O-O-O, or interviews with the dead
a short story by Duncan White
. . . any soul may be yours if you find and follow its undulations . . .
. . . perhaps we both are someone that neither of us knows.
– Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (last page)
37. Make the Acquaintance of Vladimir Nabokov
– Georges Perec, “Some of the Things I really must do before I die” (last line)
Versions
There are two versions of the story of Olga Olegovna Orlova. In the first, Olga was born in Varna, on the Black Sea coast, on New Year’s Eve in 1979. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Virginia. Her parents, both of whom were doctors, flourished in the United States. They bought a comfortable home with a pool on a suburban street named after an ex-American president. An only child, Olga was bright and independent. She made friends easily; she swam for the high school team and received good grades in English, physics and mathematics. Her parents never discussed their lives on the Black Sea. Bulgarian and Russian were never spoken in the house. In the winter she skated with her father on the lake at the edge of town. History for the Orlovas began in the autumn of 1989.
After school, Olga won a swimming scholarship to study quantum science at Harvard University but dropped out in her junior year. She moved to Florida with a girl friend several years older than Olga who secured her an internship at NASA. During her time in the labs she completed a PhD in Space Manufacture, deploying satellites in which new alloys, medicines and semiconductors could be manufactured in outer space. In a bar one night, Olga explained her research: Earth is a wonderful place to live, but terrible for building so many things. You have to fight gravity and the dense atmosphere while trying not to cause pollution. But in space you have no gravity to interfere with the mixing of materials, while you have a pure vacuum and no atmospheric pollution. Two months after her thirtieth birthday, Olga published a science fiction novel with a little-known publisher in Orlando. (Olga once joked that nobody knows anything about Orlando except that it is close to Disneyland and has something to do with launching rockets into space and putting men on the moon. This is especially true of the people who live in Orlando, she said.) The novel tells the story of Svetlana Daye, an astrophysicist and chess champion, who in 2042 would pilot the first manned mining probe to Phobos, the largest of Mars’ two moons. The novel is called The Real Life of Svetlana Daye.
In the second version of the story, Olga Olegovna Orlova is one of those walk-on characters who, like a match flame, appear briefly in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov before being put out, never to be mentioned again. We know nothing about Olga except that she was an “old Russian Lady” who lived in St Petersburg in the last years of the nineteenth century and later moved to France. In Paris, she meets the narrator of Nabokov’s novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The only thing that saves Olga from oblivion is her diary, which she is keen to share with, V., half-brother of the now deceased and ever allusive Sebastian Knight. The diary is all but useless. So uneventful had those years been (apparently) that the collecting of daily details (which is always a poor method of self-preservation) barely surpasses a short description of the day’s weather. And yet, this poor method of self-preservation means that V can state with some confidence that the morning of Sebastian’s birth was a fine and windless one, with twelve degrees (Reaumur) below zero . . . this is all however that the good lady found worth setting down. Then Olga is gone. Returned to oblivion where she dissolves into shadow, dust of another time.
Transparent things
Rather than sentenced to oblivion, it may in fact be the case that these characters continue to live a near invisible life, waiting to be recovered. We meet them by accident in the shade of trees, or passing under a bridge somewhere, in a doctor’s waiting room where men and women, and sometimes children, sit alone or in pairs in the anticipation of a diagnosis, a course of treatment, best-case scenarios. These inventions seek to share with us their fate, to attach themselves to what is real, if only briefly, to move in the air like us. In return we index ourselves to the details of their fictional existence, to times we didn’t live and to times when we will no longer live again.
By way of evidence, I should perhaps say that there is a third version of the story of Olga Olegovna Orlova. In December 2015, I had been invited to one of the universities in Paris to give a talk on accidents in art. After the presentation, which didn’t go well, we were invited to a party in a large loft-room in a busy neighbourhood close to the Canal Saint-Martin. The room was dark and sparsely furnished. Having nowhere to sit I found myself leaning against a bare tabletop. The party’s host was introduced to me as Olga Olegovna Orlova. She said she had enjoyed my talk (which I found hard to believe). Then she apologised for the bareness of the flat, a Ukrainian poet named Svetlana Daye had lent it to her for the week. Olga was from Norway originally. Nowadays, she travelled a great deal, moving from place to place. She had most recently been awarded a scholarship to write a new book on cinema, Flaubert and the paintings of Edvard Munch. Olga looked at me and asked if I needed a drink. When I said yes, she led me to a kitchen and told me there was nothing in the fridge other than undated bottles of champagne.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder if it wasn’t just people who could travel out of stories and meet us in rooms we didn’t know, or if objects could travel in this way as well. I once found a blue pencil in a hotel room in Lausanne and wondered if it wasn’t the same pencil discovered in a dresser at the beginning of Nabokov’s, Transparent Things. In many cases such fictional objects were real before they were put into a poem or a novel as if certain arrangements of words were also rooms, or gardens, or train carriages.
In Georges Perec’s writings (to give an example), objects circulate freely, as prompts for memory, or as markers of space, a way to talk about his work, his history and his preoccupations, an attempt to grasp something pertaining to my experience, not at the level of its remote reflections, but at the very point where it emerges, he writes. For a long time I have been tracing the three ashtrays Perec includes in a catalogue of items found on or around his writing table during the last weeks of 1975. At first I traced them through Perec’s other books, where they would show up on the desk of Gaspard Winkler, for instance, or in a café close to the Luxemburg border, or in a radio station studio in Halberg in Germany. But I soon found myself looking for the ashtrays outside of the pages of Perec’s fiction, in houses of friends, in shop windows, in cafés, railway stations and pubs. The first ashtray is ceramic and shows a war memorial in Beirut, the second, which may also be ceramic, shows the rooftops of Ingolstadt in Germany, and was very fragile according to Perec, but it was the third I most expected to come across due to its generic nature, being made from black plastic with a white metal lid. In fact, I am certain I came across this ashtray long before I read any of Georges Perec’s books, in the living room of a boy I went to school with and who lived above The Prince of Wales in Clapton (I think). While I can see that the objects held some meaning for Perec – the Middle East and Germany were important places in his personal history – I could not say exactly why they would hold any meaning for me, especially given that I do not smoke. But it may be that these objects, especially the plastic ashtray which carries no reference to anything (other than itself), had become for me small markers of fate, carriers of ill burdens of the past but also futures that have in some way been lost. Smoking was of course habitual for Perec and it was lung disease that would kill him prematurely a week before his forty-sixth birthday (the age I am now). So when I saw the champagne bottles stacked in the white light of the fridge in Paris, I wondered if they had been purposely mislaid somehow, as if someone had confused the storerooms of fiction with the store cupboards of fact. And yet I’m sure it is a true story because I was there: the only thing Svetlana Daye kept in her kitchen in Paris was champagne.
Crossed lines
Some months later, I wrote to the Olga Olegovna Orlova of Oslo and asked her if she was in fact the Olga Olegovna Orlova of Orlando who wrote The Real Life of Svetlana Daye, a book that was not simply based on Nabokov’s Real Life of Sebastian Knight, but was its mirror reversal. Instead of a man and his life, it was a woman; instead of night, it was day; instead of being set in England it was set in space? I assumed that for some reason, Olga had wanted to keep the identity of the Paris apartment’s owner a secret and so had come up with an alias.
My message received a heated reply. Olga assured me that Svetlana Daye was very much a real poet. She had been exiled to Paris after Russia annexed Crimea earlier that year. She wanted to know where I had heard the preposterous story of Olga Orlegovna Olrlova of Orlando. When I explained that I must have made a mistake and apologised for getting my wires crossed, Olga’s tone mellowed and she wrote to say that her parents had in truth been avid fans of Nabokov’s books. Not only had they both adopted her mother’s maiden name when they married in the early 1960s, they had given their first child the name of Olga Orlegovna, perhaps as the kind of metaphysical joke common, she wrote, to those “zany times.” As for Svetlana Daye, Olga said she would be happy to put us in touch. Svetlana is planning to visit London in the spring.
At this point, it is perhaps important to note that I once owned a copy of The Real of Life of Svetlana Daye. The novel kept me company one summer when I was still a politics student and I travelled by train to the cities of southern Europe seeking a way of life I hoped would be more forgiving. I lost the book on an overnight train from Barcelona after I had been discovered by a guard without the correct supplement to my fare and was hastily disembarked somewhere in the Pyrenees. I hadn’t yet finished The Real Life of Svetlana Daye and much of what I recall of the novel is hazy to say the least. That said, I will attempt to give an account of its basic plot.
The real real life of Svetlana Daye
The novel begins several years in the future on a boat in the Mediterranean. Svetlana Daye is sailing with her father. She is nine years old. They stop for lunch on a remote island. The wind picks up. When they get back to the boat they find themselves in the midst of a storm. Svetlana is made to wear the only lifejacket on board. The boat capsizes suddenly. In the dark waters Svetlana loses sight of her father. She blacks out. When she comes to she is alone on a beach. Svetlana later learns that her father had drowned trying to get her back to shore.
Like in a film, we find that Svetlana Daye has been recalling these things from the cockpit of The Pequod, a mining probe on its maiden voyage to Mars. Throughout the three-year journey she travels back and forth in her mind to her childhood in Europe, her youth in the United States and her time as a chess champion on tour in South America, Russia and the People’s Republic of China. In the meantime, unbeknownst to Svetlana Daye, atomic war has broken out on Earth. When she reaches the moons of Mars it soon becomes clear that she is not part of a mining expedition at all. Phobos, Mars’ largest moon, has been requisitioned as a labour camp run by an advanced computer intelligence. Transports soon arrive from Earth carrying prisoners of war put to work in the extreme cold of the moon’s surface. The company who runs what is effectively an extraterrestrial gulag supplies the workers with synthetic oxygen. Any person who attempts to escape the controlled environment quickly suffocates as their internal organs combust in the immensely pressurised atmosphere of the moon. Svetlana Daye is enlisted as a guard and chief engineer. As news of the situation on earth reaches the colony a sense of despair pervades the camp. Even if they could escape there is nowhere to escape to.
Svetlana Daye is charged with interviewing the new prisoners transported from Earth. As the men and women file past her desk she comes face to face with her father. At first he doesn’t recognise his daughter. She watches him work. When he collapses she breaks protocol and helps him up. This happens several times until they are sent to isolation. There they are reunited.
I cannot recall exactly how her father had survived the storm or why it was he kept himself hidden from his child for all those years. Guilt? Despair? Events beyond his control? On the night I travelled from Barcelona, I read of Svetlana Daye’s photographic memory. She had made drawings of the internal workings of the camp based on maps she had found and destroyed in case she was detected by the robots. Using these memory-drawings she had begun to explain an escape route based on the Knight’s Tour in chess when the guard pulled open the door and demanded my papers.
Envoys in the light
It may or may not be significant, but during those winter months in London as I awaited the arrival of Svetlana Daye, I frequently encountered ghosts. These encounters were always outside. On the street. In car parks or on train station platforms. On walks alone in the woods. On very cold days or on days when it was suddenly warm in the early spring, days that share a common brightness, a particular glare, that seemed to catch them out. At first the ghosts appeared startled, then as I got closer they seemed relieved, reassured, as if they had been waiting to pass on their news. I have read others describe the maliciousness of these spirits at work in the world of the living, who are a foot shorter than they had been in life, and who flicker at the edges of their faces. How they come to seize the living with misfortune and harm. Of how the dead were thought of as extremely touchy, envious, vengeful, quarrelsome and cunning. Given the least excuse they would infallibly take their displeasure out on you. But when I was within speaking distance the ghosts appeared to lose interest as if they were expecting someone else, or as if they had forgotten why they were there at all. I had no way of knowing what it was they had been meaning to tell me or, indeed, what questions they had intended to ask.
Seeing these lost figures in the blinding light, I often wondered if those writers who died young (Roberto Bolaño, Georges Perec, Arthur Rimbaud, for instance) had not been spared the same questioning; the prodding and probing of interviewers, readers, the public at large, the trade in explications, theories, interpretations, biographical facts. Not that they were resistant to or shied away from any such interest in their work. No doubt the paradoxical nature of the situation would have appealed to them (why bother to write books which would then require explanation?). But in the case of Perec and Bolaño, such probing becomes part of an expanding text, one that enveloped them in their fictions. This happened through their work but also through the enquiries of other interrogators. How could one know where one’s fictions would stop and one’s self would begin, or vice versa? And it struck me then that while it was common for certain writers to be asked if their work was “autobiographical,” few ask after the “infra-biographical,” the gaps, or spaces in which the life of the writer, the lives of their characters and the life of the reader (whoever that might be) intersect or merge like paths at the horizon. Perhaps this was why I so frequently found myself passing time with the dead.
Anti-memory
When Svetlana Daye arrived in London at the end of March, she wrote to tell me that she was very busy and asked if I could meet her at the National Gallery where she had an engagement with one of the curators. I found her in front of Manet’s unfinished study of Maximilian’s execution in Mexico.
Svetlana was tall, she wore a long red coat and a beret. She was older than I expected, and her thin, near transparent face reminded me of pictures I had seen of Arthur Rimbaud’s biographer, Enid Starkie. I followed her to the tearoom in the basement with its panelled walls and Polish waiting staff who wore black waistcoats and black ties. Svetlana assumed I wanted to interview her on the subject of her poetry. I confessed that I hadn’t read any of her poems. And then, for something to say, I told her that I once read a book on a train following a Catalonian railway line entitled The Real Life of Svetlana Daye.
I assumed Svetlana would think I was mad or ill. Instead she laughed and began to ask about my work. I told her that I worked in my kitchen, that I often found myself in a trance picking up books at random looking for a way forward in my notes. She said I was lucky. She had to work wherever she could. She quoted a Russian writer I didn’t know: A work that accumulates out of an exhausted life, out of the narrative momentum of survival energy, is by its nature fragmented, coming in starts and stops, manifested out of any available time.
Svetlana was furtive, her hands moved continuously. She drank her coffee quickly but didn’t touch the piece of chocolate cake she had asked the waiter for in Russian. Then she told me a strange story about a woman she used to see at the window across from her childhood home in Mariupol. Whenever I looked up, Svetlana said, she was typing or working at a computer. In the early winter mornings and at night in the summer I could see the screen lighting up her face.
It soon occurred to my childish imagination, Svetlana went on, that she must be a Great Writer working on an endless novel – or perhaps a string of endless novels. Writing, writing, always writing, she said. I envied the Great Writer’s concentration, her commitment, her strength of will. Whatever she was working on must have been for her a source of joy – why else would she do it, I thought? Then it occurred to me that it may have been the case that the writer had no choice. That she had to keep working otherwise everything around her would collapse, would dissolve into dust. Her children’s lives depended on it, her loved ones, those invisible residents of the other rooms in her house.
But then I realised, Svetlana went on, it was not the life of the Great Writer that depended on her work. It was mine. The Great Writer was the author of our family’s existence (not an easy one at that time). I often imagined her looking down on us, she said. Not just watching us but waiting to see what would happen, if things would play out the way she had designed, if she could improve on matters, make things better, more lively, more exciting in some way. Whether she could create a life that was liveable without clear storylines, without predetermined narratives, governed instead by chance, by pleasure, misfortunes and joy. No mean feat, Svetlana said. From then on I have always been haunted by the question of who is writing who? Looking back, Svetlana said, the woman now reminds me of W.G. Sebald’s great uncle, who may or may not have been real, writing from a hotel room in Jerusalem as it begins to snow in the dusk. Memory, he writes, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.
Svetlana apologised and explained that she was in something of a rush. It was then that I described my meeting with Olga Olegovna Orlova in Paris. Svetlana Daye shook her head. You cannot believe a thing that woman says, she told me. The last time Svetlana had been in Paris the two of them had fought bitterly about art and literature. Olga insisted that the biographical had no place in literary or aesthetic critique. And yet, when I read her notes on Flaubert and Edvard Munch I threw my hands in the air, Svetlana said. She describes Madame Bovary as cinematic, a book written nearly half a century before the invention of moving picture films – how could that be? I said I didn’t know. Nor does she mention that Munch made strange little films of blurry walks in his native woodland or from barroom balconies in Olso, Munich and Berlin.
Listening to Svetlana as she gathered her coat and her bags, it suddenly occurred to me that she and Olga might in fact be the same person, or that they had swapped places somehow. Perhaps it was Svetlana Daye who had invented Olga Orlegovna Orlova from a hotel room in Kiev in a suite of prose poems I had forgotten I once read. Svetlana opened a wallet, but I said not to worry, I would settle the bill. When I came back to the table, Svetlana was gone.
A gift (the fatalist)
Working forward through my notes from that time, I came across a newspaper picture from March 27, 2022, showing the results of Russian shelling in Mariupol and Kharkiv. For some reason my notes didn’t pass comment on the picture, which must have moved me in some way. Instead there was a note on Freud’s visit to Pompeii in September 1902, as well as a note on the weather in London. Apparently, I had sat for a few minutes in the sun that afternoon.
Recalling that strange journey to Paris in the winter of 2015, I have begun to wonder if Olga Olegovna Orlova and Svetlana Daye, had in fact been one of those visitors from a future that had now become the past. To report on an immense sadness and destruction, on the lives that would be lost. As usual I had missed something or had been found unreceptive and they had moved on, disappointed, but hopeful of arriving in better hands. Before leaving me at the gallery in Trafalgar Square, Svetlana had promised to send me a gift. A few weeks later when I got back to my kitchen after a day of the usual errands, I discovered a package from Orlando, posted via Oslo (and for some reason northern Spain). There was no return address on the package other than the initials O-O-O. Inside the box that had been carefully wrapped I found an undated bottle of champagne and a first edition of The Real Life of Svetlana Daye. Maybe now I will get to finish that book.
Duncan White’s book, A Certain Slant of Light, was published by Holland House Books. Other publications include works in Hotel, ETZ, Blackbox Manifold and the Journal of Visual Culture. White wrote for and edited the collection, Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance Film (Tate Publishing). Forthcoming pieces will be published in Rehearsal, The Handbook of Experimental Cinema and the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. White works at Central Saint Martins in London where he is the Pathway Leader for MRes Art: Moving Image.