‘My life has crept so long on a broken wing/ Thro’ cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear. That I come to be grateful at last for a little thing’.
Tennyson ‘The May Queen’ (1833).
I was five years old when I first saw her. She was standing at the top of a flight of stairs, and as I looked up into her angry, wild dark eyes, fear flooded through my small frame, and I thought ‘trouble’ has arrived.
I saw her for the last time lying dead in a hospital bed ,when I was sixty. And I feared then that she would wake up suddenly , for I couldn’t believe that she had finally gone from my life. The relief was so profound. This time my heart raced with joy and delight.
I was free at last!
But I never expected that from then on I would have nightmares about her for the rest of my life, Recurring dreams that still wake me up in the early hours , if you will forgive the cliche, in a cold, icy sweat. It feels like I am trapped in a life-long prison sentence that I can never be released from. This is my story.
Imagine yourself as Russian author born into, and confined to, a Gulag. The innocent, unintended act of birth invokes punishment. Whether or not there was any crime is both unknowable and irrelevant. The days, weeks, months, years, decades roll by as an endless and featureless landscape. One day, you find an open door, you are free to leave unnoticed, detached from all that has gone before. Your life is revealed as an explosion of ideas, images, words, fantasies in which no trace of the Gulag can be found. It is time to start to write, in a way you have never known.
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