Table for Two: Fictions

“On his first day with the sweepers, Pushkin was sent with his broom to the cavernous warehouse where the sacks of flour were stacked in towering rows. In all his life, Pushkin had never seen so much flour. Of course, a peasant prays for an ample harvest with enough grain to last the winter, and maybe a bit left over to protect against a drought. But the sacks of flour in the warehouse were so large and piled so high, Pushkin felt like a character in a folktale who finds himself in the kitchen of a giant, where mortal men are dropped into the pie.”

Though Pushkin is surrounded by the abundance of flour, which should elate him, he is dismayed by the industrialism of Moscow, making the bags of flour into monsters. At home, his experience with flour is pastoral—limited in scale but connected to the process of farming and milling, which is absent at the biscuit factory.

“Irina couldn’t read a word on the leaflet, but embedded in the middle of the text, staring back at her with an expression at once determined and wise, was none other than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the very man who, not a week before, had reminded her that the revolution in Russia was meant to be a foothold. Irina scanned the departing sample of the world’s citizens, and sure enough, there among them she spied two young women wearing the headscarves of home. Rushing across the street, Irina called to them.”

The pattern of Irina’s life is clear in this passage, as she follows the same steps she took in Moscow to secure community and employment. Unlike Pushkin, who allows himself to be moved by the crowd, Irina focuses on her needs and abilities, forcing her way into the spaces she needs to succeed.

“But then, in a steeplechase, does the thoroughbred that has cleared the first hurdle suddenly slow down to consider the second? Of course not. Taking confidence from the success of his first leap, losing himself in the thrill of the contest and the sound of his own thundering hooves, he takes the second hurdle without a second thought. Just so, when Timothy executed this second signature, he easily cleared the moral obstacles and raced around the track while perfectly capturing the Nobel Prize winner’s thick-rimmed spectacles, the off-center part in his hair, and his well-known predilection for tweeds.”

The skill needed to commit forgery is framed as art in this passage, letting the reader in on Timothy’s temptation. Though forging signatures is immoral, he reframes his actions to bring himself closer to the art he wants to create.