Caterina’s Reviews > Steppe > Status Update

I've told you that I want to become a restless tongue, feeling the world like a dark, wet mouth, finding its chips, blisters, and cracks. When I saw the steppe I wanted to capture it. But a tongue isn't enough for the steppe. Nothing is enough for the steppe..The steppe requires a song with words as precise as an instrument for seeing the most distant stars. But I had no words, & it was as though I didn't even exist.

Watching my father,I thought I understood him.I could feel that inside me there was.adarkness that begged only to be destroyed..I knew the feeling that drove my father-he was moved by the desire to leave himself behind..There was a darkness in him, but this.didn't make him a romantic hero or someone to be pitied& saved.The darkness deformed him& turned the world around us.into a cramped space where all of us suffered

He looked at me with his ancient eyes, blinking slowly. Uncle Vitya reminded me of a giant koala. ... He told me that I was a rare type of woman. I haven't seen many others like you, he said. You're a wandering woman, there's no peace anywhere for a woman like you....You're not interested in men, and you don't need them either. It's going to be hard for you, he concluded.
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Maybe you'll become someone important, he continued.A great Russian writer, like Gorky or Tolstoy.
I was unnerved by this conversation.
To be a writer, my father went on, you need a particular kind of wisdom, writerly wisdom.A writer has to be able to love&pity anyone.
But to begin with,I said to him,writers have to understand themselves.
That may be true, my father said.But the main thing is pity&love for others.

A wild blue saltwort bush had risen on the grave, growing out of my father and settling down on the concrete slab. My father had liked to see the grasses growing in the steppe; by fall they all wilted in the sun. Now my father was the steppe, and he nourished it with himself.

Night in the steppe is deafening. It's pitch black, and the chirring in it pierces your body with a thousand needles. It's hard to sleep; the entire steppe seems to be launching itself in your direction. The nighttime steppe is an army of archers aiming their electric black arrows directly at you.
Meanwhile the grasses keep whispering, whispering about some mortal danger...