dear yakutsk

Dear Yakutsk, I miss you. I didn't think I'd be having these feelings a year later from when I was still wandering your slippery February streets, waiting for them to melt into the morass of mud as the earth heaved into spring. But I do. I think about you a lot these days, when I'm writing my dissertation, and since I am basically always writing/thinking about my dissertation these days, you are never far from my thoughts.

(The ice cream stands and those pomegranate-champagne popsicles and how children eat ice cream on the street even at -40C. Strolling with friends through the Park Kultury looking for first crocuses, glimpsing the berry-red breasts of bulfinches, sitting on benches the first jacketless day basking in wind and sun)

You--as a city, a centre, a place people move through--are becoming pretty important as a concept in my writing, because of what people consider you to be and what you do to their language, or perhaps more accurately, what their language does to you. Because place is never a background, no mere scenery -- place is an actor, an interlocutor, it is something more.

(Tea with Fenya at that little café named after Mister Livingston Seagull for no apparently reason, weeping until our heads ached after seeing the play 'Taptal', eating cabbage pirozhky, nimbly walking through the flooded streets, around the riverine roads and their ice floes, time to gulyat', to ramble and wander, nowhere in particular but eventually home)

I am talking about mobility, and movement, about people moving and being in places and referring to places, and speaking in places and from places, about things taking place. And Yakutsk, you are important. You are a mecca and a temptation, a place of possibility and a necessary evil. You are a strange collection of pebbles along the banks of a very large and powerful river, ruins and transformation, and people hate you and people tolerate you and they also love you, both purely and begrudgingly, because you are home for so many, at least temporarily, and it is people that make you, really, and it is those people who (grew up within you, came to you later, wandered back and forth) who hold you together.

(Out at Liuda's dacha on the city's edge, we rake the leaves and the long grasses, like combing the unkempt hair of the earth, tidying, readying for the spring. Call of the wagtail, flickering against the blue, blue sky. The quietest nights in the pine-scented cabin darkness, waking to the match strikes and kettle whistles. Furnishing the summer kitchen, burning herbs and making an offering to the fire--the hotplate--to consecrate this space.)

These aren't even my best pictures of you, but I like the ones I posted above, of people dancing the ohuokhai on Victory Day last May, dancing on you, because there is still earth beneath your concrete cobblestones on the Ploshchad Pobedy, and they remember that.

(Spring nights, the windows open, curtain breezes. Tea and transcription. In the courtyard, the sun lounging on the horizon, steady thump of basketballs, beat to the guitars and Sakha pop songs strummed. One day they are playing circle games, then someone starts to dance ohuokhai, these young students from the ulus, a girl is calling, they are answering and they go faster and faster over the uneven cobblestones until the vakhtërshka calls them in)

You are hazy, in the ice fog and the early summer forest fires, and sometimes you feel stagnant even though you are still growing, spilling, sprawling. Sometimes you feel like a real city, but what is that anyway, but yes, not just an aggregation of buildings and paths and things, you are a whole and a system and you work. Shakily sometimes, without water sometimes, but you function.

(The thickness of the cold as the wooden doors creak out into the bluish daylight. Every breath a blessing. Strange to see the foreign fruits and vegetables in this wasteland, chat with the bewildered Uzbek boy who never knew you could survive in this before. Frozen fish sold on the streets, in brown wooden bins standing solidly like thick iced baguettes. Cars materializing in the fog, the scurrying masses, mittened hands over their faces. Quiet except for the fuzzy footsteps, the crisp whisper of stars in your breath.)

I wish you had more trees, of course, but I understand the whole river steppe-plain thing and really short growing season. Your birches are lovely whether losing their gold early or weighted by hoarfrost, branches tired arteries, or growing their first green leaves, the ones people compare to the tongues of carp.

(The wooden houses, still standing weathered after another winter. Ice cascading over the leaky waterpump. Flocking of waxwings in Zalog, lining the telephone wires, swooping to devour the ashberries, swirling up into the sun. Shashlik on the street corner, and everyone emerging from their small stacked apartment nests to skate out March and April on the oxbows, make long lazy loops of the Green Meadow on skis after work as the sun finally starts to linger into the evenings.)

Silly foreigners will say you are not a real city, that your architecture is a shabby and cheap pastiche, your restaurants are naive and pretentious places aping the cuisine of a 'real' European city and yes, there's a lot of trash everywhere and half-wild dogs (who have their own parallel civilization), the sidewalks don't know how to lie flat on the stretching, thawing earth--but you know better than to listen to them, because it's not even worth having debates about taste. Your own citizens will complain about you, apologize on your behalf but they'll also defend you, they'll stand for you, because you stand for something, for them.

(Peeling pastel pink paint, the bright jewel-toned murals, the infinite repetition of the lyre-like folk designs--fertility, new life, fortune, light. Someone gives a blessing as earth is turned for the new hospital. Dancers pour out of the theatre into the square. Flowers for Ammosov, day of the Republic. On the weekends subbotniki gathering the trash out of the sloughs and marshes, stopping to picnic by the spindly birches. At the long-distance bus depot, men chat, joke, smoke silently, resting before they head off again, lifting up their faces to early summer sun.)

You are a place where things happen. Where people live and makes things, and they are making a lot of things and they are making them in the Sakha language and the Russian language and even the English language and they are trying to rise above corruption and loss and uncertainty and that is really something. They are trying to inspire and allow themselves to be inspired. That is what happens in places. That's really enough for me.

(Also, your sunsets and clouds and skies in the summer from my kitchen window crossed by swallows are some of the most breathtaking I have ever seen, and I've been to Hawai'i, and you win.)