Ah, Paradise Kendric W. Taylor

Ah, Paradise

For I, with all my dumb luck, had been given a life now of such wonderment. . .

By Kendric W. Taylor

I live in a distant land so remote even Indiana Jones couldn’t find it, so far off the grid, we have no idea what a grid even is, so tucked away in amongst the vast tundra, it makes the lost city of Atlantis as prominent as the Eiffel Tower.

I live in a village so poor the Czar’s Tax Collector, on his last visit, gave us money; so potholed and cratered, the moon looks like provolone instead of Swiss; so cold and miserable, the reindeer moved to Lapland for the milder climate. Though it’s named Paradise, it’s really only a few rickety-rackety wooden shacks with sod roofs, peep holes in the linoleum passing for windows, and yak hides for doors, its few pathways so empty of pedestrians, they make the Martian canals seem like freeways.

No one here knows exactly where this is, as no one has been anywhere else to find out where they came from. We think the Capitol City is out there where the sun doesshine; but that’s it. One thing we’re sure of, if you did leave, managed to get beyond the ice fields, through the great forest, even

past the frozen desert that’s out back in the back of the Outback – and -- if you didn’t bump into the Capitol City -- you’d fall right off the edge of the earth. Yep, it’s the steppes alright, but these don’t head anywhere but down, and you can bet it’s not as nice there.

We’re not sure who or what administration of the Czar governs us; or even which Czar it is –- still Ivan the Terrible, maybe? We did have a visitor stumble in out of the blizzard many years ago. He said he was looking to set up a thing called a Gulag (whatever that is) and claimed we were perfect for it. We were very impressed, thinking of the tourism it would attract. He mumbled something about being a commissar for some son of a bitch called Stalin, and then the freeze finished him off before he could tell us who ran things. His tied-up underwear bundle had an encyclopedia book with lots of pictures though, which allowed me to make all these clever comparisons.

A big part of life here is our religion, one that believes in little, harms no one, and collects nothing on Sunday. We worship no false idols, except of course the Ьросиьїя (Brosnya), a mythical Russian lake monster, who, when not scaring the bejeezus out of little children, also serves as our beloved village symbol. We dress modestly, eat sparingly, and bathe not at all. There are no restrictions on our women, except they must cover their noses: given the freezing cold that peels the skin right off the face, they’re all too happy to comply. There had been talk of having the women grow full beards like us, but this proved difficult. The one girl who did manage, quickly ran away to join the circus.

Our religion doesn’t have a name – it’s just there every day – be nice, stay out of one another’s way, and definitely keep your hands off your neighbor’s wife. That lets me out – I have no neighbors, but if I did have one, he’d be too ugly to get a wife anyway. Of course, I’m pretty good looking, but we have no mirrors, so that’s not a sure thing. We have to rely on one another for a description, and as everyone thinks he’s the handsome one, we all lie to each other.

There is plenty of down-time in our village, hours piled upon hours to do anything we want, even though there is nothing here worth doing: watch the wind maybe, or wait for Summer Day, when we can struggle out of our bearskin coats, fling off skunk skin hats, shake off our beaver skin gloves and frozen tundra mukluks, and run around bare-arsed in the snow.

There is only one prohibition in this idyllic life – we can’t leave the village, which is a problem as there are not enough women -- hardly any, as a matter of fact. Each year, as the small group of females that do live here near marriage age (about the time they might begin growing a beard, around 11, which is when mine began) they are put in a cart, hitched to a yak, and accompanied by one of the wives, sent off to charm school in the Capitol City. For some reason, they never come back.

Paradise has few sports: bear wrestling, wolf chasing and mud flinging. I’m not much good at any of this, but Saturday nights are my fun time, standing up to our knees out in the marsh cursing at the moon, especially when it’s full; that’s when things can get out of hand.

But about the women problem: we do have an agreement with another village further along the permafrost line, one with a surfeit of women. The village elders there have convinced the unmarried females that a better life awaits them here. What salesmen they must be! Talk about selling iceboxes to Siberians.

I had arrived at the stage of my young male life where getting drunk and purging with the boys didn’t hold the attraction it once did, and weird thoughts now snaked through my mind that set me quivering all over. I went to one of the eldest of the elders with my problem. He mumbled into the beard covering him to his ankles for a long time, then jumped to his feet and shouted: “Yes! Yes! I remember now. A woman! Go get a woman! Then, settling back into the mud, he seemed to smile up through the hairy undergrowth and added: “one under 75, if you can.”

It was perfect timing. We had just recently taken a huge leap into the age of advanced communications technology. So after weeks of laborious composition, I addressed my idea of a marriage proposal to any female who might be interested, to those far-off village elders, and specifying expedited handling, quickly dispatched our new carrier pigeon,.

However, as the months passed, I began to consider my folly, if indeed it was, even though at the same time, eating away at my brain were those stimulating images of what might someday be delivered to my front door (which I made a note to fix as I didn’t want the package falling into the compost).

I had just hammered in the last wooden peg, when she arrived, six months later, chased screaming down the path by a pack of howling wolves. A tall sturdy girl -- plain of face of what I could see, with the customary shaven head for those seeking a husband, and amazing blue eyes. But then, set almost directly between them, emerging as she lowered her mask, was an equally amazing nose. Formidable, even. Spectacular for sure. Not round like a doorknob, nor pink and snubby, or pointed and scary, like those Bronsnya lake devils I mentioned that we scare the kids with. No, this nose stuck out slightly, then plunged quickly down at a right angle, reminding me at once of the village bully’s beezer, given to him by an annoyed bear who had smacked him in passing.

Well, I couldn’t leave her standing on the porch, it might give way at any minute, and then she’d smell terrible, to make things even worse. Not that she could out-stink me, if that was possible. We squeezed inside, and I pointed her to what passed for the bedroom, the goats who previous domiciled there, now kicked outdoors.

It was then, that I made the smartest move and dumbest mistake of my life. Instead of returning her postpaid and hoping for a refund (if the wolves didn’t get her on the way out), I decided I would let her to stay on, figuring she’d soon have her fill of listening to my endless village weltanschauung, and bolt on her own. Instead, I made a different proposal than one she might have expected: “let us take a few days before deciding,” I oozed, “time to

become acquainted,” With a puzzled look, she agreed, and I brought the goats back inside.

The days passed. I moved the stove into the bedroom so she could sleep on the shelf above it, the warmest spot in the hovel. The months went by: I didn’t overwork her; I didn’t beat her, which was the local custom in those days. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t dare; she was as tall as I, with a ferocious left hook that could knock down a camel, which I saw her do one day when one spit at her.

We began to know each other. She didn’t tell me her name because she couldn’t say it herself. The Cyrillic alphabet has only 21 characters, and she had three names. She had a few unsettling ideas too – such as we should be equal partners. I was expected to share in the cooking and cleaning and not laze around all day with the other men. But I was confident that my imposing command presence would soon unburden her of these those silly notions, and I would soon rejoin the lads flopped in the mud around the village circle, squirting goatskin bags of 200 proof homemade vodka down our gullets, to keep from freezing. But all the time, those glittering blue eyes would look at me, the mouth curled into a mysterious smile, and the nose began to recede. She would brush against me in passing – she could hardly avoid it in those narrow spaces -- and things beneath the bearskin vest she wore brushed teasingly against me, setting my mind aflame. The nose kept getting smaller. And smaller.

She bathed daily in an old washtub, packed with melting snow, a custom absolutely unheard of hereabouts. Her hair had grown back, and one night after her bath she unleashed it in front of the stove. It flowed over her shoulders and down her robe like a golden waterfall, smelling wonderfully, and it sealed my fate. I began sharing the water trough with the village animals, jumping in daily and rubbing off with rolls of birch bark: it got the grease and smoke smudge off at least. We would talk all night, bundled up together on the porch waiting for the midnight sun to set. She told me of things I had never imagined, of things she had read of in books, of tales she had heard, even of things she had seen in visions. I began wanting to share everything, every moment, with her. More and more I began to regret my decision to wait her out and rid myself of her. I thought of chaining her to the stove, but the chains had been lost after the last ice bondage festival.

Then one evening, at bedtime, she stood at the doorway of the bedroom and her robe parted, not shyly, nor wantonly, but happily, eager to be seen, explored, shared: there was revealed the female form in unmatchable glory. Surely if we are made in God’s image, he is a female, and a God of love, of giving, a happy confident God, one of compassion, possessor of supreme good taste. If the body is a temple, this was the Taj Mahal; if a cathedral; Notre Dame; a museum; the Louvre, a statue; Venus. It was perfection. So perfect in form and style in fact, it would make a dressmaker’s dummy cry sawdust tears. In God’s eyes, the male figure was obviously Plan B.

And now, here, it was being offered gladly, unrestrainedly, to me, and if ever anyone was so undeserving, so unworthy, and generally not good enough -- in a word – it was me.

But I write no more of this: I close the book. Too often prying eyes of precocious pernicious minors might be snooping in these pages. I withhold this information, not out of any moral sense, nor of shielding impressionable young minds from the sins of life. No – just the opposite – let the unspeakable little cabalistic beasts twist in the flames of the burning hell of puberty. Let them boil in their own lust. They can find out for themselves. I take this secret to the grave.

By now of course, I was beyond caring about a silly little thing like a nose. What nose? That cute little nubbin? That adorable mile post directing kisses to the sweet mouth below? And that hair -- down to her waist now, thick and quite lovely, framing her face, setting off those piercing blue eyes, and yes, alright, that nose. That fabulous, rubable, loveable, kissable nose.

For I, with all my dumb luck, had been given a life now of such wonderment, such joy snuggled next to my darling in our new queen-size shelf over the oven, forever happy together in this stultifying rickety-rackety village, with no light except a few small candles that sputter out quickly in the long Arctic night.

Ah, but in that last flickering glow, when the robe parts, it is truly Paradise.

(Apologies to Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Turgenev and Isaac Bashevis Singer)

Photo Shoot, Long Beach, New York Photo by Karen Dinan