My grandfather was a very quiet man. He fled Russia with my mom just after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and, though he lived in Ohio from the age of 54 to his death at 77, he never managed to learn much English. Luckily, I became invested in studying my cultural heritage, and I’d picked up enough Russian to hold conversations with the old man by the time I had reached my sophomore year in high school. Still, he was a man of few words, and even if he had been the whimsical grandfather of American TV shows that read bedtime stories to his grandchildren by a roaring fire, I would have been too old by the time I could understand them anyway. I tell you all this to explain why it was hardly a surprise to me when, in the process of cleaning out his house after the funeral, I found an unfamiliar children’s book.
It was plain in appearance, with a coarse, dark blue binding and gold lettering on the front that said “A Village On The Coast of Siberia.” Or maybe “A Village On The Siberian Coast.” I had let my Russian skills slip a bit in adulthood and I had never been good at grammar anyway, but it hardly mattered. When I picked up the book, I got the strangest feeling. Not like a feeling in the air or an emotional feeling, but more of the jolt that you get when your body suddenly gets that falling feeling just before you go to sleep. The shock startled me, and I checked all over the book for something that could have caused it, but my search was fruitless. Still, I was deeply interested to look inside and maybe gain some insight into the words that had shaped my grandfather’s childhood, or at least get a chance to practice my rusty Russian skills. However, as I creaked open the ancient book binding, I couldn’t have imagined the terrifying story I was about to find inside. I have transcribed the story below, to the best of my translation ability:
There was once a little village on the coast of Siberia perched high on a craggy, salty cliff overlooking the sea. The villagers there were happy, despite their isolation on the lonely cliff, and each day they had a routine. Every morning, the wives of the village would stand on the rocky shore and wave handkerchiefs at their husbands on the boats that slunk off into the sea. The husbands would spend the day fishing while the wives stayed at home, tending to the village and their precious children. Each evening, the husbands would return home, baskets full of fresh fish, and the village would cook together over a large bonfire in the center of town, laughing and watching the stars twinkle to life in the night sky.
But on one particular day, something was different. The town felt gloomy, and all the townspeople had a terrible sense of foreboding. It felt as if something big and dark were rolling in, and each and every one of them came out of their houses and stood at the edge of the cliff overlooking the sea, because they all knew at once that it was the source of their apprehension. For the first few days, the feeling was ignored by the townspeople, for fish still came in each night and, though the ominous creep was becoming bigger by the day, no real sign of danger had yet reared its ugly head. It was only when the husbands came home with dry, empty baskets that the village began to worry.
Their first solution was to send a hunting party out into the sea, hoping to destroy the approaching beast with hooks, spears, and harpoons, but the party returned empty-handed, reporting only that a great storm was rolling in from the north. Yet as the feeling grew greater by the day, the village became more divided. Some tried to pretend that nothing was amiss, ignoring that they were forced to subsist on the labors of the few small farms that dotted the shoreline. Others paced anxiously, doing little but fretting and dithering over simple tasks as the sky over the sea grew darker, and others still packed up their families and fled deeper inland, not caring where they ended up as long as the feeling did not follow. A few could not take the strain and threw themselves from the cliff’s edge, and the others were forced to ignore the wet crack of rock on bone and flesh that echoed across the cliff’s solemn face.
Still, nothing seemed to soothe the villagers, and the ominous ache reached its peak on one particularly grey, windy morning. That day, all of the remaining villagers sat on the cliff’s edge, staring out over the great, roiling ocean as the storm lumbered overhead. They stayed on the cliff even as rain lashed their skin and lightning split the sky, and they stayed even as the storm subsided to a trickle and then vanished altogether, as dusk began to spread its golden feathers over the horizon. At that moment, the feeling disappeared, and tears of fear turned to tears of joy as the villagers, freed of their burden, leapt and danced as the sun sank lower and lower. Many ran inside to sleep or continue the celebration, and soon there was only a single child left on the cliff’s edge. It was this child, little Vanya, who was the first and last to see the cause of all this terror, as he turned his plump face to the sky, searching for a glimpse of that familiar, comforting twinkle. In these final moments, it was he, alone, who realized that the villagers should never have feared the sea.
This is where the story ends, and, though it may seem a bit anti-climactic as I have told it to you, there is one last detail that I must explain in order for you to understand why this story gives me such a terrible feeling in the depths of my very core. The final page of the story is an illustration. Though it is done in black and white, the detail is remarkable, and it is this illustration that has haunted my memory since I first pried open that old blue book. The illustration shows a little boy, standing alone on a cliff, with the light of a village glowing behind him. The little boy is gazing at the sky with a look of confused horror on his gaping, wide-eyed face, and he is staring at an almost impossibly dark sky. Now, everything at the end of the story is implied of course, but it is my understanding that, with the storm having passed, stars should be up there, shining in the night sky just as they did when the villagers had their nightly bonfire. In my mind, there is only one explanation that makes sense as to why they are mysteriously absent. Something had covered them up.