The Fountain House by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

I miss the wisdom of the old Canadian master, Robertson Davies, who wrote novels in trilogies. I think it was in the first volume of The Cornish Trilogy that he mentioned that the human mind doesn’t grow up as fast as we think. Dip into your psyche and you’ll find that something quite medieval, like the Hunchback of Notre Dame, will be lurking around in the shadows.

Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, another old book, argued that science didn’t effectively address our concerns on the level of so-called “real life”. Maybe we’ll always have to resort to religion or its ugly stepsister, superstition, to keep the Hunchback at bay.

My friend JE has said that his concern about realist fiction is that it’s a mask for pessimism. I hope I’ve got that right, JE. My own puzzlement is that realist fiction is reductionist. Hermann Hesse said in his novel, Demian, that we should pay attention to our dreams. Pardon me, my 60′s roots are showing. But surely high emotions, dreaming…day and night…moods, delusions, the faith in reason and the faith in faith are part of our makeup too. I’d like to see a more complex literary realism that includes them.

The Fountain House by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, a gem of a rather short story, in the current New Yorker, satisfies my soul in a way that would probably piss off the realists who would say that I don’t have one.

It starts “There once lived a girl who was killed, then brought back to life.” After that, we are in the very ugly real world of terrorism. The girl was traveling on a bus with her parents. Standing up front of them while they were sitting down, she was struck dead in a explosion that her parents were able to walk away from.

Extreme incident, irrational aftermath. How do you react if something impossibly horrible happens to you. Neither of us really want to think about it. But someday you will have to.

The grief stricken father decides to sneak into the hospital and steal the body of his daughter before an autopsy is performed. Are we are back in a very ancient world here? Burial rites. Respect for the dead. Maybe what we recognize as human began this way, segued through Antigone, and fulfilling itself in this tragic parent who can’t let go of his child. Is he insane? There are circumstances in life when that question makes no sense.

But it’s gets wilder than this. He wheels the body of his kid out of the morgue and, by bribing a doctor, has the corpse admitted to the intensive care unit.

The father, disguised as a patient, takes the adjoining bed. Both physically and spiritually exhausted, he falls asleep.

The Fountain House now re-structures itself as dream-scape. What a father can dream after such an experience, after injecting into it as much craziness as he can muster, is for Petrushevskaya to construe. She does a great job.

It’s like this: You fall asleep and you dream. I can’t tell you what your dreams are going to be and you can’t share what I’ll dream after I finish this post and get ready for bed. But LP has crafted art that tells us how, as a community of the literate, we can attempt to understand the impossible mystery that being alive confronts us with everyday and when the worst things happen. Even Quasimodo would sit in rapt silence and listen to this story…so you should read it too. Here.

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