who can tell?

Yesterday, my good friend Marina (who just flew back to Mozambique on Tuesday from a four-month leave in England), Sara, and I were all having a chat around our kitchen table. I can't remember now what started the conversation, but at one point Sara made the observation that it would be fun for the three of us to go somewhere to watch the Olympics together. I was sitting at the table, nodding my head in agreement when Marina nearly spit out her juice guffawing. "But they're already OVER!", she exclaimed loudly, and slapped her knee laughing. We replied in unison: "They are??" "Yes," she chortled. "About a week ago!"

Oh.

This is one of the drawbacks to the lifestyle we live. We're far from isolated, but we don't own a television and mostly get our news via a subscription to The Guardian, which is a terrific left-leaning newspaper from the United Kingdom. This normally arrives in our mailbox one month late. The latest edition was still raving about athletes performing wonderfully/terribly/illegally in Beijing, so we both assumed they were still going on. Marina's news left me crestfallen, as I had therefore seen exactly zero minutes of the entire 2008 Olympics, a great disappointment, since I am a person who cries at both the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. (It's kind of how I imagine heaven, minus the patriotic flag-waving: all those different kinds of people, everyone hopeful, bursting with pride and goodwill, peace on earth, tragedies and miracles side-by-side, plenty of fanfare, dancing and flowers.)

Tonight I had The Guardian from 08/08/08, was reading about a clean needle exchange program in Mexico and the search for water on Mars, when I flipped the page and my jaw dropped again: "Dissident writer Solzhenitsyn dies at 89", the headline announced. I couldn't believe it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn meant a lot to me as a reader for a lot of years; he is my favorite Russian author, even more than Tolstoy, even more than Dostoevsky. (I cannot get through The Brother's Karamavoz. I understand this is heresy. I understand I must now sit on the reduced price shelf in the Thoughtfully Deep People produce section, with the rest of the bruised eggplants.)

I ate up all the Solzhenitsyn books I read. I loved Cancer Ward. I loved The Gulag Archipelago. During a short, rapturous hour in a Joburg bookstore last year, I picked up The First Circle, which wasn't quite as good as the others but still wonderful. The worlds he writes about are so foreign to me, so seemingly antiquated now, like when you visit a Civil War museum and they display those crazy-looking surgical tools used at that time, making you gasp and squirm. But Solzhenitsyn was a great writer because his books actually weren't dated even though the geopolitics have changed so drastically. He knew the human heart; he relayed painful truths; he told spare and beautiful stories. To me he seemed misplaced in time, like the final relic of a past, glorious age of Russian writers. It always seemed incredible to think he was (till now) still alive and for years living in Vermont!

There was plenty of controversy about him, but there is no doubt that he was a man of immense courage. To have finally lost him is Russia's grief, and the whole world's.