Semmant, Vadim Babenko [best books to read all time TXT] 📗

something pushed me to continue – a feeling of incompleteness, a desire for verification. The resonance of vibrations did not betray me; I was growing increasingly wealthy. Over the next half a year I earned a lot – enough for a comfortable, worry-free life. Only then did I allow myself to stop; the project could be considered finished. I got in a new car and drove to Tyrol – to Thomas, my roommate at the School, who had long been inviting me for off-piste skiing. It was there the fragments cohered into a whole, the component parts took their places...

Listen! This was like an explosion. Like a dazzling lightning bolt that ices your blood. Thomas, a thirty-year-old youth with the face of an old man, noticed nothing, which wasn’t his fault. He did enough as it was, and I’m forever in his debt. I am a debtor to the glacier and the peaks of Tyrol, and to all the serene grandeur of the Alps!

We met in the evening, took a seat in a bar, and got to reminiscing. I let him know about Anthony and the ill-fated syringe, while he told me of Dee Wilhelbaum, who had removed himself from the public eye, permanently. Then Thomas asked cautiously, “Well, you’ve heard about her, haven’t you?” And, seeing my bewilderment, he uttered with a sigh, “Little Sonya, she’s not with us anymore either.”

This was a shock – greater than all the rest. The walls spun; there was a lump in my throat – I tried not to let it show. Soon we got drunk, and I cried in the lavatory. Then my tears dried, and we drank some more. I couldn’t shake the sense of terrible danger which we both had the luck to escape. An avalanche of time shuffled past, without touching Thomas or me. Some got unfortunate, but we were protected. He by the Tyrol mountains to which he returned after leaving a banking career. I by my co-workers and partners – sea captains and cynical medics, lab assistants and bearded chemists, even rockers from Manchester and twins from Siberia: everyone who fed me currents of real life, pushing me away from abstractions. It’s to their credit that I, tied by a thin thread, did not fly off like an unfettered balloon.

“What bothers me,” Thomas sneered, “is that things happen so fast, you don’t have time to even say good-bye.” This simple thought shifted some more elements in my brain. Like a few years ago, in the smoke and smog of the city scorched by the sun, I now recognized again how little time there is – for each and for all. But for some there is more. Me, for example – and I, it seems, don’t appreciate it as I should. Slices of time, they’re for making progress, not for complaining and griping. I must do my job – and it looks like I still haven’t started!

In the morning we went up to the glacier and skied until midday on the untouched, virgin snow. Then we stopped to rest at Mount Wildspitze, on its south peak. To the left was Brochkogel – unreachable and formidable, it was gorgeous. And its younger brother, Brunnenkogel to the right, was striking just the same. The sun’s rays were blinding even through the mask. The snow was dry and utterly pure.

I realized then: this is an eternity which denies the meaning of all goodbyes: there is no one to say it to. This is victory over chaos, the disarming of disorder, harmony of the utmost precision. The best things that could happen in life happen here; I could climb up and live this over and over again... I felt like loving the whole world – that real world, which had probably saved me. I wanted to bestow on it something precious in return.

“A dream!” I thought, and I decided to give the world a dream. It was clear to me what it should be. “Semmant,” I thought. The name came of its own accord. And it never left.

 

Vadim Babenko left two "dream" jobs - cutting-edge scientist and high-flying entrepreneur - in order to pursue his lifelong goal to write full-time. Born in the Soviet Union, he earned master's and doctoral degrees from the Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology, Russia's equivalent to MIT. As a scientist at the Soviet Academy of Sciences he became a recognized leader in the area of artificial intelligence. Then he moved to the U.S. and co-founded a high-tech company just outside of Washington, D.C. The business soon skyrocketed, and the next ambitious goal, an IPO on the stock exchange, was realized. But at this peak of success, Vadim dropped everything to set out on the path of a writer and has never looked back. He moved to Europe and, during the next eight years, published five books, including two novels, The Black Pelican and A Simple Soul, which were nominated for Russia's most prestigious literary awards. His third novel, Semmant, initially written in Russian and then translated with the author's active participation, is published exclusively in English.

 

Find out more at vadimbabenko.com

 

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Publication Date: 02-03-2014

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