In the red desert, Li-Lo was hard at work. She was always out and about, taking photographs and persuading people to get involved with her dream magazine. Sooner or later, she knew, she was bound to run into Bobby because the town of Alica was only small. She dreaded the meeting, fearing that he would still be furious with her, fearing that she might still be attracted to him.
And then one day it happened. She saw him first. She had a moment to study him before he saw her. He was standing by the backpackers’ hostel, waiting for someone to come out. He had dyed his beautiful silver-streaked black hair an unfortunate shade of brown. His belly bulged under a loud tropical shirt. She was relieved to discover that she was not attracted to him. But might he still be angry?
She approached him cautiously.
“How are you going, Bobby?”
“Li-Lo!” he said with spontaneous and undisguised delight.
So he was not angry with her any more.
“Let’s go for a coffee,” she said.
“Or a beer,” he chuckled.
Over coffee and beer, they caught up. They made friends again. He said he was happy. He had a new girlfriend.
From then on, they met periodically. The ground rules were clear. “No sex and no money,” said Li-Lo, “but we can be friends.”
“No sex? Not even if you close your eyes?” he said. “If I make love to you while you close your eyes, you will just think it was a dream.”
“No,” she said.
“Not even a little loan?” he persisted.
“No,” she said.
She was surprised to find that he accepted it quite easily. All he needed was to hear the word “no”. He wanted the boundary. It made him feel safe.
Li-Lo was relieved. She hated to be in a state of conflict with anybody, especially someone she had loved. This was important to her because when she died, she wanted to be in a state of peace with everybody and everything.
In the desert, Li-Lo thought at lot about death. It was natural to do so in such an empty landscape. She began to write a book about love and death.
At the start, she would fool the reader into thinking the young man in the story had really died. At the end, she would show he had only been parted from his lover; it had just been a rehearsal for death.
I was seeing my beloved for the last time, she wrote. Through the long night, we kept a silent vigil. Shortly before four am, he made a move to depart.
“Go on,” I said, making light of it, “get along with you now.” His laugh was a rattle in the throat. Then he was gone.
I turned aside to sleep. At dawn, I rose and started doing chores around the house. I felt at peace. The calm spread out and deepened into happiness, the happiness blossomed into joy, the joy overflowed in ecstasy. It was a seamless transition.
It was Slava’s birthday. Li-Lo had kept her promise not to send him any faxes and neither had she phoned him for a long time but she could not contain herself now and wanted to send him some gift to mark the occasion. She decided to post him an extract of her new book. In addition, she slipped into the parcel a silly birthday card – a picture of a chicken and an egg in bed together with the punch line: Who Came First?
She was sure Slava would get the joke and understand the book’s reference to their meditation together. She was certain she could not have expressed herself more clearly. She waited for some signal that he had received the package.
Weeks passed and she heard nothing. She began to worry. Finally, she telephoned Moscowville to find out if everything was OK. At the other end, Slava sounded stiff, if not unfriendly. She was shocked to learn that he had interpreted her line about “seeing her beloved for the last time” as meaning that she had finished the relationship with him. And he had not got the egg and chicken joke either.
There followed a long, tearful and very expensive conversation in which Li-Lo did all she could to convince Slava that he had misunderstood and she still loved him. She hoped he still loved her. When finally she put the receiver down, Li-Lo thought their love was back on track; well, probably.
“I’m still waiting for you. Just do your magazine. I’ll be your rock,” he had said. But she felt something was wrong. The depth of the misunderstanding unsettled her. It was like a Shakespearean comedy. Were the fairies again putting dust in their eyes?
She plunged back into work. It was her salvation. But still she was unsettled, worrying about Slava. Something was definitely amiss, her instincts told her.
Christmas was coming. She felt thoroughly miserable about the prospect of spending Christmas, sweating under her useless ceiling fan in the hottest place on earth. For when it is the height of summer in the desert, it is the depth of winter in the northern hemisphere. Soon the earth would turn and the seasons would start to run, like sand in an egg timer, back in the other direction. Something was also turning in Li-Lo.
Outside, in the town, absurd tinsel snowflakes went up on the lampposts and Jingle Bells played in the mall, heralding the arrival of Santa on a sleigh pulled by six white kangaroos. Li-Lo shut herself in her unit with the curtains drawn. She took her exercise at night, when it was no longer boiling but simply hot. Round and round the caravan park she walked, looking up at the stars.
She was alone that Christmas, although not exactly lonely. She was glad of the time for some quiet contemplation. She began to piece together a jigsaw puzzle that she had picked up for a dollar in a junk shop. As a child, she’d loved jigsaws and even as an adult she sometimes did them; they helped her to assemble her thoughts.
She looked at the picture on the box. It showed a redbrick house in the middle of a pine forest. A blanket of snow lay on the ground but a rippling, silver stream flowed towards the house, with its glowing windows.
The bright house was easiest to piece together, although the door eluded Li-Lo. The white of the snow and the green of the forest were fiendishly difficult. It took her several days to bring this winter landscape close to completion.
She realised the picture represented the Great Frozen Country. During the “ice-walk” or thaw, she had been washed to the red desert but now the little stream was leading her home. She fitted together the rippling, silver pieces. Still she could not find the fawn-coloured door to the house.
When she finally spotted it, lying on the beige carpet, and slotted in the missing piece, she broke down in tears. She knew it was time to return to Moscowville, but how?
She was a traveller, like Odysseus, but if she did not eventually turn for home, there was a risk she would just wander aimlessly. Having taken the decision that she would return, she left the gods to work out the logistics for her. Over the internet, she put out an appeal for a job back in Moscowville.