Excerpts from On Bethel Ridge:
A Christmas Fable by Phil Austin

When the phone rang, Bella Orlovsky was dicing beets at her small kitchen table. Her mind had been loosely focused on the sharp knife’s lazy rhythm, but she idly pondered a small russet squirrel making its jerky, scrambling passage onto the long, overhanging birch outside the north window. They hadn’t seen the sun for a week, and the cold had recently returned after a warming spell, bringing with it a foot of new snow. It was two days before Christmas Eve on Bethel Ridge, a small hilltop village in central Vermont. It might as well be on the dark side of the moon. They rarely saw neighbors these days, only in the village market on Saturdays or when they needed to call someone to fix the plumbing or patch a fresh leak in the roof shingles. Bella heard her husband Giorgi shuffle to the living room phone, heard him loudly demand, “Hell-ow? Who is this pleeeze?”

In his forty-five years as an American citizen he still hadn’t lost the thick Russian accent he had arrived with after the most recent world war, and with not much more than the clothes on his back. But his English vocabulary and usage were impeccable, delivered with the robust enthusiasm of a man who adores words and their meaning. Bella’s English skills were cruder, more utilitarian. When confronted by a linguistic obstacle, she often lapsed into a kind of demi-tongue of halves, a frustrated patois bisecting English and Russian. Giorgi had perfected a style of gentle, but firm, corrective toward her frequent excursions into grammatical infelicities.

“Oh,” Bella heard him say, then softer, disappointed, “I see. Perhaps New Year’s then.” Her knife jumped, nearly amputating the pointing finger of her left hand. The squirrel had leapt from the birch onto the long, low slope of their chalet- style ranch house. Anna. She knew instantly it was her daughter. Anna of the Boston suburbs. Anna of the faraway. Anna of the missing. How long has it been? she thought.

“Do you wish to speak to your mother?” Giorgi’s sonorous query drifted in.

Bella felt a wave of disappointed nausea. “No?” she heard him ask. “Late for a parent-teacher conference. I see. Very well, then. Have a nice Christmas. Kiss my grandchildren for me.” Bella felt, rather than heard, her daughter’s excuses beyond the long, cold phone wire and felt for her husband pity that he should have to listen. She’d heard it herself too many times. Merry Christmas, my sweet girl, dear one so far away.

Giorgi replaced the receiver, padded into the kitchen and sat down heavily opposite her. “Borscht?” He nodded at a bowl of royal purple beets.

"They’re not coming?" Bella asked, flicking the last of the pieces, wiping her hands on her apron. She felt close to tears.

Giorgi shrugged. “She’s very busy,” he explained to her in Russian. Weeks went by with barely a word of English being spoken. “The new house. Her school job. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

She nodded vaguely, rose to walk across to the counter, setting the bowl of livid slices next to a blender. Without turning, she mused softly, “It’s not so far away. Just one day. Just one day to see my daughter.” Her shoulders heaved, and slowly, deliberately, angrily, Bella fed the beets into the Pyrex pitcher, then as if suddenly remembering, she turned. “Take your medication, Giorgi. Three o’clock pills.” She reached into an upper cabinet and took out a plastic box closed with a rubber band, placed it on the table in front of him. For a man of his age, his arm moved surprisingly fast to encircle her waist. She tried to wriggle free a second, then stoically endured his comforting.

“Don’t fret, old woman,” he told her. “She’ll come. Someday she’ll come. All our lives are different now. It’s not the right time now. Be patient.” Bella glared at her husband of over half a century. The man who had walked through death so many times to be with her. The only man she had ever loved, or known. They were so different. He came from the big city, St. Petersburg, the son of a naval officer, born to a high-placed family in the waning years of the Romanov dynasty. She was just a pretty country girl from a small village in the Ukraine, with peasant blood rivering through every inch of her stocky frame. Her father, a farmer, had been killed for his land when the Bolsheviks took power. How they had come together from such disparity was a romantic miracle of coincidence.

“Every year is the same,” she whispered hoarsely and pulled herself free. “Always too busy. It’s that husband of hers. Everything changed when she married him. Here, take your pills.” Giorgi began swallowing, sipping water, following her with doleful ancient eyes. The corn-silk hair she had adored was now a shined opalescence, as snowy as flax. His rose cheeks were as dry as parchment and tough as hide. He hobbled, rather than barged, his way though a room. When the last pill was down, he carefully snapped the plastic box shut and replaced the rubber band. Then, grimacing from the effort, he hoisted himself up, took a tentative step forward, cajoling her. “Alright, Bella. Enough sad talk. I’m going outside to find us a nice Christmas tree.”

Bella smiled, a slight upturning on her lips, but only slight. “Not so tall,” she warned him. “You’ll scratch the ceiling.”

“Alright,” he joked, “just a tiny one, then.” He held his palm two feet from the floor, as if measuring. “How high? This high?” Her face clouded again. Her shoulders tightened. “Giorgi?” she began tragically, “remember how Anna used to like to decorate the tree with us? When we first lived in America? She was a little girl that loved Christmas so much. Giorgi?” Bella paused, drew her back up stiffly, very near tears again. “Why won’t she come? Tell me.” Giorgi went to her, took her pinched, tired face in his broad, callused hands, kissed it lightly. “I’m going for a tree. When I get back, we will sit down for a nice dinner, you and me. Then we will unwrap our decorations and have a merry Christmas, you and me. If Anna wishes to join us, she is always welcome. That is all we can do.” Bella’s eyes were dark slits. “NO! That husband. Jerry. He won’t let her; I know it. She’s a prisoner inside that marriage. To a software engineer.” The way she said this, it became zoffvwhere.

Giorgi silently unwrapped his arms from around her and started walking slowly to the door. From down the hallway, she saw him struggle into a frayed checked woodsman’s jacket he wore around the yard, then zip it up defiantly. Needs mending, Bella thought, filing a reminder. Just before he shut the door, she heard him conjure new possibilities: “If it’s meant to be, it will be.” Meaning, not just an impatient mother’s bleakly unrequited wishes, but each and every miracle in life.

Two

Giorgi stood in the forest clearing and listened: to the looming silence, to the blood pumping from his weary heart, to the shifting weight on the balls of his feet. It was the sound the storm makes before it strikes, or the vacuum of the sea just below the surface. A slight rustle behind him made Giorgi whirl. He knew it was the red squirrel, his old nemesis, a tiny russet-headed animal stalking an old man in a dappled wood. “Looking for a snack, eh?” he asked the rustle. A branch overhead bent lightly, and a long shadow drew over the deep blue-white of fresh snowfall. Giorgi trudged deeper into the woods. His land, which stretched farther than he could see, evoked a rich feeling of wealth and primal authority yet had become a crushing tax burden over the years. Giorgi paid all his bills on time and in cash. The frugal, retired schoolteacher was a cornerstone of the tiny hamlet he and Bella had to come to live in so long ago. But he worried about the future. The branch sagged again. “Come out, come out, my little friend.” He asked the shadow, “Here to help me find a good tree this year, eh?” A loose shard of birch bark floated to the ground, and he heard the rssshhtt of fleeing claws. Giorgi pierced the woods even farther. His legs were already numb from exhaustion, his back ached, his fingers were stiff with arthritis. A small pruning saw dangled from the crook of his elbow, ancient but freshly sharpened. He could no longer distinguish the jutting roofline of his house as he felt the mystic depth of the woods inhale him. “My land,” Giorgi whispered earnestly. It was the prayer of finding home. “My trees, my granite, my moss, my sky.” Then a disturbing thought came from nowhere. When I die. . . . He paused, locked on the horrific enormity of it. When I die, when Bella dies, this will all be Anna’s. My land will belong to a schoolteacher from Brookline. And a software engineer. . . . Giorgi spat dryly into the snow, and felt light-headed. The squirrel had deserted him. He looked down. A loaf-sized dropping, still steaming, stained the path. Moose? Giorgi scanned the tree line for fleeing haunch and hoof.

The tree.This reminder forced Giorgi back to his task. Off the path, the snow lay knee-deep in places. Here he waded toward a small patch of low miniature balsams. Not too tall, Bella had admonished him.

Giorgi could barely make headway in the deepening snow. He was inside a thicket of rich, verdant pines; the odor filled his nostrils like incense. A coffin in the woods. This odd thought leapt into his mind as he stopped to rest a minute, exhaling puffy clouds of white frost. Right hand absently massaging throbbing temples, he felt blood surge through brittle arteries, like antique plumbing set to burst. Is this it? The end? In my own woods, where no person can hear? The thicket seemed to breathe back, saying nothing. Easy there, steady now. Then he saw it. His tree, their tree. A perfect cone-shaped scotch balsam, tiny brother to one of the towering giants that shaded the forest floor. And I will take you home, my beauty. Giorgi raised his saw, and gently cradling the skirted boughs, began to cut the dwarf. Slow opaque sap and pungent chips bled from the wound. It was slow going. His face flushed, chill sweat damp under his clothing. Every extremity ached with each stroke of the rough-toothed blade. Almost done. The sound of his labors echoed through the woods. At last, the tiny evergreen fell in a gentle shoosh of verdant needles at his feet. Giorgi sang out triumphantly, “Da!” He reached for the trunk and began to slowly drag it out of the copse.

It was heavier than he had thought it would be. Its branches snagged on other trees, like a recalcitrant child clinging to its mother. Eventually Giorgi emerged from the smothering drifts onto the relative hardback of the forest trail, stumbling like a blind man. The night was now nearly impenetrably dark. All around him, the silent woods came to life with the swaying whispers of the tall birch and oak and maple. The wind rose to a verseless siren’s song. A copper moon shone from the east, spiriting inky silhouettes and etchings, casting mystery from familiar things. Giorgi trod a single, leaden step farther and squinted through the gloom. There. His house, lighted for the night. The dwarf tree felt enormous, like a flatcar of iron ore.

Giorgi closed his eyes and counted the beats it took his heart to pump tired blood though his old body. Too high. Too fast. Giorgi, you old fool, now you’ve done it. You survived the Nazis. Survived Stalin. Now you die at your doorstep bringing home a Christmas tree. Clutching a fistful of sky he pitched forward, caught himself briefly, then clumsily fell backwards into the snow. The little balsam’s perfume crept high into his nostrils, and Giorgi felt oddly warm. How strange, to lie there in the inky darkness, a few feet from his own front door, unable to cry out. Here he could just drift off to sleep; it was so calm, so beautiful. Overhead, a comet blazed. Polaris, the North Star, calmly twinkled—or was it Venus?—like a vast street lamp in the heavens with Orion’s three sisters all in a row. So nice to just drift and drift to eternity. Giorgi closed his eyes and dreamed a journey he might someday make. It is the journey everyone makes alone. In it he saw a long corridor, devoid of size, shape, direction. At the end of this corridor he saw a face, brightly illuminated and oddly familiar. It was the face of a woman he had last seen when he was ten years old.

Behind his closed eyes, in his waning consciousness, he made his way closer, close enough to see the woman’s smile. She was smiling at him. Still closer he saw that she wore a long black velvet coat and a delicate white lace scarf covering her throat. Her head was bare. The tunnel was as warm and bright as a late spring morning after the frost has burned off and become mist.

From somewhere outside of himself, Giorgi observed that his fingers and toes were numb. His left leg was pretzeled uncomfortably off to one side. But the woman at the end of the tunnel held out her hand as with an offering. All pain was quickly forgotten. “Giorgi?” She was beckoning. In this dream he clacked open shivering lips and managed to reply, “Yes? What do you want?” The woman smiled and revealed the contents of her upturned palm. In it lay three golden coins. She brought her other hand up and began to slowly cascade them from one hand to the other. It was hypnotic. Then the woman spoke again, a bright echo in his old ears of a memory long lost.

“Giorgi Orlovsky?” she asked. “I’m looking for Giorgi Orlovsky.” “I am he. I’m Giorgi Orlovsky,” Giorgi heard himself answer. The voice came from a great height. His words sounded muffled, wrapped in gauze. It was the thin voice of a young boy he’d left behind. It was he. The woman stopped juggling. She held up the coins. They glittered in the dazzle of white light. “These are for you,” she explained gently, “to help your family.” At this, the woman shook her veil loose, revealing the pale porcelain skin of a china doll, intelligent deep-set blue eyes a shade of five minutes past midnight, and gentle cerise lips that formed a question. “Do you believe in God, Giorgi Orlovsky?” “Yes, yes. I do,” he heard himself say excitedly. There was no hesitation, just the boy’s glad reply from time’s deep well. Giorgi saw her suddenly reach her hand around and hurl the coins in his direction. They spun, twisting end over end toward him, closer and closer, until they were so bright the brightness hurt his eyes. Flickering orbs of golden pirouettes, wondrous treasure to a long-ago boy’s eyes. Then he became of his body again, a clenching, riveting agony.

A bone chill inside freezing extremities, a steady biting hypothermia, like a chill tide. His head throbbed, legs like a broken marionette’s, his grip a newborn’s. Without knowing why, in this brief excursion toward the tunnel’s light, his arms had somehow inexplicably reached out behind him, forming a sort of winged concavity in the snow. He had become a fallen snow angel. When he looked again, to the woman, to the light, the tunnel was black.

Then, just beyond the frozen dream: another woman’s voice, chiding him in panicky, broken English. “Giorgi! You are stupid, stupid man.” He opened his eyes again, found himself staring into the tear-stained, pinched face of his Bella. She was perched on the jump seat of a speeding Bethel Ridge Volunteer Fire Department Emergency Services van looking down at him strapped onto a wheeled stretcher. Giorgi felt the sensation of movement as the stretcher rolled slowly back and forth, mirroring the ambulance’s lurching dash down Bethel Ridge. The low, staccato chirp of a CB radio filled the jouncing interior. Through the back door glass the pulsing flash of blood-red snow banks rushed by. Mercifully, they had left the bleating siren off for the ride to the Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital in Hanover. A hovering, grim- faced technician cinched tight a blood pressure band around Giorgi’s arm and briskly pumped the rubber bulb up, nodding silently and noncommittally down at him. Next he fingered an IV tube that wound down to Giorgi’s thin, limp wrist. Then he tore the band off with a snicking exhalation of pressure, his inscrutable face revealing nothing. “What’s the verdict, Doctor?” Giorgi managed a weak quip. “Will I play the violin again?”

“Try not to talk, Mr. Orlovsky. We’re almost there. You had us all scared pretty good back there.” Giorgi nodded, then craned around to see Bella’s ashen face. “I got a pretty good tree, though, didn’t I?” Bella nodded her head violently, said nothing.

So cold. She thought. My darling is so cold. “I called Anna,” she explained instead, in a tear-choked voice. “I call before ambulance go.” “Before it left,” Giorgi corrected her weakly, automatically. “Shut up, idiot.” Bella touched his lips. “I told her that you were going in hospital, and that she comes quickly to see you, perhaps, because . . . I don’t know. . . .”

Her rambling narrative abruptly trailed off. Giorgi closed his eyes, thinking of falling coins, of falling trees, of the nativity. He squeezed her fingers, told her softly in Russian, “I’m a tough old bastard. Don’t count me out yet.”