7/11/2006
Scarlet Sails, conclusion
Although meeting Lena, and particularly my last sight of her - running away from me and back to the orphanage - have consistently intruded upon my consciousness, I never gave much thought to how Scarlet Sails Rehabilitation Center came upon its curious name. Three years after my visit there, however, I suddenly stumbled across its origin, and with that discovery a new significance to all that occurred there.
A friend who knows that I enjoy reading literature in Russian, which I have difficulty finding in this country, occasionally shops for me at university book sales and flea markets. While thumbing through one of these gift books, an anthology of Soviet-era prose, I was startled to find a short story titled "Aliyeh Parusa" - Scarlet Sails.
The story was written in 1922 by Alexander Green - the pen name of Alexander Stepanovich Grinevsky - and there is no doubt this tale inspired the name of the place where Lena would grow up.
Green wrote about a child who frequently ran errands for her father, a toymaker. One day, the girl is sent to a shop in town with a basket of toys, one of which is a boat with scarlet sails. While crossing a stream, she decides to put the boat in the water and follows it along the banks of the stream deep into the forest. She becomes disoriented and frightened, but presently the forest opens to a clearing and a sandy beach by the sea.
She runs to find the boat and soon spies it - in the hands of a strange man who is examining it with fascination. The man - a magician and storyteller - tells the girl her fortune: Someday a real ship with scarlet sails will arrive, and on it will be a prince who will ask for her. And he will promise to provide for her all that she needs, all that she has ever desired.
The child runs home and tells her father of the encounter and asks him if this fortune will be hers. He tells her that it indeed may be true. But he laughs, then thinks to himself about how many men may come asking for his daughter, that many of the sails will be soiled and the sailors impudent. The last line of the story translates as: "But you'll see scarlet sails, all right."
This story is commonly read by school children in Russia, and indeed is a fairy tale, on one level. I am sure that Lena has read it. But like much Russian literature, it comes in layers of meaning. The second layer of the story is an allegory of the Soviet state. The little girl is assured that she need not fear, that the Soviet leader (the prince) and his ship of state would provide for her and her generation.
But deeper still in the strata of the story is a sad truth of the human condition. The father knows that he will lose his daughter someday when another man comes into her life. The man she chooses may be a scoundrel; she will not realize this but instead see him as her prince.
Lena is a teenager now, most likely still living at Scarlet Sails, the place that is supposed to provide for all her needs. I think of her often; think of her intense gaze as she stood in the lane after the sun shower. Did she think I was the prince who had come to take her away? No, it wasn't that at all.
Now I understand. I was the fortune-teller, the strange man on the beach who told her about the future, that someday she would have a little girl of her own. Like the little character in the story, she just needed to know if what I had told her was just meant to amuse her, or if it was really the truth.
THE END
