In June of his hundred-fifty-something-th year, when the pages of his native Russian novel started to feel positively toxic, Innokentii dusted off the folds of his jacket, picked up his hat and a walking stick and stepped out into the world.
Thrust into being by the imagination of an author, whose own name nobody cared to remember anymore, Innokentii felt more powerful and free than that man had ever been. He was created to walk in step with the times, and he would carry on his mission with pride no matter what the times were. The important things about people never changed, wasn’t that the Russian author’s insight?
After a cursory tour of the world’s capitals, Innokentii settled in Vienna. He liked the slightly offbeat, cozy and still recognizably European feel of this capital. There were ample pedestrian areas here to get away from the noisy horseless carriages. Partly of German descent, he understood the Viennese dialect, and the cuisine agreed with him.
He tasted a Sacher torte and an Apfel strudel for breakfast, then walked the streets some more, and in the afternoon finally scoped out the perfect café. He made his selection and landed on a bar stool with an ube mochi muffin and a pour-over.
The café, set decidedly against the Viennoiserie, was popular with the international students, employees of the Museum Quarter, dancers, filmmakers. As ancient as he was, Innokentii felt right at home with those aching to create a better world. He struck up a conversation with one budding director.
“There were simply too many characters in the pages of my novel,” Innokentii explained his origin story. “The Count and the murderer, the brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, third cousins removed and fourth cousins remarried, servants, maids, cooks, laundrywomen, generals and the army, and the tsar himself all kept fighting with one another. No reader could ever remember my name.”
“How do you pronounce your name?” asked the director, sliding his fingers across a glowing keyboard as though playing a game.
“Call me Kesha, for short.”
“Ke$ha, like the singer?”
“If you insist on Innokentii, think of ‘innocence.’ I’m not to be confused with Ippolit, the one trampled by horses, from page 135. Ippolit is an entirely different character, though it is not impossible that the author himself got confused and meant for me to be him—or for him to be me.”
“Wait, who are you?”
“A character. A figment of my author’s imagination. For over a century, scholars have been arguing whether my actions were dictated by passion or cold calculus. In truth, it was always a sense of having been born different.”
“I admire your honesty, Kesha. Why Vienna?”
“My most considerate reader, Dr. Freud, was of these parts.”
“Sigmund Freud? He died in London.”
“Oh, believe me, I know. We, people of letters, have ears, too. Unlike most readers who focus on the Count and the murder, the brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, and the tsar himself, Dr. Freud noticed me. He saw the individual in me, he saw the uncertainty of my very name as a manifestation of my unconscious conflicts. I came here to commune with his spirit.”
“Indeed?”
“That, and the cuisine. I enjoy formal structures suffused with contemporary influences.”
“Do you plan to stay? What will you do here?”
“I was just starting to hope to make a new life for myself with your help, young man. Won’t you make a movie about my traumatic past and glorious triumph over the circumstances of my creation?”
“I’m afraid nobody’s interested in Russian novels at the moment.”
“That I understand perfectly. I am horrified to see what Russia has become. Indeed, I myself cannot forgive my author for his flirtation with imperial ambitions. I consider myself his first victim. This is exactly why I want you to help me: let’s do our part in bringing him down. Make a movie about me!”
“Nobody will watch it. Nobody even remembers his name.”
“I wish I could argue with that.” Innokentii finished the last of his coffee, thinking. “In that case, I’ll train as a pastry chef. This does not mean that I let go of my ambitions for change. Forget that most overhyped Sacher torte! I’ve brought with me some magic dust to thrill my customers.”
“It isn’t opium?”
“Opium! You confuse me with the British. My sprinkles are pure, innocent, bookish. The only high they will give you is the belief that your own self is worthy of notice. You will wish for space, the unbridled steppes where your own story might roam free, unmolested by wolves, untrampled by horses.”
“That sounds unhinged,” said the young director, backing out of the conversation.
Innokentii lifted his hat in a gesture of goodbye. The look of confusion in the director’s eyes only kindled his enthusiasm for this chapter of his life.
He was just getting started. First off, he was going to stage a grand celebration for his former copagitants, the Count and the murderer, his nieces and nephews, and so on, including the tsar himself. His departure had created a fatal gap in the novel of his birth. It went up in smoke and left behind a hefty residue. Before even realizing the fantastic properties of his former home’s remains, Innokentii collected them into a handy flour canister and packed it into his luggage.
Now he would mourn the novel’s former glory and bake a cake, airy and light, with just the right amount of birch syrup and pine nuts for flavoring. As a final touch, he would sprinkle it with the magic dust to enchant a new generation of fellow innocents.
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Olga Zilberbourg is a San Francisco-based writer and the author of Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press) that explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to the Moscow Times. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Electric Literature, Lit Hub, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, Bare Life Review, and elsewhere. She serves as a co-moderator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop and co-edits Punctured Lines, a blog on the literatures of the former USSR and diaspora.