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A shabby-looking threadbare salesman had spread himself out on the seat next to me. He has a see-through plastic bag bulging with matrioshka dolls wrapped in cellophane and he’s nursing it on his lap, protectively. The carriage lurches over the sleeper junction and the matriohskas knock against each other with an eerie wooden sound.
Matrioshka – now there’s an interesting symbol: tomorrow lives in its belly. But inside that tomorrow there is not a real personage but just another matrioshka. And in that new doll—the dream of long, boring days—there is less substance but more meaning. Sometimes the clothes vary, sometimes the age varies, sometimes even the gender varies. As the days pass, the meaning thickens, condensing into the small genderless doll, a small, wooden saint, which canno
