At breakfast, Stacy served open sandwiches with hummus instead of butter, fish roe, meat or anything that the others would normally expect. She placed mint leaves on the hummus.
“I hope this is all right,” Stacy said a bit nervously. “This was going to be a simple breakfast, but we do have – astonishingly – mint and I wanted to use it before it went bad. And of course there’s the hummus that I also wanted to use up. So this is really a hummus mint buterbrod.”
“Hummus mint buterbrod,” Riley and Naz repeated together without having coordinated first. They looked at each other, and laughed.
Stacy registered a little bit of concern. So far her food preparation had been welcomed by the rest, but she wanted it to be good judgment, not luck.
Marilyn reached for the jug of milk and poured some in a bowl. She then picked up a slice of buterbrot and made as to dip it into the milk, but failed to grasp the bread properly.
Plop!
The buterbrot fell, buter (actually hummus) side down on the table.
Marilyn didn’t make a sound at first, but Stacy’s eyes went to Marilyn’s face immediately. Marilyn had this irresistibly cute expression of dismay on her face, like a child whose toy broke.
“Aaaah!” Now came Marilyn’s delayed vocalization of the same emotion. “So sorry, Stacy!”
“It’s all right, sometimes food gets wasted,” Stacy said. “Don’t worry, we have our recycling mulch bin.”
“We’re parked right over a forest,” Marilyn said as she picked up the toast. “We should throw this out for the birds.”
“It’s a bit of trouble,” Angel said. She didn’t want Marilyn to carry the bread all the way downstairs to the garage and throw it out of the airship that way. Marilyn would drop crumbs, and who was the cleaner? But Angel had forgotten something about the airship. It was an extremely uncommon feature on board flights ever since the advent of the jet. Windows could be opened.
“I’ll help with the windows,” Naz said as she got up. “Good that we have an airship.”
So Naz went to the windows on one side. She opened the inner double glazed windows, and then the outer double glazed windows. After looking out cautiously, Marilyn threw the toast out. Naz then closed both sets of windows. Because it was spring, and too cool for the windows to be kept open all the time.
When Marilyn and Naz came back, Angel was talking about music.
“This reminds me of Kino’s posthumous Black Album,” Angel said. “He sang about buterbrot falling face down.” Looking at Marilyn, Angel continued, “this must be the fifth time in my life that I’ve seen buterbrot fall. And guess what? It’s the fifth time that it wound up face down again!”
“Maybe we’ll really see it fall a hundred times out of a hundred,” Riley said with a mild smile. “Like in the song.”
Naz was unmoved. “There’s no magic to it. When you apply stuff to one side of buterbrot, it gets heavier. And the heavier side is going to be more likely to fall face down.”
“We have no hope anymore… but maybe there will be a day, an hour when we are lucky…” Marilyn sang.
Everyone turned to Marilyn. Stacy was watching, and noted that they all knew Kino’s lyrics for this song. Something touched Stacy’s heart.
Kino had sung for a generation of Soviet people. His father was a Korean deportee to Kazakhstan. his mother was Russian. They lived in Leningrad and Latvia, and Viktor died in Latvia. There was a bit of them from all over the USSR.
This seemed to be both a fable about Soviet life, and about modern life in a very harsh climate.
Winter was very long, summer was very short. When summer ended, things would get tougher and tougher again for a long time, before things got better.
But Viktor Tsoi didn’t have the same ancestors as Stacy. Stacy could draw wisdom from her ancestors, who were all from latitudes higher than Korea.
The weather was horrible, so one had to obtain pleasure and the will to live from other places. One couldn’t depend on external factors to feel happy. Happiness and resilience had to be generated entirely from within.
It was all right if summer was ending. Stacy would keep marching on and do the best she could. She wasn’t going to accept Viktor Tsoi’s words about hopes ending, or depending on luck. Stacy’s ancestors wouldn’t have expected any less.
…
…
Unknown to the ZIL members, a lumberjack was cutting down a tree right below the cloaked ship. He heard the sound of splat, as though some big bird had done its business on top of the tree, but could not see any big birds. To his amazement, after the tree came down, he found a slice of buterbrot stuck near the top of the tree.
“Now, what in the heck is this? Your lunch?” He asked his colleagues with surprise as he pulled the buterbrot off. This was an odd prank to play.
But it was very strange. Normal people ate buterbrot with a variety of things, so it could be butter or jam or meat or caviar. This appeared to be some weird substance; definitely not butter or jam or caviar. Was it really the work of his fellow lumberjacks?
Having no answer, the lumberjack tossed the slice of bread into the woods where other animals would eat it soon.