SARAH JOHNSON

Born in Canada and raised in the Pacific Northwest, Sarah Johnson is a college sophomore, writer, and full-time big sister to twelve younger siblings. She enjoys theology, Bach, climbing trees, and exploring history through researching and writing fiction. Her work has appeared in Senior’s Sunset Times, the devotional Weekly Diner, Cassandra Voices, and in podcast at Coastradio.org.

AN EXCERPT FROM “AMBROSIY’S PICTURE”

Certain things counted against Ambrosiy Lyachov, morally, spiritually, socially, in the early 1920s—his own early twenties—which made it impossible for him to go on as a good, even pious boy; so when the Soviets took the Ukraine and a great many people fled west for Poland, Germany, America, he went east, was educated in Moscow, simply and naturally made of himself what eventually rose to direct a Kiev railyard.

His transformation—from a simple, carefree boy tended by a well-heeled family, into a solitary, self-reliant, professional cog in the machine of collective industry—seemed at times too successful. He sometimes felt a victim of his own zeal, a tailor’s dummy of other peoples’ ideas and wishes, an effigy. But his cleverness found it the only way ahead, and usually took a certain pride in his own affability, and a well-organized collection of friends—influential friends, useful underground friends, drinking friends, even one or two stupid and ridiculous friends he kept merely as foils. What was profitable to forget, he forgot; what to remember, in dealings and in a regime where putting his most profitable business on paper was increasingly dangerous, he remembered.

In the mid-thirties his modest smuggling enterprise, thriving on the shortages of recent famine, ventured cautiously out of contraband foodstuffs and toiletries into the more perilous, and more and more profitable line of banned literature. He acquired craftily secreted stores of politically offensive and religious material. The latter sold ten times faster. In ’ 34 he smuggled in a crate of highly subversive material from Bialostyk—children’s Sunday School literature. In a dim boiler-room under his dispatch offices he pried open the crate to inspect the haul.

Just under the raised slat was a supple book of color lithographs; he slid it carefully out and held the front cover obliquely to the dim reflected light. Keen disappointment: the title was Polish, though Wojcik had given him to believe the lot was pre-revolutionary stuff in Russian. If it were well illustrated, though, it would sell. He opened it down the center fold.

The New Testament scene of the lithograph, covering both pages, was so nicely forgotten he had to look for a long time, eyes roaming vaguely over its many secondary figures, before he could recognize it. This leisurely examination noted that the artistic quality was very high, though too—too something (Lyachov was not trained in art) to be prerevolutionary. Lyachov sat on the crate, imprudently losing himself in the pictures. The people looked like people, managing to be human and art at once.

He was a little surprised to realize that, brash Marxist irreligionist as he had become, his eyes were instinctively avoiding the central figure, obviously Jesus Christ. This figure was difficult to avoid, drawn so largely in the foreground, at twice the size of the others. He looked resolutely at the face.

It was dangerous to so completely forget that he was sitting in the boiler room with the crate of statutory crime, but the face in the book was more disconcerting than all that. Ambrosiy stared at it, separated from it only by his expression of faintly alarmed shock—it was his own face.

His own face—oh, exactly the same; anomalous on a first-century Jew, his short, wide-cheekboned, uncolored Ukrainian face, but perhaps younger… perhaps not younger, but only what his face would be now if it had worn that expression more often, that gentle, high, compassionate—

Nobody found that box; Lyachov was a sharp worker. Everything in it was safely sold and out of his hands in a week. Everything—

No; one supple book of colored lithographs was somewhere—or many places—as Ambrosiy’s prudence could not find a sure enough spot. Every really secure place was too inconvenient for his compulsion to look at it twice a day.

He preferred the secondary figures to the Christ who centered every page with a plagiarism of Ambrosiy Lyachov’s face. In the secondary figures—pensive Marys, vigorous Peters, reverent Johns—Ambrosiy found a common thread of suggestion, a quality he could not isolate, at once warmly, captivatingly familiar, and obscurely connected with some far-off, evidently very well-forgotten pain. The pain was exactly the thing which made the pictures irresistible to him. He did not think clearly or honestly enough to recognize that by working with all his powers for fifteen years to protect himself, politically, financially, socially, he had really encased himself in social and mental layers to prevent his feeling at all; that the draw of those pictures was less good feeling than feeling itself.

Read more of “Ambrosiy’s Picture” in Solum Journal Volume I.