Winterschwimmen

Christmas stories from the Borges Review of Books.

The offices of the Borges Review of Books look out onto a creek that becomes a stream in the wintertime rain. Mrs. Rozhdestvensky, our bookkeeper and secretary, decorates for the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord by painting scenes from the Christmas story on the walls, and on Christmas eve the whole staff heads to the stream for our Winterschwimmen.

You could say that everything we do at the Review is merely a passage from one winter swim to the next. The journeys to Tarlabaşı, hours in forgotten archives, knife fights and haircuts, slow summer conversations in Ciscaucasia, haggling with book dealers in Rajasthan, India and Muncie, Indiana, and breaking into private libraries in Ohio… all to justify our heavenly hours in the water on Christmas eve.

There’s a strange membership that forms in the offices of an unknown-but-world-historically-important publication and when that membership submerges itself in cold running water it becomes a chorus of the Eternal Guffaw. There’s the legend of Christmas, made famous by Johnny Cash, that the animals spoke on the night of Jesus’ birth. Less known is the Kijk story of Christmas in which the trees learn to sing, and the birth in the cave is not a single event in a distant city of Israel but the unending founding of a new cosmos or the unending founding of new cosmoses. The Ciscaucasian trees sing quiet and low in an old, nearly forgotten dialect of Kijk. The only words in their song are names and the names given to names and the impressions made by names in the soil when they walk in the cool of the evening.

Mrs. Rozhdestvensky stays in the stream longest. She swims and sings the songs she learned as a girl at the Bogoroditsye-Rozhdestvyenskiy monastyr. She kisses each of us once on the cheek and walks home through the woods. That’s the sign for all the Review’s staff to depart, and on my homeward walk, if the weather is mild and the birds are quieted by a passing hawk, I hear the murmuring song from the trunks and branches, the sweet Kijk names, heralding the arrival of the child, the founding of a new cosmos.