THE IDIOTS (WO #3)

Clay

It wasn't as if they'd read any of them anyway. If anything it was the trees he felt sorry for. Surely in an age of criminal deforestation, there should be some restraint on the publishing of books made from pulp.

Nature should always come first. Art second, possibly third.

He was just thinking aloud. The increasing conflict between Russia and Ukraine had made him question a lot of things about his priorities of late.

Removing the books of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev from his book shelf, Clay felt an immediate sense of relief as if he had already begun the spring clean purge he'd planned for later that month. Well, he supposed, it was March after all,  and although Easter was a way off yet he could sense an invigorating new energy sweeping through him and the house.

He was astonished at the amount of dust these weighty tomes had accrued in all the time they'd just sat there. Did he ever imagine he would realistically get round to reading them anytime soon? If he was honest, he had them there only as a literary flex, so he could pretend he was well read on the rare occasion he had friends round for dinner or drinks. The truth was, the only things he read these days were lengthy Twitter and Facebook threads about social and cultural injustices around the world.

Piling the books up by the front door, he began to think ahead as to what he would do with them. He couldn't give them away. Who would possibly want Russian literature in these times of war? He couldn't give them to a charity. That would be unethical.

He couldn't burn them. That's what Nazis did.

However, he did have some garden waste he needed to get rid of and if he ripped the pages out and screwed them up into little balls like he used to do with his log fire then it wouldn't be so bad.

And besides, who would know? And would they even care?  

Yes, it was actually the best solution. It was relatively discreet. He could do it in his back garden and drink the last of the Stolichnaya Vodka he'd planned to pour away down the toilet.

It would be like a wake for the Russian nation's soul.

How Russian, he laughed to himself as he prepared his bonfire of broken down branches and ripped out pages.

Watching the fire lick the pages gave him an almost erotic sense of power over these books that he'd never had the courage to read.

Watching as the intensifying flames turned the supposed Russian masterpieces to ash, a funny thought came into his head.

"Well, at least, now I don't even have to pretend to read them."

Joy

She'd always loved playing Tchaikovsky, especially when she'd been heartbroken. Had there been any greater, more consoling music for her in her adult life than the andante cantabile from his 5th Symphony, and as a little girl she could remember growing up listening devotedly to the Nutcracker all those many Christmases ago.

But now as she looked upon her endless racks of classical music she felt it would be wrong on sheer principle to have any Russian music in there. They would be forever tarnished by the thought of Putin and his evil regime.

It wasn't an original thought, as the orchestra she played for had literally just withdrawn an entire programme of Russian music from their concert schedule. She felt sad at the prospect that she'd never be able to play that beautiful music ever again. But in light of the egregious humanitarian atrocities occuring right now, her love of Tchaikovsy, Rachmaninov and Mussorgsky really paled into insignificance.

The sanctity of human life was far greater than the sanctity of art.

But as she put all the CDs into a ethically sourced shopping bag, she wondered how best to dispose of the collection. No charity organisation would surely accept them and no friends would see it as anything other than an insult.

Instead, she decided to dig a small hole in her garden and bury the bag in it.

That was discreet and would invite absolutely zero allusions to book burning. She herself was fastidious in reporting Nazi trolls online and would certainly refuse any comparison to her disposing of cultural items representing a foreign country commiting acts of war on innocent people.

As she lowered the fair trade cloth bag filled with CDs into the small hole she'd dug, she couldn't help notice the symbolism of it being like that of a coffin.

How Russian, she thought to herself as the silence was broken suddenly by a nearby warbler, perched on a branch above her head.