Sebald in Starbucks

Abstract

Marfa, Texas. Dry grasslands, desert and mountains. The western corner of Texas wedged between Mexico and New Mexico, where the hot emptiness of the Chihuahuan Desert obliterates the border, keeping the Border Patrol wired and alert. The railroad runs through it; the railroad put it on the map; the railroad is still loading freight from the California coast to the Gulf of Mexico, almost 800 miles across Texas. The trains run through all day and all night, hooting, calling, sometimes a hundred cars long, moving across the high desert. At night the great eyes of the engine lights move east, move west, through the darkness. Under black skies, or moonlit ones. Marfa is a funny sounding name. Like a child's lisp, or a foreigner who can't get that troublesome English th sound. Or like a brand name cobbled together out of two people's names?Marfa Delivery, or Marfa Soap, or Marfa Manufacturing from Marv and Fanny, or Martinez and Farrell. As it happens, this little whistle stop, founded to accommodate the railroad in 1881, was named by a Russian, a woman, a frontier wife brought to the wide views of the Chihuahuan Desert and the long view of the iron rails cutting through it because her husband was a railroad overseer. So, one important thing to know is that in Russian that Cyrillic /-sound is perfectly accept able. A literate woman, reading The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, provided a name for the place from her reading, from the Karamazov family servant, whom nobody remembers, but to whom Dostoevsky gave the name Marfa. And if you think about it, Fyodor has the same problem of the funny lisp. What seizes the imagination here is the woman reading a recently published novel, something just out from a contemporary writer from home. She was on the other side of the world from Fyodor and his Karamazovs, the dysfunctional relationships, unholy and holy desires, the exploding sentences. Possibly for her it was a link to home, possibly it was a way to while away the long hot days in the desert, a way to defeat the interminable space and the bright eye and lonely hooting of the trains. Did she know that she was read ing Russian Literature? Dostoevsky: Isaiah Berlin's great example