(We don’t have anything to add to this. Continue, Polina, do not allow your train of thought to derail!)
“Swedenborg also deduced that because God had created man in his own image, the universe and all its levels, as well as the afterlife, are in the shape of a man. If this is the case, then we must be located on the milky-white sclera of the eye, although the veins must have been removed! Swedenborg carefully studied every growl of his gut and burble of his bowels, because through them he believed he could access ultimate reality. He himself, of course, was a link in the chain of correspondences . . .
“According to modern conceptions, Swedenborg is the first modern architect of heaven. He divided the afterlife into three parts, heaven, hell, and some sort of intermediate space, the spirit world, a place where the dead go first. There is no time in the spirit world of the dead. In the afterlife, changes in spiritual state correspond to differences in time.
“In Swedenborg’s heaven people work, go to school, and improve themselves. They eat, drink, and make love—although marriage in the afterlife means a melding into one mind. Swedenborg says it this way: ‘In the spiritual world, love is conjunction. Wherefore, when all act thus, then from many, yea from innumerable individuals consociated according to the form of heaven, unanimity exists, and they become as one.’ Do you follow? And what do you say of this: ‘The spirit of man after the death of the body appears in the spiritual world in a human form, in every respect as in the world. He enjoys the faculty of seeing, of hearing, of speaking, and of feeling, as in the world; and he is endowed with every faculty of thinking, of willing, and of acting, as in the world; in a word, he is a man as to each and every thing, except that he is not encompassed with the gross body which he had in the world.’
“Well now, dear women. Based on this, can you say where we are now if we even believe a part of Swedenborg’s teachings?”
“In hell.”
Shlomith’s reply comes as easily as from a druggist’s shelf. At least she had listened carefully to Polina’s speech.
“Good,” Polina said, taking up Shlomith’s response without missing a beat. “Let’s assume we’re in hell. That’s fine with me. But in the meantime we must have been in the world of the spirits, and I at least have no memory of that. In the spirit world, everyone who has ever lived is arranged orderly in groups. The hallmark of each group is a special fondness for something or a peculiar quality of life—and I still haven’t been able to figure out what might connect the seven of us.”
So maybe they are in hell. At least they are hopelessly far away from the normal world and the bustle of normal people, far from Moscow, Zwolle, Salzburg, New York, Dakar, and Marseilles. But Ulrike looks alert now. Her mouth is open a crack, and she clearly has something on her mind, but she waits.
No, they aren’t in the waiting room between heaven and hell, in the spirit world, looking forward to their final placement, which will be an absolutely just judgement. The surroundings should look different. It should resemble the world of the living. “Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t resemble life, it is life,” Polina says, as if she is reading Ulrike’s thoughts. “It’s a life more real than life. The ‘spiritual substance’ of the spirit world is the first, primordial substance, which the world of the living only reflects. Do you understand? Swedenborg was an arch Platonist!”
Ulrike nods enthusiastically. She likes philosophy, and she especially likes Plato’s cave, which her teacher, Frau Schwartz, talked about before the summer holidays: she saw herself on the floor of the cave stoking the fire, the Fire of Truth, which threw terrible shadows onto the black rock walls. The distorted, almost unrecognizable silhouettes of all the stupid, doomed beings rampaged there: Elfride the prima donna with a smoking Lucky Strike in her hand, loud-mouth Felda and her constant powder mirror, Timberlake-oh-Timberlake Trixi waving her brand new mobile phone camera—Ulrike smoked all of them to death in the cave, all their lies and stupidity and loathsomeness. Thank God they aren’t here!
“If we assume we’re dead,” Ulrike says, also not noticing that she is speaking her own language, which everyone simply just understands without a second thought as everyone had understood Polina’s Russian, “and if we imagine that we’re Swedenborg’s spirit beings, then what primordial state have we entered? What does the emptiness around us tell us about the world we lived in before? That everything, absolutely everything, is an illusion and a fiction?”
Polina takes up the challenge. She positively waxes poetical as she describes the Swedenborgian death, a space that in terms of sensory perceptions was one-to-one with the world of the living. Flowers and trees, meadows and fields, asphalt and weeds growing from the cracks in the asphalt, sparrows, eagles, rattlesnakes, parking structures, cement foundations, saffron milk caps and all the other mushrooms; simply put, everything is exactly the same in both worlds. Both for the living and the recently deceased. When you mistake the sole of a boot thrown on the shoulder of the road for a crouching cat, or a paper tissue dropped on the pavement for a dead bird, you could be either living or dead. Even illusions don’t disappear when you die! Because the dead, Swedenborg believed, Polina argues vehemently, the dead first step into the state of the external mind. Which is exactly the same kind of state as the state in the world of the living, so the dead can’t even know
