The story begins in Switzerland — the narrator works at the local immigration office interpreting interviews with Russian refugees seeking asylum. They all tell stories — some came to Zurich from Chechnya, others from orphanages, some lost their houses in the war, or had parents murdered in front of their eyes, or were raped in prison with a mop handle, tortured, persecuted... They tell these stories for one reason, to stay. One horrid story follows another, in a chain of endless questions and answers,. We don’t know what’s true and what’s not any more but at the end it really doesn’t matter whether it’s really happened to them or not — it’s enough to know that the stories are true. Now they have a chance to re-write their lives, to get a new beginning, to find their new true selves. The interpreter becomes the only link between the two worlds, the gatekeeper to the better life. Their lives will lead to their deaths. Unless he redeems them. Once again, with a word.

Between the interviews the interpreter writes letters to his son addressing him as Emperor Navuhodonozaur — letters that will never be sent, describing his life as a servant of the “Swiss Paradise Ministry of Defense.” He remembers his past, reviving and reliving the story of his doomed love, which resonates with other great love stories of world literature — Daphnis and Chloe, Tristan and Isolde.

In the meantime he reads Anabasis by Xenophon about the Persian expedition. And since the written word has the power to revivify the past, it is today that the Greek mercenaries retreat to the sea, march though the deserts and towns, cross over rivers — and meet a group of Chechenian refugees who come down from the mountains, having sworn that they’d rather die than surrender to the Russians. Time becomes irrelevant, their meeting seems only natural, and so the Greeks and the Chechenians continue their journey together.

Interviews, letters, memories, love stories, Greeks, Chechenians are linked in a single chain of events and human destinies, interwoven, resonating with one another, outside of time. Another distinctive voice in this chorus of voices is a fictional diary of Bella, or Isabella Yurjeva, a Russian romance singer, notorious beauty and socialite that the main character uses to write her biography — or to bring her back to life as he interprets his task. It’s nothing more than a girl’s private diary where she describes her childhood, her love affairs, her success, her ups and downs — but somehow it manages to depict a hole era from the pre-Soviet times till this day through the events of her 100-year long life.

In Maidenhair Shishkin demonstrates utter proficiency in various styles and manners of speech. The main character’s line of work is by no means accidental — his interpreting skills are a metaphor for omniscience — and the real meaning of a Word — thus his almost obsessive desire to find the tomb of Saint Cyril, the creator of the Cyrillic alphabet, while in Rome. This is the alphabet of which his universe is made. The world is magic only because its story can be told. It’s unpredictable and erratic, but what once existed will exist for ever. In the word.

Maidenhair is in many ways an autobiographical novel. Just like his main character, Mikhail Shishkin worked as an interpreter at an immigration agency.