The Absolute, page 11
And he left.
The second doctor, Vasily Basedow—a true anticipator of Tolstoy, who crossed part of the steppe barefoot to attend to him—recommended that he follow a naturist diet, with a soup made from birch tree bark, juniper roots, insects . . . The third, the affable Lev Rozenbergstein, an ideal hare to be pursued by the dogs of any pogrom, would no doubt have been the top choice as my great-great-grandfather’s doctor, were it not that at the end of the examination he shook his head and confessed: “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, and don’t know what to do.” Finally, by elimination, Propolski appeared again, filling his mouth with talk of gastrectomies and ablations, elaborating on his recent liaison with a foreign beauty and, after encouraging him by saying: “You look phenomenal, darling,” prescribing him laudanum. Frantisek could work out that he was preparing him for a good death, and decided to accelerate the process by taking large doses of the medicine, but this opiate served only to intensify his serene detachment toward the things of this world. Dominated by the sensation, he considered all events from the perspective granted by existence in a life beyond; due to a secondary effect of the drug, he even tended to perceive the existence of Athenea and her surroundings in the form of luminous emanations, ordered in thermal chains and lacking a central bone structure, just like worms; he believed that every variation of color transmitted a different thought or emotion in people and had an objective character. Anyone might have said this light show was the system that madness had found to adopt an appearance of truth, but in fact it was precisely the measure my great-great-grandfather needed to embark again down paths of artistic work.
Even that wasn’t easy. Frantisek no longer enjoyed tranquility in his studies. Nobody bothered to ask whether he was busy with a new composition. But the papers and books on his desk buried under a pile of gloves, coats, hats and magazines left by visitors, and the manuscripts used in the kitchen to cover jars of curd or line the drawers, didn’t seem to bother him. Athenea also began to show signs of delicate health: she suffered from insomnia and walked around the house all night long, tripping over the bodies of guests who dozed in chairs or on the staircase, while in the daytime she tormented him with unnecessary recommendations.
In such conditions, it’s a real feat that my great-great-grandfather moved ahead with Universe, the symphonic poem that stands out as his musical testament and requiem. Luckily he could count on the help of Volodia Dutchansky, who, prompted by an omen, went to visit him out of the blue and, seeing him reduced to such a state, decided not to leave his side. They often sat together all afternoon in the garden (Volodia carried his friend in his arms and set him down in the lawn chair), where they talked about existing and imaginary music. Frantisek serenely accepted the nearness of his end. Once he confided:
“The blindness doesn’t bother me much. I still enjoy the sun on my face. The only thing I regret . . .” and emotion interrupted his secret.
He dedicated at least a couple of hours a day to dictation. It was a difficult task, which demanded great energy from him; he showed an extreme concern for every detail, every note. Sometimes, as soon as he indicated an eighth note and before Volodia had finished jotting it down, my great-great-grandfather, prey to the greatest agitation, would request a change. He gesticulated until he was bathed in sweat and had to stop. Then Volodia would pick him up in his arms once more and lay him down again in bed. Frantisek was so absorbed by the first fruits of his new creation that he didn’t realize—despite the efforts against it by his composer friends—that his name had begun to travel beyond the borders of his country. Often musicians of international prestige would introduce themselves to him and kiss his hands. Eager to look after his health, Dutchansky kept him away from these strong emotions; he yielded in his role of a polite guard dog only when the offer was too good to refuse. So it was that my great-great-grandfather left Crasneborsk for the last time and crossed the eighty versts toward Saint Petersburg to attend a great festival dedicated to the performance of his works.
On the night of the premiere, the audience witnessed the entrance of a stretcher bearing a man with white hair covered by an astrakhan cap. His terrible skinniness wasn’t hidden by the bearskin coat wrapped around him. Scored by wrinkles, his pale, ascetic face seemed to vanish behind the tortoiseshell glasses that also hid his blind eyes. There were ovations between pieces, and a moving finale ended the concert. Then everyone turned toward the box seat where Deliuskin lay surrounded by flowers. Without rising, in a slow but clear voice, he said: “Thank you.”
Despite the triumphal reception, my great-great-grandfather didn’t want to attend the rest of the performances, and that same night, he gave the order to go back to Crasneborsk. Throughout the return trip he remained silent. Maybe it irritated him that they’d applauded him for the wrong reasons. Uncomfortable with this silence, Volodia tried to create an environment of conversation, but got off on the wrong foot by mentioning Athenea:
“She looked so moved!”
“Was she there,” said Frantisek, his voice lacking coloratura.
After this excursion, my great-great-grandfather showed no further desire for anything but to continue with his final composition. He was anxious to conclude it before his strength deserted him. And so it makes sense that at the dawning of his agony he commenced his greatest artistic effort, rightly considered to have been the first symphonic poem, however much it may weigh on Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie fantastique (1830) dates to over half a century later. Of course, one can’t help but point out that to conventional tastes Universe lacks those fixed traits that permit one to identify a work and make it possible to mark out details that set it off or bring it into relation with a known model. But no doubt there was a model. Even someone ignorant of music will notice that the work is built on a consecutive series of melodic ideas, in which greater importance is granted to tonal color than to form, to insinuation than to clear exposition, so that a listener has to respond intuitively to its multifaceted portrait in the same way that Deliuskin himself responded intuitively to the beauty and majesty of the Universe he was attempting to portray. The nebulous, harmonious design, the delicate timbres, the iridescent colors . . . everything is definitely new. The initial theme is heard on the woodwinds and repeated by the strings. An English horn adds a brief flourish to a passage of fantasy. Swans drink at the waterfall. Now the music grows lively. The main theme is a sweeping melody played by violas, accompanied by motifs on woodwinds and chords played by strings of a lower register. All of this develops with a pleasurable intensity. The atmosphere then grows calmer, albeit just for a few moments. A feverish new idea seizes the violins and is taken up by the woodwinds. But serenity returns again. The initial material repeats and the symphonic poem ends in an atmosphere of mist, as the music fades out.
9
Frantisek Deliuskin died at the peak of the summer solstice. In accordance with his last will, he was buried alongside Jenka Roszl, his first wife (a small mound of stones at the foot of a larch tree). In the letter he sent to Vladimir Deliuskin (who died the next year in a fishing accident), Volodia Dutchansky narrates my great-great-grandfather’s final elegiac moments, the gentle way he expired seconds after dictating the final note. He records how during the funeral ceremony, he almost couldn’t hear the priest’s oration, because of the heartrending cries of Athenea, the widow.
“Surprise demise,” Izvestia headlined his obituary. Striking an involuntary comic chord, its anonymous writer—Propolski, needless to say—opened the article with a dubious claim: “Medical science is still unable to explain what happened . . .”
BOOK 2: ANDREI DELIUSKIN
The tragedy, now, is politics.
—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
1
According to Jean-Philippe Rameau’s classic Treatise on Harmony, “The world of books doubles the relational system of thought: universal knowledge mirrors the design of a supreme mind.” If the latter hadn’t been referring to God, it would have served perfectly to describe the tremendous intellectual ability that characterized Andrei Deliuskin, my great-grandfather.
Andrei Deliuskin arrived at his Finnish grandparents’ home on the day the fish talked. The aquatic vertebrate was calmly waiting for its turn under the knife, on the counter of the family fish shop, when just as he was about to gut it, as Abraham Roszl was now telling his wife Jamke, the mid-sized carp made a bold move, leaping out of his slippery hands, falling into a bucket of water and popping out its head. Since the Torah doesn’t say anything about resurrection, Abraham thought this might be a specimen particularly resistant to changes of habitat. Ah, but it’s really something else when a carp—alive or dead—sticks its head out of the bucket, waggles its fins to call your attention, looks you dead in the eye and says: “Tzaruch shemirah” and then: “Hasof bah”—that is, everyone must take responsibility for their acts, because the end is near! This was a real miracle, not some fake Messiah burdened with good intentions taken down from a cross after passing out!
Then . . . Abraham Roszl had just begun to draw up a comparative list of miracles by the carp and Christ (the first longer by far than the second) when the door to their home opened and a frozen-stiff Marina Tsvetskaia laid an adorable, tiny bundle of life, tucked between layers of wool, in his arms. “Jenka is dead. This is Andrei,” she was able to get out. Then she fainted from the cold.
There must be no stronger emotion in the world than simultaneously learning of a daughter’s death and grandson’s birth. Abraham and Jamke Roszl didn’t know whether to thank God or abhor Him. Of course, they had the whole weight of tradition to help them resign themselves to the idea of a trial, not to mention the fact that on this same day full of extraordinary events, a fish had spoken. Late at night, while Andrei and his wet nurse slept, Abraham and Jamke went on with their crying and laughing. When they’d calmed down a bit, Abraham continued his tale:
“. . . And then I said: ‘You’re a dybbuk! Who’s ever heard of a talking fish?’ ‘But Abraham! Abrumi, darling!’ the fish said to me, and rolled its eyes just like this. I swear to you, Jamke, if you’d have seen it, it would’ve broken your heart. ‘Don’t you know who I am? Doesn’t my voice tell you anything? I’m Biniomen Pinkas, your neighbor!’ ‘You liar! Biniomen died last year!’ I told him. ‘Of course, I did, do you think if I hadn’t died you’d have seen me reincarnated like this?’ said the carp. ‘And what brings you back? You couldn’t stay quiet in your tomb? If you’ve come back to see your dear Noime, I can assure you you’ve got the wrong body. Now if you’d taken the form of Motl the milkman, you’d have seen her real up close . . .’ I said. ‘Abrumi! Always the same joker. No, I didn’t come back to life for Noime, though we’ll settle our accounts, that loose woman and me. I came for you, pierogi head. I have a message to give you straight from the mouth of G’d,’ said the carp. ‘What? G’d wants to talk to me, before I’ve taken my ritual bath?’ I said, and took off running . . .”
“But Abraham . . . Mame Maine! G’d has a message and my husband makes him wait!” despaired Jamke.
“It was a little lie, woman. I went to look for the rabbi. What else is there to do in a situation like this? Obviously looking for him took some time, since he was on the other side of the city, and when I found him, it was hard for me to convince him I wasn’t drunk. ‘A talking fish, Abraham! What is this, a Hassidic tale?’ ‘But seriously, rebbe . . .’ ‘Abraham, Abraham, do you think that if G’d had wanted to announce the Apocalypse he’d have sent a neighbor of yours turned into a fish that gives big talks at the shop?’ ‘And what’s so strange about that? If the goyim believe the Lord is one and three, why shouldn’t we believe the Word of G’d took a little dip in the Baltic?’ et cetera, et cetera, and so we took some time getting back to the fish shop . . . And what had happened in the meantime? In the meantime, Kemi, my good employee, had the bright idea to sacrifice the carp and make a tasty gefilte fish of it, which he sold to all the customers in the neighborhood! So the message of G’d is out of my hands now . . .”
“What do you mean? Kemi killed a talking fish?”
“Jamke, woman! Do you think Kemi understands Yiddish?”
“Ah . . . And the message of G’d?”
“Maybe it’s better this way . . . Divided up in the stomachs of many good Jews.”
“Yes. Maybe you’re right. The absolute truth would be indigestible for a single person, no?”
“I think the same. What a day! Better it’s over. Good night.”
“Good night.”
“Jamke . . .”
“What?”
“My heart is destroyed by Jenka’s death.”
“And what about me?”
“What about your ‘me’?”
“What about me, the mother?”
“Yes. I don’t even want to imagine.”
“Good night. Jenka, Jenka!”
“You have to resign yourself, woman . . .”
“Resign myself, yes. Maybe my belly will burst when I’m sleeping. I’ll leave this world in blood.”
“Don’t tempt the devil.”
“The law is that parents walk before their children along the path of shadow. Who runs the Universe? Eh? I think He’s dead, and before He died, He left his place to some schlimazel.”
“Don’t talk like that.”
“Why not? It would explain everything. Why shouldn’t I talk like that?”
“Because it’s a sin.”
“I’m a woman, and that’s enough. Not even G’d can understand what I’m going through.”
“I can’t take it anymore either!”
“It’s not the same thing, how can you compare? A father!”
“All right, enough.”
“Whoever says enough is able to put limits on pain.”
“I’m going to sleep now.”
“All right, sure, leave me alone with my anguish, which is infinite. You can’t think of anything else to say? He ruins your life, murders your daughter, our daughter, and here the mister can only say, ‘I’m going to sleep now’?! When you die there’s not a chance you’ll reincarnate as a fish. Even a sturgeon egg would be too big for your soul!”
“Jamke, let’s sleep. Tomorrow will be another day.”
“Abraham . . .”
“Mmhhh . . .”
“Abrumi . . .”
“Can’t I have a little silence? What’s the matter now?”
“No, nothing . . . better not to say.”
“Let’s hear it . . .”
“Our grandson is going to fill us with happiness . . .”
“Mazel tov. And now sleep.”
“Andrei. What a beautiful name . . .”
Can God—the God, a god, any god—distribute the meaning of a message via the infinitesimal portions of material into which a messenger’s body has been sliced? Where and in what ways is the content of a truth conserved or destroyed? Does it linger as an aura or is it a purely mental effect, the memory of an existence? Is it possible to transmit it by means of a divided-up body? And if so, through which part? Is the message lodged in the white flesh, the dark bones, the gills, the round strabismic eyes? Or is the Word corrupted if the fleshly bearer is mixed with chopped carrot, grated jrein, sautéed onion, flour, pepper and salt? Questions Abraham and Jamke never resolved (or even came to formulate), but that when transfigured into the inquiries of their own experience, both gave and took away justifications for the life of Frantisek and Jenka’s only child.
2
Although his existence was full of travel, knowledge and adventure, Andrei Deliuskin’s childhood and a good part of his adolescence went by without his leaving the urban radius of Helsinki, submitting to a certain method of concealment that Abraham Roszl had designed for his family as a preventive strategy against all possible representations of the word joukkovaino (Finnish translation of the Russian pogrom). He believed that abstaining from participation in politics, avoiding intervention in public debates, insisting on holding his head high, keeping off the sunny side of the pavement and steering clear of every opportunity to use pale-colored clothing, expand his property, go for a vacation, take a lover or buy himself a tilbury carriage for outings around town, created a kind of phantasmagoria of nonexistence that helped him merge into the surrounding landscape. As if a chameleon can’t be trapped! Sometimes it is, and precisely because of its camouflage. Abraham Roszl’s mottos: Don’t raise your voice, don’t look anyone in the face, don’t laugh loudly, don’t speak to strangers about religious matters. Every so often, deafening sounds forced him to stay awake, rise in the early morning mist and slip from the house like another shadow to whitewash the phrases painted on the door by terror artists: “Be a patriot, kill a Jew! This is an order of the Finnish Nationalist Civil Guard.” The poor old man hurried to wield his anxious brush before any passerby surprised him; he didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. Naturally, for the perverse hunter, there is no scent more exquisite than the perfume left by a prey seeking to go unnoticed. In this case, the hunter was reality. Due to a shift in the currents and temperatures of the water bodies around Finland, fishing began to grow scarce off the coastlines, which raised the prices of the goods put on counters and reduced demand. The problem grew worse with the arrival of winter. Abraham Roszl spent the few daylight hours wringing his hands over the scene of clean tiles in his deserted fish shop. Sometimes he asked himself whether the phenomenon could have some relationship with the uncommunicated message of the talking fish. What had it wanted to say before its end? Primitive Christians had represented Jesus in the form of a fish. What did that mean? Maybe the Lord had become Catholic and was punishing him for encouraging theophagy . . . !
