The Absolute, page 5
Is it possible for two clicking needles to give out sparks? Frantisek saw it, and in their crossing, he too glimpsed the absurdity of his idea, an infinite row of scribes in gray robes losing themselves in the infinity of perspective, their ears straining to capture the static of nothingness; or worse, a constant murmur of quills scoring the paper, each hearing only its own strokes, its own scratchings multiplied to the nth potential.
“Don’t fill our house with strangers, Fran . . .” the pleasant voice of reason sprang from Jenka’s lips.
My great-great-grandfather understood that his wife’s reluctance to debate these questions concealed, in addition to a certain boredom, a message that could be summed up in a single word: “Simplicity!” For her, simplicity was an end in itself, not the prelude to a more rigorous decision. Despite its branching nature and its pleasures, madness in some cases is the easiest option, while simplicity takes work. Jenka was a wonderful woman!
What did Deliuskin do? He cut his losses and seized the best of every possibility (every “temptation”), putting it at the service of his fancy. He hired Lev Isaias Tchachenko, a developmentally disabled man who scrambled around the farms looking for work, instructing him to gather up all the trash, shiny things, loose objects and curiosities that he found in Crasneborsk and its surroundings. Every afternoon, after a meticulous period of collection, Lev would appear with his burlap sack full of treasures: little bells, metal scraps, bolts, fragments of cannonballs, branches polished by water, feathers, worn-out brushes, gnawed bones, teeth, butterfly elytra, scarab beetle carapaces, et cetera, et cetera. With his magic hands, he went about hanging each thing from the ceiling; occasionally, out of pure decorative instinct, Jenka would point out some combination, but in general, Lev worked alone; sometimes, while tying a dried-up wasp or hanging a tuber from a saddle, the idiot would whistle a melody from deep Russia between his teeth, always the same one. (In the third movement of Frantisek’s Slavic Motif there’s a ritornello capriccioso with a carefree air that evokes this whistling.)
Then, and thanks to what Lev had obtained, along with the music that continuously played in his head, which he swiftly transferred to music paper, my great-great-grandfather could hear the system of relationships and allusions produced by this grouping, as objects brushed, collided and rubbed against each other, borne on currents of air. There were even some that spun on their own axes without anything pushing them, out of pure kinetic sympathy, in search of a frequency. These were the privileged objects of pure art, the promise of coming centuries that would run through the whole chromatic scale. One of Frantisek’s favorites was a small bent piece of dark-green iron, pure grime and rust hanging from the center of the barn (now transformed into a studio). No doubt it had been the support arch on which the false teeth of a rural noble had been implanted, lost in the midst of a horse ride or the vomiting of a drunken spree. But now it worked as a “basic tuner,” because it gathered the vibrations of the objects moving around it and could detect even the slightest differences in tone, correcting, absorbing and launching them once more into the air as a generous collection of harmonious subtleties, a mysterious bouquet.
Of course, no one who wasn’t my great-great-grandfather could have extracted music from all this, just as no one but Jenka could find attractive this wilderness where love had brought her to live. Every day, while her husband shut himself away, she put on her rugged boots and wide-brimmed Pre-Raphaelite hat and, with her gaze resting on the distant peaks, entertained herself by painting watercolors of such fine variations they inevitably got lost in the dilution or mist they intended to represent. Those works, which an unsympathetic spectator would catalog as a mere waste of materials, Jenka dubbed “applied replicas of fate.” In any case, and except for some news they would find out in a few months, those days were the end of the period when Frantisek and Jenka lived with the feeling that they were on the brink of achieving happiness.
One morning, Frantisek found Lev stretched out a few steps from the door of his house, and not because he’d decided to sleep under the stars. Now he was shapes and colors, nourishment for the retinue of worms. The afternoon that preceded this horrible and fragrant spring morning, the idiot had been going about the fields, carrying his burlap sack brimming with treasures—a wilted petal, a doorknocker, the broken bit of a gentle-sounding flute, a pileyforus mushroom of the most poisonous species—when all at once he met with Basia Oprichnick, naked in the weeds, naked and aroused because that scoundrel Anatoli Tarkhov—an adolescent now snoring satisfied under a thicket—had just deflowered her. Basia had been left with the spicy taste of the one she’d just known, and the certainty that this appetizer could be completed with some heartier meal. To catch sight of the idiot—robust, virile, not bad looking—and launch herself upon him was the work of a moment. Everything would have turned out perfectly, and those meetings could have repeated for their mutual diversion, had it not been that as soon as she returned to her hut, Basia realized she could hide almost nothing from her mother. Anguish, uncertainty, tears. “Who was it?!” her mother screamed. Basia thought that in the long run Anatoli might be a good candidate for a husband, and so she half confessed: “The idiot.”
The pack of avengers from Crasneborsk surrounded Lev in his little fairy-tale cabin, threw him onto the dreamy field of herbs, stripped him, religiously castrated him—one of the enthusiasts belonged to the orthodox Christian sect of the Apokotekai—scorched his nipples with burning irons, pulled out his tongue with pincers, and, after carving the numbers of the Anti-Christ into him with a knife, yanking out his ears by the roots, and destroying his eardrums with kicks so he’d never hear another moan again, dedicated itself to his eyes. “Rapist!” shouted Olega Fyodorovsky Oprichnikova, and unsheathed her claws. In the millionth of a second that distanced the intention from the act, Lev had time to understand that in seeing Basia, he had already experienced all the beauty in the world, and now he had to pay for such abundance. He closed his eyes, not to delay or prevent the inevitable, but to stamp the image on his mind, and as he sobbed with joy, he once again savored, just like the first time, the fresh taste of cherry of his beloved.
A shout and it was done. Two gelatinous little balls to crush in the stone basin where Olega prepared compote. Then came the final moment. Avran Palizin, the strongman of the area, lifted up a big rock and released it over Lev’s head. This rock destroyed his cranial cavity; after shattering into thousands of sharp splinters, the bones entered the idiot’s cerebral mass (a sponge of exquisite design, reproduced by a drawing of coral reefs in the Kalnuk Sea), perforated and compressed it. And so, in the last moment of his life, amid his final bleat of pain, Lev heard within his head all the measures of a music that so many had longed to hear: it was a kind of vastly improved Anton Bruckner, a typical example of the kind of creative influence Frantisek Deliuskin was able to produce on a composer now in the full use of his abilities. But what most called the attention was not that this symphony had been unfurled complete in a moment, or that its supremely elevated level permitted it to aspire to a golden-lettered inscription in the history of music as an unknown masterpiece, the best-kept secret of eternity. No. The strangest thing, the ne plus ultra of absurdity, waste and magnificence, was that in the depths of this enveloping tide of notes, Lev had been able to hear the melodious voice of a lost and distant woman, the voice of a love who moved between tulles and birch trees, singing the folk song “Ochichornia,” as Basia’s black eyes fused with his fade out.
Given the way events took place, Frantisek would never discover that Lev had been his only disciple, the only heir unrelated to him who had been at his level. All he knew was what lay before him, something he quickly had to hide from Jenka’s sight. My great-great-grandfather took off his jacket and covered the destroyed face of the poor fool, already covered by a halo of flies and blood. Why had they thrown him in front of his door? Atavistic mysteries of those barbaric regions. Then he leaned over and, without fully knowing what he was going to do next, picked up the body. As he straightened up, he felt a double stabbing pain that shot through his lungs; it didn’t last long, but when it left him, Frantisek was trembling and Lev had once more spilled onto the floor. “It’s old age,” he thought. “It’s the pain of this useless loss.” He lifted up the deceased again and carried him deep into the leafy conifers of a nearby forest; there he buried him under a mound of stones. An attentive observer would have detected the similarity between the white color of those rocks, their artistic pink marbling, and the tone that predominated in Frantisek’s phlegm in the days that followed. But Frantisek himself was barely attentive to the visual aspects of things—Jenka always made loving jokes about this, because of how terrible he was at matching his clothes—and so the relation in spectrum between the small clots of foam and the tomb of the beloved dead man went unnoticed. In fact, the pink color soon took on almost the opposite meaning, la vie en rose, when a few days later he found out that Jenka was pregnant.
Frantisek found himself dreaming of a baby girl, thinking of bibs and nappies and onesies and satin frocks. He also developed a new terror that, with the birth of this creature, his daily existence would see itself annihilated by the entrance into the atmosphere of an unknown dwarf planet, made of diverse materials like nocturnal shrieks, fecal explosions and endless episodes of purple-faced crying. The reign of constant interruption. He also feared that a woman of Jenka’s delicate constitution was capable of giving birth only to an angelic being, someone too good for this world and therefore condemned to succumb to the slightest illness. It was necessary to preempt the fulfillment of these dark fantasies, just beginning to blossom in all their richness:
“We urgently need a wet nurse who can serve as governess,” he told his wife, and thought the phrase sufficient to leave all matters concerning the decision in her hands.
Jenka, for her part, assumed that the brevity of this spoken comment came as a kind of communication from her husband, and that he planned to take it upon himself to set in motion a process of background checks and selections of local nutrient providers, which she was unable to do given her inadequate command of the language. In her view, the notion of breastfeeding also reinforced the evidence that Frantisek was thinking of getting hold of some fat and cheerful Russian matron, a kind of speckled hen (or mammoth), all breasts and no brain. As far as the incomprehensible addition of the final condition went, that the woman also be a governess, well . . . that was definitely a hassle, no doubt one to be dealt with by him.
And so, both Frantisek and Jenka waited months for the other to take action. It isn’t strange that this happened. Once a plausible idea has been conceived, the whole world moves its head looking for a sacrificial victim to carry it out. And marriage, an institution given to blame and derivative by nature, often generates situations such as the one described. In any case, the matter was far from being explosive. Sometimes, at night, Frantisek would lean his head on the belly of his beloved and comment with a trace of apprehension:
“I don’t want to run any risks. We need to get hold of someone . . .”
Jenka, sleepy, preferred not to answer, and Frantisek ended up wondering whether in the end the search wouldn’t fall to him. And ultimately, so it did. But not because he’d decided to resolve anything. One day, hearing him cough, Jenka suggested that he visit a doctor. Frantisek decided to listen: he grabbed his cane and set out walking. Of course, Crasneborsk was barely a town at the time: a main avenue, some side streets. A butcher, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a doctor. My great-great-grandfather’s knuckle hit the second “o” of Propolski, painted, like the rest of the last name, with an unsteady pulse on the frosted glass divider of the door to the doctor’s office.
“Avanti!” he heard, in a crescendo not entirely out of tune.
Frantisek was about to flee, having decided not to place himself in the hands of a lover of Italian opera—that is, a dimwit. But a new coughing fit doubled him over; at just that moment, a kind of spreading ectoplasmic projection cast itself over the glass, injecting it with colored phlegm. Once again the “Avanti!” sounded, before Propolski himself opened the door, caught him by the handle of his cane, gave a brief but energetic tug, and pulled him inside. Here was his first client of the day, the second of a whole week coming to an end.
Alexei Propolski had spent more than half of his life burning the midnight oil over his books, learning theories and techniques, both ancient and modern, about the art of healing; testing on foreign bodies the efficiency of the concoctions of the pharmacy, the lozenges and poultices of the academy, and the herbs and weeds of popular shamans; and mixing and recombining everything, adding to them some medicinal formulas of his own invention. But his efforts had not served to win him the reputation to which he believed it was his right to aspire. For a couple of decades, this delayed apotheosis had been an incentive; every new discovery, every new understanding, had been for him like the imminence of the moment he was anticipating. Finally, well into middle age, he’d realized that the only experience he would have in this respect was not fulfillment, and never would be, but was rather this wait for an illusory dawn. He had given all of himself, scientifically speaking, and the only thing he’d received in exchange was a perpetual feeling of bitterness, the injustice of knowing himself to be the owner of a talent squandered in solitude. Fed up with everything, he’d decided to bury himself in the most remote corner of the saddest of Russian provinces, and helping along the fickle finger of fate with a map, he ended up choosing Crasneborsk. Of course, in Crasneborsk there is nothing to do, except become a specialist in tedium. Because of this, and because he didn’t pursue any policy of constant distraction, however, he now had more free time to go on with his study and research; he dedicated himself to these matters with an impetus even greater than he’d done in his native Moscow. At fifty-four years old, Alexei Propolski was short, broad, extravagant, squat and half-bald, and he suffered from spots and bad breath. He was also professionally brilliant, and without a doubt his work—in the theoretical plane—would have been of enormous use for humankind if it weren’t that its author never took the trouble to document his discoveries in accordance with any scientific protocol; his desk was chaos and the best notes fell into the inexpert hands of the various women hired for cleaning, who, owing to the anxious and occasionally successful sieges by the owner of the house, barely stayed on long enough to contain the overflow of that scrap heap. Like so many other doctors, Propolski trusted too much in his own knowledge and very little in the ability of the patient to transmit correct information about his illnesses. Thus, as soon as Frantisek had begun to speak, the doctor raised his hand as if to say “I know, I know.” He pensively scratched at the abundant dandruff flakes in his mustache and pronounced: “Excess of greasy humors. Sedentary lifestyle and dyspepsia. We are going to lighten and purify the blood. Take off your clothes and lie down on the table.” Over the patient’s back he spread a collection of transparent and hungry leeches from the swamps, which immediately swelled and turned red at his expense. Afterward, he pulled them away one by one and threw them in a basket. “It is done. Blessed remedy,” he said.
For a week, perhaps thanks to the doctor’s claim, Deliuskin believed he was cured. But the cough returned, accompanied by a sensation of growing weakness. He decided to come in for another consultation.
Propolski received him offended, as if the repetition of the inquiry suggested a mute criticism of his healing gifts. Once again he made the patient take off his clothes and lie down on the examination table. He sounded him in an offhand way, slapped him on the back, asked him to yawn, shriek, snore and moan, sniffed his tears and blew into his throat. Then he gave his diagnosis:
“The body isn’t so bad, but the mind doesn’t help. I’m going to recommend you a treatment for soma and psyche. It’s a daily application for at least two months. You must surrender yourself, my friend, you must surrender yourself!” and he gave him the address of a thermal bathhouse in the neighboring village of Taganrog, famous for its gentle climate, which years later Tsarina Elizaveta Alexeievna would enjoy in a brief interlude before her end.
“Is it a brothel?” asked Frantisek.
“If only! If it were, I’d be there myself,” Propolski laughed, delighted by his own joke.
5
Pravda, which in Russian means “truth” and also “exact word,” was a rather spacious establishment with “Turkish-style private rooms,” small and enclosed areas with only a kind of marble bed and a towel for pillow. At eye level for a person of average height, a sign instructed: “Undress.”
A curt word is not the same as a complete phrase. Should one undress and remain standing? Or sit? Kneel? Lie down? And if the latter, face up or face down?
“Get into whatever position you like,” said a woman’s voice, answering a question my great-great-grandfather hadn’t asked out loud. Frantisek turned around. The woman was standing just outside the door of the private room, her left hand resting on the jamb. The right was holding a number of slim, flexible, fragrant Asian cane rods. She was dressed in a full-length garment of gray wool, closed at the neck with buttons of austere black coral. “My name is Athenea. Who sent you?”
“Doctor Propolski,” said my great-great-grandfather.
“Ah,” said Athenea, with a face that seemed to express as much knowledge as contempt. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you used to being naked in front of a woman?”
