The Wolves of Eternity, page 59
Vasya loved the idea of life’s core consisting in signs, communication and relations, of course she did, to her it was a fantastic thought, that the whole world was basically language. She lived, as Papa lived, in the world of literature. I didn’t care for her inclination to dissolve the world into language, that was when it became too abstract for me, because it wasn’t like that at all, that wasn’t the point, the point was the exact opposite, that language was matter, language was flesh and blood. Mind was not a product of the brain, mind was the brain. There was no gap between the abstract thought and the concrete matter that produced it. The problem was, as Wittgenstein noted, not the phenomenon itself, but how we spoke about it.
* * *
*
And then Mama phoned.
She asked after Seva first, then she asked how I was, and I asked her how she was, and Papa, and some friends of hers too. And once we’d been through all that and were silent for a moment, she said:
‘I’ve some rather bad news, I’m afraid, Tinoshka.’
‘Oh?’ I said. ‘Has something happened?’
‘It appears I have cancer.’
‘Mama, no. Is it serious?’
‘Quite serious, yes. It’s in the pancreas. It’s been discovered rather late, so apparently there’s no way back now.’
She gave a little laugh.
‘Such things are notoriously hard to predict, but it won’t take more than a few months, six at most.’
‘Oh no,’ I said. I had no idea what else to say.
There was a lull, in which she said nothing, before I spoke again:
‘Do you want me to come home? We can stay with you, Seva and me. I’m just sitting here working, I can just as easily do that there.’
‘Thanks, it’s thoughtful of you. And it would be nice, of course. But when I get poorly, which I will soon, it won’t be such a good environment for Seva.’
‘Perhaps not,’ I said with relief. I hadn’t imagined only a few short weeks would pass before she was taken into hospital and Papa called to say she hadn’t much time left. If I’d known, I’d have gone back home with Seva and stayed with her those last weeks of her life. Of course I would.
Only I didn’t. A few minutes was all I got with her before she was gone. After that, three days with Papa in the apartment, during which he spent most of his time on his own in his room, but I was used to that, so the only real change I noticed in him was that he hardly spoke. Sasha had gone home, he didn’t want to be there with us, he refused to share his grief with Papa and didn’t appear again until the morning of the funeral. Seva screamed through the entire ceremony. He was too little to understand what death meant, but old enough to register the emotions it involved. The white coffin with all its wreaths appeared so distressing when I tried to look at it as if through his eyes, and the hush of those in attendance would have unsettled him too, the stifled sobs now and then, the cold and solemn mood. Of course I, his mother, was not my usual self either. And Sasha, his beloved uncle, breaking down like a child after stepping up to say a few words. I’d urged him not to speak, nothing would be worse than him turning up drunk, standing there swaying at the coffin. But he insisted and promised he wouldn’t touch a drop. He kept that promise and was sober as a judge in the church. Stepping up, he took his speech from his inside pocket and unfolded the pages with trembling hands, only for grief to overwhelm him, his face contorted, his mouth opened and closed a couple of times before he went and sat down again, his shoulders heaving, a look in his eyes that was part terror, part distress.
He wasn’t a strong person, Sasha, never had been. It was I who had to take care of the arrangements, for the funeral and afterwards, I who took it upon myself to welcome those who came. Papa was even more distant than usual, his face was like a mask and he almost shoved me away when I put an arm around his shoulder to give him a hug after the coffin had been lowered through the floor to be taken away for cremation and we were on our way outside.
Sasha looked after Seva, it was kind of him, but I couldn’t help hoping when I saw them together in the function room afterwards that Seva wouldn’t turn out like his uncle.
The reaction didn’t come until a few weeks later. When I’d collected Seva from nursery school one afternoon, the staff told me they’d noticed a couple of small blisters on his body that they were worried might be chickenpox, they’d had a couple of cases only recently, and they asked me to keep an eye on it. As soon as I got home, I took his clothes off and could see immediately that he was now developing a rash, even in the short time it had taken us to walk back it had broken out visibly. I counted three blisters on his tummy, five on his back, two on his thigh, one on his arm, two on his cheek.
‘I think you’ve got chickenpox, little man,’ I said, and put his trousers and top back on. ‘Shall we give Babulya a ring and ask her what to do?’
‘Is Babulya alive?’ he said.
‘No, she’s not. Of course she’s not,’ I said, horrified, and turned the television on for him, then fetched him a glass of milk and a biscuit while he curled up on the sofa.
Standing at the window I bit my lip as my eyes filled with tears. I wiped them away with my sleeve and thought I could control myself, but then my whole chest started heaving, a sob escaped me and when I tried to breathe in I just broke down. I stepped into the kitchen so that Seva wouldn’t notice, but it was too late, he came after me.
‘What’s the matter, Mama?’ he said, looking up at me. My face crumpled, my mouth quivered, and when I tried to answer him, my voice would emit only a wail.
‘Why are you crying, Mama?’
I kneeled down and hugged him tightly.
He patted my back like a little man.
I got to my feet and turned the tap on, splashing cold water onto my face as I tried to regain control of my breathing.
I knew I mustn’t break down in front of him, but although I did all I could to pull myself together, I couldn’t help it, all I could do was stand there weeping at the sink, aware between every sob that he was watching me.
‘Mama’s a bit upset, that’s all,’ I managed to say eventually. ‘It’s all right. Come on, let’s go and watch the television again, shall we?’
I’d settled a bit by the time we sat down, letting out only the smallest sob, the occasional sniffle, a kind of afterquake, until eventually that too subsided and I was able to ruffle his hair and smile at him through still teary eyes.
At bedtime, I read Vasilisa the Beautiful for him. He loved fairy tales and this one was his favourite. I liked it too. This evening it seemed apt, with all the grief the little girl felt when her mother died. Seva lay as always with his head back on the pillow, looking straight up at the ceiling as I read, never at me. The story was a world of its own, beyond the world we knew. He liked the fact that he knew someone called Vasilisa, too. That she could hardly be called beautiful wasn’t something he gave a thought to yet.
‘Sleep tight, my little star,’ I said, switching the light off by the bed and drawing the curtains before going for a shower.
The strange thing was that there hadn’t been a thought in my head while I’d been crying. I puzzled over it as the hot water streamed over my body. Not a thought about Mama, about death, about myself, about anything. The thoughts came now.
I knew she was dead, yet she was still near to me, that connection hadn’t been broken. I could think about her.
But she couldn’t think about me.
She couldn’t think about Seva.
She’d never know what was to become of him, or me.
And I’d never be able to tell her it didn’t matter that she spoiled him like that. I’d never be able to apologise for all the barbed comments I’d aimed at her, never be able to say, I’m really sorry, Mama, for behaving so badly towards you then. I took everything you gave, but gave nothing back, I know, and I’m so very sorry.
She’d never be able to say, it’s all a part of life, my love, that’s what it’s like having a daughter, you must lead your own life, you understand, and sometimes it’s hard.
I’d never be able to put my arms around her and thank her and tell her, you’re the best mother anyone could ever have.
I want you to know I’m proud of you, she’d said.
Oh, Mama, Mama.
I started crying again, but this time it felt good, and my tears mingled with the water that washed everything away.
* * *
*
Not long after that, Papa started phoning me. He’d never done that before. He’d call once a week, always at the same time, 7 p.m. on the dot. Mostly he talked about what he’d been reading or thinking about since the last time we spoke. If he was on form, we could end up talking for perhaps an hour. Gradually, I learned to handle it, making it more dialogue than monologue. If I ignored his lack of interest and talked about whatever I wanted to talk about, regardless, he would eventually start listening and engage himself in a conversation, however half-heartedly.
What struck me around that time, something I’d never thought about before, was that everything Papa concerned himself with was an abstraction. Books, music, ideas, concepts. He had no interest at all in nature or his surroundings. His only physical activity was to go for a walk every day, but only so that he could think without being disturbed, not to exercise. Apart from that all he did was sit in his chair or behind his desk. Everything went on inside his head, that was where he lived his life. That it hadn’t occurred to me before had of course to do with all that abstraction going on inside him, invisible to anyone but himself, whereas what we saw, Mama and I, was him, his physical being and all its various expressions, that was as concrete as things got with him. Only after I’d moved away and he became a voice on the phone did it occur to me at all. Words, sentences, thoughts, opinions – these were things that didn’t exist on their own, only as parts of a system that referred to itself. So when I told him about mycorrhiza, he couldn’t just let it be a phenomenon I was studying and listen to what I had to say about it, he would have to compare it, typically, to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, thereby turning it into something else, a model for alternative ways of thinking and understanding, horizontal and branching, centreless, non-linear.
‘But, Papa,’ I said then, ‘mycorrhiza isn’t an example of anything! It’s a thing in its own right! It’s there in the soil, you can dig it up and look at it with your own eyes, feel it in your hands. It’s not a concept!’
‘Now, now,’ he said, back to his most patronising. ‘I understand, I understand. But when you write about it, it becomes a concept whatever you say, whether you like it or not. You can’t just present these roots at your exam, now, can you? It’s your understanding of them the examiners are after, and that’s something other than the thing itself. That’s the whole problem with the natural sciences. Language about the world isn’t the world. Even mathematics – no, mathematics especially – is culture, it belongs to our human sphere. What the natural sciences are really about is our relationship to the world, not the world itself. And that relationship exists in language.’
‘So evolution isn’t something that actually happens, it’s just something that’s inside our heads?’
‘The theory of evolution describes our understanding of what we observe, yes. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’ve nothing against your subject, if that’s what you think.’
‘What about DNA?’
‘Inside our heads, as you so succinctly put it.’
‘But, Papa,’ I said again, ‘we know exactly what DNA is composed of, as well as how it works. It’s not a theory, it’s validated every single day in laboratories all over the world and in the most tangible of ways, in animals and insects, plants and bacteria, and everything else that’s living. I really don’t understand how you can deny it.’
‘It’s not that hard to understand, is it? A lot of things in nature repeat themselves, so if you observe and describe a phenomenon in a certain way and understand it that way, you’re bound to understand it in exactly the same way the next time it occurs, even if it’s in a different place, in a different context.’
‘You’re incorrigible,’ I said. ‘You know nothing about natural science, nothing about biology, not a single jot, and yet you set yourself above it and claim to know better!’
‘A little opposition can do no harm, surely? There’s enough whooping self-congratulation as it is in the world of science.’
‘I’m actually trying to learn something by it. Your opposition is the last thing I need. How about some support instead? Oh, that’s fascinating, Alya! Amazing what all those little roots can do there under the soil!’
I laughed, because even the thought was absurd.
‘It is rather amazing, of course, you’re right about that. But amazing from what perspective? For the fungus it’s quite banal.’
‘Papa!’
He chuckled.
‘I do think what you’re doing is interesting. Just don’t take everything at face value, that’s all.’
Neither of us spoke for a few seconds.
‘Thanks for the chat,’ he said then. ‘Take care.’
And with that he hung up.
* * *
*
After one such discussion I found myself thinking I was getting to be like him. Apart from the staff at Seva’s nursery school, shop assistants and librarians, and Bochanov once in a while, I hardly saw anyone at all during those months of reading, writing, working. I looked after Seva too, of course, but it couldn’t have been good for him living somewhere no one visited, with only his mother for company. It was shaping him, I could tell. He became more used to playing on his own and had turned into something of a little grown-up. At nursery school he was different, more unbridled, more physical, and the thought that he felt perhaps he had to be compliant when he was with me, that I was suffocating him in that way, the part of him that was him, was enormously unpleasant.
On the other hand I was doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t miss anyone, wasn’t longing for anyone, Mama’s death had been a lot easier to cope with than I’d feared. After my little breakdown that day I hardly even thought about her. Only occasionally did I feel a jolt of grief and would pause for a moment as if before an abyss, a void that was her absence, but all I had to do then was turn away and it would be gone.
I really didn’t want to be like Papa. I wanted what I did to have consequence, to mean something. In literature, the tangible world was blown to pieces, whereas the opposite happened in biology, where the abstract took on substance and form and became concrete. The rough, hard bark, the lattice of veins when the sun shone through the delicate leaves, the dark, moist earth. The swarms of midges, the pink maggots, the woodpeckers, the blackbirds. The thing about it was that there was no doubt – what was, was. The stringency and logic, too, the clarity of the natural sciences were aspects that had drawn me to them, that their abstractions weren’t just speculation but were verifiable. DNA was no abstraction, its signs were proteins, matter, and its code was transformed into concrete actions. The abstraction was in the language employed about them – signs, code – not in the phenomena themselves. Papa was right about that, but the conclusion he drew from it was wrong.
* * *
*
My thesis was well received, my supervisor told me he had support in urging me to apply for a doctoral scholarship. I would, of course. But what would I specialise in, what would I research and write about? I thought about it all through the summer, which was unusually hot and dry that year in Moscow, I remember it almost as a colour, the colour of grass everywhere after months of blazing sun, almost white. I’d never known anything like it before, the way the heat made it seem as if the landscape stiffened and became unpliable, usually it was the cold that had that effect. Seva spent some weeks with his grandmother in the country, it was good for him, while I lay reading in the daytime under shady trees in the park next to the student halls, going out in the evenings, guzzling vodka and tonics in bars and clubs, often ending up with quite different people from the ones I’d gone out with, those casual encounters in the night, when all of a sudden anything can be said and anything done, the alcohol turning even complete strangers into confidants. I liked it, as long as it was only for a short time. Years and I would have been one of those who glitter in the night-time and fade in the daylight, one of those flickering shadows without a will of its own any more. But for those few weeks it was a release to let go for a while and just drift.
The first day after Seva’s return, I felt the longing to be out there again, enveloped in the darkness, with all its anonymous faces, that compelling, all-or-nothing desire that coursed through my body. And perhaps I even toyed with the thought of going out after I’d put him to bed, given that he always slept through until morning without waking, but it was never a serious thought: the two worlds excluded each other.
In the evenings we made dinner together. Which is to say that he would sit on a stool in the tiny kitchen and watch me as I heated the food in the microwave and sliced some tomato and cucumber. I’d hand him two plates and he would put them out in that solemn little way of his on the table in the living room, then glasses, knives and forks. I always tried to make an effort and keep things together when we were on our own, even though the flat was so small that I slept, ate and worked in the same room. Seva had his own little room, barely more than an alcove, and there was a minuscule bathroom next to the kitchen. We didn’t have much space, but the place was ours, and we each had our ways of making it work.
