And Time Was No More, page 19
On this Novinsky Boulevard I so loved, there was also a big, bad boy, about eight years old, who hung around being naughty and picking fights. His name was Arkasha. Once he climbed onto the very top of a bench, tried to look impressive and poked his tongue out at me. But I stood up for myself. Even if he was big, I wasn’t afraid of him. I taunted him, saying, “Arkasha eats baby kasha! Arkasha eats baby kasha!”
And he said, “Yah, you’re just a little squirt.”
But I wasn’t afraid of him and I knew I would always be able to make fun of spiteful fools, no matter how high they might climb.
Then there was that proud moment of my first bold triumph, my first triumph of ambition. There on that same boulevard. We were walking past our house when Nyanya pointed to a short, stout figure up on the balcony.
“Look, there’s Elvira Karlovna. She’s come out for some fresh air.”
Elvira Karlovna was our nursery governess. We were little and her name was so hard for us to say that we just called her “Baba”. But suddenly I felt bold.
“Irvirkarna!” I called. Not “Baba” but “Irvirkarna”—like a big girl. I said it in a loud ringing voice so that everyone would hear that I could talk like a big girl. “Irvirkarna!”
It seems I had once been bold and ambitious. Over the years I had lost all this, more’s the pity. Ambition can be a powerful force. If I had been able to hold onto it, I might have shouted out something for all the world to hear.
But how wonderful everything was on that boulevard. For some reason it’s always early spring there. The runnels gurgle as they start to thaw, it’s as if someone’s pouring water out of a narrow little jug, and the smell of the water’s so heady that you just want to laugh and kick up your heels; and the damp sand shimmers, it’s like little crystals of sugar and you want to put some of it in your mouth and chew it; and a spring breeze is blowing into my woolly mittens. And off to one side, by a little path, has appeared a slender green stem. It stands there, quivering. And the lambs’-fleece clouds whirling about in the sky look like a picture from my book about Thumbelina. And the sparrows bustle about, the children shout, and you take all this in at the same time, all in one go, and all of it can be expressed in a single whoop of “I don’t want to go home!”
This was in the days when my hair was fair and silky. And now, all of a sudden, my hair’s like that again. How strange. But is it really so very strange? Here in this little house with the cockerel strutting along the bench, what could be more ordinary?
Now I’ll put on my little cap, the one I wore on that hunting trip, and go out on my skis.
I walk out onto the porch. There, propped against the wall, are my skis. No sign of the old woman and the huntsman. Eagerly I slip my feet into the straps. I grab the poles, push off and glide down the slope.
Sun. The odd powdery snowflake. One flake falls onto my sleeve and doesn’t melt; it’s still crystalline when it blows away. I feel so light! I’m held by the air; happiness is carrying me along. I’ve always known and I’ve often said that happiness isn’t a matter of success or achievement—happiness is a feeling. It’s not founded on anything, it can’t be explained by anything.
Yes, I remember one morning. It was very early. I’d been on my knees all night long, massaging the leg of someone very ill. I was numb from cold and trembling from pity and fatigue, as I made my way home. But as I was crossing the bridge, I stopped. The city was just beginning to wake up. The waterside was deserted apart from a longshorewoman the likes of whom you’ll see only in Paris. Young and nimble, a red sash around her waist and pink stockings on her legs, she was using a stick to fish for rags in the dustbins. The still sunless sky was just brightening in the east, and a faint haze, like pencil shading on pink blotting paper, showed where the sun’s rays were about to burst through. The water below wasn’t flowing the way it’s supposed to flow; instead, it was whirling around in lots of flat little eddies, as if dancing on the spot. It was waltzing. And trembling gaily in the air was a faint ringing sound—perhaps the sound of my fatigue. I don’t know. But suddenly I was pierced by a feeling of inexplicable happiness—a feeling so marvellous it made my breast ache and brought tears to my eyes. And reeling from fatigue, laughing and crying, I began to sing:
Wherever the scent of spring may lead me…
I hear a rustling behind me. The huntsman. Now he’s standing beside me. I know his face, his outline, his movements. His earflaps are down; I can see him only in profile. But who is he?
“Wait,” I say. “I think I know you.”
“Of course you do,” he says.
“Only I can’t quite remember…”
“There’s no need to remember. What use is remembering? Remembering is the last thing you need.”
“But wait,” I say. “What’s that sentence that’s been bothering me? Something like, ‘Just one left till morning.’ What on earth does it mean? Something nasty, I think.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “It’s all right.”
I’ve been ill for so long, and my memory is poor. But I do remember—I made a note: I want to hear the Lohengrin overture one more time, and I want to talk once more to a certain wonderful person, and to see another sunrise. But Lohengrin and the sunrise would be too much for me now. Do you know what I mean? And that wonderful person has left. Ah, I remember that last sunrise, somewhere in France.
Dawn had just begun to glow, its wine-red hue beginning to spread. In a moment the sun would come up. The birds were getting agitated, twittering and squawking. One little bird was loudly and insistently repeating, “Vite, vite, vite…” Tired of waiting, it was urging the sun on. I joined in this reproach to the sun, saying (in French, of course, since it was a French bird), “Il n’est pas pressé.”1 And suddenly there was the sun, round and yellow, as if breathless and embarrassed about being late. And it wasn’t even where I’d expected it to be, but somewhere far off to the left. Out came the midges, and the birds fell silent and got down to their hunting.
The poetic conceit that birds greet the rising of the sun god with a hymn of rapture is ever so droll. On the whole birds are a restless, garrulous tribe. They make just as much fuss when they’re going to bed as when they wake up, but you can hardly make out that they’re hymning the sun late in the evening. In Warsaw, I remember, in one of the squares, there was what you could call a sparrow tree. In the evening people would gather to watch the sparrows go to bed. The birds would flock around the tree and make a clamour you could hear all over the square. From the tone of their twittering you could tell that these were squabbles, disputes, brawls and just plain mindless chatter. And then everything would calm down and the sparrows would settle in for the night.
Although I shouldn’t reproach the birds for this garrulousness. Nature gives each bird a single motif: “cock-a-doodle-doo” or “chink-chook” or just plain “cuckoo”. Do you think you could get your message across with a sound as simple as that? How many times would you have to repeat yourself? Imagine that we human beings were given a single motif according to our breed. Some of us would say, “Isn’t the Dnieper wonderful in fine weather?” Others would ask, “What time is it? What time is it?” Still others would go on and on repeating that “The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection.” Try using a single sentence like that to rhapsodize about the Sistine Madonna, to expound on the brotherhood of nations or to ask to borrow money. Although, maybe this is exactly what we do do and we just never realize it.
Sunrise! How varied it can be, and how I love it in all its guises. There’s one sunrise I remember well. I waited for it a long time; for some reason I was really longing for it. And there in the east was a strip of grey cloud or light mist. I raised my arms like an ancient pagan worshipping the sun and beseeched the heavens:
Sun, our god! Oh, where are you?
We are arrayed in your flowers,
Our arms upraised to your blue,
We are calling, invoking your powers…
And then there it was, an orange coal ringing through the grey mist. Slowly before us rose a bronze sun, swelling, incandescent, malicious. Its face was blazing with rage; it was quivering and full of hate. Sometimes sunrise can be like that…
And I remember another very curious sunrise.
In a patch of grey there suddenly appeared a round hole, like the spyhole in a stage curtain that actors look through to check the size of the audience. Through this little hole in the sky peeped out a hot yellow eye; then this eye disappeared. A moment later, as if deciding—Now!—out jumped the sun. It was very droll.
Sunset, on the other hand, is always sad. It may be voluptuous, and opulent, and as richly sated with life as an Assyrian king, but it is always sad, always solemn. It is the death of the day.
They say there is a reason for everything in nature—the peacock’s tail serves to perpetuate the species, the beauty of flowers attracts the bees that will pollinate them. But what purpose does the mournful beauty of sunset serve?
Nature has expended herself in vain.
Here’s the huntsman again, standing beside me.
“Where’s your gun?” I ask.
“Here.”
It’s true, I can see his gun behind his back.
“And your dog?”
“There.”
Up bounds his dog. Everything’s as it should be.
I feel I ought to say something to the huntsman.
“How do you like my little house?” I ask. “When it gets dark, you know, we light a lamp.”
“Does Nyanya light it?”
“Nyanya? Oh, yes, yes, the old woman—that’s Nyanya,” I say, remembering. Nyanya… She had died in an almshouse. She was very old. When I visited her, she would ask, “Just what are these granchilder? Some countryfolk keep coming round and saying, ‘But, Grandma, we’re your granchilder.’”
“They’re your daughter Malasha’s children,” I explained. Malasha had been our housemaid when I was little.
I remember it all so vividly it’s uncanny. Someone has spilt some needles on the window sill and I’m stroking them. I think they’re absolutely wonderful. And someone is saying, “Liulia has spilt some needles.”
I hear but I don’t realize that this Liulia is me. Then someone picks me up. I’m touching a plump shoulder tightly encased in pink cotton. This, I know, is Malasha. And as for the needles—I’ve loved needles and everything sharp and glittery all my life. Maybe I began to love them back then, before I realized that Liulia was me. We were talking about Nyanya. She was very old. And now she’s here in this little house. In the evening she lights the lamp; from outside, the little window shines orange, and out from the forest comes a fox. It comes up to the window and sings. You’ve probably never heard the way a fox sings? It’s extraordinary. Not like Patti or Chaliapin,2 of course—but far more entertaining. It sings tenderly and off-key, in a way that’s utterly bewitching: very soft, yet still audible. And the cockerel’s here inside, standing on the bench, its comb like raspberry gold with the light shining through it. It stands there in profile and pretends not to be listening.
And the fox sings:
Cockerel, cockerel,
With your comb of gold,
Your combed little beard,
And your shiny little head,
Come, look out the window.
But the cockerel clicks its claws on the bench and walks away. Yes, at least once in your life you should listen to a fox singing.
“It sings at night,” says the huntsman, “but you don’t like night, do you?”
“How do you know? Does that mean you’ve known me a long time? Why’s it so hard for me to remember you when I’m quite certain that really I know you very well?”
“Does it matter?” he says. “Just think of me as a composite character from your previous life.”
“If you’re a composite character, then why are you a huntsman?”
“Because all the girls of your generation were in love with Hamsun’s Lieutenant Glahn.3 And then you spent your entire life seeking this Glahn in everyone you met. You were seeking for courage, honesty, pride, loyalty and a passion that ran deep but was held in check. You were, weren’t you? You can’t deny it.”
“But wait… You said I don’t like the night. That’s true. Why? What does it matter? Tiutchev said, and he’s probably right, that it’s because night rips away the veil that prevents us from seeing the abyss.4 And as for the anguish inspired by the stars—‘The stars speak of eternity’—what could be more terrible? If a person in pain gazes up at the stars as they ‘speak of eternity’, he’s supposed to sense his own insignificance and thus find relief. That’s the part I really can’t understand. Why would someone who’s been wronged by life find comfort in his complete and utter humiliation—in the recognition of his own insignificance? On top of all your grief, sorrow and despair—here, enjoy the contempt of eternity, too: You’re a louse. Take comfort and be glad that you have a place on earth—even if it’s only that of a louse. We look up at the starry sky the way a little mouse looks through a chink in the wall at a magnificent ballroom. Music, lights, sparkling apparitions. Strange rhythmical movements, in circles that move together and then apart, propelled by an unknown cause towards an incomprehensible goal. It’s beautiful and frightening—very, very frightening. We can, if we like, count the number of circles traced by this or that sparkling apparition, but it’s impossible to understand what the apparition means—and this is frightening. What we cannot understand we always sense as a hostile force, as something cruel and meaningless. Little mouse, it’s a good thing that they don’t see us, that we play no role in their magnificent, terrible and majestic life. Have you ever noticed how people lower their voices when they’re looking at the star-filled sky?”
“Nevertheless, the stars speak of eternity,” said the huntsman.
“Eternity! Eternity! How terrifying! ‘Forever’ is a terrifying word. And the word ‘never’ is no different—it is eternal in the same way. But for some reason ‘never’ frightens us still more. Maybe this is because ‘never’ includes a negative element, almost a prohibition, which we find abhorrent. But enough of that—or I’ll start feeling wretched. A while ago, a group of us were talking for some reason about how impossible it is to grasp the concept of infinity. But there was a little boy with us who made perfect sense of it just like that. He said, ‘It’s easy. Imagine there’s one room here, and then another, and then another five, ten or twenty rooms, another hundred or million rooms, and so on and so on… Well, after a while it gets boring, you just can’t be bothered any more and you say, To hell with it all!’ That’s what it is—that’s infinity for you.”
“What a muddle you’re in,” said the huntsman, shaking his head. “Eternity and starry despair, a singing fox and a little boy’s prattle.”
“But to me it’s all quite clear. I simply want to talk without any logic or order, the way things come to me. Like after morphine.”
“Precisely,” said the huntsman. “After morphine. Because this little house of yours never really existed either. It’s just something you used to like drawing.”
“Look, I’m tired and ill. Does it really matter? When all’s said and done, we invent our entire lives. After all, don’t we invent other people? Are they really, truly the way they appear to us, the way we always see them? I can remember a dream I once had. I went to the home of a man I loved. And I was greeted there by his mother and sister. They greeted me very coldly and kept saying he was busy. They wouldn’t let me see him. So I decided to leave. And as I was leaving, I caught sight of myself in the mirror and let out a groan. My face was fat and puffy and I had tiny squinting eyes. On my head was a hat with bugle beads, the kind that used to be worn by elderly shopkeepers’ wives. On my shoulders was a brown cape, and on my short neck a filthy, coarsely knitted scarf. ‘Good God!’ I said to myself. ‘What’s happened to me?’ And then I understood. This was how those women saw me. And I know now that you will never find even two people on earth who see a third in the same way.”
“You seem to have set great store by dreams,” said the huntsman.
“Oh yes. Dreams, too, are life. I’ve seen and experienced much that is noteworthy, beautiful, even wonderful—and yet I don’t remember it and not all of it has become an essential component of my soul in the way that two or three dreams have done. Without those dreams I wouldn’t be the person I am. I had an astounding dream when I was eighteen—how could I ever forget it? It seems to have foretold my whole life. I dreamed a series of dark, empty rooms. I kept opening doors, making my way through one room after another, trying to find a way out. Somewhere in the distance a child began to cry and then fell silent. He’d been taken away somewhere. But I walked on, full of anguish—until, finally, I reached the last door. It was massive. With a great effort, pushing with all my strength, I opened this door. At last I was free. Before me lay an endless expanse, despondently lit by a lacklustre moon. It was the kind of pale moon we see only by day. But far away in the murk something was gleaming; I could see it was moving. I was glad. I wasn’t alone. Someone was coming towards me. I heard a heavy thudding of horses’ hooves. At last. The sound was getting closer. And an enormous, bony, white nag was approaching, its bones clattering. It was pulling a white coffin sparkling with brocade. It pulled the coffin up to me and stopped… And this dream is my entire life. It’s possible to forget the most vivid incident, the most remarkable twist of fate, but a dream like this you’ll never forget. And I never have done. If my soul were reduced into its chemical components, analysis would reveal the crystals of my dreams to be a part of its very essence. Dreams reveal so very, very much.”
“Yours is a very nice little house,” he says, interrupting me. “And it’s a good thing you’ve finally come to it.”
