garden as if on the threshold between the two realities – one of which held me in its eclectic image of the present, and the other which drew me, without ever letting me in – provoking and perplexing me with tenebrous hints, tips and reminders of the Unity.
I knew nothing thoroughly, yet after five minutes silence, I imagined a new call – a call to a path that seemed mine at once and for certain. It seemed so easy for me to rise from the threshold entirely as I was and go wherever my eyes led me – for on this path, one by one, would be torn all superfluous trappings and bonds, and the soul (for the soul does exist) would exult from the return flow of sensation from the universe’s imperceptible movement and unfading growth – yet I remembered how this happens.
Why did I have to confuse frankness and honesty – integrity and self, too? Do eyes always follow where the heart yearns? The truth is that there exist mutual bonds of existence, and tearing them will not spread light – only the utter darkness of despair.
Didn’t I know that my longest path led always to you, and that for so many years, any road, wherever it took me, always began and ended with you?
After losing yourself in work or reading until after midnight as so often, you slept on serenely upstairs, rather closer to the sky, and these penetrating questions melted in the moist calm of the morning – unseemly in your dreams, the guardian and shepherd of which I was long ago destined to be.
Unfathomable and far off, you slept, slept as always, like the first time, and through the window in our mansard bedroom gazed bushy cedars, their dark purply green needles and dozy pillars entwined in curling ivy, and beside them a ghostly willow and an oriental poplar. Through the gaps in the branches the great expanse of London climbed to the horizon of its northern hills, draped by low skies, and beyond intriguing but not unlimited distances.
And now like the blue tit, perfectly Russian, darting from the aspiring branches of the one apple tree not planted by us, a thought flashes up into these deep silences – that from long ago, and for a long time, we have been wandering, together.
This morning, you slept while I awoke alone – a morning of separation and farewell for the day. In the evening, past midnight, it was you awake alone, while I slept, embracing my illusions, illusions which any other woman might dismiss as pure balderdash and baloney. But you know, so well, that someone else’s present world is untangible and unimaginable, like a foreign country filled with great happiness and great sorrow. In our mutual love, we have caused each other so much anguish and unacknowledged misery, but it has finally become clear that in the unique love for either a woman, or a homeland, one learns the meaning and idea of the world – love for the One and Only Authentic Existence, which created us from one soul alone, the same for men and for women:
O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord, who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate and from them has spread abroad a multitude of men and women, and fear Allah in whose name you appear to one another, and fear Him particularly respecting ties of relationship.
Al-Nisa 4–1
How little life we are given, Oh God, for learning and understanding!
The house, on the threshold of which these minutes were trifled away, our stone house on the hill, was girded on the northern side by the dormant buds of the woods scaling the slope, and on the south by a brick wall festooned with curls of ubiquitous ivy and by the small garden, a-brim with daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths, created by your own hard work. For all its sturdiness, it was not our last home, but an enduring shelter on the way to another shimmering place. Bestowed on us as a challenge at the crossroads of our wanderings, it grew on us, with its simple objects, which also bore memories of previous homes. Every object is an accumulator of memories and feelings, memories and feelings that can sometimes surge back with the odd glance or touch to remind us that we have shared experiences – that our two lives, though so different, are intimately entangled and, for some purpose, lastingly conjugated.
This house, so different from those other time-worn homes, does not bring our lives together by force, but is sympathetic to the natural separateness of human existence, with its two studies, its two disparate worlds where each can shelter to read and write, with a shared wall but opening to opposite points of the wind rose – my windows looking out south and east, yours to the north and west.
Our beliefs and ambitions are so different in many ways, but this makes the mutual connections that much clearer as they lodge within our home, bringing together both worlds. All their variegated differences mingle here in unity, allowing the grace of occasional mutual silences to penetrate commonplace reality, as the point of a young leaf penetrates the maple bud, or a tear disturbs an impassive countenance.
Now it’s happened, and there’s no time – and I didn’t even notice where the time went. In my heart, you see, there gathered so clear, so earnest a wish to explain, to explain myself with all the guilty prolixity and diversions of words – those words I never have enough of from day to day for your more substantial grievances. But even words are given to me in unmindful silence, like the radiance of familiar objects that brings back emotions from the past.
And the traces of the past are slipping ever further away – the start of our mutual destiny is receding – the time when we, two people, two differences, two lonelinesses, had neither a common home nor even common memories. When did those memories begin?
No, it wasn’t that secluded summer at Butharovo, under the roof of the rented cottage with the carved terrace, deep amidst the forest in a landscape alien to both of us. It wasn’t then that began our life of love, a love which then and for long after seemed a simple story of dark temptation and glorious but brief passion, a seduction by fate – a perishable romance that is born and dies in the pride of either man or woman.
‘She didn’t understand him.’ … ‘He didn’t understand her.’
However one begins such a humdrum tale, its humdrum end will loom all too plainly. Was this meant for us? Who knows? If it weren’t for the irresistible gravitational attraction of fate, and not another conjugation whose heavenly justice will only later be revealed, would we have been able to resist the centrifugal force of unrestrained egoism that at the time seemed for me and you the self-preservation of talent? We will only discover the answer in the many-layered joys and sorrows of life; the pain of mutual existence is the need for us to sacrifice even those things sweetest to our hearts, the strident ghosts of our unmutual past.
I think we chose to meet under the roof only rarely, but as the rains kept falling, so we were brought together – for where else could we go in that dull village? We walked together, yes, but somehow singly. We adapted to each other, but the arguments were terrible and the silences filled with tension, leading to new arguments. But in everything around us – in the ripening leaves of the alien forests, in the distant murmur of a brook, in the drizzle drops on burdock and nettles, in the unexpected birds of our foreign garden, in the maple reflections on the country ponds where I fished to be alone and waken to the real world – everything was filled with the inevitability of life, and shone with the possibility of unity.
In your words:
Here’s a soul’s garden neglected and dank
without love without care a desolate blank
dense jasmine and lilac grow over the bank
raspberries and blackberries thorny and rank
if some bold stranger ventures inside
in the green shadows where lost truths now
