like ice underfoot with each strideon leaves and blooms fallen in piles deep and wide
the anguish is neither implied nor intended
but it’s magnified greatly by fear and doubt
so I’m unsure what’s broken can ever be mended:
if one entered here – would they ever get out?1
Why were we staying in Butharovo if not for your wish to test our feelings again? I have only understood at last – it takes a long time for plain but unpalatable truths to reach the liver. All the human bonds in your life were snapping then, and every attempt at unity left only blank emptiness, and despite that hard-won stubbornness which shone through the loss of your parent, your dreams of what your life should be were lost in a mist of uncertainty. The highest power endowed you with immense vitality. Yet the death of your young father in an aircraft fire deep in the Arctic circle then deprived you yet again of any strong shelter, and left you with the sense that even the ground could give way beneath your feet.
Could I then be your solid earth? Could I be not a charming prince, a Prince Yelisei2 whose fairy tale inevitably ends, but the one you needed all your life – your comforter, father and brother, your wall and shield from the evils of the world, the strong and disinterested patron of your golden talent?
No, I could not. I did not know how to. People learn to do it, giving their whole life to learning. Your striving to be brave in the face of despair drew me but I was terrified by it, because it was so overwhelmingly demanding – not only for me then, but for the future me, of which I had no inkling then.
So Butharovo, where my best poems were written, failed to become our joint shelter, and has sunk into your past like a painful coincidence, lacking the happy memories that might bind it into your life. We were not aware then that we should not stay in one place, locking ourselves for years into meaningless restrictions. For you and me, it turned out, it was ever better to be on the road.
The minutes of silence were running out. You slept on upstairs. And the light that augured spring cascaded into the mansard through the twin windows, beyond which the clouds and trees were flooding with dreams anticipating new shapes – shapes that will be formed once and never again.
Sometimes I allow myself to wake at dawn, like a little boy for whom, odd as it sounds, everything is yet to happen. But I see through my drowsiness how the streams and flows and flickers of light happened without me this morning, and I remember the light-lured pink of budding apple-blossoms, uncertain and moist, in those lost secluded gardens at Kuskovo3 where the light of our first mutual feelings budded and shone towards the foreign lands destined for both of us.
If I could write this life like a novel, I could make up the beginnings of the story as if it was a prophesied meeting of two existences after years of separation, in such surroundings and scenery, a classic unity of time, place and action: amid the generously blooming apple and cherry trees of an orchard on the outskirts of Kuskovo, in the rented room of a shabby wooden house near the station, not far from the palace parks with their lakes and waterways, humpback bridges and well-proportioned marble statues, an ancient and steady harmony far from the mental strife, and far from the inevitable restless and rootless rage and remorse bought on by life’s desires.
I loved – you didn’t believe and wanted to believe and didn’t believe again, just as you’re not believing now, when it can be sweet not to believe. But to all the shocks, dreams and true torments of the heart, there was a Witness, who was creating balance and proportionality; all that was needed was to look deeply, not with the eyes but with the heart.
Why with such a lack of faith, and a woman’s eternal need for words, were both of us, once our wanders had begun, always drawn to the same places: to Kuskovo with its shiny sprinkles of leaves and silvery waters, its Dutch house dedicated to Peter the Great, its museum of Shuvalov porcelain, and the time-defying oak near the Orangery fenced off by a cast-iron chain from Kasli; to Archangelskoe, on our last few kopeks, with its palatial cascades of terraces, amid the russet and gold autumn forests to the west of Moscow; to Pavlovsk on the fringes of Saint Petersburg and its natural looking English park; and of course that first prophetic journey which precipitated our nomadic life.
It was a quarter of a century ago when, golden-headed and warmed by the September sun, we stepped down from the train in Leningrad and I, remember, said to you – as a joke or consolation: ‘Welcome to Paris!’
Then after many years, we did go to Paris for real, and although I didn’t repeat the phrase on the Gare du Nord, you joked about it. But perhaps how it appeared to me then rebelled against my many images of Paris before it became an effective memory of the heart.
If you ask me, even now, what single memory of love I would choose, it may be that coloured vividly in red and gold on green, of leaf fall on grass on the Pavlov Hills near the arbour of the dowager empress, from where with a gasp of happiness and unguarded faith – yellowy shimmering birch, scarlet Russian maples, deep azure of mountain air, silvery shafts of sunlight, shining golden curls in your warm-wind-caressed hair – you ran into my open arms, and for the very first time we came together in that devout impulse to human unity which, Oh Lord My God, happens truly only once, to leave ever after its inescapable presence and a yearning for it to come back.
I confess: my entire life I have been waiting for a return of that glorious moment of fulfilment and alignment, of that irresistible triumph of unselfish happiness. It is part of our shared past, and it beckons and teases me with its constant presence and its foretold uniqueness amid the normal strains of life. But of course you can never retrieve true unity; it has to be accomplished anew each time. It must happen afresh and not become a memory. It must appear to the soul as another new dawn, in which I must understand you and myself entirely, from the beginning.
Yes, you were sleeping in the heavens above the garden in which things were happening and being achieved. My ten minutes have already departed, like the unified wholeness, and the silence has lifted, to return only as scattered moments in the happenstances of an ordinary day. Once more, I was leaving you for a day, to come back in the evening with a heart exhausted by the pressing vanity and powerlessness of the necessities of life, in the silence of tiredness which I can never share.
Time has not stretched, and the urgency of our unmatched dreams, and our perceptions of visible realities, separates us far more often now. So forgive my manly silence, if you can – authenticity cannot be explained in spoken words, but may sometimes be written down.
What was formed in the silence of the morning was a message to your inner life and your separate existence. What had concerned me for so long was to be written down like a letter to another room of our shared house, and it turned out to be a reflection on silence – a simple composition in four extended parts with a brief additional story that in my flush of honesty emulated a moral parable …
For us humans even honesty is impulsive, but the open authenticity of the garden is mantled with marvellous nobility, and possesses, as if leading on perfectly from the past, a wonderful classic unity and balance of shapes, where every detail is distinguished and transformed to a centre of gravity.
Whatever we verily love about the world, a lover or a homeland, we love about God – about the ancient Unity, partially reflected in the mirror of a troubled soul and in the muted secrecies of a mortal heart.
Si tu n’existais pas, dis-moi, pourquoi j’existerai?
(And
