How warm, how fresh and light, how easy to forget debts and guilt and all the confusing details in the vision – which, thank God, the eyes can still see – and see with all the simple clarity of the children playing in the sandpit and on the grass who will remember all their lives some chance view of an ant busily climbing a straw of grass, or a crimson and black fire beetle, or a gleaming, brassy water-beetle flashing amber on the pond – where, the adults say, also live the scary tritons with those bright red spots on their white bellies. Ah!
Elizaveta Osipovna died that summer in the regional hospital. So now there was no-one to leave the children with. The young neighbour who helped her buy the TV visited her in the hospital only once, and found her sitting on the bed, wearing a grey hospital robe, which slipped off her yellow shoulder to reveal a pitifully thin clavicle. When she saw him, she started to cry, and said she was so scared of going blind. There was a phone call later, informing him that she’d died.
Elizaveta Osipovna’s relatives from Baku arrived for the funeral, and the young neighbour went with them to the crematorium, and as the coffin glided slowly between the open furnace doors, a taped voice solemnly sang Massenet’s ‘Elegy’ ‘O-o-o, where are they, the light days, the tender nights of spring? …’ And on the way home, the neighbour couldn’t help humming that haunting melody, again and again out loud and in his head, until the moment he walked into the yard and it was overwhelmed by Joe Dassin:
Si tu n’existais pas, dis-moi, pourquoi j’existerai …
Yet, extraordinarily, as he walks through the yard, enters the porch and goes up in the lift back to normality, he has no idea that for all his life he will remember that music, and every time he moves on, or changes his life in any way, that music will awaken in him an inevitable, unquenchable longing, a perpetual reminder of the involuntary betrayals that lodge guiltily in his core. He might have forgotten it entirely – for was there really any fault – but what is anyone left with if you take away their last treasure, their secret and very personal guilt?
Only shame is then left, but with shame it is completely impossible to live, dear neighbours.
1Poem by Lydia Grigorieva.
2The hero of The Tale of The Dead Princess, Pushkin’s telling of the Snow White fairy story. The princess, who is protected by seven knights, is tricked into eating a poisoned apple and falls into a deathlike trance, only to be awakened, finally, by the brave young Prince Yelisei.
3With its sumptuous palace and magnificent formal gardens, Kuskovo is sometimes called the Russian Versailles, created in the eighteenth century by Pyotr Sheremetyev, the wealthy son of one of Peter the Great’s key generals, as a luxurious summer retreat on the fringes of Moscow.
4Sausage-shaped sweets from the Caucasus made by threading almonds, walnuts, hazel nuts and raisins on to a string, dipping them in grape juice and drying them in the shape of a sausage.
5A soviet variation on a pub, where people went simply to drink. The word rumochnaya comes from the Russian word for ‘wine glass’.
6Joe Dassin was an American singer-songwriter famous in the 1960s and 1970s for his French songs.
2
THE GOUT FLOWER
MEMORIES ARE CRUCIAL when you’re craving to be reunited with life – when you long to be aware simultaneously of the present, past and future. The future, which is in any case filled with the past, is seen only dimly and slips away in vague guesses, while the present is by definition uneventful. But the past is with us always – without permission, pacing through any scene as unconditional reality.
And so like this, memories came striding towards me that spring in the early 80s. With it came dejection as I, with pointless humility, punished myself for misdemeanours in some past setting where, for absence of proper achievement, I was brought by life and fate …
That setting was a concrete and asphalt and grey-brick world where the Gorky Railway is crossed by the Enthusiasts’ Highway, which long ago was called the Vladimirka7 and stretched away from the might of Moscow into the gloaming of a memory that once palely hurt me in the remote and beautiful woods and fields of the Vladimir region.
Here, in Vladimir, is the small white and blue Church of the Intercession on the Nerl.8 The square and ancient church with its central tower stands on a low mound above an oxbow lake formed by the snow melt. It looks entirely self-sufficient, and without need of anyone – or so it seemed to me, confused and empty at heart.
Even this scene failed to wake any particular tender emotions in my soul, and yet it was deeply beautiful and even disturbing in its unique harmony, with its miniature white walls and the vast sky around in such perfect balance that in my imagination it became weightless, and seemed to float and shimmer like its reflection in the lake, the two images separated only by the band of limp reeds that grew between the floodlines. In those vague days of non-existence, there was nothing I wanted more than such freedom from gravity, but my earthweight dragged me down, and even in my dreams I had forgotten how to fly.
At the time, thanks to my foolish extravagance, I had neither home nor wife, nor any significant money. I was spending every kopek I had on necessities and could not save at all. Lacking even a proper home, I was staying with a kind friend in a room from the tall windows of which could be seen, mirrored in glass on the opposite side of Enthusiasts’ Highway, the whole of the grey, apartment block with its groundfloor foodstore, its shelves entirely empty but for ranks of then ubiquitous ‘Siberian’ vodka. The room stuck in my memory because it was so hard to sleep in, even when very drunk, yet waking up in it was harder still and I never, never wanted to get up. I was in that foolish frame of mind where I was just existing, with nothing happening around me, and this fake existence, like everything devoid of a beginning and end, charged itself into the general guilt of life, meaningless and useless.
Yet even this dark winter, long as it was, did pass, and I started to peer gingerly outside, each time looking further and further from my shelter – until once I managed to walk to Izmailovsky Park, where above the last vestiges of blackened snow the restorative pussy-willows were starting to bloom, and the muddy ditches were awash with the clear snow melt of Moscow’s foreign to me spring.
It was there in Izmailovsky that my eye was taken by a golden-yellow mother-and-stepmother flower,9 emerging from a bank of poor clay soil washed out by the spring rains. A zealous bee buzzed around this early source of nectar. I took the plant with me, dislodging its roots so easily from its native clay that it seemed almost accidental – the reddish-brown, tomentose roots led up the reedy stem to the heart of the floral corolla, shining like a miniature sun.
When I reached my room again, I stowed the flower in a delft tea cup
