actually rather self-obsessed. You suddenly want to do something, ignite your remaining powers, only for them to be snuffed straight out, since nothing in non-existence retains any meaning for long, even the express delight of a new spring. In this dimmed life, apart from such occasional flashes, there’s no engagement or connection because everything is dictated by only dismal ambition or boredom. No talent is ever engaged or else it is abused by the agony of self-love which artfully pretends to be a life.
Even that first spring flower, captured in the white-inside brown cup sitting on the broad, paint-peeled sill between the piles of worn-out books, prompted no revelations to the soul about the future. It was merely a reminder of the past, implying that the past, and so all our life, is a matter of chance – in other words, even the living spring bloom was turning the unchanging recurrence of separate particles of time into yet another sweet lie, another seduction, turning everything towards the paltry self-deception of non-existence.
Mother-and-stepmother, Tussilago farfara, the Gout Flower: if it weren't for the reductive power of non-existence, each word of this composite botanic name could and would encourage some kind of true fulfilment or action, or maybe even some true words. Yet these names awoke nothing in my soul, apart from dull sensations that became manifest only as a dying echo or wisps of dust from the ashes of burned out love. I somehow imagined these ashes being whisked away from my homeland to the rest of the world, because the pain of love for a woman, in all its inexplicability, is a kind of homeland, a soil of life – and the loss of this scarce soil leaves only a dreadful foreign land. All natural connections were torn from inside of me – apart from the single root that thrived without sunshine but still could not bring me joy – merely reverberating in the great void of shame and pain of loss, which I took simply as proof of my own worthlessness.
Putting down yet another worn-out book in which I was trying to escape reality, my vacant gaze fell by chance upon the mother-and-stepmother flower and through the fog of my non-existence an image came to me from my recent past of the River Lopasnya on Moscow’s hem, a ribbon of blue and light-blue surrounded by spring forests in which snow was quickly melting, dripping down the pine trunks and liquefying in the glades – those bare places amid the trees where amber shafts of sun can needle in to bring life to the rare ant herbs of Russia’s middle band.
I was staying in a sanatorium there for almost nothing on a family pass card I got by chance through a friend. But I wasn’t there for nervous exhaustion from work – rather because the continuation of our love, then an undiagnosable illness, had reached a crisis which must end in the death of my ‘I’, or a final cure, and this week-long stay was the last test, a natural break from the addictive pain of emotions, a respite imposed before the decisive and irretraceable step into a new homeland that still looked to me like, and actually was, a cloudy foreign land.
For that whole week, languishing from unresolved love, I walked among these unfamiliar surroundings, wandering as far as I could into the still forests along muddy tracks. At dawn, the mud was hard from the tenacious frost, and the spongy, shallow spring snow was covered with a sparkling crust. There in the early morning calm, my ears filled with the soft chatter of woodpeckers and the light trill of blue tits, I saw a huge forest deer. It slowly observed me with its large, moist eyes and then retired with graceful dignity, and the image struck into my memory as if I was born to it – with the greedy force of one who can steal from another life, when their own is not enough.
The Lopasnya here swept out a broad, deep bend, and the spring breeze that flowed in the clear air followed its curve – fresh and free-spirited, it followed the water. I too was drawn there, but the sticky, ribbed clay banks were not overgrown yet as they are in summer with waxy-topped, velvet undersided leaves of mother-and-stepmother, with lush burdock and with strong-stemmed horsetails, and it was impossible to get down to the river, especially as the spring melt was flooding ever more of the shallow banks.
But there was the small blue wooden bridge, which I crossed to meet you from the local bus that came out from Moscow once a day. It was a hard meeting. It was clear you wanted to break with me, yet didn’t know how to, which is why you were so sharp – rough and desperate because you knew nothing would work out, this way or that, because life, despite its dreams and vague desires, was already plunging into the chill flow of obscurity, swept away in deep, strong currents that surged under the blue, blue bridge.
What we didn’t know then was that bridge bound us together forever, eye-to-eye as we toiled with bitter jealousy of our separate pasts – I jealous of the things I didn’t know and would never discover, and you of the constant Senezhes and Intercession on the Nerls of my flights to going-nowhere isolation.
The sky was blue. The wind flapped and spread the drooping branches of the birches, their trunks full of sun near the top but pink from sap near the bole. Stunted, pale-green pines were candling together up to the sky, while in the damp soil on the river slope yellow and shining mother-and-stepmother blooms spilled almost to the inaccessible water’s edge. Muddying my boots, I snatched a flower for you – but it was no use, and soon it flew from the bridge into the churning, unstoppable currents of the Lopasnya.
Even after a few years our emotions were still disturbed, and their continuation was so acutely painful that they culminated in what was to me an appalling separation that seemed so belated that it could have neither success nor justification. Only unconscious non-existence and desperate reading saved me from the dark abyss. Day and night, traffic streamed along the Enthusiasts’ Highway, and trains clattered under the bridge, slowed down through Novaya station and rumbled punctually on. The tall window glowed with the morning light or the bright stripes shining up at night from the streetlights below, and on I read and re-read, reading someone else’s words and mistaking them for my own. Then one day I looked at the little flower from Izmailovsky Park again and found to my surprise that it not only had not withered, but was growing so stubbornly it had spilled right over the edge and crept across the edge of the window sill, extending its ringed, scaly indestructible stem.
This will for life so struck me that I started to observe the mother-and-stepmother flower daily – and maybe because of my bookishness I began to think there was something symbolic about it, some sign for me – but of course there was nothing, and where would it come from anyway? Yet the flower kept on stretching and growing and sprouting in front of my eyes, and simultaneously I sensed life beginning outside, and what had seemed irretrievable flowing back – until finally I woke up and realized I had no burden and I closed my eyes, opened my heart and took flight into the new space in which there was everything but the fear of darkness.
The darkness, of course, was there, but there were stars too – each one, if you looked closely, resembling that radiant flower, that in authentic reality is a giant, dazzling sun, compared to which the sun that shines from the sky is just a weak spring sun, surrounded by the busy bees of our attention.
KARAOKE
By the time Nina got back from Klayz’ma, it was already nearly dark in Moscow. Snow, yellow under the streetlights, was flying down for the second time this year. The first fall had come in November and soon melted, leaving a ghastly slush. It was uncertain if this new snow would settle itself lastingly on the ground – if it would tame the sticky slime of puddles and stir, even for a while, an indifferent gaze with its infant purity, or if it would quickly and futilely melt away according to the newly established, indifferent mechanics of natural processes, in which a misty winter delivers rain that can bring neither joy nor disappointment to now wingless souls – and where every unconscious impulse becomes enfeebled and dwindles to nothing like the Sunday snow uselessly scattering its flakes under the streetlamps in Moscow’s damp dusk.
The descending darkness nearly caught Nina on the road. But it didn’t. The car, a new Lada, had run like clockwork. In the lobby, Nina, relaxed by the journey, smiled at the unsleeping concierge. The lobby
