consult in writing my answer to V., but instead I asked him to send everything he could find, to general delivery in Livadia. The books started arriving that week, brown-paper packages, tied up with string, sealed with wax: letters, mainly in Russian, French, English, and in Spanish, my own language.
Among the first he sent was one that was not much use to me, except here, as an example. Its title: A Treasury of the World’s Great Letters from Ancient Days to Our Time, Containing the Characteristic and Crucial Communications and Intimate Exchanges and Cycles of Correspondence of Many of the Outstanding Figures of World History, and Some Notable Contemporaries, Selected, Edited, and Integrated with Biographical Backgrounds and Historical Settings and Consequences.
1
LIVADIA
The girl in the Post Office handed me a second letter from V. She watched with a smile as I turned it over in my hands, incredulous. Out in the street, a cloud of children swirled around me, Greeks, Armenians, Tartars with biblical curls. A youthful chorus asked the time, but I opened the envelope, oblivious to their cries, as if I had jumped up to close a door, shutting out music that was too loud. V.’s greeting resounded in my ear, like in those movies where the offscreen voice descends on a character, getting too close for comfort. Or like that old tapestry (in the north wing of the Hermitage?), an angel unrolling a parchment for a boy in a saffron toga and sandals, his bowed lips at the ear of the rapt youth. When my eyes had made their way to her name on the last page, after reading a letter perhaps more beautiful than the first, I stood stunned for a moment, scarcely aware of my surroundings, immersed in absolute silence, her words of farewell ringing in my ear like a glass bead bouncing around the walls of a seashell, speeding through the spiral chambers. My eyes lifted from the page, darting around, where was I? where had my walk taken me? not really a walk, a glide past walls, entrances, standing at the crossroads, watching two cars go by, then a wagon, pulled slowly by a Percheron (its flanks and feet covered with long hair), as if I was running on automatic pilot, like ships use on the high seas, functioning only enough to move forward, to get around without bumping into things. I blinked and my eyes were caught by something vertical, which got bigger and bigger; then I was hit by a wave of images, breaking over me in a dizzying flood, indistinguishably. They were clear signals of where I was, but only images, no sounds, and they slid past my retina so fast my head spun, each vision of the place rushing past before a single thing, any detail, could pull up on my memory bank. I knew that I must order my ears to reconnect to the exterior if I were to have any hope of grasping some part of the tide of images coming at me, so I went back to open that door and was struck by bursts of sentences, the music (a Greek melopoeia) of the place, and heard clearly: “Two octopus in ink for table five,” and there in front of me stood the person who had turned to shout (I had seen it a second before: the mouth appearing over the shoulder, opening, yelling, the vein in the neck distending—all of which was captured by my ears after a slight delay and subsequently deciphered by my speech centers as an order that this man, the waiter, was shouting to the kitchen).
The crystal bead crashed against the nacreous shell one last time. As if awakening from a dream, I saw the mocking face of Diodore (Diodo), the Greek, and knew I was in the restaurant with the bay window, and I ordered: “A beer. Dark. Draft.”
I had stopped at this restaurant many times. I had spent hours reading letters, copying sentences, whole paragraphs, with the secret hope that if I repeated those words written one, two hundred years ago (and more), my hand would acquire the skill of the ancients. I hoped, for example, to acquire a sense of freedom by copying a passage from Petrarch, describing the ascent of Mount Ventoux, from a letter dated April 26, 1351, into the reply I was starting to draft, sitting in the bay window of the restaurant, looking down on Livadia. The Faustian impulse, the craving for travel of this “first modern man”: “Inspired only by a desire to contemplate the lofty elevation of the place, I have today climbed the highest mount in the region, known, not without cause, as Windy … I stood astonished and overwhelmed by the vast panorama and by the unusual breeze that was blowing …”
I too was “astonished and overwhelmed by the vast panorama” from the Greek restaurant high above Livadia, the spot on the globe I had chosen to see. V.’s letters completely altered this setting. Instead of a simple nature preserve (for yazikus butterflies) I now saw beeches, oaks, cypresses—a row of tall cypresses marking the end of the gentle slope on my left—and the harbor in Yalta, boats anchored there, boulevards running down toward the sea. The octopus I impaled on a broad fork with large tines and raised to my lips came from this very sea. I chewed it slowly, its thick sauce spreading an oily cloak over my taste buds.
With my back to the little restaurant where Diodo was moving between the tables, I leaned over the balustrade and studied the afternoon light, just a hint of the shadow of the hour floating in it: the rays of sun slanting through the clouds and growing shorter, the pyramids of poplars growing less sharp, withdrawing slowly into a larger darkness in which it was impossible to distinguish the branches, their foliage dissolving into a green-blue mass. It wasn’t that everything had become obscured (it was far from totally obscured), no, the initial change here was just as fast as a nightfall farther south, but then a brighter twilight lingered as long as another five hours, with the sun hanging a few meters above the sea.
I rested in my room for a few hours. It was already dark, but for me a good night began at midnight, when no light at all filtered through the curtains. I surveyed the garden in front of the pension, leaning over the rail around the veranda, toward the beech trees in the distance, my eyes wide open, pupils dilated in the low frequency light, infrared. In the painfully harsh light of day, I could not help noting the differences between Crimea and the outskirts of Stockholm, for one example. During the day I registered every detail with my eyes half-closed, hidden like some bird’s behind a double eyelid (or the lace-curtain shutter of a camera), the disk of the sun suspended in a deep blue sky, the bright colors of the bikinis on the beach. I had lived in the north for years, traveling in geographic zones, regions that received less light for most of the year, but more rain and snow, often visiting cities where it snowed as late as May, Stockholm, for example; if I was going there in May, I would certainly take my warmest overcoat, wear it when I left St. Petersburg, to board the train in the Finland Station, and then keep it near me in the luggage rack, so I could put it back on in Helsinki, to board the ferry to Stockholm. I would open it when I got inside, in the glassed-in cabin, pulling the zipper down without taking my eyes off the black rocks along the coast, the dark cold water, the gray sky, good indications of a northern country, no palm trees, no yellow orb throwing thousands of watts on them. A breath of cold air, at last. Yes, I should turn up the collar on my overcoat.
A trip should be traced beforehand in a traveler’s soul, in a tiny polygon like a Wilson camera, where you can follow the trajectory of an atomic particle, to arrive at the state of satisfaction that awaits on the other shore, the water boiling in the kettle, the sun hidden behind the trees, the bashkir guides chatting quietly a few steps away, in their makeshift stores. Because of the importance of the physical, of skin exposed to the wind and sun through the eyelids. But the mental and spiritual are just as important, the heightened experience that allows us to watch entranced as bubbles rise through liquid, to see the universes contained within their narrow walls. An idea that is elusive and fragile, the wings of a butterfly, a dream. Two dreams winged my feet, speeding my descent from the platform. The first, a Chinese parable, I will not repeat, as it is commonplace; the second, maybe less so. (I felt so alive throwing my knapsack onto the luggage rack, drinking homemade liquor with the chance companions on my trip, some Cossacks from Zaporoshets, wrapped in red kerchiefs, just a masquerade for the weekend; it’s true, but so what?)
A man travels to the past like a light ray, cutting through time as easily as a hot knife though butter, as cleanly as night-vision goggles penetrate the darkness. That ray lights the part of the Jurassic forest he is moving through. The traveler can’t leave the path, can’t join the flutter
