Читать книгу Nocturnal Butterflies of the Russian Empire - José Manuel prieto - Страница 11

LIVADIA

What I didn’t grasp were the empty points, the amazing stretch between the time when I had left V. on the Odessa steps, or actually, between the moment she left me in the Ferry Terminal, and the point at which she reappeared, yesterday afternoon when the window opened and the thin arm of the Post Office clerk reached out to hand me her letter.

I had gone into the Post Office to make a long-distance call (since Post and Phones are in the same Russian ministry, in the same gray Moscow edifice). While the operator was making the connection, I was inspecting the model telegrams displayed under glass on her desk—announcements of train arrivals and departures, notes of congratulation—and it occurred to me I might have a letter at general delivery (poste restante). I looked up from a sample of a 500-ruble money order, located the general delivery window, and suddenly heard a voice: “Sir, there’s a letter for you.” This gospodín (sir) was unusual in Russia, so I figured it was directed at someone else, certainly not me. Some person behind me, somebody who had come in for his mail. And they addressed him with an expression starting to spread in Russia, the old-fashioned: “Sir.” (I was just plain “mister” to the streetcar drivers and porters of Petersburg). And “a letter for you,” that was odd, too. From whom? I wasn’t expecting one. No one knew where I was (except Stockis, who never wrote to me in Russia, for security reasons. We only spoke on the phone, our words—he was sure—going off into thin air), so I could hardly be getting mail here. It had been ridiculous to come to this window. Not only that, my call must be going through. Going back to stand by the desk, I heard some pounding—metal rapped against the window behind me (the handle of the postmark stamp, I found out later)—and then the voice piped up again, much louder: “Muzhina, I believe we have a letter for you. Isn’t this yours? Here, take a look. Aren’t you J.P.?” and a hand was extended, sliding a pale yellow envelope through the slot in the glass. I approached it slowly, shock flooding me with a vague conviction … “My God, It’s incredible!”

“Yes, I believe it’s for me. You’re right, it’s for me.” She must have noticed me yesterday, when I had come in to place a call to Stockholm, which had never gone through. Then she got a letter with a foreign name and concluded it was mine.

I stood there speechless, as if I had been descended upon by an angel (her rustling wings with their white tips and tailfeathers quite a sight in the gloom of the Post Office), who had handed me an envelope that had the sender’s name (which I saw at once), but no return address (in the bottom right, where they put it in Russia). I had not been expecting a letter from her. She had disappeared without a trace in Odessa, leaving me with an uneasy feeling, like when you drop a letter that contains vital information into the indifferent mouth of a mailbox, afraid it’s gone for good. But no, it reaches its destination and weeks later, out of the blue, you get a response. (The response to its disappearance and, more than anything, the real and true response to itself.)

I have never read letters very carefully. Nor had I had any interest in other people’s letters, in collections of letters. I didn’t know a thing about letters. I’d read novels, books of short stories, but never letters (nor plays; I never go to the theater). Whenever I get back from one of my trips, with a huge stash of cash in my clothes, I’d just glance through the few letters I’d received, from all over the world, Japan, New Zealand (and even Cuba!), maybe looking twice at a word or phrase if I couldn’t make it out. I’d never gotten a letter that affected me like V.’s. I read it over and over, like the chess player who defeated twenty opponents at once, blind, and can’t stop repeating the moves in his head, returning from ending to opening gambit again and again, in an endless loop, to the point of madness. In a lucid moment I held the thin rice paper up to the light, hoping to discover its secret, some mesmerizing device between its layers. I classified it (erroneously) as a love letter, but then, life had not given me much experience with love letters. I have gazed into the eyes of very dear women, talked on a balcony in the wee hours, walked silently in a cold fall rain, slept by the sea all afternoon, a girlfriend at my side, waking after nine on an empty beach, the tide rising, waves lapping the pines, a distant ship on the horizon, but I have never gotten a love letter. And her letter had a subtle musical quality, too, like a simple song, strong enough to lift us briefly, all too briefly, and express the inexpressible truth of our hearts. It had a kind of melody, pretty, and moved at a nice tempo, steady, with some ups and downs, of course, little details that could be passed over, like some song in Norwegian—I didn’t speak Norwegian, and I never would, but it could touch my heart anyway. Her letter colored those morning hours, and every day that week, with a clear light tone, so that I often smiled during the day, the way you sometimes feel bad, for no apparent reason, and I finally located the source of this joy, after I subjected it to analysis: could it be the day dawning so bright and sunny? No, that wasn’t it. The film I stayed up to watch? No, that wasn’t it either. No, it sprang from her letter, and the light was composed of its words.

I now saw that the simple cut of the cotton dress she’d bought herself in Odessa, the broad shoulder straps, the three big white buttons, revealed much of what now left me breathless, her figures of speech, her turns of phrase, the smooth way she had of introducing speech after speech, developing a thought, grasping an idea from every side, quickly connecting it to another, like someone sewing, someone darning a hole in a sock, stretching it out with her fingers, holding it at arm’s length, giving a sigh of satisfaction, and picking up another, or maybe a wool sweater, with a hole at the elbow, biting the thread with her teeth, spitting on the end, and picking up her idea where she left off, at the last stitch. Quite a contrast between this woman, in a dressing gown open to the thigh, sitting down to write me this letter, in her peaceful home in some tiny village (almost a hamlet)—and the cold, hard, tough woman I had met in Istanbul.

That woman hadn’t come to me in Livadia, I realized. Reading this letter was a surprise, like cutting into a fruit and discovering ripe flesh. I had not seen her soften up, I thought; it had happened since she disappeared that afternoon, shortly after I (foolishly) sat down to read Chase, after admiring the fresh intelligence of her arms with their golden down, unshaved. I had appreciated her intelligence my first morning in Istanbul; I had taken her for the very model of intelligence at first sight (those white teeth chewing lettuce at breakfast), the organic intelligence of shapely ankles, deep blue eyes, pale blond hair, falling to her shoulders. She had a few bumps, but luscious ones, like the plump—bare—arms bursting from the sleeves of her blouse, the ones I had squeezed as if testing the softness of a pillow, good for laying your head on, imagining the days on the beach, the dips in the sea we could enjoy in Livadia.

Before I got the first letter, during the three days I had waited at the Yalta dock, in a downpour that lasted just as long, I thought (wrongly) that I should have treated her rough, the way I saw her treat Leilah, the other girl from the Saray (the way you pound a peach or a mango to tenderize the flesh). But V. had ripened on her own, bedded down in the hay, in the loft of her hut, staring out the blue slot of the window, watching the leaves on the trees changing color, the flocks of wild ducks crossing the sky in perfect formation. She woke up dazed, her mouth thick with saliva, her ears tuned to new sounds, the cheeping of chicks just out of their shells, the clanking of the bucket against the lip of the well. She had guessed the hour from the faint glow around the apple trees in the garden and slipped downstairs, sliding her hands over the ladder rails; or maybe she had leapt down and thrown on her clothes, a simple percale smock (or her bathrobe), and then went into the kitchen and sat down to write me this letter, surrounded by jars of preserves. In the same soft light of that hour, the same silence, the same sense of peace, reinforced by the rattle of the bucket against the side of the well, the creaking of the rope in the pulley. She had gotten up way before me, with this amazing handwriting and this letter full of truths I hadn’t suspected she knew. It came to seven sheets covered with her small but well-formed writing, saying things I had always imagined could be said in letters, but that I had never seen spelled out so nicely, with never a false step. It was written at one sitting, I now felt sure, but by whom? How could it have been written by the same girl I rescued from Istanbul, by the same V. who told me those lies about working as a figure skater, tracing endless circles on the ice? I had seen her behave coarsely, yelling at her friend Leilah, almost coming to blows; but then, I had also heard her claim she’d studied art, drawing or painting, I can’t recall. (I do remember: it was at lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Istanbul. While we waited for our order, I made some comment—out of place—about the painting that was hanging on the wall in front of us, its vertical perspective. Immediately realizing the absurdity of my remark, I turned to the glazed duck, praising the dish we’d been served. But she had stopped my move toward my plate, saying that she had studied painting and had never heard that term, vertical perspective. I assumed she was lying—she had never studied drawing (or painting)!—and so I joked that I’d just made it up. But she was bent over her plate again, carrying a piece of bread to her mouth, taking a bite without lifting her eyes. I hastily abandoned vertical perspective, and we finished eating in silence. V. waited almost two months to break that silence, without showing any impatience, like those people who won’t talk about complex subjects, can’t say such things out loud. Who write treatises instead, books that are rarely complex, just the reverse, quite simple. Her letter wasn’t complex either, not in and of itself, but it created an unbearable complex within me, as the fine thread of her handwriting unreeled our days together in Istanbul, the difficulties of our flight, the drama in the Russian merchant ship, ending in a disappearance in Odessa. Her letter’s real subject (I realized after several rereadings) was friendship, love if you like, but a love that had waited for days to pass, for the great Russian rivers to start to rise, the trees to sprout, the afternoons in Livadia to grow longer, for her pen to break the ice of those days of screams and shouted orders, of fear, suspicion, and danger.

A brief description of V. may help explain my confusion, the uncertain state in which I found myself. After I went to meet Stockis at the Istanbul club, while I was standing there at loose ends, I saw the girls from the Saray (among them V. and Leilah) at the sidewalk café across the street, having what I later learned was breakfast—it was already lunchtime. I saw V. that morning, sitting at a nearby table (as if posed), and my eye was drawn to her. She shone in the sun! That’s it exactly, the only way I can describe my impression. She was not in direct light, it was filtered through the umbrella over her table and fell gently around her like a halo (no exaggeration)—like a photo shoot, with a model lit by floodlights, which are softened by umbrellas, and a life-size picture for a backdrop, (for example) an Istanbul street scene. But this background was real and changing. A crowd flowed by—looking almost European, but unmistakably Turkish, when you slowed it down and looked carefully: a butcher in a leather apron, indistinguishable from the stream at one moment, then moving into focus; Turkish women, many in headscarves; their husbands in sports coats that barely meet across their bellies, wearing two vests, one on top of the other—and in front, set off against this backdrop, the splendid woman who had caught my eye. I could not see her legs, which are generally the first things I check in the women carried my way by the river of humanity in a busy street. With some sixth sense I register a sort of overall perception of a beautiful woman—face, eyebrows, cheekbones—and immediately, even before I confirm this strong and virtually foolproof first impression, I form another impression (again, always or almost always right, at least in some crowds, some cities, some countries) of legs that are absolutely outstanding. Confident, steady, onward come those legs, and above them, borne aloft like figures in a holy procession, the faces that I study like a part from which I can reconstruct the whole. I submitted the young woman who was sitting (or posing) at the next table to this procedure. Since I could not see her legs from where I was, her arms had to fill that role: firm fresh arms exuding frankness. They spread out slightly from elbow to shoulder (she was in a sleeveless blouse), then joined to form a perfect arch, a shrine to the patron saint of arms, to be kissed reverently. Her shoulders, deep anatomical soap dishes, appeared from under the loose cut of her beige, nearly white blouse. She was not looking at me, her eyes were fixed on her plate, and she was eating her breakfast hungrily. The skin of her neck reacted promptly to the first movements of her jaws, which were working furiously. An earring dangled from her earlobe, and with my eyes on the soft curl of her ear I whispered: “Turn around and look,” and she turned and looked but did not linger on me since it was the waiter she wanted, and he was at the table behind me. Seeing her this way, head on, hardly inspired painful thoughts. She did have a pretty stiff spine, it’s true, like the water-seller in the print, walking away from the the fountain without spilling a drop. And the friendly look in her eyes was undercut, belied by a perennial scornful smile, tight-lipped.

During our week together in Istanbul some real feeling, a real look, a real spark sometimes flashed between us (in the space between our physical bodies), but she would try to hide her feelings, afraid of losing this real chance of escape, of staying trapped in the Saray (the nightclub with dancers and strippers—prostitutes really—where we met). Like a bean sprout shooting up through layer after layer of clouds, this letter had opened a path to me—passed from sack to sack, tumbling around inside mail trucks, eventually coming to me in Livadia. It was no angel, as I had imagined in the Post Office, no, it was a plant, a bean sprout, that had slowly germinated and finally got to me.

It was growing lighter every moment. I slumped forward, put my head on the table, and fell into an uncomfortable sleep. I had not written a single line. I woke up in misery. Out the window was the deep blue of daybreak. I picked up her letter, held the pages to the window, watched them turn as red as the glass. I had moved the table near the window, wanting to shed more light on the butterflies, the bottles holding the butterflies, and Stuart’s illustrated guide. Now the light was shining through the layers of papers, and I sought in them a sliver of strontium, some chemical element radiating brilliantly, like a technician scanning an X ray, deducing from its shadows the healthy functioning of your kidneys, the oiled mechanism of your internal body—or (readjusting my focus) my own anxious eyes in the glass.

I went out into the world.

I didn’t head straight for the gravel path, like I did most mornings at eleven (with less apprehension), no, I did what I had intended from the first: I turned right and walked to the wall behind the house, which looked out to sea. The garden in front of the pension stretched for ten or fifteen feet to a double row of beech trees, with the road to Yalta beyond. At the end of the row—if you turned left, not through the garden—was the path to the veranda. I usually cut through the garden to go to town, and there were signs in the wet grass that others did too. Only the oldest boarders, I noticed, took the path, which circled too far away from town. But you could take it to the beach, going out to the road and then through the woods, coming out a few yards away.

The pension had six windows on the first floor, seven on the second, all painted (in about, say, 1935) pale green like the downspouts. My room’s was the first one, at the corner, and I had a second on the other side (two windows, lots of light). The building was set on a foundation of solid stone, its mortar white behind the acacias. There were rusted tin cans, cigarette butts, and old newspapers in the grass. It was a great place to sunbathe: I could lower a chair right out the window or spread a blanket on the lawn. The women who rented rooms in the house, most of them single, tanned themselves on this strip of grass. I walked through the shadows to the other end of the house, as far as the path, but I didn’t take it. Instead, I cut through the garden and went to town.

I sent a telegram to Vladimir Vladimirovich in St. Petersburg. I just dashed it off, using the model letters, the samples under the glass on the desk, copying word for word, my hand not shaking at all. I merged one wishing a happy new year with another announcing: “Tanya and the girls. Coach five. July 7. Moscow at 17:00. Kisses.” I skipped easily between the two telegrams, finding all the right words, the proper expressions. I had planned to ask him to send me a list of collections of letters to 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.