Читать книгу Letters to Another Room - Ravil Bukhraev - Страница 10

3

THE GHOST OF THE

BIRD-CHERRY TREE

COMING BACK TO the present day from the past, from Karlovy Vary where the freedom from schedules gave me those mountain walks so good for the heart, spring has arrived at last – and it has arrived on the heights of London, too.

I once thought of London as flat, like a tourist’s map. But, no, to the south and to the north of the Thames, first gently, then more dramatically, this great city rises to various hills, some completely built over, others sweetening the view with the dark green of mature trees rising above the lighter green of grassy parks and open spaces.

Hampstead Heath to the north is famous, known for its absurdly expensive mansions and conserved woods and heathland, but I dwell in the south, amongst lesser known hills, with less appeal to tourists. Indeed, so little is their appeal that even the whimsical drivers of London’s black cabs cannot always be persuaded to venture ‘south of the river’. But if you take the bus from Waterloo, as we often do, you find the ups and downs begin even in Camberwell, reminding us continually that to reach the next crest, you must always first descend – so there is no need to be upset when your life takes a downturn …

All the hills around Sydenham, on top of one of which nestled our house, have their own names: Honor Oak, Gypsy Hill, Denmark Hill, Forest Hill, Norwood. When you’re approaching this domain, already from the crest of Denmark Hill you can see that, alone among the southern hills, our hill, a deep overturned bowl, is entirely mantled in green, and from the taxi home after the night shift at the BBC, you can’t see a single light twinkling on it – as if it was left entirely untouched from those ancient times when all of London’s southern hills were the province of thick forests inhabited by deer and bears.

But it’s neither down to the English love of nature or divine disinterest that this wooded hill survives barely fifteen minutes drive from Buckingham Palace, and that the village of Dulwich at its foothills looks so historic. The reason, I discovered, is bears – or rather baiting bears for the pleasure of Londoners, arranging which considerably enrichened Shakespeare’s chum, the famous Elizabethan actor Edward Alleyn. It was Alleyn that bought the village of Dulwich and then bequeathed his estate to a special trust that has managed all the local land for four centuries, and prevents any unfortunate changes. Alleyn’s name is preserved in the names of roads. At the foot of the hill there is an old mill dam, and on the site of the ancient mill now stands the famous Dulwich College, founded, like the local public art gallery (the oldest in England) by the same Alleyn.

Despite the continual recession of reality, history keeps its grip in Dulwich in the old names of places. A road skirts the hill near Dulwich College and the upmarket sports and riding clubs (one of which is even named the Old Club of Alleyn) and runs into Lordship Lane next to the Harvester pub. It used to be the only road to London. Even this road recalls in its name Dulwich Common, the time when around Dulwich spread only fields of oats and barley and pastures for cows and sheep.

Cereals once sent up their fruitful stems in fields all over south London. Take, for instance, Peckham, not far from Dulwich, where before the railway era people grew rye, which is why the green expanse of the local park is still called Peckham Rye, and once stretched all the way up the hill to Honor Oak. That oak, in turn, gained its fame because in Shakespearean times, the Virgin Queen Bess, Elizabeth I, honoured it with a picnic;¹⁴ so even a lone tree, growing on just another hill amongst the fields, has etched its way into the life story of these London suburbs.

And in Dulwich College, set up by Alleyn in 1619 as a school for twelve poor children, are kept ancient court archives from Dulwich’s history, including some documents that seem rather funny today, like the one describing how, in 1334, one William Hayward ran off with the wife of commoner Richard Rolfe, taking not just all her jewellery but a cow worth ten shillings. And it’s not only family dramas that are recorded here. It should not be forgotten that in 1333, poor William Collin was obliged to fork out three pence because his pig had the unheard of audacity to wander into the oat fields of his local feudal lord.

So, I think, what is history, when even a damned pig is not forgotten, and nor is Julian Farrow who was dragged to court by the scruff of the neck in the year 1440 for missing a day’s work on his lord’s fields? What is history, if not a mirage or a fantasy, in which you have to imagine there really once existed Edward Alleyn, Shakespeare’s chum, and that other about who we’d never know – and so wouldn’t have existed at all – if his pig hadn’t strayed into someone else’s field.

But let’s get back to reality, where the time was certainly the present, and the English spring really was happening.

At night, from beyond our windows in the wooded ravine overgrown with elderberry and brambles came the hoarse, hysterical squealing of foxes, while in the garden that morning I saw baby squirrels in the tall tree. In the fresh green leaf buds, in the singing birds and blue-pink primroses spring was indeed rising and coming to life in the tangled woods of Dulwich that climbed, as I said before, the stepped slope of Sydenham Hill right up to our house.

So as not to forget spring in the mountain forests of Karlovy Vary, I had adopted the habit of walking through the restorative green of the woods both on my way out in the morning and on my way back in the evening. I could get a bus to work right by the house and that was the logical, conventional way to go, but that’s what made me sick of it. There are always other ways, unnecessary ways it would seem – but it’s these needless deviations that lead you to that longed for balance in the soul. As long as I stayed on damp and muddy paths, it seemed to me that our home, with its surrounding woods already preserved for five centuries from financial pressures, existed beyond the starkly painted vicissitudes of fate.

Despite the obvious benefits, the decision to abandon the bus stop three minutes from home to hike through the woods wasn’t made easily. It meant I had to leave half an hour earlier, which entailed not just tearing myself from my sleep but from writing – I didn’t have, and still don’t have, any other time apart from that early time in which to follow this obligation of the heart, and I was greedy.

Yet there is a silver lining to every cloud, and the extra half hour’s walk gave me time to reflect, and to develop a sense of the wood – which, as it turned out, I had for five years lost in the fevered dash for the red double-decker bus on which, ensconced on the upper deck, I could for 45 minutes hungrily read sources for another historical book about Islam in Russia. But I realized that for these letters to another room there is only one dependable source – that is me, myself – and so there was no need to scrape and cram: what will happen will happen.

There are many paths through the Dulwich woods to the more distant bus stop, but by taking three little tracks down from the crossroads, I could find my way along the sparsely grassed gravel bed of a disused narrow-gauge railway. Whenever I set foot on that long-abandoned track, I had a sense of my own long-forgotten narrow tracks from the past.

One of these once led me and my father to the August hunt in Tatarstan – in the chilly white predawn mist on a high crest that rose, silvered with dew, above our Tatar meadows, with their knolls of knotted willows entwined with brambles, stubbornly blooming wild roses and hops with their clusters of pale-honey coloured cones. But all of this, you will see later, when the sun rises …

You know how it happens: unbearably beautiful, it pours into the world fresh and newborn, pale gold and soft

brilliance, and then, becoming hotter and shining with devout, intense clarity, it melts away the haze and greyness of the dawn smoking above the meadow glades and illuminates the dew on grasses and branches, and its joyful brightness washes all the intermingled colours of the invisible rainbow of life, knowing no boundaries in breadth or height, earthwards and skywards, and goes on forever, inextinguishable.

But I recall that morning, just before dawn, on to the open meadow there darted the daftest rabbit, loopily sitting upright for a moment, staring straight at us, before bounding away into the pale mist.

Another narrow track from the past, this one carpeted with wilting grass and yellowing pine needles, with my brother Almaz, in our first youth, when with limitless enthusiasm we vanished into the virgin forests of our homeland. Once we walked all day through the November taiga with heavy rucksacks to reach the sacred lake. At night, the frost was bitter, and in the tent, pitched on the shores, it was so utterly freezing that we spent the whole night huddled next to the fire. It was the first time I was ever awake to experience the gelification of the lake waters as it happened. The chill, exposed thickets by the lake basked palely in the light of a vast moon, which cast shifting, glittering spars on the surface of the lake as the water froze, later accompanied by a startling, starry crunch and crackle, like distant gunshot, as the ice formed out beyond the shallows. Long, lightning bolts and zigzags of moonlit crystals spread, like the brilliant cross-cuts on fine Moser crystal, yet continually changing direction. Enchanted flames of icefire sprang from the twigs of pine and birch and found their echo in the glowing embers flying vivid orange into the dark sky from our fire, with the resounding crack of the present.

The Dulwich narrow-gauge track comes to an abrupt halt nowadays in front of the welded iron gates and thick rusty cage that bars the entrance to the old tunnel, from which padlocked and mysterious darkness always blows a scent of fungal dampness and desolation. The mighty arch which thus forbids entry rises in the wood’s twilight as a citadel, fortified like a Czech castle or the Pope’s Palace in Avignon. Up the steep brick slopes, creep and swarm besieging strands of dark and ancient ivy, marking the end of the line and the beginning of oblivion.

In Victorian times, the ornate red-carriaged, copper-handled trains of the Express Electronic Service company whisked smartly dressed people from Victoria station in central London to the modern wonder of the world – the glass pavilion of the Crystal Palace, which dazzled the grey-bearded Camille Pissarro as he wandered among these trees with his easel. But the smoking chimneys of trains have long since diffused into the past and the carriages no longer jangle through the dark tunnel, even as ghosts. And the great transparent palace, constructed entirely of glass and cast-iron tracery by Joseph Paxton in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, then dismantled and rebuilt near Sydenham, burned down entirely in a single night in 1936, and photos of those infamous flames decorate the walls of the local pub, the Dulwich Wood House, designed, like the palace, by Paxton.

Besides the photos, the pub’s walls are hung with newspaper reports of the great fire, and a yellowed, framed bill, announcing, in letters of different sizes that after the royal family’s visit to the Festival of Empire in the glass colossus in June 1911, the Crystal Palace, together with the Concert Hall and central portal, and also the pavilions of the Chinese, Ancient Egypt and Rome, the Byzantine, the French Farmstead, the Chambers of the Moorish Alhambra and the Renaissance era, besides a Medieval English Court, and also the adjacent park with man-made lakes, with their humpback bridges and small islands – will be put at once up for auction. But even then, no-one was actually willing to stump up any cash for this onetime pride of the empire.

It’s a short walk from the pub to the park, where you can still see amongst the weeds the wide flights of ruined stone staircases, imperial lions and statues that survived the flames. But the Palace itself has merged with history and become not merely transparent but invisible. And it comes to mind that those everyday worries that force us into alien schedules burn and crackle away to nought, and so do those imaginary palaces of the heart and chambers of the soul – those Chinese pagodas on Formosa lakes, those ancient stone-pines of Cyprus, those Byzantine churches and Roman temples, those luminous lagoons of Renaissance Venice, our own personal Alhambra, our Sinai deserts, our English Middle Ages – are all blown through the gaps of consciousness, through any imposed reality, like the Mistral sweeping down through the French valleys from the Alps, verifying that the past is not completed … that everything is being accomplished and everything happens outside time, outside the here and now, as in the human soul.

And that’s quite enough justifications for these apparent confusions of thought before those who won’t welcome them anyway, just as they won’t welcome in spring the insane winds of autumn – like that furious mistral in ever-sunny Provence that recently and yet so infinitely long blew in our presence with such energy that it almost blew us and our love off the famous Avignon bridge into the chill font of the deep, plethoric Rhone …

Oh Allah, what was I meant to realize at that moment, when it was so freshly and so terribly imprinted into my memory and consciousness, that moment which could so easily inspire, but even more easily bring grief:

Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

L’on y danse, l’on y danse

Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

L’on y danse tous en rond¹⁵

Out on the remains of the medieval bridge stranded in the river: around us the penetrating, maddening mistral that knocked you off your feet, below the icy azure waters flowing as they had for tens of thousands of years, and behind, on a hill, the vast and imposing Palais des Papes – its thick walls faceted with cubes and rhomboids and corresponding spaces: a labyrinth, a charade, an enigma, a conundrum of history that stimulates the imagination perhaps more than it should.

And so we wandered through the deserted stone halls, quietly pleased that the mistral had already blown away most of the idle-eyed tourists, leaving only a handful to shuffle around that palace where, like a repository in time, the papacy was exiled for a century when the light in Rome was dimmed. Through the empty palace, through its connecting echoing halls and galleries and through the wide open doors, gusted the mistral, the one visitor which had a right to visit freely, earned by long service.

And who were we with our lonely earth love in this stone shell, this ancient masonry undefeated by time which we naively touched to sense immortality? The chill of the stone shot through the fingers and penetrated the heart, which so rarely obeys the mind. And again there was the question – what is in the world beyond the illusion of our historic existence? After all, if history itself is a mirage, an illusion of the mind, a delirium of the calendar, an unembraceable dream, then you cannot touch it, and you cannot just feel the truth. We can only reckon when we want to feel and be present, because only when we are present does this seem an action. But there was only the mistral, the sun-stirred wind and the Rhone, rolling its full, blue, icy waters past the Avignon bridge, which you can’t cross.

Everyone has their own tongue. Everyone has their own truth. Everyone has their own history. And these variations of people’s sufferings interact only on dates, in the numbers that rule the world of people. The age of the Avignon retreat, the age of Babylon’s captivity, the age of purgatory before the brief deceptive paradise of the Renaissance – you can call them what you will, and all will be true and nothing will be true. Yes, these ages that overload us with knowledge and lure the mistral in the mind to murmur to the heart. The age of the Hundred Years War, the age of Dante, of Giotto, of Bocaccio, the time of Petrarch, of the Great Plague, the years of darkness and foreboding, the times of plots and brutal dictatorships, the ages of grumbling by the illiterate rabble forever seeking bread and circuses … And in the mirror of ages, this present age of quiescent changes that are neither visible nor yet have brought anything but lost illusions and everyday suffering. The trap of ages.

Who else but us will remember our presence in the Pope’s palace, when, chance visitors, we strolled from hall to hall, from one floor to another, witnessed only by the secret eyes of the ancient stone walls newly uncovered by restorers? Yes, stones can see, but it takes them long to learn how.

In the streets of Avignon – a poor village compared to Rome even though stubbornly electing its own pontiffs – cattle both large and small loiter in the day, while at night lurk restless gangs of medieval lads. In the echoing halls of the palace, its bedrooms and corridors, trail vile intrigues and the smell of death, mingling with smells of cooking as smoky aromas fill the lofty refectory from the spit-roasting of a lamb the size of a small bull. Aromas of death still linger secretly in the palace chambers where the mistral can’t reach, where lived and died the first Avignon pope, Clement V – who tried to unite Europe with a new crusade against the Saracens and met his demise after treating indigestion with crushed emeralds; who outlawed the Knights Templar and blessed their brutal execution; who smiles at us from a dark corner with his public smile, since he went down in history as a pious, placid and pleasant priest, and there must be some truth in the reports.

Accompanied by that unsettling smile, we escaped the Pope’s chamber, recognizing that it was locked up in time – a time not ours.

And outside, the mistral was blowing, the wind that drives people mad, that confuses the mind of even the toughest husband, by blowing out from the soul and from the heart the dusk of self-possessed pride.

The mistral blew, filling up the sunny spaces of autumn with the ghosts and memories of things unhappened, unhappened because everything that truly was, was different from how we imagined.

The mistral blew, turning the heads of northerners and driving Van Gogh crazy in canvases of scarlet vineyards and twisted cypresses near Arles, yet invigorating the mind of Cézanne who, as it turns out, did not invent, but precisely impressed with his brush the motley, smoky scene around Mont St Victoire. That is what Provence is, with its Aix, its Arles, its Avignon and Marseilles, and its vivid blue calanques that gnaw the rocky coast, overgrown by the stone-pines of the infinite imagination.

A human being – seeks to justify his being and his wanderings through life. A human being – understands that his brief stay within nature and geography is like the existence of a leaf that once quivers on a plane-tree branch then is carried off by the wind in an unknown direction, and there’s no human being whose existence is fixed like a stone.

Everything that happens, happens inside the soul. Only the soul can sense invisible connections that slip away unnoticed from so much knowledge. But the soul can slumber, or shiver in fear, and only earthly love and God’s mistral can help it see and comprehend how everything in the world is interconnected – even those things that seem utterly disparate.

Yet do they really understand this, these chance observers, these frequent trippers, these earnest tourists in Avignon and Turin, the Holy Land and Sinai, where a wily Bedouin, wrapped in a keffiyeh, gives them a ride on his asthmatic camel to the monastery of St Catherine which holds behind its stone walls Moses’s ‘burning bush’, the first images of Christ and an original handprint of the Holy Prophet of Islam. The only thing they’ll really remember is the camel ride, because they paid for the ride. Only very rarely will one of this mixed crew look up and feel with the trembling heart that they all, so different, are inextricably connected to each other by the common air of the world, our one atmosphere, that looks from space like a soft blue haze above this planet of people in which each of who, you must remember, Mozart is killed …

People, people, nameless as the wandering clouds that shine so brightly in the heights of love above other spaces where live the northern, the sick, the grieving, the Russian – spaces for long uninhabited and careless in their vacancy, spaces where now and forever reverberates the chaos of shrieking hatred and its strident echo: the unctuous teaching of lies.

And in these spaces, vanquished people, tired of passive flesh and of the heart that alone can vanquish the fear of death in life – this is what it comes to.

Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

L’on y danse, l’on y danse

Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

L’on y danse tous en rond

Any river has two banks and the wind blows above each. And what can we do if we do not dance on the bridge that leads to nowhere but to and fro – dance like the dessicated plane-tree leaves whisked through Avignon’s cobbled strets, dance like the mistral – and smile to your beloved, and try not to think but to live ….

I could walk straight down from my house to the abandoned tunnel, but I chose other paths. If you go right, say, after just five minutes, you find yourself on a meandering track, curling through the twittering of goldfinches and the fluting of red-breasted robins, between young hornbeams and ash trees entwined with mistletoe and honeysuckle, past early spring flowers – pale bluebells, anemones white as ivory, anemones like tiny stars peeping from the tangled grass, violas and foxgloves – digitales with their fleshy, geranium-like leaves and crimson bell-shaped blooms.

You can then climb up to a Cedar of Lebanon, so ancient and tall, that spreads a tent so broad and dense that nothing grows beneath, not even the most tenacious bramble. In this bare space, exposed sandstone is blanketed in fallen needles.

In the thick base of this great cedar, nestling deeply into its tough bole and knotted sinews, is set a bench for contemplating the dark pond below, a pond which even in spring is short of water. So this place is not a happy place, but filled with melancholy, like any place that does not fulfil its purpose. At first, I came here often to sit on the bench and think, but the sight of the exposed mudslime and seeps of the pond bed brought only dreary thoughts, so I gave up draining my imagination and heart here, along with the duckweed and water fern – and followed other paths through the wood and found other benches, some set up in memory of English people who had loved these places when they were alive. On the copper plates screwed to the bench, I read Gus Berger, Phillip Heath, Brian Seymour …

Then the path winds further on, under the shady canopy with its flashes of sunlight, past constellations of snowdrops and wild garlic with their lanced leaves, past blackberry and raspberry bushes, and ferns with fronds still curled in yellow spirals like a bishop’s mitre, and then after a while emerging past what seems like a ruined chapel where rocks fused into a gothic arch.

And everywhere in the gloom of the trail beneath the trees, it seemed to me there beckoned the deceptive scent of bird-cherry blossom. I looked for it with my eyes, but it wasn’t there – only the faint scent, bitter, brusque but beloved, drifting past – but where from?

Maybe it was the mingling of moist morning air and whiff of muddy puddles with the fragrant bouquet of flower scents – the pinky froth of hawthorn, fluffy rosettes of rowan blossom, golden showers of meadowsweet, subtle jasmine, wild garlic and lily-of-the-valley invisible amid the grass. Maybe they all conspired to compose for me that longed for breath of pure happiness.

Gus Berger, Phillip Heath, Brian Seymour (vanished descendants of the Victorian imperial era), Cedar of Lebanon and artificial ponds with small oak islands, wide, grassy banks with bluebells and angelica, dandelions and fireweed and thistles, and English birch trees and may alders with their sticky seedpods primed to fluff up and fly over the glades where are bedded lungworts (pink but turning purple), glades which, after the moist gloom under trees … all of these suddenly stir a marvellous thought in the passerby’s mind: this isn’t just for me to wonder at snow-plumed and pink starry flowers, nor even to foster my contact with the Unity, but for those working hard on the Earth – for Gus Berger, Phillip Heath and Brian Seymour, the walkers of the many paths, the black-wet paths with the staccato signature of dog-runs leading into thickets and the dry sandy paths in spots of sun, the paths on which I could as easily go astray as I do in these letters, yet, glory to Allah, always find my way out. Let peace be with you in the truths of the Father’s spring, where the memory of you so carefully ministers today to the regular visitors and chance passers-by to this ancient English wood, who, sadly however, have no idea that in the world there exist entirely different kinds of wood …

…where also in the beginning there was silence, undisturbed by a single memorable sound, and only later did the sun pierce the deep blue and gold gaps in the clouds to break the chill – drip-drop, splash, little by little – and suddenly a stiff breeze stirs the uncaring leaves, and sunlight flushes glittering gold from birch and aspen in clearings still spread with white, and sparkles the pearly frosted webs that in autumn glimmer through the tall grass – in autumn, filled with taiga briar, gangly pink honeysuckle, dizzy elder, as well as copper-rusty angelica, yellow-eyed tansy and marvellous magenta fireweed …

…in autumn, when helpful fatigue forces you to find moments of midday repose – the blissfully stretched out body with no sense of its final shape, lying supine on the grass and merging into one with the season happening around, and just barely, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse moments of your life flowing by – a gun and backpack; fresh animal trail winding through birch glade and past pine windbreak; flash of sunlight on dragonfly wings; sun-baked mushroom umbrella – but even those visit only vaguely before again comes, drip-drop, honest, sensitive, wonderful silence, and you soon can’t tell what was, what is and what will be, and events swap over and over in the undelineated reality of memory, happening before and after, after and before, flowing in and out, joining, transposing, stretching and shrinking …

…just as this onflowing sentence which, like a dream, can only be broken by waking …

…and will slip again, slithering through brown shadows under pines over the mesh of crimson cranberry and emerald taiga mosses to the capercaillie lek, where amid hog-hued shadows, a trio of capercaillie cocks flurry from boughs to view the brace of hens that squat on silvery needles strewn on the close-compacted sandy forest floor – and the old grey cock perches on palings, sprinkled beak to tail with beads of icy, autumn dew.

It’s so good to doze in the last heat of the autumn, so good to feel the whole day open before you, open to impressions, amongst which will be the forest river Ilet, with its confined channel, sandbanks and deep pools, running smoothly past trees that plunge in their roots and trunks, and bifurcating into three limpid streams that quietly murmur in sympathy with the whispering wind and the soft rustle of glowing-in-the-sun leaves.

If you gaze from the bank or, mayhap, the knotty bole of a pine where it drops to rapids: shoals of dark-backed, double-edged ide, riding the current on scarlet fins, head upriver: the flicker and glitter of silvery roach; a deep hole where the novice might be seduced into angling for red-scaled perch, unaware that the first catch will scare off the rest, leaving you to fish in vain all day. Taiga rivers demand movement, not just when hunting with a gun, but even fishing will knock your legs out, walking from catch to catch up the stream in search of the perfect bowl of ukha.¹⁶

Will you come back to this extraordinary, fleeting experience at least once again? Or of all that truly was, will the lasting memory be waking in the dusk – awakening from sleep before night falls, before the coming of mortal loneliness, with the sudden, distressing realization that reality endures more memorably than any dream.

These twilight moments are so familiar – these moments when all around becomes imperceptibly more vague and melancholy; when each joyful tree, its boisterous rustling briefly stilled and suspended from the innocent festival of life, and the purling river, too, slipping into quiet abstraction, accentuate the coming silence with their remoteness. These moments of detachment when barely lingering day yields to the clarity of night, and you seem to sense directly each tree and flower and bird – birds especially seem to sense this time of withdrawal, becoming quieter.