Читать книгу Letters to Another Room - Ravil Bukhraev - Страница 8

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TEN MINUTES OF SOLITUDE

‘IN ENGLAND, SPRING is rising: should it be ever rising thus, and coming alive within the human soul?’ So, impeccably attired as a gentleman, might I scribble with a golden Parker pen upon my snow-white cuff on a melancholy March ­evening at the Athenaeum Club …

Or rather, I might if I were one of those dusty relics whose entire existence devolves into ritually serving out their allotted time in deep, green leather chairs, sipping weak, sepia tea dutifully delivered by albine waiters, or wafting desultorily through the newspapers.

It is, of course, extremely flattering to be admitted to the Athenaeum’s hallowed inner sanctum. Yet I confess I am a poor connoisseur of its ancient and time-honoured privileges, being rather better acquainted with much more modest old curiosity shops. I rarely wear bow-ties, and my sole pair of golden cufflinks bears only the singular coat of arms of the Tatars – not exactly buoyant currency in today’s bonfire of the vanities!

To be honest, I was never destined for such a serene and regulated life, and I have not yet quite reached that pinched age when I do actually need to scrawl liverish notes upon my sleeves.

Indeed, I still retain some fleeting memories, amid a host of which sits that delicious riposte of Oscar Wilde, the supreme Irish arbiter of fashionable wit: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.’

I also maintain that to thoroughly inhabit a gentleman’s being, rather than simply resemble a gentleman, one must actually be born wearing a Saville Row suit and bow-tie, and then take up residence in them in infancy. Otherwise, the entire thing is an utter masquerade. And despite the natural obligation to dissemble, I know I don’t look at my best in masks, which are apt to slip – even though I also know the hardest thing in life is to be what you are, regardless of the consequences.

Just between us – beneath this sneaking yen to not merely appear like a true gentleman but actually be one – I admit an even deeper longing to be a man of noble qualities, in contradiction to the advice of Confucius, who observed that, ‘the genuinely noble man is not worried when his merits go unnoticed; he is far more concerned with his own imperfections’.

Ironic, then, that this narrative, the invisible creation of which has brought its author so many pangs of conscience, should unconsciously and uncharacteristically commence with starched cuffs and vague sartorial musings!

What then took me on this diversion, and almost led me astray? Perhaps it was that absurd and theatrical procession along the Staroluzhski embankment in Karlovy Vary, when, past the common folk watching from the pavement cafés, there paraded grandly towards the Mill Colonnade such a gaudy, peacock array of young and not so young aristocrats – the elite of the Old World.

Observers marvelled at them and instantly diagnosed their blue blood from their haute-couture garments – those green velvet tail-coats and black tuxedos, those ballgowns in all shades of red from Bermudan dawn to Sinai sundown; the flowing silk mantles and luxurious capes; the ladies’ shimmering elbow gloves and lustrous beaded purses; all polished off by extravagantly costly shoes and exquisite canes.

That evening, I tell you truly, the Fifth Congress of the European nobility was holding a Vampire Festival! And it all culminated spectacularly, late that night, with fireworks brilliantly streaking the darkness above the Castle Tower – followed by a drunken braying in the streets beneath our wrought-iron curlicued fourth-floor balcony – that very balcony from which everyday I gazed out across the way on that old-fashioned but charmingly refurbished house Zum Pomeranzenbaum, its eaves intriguingly adorned with a colourful oval emblem depicting a green orange tree hung with plump sunset fruits.

The following day, the host gathered once more to celebrate: those barons and baronesses, counts and countesses, marquises and crown princes, and a plethora of other pinnacles of the peerage – all those Waldsteins and Thuns, Likhovskys and Esterhazys, from whose resplendent ancestors Mozart and Beethoven had to beg their daily bread.

This time, however, they went the other way, upstream against the Tepla River towards the grand and newly renovated empire-style spa. Yet the sheer perfection of their garments, which demanded such an exacting performance from them, and such undivided attention, especially from the ladies, awoke in those who witnessed the procession a train of thought that led ineluctably to an appraisal of their own earthly fortunes.

Indeed, it was a tableaux of a life unknown to most people, a startling invasion courtesy of the lacquered pages of the spa’s photo-chronicles, an effusion that projected itself like a rainbow upon the curious vision of those ordinary leisure-seekers enjoying coffee with cream at the gold and marble tables of the Elephant, those holidaymakers who everyday pass, without special thoughtfulness, without the inquisitiveness that entices a child, the houses of the erstwhile Carlsbad where Beethoven and Batyushkov, Gogol and Goethe (yes, the great Goethe) domiciled as they took the waters – houses like the elegant pastel green and gold Mozart Hotel once called The Three Scarlet Roses and now slightly rundown; the mud-hued house dubbed The White Rabbit pedimentally and suitably adorned with twin rabbits in relief; and the pearly-yellow mansion known as The Three Moors which squats upon the old Market Place not far from the Plague Column and is decked out with bizarre bas-reliefs of three thick-lipped negros, not to mention the Daliesque plastic mouldings of orange trees, vines and bushes that should be utterly tasteless, and yet are beguilingly entertaining and beautiful in that authentic way that excites the fancy of a child.

If you give this inner desire for authenticity even the slightest freedom, then even here, amongst all the paying trippers from Minusinsk and from Liechtenstein and from Monaco, amongst all the gaudy mirages of life that command the attention of the promenading crowds just as from the heights the lofty Imperial Hotel reigns over the lower hotels of this spa, you may suddenly see – for a moment, for a second – reality, fresh and green as spring upon the mountain; the original, as if touched by Allah’s answer to the heart’s most fervent prayer; and the actual, like a genuine memory. The truth of life the enlightened soul longs to experience.

Maybe there will come a vision – and not just a vision, but sounds and smells and even tangible sensations – in which time and its conventionalities have no meaning: a vision in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps in 1812, perhaps in 1820 (it is not yet clear), is walking before you, attired in a long grey frock-coat and snow-white linen shirt and neck scarf, taking his usual path by the darkly transparent Tepla, as gentle airs whisper and waft the scents of the blossoming bird-cherry trees from high in the mountains above.

He walks, then takes a draught of Carlsbad’s restorative waters and strides away on a constitutional stroll amidst the ashes, beeches, limes and sycamores beyond the town where they cleave to the mountain slopes near the Post Yard. Every now and then, he meets on the way himself a little younger and even youthful, from 1786 and 1791, and believes this is an ordinary and matter-of-fact occurrence – as it should be, and entirely typical for an elevated spirit thinking about something deeply and intimately personal …

…And here I am, I can see, still holding on to his proletarian youth, not to say his vulgar haste, provoked by a greed for things that seem most important in the moment, running far ahead of the field lines of the limited time and space of my narrative in divergent spirals – and for this I should whip myself on the hand with a cane, like a grey-haired teacher (which no doubt is how I look to some people) – whip myself, a smug student who hasn’t even got the basic grammar, yet is already presuming to subvert the rules of the game and overturn the true canons of composition.

In reality, it wasn’t a time for starched cuffs and cufflinks, but a very ordinary London morning, when I indulged myself in passing judgement on spring and the human soul, as if this judgement was not to be disputed – and just as a truly impartial blast of storms and snow beat down from the English north for the next few weeks to expose my all-too-human error. Only in May did spring bless the islands – and even then somewhat reluctantly.

Yet though of course I soon discovered my error, I would not admit it straightaway. I simply amused myself with this illusion. And no wonder, after such an endlessly long and dark winter.

So, coming down that morning after the Muslim prayer that had become mandatory for working with a calm heart, I entered the kitchen and boiled filtered water for my coffee – two lumps of brown sugar and two teaspoons of instant – and as usual, ambled through those mundane solitary ten minutes preparing to go to work. I opened the door to our haphazard garden, sat down on the step with my red delft mug, sipped the still scalding coffee and, striking a match, lit my rough cherrywood pipe from Karlovy Vary. And after this simple personal ritual developed over the years, I finally opened my sleepy eyes and, through my ancient spectacles, looked and saw: it has happened.

Yet, the bold simplicity of my assessment again turned out to be an error; in reality, it was only just starting to happen, and the conception was far from certain. In my haste, I had once more shot far ahead, rashly outpacing the proper time. Meanwhile, the sky turned pellucid blue before I truly woke; and the aromatic, incense smoke of Mac Baren tobacco (an offering to the idol of defective pleasures) hung in the moist, clear and slightly dim air and diffused gradually. The morning was fresh, but not too chilly, and I was warm enough in that green, quilted and rather stiff dressing gown given to me in wintry Tashkent – so comfortable and convenient for the morning, yet also very traditional in its lack of pockets and buttons, which means you can quickly wrap it around you and belt it with a twisted scarf – now where is that scarf? So again, I was sitting on the kitchen step and doing what had become usual for me – seeing what I wanted to see.

Collecting my thoughts and dragging myself back to reality, of course I sought authentic perceptions, but each day of life for just a single soul has already proved that although the authenticity of prayer is an absolutely necessary condition, it’s not always enough. Action is needed – not just any action, but one formed and matured from lessons of previous existence and which slowly flows from the soul with the clear light of labour and compassion to the world – an action that begins without my frail, capricious will, and once begun has no mortal end but joins the Unity of immortalities.

This soul action, which was meant to happen and, maybe, has long been imprinted with a moving script, must foster all other efforts in life and ensure they are not futile; so everything must happen constantly, rather than stagnate, and it is starting even now, and secretly, in the inner life of the first primroses, birds and trees …

And so the puffs of vanilla incense that hovered and floated in the morning air, conjoining and dispersing, were like awakening imagination that without your conscious will conjures seeming facts in your passage through the world – that imagination which the moment it arises brings ideas to the soul, Sufi-like in its moving script, the same Fancy that Laurence Sterne admonishes: ‘Thou art a seduced, and a seducing slut; and albeit thou cheatest us seven times a day with thy pictures and images, yet with so many charms dost thou do it, and thou deckest out thy pictures in the shapes of so many angels of light, ’t is a shame to break with thee.’

That is how spring entered my imagination, as on the verdant lawn amidst the plain grass a tiny wild crocus shone its soft lilac light, while above on the strong boughs of the spreading maple tree two stock-doves perched saucily, along with a fickle magpie that occasionally picked a fight with the squirrel family that long ago took a liking to this mysteriously hollow and exotic tree in the corner of the garden.

Then the birds took flight, but the maple remained, as it probably will long after me and my philosophizing are gone. Climbing into the sky like some giant branched fountain, the tree was still completely bare, yet so dense and ample with branches that even the unadorned candour of its naked form still hid its pure, natural essence – and isn’t this like the legendary Lady Godiva who covered her marvellous nakedness beneath the golden veil of her down-fallen dale of hair? So she rode past the greedy gaze of the people on her black, or was it white, horse? In the same way, the ambient reality of life slipped undiscovered through my morning, overfilled as it was with the fancies common to all mankind, while reality in its complete authenticity was lived out within the bushes and crocuses. There awoke in my heart a wrenching and insatiable jealousy of how completely they fulfilled their purpose in their brief existence.

Everything I saw through the small circle of my glasses made me ache with its unreachable authenticity, its absolute compliance with intention. Everything was explicit, and without any sly concealment. If there is one all-embracing word to describe this super-real sense of the garden, it would be ‘honesty’. Isn’t it true, though, that frankness in men is not always honest?

Frankness may be disingenuous when it breeds ­narcissism, and derives from that deliberate invention of conventions from chance human meetings, in which a clever script ­conjures hidden meanings and associations, establishes links with petitions and entreaties and the explanatory notes with which it is sometimes possible to justify oneself – but it is impossible to reckon and exhaust the guilt of life, the guilt which years not only fail to diminish but ceaselessly multiply.

Honesty, on the other hand, draws on silence – not because of any dark secrecy, but because it is impossible with even the best writing and speaking to be completely honest in a way that is understandable – yet still I keep trying. Can words ever be as honest as true music, which is ever replete with unspoken nobility, love and loyalty to one’s spiritual and earthly home; honest as music that directly and unequivocally connects soul to soul and expresses for solitary humans conjugations of authentically present realities, rather than just the visible, the manifest, the apparent?

I cannot compose or even record music, yet I cannot be honestly quiet, and just like a beloved woman, I am always demanding words.

In the meanwhile, in the world of plants and birds, and the world of cats, foxes and squirrels, two different aspects of reality – the visible and the true – were merging into one, their corporeal union free of human disorder; a conjoined existence which feels all the unseen, unheard sadness and pain of living things, yet does not sow the bitter seeds of distemper and doubt that flourish in human hearts and souls.

By now, dawn had fully broken. Yet the sun still hid behind low, trailing clouds, and you could only wonder at the innate colour of the sky. This saddened me greatly and it seemed that if day’s dawn begins only with the sun, then the soul’s dawn can come only when its light marries the visible and the true.

Oh Allah, if I did not know, and could not imagine, what heights exist! And how steep the vertex of human destiny! If the truth of the Unity didn’t at times shine into the soul with such unbearable brilliance and burn into it forever an unquenchable thirst for everything to be accomplished as intended! If I was not so profoundly aware of that summit – sublime, poised, fitting – which might be achieved once and forever … then if only I might know how and what to sacrifice for it.

That human and artistic imperfection, unspoken but felt from afar like the music of the spheres, was troubling me again this morning, and again I could neither express nor capture the truth of the moment, mundanely realizing that all things captured in haste stagnate in the mire of monosemantic meaning. The visible made me forlorn, and the true was so far, so infinitely far, away, and ever receding – leaving me in my dull bondage to a world which, like an idle woman, is drawn to light chatter and superficial folly – a world loosed from the mutual obligations which, in her opinion, no-one follows anyway.

And so there I was, wearing the Tashkent robe and smoking my Czech cherrywood chibout, sitting on the kitchen doorstep, poised between house and garden as if on the threshold between the two realities – one of which held me in its eclectic image of the present, and the other which drew me, without ever letting me in – provoking and perplexing me with tenebrous hints, tips and reminders of the Unity.

I knew nothing thoroughly, yet after five minutes silence, I imagined a new call – a call to a path that seemed mine at once and for certain. It seemed so easy for me to rise from the threshold entirely as I was and go wherever my eyes led me – for on this path, one by one, would be torn all superfluous trappings and bonds, and the soul (for the soul does exist) would exult from the return flow of sensation from the universe’s imperceptible movement and unfading growth – yet I remembered how this happens.

Why did I have to confuse frankness and honesty – integrity and self, too? Do eyes always follow where the heart yearns? The truth is that there exist mutual bonds of existence, and tearing them will not spread light – only the utter darkness of despair.

Didn’t I know that my longest path led always to you, and that for so many years, any road, wherever it took me, always began and ended with you?

After losing yourself in work or reading until after midnight as so often, you slept on serenely upstairs, rather closer to the sky, and these penetrating questions melted in the moist calm of the morning – unseemly in your dreams, the guardian and shepherd of which I was long ago destined to be.

Unfathomable and far off, you slept, slept as always, like the first time, and through the window in our mansard bedroom gazed bushy cedars, their dark purply green needles and dozy pillars entwined in curling ivy, and beside them a ghostly willow and an oriental poplar. Through the gaps in the branches the great expanse of London climbed to the horizon of its northern hills, draped by low skies, and beyond intriguing but not unlimited distances.

And now like the blue tit, perfectly Russian, darting from the aspiring branches of the one apple tree not planted by us, a thought flashes up into these deep silences – that from long ago, and for a long time, we have been wandering, together.

This morning, you slept while I awoke alone – a morning of separation and farewell for the day. In the evening, past midnight, it was you awake alone, while I slept, embracing my illusions, illusions which any other woman might dismiss as pure balderdash and baloney. But you know, so well, that someone else’s present world is untangible and unimaginable, like a foreign country filled with great happiness and great sorrow. In our mutual love, we have caused each other so much anguish and unacknowledged misery, but it has finally become clear that in the unique love for either a woman, or a homeland, one learns the meaning and idea of the world – love for the One and Only Authentic Existence, which created us from one soul alone, the same for men and for women:

O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord, who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate and from them has spread abroad a multitude of men and women, and fear Allah in whose name you appear to one another, and fear Him particularly respecting ties of relationship.

Al-Nisa 4–1

How little life we are given, Oh God, for learning and understanding!

The house, on the threshold of which these minutes were trifled away, our stone house on the hill, was girded on the northern side by the dormant buds of the woods scaling the slope, and on the south by a brick wall festooned with curls of ubiquitous ivy and by the small garden, a-brim with daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths, created by your own hard work. For all its sturdiness, it was not our last home, but an enduring shelter on the way to another shimmering place. Bestowed on us as a challenge at the crossroads of our wanderings, it grew on us, with its simple objects, which also bore memories of previous homes. Every object is an accumulator of memories and feelings, memories and feelings that can sometimes surge back with the odd glance or touch to remind us that we have shared experiences – that our two lives, though so different, are intimately entangled and, for some purpose, lastingly conjugated.

This house, so different from those other time-worn homes, does not bring our lives together by force, but is sympathetic to the natural separateness of human existence, with its two studies, its two disparate worlds where each can shelter to read and write, with a shared wall but opening to opposite points of the wind rose – my windows looking out south and east, yours to the north and west.

Our beliefs and ambitions are so different in many ways, but this makes the mutual connections that much clearer as they lodge within our home, bringing together both worlds. All their variegated differences mingle here in unity, allowing the grace of occasional mutual silences to penetrate commonplace reality, as the point of a young leaf penetrates the maple bud, or a tear disturbs an impassive countenance.

Now it’s happened, and there’s no time – and I didn’t even notice where the time went. In my heart, you see, there gathered so clear, so earnest a wish to explain, to explain myself with all the guilty prolixity and diversions of words – those words I never have enough of from day to day for your more substantial grievances. But even words are given to me in unmindful silence, like the radiance of familiar objects that brings back emotions from the past.

And the traces of the past are slipping ever further away – the start of our mutual destiny is receding – the time when we, two people, two differences, two lonelinesses, had neither a common home nor even common memories. When did those memories begin?

No, it wasn’t that secluded summer at Butharovo, under the roof of the rented cottage with the carved terrace, deep amidst the forest in a landscape alien to both of us. It wasn’t then that began our life of love, a love which then and for long after seemed a simple story of dark temptation and glorious but brief passion, a seduction by fate – a perishable romance that is born and dies in the pride of either man or woman.

‘She didn’t understand him.’ … ‘He didn’t understand her.’

However one begins such a humdrum tale, its humdrum end will loom all too plainly. Was this meant for us? Who knows? If it weren’t for the irresistible gravitational attraction of fate, and not another conjugation whose heavenly justice will only later be revealed, would we have been able to resist the centrifugal force of unrestrained egoism that at the time seemed for me and you the self-preservation of talent? We will only discover the answer in the many-layered joys and sorrows of life; the pain of mutual existence is the need for us to sacrifice even those things sweetest to our hearts, the strident ghosts of our unmutual past.

I think we chose to meet under the roof only rarely, but as the rains kept falling, so we were brought together – for where else could we go in that dull village? We walked together, yes, but somehow singly. We adapted to each other, but the arguments were terrible and the silences filled with tension, leading to new arguments. But in everything around us – in the ripening leaves of the alien forests, in the distant murmur of a brook, in the drizzle drops on burdock and nettles, in the unexpected birds of our foreign garden, in the maple reflections on the country ponds where I fished to be alone and waken to the real world – everything was filled with the inevitability of life, and shone with the possibility of unity.

In your words:

Here’s a soul’s garden neglected and dank

without love without care a desolate blank

dense jasmine and lilac grow over the bank

raspberries and blackberries thorny and rank

if some bold stranger ventures inside

in the green shadows where lost truths now hide

crunching like ice underfoot with each stride

on leaves and blooms fallen in piles deep and wide

the anguish is neither implied nor intended

but it’s magnified greatly by fear and doubt

so I’m unsure what’s broken can ever be mended:

if one entered here – would they ever get out?¹

Why were we staying in Butharovo if not for your wish to test our feelings again? I have only understood at last – it takes a long time for plain but unpalatable truths to reach the liver. All the human bonds in your life were snapping then, and every attempt at unity left only blank emptiness, and despite that hard-won stubbornness which shone through the loss of your parent, your dreams of what your life should be were lost in a mist of uncertainty. The highest power endowed you with immense vitality. Yet the death of your young father in an aircraft fire deep in the Arctic circle then deprived you yet again of any strong shelter, and left you with the sense that even the ground could give way beneath your feet.

Could I then be your solid earth? Could I be not a charming prince, a Prince Yelisei² whose fairy tale inevitably ends, but the one you needed all your life – your comforter, father and brother, your wall and shield from the evils of the world, the strong and disinterested patron of your golden talent?

No, I could not. I did not know how to. People learn to do it, giving their whole life to learning. Your striving to be brave in the face of despair drew me but I was terrified by it, because it was so overwhelmingly demanding – not only for me then, but for the future me, of which I had no inkling then.

So Butharovo, where my best poems were written, failed to become our joint shelter, and has sunk into your past like a painful coincidence, lacking the happy memories that might bind it into your life. We were not aware then that we should not stay in one place, locking ourselves for years into meaningless restrictions. For you and me, it turned out, it was ever better to be on the road.

The minutes of silence were running out. You slept on upstairs. And the light that augured spring cascaded into the mansard through the twin windows, beyond which the clouds and trees were flooding with dreams anticipating new shapes – shapes that will be formed once and never again.

Sometimes I allow myself to wake at dawn, like a little boy for whom, odd as it sounds, everything is yet to happen. But I see through my drowsiness how the streams and flows and flickers of light happened without me this morning, and I remember the light-lured pink of budding apple-blossoms, uncertain and moist, in those lost secluded gardens at Kuskovo³ where the light of our first mutual feelings budded and shone towards the foreign lands destined for both of us.

If I could write this life like a novel, I could make up the beginnings of the story as if it was a prophesied meeting of two existences after years of separation, in such surroundings and scenery, a classic unity of time, place and action: amid the generously blooming apple and cherry trees of an orchard on the outskirts of Kuskovo, in the rented room of a shabby wooden house near the station, not far from the palace parks with their lakes and waterways, humpback bridges and well-proportioned marble statues, an ancient and steady harmony far from the mental strife, and far from the inevitable restless and rootless rage and remorse bought on by life’s desires.

I loved – you didn’t believe and wanted to believe and didn’t believe again, just as you’re not believing now, when it can be sweet not to believe. But to all the shocks, dreams and true torments of the heart, there was a Witness, who was creating balance and proportionality; all that was needed was to look deeply, not with the eyes but with the heart.

Why with such a lack of faith, and a woman’s eternal need for words, were both of us, once our wanders had begun, always drawn to the same places: to Kuskovo with its shiny sprinkles of leaves and silvery waters, its Dutch house dedicated to Peter the Great, its museum of Shuvalov porcelain, and the time-defying oak near the Orangery fenced off by a cast-iron chain from Kasli; to Archangelskoe, on our last few kopeks, with its palatial cascades of terraces, amid the russet and gold autumn forests to the west of Moscow; to Pavlovsk on the fringes of Saint Petersburg and its natural looking English park; and of course that first prophetic journey which precipitated our nomadic life.

It was a quarter of a century ago when, golden-headed and warmed by the September sun, we stepped down from the train in Leningrad and I, remember, said to you – as a joke or consolation: ‘Welcome to Paris!’

Then after many years, we did go to Paris for real, and although I didn’t repeat the phrase on the Gare du Nord, you joked about it. But perhaps how it appeared to me then rebelled against my many images of Paris before it became an effective memory of the heart.

If you ask me, even now, what single memory of love I would choose, it may be that coloured vividly in red and gold on green, of leaf fall on grass on the Pavlov Hills near the arbour of the dowager empress, from where with a gasp of happiness and unguarded faith – yellowy shimmering birch, scarlet Russian maples, deep azure of mountain air, silvery shafts of sunlight, shining golden curls in your warm-wind-caressed hair – you ran into my open arms, and for the very first time we came together in that devout impulse to human unity which, Oh Lord My God, happens truly only once, to leave ever after its inescapable presence and a ­yearning for it to come back.

I confess: my entire life I have been waiting for a return of that glorious moment of fulfilment and alignment, of that irresistible triumph of unselfish happiness. It is part of our shared past, and it beckons and teases me with its constant presence and its foretold uniqueness amid the normal strains of life. But of course you can never retrieve true unity; it has to be accomplished anew each time. It must happen afresh and not become a memory. It must appear to the soul as another new dawn, in which I must understand you and myself entirely, from the beginning.

Yes, you were sleeping in the heavens above the garden in which things were happening and being achieved. My ten minutes have already departed, like the unified wholeness, and the silence has lifted, to return only as scattered moments in the happenstances of an ordinary day. Once more, I was leaving you for a day, to come back in the evening with a heart exhausted by the pressing vanity and powerlessness of the necessities of life, in the silence of tiredness which I can never share.

Time has not stretched, and the urgency of our unmatched dreams, and our perceptions of visible realities, separates us far more often now. So forgive my manly silence, if you can – authenticity cannot be explained in spoken words, but may sometimes be written down.

What was formed in the silence of the morning was a message to your inner life and your separate existence. What had concerned me for so long was to be written down like a letter to another room of our shared house, and it turned out to be a reflection on silence – a simple composition in four extended parts with a brief additional story that in my flush of honesty emulated a moral parable …

For us humans even honesty is impulsive, but the open authenticity of the garden is mantled with marvellous nobility, and possesses, as if leading on perfectly from the past, a wonderful classic unity and balance of shapes, where every detail is distinguished and transformed to a centre of gravity.

Whatever we verily love about the world, a lover or a homeland, we love about God – about the ancient Unity, partially reflected in the mirror of a troubled soul and in the muted secrecies of a mortal heart.

Si tu n’existais pas, dis-moi, pourquoi j’existerai?

(And if you didn’t exist …)

Devoted people are the first to be betrayed. You can rely on people like this. They will always be there for you. But I can vouch that just over twenty years ago, one summer’s day, around Moscow’s Sokol metro station not a living soul had this sort of idle thought in their head. In one green quadrangle stood substantial apartment blocks which had only one, but I must say significant, drawback, which was the constant traffic on the nearby circular railway. Every night, heavy-goods trains without any apparent end seemed to slow down then pull away again right next to the apartments with a fearful fusillade of metallic clangs from the truck couplings. The residents, though, long ceased to pay any attention – can people get used to anything? In fact, this place wasn’t especially quiet even during the day.

On one side, the eight-story apartment block overlooked the Volokokamsky Highway, and on the other, the side on which Elizaveta Osipovna lived, the 23 tram regularly clattered by. For three kopeks you could ride the tram to Koptevsky market, where moustached Azerbaijanis royally traded scarlet persimmons, richly coloured apples and grapes as pale as teardrops – where did they get such ripe fruits in June? Piled high on their stalls, too, were lush bunches of coriander and sweet brown Georgian churchkhela⁴ – jumbled, for some reason with wonderful pickles, huge, waxy marinated garlic, and delicious crimson-stained Gurian cabbage bound in sheaf-like bundles with salty green ramson.

Of course, there were also many other Moscow treats, especially rich, butterlike soured cream, the purest most trickling cottage cheese, village butter in golden millstones, freshly drawn meat ruddy and steaming, juicy vigourous radish, giant dense onions, plump washed carrots and lush green celery and parsley.

Yet Elizaveta Osipovna had long ceased going to the market. A butchers, a dairy, a baker and a fish shop were conveniently at hand, next to the tram stop. The greengrocer’s was a disappointment with last year’s spongey potatoes and straggly damp carrots covered with the soil that was smeared all over the floor. The soil was often dry and the smell of the dust filled the shop. Not far away, though, near the beer dispensers and a recently opened rumochnaya,⁵ there were almost always old women selling herbs such as dill and parsley much cheaper than in the market.

True, the bunches the old women sold were sparse, but, lonely as a finger, Elizaveta Osipovna didn’t need much. She was terrified of anything not fresh, so every single day she went to the local shops to top up. She’d buy 50 g of butter, a couple of slices of doktorskaya smoked sausage or, on ­pension day, a few slices of ham, a morsel of soured grain, and a sliver of cheese – just a smattering of each. Strangely, her fear of stale food harmonized perfectly with her pension of 56 soviet roubles. She learned how to eke out that sum over the entire month, yet at the same time, out of the kindness of her heart and the natural diplomacy essential in communal flats, she managed to give a rouble to the local wino to tide him through to the next pay day. Well, one couldn’t dare refuse.

All her neighbours were, as a rule, drinkers. Some drank more. Some drank less. Some drank because they were young and foolish. Some of the older ones were so fossilized into the habit that they drank like fish. Her nearest neighbour was, in this sense, just reaching maturity. Through the working days, he imbibed moderately, but on Saturday he got roaring drunk, fighting with the girl he’d just picked up; and Elizaveta Osipovna, consumed by a black and viperous fit of anger, locked herself in her room and convulsed at each clatter as furniture was thrown over in the flat next door. It was lucky, then, that she had no children with her, as she did much of the time, since the neighbours would often hand their offspring to her to look after while they had a break from boozing at home, and a break from playing the songs of the highly fashionable (in those long-gone times) Joe ­Dassin.⁶

That summer, it was especially hard to get away from Joe Dassin. Sweet and catchy tunes spilled out into the warm summer air, if not from one window then another. ‘Si tu n’existais pas, dis-moi, pourquoi j’existerai?’ the handsome foreign singer was convincing some girl, and if only Elizaveta knew French she’d have recognized the haunting lyrics: ‘If you didn’t exist, then why should I?’

But Elizaveta Osipovna didn’t understand French. She knew a little Azerbaijani, because she was from Baku. But all her family lived in that faraway place by the Caspian Sea. In Moscow she had no-one, no-one at all, apart from her neighbours, who were entirely convinced she was a native of Moscow because of her incorrigible love of theatre and her stubborn intelligence. They were truly astounded when her sister and nephew arrived from Baku to arrange her funeral.

In the past, before her retirement, she went to the theatre regularly, and never missed a key premiere, although she always bought the cheapest seats. Her pension wouldn’t stretch even to the cheap seats, so whenever she could she got a free season ticket to the lectures in Bakhrushin theatre museum, and was always up on the latest theatre news. In the past, too, Elizaveta Osipovna had visited Baku almost every year. This summer, though, it was getting hard for her to even walk to the shops.

So she relied on her TV, small and black and white. She’d saved her pension for quite a few years to get it. Then finally she had enough. With the help of another neighbour, a giddy young father from across the stairwell who, thanks to her child-minding, had plenty of time on his hands, she went to the shop, selected the very cheapest set and brought it home in a cab, worrying all the way that it might get broken and stop working. But the TV did work, and Elizaveta Osipovna, who suffered senile insomnia, watched and listened to every programme right up to the anthem of the Soviet Union that closed broadcasting for the day. In the past, before the TV, she had read a lot, but now her eyes were letting her down. ‘I’m so afraid I’ll go blind,’ Elizaveta Osipovna would say, ­weeping bitterly. But that was when she was in hospital.

Before she was taken into hospital, on a quiet night when the lips of the ever-present Joe Dassin were momentarily stilled on the insistence of Soviet regulations, then a ­single nightingale, or even a pair, that swooped into the yard between the blocks from the Streshnevsky ponds might just be heard. In between the clanging and rumbling of the goods trains, Elizaveta Osipovna, holding her breath, listened intently to their leaping song. Sometimes, when it was hard to stay lying down, she went to the window and tried to guess in which of the yard’s trees the nightingales were hidden.

One might imagine that hearing the silvery warbling of the nightingale, singing out through the sudden silence of the dark yard and ascending to the stars, might bring to Elizaveta Osipovna some sweet, or even sad, memories, but did not – and even if it did, we, her ex-neighbours, will never know. If you do let free the dreamy capriciousness of the imagination, then much more plausible in this ordinary world would be her sudden wish to have the strength to walk in the morning across the railway and along the white, beaten path to the Streshnekovsky ponds and sit on a bench to watch the flashing ripples in the water, the soft to and fro of the reeds, the ever-shifting reflections of the pines. And maybe she’d catch the watery scent of overblown bird-cherry blossom, strewn across the pond in blankets of white stars.

After all, do any of us, here and now, realize what a joy it is simply to be conscious of our own existence and, while there is still time, feel alive – realize not what life was, but what it is, before, ahead of time and carelessly, we bid it goodbye?

To really feel, experience, see, hear and comprehend – without some exaggerated sixth sense and redundant imagination – how the living branch of the tree near to you shades the grass; how gently and sympathetically the warm summer breeze touches your hair, while at the same time rippling the sparkling water and waving the reeds; how the pine trees on the far bank stand straight and while they are alive, stretch up through the air towards the heavens, up to the clouds that are tenderly spun by the same soft wind of life. All that is in the world is perceived together in such a moment, like the summer’s warmth, and appears as it truly is – a miraculously bright, gratefully received yet undeserved blessing.

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.