Читать книгу Letters to Another Room - Ravil Bukhraev - Страница 9

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THE GOUT FLOWER

MEMORIES ARE CRUCIAL when you’re craving to be reunited with life – when you long to be aware simultaneously of the present, past and future. The future, which is in any case filled with the past, is seen only dimly and slips away in vague guesses, while the present is by definition uneventful. But the past is with us always – without permission, pacing through any scene as unconditional reality.

And so like this, memories came striding towards me that spring in the early 80s. With it came dejection as I, with pointless humility, punished myself for misdemeanours in some past setting where, for absence of proper achievement, I was brought by life and fate …

That setting was a concrete and asphalt and grey-brick world where the Gorky Railway is crossed by the ­Enthusiasts’ Highway, which long ago was called the Vladimirka⁷ and stretched away from the might of Moscow into the ­gloaming of a memory that once palely hurt me in the remote and beautiful woods and fields of the Vladimir region.

Here, in Vladimir, is the small white and blue Church of the Intercession on the Nerl.⁸ The square and ancient church with its central tower stands on a low mound above an oxbow lake formed by the snow melt. It looks entirely self-sufficient, and without need of anyone – or so it seemed to me, confused and empty at heart.

Even this scene failed to wake any particular tender emotions in my soul, and yet it was deeply beautiful and even disturbing in its unique harmony, with its miniature white walls and the vast sky around in such perfect balance that in my imagination it became weightless, and seemed to float and shimmer like its reflection in the lake, the two images separated only by the band of limp reeds that grew between the floodlines. In those vague days of non-existence, there was nothing I wanted more than such freedom from gravity, but my earthweight dragged me down, and even in my dreams I had forgotten how to fly.

At the time, thanks to my foolish extravagance, I had neither home nor wife, nor any significant money. I was spending every kopek I had on necessities and could not save at all. Lacking even a proper home, I was staying with a kind friend in a room from the tall windows of which could be seen, mirrored in glass on the opposite side of Enthusiasts’ Highway, the whole of the grey, apartment block with its groundfloor foodstore, its shelves entirely empty but for ranks of then ubiquitous ‘Siberian’ vodka. The room stuck in my memory because it was so hard to sleep in, even when very drunk, yet waking up in it was harder still and I never, never wanted to get up. I was in that foolish frame of mind where I was just existing, with nothing happening around me, and this fake existence, like everything devoid of a beginning and end, charged itself into the general guilt of life, meaningless and useless.

Yet even this dark winter, long as it was, did pass, and I started to peer gingerly outside, each time looking further and further from my shelter – until once I managed to walk to Izmailovsky Park, where above the last vestiges of blackened snow the restorative pussy-willows were starting to bloom, and the muddy ditches were awash with the clear snow melt of Moscow’s foreign to me spring.

It was there in Izmailovsky that my eye was taken by a golden-yellow mother-and-stepmother flower,⁹ emerging from a bank of poor clay soil washed out by the spring rains. A zealous bee buzzed around this early source of nectar. I took the plant with me, dislodging its roots so easily from its native clay that it seemed almost accidental – the reddish-brown, tomentose roots led up the reedy stem to the heart of the floral corolla, shining like a miniature sun.

When I reached my room again, I stowed the flower in a delft tea cup and soon forgot about it – because the reality of non-existence is actually rather self-obsessed. You suddenly want to do something, ignite your remaining powers, only for them to be snuffed straight out, since nothing in non-existence retains any meaning for long, even the express delight of a new spring. In this dimmed life, apart from such occasional flashes, there’s no engagement or connection because everything is dictated by only dismal ambition or boredom. No talent is ever engaged or else it is abused by the agony of self-love which artfully pretends to be a life.

Even that first spring flower, captured in the white-inside brown cup sitting on the broad, paint-peeled sill between the piles of worn-out books, prompted no revelations to the soul about the future. It was merely a reminder of the past, implying that the past, and so all our life, is a matter of chance – in other words, even the living spring bloom was turning the unchanging recurrence of separate particles of time into yet another sweet lie, another seduction, turning everything towards the paltry self-deception of non-existence.

Mother-and-stepmother, Tussilago farfara, the Gout Flower: if it weren't for the reductive power of non-existence, each word of this composite botanic name could and would encourage some kind of true fulfilment or action, or maybe even some true words. Yet these names awoke nothing in my soul, apart from dull sensations that became manifest only as a dying echo or wisps of dust from the ashes of burned out love. I somehow imagined these ashes being whisked away from my homeland to the rest of the world, because the pain of love for a woman, in all its inexplicability, is a kind of homeland, a soil of life – and the loss of this scarce soil leaves only a dreadful foreign land. All natural connections were torn from inside of me – apart from the single root that thrived without sunshine but still could not bring me joy – merely reverberating in the great void of shame and pain of loss, which I took simply as proof of my own worthlessness.

Putting down yet another worn-out book in which I was trying to escape reality, my vacant gaze fell by chance upon the mother-and-stepmother flower and through the fog of my non-existence an image came to me from my recent past of the River Lopasnya on Moscow’s hem, a ribbon of blue and light-blue surrounded by spring forests in which snow was quickly melting, dripping down the pine trunks and liquefying in the glades – those bare places amid the trees where amber shafts of sun can needle in to bring life to the rare ant herbs of Russia’s middle band.

I was staying in a sanatorium there for almost nothing on a family pass card I got by chance through a friend. But I wasn’t there for nervous exhaustion from work – rather because the continuation of our love, then an undiagnosable illness, had reached a crisis which must end in the death of my ‘I’, or a final cure, and this week-long stay was the last test, a natural break from the addictive pain of emotions, a respite imposed before the decisive and irretraceable step into a new homeland that still looked to me like, and actually was, a cloudy foreign land.

For that whole week, languishing from unresolved love, I walked among these unfamiliar surroundings, wandering as far as I could into the still forests along muddy tracks. At dawn, the mud was hard from the tenacious frost, and the spongy, shallow spring snow was covered with a sparkling crust. There in the early morning calm, my ears filled with the soft chatter of woodpeckers and the light trill of blue tits, I saw a huge forest deer. It slowly observed me with its large, moist eyes and then retired with graceful dignity, and the image struck into my memory as if I was born to it – with the greedy force of one who can steal from another life, when their own is not enough.

The Lopasnya here swept out a broad, deep bend, and the spring breeze that flowed in the clear air followed its curve – fresh and free-spirited, it followed the water. I too was drawn there, but the sticky, ribbed clay banks were not overgrown yet as they are in summer with waxy-topped, velvet undersided leaves of mother-and-stepmother, with lush burdock and with strong-stemmed horsetails, and it was impossible to get down to the river, especially as the spring melt was flooding ever more of the shallow banks.

But there was the small blue wooden bridge, which I crossed to meet you from the local bus that came out from Moscow once a day. It was a hard meeting. It was clear you wanted to break with me, yet didn’t know how to, which is why you were so sharp – rough and desperate because you knew nothing would work out, this way or that, because life, despite its dreams and vague desires, was already plunging into the chill flow of obscurity, swept away in deep, strong currents that surged under the blue, blue bridge.

What we didn’t know then was that bridge bound us together forever, eye-to-eye as we toiled with bitter jealousy of our separate pasts – I jealous of the things I didn’t know and would never discover, and you of the constant Senezhes and Intercession on the Nerls of my flights to going-nowhere isolation.

The sky was blue. The wind flapped and spread the drooping branches of the birches, their trunks full of sun near the top but pink from sap near the bole. Stunted, pale-green pines were candling together up to the sky, while in the damp soil on the river slope yellow and shining mother-and-stepmother blooms spilled almost to the inaccessible water’s edge. Muddying my boots, I snatched a flower for you – but it was no use, and soon it flew from the bridge into the churning, unstoppable currents of the Lopasnya.

Even after a few years our emotions were still disturbed, and their continuation was so acutely painful that they culminated in what was to me an appalling separation that seemed so belated that it could have neither success nor justification. Only unconscious non-existence and desperate reading saved me from the dark abyss. Day and night, traffic streamed along the Enthusiasts’ Highway, and trains clattered under the bridge, slowed down through Novaya station and rumbled punctually on. The tall window glowed with the morning light or the bright stripes shining up at night from the streetlights below, and on I read and re-read, reading someone else’s words and mistaking them for my own. Then one day I looked at the little flower from Izmailovsky Park again and found to my surprise that it not only had not withered, but was growing so stubbornly it had spilled right over the edge and crept across the edge of the window sill, extending its ringed, scaly indestructible stem.

This will for life so struck me that I started to observe the mother-and-stepmother flower daily – and maybe because of my bookishness I began to think there was something symbolic about it, some sign for me – but of course there was nothing, and where would it come from anyway? Yet the flower kept on stretching and growing and sprouting in front of my eyes, and simultaneously I sensed life beginning outside, and what had seemed irretrievable flowing back – until finally I woke up and realized I had no burden and I closed my eyes, opened my heart and took flight into the new space in which there was everything but the fear of darkness.

The darkness, of course, was there, but there were stars too – each one, if you looked closely, resembling that radiant flower, that in authentic reality is a giant, dazzling sun, compared to which the sun that shines from the sky is just a weak spring sun, surrounded by the busy bees of our attention.

KARAOKE

By the time Nina got back from Klayz’ma, it was already nearly dark in Moscow. Snow, yellow under the streetlights, was flying down for the second time this year. The first fall had come in November and soon melted, leaving a ghastly slush. It was uncertain if this new snow would settle itself lastingly on the ground – if it would tame the sticky slime of puddles and stir, even for a while, an indifferent gaze with its infant purity, or if it would quickly and futilely melt away according to the newly established, indifferent mechanics of natural processes, in which a misty winter delivers rain that can bring neither joy nor disappointment to now wingless souls – and where every unconscious impulse becomes enfeebled and dwindles to nothing like the Sunday snow uselessly scattering its flakes under the streetlamps in Moscow’s damp dusk.

The descending darkness nearly caught Nina on the road. But it didn’t. The car, a new Lada, had run like clockwork. In the lobby, Nina, relaxed by the journey, smiled at the unsleeping concierge. The lobby light was working, and the lift didn’t let her down either. As she entered her single flat, Nina was wrapped by its reliable warmth and felt the small irritations of life drop away. Not only was there hot water, but the tap in the bathroom omitted to bark back with its habitual ferocity. And the other day the plumber, surprisingly sober, had fixed the shower by changing the ancient and leaking chrome hose for a shiny new Italian one.

Now, after throwing off her purple sheepskin coat with its furry cowl, she filled the bath with scented herbal foam, just as she used to. She could sink into it, close her eyes and ignore the little icy drops that fell occasionally on her face. She could put some gentle music on, and leave the bathroom door slightly ajar, too – so that the air from the entrance hall kept the big, oval mirror from clouding as it did if she shut the door completely, leaving Nina to wipe it crossly with the end of her thick towel in order to reveal her flushed face, her refreshed chestnut curls rumpled with drying, and her still strong body in its pure and uncomplicated nakedness.

Anyway, even without the music, there was no reason to shut the door. Nobody could see her in the secure seclusion of her little flat, that was like a handy cosmetic box in which all things, both useful and useless, can find their own special place. In Nina’s wardrobe, for instance, hung a forgotten fur coat that once seemed so alive and animated that it begged to be stroked and spoken to. In the living room, that was at the same time a bedroom and a studio, there was her computer, her books and paintings. And on the kitchen wall dangled the shiny gold circle of a frying pan, with a long polished handle, in which she’d had such fun in former times making gooseberry jam.

To a casual visitor, Nina’s apartment block might look like a grim fortress tower where someone might hide from the inevitable grievances of being. But Nina didn’t encourage visitors. On her salary from the advertising agency, she could actually have afforded a bigger place, but in her personal retreat nothing annoyed or disturbed her. The flat suited Nina because it was a perfect fit, like the bathroom, for her new routine of life. She could draw the drapes on her eighth floor windows, leave just the kitchen light on and a candle burning in front of the tiny icon of the Mother of God brought from Cyprus, undress entirely, wrap herself in a dressing gown, take the few steps to the bathroom and slide into the piping hot water.

As she lay in the bath, the sensation of the water suddenly took her back to some long forgotten time when she was a child. Clear blue sky. Vest, knickers, a panama hat. A host of evocative smells. And the dark, smooth path to the bathhouse, over nettles and star-shaped night blindness¹⁰ with its soft hairs, past dense thickets of raspberry-red fireweeds, past yellow tansies and lacy snow-white lungwort. Young pines exuding a rich aroma of sun. Lacewings and pop-eyed dragonflies flitting and hovering in the shimmering air. Behind was the carved wooden verandah of the kindergarten’s dacha, from which they were led in small groups to bathe nearby in the spacious borrowed bathhouse on the fringes of the village. Beyond the bathhouse spread a vast field, green with ears of wheat but splashed blue with cornflowers, wheat waving in the breeze – going on, on, on, right to the far blue sky, never ending, like the life within the ripening seeds. And finally that pure sensation of the skin stepping into the water – so sharp, bright, wonderful. As she lay in the bath, Nina, held by the imperishable spirit in her, waited for it all to flood back to her. But not this time.

Now the shock of the water reminded her of something completely different – the foggy, pre-winter lane from the dacha where that afternoon she had parted from her husband for the week again. It was three years now they had been living apart, without thinking about divorce – he, a physicist working in the defence industry in some institutional settlement in the Moscow suburbs, while she, who remembered Moscow’s dissipation, moved into the centre. ‘I am a bad physicist and a bad wife …’ she joked with that old phrase, culled from a sixties movie. Even now, they understood each other better than anyone else, but life was turning out in such a way that they saw each other only at weekends. It was always Nina who visited him, either at the settlement, or at the dacha if the weather was ok.

Today, an old friend they hadn’t seen for some time dropped in at the dacha. Yet as the conversation gained momentum, Nina had suddenly got up to rush back to Moscow. Aleksei walked her to the car, and then stood for some time watching the car rumble off down the lane. Finally, he vanished from her sight in the rear-view mirror – along with the little cluster of houses; along with the neat rows of American maples, their branches hung with propeller seeds that looked like dragonflies’ wings; along with the bridge across the black, icy still flowing river. And after that came the slipway on to the main road.

There was a time when Nina had really loved that road. On each side spread vast, open fields, and the river was sporadically visible on the right, its banks picked out by pale bundles of ginger grass, by the thin, drooping black branches of weeping birches, and by stunted willows from which withies protruded like scribbles smeared in pencil in a child’s sketchbook. Alongside the road marched groves of purplish, glaucous-leaved trees, mixed with the odd cloud of dark green spruce.

Nina was driving fast, mechanically sliding past the naked winter trees in the raking rays of the equally unconscious setting sun, as the groves darkened and thickened, merging with the damp, descending dusk. The twilight spaces flooded with a dank silence and the first flurries of snow slanted across the fields. Good, Nina thought, wanting precisely the soft, longed for calm whiteness of nature at rest, a natural refuge for the pain of her unseen mental torpor. The aching depths of that autumn soil, she hoped, would soon be buried – sweetly, thoughtlessly, benumbed – and there would be no more need to live, to labour, to give birth throughout the long, fierce, icy winter, while above in the pure, white snow-swept fields, shivering spikes of wormwood¹¹ would turn dark-gold in the setting sun.

How sad it is, how thick the mist …

Wrapping her head with a towel, Nina suddenly caught herself humming an old romance – the one her husband had started today on the guitar. It was at that moment she’d suddenly remembered she had to get to Moscow. He, bless him, didn’t get offended or act surprised, but put aside the battered instrument, a veteran of many hiking trips, and went with her to the car. Now the words from that romance appeared on her lips by themselves and she, just as suddenly as she’d wanted to escape from the chatter in the dacha, wanted to banish the now oppressive silence by singing aloud, with the backing of the karaoke machine she had bought on impulse. Nina switched on the electronic orchestra, picked up the microphone and, sensing the beat, started to sing.

And the past seems a dream …

Nina sang, and the snow flew outside the window, and the orchestra boom-boomed on and on with its relentless rhythm. The mechanical pop tempo was a little too fast for Nina, so she couldn’t sing with the proper expression. It is the accompanist who must listen to the singer sympathetically. But sadly a karaoke machine has no sympathy. Still, you don’t have to talk to it. You don’t have to share the unconscious impulses of the all-enduring heart. You can, without offending anyone, simply fling the microphone on the armchair and walk to the window to gaze at the snow again from behind the curtain.

That snow was tirelessly covering Moscow, and in the suburbs everything was maybe already white, whitening the darknesses and the endless nooks and open spaces in which no soul could find an earthly answer to their prayers or relief for that unbearable, for Nina, poignancy; nor was there any consolation in the candle guttering weakly in front of the Cypriot icon of she who, as Nina was told, in the very death of her son found comfort and example, and her own immortality.

Snow flew, flew and fell – in big fluffy flakes now. The pavements began to turn white and even the ugliest trees near the block were transformed by slipping on snow-white furs for a while. Snow clung to their branches, lodged in their forks in moist threads, and sat like white dough on their gleaming, naked twigs. But whenever too much snow piled up, it collapsed with a thump to the pavement beneath, and it was becoming clear that the snow wouldn’t stay until morning, that it would melt in the never-ending repetition of wet weather, as if it was trying with all its being not to remember how icy, how invigorating, how ringing and crisp it once knew how to be.

There was a place on the way back from Klyaz’ma, a mixed grove where one November we picked mushrooms in the first snows. That day, remember, was also foggy, but the sky was still bright above. The road was smeared with such terrible sludge that the old car with its bald summer tyres shot into the ditch. Fortunately, we were driving slowly – so got away with just a little fright. Aleksei set off back to the dachas on foot to get help, while we, not wanting to hang around on the road, walked deep into the winter grove with Lenechka.

Soft, clinging snow was lying on the pine needles and yellow leaf-fall, thickening the arms of the spruces and forming fringes along the branches of birches and aspens. It was Lenechka who spotted a cluster of small snowy mounds in a shallow dip, and scattering away the snow revealed huge, creamy milk mushrooms¹² – real milk mushrooms, freshly fringed, beaded on their silvery undersides with white dew drops of their secret juices.

Lenechka skipped back to the car for a penknife and they, lost in awe, cut half a dozen mature mushrooms, and were struck by the rich aroma which brought the soul alive with its sense of warm summer rain and dew-soaked forests plants. It emanated not only from the exposed milky caps, but rolled in waves from their leafy nests that were laced with the whitish threads of their hidden mycelium. Life itself, continuing against the odds, smiled on them in that white grove, where it seemed, every living thing was held forever in suspense.

Lenechka would have already been twenty-two. He died four years back, appallingly and stupidly – not in Chechnya, but during a student winter hike in Kolsky.¹³ He broke his leg and froze to death in the tent, while the rest went vainly to get help.

After that, Nina couldn’t look at snow for a long time. She’d even had to find a job in Cyprus to escape it. But she couldn’t settle in the Mediterranean and had eventually returned to Russia and learned to face the snow again. Now it flew and beat the window and smothered, smothered everything, and her heart, Nina felt, was humbled in waiting for the coming white, pure, infinite spaces of eternal winter, so light and perfect that her soul would feel neither warmth nor cold but reflect only the light of the skies that still glows even in the total Russian darkness.

The electronic orchestra, mechanical and predictable as the duties of existence, went on boom-boom, boom-boom, officiously leading Nina back to the banalities of life, but she wouldn’t turn it off. She suddenly regretted that she’d let the idea fill her head that she must come home so early, because nothing now seemed to save her from mortal vanity, not even calling her husband’s name, nor screaming, nor howling aloud to the God of the Just for Justice – and all that was left to her was to swallow her usual strong sleeping pills and slump at once into a deep sleep.

But before that she must still dry her hair – and kill another two hours, or else she would wake before it was light. And she’d have to while away the hours in silence, because those snooty neighbours wouldn’t tolerate music late.

⁷A diminutive name for the road running east from Moscow to Vladimir, made famous in a great painting by Isaac Levitan from 1892 (now hanging in Moscow’s Tretyakovsky Gallery), which shows the lonely, open road stretching into the distance.

⁸The Church of the Intercession on the Nerl is one of Russia’s most treasured architectural monuments, a perfectly square twelth-century church in white stone built on a man-made mound above the Nerl river.

⁹The flower known in English as coltsfoot, once widely used in herbal medicine in the treatment of gout, but which has been found to contain alkaloids that cause liver damage.

¹⁰The Russian common name for meadow buttercup.

¹¹In Russia, wormwood is often used in herbal medicine and its bitter taste is a symbol of a bitter truth that must be acknowledged. In contemporary Russian poetry, it is often a symbol of the loss of illusory beliefs.

¹²Milk mushrooms or milk-caps, known as gruzd in Russia, are mushrooms of the genus Lactarius, and get their name from the milky liquid they secrete when you cut them. They are little thought of in the West, but Russians love them. There is a Russian proverb, ‘If you think yourself gruzd, get into the basket’ – that is, if you’re as good as you say you are, get on with the job.

¹³A district in the extreme north of Russia, on the Kola peninsular deep within the Arctic circle.