Читать книгу A Hunt for Optimism - Viktor Shklovsky - Страница 8

A SIMPLE LIFE

I

Life is simple but we like to make it complicated. I recall the following incident.

There was a woman sculptor who lived in an attic room in Berlin. Attic rooms in Berlin are cheap, but they are freezing cold. The windows face almost directly into the sky, while the glass isn’t properly fitted to its frame. The iron stove smells of intense heat, short-lived comfort. The clay cools in the vats.

It’s difficult to live in Berlin. The gray asphalt streets are clean. In the summer, they are filled with the scent of vanilla from flowers that bloom in clean flowerbeds. The house façades look like interior walls, and the sky — I’m starting to remember now — is uninviting and foreign, it’s very urban, organized, and it’s not even a sky, but a spotless blue lid over the gray walls of houses that extend toward it.

They asked civil engineers at a conference: Will the person who sweeps streets get the same salary as the chief engineer in a socialist state?

It’s easier now to imagine socialism in Russia than the idea that streets are going to be cleaned by machines.

A quiet battery-powered car with rubber brushes cleaned the street in front of Ksana’s house. The car cleaned and polished the street until it shined. At night the street froze in the reflection of illuminated buildings.

The attic room was lit by a gas lamp. The clay was cooling in the vat. And the stove occasionally hummed.

The woman was beautiful and she didn’t love anyone.

She sculpted and applied wet clay on the badly connected rusty armature.

Art is difficult.

The sculpture stood wrapped in heavy rags. The rags would dry slowly and turn gray. At first they would look like carved draperies, then they would turn completely gray. She had to wet them again. The metal frame was bending with great difficulty.

The woman was beautiful and she had many suitors. They brought her flowers. She didn’t love anyone. That’s probably why she had so many suitors.

One of them was a German architect.

He had a villa on the outskirts of the city. The old asphalt road flowed from the city and streamed past the small house. In the spring, the garden was filled with the scent of vanilla. In the summer, it bloomed with exquisite black roses.

The water would freeze in the attic room. Not in the summer, of course. But it seemed that it was always summer in the small house by the gray road, while it was always winter in the attic room.

When summer would arrive in the attic room, the rags on the sculpture would dry faster and the corrugated sheets on the roof would get blazing hot.

The woman decided to visit the architect in the winter.

He had a small, specially made coffee pot. They poured coffee into small, specially made cups. Then they added some Benedictine to the coffee. There were specially built wooden chairs with sloping backs by the wall. The chairs were uncomfortable and they had armrests that were also specially built.

The host made jokes. He had removed his jacket and sat in his bright vest. He kept joking and wasn’t shy at all that he was unattractive.

The woman sat examining her own portrait in Die Dame, a women’s fashion magazine. There was a strange horse’s muzzle behind her own familiar face. The photograph was taken in a riding arena. It was arranged by the host. And that was pleasant.

“Will you be my wife?” asked the host.

It was a nice room. There was a lot of space under the delicate tables and chairs. There was a ceiling over her head instead of a sky. While the sky above the attic room didn’t seem urban enough.

It looked like a sky from a Dutch novel.

The Dutch sometimes notice the sky and get scared.

Ksana didn’t say anything. She got up. Looked at the table. Everything was in order. The cups, the coffee pot, the biscuits.

She passed through the special room and went into the bathroom.

The bathroom shined with its tiled walls and nickel faucets.

The bathtub was made from enameled cast iron.

Ksana opened the faucet with hot water. The room filled with the sound of running water. The shiny walls lost half their gleam. Sponges hung in their string baskets. Round bars of soap sat in their round dishes.

The woman slowly undressed. The hot water was filling up the tub, playfully reflecting on the ceiling.

II

She didn’t marry him. The conversation was interrupted by her bath. Then she had to dry her hair, and that reminds one more of catching a cold than of love.

The conversation was interrupted and the quartered sky was left hanging above the attic room.

Occasionally a Czech painter would sit under that sky.

He painted on small boards. White on black, black on white. The paintings were all alike.

Shorosh was timid, quiet, and hungry, but he published small pamphlets several times a year. They were derisive, bold pamphlets in Czech, which nobody read or understood in Berlin.

He would always stay at Ksana’s for so long that the sky would disappear behind the window casing in the ceiling. The casing would fill with blackness. Then Shorosh would descend the dark stairwell and wait to see if anyone was coming out of the house to walk a dog.

All German shepherds look the same, like glasses or bottles of beer. They all wear identical collars and their masters take them out for a walk on the same short leash, at almost the same late hour.

Shorosh would wait in the dark passage by the entrance and squint his eyes when the light would turn on in the stairwell.

A silent dog and her master holding the leash would slowly descend the stairs. Shorosh would follow them. The light would automatically switch off behind the entrance door.

He didn’t say anything. The black and white paintings didn’t even cover the cost of paint. Hunger held him by the collar as he walked through the Berlin street, stumbling upon identical German shepherds walking at the same hour.

The lawn in the Tiergarten is illuminated with street lanterns and the color of the grass can only be recollected. The gray alleys stream in the unnamed color of the grass. The unrecognizable moon hangs low above the lanterns. The highways flow like wide rivers beneath the trees. The dry leaves shake from the noise of car engines. Gurgling, the water runs like that in a bathtub somewhere under a low gray bridge. The statues stand in a long row, flooded in lights. The cars turn on the wide lakes of asphalt plazas, hitting the trees with their headlights.

In a quiet, shady place Shorosh hung himself from a tree.

The incident didn’t cause any uproar in Berlin.

III

The clay didn’t stick to the rusty frame very well. The sculpture machine didn’t rotate properly.

She returned to Moscow. The unevenly illuminated city was alive. It was noisy and restless. The trees that stood in parks weren’t growing right. They seemed to have stopped for a minute, as if they were taking part in a demonstration and now were about to resume their march. The houses too were moving. They whirled in circles, wanting to break away, and they turned their backs against each other.

An extraordinary number of horses walked the streets, as they would in a village.

The room looked like a box. It had two yellow plywood walls that were incorrectly angled into the space by the window.

The feet wobble on the stones of the pavement in Moscow, and the sky is completely different. It is more purple than pink at night.

Someone was leaving and gave her the room. Then there were a lot of phone calls, the room had to be exchanged for another one, and they had to go to the housing management. People at the housing management sat with their coats on.

The cleaners swept the cobblestone pavements with brooms made of bundled twigs.

Dogs wandered the streets.

Large buildings were being built in the city.

Ksana didn’t understand anything. She had already placed her heavy sculpture machines in the long narrow room, between the plywood walls. The floor turned out to be freezing cold. This was probably why they had exchanged the apartment. The water pipes under the floor made noise. She had to buy thick shoes. Her feet became strange-looking.

She had a visitor in the evening. He slightly resembled Shorosh — a quiet man, who couldn’t have sold even one of his paintings. At first they talked about the new buildings in Moscow. They were bigger than the ones in Berlin. Huge spaces in the country had already been set in steel armature nets for concrete reinforcement.

The spaces had already been mapped and demarcated, caged in from the world as it were, but the concrete hadn’t been poured yet.

The guest talked for a while. It was clear that he wasn’t in a hurry to leave. He sat with his legs crossed, his checked socks were not pulled up. His shoes, unlike the shoes abroad, bore the marks of galoshes. He shook his “local” head and didn’t hurry at all.

Finally the man stood up. He went out into the foyer. The foyer was cut off by plywood walls. It turned into a hallway that resembled a quiet street. The floor in the hallway reminded one of the asphalt in Berlin. There were cartons on the coat rack and a huge trunk pushed underneath it.

The man stretched out a hand toward his coat, then said:

“You know, I forgot to tell you something.”

He went back into the room. He was silent for a moment. The pipes were singing under the floor.

“The room, which you exchanged for this one, has been sealed off.”

“You’re left without a room?” asked Ksana.

She looked at her sculpture machines. She just couldn’t leave this place.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked.

She remembered a scene from a film. It seemed as if it should have been raining outside.

I even almost wrote that it was raining outside and the steel windowsill was lightly trembling.

They drank tea. He had nowhere else to go and he wasn’t in a hurry.

Ksana kept going out of the room into the hallway. She would go into the dark, savage bathroom where the baby carriages, trunks, and mannequins lived. She soaked the heavy clay rags in the water; the pipes became lively with water. It was deafening in the room.

“What is he supposed to do?” she thought.

The heavy rags were tightly embracing the sculpture. The woman with heavy molding and gentle hands, the woman, who was not needed here, disappeared behind the canvas.

The guest stood up and prepared to leave. The foyer door opened once again. The room with long walls filled with darkness pouring in from the street. The mattress was still propped up against the wall without a frame. It stood there like that since yesterday. He stood there for about a minute. He won’t live through this minute. He’ll never move into that building, the walls of which have already been marked with armature nets.

It was dark in the stairwell. The dogs slept in different apartments. They were all different and walked in the streets at different hours. And on the whole, nothing was clear.

The coat was still hanging in the foyer and all those who passed through the main hallway noticed it in the morning.

The man had stayed.

IV

Life is simple. And things are simple when one takes them without resisting.

Shorosh hung in the Tiergarten, not as a man, but as a painting.

The woman was beautiful. She lived in the attic room and didn’t drink wine and didn’t know that to live with her one only had to stay.

She finally looked closely at her husband. He had a mustache. Gray eyes. A slightly shorter upper lip.

And he was quite unusual, on the whole.