by Frank Wynne
Meanwhile Mark had finished work and was already on his way home. Crew-cut Adolf walked him all the way to his house. They both stopped, shook hands, and Mark gave a shove with his shoulder to the door which opened into cool emptiness.
“Why go home? The heck with it. Let’s have a bite somewhere, you and I.”
Adolf stood, propping himself on his cane as if it were a tail.
“The heck with it, Mark….”
Mark gave his cheek an irresolute rub, then laughed.
“All right. Only it’s my treat.”
When, half an hour later, he came out of the pub and said good-bye to his friend, the flush of a fiery sunset filled the vista of the canal, and a rain-streaked bridge in the distance was margined by a narrow rim of gold along which passed tiny black figures.
He glanced at his watch and decided to go straight to his fiancée’s without stopping at his mother’s. His happiness and the limpidity of the evening air made his head spin a little. An arrow of bright copper struck the lacquered shoe of a fop jumping out of a car. The puddles, which still had not dried, surrounded by the bruise of dark damp (the live eyes of the asphalt), reflected the soft incandescence of the evening. The houses were as gray as ever; yet the roofs, the moldings above the upper floors, the gilt-edged lightning rods, the stone cupolas, the colonnettes—which nobody notices during the day, for day-people seldom look up—were now bathed in rich ochre, the sunset’s airy warmth, and thus they seemed unexpected and magical, those upper protrusions, balconies, cornices, pillars, contrasting sharply, because of their tawny brilliance, with the drab façades beneath.
“Oh, how happy I am,” Mark kept musing, “how everything around celebrates my happiness.”
As he sat in the tram he tenderly, lovingly examined his fellow passengers. He had such a young face, had Mark, with pink pimples on the chin, glad luminous eyes, an untrimmed tag at the hollow of his nape…. One would think fate might have spared him.
“In a few moments I’ll see Klara,” he thought. “She’ll meet me at the door. She’ll say she barely survived until evening.”
He gave a start. He had missed the stop where he should have got off. On the way to the exit he tripped over the feet of a fat gentleman who was reading a medical journal; Mark wanted to tip his hat but nearly fell: the streetcar was turning with a screech. He grabbed an overhead strap and managed to keep his balance. The man slowly retracted his short legs with a phlegmy and cross growl. He had a gray mustache which twisted up pugnaciously. Mark gave him a guilty smile and reached the front end of the car. He grasped the iron handrails with both hands, leaned forward, calculated his jump. Down below, the asphalt streamed past, smooth and glistening. Mark jumped. There was a burn of friction against his soles, and his legs started running by themselves, his feet stamping with involuntary resonance. Several odd things occurred simultaneously: from the front of the car, as it swayed away from Mark, the conductor emitted a furious shout; the shiny asphalt swept upward like the seat of a swing; a roaring mass hit Mark from behind. He felt as if a thick thunderbolt had gone through him from head to toe, and then nothing. He was standing alone on the glossy asphalt. He looked around. He saw, at a distance, his own figure, the slender back of Mark Standfuss, who was walking diagonally across the street as if nothing had happened. Marveling, he caught up with himself in one easy sweep, and now it was he nearing the sidewalk, his entire frame filled with a gradually diminishing vibration.
“That was stupid. Almost got run over by a bus….”
The street was wide and gay. The colors of the sunset had invaded half of the sky. Upper stories and roofs were bathed in glorious light. Up there, Mark could discern translucent porticoes, friezes and frescoes, trellises covered with orange roses, winged statues that lifted skyward golden, unbearably blazing lyres. In bright undulations, ethereally, festively, these architectonic enchantments were receding into the heavenly distance, and Mark could not understand how he had never noticed before those galleries, those temples suspended on high.
He banged his knee painfully. That black fence again. He could not help laughing as he recognized the vans beyond. There they stood, like gigantic coffins. Whatever might they conceal within? Treasures? The skeletons of giants? Or dusty mountains of sumptuous furniture?
“Oh, I must have a look. Or else Klara will ask, and I shan’t know.”
He gave a quick nudge to the door of one of the vans and went inside. Empty. Empty, except for one little straw chair in the center, comically poised askew on three legs.
Mark shrugged and went out on the opposite side. Once again the hot evening glow gushed into sight. And now in front of him was the familiar wrought-iron wicket, and further on Klara’s window, crossed by a green branch. Klara herself opened the gate, and stood waiting, lifting her bared elbows, adjusting her hair. The russet tufts of her armpits showed through the sunlit openings of her short sleeves.
Mark, laughing noiselessly, ran up to embrace her. He pressed his cheek against the warm, green silk of her dress.
Her hands came to rest on his head.
“I was so lonely all day, Mark. But now you are here.”
She opened the door, and Mark immediately found himself in the dining room, which struck him as being inordinately spacious and bright.
“When people are as happy as we are now,” she said, “they can do without a hallway,” Klara spoke in a passionate whisper, and he felt that her words had some special, wonderful meaning.
And in the dining room, around the snow-white oval of the tablecloth, sat a number of people, none of whom Mark had seen before at his fiancée’s house. Among them was Adolf, swarthy, with his square-shaped head; there was also that short-legged, big-bellied old man who had been reading a medical journal in the tram and was still grumbling.
Mark greeted the company with a shy nod and sat down beside Klara, and in that same instant felt, as he had a short time ago, a bolt of atrocious pain pass through his whole frame. He writhed, and Klara’s green dress floated away, diminished, and turned into the green shade of a lamp. The lamp was swaying on its cord. Mark was lying beneath it, with that inconceivable pain crushing his body, and nothing could be distinguished save that oscillating lamp, and his ribs were pressing against his heart, making it impossible to breathe, and someone was bending his leg, straining to break it, in a moment it would crack. He freed himself somehow, the lamp glowed green again, and Mark saw himself sitting a little way off, beside Klara, and no sooner had he seen it than he found himself brushing his knee against her warm silk skirt. And Klara was laughing, her head thrown back.
He felt an urge to tell about what had just happened, and, addressing all those present—jolly Adolf, the irritable fat man—uttered with an effort:
“The foreigner is offering the aforementioned prayers on the river….”
It seemed to him that he had made everything clear, and apparently they had all understood…. Klara, with a little pout, pinched his cheek:
“My poor darling. It’ll be all right….
He began to feel tired and sleepy. He put his arm around Klara’s neck, drew her to him, and lay back. And then the pain pounced upon him again, and everything became clear.
Mark was lying supine, mutilated and bandaged, and the lamp was not swinging any longer. The familiar fat man with the mustache, now a doctor in a white gown, made worried growling small noises as he peered into the pupils of Mark’s eyes. And what pain! … God, in a moment his heart would be impaled on a rib and burst…, God, any instant now…. This is silly. Why isn’t Klara here….
The doctor frowned and clucked his tongue.
Mark no longer breathed, Mark had departed—whither, into what other dreams, none can tell.
THE RESURRECTION OF MOZART
Nina Berberova
Translated from the Russian by Marian Schwartz
Nina Nikolayevna Berberova (1901–1993) was a Russian-born poet, novelist, playwright, critic and professor of literature whose biogra
phy is a classic of the Russian émigré Diaspora. Her fiction has been on best-seller lists in France, and she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French Government in 1989. In 1937, her biography of Tchaikovsky created a sensation because it was the first to deal openly with the composer’s homosexuality.
I
In the early days of June 1940, just at the time when the French army was beginning its final and irrevocable retreat after the breach at Sedan, on a quiet warm evening, a group of four women and five men were sitting in a garden under the trees, about thirty miles from Paris. They were in fact talking about Sedan, talking of how the last few days had restored to that name which, like crinoline, had long since gone out of fashion, the ominous connotations it had had before; this town, which none of them had ever seen, and which had died in the time of their grandfathers, seemed to have been resurrected in order to relive the tragic events that were destined for it alone.
The silence was so complete that when they stopped talking and returned to their own private thoughts, they could hear through the open windows the clock ticking in the large old house. The sky was green, clear and lovely, and the stars were just beginning to shine, so few and far-flung that they failed to form any definite pattern. The old trees – acacias, limes – neither breathed nor trembled, as if standing stock-still were a safeguard against something that was invisible to men but somehow immanent in the summer evening. The hosts and their guests had just finished supper; the table had not yet been cleared. Some wine-glasses were still on the table. Slowly, the green light of the darkening sky transformed the faces of the seated company which was now obscured by shadows. They were talking about war and about the omens of war. A young woman, a guest who had driven out from town with her husband and sister, restraining her brassy voice, remarked that she had seen a meteor a fortnight before.
‘It was about this time of day. The sky was just as hazy. At first it looked like a falling star, but it was so long and it was so bright.’
‘You probably wouldn’t even have noticed it a year ago,’ said another guest, smiling. This was Chabarov, a bald, robust man with a drooping black moustache and wearing a bright blue shirt. He was a groundsman at a château about eight miles away and had just arrived on his bicycle.
‘A year ago,’ said Vassily Georgievich Sushkov, the host, a tall man, taller than anyone else at the table, grey-haired but not yet old, with a sharp and furtive look in his eye. ‘Yes, it was exactly a year ago today that Nevelsky died. He knew a lot of this was coming. He predicted so much of it.’
‘Well, he couldn’t have picked a better time to die. At least he doesn’t have to see what we see. If he were resurrected he’d either spit in disgust or break down and cry.’
Facing the hostess, at the opposite end of the table, sat a Frenchman brought along by Chabarov but whom no one else really knew. Simply, and without any fussy apology, he asked them to translate what they were all saying.
‘Monsieur Daunou, we were talking about the dead, and what they would say if they were resurrected and saw what’s going on now,’ replied Maria Leonidovna Sushkova.
Daunou took his black pipe out of his mouth, furrowed his brow, and smiled.
‘Is it worth waking the dead?’ he said, looking his hostess straight in the eye. ‘I suppose I might well invite Napoleon to come and have a look at our times, but I’d certainly spare my parents the pleasure.’
Suddenly everyone started talking at once.
‘Resurrect them for your sake or for theirs? I don’t understand,’ Manyura Krein, who had come from Paris, asked with a lively expression, not addressing anyone in particular and no longer trying to conceal her loud voice. She had a full mouth of her very own white teeth, which gave the impression of being false. ‘If it were for their sake, then of course you’d resurrect Napoleon and Bismarck and Queen Victoria, and maybe even Julius Caesar. But if I could bring someone from the past back to life for my sake, just for mine, then that’s an entirely different thing. That calls for some thought. Such a large choice, so many temptations … still, silly as it sounds, I think I’d resurrect Pushkin.’
‘A charming, fun-loving, marvellous man,’ said Maria Leonidovna Sushkova. ‘What a joy it would be to see him alive.’
‘Or maybe Taglioni?’ continued Manyura Krein. ‘I’d lock her up at home so I could look at her whenever I wanted.’
‘And then take her to America,’ put in Chabarov, ‘and let the impresarios tear her to shreds.’
‘Come on, if you’re going to resurrect anyone, then don’t resurrect Taglioni,’ said Fyodor Egorovich Krein with barely repressed irritation. He was Manyura’s husband, twice her age, and a friend of Sushkov’s. ‘There’s no need to be frivolous. I would make the best of the occasion. I would drag Tolstoy back into God’s world. Wasn’t it you, dear sir, who denied the role of the individual in history? You who declared that there would be no more wars? And wasn’t it you who took a sceptical view of vaccination? No, don’t try to wriggle out of it now. Just have a look at the result.’ It was evident that Fyodor Egorovich had scores to settle with Tolstoy and that he had an entire text prepared should they happen to meet in the next life.
‘Avec Taglioni on pourrait faire fortune,’ Chabarov repeated his thought in French.
‘And I, gentlemen,’ piped in Sushkov’s mother, who wore heavy violet powder and reeked of some unpleasant perfume, ‘and I, gentlemen, would resurrect Uncle Lyosha. Wouldn’t he be surprised?’
No one knew who Uncle Lyosha was, so no one said anything for a minute or two. Little by little the conversation had drawn everyone in, taking them far from that evening, that garden and into the past, the recent or the very distant past, as if someone had already made a firm promise to wave a magic wand and fulfil everyone’s wish, so that now the only problem was in making a choice, and it was a difficult choice because no one wanted to miscalculate, especially the women.
‘No one but Mozart will do for me, though. Yes, it has to be Mozart,’ Maria Leonidovna thought to herself. ‘There’s no one else I want, and it would be useless anyway.’
She had decided not out of any morbid love of music, as can happen with women who have reached a certain age and who are generally thought of as ‘cultured’, but merely because she connected that name in her mind with her earliest childhood, and because it lived on as something pure, transparent, and eternal that might take the place of happiness. Maria Leonidovna smoked avidly and waited for someone else to say something. She didn’t feel like talking herself. It was Magdalena, Manyura Krein’s sister, a young woman of thirty, full-figured and pale, with unusually rounded shoulders, who spoke up. The sight of her always brought to mind those undeniable statistics about how in Europe so many millions of young women had been left single because there weren’t enough husbands to go round.
‘No, I wouldn’t resurrect a single famous man,’ said Magdalena, with a certain disdain for men of renown. ‘I’d much prefer an ordinary mortal. An idealistic youth from the early nineteenth century, a follower of Hegel, a reader of Schiller; or a courtier to one of the French kings.’
She shrugged her heavy shoulders and looked around. But already it was nearly dark, and one could barely make out the faces round the table. But the stars were now quite visible overhead, and the sky seemed familiar again.
Chabarov didn’t say anything for a long while. Finally he made a muffled nasal sound, drummed his fingers on the table, opened his mouth, but suddenly hesitated, said nothing, and sank back into his thoughts.
The ninth person present, who had been silent until then, was Kiryusha, Sushkov’s nineteen-year-old son and Maria Leonidovna’s stepson. In the family he was considered a little backward. Slowly he unglued his thick, wide lips and, gazing trustfully at his stepmother with his blue and very round eyes, asked if it were possible to resurrect two people at the same time.
God alone knows what was going through his dreamy mind at that point. He seemed to think that everything
had already been decided by the others and that only the details remained to be settled.
‘Mais c’est un vrai petit jeu,’ noted Daunou with a sad laugh, and immediately everyone seemed to move and smile once more, as if returning from far away. ‘Everyone has their own private passion, and everyone is being terribly serious about it.’
Maria Leonidovna just nodded at him. ‘Mozart, of course, only Mozart will do,’ she repeated to herself. ‘And it’s a good thing I’m not young any more and don’t have any physical interest in seeing him. We could sit up till dawn, and he could play our piano and we’d talk. And everyone would come to see him and listen to him – the neighbours’ gardener and his wife, the postman, the shopkeeper and his family, the station master … What a joy it would be! And tomorrow there’d be no post, no trains, nothing at all. Everything would be topsy-turvy. And there wouldn’t be any war. No, there would be war all the same.’
She lit another cigarette. For a moment the match illuminated her thin, slightly worn face and her delicate, beautiful hands. Everything about her, except her face, was feminine, youthful and sleek, particularly her light and silent walk. Everyone noticed when Maria Leonidovna suddenly got up and walked out under the trees, and then came back to the table, and they could see the lit end of her cigarette in the darkness of the advancing night.
A chill came up about then from the low-lying part of the garden, where two little stone bridges crossed the narrow loops of the flower-banked stream. Old Mrs Sushkova, wrapped in a shawl, was dozing in her chair. Kiryusha was looking up blankly, and it was clear that like the trees and stars he was merely existing and not thinking. And suddenly, somewhere far off, perhaps twenty-five or thirty miles away to the east, where the sun rises in the summer, the sound of gunfire rumbled, burst out, and then disappeared. It was very much like thunder and yet completely different.
