Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  Haffner paused.

  ‘Those were strange words for me to read. They pointed like an arrow to the world of faith. I sensed the void inside myself. Of course, I believed in nothing. How could I? There was nothing in my past or my traditions in which I could believe. At last I laid the notebook aside, and fell asleep. It was the time of dawn in Leningrad: the whiteness strengthens, shadows like ghosts take form. I dreamed—and I found myself transported to Solovki. In the theatre of my dream, I saw a scene from the pages I had read: it was a moment, a stray line, in which the writer recalls an afternoon when he left the fortress and travelled the length of the island, to the labour colony, on some official business; he often had to take messages of this kind from camp to camp; he would walk the road to Deep Bay, a long stretch, and sometimes on warm, sunny days, as on this day, he would cut down the coastline, though this was strictly forbidden to all prisoners—and there, in a deserted garden of the old monastery, he lay down and closed his eyes. When he opened them he saw, close by, no more than an arm’s length from him, a family of hares—a mother, with her offspring, all gazing at him, eyes wide, as if at a miracle. He looked back, unmoving, overcome by a feeling of loving goodwill—and for a long time afterwards a warmth of affection for all living things stayed with him.

  ‘I dreamed, and saw that scene—it was a message for me, a proof of how strongly experiences can pass from heart to heart. In mid-morning, I went back to him to return the manuscript. How full my head was of words to say to him: how much gratitude I felt for what he had shown me—but things were not as I expected. He was cold, and formal: he received the package with his notebook in it into his hands almost in silence, and escorted me down onto the street. I assumed at first he must have been embarrassed by what he had allowed me to see—but then I realised in all likelihood he was afraid, and regretted what he had done: those were still times when it would have been natural for a foreign student to be an informer of some kind, a creature of the state. We were about to part: it was the corner, on the embankment; I looked at him, with all my youthful affection brimming up. I had made a great decision that night: I wanted to tell him. I struggled, and stared into his eyes, but they were cold, with the coldness and glare of open seas. I remember how I flinched, and turned away.’

  ‘And the great decision?’

  ‘I had decided to go to Solovki, to see that prison landscape for myself. I kept to that decision. I made my plans. It wasn’t an easy task, in those days, to travel to such places, deep in military zones.’

  ‘But you had no trouble, in the end,’ said Berenika at this point, quite smoothly.

  ‘Trouble? Trouble was all I had. I travelled north on a supply train, by stages, to Arkhangelsk. At first I was marooned there. The penal colony and all its outcamps on the archipelago had been shut down: the fort on the main island had been turned into a naval cadet training base—but there was the chaos of reconstruction just then, all through the north, whole towns deserted, others springing up; unusual things became possible. I found a place on an Arctic survey vessel, charting that coastline, searching for wartime remains and wrecks. They spent some while working in the archipelago: I could inspect what I had only been able to imagine—but it was as if I had seen a film, not read through a manuscript; each view seemed like a picture I had seen before. Every colour was familiar, every sound. If ever I had doubted the power of books and words to capture life, those doubts died inside me then. I walked through the old Kremlin, with the naval crews and scientists round me, and I could see the shadows of what had been there before. It was more living to me in those moments than my own past. Then something strange happened.’

  Haffner laughed, but his expression was agonised.

  ‘A transformation—it was almost comical. I reached a limit inside myself. I wanted no more. I could go no further. It had been my idea to go down to that garden by the sea, where the family of hares had come to visit my teacher all those years ago. I had wanted to take into myself all the colours of the islands. I stopped. I felt I had come up against that borderline where art and writing sweep you up too far away from yourself, and become a danger to you, more than a friend. It was a relief for me when the time came for us to sail. The survey ship continued on its course, through the islands, headed south. We had been keeping close to shore: now it was unbroken waters—the White Sea of tale and fable. Of course, it wasn’t white at all; it was piercing, hard grey-blue: first the wind whipped up wave caps; then there were periods of absolute calm, when it was almost impossible to distinguish the water from the greyness of the sky. All you could hear was the rhythm of the ship’s engines, and the cries of the gulls that flew in our wake for hours, then vanished as evening came. We spent days out of sight of land; at last there was a low, level shore: islands, causeways, a harbour, long wooden buildings, rocks. We anchored close by the entrance to the canal.’

  ‘The canal?’

  ‘The White Sea Canal. Belomor Canal. The canal the convicts built. From the Arctic through to the Baltic, with pick and spade. Nineteen locks with their gates: one hundred thousand workers, ten thousand dead. I had no idea then, beyond hints and whispers; now I know: there was a dead man, a spirit, for every step. They might as well have mixed the concrete for the banks from human ash! There it was, the canal basin, wide before us, gleaming in the light. All was still—a wondrous silence. It was as if no one was living any longer, in that settlement—and that was close, in fact, to truth. In the evening I walked out, alone, to the tip of the northern breakwater: from there you looked back, and saw the town stretched out beneath the thin bands of haze and the looming sky. You saw wide bridge spans, powerlines: there were coastal cutters and transport barges, listing, rusting away; empty loading docks, cantilevers, all motionless. Over everything there was that sense of beauty and desolation you come on at old, decaying industrial sites. So it was all for this, I whispered to myself: all for this, those years of effort: for this, that secret, hidden world of pain. I watched the survey ship making its way into the wind. I followed it until it dipped below the horizon—and even then, for what seemed an age, I could make out the smoke from its funnel rising through the air. It was late, by now, in the progress of the night—and the sun, which had been until then no more than a filmy disc of yellow, dropped down beneath the plume of clouds: it glittered, suddenly; its beams lit up the sea—and at once I realised where the name came from. All I could see was white, a pure, blazing white, white like a fire’s heart. I had to turn away my eyes—and as I did so, I could picture myself with complete clarity: what I was, the accents of my being, what would become of me. Of all our kind.’

  He paused.

  ‘That’s quite an epiphany,’ I said.

  ‘The epiphany was this.’ His face was stern. He moved his hands in such a way as to suggest things just beyond his reach. ‘As I was looking, what was before me had vanished. It melted away. It became whiteness—not waves, and beams of light, and sky. It was the whiteness behind the world. I understood that I was staring into the void at the core of things; that what we see is not the final verdict on what exists. Since that day it has been clear to me there are moments in our lives when the world becomes unstable, when our visual field gives way: things break before us; they burst into fragments, disappear.’

  ‘You’re discounting mirages, or haloes in the sky?’ I said—not so much mockingly as from embarrassment, so intense had the pitch of his words been, for so long—but this faint note of contestation was enough to break the story’s spell.

  Haffner had been speaking softly, almost whispering, leaning forward. He smiled at me, then, a betrayed smile: he pulled back from his recitation.

  ‘Go on, Professor Haffner,’ I said then: ‘Please—take your story through.’

  ‘My friend,’ he said: ‘My foreign friend. Naturally we know we are mere material for you: we are curiosities, trapped here in a world you journey through, and leave; and every story should have its untold edge—or why would you come back agai
n? But perhaps the truth in this tale is different from what you expect. What I saw then, on the shore of the White Sea so long ago, you might well find elsewhere. There’s a whisper of unreality about all our lives. That trembling of the light that was in my eyes: have you never seen that? Never felt a single thing beyond the world? Those shafts of insight I was trying to describe to you—they came to me, after such experiences and disillusionments, only after weeks under strange skies, far from the daily world I knew, at the fringe of the Earth. But I had seen them before. I could have told you a very different story—a story from here—and that is what I was telling you by giving you a tale from far away: only if I had described to you the sights I saw in Dresden, in my boyhood days, when the sky turned white and the world disappeared above me, that would have been enough to break and tear your heart.’

  He stood up, and went to the tall windows and opened them. Chill air with the bite of coal dust flowed in.

  ‘Professor,’ I said, and stood behind him: ‘Forgive me’—but he simply gazed out, and, after some moments, waved a hand, in sweeping fashion, to take in the cityscape.

  ‘Fragments,’ he then said: ‘Shattered fragments; not just ruins. They also have their fate, their hidden order, their own narratives to tell. And we too.’

  He turned, and looked at me, as if trying to see beneath my skin, and gave me a wry, crooked smile. ‘I used to have the finest ideas, believe me,’ he said, ‘about the inner meaning of our life: but my ideas and theories are all gone now. I see us more and more as travellers through the rubble: I look on words as tokens, things we have to pick up to shape some structure in the world.’

  ‘And that’s the life we lead? Always in the shadow of a cataclysm?’

  ‘If the world is pulverised, isn’t it for us to piece together the broken shards? We have to sift, and search, and gather up. To find the scattered pieces that belong together. To make our way through time, searching constantly, seeking for the echoes that come to us, the parallels; and then, maybe, patterns appear: a sight, a sound sends us back, or we sense, through some facility, that what we live through will come once more—that we can be lifted from the blur and flow of daily things.’

  ‘Not a very materialist account of man’s life,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ replied Haffner, suddenly almost swaying: he held the door frame; the look of a pursued, exhausted fugitive had come over his face.

  Before us, at the end of the avenue, the two stone piers of the old Frauenkirche stood out in glow cast by the street lights.

  ‘Do you remember it?’ I asked: ‘The way it was?’

  ‘Self-evidently I do,’ he said. ‘It has a different kind of beauty now. A destroyed order is finer than the original. That old stone bell was not only beautiful, and imperial, and grandiose—it was oppressive, too, and vulgar, I would almost like to say; even if it was from a world in harmony, and there was sweetness and charm to it as well.’

  ‘There’s always sweetness and charm in the past,’ I said, but he made no reply. He turned from the view back into his study, and picked up the pack on the desk again, and held it out.

  ‘You’re not a smoker? Want to try? The taste of servitude?’

  ‘You make it sound so tempting. You started with that brand up there, when you were at Belomorsk, on the canal?’

  ‘Later—years later. Those experiences only grew to full significance for me as life went on. I wanted to commemorate what I had seen, and all those forgotten builders of the north: take their spirit into me with every inhaled breath of smoke. I felt my visit to Solovki had shaped me: I even made an attempt to go back there, once, long afterwards, when I had gained some eminence in my chosen field. But something in me baulked at the last moment. I knew it would be the wrong thing to do.’

  ‘Because one should never go back to a place of enlightenment, for fear of disillusion?’

  ‘Because the light of the mind is the strongest of all.’

  He produced a cigarette from the pack: gently, caressingly, he smoothed its rough cardboard tip into even shape.

  ‘The design,’ he said: ‘Doesn’t it tell you everything? The curve of the lettering; the blue blaze slicing through the landscape; the schema of towns and rivers, in place of a realistic map: it is the cigarette of ideology—and of mourning.’

  He struck a match. I got up to go; but, as I did so, something caught my eye.

  ‘What have you there, on your desk, if I may ask?’

  There was a single photo, of a picture, but in black and white, and in a modest frame.

  ‘Surely you know the work,’ said Haffner, and he turned it towards me: ‘The Sistine Madonna of Raphael, that hangs here in Dresden, in the gallery—the most admired painting in the eastern half of Europe!’

  I looked down more closely: the photograph was a mass of greys, fading into and competing with each other; the folds in the rich curtain across the top of the image could only just be distinguished; the two cherub angels peering upwards were no more than smudgy dots. The expression on the Virgin’s face was hard to read—the large Christ child in her arms was a pallid blank.

  ‘It’s difficult to make out,’ I said, cautiously: ‘Usually, we see her in colour.’

  ‘We scarcely her see at all, the museum is so rarely open now,’ Haffner shot back, in tones of bitterness: ‘Or if it is, the great paintings are under restoration for years on end. But before: all the time, we went always; and to see her there, in the gallery, was to look on history; it was to be in a succession line of thought. Every master of old Europe took her as the emblem of perfection; she brought everyone to us: Winckelmann, Wagner, Nietzsche— Dostoyevsky above all.’

  ‘And why? What was it he would have seen in her? You’d think he had other concerns: murders, devils, hallucinations, blood.’

  ‘I don’t know that those concerns are actually very far from the life stories of the figures in this painting,’ said Haffner then: ‘But it was something else, for him, at that stage in his writing. He was beyond fears and loves and longings. He was trying to reach one point: it was the point where words fail. Where emotions dissolve—they lose their tone, and their direction; they become just depth. You feel not sorrow, but pure feeling—it’s the point where there’s nothing we describe. That was what he wanted with her. That’s what all true artists want. The moment where ideas and thought vanish, and feelings stay. The great artists looked into her eyes—and they saw there only depth: pity, sorrow, the acceptance of fate. Of course, Dostoyevsky always cared for the work of Raphael: when he went abroad he would study all the masterpieces of painting he had read about; he hunted the great Madonnas down in their galleries—he found them, in Florence, in Rome; he stared at them, each in turn for hours. But this one was his single, chosen image: this one—he gave his love for her to all his darkest heroes; he had his sketched copy of her like an icon above his working desk. Certainly he also knew this was the last of Raphael’s completed paintings—and every last work has in it the low murmur of what lies ahead. Her eyes see that: and that was what he looked at in her. Perhaps it’s why the Russians felt they had to take possession of the painting, after the war—steal her away.’

  ‘Steal her?’

  ‘Don’t you know the story? You don’t know much, really, about us, do you? And we think so constantly of western things! It’s a story with its own characteristic humour: you would blush to write it in a work of fiction. Picture the scene: the drama’s last stage is already unfolding; the Red Army is advancing; its divisions on the front line see the firestorm rising high above the city; but when they enter Dresden, there is nothing left for them to find. Nothing! All the paintings and treasures from the court collection had been gathered up and sent to safety as soon as the course of the conflict was clear, and the great bomber raids had begun striking night after night into the heart of Germany. They were stored away in a tunnel, deep in a sandstone mine, near Pirna, in the Erzgebirge—but it was a humid sanctuary: the works in their racks and storage
boxes suffered a dreadful fate. Of course, at the close of the last scene there was a liberation—of a kind: there always is. The new masters were on the trail of art: they found the treasure. They behaved just like Bonaparte in Egypt or Italy—they commandeered everything they could: they carried the Madonna away to Pillnitz, to the castle there; then off on a railway flatcar to Moscow. I have heard the story that they even held a secret exhibition of their spoils, in a closed set of galleries at the Pushkin Museum of Art, and all the dignitaries celebrated their final victory over the cultural antiquities of Europe, and drank vodka and champagne. Then Stalin died; there was the uprising in Berlin: the Madonna was sent back as a gesture of fraternal solidarity—to strengthen the friendship between the Soviet and the German peoples. It was the standard rhetoric—that style of language you certainly know very well.’

  Haffner shrugged, as if to indicate a still point where thought could go no further.

  ‘And now,’ he said, ‘we have come at last, through circling ages, through war and peace, to the present time—and the night is late.’

  His manner had suddenly become sombre: he rose. Berenika and I edged along the darkened hallway towards the entrance.

  ‘Indeed, professor,’ I said—but his mood was now quite changed: there was no response to this, in word, or look.

  We made our goodbyes, which were brief, and formal. He shook hands almost dismissively, ushered us out and closed the apartment door.

  Berenika and I walked back through the night, in silence, listening to our footsteps.

  ‘A real eccentric,’ I said, a touch hesitantly, after several minutes, as the hotel’s ill-lit entrance portico loomed out of the murk: ‘And a fine tale.’