‘Don’t let us try to outdo each other in politeness. Tell me simply - do I really mean as much to you as it might appear from the phrases you have uttered at certain times?’
‘You mean everything to me.’I said with complete sincerity.
‘Very well then,’ said Anna. ‘I believe you suggested that we should go for a ride in the carriage? Into the country? Let us go.’
‘This very moment?’
‘Why not?’
I moved closer to her.
‘Anna, you can never
‘I beg you,’ she said, ‘not here.’
Driving out of the gates, I turned the carriage to the right. Anna was sitting beside me, the colour had risen in her cheeks, and she was avoiding looking at me. It began to seem to me that she already regretted what was happening. We drove to the woods in silence; as soon as the vault of green branches had closed over our heads I stopped the horses.
‘Listen, Anna.’ I said, turning towards her. ‘Believe me, I appreciate your impulse immensely, but if you have begun to regret it, then
She did not allow me to finish. She put her arms around my neck and set her lips against my mouth. It happened so quickly that I was still speaking at the moment when she began kissing me. Naturally, I did not value the phrase I was pronouncing so much as to try to stop her.
I have always found kissing to be an extremely strange form of contact between human beings. As far as I am aware, it is one of the innovations introduced by civilization; it is well known that the savages who inhabit the southern isles and the peoples of Africa who have not yet crossed that boundary beyond which the paradise originally intended for man is lost for ever, never kiss at all. Their lovemaking is simple and uncomplicated; possibly the very word ‘love’ is inappropriate for what takes place between them. In essence, love arises in solitude, when its object is absent, and it is directed less at the person whom one loves than at an image constructed by the mind which has only a weak connection with that original. The appearance of true love requires the ability to create chimeras; in kissing me Anna was really kissing the man behind the poems which had affected her so strongly, a man who had never existed. How was she to know that when I wrote the book I was also engaged in a tormented search for him, growing more convinced with each new poem that he could never be found, because he existed nowhere? The words left by him were simply an imposture, like the footsteps carved in the rock by slaves, which the Babylonians used to prove the reality of the descent to earth of some ancient deity.
This last thought was already about Anna. I felt the tender touch of her trembling tongue; between their half-closed lids, her eyes were so close that I felt I could have dived into their moist gleam and dissolved in them for ever. At last we grew short of breath and our first kiss came to an end. Her face turned to the side so that now I saw it in profile; she closed her eyes and ran her tongue across her lips, as though they were dry - all of these small mimetic gestures, which in other circumstances would not have meant a thing, now moved me with a quite unbelievable power. I realized that there was no longer anything keeping us apart, that everything was possible; my hand, from lying on her shoulder, which only a minute ago it would have seemed like sacrilege merely to touch, moved down simply and naturally to her breast. She leaned away from me slightly, but only, as I realized immediately, in order that my hand should not encounter any obstacles in its way.
‘What are you thinking of now?’ she asked. ‘Only honestly.’
‘What am I thinking of?’ I said, moving my hands together behind her neck. ‘Of the fact that progress towards the zenith of happiness is in the literal sense like the ascent of a mountain…’
‘Not like that. Unfasten the hook. No, no. Leave it, let me do it. Forgive me, I interrupted you.’
‘Yes, it is like a difficult and dangerous ascent. As long as the object of desire lies ahead, all of one’s feelings are absorbed in the process of climbing. The next stone on which to set one’s foot, a tuft of grass which one can grab hold of for support. How beautiful you are, Anna… What was it I was saying… Yes, the goal gives all of this meaning, but it is completely absent at any single point in the movement; in essence, the approach to the goal is superior to the goal itself. I believe there was a certain opportunist by the name of Bernsteen who said that movement is all and the goal is nothing
‘Not Bernsteen, but Bernstein. How does this thing undo… Where on earth did you find such a belt?’
‘My God, Anna, do you want me to go insane
‘Carry on talking,’ she said, looking up for just a second, ‘but don’t be offended if I am unable to maintain the conversation for a while.’
‘Yes,’ I continued, leaning my head back and closing my eyes, ‘but the most important thing here is that as soon as one has ascended the summit, as soon as the goal has been attained, at that very moment it disappears. In its essence, like all objects created by the mind, it is ultimately elusive. Imagine it yourself, Anna, when one dreams of the most beautiful of women, she is present in one’s imagination in all the perfection of her beauty, but when she is actually there in one’s arms, all of that disappears. What one is dealing with then is reduced to a set of the most simple and often rather crude sensations, which, moreover, one normally experiences in the dark… O-o-oh… But no matter how they may rouse the blood, the beauty which was calling to you only a minute before disappears, to be replaced by something, to strive for which was ridiculous. It means that beauty is unattainable. Or rather, it is attainable, but only in itself, while that goal which reason intoxicated by passion seeks behind it, simply does not exist. From the very beginning beauty is actually… No, I cannot go on. Come here… yes, like that. Yes. Yes. Is that comfortable? Oh, my God… What did you say was the name of the man who said that about the movement and the goal?’
‘Bernstein,’ Anna whispered in my ear.
‘Does it not seem to you that his words apply very well to love?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered, gently biting the lobe of my ear. ‘The goal is nothing, but the movement is everything.’
‘Then move, move, I implore you.’
‘And you talk, talk
‘Of what exactly?’
‘Of anything at all, just talk. I want to hear your voice when it happens.’
‘By all means. To continue that idea… Imagine that everything which a beautiful woman can give one adds up to one hundred per cent.’
‘You bookkeeper…’
‘Yes, one hundred. In that case, she gives ninety per cent of that when one simply sees her, and everything else, the object of a thousand years of haggling, is no more than an insignificant remainder. Nor can that first ninety per cent be subdivided into any component fractions, because beauty is indefinable and indivisible, no matter what lies Schopenhauer may try to tell us. As for the other ten per cent, it is no more than an aggregate sum of nerve signals which would be totally without value if they were not lent support by imagination and memory. Anna, I beg you, open your eyes for a second… Yes, like that,… yes, precisely imagination and memory. You know, if I had to write a genuinely powerful erotic scene, I would merely provide a few hints and fill in the rest with an incomprehensible conversation like the… Oh, my God, Anna… Like the one which you and I are having now. Because there is nothing to depict, everything has to be tilled in by the mind. The deception, and perhaps the very greatest of a woman’s secrets… Oh, my little girl from the old estate… consists in the fact that beauty seems to be a label, behind which there lies concealed something immeasurably greater, something inexpressibly more desired than itself, to which it merely points the way, whereas in actual fact, there is nothing in particular standing behind it… A golden label on an empty bottle… A shop where everything is displayed in a magnificently arranged window-setting, but that tiny, tender, narrow little room behind it… Please, please, my darling, not so fast… Yes, that room is empty. Remember the poem I recited to those unfortunates. About the princess and the bagel… A-a-ah, Ann
a… No matter how temptingly it might lure one, the moment comes when one realizes that at the centre of that black bage… bagel… bagel… there is nothing but a void, voi-oid, voi-oi-oooid!’
‘Voyd!’ someone yelled once again behind the door. ‘Are you in there?’
‘Merde,’ I muttered, getting up from the bed and casting a crazed glance around my room. Outside the window the twilight was thickening. ‘Damn you to hell! What do you want?’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Come in.’
The door swung open, revealing a blond-haired, bow-legged hulk of an individual standing in the doorway. In theory he was my orderly, but after several weeks of the demoralizing in flu ence of the Reds, it was no longer quite clear just exactly what he had on his mind, and so now every evening, just to be on the safe side, I pulled off my own boots.
‘What, sleeping, was you?’ he asked, looking round the room. ‘Woke you up, did I? Sorry. You give us a real surprise today. Here’s a present as the men wants you to have.’
Some object wrapped in newspaper flopped down on to the bed in front of me; it had a strangely familiar smell. I unwrapped the bundle. Inside there was a bagel, one of those that were sold in the bakery on the main square, except that it was black, and it smelt of the coal-tar dubbin which the soldiers used for blacking their boots.
‘Don’t you like it, then?’ he asked.
1 looked up at him, and he immediately took a step backwards; before I could find the butt of my Browning in my pocket, he had disappeared from the doorway, and the three bullets which I fired into the empty rectangle ricocheted off the stone wall of the corridor like the song of angels.
‘All. Women. Suck.’ I said in a loud voice, and collapsed back on to the bed.
For a long time no one disturbed me. Outside the window I could hear constant drunken laughter; several shots were fired and then apparently a long, feebly fought fight broke out. To judge from the sounds that reached my ears, the concert had developed into an evening of total outrage, and it was very doubtful whether anybody at all was capable of controlling this tempest of the people’s rage, as the St Petersburg liberals had liked to call it. Then I heard quiet steps in the corridor. I felt a brief, fleeting hope - after all, I thought, there are such things as prophetic dreams - but it was so weak, that when I saw the broad-shouldered figure of Kotovsky in the doorway, I was not really disappointed. It even seemed rather funny to me that he should have come back to continue haggling over the trotters and the cocaine.
Kotovsky was wearing a brown two-piece suit; perched on his head was a dandified hat with a wide brim, and he had a leather portmanteau in each hand. He set them down on the floor and raised two fingers to his forehead.
‘Good evening, Pyotr,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to say goodbye.’
‘Are you leaving?’ I asked.
‘Yes. And I have no idea why you are staying,’ said Kotovsky. ‘Tomorrow or the next day these weavers will torch the entire place. I simply cannot understand what Chapaev is hoping for.’
‘He was intending to resolve that problem today.’
Kotovsky shrugged.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘problems can be resolved in various ways: you can simply drink yourself into a fog, and then for a while they will disappear. But I prefer to deal with them, to sort them out - at least until they begin to sort me out. The train leaves at eight o’clock this evening. It is still not too late. Five days, and we are in Paris.’
‘I am staying.’
Kotovsky looked at me carefully.
‘You do realize that you are mad?’ he asked.
‘Of course.’
‘It will all end with the three of you being arrested and that Furmanov in supreme command.’
That does not frighten me,’ I said.
‘You mean you are not afraid of arrest? Of course, all of us in the Russian intelligentsia do retain a certain secret freedom a la Pushkine, even in the madhouse, and it is possible…’
I laughed. ‘Kotovsky, you have a quite remarkable talent for detecting the rhythm of my own thought. I was actually pondering on that very theme only today, and I can tell you what the secret freedom of the Russian intellectual really consists of.’
‘If it will not take too long, I should be most obliged to you.’ he replied.
‘A year ago, I think it was, there was a most interesting event in St Petersburg. Several social democrats arrived from England - of course, they were appalled by what they found - and we had a meeting with them on Basseinaya Street, organized through the Union of Poets. Blok was there, and he spent the whole evening telling them about this secret freedom which, as he said, we all laud, following Pushkin. That was the last time I saw him, he was dressed all in black and quite inexpressibly morose. Then he left and the Englishmen, who naturally had not understood a thing, began asking us exactly what this secret freedom was; nobody could give them a proper answer, until a Romanian who happened for some reason to be travelling with the Englishmen said that he understood what was meant.’
‘I see.’ said Kotovsky, and he glanced at his watch.
‘No need for concern, this will not take long. He said that the Romanian language has a similar idiom - haz baragaz, or something of the kind - I forget the exact pronunciation, but the words literally mean «underground laughter». Apparently, during the Middle Ages Romania was frequently invaded by all sorts of nomadic tribes, and so the peasants constructed immense dugouts, entire underground houses, into which they drove their livestock the moment a cloud of dust appeared on the horizon. They themselves hid in these places as well, and since the dugouts were quite excellently camouflaged, the nomads could never find a thing. Naturally, when they were underground the peasants were very quiet, but just occasionally, when they were quite overcome by joy at their own cunning in deceiving everyone, they would cover their mouths with their hands and laugh very, very quietly. There is your secret freedom, the Romanian said, it is when you are sitting wedged in among a herd of foul-smelling goats and sheep and you point up at the roof with your finger and giggle very, very quietly. You know, Kotovsky, it was such a very apt description of the situation, that from that evening onwards I ceased being a member of the Russian intelligentsia. Underground giggling is not for me. Freedom cannot be secret.’
‘Interesting,’ said Kotovsky. ‘Interesting. But I am afraid it is time for me to be going.’
‘Let me see you to the gate.’ I said, rising to my feet. ‘There is the very devil of a commotion out there in the yard.’
‘As I was saying.’
I put the Browning into my pocket, picked up one of Kotovsky’s portmanteaus and was on the point of following him along the corridor when I was suddenly struck by a strange presentiment that I was seeing my room for the very last time. I halted in the doorway and looked around it carefully; two light armchairs, a bed, a small table with copies of Isis for 1915. My God, I thought, if things really are that bad, what does it matter that I shall never come back here? What does it matter that I do not know where I am going? How many places have I already left behind for ever?
‘Have you forgotten something?’ asked Kotovsky.
‘No, it’s nothing,’ I replied.
The sight that greeted us when we emerged on to the porch of the manor-house reminded me in some indefinable manner of Briullov’s painting The Last Day of Pompeii. There were not actually any collapsing columns or clouds of smoke against a black sky, just two large bonfires burning in the darkness and blind-drunk weavers wandering everywhere. But the way in which they slapped one another on the shoulder, the way they stopped to relieve themselves in public or to raise a bottle to their lips, the way some half-naked, drunken women were laughing as they staggered around the yard, together with the menacing red glow of the fires that illuminated the entire Bacchanalian scene - all served to induce a sense of impending menace, final and implacable.
We walked quickly to the gate without speaking; some men with rifles sitting by
one of the bonfires waved for us to join them and yelled something indistinct, and Kotovsky nervously stuck his hand in his pocket. Nobody fell in behind us, thank God, but the last few yards to the gate, when our defenceless backs were exposed to this entire drunken rabble, seemed extremely long. We went out of the gate and walked on another twenty steps or so, and then I halted. The street winding spiral-fashion down the hill was deserted: a few street lamps were burning, and the damp cobblestones gleamed dully under their calm light.
‘I will not go any further.’ I said. ‘I wish you luck.’
‘And I you. Who knows, perhaps we shall meet again some time.’ he said with a strange smile. ‘Or hear news of each other.’
We shook hands. He raised two fingers to the brim of his hat once again, and without turning to look back, he set off down the street. I watched his broad figure until it disappeared round a bend, and then began slowly walking back. I stopped at the gates and glanced in through them cautiously. The window of Chapaev’s study was in darkness. I suddenly realized why I had felt such horror at the sight I had seen in the yard - there was something about it which reminded me of the world of Baron Jungern. I did not feel the slightest desire to walk back past the bonfires and the drunken weavers.
I realized where Chapaev might be. I walked along the fence for another forty yards, then glanced around. There was no one in sight. Jumping up, I grabbed hold of the top plank, managed somehow to haul myself up and over it and jumped down.
It was dark here; the flames of the bonfires were hidden behind the dark silhouette of the silent manor-house. Feeling my way by touch between the trees still wet from the recent rain, I scrambled down the slope into the gully, then slipped and slid into it on my back. The invisible brook was babbling somewhere off to my right; I walked towards it with my hands extended in front of me and after a few steps I glimpsed the brightly lit window of the bathhouse between the trunks of the trees.
‘Come in, Petka,’ Chapaev shouted in response to my knock.
He was sitting at the familiar rough wooden table, which once again bore a huge bottle of moonshine, several glasses and plates, a kerosene lamp and a plump file full of papers; he was wearing a long white Russian shirt outside his trousers, unbuttoned to the navel, and he was already extremely drunk.
Buddha's Little Finger Page 33
