by Boris Akunin
“You believe that every person can be helped?” his listener asked in surprise, throwing her hands up in the air. “But surely there are aberrations that are very difficult to cure? For instance, chronic alcoholism, or even worse, opium addiction!”
“In fact that's a very simple matter,” the doctor said with a condescending smile. “That was what I began my experiments with. I have an island of my own in the Indian Ocean, a long way from the sea lanes, where I put the most hopeless alcoholics and drug addicts. There are no intoxicating substances at all to be found on the island, not for any money. In fact, money has no value there in any case. Once every three months a schooner comes from the Maldives, bringing everything the people need.”
“And don't they run away?”
“Anyone who wants to go back to the old life is free to sail away on the schooner. No one is held there by force. I don't believe in depriving a human being of the right to choose. If he wants to destroy himself, well then, that is his right. And so the real difficulty is presented not by slaves of the bottle and the hookah, but by people with anomalies to which the key is not so easy to find. I work with patients like that here, on Canaan. Sometimes successfully and sometimes—alas.” Korovin sighed. “The person living in cottage number eighteen here is a railway telegrapher who claims that he was abducted by the inhabitants of another planet who took him away and kept him on that planet for several years, which were much longer than years here on earth, because the sun there is much bigger than ours.”
“Quite a subtle observation for a simple telegrapher,” Polina Andreevna remarked.
“Oh, that's nothing. You should hear him talk about that Woofer of his (that's what the planet is called)—Jonathan Swift and Jules Verne combined are no match for him! Such vivid descriptions! Such technical detail—it's quite fascinating. And the language! He is giving me lessons in the language of Woofer. I even began compiling a special glossary in order to catch him out. And would you believe it: he has never made a single mistake—he remembers all the words! And the grammar is remarkably logical, far more elegant than any earth language that I know!”
Lisitsyna clasped her hands together—she found this story about another planet so interesting. “And how does he explain his return to earth?”
“He says they told him straightaway that they were only taking him for a while, just for a visit, and they would bring him back safe and unharmed. He also claims that a lot of visitors from earth have been to Woofer, but they wipe most of their memories clean in order not to make things difficult for them when they return here. But my patient asked them to leave him all his memories, and now he is paying the price. By the way, remind me to tell you about another case of the caprices of memory …”
It was clear that Korovin had mounted his favorite hobbyhorse and would go on talking for some time, but the last thing Polina Andreevna wanted was for him to stop.
“He says that the Wooferians have been observing life on earth for a very long time, centuries, in fact.”
“But why don't they show themselves?”
“From their point of view, we are still too savage. First we have to solve our own problems and stop tormenting one another. Only after that will we mature sufficiently for interplanetary contact. According to their calculations, it could happen in the year 2080, but that's only in the very best case.”
“Ah, such a long time,” Lisitsyna said, disappointed. “You and I will not live to see it.”
Donat Savvich smiled. “Come now, these are the ravings of a sick imagination, no matter how coherent they might be. In actual fact our telegrapher never went anywhere. He was out hunting with friends and winged a duck. He waded into the rushes for his trophy and was gone for no more than five minutes. He came back without the duck or his gun, behaving very strangely, and immediately started telling his friends about the planet Woofer. He was taken straight from the swamp to the district hospital, and many months later he arrived here. I am struggling with him, struggling really hard. The important thing in his case is to punch a hole in his shell of logic, to discredit his ravings. So far I haven't managed it.”
“Ah, how very interesting,” Polina Andreevna sighed dreamily.
“It most certainly is,” the doctor said, with the air of a collector proudly demonstrating the most important treasures in his collection. “The telegrapher does at least behave in the usual way (if you don't count the fact that he sleeps during the day and spends the whole night looking up at the stars). But you remember I mentioned a maniac who wants to live forever, as I did in my youth? His name is Weller, in cottage number nine. He is totally obsessed with his own health and longevity. He very probably will live until 2080, when the people from the planet Woofer come to introduce themselves to us. He eats nothing but healthful food, calculating its chemical composition precisely. He lives in a room that is hermetically sealed and sterilized and always wears gloves. The only contact the staff and I have with him is through a window covered with gauze. Weller was taken into a psychiatric clinic after he voluntarily submitted to castration—he claims that every ejaculation of sperm takes away two days’ worth of vital energy, which is why men live on average eight years less than women.”
“But without fresh air and exercise he won't live very long!”
“Don't worry, Weller has everything worked out. First, a complex ventilation system made according to his own drawings has been installed in the cottage. Second, from morning till night he does gymnastics or deep breathing exercises, or pours hot and cold water over himself—distilled, of course. For an hour each day he takes a walk in the fresh air, with the most incredible precautions. He never touches the ground with his feet: he learned how to walk on stilts especially ‘to avoid breathing in the vapors of the soil.’ The stilts stand on the porch, outside the house, and so Weller never touches them at all unless he is wearing gloves. Weller out walking is a sight, I can tell you! Come and admire him someday between nine and ten in the morning. Completely covered in a suit of oilcloth, with a respiratory mask on his face, striding over the ground on his wooden poles: boom, boom, boom. Like the Commander's statue in Don Juan!”
The doctor laughed, and Polina Andreevna gladly joined in.
“And what was it you wanted to tell me about the caprices of memory?” she asked, still smiling. “Something else funny?”
“On the contrary. Something very sad. I have a female patient here who wakes up every morning and always returns to the same day, the most terrible day of her life, when she received the news of her husband's death. On that day she screamed, fainted, and lay unconscious right through the night. Every morning since then she thinks that she hasn't woken up from sleep, but come around after her fainting fit, and the terrible news only arrived the evening before. It is as if time has stopped for her, and the pain of her loss is not blunted at all. She opens her eyes in the morning, and immediately there are screams, tears, hysterics … She has been assigned a special doctor who tries to comfort her by making her understand that the disaster happened a long time ago, seven years ago in fact. At first, of course, she doesn't believe him. The first half of the day is spent in presenting her with proofs and explanations. By lunchtime the patient allows herself to be convinced, calms down a little, and starts asking what has happened during those seven years, taking a very lively interest in everything. By the evening she is already quite calm and pacified. She goes to bed with a smile and sleeps like a little child. But in the morning she wakes up and everything starts all over again; the grief, the sobbing, the attempts at suicide. I struggle and struggle, but so far I haven't been able to do anything. The mechanism of psychological shock has been too little studied as yet—I have to grope my way forward. Working with this patient is very hard, with the same thing being repeated day after day. The doctors can never stand it for more than two or three weeks—I have to replace them …”
Noticing that his listener had tears in her eyes, Donat Savvich said cheerfully, “Come now. Not all of
my patients are unhappy. There is one who is perfectly happy. Do you see the picture?”
The doctor pointed to the octopus that we have already mentioned. Polina Andreevna had been glancing at it throughout their conversation; there was something special about that canvas—it held her gaze in a firm grip, never releasing it for long.
“It is by Konon Yoshihin. Have you heard the name?”
“No. It is amazingly done!”
“Yoshihin is a genius,” Korovin said with a nod. “A quite genuine, unadulterated genius. You know, he is one of those artists who paint as if no painting had ever existed before them—no Raphael, no Goya, no Cézanne, nobody at all until Konon Yoshihin, the first artist on earth, was born and began bringing the canvas to life beneath his brush.”
“Yoshihin? No, I don't know him.”
“Naturally. Not many people know Yoshihin—only a few connoisseurs of art, and they are sure that he died a long time ago. Because Konon Petrovich is totally insane, he hasn't come out of cottage number three in more than five years, and before that he spent ten years in an ordinary insane asylum where the idiot doctors who wanted to restore Yoshihin to the ‘norm’ would not give him any paints or pencils.”
“What form does his insanity take?” asked Polina Andreevna, still looking at the octopus; the longer she looked at it, the more it mesmerized her with its strange gaze.
“Do you remember what Pushkin said about genius and villainy being incompatible? Yoshihin's example shows that they are in fact perfectly compatible. Konon Petrovich is a spontaneous natural villain. His passion for art obliterated every other feeling in his soul. Not straightaway, but gradually. The only living creature that Yoshihin loved, and loved with passion, was his daughter, a lovely, quiet girl who lost her mother early and was slowly dying of consumption. For months he hardly left her bedside at all, except perhaps to work on a painting for an hour or two in his studio. Eventually he even moved his canvas into the child's bedroom in order not to leave her at all. He didn't eat, drink, or sleep. People who saw Yoshihin in those days say that he looked absolutely awful: his hair was matted, he didn't shave, and his shirt was spattered all over with paint. He was painting his daughter's portrait, knowing that it would be the last. He wouldn't let anyone into the room; he did everything himself—he gave the girl a drink, or medicine, or food, and then grabbed his brush again. And when the child's death agony began, Yoshihin fell into an absolute frenzy, not from grief, but from delight—the play of light and shade was so wonderful on the emaciated little face contorted in agony. The people gathered in the next room heard pitiful groans from behind the locked door. The dying girl was weeping and begging for water, but in vain—Yoshihin could not tear himself away from his painting. When they finally broke the door down, the little girl had already passed away, but Yoshihin had not even looked at her, he was still correcting something on his canvas. They took the daughter away to the cemetery and the father to the insane asylum. And the picture, even though it was still unfinished, was exhibited in the Paris Salon under the title La morte triomphante and won the gold medal.”
“The father's reason broke down under the grief and he erected defenses in the form of art”—such was kindhearted Polina Andreevna's interpretation of the story she had just heard.
“Do you think so?” Donat Savvich took off his spectacles, wiped them, and put them back on again. “But when I study Yoshihin's case, I come to the conclusion that a truly gigantic genius cannot mature completely without the necrosis of certain regions of the soul. By destroying the final remnants of human feeling within himself, including his love for his daughter, Konon Petrovich liberated himself completely for art. The things he now creates for himself in cottage number three will one day adorn the finest galleries in the world. And then who among our grateful descendants will recall the little girl who cried and died without quenching her final thirst? I have absolutely no doubt that my clinic, I myself, and even the island of Canaan will only be remembered by the generations to come because a genius lived and worked here. By the way, would you like to take a look at Yoshihin and his pictures?”
Mrs. Lisitsyna hesitated for a moment before answering rather uncertainly: “Yes … I suppose I would.”
She thought a little longer, nodded to herself, and said in a firmer voice, “I definitely would. Take me there.”
‘Warm, Warmer, Hot
BEFORE SHE SET out to visit Dr. Korovin, Lisitsyna had called in at her hotel, where she had exchanged her light talma for a long black cloak with a hood—evidently in anticipation of the coolness of evening. However, even though the sun was not bright, in the course of the day it had warmed the air quite well, and there was no need to put on the cloak for a walk around the grounds of the clinic. Polina Andreevna limited herself to throwing a scarf across her shoulders, and Korovin went just as he was, in his waistcoat and frock coat.
Cottage number three stood on the very edge of the pine-forested hill that Korovin rented from the monastery. With its smoothly plastered white walls, the cottage did not strike Polina Andreevna as being in any way remarkable, especially in comparison with the other cottages, many of which were quite astounding in their quaint whimsicality.
“All the magic here is inside,” Donat Savvich explained. “Yoshihin is not concerned about what his dwelling looks like from the outside, and anyway, as I told you, he never comes out.”
They walked in without knocking. It became clear why a little later: the artist would not have heard them anyway, and if he had heard, he would not have answered.
Polina saw that the cottage consisted of one room with five large windows—one in each wall and another in the ceiling. There was no furniture at all to be seen in the studio: Yoshihin probably ate and slept right there on the floor.
However, before the visitor could take a good look at the contents of the room, her attention was captured by the walls and the ceiling of this peculiar dwelling. All the internal surfaces, apart from the floor and the windows, were covered with canvas, almost all of which had been painted with oil paints. The ceiling was a painting of the night sky, so precise and convincing that if it were not for the square of glass through which clouds tinted pink by the sunset could be seen, it would have been very easy to fall into the error of imagining that there was no roof at all. One of the walls, the north-facing one, depicted a pine grove; another, facing east, showed a shallow slope leading down to a small river and a farm; on the western-facing wall there was a meadow and two cottages standing side by side; and on the southern-facing one there were bushes. It was not hard to see that the artist had reproduced the views outside his windows with astounding precision. But the scenes in Yoshi-hin's landscapes had turned out far richer, with more palpable space, so the originals that could be seen outside looked like pale copies of the paintings.
“In his present period he is passionately enthusiastic about landscapes,” Donat Savvich explained in a low voice, indicating the artist, who was standing by the east-facing wall with his back to his visitors and working away intently with a little brush without even bothering to glance around. “At the moment he is painting a cycle entitled Times of the Day. Look: this is dawn, this is morning, this is afternoon, this is evening, and the painting on the ceiling is night. The important thing is to be sure to change the canvases in time, or he will start painting a new picture straight on top of the old one. Over the years I have accumulated a substantial collection—someday I shall recover all my outlays on the clinic,” Korovin joked. “Or if I don't, my heirs will.”
Lisitsyna cautiously approached the genius, who was working on the “evening” wall, from the side, in order to get a better look at him.
She saw the profile of a thin face that wore a constant grimace, with graying, dirty hair hanging down over the forehead, a greasy stained blouse, and a thread of spittle dangling from a drooping lower lip.
On closer inspection the picture itself produced an equally unpleasant, although decidedly powerful, impressio
n on the visitor. Beyond the slightest doubt it was a work of genius: the brightly lit windows of the two cottages, the moon hanging above their roofs, and the dark silhouettes of the pines all emanated an air of mystery, horror, and death—it was not simply an evening but some all-encompassing Evening, the precursor of eternal darkness and silence. “Why is it that in art the repellent and the hideous are more compelling than the beautiful and the uplifting?” Polina Andreevna asked with a shudder. “It never happens in nature; the repellent is present there too, but it is created only to serve as a foil for the beautiful.”
“You speak of the creation of the Heavenly Artist, but art is produced by earthbound creators,” the doctor replied, following the movements of the brush. “Here you have yet another confirmation that artists can trace their family tree back to the rebellious angel Satan. Konon Petro-vich!” he said, suddenly raising his voice and slapping the painter on the shoulder. “What's that you've depicted there?”
Lisitsyna saw that something strange had been painted a little to one side of one of the cottages, at the level of its roof: an unnaturally elongated figure in a black robe with a pointed hood, with long, thin legs like a spider's. The young lady instinctively glanced out the window, but she did not see anything of the kind out there. “It's a monk,” she said in an emphatically naïve voice. “But he looks rather strange.”
