‘Why not?’ asked Chapaev. ‘There is a way.’
‘Do you know it?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Chapaev.
‘Perhaps you would share it with us?’
‘Gladly,’ said Chapaev, and he clicked his fingers.
The Bashkir seemed to have been waiting for precisely this signal. Setting his lamp on the floor, he ducked nimbly under the railings, leaned out in the darkness over the invisible elements of the carriage coupling and began making rapid movements with his hands. There was a dull clanging sound and the Bashkir returned to the platform with the same alacrity with which he had left it.
The dark carriage wall facing us began slowly receding.
I looked up at Chapaev. He met my gaze calmly.
‘It is getting cold,’ he said, as though nothing had happened. ‘Let us return to the table.’
‘I will follow on after you,’ I replied.
Left alone on the platform, I went on gazing into the distance for some time. I could still make out the singing of the weavers, but with every second that passed the string of carriages fell further and further behind; suddenly they seemed to me like a tail cast off by a fleeing lizard. It was a beautiful sight. Oh, if only it were really possible, as simply as Chapaev had parted from these men, to leave behind me that dark crowd of false identities which had been tearing my soul apart for so many years!
Soon I began to feel cold. Turning back into the carriage and closing the door behind me, I felt my way along by touch. When I reached the staff carriage I felt such a great weariness that without even pausing to shake the snowflakes from my jacket, I went straight into my compartment and collapsed on to the bed.
I could hear Chapaev and Anna talking and laughing in the saloon car.
‘Pyotr!’ Chapaev shouted. ‘Don’t go to sleep! Come and join us!’
After the cold wind which had chilled me through on the platform, the warm air in the compartment was remarkably pleasant. It even began to feel more like water than air, as though at long last I were taking the hot bath I had been dreaming about for so many days. When the sensation became absolutely real, I realized that I was falling asleep, which I might have guessed anyway from the fact that instead of Chaliapin, the gramophone suddenly began playing the same Mozart fugue with which my day had begun. I sensed that I should not on any account fall asleep, but there was no longer anything I could do to resist; having abandoned the struggle, I hurtled down headlong between the minor piano chords into the same stairwell of emptiness which had so astounded me that morning.
4
‘Hey there! No sleeping!’
Someone shook me carefully by the shoulder. I lifted my head, opened my eyes and saw a face I did not recognize, round and plump, framed in a painstakingly tended beard. Although it wore an affable smile, it did not arouse any desire to smile in return. I understood why immediately – it was the combination of the carefully trimmed beard with a smoothly shaven skull. The gentleman leaning over me reminded me of one of those speculators trading in anything they could lay their hands on who appeared in such abundance in St Petersburg immediately after the start of the war. As a rule they came from the Ukraine and had two distinguishing features – a monstrous amount of vitality and an interest in the latest occult trends in the capital.
‘Vladimir Volodin,’ the man introduced himself. ‘Just call me Volodin. Since you’ve decided to lose your memory one more time, we might as well introduce ourselves all over again.’
‘Pyotr,’ I said.
‘Better not make any sudden movements, Pyotr,’ said Volodin. ‘While you were still sleeping they gave you four cc’s of taurepam, so your morning’s going to be a bit on the gloomy side. Don’t be too surprised if you find the things or people around you depressing or repulsive.’
‘Oh, my friend,’ I said, ‘it is a long time now since I have been surprised by that kind of thing.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘what I mean is that the situation you find yourself in might seem quite unbearably loathsome. Inexpressibly, inhumanly monstrous and absurd. Entirely incompatible with life.’
‘And what should I do?’
‘Take no notice. It’s just the injection.’
‘I shall try.’
‘Splendid.’
I suddenly noticed that this Volodin was entirely naked. Moreover, he was wet and he was squatting on a tiled floor, on to which copious amounts of water were dripping from his body. But what was most intolerable in this entire spectacle was a certain relaxed freedom in his pose, an elusive monkey-like lack of constraint in the way he rested his long sinewy arm against the tiles. This lack of constraint somehow seemed to proclaim that the world around us is such that it is only natural and normal for large hairy men to sit on the floor in such a state – and that if anyone thinks otherwise, then he will certainly find life difficult.
What he had said about the injection seemed to be true. Something strange really was happening to my perception of the world. For several seconds Volodin had existed all alone, without any background, like a photograph in a residence permit. Having inspected his face and body in their full detail, I suddenly began to think about where all this was happening, and it was only after I had done so that the place actually came into being – at least, that was how I experienced it.
The space around us was a large room covered throughout with white tiles, with five cast-iron baths standing in a row on the floor. I was lying in one of the end baths and I suddenly realized with disgust that the water in it was rather cold. Offering a final smile of encouragement, Volodin turned round on the spot and from his squatting position leapt with revolting agility into the bath next to mine, scarcely even raising a splash in the process.
In addition to Volodin, I could see two other people in the room: a long-haired, blue-eyed blond with a sparse beard who looked like an ancient Slavic knight, and a dark-haired young man with a rather feminine, pale face and an excessively developed musculature. They were looking at me expectantly.
‘Seems like you really don’t remember us,’ the bearded blond said after several seconds of silence. ‘Semyon Serdyuk.’
‘Pyotr,’ I replied.
‘Maria,’ said the young man in the far bath.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Maria, Maria,’ he repeated, obviously annoyed. ‘It’s a name. You know, there was a writer, Erich Maria Remarque? I was named after him.’
‘I have not come across him,’ I replied. ‘He must be one of the new wave.’
‘And then there was Rainer Maria Rilke. Haven’t you heard of him either?’
‘Why, certainly I have heard of him. We are even acquainted.’
‘Well then, he was Rainer Maria, and I’m just Maria.’
‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘but I seem to recognize your voice. Was it not by any chance you who related that strange story with the aeroplane, about Russia’s alchemical wedlock with the West and so forth?’
‘Yes,’ replied Maria, ‘but what do you find so strange about it?’
‘Nothing in general terms,’ I said, ‘but for some reason I had the impression that you were a woman.’
‘Well, in a certain sense, that’s right,’ replied Maria. ‘According to the boss here, my false personality is definitely that of a woman. You wouldn’t by any chance be a heterosexual chauvinist would you?’
‘Certainly not,’ I said, ‘I am simply surprised at how easily you accept that this personality is false. Do you really believe that?’
‘I don’t believe anything at all,’ said Maria. ‘My concussion’s to blame for everything. And they keep me here because the boss is writing his dissertation.’
‘But who is this boss?’ I asked in bewilderment, hearing the word a second time.
‘Timur Timurovich,’ Maria replied. ‘The head of the department. False personalities are his line.’
‘That’s not exactly right,’ Volodin countered. ‘The title of the dissertation he is working on is
“The Split False Personality”. Maria here is a fairly simple and uncomplicated case and you really have to strain the term a bit to talk about him having a split personality, but you, Pyotr, are a prize exhibit. Your false personality is developed in such fine detail that it outweighs the real one and almost entirely displaces it. And the way it’s split is simply magnificent.’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ objected Serdyuk, who had so far remained silent. ‘Pyotr’s case isn’t really very complicated. At a structural level it’s no different from Maria’s. Both of them have identified with names, only Maria’s identification is with the first name, and Pyotr’s is with the surname. But Pyotr’s displacement is stronger. He can’t even remember his surname. Sometimes he calls himself Fourply, sometimes something else.’
‘Then what is my surname?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Your surname is Voyd,’ Volodin replied, ‘and your madness is caused by your denying the existence of your own personality and replacing it with another, totally invented one.’
‘Although in structural terms, I repeat, it’s not a complicated case,’ added Serdyuk.
I was annoyed – I found the idea of some strange psychic deviant telling me that my case was not complicated rather offensive.
‘Gentlemen, you are reasoning like doctors,’ I said. ‘Does that not seem to you to represent a certain incongruity?’
‘What kind of incongruity?’
‘Everything would be perfectly fine,’ I said, ‘if you were standing here in white coats. But why are you lying here yourselves, if you understand everything so very clearly?’
Volodin looked at me for several seconds without speaking.
‘I am the victim of an unfortunate accident,’ he said.
Serdyuk and Maria burst into loud laughter.
‘And as for me,’ said Serdyuk, ‘I haven’t even got any false personalities. Just an ordinary suicide attempt due to chronic alcoholism. They’re keeping me here because you can’t build a dissertation around just three cases. Just to round out the statistics.’
‘Never mind all that,’ said Maria. ‘You’re next in line for the garrotte. Then we’ll hear all about your alcoholic suicide.’
By this time I felt thoroughly chilled; furthermore, I was unable to decide whether the explanation lay in the injection which, according to Volodin, ought to have made everything that was happening to me seem intolerable, or whether the water really was as cold as it seemed.
Thankfully, however, the door opened at this point and two men in white coats entered the room. I remembered that one of them was called Zherbunov, the other Barbolin. Zherbunov held a large hourglass in his hand, while Barbolin was carrying an immense heap of linen.
‘Out we get,’ said Zherbunov merrily, waving the timer in front of him.
They wiped down each of us in turn with huge fluffy sheets and helped us to put on identical pyjamas with horizontal stripes, which immediately lent events a certain naval flavour. Then they led us out through the door and down a long corridor, which also seemed somehow familiar – not the corridor itself, however, but the vaguely medical smell that hung in its air.
‘Tell me,’ I said quietly to Zherbunov, who was walking along just behind me, ‘why am I here?’
He opened his eyes wide in surprise.
‘As if you didn’t know,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I am prepared to admit that I am not well, but what was the cause? Have I been here for a long time? And what specific acts am I actually charged with?’
‘Ask Timur Timurovich all your questions,’ said Zherbunov. ‘We’ve no time for idle chatter.’
I felt extremely depressed. We stopped at a white door bearing the number ‘7’. Barbolin opened it with a key and they allowed us through into a rather large room with four beds standing along the wall. The beds were made, there was a table by the barred window and standing by the wall was something that looked like a combination of a couch and a low armchair, with elastic loops for the sitter’s hands and feet. Despite these loops, there was nothing at all menacing about the contrivance. Its appearance was emphatically medical, and the absurd phrase ‘urological chair’ even came into my mind.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, turning to Volodin, ‘but is this the garrotte of which you spoke?’
Volodin gave me a brief glance and nodded towards the door. I turned to look. Timur Timurovich was standing in the doorway.
‘Garrotte?’ he asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘The garrotte, if I am not mistaken, is a chair on which people were executed by strangulation in medieval Spain, is that not so? What a dark and depressive perception of surrounding reality! Of course you, Pyotr, had your injection this morning, so it’s nothing to be surprised at. But you, Vladimir? I am astonished, astonished.’
As he rattled off this speech, Timur Timurovich gestured for Zherbunov and Barbolin to leave and walked to the centre of the room.
‘It’s not a garrotte at all,’ he said. ‘It’s a perfectly ordinary couch for our group therapy sessions. You, Pyotr, have already attended one of these sessions, immediately after you returned to us from the isolation ward, but you were in rather poor condition, so it’s unlikely that you can remember anything.’
‘That is not the case,’ I said, ‘I do remember something.’
‘All the better. Then let me briefly remind you what takes place here. The method which I have developed and employ could be provisionally classified as turbo-Jungian. You are, of course, acquainted with the views of Jung…’
‘I beg your pardon, of whom?’
‘Karl Gustav Jung. Very well, I perceive that your mental activity is currently subject to powerful censorship from your false personality. And since your false personality is living in 1918 or 1919, we should hardly be surprised if you seem unable to remember who he is – or perhaps you really never have heard of Jung?’
I shrugged my shoulders in a dignified manner.
‘To put it simply, there was a psychologist by the name of Jung. His therapeutic methods were based on a very simple principle. He attempted to draw to the surface of his patient’s consciousness the symbols which he could use to form a diagnosis. By means of deciphering them, that is.’
At this point Timur Timurovich gave a cunning little smile.
‘But my method is a little different,’ he said, ‘although the fundamentals are the same. With Jung’s method we would have to take you off somewhere to Switzerland, to some sanatorium up in the mountains, sit you down on a chaise-longue, enter into long-drawn-out conversations and wait for God knows how long before the symbols began to surface. We can’t do that sort of thing. Instead of the chaise-longue we sit you down over there,’ – Timur Timurovich pointed to the couch – ‘we give you a little injection, and then we observe the symbols that start floating to the surface in simply va-a-ast quantities. After that it’s up to us to decipher them and cure you. Is that clear?’
‘More or less,’ I said. ‘How do you go about deciphering them?’
‘You’ll see that, Pyotr, for yourself. Our sessions take place on Fridays, which means that in three…no, in four weeks it will be your turn. I must say, I am really looking forward to it, working with you is so very interesting. But then, of course, the same applies to all of you, my friends.’
Timur Timurovich smiled, flooding the room with the warm radiance of his love, then he bowed and shook his own left hand with his right one.
‘And now it’s time for class to begin.’
‘What class?’ I asked.
‘Why,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘it’s already half past one. Practical aesthetics therapy.’
With the possible exception of the psycho-hydraulic procedures which had roused me from sleep, I have never experienced anything quite so distressing as that session of practical aesthetics therapy – but then, perhaps the injection was really to blame. The exercises were held in a room adjacent to our ward; it was large and dimly lit, with a long table in its corner heaped wit
h lumps of Plasticine of various colours, ugly misshapen toy horses of the kind moulded by artistically gifted children, paper models of ships, broken dolls and balls. At the centre of the table was a large plaster bust of Aristotle, and we sat opposite him, on four chairs covered with brown oilcloth, with drawing-boards on our knees. The aesthetics therapy consisted in our drawing the bust with pencils which were attached to the board and had also been covered in soft black rubber.
Volodin and Serdyuk remained in their striped pyjamas, while Maria removed his jacket and put on instead an undershirt with a long slit reaching almost down to his navel. They all seemed quite accustomed to this procedure and sat there patiently pushing their pencils across the surface of the paper. Just to be on the safe side, I made a quick, rough sketch and then set the board aside and began inspecting my surroundings.
The injection was certainly still working – I was still suffering from the same effect that I had felt in the bathroom and was incapable of perceiving external reality in its totality. Elements of the surrounding world appeared at the moment when my gaze fell on them, and I was developing a giddy feeling that my gaze was actually creating them.
Suddenly I noticed that the walls of the room were hung with drawings on small sheets of paper, some of which appeared to be very curious indeed. Some of them obviously belonged to Maria. These were extremely clumsy, almost childish scribbles which all repeated in various forms the theme of an aeroplane adorned with a massive phallic projection. Sometimes the aeroplane was standing on its tail and the images acquired Christian overtones of a somewhat sacrilegious nature. In general though, Maria’s drawings were of no particular interest.
However, another set appeared curious in the extreme, and not merely because the artist possessed indisputable talent. These were drawings united by a Japanese theme, represented in a strange, uneven fashion. Most of the drawings, seven or eight in number, attempted to reproduce an image seen somewhere previously: a samurai with two swords and the lower half of his body indecently exposed, standing on the edge of an abyss with a stone hung round his neck. Another two or three drawings depicted horsemen at rest against a background of distant mountains, which were drawn with astonishing skill in the traditional Japanese style. The horses in these images were tethered to trees and their dismounted riders, clad in loose, colourful garments, were sitting near by on the grass and drinking from shallow bowls. The drawing which made the strongest impression on me had an erotic theme; it showed an other-worldly man in a tiny blue cap astride a woman with broad Slavic cheekbones who was giving herself to him. There was something horrifying about her face.
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