‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ I said, unable to restrain myself, ‘to whom do these drawings on Japanese themes belong?’
‘Semyon,’ said Volodin, ‘who do your drawings belong to? The hospital, I suppose?’
‘Are they yours, Mr Serdyuk?’
‘Yes,’ answered Serdyuk, glancing sideways at me with his bright blue eyes.
‘Quite exquisite,’ I said. ‘Only, perhaps, rather sombre.’
He gave no answer.
The third series of drawings, which I guessed must be those of Volodin, was very abstract and impressionistic in manner. Here also there was a leitmotif – three dark blurred silhouettes around a burst of flame, with a broad beam of light falling on them from above. In compositional terms it was reminiscent of a well-known Russian painting of three hunters sitting round a camp-fire, except that in this work it was a high-explosive shell that had exploded in the flames just a moment before.
I looked over at the other wall and started violently in surprise.
It was probably the most acute attack of déja vu I have ever suffered in my life. From my very first glance at the six-foot-long sheet of cardboard, covered with its tiny figures in various colours, I sensed a profound connection with the strange object. I rose from my chair and went across to it.
My gaze fell on the upper part of the sheet, which showed something like the plan of a battle, in the way they are usually drawn in history textbooks. At its centre was a solid blue oval, where the word ‘SCHIZOPHRENIA’ was written in large letters. Approaching it from above were three broad red arrows; one ran directly into the oval and the two others curved round to bite into its sides. Written on them were the words ‘insulin’, ‘aminazine’ and ‘sulphazine’, and running down from the oval in a broken line was a blue arrow, beneath which were the words ‘illness retreats’. I studied this plan and then turned my attention to the drawing below it.
With its numerous characters, abundant detail and crowded composition it reminded me of an illustration to Tolstoy’s War and Peace – one including all of the novel’s characters and the entire scope of its action. At the same time the drawing was very childish in nature, because it broke all of the rules of perspective and common sense, exactly like a child’s drawing. The right-hand section of the drawing was occupied by a representation of a big city. When I spotted the bright yellow dome of St Isaac’s, I realized that it must be St Petersburg. Its streets, in some places drawn in detail and in others merely represented by simple lines, as though on a map, were filled with arrows and dotted lines which clearly represented the trajectory of someone’s life. From St Petersburg a dotted line led to a similar image of Moscow which was close beside it. In Moscow only two places were represented in real detail – Tverskoi Boulevard and the Yaroslavl Station. Leading away from the station was the fine double cobweb-line of a railway track, which widened as it approached the centre of the sheet and acquired a third dimension, turning into a drawing rendered more or less according to the laws of perspective. The track ran off to a horizon overgrown with bright yellow wheat, where a train stood on its rails, wreathed in clouds of smoke and steam.
The train was drawn in detail. The locomotive had been badly damaged by several direct hits from shells; thick clouds of steam were pouring from the holes in the sides of the barrel-shaped boiler, and the driver’s dead body was hanging out of the cabin. Behind the locomotive there was an open goods truck with an armoured car standing on it – my heart began to race at this – with its machine-gun turret turned towards the yellow waves of wheat. The trapdoor of the turret was open and I saw Anna’s close-cropped head protruding from it. The ribbed barrel of the machine-gun was spitting fire in the direction of the wheatfield; Chapaev, wearing a tall astrakhan hat and a shaggy black cloak buttoned from his neck to his feet, stood on the platform beside the armoured car and waved his raised sabre in the direction of its fire. His pose seemed a little too theatrical.
The train in the picture had halted only a few yards short of a station, the greater part of which was invisible beyond the edge of the sheet of cardboard; all I could see was the platform barrier and a sign bearing the words ‘Lozovaya Junction’.
I tried to spot the enemies at whom Anna was firing from her turret, but all I could discover in the drawing were numerous vaguely sketched silhouettes largely hidden by the wheat. I was left with the impression that the artist responsible for the work did not have a very clear idea of why and against whom the military action shown was being conducted. But I had little doubt as to the identity of the author.
Written in large letters under the drawing were the words: ‘The Battle at Lozovaya Junction’. Close by, other words had been added in a different hand: ‘Chapaev’s waving, Petka’s raving’.
I whirled round to face the others.
‘Come now, gentlemen, does it not seem to you that this rather exceeds the bounds of what is acceptable among decent people, eh? What if I should start acting in the same way, eh? Then what would happen?’
Volodin and Serdyuk averted their gaze. Maria pretended that he had not heard. I carried on looking at them for some time, attempting to guess which of them was responsible for this vile act, but no one responded. Besides, I was not in all honesty particularly concerned and my annoyance was to a large extent feigned. I was far more interested in the drawing, which from my very first glance had given me the impression that it was somehow incomplete. Turning back to the cardboard, I struggled for some time to understand exactly what it was that was bothering me. It seemed to be the section between the plan of the battle and the train, where in principle the sky should have been – a large area of the cardboard was blank, which somehow produced the impression of a gaping void. I went over to the table and rummaged in its clutter until I found a stub of sanguine and an almost complete stick of charcoal.
I spent the next half-hour adding black blotches of shrapnel shell-bursts to the sky over the wheatfield. I drew them all identically – a small dense black cloud of solid charcoal, and fragments scattering like arrows in all directions, leaving long trails of dark red behind them.
The result was very similar to that well-known painting by Van Gogh, the name of which I cannot recall, where a black cloud of crows looking like thick, crudely drawn ‘V’s circles above a field of wheat. I thought of how hopelessly despairing the condition of the artist is in this world: at first the thought gave me a certain bitter satisfaction, but then I suddenly felt it to be unbearably false. It was not merely a question of its banality, but of its institutional meanness: everybody involved in art repeated it in one way or another, classifying themselves as members of some special existential caste, but why? Did the life of a machine-gunner or a medical orderly, for instance, lead to any other outcome? Or were they any less filled with the torment of the absurd? And was the unfathomable tragedy of existence really linked in any way with the pursuits in which a person was engaged in their lifetime?
I turned to look at my companions. Serdyuk and Maria were absorbed in the bust of Aristotle (Maria was concentrating so hard that he had even stuck the tip of his tongue out of his mouth), but Volodin was attentively following the changes in the drawing on my sheet of cardboard. Catching my gaze on him, he smiled inquiringly at me.
‘Volodin,’ I began, ‘may I ask you a question?’
‘By all means.’
‘What is your profession?’
‘I am an entrepreneur,’ said Volodin, ‘or a new Russian, as they say nowadays. At least, I was. But why do you ask?’
‘You know, I was just thinking…People go on and on about the tragedy of the artist, the tragedy of the artist. But why the artist in particular? It is really rather unfair. The fact is, you see, that artists are very visible individuals and therefore the troubles that they encounter in life are bandied about and exposed to the public eye…but does anyone ever think about…Well, no, they might well remember an entrepreneur…Let us say, an engine-driver? No matter how tragic his life might be?’
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br /> ‘You’re coming at the question from the wrong side entirely, Pyotr,’ said Volodin.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re getting your concepts confused. The tragedy doesn’t happen to the artist or the engine-driver, it takes place in the mind of the artist or the engine-driver.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Granted, granted,’ Volodin purred and turned back to his drawing-board.
It was several seconds before Volodin’s words sank in and I realized what he meant. But the mental listlessness induced by the injection completely blocked out any response.
Turning back to my sheet of cardboard, I drew in several columns of thick black smoke above the field, using up all my charcoal. Together with the dark spots of the shrapnel-bursts, they lent the picture a certain air of menace and hopelessness. I suddenly felt unwell, and I dedicated myself to covering the horizon with small figures of horsemen galloping through the wheat to cut off the attackers.
‘You missed your vocation – you should have been a battle artist,’ observed Volodin. From time to time he would look up to glance at my sheet of cardboard.
‘A fine comment, coming from you,’ I replied. ‘After all, you are the one who keeps drawing an explosion in a camp-fire.’
‘An explosion in a camp-fire?’
I pointed to the wall where the drawings hung.
‘If you think that’s an explosion in a camp-fire, then I have nothing more to say to you,’ replied Volodin, ‘nothing whatsoever.’
He seemed to have taken offence.
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s the descent of the light of heaven,’ he answered. ‘Can’t you see that it comes down from on high? It’s drawn like that deliberately.’
My mind raced through several consecutive conclusions.
‘Can I assume, then, that they’re keeping you here because of this heavenly light?’
‘You can,’ said Volodin.
‘That’s hardly surprising,’ I said politely. ‘I sensed immediately that you were no ordinary man. But what exactly have they charged you with? With having seen that light? Or with attempting to tell others about it?’
‘With being the light,’ said Volodin. ‘As is usual in such cases.’
‘I must assume that you are joking,’ I said. ‘But seriously?’
Volodin shrugged.
‘I had two assistants,’ he said, ‘about your age. You know, garbage men – they were very useful for cleaning up reality, you can’t do business without them these days. They’re in the drawing here, by the way – see, those two shadows. Well, to cut it short, I made it a rule to discuss such exalted subjects with them. And then one day we happened to go into the forest and I showed them – I don’t even know how to explain it – the way everything is. I didn’t even show them – they saw it all for themselves. That’s the moment shown in the drawings. And it had such an effect on them that a week later they ran off and turned me in. Stupid idiots, each of them had a dozen stiffs to answer for, but they still reckoned that was nothing compared with what they had to report. Modern man has the very basest of instincts, let me assure you.’
‘Indeed you are right,’ I replied, thinking of something else entirely.
For lunch Barbolin led us to a small dining-room rather like the room with the baths, except that the place of the baths was taken by plastic tables situated next to a serving-hatch. Only one of the tables was laid. We hardly spoke at all during the meal. When I had finished my soup and begun eating my gruel I suddenly noticed that Volodin had pushed away his plate and was staring hard at me. At first I tried not to pay any attention, but then I could stand it no longer, and I looked up and stared boldly into his eyes. He smiled peaceably – in the sense that there was nothing menacing in his expression, and said:
‘You know, Pyotr, I have the feeling that you and I have met in circumstances that were extremely important – for me, at least.’
I shrugged.
‘Do you by any chance have an acquaintance with a red face, three eyes and a necklace of skulls,’ he asked, ‘who dances between fires? Mm? Very tall, he was. And he waves these crooked swords around.’
‘Maybe I do,’ I said politely, ‘but I cannot quite tell just who it is you have in mind. The features you mention are very common, after all. It could be almost anybody.’
‘I see,’ said Volodin, and he went back to his plate.
I reached out for the teapot in order to pour some tea into my glass, but Maria shook his head.
‘Better not,’ he said. ‘Bromide. Takes away your natural sexuality.’
Volodin and Serdyuk, however, drank the tea without appearing in the slightest manner concerned.
After lunch we went back to the ward and Barbolin immediately disappeared off somewhere. My three companions were obviously accustomed to such a routine and fell asleep almost as soon as they had laid down on their beds. I stretched out on my back and stared at the ceiling for a long time, savouring the state, rare for me, of an entirely empty mind, which was possibly a consequence of the morning’s injection.
In fact, it would not be entirely correct to say that my mind was empty of all thoughts, for the simple reason that my consciousness, having entirely liberated itself of thought, continued nonetheless to react to external stimuli, but without reflecting upon them. And when I noticed the total absence of thoughts in my head, that in itself became already a thought about the absence of thoughts. Thus, I reasoned, a genuine absence of thoughts appeared impossible, because it cannot be recorded in any way – or one might say that it was equivalent to non-existence.
But this was still a marvellous state, as dissimilar as possible from the routine internal ticking of the everyday mind. Incidentally, I have always been astounded by one particular feature typical of people who are unaware of their own psychological processes. A person of that kind may be isolated for a long period from external stimuli, without experiencing any real needs, and then, for no apparent reason, a spontaneous psychological process suddenly arises within him which compels him to launch into a series of unpredictable actions in the external world. It must appear very strange to anyone who happens to observe it: there is the person lying on his back, he lies there for an hour, for two, for three, and then suddenly leaps up, thrusts his feet into his slippers and sets out for goodness knows where, simply because for some obscure reason – or perhaps without any reason at all – his train of thought has gone dashing off in some entirely arbitrary direction. The majority of people are actually like that, and it is these lunatics who determine the fate of our world.
The universe that extended in all directions around my bed was full of the most varied sounds. Some of them I recognized – the blows of a hammer on the floor below, the sound of a shutter banging in the wind somewhere in the distance, the cawing of the crows – but the origin of most of the sounds remained unclear. It is astonishing how many new things are immediately revealed to a man who can empty out the fossilized clutter of his conscious mind for a moment! It is not even clear where most of the sounds that we hear actually come from. What then can be said about everything else, what point is there in attempting to discover an explanation for our lives and our actions on the basis of the little that we believe we know! One might just as well attempt to explain the inner life-processes of another individual’s personality through the kinds of phantasmagorical social constructs employed by Timur Timurovich, I thought, and suddenly remembered the thick file on my case that I had seen on his desk. Then I remembered that when he left, Barbolin had forgotten to lock the door. And instantly, in a mere split second, an insane plan had taken shape in my mind.
I examined my surroundings. No more than twenty minutes had passed since the beginning of the rest hour, and my three companions were asleep. It seemed as though the entire building had fallen asleep together with them – in all that time not a single person had passed the door of our ward. Carefully pulling off my blanket, I thrust my feet in
to my slippers, stood up and stealthily made my way over to the door.
‘Where are you going?’ came a whisper from behind my back.
I turned round. Maria’s eyes were focused keenly on me from the corner of the room. I could just see him through the narrow gap in the blanket in which he had wrapped himself from head to toe.
‘To the toilet,’ I said in a similar whisper.
‘Don’t play the brave soldier,’ whispered Maria, ‘the pot’s over there. If they catch you it’s a day in the isolation ward.’
‘They won’t catch me,’ I whispered in reply and slipped out into the corridor.
It was empty.
I vaguely remembered that Timur Timurovich’s office was located beside a tall semi-circular window, which looked straight out on to the crown of a huge tree. Far ahead of me, at the point where the corridor in which I was standing turned to the right, I could see bright patches of daylight on the linoleum. Crouching down, I crept as far as the corner and saw the window. I immediately recognized the door of the office by its magnificent gilt handle.
For several seconds I stood there with my ear pressed to the keyhole. I could not hear a sound from inside the office, and finally I ventured to open the door slightly – the room was empty. Several files were lying on the desk, but mine, which was the thickest (I remembered its appearance very clearly) was no longer in its former place.
Buddha's Little Finger Page 12
