Oh, you naughty boy! Have you no shame? Gray hair, and you behave like a little boy. It’s true, my husband is always reading things out loud from the newspapers. For instance, recently there was one story about three men convicted of raping a girl, a teenager. Not only that, but imagine, they were all reputable men and had families and children. In short, you never would have thought something like that about them. Understandably, they were angry and indignant, and they hired the best lawyers. They brought charges against someone, saying it was all a frame-up. The girl was the daughter of their mutual acquaintances, though, and her parents believed everything she said and were furious at the base and vile things their good friends had done. During the inquiry and trial the girl told stories of such degenerate acts committed against her that no one ever doubted the veracity of her testimony. Such horrors simply could not have entered a child’s mind. In short, they were convicted, but their lawyers kept active, another inquiry was scheduled, and the upshot was that the three were innocent, that the girl was sick, that she had an erotically based psychological deviance and had dreamed this all up and believed her own fantasies. The convicted men were released, of course. One can only imagine the joy in their unfortunate families. And they placed the girl in a special clinic to teach this horrible girl not to defame honest people. After all was said and done, though, they found details in her initial statements that simply could not have been invented: an unusual birthmark in a most intimate place and something else like that. Other testimony and evidence were found as well. Finally, one of them confessed and all three were imprisoned again, this time for good. But meanwhile, what was most interesting was they didn’t release the girl, because she really was abnormal and attacked everyone, men and women alike. In short, a fine lot all. But you just don’t know my husband really. He’s a marvelous man and I love him very much. This is a man worthy of every respect. He loves me and our children very much. He’s always coming up with surprises, For instance, he writes either me or himself letters and mails them, and then we open them together and he watches me—after all, he only does it to bring me pleasure—and I go into ecstasies over his silly scribbles, to make him feel good. I rushed headlong into marriage. This very young fool fell head over heels in love with a grown man just because he visited our house occasionally and never said a word. Now I realize my primitive curiosity fed my fantasy—so that I couldn’t go on living without this clam. Later, after the wedding, I had an epiphany. It was like I’d regained my senses. I was horrified at what I’d done, but our son showed up so I resigned myself. This man is a marvelous husband, and I understand intellectually that I should be grateful to him, but it’s unbearable. The strange, crazy ways he has of eating disgust me. He always has his second course first and then his soup. He likes to crumble bread into his milk because his mama made him a mush like that when he was little, and he shovels that mess, that awful, swelling swill, into both cheeks. I’m always finding his socks in the most incredible places, and when he loses something, it’s my fault. He can go weeks without a bath and his dirty hair smells awful, but before leaving for work he spends fifteen minutes putting on cologne, to mask the smell. When he thrusts himself on me, especially at night, I try to imagine it’s someone else instead of him. Don’t get the wrong idea. I have no thought of cheating on him; I would despise myself afterward. If I fell in love with someone else, I would fight the feeling in any case. Self-respect is more important than pleasure. I have children and a home and I can’t imagine a different life for myself, although in my mind I’m cheating on him constantly—disgusting, horrible, filthy thoughts, and I try to drive them out, but I can’t. And that’s even worse than cheating on him for real. Sometimes I scare myself. And that goes not just for my husband but for the thoughts that overwhelm me in general. It’s become impossible. When I was nursing our first child, I was so tired, I was in a state of such nervous agitation over his endless illnesses and my chronic lack of sleep, I was so tormented by his screaming and crying, that one day I had a nervous breakdown, a moment of insanity. In the middle of the night the boy started screaming again and I jumped up, exhausted, and suddenly such hatred bubbled up inside me, such rage, such fury, that I was ready to kill him. I actually snatched the child from his crib—I remember I was suddenly struck by the idea of throwing him off the balcony. This horrified me so that things suddenly felt crazy after all, I was a second away from the irrevocable. After that night, my milk dried up. Listen to me, because it would never occur to a mother to kill her own child!
What are you talking about! At work I deal with stories you could never even imagine, but you know I’ve gotten used to it and I do my job. One man, for instance, quarreled with his wife and slaughtered her and their two children with the bread knife. The older was four and the younger was an infant. Then he came to his senses and started to slit his own veins, and while he was bleeding, he set fire to the apartment and jumped out the window. Another forced his daughter to sleep with him, and that very night she killed him with an ax. A third beat his brother to death with a log because they couldn’t figure out how to divide up the house they’d inherited. A fourth tortured twins, neighbor children, raped them, poked out their eyes, and left them to die in an abandoned cellar—and then went through the worry with their parents, acted outraged, and took part in the searches, until they happened to expose him. You wake up, have breakfast, get ready for work, and you already know what’s going to happen. One man choked his own mother with a stocking and carried the body to the outhouse piece by piece, and I said to him: “Please sign here!” And so it goes, day after day, year after year. If it’s not Peter, it’s Nikolai; if it’s not the doting father, it’s the loving son. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a hundred years from now. The words, even those are the same: I didn’t see it. I wasn’t there. It wasn’t me. Nor is the charge ever very original: “consumed by an unquenchable thirst for gain,” “blinded by envy, tormented by his awareness of being a nobody,” “the scum, having lost all humanity, to satisfy a moment’s fancy,” “after foully taking advantage of the helplessness of his father, who was crippled by paralysis,” “who for twenty years cleverly and perfidiously concealed his criminal essence under a mask of decency.” And the defense babbles on the same way: “made desperate by the hopelessness and pointlessness of his pitiful existence;” “having no other way to defend his profaned honor;” “being a victim of a prison education—since if you’re born in prison all you’ve seen around you since childhood is rapists and murderers;” “Yes, blood was spilled, and the instrument of murder is before you, but look at the remorse this unfortunate man has shown! Instead of convicting him, share the grief of a man who murdered his own son!”; “My God, even you must have been thoroughly oiled and felt a wild, half-bestial, half-childish desire to take revenge on someone for your good-for-nothing, betrayed life, for all the agonies and injustices, for everything you’ve suffered at the hands of people near and far, God, and your own self. Haven’t you?” They do things even they can’t imagine, and I tell them, Write, now, to keep from losing your mind, write a final word not in some lapidary cursive but, say, an elegant, bubbly Rondo, in blurred letters that repeat, but the verdict is in a littera fractura with flourishes, or Gothic logjams, or Batard, or Coulé, or whatever strikes your fancy, one page like this, another like that. Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offset that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset. Why just today they convicted someone who had poisoned her husband, a drunkard and a brawler, someone the long-suffering household members may have needed to be freed from long ago because their children are cretins, monsters. She tried to hang herself in her cell, but they cut her down and at the hearing she said, “Do whatever you want. You’re nobody to me because I’m still going to kill myself. I’m not going to live, and the Highest Court will vindicate me, because I’m fed up with living.” That’s what she said. But our presiding judge said, “But
you see, dear, that’s us. We are the Highest Court, and whether you are or aren’t fed up is not for you to decide!” But she kept up her muttering: “I’m fed up with this life of yours.” That’s what I wrote: fed up. What that one word costs! Just try it! The primitive H may not merit special mention. Its crossbar is written on a slant in a single stroke. You place the tip of your pen at the beginning, then bend your fingers right away, and the pen itself pulls you down, but the main thing here is the pressure. God forbid you press too hard or lift too much because the line isn’t supposed to breathe! The flamelike shape—because it does resemble a tongue of flame—bends first to the left, then the right. It gets fatter in the middle and dwindles to nil at the ends. On the third beat the stick has a curve at the bottom. The first five sections of the line are drawn straight, but on the sixth the pressure eases up and the line, rounding, drifts off to the right, ending at the invisible line that confines each letter to its allotted space, its cell, you might say. Below, where the stick curves, between the imagined field of the cell and the tip of the line it contains, you get an empty corner. After the curve the fine line goes up—not straight up but in an arc—bending slightly to the right so as not to lose contact with the page and break through to the ë, a cunning ninny, unprepossessing to look at, but demanding caution and deft treatment in order to achieve the desired end. After the clumsy, snub-nosed H, the e requires a light, graceful line that begins with an eyelash stroke and a bend to the right, cuts across the middle evenly on an incline, flies back after the bend, nearly grazing the ceiling of its chamber, and as it falls back in its noose rushes into the half-oval with pressure on the left side; moreover the bend of the capillary outline is hidden in the half-oval but is not left behind. After a break the pen heads all the way to the upper corner of the next cell. The merest tremble or thickening could instantly destroy the illusion of this free soaring, which takes a drastic gain in altitude to become a . The secret essence of this spindleleg lies by no means in the spaces that run through it from top to bottom but in the concluding, unremarkable, but danger-laden sign-off loop beyond which the m is already twitching impatiently. Here it’s important not to be too hasty in imprinting the tightening loop but to wait for the loop to turn almost into a period. Then you can rush headlong into three holes in a row, returning happily once again to the e, p, and n, which is hardly a letter, just a on a stick. But onward, onward, to the very end and the , that amazing, anthropod peahen, the only one that falls into a full five beats! There’s something of the two-headed eagle to it and at the same time its soft half-ovals sit firmly on the line, like on a perch. It seems to clamp an unraveling world together—heaven and earth, east and west. It’s elegant, perfect, and sufficient unto itself. And now, if the hand was true, if the pen didn’t shake once, if everything came together, then, you won’t believe it, a miracle takes place at my desk! A sheet of ordinary paper breaks free and rises above events! Its perfection immediately yields an alienation, a hostility even, toward all that exists, toward nature itself, as if another, higher world, a world of harmony, had wrested this space from that kingdom of worms! They may hate and kill each other, betray and hang themselves there, but it’s all just raw material for my penmanship, fodder for beauty. And during those astounding minutes, when you feel like writing nonstop, you experience a strange, inexpressible feeling. Truly, this is happiness!
Evgeny Alexandrovich, you’re insane!
You don’t understand, Anna Arkadievna. Going mad is the privilege of God’s fools, a reward for the elect, but we are all being punished for something. The main thing is that there’s no one to ask what for. Judge for yourself. Take my Kolya. When he went to Moscow to study, I was happy for him, my son, who had suddenly, imperceptibly, turned into a young man, a university student with a sparse, impatient little beard. Less than two months later I received a document, a notification, saying my son was under investigation, charged with murder. I dropped everything and rushed to Moscow. The investigator in charge of the case told me that my Kolya and his friend had attacked and killed some young woman. Kolya was caught, but the second youth slipped away. “Are you in your right mind?” I shouted. “Yes. The scoundrel has confessed to everything.” I didn’t believe a word of it. I knew there had been some mistake, some horrible misunderstanding. Finally they allowed us a visit. Kolya hadn’t changed at all. He was even wearing the same jacket. He’d just let his beard grow out. “Kolya, why did you confess?” I began. “After all, it wasn’t you!” I thought he would throw his arms around me, cry, and tell me everything that had happened, but he started talking about which petitions I needed to write and to whom, asked me to remember everything exactly and not get mixed up, and got angry when I couldn’t seem to. That’s what he said to me: “Father, wake up and remember this!” And he was beside himself that I hadn’t brought any money. All I had with me were a few small bills. “Papa,” he said, “if you have money, you can live anywhere, even in prison.” And still I didn’t believe the investigator or Kolya. I still don’t. My boy could not have done that. He slandered himself. Out of fear. Someone had put the fear of God in him. But Kolya might have been trying to protect or save someone, too. At trial he was so nervous, he tried so hard to fight his fear, that instead he was brash, slouched in his chair, and answered questions with a smirk. When the witness, a janitor, got his testimony mixed up, Kolya actually started laughing. And he shrugged at his terrible sentence—fifteen years—as if to say, Imagine. He’s just a little boy, a silly little boy, a child. As they were leading him away, he shouted, “Papa, don’t cry. I love you!” The parents of the murdered girl were sitting right there in the courtroom. During the hearing the mother would start sobbing from time to time, and then the father would take her out of the room, but after a while they would return and take their seats again. The first day of the trial I went over to them and wanted to say something, I didn’t know what—beg their forgiveness, plead for mercy—but they wouldn’t let me say a word. “Get away!” the father shouted. I collected Kolya’s things, wrote endless, pointless requests and petitions, and sat in reception rooms for hours just to clarify where they were sending him. I’d already made plans to visit him in the summer. Maybe they’d let me if I asked my boss for a special meeting. But that summer I got sick and took to my bed, and I never did take my trip to the distant and terrible Ivdel. Kolya’s letters were brief: what to send in the package, where to write the next pointless mercy letter, as he put it. A year passed that way. At work they didn’t know anything about Kolya, or maybe they were pretending they didn’t, because before that they would occasionally ask, “How’s that son of yours?” and now it was all about cases, as if I’d never had Kolya. And then one day I was asked to stop in to see our Viktor Valentinovich. I went into his office and stood there, waiting, but he was clearly uneasy and started pacing around the room, asked me to have a seat, and for a long time didn’t say anything. Then he mumbled, “Really, I don’t even know how to begin this conversation. You see, the problem is that your son—” I interrupted him. “Yes, my Kolya was convicted, but he’s not guilty of anything, it’s a mistake, he slandered himself!” “Please, wait!” he put a document in front of me. “Your son has escaped.” For a long time after that I couldn’t think clearly. Viktor Valentinovich brought me some water, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, “Get a grip,” and something else. Then he started saying Kolya would quite likely come home sooner or later, but regardless, he was a dangerous criminal and I as a decent man whose honesty no one doubted would let them know as soon as he showed up. “Yes yes, of course.” It felt like I was dreaming. I nodded and went to continue my writing. A long time has passed since that day, but still no Kolya. Sometimes I look out the window in the evening and it feels like he’s somewhere nearby, in the darkness, behind the trees. He’s hiding, afraid to come out. I open a small window and call out softly, so only he can hear, “Kolya! Kolya!”
Pay no attention to me, Evgeny Alexandrovich, I just remembered someth
ing that happened yesterday. You don’t know whether to laugh or cry. You know Zhdanov? Well, you’ve seen him at our house—a second cousin twice removed and a dreadful self-centered fool. I happened to be home alone. My husband had gone on an inspection tour, little Sasha was with his grandmother, and Vova’s been in college for two months. Out of the blue, Zhdanov showed up. “Larochka,” he said with a leer, “I came to have my way with you!” “What’s this, Zhdanov? Has passion got the better of you? You know I never thought of myself as a femme fatale!” “Passion? Hardly. It’s just that you talk so much about morality that this will be my last argument in our debate. I came merely to tempt you and lead you into sin, that’s all.” “But you’re repulsive, Zhdanov!” I told him. “Believe me, that doesn’t matter!” and he reached under my skirt. I wanted to laugh, slap him, pour water over his bald head, but I was overtaken by apathy, passivity. I can’t explain. It all just happened, moreover I felt nothing, absolutely nothing. Zhdanov grunted and wheezed and growled. Then he stretched out across the bed, flopping his belly to one side, and lit up. I said, “What a smart aleck you are, Mishenka! I just might go and fall in love with you!” And he said, “What do you mean? I love my wife and children.” He finished smoking and reached for me again. Suddenly there was a noise in the front hall. Before I could figure out who it might be, my husband was standing in the doorway. Dead silence. Finally Zhdanov said, “Well, time for me to go!” and started pulling on a sock. My husband hemmed and hawed in a strange, old womanish voice. “Didn’t you see the telegram? I left it by the mirror. Vova’s coming home today. They gave him leave.” “And here he comes!” Zhdanov said, pointing out the window. Indeed, Vova was opening the gate, wearing his uniform—smart, grown-up, handsome. We rushed to get dressed. Zhdanov couldn’t seem to find his other sock, so he put his boot on his bare foot. My husband made the bed. I didn’t even have time to put my dress on properly, let alone comb my hair! Vova fell on my neck immediately and then started hugging his father and then hugged Zhdanov. “Uncle Misha! Lord, how glad I am you’re here! I love you all so much!” He grabbed a plate of pirozhki and started cramming them into his mouth, one after another, poor kid. I broke down in tears, kept kissing his prickly nape, his coarsened hands, his pimply cheeks, his sweat-soaked tunic. Zhdanov wanted to leave, but Vova wouldn’t let him. “Oh no, Uncle Misha, you’re staying for dinner!” Vova told stories nonstop about the barracks, his idiot commanders, how you have to eat everything with a spoon and you practically have to fight to get an apple for dessert. The three of us behaved as if nothing special had just happened. And maybe nothing so terrible had. Before Vova could finish his cup he jumped up from the table, plopped down on the sofa, shut his eyes, and sighed. “God, this is great!”
Calligraphy Lesson Page 4
