Calligraphy Lesson

by Mikhail Shishkin

  There is a famous phenomenon, recovered sight, Evgenia Dmitrievna, described back in the eighteenth century. Someone blind from birth who acquires vision after an operation thinks that the objects he sees are touching his eyes. He can’t judge distance and misses when he tries to grab a door knob. They show him a sphere and a cube. But he can only tell what they are by feeling them. Amusing, isn’t it?

  Here I am writing you one last letter, kind Alexei Pavlovich, which, like the ones before, you will never receive. Any novel, no matter how short, should have an epilogue. Nothing happened, it’s just that your Zhenya changed. This different Zhenya came home one fine day and found a tear-stained Mika sitting there. Zhenya asked, “What happened?” Silly question. Zhenya knew full well that Roman had taken the exam and failed. Zhenya stood by the window in her room for a while, watching the little boys in the courtyard taking turns blowing into an empty bottle, and then she went into Roman’s room. He was sitting like a statue. Zhenya started reassuring him and said that it didn’t matter, it was all silly, because that wasn’t what was most important. “What’s most important,” Zhenya said, “is that I love you. I’ll be your wife, we’ll go away from here, and we’ll just live.” She started kissing his face, eyelids, and forehead, but he had a fever. They took his temperature—he was burning up. They put him to bed. They called the doctor without waiting for my father. Pneumonia. How? Why? Mika and I sat with him that night, together. Roman mumbled something in his fever. Then fell asleep. Zhenya asked, “You don’t believe me?” Mika answered, “I do. Roman loves you very much, Zhenechka. And I know that you can make him happy. Only I’m afraid you’ll bring him grief.” But Zhenya said, “Whether you believe me or not, I love your son and I’ll do everything I can to make things good for him. If only you knew how happy I am right now!” Zhenya sat at his bedside day and night, spoon-fed him, gave him his medicine, sponged off his sweating body, changed his sheets, and took him to the bathroom. She and Mika discussed what kind of wedding they would have. Zhenya wanted it all to be very quiet—first church and straight home, and there only their closest friends and a simple supper. “Yes yes, Zhenya dear,” Mika agreed. “We’ll do everything your way.”

  How frightening to wake up without you here, Evgenia Dmitrievna. Here I am holding your hand, and I still can’t believe it’s true. My beloved, my one and only Zhenya, how well you put it then: we’ll get there and just live. You’ll be my better half, my spare rib, my God-bestowed wife, and I’ll stuff myself on pears.

  Before going to the train station, we all sat quietly for a minute. The streetcar outside set the bookcase glass to shaking.

  You got all the way downstairs and had to go back.

  “The gingerbread! We forgot the gingerbread!”

  Cottonwood puffs swept even through the front door.

  We arrived at the station early; they’d just brought the train up.

  My father flicked a puff off his sweaty face and shielded himself from the sun with a newspaper.

  Quickly, get in quickly, it’s about to move, any minute now. The train sailed past the Andronikov Monastery, whipped by the oncoming wind.

  Would you like me to tell you what’s out the window right now? Can’t you feel it when the knocking of the wheels changes? First we were going over an embankment, now we’re in a hollow. Going down and down. Look, what did I tell you? A tunnel.”

  At a station where we waited an hour, a garbage can was smoking.

  You can feel the heat subsiding. Zhenya, Roman, let’s have dinner. In the morning we’ll be home.

  The paperclip Roman used to mark his place in his book had gone missing.

  Where are you going, Zhenya? It’s only a five-minute stop.

  I’m going to stretch my legs. Don’t worry, I have time.

  They were selling cherries and steaming potatoes on the platform. Out of a big kettle, so when the lid was lifted, steam spilled out.

  Mika poked her head out the window, waved, and smiled.

  Zhenya, it’s time. Or you’ll be left behind.

  It’s all right, Aunt Mika, there’s still time.

  The train blew its whistle and was enveloped in steam like a potato. The cars jerked in a chain. Slowly, Mika started moving.

  Zhenya, what does this mean? Zhenya, how can this be?

  The suitcases, Aunt Mika! Send my suitcases!

  What about Roman? How could you? How could you?

  She returned the next morning, but she didn’t go home. She went there.

  She opened up with the same key. It was dark in the entry. She turned on the light. Hanging on the coatrack was the same coat with the mother of pearl buttons. She grabbed one and pulled hard. The button flew apart. She tore another off, taking fabric with it.

  Alexei Pavlovich came out of the bathroom with bare, wet arms.

  Zhenya? What happened? Vera Lvovna’s here washing…What’s the matter with you?

  Everything’s fine. There is no light or dark.

  What?

  Let’s go.

  She took him by the hand and led him into his room.

  What’s wrong with you?

  She fell on the bed.

  Something heavy slapped on the bathroom floor.

  She held him tightly, squeezed him with all her might, held her palms hard to his shuddering, bumpy back.

  She began to laugh, drinking in life.

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  __________

  6 “Zhenya” is the diminutive of “Evgenia.”

  7 “Verochka” is the diminutive of “Vera.”

  8 “Mika” is the diminutive of “Mirra.”

  9 “Alyosha” is a diminutive of “Alexei.”

  10 “Shut up, you asshole!”

  11 “Mitya” is the diminutive of “Dmitry.”

  Language Saved

  When I arrived in the city of Joyce for the first time, I went straight from the train station to the Fluntern cemetery. The streetcar was full to the last stop. Everyone got off at the cemetery and headed with me down the path between the gravestones in the direction indicated by the arrow: “To James Joyce.” I felt uneasy. The closer we got to Joyce’s grave, the more numerous the procession became. The burial site was surrounded by an already packed crowd—and on a work day, not an anniversary of any kind.

  I had always assumed that the author of Ulysses was more respected in the West than in my homeland, but this…

  Shaken, I looked for some catch, only to find it immediately, unfortunately. They were burying Elias Canetti, who had asked to be laid to rest alongside the great blind man.

  Canetti begins Tongue Set Free (whose original title could also be rendered as “Language Saved”) with his first childhood memory. At two, someone frightened him (his nanny’s lover, as would become clear many years later), by rapping his penknife and joking villainously, “And now we’ll cut out his tongue!” The fear of being rendered tongueless would pursue the child, adolescent, youth, and writer for many years. His whole life.

  I experienced something similar when I saw the generously daubed backdrop of the Alps. The fear of being left tongueless. Swiss German clanged all around me.

  Later, everything fell into place.

  Actually, it was quite simple: I had to set my own language free so that my language could save me. I began writing my novel all over again, but in a different way and about something else.

  It had just become more obvious that I had to write purely and clearly.

  One expects a highly inflected language such as Russian to come in twos, like livestock or people, and to count off: one-two, one-two; translate this, don’t translate that. Moreover, in translation, what can be translated doesn’t so much get translated as mutate.

  Say any word, the most inoffensive, the most objective, for instance, “scholarship,” and misunderstanding immediately sets in. It is one thing for a scholar here to study agricultural relations in the fifteenth century in the Canton of Glarus, where five hundred years la
ter the land still belongs to the same family. It is quite another to talk about private ownership of land there, where that kind of scholarship is fuel to the fire of a future civil war.

  So it is for any word in the dictionary.

  The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into noncommunicating vessels. The past that lives in words does not yield to translation, especially that Russian past which was never a fact but always an argument in the endless war the nation has waged against itself.

  Each word individually and all words taken together only exacerbate the impossibility of interlingual understanding and horizontal communication. Ever since the Tower of Babel, the task of language has been to misunderstand.

  The art of Russian speech has its own bottled up aroma, ingredients inherent only to the substance of Russian literature. The story of Bloom’s first and last day can be translated into Russian, but Joyce’s text rejects our national language’s substance. The words’ blood curdles. There can only be a “Russian Ulysses” with a “little man’s soul” à la Leskov.

  The students in the Zurich Slavic seminar read Kharms (with a dictionary and delight), but it’s not the same Kharms. The Swiss Kharms is about something else. Ours is Platonov’s identical twin. Their words, their Russian substance, cast on the Alpine wind, are pure and clear.

  The absurd of OBERIU—the Russian Futurists’ Association of Real Art—is an extension of Akaky Akakievich realism in a country where war and throwing old women out windows is simply a way of life. The most absurd and Kharmsian text cannot help but become the very megaphone through which old women squawk before slamming into the pavement.

  This is a healthy disease; you can live with it until you die. Its causes rest partly in genetic predisposition, partly in birth trauma.

  You have only to cast an eye over the stages in the great journey of our nation’s chicken-scratches. First came the epaulets, ribbons, and odes on ascension. After plodding along for not very long, Russian letters retired, basically. It read at its leisure and, when it had recovered its sight, it swelled from a sense of its own importance. And wrapped itself up toga-fashion in Gogol’s overcoat. Henceforth and ever after, Pushkin’s seraph from his famous poem “Prophet” would lie in wait in some vacant lot or on the Swallow Hills, where Herzen and Ogarev made their famous vow to each other, and crush the balls of anyone writing in Russian, twist his arms behind his back, rip out the fleshy organ that delivers food to the teeth, as Dal’s dictionary defines it, and whisper: Rise up, see, hear, and burn!

  In line with his era’s tastes and the stench of circumstances, a prophet can reveal himself anywhere, even to hardened convicts stashing novels under plank beds, the way poets did trying to survive the Gulag. And this can in no way alter his status: what a seraph gives only a seraph can take away.

  Not even the most vomitous language of the most vomitous era, even the most absurd method for describing reality, the most exquisite pen craft, can change anything in the relationship between someone writing in Russian and the six-winged, who themselves have been sent by someone.

  One can think only of how words taste, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot violate the job description. Thus, nature has thought of everything: man thinks about the delightful rubbing of genitalia and the result is children. A prophet thinks about the delightful turning of the tongue and a seraph gives Cyrillic its essence, meaning, spirit, and depth. Kharms wrote about old women falling out of windows and the result was the end of the world and the sole possibility for salvation: to love and repent.

  But horizontal communications are impossible even within a single language. Even speaking Russian, there is no understanding one another. Yurovsky reads out the sentence in the Ekaterinburg basement where the tsar’s family has been assembled, but Dr. Botkin doesn’t understand, just as Pasternak and Khrushchev misunderstood each other—or the person standing outside with a sign against the Chechen war and the general populace. And what about on a crowded bus? Or in a marital bed grown cold?

  How does one give language the purity and clarity needed for understanding? This has nothing to do with being tongue-tied.

  A tied tongue, starting with “she sells seashells,” proceeding through a lead article on enemies of the people, and moving on to Brodsky, is actually language’s sole possible form of existence. Refined literature is just another way to be tongue-tied.

  One simply has to find a tongue tied in just the right way to explain something. To say something and be understood.

  How correct the reception is depends on how correct the code. But everything in language is necessarily aimed at confusing the code and complicating understanding; from the beginning, language has put up an infinite number of boundaries and limitations and introduced utter mayhem.

  The search for a code of understanding ties the tongue on a whole new level. Boundaries narrow and walls rise swiftly. The space for understanding collapses and leads to its logical conclusion.

  For whom was Finnegan’s Wake actually written? Robert Walser spent his last writing decade on novel after novel, his handwriting tinier and tinier, as he and his letters moved off into infinity.

  If the point of language is still communication, then communication between whom?

  In what language did St. Francis and the birds communicate? Or rather, better to ask: with whom was the barefoot man from Assisi whistling back and forth?

  Intel’s boss once said that he could never outdo the Creator and man would always be the universe’s best chip.

  A processor is dead without animating code. A user has to have software to establish contact with the hardware.

  A human being released into the world is given a tongue so that he can have vertical communication.

  Something has to transform the burning thickets of thorns—every summer forests do burn—into a burning bush.

  For mortals, language is the User’s sole form of existence. Thus, it represents both creature and Creator simultaneously.

  Walser would have been surprised at the reproach over the indecipherability of the letters he wrote, letters which toward the end of his life shrank to the size of a period. Joyce had no doubt about the intelligibility of Finnegan’s Wake. Both said what they wanted to say purely and clearly, and they were understood.

  “And then they did take the hermit priest, the monk ascetic, Epiphanius the elder, and did cut his tongue out whole; from his hand they did sever four fingers. And in the beginning he spoke in a nasal voice, and then he did pray to the Virgin Mother of God, and shown to him were both tongues, the one of Moscow and the one of these parts, in the air; and he, taking hold of one, put his own in his mouth and ever since began speaking purely and clearly, and his tongue took root in his mouth and lived.”

  Translated by Marian Schwartz

  Nabokov’s Inkblot

  I stood in the arrivals terminal of the Zurich International Airport, holding a sign with the name KOVALEV and feeling happy.

  Our son wasn’t even a year old and my wife was at home with him. Meanwhile, I couldn’t seem to find a steady job. Life was hard in those days and we had to scrimp on everything. It was sufficiently demeaning that I couldn’t earn enough money for my family, and on top of that we had two birthdays coming up—first my son’s, then my wife’s. I desperately needed money for gifts. I wanted to buy my loved ones something wonderful and special, or maybe whisk them away on vacation somewhere; do something, in short, to make them happy. But there wasn’t even enough money to pay the rent. And then luck struck: I got a call from the interpreter agency. They needed me to meet a client at the airport, drive him to the hotel, then the bank, then to Montreux. So that’s how I ended up standing in the airport, enjoying life. Aside from the promise of good pay, I was especially excited that the trip would take me to an extremely important place for me—to Nabokov. The client had reserved the very same room at the Montreux Palace where the writer had lived, so even the lowly interpreter would
have a chance to visit that sacred place, the dream of any Russian reader. I waited for the delayed flight with my sign and daydreamed about how I would sit at his desk, open the drawer, and finally see the famous inkblot that I’d read so much about. Nabokov’s inkblot! I’d be able to touch it with my fingers! Joy!

  Then I saw Kovalev. I recognized him immediately. And he, of course, did not recognize me. I hadn’t even thought that this could be the same Kovalev. Of all the Kovalevs in the world!

  My first crazy thought was to thrust the sign into his hands, turn around, and leave.