The Buddha's Return

by Gaito Gazdanov

  “Now wait just one moment, Pavel Alexandrovich,” I said. “What sort of macabre creation is this? And anyway, as far as I recall, you have no close friends or acquaintances, not counting your more recent associates of course. You have no one to leave a will for. And who’ll come to your funeral? From a purely practical perspective, as it were, and forgive me for being so blunt, but these dreams of yours seem rather fanciful to me.”

  “Perhaps,” he answered distractedly. “But I assure you, they aren’t devoid of a certain pleasure.”

  I admitted that, although I could understand this from a theoretical stance, I found it difficult to accept. I said that I always imagined death to be a catastrophe—momentary or slow, sudden or natural, but a catastrophe nonetheless—a spectre of otherworldly terror that made one’s blood run cold. The notion of there being some comfort in this was entirely alien to me. He remarked that such a view at my age—he emphasized this point—was understandable, and asked incidentally whether I had a conscious dislike of cemeteries.

  “No,” I said. “I suppose there’s something calming about them.”

  As we spoke of this, I remembered being in an army camp on the banks of the Dardanelles long ago; one day I was assigned to a grave-digging detachment. I told this to Pavel Alexandrovich. The man in charge of the cemetery was an old colonel with moustaches, who spoke with a strong Caucasian accent. He would come up to me, inspect my work and say:

  “Dig! Dig, my boy! Dig deeper. Dig as deep as you can.”

  When he came over one last time, he found me standing at the bottom of a rectangular pit one and a half times the height of a grown man. It was already approaching evening.

  “That’s enough now,” he said. “Climb out of there, my boy.”

  “Colonel, sir,” I said. “May I ask—who exactly am I doing this last service for? Who’s to be buried in this grave?”

  He made a vague gesture with his hand.

  “I don’t know yet, my boy. I just don’t know. We’re all in God’s hands. If you should die tomorrow, my boy, why, it’s you we’ll bury.”

  Many years later I learnt that this colonel had ended up as a labourer in France, dying somewhere near Roubaix. In that moment I pitied that it hadn’t happened on the banks of the Dardanelles and that he hadn’t been lowered into the pit I had dug in the warm clay soil that yielded so readily under the gravedigger’s shovel; it would have spared him the long years of an unhappy life, and perhaps, had he died then, he might have managed to hold on to some of the illusions whose fallacy had been revealed to him only because he died too late.

  “Perhaps,” said Pavel Alexandrovich. “But perhaps not.”

  The conversation now turned to other matters. Pavel Alexandrovich recounted memories of his youth, and I particularly remember—perhaps because I envisaged it with a peculiar clarity—one of his adventures, albeit of little importance. One winter’s day, in the north of Russia, he had been walking through a forest—this was not long before the Revolution, when he was still an officer. Suddenly his bulldog, which had been running ahead of him, began barking ferociously. He looked up and spotted a lynx sitting stock-still in a nearby tree. At the time, Pavel Alexandrovich was wearing an officer’s greatcoat and carrying a sabre and a revolver. He shot at the lynx, but instead of killing it only wounded it—then, in one gigantic leap, the lynx pounced at him. He took a step back in the nick of time and the lynx landed on all fours right in front of him, whereupon the bulldog immediately tore into it. Pavel Alexandrovich elected not to shoot, afraid of wounding the dog, so he took his sabre and slashed open the lynx’s stomach as the dog clamped its jaws around its throat. The snow turned red with blood, and against the pink sunset of a winter’s day crows were circling slowly above. Before me I saw the lynx’s dead grin, the virgin whiteness of the snow that had been disturbed in the struggle, and the young officer with a sabre in his hand. Now I looked at his face—it wore a weary, peaceful expression—and I thought how many years had passed since that Russian winter, and in so doing I perceived the seemingly unstoppable onward march of time.

  Then began talk of travel, and Pavel Alexandrovich said that he was intending—if everything went according to plan—to emigrate to Canada, far away from Europe, her political paroxysms and the constant feeling of vague anxiety that filled the air we breathed.

  “Just think,” he said. “Here, every stone is dripped in blood. Wars, revolutions, barricades, crimes, despotic regimes, inquisitions, famine, devastation and this whole historical gallery of horrors—the fate of Bohemia, St Bartholomew’s Night, Napoleon’s soldiers in Spain—do you recall the series of drawings by Goya? Europe is like a murderer, haunted by bloody visions and remorse, just waiting for even more state-led crimes. No, I’m too old for all that; I’m tired. I long for warmth and peace. For so many years I went cold and hungry, without hope, in the vague anticipation of death or some miracle, so now I believe I’ve earned the right to some repose and certain illusory, sentimental consolations—the last I’m ever likely to know.”

  Illusory consolations. Yes, there was no better way of putting it. So he did understand, despite his recent blindness; even that villainous shadow across Lida’s face, which, every time I saw her, aroused within me both fear and revulsion at the same time as it did an incomprehensible and humiliating attraction to her—even that had not escaped his eyes.

  “And you? How have you been lately?” he asked.

  I told him that I was still fumbling my way, as it were, through a causeless, unremitting state of almost metaphysical malaise, and that I felt at times such spiritual fatigue as if I had lived for ever.

  “Something is the matter with you, dear friend,” he said. “To look at, however, one would think you’re perfectly fine. Perhaps you should take some rest by the sea or in the countryside. Have a think about it.”

  I shrugged and glanced over at the bookshelves. For the first time I noticed a little yellow statue that I was unable to make out properly. I asked Pavel Alexandrovich what it was. He got up from his armchair, picked it up and handed it to me.

  It was a solid gold statuette of the Buddha, with a rather large oval ruby at its navel. I was struck most by the figure’s pose: contrary to what I was used to seeing, it was depicted not sitting, but standing upright. Both its arms were raised aloft, without any bend at the elbows whatsoever; its bald head was tilted slightly to one side, the eyelids drooped heavily over the eyes, its mouth lay open, and the face wore an expression of austere ecstasy, which was conveyed with extraordinary power. At its golden stomach, with a mysterious, deathly significance, the ruby glittered dimly. The statuette was so remarkable that I just kept staring at it, unable to tear myself away, entirely forgetting where I was. Finally I said:

  “A splendid piece. Where did you come by it?”

  He said that he had bought it recently in Paris, in one of the antique shops.

  “I often find myself looking at it,” he said, “and of course every time it makes me think of Buddhism, which rather appeals to me.”

  “A tempting religion, I find.”

  “Exceedingly so. You and I are Christians by an accident of history; we Russians could have made excellent Buddhists.”

  What he then said to me seemed questionable—perhaps because in such arguments it is difficult to avoid several arbitrary generalizations. Moreover, I was inclined to think that almost all religions, with the exception of a handful of barbaric cults, agreed on certain points, and the ecstasy of the Buddha, for example, which had been communicated with such persuasiveness in this golden statuette, reminded me of several paintings in the Louvre—in particular, the exultant face of St Jerome.

  “Yes, this is what one must strive towards,” said Shcherbakov. “One must reach an understanding of nirvana. Before, I used to think that it was like looking into a dark bottomless pit, but then I realized my error.”

  Perhaps, I thought, I ought to become a Buddhist—principally because of this striving towards nirvana. I to
ld Pavel Alexandrovich that in moments of extreme psychological anguish, I would invariably experience a desire to dissolve and disappear.

  “I think,” I said, half in jest, half in all earnestness, “that if I were able to tell the Buddha about this, the great sage would take pity on me.”

  In spite of the late hour, we sat discussing a great variety of subjects: Buddhism, Dürer’s paintings, Russia, literature, music, hunting, the crunch of snow that has turned to ice, the streak of moonlight that ripples on the ocean’s surface, the poor who were dying in the streets, the daily life of cripples, America’s urban civilization, the foul stench of Versailles, the ignorant, villainous tyrants who so often ruled the world, and the inevitable and loathsome apocalyptic devastation apparently inherent in every era of human history.

  * * *

  It was precisely ten minutes to one when I left. I remember this because I glanced at my watch and momentarily thought, in the false light of the street lamp, that it was five minutes past ten, which surprised me. But then I took a closer look and realized my mistake. Perhaps I could have caught the last service on the Métro, but I decided to walk nonetheless. It was a cold, starry night; here and there along the pavements glimmered streaks of frozen water. I surveyed my surroundings distractedly as I continued along the familiar road, then I looked straight ahead of me and saw amid the yellowish winter mist that the streets and their lamps had mysteriously disappeared. I paused, lit a cigarette and looked about myself. Truly, there were no buildings or streets at all: I found myself standing in the middle of a bridge across the Seine. Leaning against the railing, I stood there for a long time, gazing at the dark surface of the river. It flowed silently between those statues of the water nymphs that I had failed to recognize on my return from the nonexistent prison in that imaginary state. As I looked down at the water I gradually forgot all about my contemplative faculties’ unfortunate limitations, which I was always conscious of unless there was sky or water in front of me. Whenever I beheld either of these, I would begin to feel as if I were no longer pent in on all sides—by time, circumstance, the imperfection of my senses, the personal and insignificant details of my life, my own physical traits. Only then would I feel as if my mind were unburdened, as if freedom’s reflection were approaching me, fulfilling some divine promise—amid this silent, magisterial infinity of water or air. Whatever I thought of in these moments, my mind functioned differently than it did normally and acquired a certain detachment from the external circumstances affecting it. Sometimes I would forget where these thoughts had begun; at other times they would remain fixed in my mind. I knew, however, that I would never discover their mysterious, long-lost origin, which had vanished in the mute stillness of time gone by. I would feel as if I were now a spectator, somewhere amid this expanse of air or water, to the perpetual motion of that indefinable mass of the most diverse things—objects and thoughts, stone buildings and memories, street corners and expectations, optical impressions and despair—through which passed both my own life and those of other people, my brothers and contemporaries.

  And so I thought of the strange allure contained in this longing for my own disappearance. What seemed seductive to me might have been so for others, too, and particularly for Pavel Alexandrovich. Perhaps it was not by chance that he had spoken about Buddhism, which, as he saw it, led to an almost complete liberation from our impermanent, earthly shell. It was necessary to overcome this persistent oppressive state: the essential dependence of our spiritual life on some sordid physical substance that filters our perception of the world and is ultimately unworthy of fulfilling this “solemn mission”, as he had termed it. A man who thinks like this must surely have experienced some imbalance in his mental equilibrium, he will have heard the far-distant call of another world, abstract and sublime like the end of time, of which the holy books speak so insistently. Compared to this, of what value was this meagre aggregate of sensual pleasures that were left to him? Had he been a few decades younger, had he been possessed of a strong heart, enormous lungs and the muscular strength of a young athletic body, then perhaps this pagan frenzy of earthly passions would have rendered him impervious to Buddhism and meditation alike.

  As happened so often—perhaps precisely because I was twenty-five and knew nothing of physical handicap, and for me the sensual world was no less attractive than the spiritual one—my thoughts were cut short by a visual memory. Before my eyes appeared the two glass circles of my field binoculars, through which I found myself observing a cavalry attack bearing down upon us—that is, my comrades and me—during the war in Russia. I could see the cavalrymen approaching us in close formation, the rapid, rhythmic undulation of this live mass of horses and riders; watching it with baited breath, unable to tear myself away, it revealed the seemingly irresistible power of youth and muscle. This was an attack of the victors: it was a victory over death and over the fear of death, because it was madness and because machine guns and cannon were aimed at these men armed only with rifles and sabres. No thought, no argument could put a halt to this blind will to self-oblivion. With a feeling of profound pity I took the binoculars away from my eyes, for the riders were already two hundred metres away and at any moment artillery and dozens of machine guns would open fire on them. Moments later waves of them would be mown down, and on the scorched grass of the rolling field would lie only corpses and the dying. Nothing remained of all this but the two glass circles of my field binoculars, preserved in time and space and reflected now in the retreating surface of a night-time river in a distant foreign city, as well as that recurring weight in my heart and the memory of these fallen victors who, after so many years, had commenced their senseless, heroic attack once more in my mind.

  The dark waters continued to flow silently before my eyes. Again my thoughts turned to Pavel Alexandrovich. What would remain in life if one were to remove the base pleasures resulting from purely physical sensations—warmth, food, bed, Lida, sleep? The exultant face of the Buddha? The ecstasy of St Jerome? The death of Michelangelo? What could this biological tremor of existence signify to a man who has known the cold allure of oblivion? “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.” If one were to look upon it as a spectator, what was happening here and now was particularly absurd: winter, February, Paris, a bridge over the Seine, eyes cast down at the dark river, and a mute stream of thoughts, images and words in an incredible mix of time and thought. Pavel Alexandrovich, Lida and her entire life, the Buddha, St Jerome and the Revelation of St John, the cavalry attack, the binoculars, oblivion, and the random physical appearance of a man in a navy-blue overcoat resting his elbows on the heavy railings, the fragile physical shell that encases a part of this mysterious range of movements.

  Just then something twitched inside me—I cannot describe it any other way. My gaze, which had until now been fixed on a single point in the river, slid farther away, and the shimmering reflections of the street lamps floated into my field of vision. I looked up from the river, and then with phenomenal speed the stars in the winter sky appeared before me, cold and distant. Perhaps I am still destined to awaken one day or one evening, to forget these abstract terrors and to begin living as I once did and as I ought to live always, not in the fantasy that surrounded me, but in the immediate reality of existence. Oblivion never entirely forsook me; it merely receded a little into the distance. This almost allowed me to forget all about it, and thus I would begin to perceive everything differently: when spending the night with a woman I would feel a sense of gratitude towards my poor body, when reading some third-rate novel I would no longer despise the dead man who had written it. In a certain sense, it began to seem as if everything—or almost everything—had a justification of its own and that, surrounded by this scant human warmth, I was living in a world where people cried when a baby died or a husband was killed on the battlefield, where people said, “I’ve never loved anyone but you,” in a world full of child
ren and puppies, in a world beyond which lay only coldness and death.

  Suddenly I felt chilled to the bone; I upturned the collar of my overcoat and crossed the bridge. Yet I kept thinking about Pavel Alexandrovich and his ultimately astonishing fate. I recalled his saying to me that he had been saved by this obscure illness, and the more I thought about it, the more I was inclined to believe that his abstinence from wine, all the pain and retching, was perhaps not even an illness, but some mysterious manifestation of man’s instinct for self-preservation, the very thing that his unfortunate comrades had been so lacking in. What would have become of his inheritance had he remained an alcoholic? Again I saw him standing in front of me, just as he had been when I first laid eyes on him—an old beggar in the Jardin du Luxembourg. Those words of his, which had been uncomfortable to hear and which he had uttered long after becoming rich, rang in my ears:

  “I shan’t return to you the ten francs you gave me back then; that would be no way to thank you. I was so very grateful to you for it. I know, of course, that you’re more or less indifferent to money, but people seldom give so much to an old beggar.”

  Now he would be sitting in his armchair, in his warm, well-appointed apartment, looking at his bookshelves and the golden Buddha, thinking on a peaceful death. Lida would come in the evening and render up her obedient body to him; then she would arise from his bed and return to her flat, and he would sleep until the morning—in those white bedsheets, under the quilted duvet. In the morning he would drink some coffee and read the newspaper, later he would take lunch and then go out, either on foot or by car, for a walk. In the evening he would go sometimes to the theatre, sometimes to a concert, sometimes to the cinema. He had no concerns about tomorrow, money or the future in general; there was everlasting warmth and comfort, a fireplace, divans, armchairs, and soft footsteps across the thick-piled rug in his study. How absurd all of this might have seemed to him even two years ago, as he wandered about Paris during those cold winter days, occasionally ducking into the warm, foul-smelling Métro. If you had said to him then that he would presently be living as he did now… Then again, there had been nothing miraculous or incredible about it. It had come about simply because one day, one and a half or two thousand kilometres from Paris, the sea had been rather cold, and a cruel, miserly old man who was swimming not even very far from the shore had experienced a fateful cramp, leaving him to sink down to the seabed, his lungs filling with water, and die. There was nothing to it, apart from a most natural series of facts: the water temperature in the North Sea, a tendency towards arthritis in men of a certain age, an inadequate knack for swimming or, perhaps, a sudden stroke.