by Andrei Bitov
“Is that the midshipman’s bandana? Take it off. Now!”
“It’s not his, it’s mine! I bought all three of us the same kind.”
“Oh, all three … Well, where’s mine?”
“I haven’t gotten around to getting you one.”
“But I’m the third. Give it to me!”
Lili tried to put up a fight but feigned weakness at the same time.
Finally, he managed to kiss her. His hand strayed over the bandana. The bandana was too tight, and the head underneath it was too smooth. His hand guessed what was wrong. He yanked the bandana off. It was Marleen, sans makeup. And yet it was Lili, her head shaved clean.
“Who are you now? Lili or Marleen?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is who you are now.”
“‘Whoever I was then, I still am now,’” Urbino quoted from memory.
“Precisely. You’ve always been alone. Good job, now keep it up!”
“Take your own advice!”
“Are you just pretending, or does your elevator not go all the way to the top?* Do you really not understand that there’s only one of us?”
“I’ve never had any experience with real twins. I heard that besides their physical likeness they can have a heightened affinity, be very close to one another—a spiritual bond, so to speak … But you are so different … Listen, if you and Marleen are really the same person, then there are only two of us!”
“What are you going to do about Marleen now?”
“Who’s Marleen? I only have you. You’re my Lili Marleen!”
“That’s a song, not a person. And I’m here alone; except for Marleen.”
“What Marleen?” Urbino was losing patience.
“The dog, of course.”
“Oh, thank God! Then we finally are alone, just the two of us. We’re happy, aren’t we?”
Lili didn’t speak.
“Two people in a boat, to say nothing of the dog.” The joke didn’t fly.
“The dog has nothing to do with it.”
“So there definitely are just the two of us. We are one whole, I mean…” Urbino mumbled.
“You disgust me. Don’t you get it? We’re never going to forgive you for this. I’ll never forgive you about Marleen, Marleen will never forgive you about me, and neither of us will forgive you about Dika.”
“Leave Dika out of this. I’ve been waiting for you! You are my fate.”
“Fate is what you got, you slithering dirty reptile, you! You’ve never loved anyone. Your poems are trash. You’re a man split in half. Do you think you’re smack dab between Heaven and Earth? Well, like hell you are! Between the soul and the body. You know what you are? You are a callus. A callus doesn’t hurt, it only causes pain. Oh, how the dead cling to the living! You are an invalid. Your capacity for love is atrophied.”
“If I’m so bad, how come you seduced me?”
“Me? Seduce you? It required no effort on my part. If only … If only I had … It would have meant at least something to me. And to you, too. But no, you melted like wax from the word go. Never in my life have I seen such a milquetoast.”
“You haven’t seen much, then, I take it,” Urbino spat back at her, not without jealousy.
“None of your business what I’ve seen. To think that I had gotten my hopes up. The Baroness had wasted no words describing the power of your feelings, your inconsolable grief over Dika, and I thought: There’s at least one real man on Earth. I liked your looks. All is not lost, I thought. I’ll save him, I thought. I never suspected that the Baroness would saddle me with such a swine of a man!” She shook her head in disgust. “I should have guessed right away! Maybe she really is a good psychiatrist. She saw right through you, and for that reason, instead of going after you herself, she forwarded you to me. She spread out the net for me by painting a glowing image of you in her letter.”
“Stop it, you mutt!” Urbino said in a fury.
“Well, I may be a mutt, but right now I’m ready to barf, not bark. It hurts between the horns I’m wearing now because of what you’ve done to me!”
“Horns are also a kind of callus,” Urbino retorted.
“That’s right,” she continued, “because you’re a bull. It makes no difference to you whom you cover. What made you pass up the Baroness? Was that fine, upstanding woman not good enough for you?”
“She’s a psychiatrist. Their lot has dispensed with romance.”
“Perhaps it’s so they won’t go mad themselves. Yet she did…”
“How so?”
“Revenge is a kind of mania.”
“Revenge?”
“She was head over heels in love with Happenen.”
“What about him?”
“He was in love with me.”
“So whom did she want to avenge herself on by sending me, you or Happenen?”
“Both of us.”
“But why?”
“To separate us.”
“To separate you? Are you engaged?”
“Halfway.”
“Which of the two of you, you or Marleen?”
(Urbino hadn’t noticed that he had already chosen Lili over Marleen.)
“To him, I’m the only one.”
“And he to you?”
“I’m the one who persuaded him not to kill you. He sensed danger. He’s a real man, a pillar of support. Perhaps he was more aware of the danger to him than to me.”
“Care to elaborate?”
“It’s simple. He loves me. He needs only me, even if I don’t love him back.”
“So he allowed you to have me?”
“Why not? He said he’d kill you either way.”
“For what? It was his idea to begin with.”
“For me! Because you would cheat on me.”
“But you set it all up! Why did you pretend to be Marleen?”
“To prove him right.”
“Oh, so you conspired against me together.”
“No, he’s not capable of that. It was just me and Marleen.”
“But there never was any Marleen!”
“Yes, there was. And I’ll marry him.”
“Did you promise yourself to him?”
“Yes, but on one condition.”
“Do go on.”
“That he never be jealous of my infidelity again.”
“Again? You’re one lowdown scum. You’ve got quite the nerve to mistreat two men at the same time.”
“Why two? There’s just one. And he’s still the only one.”
“I’m speechless.”
“Don’t worry. He’s not going to kill you. Provided one condition is met.”
“You dare set the terms for him?”
“No, this time it’s him. He set the terms for me.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. And the terms are…?”
“That I marry him.”
“Damn you, Lili! You’re worse than Marleen. You’re a monster!”
“Go to your Marleen, then. Damn right I’m a monster. Because I’m a woman, and I know how to love. I’m bound to love one who does not love me back. You told me yourself that one can’t split the magnet into a negative and a positive pole. You can’t split me with love, either. Just like the magnet, just like Marleen and me. No, you didn’t say anything about a magnet, that wasn’t your idea. It was your lovestruck Russian scientist Tishkin, whose story you can’t finish writing. You know why you can’t finish it? Because you don’t know how to love.”
“‘The less we love a woman, / The more the woman loves us. / And thereby we destroy her.’”
“Now, that’s good. Did you write that?”
“No, it’s by another Russian. Pushkin.”
“Someone else’s stuff again. Tishkin, Pushkin … Do all Russians have the same names?”
“No, not all of them. Just Pushkin. That’s a joke. Mine.”
Lili laughed, and Urbino attempted to draw her to him again. No go.
“It’s my translatio
n, too. My Slavist friend translated it differently: ‘The less we more a woman, the more she lesses us back.’”
“Are you saying that you’re more and I’m less?”
Urbino sensed the change of tone and changed his tack. “If you and Marleen are the same person, it means you stayed on the island the whole time and couldn’t have gone to see Happenen. Where did the kerosene come from, then? Where’s the logic in that?”
“Logic is all that’s left. I have a storehouse on the other part of the island, behind the woods.”
“Okay, fine. But how on Earth did you manage to transform yourself into Marleen?”
“That one is even easier. When we were being brought up in the monastery, we put on wonderful puppet shows at Christmas. I always got the role of angel, and Marleen played the devil.”
“Oh, come off it. You’ve told too many lies for just one person.”
“There isn’t just one person. There are two.”
“What?”
“Marleen and me. Which one do you prefer?”
“Lay off.”
“No way! What if we both like you?”
“You’ll take turns, then,” Urbino said, scoffing.
“Wrong again. Make a choice. I won’t settle for less.”
“And this is why you shaved yourself head to toe?”
“I planned to do it long ago, before you got here,” Lili said in Marleen’s voice. “Besides…”
“What?”
“I was embarrassed.”
“In front of whom?”
“You. Myself.”
“Yourself meaning Lili or Marleen?”
“Obviously it’s all the same to you. But I’m ashamed!”
“Just ashamed?”
“Yes; but not ‘just.’ Idiot! Shyness is the foundation of feeling. It is the bedrock of … s-s-s … I can’t bear that word.”
“Sensibility?”
“No, of course not! S-s-s … No, I can’t.”
“Oh, you mean sex?”
“Well, yes. Except that men and women express shyness differently. For us it’s embarrassment, for you brutality.”
“Brutality, eh? So it’s Happenen. Fine, but where’s the embarrassment? In your tattoo?”
“What tattoo?” (Innocence itself.)
“The tattoo. The one you have down there.”
“Oh, that? That’s Marleen. She did it when she was a kid, a silly prank. What is it, by the way? I haven’t seen it in a long time.”
“Talk about shyness. You’re two of a kind.”
“So, two?” (Another clapping of one hand.)
“Well, let’s take a look, shall we? Maybe it’s a fleur-de-lis, like Milady de Winter’s brand!”
“Milady? What Milady? What are you talking about?”
“You must have read The Three Musketeers. Go on, show me!”
“No way!” Lili said, spurning his readiness.
“Yes, way!” Marleen screamed, grabbing it roughly.
Suddenly, everything in Urbino seemed to go limp.
“Why don’t both of you just go f——k yourselves!” he shouted. “I’m going to get my things.”
“No, you go f——k yourself!”
“Enough! I’m not Happenen. You’re a monster. This isn’t Hollywood. There are just two of us. You and me. No Marleen, no Happenen, no Baroness, no…” He broke off.
She understood.
“Oh, so there’s no more Dika, either? You see, now you’ve betrayed her, too.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“Thank goodness, you still have some feelings left.”
“I didn’t betray her while she…” He broke off again, and again she understood.
“While she was alive?” She finished his sentence. “But you did betray her while she was still living.”
“How would you know? Who could I have betrayed her for?”
“I just know. Otherwise the snake wouldn’t have bitten her. You betrayed her for the snake that stung her in her heart.”
“With a snake? You are so cruel! You’re a snake yourself!”
“Finally! Now you’re getting it. It was me. I was that very one.”
“I’m going to strangle you! No, I’m going to see your tattoo! What have you got there? A snake?”
Urbino threw the full weight of his body on her, all the while continuing to grope and fondle her … Before they realized it, it was all over.
“How could you! You rapist! I’ll never forgive you for this!”
“Marleen said you were into this kind of thing.”
“She’s a bitch, your Marleen.”
“Pot calling the kettle black.”
“The Kreutzer Sonata!” Lili-Marleen moaned.
A shadow fell across their bodies. Happenen loomed over them.
“Ready yet?”
* * *
The goodbye was cool and restrained. Urbino handed her a carefully sealed envelope, with no addressee, and no return address.
“I wrote this just for you, Lili. Not for Birdy, not for Marleen. For you.”
On the envelope was scrawled:
THE LAST CASE OF LETTERS
Happenen splashed the oars impatiently, like Marleen wagging her tail.
“Hurry! We’ll never make it before the storm!”
And it was true. Something unimaginable was brewing in the sky. It was still and quiet, but the waves were starting to surge. The edge of the sky was charred and turned upward, like a Chinese pagoda, inside of which a bright transparent ring took shape. In the middle of the ring, as though directly over the boat, a storm cloud appeared. It condensed and grew steadily blacker toward the center. Darkness was pouring into it, and it sagged like a bomb.
Everything anticipated his imminent departure.
* * *
Their boat had already crossed half the strait when the black bomb tore off like a droplet and began to fall. An orifice just big enough for a full Moon to fit in opened up in the morose skies. The Moon illumined the rearing waves that crashed over them.
“Lili! I remembered!” Urbino cried, choking and gasping for breath, paddling back to the island with all his might. “I remembered the word from the crossword puzzle! It’s TROGLODYTE!”
“Troglodyte?” an echo resounded.
But this was Happenen, bobbing up and down in his boat on the crest of a wave.
“Rape her!” Urbino burbled, taking in another gulp of seawater. “She likes it!”
“Can do,” said Happenen, trying to brain Urbino with the oar.
* * *
A military patrol boat picked him up. When they had pumped all the water out of him and he had started breathing again, the first word he uttered was “Happenen!”
“There was someone else with me! Where is he?”
They gave him some whiskey. He took a swig, and began undulating to the rhythm of other waves …
The more we live
The more we leave.
The more we choose
The more we lose.
The more we try
The more we cry.
The more we win
The greater the sin.
To reach the aim—
Obtain the same.
The only law—
Lose Waterloo.
The only way—
Just run away.
THE LAST CASE OF LETTERS
(Pigeon Post)
FROM Lines from a Coffee Cup, A COLLECTION OF POEMS BY Ris Vokonabi
I.
In my sleep I was forewarned
of your impending visit … What the devil?!
I woke up too early, and arrived
almost too late at the station,
cursing to high Heaven (though dark
as Hell it was) the sluggishness of servants:
couldn’t they have brought the news on time?
At the appointed hour a ladder was in place: I descended
into a flock of waiting Vietnamese. “Get lost!
The ship left, I was ungodly late, and thought
up a just punishment for the trusty servant
who managed to wake me up on time:
For Promptness. What dismal failure
in the task at hand—to wake me up,
and by ticking, to measure out the time of life,
depriving life of—time … What do you mean “what for”!?
Because, you scoundrel, you didn’t pinch the maid,
did not drink an extra mug, and managed to
shun the realm of dreams—
behind the door, out shivering with the roosters!
II.
Thus, wrenched out of my delirium at last,
I sat upright and glanced around me groggily:
“What a night! Thank goodness it was all a dream.”
In the night, someone had reupholstered the divan
and moved the walls around. There, across from me,
where I fell asleep the night before was now a rectangle,
overgrown with a flora of dust … within this thicket—
another, geometrically similar shape: a letter,
the address facing downward, two diagonals crossing it …
Two threads from the corners came together in a knot—
a little kite!… a fragile thread
stretched over to the window. The window was grayish
and looked just like an envelope … amidst the dust a window gapes,
a letter shines bright in the window sash
and strains to fly off to the sky. Such wondrous
ties and connections are completely understandable.
I’m tired of guessing: defining the circle of loss is always helpful.
The window is torn open. Barefoot, shivery handwriting.
A scrap of fog is hanging from the windowsill …
“I arrived yesterday
too early at the station;
don’t wait and don’t be late
kisses, sleep, goodbye
—Marquise Méranville” …
Oh, drat it!
I tore it up. Untied the laces.
Who in our day and age writes letters, really?
The letter flew up in the air, nodding to the wind,
The sky above the former Prussian town grew rosy pink,
anticipating sunrise, signifying
that today had finally come!
I smiled and wiped it from my face:
“It’s all right now,” the nonsense went,
