Unwitting Street

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  The result: an elephant with the soul of a fly—a Flyelephant.*

  2

  Insects are generally accustomed to so-called metamorphoses. But in this case, seeing itself in its new thirty-five-­hundred-pound body, the fly experienced a kind of terror and bewilderment. This, no doubt, is how the poor man in the fairy tale felt when, having fallen asleep in his snug little room, he awoke—by the fairy’s will—in the vast chambers of a magnificent but deserted palace. After wandering around its new body for a bit, mortally tired and finally lost, tormented by countless questions, the fly’s soul made up its mind:

  “Life is not a bed of roses. But elephants live too. Better than our fellow flies. Well and I . . . How am I not an elephant, for Pete’s sake!”

  And so it began.

  3

  Surveying its surroundings with kind elephant eyes, the insect noticed a little log hut, old and tumbledown, its one window conspicuously gleaming.

  “Oh, for a gambol across that glass!”

  And off it gamboled. Crack! The window was smashed to flinders, the little log hut to splinters.

  The Flyelephant had only wiggled its ears: how strange!

  It was spring at the time. A good fairy was tripping over the grass without bending a blade and smoothing out the petals on buds with her gentle fairy fingers: that’s why the flowers bloomed. The sticky leaves on the birch trees were turning green for all they were worth.

  “What a lovely little birch,” thought the sentimental Flyelephant, flourishing its merry feet: the slender sapling reeled, moaned, and, murmuring something with its slowly fading leaves, expired.

  Standing on four feet dug deep in the sand, the Flyelephant began to think grievous thoughts. Tears—in any one of which it might have drowned, if not for the ungainly miracle that had befallen it—trickled down its low-drooping trunk.

  “Not it, not it, not it,” thumped its frightened heart. In response to its heart, two tiny gossamer wings enmeshed in sunny threads of gold began to quiver in the blue spring air—the wings of the one whom the Flyelephant, before the miracle, had passionately and tenderly loved.

  All at once the spring was springier: all at once the sun shone like two suns, while the trunk, dried of its tears, stretched toward the tiny wings of its darling. Not only the trunk, the whole Flyelephant, in search of past caresses, clung body and soul to its beloved. A moment of bliss . . . And, quaking, its eyes round with horror, the piteous and terrible Flyelephant stood over a small black smudge, peering at the pair of tiny wings stuck to it. The tiny wings twitched—once, twice—and were still. A terrible trumpeting thundered in the ears of the elephantized creature. The creature’s soul began dashing around its gigantic body, as though trying to break through the thick gray skin.

  “Enough! I want to go home, back to my old, dark fly crack.”

  4

  What happened next? That’s not interesting. After searching the entire earth, sifting through the planet dust mote by dust mote, the Flyelephant finally found its homely narrow and lilting crack half-silted-up with sand: its old abode.

  The Flyelephant started to crawl inside: but, alas! The crack was calling, calling in a lilting high-pitched voice, yet would not let it in.

  To this day the tragic Flyelephant is still standing over its old cozy crack. It can go nowhere: neither away to open spaces, nor into the lilts of its crack.

  1920

  “A PAGE OF HISTORY”

  UNIVERSITY lecturer Heinrich Ivanovich Nolde* closed the door behind him and felt around with a foot for the stairs: one-two-three. Behind him, through the door, muffled words swarmed. A familiar voice seemed to be knocking with them from inside on the tightly closed panel—“A page of history is turning, gentlemen . . . We are witnessing an event . . . We shall write a new page . . . A page . . .” University lecturer Nolde winced: awaiting him at home on his desk were the most ordinary paper pages, the proofs of his monograph on easements.* It was about them that Nolde had wanted to speak, but meanwhile through the door . . . The university lecturer took four more steps and passed out into the street. The clamor of voices behind him broke off. Before him the nighttime street, clad in blue-white moon blots, lay silent.

  At the end of March 1917* the nights were (remember?) windy. Nolde walked along, treading gingerly on the ground’s moon-blanched flatness and listening to the sough of the spring wind. Still-bare trees bending over a fence shook the blue-black shadows from their branches down onto the ground: the shadows skittered on the flat white surface at his feet like pen-and-ink symbols on a colossal sheet of paper. A second-long lull. Then suddenly a burst of noise: somewhere far away at first, then closer and closer, louder and clearer: the white plane surface at his feet (“How strange,” thought Nolde) seemed to sway, to shudder, and everything—the plane itself, pressed to the soles of his feet, the black-blue symbols on it, the lunar disk above, the trees, the walls, and Nolde himself (at a loss, he had stopped and dropped his cane), and the houses crowded round—everything, after that strange swaying, began ever so slowly to rear up and pitch back into the unknown, arching its white surface. Nolde closed his eyes. A sound familiar to the ear of a man who has long lived among books—the delicate crackle and rustle of a page being turned—but magnified, as if by a microphone, myriad times, was coming closer and closer, descending on him with appalling speed: the rustle became a din, the din a racket, the racket the roar of a hurricane. And here it was, howling underfoot. Afraid to unclench his tight shut eyelids, Nolde only heard everything, but he heard distinctly: houses, tumbled up in the air, were falling back down on their roofs; people shaken out of their beds and dreams were screaming, crushed flat by collapsed brick walls; with short copper sobs, church bells clanged and went silent, buried under the stone piles of their ruined belfries. Forests crepitated like heaps of wind-felled trees trampled by giants; lakes swashed out of their shores; mountains, droning with landslides, fell on their peaks. Racket and roar. Going mad, Nolde clung to a wall, clutching at its ledges and sills: but the wall wobbled, began to rumble and crashed down on him with all of its bricks: consciousness passed away.

  At first there was a vague sensation of cold. Then the pressure of an immense slab bearing down from above. Not a rustle, not a sound. Perhaps for seconds, perhaps for centuries, what had once seemed to be “Nolde” gave itself up to a strange feeling of beinglessness: here—and gone. That’s all. The only odd thing was the very fact of consciousness: it seemed somehow superfluous and unnecessary. A thought began to smolder—then went out, and again began to smolder: how is it that I, a thought, am? After that a sense of its body took hazy form and slowly strengthened: its body was lying somewhere far below, flattened by the slab.

  At first the possibility of movement seemed a phantasm. But then it began to dawn: what if. Determination grew, became firmer; all at once, at the point where slab and body touched, something miraculous began to happen, a sort of exchange of weights: the slab was becoming lighter and lighter—the body heavier and denser. The slab trembled and abruptly slid sideways, returning the flattened body to its former three-dimensionality. A pale glint sprang up. Where? By an eye. Whose eye? The eye of a Nolde, yes, Heinrich Nolde . . . That’s right, university lecturer Heinrich Ivanovich Nolde. The old overturned verticals were trying to straighten up and resume their places. University lecturer Nolde also attempted to raise himself up on an elbow: the serried houses all around him were silent. Nolde moved his hand—it struck against wood: a shutter made of crude boards covering his head and chest. Where had it come from? Nolde shook the shutter off him and looked around: next to some boarded-up windows glittered an exposed shop window which, evidently, had dropped on him, Nolde, its shutter torn away by the wind.

  Nolde scrambled to his feet, legs trembling slightly, found his cane on the ground and poked with it at the innocent wooden shutter.

  “What an astonishing illusion,” he muttered. Now everything was clear, except . . . Nolde again glanced around: every­thing
was quiet. Save for someone’s rhythmic footsteps approaching in the distance. The ground still shone white like a gigantic moon-blanched page with ink blots and strange symbols of dancing black shadows on its wide-open plane.

  “A rare example of an illusion,” said the by now braver university lecturer. “I read somewhere—in Lazarus,* I believe—about phenomena of this kind. If I’m not mistaken, in his ‘Researches on . . .’” Nolde strode off down the white page, carefully pressing his soles to its motionless surface.

  Now everything was clear to him, except . . .

  1922

  GOD IS DEAD

  1

  WHAT a much-mocked philosopher once predicted—in the long-past nineteenth century—had happened: God had died.

  In the angelic choirs a foreboding had begun to smolder long before and flare up. And in the seraphim’s serried circle there had long been whispers—whispers into the rustlings of wings—about the inevitable. But no one dared look. An emptiness had arisen and was expanding, like a creeping black cavern, where He had been, unspooling space, casting fistfuls of stars and planets into the chasms. Nothingness was chilling upturned wings and feathered breasts, creeping on soundlessly stepping black paws along the worlds’ elliptical and ring-shaped orbits—but no one dared look.

  There was a cherub, by name Azaziel.

  “I want to see,” said he.

  “You’ll perish,” whispered the others.

  “How can one perish at the hand of one who has perished?” replied Azaziel and, wings outspread, he looked.

  And the wails of Azaziel rang out: “God is dead! God is dead!”*

  The angels turned their faces toward the center of the center and saw there, yawning like a black abyss, Nothingness:

  “He is dead . . . The Ancient of Days is dead”—swept from choir to choir, from star to star, from land to land. While the cherub Azaziel, pupils wide, imbibed the distance: nothing was changing. God was dead—and nothing was changing. Instants spun around instants. Everything was as it had been. Not a single star beam flickered. Not one orbit burst its ellipsis.

  Tears trembled in the beautiful eyes of Azaziel.

  2

  Thomas Graham, slippers slapping, shuffled over to the bookcase. As he reached round its glass door, he clearly saw a familiar face—old, clean-shaven, lined, with slightly narrowed eyes—glide across the door’s slippery surface and vanish; glittering behind the sidelong reflection were the colored spines of his books. Mr. Graham ran his eye over the bindings and did not see the book he wanted. He clearly remembered: a green spine, not very tall, with gold title inverted on its first letter: θ.

  He absently fingered the rough bindings of two or three books: the green-and-gold spine was nowhere to be found. Dr. Graham rubbed the bridge of his nose with a dismayed thumbnail: where could it be?

  Dr. Graham, an elderly emeritus professor at the London School of History in the Department of Religionist Prejudices, was a great eccentric with a fondness, especially in moments of bewilderment and dismay, for antiquated and outmoded turns of phrase. That is why he, running his fingers over the spines once more, muttered:

  “‘God knows’ where it’s gone.”

  But God did not know where Mr. Graham’s book had gone: even this one. He was dead.

  3

  Mr. Brooge, seated before a photometer in a small round pavilion (No. 3a) at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, was hurrying to finish a tedious test calculation of the sum of starlight in the constellation Scorpius. Bringing the emerald-white β up to the crosshairs inside the refracting telescope, he turned the alignment screw with his left hand, and with his right quickly pressed a metal button: at once the clockwork drive began to whirr.

  Everything was quiet. Mr. Brooge applied his eye to the ocular lens. A clamp clicked: in his field of vision an electrical dot lit up. Now he had only to turn the micrometer screw once or twice . . . —when suddenly something strange happened: the star β went out. His desk light was on, but the star had gone out.

  Mr. Brooge kept his head. “Must be the clockwork drive,” thought he. But the taut vertical wire was evenly rotating the little wheel with the same rhythmic whirr. Disbelieving the lens, Brooge leaned back in his chair and looked with his naked eye at the black segment of nighttime sky overhanging the pavilion’s round sliding dome: “α is there, γ is there, δ as well, but not β,” said Brooge aloud. His voice sounded somehow strange and dead in the empty pavilion. He brought the desk light nearer and scrutinized the star map: “β.” How strange—there and gone. Brooge glanced at his watch and made a note on the map’s margin: anno 2204.II.11. 9:11 β Sco/†/obiit. He put on his hat and turned out the light. For a long time he stood in the dark, trying to finish his thought. Then he left, quietly closing the door behind him: the key would not come out of the lock at first as the hands of Mr. Edward Brooge were trembling slightly.

  4

  This happened at the exact same time, to the second, as the disappearance of the star β.

  Victor Régnier, the celebrated poet, was working by a green-shaded lamp on his long poem “Footpaths and Orbits”: letters were leaping forth from his pen. The rhymes sounded strikingly consonant. Their regular rhythm was lulling his brain. The features of Régnier’s long face became sharper and much flushed. The happiness of poets is fitful. This was that rare but intense access of happiness: then suddenly—what the devil?—a gentle jolt to his brain,—and everything vanished, from first to last, as if swept into the void. True, nothing had moved: everything was where it had been, and as it had been. But from everything came an emptiness: as if someone, with a quick yank, had plucked from the letters their sounds, from the beams their light, leaving his eyes only the dead outlines. Everything was as it had been before, and yet there was nothing.

  The poet glanced at his manuscript: letters; from letters words; from words lines. Now here he had omitted a colon: he inserted it. But where was his poem? He looked round: by his elbow were open books, manuscripts, the lamp’s green shade; farther off were the oblongs of windows: everything was where it had been, and at the same time: not.

  Régnier gripped his temples in his palms. Under his fingers his pulse was twitching. He closed his eyes and understood: there was no poetry. Nor would there be. Ever again.

  5

  If, in February 2204, the papers had learned of God’s death, then in all likelihood not one of them, even the thirty-two page Central Word, would have devoted even two lines of brevier to that event.

  The very concept of “God” had long since been disimagined, eradicated, and extirpated in people’s brains. The Commission to Liquidate Divine Worship had not functioned for close to a century for lack of need. True, historians wrote about the bloody religious wars of the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but all of that had receded and abated long ago. The very possibility of the existence and development of faiths in gods was ascribed to pathogenic toxins which, over the centuries, had weakened intracranial nervous tissue. Scientists had discovered and even caught with the lens of a microscope a specific fideococcus1—a wrecker that fed on the fatty substance in nerve cells, an activity which would explain “faith disease,” the ancient mania religiosa that destroyed correct correlations between brain and world. True, this view was disputed by the Neuburg school of neuropsychology, but the masses had accepted fideococcus.

  Those who fell ill with faith in God (such cases were fewer and fewer) were immediately isolated and treated with special phosphorous injections—directly to the brain. As many as seventy to seventy-five percent were cured, while the human remainder, those who resisted the injection needle, the so-called hopelessly hopeful, were confined to a small island named—no one knew why or by whom—Third Testament Island. Here, inside high solid walls, an “experimental church” had been built for incurable believers: certain medical authorities, guided by the ancient rule similia similibus curantur,2 maintained that morbus religiosa in its most virulent and seemingly incurable forms tended t
o eradicate itself and that an experimental church combined with laboratory worship would only accelerate the natural process of attrition.

  The experimental church was a spacious vaulted room with light from above. The walls were covered in gray striped wallpaper patterned with a cross-crescent-lotus motif; cross—crescent—lotus. In the center of the room was a round stone; and on the stone a censer. That was all.

  At the moment when Azaziel began to wail, the faith-sick were ranged in rows around the round stone and praying under doctors’ supervision. They stood in silence; not even their lips moved. Only the incense in the censer was allowed to stir: curling in gray-blue whorls, the smoke rose up like a transparent thread, as if trying to reach the heavens, but then it swayed and began to sink back down in turbid wreaths. Suddenly a very distant, barely audible cry let fall by the heavens struck the dome, slid down the walls, and, as if it had crashed to earth, ceased. The doctors did not hear the cry: they saw only the horror that had crumpled their patients’ faces and thrown the rows into a moaning and murmuring heap. Then everything returned to normal. But the doctors’ astonishment was not fated to end there: within a week the patients—one after another—had all left the island with a terse “God is dead.” They would not say more. The last to go was the frail and venerable old man who had been the priest there and the last apostle, so to speak, of the island’s experimental church.

  “We were both old,” said he, hanging his head, “but never did I think that I would outlive Him.”

  Third Testament Island was deserted.

  6

  Mister Graham had found the book he wanted. Now he could call on that quotation which lived, he believed, on page 376. Smiling, Mr. Graham crooked a finger and rapped softly on the binding: may I come in? (He liked to joke now and then with the widowed thoughts of dead men.) Through the pasteboard door no answer came. Then he cracked the book open to page 376 and peered: it was that long-forgotten line of an antiquated author which began with the words “God is dead.” A sudden agitation overcame Mr. Graham. He clapped the book shut, but his emotion, which would not be clapped shut, was increasing with every second. Gripped by this new sensation, a somewhat fearful Mr. Graham listened closely to himself: the pointed letters that had leapt into his pupils seemed to be vibrating like a swarm of angry wasps in his optic nerves. His fingers fumbled a switch: the lights went out. Graham sat there in the dark. Forty-story buildings stared into his room with their thousand window-sockets. Graham closed his eyes. But the furious dance continued: “God is dead—God is dead.” Afraid to move, he clenched his fingers spasmodically: he felt that if he were to so much as touch the wall, his hand would be sucked into the void. Then suddenly Mr. Graham noticed: his lips were moving and enunciating: “Good Lord!”