Oneiron

  It is important to know one thing about Polina that has remained hidden until now, namely that she had a photographic memory. When her mind was sharp, she could recall a very detailed picture of any page of a book she had read if the book had touched her in the slightest, and most books she read did. The citrus bitterness of Cointreau, l’eau-de-vie V.S.O.P. aged in oak barrels, or a sweet muscat helped impress the pages on her mind. Begemot had listened to many lectures delivered from memory in his mistress’s lap. Unlike human beings, the cat clearly enjoyed the voice she used to tell him things. Polina’s voice was individual; indeed, her whole self was very individual. Begemot’s poor mistress didn’t know how to approach most situations other than by carrying on, by taking up space in a style that was far too original given most people’s limited tolerance. When Polina joined a group of people and opened her mouth, that was almost always the end of everything. Either she was silenced by a sly change in topic, or she was simply left out entirely. Everyone suddenly had somewhere else to be, and the cluster of people scattered, leaving Polina alone with herself again.

  Polina was an entirely insufferable person. She happened to have a few special abilities, for example this cursed photographic memory, which would have been useful in a magic act but not in an office and not even in the world of creative people, because the creative world, like any other socioeconomic stratum, is full to overflowing with carefully polished posturing. Fortunately Polina had her cat, her bar cabinet, and her books. Or should things be arranged differently in the name of truthfulness: bar cabinet, books, and cat? The significance of the cat was great, though. Every morning Begemot meowed and butted his drowsy mistress into a good mood, meooow! His lovely shining black coat and the slender, strong frame that slid beneath (he mainly ate raw entrails like liver) felt so good under a crapulous hand, so very good. Yes, her cat was dear to Polina, the dearest of all, so the final order is this: cat, bar cabinet, and books. The bar cabinet has to be put there in the middle because there were no books without alcohol, as we know, although we also know that if Polina had been forced to put a tick mark next to either the bar cabinet or books in a multiple choice questionnaire, concerning the most significant things in her life, of course she would have ticked the books, since they had intrinsic value, and alcohol only had significance as part of her reading ritual.

  Let this introduction suffice for Polina’s special gift, her monstrous photographic memory, of which we receive the following indisputable evidence:

  “‘It may therefore be stated in advance that of the Lord’s Divine mercy it has been granted me now for some years to be constantly and uninterruptedly in company with spirits and angels, hearing them speak and in turn speaking with them. In this way it has been given me to hear and see wonderful things in the other life which have never before come to the knowledge of any man, nor into his idea.’ Thus wrote Swedenborg in the introduction to his Arcana, a work of which only four copies were sold during his lifetime, one of which was purchased by Immanuel Kant. Kant read the book and was deeply disappointed, because he did not find any evidence of the spirit world in it. A hypochondriac wind raging in a delirious mystic was Kant’s evaluation.

  “So was Swedenborg insane? Or was he a great, misunderstood poet? Due to his high social status, he wasn’t shut up in an asylum, although apparently that option did receive serious consideration. I, on the other hand, would say that we, dear women, are in a unique position among the critics of Swedenborg’s celestial visions. So I propose that once I’ve given you a basic overview of his ideas, we vote as we just did about the couch and the flying carpet, about whether Swedenborg was right or wrong when he wrote about the afterlife. What do you say?”

  Should Polina have become a teacher? Damn it to hell, she knew how to talk! Had she made the mistake of her life when she made the safe choice of business education, which had only led her to a fair-weather camaraderie with pleasantly incorruptible yet depressingly emotionless numbers? Perhaps she should have worked with children! Polina clearly had a talent for engaging an audience, assuming the audience was primed before her, as it now is (and as well-bred students are).

  What Polina hasn’t noticed is that she is talking about Swedenborg in her own language, not English. And everyone seems to understand although no one else knows a word of Russian. Nina nods, and soon all the others are nodding; Polina’s suggestion of a vote is an idea they could support. Wlibgis has sat up from under her wig, and Maimuna has opened her eyes again and doesn’t look at all angry now. There the women sit, gawking like obedient little girls eager to learn. All that is missing from the picture are partings running down the middle of their heads, tight plaits, and bright red bows.

  “Emanuel, eldest son of the chaplain Jesper Svedberg and Sara Behm, got along famously in the company of the royal family,” Polina continues self-confidently, downright beaming, “and he even competed in philosophy with his friend Charles XII. So Queen Ulrika Eleonora elevated Swedenborg, not forgetting his sisters and brothers, to the nobility in 1719. That was how Svedberg became Swedenborg. The family had mining interests, which Emanuel inherited when he was thirty-two, after which he no longer had any financial worries. Quite a nice starting point for erecting the architecture of the heavens, wouldn’t you say!

  “Swedenborg was a product of the University of Uppsala, and his colleagues included Carl von Linné (the king of taxonomy!) and Anders Celsius (the thermometer!). So you could say that he matured intellectually in extremely elevated company. His own subjects were geometry, metals, and chemistry, but of course he practiced other skills such as mechanics, mathematics, and astronomy. He advanced the understanding of hydrology and attempted to solve the hottest scientific problem of the day, how to determine longitude at sea. He didn’t get anywhere near a solution but, proud as he was, refused to admit his failure.

  “Swedenborg’s skill and especially the subjects of his interest were not insignificant. He bound books, ground lenses, did clever engravings, made furniture, and even tried his hand at clock making. Fourteen inventions can also be credited to him, including a universal musical instrument, a notable flying machine design, and a less notable submarine design. In my opinion his most fascinating invention was the analytical method he developed for ‘predicting desires and emotions’. Unfortunately little record of this bright pearl of thought was preserved for future generations, and so Mr. Sigmund Freud later swept the board.”

  Polina pauses briefly, as if she wishes to say something about Mr. Freud. (She doesn’t like Mr. Freud very much.) Will is more important than understanding, Polina had always believed, and with this thought she catapulted centuries back, leaving behind the muddy present and the pathetic onion-like model of the soul dismembered by too much talk and endless stinging discoveries. Her soul was not an onion. And she also wasn’t a ruminant. If human will was as tortuous as the human walnut brain with its endless folds, nothing would ever come of anything.

  And nothing ever did come of anything! There were an unfortunate number of cautionary examples. Once long ago at an evening gathering, Polina had wished to recite a poem from memory to delight the other revelers. Her voice was practically made for intoning hundred-year-old verse. She wanted to give herself, her whole aspic-like body, to the service of the poem, humbly and selflessly. Unlike the others, she didn’t imagine she was special. That one of her loathsome personal secrets, whatever it might be, could be an interesting topic of conversation. None of them were. But neither were anyone else’s secrets! Every explanation of a motive pressed into service as a blithe amusement—I only meant to wound him, that loud but oh-so-primitive way of speaking, I went looking for attention and I got it, believe you me, I got it with interest—sent shudders through her body. It irritated, scandalized, and shocked her. The direction of the conversation was always so depressingly predictable. Surely she wasn’t the only one to be disgusted by the exhibitionists? The admiring gazes and encouraging nods the confider received were just theatre. Right?


  There Polina had stood and seized, as they say, the moment. “Mmmmm, do you know, I just read . . .” As a rebuke to the confider and in order to delight the others, she began to recite from memory an old poem that lacked any hint of the onion soul, that had a stately rhythm and a bright, uncomplicated will. Each line resounded in the hall, and, entranced by her own voice, Polina added volume. Everyone within ten meters froze to listen.

  And then—silence. Someone snickered. The circle dispersed. Someone, perhaps in the corner with the fireplace, lobbed a feeble effort, doomed to failure, at building a swaying suspension bridge: “. . . that someone still knows how to do that in the age of copy and paste . . .”

  That Sigmund Freud, not Swedenborg, received the glory for developing a method for analyzing desires and emotions was only a small, repulsive fact, though. Polina quickly brushes both of her ample, sagging breasts with her hands as if wanting to shake something off them. Then out of old habit she straightens her back (as she had done with her cat in her lap: her back hunched from reading, she would continue scratching and petting with her right hand as she straightened up, so as not to interrupt Begemot’s purring and cause him to misinterpret her change in position and jump off her lap, because, Begemot soon learned, now began the best stage of the evening, when his mistress would begin a trance-like oration, during which her touch would become almost supernaturally gentle). A bright, clear voice begins to rise from Polina’s erect frame.

  “Swedenborg practiced his more customary scientific skills by founding a vernacular publication, Daedalus Hyperboreus, and serving as its editor. He was also a keen economic thinker, adamantly opposing limits on trade, such as customs laws and navigation acts. He placed society above the individual, the fatherland above society, and the church above the fatherland. Well. Ehem. Perhaps this is sufficient background on the temporal interests of Mr. Swedenborg?”

  Instead of waiting for a reply, Polina continues, sliding forward like a slippery herring, like a shuttle in a loom, because she is in motion now, in her element; she is in a seraphic mood.

  “So let us move on to Swedenborg’s literary output; here also we have reason to detour through his early writing in order to avoid misrepresenting his achievements. Regnum subterraneum, ‘The Underground Empire’, became one of Swedenborg’s most notable scientific works from his period of activity in the mining industry. Especially the sections on iron and copper, ‘De ferro’ and ‘De cupro’, which offered an excellent general treatment of the subject even for encyclopedists. Swedenborg adopted his conception of reality from Descartes, who believed in the fullness of the universe, not Newton, who defended void theory. We know that he should have listened to the latter ideas, at least if we’re approaching the matter from a scientific perspective. But poetic souls may find more inspiration in Swedenborg’s speculations. At least I find them both uplifting and diverting!

  “According to Swedenborg, reality is made from small bubbles or bullae. The space between these bullae is filled with even smaller, finer bubbles, aether particles. The smaller the bubble, the more durable and quick moving it is. And things certainly have a habit of moving in this world! Nothing remains stationary for even a moment. Either movement arises internal to the bubble, tremulation (vibrations), or externally, that is motion caused by the bubble, known as undulation. Let me see if I remember how it went . . . ‘The atmosphere, whether the ethereal atmosphere, or the aërial, is a lower aura, and with this also the angels are compared; and the human animus, to which the affections or passions are attributed, is a similar spirit or genius.’ Yes, that was it!

  “Gradually Swedenborg developed more interest in the human body, the kingdom of the soul. He became fascinated with the circulation of blood and especially the anatomy of the brain. Open a brain cell, Swedenborg said, and you will find small spheres within that give birth to material ideas. Continue opening, peel back one more small sphere, and you find new small vortices, namely intellectual ideas . . . According to Swedenborg, the soul is created and limited, bound by the body, one of the natural parts of the body, but, by the grace of God, immortal. It is a point. The extreme point of finitude, beyond which begins the divine, the infinite, which the soul, being on the boundary, brushes up against. Thus, the soul is not located in the epiphysis, as Descartes claimed, but rather flows through the whole body. Ergo influxus gloria! Therefore we all have direct contact with the divine!”

  Perhaps Polina should have become a poet after all. Her mind clearly yearned for poetic heights. If Polina had not been so utterly misunderstood in her work community, which at the very least failed to encourage her to pursue her strengths, and if she hadn’t been so bibulous and died before her time, she might have written anything. For example, perhaps an ode to the beautiful Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, like this:

  ODE TO A BUTTERFLY

  Spark of life, oh thou, bright and colorful,

  amidst the tattooed crowd you walk,

  but paint yourself with marks as well,

  you dance, wild, and burst into song,

  guileless, innocent child,

  whose merit, whose success

  is to play with flowers beneath the trees!

  Your nature is to be like the butterfly: free,

  a winged flower that soil cannot mire,

  who may, and can, and wishes to find,

  to search the garden’s corners and boundaries!

  Fly, fly away now,

  reject the root, the ground,

  nimble, flee far with the winds and squalls!

  For only a moment you can endure, Nadezhda,

  thus must your brilliance burn bright

  like the red dying of the day

  to color the sky and land,

  you too, bold girl,

  will conquer the choir of men,

  despite their wish to silence your sound!

  Nor would you devour the offerings of your garden,

  although you reveled until you were old,

  since even a drop of honey suffices you:

  a second would daze your delicate frame!

  Here is the virtue of your feast,

  although you do not bow to the snare,

  nor laws restrain or hold you back!

  Even laws are made to remind us

  of will, of desire surrendered,

  of power to prescribe oneself alone,

  what we will surrender for peace,

  but we remember still

  what true freedom is like:

  your game, frenzied, riotous, bright, innocent!

  The ode would have been published in Novyi Mir, and Polina would have become famous. No one would have dared question her uniqueness any more. No one would have laughed at her. She would have been a woman equal to her poem, equal to all the poems she wrote, equal even to all the poems she might one day come to write. She would be big and magnificent and soon greater than Akhmatova herself!

  “Despite his poetic ideas, Swedenborg’s works were left rather incomplete. Œconomia regni animalis, ‘The Economy of the Kingdom of the Soul’, was a hastily patched together book, and only three installments of the planned seventeen ever appeared of the Regnum animale, ‘The Kingdom of the Soul’ series. It may be that Swedenborg preferred thinking and reading to writing his ideas down. It may be that he preferred dreaming to writing . . .”

  Out of habit, Polina slips back into her book-reading stoop, into the posture she assumed when scanning the words that throbbed on the paper. Thoughts born of words soaked into her with ease, becoming her thoughts, her knowledge, growing her larger and larger, making her a giant. But why was talking about those ideas so hard? As soon as she tried something, disturbances cropped up, circuits shorted. Maybe Emanuel was the same. The mystic closed his eyes, saw angels around him, and that was enough for him. Then when he tried to write out of a sense of duty, the visions didn’t bend so easily to words, the words didn’t melt into sentences, and the angelic nature of the angels didn’t appear on the paper at all. The i
deas became dead, rotting things, little more than poor maxims. “He that is deficient in mind and spirits, is also deficient in life and intelligence; he is a dead man, a stock, a carcass,” Swedenborg wrote.

  Just then a melancholy enters Polina’s mind, somewhat similar to that in her fourteenth-story flat on Yauzsky Boulevard, in those moments when she thought of her French professor, the Swedenborg scholar with the beautiful soul. He had given an assignment to her and only her: “Read Swedenborg. Even though he may be a complete wacko from a modern perspective, I found myself identifying deeply with him as I studied his ideas. I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m going crazy myself. My wife already lives somewhere in the world of the angels. She smiles into emptiness and doesn’t even recognize me. But, to return to the point, it would be interesting to hear what you think of Swedenborg as a layperson. Does he arouse any feelings in you . . . for example a protective instinct?”

  The professor had cast Polina a significant look, and Polina returned it. A long, burning silence ensued, an electricity between them, and snap, Polina received a shock on her fingers when she happened to touch the man’s red scarf. They both burst out laughing in relief, after which they leaned on each other. The wine was better than ever. And soon they would meet again.

  But then the world built a barrier between them. The House of Culture of State Ball-Bearing Plant Number 1 was occupied, people were killed, and the world observed a moment of silence for the deceased. The timing was perfectly wrong for Polina. It was nothing but the snot-faced mockery of a sadistic fate. Polina was left alone with her Swedenborg. For a long time, a full six months, she believed that things would work out, that fate would yet deliver a surprising, joyous reunion. Because it couldn’t be a coincidence that a man like that, speaking words like those, with glances like his, appeared before her—could it?

  Polina read, waiting and pining. Her heartache was salty, manifesting as sweat in the folds of her knees and on her back, palpable as a burning in her face. Begemot was gracious. He didn’t judge her as she lolled in her cognac, wine, or liqueur chair after a few glasses, her office skirt rolled up to her waist, her stockings down to her ankles, her fingers where lonely virile women’s fingers sometimes are. Terrible perspiration, estrus sweat, menopause encroaching; salt, amino acids, phosphates, potassium chloride . . . Her very own Jean-Louis Trintignant was inside of her, whispering in her ear, “Read Swedenborg,” and full to overflowing with pent-up passion from caring for his ailing wife.