Autobiography of a Corpse

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  Glinting fitfully from the walls of buildings I saw paper squares. Only yesterday afternoon they weren’t there.

  I walked up to one. The shadow from a cornice had cut off the top lines. I began reading from somewhere in the middle:

  . . .are being bought up by the commissariat: foot wrappings—7 kop.; undershirt—26 kop.; pair of boots (mil. type)—6 rub.; also . . .

  Only by holding a lighted match up to the paper square’s top lines did I learn that it was collecting not only boots and undershirts but bodies with what was in them: life. About the price of this last item, it said nothing.

  By morning many-hued military flags were hanging over building entrances and gateways. Men with newspapers held up to their eyes were walking down the sidewalks; men with rifles on their shoulders were walking down the roadways. Thus from the very first day newspapers and rifles divided us all into those who would die and those for whom they would die.

  At first, of course, there was great confusion and chaos. People would crowd round some gawky new recruit in his long earth-colored greatcoat in glad agitation.

  “You for us?”

  “We’re for you.”

  But later the blurry line dividing “those who” from “those for whom” became clearer, and along that line there ran a crack; the crack opened and began to widen.

  I don’t know what it was, but the early days of the war slightly excited even me. I had worked too much and too often with the “death” symbol, had included that biological minus in my formulas too systematically, not to be affected by all that was going on around me. Death—a dissociation that I imagined within the bounds of my “I” and only my “I” (beyond was of almost no concern to me)—was now forcing me to think in broader and more generalized terms. All the printer’s ink was now going to death’s accounts; death was turning into a programmatic, government-recommended idea. Officially regulated, death began putting out its own periodical, which, like any well-organized publishing concern, kept to a schedule. It was the most laconic, businesslike, and absorbing publication I had ever read: I refer to those white booklets that provided a “complete list of the dead, wounded, and missing in action.” At first glance, a journal of death might seem dull: number—name—number—another name. But given a certain imagination, the dry, lapidary style of those booklets only intensified a sense of the fantastic. They pushed one to the most surprising conclusions: Having made a purely statistical inspection of the March and April issues for 1915, I, for instance, knew that among the dead there were 35 percent more Sidorovs than Petrovs. Then again, Petrovs went missing more often. Sidorovs were evidently unlucky. Or perhaps Petrovs were cowards, or else found places at the rear. I don’t know. I only know that the distant, battle-scorched fields and crater-pocked earth were exerting a stronger and stronger pull on my imagination. I was here, one of those and among those for whom men were dying. They were dying far away, hundreds of miles away, so as not to alarm us. And their corpses, if they returned at all from there to here, returned in secret, at night, so as not to disturb us, the ones for whom they must die.

  I remember I even gave up on my “Axiomatism Crisis.” Work on it had not been going well. Some nights I would quietly dress and slip out into the benighted streets. I knew the exact hours when the ambulance trams fetched up at the infirmaries with fresh batches—just arrived from that mysterious “there”—of hashed human flesh.

  As a rule, I didn’t have to wait long. From around a bend in the street, steel grinding softly against steel, unlighted black cars would come trundling out. They would stop at the entrance. A light would snap on. The doors would swing quietly open and, while whispering orderlies tramped up and down the steps with stretchers, I would steal up to the cloth panels of those summer ambulance trams and listen to the muffled, almost soundless squirms and moans of dying human flesh. By the time the cars had been cleaned out, a new load would be creeping up from behind.

  I found it hard only to look. Being here but drawn there, I could no longer do that. One night, I seized the moment when several orderlies, while unloading carcasses, converged in the doorway creating a jam: I walked up to a stretcher abandoned on its short folding legs in the middle of the pavement. (The carriers, given a free minute, had gone off to get a light from someone’s cigarette.) The carcass, entirely covered by a greatcoat, was unguarded. I quickly bent down and pulled back the broadcloth. I could barely see anything. Before my suddenly fogged lenses was a blurry smudge, writhing and twitching. A smell of sanies and sweat singed my nostrils. I bent down lower still, to the ear of what was lying under the broadcloth.

  “For us? For me? But I may not exist. That’s just it, I don’t. So it turns out that . . .”

  My tugging at his greatcoat must have hurt him, because suddenly from there, from the twitching smudge, came a soft and strained eeeee. I unclenched my fingers; the broadcloth sank down—and covered the smudge.

  I hurried home, in a rush to get somewhere. Yet when I got to my door, I hung back, loath to cross the threshold. I knew that there, in that dark box, patiently waiting among the symbols and numbers, was my figment: 0.6 person.

  All that night it tormented me with the relentless emptiness of its eye sockets.

  Meanwhile, the white and pink squares pasted to the walls of buildings had been replaced by dark blue rectangles. The years listed, rising up the scale of time, were coming closer and closer to my “call-up year.” The distant there, glowing blue from the paper leaves, was calling to me ever more loudly and tenderly: Come.

  It seemed to me that I heard it, that short simple syllable.

  But then one day, at a crossroad, I met a doctor I knew. As we were saying goodbye, I retained his hand in mine.

  “Tell me . . .”

  “What?”

  “With six diopters, do they take you?”

  “Y-yes. Although . . .”

  “What about seven?”

  “No.”

  We unlinked palms. When he had gone a dozen paces, the doctor glanced back at me and made to turn round. But then he went on. At the time my vision was 7.5. My glass adjunct was stubbornly clinging to here. Still standing where the doctor had left me, I unclasped its tight metal legs, held it up to my face, and peered at its enormous oval-squinting biconcave eyes. I don’t know if it was a simple solar reflex or something else, but in the eyes of my adjunct there glittered a joyful brilliance.

  It was then that my excruciating insomnias began. I gave up my late-night strolls about the streets. They no longer helped. I never could and cannot drink. People’s society to me is worse than insomnia. But I had to fill my long, empty vigils with something. I bought thirty-two black and white carved figures and began playing chess: myself against myself. The utter futility of chess thinking appealed to me. After long struggles between thoughts and counter-thoughts, pitched battles between moves and countermoves, I could pour that whole tiny world, wooden and dead, back into its box, and not a trace of the dynasties of its black and white kings, or the devastating wars they had waged, remained—within me, or without.

  Still, my games of “myself against myself” did have one peculiarity that at first intrigued me: Black almost always won.

  Meanwhile long caterpillars of trains had taken away almost all of the men with rifles. Left behind were those with hands fit only for newspapers: nervously crumpled sheets full of numbers—now threatening, now falsely promising—that changed their tune from one day to the next. Purely psychological statistics don’t (yet) exist. But it’s fair to say that the war’s dialectic forced those who were more or less alive to go to their death, and gave those who were more or less dead the right to live. And if the war managed only to separate the living from the dead, then the new regime, arriving in its wake, would sooner or later pit them against each other as enemies.

  Even then one sensed the approach of this new, as yet unnamed regime. It was as though the oxygen were being pumped out of the air by a slow gigantic plunger. The atmosphere was suf
focating. Men from here could not and would not hide their dislike of men from there, the ones who, having snatched a two-week furlough from death, tried in vain to be happy among the unsympathetic men for whom they were dying.

  One day, as I was wiping my bookshelves with a rag, a plump German tome slipped out of my fingers and flopped on the floor. A random line in that open book caught my eye, and I read on. I learned that inhabitants of the Fiji Islands have no word for “I.” Savages do without that symbol we so cherish by replacing it with something like our “to me.”

  I felt that I had made an important practical discovery. Now, if I were to fall out with my “I,” I might try living in the dative case.

  To me: some bread

  a female

  some quiet

  and a little peace in Heaven. If there is any. And perhaps . . .

  But the events then bearing down on us at such a catastrophic rate rendered my venture with “to me” somewhat belated.

  The situation was becoming more and more alarming. The front lines were creeping up on us. Some people were already imagining they heard distant cannonades that didn’t exist. When small scraps of clouds drifted over the city, they said they came “from there.” And then launched into lengthy explanations of how gunfire alters the shapes of clouds. It felt as though we, the ones still here, had been billeted in an enormous thick-walled building clad in rows of false windows.

  On my writing table is an amusing toy for reflection. It was given to me by an acquaintance, an engineer who worked in a vacuum laboratory: an ordinary, hermetically sealed glass vial. It contains an intricately twined and exceedingly fine strand of silver hair. Surrounding the strand is a vacuum, a carefully filtered void. For me, that is the vial’s whole point.

  The engineer explained that this total evacuation, this absolute void, had taken a long time to achieve. Only recently have we mastered the technique of making an absolute emptiness, a so-called hard vacuum.

  Yes. And now the moment has come when I, having hidden my thought inside a fragile vial, have entered its hard vacuum.

  Incidentally, after turning the vial this way and that, I asked, “But how do you put the air back in?”

  The engineer looked at me the way one looks at an eccentric or a child, and burst out laughing.

  “Very simple: Break the glass.”

  THE THIRD AND LAST NIGHT

  I’m falling behind in my writing. I doubt I’ll manage to finish by morning. The silliest thing cut into my work: sleep. And disrupted the routine of my insomnias.

  Late this afternoon I suddenly could not keep my eyes open, and I had this dream.

  I dreamt that I was here in this cage of flat dark blue roses. Sitting and waiting for something. Then suddenly I heard the soft sound of wheels on snow. How odd, I thought, wheels in winter. I went to the window. A hearse was by the entrance: black with white tassels. Two or three men in dress caftans over knitted jackets were staring up at my window. No mistake there. One even shielded his eyes with his hand. I stepped back from the window, then again crept up, but from the side, so they wouldn’t see me: They were still staring. One of them adjusted an absurd hat like the upturned hull of a boat, sat down on a spur stone, and began to smoke. So they had decided to wait. Trying to make myself invisible, I hugged the wall and edged toward the threshold. Stepping out into the corridor, I heard the tramp of heavy boots by the entrance door, as though three or four men were shouldering something long and unwieldy. The door stood wide. But the doorway was narrow and their burden, dark blue with a white border, swaying on their shoulders, had gotten stuck. I stepped back, closed the door, and looked round for the key. There was no key. The dark blue burden was lurching closer and closer, banging into walls and corners in the corridor. I put my shoulder to the door and braced an outstretched foot against the bed. For good measure. And then . . .I woke up. My shoulder was twisted uncomfortably against the wall’s dark blue roses. My outstretched foot was wedged in the bed’s wooden back.

  Still barely awake, I thought to myself: Am I really afraid? And have I correctly anticipated and calculated everything? What if . . .

  No. Whatif can no longer fool me. How well I know him, that universal marplot and jester. Posing as a “grand Peut-être,”[4] he outjested that jester Rabelais by inviting him “for after death.” And Rabelais believed him.

  Whatif doesn’t believe in anything, not even corpses. As soon as he sees the lid being fitted onto a coffin while men wait with shovels, he slips a finger in between coffin and lid. And keeps it there till it’s pinched. He always gets in the way.

  Censers may waft incense as the clergy sing of the last kiss and a girl’s trembling lips bend over the dead, tightly pursed crack, but Whatif is right there, whispering into a waxen ear: “Don’t miss your chance, Dear Departed.” Even so, I’m grateful to the marplot. He made me a gift of one day. Just one. I promised myself to remember him right before the end, and here I am remembering.

  The revolution crashed down like lightning. One can hide lightning (its discharge) in a dynamo and force it, torn up and measured on meters, to flicker dimly inside the bell jars of thousands upon thousands of economic lightbulbs. But then, when the revolution was still new, we were all, willingly or unwillingly, inflamed or burnt by its jagged, all-consuming course. In an instant, all thresholds had been removed—not only from rooms, cells, and studies but also from consciousnesses. Words one had thought forever crushed by the censors’ pencils, shrunk and shunted into breviers and nonpareils, suddenly revived, and began waving and calling from red flags and banners. Having suddenly overcome my own threshold, I too crept out to meet the banners and crowds. Whatif had managed to convince even me. Not for long, but still.

  On that day of mine, the first and only, the din and glints from a mass demonstration had been beating on my lenses and brain since morning. For a minute I even put away my inseparable adjunct: Spots spun round me, dancing a harum-scarum jig. The sun skipped in the March puddles. In the blue rain-washed sky, white cloud blots pranced.

  For want of habit, I very quickly tired. With vibrating nerves, nearly drunk from the sounds and meanings, so new and not mine, I quietly disengaged myself from the crowd and set off through the streets. But the streets, also noisy and excited, gave my nerves no rest. Then a long cemetery wall loomed up. I turned in.

  But strangely, even the peace locked inside those walls was that day somehow unpeaceful. The crosses, pitching about and waving their crosspieces, seemed to be mounting a defense; the stone wall round the cemetery resembled that of a fortress under siege.

  Worn out, I sat on a still-damp bench. And immediately I saw her: a little girl of three or four. Tripping toward me down the path. She appeared to be alone. Slightly unsteady on the hard slippery earth, her little legs were stubbornly, step by step, conquering space. From under her knitted hat, a fine and seemingly familiar oval shone white. The wind ruffled her golden curls and the ends of the red ribbon in which they were tied. When she reached the empty end of my bench, I said, “Life.”

  She knew that I meant her. Standing among the crosses, their dead white arms outstretched above her, she looked up at me and smiled. Her pupils, I noticed, were strangely dilated inside their fine light blue rims.

  From around a bend in the path came the sound of hurrying footsteps. A woman’s voice called the child. But not by that name, my name. I quickly rose and set off in the opposite direction, walking faster and faster. Near the gates I knocked a pious old woman off her feet.

  “You owl!” she cried after me.

  “Comrade Owl,” someone’s merry bass corrected, and laughed.

  I laughed too.

  As soon as I got home, I began hunting for that long-forgotten missive. I especially needed the nine letters helplessly and touchingly (as it seemed to me now) stitching together my name on the envelope. I rummaged through all my paper piles. Old useless jottings kept thrusting themselves into my hands, university junk, odd passages from books, official co
mmunications. The one thing I needed was not there: The small narrow envelope with the jumping lines hidden inside had disappeared. Apparently forever.

  That day, though, I was in luck; I had not disturbed the dust in my folders and paper piles for nothing. My attention was unexpectedly drawn to an old extract. A note in the margin read: from Kirik’s questions to Bishop Nifont of Novgorod.

  And farther down:

  QUESTION 41: Ought a burial to take place after sunset?

  ANSWER: No. For it is the reward of the dead to see the sun at the hour of their burial.

  I went to the window and opened it to the night. The day noises, now quieted, were tossing softly and sleepily among a myriad of lights. I drew up a chair and sat the whole night with my head in my hands. Between my temples, the thought fought and fought and would not be still: So I’m a corpse. So be it. But I too shall see the sun at the hour of my burial.

  Meanwhile the March fury was surging higher and higher, and many were frightened by its violent rise. What had to happen, happened. At first the dead and the living lived together. Life, caught in a vise, fettered, and forced to be part of a dead mechanism monotonously counting off the days, seemed to favor the dead. They better suited the existing order. Later on, the war separated, at least in part, the dead from the living: Having finished with the living, having settled accounts with them for good, the war wanted to give life to the galvanized corpses. But the living, herded into slaughterhouses, found themselves together for the first time and so seized Life. They did not need to manufacture it by galvanic means, by stealing things from nature: Nature was in them—inside their nerves and muscles. An ordinary musculature pulled down the walls of the well-equipped slaughterhouses—and then began the planet’s first struggle or, rather, revolt of the living against the dead.