Yes, the revolution, as I see it, was not an internecine war between Reds and Whites, Greens and Reds, not a campaign of East against West, class against class, but a fight for the planet between Life and Death. Either—or.
When the revolution began to get the upper hand, then corpses too joined the fray: all those “and I’s,” “half I’s,” “barely I’s,” “slightly I’s.” And especially that variety of corpse discovered by me: “to me.” They offered experience, knowledge, passivity, compassion, and loyalty. Everything except life. Yet life was what was in demand. It gradually became clear that even outside cemeteries there was plenty of room for corpses. The revolution could “use” them as well. A doctor I knew once described to me the climacterium in women: the gradual numbing of the sexual system, the loss of sensitivity, and the physiological sensation of love. Climacteric women cannot love (purely physiologically). But they can be loved. Taking this example in extenso, I maintain that people with a numb sensorium, with an almost corpse-like ossification of the psyche, can no longer live themselves. But they can be lived. Why not?
I may be climacteric too, but I’ve understood. I cannot. And I’m ashamed, because I saw, if only for an instant, the sun at the hour of my burial.
This past summer, I was walking by the banks of the Moscow River when I noticed some boys playing skittles. The game was in full swing. I stopped to watch.
“Hey, Petka, set up the dead man,” a spirited voice rang out.
Petka, bare soles flashing, dashed into the square etched in the dirt and quickly arranged the skittles: two lay side by side—the table. A third on top: the corpse. Two more stood either side: the candles.
“R-right, and now . . .” Petka ran back to the line and picked up the bat. For a second he fixed the “dead man” with a squinting, slightly malicious eye. Then he sent the bat hurtling through the air, and the dead man, scattering skittles, was knocked out of his square. A cloud of dust rose over him and settled back down.
And I thought to myself: It’s time. It’s now time.
Indeed, Dasein-Ersatz—an imitation life—used to be possible. But now it’s harder. Almost impossible.
New eyes have appeared. And people. They have a new way of looking at you: not at but through. You can’t hide your emptiness inside; they will bore into you with their pupils. No need to step aside when you meet them; they will walk right through you, as through air.
I feel sorry for all those “and I’s” and “barely I’s” still clinging to their half existence: Living for them is hard and tedious; “no” has driven a wedge into “yes”; left has run into right; the top of their life has been stove in and the bottom exposed. Even so they will all, wherever they hide, be dragged out and ripped open like old tin cans that have rusted through; better to bury oneself under a dark blue lid with a white border.
A month ago I met someone. I was walking along the Arbat, past shopwindows; in the windows were numbers on tags; under the tags were goods; but in one window, above the number, were two bullet holes caulked with a dirty gray paste. This struck me as curious: I lingered for a moment. Suddenly I heard a merry voice at my ear.
“You’re intrigued. Y-yes, skillfully patched. We’ve riddled all of Russia with bullets, but here she is again. Patched—” The voice broke off.
A couple absorbed in reading the numbers—arm in arm—walked quietly away. I glanced round: from under a leather cap, sharp pupils with a metallic shine; a narrow clean-shaven face between high knobby cheekbones; and a scar across the forehead.
“Here we see,” the man went on, “how greedy people are for things. They can’t buy them, but at least they can feast their eyes. Well I don’t need any of that,” he waved a square, stubby-fingered hand, “that’s why I travel like a bullet: either past or through. I have a rule: that all my belongings weigh no more than eleven and a half pounds.”
“Why eleven and a half?” I asked.
“Because a rifle requires it: eleven and a half pounds, and no more. So as not to overbalance the rifle’s bayonet. Understand?”
I nodded. Continuing our conversation, we started down the street and turned in at the first beer sign. The details are still fresh in my mind: On the wall above our table, inside a square frame, against a foaming sea of dark blue, the upturned hull of a ship was sinking.
From everywhere: that.
We asked for two beers. I barely touched mine. He drained his glass. And went on talking, while looking through me.
“Eleven holes I’ve got in me, but I don’t want to die. Life interests me too much. Take the time they picked me up near Saratov—we were fighting Czechs there—I had barely any blood left: It had all run out. They said I’d die. I said, no I won’t, I don’t believe you. Or the time I was caught by the Whites. They lined us up along the edge of a ravine. As soon as I heard the word ‘R-r-ready!,’ I dropped like a stone, rolled down the hill, and ran. They came after me: bang-bang. But I kept on running, I had this feeling, you know, that they’d never get me. How could they? How could they get a man who couldn’t do without life?”
This acquaintance (I rarely allowed myself the luxury) was not broken off. The man in the leather cap even came by my room for books. With me, the books’ owner, he apparently had no business. He never once asked me who I was or what was in me. But my books he devoured. To start, I gave him a bundle of simpler things. He won’t understand, I thought. No. He understood. In his own way, but he understood. Then I gave him more difficult books. On returning the second bundle, he divided the books into two piles.
“These went past. Those went through.”
When my guest had gone I looked through both piles, taking care not to mix them up: very interesting.
Incidentally, you too may make the acquaintance of my acquaintance (if you like) since the delivery of my manuscript shall be entrusted to him. At our last meeting I told him I was going away. Tomorrow, as agreed, I shall give him the manuscript so that in exactly one week he may deliver it to room No. 24. I can rely on him. Of that I’m sure.
In the era between the two Romes (now both dead) the game of cottabus was very much in fashion. The object of the game was this: When guests had finished feasting they would fling the last drops of wine from the last goblets to see who could fling them the farthest. Evidently both eras and games repeat themselves. Well, I, a drop, agree to play the game. We’re on. Hurl me. But not the goblet. The empty goblet must remain where it is: Those are the rules of the game of cottabus.
Well, it’s time I finished: my manuscript, and everything. In the next room people are already awake. The day is beginning. So then, I must: drop off the manuscript; dispose of my books and effects; then destroy various papers. That will take the whole day and part of the night. Fine. Then lock the door and throw the key out the window, into the snow. It’s safer. Now let’s see . . . Yes, the hook is already in the wall (I hammered it in yesterday)—third rose to the right of the lintel. Its story is clear, like mine. Until the first glimmers, the hook will be bare. Then not bare. By the way, I’ve already experimented with the chair, knocking it over with a clatter on purpose. The first time someone yelled through the wall, “What’s going on?” The second time they didn’t bother. So on that point, I’m guaranteed. Now then, twenty-four hours will go by, perhaps more, and the hook will still be not bare. Then someone will call to me through the door. Then they’ll knock. Softly at first; then more loudly. Three or four people will gather by the door: First they’ll bang on it, then they’ll stop. Then they’ll take an ax to the lock. They’ll walk in. Jump back. And walk in again, only not all of them. They’ll disencumber the hook, then pull it out of the wall. After that, room No. 24 will be empty for a day, or two, or even three, until it admits you.
I’m afraid that by now you must be feeling somewhat anxious. Don’t be afraid: I won’t menace you with hallucinations. Those are cheap psychological tricks. I’m counting instead on that exceedingly prosaic law: the association of ideas and images. Even now, e
verything, from the dark blue blots on the wallpaper to the last letters on these pages, has entered your brain. I’m already fairly well entangled in your “associative threads”; I’ve already seeped into your “I.” Now you too have your own figment.
Be warned: Science has proven that attempts to disentangle associative threads and excise the foreign image entwined in them will only embed that image more deeply in one’s consciousness. Given all those failed experiments with my “I,” it has long been my dream to inhabit someone else’s. If you are at all alive, I have already succeeded. Goodbye.
The lines broke off. Shtamm’s eyes skimmed down the notebook’s dark blue rules for another second or two. Then abruptly stopped.
Shtamm turned toward the door and got up. To the door it was six steps. Third rose to the right: Yes, his fingers clearly felt a narrow hole.
Suddenly he jerked open the door and rushed out. Only to run up against a wall. The corridor was quiet and dark. Save for the narrow band of light from his half-open door. It helped him to see; in front of his eyes a number showed white: 25. He stood stock-still for a minute, he needed to hear a living sound, if only the sound of human breathing. The people behind that closed door were probably asleep. Shtamm pressed his ear to the number and listened hungrily. But he heard only his own blood, chafing against his veins.
Gradually regaining his self-possession, he returned to his room. He walked in and closed the door tight behind him. Again he sat down at the table. The manuscript was waiting. Shtamm pushed it aside and covered it with a book. On top of the book he placed his briefcase. That same black nighttime hush still hovered. Then suddenly (in Moscow this happens), somewhere nearby, a bell tower started awake: ringing at random, but with brio, bells banging mightily against the silence. And just as suddenly, it stopped. The alarmed copper droned on for a minute more in a low, slow-fading monotone—and again the hush closed in. Little by little the day began to glimmer. The dove-colored half-light clinging to the panes crept slowly into the room. Shtamm moved to the window. His agitation was gradually subsiding. Now through the frozen double panes he could see the metal hulls of upturned roof-ships plunging slowly into the dawn; rows of black window holes under them; and crooked cracks of side streets down below; the cracks were deserted, dead and mute.
“His hour,” Shtamm whispered, and felt as if a noose were tightening about his neck.
From somewhere far away, from the outskirts, came the long even bass of an automobile horn.
“I wonder if that man will turn up again: the living one.”
Shtamm was again—or so it seemed to him—his old self; even almost Etal.
Only now did he notice: The dark blue roses on the wall were trimmed with a thin—thin as a thread—white border.
“What of it,” muttered Shtamm, sinking into a reverie. “Can’t very well find another room. I’ll have to stay here. Indeed, I’ll do whatever it takes.”
1925
1. Nature abhors a vacuum. (Latin)
2. A vacuum abhors nature. (Latin)
3. Ordinary corpse. (Latin)
4. Great Perhaps. (French)
IN THE PUPIL
1
HUMAN love is a frightened thing with half-shut eyes: It dives into the dusk, skitters about in dark corners, speaks in whispers, hides behind curtains, and puts out the light.
I do not begrudge the sun. Let it peek—so long as I am there too—under the unsnapping snaps. Let it peep through the window. That doesn’t bother me.
Yes, I have always been of the opinion that for a love affair midday suits far better than midnight. The moon, on which so many rapturous exclamations have been wasted, that night sun under a vulgar blue lampshade, I simply cannot bear. The story of one “yes” and its consequences—to which this narrative is devoted—began in the bright sun, before a window flung wide to the light. If the end surprised her between night and day, in the dim glimmers, I am not to blame. She is. The one for whose “yes” I had so passionately longed.
But even before that “yes,” things happened that must be mentioned here. One can say with certainty that in love the eyes . . .how shall I put it . . .always run ahead. That’s understandable: They are nimbler and know their business, that is, how to look at and through. While lovers’ bodies, huge and clumsy as compared with their eyes, hide from each other behind the stuff of their clothes, while even their words dither and dally on their lips, afraid to take the leap, their eyes—far out in front—are already surrendering.
Oh, how clearly I recall that dazzling day shot with blue when, standing at a window wide to the sun, we both at the same time, as if by agreement, looked . . .not out the window, of course, but at each other. It was then that I saw him, a tiny little man staring at me from out of her pupil, my Lilliputian likeness: He had already slipped in there. I hadn’t so much as ruffled her dress, whereas he . . .I smiled and nodded to him. He nodded politely back. But then her eyes jerked away, and the little man and I did not meet again until that famous “yes.”
When it called to me, that tiny, barely audible “yes,” I did not hesitate. Taking her meek hands in mine, I saw him: Leaning out of her round pupil window, he was bringing his excited face closer and closer. For an instant he was curtained by her lashes. Then he was there again—and gone. His face, I noticed, beamed with joy and a proud satisfaction; he looked like a capable administrator, fussing and clucking over a client’s affairs.
From then on, at every meeting, before finding her lips with mine, I would look under her lashes for him, love’s tiny organizer: He was always at his post, neat and punctual, and no matter how tiny his face was in her pupil, I always guessed his expression exactly—now boyishly ebullient, now a bit weary, now quietly contemplative.
One day I told my love about the little man who had stolen into her pupil, and my thoughts about him. To my surprise, my story was greeted with coldness and even a touch of hostility.
“What nonsense!” With an instinctive movement, her pupils drew back. Then I took her head in my hands and tried forcibly to find the little man. But she just laughed and lowered her eyelids.
“No, no.” In her laughter I also divined not-laughter.
Sometimes you become accustomed to a trifle, invent a meaning for it, philosophize it—then before you know it, that trifle starts raising its hand, contradicting the important and the real, brazenly demanding more existence and legitimacy. I was becoming accustomed to the trifling little man in her pupil; it pleased me to see, when talking of this or that, that both she and he were listening. What’s more, we fell into the habit of playing a game (who knows what lovers will think up) in which she would hide the little man, and I would look for him: all this with much laughter and many kisses. Then one day (it still pains me to recall this) . . . One day, as I was nearing my lips to hers, I looked into her eyes and I saw the little man look out from under her lashes and wave to me (his expression was sad and guarded), then he turned on his heel and trotted away into her pupil.
“Come on and kiss me!” Her eyelids closed over the little man.
“Stop!” I cried and, forgetting myself, squeezed her shoulders. In fright she raised her eyes, and in the depths of her dilated pupil I again glimpsed the tiny figure of the retreating me.
In response to her anxious questions I said nothing, concealing the truth. I sat there looking away, and I knew: The game was over.
2
For several days I did not show my face—to her or to anyone else. Then a letter found me; the narrow cream-colored envelope contained a dozen question marks: Had I gone away unexpectedly? Was I ill? “Perhaps I am ill,” I thought as I reread the slanted cobwebby lines, and I decided to go to her—straightaway, without losing a minute. But not far from the building where my love lived, I sat down on a bench to wait for the dusk. Doubtless this was cowardice, utterly absurd cowardice: I was afraid, afraid of again not seeing what I had not seen. You would think that the simplest thing then would be to search her pupils with mine.
It was probably an ordinary hallucination—a figment of the pupil—nothing more. But as I saw it, the very act of checking would signify the separate real existence of the little man in her pupil and my own mental derangement. I would have to prove the impossibility of this absurd trifle—as I then thought—by means of logic, without yielding to the temptation of an experiment: Real actions performed for the sake of an unreality would lend it a certain reality. I easily managed, of course, to hide my fear from myself: I was sitting on a bench because the weather was fine, because I was tired, and because the little man in her pupil was not a bad theme for a story and why not consider it here, now, at my leisure, at least in outline? Eventually the gathering darkness admitted me to her building. In the dusky vestibule I heard “Who’s there?” The voice was hers, but slightly different or, rather, for a different person.
“Oh, it’s you. Finally!”
We went into her room. Her hand, dimly white in the gloaming, reached for the light switch.
“No, don’t.”
I pulled her to me, and we loved each other without eyes, with a love closely muffled in darkness. That evening we did not turn on the light. Then we arranged to meet again and I left, feeling like a man who has received a stay.
I need not go into details; the further one goes, the less interesting it gets. Any man with a smooth gold band on his finger can finish telling this chapter: Our meetings, now moved from midday to midnight, became monotonous, blind, and sleepy, like the night. Our love gradually became run-of-the-mill and double-bed, with the usual inventory—from soft slippers to chamber pot inclusive. I did everything I could: Fear of happening on her pupils and finding them empty, without me, woke me every morning an hour before daylight. I would quietly get up, dress, tiptoe to the door, and let myself out. At first these early-morning disappearances struck her as strange. Then they too became habit. Thank you, man-with-the-band-on-your-finger, I’ll tell the rest of the story myself. Striding home through the city in the chill early dawn, I would invariably reflect on the little man in her pupil. Gradually—from reflection to reflection—the idea of him ceased to frighten me. If before I had feared his real existence and had thought of him with suspicion and alarm, now the little man’s nonexistence—his very ghostliness and illusoriness—seemed to me sad.
Autobiography of a Corpse Page 5