Autobiography of a Corpse

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  At this point, not even my huge blunderbuss could have erred in his diagnosis. We moved closer to her.

  “You don’t know how. Allow me.”

  “Leave it be.”

  “First give it a good shake. Like that. And then—”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  Now their eyes were close together. I got into position—and jumped. Her pupils were glistening with that misty patina, the surest possible sign . . . But I had misjudged the distance and was hanging on to an eyelash, batting about like a branch in a storm. I know my business though, and a few seconds later I was climbing inside her pupil, agitated and out of breath. Behind me I heard the soft sound first of kissing, then of the thermometer tinkling to the floor. Then her eyelids clapped shut. But I’m not curious. Feeling that I had done my duty, I sat down under the round vault and reflected on the difficult and dangerous profession of a little man from the pupil: The future proved me right. What’s more, it turned out to be even gloomier than my gloomiest imaginings.

  Eleventh fell silent and sat slumped on the glowing rise. The forgotten ones again began to sing—at first quietly, then louder and louder—their strange hymn:

  Man-man-man, nimble man, my little man,

  If you wish your life to keep, ask the pupil before you leap,

  Odd-odd.

  “Rather a brazen beast,” I remarked, in response to Sixth’s inquiring look.

  “He’s one of the odds. They’re all like that.”

  I said I didn’t understand.

  “Why yes. Haven’t you noticed? Here am I, Sixth, on one side of you, while Second and Fourth are on the other. We evens stick together because all those odds—as if they’d been handpicked—are boors and bullies. From our point of view, as sedate and civilized people—”

  “But how do you explain that?”

  “How? Let me see . . . The heart must have its own rhythms, or changing desires, a sort of dialectic of love that alternates thesis with antithesis, and boors with gentlemen like you and me.”

  Sixth chuckled good-naturedly and winked. But I didn’t feel like laughing. Then he too stopped smiling.

  “You see,” he said, moving closer, “one mustn’t rush to judge; the audience creates the speaker’s style. You’ll soon be persuaded of this yourself. You can’t deny that Eleventh is observant. Put it this way: People use diminutives to express magnified emotions; the significance grows, the sign diminishes. We call those who mean more to us than others by diminutives. No wonder the words mil[1] and mal[2] were confused in Old Church Slavonic. Yes, I, like Eleventh, am convinced that women love not those mastodons who propel us from pupil to pupil but us, the little men who live cooped up in other people’s eyes. Moreover, if you strip his theory of minor services of its vulgarity, then here too Eleventh is right: To make someone fall in love with you is to take possession of their ‘associative matter’; love itself, schematically speaking, is nothing but a special case of two-way association—”

  “What on earth—”

  “Just listen: In classifying our associations, psychologists have failed to notice that the connection between recepts is either one-way or two-way . . . Now wait,” he sputtered, noticing my gesture of impatience, “a minute of boredom, and then it gets interesting—you’ll see. The lover (he) combines not an idea and an image, not an image and a concept, but an image (a person) and an emotion; he must remember that this process goes either from emotion to image, or from image to emotion. And until that double spark occurs, until . . . What? Not clear? Well, think about it. I can’t very well think for you. Examples? Certainly. First case: The emotion is present but undirected, unassociated with an image; we see ‘a soul waiting for someone,’ nervous excitement with no object, firing in air. Then the ‘some’ falls away—at which point, it is extremely easy to slip into the vacant ‘one.’ Second case: When an image must wait for the emotion, here the coalescence of associative elements may be slow and difficult. Love affairs in one’s youth mostly take the first route, in one’s second youth, the second. But the law of associations causes lovers a great deal of trouble: Given a constant love, the ‘beloved,’ every time he or she walks into the room, must inspire—by association—a feeling of love; by the same token, all sexual excitement should call up the image of that same ‘beloved.’ But in reality, the feeling and the image usually connect like the currents of a cathode circuit attached to a detector, that is, they only go one way. Most bonds are based on these one-way half loves. In relationships of the first type, the associative current runs from image to emotion but not vice versa; this makes for a maximum of infidelities but a fine passion. Why? My God, he doesn’t understand anything! Well, instead of the detector connection, take the circulation of the blood through the heart: Flowing in one direction, the blood opens the valves; flowing in the other, it closes them, barring the way to itself. The same is true here. Every meeting is passionate; indeed, every thought or, rather, every image, causes a rush of passionate feeling—the blood, if you will, opens the valves for itself; but this emotion, when it arises in the absence of the image, is easily channeled elsewhere; people who fall in love like this are in love only in the presence of the beloved, whose image quickly finds the way to their feeling, but their feeling doesn’t know the way to the beloved; the blood, flowing toward love, closes the heart valves to itself. Was that a yawn? Nerves? Now. The second manner of falling in love produces, please note, only a small percentage of infidelities but a passion that is weak. An attack of love hunger always triggers one and the same image, but that image, if it enters the consciousness first, brings no emotion with it. This sort of one-way associatedness works well day-to-day; it is homely and averse to drama. But only the third case—two-way association, when image and emotion are inseparable—engenders what I would consent to call love. Say what you like, Eleventh knows where the truth lies; he just doesn’t know how to get at it. Whereas I—”

  “Why dig up all that rot,” I snarled.

  For a minute Sixth sat silent with the look of a man intent on mending the broken thread of his thoughts.

  “Because the point at which Eleventh arrived, but stopped, is the fundamental question for those who, like you and I, have ended up in this black pit of a pupil and . . . Why pretend? We’re all sick with a strange chronic colorlessness; time slides over us like an eraser over penciled lines; we’re perishing like waves in a calm. I’m fading; soon I won’t be able to distinguish the shades of my thoughts; I’ll become formless and vanish into nothingness. But worse than that, countless observations, scientific facts, and formulas will perish with me. If I could get out of here, I’d show all those Freuds, Adlers, and Meyers the true nature of oblivion. What would those smug collectors of slips of the tongue and pen have to say to a man from a black pit called oblivion? I’m not likely to find out: It would be easier to return from death than from here. But it would be amusing. Since youth, you see, I have been consumed with the problem of oblivion. I first encountered it almost by accident. I was leafing through a slim volume of someone’s verses, and suddenly:

  Past a flock of birds, past a veil of dust,

  The disk of the sun sinks spent;

  If I am forgotten, then it must

  Be now, at this very moment.

  “Pondering this handful of words, I didn’t suspect that, having entered this thought, I would never come out of it. Recepts, I reasoned, constantly roam from the consciousness to the unconscious and back again. But some go so far into the unconscious that they can’t find their way back to the consciousness. I began to wonder: How does a recept perish? Like a smoldering ember or a candle in the wind? Gradually or instantly? After a long illness or suddenly? At first I agreed with the poet: Oblivion was a long-in-the-making but instantaneous collapse: here—and gone. Using Ebbinghaus’s mnemonic series, I even tried to determine the instant when this or that recept disappeared, washed away, broke up. My attention was immediately drawn to the question of forgotten emotions. A curious questi
on indeed: A man and a woman meet n times, and every time they both experience a nervous excitement; yet at the n + 1 meeting, the woman comes to the man but the nervous excitement does not; the man feigns it as best he can and, when the woman has gone, even ransacks his soul for what he has lost. In vain: To recall an image that has gone is possible, but to recall a feeling, once it has gone, is utterly impossible; the lizard, if you will, has run away leaving its tail in your hand; the image and the emotion have dissociated. In studying the cooling that makes what was dear hateful, I could not resist certain analogies. The cooling of passion, it seemed to me, clearly had something in common with, say, the cooling of a piece of ordinary sulfur. By depriving sulfur of calories, we convert its crystals from one system to another; that is, we force it to change its form and appearance. What’s more, it has been proven that a chemical substance—such as phosphorus—when gradually cooled not only changes its crystalline form and color, turning from violet to red, and red to black, but also, at a certain point in the cooling, loses all shape, decrystallizes, and becomes amorphous. I wanted to catch the moment of deformation . . . If one could observe the second when the sparkling carbon we call a diamond changes into the ordinary coal that leaves our hands black, why couldn’t one observe the instant when ‘I love’ turns into . . .

  “But, even remaining in the realm of chemical symbols, this wasn’t easy to do: Before losing its facets and becoming a formless, amorphous substance, crystal goes through a stage called metastability—halfway between form and formlessness. This analogy struck me as cogent. The relations of many, many people are metastable, somewhere in the middle between ice melting and the boiling point; interestingly, metastability shows the greatest resilience. One can take these analogies further. An incandescent substance, if left alone, will cool naturally and continually; the same is true of emotion. Only by changing the objects of that emotion, only by throwing more and more wood onto the fire of feeling can one maintain its white heat. Here I remember thinking that my analogies had brought me to an impossible impasse. But science, which tells us in which cases cooling temperatures turn crystal into an amorphous something, told me in which cases naturally cooling emotions turn diamonds into coal, love into indifference, form into formlessness. I learned that a crystalline substance, when cooled, changes form, but since the rate of cooling exceeds that of recrystallization, the latter process hasn’t time to finish, and the particles, overcome halfway (between one form and another) by the cold, stop. The result is frigid and featureless or, to convert chemisms into psychisms, hateful and forgotten. Under these conditions, a long and stable bond can only be explained as a succession of betrayals of each other with each other. What are you staring at? That’s just what it is: If even one person were absolutely faithful to the image etched in his mind, like an engraving on a copper plate, then his love might last a day or two—at most. The real love object is constantly changing, and one can love you today only by betraying the person you were yesterday. You know, if I were a writer, I’d try my hand at this fantastical story: My hero meets a girl, a charming creature not yet eighteen. Fine. They fall in love. Have children. The years go by. Their love remains what it was: strong, good, simple. By now he has asthma; she has crow’s feet and withered skin. But they are as dear as ever to each other. Then one day the door opens and in she walks, only she is not she, not who she was an hour or a day ago, but the seventeen-year-old girl he vowed always to love. My hero is perplexed and, I suppose, stunned. The visitant looks round in bewilderment at this strange, middle-aged life. At the children she has not yet borne. At the heavy, half-familiar man glancing nervously at the door to the next room: What if the other woman, the same woman, should walk in? ‘Yesterday you promised me,’ says the young creature. The asthmatic scratches his head, distraught: ‘yesterday’—that was twenty years ago. He doesn’t understand and doesn’t know what to do with his guest. Suddenly he hears footsteps—it’s the other woman, the same woman now.

  “‘You must go. If she finds you here . . .’

  “‘Who?’

  “‘You. Please hurry . . .’

  “But too late. The door opens, and my hero, well, let’s say . . .he wakes up, I suppose—”

  “Listen, Sixth, that’s not fair: jumping from psychology to chemistry, from chemistry to fiction. And from there I don’t see how you’ll get back to your crystallization of whatever it was—images or phosphorus and coal.”

  “But I will. Now listen: You love A. But by the next day A is A1, and by next week A2. To keep up with this constantly recrystallizing being, you must constantly readjust the image, that is, redirect the emotion from one recept to the next, from stepping-stone to stepping-stone, betraying A-prime with A-second, and A . . . And if this series of betrayals, caused by the lover’s changeability, proceeds at the same rate as the changes in the beloved, then everything is as it should be—and just as a man out for a stroll will walk a hundred paces without realizing that his body has fallen a hundred times and been caught in time each time by his muscles, so lovers of several weeks or even years never suspect that the number of their meetings is equal to the number of betrayals.”

  He finished with the look of a popular speaker expecting applause. But too much theorizing has a soporific effect on me. Sixth said nothing for a minute then resumed his rant: the difference in rates, betrayals unable to keep pace with change, change lagging behind betrayal . . . Unable to keep my eyes open, I sank into a deep sleep. Even there I was pursued by shrill swarms of chemical signs and algebraic symbols buzzing like bees on their nuptial flight.

  I don’t know how long I would have slept if I hadn’t been woken by jabs and voices.

  “Twelfth, into the middle.”

  “Let’s hear from the new boy.”

  “Twelfth . . .”

  I had no choice. Nudged and nagged right and left, I scrambled up onto the glowing yellow rise. Ten-odd pairs of eyes, squinting at me from out of the darkness, prepared to absorb and appropriate the secret of two people. So I began my story, the story you know. Skip it. When I had finished, they began singing their strange hymn. A dull longing gripped my temples and, rocking from side to side, empty and dead, I sang with them:

  Put your neck in the noose—and expire. Fire with fire.

  Even.

  Finally they let me go back to my place. I slipped quickly into the shadows. I was shivering so my teeth chattered. I had seldom felt so vile. With a sympathetic nod, Sixth leaned toward me and whispered, “Forget it. It’s not worth it. You told your story and fine. But you do seem undone.”

  His stiff fingers gave my hand a brief squeeze.

  “Listen,” I turned to Sixth, “I know how we, the rest and I, got here, but why do you need love? What are you doing at the bottom of this pupil? You have the soul of a bibliophile. All you need are your bookmarks. You should have gone on living with them and your formulas, your nose in a book, rather than butting in where you’re not wanted.”

  The university lecturer looked crestfallen.

  “It can happen to anyone, you see . . . Even Thales, they say, as he was walking along staring up at the stars, once fell into a well. So did I. I certainly didn’t mean to, but if someone trips you with their pupils . . . At the time I was teaching psychology at a college for women. Seminars, tutorials, papers, what have you. Naturally, my students came to me, sometimes at home, for topics, references, sources. She among them. Once, twice. I hadn’t yet realized that for women, science, like everything else, is personified. Questions—answers—and again questions. She wasn’t particularly gifted. One day, while explaining stimulus logarithms in the Weber-Fechner law, I noticed she wasn’t listening. ‘Repeat what I just said.’ She just sat there, looking down and smiling at something. ‘I don’t know why you bother to come here!’ I exploded and, I believe, banged a book on the desk. Then she looked up, and I saw tears in her eyes. I don’t know what one does in such cases. I moved closer and made the mistake of looking into her moist pupils. Tha
t’s when I . . .”

  With a dismissive wave of his hand Sixth fell silent.

  Again the well’s yellow murk closed over us. I scanned the walls, cylindrical and seamless, and thought: Can this really be my final resting place? Have I really been deprived of the present forever and irrevocably?

  Now it was First’s turn to speak. On top of the yellow blot lay a black one. Beside it was this book here. (Quagga always had it with him.)

  “With the help of a single intimate characteristic,” the black blot began, “we may divide all women into four categories. In the first category are the ones who allow themselves to be undressed and dressed: celebrated courtesans and women versed in the art of turning their lovers into meek slaves made to do all the feverish work of unfastening and fastening hooks and recalcitrant buttons. These women stand aside, as it were; they close their eyes and merely give leave. The second category consists of the women one undresses, but who dress themselves. The man meanwhile sits staring out the window or at the wall, or smokes a cigarette. To the third category—perhaps the most dangerous—belong those who guide you to the hooks and buttons themselves, but afterward force you to take loving part in all the touching details of their toilet. These are mostly malicious flirts fond of double entendres, experienced predators—in short, the come-hither type. The fourth and final category is made up of women who dress and undress themselves while their more or less patient partners wait: prostitutes, faded wives, and who knows who else. Now I must ask you, my good successors: To which category does our mistress belong?”

  The blot paused, only to be accosted on all sides by shouts:

  “To the first, of course.”

  “Why no! To the second!”

  “Wrong! To the third!”

  Drowning out the shouts, someone’s hoarse bass bellowed: “To the very last.”