Autobiography of a Corpse

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  The black blot twitched with soundless laughter.

  “I knew it: Your opinions couldn’t help but differ. This book knows a great deal about a great many. True, plenty of blank pages remain and we’re not all here. But sooner or later our mistress’s pupils will lose their ability to attract and entice. And then, when the last page has been filled in, I shall compile my Complete and Systematic History of One Enchantress. With an index. My categories are just a sketch, for methodological purposes, as Sixth would say. The doors—from category to category—are wide open. It’s hardly surprising that she went through them all.

  “As you all know, I was her first. The year was . . . Actually, the only thing that matters is that it was. We were introduced at a literary gathering: ‘Please be kind to her, she’s from the provinces.’ Her unfashionable dress, hardening as it did her girlish fragility, said as much. I tried to catch her eyes with mine, but no—lashes fluttering, they broke away.

  “Later, as we sat stirring our glasses of tea, someone gave a paper and kept mixing up the pages. The instigator of this cultural tedium took me aside and asked me to see the provincial young lady home: ‘She’s alone, you know, it’s late, she’ll lose her way.’ I remember that the loop inside her coat collar had come off.

  “We stepped out. Into a downpour. I shouted to a coachman, and through the pelting rain we dove under the leather hood of his horse-drawn cab. She mumbled something but under us the cobblestones were already clattering and I couldn’t hear a word. One turn, another turn. I gave her elbow a cautious squeeze. She flinched and tried to pull away, but there was nowhere to go. The galloping cobbles kept throwing us together with short, nervous jolts. Somewhere here, beside me, in the darkness, were her lips: I wanted to know where; I leaned over—and was taken completely by surprise. She lunged forward, ripped back the leather apron, and leapt out of the moving cab. I remember reading in someone’s novels about a similar trick, only in the novels the trick was typically performed by men, and driving rain did not enter into it. For several seconds I sat beside emptiness, utterly discouraged and perplexed; it took several more seconds to rouse the coachman and stop his nag. Seeing me jump out of the cab, he mistook my motives and began shouting about the fare: another several seconds lost. Finally I rushed off down the wet pavement, trying to descry her silhouette in the blackness of the night. The streetlamps had been doused. At a crossroad I thought I’d caught up with her; she turned round and, an ash glowing between her teeth, called: ‘Come to bed.’ A harlot. I rushed on. Another crossroad—a confusion of streets: nowhere. Close to despair, I crossed a street at random and ran right into my runaway: shivering and rain-lashed, lost and not knowing which way to go. I won’t repeat our conversation; you’ve heard it many times. My remorse was genuine: Kissing her wet fingers, I begged her to forgive me and threatened to get down on my knees in a puddle if she wouldn’t. We found another cab and, however the cobbles jostled me, I sat quietly the whole way, keeping my shoulder away from hers. We were both numb with cold and our teeth were chattering. As we said goodbye, I again kissed her frozen fingers and suddenly she dissolved in girlish laughter. A day or two later, I called on her with heaps of assurances and patent powders. The latter proved useful: The poor thing had a cough and was complaining of chills. I did not resort to your method, Eleventh. It was still . . .too soon. The slightest indiscretion could easily have destroyed our incipient friendship. At the time, I was not the faded gray blot I am now. Sitting on her sofa’s shuddering springs, we often talked far into the dusk. This inexperienced girl knew nothing about the city, about the world, about me. Our conversations, as if buffeted by the wind, chased this way and that. First I would patiently explain how to use the kerosene stove; then, a little mixed up myself, I would expound the premises of a Kantian critique. Curled up in a corner of the sofa, she listened avidly—to both the bit about kerosene stoves and the bit about Kant—never taking her dark, deep-set eyes off me. There was another thing she knew nothing about: herself. In one of those conversations that drifted far into the dusk, I tried to explain her to herself, to unfasten the clasps of the now tattered book you see in my hands. That evening we talked of her future, of the encounters that awaited her, of the passions, the disappointments, and still other encounters. I kept knocking on the door of her future. Now she would give a dry laugh, now she would correct me, now she would listen in silence without interrupting. I happened (my cigarette must have gone out) to strike a match, and in its yellow light I noticed that her face was different, older and more womanly, as if it too were a vision from the future. I blew out the match and rushed on in time: her first love, life’s first blows, bitter separations, subsequent affairs of the heart. Rattling on, I was fast approaching the years when feelings are tired and spent, when fear of fading causes a person to rush through happiness, when curiosity gets the better of passion, when . . . Here I again struck a match and stared, amazed, into her eyes, till I burned my fingers. Yes, my worthy successors, had I performed my experiment correctly, a dozen matches would have shown me all dozen faces carried off by you. But she grabbed the matchbox out of my hands and flung it aside. Our fingers entwined and started to tremble, as though lashed by cold rain. I needn’t go on.”

  The hazy humanoid blot began its slow descent.

  “Well, what do you make of our Quagga?” asked Sixth.

  I rudely said nothing.

  “Oh, I suppose you’re jealous. I admit there was a time when Quagga’s claims, his crowing about being her first, irritated even me. But you can’t overthrow the past: It’s more kingly than kings. You have to make your peace with it. And besides, if you think about it, what is jealousy?”

  I turned my back on his lecture and pretended to sleep. Sixth muttered something about impolite people and sank into offended silence.

  At first I feigned sleep, but then I really did drop off. I don’t know for how long. A strange light seeped under my lids and forced me to open my eyes. All around me was a phosphorescent blue. I raised myself up on one elbow, searching for its source. To my astonishment, I saw that the light was coming from me: I was enveloped in a phosphorescent nimbus whose abbreviated rays faded within a few feet. My body was light and springy—as happens sometimes in dreams. The others were all asleep. I bounded up onto the glowing yellow rise, and the two lusters, their rays crisscrossing, filled the air with iridescent rainbows. Another bound, and my light body, dreamily gliding, was scaling the wall of the cave. The crack in the vault overhead now opened and my body, supple and elastic, slipped easily out. Before me stretched the low passageway that had lured me to the bottom. Once before I had roamed its bends, bumping into darkness and walls. But now the light, gleaming blue, showed the way. Hope stirred within me as I walked toward the pupil’s egress. Along the walls, dancing ahead of me, glints and outlines flickered, but I hadn’t time to study them. My heart was pounding in my throat by the time I reached the pupil’s round window. Finally! I rushed blindly forward and cannoned into her lowered eyelid. That accursed leather shutter was blocking the exit. I took a swing at it with my fist, but it didn’t even twitch: She was evidently sound asleep. Furious, I attacked the barrier with my knees and shoulder. Her eyelid fluttered and then the light enveloping me began to dim and die. In my panic, I rushed back down the passage, afraid of being left in the pitch-dark; the rays were drawing back into my body, and I could feel my weight returning; with leaden steps and gasping for breath, I finally reached the aperture in the cave’s vault: It obediently expanded, and I jumped down. My thoughts were swirling about like grains of sand in a high wind: Why had I returned? What force had hurled me back to the bottom, from freedom into slavery? Or perhaps this was all an absurd nightmare? But then why . . .I crept back to my place and shook Sixth by the shoulder; he sprang awake and, rubbing his eyes, took the full fire of my questions.

  “Just a minute, you say it was a dream,” he was staring at the last faint flickers of my dying nimbus. “Hmm . . .A dream may indeed be in progr
ess, and that dream—only don’t be surprised—is you. That’s right. This has happened to others: Her dreams sometimes wake us and force us to roam, like sleepwalkers, without knowing why or where. She’s now dreaming about you, you see. Look, here you’re still glowing. Oh, it’s gone out. That means the dream is over.”

  “Sixth,” I whispered, grabbing his arm, “I can’t go on like this. Let’s escape.”

  He shook his head: “Impossible.”

  “But why? I was just there, at the entrance to the world. If not for her eyelid—”

  “Impossible,” Sixth repeated. “In the first place, who can guarantee that once you’ve found your way out of her eye, you’ll find your master? They may already have separated, space is huge, and you . . .you’ll lose your way and die. In the second place, other daredevils before you have attempted to escape. They . . .”

  “They what?”

  “Came back, imagine that.”

  “Came back?”

  “Yes. You see the crack in the vault opens only for those being dreamed about and for newcomers from there, from the world. But those dreams keep us on a tight rein. They cut us off from reality with lowered eyelids and then, when they’ve done with us, they hurl us back to the bottom. There is one other solution: to wait for the crack to open for a newcomer and jump out—then follow the dark passages (you know them) to freedom. It sounds simple. But one detail brings it all to naught.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You see, as you are scrambling out, you will necessarily meet—head to head, shoulder to shoulder—the new man jumping down in your place, into the cave. The temptation to glimpse one’s successor, if only for an instant, is usually so strong . . . In short, lose that instant and you lose your freedom: The crack seals shut, and you both fall down to the bottom. That, at any rate, has been the result of all previous attempts. Here, you see, is a psychological snare that no one can resist.”

  I listened in silence. The more Sixth repeated the word “impossible,” the more determined I became.

  I spent several hours formulating a detailed plan. Meanwhile, it was Second’s turn to speak. The taciturn man on my left crept out into the yellow light. For the first time I saw his faded form, drab and stooped. With an embarrassed cough, he began, stammering slightly.

  “It happened this way. One day I received a letter: a long envelope. It smelled faintly of verbena. I opened it: crooked cobwebby script. I began reading . . . What’s that?”

  “Quiet!” Quagga’s voice rang out. “Stop the story. Up there . . . Hear it?”

  Second and the voices around him fell silent. At first I heard nothing. But then, from far away above the vault, came the tentative sound of soft, cautious footsteps. They stopped. Started. Stopped again.

  “Did you hear that?” Sixth whispered in my ear. “He’s come. He’s roaming.”

  “Who?”

  “Thirteenth.”

  And we began to sing—softly at first, so as not to scare him away, then louder and louder—our Hymn of the Forgotten. Now and then, at a sign from Quagga, we would stop singing and listen. The footsteps, which had seemed very close, suddenly began to retreat.

  “Louder now, louder!” Quagga shouted. “Lure him in, lure him in. You won’t get away, my friend, no-o-o-o.”

  Our hoarse voices, rising to fever pitch, beat against the slimy walls of our prison.

  But Thirteenth, lurking in the dark passages above, couldn’t make up his mind and kept retracing his steps. We sang till we could sing no more. Quagga allowed us to rest, and soon everyone fell asleep.

  I, however, did not succumb. Pressing an ear to the wall, I went on listening to the darkness.

  At first everything was quiet, and then again I heard—from above the vault—approaching footsteps. Very slowly the opening in the vault began to expand. Grabbing hold of the wall’s slippery bevels, I tried to climb up only to lose my grip and fall back down. I landed on something hard: Quagga’s Book of the Forgotten. Trying not to make any noise (so as not to wake Quagga), I undid its clasps and, using them as grips, pulled myself quickly up, from bevel to bevel, until my hand grasped an edge of the expanding aperture. Someone’s head was hanging over me. Closing my eyes tight, I catapulted past and rushed down the passageway without looking back. Having roamed the pupil labyrinth twice before, I knew my way even in the dark. Soon I could see a dim light coming from under her half-closed eyelid. I climbed out, jumped down onto the pillow and strode off, struggling against oncoming gusts of breath.

  “What if it’s not him? What if he’s not mine?” I worried, wavering between fear and hope. And when finally, in the early-morning light, I descried my own giganticized features, when I saw you, my master, after so many days apart, I vowed never again to leave you, never again to prowl about in other people’s pupils. Although it’s not I, but you who . . .

  The little man from her pupil said no more. Tucking his black folio under his arm, he stood up. Rose-colored patches of dawn were trailing across the windowpanes. Somewhere in the distance a wheel clattered. Her eyelashes quivered. The little man glanced at them warily, then turned his tired face back to me: He was awaiting my orders. “Have it your way,” I smiled, bringing my eyes as close to him as I could. He leapt up under an eyelid and strode inside, but then something, probably the book sticking out from under his elbow, nicked my pupil and a sharp pain ricocheted through my brain. Everything went black. Not for long, I thought, but no: The rose-colored dawn remained black, and a black-night hush descended, as though time, crouched down on its paws, had padded backward. I slipped out of bed, quickly dressed, and quietly opened the door: the corridor, a turn, a door, another door, and, fumbling the wall, stair by stair, the courtyard. The street. I walked straight ahead, without turning right or left, without knowing where or why. Gradually the air began to thin, liberating the outlines of buildings. I looked back: A second dawn of bluish crimson was catching me up.

  Suddenly somewhere overhead, in a bell tower, bells banging copper against copper began to clang. I looked up. From the pediment of an old brick church, a gigantic eye painted into a triangle was staring straight at me through the mist.

  Shivers prickled between my shoulder blades. “Painted bricks. That’s all it is.” Disentangling myself from the whorls of fog, I went on repeating, “Painted bricks—that’s all.”

  Coming toward me through the light-shot mist I spied a familiar bench: Here I had waited—not so very long ago—for the darkness to join me. Now the slats of the bench were dappled with glimmers and dewdrops.

  I sat down on its damp edge and recalled: It was here that the still-hazy novella about the little man from her pupil had first visited me. Now I had enough material to flesh out my theme. With a new day nearing, I began to consider how to convey everything without saying anything. To begin with, I must cross out the truth; no one needs that. Then variegate the pain to the limits of my canvas. Yes, yes. Add a touch of the day-to-day and over all, like varnish over paint, a veneer of vulgarity—one can’t do without that. Finally, a few philosophical bits and . . . Reader, you’re turning away, you want to shake these lines out of your pupils. No, no. Don’t leave me here on this long empty bench: Hold my hand—that’s right—tight, tighter still—I’ve been alone for too long. I want to say to you what I’ve never said to anyone: Why frighten little children with the dark when one can quiet them with it and lead them into dreams?

  1927

  1. Dear. (Old Church Slavonic)

  2. Small. (Old Church Slavonic)

  SEAMS

  1. MAN IS TO MAN A GHOST

  EVERYONE can forget. Everyone—but the one forgotten. That has stuck in my head: from temple to temple. I know: I’ve been expunged from all eyes, from all memories; soon even panes and puddles will stop reflecting me. They don’t need me either. I don’t exist—so much so that no one has ever said or will ever say about me: He doesn’t exist. That is why I cannot forget. Walking past shopwindows and spur stones, I often hear ch
ildren’s whistles cheeping cheerlessly after me: Go ’way! Go ’way! But I can’t even do that—how can someone who doesn’t exist go away? I’ve never worn an invisibility hat; mine is an ordinary old fedora with a drooping brim. Even so, even when people look right at me, they don’t see me; even when we bump shoulders, they merely mumble something without looking up. I only dimly remember what a handshake feels like, that pressure of palm against palm. And only very rarely, when my steps have led me to a distant graveyard, to the headstones among which it is so easy and peaceful to muse, only then do I see words calling to me: “Passerby” and “Stop.” And I do stop; sometimes I even sit down by a cross and iron fence and converse with those who never reply. In essence, we are the same—they and I. I stare at the nettles growing up over them, at the matted blades of dusty grass—and I think: we.

  Today it’s a bit windy. The cold keeps squeezing through the seams of my ragged coat. The sun has nearly set. Ahead is another long, black, chill night. I wear my problem, in essence, on my sleeve: seams coming undone and disgorging the rotted-through thread inside—unseemly. And all because I am neither “here” nor “there” but in a between—in a seam. Perhaps the old coat constricting my shoulders, if it can no longer warm me, can at least remind me: seams.

  Indeed, the only way I can write is bit by bit, in a break—along a seam. My thinking, too, feels short of breath: inhale—exhale, exhale—inhale. It’s hard to finish a thought. Take today. I sat down on my usual bench on my usual boulevard and looked about. People were walking by—mincingly and swaggeringly, from right to left, from left to right, in ones and twos, and in groups. First I thought: Who are they to me and who am I to them? Then I just stared. On they went, mincingly and swaggeringly, from left to right, from right to left. Again I thought: Man is to man a wolf. No, that’s not true, that’s sentimental, lighthearted. No, man is to man a ghost. Only. That’s more exact. To sink one’s teeth into another man’s throat is at least to believe—and that’s what counts—in another man’s blood. But there’s the rub: Man ceased to believe in man long ago, even before he began doubting God. We fear another man’s existence the way we fear apparitions, and only very rarely, when people glimpse each other in the gloaming, do we say of them: They’re in love. No wonder lovers seek out a nighttime hour, the better to envision each other, an hour when ghosts are abroad. It is amusing that the most optimistic of all philosophers, Leibniz, could see only a world of discrete monads, of ontological solitudes, none of which has windows. If one tries to be more optimistic than the optimist and avow that souls have windows and the ability to open them, then those windows and that ability will turn out to be nailed shut and boarded up, as in an abandoned house. People-monads, too, have a bad name: They are full of ghosts. The most frightening of these is man.