Autobiography of a Corpse

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  Yes, blessed are the wolves, for they believe at least in blood. All against all—that should be the object of our long and hard journey, and only when . . . But now my thoughts have become confused and my pencil has stopped, as though stuck . . .in a seam.

  2. BREAD WITH METAPHYSICS

  Last night was colder than expected. It’s only the beginning of August, yet the first fall frosts are already here. I have a rheumatic pain in my knees. And I’m a bit feverish. One of these evenings I’ll huddle against the back of a bench, and come morning I won’t get up. Some shivering woman with an unsold night on her hands or else a drunk, whose blear eyes have confused dreams with reality, will sit down beside me—with the dawn glimmers—and ask for a light. I won’t reply. Peering under the brim of my hat, he’ll ask again—only a bit more quietly and tentatively . . . Again I won’t reply. I’ll go on sitting there, icy knees clenched, stiff fingers in coat pockets, and white pupils hidden in the shadow of my hat. No doubt it will be rather difficult to unbend me—the usual case with corpses.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. At present I can still move, see, and hear, and at moments even try to think. True, I only try: As soon as I begin, I collapse; try again, and collapse. My brain must be short of fluids, my body of warmth and food.

  My daily allowance is ten kopecks. No more and no less. I must keep within the coin’s confines. Like it or not. Every morning, as soon as the sun has twitched back Moscow’s black, star-tattered cowl, I begin trudging through my day. Again and again. In shopwindows I see huge fish, their flat tails flush against the glass, profusions of fruit, pyramids of tins, sealed bottles of shimmering alcohol. I stop at almost every window: All this is for me; both for me and for others too, of course, but only within the limits of my ten-kopeck coin. I turn to face the street, spokes spinning by, springs lazily swaying—women’s eyes through net veils, flickering glints and shadows; a soft whoosh of wheels whisks them past to some elusive where—past and past. I clench my teeth and I think: “That’s right, all this is mine as well as theirs. But only within the limits of my ten-kopeck coin. Patience—you’ll get your share of the earth. Width—from shoulder to shoulder; length—from crown to soles; and for now you have the cheer of your own tiny sun, the diameter of a ten-kopeck coin.”

  I do not go in the plate-glass doors of shops; I try not to hear the whoosh of wheels and not to see what can only be seen. On reaching the Iverian Chapel, where the ancient gates overarch hawkers’ trays, I unclasp the disk dimly gleaming in my fist, and in a minute have exchanged it for a sandwich, an ordinary sandwich of two small white palms, with grains of red caviar stuck to the butter inside. That is all I can afford. Then, having found an out-of-the-way bench, I open my bread diptych and—first one half, then the other—swallow it all, neatly catching the crumbs. Have you ever had to tinker with a cheap pocket watch? It tends not to stay wound for very long, and if the watch is over the hill and the gear teeth are worn down, it stops more than it runs. Even so, every time you wind the spring, it tries to tick, at least briefly, and move its hands. Then look, it has stopped again. That’s how it is with my brain: I wind it as you would a cheap pocket watch; I poke a sandwich between my teeth—and lo and behold, in my head there’s a ticking, and the hands jerk forward. Gear tooth by gear tooth, phrase by phrase—a metaphysical something starts up. Then just as suddenly it balks, sinks back, and I sit empty, as if I had no pulse and no “I.” Bear in mind, these jottings will work like that: sandwich—metaphysics—sandwich—metaphysics . . . So many ten-kopeck coins, so many worldviews.

  3. PURVAPAKSHIN

  This name wound up in a notebook of mine years ago. I remember I was rummaging through English editions of ancient Indian texts, copies of the Vedanta and the Sankhya, commentaries and compilations, when I came across it: Purvapakshin. The Purvapakshin seems never to have existed, yet who of us would have the right to say “I am,” if not for the Purvapakshin? This man-myth was invented by Indian casuists for the sake of constructing antitheses. Builders of systems came and went—one after another. So many builders, so many worlds: Each one—be it Vyãsa or Patanjali—brought with him his “yes.” And each one, having relinquished his “yes,” returned to death. But the man-myth Purvapakshin never died, if only because he was never born; he never said “yes” to anything or anyone because his name means “he who says ‘no.’” A defender of antitheses, the Purvapakshin objects to everything always: treatise after treatise, millennium after millennium. Therein lies this man-diagram’s sole existence: to trump every “yes” with his “no.” For me too the immemorial Purvapakshin is the non-dialectical personification of an Indian rishi. I can almost see and keenly sense him here beside me on my evening boulevard bench: Wrapped in ragged, many-colored stuffs, his stubborn bony brow bowed, he unpurses his thin, shriveled lips for the sake of a single, brief-as-a-blow “no.” Oh, how often have we—elbow to elbow, the Purvapakshin and I—on these noisy Moscow boulevards, amid the clangs and whirlings, the rush of lights and shadows, raised up over all of this, again and again, our “no.”

  Yes, I am drawn to him, indeed I almost love him, him alone perhaps, this man who does not exist, with his “no.” I want to squeeze my temples between my palms, draw the whole world into my consciousness, and brandishing my “no” like a hammer, object to everything: smite what is above, below, and all around; strike near and far. This is my one happiness, however fitful, however sick: overturning all verticals; extinguishing the imaginary sun; entangling the orbits and the world in worldlessness.

  I cannot make this life, which walks over me, other than it is or altogether nonexistent, and even so—I object; we object: the Purvapakshin and I. We do not want clockwork days; we do not want lives insured by State Insurance; we do not accept the ideas ironed into newssheets neatly folded in four; as in the days of the emperor Ashoka, so now, in this time of tsarlessness, he says and I repeat, he asserts and I concur: “no.” A persecuted and half-dead pauper, I cannot overturn all things, the houses that have sunk into the ground, all the lived-in-to-death lives, but I can do this: Overturn the meanings. Let the rest remain. Let it.

  4. DNP

  Ever since people first acquired letters, they have been trying to make something out of them. A person immersed in letterizations is called a writer. I’m like other people: Every time I try to make something out of the alphabet, it collapses—there it goes again. These days I don’t write for anyone. But once upon a time I did occasionally show my words to other people. To professional appraisers of lines who either bought them or returned them marked: DNP. That means: DO NOT PRINT, DOES NOT PERTAIN.

  I confess I too had to discover the whole bitter meaning behind that three-letter DNP. I remember the first time I, a little fearful, my heart racing, delivered a manuscript—from palm to palm—and a briefcase clicked metallically shut over it. I had to go back many times for the answer; this cost me a whole series of conjectures, whereas my appraiser had needed just three symbols: DNP. I remember how those symbols kept hopping about in my eyes, hanging by an associative thread: DNP—GDP—GNP—DNP. All this seems silly to me now, but at the time it was simply pitiful; yet this too I, the one forgotten, refuse to forget. Over this too I set my “no.”

  So many of us do not pertain and must be “returned.” So many of us have been crossed out and pushed aside. I don’t know where our literature is: in bookshop windows or in wastepaper baskets. In any case, people who believe in the bookshop window don’t believe in it too much. Given the pittance of my per diem, I can have only the covers: I notice every Monday when the bookshop window changes its paper skin. I try to guess what’s inside—inside the uncut, smoothly pressed pages—then I wander on, from window to window, amassing grim forebodings. Where these come from, I don’t know. I don’t work with a paper knife and glimpse literature only through glass. But one can learn something even from the covers. From the periphery, one can draw radiuses to the center. Sometimes I come across a crumpled newspaper on a boulevard
bench. Sometimes next to me, on the same bench, a man is reading a book. But having smoothed out the lines of the crumpled sheet, I always find the same old thing, the same old thing, about the same old thing. And on the face of the man buried in his book, I always see the same gray reflections and bored creases round the mouth. Then the reader (I’ve often observed this gesture) suddenly jerks back from his open book, lays it facedown on the bench beside him, looks at me, the passersby, the trees, the puddles, and whatever else—and in his eyes, through the ripple of the lines read, I see: DNP.

  I feel no envy and no regret. But sometimes I do try to imagine all those manuscripts that have shot ahead of me, that have managed to swap their own ink for a printer’s. If in the past writers looked for themes in their inkwells, close at hand, in and around themselves, now they don’t look at all: Themes are assigned. Any writer, if he’s conscientious, may draw up his own Reference Table of Themes. Having allotted the Specialist, Émigré, and Worker each a column subdivided into a) party member and b) nonparty member of the intelligentsia—who has been: i) jammed into a class, ii) forced out, etc.—the penman may, purely mechanically, using the formula for calculating combinations of n, obtain between thirty and forty plots. For some reason I think it’s thirty-nine.

  If you hang this schedule of ideas from a hook under the flyspecks—and . . . Then again, you may as well hang yourself: No. 40, the last theme. And if you juxtapose . . .then . . .but now my thoughts have become confused. I’m seeing gray-yellow spots. I can’t go on. Can’t—

  5. PONDERING THE PANTALYK [1]

  What a strange machine: My jaws have only to finish chewing a bit of bread and meat—and again the emptiness contains something. Again between my temples—rising and falling, falling and again rising—there is a stubborn and ineradicable thought. Or rather, a paroxysm of thought. Today my brief twenty-minute something found me by a high white wall with names half plastered over and immured: MARAT—ROBESPIERRE—GRACCHUST (sic: our own homegrown Gracchust, not in a toga but in gray broadcloth and bast shoes). Hiding behind those solid bricks are the last, somewhat old-fashioned-sounding shots. Not so long ago, shots were fired everywhere at everything. Now they’ve been gagged, driven into a stone enclosure, and forced to make do with a round practice target twenty inches in diameter.

  Sitting on a bench on Prechistensky Boulevard with one ear cocked, I like to listen to the tamed shots with the look of a connoisseur. In resonant, staccato words they recall—as do I—the days that have died: was knocks again and again at the door of is; the metallic voices behind the stone wall are echoed by myriads and myriads of others. I listen, and ghosts crowd round me—I, who am now no more real than my memories, who am more imaginary than the imaginings that come to me and want to exist.

  Yes, crudely put, those years, so recent and already those, pulled the pantalyk out from under us all, the familiar pantalyk that was so convenient for the not too alive and the not too dead. Points of view, all topsy-turvy, streamed past our eyes in strings of visual points. But then, when the days had done spinning like spokes, that absurd, ridiculous pantalyk was again underfoot. The actual meaning of this silly word that has thrust itself under my pencil is none too clear to me: It may come from παντα[2] and λευκοζ.[3] If so, that means we were first knocked out of omniphlegmia, then sucked back into it. Who knows, perhaps the cycles of epochs are due to life’s shifts now from blood to phlegm, now from phlegm to blood, and then all over again. History is forever spinning, now inside fiery arteries, now slowly, drop by drop, along the cold ducts of lymphatic systems. Everyone has the right to speak for himself, so here I sit, inside a vast, lymphatically cold and slimy after, following the crooked flight of a gigantic boomerang: first forward—then up—then backward and down.

  6. MINUS 1

  With each dawn I get up from my bench and, stretching numb legs, plunge through the fog, along the tracks. Trundling toward me, steel clanking against steel, come groggy trams. Empty as yet, through their rime-covered windows I see the bare backs of benches. I stop beside a green-lighted panel and let pass—floating out of the fog into the fog—a caravan of clattering emptinesses. The empty metal cars, stopped by the green lights, judder to a halt. A second or two goes by; you might think that someone was getting on or off. But then a bell jangles, and the steel-encased emptiness, having set that emptiness down and taken it back on board, again rumbles off into the dusky daybreak.

  Little by little, now in one window grinding through the gloom, now in another, hunched, shivering shapes appear. But I’m no longer part of that. Turning away, I set off through the thinning fog to meet another long and hungry day.

  People whom Moscow has tried in its courts and banished from the city are said to have been sentenced to “minus 1.” No one has passed sentence on me: 0–1. I am still here, in the hodgepodge and hubbub of the capital. Yet I am fully and firmly aware: I have been banished forever and irrevocably from all things, from all joys, from all truths. Though I walk, look, and listen beside others settled in this city, I know: They are in Moscow and I am in minus-Moscow. I am permitted only the shadows of things; things are beyond my reach; coins skipping from palm to palm give me only their thin, high-pitched tinkle; I am allowed encounters and conversations only with the emptiness that early-morning trams, bells jangling through the gloom, let carefully on and off; all the doors open to others are closed to me, while everything behind them is almost transcendental.

  I may only watch, hugging the wall at an evening crossroad, as someone, as numberless numbers of all sorts of someones turn lights on and off in their windows, lower and raise blinds; I may only watch as more and more someones, pushing and pulling entrance doors, come out and go in: They are expected behind theater curtains, behind bed-curtains.

  Yes, I am a resident of minus-Moscow. This city, from which I have yet to be banished, in which I still have my quadrature and my rights, is a city not of things but of reflections. Into it, as into the watery depths, have tumbled all the overturned surfaces, shapes, and “covers” of things. If I am a man who can have only minuses, I try to believe in minuses. It will do me no good, you see, no good at all to repeat after others: Things cast shadows. No, in my minus-city, in my ghostly, minusy little world, only minus-truths make sense—only facts that have fallen on their heads. Therefore, shadows cast things. That’s right, and no one disputes this in my excluded-from-the-world world. I manage as best I can among my minuses and shadows; cut off by closed doors, I cross them out with the thought: If from that other world I may have nothing but surfaces, shadows, lies, and covers, then I have the right to suspect that inside all those covers are lies and that all their things are shadows of my shadows.

  It’s strange, the streets of Moscow resemble unraveling stone seams. Hmm. So I’ve been dropped into a street seam; so I will have to live and die in a minusy, excluded, and outcast little world. I accept that world, and I will wind through all its seams wherever they lead.

  7. STOLEN SOLITUDES

  For everyone, reality is in one’s self. Yet every “I” is sewn into a “we”; from individuals—however loosely stitched together—comes a society, a kind of unit composed of solitudes. The strangest paradox of all is a city, connecting the unconnecting. Here the need to be alone nearly coincides with self-preservation: People survive so as to buy from each other, at a cost of ceaseless labor, the chance to be without each other. People hoard the coins from their art, their work, their thieving so as to acquire walls. In the countryside, far from human congeries, their solitudes are not protected, not bounded by walls, and so open to attack; in the city, they are organized, hidden behind blinds and walls, kept under lock and key, properly defended. Man, however, must be not only without man but without God; the tenet of divine omnipresence violates his right to solitude; that unblinking eye fixed on his life, peering through its mystical triangle as through a prison-cell peephole, must be removed. Hence the distinctive urban atheism of beings who, after a long day of rushing about amo
ng questioners and observers, of struggling frantically to break away from “we” to “I,” crave at least a few minutes of complete isolation, out of sight and reach of everything without. Thus does the silkworm, when its time has come, creep away in anxious search of stillness, soundlessness, so as to wrap itself in its cocoon. A city, too, consists of anxious creepers and a system of discrete cocoons, its only purpose. And of course a city is most city-like not at midday but at midnight, not when it’s all clamors and clanks but when it’s all hush and dreams: Only a deserted street with dead, rayless windows and rows of shuttered doors can fully explain a city. Yes, we can only live back to back; everything—from the small children on an urban boulevard slapping together their separate cities of sand and clay, to the corpses in suburban cemeteries lying in graves separated from one another by iron fences—everything confirms and corroborates this thought.