Autobiography of a Corpse

by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

  I remember once, as I was pacing up and down the crooked camber of a side street before dawn, I heard first footsteps, then someone’s measured muttering. The footsteps broke off but the muttering continued. I walked toward the sound. By a gray stone pile, still hazy in the half-light, stood a man with his back to the wall; his legs wobbled, while his head looked as if it would come unscrewed from his coat collar. He did not notice me or the dead stone surround and, as if inscribed in an inviolate magic circle, went on rocking and raptly repeating: “God, thank God, doesn’t exist. Thank God, God doesn’t exist.”

  This sounded like a declaration of solitude. Walking past the drunk, it occurred to me that the only thing that still interested me was following human solitudes, solitary souls who were trying—with comic ineptitude and tragic obstinacy in the thick of this human hive—to inscribe themselves in their own inviolate circle. As my hours of leisure were long and many, I decided to devote myself unstintingly to stealing solitudes. That’s right. Indigence and indolence always incite one to sin: to steal solitudes.

  However, my very first experiments convinced me that hunting for city solitudes was an extremely difficult and painstaking task. City dwellers, used to maneuvering among ears and eyes, deftly elude observation and never allow one to infiltrate their “I.” I would have to develop a special technique, an ability to come up from behind, so to speak, to combine celerity with stealth. After several failures, I realized that I must start with simple situations and only gradually work up to more complex ones. So then, one day, walking past a blind old man, his wooden cup poised to catch the obliging coin, it struck me that here was a suitable subject. I stopped ten paces away and, eyeing his stern weather-beaten face and corrugated brow, considered the advantages his blindness gave me. After a few such encounters, I happened to catch sight of his retreating back, stooped and slowly rocking: He was walking along, tapping the cobbles with the tip of his long stick and listening for strange sounds. We were near the city outskirts. I decided to pursue my subject. Together we advanced—the stone-tapping stick and I—past squat wooden houses, slowly, step by step, through the city gates and out along a road that wound away to a quarry. Two hundred yards ahead was a pond overhung with soft whorls of willows. The old man’s stick went on poking about in the dust. Lessening the distance between us with noiseless steps, I followed behind. Suddenly he cocked an ear—and listened. To the complete hush. Somewhere in the distance a locomotive hooted. Then silenced. The blind old man turned from the road into the high, dusty grasses and, jabbing the ground, sat down. I went on standing there, watching: a human solitude in the palm of my hand.

  My subject now produced a small bundle from inside his dirty smock, unknotted the ends, and began jingling coins. “And that’s all,” I thought with chagrin, preparing to disturb the stillness and be off. But just then the lines round his dead eyes twitched, his lips broke into a sly smile, and he began a strange game. Putting stick and bundle aside, he suddenly lay down, flat on his back, placed his palms together with fingers interlocking and pressed them to his chest. Then he relaxed his face, let his toothless jaw go slack, and rolled up his dead pupils. Only now did I understand: The old man was playing, with glee and cunning, at death. It hardly matters how one discovers how different people amuse themselves inside their closed, magic-circle-inscribed solitudes. I found the scene somewhat repugnant, and I knew there was no more to it, but still I stood there without moving. Every thief, no matter what he’s stolen, has a horror of being caught. The clatter of a cart lumbering up from the quarry released my footsteps—and I hurried back to the city. This episode did not put an end to my pursuit of city solitudes, though I did promise myself and them one thing: never to entrust these stolen essences to a pencil. Even this one here. I’ll keep them inside me: It’s safer.

  8. A CONVERSATION ABOUT FOOTSTEPS

  I did not know that I could speak. Yet today I did, for the first time in many months. The first time. Not just a half word, a rejoinder, a question (that had happened before). No, this was a veritable conversation, the recording of which will require a good ten pair of quotation marks. Of course, only chance could have compelled me to speak and be spoken to. It happened this way. Walking down Strastnoi this morning, I decided to cross over from the sidewalk to the boulevard. Two huge cauldrons of smoking asphalt stood in the road, blocking my way. A long steel spoon, turning lazily in the black goo, was kneading the asphalt paste. The old asphalt, footworn and even torn in places, lay in cracked rolls by the raggedy sidewalk. A wind was wafting the acrid blue-gray smoke toward me. I averted my face and at that moment saw, a step away, a pale slip of a girl peering through the smoke at the squelching asphalt slop. In the crease between her long thin eyebrows, in the slight trembling of her lips, as if mouthing words, I divined the solitude whose meanings I had so long sought. I quickly took a few steps back, the better to observe her. She went on standing in the blue smoke, as in the smoke of a censer, lightly and bravely inscribed in the moist morning air and as seemingly unaware of me as of the workmen whose backs and aprons bustled between the two cauldrons. This went on for perhaps a minute. Then she suddenly looked round—and our eyes met.

  “We’re both observing: I, the smoke; and you, me. Why would you do that?”

  “Why would you?”

  “I agree to answer first. But my answer is long, and this won’t wait.”

  She glanced down: Only now did I notice tucked under her elbow a shabby satchel with unraveling seams, its rough leather pressing indifferently against her bare arm.

  “Then tell me on the way.” I surprised even myself. How could I have said that?

  She wasn’t the least bit angry, no—on her lips, making her nostrils quiver, was a smile.

  “Well, I was just wondering—you’ll think it’s silly—how many footsteps there are in an asphalt cauldron. Understand? How many footsteps? Moscow is full of people walking somewhere. Like the two of us now: walking along, then ‘goodbye-goodbye’—and that’s it. Whereas our footsteps—I mean our footprints, until the first wind or broom—will remain. Think how many, many footprints have been trampled into the asphalt, footprints on top of footprints, till they’ve worn holes through to the ground. Then both footsteps and asphalt are dumped into a cauldron and stirred with a steel spoon, as in a folktale—in folktales, you know, they practice witchcraft with footprints and even cut them out. So now listen: If every once in a while, once in a lifetime, say, everything that man, that people had trampled underfoot, sullied, sinned against, and lied about could be swept up into a pile and thrown into a furnace and burned, you understand, burned, so that it all went up in smoke, then life could begin again. From the beginning.”

  She tripped along, heels pattering, with scarcely a backward glance. It was all I could do to keep half a step behind.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t believe in footprints. Man . . .” And yielding to a sudden flood of long-suppressed words, I began to speak my mind: “Man is to man either a wolf or a ghost. To live as a wolf means to take everything, even the footprints, to devour every last trace. As for ghosts, they flare and fade in tracelessness . . .”

  We walked along, now slowing, now quickening our step, turning up this street and down that, and, gazing at the rhythmic motion of her shoulder, I went on and on about the two formulas between which one must choose: either man is to man a wolf, or man is to man a ghost.

  When I finished, I saw turned toward me the same innocently smiling face.

  “I go in here,” she said abstractedly, ascending an entrance step (now our heads were level).

  Then, after a brief pause: “Maybe so. But there’s a third formula, if that’s what you want to call it: In the end, you see, man is to man . . .a man. Why are you missing two buttons? Right here—on your front: You’ll catch cold. I tell you what, come tomorrow, only a bit earlier, to the bench opposite the cauldrons—and I’ll sew them on for you. Otherwise . . .”

&nb
sp; With that she vanished behind the door’s cut-class panes. I was left alone. My heart was pounding unusually hard—it must have been the fast walk—and distinctly in my temples. Through the plates of glass, fantastically fractured in their facets, a marble staircase blazed white. Outside, flanking the door, were white and yellow squares.

  “Where had she gone?” I scanned the squares, and they replied: BOOKKEEPING COURSES. KINDERGARTEN. PAINLESS TOOTH EXTRACTIONS. DRESSMAKER. SKIN DISEASES. EXPERIMENTAL READING ROOM. SEAMLESS SHOES. USING THE TEN-FINGER SYSTEM.

  9. ANOTHER CONVERSATION: ABOUT CALL NUMBER 176

  This morning just after dawn I was waiting on the appointed bench. Through the boulevard’s gold September leaves I eyed the two round cauldrons. They were empty, and the blue smoke that had introduced us, its work done, was gone—as if it had never been. The boulevard, still shivering and only half awake, was slowly accumulating footsteps. First to trail by was a trio of waifs who might have passed the night with the asphalt and footsteps in one of those cauldrons. Then—at odd intervals—hawkers slung with wooden boxes, sleepy boys yet to begin crying their newspapers, workers, and a policeman just come off duty. After that—women wrapped in shawls carrying large bottles and canisters, also office clerks, their caps pulled low and elbows sticking out of their pockets. I began to look more closely. There she was, hurrying my way; on reaching the bench, she sat briskly down beside me.

  “Now then. Unbutton your coat.” She placed her dilapidated satchel on her knees and, while her fingers were busy fishing out needle and thread, a thimble, and a pair of sturdy horn buttons, I managed to descry, screwed into the satchel’s limp leather, a small metal D.

  Then for three or four minutes, my eyes half closed, I heard nimble nails darting to and fro over the front of my miserable coat, heard her soft, close breathing, and the thread break twice. Then the satchel clicked shut and, looking up, I saw stern, intent eyes.

  “The buttonholes are fine. Try buttoning the buttons. Good. Now answer me this: Why were you watching me yesterday? Well?”

  Somewhat confused and abashed, I began “to explain”: I told her about my hunt for solitudes, about my attempts to breach the circles in which all city people are inscribed.

  She listened, looking away now and then and tapping the metal D with a sharp fingernail.

  “I see. But where is it easiest for you to assail our poor solitudes? Where and when are they most vulnerable and defenseless? If this is your profession, as you put it—you are a strange man—then—”

  “There are no set rules. Though certainly the beginnings and ends of days afford more chances than the middle of the day. Perhaps because, in the first case, people haven’t yet entered into the day, while in the second, the worn-out ‘we’ breaks down of its own accord into ‘I’s.’ In short, it’s best to search around dawn, near the line between dreams and reality. Where are solitudes most discoverable? Let me see, usually on the periphery of a city since the need to be alone acts centrifugally—in relation to a city’s convergent centripetal force. Or else at train stations. People sitting on their bundles, or clutching a suitcase, are also good subjects: no longer here and not yet there. And not overly aware of the eyes around them. If your hunt takes you through the metal turnstile—after those departing—out onto the platform, there you’ll see connected sorting cars marked SOFT (black letters on a yellow ground) and HARD (black on green). Now picture this: Seated on the benches in the hard cars are what I call soft solitudes, warmed by lyricism, inscribed in either sorrow or joy, while in the soft cars, separated from each other by raised panes of glass, sit the silent solitudes I call hard. This again is not a rule, only a working hypothesis.”

  I glanced at my now-silent companion. Her face with moist lips half parted seemed touched with the faint impress of some still-hazy dream. Her eyes were gazing past me, into the distance. Seizing the moment, I said, “Yesterday, after you went in the door, I was left with the nameplates and I spent a long time trying to guess—”

  Her eyes turned reluctantly back. “Try again.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. A kindergarten—hardly. The ten-finger—”

  “You’re close. You’ve almost got it. Guess again.”

  I shook my helpless head.

  “It’s really nothing very interesting: I work in a reading room. I catalogue books using the decimal system. Do you know what that is? Soon I’ll give it up.”

  I smiled. “Of course I do. It’s a system that allows you to hang all things and meanings on ten hooks and give each thing a number.”

  “You mustn’t laugh. It’s not at all that silly. With three or four numbers you can find anything you want. It’s very convenient; everything has a call number. Name the call number and it’s yours.”

  “Hmm. Then does love have a call number?”

  “Just a minute: The class would be 1, and the division would be 76. 176—there you have your . . . But why did you ask me that?”

  She flushed a deep red; her long eyebrows met in a single line. I waited. Then she got abruptly up. I too got up.

  “No-no, you mustn’t come with me. Someone’s waiting for me at the crossroad. Goodbye.”

  I sank obediently onto the bench and watched her whisk away, without looking back, in among the autumnal rust-covered trees. When I opened my eyes I saw lying on the bench next to me a white paper packet. I carefully opened it: two small palms of bread with ham inside—a sandwich. Something excruciatingly sweet rose in my throat. I pulled my hat down over my eyes: No one must see.

  10. DR. SCHROTT

  When people abandon a person, they are replaced (very easily) by non-people. I mean to say: When a person is excluded from facts, he is included in phantasms. I’ve already mentioned the Purvapakshin. But sometimes one figment wasn’t enough for me, so for conversation and companionship I invented Dr. Schrott. The real Dr. Schrott lived somewhere at some point, but I never knew him. I first heard of him from an odd fellow whose abundant good health compelled him to take constant cures. Dr. Schrott, he said, had invented a panacea: a hunger cure. I had no use for it at the time, but when my circumstances suddenly changed and I switched to a ten-kopeck regimen, I dug up Dr. Schrott (forgotten at the bottom of my memory like an inflatable pillow folded in six and buried at the bottom of a rucksack), unfolded him, and blew him up to size, so to speak, to capacity. Now I had only to close the air valve and make use of my phantasm. Materializing Dr. Schrott was no trouble; excessive reality and solidity did not become that fanatic of not eating (his cure called for two foodless days the first week, four the second, six the third; then in reverse order—four, two; and again four, six, and so on). After a few tries by my imagination, I sensed him and allowed him to exist: Dr. Schrott was somewhat taller than average, with graying strands combed over his bald, knobby crown. Through the lenses of his metal-rimmed spectacles stared a motionless pair of tightly screwed-in eyes. His sunken yellow cheeks were clean-shaven and cased in a tight starched collar; his evenly breathing ribs were buttoned into a black redingote; his wiry legs laced into tight top boots with double soles; his long fingers wrapped round a dark-wood cane. At first we met mainly in dreams, but later on we also met outside of dreams. Wherever and whenever we met, the worthy Dr. Schrott would touch my palm with his bony fingers and inspect me from head to toe.

  “Temples more drawn. Aha. Very good. Thinning of the neck—excellent. Irregular heartbeat, you say? Um-hmm. Now. Pulse. Fifty-six. Bravo! You’re on the road to recovery. It’s been an honor.”

  Tipping his tall top hat, Dr. Schrott would turn his narrow, black back to me and, evenly swinging his long wiry legs, melt away, until we met again.

  I mention him now, my old companion of many long days, because the time has come for us to part. Forgive me, my dear, edifying Schrott, for today I shall open the little valve that keeps you in existence. I shall let all the reality out of you, as one lets the air out of an inflatable travel pillow because, you see, my station is next.

  Y
es, I needed my ghosts—they honestly did what they could—until I met a person. Yesterday, when I, full of new meanings and an audacious hope, walked out to Petrovsky Park and, huddled under a canopy of pine needles, tried in vain to fall asleep, I summoned the Purvapakshin and Dr. Schrott: to say goodbye. Instantly, without opening my eyes, I could see: They had come; they had come and sat down beside me. Not a leaf rustled beneath their footsteps; the air did not stir. Still with my eyes closed, so as to see more clearly, I turned first to Schrott.

  “I hate to disappoint you, but I’ve gone off my regimen: Today I ate two sandwiches. My pulse shot up: It’s almost normal.” (He shrugged.) “And look at these—two buttons: against colds. The most marvelous buttons: They radiate warmth. Who knows? Perhaps it’s not really September. You’re pursing your lips, I see, and frowning. Even so, I have opened the little valve and am depriving you of your reality. I no longer need the help of ghosts. See these hands? Ten fingers: I’ll put them to work. I’ll switch from brain to brawn; soon I’ll have a pulse of seventy-two, ruddy cheeks, and a straight back. I need this because . . . But you wouldn’t understand. Now don’t let me keep you: Off you go, right back to nothingness.”

  With that I turned to the wise Purvapakshin. His bearded face was muffled up to his eyes in the folds of his flowing cloak.

  “Oh, noble rishi, I am a man who must have at least one ‘yes’: Not from you, of course, you have none. Will you also say to this ‘yes’: ‘no’?”

  He was silent. Only his cloak, fragrant with thousands of years, betrayed his even breathing. Having heard me out, he rose majestically. The leaves did not rustle beneath his footsteps, the air did not stir with the fluttering of his cloak as he receded into the darkness, entered it, and became like it.

  That night, until the loomings of dawn, I rethought all my thoughts. Come morning I returned to the city, to a gray-blue day clad in dew and chill, with a firm decision: All footsteps must go into the furnace. With the lid on. The merriest phrase I know is “From the beginning.”