11. SOFT AND HARD
Serves me right, completely right. Philosophizing fool. For two days now I’ve been sitting here in a stupor. Perhaps a pencil will help: I’ll try to untangle fact after fact, line by line. Mistake: I banished my ghosts too soon. It began the next morning, with my return to the city. I waited in the same place on the same boulevard. The morning hours passed. She hadn’t come. The warm midday was approaching. Still sitting on our bench (I remember these details exactly), I unbuttoned my coat and suddenly realized that she had also sewn two phrases firmly into my mind: “Someone’s waiting” and “Goodbye-goodbye.”
“Coincidence,” I said to myself, and resolved to be more patient. The next day was Sunday. There was no point even waiting. Walking down the early-morning Sunday streets past boarded-up windows, past windows obscured by blinds and gratings, it struck me that this was like that ideal city I had tried so many times to imagine, but which no longer interested me. I needed that tiny metal D—the hard mystery it concealed—more desperately than any problem or worldview. Another day passed: Again she did not come. I decided to act more boldly, to go to the Experimental Reading Room: They would tell me what had happened to her. If she were sick, or . . . But she who? I could name only the one initial, D. All the same, after some hesitation, I found the door surrounded by little squares and was on the point of opening it when the plate-glass facets suddenly showed me to myself: a pitiful wraith from whose shoulders hung a ragged coat; with tufts of unshaven beard beneath hollow eyes. I stood for a minute on the stoop, then went quietly away: Until tomorrow; I would wait one more day. To conquer my emotion, I decided to wear myself completely out and, having walked a long, broken line of side streets, came out onto 1st Meshchanskaya. The street’s straight course looked sufficiently exhausting. Head down, hands in pockets (and footsteps on top of footsteps), I plunged ahead, on and on. The glowing clockface at the Vindava Station stopped me. Skipping from numeral to numeral, my mind described a circle and another third of a circle: Sixteen hours until our meeting. Patience. A moment later the meeting took place. Two figures drove by in a horse-drawn cab: a man and a woman. The woman was she. The droshky swept round the entrance circle and stopped at the station steps. Watching closely, I stole up from behind: Yes, it was she. The two gave their things to a porter and hurried up the steps. I followed. The ensuing scene probably took between five and eight minutes. It’s strange that in that time, though the station lamps were burning brightly, I never managed to see her companion’s face. I don’t know why. They walked through the station hall and slipped out onto the platform. I automatically walked up to a green box, which just as automatically swallowed my ten-kopeck coin. With a platform ticket in hand I continued to march mechanically after them. Down the length of black asphalt past connected cars. Cars marked SOFT—HARD—HARD—SOFT. I saw them, but they didn’t see me. Here was a remarkable sort of solitude: a tandem solitude. They seemed joined at the eyes as they stepped, shoulder to shoulder, into their shared circle, which no third person could enter. I didn’t even try. Copper banged against copper: once (I); then, again and yet again (they). Buffers clanked, and the train unsheathed the tracks. The platform emptied. I walked past a dismal row of iron holes for spittle and cigarette ends. A minute later I was again striding—hands in pockets, head down—down the long, straight course of Meshchanskaya.
12. METAPHYSICS WITHOUT THE BREAD
A machine swallowed my last coin. Now my brain is without its winding mechanism; my thoughts will have to feed on themselves. I suppose that’s why, in place of syllogisms, there’s a scarcely logicalized murk. Well, perhaps it’s better that way: Who knows what’s under the murk, at the bottom. The congestion of city things and people is a torment to me, their constant obtrusion unbearable. Every building bores into you with all its windows. Though my weak and erratic heart is a hindrance, I’ve somehow managed, with breathing spells, to walk the whole endless length of hospital façades down Kaluzhskaya, around the stone square of Donskoi Monastery, past the old knackeries, and out along the field road, all the way to the Andreyev ravine. There’s not a soul to be seen, and at the bottom of the ravine is a peaceful hush. Overhead are fleecy clouds; off to the left, wisps of blue smoke: They must be burning trash at the scrap heaps.
My thoughts keep jerking back from the facts, both from was and will be: It is so pleasant to rest in abstractions, in the breaks from all that.
Right now I’m trying to concentrate on the problem of pain. Our sturdy peasant language calls a sick person—if he’s all pain, he’s mighty sick—a “person-in-pain.” The person-in-pain is identified with his pain. Proceeding from this, as from a logical y, you naturally arrive at the construction: Pain is the existence of a person-in-pain; therefore, for him nothing exists but his pain. The only conceivable way to anesthetize the consciousness of pain, whatever its content, is to cut away that content (the pain in the person-in-pain), to drive it out. Thus the necessity of an outside is deduced; the reality that was in the “I” is objectified in space and time. “I am in pain” becomes “my pain is greater than me.” But what pushes pain away? Pain. A basic reflex, endemic both to frogs under vivisection and to the human mind, is to repulse pain, to cut the pain off or be cut off from it. The beast that plucks a thorn from its paw and the mind that builds space and time so as to be able to hurl its pain away—to enpast and enspace it—are exercising the same will in different ways. Thus the mind, gradually ridding itself of its original illness, is gradually taken ill with the outside world, with the pain expelled from within. But as the pain is externalized, the metaphysical person-in-pain, who gives up his only existence (pain) in being cured, is cured, in essence, of himself; fear of pain (which creates its objectification) and fear for one’s existence (self-preservation) restrain each other; the remainder of the pain, what has not withered without or been cut away, is commonly called “the soul.” A propos, I’ve just remembered: When Leibniz, the inventor of optimism and the legend about the best of all possible worlds, became ill, his obliging mind instantly devised a machine—a cunning construct of clamps, screws, and wooden laths—to deaden the pain. Whenever the pain invaded his thinking and prevented him from writing about the harmony of monads, Leibniz, aided by a manservant (so his secretary Eckhart tells us), would apply to his person those specially made braces—of wood and iron—and order the screws tightened: The laths would clamp the pain, and the optimist would go on with his work. That machine to clamp pain is, in essence, a model of the world invented by Leibniz. Loosen the screws, release the “I” from the complex chain of things gripping it, and the unclamped pain will again swell and spread, destroying the preestablished harmony, faith, and all that comes after. This process, which first acted centrifugally and then paused (“I”), now turns in the opposite direction: The person-in-pain, cured by the objectification of his pain, sensing objects in the outside world as foreign and not being ill with them, begins to want so-called truth. Cognition is the return of things to their original existence: pain. Clearly, for the person-in-pain, cognition is possible only in very small doses, for to increase one’s existence with the contents of the cognized is to multiply one’s pain, to reattach the rotted-off part to the half-healed wound. Skepticism in a world of people-in-pain determined to cultivate cognition must rely not on the paucity of cognitive powers but on the enormity of the pain that stands between the world and cognition and makes the latter unbearable.
Then again, what if I were to call them back? Call back all things—from the stars to specks of dust—and let their pain inside me. But people-in-pain are small and cowardly: One person-in-pain has only to fall in love with another, has only to invite another person’s pain inside his own, for there to be that fear, that reflex that jerks the paw away from the stinger. No, don’t. Don’t sting me.
13. THE PAWN ON THE D-FILE
I’m afraid to go back to the city. If someone were to push me now, to elbow me—I’d fall down and be unable to get up. I’m better of
f here. It’s been two days; I’m still at the bottom of the ravine. Only sometimes, when people appear, I creep away to the Tatar graveyard nearby. It’s nice there too because you can’t see the city: The city is somewhere in the distance, beyond the edge of the ravine. Only train whistles intrude; if not for them, it would be completely restful.
Oh, I almost forgot: Yesterday I had a visit from Dr. Schrott. My thanks to that eccentric. It was nearly evening: I was sitting among the squalid Tatar graves, tin stars and crescents poking up above the nettles, and was about to doze off, when suddenly there he was, looking just the same—eyes screwed tight, long wiry legs. He came up to me, pressed a shaggy ear to my heart, and listened.
“Hmm, uh-huh. Now. It’s not a Muslim graveyard you want—”
I interrupted: “Tell me, Schrott, can one wound a wound?”
He chewed a pensive lip and hovered over me for about a minute.
Then his narrow black back flickered away through the tin stars and crescent moons. Too bad. I wanted to tell him about the pawn. I tried to call out, but my voice was gone.
The story of the pawn is this: One day, I don’t recall when exactly, I happened on a demonstration game of chess. I simply cannot remember when. Wait, why am I talking about chess? Oh, yes, the pawn, the pawn on the d-file. So then, dead silence, like the silence in this graveyard; people massed by the barrier, all eyes on the board. Two players hunched over the board. Carved figures inside the little squares. And not a sound: behind the barrier, at the board, on the board. I’m a poor judge of positional chess. As I recall, the only piece that interested me was a tiny pawn clad in glossy black. As if to break free of the game, the pawn strode two squares over the front line to stand alone and isolated among empty squares. The game was being played on the king’s flank, gradually concentrating on the f-file. Attack—counterattack. Then suddenly, in response to a jump by white’s knight to cover white’s exposed f3, black, as if meaning to lose a tempo, advanced its seemingly forgotten and doomed pawn on the d-file: The little hop-o’-my-thumb strode boldly from black square to white, leaving itself open to attack. Now only a diagonal move by black’s queen might defend it; but the queen, as if on purpose, stepped aside, leaving the pawn on the d-file in mortal danger. My heart, silly as it sounds, began to beat faster, as though that black hop-o’-my-thumb were somehow necessary and dear to me.
Another exchange of moves. Now not only my eyes but the eyes of everyone silently jostling behind the barrier were fixed on the d-file: The black waif, as if in a mortal lassitude, again took a step forward. For the last time. One more step would have crowned the pawn. The player playing white (oddly, I never did see his face) delayed, tapping the edge of the board with a calm fingernail, then pounced; the black waif flinched in the grip of his thin, tenacious fingers; the fight for the d-file was over.
1927–1928
1. Sense, meaning, order. (Russian)
2. All. (Greek)
3. White. (Greek)
THE COLLECTOR OF CRACKS
1
THE FAIRY tale lay glistening with still-wet letters on my writing desk, by the inkwell. I put the last touches to it with my pen and was about to roll the manuscript up when it struck me that the letters were straining to leap out of the lines: quick, into eyes.
But the hour was noon. The reading was set for nine. The sun dislikes phantasms, whereas lamps are sometimes not averse, their shades attentively cocked, to listening to a tale or two.
So the letters would have to wait until dusk.
A meager authorial joy had been prearranged: A quiet room with sad city flowers in its windows awaited my fairy tale, as did a dozen well-wishers. But then (who would have thought it) I met a man who crossed out the phantasm.
The meeting occurred right after my last revision to the text. The lunch hour was approaching. Leaving the manuscript on my desk, I put on my coat and went out. I hadn’t gone a hundred paces when my attention was drawn by the tall, seemingly frozen figure of a man leaning against a lamppost. The man was standing opposite the white tin face of a gold-rimmed clock suspended over the door of a watchmaker, and staring at the painted black hands jabbing the disk’s roman numerals. I meant to walk on, but then I looked back; the stranger was still standing in the same attitude, half-closed eyes raised to the painted numerals. I too looked up: twenty-seven past one.
The stranger’s carefully shaven face and carefully brushed suit were worn and faded—his suit was creased, his face lined. People elbowing each other off the sidewalk ribbons—eyes boring into shopwindows, posters, playbill pillars, or else buried in their boots—took no notice of the musing man. Only I and a little boy slung with a hawker’s box appreciated the phenomenon. Meanwhile the musing man flicked back a coat flap, pulled out a pocket watch, and, slowly shifting his gaze from the disk in his hand to the disk on the sign, set his watch to the time painted. The little boy burst out laughing. Turning aside, I continued on my way. Looming ahead, amid the signboard squares, ovals, and rectangles, was another round white clockface. I don’t ordinarily look at signs, but now I did. The motionless black hands over black numerals showed: twenty-seven past one. An obscure foreboding gripped me. I quickened my step, but now my pupils were ransacking pieces of painted tin on their own, searching for disks and numerals. Another disk emerged at the turning into a dark lane. Poised above the crack-like cul-de-sac, its black hands were hiding in the black shadow of a well-windowed stone pile, but even through the shadow I descried: twenty-seven past one. I stopped, eyes raised to the numerals: I somehow thought the hands should move, should quit the fatal divisions. But on the painted clockface nothing stirred; the thin gold rim glimmered dimly while the black hands, having found what they wanted, pressed their tips to the edges of the disk and froze—forever.
Wheels whooshed by, soles pounded past. Up to half a dozen elbows jabbed me. A heavy sack knocked into my shoulder; I took my eyes off the disk; a torn-capped youth slung with a hawker’s box bored into me with grinning eyes. I could only go on.
It was nearly dark when I returned to my manuscript. The letters, now quiet on their numbered pages, peered up from the lines like gnarled black gnomes. I stuffed them in my pocket; the clock hand was creeping toward nine.
2
We all sat in a circle. Silence. My manuscript had the floor. Moving closer to the lamp, I began: “‘The Collector of Cracks. A Fairy Tale.’ In a certain land . . .”—in the vestibule the bell let out a tinny sob. I broke off. The host tiptoed out into the hall. A minute later, looking slightly embarrassed, he reappeared in the doorway: Beside him stood, not looking at anyone, in a long frock coat buttoned up to his chin, the very same man I had seen in the street by the clockface. The unexpected guest, still without raising his eyes, bowed politely to the room and took a silent seat in the corner, by the door. “He won’t disturb us,” the host whispered to me. “He’s just an eccentric. A mathematician, philosopher.”
I lowered my eyes to the text (the mood was spoilt) and began again: “‘The Collector of Cracks. A Fairy Tale.’ In a certain land whose name is long forgotten, far from cobbled streets and moss-clad footpaths, beyond the briery brambles, in the heart of an ancient and overgrown forest a very long time ago, there lived a very old Hermit . . .”
After the usual fairy-tale preamble, the fable went on to tell of the Hermit’s goodness: how he healed the forest’s wind-broken branches and stalks, its torn grasses tangled and trampled by beasts; how he nursed the chicks in an abandoned shrike’s nest; how he taught the morning glories to twine not any which way, but up and up to the sky where God has his Heaven; how he bade the little, feeble-minded flowers pray to God before closing their petals for sleep; how he persuaded the withered grasses to make morning sacrifices of dew, raising them up on their spires to God, some a drop, others a half drop (tiny blades—a watery speck): each grass what it could.
“In return,” preached the Hermit, raising three fingers to bless the grasses and the dew, the roots and the mosses, the
flocks of birds and swarms of flies, “God shall give you abundant rain to drink: You shall be clean and never thirsty.” And it was according to his word.
The Lord smiled down from Heaven on the Hermit’s sermons.
Then late one night, when all creeping things and all fowls of the air, all oaks and all grasses were fast asleep, the Lord came down from Heaven to the Hermit in his lowly hut.
“Whatsoever you ask—life in Heaven, worldly riches, and kingdoms—it shall be given you.”
And the Hermit answered: “Why ask for Heaven, O Lord: the gates of Heaven are opened not by thy mercy but by thy righteous Judgment. Why ask for worldly riches and kingdoms: Do my eyes not behold thy world entire, from sun to sun? Why seek out human vanities: Have I not forsaken all such roads and paths? I pray thee only this, O Lord: Give me power over all the cracks, great and small, that are crannied into things. I shall teach them righteousness.”
The Lord smiled: It shall be according to your word.
They filed past—morning, midday, and twilight. Then, when the sun had sunk, the Hermit stood up in the middle of a lonely forest glade and called to the cracks. And the cracks, summoned by his gentle words, slipped and wriggled out of all things wherever they were, and they all—small and great, wide and narrow, crooked and straight—crept down to the glade into the presence of the Hermit.
Down they crept: the long cracks eroding rocky crags; the small coiled cracks fidgeting in walls, creaky floorboards, and settled stoves; the gigantic green-bodied cracks in the moon’s fissured and desiccated disk; the tiny cracks in the soundboards of violins. And when they had all come before the Hermit, he spoke to them.
Autobiography of a Corpse Page 11