Dreams and Stones

by Magdalena Tulli

  This city is built of a twofold kind of imagination to which the two rail networks correspond. One extends toward Moscow and St. Petersburg, the other toward Paris and Lausanne. They are unable to pass beyond the city gates, which does not prevent them from entwining the whole world with their networks – spreading farther every year – and acquiring locomotive sheds, warehouses and provincial garrisons in which it is possible to embezzle the regimental funds and then shoot oneself in the head.

  In this city there live sand-diggers who seek consolation at the pub on the corner, and clerks in threadbare frock coats who quail beneath the gaze of their superiors and who have no future in their offices since all the best positions are permanently occupied by jovial old men or cynical young swells; bearded Jews, blacksmiths and carpenters from failing shops, self-aggrandizing engineers, and coughing poets devoid of inspiration. They are passed on the street by carriages containing disdainful generals in white uniforms embroidered with gold thread, and by the steeds of cheerful lieutenants separated by hundreds of versts from their mothers and sisters, uncertain whether the mud beneath their horses’ hooves can be real in a place that is so accidental and in which the only self-evident thing is the garrison.

  The area enclosed by the gates is rather cramped. To cross from one end to the other takes half an hour, forty-five minutes in bad weather; the trip leaves no illusions. Certain inhabitants of the city, sick of its narrow horizons, attempted to perish in flames or in snows. Others, equally distressed, decided that it was their duty to live there and that death was a kind of layoff. Both the former and the latter, from the cradle to the grave, when they reached for something with their hand would encounter empty space and when they took a step would bump into a wall. The first perished the way they wanted – in snows or in flames. The second died in unaired rooms, their bedside tables littered with tiny bottles containing bitter medicines, leeches behind their ears. But death could not soothe their pain.

  Both the former and the latter ultimately came to rest in caskets; the caskets crumbled to dust deep beneath the earth yet the pain remained on the surface: in stuffy bedrooms, in pubs on the corner, in sofas on which they used to sit, in drawers where their letters were kept. Eventually the day came when the sofas were chopped up for firewood; a stray shell released the letters from their drawers. Paper turned to ashes, windowpanes shattered, door frames and tiled stoves were smashed to pieces. But this too failed to stop the pain. For pain does not belong to those who experience it but rather they belong to it. Taking into its possession successive tradesmen, clerks and poets, it fills all interiors to the very ceiling.

  Many tried to flee from it, surreptitiously taking advantage of the fact that every unaired room contains broad plains over which great clouds sail past, and endless tracts across which coaches drawn by galloping horses deliver documents that bear a two-headed eagle on their seals. Certain inhabitants of this city desired space so badly that they abandoned the city forever. They were sucked in by the wide-open spaces of boundless fields, which in order to exist needed the tracks of the railroad that spread from year to year, from station to station, to the very end, where it transpired there was no way back. They began to wander aimlessly about St. Petersburg, great in its golden frame, where beneath the shiny varnish it is dark in the winter for as much as twenty hours a day. Or Moscow, where the streets were paved with wood that may have been real or may have been made from lacquered building blocks. They even traveled as far as Tula, which was tall and had a brass tap to let out boiling water, and also to Omsk and Tomsk, where in the summertime they float wood down the river and in winter they are chilled to the marrow. And to Astrakhan – that storehouse of ice and skins – where caviar is eaten by the spoonful and champagne drunk straight from the bottle. At the feet of a good few of these lost travelers, somewhere at the meeting point of steppe and sea there opened up a dark abyss by the name of Odessa, filled with sailors, bandits, officers and femmes fatales, washed over beyond salvation by waves of epidemics and filled forever with the echo of shots. Some did not stop till Baku, where blood flows like rainwater in the streets, or Khabarovsk, where White Army soldiers without boots lie on the white snow. Or Vladivostok, that last station in the world, toward which tracks that previously ran straight as an arrow begin to describe the first loop of a spiral. The next loop rests on Harbin, where Chinese in felt shoes wade through snowdrifts. Subsequent loops are no longer visible; one has only to hold on ever more tightly on the curves. Saved or lost, people sucked into the vortex were swept into the interior of memories and began to live as the recollections of others, endlessly repeating their former gestures. Younger than they were in their youth, they looked from their nightstands through eyes that saw nothing at all: neither the space nor the flames.

  The city the inhabitants know is composed of a certain number of elements that have a defined color and shape but do not possess a permanent location. They move about, vanishing then emerging again, like crystals in a kaleidoscope. Here, for nannies minding children there opens up a park surrounded by a cast-iron fence, here a great hotel presents itself, having previously demolished the stables of the light-horse barracks. Somewhere there rises an Orthodox church with a dome like a crystal that till now has been hidden behind others. One day Russian lettering disappears from the shop signs and is replaced with Gothic script. The streets bear now one set of names, now another. The statues on the plinths change; the fountain in the square is pulled down because an underground passageway is being built, and reappears many years later in a different place. The crystals move about in disorder, and it is only the arrangement of the mirrors that creates the illusion of regular, perfectly symmetrical wholes in which the element of the accidental temporarily acquires the status of principal structural component. The city is a work of the eyes. In them as in mirrors the random configurations of colored crystals are reflected and thus acquire symmetry and sense. A scratch on the glass, an unforeseen glint, a speck of dust, subjected to the same rule, multiplied and incorporated into the whole, defines the context. It is precisely in this way that Moscow and St. Petersburg appear here and also Paris and Lausanne: as optical illusions produced by blemishes in mirrors. It goes without saying that even the slightest movement of the elements must lead to significant changes in Paris and St. Petersburg. The shadow of a mote of dust on the mirror is sufficient for the cancan to begin in the cabarets; it may also alter the cut of full-length overcoats. Not to mention a good shake, which makes the crystals pile up and then scatter. The sudden appearance of an inconceivable connecting line between the two railway stations will threaten the equilibrium of the whole. The city, pulled in two directions, will incline dangerously toward Paris, where the Trans-Siberian Railroad is a paper share, one of many noted on the stock exchange, and where every day at dusk the terraces of the cafés are filled with laughing people who have never heard of it.

  Many a Paris is inhabited by sentimental residents of St. Petersburg dressed in hotel livery, dexterously pocketing tips and surreptitiously wiping away tears of emotion, while one of the successive St. Petersburgs may turn out to be a provincial backwater completely invisible from beneath another name as beneath thick wrapping paper, a place that the inhabitants of Paris never visit. And yet even the tiniest scrap of wrapping paper amid the crystals of the kaleidoscope would suffice for the whole to take on a grayish coloration and a gloomy atmosphere, for wrapping paper utterly changes the properties of light.

  It is possible to imagine a city perfect in its entirety, a city that is the sum of all possibilities. In it nothing is missing and nothing can perish; every china teacup comes from somewhere and is destined for somewhere. But precisely this absolute city is eaten away by the sickness of never-ending disasters. Change invariably brings confusion to the lives of the inhabitants. One has to pay attention so as not to drive accidentally onto a bridge that was demolished years ago, so as not to sit on the terraces of torn-down cafés once known for their unparalleled doughnuts. Lo
ng hours can be wasted waiting at the stops of long-canceled tram routes if one does not notice at once that the rails have been covered over with asphalt. One has to remember carefully where walls have been put up that once were not there. Crossing a market square filled with carts and horses with bags of oats round their necks, it is best not to forget about the nature of apartment buildings and about the opaqueness and firmness of their interior walls. That which one can bump into and hurt oneself on from a certain perspective is more real than the fleeting landscapes seen by a gaze turned in on the interior of the memory. The present moment slips through the fingers of the inhabitants of the city of changes; they must thus live by means of the past. They merely try not to knock their heads against the walls out of nostalgia for that which is no longer. They realize that it is not the walls that block their view. Even if they destroyed them with their gaze the marketplace with its horses and carts still would not return to its place. They would have too much to lose, considering that the alleyways, transparent as air, made by the cuboids that form an invisible frontage would be filled with a vacuum that with a whistle would suck in crumpled newspapers, umbrellas, hats, and recollections.

  Lesser wholes can be more easily encompassed with the gaze. Every one of the supplementary cities hovers freely in space, as weightless and incorporeal as an image in a kaleidoscope. They are not linked by pipes or cables through which substance or energy could flow. They neither appear nor disappear, nor change into one another. Each exists for itself and is closed in on itself – and nothing in them ever changes. It is precisely because they endure so immutably that there has to be so many of them. But observers, who cannot get by without ordering events in their memory, try to combine them into a single whole so as to restore to the world its continuity and its consequentiality, its cause and effect. It is because of them that what is new becomes old and what is clean becomes dirty. The city seen by the observers is a place in which today’s dust falls on yesterday’s dust, in which bread goes stale, water dries up and iron rusts. There statues are erected and knocked down, while streets bear now one name, now a different one. The city woven from changes is a stage for perpetual entrances and exits that deteriorates a little more with every day, a place of losing and finding, breaking and mending, birth and death.

  Past events leave traces in the memory like an ax chopping wood. Chips fly; they remain where they fall even after the wood has been used to light the stove. Trampled underfoot and rained upon, they slowly change color. If nothing can be preserved and saved, how are recollections supposed to resist changes? In this city of changes, ruled by memory, there had to be room for everything that memory has retained, yet every day its contents are reduced to shreds a little more. As if in a wardrobe where alongside an off-the-rack suit of low-grade wool there hangs a moldering yet good-quality uniform of a now defunct regiment, and between them a lady’s muff infested with moths.

  It is for this reason that the spaces yawning inside heads are vaster than anything that can be thought up. Every one of the past and future cities thrust into the recesses of the world has its own star there, and it can also be said that each of these cities is the most important one. For is the world not composed exclusively of recesses? As is common knowledge some stars have been extinguished; a certain number of them were destroyed by stray helicopters. But the name guards the city against collapse, since it has the property of containing within itself all that was and is no longer and all that has been told to the marines.

  Prey to longing and doubt, every night the unquiet city of recollections releases dreams – enchanted adhesive shoots that seek support in silence and darkness. Yet they find nothing but other dreams, and so the dreams attach to one another. They grow in all directions, creating knots and loops, twining around one another, merging together and then branching. There are dark dreams and bright dreams, beautiful dreams and horrible dreams. But their brightness always arises from darkness and their beauty from horror. The tangle of dreams, untouched by pruning shears, fills the whole world; it can even be said that it is the world and that the inhabitants of the city – along with their houses, their beds, their blankets, their recollections and their unanswerable questions – are only necessary for the dreams to be dreamed.

  Only for dreams to be dreamed? What about maintaining order in the world? What about polishing floors, making repairs? Surely the reason why people sleep at night is to gather strength for the labors of the day? Well, in fact this is not so. It is not enough to sleep soundly and eat well. It would always transpire that bread from dreams is not filling, that water from dreams does not quench one’s thirst. Dreams – those merry or cheerless realms of unfulfillment – were able to open the inhabitants’ eyes to the whole truth which always escaped them in their waking hours: that the desire to maintain order in the world also arises from dreams. From strenuous dreams in which every object the eye lights upon finds its place, while five others are scattered and lost at the same time. But the dreamers cannot see this since they dream inattentively.

  At dusk the city of dreams and the city extending in space become one and join in a murky whole crowned by the black silhouettes of office buildings against a reddish sky, giant edifices constructed not long ago yet already affected by corrosion and darkness. Nowhere is there any boundary marker, inscription or informational sign that would indicate the relative positions of dreams and waking life. Some take the ringing of alarm clocks in the morning as a signal indicating the crossing of the border. But alarm clocks which themselves belong to dreams cannot wake people from them.

  In the depths of sleep the dreamers push their way into trams, from trams into offices, from offices into stores. Dreaming, they wander amongst the shelves and squint at the over-abundance of colors and shapes. The plenitude muddles their heads. In every item there dwells a promise; the future changes as the dreamers carry their shopping along. The immaculate beauty of an altered fate endures for a short moment after the parcels are unpacked, then melts away without a trace. But the everyday lack of hope lying in wait for the happy purchasers in the corners of apartments is not allowed in the city of dreams. Each inhabitant can have the sins of their life – their uncertainty and sorrow – accounted for by the unknown women and men who have a guaranteed livelihood on the vast surfaces of billboards. They live amongst appropriate slogans, calm and immobile. They are given assurances about which no one else is able even to dream.

  In the city of dreams all the colors of cars are reflected in the glossy floors of automobile salesrooms. Passersby are thrilled as they look through the huge display windows: they admire the nobility and the power. The sales managers watch over the cars. Passersby who wish to sit behind the wheel and drive off must have with them a bag full of cash or a certified bank check. And so many inhabitants of the city of dreams, unable to count on their check being certified, instead wander day and night in search of bags filled with money.

  It is they who crowd into buildings equipped with special openings in the roof and internal chutes to direct the rain of money directly to devices that count it and divide it, according to their needs, amongst those waiting for a miraculous decree of fate. Every number, color and card must win sooner or later. Thewheel of fortune spins only so that everyone should receive a generous share. Those who do not come empty-handed will not regret it if they wait long enough for their lucky moment and at just the right instant do not hesitate to put everything on a single card. It is precisely here – and nowhere else – that one can catch hold of destiny, by one’s own hand correct its crooked rudder without wasting time and energy on other actions that are indirect and of dubious effectiveness. But the game must be paid for. One single coin is needed, the lucky one. Whoever has already used up their coin will not win. It is better then not to raise one’s eyes so as not to be tempted to buy chewing gum, peanuts and beer. But those who play are certain of nothing, not even that. Everyone wasted their lucky coin long ago on trifles. That is why the rain of money from the sky t
hat falls into the special openings in the roof is ultimately drained off into the sewers.

  The city of dreams never forgets about money. In the evening its glow spreads across the sky over immense hotels. Elevators glistening with chrome and nickel bear smug foreigners in gleaming shoes and silk underwear, with fat wallets tucked in the inside pockets of their soft woolen suits. A mist of cologne mingles with cigar smoke and the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. As high as the clouds, the skyscrapers stand in a row with walls made of huge sheets of glass, behind which lobbies filled with leather sofas and tropical greenery are lit in the glow of thousands of lamps. Whoever crosses the threshold of these hotels immediately becomes a foreigner and can leave forever for America, above the clouds, a lit cigar in his mouth. Yet if he reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket he will be disappointed – nothing is there.

  For the most impatient, there are numerous recruiting offices for the Foreign Legion; in each of them, day and night, a French-speaking officer blows smoke rings as he puffs on his pipe. He wears a white kepi and a uniform with red and green facings in which he fought in the desert and stumbled through sandstorms. Whoever enters there, even by mistake, he presents with a contract to sign, binding him to fifteen years’ service in the tropics, and shows him on his fingers in round sums the amount his government will pay the volunteer. He entices with the green of hope and with an indifferent smile conceals his embarrassment at the presence, next to the green facings, of blood red. Blood that the passerby signing the contract will shed in the tropics. The foreign officer is well aware that in the tropics it is possible to live entirely without blood; in case of need it can be replaced with cognac, which is supplied by the caseload to the mess halls there. The round sums paid to the volunteer by the foreign government will be put toward its purchase, since in the tropics it is not possible to live without cognac. And having signed the contract the passerby disappears for good, because from the tropics no one ever returns.