Yes, you’re quite right. Nothing so terrible! There was a silly embezzlement case that crossed my desk. This cashier, you see, a respectable type, a decent-looking man, had embezzled a lot of money. He denied all the charges and said he’d been put up to it by his thief of a boss. All in all he behaved like any honest man insulted by suspicions would. The whole case was proceeding toward acquittal. The defense presented spotless references and letters of praise for his many years of honest service. The man also won people’s sympathy because his wife and three identically dressed sons were sitting in the courtroom in the front row. From time to time the father would buck them up, say something loudly across the entire courtroom—that they shouldn’t cry, that he would certainly be acquitted because there was justice in this world, it could not fail. In essence, the entire case boiled down to a single note of a few lines submitted by the investigation. It had allegedly been written by the defendant and was proof of his guilt. Burinsky himself, the famous expert, was called in specially from Moscow to testify. Everything hinged on his opinion. So on the third day, I think, the case got to the point of his expert testimony. Burinsky rose—a large, stern, majestic man two heads taller than everyone else. Robinson himself would have envied that head of hair and beard. Everyone held their breath, gazing at the celebrity. He paused and then growled resoundingly, “This is the note.” Burinsky shook the sheet of paper over his head. “And this is a handwriting sample.” He shook another sheet. “And here is my conclusion. This man is innocent!” Pandemonium! The courtroom burst into applause and people were practically hugging each other. Burinsky sat back down and began raking his beard with an indifferent look on his face. A few formalities remained. The note, the letter, the handwriting taken for a sample, and the expert analysis lay on my secretarial desk. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Both were written by the same person. “Wait a minute!” I exclaimed. “What do you mean? This is the same hand!” I felt the eyes of the entire courtroom on me. “Just look. Here and here!” Burinsky tossed back his gray curls and asked in amazement. “What are you actually implying?” “Look here. Can’t you see?” I began explaining. “Just take the sweep of the pen. In handwriting the most important thing, after all, is the connection between letters. You can’t forge or alter that. Just look at the m, n, and . They’re all drawn with their bottoms downward, like the u. And believe me, this is a sure graphological sign of goodness, openness, and emotional gentleness. These letters, on the contrary, were written with arches and betray secrecy and mendacity. Notice,” I continued, “both in the note and in the letter, the pressure is not firm. No sooner does the pen touch the page than it encounters the paper’s resistance, and an inevitable struggle ensues. A pen pressed into the paper reflects urge, will, obstinacy, contrariness, and belligerence. Here, rather, the hand is yielding, a sure sign of susceptibility, impressionability, sensitivity, delicacy, and tact. In both the letters are small, which indicates a sense of duty, self-restraint, and love for hearth and home. Note also how fat the letters are and how open they are at the top of the vowels. Altogether this is proof of credulity, peaceableness, a highly developed capacity for sympathy and deep attachment. Moreover, I dare say that this person possesses both taste and a sense of beauty. Just look at the elegant but perfectly unadorned capitals, at the wide, almost verselike left margin, at the indent, which starts nearly halfway across the page. The letters are almost not connected to each other, indicating a contemplative, lofty nature, detachment from the mundane, and a rich mental life. A signature without any flourishes indicates intellect. Oh, you have before you an exceptional person. Just look at the incredibly unique shape of the letters. Do they not, all else aside, betray a single patrimony for the neat letter and the messy note? The purely outward, superficial dissimilarity can be explained simply: the note was written in the dark, hence the interlacing of the uneven lines and the blind muddle of suddenly looming letters and words. You see, even a moment’s inspection of these letters is enough to be convinced of their kinship. You have before you brothers and sisters in ink, twins from a single pen! This hook over the alone is priceless, taking a running start and sliding into the question mark! And how could you ever confuse the adjacent pinned to it? Or this , which keeps trying to latch onto its neighbor? And the -you must take a close look at this little Jewess which Cyril abducted from Solomon’s alphabet—all the grace in the steep line of her flaunted hip!” Everyone was silent, dumbstruck, but I kept talking and talking, powerless to stop myself. “Without a doubt, the person who wrote this is extraordinary, or rather, artistic. Hence the unevenness, the anxiety, the total lack of rhythm (which indicates emotional contentment), death poured outward for the time being. A tremendous, unconscious life force drives the ends of the line sharply upward. The diacriticals and the marks between the lines stretch and break off. They try to tear the word to shreds, annoyed over what has been left undone, unrealized, overlooked!” At this Burinsky rose from his seat. He walked toward the door, donning his hat as he went, and when he pulled even with me hissed through his teeth, “Fool!” Regardless, the court scheduled a second expert opinion, and of course they declared that the cashier had written the note. He was convicted, and after the hearing, while everyone was retrieving their coats in the checkroom, the judge came up to me and said, “God will punish you. Wait and see!” But it’s all right. I’m alive. Alive, breathing, eating, and using up a stack of paper every day. My pen still scratches, punishes, and pardons. What’s so important about that? I’m perfectly willing to admit that right now, this very minute, he may be whimpering from hunger, or freezing, or has had his teeth knocked out and is being raped by his cellmates, or that he’s not even alive but lying in some morgue with a toe tag, or has simply faded away with time, written in cheap ink. Not that there’s anything so awful about that. My God, what makes him any better than me or even you, that we should have regrets? Because there has yet to be a case, even the longest and most convoluted, at the end of which, when all was said and done, a pen did not place a period.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Like much of Mikhail Shishkin’s writing, “Calligraphy Lesson” is highly allusive and attentive to the formal qualities of a story both inventively told and steeped in Russian atmospherics.
The reader will want to be aware of two issues in particular.
First, what the English reader may not realize—but the Russian will pick up instantly—is that the various women’s names refer to characters from Russian classics: Sofia Pavlovna from Griboedov’s play Woe from Wit; Tatiana Dmitrievna from Pushkin’s long poem Evgeny Onegin; Nastasia Filippovna from Dostoevsky’s Idiot; Anna Arkadievna from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; and Larochka (Lara) from Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.
Second, the passage describing the calligraphy of a specific Russian wordposed what was for me an unprecedented dilemma arising from the fact that in it Shishkin describes each letter as an object, yet the word’s lexical meaning remains important.
The Russian word is colloquial, inappropriate for a court of law. Uttered by the defendant, this authentically felt word adds conviction and force to her statement. When the judge repeats it, he reinforces its power, but it’s almost as if he’s put quotes around it, so far is it from a judge’s usual level of discourse. The narrator embeds the intense emotion the word has acquired in this context into his painstaking description of how each letter is to be written, but for him the act of writing is simultaneously a kind of self-protection. By focusing on the physical act of writing he is able to distance himself from the extreme human misery he witnesses over and over.
How could I convey the section’s brilliant emotion but also truly translate it for the English reader? Should I or shouldn’t I rewrite the passage to reflect the English cursive of the word’s translation? It’s a legitimate choice: the French translator decided to recast the passage to describe the word’s French translation; I decided to do both. I translated and reproduced the Russian word. In the pre-digital era, when Cyrillic
characters were technically difficult to reproduce and so were rarely included in translations, I might have been inclined (or forced) to go the other way. Thanks to modern technology and to the fact that Shishkin’s description was based on the letters’ visual characteristics, which English readers could see and appreciate for themselves, I did not have to forgo Shishkin’s tour de force (although I could not recreate his double-entendre: “ on a stick” is a euphemism for the Russian expression “shit on a stick,” that is, something or someone utterly repulsive, worthless, or despicable).
Translating Shishkin means maintaining his virtuosic tension between complex detail and deeply felt emotion.
Marian Schwartz
The Blind Musician
How odd it felt to ring this doorbell while holding the cherished key tight in my pocket. To see again on the coatrack in the entryway her tasteless coat with the mother of pearl buttons. To walk through the rooms with all their brazen mirrors acting all innocent. To inhale the medicine smell that had once been completely aired out. To make as if I didn’t know where the cotton balls were kept. To bear her stranger’s hands holding the same lidded Chinese mug I’d fed him tea in like a little boy.
Zhenya,6 my sweet Zhenya, I really think I’m better. I don’t get dizzy anymore. I slept last night. True, I had an awful dream: I’d grown a beard. I rushed to the dream book and read that if the beard is long, that means honor and respect; if short, a trial. Lord, what drivel! Wait a little. Alexei Pavlovich will be home from work soon.
No no, Verochka Lvovna,7 I’ll just help you tidy up and be on my way.
But Zhenya, this might just be the healing action of the little gray housedress. Who knows? And the whole point was to get away from the hospital gown. Listen, there’s no way I can thank you for all you’ve done for us. I do realize how unpleasant it is—the trips to the hospital, the bandages, the pus, the bedpan.
Stop it! And don’t you dare say those things ever again. Did they bring your prosthesis?
What prosthesis? It’s an ordinary brassiere they’ve stuffed with something. Help me hook it up.
There, Verochka Lvovna, look how nice.
At home, in the dark entryway, I bumped into suitcases.
Zhenya, how you’ve grown! I barely recognize you! I remember you when you were this high! You and your father were always playing Gulliver. He’d spread his legs and shout, “Gulliver!” And you’d run back and forth, bubbling over with giggles. Remember? I came to visit and everyone here was hysterical because you’d eaten two apricots and swallowed the pits. The pits were sharp and got stuck in your bottom. Poor thing, you were wailing and no one knew what to do. They were just about to take you to the hospital, but I said, “Stop!” I washed my hands, poured oil over my finger, and in I went! I rotated one pit and both popped out as if they’d been shot from a cannon. And this is my Roman. Do you recognize my Roman? You were little when he and I came to visit and you played together. There was no leaving you alone for a minute or there’d be a fight. Remember how you ate all the candies and said it was him? I locked myself up in the bathroom with little Roman and took a belt to him. Immediately you pounded on the door: “Aunt Mika,8 Aunt Mika, don’t beat him, don’t beat him, it was me!” You look so much like your papa, not at all like your mama. Your mama and I were like sisters. Here, look, this is us at the seashore, hugging, wearing identical swimsuits. That’s what we told everyone, that we were sisters. Then she got married, became a provincial, and had you. That’s where everything happened to your mama, too. We aren’t staying long, Zhenya dear. Your papa wrote, “Stay as long as you like.” But we’re here just a little while. Once Roman passes his exams, we’ll find an apartment. How pretty you’ve become! May Roman touch your face?
Kind Alexei Pavlovich, something’s happened. Oh no, as always the ardor of my feelings raises no doubts. But in the last few days, I admit, I haven’t been able to shake a sensation that I can’t bring myself to put into words. Just like in Gulliver, the picture, remember? You’re the cook, you’re plucking a turkey, I’m sewing something, and suddenly a face peeks in the window, only it’s not a face of our—Lilliputian—proportions. The turkey falls to the floor. The needle jabs my finger, and the people we’d imagined ourselves to be up to that moment, whose lives were special and happy, are thrown into disarray. But I knew you were right before, you know. It only seems that you’re sculpting me in your own image and likeness, whereas in this reality, rainy since morning, you yourself are merely the fruit of my fantasies, a perfectly commonplace occurrence in belles lettres. Apparently, it doesn’t take a great mind or an exacting imagination to create this world. Make the paper white, the ink black, yesterday’s leftover bread stale, the stockings thrown over the chair back, having given up the ghost, the window transparent from rain, the sky grayish, and the land sinful. But maybe nothing worse happened than what you so feared. Even that little fool Psyche couldn’t love in the dark her whole life. And it certainly wasn’t the sisters’ instigation that made her, on that last night, take a sharpened razor and a lamp filled to the top with oil to identify her secret husband, who was kind to the touch but invisible in the fortunate darkness. Alone now, she worries in her sorrow, although her decision has been made and her soul is adamant. Nonetheless she still wavers, rushes, delays, dares, trembles, despairs, rages, hates, and loves the darkness she has taken in, but evening is on its way to night, and the girl hastily hides the razor under her pillow and covers the burning lamp with a flowerpot. The final moments of anticipation. Agonizing, crazy-making moments that make her shudder. Suddenly the rustle of an approach. And now Psyche welcomes the night ascending to her—its shoulders and back scattered with freckles, like oatmeal. Coitus with the darkness. At last her mystery spouse falls still beside her, rolled up in a ball. Now Psyche, weakened in body and soul, rises, takes out the lamp, clasps the razor in her fist, takes a step, still not daring to look, and lifts the lamp, expecting to see on her bed a god or a beast—but it’s you.
The day after classes ended, I stopped by the university vivarium, but they said Alexei Pavlovich wasn’t there. I walked past the glass cases where white mice swarmed in trays. When I pulled one out by the tail, a whole cluster latched on. Their red eyes burned like cranberries. Frogs were laid up in huge, smelly jars, and the moment you opened a lid, one would fly out and land smack down on the brick floor.
A fish supper at home. They called for me. I locked myself in my room.
Daughter, up and at ’em. The surgeon’s sturgeon’s tired of waiting.
Eat without me, I’ll eat later.
Zhenya, stop it.
I can’t eat out there. He smacks his lips. Then he’ll take a toothpick out of his pocket and dig around.
Why are you being like this?
Like what?
Enough, let’s go.
Mika took the fish bones out for Roman, laid them on the rim, and the dish turned into a staring eye with off-white lashes.
You said: no letters. My naïve Alexei Pavlovich. You forgot about cartes postales. Not in vain did a bald professor at the Vienna Military Academy once drop the first postcard into a mailbox, paying for it with two Kreuzers and his entire soul. Ever since, the departed professor, taking on cardboard flesh, has languished around the world and found no rest. I found a whole pack of them neatly held by a rubber band in Vera Lvovna’s writing desk. When you were away, you sent cards home daily with the sights and views, and—unintimidated by the censors—called your spouse your little mouse, your little bun, even your little fanny. Moreover, you always drew yourself in a picture: a stick man in a hat either roaming spectrally down the Samara embankment, or standing like a poet’s shadow on the bluff of the Piatigorsk gap, or scrambling up the Admiralty spire like a gorilla. How, you might well ask yourself, can one resist such temptation, having fooled you and the postal department, of writing a postcard, an open letter, addressed at this late hour to all sleeping humanity? Here, please accept, from a place where this night cannot r
each me, an unpretentious card with a glossy country landscape, gilt edging on the sunset clouds, a card scratched by swifts, splashed by a drop of a blossoming pond fragrant with lilac and iodine—it’s my father, lost in conversation, whose bandaged finger keeps missing the point. Do you recognize our clumsy house, saturated with damp, permeated by mosquito buzzing, the sunny porch where a wet footprint vanishes instantly, the peeling barrel where the little bleakfish I’d caught were hidden away until October? When the barrel was emptied for the winter, the fish flopped all over the ground, sticking to the fallen leaves. And here, under the vaults of hundred-year-old lilacs, a windy June supper. Your wife is twirling the binoculars and laughing crazily, aiming them first at the moon, which has surfaced like a jellyfish, then at the deck chairs flapping in the wind, then directly at her plate. A pimply lass who arouses herself at night with her finger is eating the icing roses off the cake. I don’t think that was me, but you know better. You’re across from me. There’s a whole beard in the rusty lilac inflorescences that drop on the table. You wink and mumble, “These are dead moths;” you scoop them up in your glass with a spoon and lick it off. My father—a cheap drunk—is shouting now, “I told them so. Here you are!” he shouted and brandished his empty glass. “Please be so kind as to join us! I’ll cut their umbilicus. Congratulations on coming into the Divine light!” But they’re shouting, they’re not satisfied! They think, the Divine light is over there, while over here is the very Kingdom of Darkness.
Calligraphy Lesson Page 5