Off the Beaten Tracks

by Irina Bogatyreva

  A lot of time has passed since then, and although I don’t know the answer to this question for sure, I sometimes think I am getting closer to unravelling it. It’s as if something suddenly opens inside me, everything becomes crystal clear and I have no more questions. Then I remember Grand’s smile in the diner and his words, “We and they are travelling the same road. Do you see now why we have to love everybody?”

  This happened for the first time in late autumn, long after the adventure with Sergey. He had moved out but Sonya Muginshteyn still occasionally came back to collect her remaining items. Then one day when she came, she unexpectedly invited me to a concert she was playing at. “We will be a trio,” she said. “Come if you’re interested.”

  I was surprised and intrigued. In all our life on Yakimanka Sonya had never been known to invite anyone to her performances. But that life was over now, and everything was overgrown with weeds. Now such a thing was possible, and I accepted.

  The concert was being held in someone’s apartment. I was given a slip of paper with the address and the host’s name. He was called Wulf Markovich, and I tried to memorise that on my way to the apartment on Leningrad Prospekt.

  I arrived at the address and found myself in an entrance with enormous flights of stairs and tall, narrow doors. The perspective in such an entrance dizzies the hero of “The Cranes Are Flying” as he looks upwards, and now I too felt dizzy. The door I was looking for was already open, and Wulf Markovich, short, wiry, with curly hair, was waiting for me with a smile.

  “Come in, come in, make yourself at home, no need to take off your shoes, no, really. Here you’re welcome to keep them on.” He was amiable and archaically courteous. No other guests had arrived yet so I received the full force of his hospitality. A child of the gallery on Yakimanka, I felt overwhelmed and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. He took me through to a room, indicated an enormous tray of apples and urged me to help myself. On the other side of the wall, rehearsal was in progress.

  “Do you also have musical connections?” he enquired delicately. His big, dark eyes shone mildly in a face overgrown by curly beard. His body was frail, the weary body of a professor of physics, but those wise eyes enchanted and held me.

  “We’re all connected with music in one way or another,” I said, embarrassed by the loud crunch from my apple. Wulf Markovich was delighted by my reply and nodded in response. I quickly took in the room, crammed with furniture and bookcases and lit by a soft half-light from two table lamps under faded orange shades. This room, a private library, the repository of knowledge from several different fields, also belonged inalienably to a professor no less than the body of the person in front of me. His eyes, however, knew more than you can learn from books.

  I inspected the large photographs on the walls: the reflection of a building in a puddle (with only the puddle in the photograph); a maple leaf on a wet pavement; the light of electric street lamps in damp air, seemingly somehow taken at a high shutter speed. They testified to the eye of an artist and the hand of a professional. In the centre was the portrait of a handsome young man and a thin, sweet girl.

  These were not typical family photographs where the subjects are posing and smiling artificially to camera. The people depicted were alive: the young man was sitting in a deep light blue armchair, turning to look at something off camera, while the girl looked as if she had just this minute sat down beside him on the arm of the chair. She too was turned half away and looking at the same thing. She had black hair which fell from a slender shoulder and tumbled down her back to below the waist. She had strikingly long, narrow eyebrows, a dark skin and a warm smile; her features were gentle, discreet, loving and trusting so that they immediately evoked a liking for her. The youth was a little older and had similar looks: equally dark skin, the same smile, and dark eyes in which, despite the paucity of light in the room, I could see something unknowable and unclassifiable which instantly put me in thrall to him. Tenderness, sincerity, a longing for warmth, almost forgotten and covered in dust on Yakimanka, awoke in my inner depths, called forth by his eyes. It was love at first sight, if it is possible to fall in love with a photograph.

  My intuition told me this was Wulf Markovich’s son, and the girl was either his sister or his wife. For me, it did not matter which: right now she too was as much a part of this man as the light in his eyes. But where were they, I wondered. Were they by any chance at home? Something melted at the thought that I might get to see that face and those eyes in the flesh. No, they have gone, the answer chillingly suggested itself and told me everything.

  Just as the flash on a camera hauls objects out of darkness and we see them, literally, in a different light, so I suddenly pictured these people in the photograph differently. Who they were, how old they were, what their relationship was when the photo was taken, no longer mattered. They had ceased to be live human beings with their own history and emotions and were removed in an instant to a place where the concept of time and space was absent, as were all other human measures. ‘They have gone’ meant both this moment and forever. ‘They have gone’ could mean to the bread shop or into oblivion. They had just gone. They were not here and now, and hence they didn’t exist at all. There was only this photo, those eyes and smiles. The people had ceased to be and instead had become art.

  All these thoughts flashed through my mind in an instant, and Wulf Markovich, following my gaze, was already telling me his son was a photographer. All these photos were by him, and he only regretted there were so few. “In the next room you will see more. There are more of them in there,” he added, breaking my trance.

  The audience arrive, a lot of old people, and young people who are all, like me, friends of the performers. They take their seats in the adjacent room which has so many photographs on the walls it looks like a museum, and the trio come out: piano, ‘cello, violin, all girls, Sonya’s classmates. They are introduced by their teacher, who describes the music they will be performing, before thanking Wulf Markovich for hosting the evening which “will give the students an opportunity to play themselves before the examinations”.

  “These evenings,” our host says, standing by the door next to the young performers, “are a joy for me, but they take place only because of my son’s initiative. It was his idea that live music should be played within these walls, and by tradition I would like the first piece to be played for those who are always present in this house.”

  We didn’t clap. The girls took up their instruments and played something as emotional and melancholy as his words. Wulf Markovich carried on standing in the doorway, listening, with a smile on his lips. His expression became fixed, then twisted, and his head was trembling a little. I listened and something inside me opened wide, like a pair of great doors, and the wind from the darkness came in through them.

  “They have gone,” I repeated to myself, and understood the wisdom which shone in the eyes of our host. It became clear where the boy and girl in that photograph were looking and what was ‘off camera’. I felt myself lose love as fast as I had gained it. I remembered the emptiness and solitude of the mountain Lake, the solitude of a small human being beneath the abyss of the sky. I remembered Grand’s smile. I looked at Sonya, sitting at the piano with her back to me, at the tall, thin ‘cellist and plump, rosy-faced violinist, still just a young girl. I took in the visitors, looking motionlessly ahead with fixed, serious expressions. I looked at the host whose eyes were red and glistening with tears. I asked myself, “Do you love everything that is around you?” and that question ‘why?’ retreated. We all just were the same; we all just were going to die.

  I knew I was crying too. I was listening not to the music but to the howling of a dark wind rushing through open doors. I knew it was for only a moment, but I knew also that after that moment I would no longer be the same person.

  Passing through a town in the evening when everyone has finished work, darting like a shadow or a migratory bird from other lands, taking all a town has
to give before again hitting the road. How I loved those expeditions! We would buy food, then turn up in the city centre, eat ice creams in the main square, and watch the careworn adults and indolent young people. We were not like any of them. For everyone we were a riddle and didn’t belong, and that was an agreeable, a very good feeling, seeing ourselves in that light. Afterwards we would go round the nearby taxi drivers and ask them how to get out to the highway to the next town. The drivers would quickly size us up and tell us. They were the only people who treated us almost as their own. Our attitude towards the road was the same as theirs.

  We were in no hurry, though, to leave. The towns were the knots that held our road together and we wanted to get to know each one and drink in our fill of it. Grand was interested in everything: the kremlins, the churches, squares, streets, people, ancient crests and history. In some towns we went to the museum, and in the cloakroom the old lady attendants stared at our rucksacks in perplexity. We walked around until the people went back to their homes and the town started falling asleep and oh, how wonderful and tormenting it was to stroll in the deepening darkness, to see the windows lit up, the people silhouetted, and think that they all had a home in this city while we had no home here or, in reality, anywhere else and yet were at home everywhere. That knowledge made me want to get back on the road, to get away, to be once more alone with the road. In the town you don’t belong, you are a stranger, but on the road you are free and everywhere at home.

  Towns were points along our way, places we were aiming to reach. Yet they were not the reason we were on the move, and neither was being on the move an end in itself. The goal lay somewhere beyond all that. I knew that when we were in the towns. Suddenly everything that weighed me down fell away and the meaning I was searching for was revealed. It was only a moment, these epiphanies of mine. They arose from the contrast between the life of the city and my own, and it was impossible to hold on to them. When, during the day, we were once more standing by the roadside and once more thumbing to no effect, fatigue again overwhelmed me and again chaos crowded in.

  You taught me, Grand, to see and hear; you taught me that the world is more than we can know. Behind shadows limitless possibilities of human perception rose up; behind the warm wind in the trees I heard voices from other worlds. I learned, heard and saw, but as we approached the end of our hitchhiking something told me that when it was over Grand would be no more, our game would be over, and for me the world would never be the same again. I would remember that a shadow is not just a shadow and the wind is not just a breeze, and that I myself am not just what I see but something greater that exists behind all this. The old world was gone and with it the old meaning of life.

  You changed my world, Grand, my friend, but what answer do you have for me now when I ask how I should live my life in the years to come?

  Completely shattered, we sit down on a mound a little way from the road and gorge ourselves on one apple after another. Sergey bought a kilogram of them in Vladimir.

  “Why did we choose this place to hitch to?” he asks. “I’ve wanted to come here for a long time.” “Did you like it?” “Yes.” “But we didn’t go in anywhere.” “I saw everything I wanted to.”

  Vladimir is a slumbering town, quiet and luminous. It retains its history and is itself a bit like a museum. The streets are like picture postcards from the seventies, and even the buses are of a kind you never see nowadays anywhere else. There are ancient churches in the town centre and the Golden Gateway. A lop-sided signboard over the sagging porch of a beer bar promises ‘Drams’, and wooden, slanting stairs lead down to a cellar from which you seem to catch the breath of a still feudal, pre-Petrine Rus. It’s a sunny day, clear and windy, and the shining birch trees shed their leaves readily into expanses which open far and wide above the River Klyazma.

  You don’t need to go far outside the city on the ancient, rickety bus to leave behind the much hyped white stone walls of the kremlin and descend by an inconspicuous path to the plain. After the asphalt it is a relaxing pleasure to walk on soil, open, without crops, fallow. You smell water and the river gleams ahead. You see it. You walk quickly and silently to the white cloud which has settled here on the bank. It is the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl which, like a sorrowful celestial she-elephant, looks for its reflection in the eternally placid water.

  “Perhaps we should have stayed back there a bit longer. We aren’t really doing anything here.” “We’re not doing nothing. You’re getting used to it. If we’d stayed it would be evening already.” “It is evening already.”

  He’s right. Damn! The air is becoming opaque and the sun is creeping towards the horizon. “Do you like it around here, Titch?” “It is beautiful,” I concede. “Everywhere is beautiful.” “No, I meant is this a special place for you for some reason? Coming here seemed to matter a lot to you.” I poke a stick from an apple tree into the ground beside me and look at the road. “I didn’t make it to this town this summer, and I really wanted to.”

  We had passed through Kazan and Nizhny Novgorod. It took us two days to reach Vladimir. We just wanted to get home by then and decided not to go into the town. What a terrible bypass though! At first we thought it was just little used: the road was so empty and overgrown. Then we came to the roadworks. A plume of dust rose in the air. Trucks carrying gravel were driving on the verge, asphalt was being drilled up, there were traffic jams of trucks and cars in both directions. Everyone was in a foul mood. Who was going to give a lift to hitch-hikers? We walked through it all, choking in the dust, then stood thumbing for an hour before a kind white Lada-6 with a local driver took us away from that hell.

  Three hundred kilometres to Moscow. In the past, especially in the Urals where even the road maps use a smaller scale, that sort of distance would have struck me as trivial, but now I had no confidence we would get home by nightfall. With these thoughts in my head I felt suicidal, really wretched.

  “The road will end for us soon,” Grand remarked cheerfully. “I know.” “You’re very gloomy these days. Smile! We’ve already turned down the gifts of the road, at least we shouldn’t scare it by looking like that.” I do try to smile but feel I may start bawling at any moment.

  “Let’s play towns,” he suggests. “I say ‘Voronezh’, and you have to say ‘Zhitomir’. You know it? Right! Let’s go!” “I don’t want to,” I say in a flat voice and shut my eyes. “I do not want to,” I repeat, pronouncing each word distinctly, focusing on them one by one and, as a result, depriving them of all meaning. “I don’t want to,” I say, coming back to reality. “I’m sick of everything, the road, people… What are we going to do, Grand? We’re moving slower and slower and every kilometre just makes me feel so cheesed off. There’s nowhere left for us to go and we’re never going to be happy like this again.”

  “Nowhere to go? Why are you talking like that?” I can see him looking at me very seriously, as if diagnosing the symptoms of a disease. “I’m tired,” I say quietly, “tired.” “Turn round.” He takes me by the shoulders and turns me to face away from the road.

  In front of me I see green grass, quite, quite green, shining in gentle sunlight. A meadow. The ground slopes away from the roadway and further down there just has to be a river. Willows with rounded crowns extend in a row, bowing to the earth. I look harder and, through the green branches, seem to see the sparkle of water playing in the sun. I realise I’m already walking down through the grass and, understanding, suddenly lie down, embrace the Earth, feel her touch on my skin and almost cry, so complete is the happiness sweeping over me.

  At this moment I see at a glance all my road, from above and afar, in the past and now, and everything I see is a miracle. Every driver who opened a car door for us showed great kindness; every person we met showed great tolerance and joy. A feeling of gratitude pours forth like the peaceful river, warm and dappled in the sun. I remember every driver, even if not their faces because usually they were sitting with their backs to me, but they pass befo
re me and to every one I want to say again, “Thank you”.

  We and they are one, and all of us together constitute the road. Do you love what is around you?

  All of this is borne in on me instantly, and I turn over on my back, look at the sky and smile at the clouds.

  “Samara,” I hear Grand’s voice. I picture him sitting two steps away from me and smiling. “The Volga,” I answer.

  “Ufa.” “The Belaya.”

  “Ekaterinburg.” “The Iset.”

  “Omsk.” “The Irtysh.”

  “Novosibirsk.” “The Ob.”

  “Krasnoyarsk…” “Hey, that’s not fair! We didn’t go to Krasnoyarsk!” I laugh, get up and sit facing him. “Grand, this is so wonderful. What an immense, immense country we have!” I want to tell him everything I’ve just realised, but instead jump up and yell in jubilation, “Come on, come on, we’ll miss our lift!”

  I almost run to the road. I stand there, thumbing. A few cars go whistling by, but I no longer take it personally. A MAZ appears. Before I have time to reflect that they don’t usually take two because there aren’t enough seats, he has slammed on his brakes and come to a halt on the verge about ten metres away. I run up to him as fast as my legs will carry me, throw back my head and yell into the cab, “Moscow!”

  “You need a lift straight to Moscow?” “Yes!” “I’m only going to Podolsk. Can you go on from there?” “Sure!” I nod, open the door and throw in my rucksack. “Just a moment, there’s my friend too,” I say, already clambering in.