Essays from the Nick of Time

by Mark Slouka

  Five years before his death in 1986, Jaroslav Seifert, the unofficial poet laureate of Prague (and official Nobel laureate of Stockholm), published Všecky krásy světa (All the Beauties of the Earth), a book that was neither autobiography nor history nor fiction, precisely, but all of these and more: a gallery of small, precise portraits, each characteristically anchored in the mind’s eye by a single, telling anecdote: a peddler’s cart, picturesque with eight decades’ worth of well-turned stories and three o’clock in the morning, second-bottle speculations summoning a past both personal and, inevitably, cultural. In short, a celebration and a leave-taking: tender, spendthrift, large. A visitor to Tolstoy’s Yasnaya Polyana recalled seeing the count, then in his last years, scoop a double handful of violets from the wet earth, breathe in their aroma with a kind of ecstasy, then let them fall carelessly at his feet. That gesture, captured on paper, is Seifert’s book.

  But this is not about Všecky krásy světa, exactly, nor is it about Tolstoy. It is about a curious little section near the book’s center, in which Seifert—no decadent after all, no Baudelaire—admits to having once been jealous of another writer’s near-death experience. That other writer was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

  The incident at Semenovsky Square that winter morning of December 22, 1849, when Dostoevsky and his fellow subversives were led before the firing squad in a mock execution, then pardoned at the last moment in order to impress upon them the full magnitude of the czar’s mercy, is well known; like Byron’s incestuous relationship with his half sister, say, or Wilde’s self-aided lynching, it has passed out of literary biography and joined that select company of events the generally literate misremember with confidence. Still, the narrative of those hours, progressing like a medieval passion play from suffering to near-death to something like resurrection, remains compelling. Reconstituted in the willing imagination, it can stab us, suddenly, unexpectedly, with the quickening thought of our own extinction—a nectar not to be indulged in too often, lest it become a self-indulgence, an obscenity.

  Imagine it, then. The sounds of voices and carriages in the prison courtyard that morning. The church bells, uncharacteristically diminished by the sound of cell doors opening down the corridor—the sudden, irrepressible, dizzying thought of freedom. You are given your clothes—the ones you were arrested in eight months ago—and told to remember to put on your socks, for the morning is cold. You must hurry. No one answers your questions.

  Dawn. You are led into the snowy yard. A line of carriages stands waiting, flanked by mounted police. Your comrades are there; you see Speshnev, peering out of a shaggy mat of tangled hair and matted beard, and then you are in the carriage. The windows are covered with frost. Perhaps you scratch at the pane with a fingernail. Perhaps the guard sitting next to you lets you. You want to see the world. God in heaven, you say to yourself, it’s over. A day, a week, a month, whatever it takes for the process to run its course, and it will be over. You’ll see your brother again. You’ll be able to release the stories burgeoning in your mind, threatening to burst your skull. You’ll be free.

  The line of carriages comes to a stop. Semenovsky Square lies under a foot of snow. The sun appears and disappears behind the mist. Soldiers stand around the perimeter of the square. A small crowd has gathered on the far end. You wait around in the snow, talking excitedly with your old comrades. No one knows what is happening. A four-sided wooden scaffolding, draped in black crepe, stands in the center of the square. Probably you will be sentenced to some time of penal servitude, lectured on your presumption and ingratitude. There are worse things.

  It is then, maybe, that you first notice the row of head-high stakes, like great, fat nails holding down the field of snow.

  Or do you? In the sudden shock of knowing (which instantly reshapes the minutes remaining into a strange, circumscribed eternity, an ocean disappearing down a drain), can a person think at all, much less in metaphor? What really happens in those final few moments? Does the world, under the pressure of extinction, blossom into tropes as never before, madly, ferociously, birthing stakes like Christic nails, or crosses symbolically shorn of the horizontal, or huge, ironic exclamation points? Does it, instead, taper down to some small perfection—the godhead glimpsed in a drop of sweat, freezing to a pearl? Or does the world simply bend its head and grow mute, and you with it? And if it does, isn’t it possible that, should you be miraculously delivered out of that silence by the czar’s pardon, you would emerge with a voice that could speak the truths of this world with a clarity unavailable to others? That you would be repaid for your suffering—as is sometimes the case, after all—in the coin of wisdom?

  It would be nice to think so. Which brings us back to Seifert, who did. “Though fully aware of the impossibility of drawing a comparison between us,” he writes, self-effacingly, “I envied Dostoevsky… that singular experience: to be sentenced to death, to know the moment when you must, of necessity, say good-bye to life, accept that unappeasable fact, and then taste again the certainty and sweetness of life, and save yourself.” The notion compelled him, fascinated him. “To experience those few, horrifying minutes when time is quickly dragging you to your erasure,” he continues, “and then to look again upon the broad expanse of time that stretches out before you like a gorgeous landscape. What a drama it must be, which plays itself out in a man during those few instants! What does an experience like that mean, for anyone, but particularly for a writer, who has the ability to articulate it?”1

  Seifert had been able to answer that question for himself. Saturday, May 5, 1945, found him, then forty-four years old, in the Lidové building on Hybernská Street in Prague, laboring, along with a small crew of fellow journalists, to bring out the next edition of the newly decriminalized newspaper Rudé právo. Outside their windows, the stylus of history had begun to move, inscribing another bloody paragraph. After six years of occupation, the fingers of the Reich had begun suddenly to loosen. In a frenzy of rage and joy, Czechs of all ages began demolishing German businesses, lighting fires, erecting barricades. The Prague uprising had begun.

  It would take its measure of lives before it was done. As Seifert and his companions soon learned, the Germans had taken a stand in the Anglobank building just down the way. The concussion of cannon and the staccato pattering of small-arms fire filled the street, windows shattered; the Masaryk train station was in flames. Seeking safety from the cross fire, the entire staff, along with a group of citizens who had taken shelter with them, moved down to the basement, then lower still, into the paper-storage rooms, and continued writing. Days passed. They barely ate. Somehow, the presses continued to roll.

  And then, as Seifert tells it, things turned. Quickly. The Germans retook the train station. From there, they captured the building on the corner of Hybernská and Havlíčková streets and entered the system of passageways connecting the buildings’ cellars. And suddenly Seifert and his comrades were being marched to the train station, where, they were informed, they would be executed. Just like that. In the station, their shoes sticky with blood, they stood by a heap of dead Czechs while the Germans worked to dispatch a train filled with tier upon tier of their own wounded. They waited. A young boy, found with an antique bayonet under his coat, was shot in the back of the neck.

  When the train didn’t leave, they were led back out, two by two. Buildings were burning. The heat was immense. They were lined up against a wall, presently, and told they would be shot in the courtyard behind them as soon as it was empty of German families preparing to flee. And again they waited.

  So what did Seifert do, those ostensibly last few minutes of his life? What did he think? This was it, after all—the experience he had envied Dostoevsky. This was consciousness in the crucible, distilled to its essence. Did the heat of those minutes crystallize his understanding into some new, unbreakable alloy? Reorder his life?

  Apparently not. Standing against the wall next to his friend Píša, waiting to be shot, Seifert discovered a piece of b
read and some cheese, no longer quite fresh, in his pocket. The two ate it hungrily. For a few moments, he tells us, he thought about his family. He knew they were relatively safe. The thought that he might never see them again did not occur to him. He looked at the buildings across the street. All the windows were closed. Now and then a corner of a curtain lifted slightly and a face appeared. Then, far off, he spotted the public toilet by the Karlín viaduct and suddenly recalled how, when he was a boy, someone had drawn a wonderfully obscene picture of a woman on one of its walls, and how he and his friends would walk kilometers just to look at it. How it had aroused and disturbed them. Then he looked again at the buildings across the street. Smoke rose languidly out of the chimneys. He found himself wondering what the people inside, who didn’t have to stand with their backs against a wall, were making for lunch.

  Then, after twenty minutes or half an hour had passed, he and the others were informed that they could go.

  And that was that, claims Seifert. The condemned scattered in all directions. And when, soon afterward, the city’s radios announced that Nazi Germany had officially capitulated and that the war in Europe was effectively over, they forgot all about what had just passed. Seifert himself never thought of it. Decades later, finding himself in that same district of the city, he actually passed by the very wall he had stood against that fateful day, and never even realized it until after he’d arrived home and was sitting down to dinner.

  So much for Semenovsky Square. So much for the romance of almost dying. Pushed to the wall, given ample time to consider his situation, to breathe, to weep, Seifert had eaten lunch. No epiphany. No prophetic voice, rising out of the silence. Nothing.

  Compare and contrast. Standing in the snow in Semenovsky Square, Dostoevsky experienced a kind of “mystic terror,” a strange and fearful exaltation. “Nous serons avec le Christ” (“We shall be with Christ”), he supposedly whispered to Speshnev, quoting Victor Hugo’s Le dernier jour d’un condamné. Seifert just looked at the ugly buildings across the street. From the moment the roll of the drums signaled to him that his life would be spared, Dostoevsky’s life had shifted course, surging, like a river around an insurmountable obstacle, toward the kind of tortured religiosity we now associate with his greatest work. Seifert? Seifert was untouched. Life went on. Thirty-five years later, writing about the hour he had expected to be his last, he recalled (not without some small, remembered pleasure) a picture of a spread-eagled woman drawn with a piece of coal on the side of a public toilet.

  Whose version do we believe? I suspect that the romantics among us (as well as the more conventionally and narrowly devout) side with Dostoevsky. And perhaps the rest of us do as well. How could a person not be touched, altered, by such an experience? We don’t want to be like an old horse led to the slaughter. We want awareness, insight. We want to believe that our consciousness, like putty, will take the imprint of great events. Suffer, and ye shall be rewarded with, if nothing else, the memory of your suffering. No, when it comes to the art of almost dying, Dostoevsky is our man.

  Literature backs us up. “They are not to lose it,” intones Faulkner, referring to the witnesses of Joe Christmas’s murder in Light in August, “in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes.” Yes, indeed, we say. Just so. And although we recognize the fact that Faulkner’s narrator, unlike Dostoevsky, contemplates his own extinction only by proxy, as it were, he still flatters our sense of the gravity of the thing, our notion of what it ought to be like. Death is a big deal, after all. If it frightens us, it ought to be large.

  What of Seifert, then? Do we write off his amnesia as denial, debunk him with a pinch of Freud? Do we see his parable of the bread and the public toilet for what it is: a re-presentation of events, an attempt to impose a shape, nearly thirty-six years afterward, on a harrowing, unmanageable experience—in sum, a fiction? Do we classify it, perhaps, as an absurdist and in many ways classically Czech response to trauma? Do we pat the author on the head and leave him to carve his figures in the tranquillity of old age?

  I think not. To do so, it seems to me, would be to assume that consciousness can be teased apart from its retelling, which it cannot. To see Dostoevsky’s experience as essentially truthful, and Seifert’s as some form of artifice, is to limit the dominion of fiction, which, from the moment we wake to the power of language, rules our lives with czarist authority and reach. It is also to forget a more intriguing and complicated truth: that we in some measure shape the events that befall us just as surely as we are shaped by them.

  There is no point in being coy; I am indulging in these kinds of end-time speculations because I, too, was once given the “singular experience” of believing that I had arrived at the terminus of my life, of seeing myself dragged to the brink of my own erasure, only to be pardoned at the last minute by some combination of arrangement and accident. Like Seifert and Dostoevsky (in this way if in no other), I was given the opportunity to know my last minutes on earth. I didn’t care for it.

  My case was different, of course. Apolitical, ahistorical—set, above all, in the New World wilderness rather than in a European square—it lacked both the cruelty of Dostoevsky’s mock execution and the context of routine and unimaginable suffering that backlights Seifert’s ordeal. My experience, in short, was smaller. No one’s life was at stake besides my own and that of the woman who was to become my wife. I suppose that in the spirit of charity I might add the life of the man who seemed to have decided to take our lives along with his own. That makes three. That morning, it seemed enough.

  Quickly, then. The year was 1985. My wife and I (to see her as anything but my wife now seems like an affectation) had just crossed the spine of the Sierras. We were in our late twenties. That July morning we were hitchhiking back to the San Joaquin Valley. I knew the area, a harsh and perpendicular landscape of considerable beauty, from some years earlier, when I had worked with a crew doing trail maintenance in the backcountry. I knew, therefore, that there were two roads to the western side of the Sierra Nevada: a highway looping around the foot of the range, and a rarely taken shortcut through the town of Lake Isabella.

  We started out at first light, eager to avoid as much of the desert heat as possible, joking in the coolness. Our first three rides were uneventful. We saw the fourth from far off, a large white car, approaching the highway at an oblique angle on a ruler-straight road, raising a wall of dust. It was coming very quickly. Perhaps a quarter mile behind us, the car came to a stop, then gunned out onto the highway. It never crossed my mind that it would stop for us. I would have bet everything I had against it.

  I remember him getting out of his car—thick, steak-fed body, sun-red face, not unkind—and asking us if we wanted to put our things in his trunk. “Give you kids some room,” he said. He called us kids. I remember him arranging and rearranging our battered packs, closing the trunk carefully to avoid damaging something. I remember the blue jacket on the passenger seat with its Kern County Fire Department insignia; he drove casually, a thick right arm around the seat next to him as though around an invisible companion. We made small talk—hitchhiking etiquette. He asked where we were headed. We told him. He was going to Bakersfield, too, he said. We were in luck. We asked if he lived there. No, he lived in the Owens Valley. My wife asked politely what took him to Bakersfield. He laughed. “Well, it’s like this,” he said. “My mother had a massive heart attack at 10:15 this morning. They’re trying to keep her alive until I get there.”

  Somewhere inside, an alarm went off. A small herd of questions, like panicked horses, stampeded across the landscape. Why would a man racing to his mother’s deathbed stop to pick up two hitchhikers? Why would he take five minutes to arrange their packs in his trunk? Why would he be so calm, so level, so apparently undisturbed?

  And yet, on the surface, everything seemed fine. He was driving well enough—a bit casually, pe
rhaps, a bit faster than necessary, but well within the normal range. When we expressed our condolences, he thanked us politely. The minutes passed. No further warnings came. For a few moments, I considered asking him to let us out in the town of Lake lsabella on some pretext, but, stymied by my inability to think of a good excuse as well as, more damnably, by my own sense of politeness (the man was doing us a favor, after all), I said nothing.

  In retrospect, my own inertia staggers me. I knew what lay ahead: a twenty-mile stretch of unimproved canyon road running, at times, a full 150 feet above the Kern River. A road so narrow that the few cars that did take it would invariably stop at every turn and honk to make sure no one was approaching from the other direction. A road without walls or guardrails of any kind. I had taken it twice, years before, to save the four hours, and driven it, each time, at barely over walking speed.

  He stopped at the cattle guard where the canyon road began and turned half around over his right shoulder. He was smiling, but he looked as though he were about to cry. “Don’t forget those seat belts, kids,” he said, like a television announcer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. That same instant he stomped on the gas.

  Let me dispense with the rational right off: This was not, for example, a superb if reckless driver testing his skill, or some variety of local daredevil, intimately familiar with the landscape, out to terrify the college kids. This was something entirely different. This was a man in such pain that he no longer cared to live; a man calmly holding a revolver to his temple and, with four chambers empty, two to go, pulling the trigger. This was a man making a bet with God—or lunging at him. It’s quite possible that he himself had no idea why he had picked us up. In some essential way, we were beside the point.

  What followed was madness. We skidded blindly into turn after turn, fishtailed down the straights. Again and again we sideswiped the wall with a sickening screech of metal and bounced toward the edge. Once, twice, three times, I felt the right rear wheel begin to drop, felt the car begin to lighten, sickeningly, sensed the pull of the canyon air below us.