Red Star Tales

by Yvonne Howell

  How much time did you spend in space?

  “How much time? It’s difficult to say. When radio-flight becomes available to the masses, it will be possible to compare volumes of accomplishments and sensations, to establish an account of one’s individual time. But in the meantime, let’s say that I lived there the same amount of time that I was not here.”

  I get up from the chair.

  “That’s all, Camilla… I mean Yulia, please forgive me! That’s enough for today. Fit me out for a walk. Let’s go to the woods.”

  (Another awkward moment: I really put my foot in it. That means that the fact that Camilla is here waiting for a meeting is stuck in my subconscious, stuck like a nail. And I have been putting it off for two weeks. Are you scared, psychonaut?)

  We psychonauts are still monsters of myth for the surrounding populace, even for much of the Institute staff; they stare, they run over for a look, they fish for reasons to have a conversation, they ask for autographs. Well, how much more attention would a star-pilot without a starship attract? So as to avoid this kind of attention, we resort to simple tricks. So this time, with Yulia Vasilna’s help, I put on a life vest that alters my head-turning figure, a reddish wig of the same color as the moustache and beard that have grown out over the past four months, and filtered glasses in gold-plated frames. I stick a pipe with no tobacco in my teeth… I wouldn’t even have recognized myself, let alone anyone else! We take the elevator down, come out of the Institute, and set off along the embankment to the woods.

  “Yulia, stop me a half-meter before I hit one of the columns. But not any sooner than that!”

  Now is the beginning of October. The air is filled with the slightly bitter smell of fallen leaves. It’s a sunny day (I can feel the right side of my face being warmed) and quiet, so for me dark and very noisy. Only the cars flying past along the embankment “illuminate” themselves as if they have headlights in front and in back.

  I’m shuffling my feet, shuffling them like mad, with my whole sole: this gives off a greyish-yellow light. Its flashes light diffuse lines, flickering surfaces from below (the barrier wall, the bases of columns?). I’ve walked along this embankment thousands of times, but now I’m not sure about anything. Twice Yulia stops me just before I touch a concrete column. I commit the picture of swelling light-noise to memory, and after that I go around them on my own.

  To the right, where the Volga is, there is a noise; if I cross my eyes, it is far-off and reverberating, like that of a jet plane hurtling away over the horizon. I raise my eyes, and the noise transitions into high, crackling sounds, into the plucking of strings, the pizzicato of the deep blue fall sky. But if I move my eyes to the right, there the Sun starts to yell deafeningly, like a trumpet.

  To the left – away from the buildings, the trees, the columns, the fences – there is an intermittent, varying noise. It’s easiest for me to recognize trees during a light gust of wind; I perceive the appearance of the leaves like their rustling, and the rustling itself like the crown of a tree with the sun shining through its changing outline.

  This was probably why I recognized my favorite grove the moment we entered it: it became lighter and noisier. The flashes from my footsteps, though I was no longer shuffling, became far brighter, as my shoes were pushing around heaps of dry leaves. Soon afterwards I recognized not only the trunks of the birches, approaching with a high-pitched – “white” – hiss, but also those of the maples (with a slightly lower, somehow grumbling, tone), and even their differently ringing crowns.

  “Is this a stump here?”

  Yes.

  “Whew!” I sat down. My heart was pounding, my back was wet, my knees were shaking: it was as if I had been spinning in the centrifuge at maximum acceleration. Boy, that was hard work! But it’s fine, like studying a foreign language: at first every syllable is difficult, your throat protests against the unfamiliar pronunciation, the mind against its lack of calibration with the phonemes and the writing system, against the discrepancy between the colossus of efforts and the paucity of results. But in your memory the new information is accumulating all the time, being generalized, being strengthened, and then you’re off. That’s how it is here. I will probably never see the Sun, the sky, human faces, will never hear waves splashing or birds singing, but I will recognize the images of everything, I will orient myself in my environment, both natural and civilized. Necessity will force me, and life will teach me.

  “Yulia, please read me some poetry. Something canonical or really well known, appropriate to the setting. With feeling.”

  In my youth there was a pastime, among the boys and girls I went to school with, of reciting poems without words, by means of “ta-ta-ta,” with the requisite intonation and rhythm, to see who could guess it first. So let’s try it now.

  Yulia Vasilyevna probably loved poetry, too, and the task was not a burden to her. As far as I could tell, she stood leaning against a golden-headed birch that rustled steadily, and she looked towards the Volga, and recited as if to herself. Pushkin, Blok, Yesenin, Tyutchev… I recognized “The woods let fall their scarlet clothes…”6 at the second stanza, “There is the archetypal fall…”7 at the third line. It turned out that our tastes in poetry coincide.

  And this was remarkable: the moment I would recognize the poem, first in rhythm with the greenish-yellow flashes of Yulia’s voice, coinciding with them, then outpacing them and guessing ahead of them, the voice of memory would ring out in me. It’s not a man’s voice, not a woman’s; it’s not tinted in overtones, but almost colorless; yet at the same time it precisely conveys all of the hues of feeling and thought that the poet poured into the line. And the combinations of the flashes with the voice of memory expressed the sensitive poetic thought, the essence of the thing, even more clearly and richly than if it had been just a voice, even a good actor’s voice. In listening, I actually fell into a kind of trance.

  And after that my ability to perceive Yulia’s speaking through her flashes was much more accurate!

  We also lit a fire, and it had a musical sound. Then we walked down to the Volga, to a place where a spring of pure water flowed into it, and the bubbling of the stream looked something like a fire.

  8

  For me that walk was the discovery of the world. To put it more carefully, the world opened, just a tiny bit, new sides of itself to me, opened in a way that promised much, that tantalized. And I had regarded it as lost!

  That evening, having returned to my room, I decided to test something that I had dreaded even thinking about: how would music sound-appear?

  Music… It has always been a big part of my life, no less so than books. It’s strange for a person of non-lyrical disposition, for a scientist and engineer, but that’s how it is. Among the arts I place music exactly where mathematics stands among the sciences: music, after all, is just as merciless to phoniness as mathematics is to error.

  Our family was not particularly well-off, and so I was not taught to play the piano or the violin. But if they gave diplomas to listeners, I would certainly have graduated with distinction. And my record collection contained the very best recordings of the best works.

  Only now I could not pick out a record.

  Even before, I liked to listen in the dark. Arrange the speakers, place the record, lower the tone-arm onto the edge of the record, and right away I am surrounded by all colors of flame: here like a bright wildfire, there like a dim smolder. My eyes (or the visual regions of my brain?) had apparently been starved for clear-cut images, and so now they were springing up. Semitransparent, with shifting outlines, permeating one another – waves? snakes? tall grass in the wind? fantastic animals? I’ve seen something like this in the paintings of Čiurlionis: now it’s like I’m watching an abstract film based on his work.

  But what composition is it, whose? It’s clearly a symphony.

  I could not figure it out. I took it off so as not to strain myself, not to expend my attention to no purpose: first, I need to learn to recognize
the music. I put on another record.

  Fleeting, sporadically glimpsed flashes, bright at first, slowly fading: yellow, turquoise, sky-blue, dark blue… and all in very clean colors. Repeating scarlet inclusions… the accompaniment? Piano? The rhythm is a waltz. It’s a Chopin waltz, I don’t have any others performed on the piano. Seems more like a minor key than a major… After this I picked through melodies in my memory, and found it, and it all fit together: opus 69, No. 2, C minor!8

  And as soon as it fit together, the melody sounding in my mind superimposed itself over the rhythmically shifting flashes in the same effect of enriched perception that happened while I was hearing-seeing Yulia’s verses. There were no flashes, no sounds, no room, no piano music, but my soul trembled and exulted at the understanding of a stranger’s soul, at the understanding of thoughts and feelings that could be expressed only in this way – not through words or any other means.

  I recognized Beethoven’s Egmont overture without guessing and without picking through melodies to fit the flashes, but by experiencing the feelings that only it can express. The burning Čiurlionis-esque visions loomed like hanging cliffs, like blue waves breaking in the sea, groaning under the blows of a storm; and the notes that sprang up in my memory flowed together with them… not the notes of a symphonic orchestra, no, the very musical essence of the thing. And the power, audacity, and stormy joyfulness overwhelmed me.

  The next record was also Beethoven. The Seventh Symphony burned like heat lightning on the horizon. I recognized it by the second part – an allegretto in the form of a funeral march – my very favorite, I recognized it by the feelings of pensive sorrow and wrathful grief that the music summoned, the grief of a strong person.

  But what’s on that first record, the one I put aside? I put it on again. Iridescent violet flecks: that’s the violin section. Fluctuating Čiurlionis-esque landscapes approach, yellowish, with green contours… a bassoon solo, French horn, tuba? A lift-off of luminous spray, bright, like a noiseless explosion: the tutti of the whole orchestra. The spray falls back and darkens, the uproar of colors and vividness forms a calm, march-like rhythm. A pause of darkness: this is the end of the movement, the needle is sliding along a chink of light. The second movement, semi-transparent flickers in a different rhythm. It’s a symphony, not a piano concerto, but which one, whose? So far it isn’t summoning any particular emotions. Or maybe I am wasting all my time on trying to guess the instruments? Why should I care about them?

  Another pause of darkness. The third movement: hasty flickers across the blue part of the spectrum: flutes, violins, violas. Ripples of water driven by the wind, the circling of swallows above a bluff… once again I’m not getting it, not grasping it. A pause of darkness before the final movement.

  And suddenly – what is this?! – it’s like a blindfold has been ripped from my eyes. Trees along the bank of a narrow river: willows, alders, aspens, and further up the hillside oaks, birches, maples. And the wind rinses them in snow-storm gusts, ringingly tousles their leaves, bends their branches and tops. At times it swoops down in free, measured gusts, at other times dismisses them, and stirs the flowers, tousles the grass to the right and left of me, rocks the little rope bridge up ahead… Where is this, what is this? I was in this place. I came down this steep slope to the river, I saw-felt this entire windswept landscape. Then I had the feeling that you get when you hear-understand music (though there was no music). But it was stronger, more dramatic, and gave me a lump in the throat. Where was this?!

  The main thing is the wind, the frantic, symphonic gusts, the bending of branches, the trembling of leaves that are ready to tear loose and fly away. And the clouds in the clear sky, and the procession of three-hundred-year-old oaks on the ridge in a circle of fresh underbrush (I also saw them later in a very old photograph: a century younger and without the underbrush by their stout trunks). The wind fills the sails of the clouds, tousles my hair; I cross the rickety little bridge, go uphill along a clay path among grass and flowers… and a lump rises in my throat from the view and from understanding everything. Why?! The path splits: the right way goes towards gloomy barns and oaks beyond them, but I have to go to the left. At the fork in the path leaves quiver, the wind carries them off in bunches and whole branches, a young birch is springily bending and straightening out. And looking at it makes the lump heavier, tears well up in my eyes. “In the field there stood a little birch…”

  That’s what it is. I am hearing/seeing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, the finale.9

  It was a year and a month ago. I was on my way to Moscow, and got off in Klin. I scorned the tourist service, and set off on foot to the other side of the town – a very ordinary one, with the standard houses and dusty streets – to Tchaikovsky’s house. A local showed me the way straight to it: a little bridge over the Sestra river. And as soon as I, moving away from the five-story apartment buildings, came off the bridge onto the left bank and saw the neighborhood, the finale of the Fourth began to resound in my head.

  Yes, it’s probably the wind that was at fault, precisely repeating in its gusts the finale’s vorticose, snow-storm opening. And it was not important that he was strolling not in a field, but above the Sestra river, and that the little birch stood on a hill. It was not important that Petr Ilyich, as I knew, had written the Fourth way before he settled in Klin, in the house to which the path led, not even here at all, but in Italy… this was all wrong and beside the point. What was right was the wind, the oaks, life-size and in the photograph (in the composer’s bedroom), the violin modulations of ripples on the river’s expanse, the lump in the throat, the tears of understanding, and the fact that the little birch at the fork in the path appeared at the very moment when, in the symphony, silencing the riot of the orchestra, its simple melody appears. “In the field there stood a little birch…”

  Because that music lived there, lived in its primary essence. And I was going to its creator, who, having died an age ago, also lived, more soundly and more fully than many thriving today.

  The record ended. I sat in the darkness-silence, recovering. So this is how it is. Then, in Klin, the view awoke sounds, music in me, and now music has awoken visual memory. The reflex arc has closed the circuit through something with a deep-seated significance, as the cat-rippers would explain, and the idiocy of rigorous science lies in the fact that they would still be right. But I am also right in my intuitive search, and right specifically in that I am not a cat, but homo sapiens. Yes, we see like animals, hear like animals (many of them far exceed us in the sharpness of their hearing and vision), but, as we are people, we grasp something that is inaccessible to the beasts, something that is beyond that which we see and hear: thought. The meaning of existence. This is why I in my mixed-up state can better perceive that which holds great meaning: poetry and music.

  It’s probable that, with some more practice, this is also how I will perceive what people say – by the thoughts it contains and by the deep emotions in it. That is also how I will perceive people’s artistic creations, and in nature all that is harmonious, majestic, and significant.

  And that which is petty, stupid, empty and low in people and in the world will remain for me incomprehensible noise and visual trash. And good riddance. I hear that which is seen and see that which is heard, but I perceive not sounds and not light, but that which lies beyond them. So am I poorer or richer for it?

  Before going to sleep, I put on, for the sake of experiment, a record with songs. The third song was my favorite, “We are High-Flying People.”10 And I perceived immediately what I had not understood, not felt before – that the singer doesn’t care at all about flying, about high ideals, but is preoccupied only with loudly and correctly stretching the notes, and that it is an aging, unwell man singing, preoccupied with his little personal troubles.

  I broke the record on my knee.

  9

  Flash-rings in the morning. I pick up the phone:

  “Yes?”

  Why haven’t they le
t me see you yet? What happened?

  I recognize Camilla’s voice from the first word she pronounces, even though it’s through the telephone. I also recognize the vain resentment in it.

  “It wasn’t allowed. Now it’s fine, come on in.”

  I wait impatiently and uneasily. But it’s not the right kind of impatience, not like you would have for a meeting with the one you love; it’s as if I want something to be over and behind me as soon as possible. What am I saying? Maybe we shouldn’t be meeting yet?

  Before, she would always tear into my room without ringing the doorbell or any advance notice, and would throw her arms around my neck. I put a stop to this after the experiment in which Geraklych and I switched psyches over the Earth-Moon distance. He himself contritely admitted to me that he had been unable to control himself when she appeared suddenly (there was a “window” in her filming schedule), threw herself on his neck – in my body – and kissed him passionately. “Go ahead, hit me!” I did not hit him: what can you do? It’s not difficult to understand him and justify his actions, but I myself was not a little wounded.

  (How deeply this is ingrained in us! What actually happened? You couldn’t even say that Camilla cheated on me. Just the same I felt insulted, humiliated: she didn’t understand that I wasn’t me, and it turns out she loves just my body! Camilla did not learn about any of this; at most she felt a chink in our relationship.)