Fourth Picture
Shootik had a wonderful ability to collect mental pictures to transmit them directly to Staretz without having to use too many words to make himself understood. Staretz, in turn, had the ability to receive and project them onto the screen of his mind, after which he could translate them into words. However, he was not able to collect them himself and therefore, was dependent on Shootik to provide him with this material. In fact, Shootik was his intermediary between the visible and the invisible world in which Staretz lived and worked…
Did Shootik work? Oh, no! He played! Nevertheless, he managed to do many an important job as simply as this: being at the right time at the right place, collecting the right bit of information and doing the right thing with it! Of course, according to his own judgement. But his questions and the content of his mental pictures gave a lot of work to Staretz, who had to translate them into language which humans can understand. In a very special way Shootik was also an intermediary between the physical world and that of, as we might call it, a metaphysical reality. A world beyond our sensory awareness, which holds the answers to all our questions.
But only if asked!
Chapter 4
Distances
Marusja left the village two months after the young couple, Jurij and Solveig, had left. She was going back to school, her mother told those few who asked. To study, she said, in Helsinki. Some asked, why in Helsinki? Her father lived there. Were they not Russians? Mother said yes, but Helsinki is almost on the border and Marusja was born there. It was left at that and everybody bade the young woman farewell.
Sitting in the bus taking her to the next station from which she would take another, to reach the airport, Marusja was thinking of Jurij and Solveig. She had seen them leaving, though she was not among the crowd embracing them and waving goodbye. It would not have been appropriate, she thought. Now, she wondered what might have become of them. It was clear to her that Solveig would soon notice, if she had not noticed it already, that her boyfriend was somehow different. That something had happened…This could not remain hidden. And women, anyway, had an extra sense which perceived such things.
Distances…Framed by the bus window, the countryside appeared to be cut into separate pictures. Like people, Marusja thought, one separated from the other, although they were all connected. Marusja had no real friends in the village. She transmitted a kind of detachment, which kept people at a certain distance from her. As though there was a space between them which they feared to enter. Instinctively, she also avoided coming closer to them. Only with Solveig it was different. There were times when she felt that they could have become friends. There was a connection between them. Distances between them, which attracted…Also solitudes. They could have come closer, like sisters perhaps.
Why do people need to couple, marrying or not…Marusja wondered, picking up this train of thought. Because they are attracted by visions of a delightful existence. The desire for pleasure seems to be at the base of human nature. The promise of durable pleasure, overtly sexual or not, makes people believe in its permanence, offering more and more of the same. This powerful wish starts creating a whole picture gallery of expected delights, seldom to be achieved on the earthly physical plane of day-to-day reality.
And happiness…? This was quite another matter. Marusja knew that in her bones: distances divide and connect at the same time. Connection is meaningless unless there is a division. There was a division between pleasure and happiness…between lust and what takes one beyond it…and to that sacred place…There was no colloquial word for it.
The importance of things happening lies in the way they happen, the exact moment when, and for what they happen. It is not the story people tell or write, the facts recorded, which matter most. It is the unseen guidance behind them, the phantom hand of destiny, so it seems, which organises things to happen. A chance, we say, one in a million, of one person meeting another on that particular spot…And yet, she recalled the magic of that night, a meeting not to last. Not to be repeated or a relationship to be built upon. For what purpose, then, did it need to happen?
Life stories have impenetrable mysteries in them. The sequence of events leading from then to then tells nothing, in fact, about the reason for a particular scenario in people’s lives, usually involving more than one person! Distances…! They had to be created between things past and the present time.
At the end of her reflections on the subject, Marusja knew that she would not stay that long in Helsinki and that she would not be going back to school. Marusja’s parents stopped being a couple a long time ago, and it was her father who took care of her for most of her elementary school time. She would visit her father, yes, but for the rest, she almost exclaimed: I need my own goal in life!
‘Life is not that which we have lived…’ Gabriel Garcia Márquez wrote words to this effect, ‘but what we can remember and how we remember it, to tell about it.’ No doubt, there was quite a lot that each of her parents could remember, and the most difficult part of that lot was that of the happy memories. Because, seen in retrospect of course, they cast a shadow ahead, as though announcing the end.
“We experience the world not as it is, but as we are,” quite a philosopher herself, Marusja recalled her father quoting someone who said this. It is not to be proved, although it is an undeniable fact, that individual destiny is, for better or worse, linked with that of others.
“We carry others in us and are being carried by them throughout life.” This was another of her father’s sayings on which he would expand: “When do we really have the chance to stand to what we are and what we think? And have the courage to express it, unafraid of what others might say or even think of it?”
One needed to be in inner freedom, a state free of compulsions, she thought, but that wasn’t so easily achievable. Because we don’t know, and in a state of non-freedom cannot know, what it might mean to be free of coercion and oppression.
How would we feel if we were to be freed of them? We might not want this freedom and reject it. This is quite imaginable, since it asks something of us, as ambivalent as this may sound. The state of inner freedom can only be sought, never attained completely, the soul would not be able to stand it. Not yet…
On her flight to Helsinki, Marusja decided that she would spend some time with her father and then fly further away. To New York, perhaps. Or some other big city, it did not much matter which.
Whoever saw them rushing towards each other in the arrival hall of Helsinki Airport could not have doubted that these two were closely related. The same curly blond hair, his turning grey at the sides, but especially their way of walking. Father and daughter. It could not be mistaken.
“Hello papa!” She embraced him warmly.
“Marusja…my dear, it’s been a long time! Five years?”
“Five and a half, from the time I left school, remember?”
“Oh yes…”
He picked up her luggage, leading her out of the hall. On the way to the car park he told her that he had moved out of the apartment in the city to live outside. In a bungalow, some forty minutes’ drive from here, he added.
Approaching it through a long lane in the woods, Marusja marvelled at the architecture of this building and its position in the landscape.
“Your own design, of course?”
“Of course!”
Besides being a medical doctor, he was a hobby-architect, the nearest way, he said, to be connected with art. Architecture is the art of right proportions, he said, and balance. Especially balance. This was in perfect balance, she thought.
He smiled at her, guessing her thoughts. They used to spend a good deal of time together, talking about art in general and relationships in particular. When she was at that boarding school…She was twenty-five now. And a half, he corrected himself, wondering what had happened in her life since then.
“Come in!” He took her arm, “How about a cup of tea with warenje?” This was the Russian word for c
omfiture.
“The way we used to drink it.”
“That would be nice,” she agreed, remembering the good old times, when her parents were still together.
The interior of the bungalow was very simply furnished, in good taste. Not a thing too much, basic comfort and quality. Nothing to remind them of good old times…Even so, emotion overwhelmed her for a moment, those times were all there. They were a separate reality to be felt. As present as spaces between the forms of a sculpture. The scent of strawberry warenje was suddenly there in her nostrils. And the memory of herself, as a child of five…when the world was still in order. When was this in-order state? Had it ever existed?
Nicholas, her father, Nicolai as he was called originally, came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with a teapot, two cups and a crystal jar filled with comfiture.
“It’s not home-made, as we used to have it, but almost as good,” he said, placing the tray on the table. They smiled at each other and the past took hold of them again.
It was well past midnight when they came back from a journey which had taken them to places which once were there, of which each of them had a particular memory. The importance of things is not in their physical existence. It is what happens through them. The place where they once lived no longer existed. Wartime had changed the outside, but the inside still knew what was there before…He was miles away on the front when the bomb hit the family house. By the time he was informed, when his letters were returned and none received, there was no evidence that anybody could have survived the attack.
Wartime. They spoke about it. What it did to people. What it left behind. Especially inside…Hell was nowhere outside men’s own underground, women’s also, when people lost all sense of humanity and turned into monsters. He had seen too much to be told or written about. And yet, war’s horrors turned everything around in his inner world. Everything he used to believe in or aim at. Mankind was not yet ready for it. Not for the best things in life.
“We can idealise them, Marusja, convince ourselves that we really want them…but then, without knowing how this happens, something envelops us, something dark and sticky…” He paused. “It may even feel nice and sweet…Or convincing, suggesting that this is what you must follow…this is the way…the right way. Hell and Paradise are next door to each other, (he laughed) and they keep each other in place. Search for the serpent and you’ll find her everyplace.”
“And she is allowed to, supposing it’s a female, to be there…?”
“And to do her work. Of course. Here, I mean. She is part of us, very well hidden most of the time, but she is here. In war, our humanity is on trial…and nobody is prepared for it. Therefore, we fail, have to fail, until we understand that this is how it had to come…”
“Had to come? What? All the horrors and destruction? You are not saying that it was right or necessary, are you? And what about the wars still going on?”
They had to stumble on this subject. Again! The last time they discussed it was when Marusja was sixteen. They used to meet for their philosophical encounters, as she called them. One of them had concerned the same topic: stories…religious and others, the scriptures included, and how true were they?
Stories people tell, or write, needed not to be true, he told her at that time. It was however important that they existed. They helped people to deal with existential crises. To think about them.
Fairy-tales had the same effect. And myths. They displayed the patterns, the intrigues which were common to all of them, so that the reader, or the listener, could discover them. In the context of their own life stories.
He stood up from the settee to open the glass doors into the garden. It was his way to put an end to this subject. Never finished, of course. Soft, aromatic night air entered the room, and the moonlight.
“Shall we go for a walk in the garden?”
They walked in silence along the moon-lit garden paths and all distances, presumed to exist between past and future, melted for them into the ever-present now. Nothing could be more real than that which they experienced at that moment.
Historical facts, all data-featuring events, were stage scenery. The play appeared to have a script, with a beginning and an end. The plot, some kind of sense. And people loved it. They lived by it. Their very personal interpretation of the dealings and figures involved gave them a feeling of reality. According to their point of view, of course. Seen from each person’s side, reality had another face. However, there were moments when stage scenery dissolved and the stage was just a space where a person could act alone, released from all the scripts he or she knew.
This was now. When the curtain falls, the lights go out, and the stage crew is gone. When silence fills the air, the view opens to the other side and we can see what is beyond what we thought was real.
Movements, religious, political and others, as history has shown, have their lifespan between rise and fall. In the middle part, the expansion, the yearning for power, through whatever means. The political upheaval in his former homeland, the end of monarchy, Marusja wondered, was it the end? The disruption of one system did not guarantee it. Without a renewal of thought, there would be only a rebirth of the old. Just in another form.
These were not the thoughts Nicolai had intended to share with his daughter. In his mind though, they were connected with others concerning relationships in general. A movement with rise, fall, and crisis in between, was to be detected in most of them. As it was in his relationship with Marusja’s mother, his wife. He was not surprised when Marusja, next morning, re-opened the discussion with a question:
"And before that…Papa, how was it before the war, can you tell me? Mama never told me. She never spoke much about her…your relationship, the time before…you know…"
“I know.” He hesitated. A family history involves all members. His daughter had been directly affected by all emotions and unspoken words between him and his wife. The time when they lived together apart in two separate worlds…
“I know…” he repeated, “your mother was never inclined to speak about those views…which divided us. She couldn’t understand, and I didn’t either…At that time certainly not…And now, well, let’s start at the beginning. How does a relationship usually start? Two people fall in love, step on a rocket which takes them for a short while into a separate reality, a heaven populated by the two of them alone. The ordinary world suddenly changes colour, the greys become bright pinks, blues and yellows, and even the occasional clouds show a smiling face! There is music in the air and stars all around. This is a wonderful feeling, making the heart expand with joy of life, indescribable to those who have not experienced it.”
“And then?”
"Then they come closer, enjoying bodily togetherness, intimacy and sex…Provided that this experience is enjoyable to both of them, they embark on a pleasure-journey with no further thought for tomorrow, believing in their innocence that it will never end. Later on, hardly noticeably in the beginning, something starts going wrong. Something disappears. Either the one or the other feels let down somehow…Or to have been cast in the wrong film. The once-experienced feeling of being on top of the world with the one-and-only beloved and desired appears to be gone with the wind…Or to have gradually faded away into routine.
“It was around that time that the stability of our world was shaken. The World War broke out. All of a sudden, your mother and I found ourselves in two different camps. Loyalties divided. In her view I was on the wrong side. The red army was the enemy. She and her family members belonged to the whites. And they were in danger of being persecuted. I felt that I had to defend my country. Our country. And I believed in doing the right thing. She was torn…between our love and her loyalties. And then there was you, who had to be saved…The rest you know.”
The rest was not the end of a life-cycle in a relationship, Marusja thought, since there had been no formal or even informal termination of their marriage. These two people, her parents, were still connected. Th
ey probably still loved each other, she thought. They certainly did, but they had lost the connection-line between their hearts.
“We need to be friends before even thinking of becoming lovers, or building a relationship meant to last…” her father said, gazing at the curtains moving with the breeze as they entered the house after a tour of the garden. Then, as though he were catching these words from behind the curtains, he added: "And this is exactly the crux of the matter. How can we be friends before being true to ourselves, knowing who we are? Friendship is the greatest of all accomplishments. To strive for. Although it is never completely accomplished…It is a continuous strife. Love is the power behind it. Mostly we want to consume love, as if it were promised for us alone. Possess it. That’s where wars start."
Fifth Picture
This time Shootik came jumping into the Old Man’s studio on a huge red inflatable plastic heart. Sliding off it, he shot his questions without much consideration for the busy expression on Staretz’s face:
“What is this about love? Why do people need this kind of thing?” He pointed to his ‘vehicle’. “And why do they seem to love each other more when they’re apart?”
“Sit down, my friend, this is quite a theme. I’m not sure you’ll be able to take in all the answers at once. We’ll start with the last question: why do they seem to love each other more when they’re apart?”
Staretz took a deep breath. For a moment his eyes became almost transparent as if he were looking into a faraway past or future yet to come. The expression on his face became timeless. He was at that moment a concentration-point of hundreds of years of records.
“Love…is the greatest force in the whole universe. It is the energy called life-force and by many other names too. Humans have no notion yet of what it is, but they can’t live without it. Because it is in them, they have to use it in one way or another…and they do, at the present time often rather for worse than for better…They hate passionately, for instance, or even kill. All this happens from the same energy-source…which in essence is warmth. The universal warmth, originally fire, from which everything materialised. It’s a long story, my little one…”
Shootik Page 5