A strange illness—call it lettermania—has taken hold of me. How so? It began some two years ago when vodka was creating sudden long lines, and the change from one’s rubles was given in postage stamps. I drink. What, you may ask, makes me drink? A sober attitude toward reality. I am old—I have rust-gray hair and rust-colored teeth, whereas life is young—therefore, I must be washed off, like a stain, gotten completely out with vodka. So there.
At the time I always began my day like this: I would get up early, walk out to the corner, and wait. Like a grouse hunter at a mating place. Soon, but sometimes not so soon, from one cross street or another, a cart would come into view loaded with wooden crates. In the crates, hidden under corks and glass, was alcohol. Roused from my quiescence, I would follow the cart—wherever it turned—until it stopped and unloaded. I felt as if I were following a hearse on whose springs lay my own remains.
But that’s not the point. The point is the stamps they gave you then, for lack of coins, as change. What can a recluse, a man separated from everyone by his loneliness, do with stamps? Those sticky little serrated rectangles for the sociable, soul mates, people who stick to one another. I had amassed a large quantity of stamps. They lay to one side, out of the way, on the edge of my table. And they asked me for work, for meaning. One day—I was half-drunk at the time—I tore serrations from serrations and decided (we drunkards, you know, are not mean) to give some pleasure to a stamp.
But to whom to write? There wasn’t a soul. Or an envelope, or a letter sheet. But even so I drafted my first letter, folded the paper into a boat, stuck on a stamp and addressed it: To the First Finder. Then all I had to do was open the small casement window and push the letter through, as through a postbox slot.
So that’s how it started. We—my coauthor, vodka, and I—gradually developed a taste for letter-writing. A sort of spiritual chaser. Don’t be offended. Then again, you of six rings can hardly be quick to take offense. Incidentally, on which ring do you start to feel excited? On the fourth, or perhaps the fifth? If you’re he, you see, then you’re waiting for she, and if you’re she, then you’re waiting for he. Whereas I’m old and no longer waiting for anyone. My only visitor is that damned it: it plunges into my soul, into my eyes with its eyelessness, into my blood with its coldness—and sometimes I feel so miserable, my heart becomes so cold, that I’d . . . But why go into it? The bottle’s empty. I’ll go out for another. On the way I’ll drop this letter in the box. Soon they’ll drop me in a box. Goodbye for now. Or rather—forever.
2
WHOMEVER YOU ARE
ARBAT, 51
3RD FLOOR, FIRST WINDOW ON THE LEFT,
BY THE RIGHT-HAND ENTRANCE
I purposely stuck on six times as many stamps as necessary—I’ve got so many I can throw them to the winds. With luck, the postman will be moved and not frightened by the strange address.
About you, Citizen Whoever-You-Are, I know only this: that over the gateway of your building is the number 51, and that in the dead of night, when the darkness passes through the zenith and the hundred windows in your absurd, rotund building have gone out, only your window glows, hiding its light behind a white curtain.
I know this because I like to go for walks at night. You and sleep, evidently, are not friends. When everyone has done thinking their daytime thoughts and uncoupled their cerebral hemispheres, you continue to follow your thoughts. So do I. There are only two of us. Among the many multitudes of sworn brotherhoods, there is one called: brothers-in-candles. An old custom. When people didn’t have the quarter-kopeck to buy a votive candle, they would buy one together, and hold it together, fingers touching fingers. Well then, you and I are brothers-in-candles. Friends in never-dimming thoughts. Although we don’t know each other, have never laid eyes on one another, and likely never will.
So then: I like to go for walks at night. During the day—when space is filled with sunbeams and the city maze with whirling wheels and mechanical footsteps—time is barely perceptible. It is merely the shadow of space. But come night, when things living and dead are still, the shadow emerges in place of things, thus driving them into dreams, into a shadow-like life. Above the empty streets clockfaces glow. And time, flicking the tips of their black hands, as I’m now flicking the tip of my pen, inscribes its thoughts in the darkness.
Our time is time’s time. We renounced the seizure of spaces, the annexation of territories.* But we seized time, annexed an epoch. This new socialist property* must be carefully and exhaustively studied. I’m doing this as best I can.
My dear never-dark window, I often converse with you while standing on the opposite sidewalk. No one disturbs us, save the occasional voices of drunks or the oncoming rumble of nighttime trucks. Time appears to me now as a whirlwind of seconds, now as a waterfall cascading down: into the future. If this wind of seconds proved strong enough to blow my hat off (while blowing others’ heads off), does that mean that I bowed to the revolution? This is the question on which all my thoughts—like drops of water on a stone—are drumming.
Now one must live with one’s soul held high. The standard of living has gone up to such an extent, it’s almost at our throats. One might easily drown in the meaning. But what to do if one’s soul is stooped with age? Or if one is a hunchback? Go for help—as the old saying advises—to one’s grave?* I guess so.
You’re not answering me, window. You say nothing with your light. Although the other day I believe I did receive from you, from you and none other, a brief line. The line was in round gold letters on a small black signboard: On your way out, turn off the light.
3
TO: THE POSTMAN
Comrade postman, this letter will not add steps to your workaday walk or make your sack a single ounce heavier. I’m only afraid that your habit of carrying letters will make you carry these lines back to your room. Instead, I would advise you to open this letter at once, read it through, and throw it away: into the nearest bin.
I greatly value the postman’s labor. In my opinion, it deserves no little respect. And yet I maintain—only don’t rush to take offense—that not one letter has ever once reached anyone, anywhere. In its entirety. To its last meaning.
By this, of course, I do not mean to cast the least aspersion on the postman’s work. The postman knocks conscientiously on the door. But to knock on a heart and knock until the heart hears—that is not the letter carrier’s responsibility.
The postman delivers an envelope. But I assure you that the letter postmarked Vladivostok and delivered in Moscow has ahead of it a far longer journey than the one behind it.
We have liquidated, or nearly liquidated, illiteracy. That’s very good. Who would argue? But what have we done to liquidate spiritual illiteracy? We all understand each other by syllables, only barely; we don’t know how to read someone else’s feelings, the essence hidden in the word.
And yet I divine in you, my accidental addressee, a sense of injury, or even boredom, which any minute now—any second—will fling my letter away. Be patient for a line or two more. You see, as the inkwell becomes depleted—drop by drop—of ink, the writer becomes replete—glass by glass—with vodka. You too, I suspect, are not always averse. To your health! Not long ago, after two flasks, I went and wrote a postcard to the Lord God. That’s how I addressed it: “To God. Personal.” Swear to God. When I went out for a third flask, I dropped the card in the box. By the time I slept myself sober I’d forgotten about it, but it had not forgotten about me. Two days later the postcard came back stamped: ADDRESSEE UNKNOWN. Now tell me our post office isn’t efficient. Your health!
But what were we talking about? Oh yes, envelopes. Thoughts fear the sun: let this cup, they say, pass from me. Then again, I seem to be in my cups. I see ripples before my eyes and dancing dots. Yes, a thought lodges first under one’s crown, in a bone envelope, then in a paper envelope. And it would be easier to break through that bone than to strip away—understand, strip away—the paper skin, down to . . . Damn it, my thoughts
are staggering like drunks. The inkwell’s on the floor for some reason. Inkwell! Can’t reach. And my pen has rndr—
4
UNWITTING STREET,* 16, APT. 1
Liquor stores have started opening only at eleven for some reason. I went out at ten and had to wander around until they removed the iron grating. First I walked over Vargunikhin Hill* and stood for a while beside the small decapitated church.* Below, where there used to be a bare shore, now there’s a cheerful public garden. Look hard and you can see, beyond the Moscow River and beyond Berezhki,* the black clockface of the Bryansk Station.* Its gold hand was dragging the minutes round haltingly and strainingly, like a porter working for two passengers at once. A wind sprang up. I turned my back on it and passed into Vargunikhin Lane. A few zigzag turnings—and suddenly I found myself in a little street I did not know, fitted out with one- and two-story houses. A street like any other. Except for its name—in white letters on a blue ground: Unwitting Street.
You, the person to whom I’m writing, aren’t there yet. You’re not there because this street has only fourteen houses, and Number 16 is still being built, it’s going up brick by brick. I don’t want this letter to arrive too soon. Let it reach your eyes together with the future I’m now thinking about.
Unwitting Street: fourteen and a half houses, and yet it seemed to me—seemed for just a minute—that it continued on, zigzag after zigzag, through all of Russia, and that its unwitting and unwilling inmates, people like me, were beyond count. I, you see, and people like me (and we’re not so very few), we all live on history’s Unwitting Street.
What did we do to make It come*—you know what I’m talking about. At most we called out to it, the way villagers used to call out to spring. With spring songs. Our spring songs really only wanted a little spring. Whereas the spring that came was frighteningly young, a genuine spring. Its blossoms are too bright for our eyes. So we hide our eyes behind goggles.* “Life is not a bed of roses”—but that is exactly what we wanted it to be. While others, hoisting days heavy as flagstones onto their shoulders, paved the way to revolution, a veritable way of giants, we tore off our calendar’s light paper leaves, glancing only now and then to see how many seconds the sun had gained or what our tear-off recommended for dinner that day: bouillon with croutons or crayfish soup.
Well, what sort of celebration can there be on Unwitting Street? Unwitting. What sort of joy? “Unexpected,” as Blok titled it.* Yet one can live only in expectation. A secondhand existence is next to nonexistence. We’re all of us beside the point. What could be more pointless? But why go into that now.
5
TO THE MAN ON THE STAMP
I see you there in your tiny green paper window. Your shoulders thrust above the serrated sill, your head held high and capped with a cloth helmet.* Now I’m sticking you onto this letter addressed to you. I, a man unable to stick to anything. An unstuck being. Unstuck, but shut up.
I envy you. Yours is a noble profession: to give your life not in minutes and not in hours, but all at once, not in bits, but in toto. To shield yours from not-yours with your corpse. I too, in fact, am a quasi-corpse.* Because alive I bar the way of yours to yours.* Logic demands that I be gotten rid of. Besides logic there’s also . . .
When It first happened,* I put it to the test along with other people. With you. I voted, went to meetings, made speeches, in a word—I tried every open door. But one day a worker—his face looked like yours—listened to a speech of mine and said: “You’re foisting your February spirit on the October cause.”* That rankled. I felt insulted. But more insulting than the insult was that it was true.
Of course, much else happened besides. I eventually realized that no matter what I did, things would take their course. With that, I sat on my hands. After all, why put a spoke in the wheel of your own hearse? I drifted away from people and befriended the bottle. I drink.
Now even the little boys in our yard, whenever they see me, yell: “Uncle Red Nose!” Well, better to have a red nose than be led by the nose. What do you think, man on the stamp?
6
THE NEVER-DARK WINDOW
BY THE RIGHT-HAND ENTRANCE
ARBAT, 51. 3RD FLOOR
Here I am again, window. You must be a writer. Who else would sit up all night by their lamp? To be honest, I don’t like our writers. They’re somehow all the same and about the same thing. Life has thrown out masses of themes: one subject sits on another subject and uses a third subject for a whip. But they’re afraid of subjects. Their one theme is that we’re not who we should be. Fair enough. But then what?
You writers use your inkwells the way an octopus does its ink sac: in self-defense. To muddy the waters and “dissociate yourself.”* Each new book gives the slip to the one before. With an eight-legged alacrity.
In short, it’s not so much literature as a game of nibs and tag: play a bit with your nib, and they tag you. And then all over again.
But you, I suspect, have your own window on the world, and you’ll understand me.
I, of course, am no writer. I’m just a . . . note-taker. If an image latches onto my brain and begins to follow me around, I go at it with my pen, as with a javelin. Here’s a sample, copied out in order, with no attempt to cohere the incoherence.
•
“You’ve got to pull yourself up,” said one man to the other. “Fine,” said the other, and went and hanged himself.
The deceased could rope anyone into anything. He even tried to rope himself into a noose.
He first led a life on the loose, then put his head in a noose.
It would be no exaggeration to say about a hanged man that his relations with life are strained.
•
And so on. Some dozen variants: like Schubert’s variations on a theme.* I sit and invent until I’ve out-contraried the contraries. Then it’s easier somehow. But to you, my friend in sleeplessness, I want to propose one theme. Perhaps even two. You won’t refuse my modest offering. After all, any thought, any conception yearns for form. I have none. But there, under the yellow light of your lamp, perhaps my conceptions will not be refused what they ask.
My first theme is, in essence, not invented, but observed. While still in my youth, I came to know a curious old peasant. His name was Zakhar. He often said that his age—he was nearly eighty—offended him. Umbrage at his own feebleness, at the yoke of years that prevented him working in the fields and on the place, is what caused Zakhar to abandon his log hut and large family and take a job as a watchman. Near the city, at a warehouse. The work required no muscle power (shake your rattle and that’s it). One needed only the ability to stay awake: from sunset to sunrise. The old man slept very little as it was, being a poor and light sleeper. Now, honestly performing his duty, his life became a continuous vigil.
During his nighttime work he might lower the wick of consciousness, but he never let it go out. With the first glimmers of dawn, he trudged the several versts* that separated the warehouse from his home. There too he never lay down. He would sit outside on the banked earth, head tilted up to the warm sun, or help his son with some light chore, or mend a bast shoe, patch a coat or felt boot. With the twilight he would again return to work.
I was young then, I paid sleep with a third of my life—an entire third—and so was both intrigued and puzzled by this sort of phenomenon. Several times I asked Zakhar how he managed to live apart from sleep. The old man, smiling brightly, always replied: “Why sleep now and then? One day I’ll drop and go to sleep for good.”
Zakhar’s gaze was piercing, sharp. He could distinguish types of birds perched on the distant threads of telegraph wires. That his eyes never closed seemed only to increase their strength, while the continuousness of his consciousness lessened its fitfulness and gave it an advantage over other consciousnesses daily broken off by sleep and re-knotted on waking.
Zakhar spoke little, but always with authority and exactitude. If you contradicted him, he fell silent. And looked down his silent nose at
you.
Well one day, having finished his night watch, Zakhar returned—as usual—to his people. First he sat for a bit on the banked earth under the cool autumn sun. Then, at his son’s bidding, he took one handle of the two-handed saw to help him saw up a cartload of wood. The saw teeth had begun to move back and forth, breaking up the woody threads, when suddenly the old man took his hand away and walked off to the porch. Only at the door did he turn round to his astonished son:
“Get the priest. Today I go to sleep.”
His son stood rooted to the spot.
“What’s scared you, fool? Do what I say.”
Soon the priest arrived. Zakhar, who had put on a clean shirt, confessed his sins and took communion. He gave some last instructions: mend the pigsty roof before the rains, prop up the fence so the wind doesn’t blow it down. Then he sat down on the banked earth. Family and neighbors kept glancing warily at the old man. They tried not to make any noise. Someone asked him: won’t you go inside? He didn’t reply. He kept nodding off, and a taut yawn distended his mouth. At first he propped his head up with his elbows. But that was uncomfortable. Then he lay down beside the banked earth and unbent his legs. His face was turned to the cold autumn sun.
Unwitting Street Page 14