Part 10 (2/2)
Then, bending lower and lower and sobbing with his whole body, he began pulling out one by one the gla.s.s-topped drawers of the cabinet. In the dim lamplight the even files of specimens shone silklike under the gla.s.s. Here, in this room, on that very desk, his son had spread the wings of his captures. He would first pin the carefully killed insect in the cork-bottomed groove of the setting board, between the adjustable strips of wood, and fasten down flat with pinned strips of paper the still fresh, soft wings. They had now dried long ago and been transferred to the cabinet-those spectacular Swallowtails, those dazzling Coppers and Blues, and the various Fritillaries, some mounted in a supine position to display the mother-of-pearl undersides. His son used to p.r.o.nounce their Latin names with a moan of triumph or in an arch aside of disdain. And the moths, the moths, the first Aspen Hawk of five summers ago!
4.
The night was smoke-blue and moonlit; thin clouds were scattered about the sky but did not touch the delicate, icy moon. The trees, ma.s.ses of gray frost, cast dark shadows on the drifts, which scintillated here and there with metallic sparks. In the plush-upholstered, well-heated room of the annex Ivan had placed a two-foot fir tree in a clay pot on the table, and was just attaching a candle to its cruciform tip when Sleptsov returned from the main house, chilled, red-eyed, with gray dust smears on his cheek, carrying a wooden case under his arm. Seeing the Christmas tree on the table, he asked absently: ”What's that?”
Relieving him of the case, Ivan answered in a low, mellow voice: ”There's a holiday coming up tomorrow.”
”No, take it away,” said Sleptsov with a frown, while thinking, Can this be Christmas Eve? How could I have forgotten?
Ivan gently insisted: ”It's nice and green. Let it stand for a while.”
”Please take it away,” repeated Sleptsov, and bent over the case he had brought. In it he had gathered his son's belongings-the folding b.u.t.terfly net, the biscuit tin with the pear-shaped coc.o.o.n, the spreading board, the pins in their lacquered box, the blue notebook. Half of the first page had been torn out, and its remaining fragment contained part of a French dictation. There followed daily entries, names of captured b.u.t.terflies, and other notes: ”Walked across the bog as far as Borovichi,...”
”Raining today. Played checkers with Father, then read Goncharov's Frigate, a deadly bore.”
”Marvelous hot day. Rode my bike in the evening. A midge got in my eye. Deliberately rode by her dacha twice, but didn't see her ...”
Sleptsov raised his head, swallowed something hot and huge. Of whom was his son writing?
”Rode my bike as usual,” he read on, ”Our eyes nearly met. My darling, my love ...”
”This is unthinkable,” whispered Sleptsov. ”I'll never know....”
He bent over again, avidly deciphering the childish handwriting that slanted up then curved down in the margin.
”Saw a fresh specimen of the Camberwell Beauty today. That means autumn is here. Rain in the evening. She has probably left, and we didn't even get acquainted. Farewell, my darling. I feel terribly sad ...”
”He never said anything to me....” Sleptsov tried to remember, rubbing his forehead with his palm.
On the last page there was an ink drawing: the hind view of an elephant-two thick pillars, the corners of two ears, and a tiny tail.
Sleptsov got up. He shook his head, restraining yet another onrush of hideous sobs.
”I-can't-bear-it-any-longer,” he drawled between groans, repeating even more slowly, ”I-can't-bear-it-any-longer....”
”It's Christmas tomorrow,” came the abrupt reminder, ”and I'm going to die. Of course. It's so simple. This very night ...”
He pulled out a handkerchief and dried his eyes, his beard, his cheeks. Dark streaks remained on the handkerchief.
”... death,” Sleptsov said softly, as if concluding a long sentence.
The clock ticked. Frost patterns overlapped on the blue gla.s.s of the window. The open notebook shone radiantly on the table; next to it the light went through the muslin of the b.u.t.terfly net, and glistened on a corner of the open tin. Sleptsov pressed his eyes shut, and had a fleeting sensation that earthly life lay before him, totally bared and comprehensible-and ghastly in its sadness, humiliatingly pointless, sterile, devoid of miracles....
At that instant there was a sudden snap-a thin sound like that of an overstretched rubber band breaking. Sleptsov opened his eyes. The coc.o.o.n in the biscuit tin had burst at its tip, and a black, wrinkled creature the size of a mouse was crawling up the wall above the table. It stopped, holding on to the surface with six black furry feet, and started palpitating strangely. It had emerged from the chrysalid because a man overcome with grief had transferred a tin box to his warm room, and the warmth had penetrated its taut leaf-and-silk envelope; it had awaited this moment so long, had collected its strength so tensely, and now, having broken out, it was slowly and miraculously expanding. Gradually the wrinkled tissues, the velvety fringes, unfurled; the fan-pleated veins grew firmer as they filled with air. It became a winged thing imperceptibly, as a maturing face imperceptibly becomes beautiful. And its wings-still feeble, still moist-kept growing and unfolding, and now they were developed to the limit set for them by G.o.d, and there, on the wall, instead of a little lump of life, instead of a dark mouse, was a great Attacus moth like those that fly, birdlike, around lamps in the Indian dusk.
And then those thick black wings, with a glazy eyespot on each and a purplish bloom dusting their hooked foretips, took a full breath under the impulse of tender, ravis.h.i.+ng, almost human happiness.
A LETTER THAT NEVER.
REACHED RUSSIA.
MY CHARMING, dear, distant one, I presume you cannot have forgotten anything in the more than eight years of our separation, if you manage to remember even the gray-haired, azure-liveried watchman who did not bother us in the least when we would meet, skipping school, on a frosty Petersburg morning, in the Suvorov Museum, so dusty, so small, so similar to a glorified snuffbox. How ardently we kissed behind a waxen grenadier's back! And later, when we came out of that antique dust, how dazzled we were by the silvery blaze of the Tavricheski Park, and how odd it was to hear the cheery, avid, deep-fetched grunts of soldiers, lunging on command, slithering across the icy ground, plunging a bayonet into the straw-bellied German-helmeted dummy in the middle of a Petersburg street.
Yes, I know that I had sworn, in my previous letter to you, not to mention the past, especially the trifles in our shared past; for we authors in exile are supposed to possess a lofty pudicity of expression, and yet, here I am, from the very first lines, disdaining that right to sublime imperfection, and defeating with epithets the recollection on which you touched with such lightness and grace. Not of the past, my love, do I wish to speak to you.
It is night. At night one perceives with a special intensity the immobility of objects-the lamp, the furniture, the framed photographs on one's desk. Now and then the water gulps and gurgles in its hidden pipes as if sobs were rising to the throat of the house. At night I go out for a stroll. Reflections of streetlamps trickle across the damp Berlin asphalt whose surface resembles a film of black grease with puddles nestling in its wrinkles. Here and there a garnet-red light glows over a fire-alarm box. A gla.s.s column, full of liquid yellow light, stands at the streetcar stop, and, for some reason, I get such a blissful, melancholy sensation when, late at night, its wheels screeching around the bend, a tram hurtles past, empty. Through its windows one can clearly see the rows of brightly lit brown seats between which a lone ticket collector with a black satchel at his side makes his way, reeling a bit and thus looking a little tight-as he moves against the direction of the car's travel.
As I wander along some silent, dark street, I like to hear a man coming home. The man himself is not visible in the darkness, and you never know beforehand which front door will come alive to accept a key with grinding condescension, swing open, pause, retained by the counterweight, slam shut; the key will grind again from the inside, and, in the depths beyond the gla.s.s pane of the door, a soft radiance will linger for one marvelous minute.
A car rolls by on pillars of wet light. It is black, with a yellow stripe beneath the windows. It trumpets gruffly into the ear of the night, and its shadow pa.s.ses under my feet. By now the street is totally deserted-except for an aged Great Dane whose claws rap on the sidewalk as it reluctantly takes for a walk a listless, pretty, hatless girl with an opened umbrella. When she pa.s.ses under the garnet bulb (on her left, above the fire alarm), a single taut, black segment of her umbrella reddens damply.
And beyond the bend, above the sidewalk-how unexpectedly!- the front of a cinema ripples in diamonds. Inside, on its rectangular, moon-pale screen you can watch more-or-less skillfully trained mimes: the huge face of a girl with gray, s.h.i.+mmering eyes and black lips traversed vertically by glistening cracks, approaches from the screen, keeps growing as it gazes into the dark hall, and a wonderful, long, s.h.i.+ning tear runs down one cheek. And occasionally (a heavenly moment!) there appears real life, unaware that it is being filmed: a chance crowd, bright waters, a noiselessly but visibly rustling tree.
Farther on, at the corner of a square, a stout prost.i.tute in black furs slowly walks to and fro, stopping occasionally in front of a harshly lighted shop window where a rouged woman of wax shows off to night wanderers her streamy, emerald gown and the s.h.i.+ny silk of her peach-colored stockings. I like to observe this placid middle-aged wh.o.r.e, as she is approached by an elderly man with a mustache, who came on business that morning from Papenburg (first he pa.s.ses her and takes two backward glances). She will conduct him unhurriedly to a room in a nearby building, which, in the daytime, is quite undistinguishable from other, equally ordinary buildings. A polite and impa.s.sive old porter keeps an all-night vigil in the unlighted front hall. At the top of a steep staircase an equally impa.s.sive old woman will unlock with sage unconcern an unoccupied room and receive payment for it.
And do you know with what a marvelous clatter the brightly lit train, all its windows laughing, sweeps across the bridge above the street! Probably it goes no farther than the suburbs, but in that instant the darkness beneath the black span of the bridge is filled with such mighty metallic music that I cannot help imagining the sunny lands toward which I shall depart as soon as I have procured those extra hundred marks for which I long so blandly, so lightheartedly.
I am so lighthearted that sometimes I even enjoy watching people dancing in the local cafe. Many fellow exiles of mine denounce indignantly (and in this indignation there is a pinch of pleasure) fas.h.i.+onable abominations, including current dances. But fas.h.i.+on is a creature of man's mediocrity, a certain level of life, the vulgarity of equality, and to denounce it means admitting that mediocrity can create something (whether it be a form of government or a new kind of hairdo) worth making a fuss about. And of course these so-called modern dances of ours are actually anything but modern: the craze goes back to the days of the Directoire, for then as now women's dresses were worn next to the skin, and the musicians were Negroes. Fas.h.i.+on breathes through the centuries: the dome-shaped crinoline of the middle 1800s was the full inhalation of fas.h.i.+on's breath, followed by exhalation: narrowing skirts, close dances. Our dances, after all, are very natural and pretty innocent, and sometimes-in London ballrooms-perfectly graceful in their monotony. We all remember what Pushkin wrote about the waltz: ”monotonous and mad.” It's all the same thing. As for the deterioration of morals ... Here's what I found in D'Agricourt's memoirs: ”I know nothing more depraved than the minuet, which they see fit to dance in our cities.”
And so I enjoy watching, in the cafes dansants here, how ”pair after pair flick by,” to quote Pushkin again. Amusingly made-up eyes sparkle with simple human merriment. Black-trousered and light-stockinged legs touch. Feet turn this way and that. And meanwhile, outside the door, waits my faithful, my lonely night with its moist reflections, hooting cars, and gusts of high-blowing wind.
On that kind of night, at the Russian Orthodox cemetery far outside the city, an old lady of seventy committed suicide on the grave of her recently deceased husband. I happened to go there the next morning, and the watchman, a badly crippled veteran of the Denikin campaign, moving on crutches that creaked with every swing of his body, showed me the white cross on which she hanged herself, and the yellow strands still adhering where the rope (”brand-new one,” he said gently) had chafed. Most mysterious and enchanting of all, though, were the crescent-shaped prints left by her heels, tiny as a child's, on the damp soil by the plinth. ”She trampled the ground a bit, poor thing, but apart from that there's no mess at all,” observed the watchman calmly, and, glancing at those yellow strands and at those little depressions, I suddenly realized that one can distinguish a naive smile even in death. Possibly, dear, my main reason for writing this letter is to tell you of that easy, gentle end. Thus the Berlin night resolved itself.
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