Multiple Personalities

Tatyana Shcherbina

Multiple Personalities

by Tatyana Shcherbina

First published in Russian as "Размножение личности"

Translated by Melanie Moore

Book created by Max Mendor

© 2012, Tatyana Shcherbina

© 2015, Glagoslav Publications, United Kingdom

Glagoslav Publications Ltd

88-90 Hatton Garden

EC1N 8PN London

United Kingdom

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 9781784379438 (Ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is in copyright. No part of this publication may be  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Chapter 1: Pushkin

I’ve got this persistent fantasy. It’s Pushkin just before his wedding at the church at Nikitskiye Vorota, right near my house. He suddenly appears at the very same spot only it’s 2006. Everyone, his young bride included, has vanished without trace and there he is standing on the pavement in his tails, gazing all around distractedly when who should come along but me. Unlike the other passers-by who think he’s a street performer, one of those European-style living statues, an actor from the theatre on Malaya Bronnaya with a sudden urge to light a candle in the church, or a visiting musician looking for the Conservatory, I realize straight away that he’s Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. And the reason I do is because, basically, I believe in time travel. If time travel didn’t exist, clairvoyance would be impossible and clairvoyance does exist – I’ve tested it myself. Well, not tested it exactly but I have read many times of even uneducated children and adults coming round from an injury, starting to speaking in languages they don’t know, and claiming to be other people. Tests have shown that at some time in the past those people really did exist. It’s what’s always used to prove that reincarnation is real as well. Whether what’s happening is the transmigration of souls or the brief encounter of two non-contemporaries in a single body isn’t known for certain. The injured recover and forget about their weird new incarnation as they go about their ordinary lives. Contact with past lives is rare but it does happen. Which means that time travel is theoretically possible.

Ah, yes, the fantasy.

“Alexander Sergeyevich, hello!” I say.

He looks at me, reluctantly tearing his eyes away from the church, and asks what’s happened.

“Now, please don’t get excited,” I say in the wheedling tones of a psychiatrist because I can tell he’s right on the verge of going mad. If he looks at the traffic jam on Bolshaya Nikitskaya for another five minutes, he’ll lose all reason. I mean he has no clue there could ever be steel horses snorting not steam from their nostrils but exhaust fumes from their backsides. They don’t even look like horses.

“Those are self-propelled carts,” I say, taking his arm.

“What sort of carts?” he asks.

He snatches his arm away and, screwing up his face, looks me over from top to toe (taking in my haircut, jeans, polo-neck).

“My dear young lady, you must be with the circus.”

I introduce myself quickly so as to move on to further explanations.

As luck would have it, Nikitskaya is one of the few streets in Moscow to have kept its old houses. Are they are old as Pushkin though? If it weren’t for three grim-looking thirteen-storey tower blocks, the street could surely pass as authentic. Pushkin might not be able to tell the difference between mock nineteenth century buildings and his original surroundings. I attempt to divert the gaze of the poet, author, playwright, and lothario, who is at the same time both 30 and 200 years old (and the rest!) and at present has the air of a demented, woebegone midget, and distract him from the three Brezhnev-era towers, one of which happens to be where I live. If he would just look at the other side of the street which, in theory, shouldn’t cause him any culture shock. I nudge him towards my own block because, if we take a dozen steps towards Nikitskiye Vorota he’ll find a diminutive statue of himself and his wife under a small golden dome, and I’ll be embarrassed. Right here and now I am the only person who can answer for our age and the architectural appearance of Moscow.

“Perhaps he doesn’t know Moscow very well, like me with St. Petersburg, so he won’t notice,” I tell myself, soothingly.

“Where is my wife-to-be?” he demands and suddenly flies into a rage. “What a show they’ve put on, those bastards! Leaky great saucepans on wheels, boxes as high as the sky, giant mummers running around without stilts! It’s not carnival week, damn it all!”

We’re nearly at my block. I just need to get him across the street. I take our great author forcefully by the arm and drag him across the road where the traffic jam has still to build up so that the cars aren’t slowing down and we have to make a dash for it. With trembling hand, I take my key ring from my bag and use the swipe key for the door to the entrance hall. It beeps and I go in, hauling Pushkin after me. He doesn’t resist as though he’s in a state of prostration.

“Goodness me, what have you got there?” asks the concierge as I wait for the lift. I give her an angry glare.

As the lift doors part, Pushkin muses quietly, “I’m in Hell. I was to be expected.”

Once in the lift, to bolster his courage, I recite: “And to the people long shall I be dear… a Kalmyk, friend of the steppes.” The lack of reaction suggests he has still to write these particular lines.

“We were led to believe that one plummets into Hell but Hell turns out to be on high as well and I had the temerity not to believe in it,” Alexander Sergeyevich pronounces ruefully as we ascend.

“This isn’t Hell, it’s life,” I say, aiming for a cheery tone. If I can just get into the flat, sit on the sofa, ply him with tea or wine, I’ll be able to take my time to explain it all in detail.

“The Ancient Greek pagans had Charon, who was a man. Orthodox Christians have angels to conduct them to Paradise, which means this has to be a devil even if it doesn’t have horns or a tail,” Pushkin mutters, giving me a wary, sidelong look. He has evidently stopped seeing me as a person. I insert the key into the lock and usher my guest in first.

“No fires, just a confined space. And a mirror so that escape into oblivion is impossible. Any minute now and they’ll clap me in irons,” says Alexander Sergeyevich, assessing his surroundings.

“Tea, coffee, wine, cognac?

He replies as though talking to himself. “Fancy that: these wretches serve cognac. I’m in a hell for aristocrats.” He smiles. “And thank God for that. I wonder where they keep the furnace?”

“Alexander Sergeyevich, you are not in Hell. You’re in the future.”

“How many eyes does Satan have?” He counts the green and red lights on the TV, video, and the computer’s surge protector. “Two red, two green. Two up, two down. That’s devils for you!”

All of a sudden, he bursts into peals of laughter as he looks at the ceiling lamp, all made of crystal, its light bulbs shaped like candles. “The candles in the lamps are lit. The flames aren’t real but they still cast light.”

“You’re in the future. It’s 2006.” I don’t even know where to start to make him believe that what’s happened is real. And he’s laughing, desperate but defiant too, as if to say: “So what if I have? I still can’t bring myself to converse with demons.” I take the collected works of A.S. Pushkin from the book shelf. This must interest him surely? It’s got the publication date too. That should convince him.

“So Hell is the future? I understand, finally, I do. The future is Hell. Hell is the future. The Book of Revelations. The Whore of Babylon – is that you?” He addresses me at last.

I show him The Tale of the Priest and his Servant Balda but it makes no impression whatsoever. “Or are you a demon who has dragged my works away to your hall? The priest did warn me, blockhead that I am. He said, ‘Alexander, Servant of God, you are doing the devil’s work.’”

I take my own book from the shelf and point to a photograph.

“That’s me. I wrote this.”

“A portrait-miniature, on card, brush strokes effaced, the whole varnished. You even have artists working in your halls of Hell.”

I am unable to explain what a photo actually is. I can see, however, that nothing surprises Pushkin any more. He’s developed a theory. Even when I switch the TV on, he doesn’t bat an eyelid.

“Ah, ha! Everything’s been chopped into pieces and now they’re burning in the fiery pit… Even Vasiliy Andreyevich Zhukovskiy used to tell me that hellfire is like the burning bush: nothing in it is consumed by fire and yet it is eternally aflame. Souls are hacked to pieces and stirred together like fruit in punch then tossed into the everlasting fire. Together with poems and pictures, with everything we’ve created. Was I shot? Was there a duel instead of the wedding?”

“No. You’ll be shot later. You’re still alive, you just happen to have come to the 21st century.”

The phone rang.

“A bell. The summons to receive a fresh victim. So be it. The more the merrier. As long as it’s not that Thaddeus Bulgarin.

I lift the receiver. It’s Rosa. I say, “Please don’t pass out but I’ve got Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin sitting on my sofa. Can you get over here right away?”

Until now, Rosa has believed what I’ve said but now she decides I’m having her on. “You’re not having me on? Are you seeing things?”

After that conversation, I think, ‘No-one’ll believe me. I’ll say it’s a hallucination. No, better still, a fantasy.’

Pushkin meanwhile is looking at me challengingly, rubbing his hands in obvious glee.

“I see it now: I’ve been taken to the lunatic asylum. You talk to yourself as if you’re having a conversation! I do the exactly the same only I do it on paper. That’s why Natalya Nikolayevna’s parents have brought me here. That’s why they’ve prevented our wedding. They think I’m crazy. I talk to myself in writing. I’m not in Hell and you’re not a devil – you’re Mad Meg.”

I point to the television and turn on the sound.

“So what’s that then, Mr. Pushkin?”

“They must be other people who are mentally disturbed, who have lost their reason and their minds, but since I myself am now an idiot, I see them as if they were hidden in a little box. It’s just as well they did call off the wedding.

‘To lose my mind I dread; ‘tis worse

Than, facing beggary and dearth.’

The thing I feared the most has come to pass.”

I had one argument in reserve, the most persuasive one. I switched on my laptop, drew up another chair and invited Pushkin to sit next to me at the desk.

“The desk is like mine and so is the mess,” he observed, ignoring the computer booting up. In theory, I would have thought that an inhabitant of the century before last would have swooned in fright, amazement, or delight when confronted with unfamiliar objects then start to ask questions about electricity and the world-wide web but what Pushkin didn’t know, he simply couldn’t see.

“Perhaps it’s a dream,” he exclaimed, brightening when I opened an empty word document. “I’m dreaming about a luminous board –– a tablet –– on which letters will begin to appear. Will it be a divine message for me?”

I typed: “To Pushkin”. He read out: “To Pushkin.” I typed: “My dear Alexander Sergeyevich! The programme has crashed,” I wrote. Then I deleted it. “An unspecified error has resulted in your being transported into the future to 2006 A.D. You are not in the underworld. You have not gone mad. You got married without a hitch and you will go on to have four offspring. With apologies for the inconvenience caused. You are my guest. This is not a dream. Our spelling’s changed.”

“Is this the word of God?” asked Pushkin.

“In a sense.” I was already contemplating how to return the errant poet to his own time. Pushkin, however, did not vanish the next day nor indeed did he vanish at all. I raced off to the Pushkin Museum but no, nothing there had changed. That Pushkin lived out the life we all know, ended by a shot from D’Anthes, but now something had to be done about the other one.

Gradually, he stopped standing out. We bought him jeans, tee-shirts, and a jacket. No-one believed he was Pushkin. At a poetry evening I organized for him, he was heckled and booed and told it would never work and I was a dreadful manager. Gradually, Pushkin lost faith in himself and began to just loaf around because he was no longer fit for anything else. He didn’t learn to use a computer. The slow drawl of his accented Russian was an irritant. He didn’t understand was a telephone was. Everybody took him for some crazy Gastarbeiter. He couldn’t obtain any papers or register in Moscow and it wasn’t long before he was murdered. Not in a duel but by a gang of skinheads who shot him down in the street like a dog.

It proved no easy task to bury an illegal immigrant.

“He can be buried where he came from,” I was told.

A bribe smoothed the way but no one I knew ever realized why on earth I was bothered about the little man who thought he was Pushkin. And they’ve regarded me with suspicion ever since.

Rosa was the only one who would go to the funeral with me. I had told them both –– Rosa and the short-lived derivative of Pushkin –– about something that happened in 2005. An American made unimaginable amounts of money on the stock exchange in just a single day by guessing all the share prices. He was arrested. He told the police he’d come to New York from the future where he’d got hold of a financial newspaper for 2005, which was how he knew it all. Of course, they didn’t believe him but nor did they come up with any alternative. They promised to publish their findings after a thorough inquiry but they never did.

“We know everything that was in the past and nothing about the future,” I said. “It’s as if we’re fixed to our own time with superglue and only making our way into the future with baby steps, on all fours, one day at a time, with all of eight hours of rest a day from the travails of the journey. Rosa, you’ve spent more than 30 years in a lethargic sleep. You sprang right into the future after that record leap through time, so why don’t you believe that Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin made an even bigger one?”

Rosa replied phlegmatically, “Because I’m the real me and the real Pushkin lived from 1779-1837. The personality doesn’t turn out multiple copies like a printer.”

“I once took my Pushkin for coffee at Café Pushkin on Tverskoy. It was right at the start,” I reminisced. “And he yelled at the waiter, ‘Waiter, do you recognize me?’ It was really awkward and we had to beat a hasty retreat.” I also remember how hard he found it to breathe. He said Moscow’s air was toxic smoke and he was always coughing.

Chapter 2: Time Runs Amok

Isaac Newton filled 4,500 pages and spent 50 years calculating the date of the end of world – the result was the year 2060. In the Mayan calendar, the “end of the sun” falls in 2012 (on either 21 or 23 December). Someone with a love of symmetry amended it to 20.12.2012.

A lot of people think about dates in general because there is a significant but inexplicable link between numbers and life, between numbers and history. In the past, numbers were used only for sequencing. When there are only a few houses, they are given names, like the house of a friend of mine in Malta – the Villa Mozart – or the one behind me (through the wall and over the stone ramparts of the German ambassador’s) – that used to be called The Rostov House. People started being given numbers once the population topped six billion. They were given numbers because of money – a taxpayer reference number, bank account number, insurance policy number. Everyone became the bearer of a dozen number sequences. Then identity as a whole was given in digits. Names as such began to fall out of use only after 2010. True, there was an instance in 2005 when one loving mamma wanted to call her child a number, a five figure one I think, but she wasn’t allowed. Her explanation of what she wanted was that lots of people had the same names and she wanted her child’s to be unique. Because, if the first time someone is designated by numbers it is 12345, you can guarantee that all the other number-bearers will be 12346 or something but only that one person will be called 12345. Presidents would, of course, immediately come to blows in order to be numbers 1, 2, or 3, but when numbers triumph over words, sequencing itself disappears. As a result, it won’t be possible to start a new calendar from 2013 even though it’s what many people are counting on right now. It’s nice to put verbs into the future tense: it means the future still exists and is waiting for us.

Numbers are regarded as sacrosanct. Any old person can be called Vanya or Masha but numbers must not be repeated. There is a mystical fear of numbers as when the number 666 crops up (something of the sort occurred in 1998 and again on 06.06.2006) or a millennium (the year 1,000 or 2000). The Russian for digit or number – tsifra – is an inoffensive word taken from the German Ziffer, while the French version – chiffre – means code in Russian. And they are all from the Italian, the Latin and, ultimately, the Arabic – sifr, zero, empty. I have found one period when numbers were used exclusively for counting. Gradually, they became the only thing of substance: everything unnumbered passes away, falls into disuse, is erased from memory, doesn’t exist at all. Names are used for differentiation but only within the limits of the specific drama played out in each individual life. There’s the curtain raiser (the baby said “Mama” for the first time today, noticed someone other than itself for the first time), suspense (the voyage between Scylla and Carybdis), the climax (the hero rewarded) and then – game over. There’s a feeling it should be a circle (a spiral, really) but the circle has been broken. It’s just an arc from birth to death and other arcs are like the dark side of the moon. That’s what happens with names but not with numbers. Numbers are the code everything’s written in. They’re like a flight of steps, they lead somewhere: one step, five steps, or a hundred at a time.

There’s something not quite right about reincarnation. It seems fine in essence but there’s something amiss. The soul is incarnated then disincarnated. There’s a new birth and, possibly, Nirvana. Peace. Emptiness. Nothingness. What sort of nothingness? Fools cannot understand nor those without belief in the Kingdom of Heaven comprehend but something isn’t right. There is nothing hid that shall not be manifested. Let’s wait for it to happen.

This parenthesis of thinking was induced when Pushkin, who left no number trail, consequently vanished without trace. The brackets squeezed my brain and little geysers of thought started gushing forth.

Rosa and I went to my place to hold the wake. She was still being spiteful about ‘my Pushkin’. “Why not just admit you’ve taken a lover? So, he’s a fugitive from the loony bin, a short-arse, a caveman – where’s the shame in that? You fancy him, so fine. I would have sympathized, shed a tear but this… don’t expect me just to repeat after you that he’s Pushkin the poet!”

Rosa was getting on my nerves. She talks about reincarnation but, faced with the reality, she denied it.

“Reincarnations only occur after death. The soul can’t enter the same body twice,” Rosa snapped.

“Where d’you get that from?”

“Everyone knows that.”

“The reality is right there in front of you. You just don’t want to accept it.”

Long before the calendar ended, whereupon it became impossible to say precisely how long before, Rosa and I went our separate ways because of Pushkin. It wasn’t because he was so very precious to me but it bothered me that Rosa took herself as par for the course but not him.

Basically, it was chance that brought Rosa to my place. Her story appears to be as follows (after all, whose story can be taken on trust?). She was in hospital in a lethargic sleep; someone was paying for her to be there and she was being looked after but the guards were fed up, another incarnation of Russia had bitten the dust, and the hospital refused to keep hold of Rosa, who lay there, a motionless Soviet-era leftover. The old guard may have been paid to keep watch over Rosa but the new ones couldn’t be bothered. But Rosa was lucky: she had a compassionate doctor. He didn’t toss her out onto the rubbish heap. Rather, he handed her over for safekeeping to a scientist who was researching lethargy. In order to survive in the new circumstances, the scientist had resorted to private business. He began to exhibit Rosa for money, presenting her as a unique and mysterious object. In the end, one of the new Russians bought Rosa off him. It was the time when every member of the nouveau riche was endeavouring to stand out somehow, but he grew bored with his toy and sold her on to a gallery owner. The gallery owner used her in art installations and Rosa gained a degree of popularity. It’s obvious why Rosa hisses when people touch her. During the period of her lethargy-induced wanderings, anyone might try to pinch her, maul her, prod her with a finger to make sure she wasn’t just a doll. On one occasion Rosa got up and began to walk (it happened once in a while), right in the middle of a private viewing and the gallery owner took fright. He sold her to a psychic and then she ended up with some Very Good Friends of mine. I don’t know why they took her. They’re part of the in-crowd, well-off, with no children or pets. Perhaps Rosa was precisely the still and silent creature they’d been dreaming of: she was utterly low maintenance.

It was nearly New Year 2005. My Very Good Friends rang to ask a favour. They said they’d been invited to celebrate New Year in the highest circles. Their housekeeper would be away over the holidays and they were afraid to leave Rosa alone and unsupervised so could I have her at my place overnight? I was at bit uncomfortable at the prospect although I had seen Rosa a number of times. Okay, I thought, it would be scary if I were on my own but with the people I’ve got coming, it’ll be fine. My Very Good Friends laid Rosa, decked out like a Christmas tree, on the mat in my bedroom, spread a thick sheet underneath her, put a pillow they had brought with them under her head, covered her in a blanket, and left. At around midnight, I hadn’t even thought about the body in the bedroom. We were seeing out the old year with champagne. We were all agreed that the next year had to be a better one and were waiting for the midnight chimes. They rang out, we clinked glasses loudly, and turned down the TV. In the second’s silence that ensued, there was a rustle and then Rosa appeared in the doorway. It was a shock to us all even me, although I knew that Rosa’s body sometimes moved without her waking up. Now, though, her eyes were open. She was rubbing them and stretching herself awake. Then she came in and sat down. The life and soul of the party started telling me off for failing to introduce him to such a looker and immediately downed a glass in honour of the New Year that had got off to such a surprising start.

“This is Rosa,” I said tensely. “Hello, Rosa.”

“Hello,” she echoed.

I introduced the guests. Rosa’s black-eyed gaze circled them and she repeated:

“Kolya, Natasha…”

“I’m Tanya,” I added.

“What? You don’t know each other?” said the same life and soul of the party, gobsmacked.

“Don’t know each other,” Rosa repeated and I got the feeling she was savouring the words. I didn’t know what to say next but Kolya took charge so that at no point during that New Year’s night did anyone seem to notice that anything special had happened. Kolya joked that I was keeping a girl hidden away, which led him to certain conclusions. It was nearly six in the morning when everyone left and Rosa, of course, stayed behind. I asked her if she needed to sleep and immediately realized how tactless that was. However, in a perfectly ordinary tone of voice, she said she’d slept her fill. I’d got a bit used to her during the night. We began to chat. She spoke in an odd accent and made surprising errors in her speech. Her mind was confused. She kept talking about various people as if about herself. She talked nonstop but I couldn’t understand a thing. I wanted to go to sleep. I suggested she watched TV but, myself, I switched off.

It was three in the afternoon when I woke up and Rosa was still sitting by the TV. We had breakfast. Her speech was slightly more coherent. Now, she was full of questions. I had one of my own.

“How old are you?”

“I don’t know,” Rosa said and thought about it. It was impossible to say how old she was from her looks.

My Very Good Friends had vanished into thin air and only rang in the evening to say that they weren’t in Moscow and would be back the next day. They apologized. I told them Rosa had woken up.

“Don’t worry,” they yelled into the receiver. “She’ll go back to sleep any minute.”

Towards nightfall, Rosa really did start preparing for sleep. I offered her the sofa, not knowing whether she would go back to her state of lethargy. But she had begun leading a normal human life. When my Very Good Friends