ASYSTOLE

A Novel

Oleg Pavlov

ASYSTOLE

A Novel

by Oleg Pavlov

© 2010, Oleg Pavlov

Translated by Arch Tait

Book created by Max Mendor

Cover Art by Mikhail Evstafiev

© 2015, Glagoslav Publications, United Kingdom

Glagoslav Publications Ltd

88-90 Hatton Garden, EC1N 8PN London

United Kingdom

www.glagoslav.com

ISBN: 978-1-909156-81-4 (Ebook)

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.

In the Book of Enoch, the Lord said of man:

“I saw his nature, which he knew not,

and that ignorance was a grievous sin,

for sin is in his nature.”

SCENE ONE

The Seeing

In one bed, under a sheet, the body of a woman, heavy as a snowdrift. She is delirious, and calling for someone in her fever.

In another, an old man so wizened only his head seems to be left, a mask on a pillow with a respiratory tube in the gap for the mouth.

A pungent smell of injections and disinfectant.

Stubble, a weak chin, swollen lips, a pointed, gristly nose. He looks like a teacher. A young, chubby face, already worn out. A bare, swaddled little fellow in a very ordinary municipal hospital’s palliative care ward which reeks of chlorine. A boy who loved everyone. Everyone. For how long? For how many days, nights? He has lost all sense of time, which has stopped in this white-tiled antechamber where sounds are so clear, the hollow white noise of the cosmos. This sterile, washed out place they have brought him to, isolated and alone, is like a sci-fi film set, a module in an alien spacecraft where the purpose of the equipment is to sustain life. But life is ebbing away and the man is floating effortlessly, weightlessly, a boat drifting without oars or sails downstream to somewhere unseen, unknown, far away

The noise of a road, of death and a road, of a road and death, because death is a road. I fear death and the road. I fear death and departing a world that I know, despatched to another, a world different and distant. The road is a path down which all here is soon to disappear. A road and a road and a road. To disappear.

A thought, “How soon, how soon,” but through the noise a tune, nearby, close, clear, dragging him back, perhaps playing through earbuds, ubiquitous, endless, cavorting, moronic, shameless. That is all there is, nothing more.

“I’m a chocolate bunny and I want to be your honey. I will be to you as sweet as sweet can be ...”

He thought, “It is good to sing.” Aloud he said, “I only want to be happy.” And then he hears her voice. A mobile phone. They say it is her, her voice calling him, caressing, tormenting, when he just wants to sleep. He hears his name, it sounds strange now, empty. He is so tired. He is far away, that is how it feels, although her voice tries to make him feel near.

The connection is lost, the song dissipates, and now the noise is all around as he drifts and wakes and drifts.

He thinks, “How long, how long,” senses her crying, remembers, “Never leave me alone like that again.” And then the seeing. The sun, a world flooded with light and warmth. A peal of happy laughter. A boy in a wheelchair is being pushed round the courtyard, a legless stump, puny, timid, one of a kind. “Stumpy” they call him.

The boy is clutching an ordinary three-litre jar, hugging it to himself, afraid of dropping it. Scuffling about in sawdust the colour of ripe wheat, hamsters. The little family is being taken for an outing and peers out of its small world, their beady eyes not seeming to take in anything.

The humble chair on wheels is being pushed as freely and cheerfully as a bike by a confident boy who might be taken for his older brother. Everybody knows this boy’s dad was a truck driver and died in a crash. That is why his mum is like she is, wandering about outside, or sitting on the bench by the entrance to their staircase till her son comes to take her back in, as if she were a little girl. He goes to a vocational school and will get a job as a truck driver. He is the bravest boy in the courtyard. If older boys hit him he just smiles, not letting them make him cry. He is a loner, but everything he does or says fills you with silent, envious admiration.

Stumpy lives next along from him. He has chosen a cripple as his friend. They laugh together, not sharing their happiness with anyone else. It seems immune to everything around. Other children run excitedly after the wheelchair and beg to be allowed to see the hamsters. The jar glints in the sun, delicate little pink paws testing its elusive surface. They keep at it, blindly scratching and sliding on the glass, until they slip back down into the sawdust.

Later it seemed to him it was those hamsters which died, before they could be remembered for anything, except for a frisky one who escaped from an identical jar, only with more food and even a little padded chair. One ginger, one white, one black, every colour they sold in a shop almost like a zoo. Its live wares were not that varied. There were goldfish, budgerigars, guinea pigs, and hamsters.

Flocks of children would gather at the pet shop at the same time, after it had suddenly closed at midday and they were waiting excitedly for it to re-open. You could still look at the natural history corner through the enticing portal of the shop window. For the first time he too had his nose pressed, enchanted, against the magic screen. In there, in the seemingly airless space behind the heavy glass, stuffed wild birds and animals posed with aristocratic aloofness. They were dead, but almost indistinguishable from live animals, even the static pieces of glass they had instead of eyes appeared to see everything. There were no girls, no squealing voices, only a few of the boys led by the hand, not allowed to stray from the side of solicitous mothers. These towered above the surrounding throng of alien street children, greatly concerned that those other children were pushing, and loudly instructing them on how to behave. Nobody paid any attention, except their own offspring, aware that being good tended to pay off. Handsomely. Possibly with an aquarium, or budgerigars, which could only be had as presents. He had seen the budgerigars and goldfish in his classmates’ homes, chocolate-box apartments which even smelled sweet, not like his. Now here he stood at the entrance to the world of his dreams, drawn by covetousness and loneliness in an agony of delight, and by the even more agonizing desire to possess. Fear and disdain. Embarrassment and a proud awareness, instilled by his mother, that he was not like ordinary boys.

It was pretty where the fish lived, and their mute, colourful shoals greeted would-be purchasers with a flutter of excitement. Their colours gleamed mother-of-pearl in a green-lit underwater realm like the picture on a colour television set, which might be why the fish seemed to be floating in a dream. The hamsters were more like tiny piglets in a miniature pigsty. Their nook in the pet shop had a musty smell, and life dimly lit up the myriad cowering beasties.

The one he chose died within a few days, as if it had already been ill. The boy cried, but with resentment, feeling cheated, or punished for something he had not done. Later, however, he felt it was his fault they died, some lasting a week, others only a few days. The longest lived was the frisky one which disappeared into the expanses of their suddenly lonely apartment. He looked for him everywhere he could, even if only by pushing in a hand. At night he heard, or thought he heard, rustling, and the expectation built up something bright in his heart and the hamster was resurrected. Hungry, he scuttled nimbly out from the dark recesses beneath a huge wardrobe but, retreating behind a rampart of food and litter, convulsively gave up the ghost a few days later in the bottom of his round, transparent prison, so reminiscent of a big empty drop of water.

The boy cried from love, because he had come to love his frisky hamster while waiting in hope for such a long time. He could not understand why they were all dying, no matter what he fed them, no matter what kind he bought, big or small, white or ginger. Uncomprehending, he just hid them, disposing of their little corpses the sooner to forget them. He buried them in mayonnaise jars, but visited the graves and even tried to decorate them, and that was his secret. Their convulsions as they died, which he observed, peeping, made him feel powerless and pathetic, and, as they recurred, callous. He would give them a funeral, say his goodbyes, and return to visit them. He was no more able to forget them than to keep them alive or even alleviate their suffering. His jar had the stench of death. He tried to comfort himself that everything would come right if he bought just one more. He imagined one day he would have a whole family living with him, a town in a large glass tank as big as the aquarium for the fish at the pet shop. That was why everything recurred so many times.

The latest one also became ill and was eventually hiding in a corner, quivering, soiling itself and its little prison, covered in its own evil-smelling filth. He kept it in a cage, hiding it, he hoped, from death. He was baffled, afraid of what he had done, as if he had not bought it but stolen a small live toy. He felt nothing for it, no wish to play with it, no joy at the sight of it, only a sense, cowed when he covertly watched, cowardly when he hid, of possessing something doomed. But this time his ownership did not come to its usual end. Life quivered on and on. He hid the cage under some bushes in the courtyard and opened the mesh hatch, frightened at first, then pained, but then just relieved. He ran home and waited, but could not resist going back to look. The hamster was still there, still alive. Children were playing in the yard and he pretended just to be out for a stroll, reluctant to leave. The children split up, looking for a ball they had lost, and someone yelled out for the others to come. Afraid of keeping his distance, which might give him away, but also of going over and being noticed, the boy heard they had found a mousetrap with a dead hamster in the bushes. For some reason, he smiled. The children came away, walking past him to get on with their game, and one who was older suddenly looked him straight in the eyes, as if he knew everything, but said nothing to anyone.

The boy ... A bright summer day came back to him like a dream. People had gathered in their apartment, waiting. They seemed to have come to see him but were holding back, as if he was stronger than they were. They wanted to say something caring, or at least to touch him. He felt very grown up. He heard a lot of new words he did not understand, and responded by saying nothing and looking important. He frowned, tired and bored with the game. In this dream he did not see his mother. Perhaps she said something to him and even hugged him, but it did not lodge in his memory. He did, though, remember hiding in his room, undressing, getting under the blanket, and suddenly falling asleep, again, in his dream. In the morning, he was woken by a woman he did not know. There were several of them, confident, motherly, and seemingly in charge in the hushed apartment. He immediately behaved, doing everything he was told to, as if back at the Young Pioneers’ summer camp where a new day began when the team leader decided it did.

There was a party smell of food. Dressed in smart clothes he had not chosen, he waited uneasily for his parents to appear, afraid to ask where they were. The strange party preparations reminded him he was to say goodbye to his father today. A doleful succession of people in dark clothing came into the apartment, his parents’ relatives and friends, their faces frozen like masks, respectfully silent. The guests seemed to have grown heavier when they slowly took their places at the set table, leaving empty the place for their host.

“Mummy, where’s Daddy?”

Enormous eyes. Neither pity nor fear. She takes him by the hand and leads him away to a small room. Muffled sounds. No one will hear. She whispers, as hard as she can, “Daddy is not here any more. He has died.” At the moment he heard that he wanted to smile. He wanted his mummy to go back to being kind again, but she squeezed his hand painfully and said, “Remember, Daddy loved you very, very much!” Her invincible face suddenly broke into a twitching, purple grimace. It looked old and flabby, and she frowned, terribly wounded by everything in the world. A visceral groan through her teeth before, a moment later, she put on a proud look and said in a clear, calm, but trembling voice, “Now we need to go and look after our guests.”

His mother had scared him and he did not know what he had done wrong. He sat down, feeling he was being punished, as if he were being put on display in front of everyone. His mother could be like that. Cross. It had hurt when she grasped his hand and had seemed to be stinging him with her words. He wanted people to feel sorry for him and thought of crying but, angry and miserable, made an effort to stay silent, unwilling to give in. Nobody wanted him. He had only to think that to feel orphaned in his heart. In that case, he would not love anyone either.

The men at the table were going to great lengths to show consideration for his mother, as if taking possession of her as she limply acquiesced. Her son was suddenly affronted, on behalf not of her but of his father. Where was his daddy? Why had Mummy told him not to ask about that, when all the people who had come to the party were standing up and making stupid speeches to trick her and him into believing Daddy had gone away and would never come home again?

The little martyr will remember nothing of this tomorrow, but can hardly know that. He will be reborn, forgetting everything, forgiving everyone, amazed upon his re-appearance by everything in the world. Fall asleep to be resurrected, and so it is fated until sleep itself is frightful and seems like death, and there is only tomorrow, and this one path leading to it. You hide under the blanket or remain alert, feeling the beating in your chest, like a clock ticking, but your eyes will close anyway, even if you hold out for a long time, and that moment, like death, not letting you feel anything, creeps up unnoticed.

That is why falling asleep in the dark is so lonely. No sooner do you close your eyes than you set out on a frightening journey. He could not understand why the light from heaven should have to end; or why he too should have to climb to the summit of each day only then to suddenly vanish; why every night he should bid farewell to life, its colours and sounds and scents. He knew everybody goes to sleep at night, yet never met anyone else as he strayed through the labyrinths of the dark. Something, however, makes you resign yourself to the unknown, close your eyes, surrender all the powers of life, fall asleep.

It was so clear, so easy: everyone should love him. His whole being, although an agglomeration of desires and curiosity, was drawn only to their love. It was made for love, from its first days receiving consolation for the slightest suffering, which it announced by crying and screaming. This being was used to receiving gratification, and perhaps the sweetest was when someone else felt they had wronged him and tried to make amends.

“Do you like that?” his grandmother asked with a smile, relenting after giving him a piece of Grandfather’s bait to taste. “The fishes do.”

Cursing, not enjoying what she was doing, she spent the rest of the day boiling something brown and gooey, angrily stirring it until it turned into a kind of dough, and when it was ready, called him and told him to close his eyes. She popped a piece in his mouth. It dissolved into something unbelievably sweet, and the boy, having spent the whole day on his best behaviour, for which this was probably a reward, swooned with delight.

He was afraid he might not be ready in time. His heart, a-quiver, was feeling rushed. It had already been light when Grandfather roused him, coming for him from nowhere. He got himself ready, like a soldier obeying orders. Grandmother was still asleep and did not get up. It was so amazing to feel you were alive in the empty silence where you could not speak too loudly for fear of disturbing all the things engrossed in themselves. It was even too early to be out walking.

As they were travelling on a wildly rattling tram, probably the only one in the entire city, through deserted, lifeless streets, the sun was already pouring down on them.

His grandfather said nothing the whole way, perhaps because he never took anyone with him when he went fishing and was used to saying nothing.

They went to the island, to their little house, which was really just a shed built from planks, even without windows, although it had a sloping roof and stood firm on its foundations, and had for many years. The house smelled of damp from the river and it was cool, and all Grandfather needed for his overnight stays. There was room between the walls only for a steel mesh bed. Just outside, a table and bench were fixed to the ground. The family ate there when they came to enjoy the sun, the river and the fresh air.

There was a little verandah, and beside it Grandmother’s rose bushes.

Inside, where it was dark and damp, were fishing and spinning rods, lures, sinkers and hooks, – all the things he was not allowed to touch, all the things which belonged to Grandfather, as secret and dangerous as a gun, as the things you needed to take from the river, the things hidden in its depths. Perhaps that was why the boy imagined the depths lived here in the dark, lurking, waiting.

The island was a resort, with beaches, beer stalls and entertainments, but their house was away from the beaches and holidaymakers. Enormous horses grazed among the oak trees just beyond the garden gate. They were hobbled and shifted their great bulk jerkily, wandering off as if to hide behind the trees and contemplating each other. He was fascinated by the heavy knotted ropes which shackled them and could not understand why such huge, powerful creatures should uncomplainingly submit to human beings. He was afraid of the hobbled giants, the fear subsiding only after he had closed the gate behind him.

Alone, away from his parents, the boy spent the whole summer swimming and sunbathing.

The river beckoned and fondled him. When his grandmother was tired, she too fancied a treat and he had little difficulty persuading her to grant his dearest wish and let them take the motor boat back home. By this time of day the crowds had disappeared, leaving the beach crumpled and trampled, while something cold and dark lay heavily on the water like a shadow, and above it the seagulls wheeled, cawing like crows. The pontoon pier, swaying gently, welcomed back its little boat right next to the beach. The boat ferried people to the other side, even though the river was spanned by an enormous footbridge.

He was feeling happy. Grandmother had bought two tickets. It was chilly waiting for the boat, the wind no longer the caressing breeze it had been on the beach, but keen and whistling.

Nevertheless, his bare feet were soaking up heat from the pier’s still warm metal skin, and felt too the water sloshing beneath it. Flocks of children, suntanned almost black, carried on fishing from the pontoon.

He had never had a fishing rod of his own. An outsider, he envied but was afraid to go too near them. The boat came in and his ultimate wish was granted.

They could sit anywhere and there were plenty of empty seats on the benches along the sides. The motor boat shook and roared, and then settled down, steadily, powerfully accelerating. The bank receded until it was no more than a strip of sand. Heavy black waves churned by the side. When they were in the middle of the river, at every bounce the wind flung spray almost painfully in his face, making him screw up his eyes. Suddenly, however, there was an open view on all sides. His fears and pain, envy and awkwardness melted away and he felt at one with the wind, the waves, and the shore receding in the distance. Then he found himself back among the same kind of holidaymakers as had spent all day at the beach, doing exactly what they were doing, shaking the sand out of their shoes and covering the deck with it. When the boat came in to the granite-lined shore, life again became small and ordinary and uninteresting. In no time at all the boat was biting into the river again, heading back to where people were waiting for it.

Today, though, no one was waiting for anyone. The abandoned, unwelcoming beach was deserted. Even the water seemed dirty and dull.

His grandfather told him to listen and not speak, because the bream he hoped to catch with his spinning rods could hear everything down there on the riverbed, to which he instantly sent down several lines. They sliced through the water as they disappeared, as taut as violin strings.

Soon the sun burst forth, warming the water and the sand, which were suddenly bright and joyful. He was obediently silent but found himself with nothing more interesting to do than play with the sand. Time ran by, like the handful of sand spilling the faster out of his fist the tighter he clenched it.

If his grandfather turned in his direction, he sat motionless for a long time, expecting something to happen, until the old man turned away again without a word.

He began to think his grandfather was not talking to him because he did not like him. It was a feeling he had whenever he himself started thinking he did not really like his grandfather. He decided once and for all that he hated fishing and, with his head wedged between his knees, whispered to himself that he would never come from Moscow to see his grandfather again. He would forget all about him and hoped he died. Who cared! Knowing no words more terrible than these, having thought and said them, he was suddenly frightened of what he had done. He kept really quiet, feeling helpless and crushed.

He fell asleep on the sand. When his grandfather noticed, he quietly came over and covered the inert little body with his shirt to shield it from the sun.

His grandfather woke him up with a prod, holding an enormous fish.

The boy had not seen or heard the little bell ringing its heart out, his grandfather jumping up, flustered, to grab the line. With the rod arching, bathed in sweat, he anxiously, delicately, slowly plied his heavy, powerful prey, his hands trembling with the strain. He called, shouted to the boy to bring him the landing net which was just a few steps away. Getting no response, he waded into the water, seeing a gleam of silvery chain mail. Without giving the great fish a chance to come to its senses, he drew the rest of its strength out of it.

The bream was still floundering frantically. Beside himself with delight, the boy was afraid to touch a live fish. His grandfather said they needed to stun it and bury it deep down where the sand was cold. He could have done it himself as he usually did, but decided to give his grandson a job to do which was more than a game.

The boy proudly felt part of his team, feeling no sympathy for the fish, which was already lying helplessly on its side, gasping for air. He hit the quivering bream’s head with a stone. It became still and blood came out. Proud of what he had done, not afraid of the blood, he began digging a hole in the sand as his grandfather said, although for him it was a game. When he got down to where it was cool, he put the fish in and covered it up again with sand. Now they had fish to take back home to Grandmother.

The mound covering the fish was like a home. He wondered whether fish could stay alive underground, and thought back to the moment when he hit it with the stone. He would have liked to dig down to see what it looked like now, whether it had changed in the sand.

Then, warmed by the sun and lulled by boredom, he fell asleep again next to the mound, hoping to hear what the fish was doing at the bottom of the deep hole. He listened very carefully, and thought the fish was listening too. The silence was broken by his grandfather, who caught another bream while the boy was sleeping.

Walking back home along the same route, only in reverse and now weighed down with sleepiness, seemed unfair. Considering he had done all the boy could wish for, his grandfather decided not to waste money on the motor boat. In any case, he liked the wide road paved with concrete slabs which ran the full width of the island to the bridge. He was evidently enjoying the walk, or had decided to pace something out, and made the way home even longer. Crossing the bridge with all the people on it was a further torment. Feeling its springiness and how it shook beneath him, the boy thought it might collapse if a lot of people crossed it at the same time. His grandfather only laughed, but if the boy glanced down, it took his breath away. He imagined he was falling from a great height down into the river. He dreamed about it, and woke in a sweat because the feeling was so realistic.

He found the idea of eternity terrifying, if it meant there would be no end to falling. It haunts you, the way your own reflection in a mirror haunts you, because you might be looking at another life. This is myself, appearing and disappearing because I have so many lives. And yet, when daylight prises your eyes open in the morning it seems only an instant has passed.

Coming back to consciousness, you always feel you have been rescued, reborn. Taking your first breath. Coming back, you remember the sense of height beneath you, and of flight in which you dissolved with every cell in your body. You feel that at night you are carried up into the sky, and in the morning safely delivered back down to earth. In dreams everything depends on you. You are born but do not die. You have no fear. Only if you are fearless can you soar in the air of your dream. If you are overcome by fear you become incapable of anything and, holding your arms out in front of you, fall headlong into an abyss that rapidly narrows to a funnel, swallowing everything around it. You are told children are growing when they dream this dream, but it is the fear, the falling, that makes its way into your soul. Your soul remembers that, and tries desperately to fly.

Sounds, smells, colours: everything seems to be born in front of your eyes and never to die. There is a blessed sense of eternity, when even sounds are filled with light, the laughter of the sun. Everything delightful and pure has just been born. It is morning. Your mother’s smile. Bluebells ringing, each individual cap. Everything is such fun, although everything about adults tells you that what they are doing is terribly important. When their faces are so serious, it makes you think your mother and father are casting spells and that is why the tea suddenly tastes so sweet. There is nothing frightening about that. All that is disturbing is the sense of being among these people. He knew they were his family and that this place was his home, but for some reason felt he was only visiting. He accepted what they gave him, not daring to refuse food and drink even if he did not like it. He allowed them to feed him, and solemnly swallowed the same food as everyone else because he knew it was his new flesh and blood and he was eating and drinking it to grow bigger. Was that not brave? The little god had his first experience of suffering, a fear he might not grow bigger, because day after day he had no sense of actually getting any bigger.

This was worrying. Each year lasted an eternity, but the only visible trace it left was on the door frame. Once a year, the moment he opened his eyes, he remembered this was the day he was born. To make up for somebody’s fault that he had not, on the day he was actually born, been able to see the light and be happy, each year he was given that day back again. Nobody except him knew that yet, so he ran to his parents’ room, shouting to wake these grown-up people, and watching in delight as undifferentiated, lifeless masks turned into the faces of people who loved him and lit up with smiles. He imagined he had brought them just what they had been waiting for, the joyous tiding of himself.

Everybody knew this was an indispensable part of the programme, and then the celebration of the birth of a son became his party. The happy assertiveness lighting up his face, perhaps a little arrogant after his performance at the tea table, was flushed and tinged with recklessness, perhaps even silliness. The toasts and stories came to an end. Admiring, anticipating, the slightly drunk guests collectively provided the audience, as if about to witness a conjuring trick, although everybody knew what was to happen. Only the boy stood stock still awaiting the miraculous revelation. Now one year older, readied for a new sacrifice, he drew himself bolt upright, trembling, his back motionless against the door post. He dared not stir as his father performed an action above his head he could not see. He would call him back to life, as if the edge of his hand was cutting off the past, everything that was dead, and laughing out loud, admiring not his son but the height he had measured. A moment ago everything hung in the balance, but now the bar of life had indisputably been raised higher! This ladder of straight lines, marked in a conspicuous place by his father’s hand, was a proud reminder of his father himself, left, passed down to a son who had already ensured his immortality. He was immortal! He chortled with delight. Another year would pass, and it would all be repeated. This seemed to be the only way, an endless ascent, but suddenly it stopped, broken off. The boy, unaware on the day he was orphaned that he had lost his father, went to sleep that night still not knowing, not yet having taken life’s suffering over from him. Everything that came back to him later came out of nowhere: dim, silent and, like in the movies, fleeting. It was a kind of seeing from which the sound had been cut, the colour removed, the life drained, an image as if reduced by the screen, to appear before his eyes, be seen, and then abruptly disappear again. All that remained was the photographs, the faces brought back to life in their capsules which time could not penetrate, in which faces no longer aged and so remained recognizable.

A bride and groom, porcelain figurines of dignity and tenderness, their eyes, probably for the first time, so intently focused on each other. The waltz of the newly wed, so graceful, the couple not even holding hands but fingers. Champagne! The kiss! In domestic settings she is always alone and he, the only witness, delighting in her, fits her into the frame as if for love. A young woman posing, feeling herself an actress, smooth, free, the coldness of silence on her lips. Almost all photographs of her were taken by his father, a keen photographer. He had a certain vanity, like a painter, and a way of taking the photographs with perspectives sweeping upwards or falling, as if on the wing. Somehow, though, they were all the same, reflections of reflections which could have been made into a short film. An upside-down baby suspended in the air in crumpled nappies, ensnared by a spider for looking so tearful. His father took many photos to get this one. For some reason he liked photographing his baby crying, or so angry that he was in tears. He thought that was just splendid. Dressed up when visiting his grandfather. Growing up, spending every summer without exception with his grandparents, but without his own parents. In a prim pose in a photographer’s studio, clad in a lambskin coat, gleaming boots, a reindeer fur hat, and wearing a gold embroidered general’s belt. A little general in the glare of highly theatrical stage lighting.

His school years, their class, year after year, with a graveyard landscape of children’s faces apparently anxiously contemplating their own deaths. Looking out of portholes, the stalwart crew of Gagarin rockets flying to the stars. They seem to be peeping like little cuckoos, each out of its own lonely little hollow, growing older and less confident. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Within a few years he will learn you do not have to agree with every verdict passed on you. He will learn to think about his own actions, and know exactly what each one is called. The little stars of the Octoberlets’ uniforms will be replaced by the neckerchiefs of Young Pioneers. Cuckoo! And next they are sprouting Young Communist League badges like teenage pimples. In 1987 it is all over. Somewhere in that same cosmos, underdeveloped, unfocused messages to himself from photographic societies at Pioneer camps dissolve. The figures of identical small beings, seemingly from other planets, are frozen in poses sweeping upwards or falling downwards on sports fields and in solemn line-ups. His father’s orphaned camera was lost at this time, with no regrets. He had not been taught to value things, and this was just something he got bored with one day, like a toy. It did not even seem to belong to anyone.

His eye falls on something else, his father’s most enduring fancy. It appeared, like all the other things with which his imagination sparkled, in the guise of something exceedingly serious. No doubt he believed he had invented a double, which would enable a pregnant woman expecting his child and awaiting the return of her absent husband from his scientific expeditions, when she looked at it, to feel his love. Mysterious and proud, he lost no time in placing himself above the baby’s cot. When he became a schoolboy and they gave him a desk at home, the portrait hung above, and his father looked down from there on his son. He just positioned the camera in front of himself, set the shutter, held his breath for a few moments, the timer made contact, the bulb flashed. Then, silence. A look of anticipation, and therefore a lonely look. Patience in those understanding eyes. He seems at that moment to have felt himself a real father. He has understood something very important. That, at least, was how he hoped he looked. He hung it on the wall of his study, darkened like an icon. An identical copy was to look from his headstone: noble, stern, cut off before his time.

Everything retreated, draining away into that ceramic medallion in the cemetery, redolent only of loss. The photos were somewhere in their home, although no one was preserving them. Rather, both of them, the mother and the son, were separately hiding from them. They were brought closer by shared fears, not least the fear pulling them down back into the past.

She has no time for her reflections, although she seems to be putting that on, and with equally feigned indifference consents to recognize her former self, as if with the passage of time something unbecoming is evident in the faded photographs. For him, it is all just stuff that no longer exists, except that there is also something about it he wants to leave firmly alone. The family he was born into, all there is to show for its time on earth, what he might some day pass down to his own children. He cannot stand to hear his mother talking about what her son was like when she was bringing him up, before he could walk, or talk, and got sat on the pot when she, not he, decided. That seemed to be all she remembered. She liked him as a helpless cripple. That was what seemed to have suited her, and he detected something crippling in her mother love. His love for the woman who had given him life was all about offence caused and waiting to be forgiven. Was that why he himself had never learned to forgive? It was only his heart that grew bigger and heavier, like an apple juicy with blood, the fruit of all he had experienced. He felt time was crippling him, making the past drag on. There was something mechanical and soulless about that, and it was the reason he was so soulless himself.

When he tried to remember what his mother was like, it was always the same incident came to mind. It was screened silently in front of his eyes for many years. The gas ring was burning in the kitchen. Unable or unwilling to save or store anything, whenever she found there were no matches in the house, she would light her cigarette from it, at the risk of setting her hair on fire. The only problem was, having used her last match to light it, she could not allow the life-saving blue flame to go out. It had to be left to burn eternally. It gave her a light, and meant the apartment stayed warm all through the winter. The burner had a steady, even hum, like a perpetual motion machine she had invented herself, after which she had no need to rely on other people. She would come home from work at the institute, where she tidied up the nonsense usual in research papers approved for publication. All that awaited her was an old sagging chair in the kitchen but, seating herself in it as if on a throne, forgetting time, she would kipper herself with her favourite Java, or the more manly Pegasus, cigarettes. She would puff away, reading some dog-eared novel which smelled of the local library. It looked, though, as if she was sitting there silently with the book in her hands, not looking up but listening by the hour to the hum of the gas ring.

He was a witness to this, and suffered. He was hoping his mother would speak to him, as if she had come back and was now the same person again. That was why he shared his secrets with her while she pointlessly reduced cigarette after cigarette to ash, waving them in her hand like so many conductor’s batons, commanding his soul, enveloping everything they talked about, sometimes until late into the night, in whirling smoke which eventually made his head spin.

Whether he became wiser or merely drugged, he suddenly saw dispassionately a beautiful, lonely woman who had forgotten everything except herself. In this state of abstraction, she continued to address spirited monologues about herself to an unknown audience, or retreated into equally pointless conjectures about the future, only not her own but of all mankind. She would talk about the universe, the cosmos, eternity, and more of the sort, purely in order not to be silent. The words she so lightly exhaled were her air. She seemed able to talk without pausing for breath. It brought her relief and intoxicated her. Simultaneously, she was intoxicating herself with Bulgarian Riesling, which she invariably bought on her way home from work. She would hide the bottle behind her chair and never let him see she was drunk, trying to behave nonchalantly. Something false came into her voice, though. Her bright, stern expression dimmed and sagged and she began to look stupid.

She decided she needed to feed her son, but he snapped at her that he was not hungry and went off to hide in his room, feeling the same gnawing hunger he had experienced at his father’s funeral when he had refused to touch the food. She called again and again from the kitchen that his dinner was ready, stubbornly, plaintively, with long, wordless pauses full of expectation. He made no reply, wanting to upset her, not knowing why, and feeling a burning sense of shame.

Perhaps no longer able to endure her loneliness, or trying to close her eyes to the fact that her son no longer needed her to care for him, she silently brought the plate of food to his room and stood there, imperturbably holding out her unwanted gift as if hypnotized. When this elicited no response, she came to life, leaned down, and suddenly brought the plate almost to his face, her silence eloquent, looking sweetly into his eyes as if coaxing a small child.

“Mum, why do you drink so much?”

“I like dry wine. It helps me relax.”

“I can do everything for you.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She straightened up and, with a haughty expression, left her son’s room. Victory would only come at a price. But how much more of this would he have to take? What was the point of it all? Now she was doing something, but not going to bed. The house was suddenly in the middle of some military-style activity. Floors were being washed. She had to feed her son. She had to clean the apartment. His heart was pounding in his chest and he could hear a deep, faraway echo, “Empty, Empty.”

He called out, “Mum!” No response. He could hear the mop rammed into the bucket, squelching over the floor, lifted, dunked in the bucket again.

“Mum, I love you!” Silence. “Mum, Mum!” Her voice completely calm, she returns herself to the world. “I love you too, my son!”

His heart dissolves in pity, for himself. He is hungry. His dinner is still warm, only there is that unbreachable silence, and later the avalanche of words is sent down from such a height, sweeping his pathetic little soul away, and in his ears there rings and makes him tremble as if in the presence of a deity: “I enjoy solitude! I ... I ... I ...”

This deity he, its human creation, once felt within himself and wanted jealously to share it with no one, even though it was not his to hoard. The idea that it could belong to anyone else, or give birth to anyone else and then take care of them the way it cared for him, and love them, instilled a great fear in him which came from some dark place.

His father returned, bringing with him a smell of strength, heavy, sour, and clinging. A smell of eau de Cologne, of tobacco and sweat. A strange, hostile smell, and a happy, smiling face with prickly bristles when he hugged him and kissed him awkwardly on the cheek. His home welcomed its master with tranquil fidelity. And then the room where his parents hid themselves away became in his mind dangerous, or at least out of bounds. A man was in a hurry to unwind. He luxuriated in the bathroom, delighted in the home cooking, was happy and content to get noisily back into everyday life, and his voice sounded very loud. He handed out gifts, caught up on his sleep, invited friends round because he felt like partying, and every time he returned from Murmansk or Vladivostok was celebrated as if he would never leave again, only he did, as if he had only dropped in on his family in transit. They did not talk about him. The place felt empty, but after a day had passed and then another, they got used to life without him, which meant that when the explorer of the ocean depths did return from his expeditions, they had an uneasy feeling that a stranger had moved in, and could not wait for him to leave again. If they did not think about him while he was away, that meant he was alive and well. Their silence developed into a sense of tranquillity, which immersed them again in sluggishly passing tedium. Even when his father was not away for long, the absence weighed on his mother and she had to force herself not to think about him. He himself lacked the patience to remember his father.

The father brought his son a gift of brittle, almost transparent, mummified ocean fish, set forever in their mysterious monstrousness; spidery skeletons of crabs; shells which sounded cavernous if you held them to your ear; sculpted corals; and stars brought up from the ocean depths. You might have thought he was trying to make amends by bringing these exotic offerings, but there was some reason why he wanted to pass them on so deliberately to his son, like a message. What surprised and scared him was that even those bug-eyed freaks which, his father told him, had poisonous needles in their fins, were biding their time, as if they might some day come back to life to tell him something important that his father was not mentioning. Something you could touch even after his death. Something taken from the bottom of the sea. All that remained of him.

She said, “Your father is no longer with us,” but when, only a few days later at the cemetery the boy was brought to the grave, he burst into tears, frightened by his new discovery. His father was still with them. He was right there, now. All that separated them was that he could not be seen or heard. It was not grief, but resentment that his father no longer loved him. He felt betrayed by this man who had deceived him, but also by his mother and everybody else: his Uncle Seva, the people still huddled in a close circle and whom he despised from that moment. Only a very few people gathered for the Wake, to see his father off on his journey to nowhere. He hid in the wardrobe which smelled of his father. The smell now was of a different, unfamiliar power which enveloped and sheltered him, although it seemed far away, barely discernible, and the clothes in the wardrobe were limp on their hangers.

No one came looking for him. He had been forgotten.

The guests departed until there was only Uncle Seva left. His mother was washing dishes, unsteady on her feet. Suddenly a plate shattered. It had slipped out of her hand, and his uncle laughed out loud. He peered out of the darkness as if through an echoing tube, at the end of which he saw a bright, motionless light and two dark, lonely, ugly figures. He got into his bed and was afraid to fall asleep on his own in the dark room, unable to hear anyone’s voices. People do not live forever, so the same thing would happen to him. Some day he would fall asleep and not wake up, and they would bury him in the ground. For him, this fear was always a fear of losing his mother, losing the physical contact with her, and it went back to an anxiety he had felt as a little child. Where was she? What had happened to her? But when he thought about his mother, when he saw her, or even when he did not see or think about her, she lived somewhere inside him, as physically as the beating of his heart. Everything that had happened to her before he was born did not exist for him, as if they had both been born on the same day. He felt that every second since he was born he had been sending out a pulse to her and receiving the echo back, reassuring, but only briefly, until the same pulse went out again: “Mum! ... Mum! ...”

As a child he would go to sleep clutching her hair, binding himself to her tightly. He would cry out to her if he did not fall asleep immediately, and then found he could not go out into the darkness of sleep without her. She had trained him to that, but suddenly either no longer wished to or had not the strength to hear him calling, get out of bed and come through to him. He called into the darkness louder and louder, and it became more and more frightening and unbearable. The walls of the room moved in closer, as if he was in the bottom of a well. Now he was wailing, howling, throwing back his head, shrieking to some place above him, into a void. Then the door was opened, and in the doorway the half-asleep boy saw a big, strong shadow. He believed he was seeing his father, because this was his home. A sense of peace, weakness, and warmth flowed over him and he was still, no longer calling, feeling he was in his father’s care. The figure uttered not a word but silently sat down beside the bed and took his small hand in its big one. The boy’s tear-filled eyes could not really see his face in the dark, but detected his calm breathing, and felt that his father was looking at him in the half-light in which you see only the outlines of things, as if they were under dust covers. He went to sleep, and in the morning his mother said it was a dream.

He should have remembered, not that strange dream but his father. When he was older, he realized he was the only one who had not said good-bye to him in his coffin. He could not even remember the day, as if someone had erased it from his memory. They had had to take him back to the dark apartment after the funeral, stuffy because of all the people in it. He would have believed them if they had told him his father had just gone on a very, very long expedition. Why did nobody lie to him? His mother had decided everything, and later could not explain why she had chosen to orphan him not a year, not even a month later. His father’s death became a secret, but a different kind of secret, and those meetings, always on the same day in summer at the place where the earth kept him hidden, not giving him back, became his expectation of a miracle, and then a doomed, senseless attempt to prolong that expectation. Death robbed her of a husband, but did it make it any easier for her to take away his father, leaving him without hope? Every year, on that same day, he was taken to the cemetery. This last place of refuge, which looked like a storehouse, only made the child’s misery more painful and bewildering. One day it was replaced by horror and dismay at the answer to a teenager’s question, when it was time for him to understand how this father had died.

He died in the Metro.

They had taken him straight from some station to the mortuary and, after establishing his identity, informed the next of kin. It was as if some insect had been crawling or buzzing around, then fallen down and lain still. Instantly. In Moscow. In the place where the city hides itself underground, and millions of people who inhabit it are transported in all directions through tunnels, and know nothing at all about each other, or about the fact that someone’s life has just been cut short.

This became so important because he went down there every day himself, into the Metro, making journeys, squeezing into carriages, getting in, getting out, changing from one line to another. A vast dead underworld. One day he was struck by the sight of a boy with a small white bread bun turning instantly into a confident adult through his impulse to help an elderly woman by giving up his seat to her. The sight of that white bun in the hands of a child made such an impression. It was like goodness itself, in a metro carriage. From that day onwards he could counter all the dark imaginings and nightmares in his mind with that boy and his bread bun. Because he had been so fearless?

The marble-clad stations proclaimed the period they belonged to. It had happened at a station, but which? He tried imagining, pretending. He believed he should be able to sense it. How could he not know? It was a torture to know nothing about the life or the death of his father. He tried so hard one time, but had eventually to accept that the woman who had given him life remembered nothing. She was capable of forgetting where her husband had been going, why he had been going anywhere that day. Sometimes he felt, to his horror, that his father’s death had liberated him. But liberated him to do what? Perhaps one day the phone would ring.

“Hello, how is life treating you?”

“Who is speaking?”

“Come off it! How’s your mother?”

“What do you mean? Who are you calling?”

The dialling tone. The call is over. A minute passes, and another. The phone is silent. Of course it is, because the whole thing is impossible.

Then he smiles that odd smile of his, when it suddenly occurs to him that anything is possible, even the impossible. He seems to hear himself say firmly,

“Maybe. May be.”

SCENE TWO

The Garden of Delights

Two stray freaks, one male, one female, decided to mate. They seemed to have fused together, creating a mutant-like creature right there in the crowded Moscow street and unsettling the passers-by because it was clear almost immediately that they were suffering terribly. They were helpless and frightened, sensing how deadly their coupling had become, caught inside themselves in a way they could not understand, not completely immobilized, backing away from people in fear, writhing, beginning to bark hysterically, almost squealing, tearing their flesh, terrified by the pain. Exhausted, their legs splayed, unmoving, gasping, trembling, they were suddenly again free. They uncoupled but had not even the strength to run away. At the height of the commotion some in the street felt sympathy, but only for the moronic female; they had no time for the hapless male, which was clearly in pain, whimpering and licking a crimson thing that dangled like an umbilical cord or a protruding intestine.

He was to recall this revolting incident very soon, and with a rueful grin, while waiting to see the doctor. He associated another with it, embarrassing and then disgusting: gonorrhea at 20 years of age, and the fact that the woman he got it from was an infected bitch who gave herself and her suppurating love flower to him for one night. It was a night which bore fruit, if you saw the clap as a kind of fruit.

Now the moments stretched out long and brain-numbing. This was his second and final visit. Whatever is curable is less than eternal, ephemeral. He was swallowing antibiotics, benefiting from their steady, magical power which, day by day, was killing his sickness, this alien thing in him. He was recovering his composure after the almost animal fear that he might have syphilis. Syphilis. To feel even the word inside him by pronouncing it was frightening and extraordinary. Back then blood was not tested for a deadly virus, it was undiagnosed, and millions of these viruses were not dying, were thriving like cockroaches.

“Duchesse! Duchesse,” the girl exclaims. She seems to see nothing in her bliss, but her eyes sparkle mischievously, naughtily, and she sends the boy a glance. Her doll-like dress is backlit by the sun. It seems made of shining, sparkling light. She laughs, throwing back her little head covered in sun-kissed, golden curls, and looks high up into the clouds, as if twirling, happy, shouting “Duchesse! Duchesse!” again and again, already breathless. Her parents hold her tightly by the hand and pull her along after them. Suddenly, when they have only just met, she disappears, having been for an instant so tangible, so alive, having plunged him into a state of delight he has never known, having robbed him tauntingly of something else and left him empty. Something is beating so loudly, so emptily inside him. He longs to rush to wherever she is, with those eyes and that laughter, and to spin round and laugh with her, only with her, holding her hand and exclaiming, “Duchesse! Duchesse!”

Sexual Hygiene. The brochure has been hidden by his parents and long ago forgotten in the wall of heavy, clever books where one day he notices a kind of gap and peeps in, as if at someone’s command, and makes it his secret. Childish bedwetting? Wet dreams? Fantasies? Making them his secret. And then: naked bodies, silky white skin, vulnerable nakedness like a butterfly, a whole flock of butterflies, fluttering, throwing off their light summer dresses. With bated breath, you can peep through a gap between the planks which, like a fence, separate the girls’ changing room from the one in which they, the boys, are hiding.

A few years later, a dog-eared, blurred black-and-white photograph which, even while showing it, they hide like criminals: a naked woman. She has been clandestinely re-photographed from pornographic playing cards, easy to hide and copy on scraps of photographic paper. One of the bigger boys showed him it in the courtyard. He gave him a glimpse, then hid it away, laughing. She must have existed somewhere, that woman, probably a prostitute, at some time, in some country. She had no face, like death. One image from a deck of cards like that. She happened his way and became his first woman, because at that moment, glancing at her, he felt desire. It stayed with him, and he hid it away as something shameful among his most secret thoughts. That blurred mound of flesh teased his imagination. It was not shameful, it was frightening, as dying is frightening, except that this death was always sweet. He could not exist without its convulsions, even without knowing anything of feminine caresses or beauty.

Oh, beauty and lessons about beauty! Debauched by his own imagination, he had only to grow older to be seduced by beauty. The man who wanted to teach a schoolboy to fall in love with beauty, who gave his lessons the flowery title of “Lessons in Beauty”, who called drawing, “learning beauty”, seduced him into something else. How many beautiful women’s bodies taught him to admire their beauty! Aged fourteen, – feeling what if not the longing for love? – he read Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant. Love beckoned, and he peeped, as if through a gap in the pages, but now he was learning and all of a sudden understood what it was he so wanted: to undress a woman. You undress a woman, you take off her clothes and, if she has let you get that far, it means she consents.

A girl in his class. He undressed her like pulling the wings off a butterfly but could do nothing, as if what he held in his hands was a log, or perhaps his hands were wooden and felt nothing, even in the places she allowed them to go. They thought love was when you take your clothes off and kiss. Can they really still have been that innocent? Were his teachers equally innocent, and all those great artists and writers who knew all about love, who tasted its fruits, but were paralysed in the face of their own knowledge?

It was not his fault, but he felt an aversion to the girl. Perhaps she too felt an aversion to him. He hated her seeing him bare, and even undressing her, touching her, and seeing her: her unfeeling, pale little corpse-like body, as if got ready for death. They put their clothes back on, bashfully, unspeaking, and ran off, pretending not to remember anything about each other. They felt they had lost, not modesty or anything like that, just that memory. Perhaps too they had lost any feeling for each other, perhaps that was what he lost in such an easy, ugly way with her, relieved by losing it of any sense of embarrassment or of his own inadequacy. And perhaps, without knowing it, he had relieved her, not physically, of course, because her body had remained intact, but spiritually, of the same thing?

At the VD clinic he found a sign which read, “Priority in this queue for WWII veterans”. His soul was maturing, swelling with tenderness, afraid, waiting, but right there in that queue an end was put to its agonies. He found it ludicrously funny, although he was still disturbed by the thought, also ludicrously funny and childish, about who and how he would have to show his shameful, diseased appendage. He was worried too that his misconduct might be reported to his college.

“Underpants down to your knees. Take hold of your penis.” Inspection of said penis by the doctor, then questions: Who had he had sexual relations with? He did not, of course, tell them where he was studying or the woman’s name, but then, nobody tortured or even threatened him. He felt disgusted by her, but not sorry, any more than he felt sorry for those others she had infected before him or might infect after him. He was old enough to see that those who infect are more guilty than those infected, and that it was they who needed to be identified and traced. No, he had not had sex with anybody since. Or, in fact, before. This voluntary confession put an end to further questioning from the doctor, and he escaped with only having to sign a statement which had no consequences. Under dictation he wrote, “I, so and so, had casual sexual relations by mutual consent with a woman unknown to me.”

Now everything was over, he could think back and see dispassionately what had happened. The last few weeks before his mother would be back. While she was away and he was living alone in the apartment. A different, short time to be spent. A women with whose body he fell in love.

He could have remained the invisible man, looking, studying every last mole on it. It could have been like that, or it might not have been her but someone else. But the invisible and the visible met. An elongated body, sexless, scrawny, as if it had extended but chosen not to mature. The almost child-like bones were not concealed in her round shoulders or hips which were already becoming heavier. The dress came off, leaving its pale shadow already outlined by suntan. Swarthy, pallid, flesh pink. Everything exposed, even a delicate, downy cleft on the back of her head, underneath thick black hair gathered up like a winding sheet. The body became motionless, fossilized, briefly re-animated only when, with a single swift gesture, she mopped glistening streams of sweat trickling, as if from a spring, down her forehead and abdomen.

The lessons were long over and exams were beginning. The studios were a devastated unoccupied lecture theatre in which even the linoleum had been ripped off the floor and everything removed in readiness for redecoration which had come to a halt. People came just out of interest. Anyone could pay and come in. They paid and took up their positions along the walls. The windows were wide open, but in these spacious premises there was no relief from the mugginess, and her skin became covered with sweat as they watched.

Drawing lessons. Nude models, male and female. He wandered into the college, saw the notice, and then this female being, or nude, which took its clothes off in front of an audience. He had been only too eager to pay, but could not stop feeling worried.

He would bring them home, but get nowhere. The ones he met on the street or anywhere they offered themselves, lonely, and also looking for someone, hoping.

She found him. She just turned up. The model noticed him only after several sessions, when he moved to sit directly opposite her, only pretending to be drawing. She noticed him because, if before he had hidden behind her back or off to one side, now he was staring straight at her. She stood without embarrassment on her platform in front of a class of fully dressed strangers and paid no attention to her surroundings, her eyes downcast. Even when the head of the studio unwaveringly demonstrated the mistakes and subtleties of their work on the model herself, running the blunt end of a pencil over her body, her face registered calm indifference, as if she was not even feeling the contact. She changed her pose, each session adopting whichever one the tutor wanted from her. After several hours of remaining motionless, at the end of the session she came to life, covered herself with her arms, and retreated behind a plywood partition. The group dispersed, and some who knew each other discussed their drawings, smoked and hung about because there was nothing to do when they got back to their floors in the hostel. She re-appeared, darted towards the stairs evidently in a hurry to get away, but suddenly came over, avidly asking someone for a cigarette. Someone who seemed to know her.

He heard her voice, rather coarse and sounding unwell. She glanced in his direction and said meaningfully, with a nod towards his drawings, “Want to let me see?” She puffed doggedly, greedily, at her cigarette, blowing the cigarette smoke away from his work, peering intently at the drawing before quickly exhaling. “Good.” Behind her someone laughed. Perhaps the solemnity of the pronouncement amused them, or they just found her comical.

“So long, boys!”

Her heels clattered on the stairs, as if a hard little ball was rolling down behind her.

The students gossiped.

“I don’t like her flesh. It looks like rotting meat.”

“She thinks she’s quite something, but what’s so difficult about stripping off and standing still?”

“She’s on the make. Didn’t you know? Flunked the entrance exams last year, got a job in the dean’s office. Puts herself about there, stands about here. She just wants another go.”