He was already coughing a little as he spoke, but the real onslaught came as we began walking again. Barking and choking, which gave him the pitiful appearance of an old dog emptying its lungs of the last of its rages. I stood there helplessly, not knowing how to come to his aid, nor what to say, embarrassed and ashamed, as one always is when confronted by a person taken ill out in the street.
We had stopped on a badly paved slope, flanked by old wooden houses. At the bottom of the incline, beyond the luminous tracery of willow groves, the river could be seen glittering. Slabs of ice still clung to the banks. From time to time a cloud hid the sun and then the landscape was reminiscent of the start of winter …
For a moment Ress managed to control his coughing, raised his head, and, with what looked to me like a blind stare, took in the slope, the riverbank, the willows. His words came in feverish gasps.
“Yes, they’ll always … be there … those three categories … dozing swine … cynics … and sourpusses with ruined lungs … like me …”
The cough started again and suddenly the hand he pressed to his lips was filled with red. With clumsy urgency he took out a handkerchief and I saw the fabric was already spotted with blood. A fresh spasm in his chest caused a dark clot to erupt from his mouth, then another. I hastened to offer him my handkerchief …
A telling detaiclass="underline" that silk square had been given to me by a girlfriend. Such a gift would seem incongruous today, but was evidently not unusual in the Russia of those years, and this brings home to me the almost cosmic gap that separates us from that period. But that day, as I watched Ress wiping his lips, it was the man’s own past that I was speculating on: “He’s not had many chances to be loved …” Long spells of hard labor, the painful slowness with which a prisoner’s life is then rebuilt, and already another arrest, and very soon health too ravaged for any hope of a new lease on life, born of some fresh encounter, a new dream, a love affair.
He was still bent double, overcome by the lashing of the cough, the handkerchief crushed against his mouth. With the ugly stance of a drunkard overcome by nausea. Disconcerted, I would from time to time stammer a useless reassurance: “It’ll calm down soon … You just need a glass of cold water …” With an intensity I had never before experienced, I sensed the atrocious injustice of life, or History, or perhaps God, at all events the cruelty of this world’s indifference toward a man spitting out his blood into a silk handkerchief. A man who had never had the time to be in love.
Half the sky was already laden with clouds. A scattering of snow-flakes began to float over the rooftops, weaving a swirl of white at the end of the street. In the far distance beyond the river, the light remained dazzling, springlike, as if that morning’s motley parade were continuing over there, leaving us all alone in this little sloping street. The snow, this last snow of the year, brought with it alleviation, a fresh, deeper perspective, the silent harmony of all we could see. This silence also came from Ress getting his breath back at last, a rhythm of short, ever calmer exhalations.
His voice, freed now from the urge to argue or convince, sounded like an echo coming from a time when all he was saying would seem obvious.
“Three categories … The conciliators, the cynics, the rebels … But there are … There are also those who have the wisdom to pause in an alleyway like this and watch the snow falling. Notice a lamp being lit in a window. Inhale the scent of burning wood. This wisdom, only a tiny minority among us know how to live by it. In my case, I’ve found it too late. I’m only just getting to know it. Often, out of habit, I go back to playing the old roles. I did it just now, when I was making fun of those poor wretches on their platform. They’re blind. They’ll die having never seen this beauty.”
What we could see was humble, gray, very poor. Houses from the previous century, their roofs bristling with dead stalks here and there. The dull air was reminiscent of dusk in November, on the brink of winter. We were in May, the whole city was busy with preparations for the festive meal, and the sun’s brutal gaiety would return. But the beauty was there in this moment adrift between seasons. All it took was these pale colors, the untimely chill of the snow, the poignant memory of so many past winters suddenly awakened. This beauty merged into our breathing, all we had to do was to forget who we thought we were.
I do not know the precise circumstances of Ress’s death, whether there was any friendly, or at least solicitous, presence with him at the end. I have my own excuses, which are the best I can come up with: travel, work, and the difficulty of remaining in contact with someone who, like him, did not even have a telephone. Besides, we had never really been close; he was “a friend of a friend of a friend.”
Today, more than a quarter of a century later, as I try to remember Ress and try, as we all do from time to time in addressing people now departed or dead, to embark on a conversation where his voice might join me, what returns to me is a scattered sequence of days, from long before he and I ever met, days going back to my childhood, to my youth. They come to life again in my memory, thanks to Ress’s words spoken then, his lips still stained with blood. Strangely enough, it is these glimpses of the past that offer the best response to his tortured tones. Perhaps because they were moments of tenderness lived through long, long ago, moments of love such as he himself had no time for in his life.
In these words, now silently addressed to Ress, what matters to me is letting him know he was right. We are all capable of stepping aside from the sheep-like procession of parades, with their fanatical chanting, their crushing emblems, their lies.
What matters is contriving to say this without betraying the broken voice of that man who, in one of the camps, was given the nickname of “Poet.”
TWO. She Set Me Free from Symbols
She was not the first woman to have dazzled me with her beauty, with the patient strength of her love. She was, however, the first to reveal to me that a woman with love in her heart no longer belongs to our world but from it creates another one where she dwells, sovereign, untouched by the restless greed of everyday life. Yes, an extraterrestrial.
And to think that our encounter took place upon a stage set devised to represent a life devoid of love!
The symbols used by officialdom are designed to affect our mental state. When we take part in a mass spectacle, each modest self gains the strength of ten, our voices ring out, amplified by the anthems and the brass bands’ din, the long view of History helps our fear of death to fade. In the trompe l’oeil of propaganda each emblem conjures up a road to be followed, a meaning to life, a future. Yes, existential tranquilizers, metaphysical antidepressants.
As a child I was not remotely aware of this, and yet these addictive symbols were already having their effect on me. They camouflaged the deprivation we lived in, which would be hard to describe today, amid a plethora of convenient, disposable objects. The world I and my comrades saw was transparent with poverty: an iron bed in a dormitory, clothes that, as we grew out of them, were passed on to our juniors, a single pair of shoes, too hot in summer, too thin during the cold weather, which, in those regions of the middle Volga, persisted bitterly right into April. One pen (to be precise, a little rod with a nib holder at the tip of it), a few notebooks, no books other than those we borrowed from the library, no money, no personal possessions, no means of communicating with the outside world.