My father flicked a puff off his sweaty face and shielded himself from the sun with a newspaper.
Quickly, get in quickly, it’s about to move, any minute now. The train sailed past the Andronikov Monastery, whipped by the oncoming wind.
Would you like me to tell you what’s out the window right now? Can’t you feel it when the knocking of the wheels changes? First we were going over an embankment, now we’re in a hollow. Going down and down. Look, what did I tell you? A tunnel.”
At a station where we waited an hour, a garbage can was smoking.
You can feel the heat subsiding. Zhenya, Roman, let’s have dinner. In the morning we’ll be home.
The paperclip Roman used to mark his place in his book had gone missing.
Where are you going, Zhenya? It’s only a five-minute stop.
I’m going to stretch my legs. Don’t worry, I have time.
They were selling cherries and steaming potatoes on the platform. Out of a big kettle, so when the lid was lifted, steam spilled out.
Mika poked her head out the window, waved, and smiled.
Zhenya, it’s time. Or you’ll be left behind.
It’s all right, Aunt Mika, there’s still time.
The train blew its whistle and was enveloped in steam like a potato. The cars jerked in a chain. Slowly, Mika started moving.
Zhenya, what does this mean? Zhenya, how can this be?
The suitcases, Aunt Mika! Send my suitcases!
What about Roman? How could you? How could you?
She returned the next morning, but she didn’t go home. She went there.
She opened up with the same key. It was dark in the entry. She turned on the light. Hanging on the coatrack was the same coat with the mother of pearl buttons. She grabbed one and pulled hard. The button flew apart. She tore another off, taking fabric with it.
Alexei Pavlovich came out of the bathroom with bare, wet arms.
Zhenya? What happened? Vera Lvovna’s here washing…What’s the matter with you?
Everything’s fine. There is no light or dark.
What?
Let’s go.
She took him by the hand and led him into his room.
What’s wrong with you?
She fell on the bed.
Something heavy slapped on the bathroom floor.
She held him tightly, squeezed him with all her might, held her palms hard to his shuddering, bumpy back.
She began to laugh, drinking in life.
Language Saved
When I arrived in the city of Joyce for the first time, I went straight from the train station to the Fluntern cemetery. The streetcar was full to the last stop. Everyone got off at the cemetery and headed with me down the path between the gravestones in the direction indicated by the arrow: “To James Joyce.” I felt uneasy. The closer we got to Joyce’s grave, the more numerous the procession became. The burial site was surrounded by an already packed crowd—and on a work day, not an anniversary of any kind.
I had always assumed that the author of Ulysses was more respected in the West than in my homeland, but this…
Shaken, I looked for some catch, only to find it immediately, unfortunately. They were burying Elias Canetti, who had asked to be laid to rest alongside the great blind man.
Canetti begins Tongue Set Free (whose original title could also be rendered as “Language Saved”) with his first childhood memory. At two, someone frightened him (his nanny’s lover, as would become clear many years later), by rapping his penknife and joking villainously, “And now we’ll cut out his tongue!” The fear of being rendered tongueless would pursue the child, adolescent, youth, and writer for many years. His whole life.
I experienced something similar when I saw the generously daubed backdrop of the Alps. The fear of being left tongueless. Swiss German clanged all around me.
Later, everything fell into place.
Actually, it was quite simple: I had to set my own language free so that my language could save me. I began writing my novel all over again, but in a different way and about something else.
It had just become more obvious that I had to write purely and clearly.
One expects a highly inflected language such as Russian to come in twos, like livestock or people, and to count off: one-two, one-two; translate this, don’t translate that. Moreover, in translation, what can be translated doesn’t so much get translated as mutate.
Say any word, the most inoffensive, the most objective, for instance, “scholarship,” and misunderstanding immediately sets in. It is one thing for a scholar here to study agricultural relations in the fifteenth century in the Canton of Glarus, where five hundred years later the land still belongs to the same family. It is quite another to talk about private ownership of land there, where that kind of scholarship is fuel to the fire of a future civil war.
So it is for any word in the dictionary.
The experience of a language and the life lived through it turns languages with different pasts into noncommunicating vessels. The past that lives in words does not yield to translation, especially that Russian past which was never a fact but always an argument in the endless war the nation has waged against itself.
Each word individually and all words taken together only exacerbate the impossibility of interlingual understanding and horizontal communication. Ever since the Tower of Babel, the task of language has been to misunderstand.
The art of Russian speech has its own bottled up aroma, ingredients inherent only to the substance of Russian literature. The story of Bloom’s first and last day can be translated into Russian, but Joyce’s text rejects our national language’s substance. The words’ blood curdles. There can only be a “Russian Ulysses” with a “little man’s soul” à la Leskov.
The students in the Zurich Slavic seminar read Kharms (with a dictionary and delight), but it’s not the same Kharms. The Swiss Kharms is about something else. Ours is Platonov’s identical twin. Their words, their Russian substance, cast on the Alpine wind, are pure and clear.
The absurd of OBERIU—the Russian Futurists’ Association of Real Art—is an extension of Akaky Akakievich realism in a country where war and throwing old women out windows is simply a way of life. The most absurd and Kharmsian text cannot help but become the very megaphone through which old women squawk before slamming into the pavement.
This is a healthy disease; you can live with it until you die. Its causes rest partly in genetic predisposition, partly in birth trauma.
You have only to cast an eye over the stages in the great journey of our nation’s chicken-scratches. First came the epaulets, ribbons, and odes on ascension. After plodding along for not very long, Russian letters retired, basically. It read at its leisure and, when it had recovered its sight, it swelled from a sense of its own importance. And wrapped itself up toga-fashion in Gogol’s overcoat. Henceforth and ever after, Pushkin’s seraph from his famous poem “Prophet” would lie in wait in some vacant lot or on the Swallow Hills, where Herzen and Ogarev made their famous vow to each other, and crush the balls of anyone writing in Russian, twist his arms behind his back, rip out the fleshy organ that delivers food to the teeth, as Dal’s dictionary defines it, and whisper: Rise up, see, hear, and burn!
In line with his era’s tastes and the stench of circumstances, a prophet can reveal himself anywhere, even to hardened convicts stashing novels under plank beds, the way poets did trying to survive the Gulag. And this can in no way alter his status: what a seraph gives only a seraph can take away.