What are you talking about! At work I deal with stories you could never even imagine, but you know I’ve gotten used to it and I do my job. One man, for instance, quarreled with his wife and slaughtered her and their two children with the bread knife. The older was four and the younger was an infant. Then he came to his senses and started to slit his own veins, and while he was bleeding, he set fire to the apartment and jumped out the window. Another forced his daughter to sleep with him, and that very night she killed him with an ax. A third beat his brother to death with a log because they couldn’t figure out how to divide up the house they’d inherited. A fourth tortured twins, neighbor children, raped them, poked out their eyes, and left them to die in an abandoned cellar—and then went through the worry with their parents, acted outraged, and took part in the searches, until they happened to expose him. You wake up, have breakfast, get ready for work, and you already know what’s going to happen. One man choked his own mother with a stocking and carried the body to the outhouse piece by piece, and I said to him: “Please sign here!” And so it goes, day after day, year after year. If it’s not Peter, it’s Nikolai; if it’s not the doting father, it’s the loving son. Tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, a hundred years from now. The words, even those are the same: I didn’t see it. I wasn’t there. It wasn’t me. Nor is the charge ever very originaclass="underline" “consumed by an unquenchable thirst for gain,” “blinded by envy, tormented by his awareness of being a nobody,” “the scum, having lost all humanity, to satisfy a moment’s fancy,” “after foully taking advantage of the helplessness of his father, who was crippled by paralysis,” “who for twenty years cleverly and perfidiously concealed his criminal essence under a mask of decency.” And the defense babbles on the same way: “made desperate by the hopelessness and pointlessness of his pitiful existence;” “having no other way to defend his profaned honor;” “being a victim of a prison education—since if you’re born in prison all you’ve seen around you since childhood is rapists and murderers;” “Yes, blood was spilled, and the instrument of murder is before you, but look at the remorse this unfortunate man has shown! Instead of convicting him, share the grief of a man who murdered his own son!”; “My God, even you must have been thoroughly oiled and felt a wild, half-bestial, half-childish desire to take revenge on someone for your good-for-nothing, betrayed life, for all the agonies and injustices, for everything you’ve suffered at the hands of people near and far, God, and your own self. Haven’t you?” They do things even they can’t imagine, and I tell them, Write, now, to keep from losing your mind, write a final word not in some lapidary cursive but, say, an elegant, bubbly Rondo, in blurred letters that repeat, but the verdict is in a littera fractura with flourishes, or Gothic logjams, or Batard, or Coulé, or whatever strikes your fancy, one page like this, another like that. Even if you only write one word, to say nothing of a page, make it harmony itself, so that its regularity and beauty offset that whole crazy world, that whole caveman mindset. Why just today they convicted someone who had poisoned her husband, a drunkard and a brawler, someone the long-suffering household members may have needed to be freed from long ago because their children are cretins, monsters. She tried to hang herself in her cell, but they cut her down and at the hearing she said, “Do whatever you want. You’re nobody to me because I’m still going to kill myself. I’m not going to live, and the Highest Court will vindicate me, because I’m fed up with living.” That’s what she said. But our presiding judge said, “But you see, dear, that’s us. We are the Highest Court, and whether you are or aren’t fed up is not for you to decide!” But she kept up her muttering: “I’m fed up with this life of yours.” That’s what I wrote: fed up. Невтерпёж! What that one word costs! Just try it! The primitive
H may not merit special mention. Its crossbar is written on a slant in a single stroke. You place the tip of your pen at the beginning, then bend your fingers right away, and the pen itself pulls you down, but the main thing here is the pressure. God forbid you press too hard or lift too much because the line isn’t supposed to breathe! The flamelike shape—because it does resemble a tongue of flame—bends first to the left, then the right. It gets fatter in the middle and dwindles to nil at the ends. On the third beat the stick has a curve at the bottom. The first five sections of the line are drawn straight, but on the sixth the pressure eases up and the line, rounding, drifts off to the right, ending at the invisible line that confines each letter to its allotted space, its cell, you might say. Below, where the stick curves, between the imagined field of the cell and the tip of the line it contains, you get an empty corner. After the curve the fine line goes up—not straight up but in an arc—bending slightly to the right so as not to lose contact with the page and break through to the ё, a cunning ninny, unprepossessing to look at, but demanding caution and deft treatment in order to achieve the desired end. After the clumsy, snub-nosed H, the e requires a light, graceful line that begins with an eyelash stroke and a bend to the right, cuts across the middle evenly on an incline, flies back after the bend, nearly grazing the ceiling of its chamber, and as it falls back in its noose rushes into the half-oval with pressure on the left side; moreover the bend of the capillary outline is hidden in the half-oval but is not left behind. After a break the pen heads all the way to the upper corner of the next cell. The merest tremble or thickening could instantly destroy the illusion of this free soaring, which takes a drastic gain in altitude to become a в. The secret essence of this spindleleg lies by no means in the spaces that run through it from top to bottom but in the concluding, unremarkable, but danger-laden sign-off loop beyond which the m is already twitching impatiently. Here it’s important not to be too hasty in imprinting the tightening loop but to wait for the loop to turn almost into a period. Then you can rush headlong into three holes in a row, returning happily once again to the e, p, and n, which is hardly a letter, just a г on a stick. But onward, onward, to the very end and the ж, that amazing, anthropod peahen, the only one that falls into a full five beats! There’s something of the two-headed eagle to it and at the same time its soft half-ovals sit firmly on the line, like on a perch. It seems to clamp an unraveling world together—heaven and earth, east and west. It’s elegant, perfect, and sufficient unto itself. And now, if the hand was true, if the pen didn’t shake once, if everything came together, then, you won’t believe it, a miracle takes place at my desk! A sheet of ordinary paper breaks free and rises above events! Its perfection immediately yields an alienation, a hostility even, toward all that exists, toward nature itself, as if another, higher world, a world of harmony, had wrested this space from that kingdom of worms! They may hate and kill each other, betray and hang themselves there, but it’s all just raw material for my penmanship, fodder for beauty. And during those astounding minutes, when you feel like writing nonstop, you experience a strange, inexpressible feeling. Truly, this is happiness!