Both the former and the latter ultimately came to rest in caskets; the caskets crumbled to dust deep beneath the earth yet the pain remained on the surface: in stuffy bedrooms, in pubs on the corner, in sofas on which they used to sit, in drawers where their letters were kept. Eventually the day came when the sofas were chopped up for firewood; a stray shell released the letters from their drawers. Paper turned to ashes, windowpanes shattered, door frames and tiled stoves were smashed to pieces. But this too failed to stop the pain. For pain does not belong to those who experience it but rather they belong to it. Taking into its possession successive tradesmen, clerks and poets, it fills all interiors to the very ceiling.
Many tried to flee from it, surreptitiously taking advantage of the fact that every unaired room contains broad plains over which great clouds sail past, and endless tracts across which coaches drawn by galloping horses deliver documents that bear a two-headed eagle on their seals. Certain inhabitants of this city desired space so badly that they abandoned the city forever. They were sucked in by the wide-open spaces of boundless fields, which in order to exist needed the tracks of the railroad that spread from year to year, from station to station, to the very end, where it transpired there was no way back. They began to wander aimlessly about St. Petersburg, great in its golden frame, where beneath the shiny varnish it is dark in the winter for as much as twenty hours a day. Or Moscow, where the streets were paved with wood that may have been real or may have been made from lacquered building blocks. They even traveled as far as Tula, which was tall and had a brass tap to let out boiling water, and also to Omsk and Tomsk, where in the summertime they float wood down the river and in winter they are chilled to the marrow. And to Astrakhan — that storehouse of ice and skins — where caviar is eaten by the spoonful and champagne drunk straight from the bottle. At the feet of a good few of these lost travelers, somewhere at the meeting point of steppe and sea there opened up a dark abyss by the name of Odessa, filled with sailors, bandits, officers and femmes fatales, washed over beyond salvation by waves of epidemics and filled forever with the echo of shots. Some did not stop till Baku, where blood flows like rainwater in the streets, or Khabarovsk, where White Army soldiers without boots lie on the white snow. Or Vladivostok, that last station in the world, toward which tracks that previously ran straight as an arrow begin to describe the first loop of a spiral. The next loop rests on Harbin, where Chinese in felt shoes wade through snowdrifts. Subsequent loops are no longer visible; one has only to hold on ever more tightly on the curves. Saved or lost, people sucked into the vortex were swept into the interior of memories and began to live as the recollections of others, endlessly repeating their former gestures. Younger than they were in their youth, they looked from their nightstands through eyes that saw nothing at alclass="underline" neither the space nor the flames.
The city the inhabitants know is composed of a certain number of elements that have a defined color and shape but do not possess a permanent location. They move about, vanishing then emerging again, like crystals in a kaleidoscope. Here, for nannies minding children there opens up a park surrounded by a cast-iron fence, here a great hotel presents itself, having previously demolished the stables of the light-horse barracks. Somewhere there rises an Orthodox church with a dome like a crystal that till now has been hidden behind others. One day Russian lettering disappears from the shop signs and is replaced with Gothic script. The streets bear now one set of names, now another. The statues on the plinths change; the fountain in the square is pulled down because an underground passageway is being built, and reappears many years later in a different place. The crystals move about in disorder, and it is only the arrangement of the mirrors that creates the illusion of regular, perfectly symmetrical wholes in which the element of the accidental temporarily acquires the status of principal structural component. The city is a work of the eyes. In them as in mirrors the random configurations of colored crystals are reflected and thus acquire symmetry and sense. A scratch on the glass, an unforeseen glint, a speck of dust, subjected to the same rule, multiplied and incorporated into the whole, defines the context. It is precisely in this way that Moscow and St. Petersburg appear here and also Paris and Lausanne: as optical illusions produced by blemishes in mirrors. It goes without saying that even the slightest movement of the elements must lead to significant changes in Paris and St. Petersburg. The shadow of a mote of dust on the mirror is sufficient for the cancan to begin in the cabarets; it may also alter the cut of full-length overcoats. Not to mention a good shake, which makes the crystals pile up and then scatter. The sudden appearance of an inconceivable connecting line between the two railway stations will threaten the equilibrium of the whole. The city, pulled in two directions, will incline dangerously toward Paris, where the Trans-Siberian Railroad is a paper share, one of many noted on the stock exchange, and where every day at dusk the terraces of the cafés are filled with laughing people who have never heard of it.
Many a Paris is inhabited by sentimental residents of St. Petersburg dressed in hotel livery, dexterously pocketing tips and surreptitiously wiping away tears of emotion, while one of the successive St. Petersburgs may turn out to be a provincial backwater completely invisible from beneath another name as beneath thick wrapping paper, a place that the inhabitants of Paris never visit. And yet even the tiniest scrap of wrapping paper amid the crystals of the kaleidoscope would suffice for the whole to take on a grayish coloration and a gloomy atmosphere, for wrapping paper utterly changes the properties of light.
It is possible to imagine a city perfect in its entirety, a city that is the sum of all possibilities. In it nothing is missing and nothing can perish; every china teacup comes from somewhere and is destined for somewhere. But precisely this absolute city is eaten away by the sickness of never-ending disasters. Change invariably brings confusion to the lives of the inhabitants. One has to pay attention so as not to drive accidentally onto a bridge that was demolished years ago, so as not to sit on the terraces of torn-down cafés once known for their unparalleled doughnuts. Long hours can be wasted waiting at the stops of long-canceled tram routes if one does not notice at once that the rails have been covered over with asphalt. One has to remember carefully where walls have been put up that once were not there. Crossing a market square filled with carts and horses with bags of oats round their necks, it is best not to forget about the nature of apartment buildings and about the opaqueness and firmness of their interior walls. That which one can bump into and hurt oneself on from a certain perspective is more real than the fleeting landscapes seen by a gaze turned in on the interior of the memory. The present moment slips through the fingers of the inhabitants of the city of changes; they must thus live by means of the past. They merely try not to knock their heads against the walls out of nostalgia for that which is no longer. They realize that it is not the walls that block their view. Even if they destroyed them with their gaze the marketplace with its horses and carts still would not return to its place. They would have too much to lose, considering that the alleyways, transparent as air, made by the cuboids that form an invisible frontage would be filled with a vacuum that with a whistle would suck in crumpled newspapers, umbrellas, hats, and recollections.
Lesser wholes can be more easily encompassed with the gaze. Every one of the supplementary cities hovers freely in space, as weightless and incorporeal as an image in a kaleidoscope. They are not linked by pipes or cables through which substance or energy could flow. They neither appear nor disappear, nor change into one another. Each exists for itself and is closed in on itself — and nothing in them ever changes. It is precisely because they endure so immutably that there has to be so many of them. But observers, who cannot get by without ordering events in their memory, try to combine them into a single whole so as to restore to the world its continuity and its consequentiality, its cause and effect. It is because of them that what is new becomes old and what is clean becomes dirty. The city seen by the observers is a place in which today’s dust falls on yesterday’s dust, in which bread goes stale, water dries up and iron rusts. There statues are erected and knocked down, while streets bear now one name, now a different one. The city woven from changes is a stage for perpetual entrances and exits that deteriorates a little more with every day, a place of losing and finding, breaking and mending, birth and death.