31
Their reading tastes were very catholic, with my mother preferring Russian classics. Neither she nor my father held definite opinions about literature, music, art, although in their youth they knew personally a number of Leningrad writers, composers, painters (Zoshchenko, Zabolotsky, Shostakovich, Petrov-Vodkin). They were just readers— evening readers, to be more precise—and they were always careful to renew their library cards. Returning from work, my mother would invariably have in her string bag full of potatoes or cabbage a library book wrapped in a newspaper cover to prevent it from getting soiled.
It was she who suggested to me when I was sixteen and working at the factory that I register at the city public library; and I don't think she had in mind only to prevent me from loitering about in the streets in the evening. On the other hand, as far as I knew, she wanted me to become a painter. At any rate, the rooms and corridors of that former hospital on the right bank of the Fontanka River were the beginning of my undoing, and I remember the first book I asked for there, on my mother's advice. It was Gulistan (Tile Garden of Roses) by the Persian poet Saadi. My mother, it turned out, was fond of Persian poetry. The next thing that I asked for, on my own, was Maupassant's La Maison Tellier.
489 I In a Room and a Half 32
What memory has in common with art is the knack for selection, the taste for detail. Complimentary though this observation may seem to art (that of prose in particular), to memory it should appear insulting. The insult, however, is well deserved. Memory contains precisely details, not the whole picture; highlights, if you will, not the entire show. The conviction that we are somehow remembering the whole thing in a blanket fashion, the very conviction that allows the species to go on with its life, is groundless. More than anything, memory resembles a library in alphabetical disorder, and with no collected works by anyone.
33
The way other people mark the growth of their children with pencil notches on the kitchen wall, every year on my birthday my father took me out to our balcony and photographed me there. In the background lay a medium-size cobblestone square with the Cathedral of the Savior of Her Imperial Majesty's Transfiguration Battalion. In the war years its crypt was designated a local bomb shelter, and my mother kept me there during air raids, in a big box with remembrance notes. This is one thing that I owe to Orthodoxy, and it has to do with memory.
The cathedral, a six-story-tall classicistic affair, surrounded by a considerable garden full of oak, linden, and maple, was my playground in the postwar years, and I remember my mother collecting me there (she pulls, I stall and scream: an aUegory of cross-purposes) and dragging me home to do homework. With similar clarity I see her, my grandfather, and my father, in one of this garden's narrow alleys, trying to teach me to ride a two-wheel bicycle (an allegory of common goal, or of motion). On the rear, eastern wall of the cathedral, there was, covered with thick glass, a large, dim icon depicting the Transfiguration: Christ floating in the air above a bunch of bodies reclined in fascination. Nobody could explain to me the significance of that pichire; even now I am not sure I grasp it fully. There were a great many clouds in the icon, and somehow I associated them with the local climate.
34
The garden was surrounded by a black cast-iron fence held up by equally spaced groups of cannons standing upside- down, captured by the Transfiguration Battalion's soldiers from the British in the Crimean War. Adding to the decor of the fence, the cannon barrels (a threesome in each case, on a granite block) were linked by heavy cast-iron chains on which children swung wildly, enjoying both the danger of falling on the spikes below and the clang. Needless to say, that was strictly forbidden and the cathedral wardens chased us away all the time. Needless to say, the fence was far more interesting than the inside of the cathedral, with its smell of incense and much more static activity. "See those?" asks my father, pointing at the heavy chain links. "What do they remind you of?" I am in the second grade, and I say, "They are like figure eights." "Right," he says. "And do you know what the figure eight is a symbol of?" "Snakes?" "Almost. It is a symbol of infinity." "What's infinity?" "That you had better ask in there," says my father with a grin, his finger pointed at the cathedral.
35
Yet it was he who, having bumped into me on the street in broad daylight when I was skipping school, demanded an explanation, and, being told that I was suffering from an awful toothache, took me straight to the dental clinic, so that I paid for my lies with two hours of straight terror. And yet again it was he who took my side at the Pedagogical Council when I was about to be expelled from my school for disciplinary problems. "How dare you! You who wear the uniform of our Army!" "Navy, madam," said my father. "And I defend him because I am his father. There is nothing surprising about it. Even animals defend their young. Even Brehm says so." "Brehm? Brehm? I ... I wili inform the Party organization of your outfit." Which she, of course, did.
36
"On your birthday and on the New Year you must always put on something absolutely new. At least, socks"—this is the voice of my mother. "Always eat before going to see somebody superior: your boss or your officer. That way youl have some edge." (This is my father speaking.) "If you've just left your house and have to return because you forgot something, take a look in the mirror before you leave the house again. Else you may encounter-trouble." (She again.) "Never think how much you've spent. Think how much you can make." (That's him.) "Don't you ever walk in town without a jacket." "It's good that you are red-haired, no matter what they say. I was a brunette, and brunettes are a better target."
I hear these admonitions and instructions, but they are fragments, details. Memory betrays everybody, especially those whom we knew best. It is an ally of oblivion, it is an ally of death. It is a fishnet with a very small catch, and with the water gone. You can't use it to reconstruct anybody, even on paper. What's the matter with those reputed millions of cells in our brain? What's the matter with Pasternak's "Great god of love, great god of details"? On what number of details must one be prepared to settle?
37
I see their faces, his and hers, with great clarity, in the variety of their expressions—but these are fragments also: moments, instances. These are better than photographs with their unbearable laughter, and yet they are as scattered. At limes, I begin to suspect my mind of trying to produce a cumulative, generalized image of my parents: a sign, a formula, a recognizable sketch; of trying to make me settle for these. I suppose I could, and I fully realize how absurd the grounds of my resistance are: these fragments' lack of continuum. One shouldn't expect so much from memory; one shouldn't expect a film shot in the dark to develop new images. Of course not. Still, one can reproach a film shot in the daylight of one's life for missing frames.
493 I 1 ii a Room and a Half 38
Presumably the whole point is that there should be no continuum: of anything. That failures of memory are but a proof of a living organism's subordination to the laws of nature. No life is meant to be preserved. Unless one is a pharaoh, one doesn't aspire to become a mummy. Granted the objects of one's recollection possess this sort of sobriety; this may reconcile one to the quality of one's memory. A normal man doesn't expect anything to continue; he expects no continuity even for himself or his works. A normal man doesn't remember what he had for breakfast. Things of a routine, repetitive nature are meant to be forgotten. Breakfast is one; the loved ones is another. The best thing to do is to attribute this to economy of space.