She raised her head and saw that the translucent people flying above her were strong and free, and she understood that she too could fly in just the same way. Then she slowly came back down, without having tried out all the possible delights.
This flying was not at all like the flight of birds: there was no flapping of wings, no fluttering, no aerodynamics, just an effort of the spirit.
Another time the angel taught her the techniques of a special verbal intellectual wrestling which does not exist in our world. It was as if you had a word in your hand which was a weapon. He put it in her hand, smooth and comfortable in her palm. He turned her hand, and a sharp ray of meaning glinted out of it. Immediately two opponents appeared, one to the right and above her and the second to the left and slightly below her. Both of them were practiced and dangerous enemies, skilled in this martial art. One glinted at her, and she gave a riposte. The second came in close and directed a quick blow at her, but in some miraculous way she managed to deflect it.
There was a razor-sharp dialogue in these attacks, untranslatable but completely clear in its meaning. Both combatants were ridiculing her, pointing out to her how inferior she was and how hopeless her attempts were to compete with their mastery.
To her growing amazement, however, she deflected every blow and with each new movement discovered that the weapon she held was becoming more intelligent and accurate, and that this combat really did seem closest to the art of fencing. The opponent to the right was more vicious and sarcastic, but retreated. Then the second one backed off too. They were gone, and that meant she had won.
Sobbing openly, she threw herself on her teacher’s breast. He said, “Don’t be afraid. You have seen, nobody can harm us.”
Masha cried even more bitterly because of the terrible weakness which was truly her own, because all the intellectual power with which she had prevailed had not been her own but lent to her by her teacher.
Masha experienced a superhuman freedom and an unearthly joy from this new experience, which came from regions and spaces the angel had revealed to her; but for all the novelty and unimaginableness of what was happening, she intuited that the extremes of pleasure she experienced when she was closest to Butonov derived from the same root and were of the same nature. She wanted to ask the angel about this but he did not let her: when he appeared, she subjected herself to his will eagerly and diligently.
When he disappeared, however, sometimes for several days, she felt very low, as if the joy of his presence had inescapably to be paid for by depression, gloom, emptiness, and miserable monologues addressed to the almost nonexistent Butonov: “So dazzling, the light of Tabor daunts us, but far harder to gaze upon the disk whose empty blackness taunts us through all the following days.”
Masha hesitated over whether to tell Alik about this. She was afraid that, ever the rationalist, he would view the matter in a medical rather than a mystical light. In her case, however, the realm of poetry lay between medicine and mysticism, and there she was the ruler.
She decided to approach him from that direction. Late one evening when the whole house was asleep, she began reading him her latest poems:
“I noticed how, angelic guardian,
your powers were looking after me,
as to the rock of sun-warmed granite
I pressed my head, still all at sea;
When from the depths of Freud’s dominions,
from darkling realms where sleep is host,
a wave propelled me to my kingdom,
like flotsam cast up on a coast.
And, as in concrete and in metal
there nestle empty voids, a thing
both void and strong had come to settle
in my room, an angel’s wing.
I thought I saw my angel weeping:
his heavenly eyes discerned with rue
the gruesomeness of lovers’ sleeping,
and wept for me and wept for you.”
“I think, Masha, that is a very good poem.” Alik was genuinely delighted. This was not one of those occasions when he felt obliged to express approval out of family solidarity.
“It’s the truth, Alik. I mean the poem. It’s not metaphor or imagination. His presence is real.”
“Well, of course, Masha, otherwise creativity of any kind would be impossible. It’s a metaphysical realm—” he began, but she interrupted him: “Oh, no! He comes to me, just like you. He’s taught me to fly and much more that I can’t tell you because it can’t be put into words. But here, listen:
“Behold how strained the seagull’s flight,
ungainly wings’ uncertain beating,
the tensing of her neck a fight
with wind and gravity, a cheating,
not to founder in the waves
while finding food beneath the surface.
Yet, Lord, you promise all the homeless
feathered wings and eyes that see,
in place of rags and penny pieces,
to soar and dance in heaven’s breezes
unrehearsed and faultlessly.”
“It’s such a simple little poem, and you wouldn’t really know from it that I was flying, that I was actually there, where flight is as natural . . . as everything . . .”
“You mean, hallucinations?” Alik asked anxiously.
“Oh no. They aren’t hallucinations. It’s like you, like this table, reality. Only slightly different. I can’t explain. I am like Kitty here.” She stroked the cat. “I know everything, I understand everything, but I can’t express it. Only she doesn’t suffer from that and I do.”
“But Masha, I can tell you everything comes through splendidly in your writing. It really works.”
He was speaking gently and calmly, but he was extremely disturbed. “Is it schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis? I’ll phone Volobuev tomorrow and ask him to see what it is.”
Volobuev, a consulting psychiatrist, was a friend of someone who had been in Alik’s class at the university, and in those times the guildlike community of doctors, a legacy from better times and better traditions, had not yet fallen apart.
But Masha was still reciting, unable now to stop:
“And on that day when free as birds,
transformed by my six-winged translator
beyond the wit of their creator,
burst forth in power my random words,
‘Let me depart’ shall be my supplication,
a coat of many colors consummation