“Everything around us is signs which you can learn to read,” he said, and the world opened like a huge book. The world became alive and immense, it began to throb, breathe, be heard — and all that was external to me, independent of me, here and now, right beside me.
You taught me to trust the Earth, to walk backwards without looking round. You taught me to listen and hear, to look and see. You taught me that the world is greater than we know or can know.
How then is it possible, friend, that you were unable to see something as simple as the ordinary love of a woman?
They suddenly turned into incredibly adult and boring people. They turned into a ball and chain on each other’s legs, trudging wearily with eyes unfocused.
We had already been waiting three days in the city for Sasha who had got stuck somewhere on the road, and meanwhile we were living with Nastya in an apartment piled high with old furniture and smelling of decay. Its owner was an ancient deaf woman who moved from one room to the next like a spider, slowly and silently. She didn’t shuffle and seemed long ago to have become one with the walls, to have dissolved in the shadows, to be part of the dust on the furniture, of the mildew on the ceiling, of the dim lamps, of the books with faded bindings, the paintings, the figurines, the crumbling decor and fittings which retained their value only in the eyes of their mistress.
The old lady is probably no longer in this world, but even then she seemed to be not wholly there. All of us who were temporarily living in her apartment tried not to notice her and treated her like all the other objects in it, with care because they were decrepit, but trying not to come into contact with them more than necessary because they made us squirm. We ignored them because they were irrelevant, because their time had passed. They came from a world to which we did not, and never had, belonged. They were like the glimpse into the past afforded by a faded, yellowed photograph. When I recollect her now the old woman is more alive for me than she ever was when I lived alongside her.
A hearing aid shrieks in her ears. It shrieks incessantly, at very high frequencies, and the louder it shrieks the more quietly we speak or even stop talking altogether. We suspect she turns the sound up the better to eavesdrop on us, the young, the living. We grudge her that. We don’t want to share our strength with this creature which is already crumbling into dust. She sneaks up to closed doors almost inaudibly; she tries to hear the sounds we make, even our breathing.
“Nastya, why is it so quiet in here? Why aren’t your friends talking? Really, Nastya, you know I can’t bear silence,” she says finally, coming in to us. My eardrums cannot bear the squealing of her earpieces.
It is impossible to stay in the apartment so we go out for a walk, but as if fulfilling an obligation or doing a chore. We walk, describing circles through the town until our legs can carry us no longer. Grand and Nastya talk, walking side by side, staring down at the asphalt. I feel like a child next to them. I can’t walk that slow, and run on ahead, play on the swings, chase dogs, make the pigeons fly up in the air. Nastya adopts a pained expression when I come close, so I try to spare her feelings by giving her a wide berth.
“Step on the side and Lenin’s just died,” I murmur a children’s rhyme as I try not to step on the joins in the paving slabs. “Step on a crack and Hitler comes back,” I recite, making the task more difficult, and have to slow down and be even more careful about where I put my feet. Nobody in our kindergarten wanted Hitler to come back. No matter how slowly I try to walk, I still catch up with them.
“So what do you do for a living, when you’re not travelling?” I hear Nastya enquire. “The road is my life.” Grand’s favourite answer. I stop and look around, wondering what to do next. “Walking, walking down the street, thinking where we put our feet,” I recite as I proceed along a kerb, my arms outstretched like a tightrope walker.
“How you’ve changed!” “That’s only natural. You’ve changed too.” “No, somehow you have changed completely.” “My quest hasn’t changed.” “Oh, you and your quests. That’s all so insufferably abstract!” I don’t want to listen to them.
“Zooom, plane coming in to land, request permission to land, charter flight Moscow-Beijing…” I roar past, darting between the passersby and hear from behind me, “Oh, this is impossible. It’s like a kindergarten!”
For Chrissakes, does she think I don’t know what she’s up to? God and all the envoys of light know I know perfectly well, but my role here is to be myself, to be Titch. That is the purpose for which Grand dragged me from one side of Russia to the other. The only question is: how was he able to see that dawn morning on the boulevard that I, sluggish, half-asleep Titch, was the person whose mere appearance would jolt Nastya out of her indifference to him?
She clings to him, doesn’t take her eyes off him. She has measured, weighed, probed him with her eyes, studied him from top to toe to ascertain the differences between the Grand she knew and the Grand who has turned up now with silly, infantile me in tow. She looks at him and tries to figure out what we have in common, how I come to be here with him. She would never just ask him that straight out, so I will carry on playing my role to the end, and then who cares what happens?
Sasha Sorokin will come to the rescue.
Mountains, larch trees, swamps. I never realised you get swamps in the mountains. We trek on, looking where we are treading, seeing only the rucksack of the person in front. Above are branches and a lowering sky, but if you look into the distance you see beyond the forest, rocky ranges as sheer as walls. At their summits there are glaciers. You can’t see them behind the clouds, but I know they are there. That’s why it’s so cold at night.
It has been raining for three days and any time now we will turn into mushrooms, get covered in moss and mildew, and settle down here to live forever. You really don’t want to move. You just want to stay immobile in the tent and sleep, burrowing deep into a warm sleeping bag.
Grand does not allow us that pleasure. He gets us up and forces us to go on, into the rain and the mud. He says that as long as we are on the move we are in some measure heading towards our goal, whereas if we stop we just eat, and our rations are running low.
We trudge through the swamps following a narrow track, not seeing each other, not knowing each other. We are just backs carrying a rucksack, stooped, our feet squelching in the mire. When we stop we say little, and lie down quietly in the tents to sleep. In the morning we get up to go on, and not to see, not to know, never to get to know each other.
Sometimes I stare at the way she walks, at her figure under that rucksack, and when we stop I stare into her eyes. I stare at her, trying to make her out, but her face remains as inscrutable as the bronze faces of Buddhas. Her body is tense and hard and she puts her feet down almost without flexing them. What she wants, what she hopes for is hidden away, sealed. She’s not going to tell anyone, probably not even herself. Sometimes, especially in the light of the campfire, I seem to see her face crumple, to sag into wrinkles, and she begins to look like the old lady with the parchment skin in whose apartment we were living. Nastya had met us by the station and taken us there. She talked incessantly, recalling her time with Grand, once, long ago. As we got to the door she had got to the moment when they parted.