In one diner some truckers joined us and asked the usual questions. They asked why we did it. What was the pleasure, what did we get out of it? We gave them the same answers: it was interesting to see new places and people, and Grand added that we just liked moving on.
“Well, why don’t you come and work as a trucker if you like being on the road so much,” they said. They were hulking young guys who had arrived on the autobahn, and what every hitch-hiker knows about autobahn drivers is that they never stop to give lifts. “No, it’s something quite different,” Grand said quietly, and I agreed. “You’re strange people,” they replied. “We at least get paid. Like hell we would go on the road if we weren’t getting paid.”
“It’s no surprise they don’t understand us,” Grand said afterwards. “They and we are at opposite ends of the spectrum, but for all that, we and they are travelling the same road. We and they together are the road. Do you see now why we have to love everybody?”
His smile just got bigger and bigger and he looked happy. Something had obviously occurred to him, but right then there was nobody feeling more disconsolate than me. That hateful question: ‘Why?’ which was so capable of devaluing everything, hovered over the world for me and I found it very unclear how one should live a good life. I tried to imagine how and what people live by, and could not. All the values that seemed self-evident in cities, after just two months on the road ceased to be meaningful. Looking back, I could see how they could all be arranged like links in a chain, explaining one thing by another. I tried to trace it back. Perhaps somewhere you could see what really makes life worth living, but I couldn’t find the ends. Education led to a job, a job to money, money to prosperity, prosperity to a family, a family to children, children to… Where was the ultimate goal? After all, I knew now that you can live without money, without a home, without supplies. What really matters is to radiate joy and be good people. But turning to the world, I saw that everything in it was arranged differently, and I wanted to stand and face it, close my eyes and shout very loudly indeed: “Stop!” To make them all stop, and then ask just one big question: “What’s this all for?”
A lot of time has passed since then, and although I don’t know the answer to this question for sure, I sometimes think I am getting closer to unravelling it. It’s as if something suddenly opens inside me, everything becomes crystal clear and I have no more questions. Then I remember Grand’s smile in the diner and his words, “We and they are travelling the same road. Do you see now why we have to love everybody?”
This happened for the first time in late autumn, long after the adventure with Sergey. He had moved out but Sonya Muginshteyn still occasionally came back to collect her remaining items. Then one day when she came, she unexpectedly invited me to a concert she was playing at. “We will be a trio,” she said. “Come if you’re interested.”
I was surprised and intrigued. In all our life on Yakimanka Sonya had never been known to invite anyone to her performances. But that life was over now, and everything was overgrown with weeds. Now such a thing was possible, and I accepted.
The concert was being held in someone’s apartment. I was given a slip of paper with the address and the host’s name. He was called Wulf Markovich, and I tried to memorise that on my way to the apartment on Leningrad Prospekt.
I arrived at the address and found myself in an entrance with enormous flights of stairs and tall, narrow doors. The perspective in such an entrance dizzies the hero of “The Cranes Are Flying” as he looks upwards, and now I too felt dizzy. The door I was looking for was already open, and Wulf Markovich, short, wiry, with curly hair, was waiting for me with a smile.
“Come in, come in, make yourself at home, no need to take off your shoes, no, really. Here you’re welcome to keep them on.” He was amiable and archaically courteous. No other guests had arrived yet so I received the full force of his hospitality. A child of the gallery on Yakimanka, I felt overwhelmed and tried to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. He took me through to a room, indicated an enormous tray of apples and urged me to help myself. On the other side of the wall, rehearsal was in progress.
“Do you also have musical connections?” he enquired delicately. His big, dark eyes shone mildly in a face overgrown by curly beard. His body was frail, the weary body of a professor of physics, but those wise eyes enchanted and held me.
“We’re all connected with music in one way or another,” I said, embarrassed by the loud crunch from my apple. Wulf Markovich was delighted by my reply and nodded in response. I quickly took in the room, crammed with furniture and bookcases and lit by a soft half-light from two table lamps under faded orange shades. This room, a private library, the repository of knowledge from several different fields, also belonged inalienably to a professor no less than the body of the person in front of me. His eyes, however, knew more than you can learn from books.
I inspected the large photographs on the walls: the reflection of a building in a puddle (with only the puddle in the photograph); a maple leaf on a wet pavement; the light of electric street lamps in damp air, seemingly somehow taken at a high shutter speed. They testified to the eye of an artist and the hand of a professional. In the centre was the portrait of a handsome young man and a thin, sweet girl.
These were not typical family photographs where the subjects are posing and smiling artificially to camera. The people depicted were alive: the young man was sitting in a deep light blue armchair, turning to look at something off camera, while the girl looked as if she had just this minute sat down beside him on the arm of the chair. She too was turned half away and looking at the same thing. She had black hair which fell from a slender shoulder and tumbled down her back to below the waist. She had strikingly long, narrow eyebrows, a dark skin and a warm smile; her features were gentle, discreet, loving and trusting so that they immediately evoked a liking for her. The youth was a little older and had similar looks: equally dark skin, the same smile, and dark eyes in which, despite the paucity of light in the room, I could see something unknowable and unclassifiable which instantly put me in thrall to him. Tenderness, sincerity, a longing for warmth, almost forgotten and covered in dust on Yakimanka, awoke in my inner depths, called forth by his eyes. It was love at first sight, if it is possible to fall in love with a photograph.
My intuition told me this was Wulf Markovich’s son, and the girl was either his sister or his wife. For me, it did not matter which: right now she too was as much a part of this man as the light in his eyes. But where were they, I wondered. Were they by any chance at home? Something melted at the thought that I might get to see that face and those eyes in the flesh. No, they have gone, the answer chillingly suggested itself and told me everything.
Just as the flash on a camera hauls objects out of darkness and we see them, literally, in a different light, so I suddenly pictured these people in the photograph differently. Who they were, how old they were, what their relationship was when the photo was taken, no longer mattered. They had ceased to be live human beings with their own history and emotions and were removed in an instant to a place where the concept of time and space was absent, as were all other human measures. ‘They have gone’ meant both this moment and forever. ‘They have gone’ could mean to the bread shop or into oblivion. They had just gone. They were not here and now, and hence they didn’t exist at all. There was only this photo, those eyes and smiles. The people had ceased to be and instead had become art.