All these thoughts flashed through my mind in an instant, and Wulf Markovich, following my gaze, was already telling me his son was a photographer. All these photos were by him, and he only regretted there were so few. “In the next room you will see more. There are more of them in there,” he added, breaking my trance.
The audience arrive, a lot of old people, and young people who are all, like me, friends of the performers. They take their seats in the adjacent room which has so many photographs on the walls it looks like a museum, and the trio come out: piano, ‘cello, violin, all girls, Sonya’s classmates. They are introduced by their teacher, who describes the music they will be performing, before thanking Wulf Markovich for hosting the evening which “will give the students an opportunity to play themselves before the examinations”.
“These evenings,” our host says, standing by the door next to the young performers, “are a joy for me, but they take place only because of my son’s initiative. It was his idea that live music should be played within these walls, and by tradition I would like the first piece to be played for those who are always present in this house.”
We didn’t clap. The girls took up their instruments and played something as emotional and melancholy as his words. Wulf Markovich carried on standing in the doorway, listening, with a smile on his lips. His expression became fixed, then twisted, and his head was trembling a little. I listened and something inside me opened wide, like a pair of great doors, and the wind from the darkness came in through them.
“They have gone,” I repeated to myself, and understood the wisdom which shone in the eyes of our host. It became clear where the boy and girl in that photograph were looking and what was ‘off camera’. I felt myself lose love as fast as I had gained it. I remembered the emptiness and solitude of the mountain Lake, the solitude of a small human being beneath the abyss of the sky. I remembered Grand’s smile. I looked at Sonya, sitting at the piano with her back to me, at the tall, thin ‘cellist and plump, rosy-faced violinist, still just a young girl. I took in the visitors, looking motionlessly ahead with fixed, serious expressions. I looked at the host whose eyes were red and glistening with tears. I asked myself, “Do you love everything that is around you?” and that question ‘why?’ retreated. We all just were the same; we all just were going to die.
I knew I was crying too. I was listening not to the music but to the howling of a dark wind rushing through open doors. I knew it was for only a moment, but I knew also that after that moment I would no longer be the same person.
Passing through a town in the evening when everyone has finished work, darting like a shadow or a migratory bird from other lands, taking all a town has to give before again hitting the road. How I loved those expeditions! We would buy food, then turn up in the city centre, eat ice creams in the main square, and watch the careworn adults and indolent young people. We were not like any of them. For everyone we were a riddle and didn’t belong, and that was an agreeable, a very good feeling, seeing ourselves in that light. Afterwards we would go round the nearby taxi drivers and ask them how to get out to the highway to the next town. The drivers would quickly size us up and tell us. They were the only people who treated us almost as their own. Our attitude towards the road was the same as theirs.
We were in no hurry, though, to leave. The towns were the knots that held our road together and we wanted to get to know each one and drink in our fill of it. Grand was interested in everything: the kremlins, the churches, squares, streets, people, ancient crests and history. In some towns we went to the museum, and in the cloakroom the old lady attendants stared at our rucksacks in perplexity. We walked around until the people went back to their homes and the town started falling asleep and oh, how wonderful and tormenting it was to stroll in the deepening darkness, to see the windows lit up, the people silhouetted, and think that they all had a home in this city while we had no home here or, in reality, anywhere else and yet were at home everywhere. That knowledge made me want to get back on the road, to get away, to be once more alone with the road. In the town you don’t belong, you are a stranger, but on the road you are free and everywhere at home.
Towns were points along our way, places we were aiming to reach. Yet they were not the reason we were on the move, and neither was being on the move an end in itself. The goal lay somewhere beyond all that. I knew that when we were in the towns. Suddenly everything that weighed me down fell away and the meaning I was searching for was revealed. It was only a moment, these epiphanies of mine. They arose from the contrast between the life of the city and my own, and it was impossible to hold on to them. When, during the day, we were once more standing by the roadside and once more thumbing to no effect, fatigue again overwhelmed me and again chaos crowded in.
You taught me, Grand, to see and hear; you taught me that the world is more than we can know. Behind shadows limitless possibilities of human perception rose up; behind the warm wind in the trees I heard voices from other worlds. I learned, heard and saw, but as we approached the end of our hitchhiking something told me that when it was over Grand would be no more, our game would be over, and for me the world would never be the same again. I would remember that a shadow is not just a shadow and the wind is not just a breeze, and that I myself am not just what I see but something greater that exists behind all this. The old world was gone and with it the old meaning of life.
You changed my world, Grand, my friend, but what answer do you have for me now when I ask how I should live my life in the years to come?
Completely shattered, we sit down on a mound a little way from the road and gorge ourselves on one apple after another. Sergey bought a kilogram of them in Vladimir.
“Why did we choose this place to hitch to?” he asks. “I’ve wanted to come here for a long time.” “Did you like it?” “Yes.” “But we didn’t go in anywhere.” “I saw everything I wanted to.”
Vladimir is a slumbering town, quiet and luminous. It retains its history and is itself a bit like a museum. The streets are like picture postcards from the seventies, and even the buses are of a kind you never see nowadays anywhere else. There are ancient churches in the town centre and the Golden Gateway. A lop-sided signboard over the sagging porch of a beer bar promises ‘Drams’, and wooden, slanting stairs lead down to a cellar from which you seem to catch the breath of a still feudal, pre-Petrine Rus. It’s a sunny day, clear and windy, and the shining birch trees shed their leaves readily into expanses which open far and wide above the River Klyazma.
You don’t need to go far outside the city on the ancient, rickety bus to leave behind the much hyped white stone walls of the kremlin and descend by an inconspicuous path to the plain. After the asphalt it is a relaxing pleasure to walk on soil, open, without crops, fallow. You smell water and the river gleams ahead. You see it. You walk quickly and silently to the white cloud which has settled here on the bank. It is the Church of the Intercession on the Nerl which, like a sorrowful celestial she-elephant, looks for its reflection in the eternally placid water.
“Perhaps we should have stayed back there a bit longer. We aren’t really doing anything here.” “We’re not doing nothing. You’re getting used to it. If we’d stayed it would be evening already.” “It is evening already.”
He’s right. Damn! The air is becoming opaque and the sun is creeping towards the horizon. “Do you like it around here, Titch?” “It is beautiful,” I concede. “Everywhere is beautiful.” “No, I meant is this a special place for you for some reason? Coming here seemed to matter a lot to you.” I poke a stick from an apple tree into the ground beside me and look at the road. “I didn’t make it to this town this summer, and I really wanted to.”