Wasn’t this because I found myself among people, renowned for their teeming activity, who nevertheless told time not by the railroad station or the office clock, but by the sundial, such as the one I saw among the ruins of Zvartnots in the form of the zodiac or of a rose inscribed in stone?
ASHOT OVANESIAN
The Institute of Peoples of the East is located on the Bersenev Embankment next door to the pyramidal Government House. A little further along, a ferryman used to ply his trade, charging three pennies for a crossing and loading his boat to the gunwales.
The air on the Moscow River Embankment is viscid and mealy.
A bored young Armenian came out to greet me. In addition, one could also see, among the Japhetic books with their spiky script, like a Russian cabbage butterfly in a library of cactuses, a blond young lady.
My amateurish arrival caused no one to rejoice. A request for help to study Old Armenian touched no heart among these people, of whom, moreover, the woman herself lacked this key of knowledge.
As a result of my incorrect subjective orientation,5 I have fallen into the habit of regarding every Armenian as a philologist . . . Which is, however, not all wrong. These are people who jangle the keys of their language even when they are unlocking nothing particularly valuable.
My conversation with the young graduate student from Tiflis flagged and ended on a note of diplomatic reserve.
The names were names of highly esteemed Armenian writers, Academician Marr6 was mentioned, who had just dashed through Moscow on his way from the Udmurt or Vogul’ District to Leningrad, and the spirit of Japhetic learning was praised, which penetrates to the deep structure of all speech . . .
I was already getting bored and glancing more and more often out the window at a bit of overgrown garden, when into the library strode an old man with despotic manners and a lordly bearing.
His Promethean head radiated a smoky ash-blue light like the most powerful carbide lamp . . . The blue-black locks of his wiry hair, fluffed out with a certain disdain, had something of the reinforced strength of an ensorcelled bird feather.
There was no smile on the broad mouth of this black-magician, who never forgot that speech is work. Comrade Ovanesian’s head had the capacity of distancing itself from his interlocutor, like the top of a mountain that only chanced to resemble a head. But the dark-blue-quartz-frowning of his eyes was worth anyone else’s smile.
“Head” in Armenian is glukh’e—with a short breath after the kh and a soft l . . . It’s the same root as in Russian [glava, or golova] . . . And would you like a Japhetic novella? If you please:
“To see,” “to hear,” and “to understand”—all these meanings coalesced at one time into a single semantic bundle. At the very deepest stages of language, there were no concepts, only directions, fears and longings, needs and apprehensions. The concept “head” was shaped over a dozen millennia out of just such a vague bundle of mists, and its symbol became . . . deafness [glukhota].
You’ll get it all mixed up anyway, dear reader, and it is not for me to teach you.
ZAMOSKVORECH’E7
Not long before that, as I had been rooting about under the staircase in the musty-pink house on the Iakimanka, I found a tattered book by Signac defending Impressionism.8 The author explained “the law of optical blending,” glorified the method of working with little dabs of the brush, and instilled in the reader a sense of the importance of using only the pure colors of the spectrum.
He based his arguments on citations from Eugène Delacroix, whom he idolized. Now and then he would refer to Delacroix’s Journey to Morocco as if he were leafing through a codex of visual training that every thinking European was obliged to know.
Signac was trumpeting on his chivalric horn the last, ripe gathering of the Impressionists. Into their bright camps he summoned the Zouaves, the burnooses, and the red skirts of the Algerian women.
At the very first sounds of this emboldening theory that braces the nerves, I felt the shiver of novelty; it was as if someone had called me by name . . .
It seemed to me as if I had changed my clodhopper city shoes for a pair of light Moslem slippers.
I’d been blind as a silkworm all my long life.
Moreover, a lightness invaded my life, my always arid and disorderly life, which I imagine to myself as a kind of ticklish waiting for a lottery in which everyone wins a prize, from which I might extract whatever I wanted: a piece of strawberry soap, a spell of sitting in the archive of the Archprinter’s chambers, or my longed-for journey to Armenia, of which I never ceased to dream.
It must be terribly impertinent, talking to the reader about the present in that tone of absolute courtesy we, for some reason, have yielded to the memoirists.
I think it comes from the impatience with which I live and change my skin.
The salamander suspects nothing of the black-and-yellow mottling on its back. The thought has never occurred to it, that these spots are arranged in two chains, or else fused together into a solid path, depending on the dampness of the sand, or on whether the papering of the terrarium is cheerful or gloomy.
As for that thinking salamander, man, who puzzles out the next-day’s weather—if only he could choose his own coloration!
Next door to me there lived some stern families of philistines [obyvateli].9 God had denied these people affability, which does, after all, make life pleasanter. They had morosely linked themselves together into a passionately consuming consumers’ association, and they kept tearing off the days due them in the ration-coupon booklet, and they would smile and smile as if they were pronouncing the word “cheese.”
Their rooms were stocked inside like handicraft shops, with various symbols of kinship, longevity, and domestic fidelity. White elephants prevailed, big ones and small ones, artistic renditions of dogs, and sea shells. The cult of the dead was not alien to them, nor a certain respect for those who were absent. It seemed these people with their Slavic faces, fresh and cruel, slept in a photographer’s prayer-room.
And I thanked my lucky stars that I was only an accidental guest of Zamoskvorech’e and would not spend my best years there. Nowhere, never, have I felt with such force Russia’s watermelon-emptiness; the brick-colored sunsets over the Moscow River, the color of the brick-tea brought to mind the red dust of the Ararat blast furnace.
I felt like getting back as soon as I could to the place where people’s skulls are equally beautiful, whether at work or in the grave.
All around there were, God help us, such cheery little houses with such nasty little souls and timidly oriented windows. Seventy years ago or less they used to sell serfgirls here, who had been taught to sew and stitch hems, quiet little things, quick to catch on.
The stale old lindens, deaf with age, lifted their brown forked trunks in the courtyard. Frightening in their somehow bureaucratic thickness, they heard and understood nothing. Time fed them with lightning flashes and watered them with downpours; thunder or bromide, it was all the same to them.
Once a meeting of the adult males who lived in the house resolved to chop down the oldest linden and cut it up for firewood.
They dug a deep trench around the tree. The ax began to hack at the indifferent roots. Doing a woodcutter’s work requires certain skills. There were too many volunteers. They fussed about, like the incompetent executors of some foul verdict.