I’m afraid the kindly bear Baloo has not yet been born to teach me, as he did the boy Mowgli of Kipling’s jungle, the excellent language of “Achoo!”—although in the distant future I foresee academies for the study of the groups of Caucasian languages, scattered over the whole world. The phonetic ore of Europe and America will run out. Its deposits have their limits. Even now young people are reading Pushkin in Esperanto. To each his own.
But what an awesome warning!
One can easily get a panoramic view of Sukhum from Mount Cherniavsky, as it is called, from Ordzhonikidze Square. It is completely linear, flat, and, to the tune of Chopin’s funeral march, it sucks into itself a great crescent of the sea with a heave of its resort-colonial breast.
It is spread out below like a case of drawing instruments containing a compass ensconced in velvet that has just described the bay, sketched the arched eyebrows of the hills, and closed up.
Although public life in Abkhazia has about it much that is naïvely crude, and many abuses, one cannot help being captivated by the administrative and economic elegance of this small maritime republic, proud of its rich soils, box-tree forests, its State Farm olive grove at New Athos, and the high quality of its Tkvarchel coal.
Rose thorns punctured kerchiefs, and the tame bear cub with the grey snout of some ancient Russian, of some dunce-capped Ivan the Fool, squealed, and his squeal cut through glass. Brand-new automobiles kept rolling up straight from the sea, and their tires sliced up the eternally green mountain . . . From underneath the bark of the palm tree they extracted a grey fiber from which they made theatrical wigs, and in the park the flowering agave plants, like candles weighing six poods, shot up a couple of inches every day.
Lei gave sermons on the mount on the danger of smoking and issued fatherly reproofs to the gardener. He once asked me a question that struck me profoundly: “What was the mood of the petty bourgeoisie in Kiev in 1919?”
I think his dream was to quote Karl Marx’s Capital in the hut of Paul and Virginie.
In my twenty-verst strolls, accompanied by silent Latvians, I developed a certain feeling for the lay of the land.
Theme: a race to the sea of gently sloping volcanic hills, joined together by a little chain—for the pedestrian.
Variation: the little green key of altitude is passed from height to height, and each new slope puts the hollow under lock.
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I visited Beria, the president of the Society of the Friends of Caucasian Letters, and was close to giving him greetings for Tartarin and the gunsmith Costecalde.
A marvelous figure from Provence!
He complained of the difficulties involved in working out the Abkhazian alphabet, and spoke with respect about that Petersburg clown, Evreinov, who had been seduced in Abkhazia by the cult of the goat, and complained about not being able to obtain any serious scientific studies because of the distance from Tiflis.
The hardheaded knocking together of billiard balls is just as pleasant to men as the clicking of ivory knitting needles is to women. The bandit-cue would devastate the pyramid, and a quartet of epic heroes from Blücher’s army, resembling each other like brothers, serving on the duty roster, with an air of precision about them and a bulb of laughter in their chests, exclaimed with pleasure over the charm of the game.
And the old men, Party members, didn’t lag behind them.
From the balcony, through army binoculars, you could get a clear view of the track and the stands on a swampy parade ground the color of billiard cloth. Once a year there are great horse races to test the endurance of anyone who wants to compete.
A cavalcade of biblical elders would follow the boy who won.
Relatives scattered around the many versts of the ellipse would deftly pass wet towels on the end of poles to the flushed horsemen.
In a distant swamp meadow a lighthouse would keep turning like the Tate diamond.
And somehow I saw the dance of death, the wedding dance of phosphorescent insects. At first it seemed as if the tips of very thin little cigarettes that kept wandering about were being puffed to a glow, but their flourishes were too daring, free, and bold.
The devil knows where they were heading!
Coming closer: insane electrified ephemera, twitching, tracing, devouring the black hack-work in print at the present moment.
Our heavy fleshly body decays in just the same way, and our activity will turn into just such a pandemonium of signals gone amuck, if we do not leave behind us substantial proof of our existence.
It is frightening to live in a world that consists only of exclamations and interjections!
Bezymensky,12 strong man lifting cardboard weights; round-headed, gentle, inkstained blacksmith—no, not blacksmith, bird-vender—no, not even birds—the balloons of RAPP—he was forever stooping, humming, and swacking people with his blue eyes.
An inexhaustible operatic repertoire gurgled in his throat. His open-air-concert, mineral-water heartiness never left him. A lounger, with a mandolin in his soul, he lived on the string of a ballad, and his heart’s core sang under a phonograph needle.
THE FRENCH
And here I stretched my vision and sank my eye into the wide goblet of the sea, so that every mote and tear should come out of it.
I stretched my vision like a kid glove, stretched it on a board,13 out onto the blue neighborhood of the sea.
I swiftly and rapaciously and with a feudal frenzy inspected the demesnes of my eye’s measure.
In such a way one puts one’s eye into a wide goblet full to the brim so that a mote will come out.
And I began to understand the binding force of color—the fervor of sky-blue and orange T-shirts—and that color is nothing other than a sense of the start of a race, a sense tinged by distance and locked into its size.
Time circulated in the museum according to the hourglass. A brick-colored trickle ran, the goblet was emptied, but then the same golden stream of a dust storm from the upper part of the glass into the lower.
Hello, Cézanne! Good old grandfather! Marvelous worker. Best acorn of the forests of France.
His painting was certified on the oak table of a village notary. He is incontestable, like a will made in sound mind and firm memory.
But what captivated me was the old man’s still life. Roses that must have been cut in the morning, full-fleshed and rolled tight, unusually young tea roses. Exactly like scoops of rich vanilla ice cream.
On the other hand, I took a dislike to Matisse, an artist for the rich. The red paint of his canvases fizzes like soda. He is not privy to the joy of ripening fruits. His powerful brush does not heal the vision, but gives it the strength of an ox, so that the eyes become bloodshot.14
I’ve had enough of this carpet chess and these odalisques!
Persian whimseys of a Parisian maître!
The cheap vegetable pigments of Van Gogh were bought by calamitous accident for twenty sous.
Van Gogh spits blood like a suicide in a cheap hotel. The floorboards in the night café are tilted and stream like a gutter in their electric madness. And the narrow trough of the billiard table looks like the trough of a coffin.
I never saw such barking colors!
And his streetcar-conductor’s vegetable-garden landscapes! The soot of suburban trains has just been wiped from them with a wet rag.
His canvases, smeared with the omelette of catastrophe, are as clear as visual aids, as the charts in a Berlitz school.
The visitors move about with little steps as though in church.
Each room has its own climate. In Claude Monet’s room there is river air. Looking at the water painted by Renoir, you feel blisters on your palm as if you’d been rowing.