The first time I got off the ground, uttering a kind of groan, I didn’t so much raise myself as leap into the air—and hit my head so hard on the ceiling that I lay for half an hour in a faint among the scattered books. Nikolai Petrovich, pale and scared, stood over me with a damp towel, then squatted down, wiping the plaster dust from my face; there was dust on every surface. “My dear old chap,” said my teacher, when I began to come to myself and felt the big lump on my head, “I did warn you! One false move of the will and you’ll be off into the ether—not physically but psychically. Your astral chord won’t hold, and you’ll never get back into your body. You will not only grieve me, but embarrass me as well. What am I supposed to do with your remains? The neighbors, the police, the procurator with his well-fed mug—the whole shooting match. Try to understand: I’m not inviting you to go astral-wandering; let us try and get by without vulgar occultism, without Koktebel[1] numbers.... I’m teaching you a simple thing: How to fly!”
We got off at a little station overgrown with fresh verdure. The road wound on through one more deserted cluster of country cottages, ran out into the field, and stumbled into the woods. Pine needles formed a springy carpet beneath our feet. An empty jam jar squeaked underfoot and flipped off into the bushes, spilling old snow. The woods came to an end. A river lay before us, a pool of fire under the westering sun. If you looked closely, the water was swelling and swirling in eddies, running secretly away into the thickening distance. We made our way along the edge of a freshly ploughed field, the rich soil upturned; not far off, a village church was settling down for the night. The cross blazed crimson. There was not a soul about; it was the hour when nothing is left of reality but a tremulous question mark.
Nikolai Petrovich picked a restful glade, moist with dew and hidden by nut trees. “Now then, Okhlamonov,” he urged, “don’t get carried away, don’t fly too high. Remember what I told you. High voltage lines are especially dangerous. And large expanses of water. And don’t be afraid of anything. If you should be really and truly frightened, even for only a fraction of a second, you understand? That’ll be the end!” Nikolai Petrovich adjusted his spring hat, pulling it lower over his eyes. “Just don’t get excited, that’s all, lie down on the air. It’s always harder to fly standing. And it’s not good for the vascular system either. Lie down, and don’t be afraid of anything!”
I leaned forward. Between me and the new grass, with flowers of as-yet unknown color poking through, there was an elastic, living force. I lay down. I was simply lying very low above the richly fragrant earth and rocking. I could turn over on my back. I could swoop abruptly upward, amorphously, like a handkerchief. I could plummet, as if punching holes in the air, in any direction. Squinting down, I glimpsed Nikolai Petrovich still standing in the little clearing below. With an encouraging gesture he sketched a circle on the air. Breathing deeply to control a certain shortness of breath, I spiralled upward. My teacher’s hat tipped sideways and blew off. What I was experiencing could hardly be called joy. It was flight, liberation, tears that blurred the suddenly expanding horizon, it was my hair streaming, my mind streaming; it was a new life—in an instant I became older, I lost nothing but was infected then and forever with a kind of knowledge hitherto inaccessible to me.
Nikolai Petrovich flew a little below and behind me. His coattails flapped. His arms were spread wide. I understood that he was insuring my maiden flight. Church, copse, clearing, fields, river—all dwindled rapidly, fell away, canted sideways, stood on end. “Good, Okhlamonov,” shouted Nikolai Petrovich, “very good! I am satisfied with you....” And although dusk was quickly gathering and the lights began to twinkle sadly in the little village far below, the rim of the world was still wreathed in golden light. I drew some gloves from my pocket, turning a clumsy somersault. It was getting a bit cold up there. The summer was only just beginning.
We returned in full darkness. Nikolai Petrovich, winding my scarf round his arm, allowed us to fly all the way to the station. He had chosen this bit of country just outside Moscow for a simple reason: there was some kind of prohibited area close by, surrounded by barbed wired—watchtowers, rails, floodlights—and no aircraft flew this way.
Do you know what it’s like returning to earth? I stood, swaying, in the damp darkness; an enormous lead ball was fastened to my feet. A moment later we were seated on a bench in the station: my heart had turned into a kind of porridge. “You, my friend,” said Nikolai Petrovich, the glow of his crackling cigaret illuminating his absent face, “today you burned up enough adrenalin for the next five-year plan. Absolutely nothing until next Tuesday, not even domestic exercises.” And then we started talking trivialities: about keys, and how we would now have to pin them on; about tree branches at night and how they could put your eye out; about television antennae that would suddenly materialize out of the resilient dark, just when you least expected it.
Who will give me back those incredible months? If you were to pour champagne into the air, so that space itself became joyously tipsy and swarmed with pricking bubbles.... No, I can’t explain. There was a moment when it seemed that everything would come crashing down. Not that I would forget how, not at all, there could be no question of that. No, catastrophe was looming in our earthly life, hanging over us, mixing everything up; and suddenly it broke, like a storm in the night, turned into a joyous pealing of bells: Katenka defected to me! Oh yes! She appeared one morning after breakfast, with a cautious smile and an ancient leather traveling bag, stood in the doorway, and said: “Okhlamonov, I have come to live with you! Not to see you, to live with you.” I was shaving at the time and everything looked idiotic: half my face smothered in lather, one inflamed and staring eye fixed on Katenka’s image in the mirror (something I’m very much afraid of, incidentally) while the dangerous blade was posed over my outstretched throat. “But what about Kolenka?” I hastily wiped my face with a not altogether fresh towel. “He released me so I could come to you,” said Katenka. She was looking straight at me, and had not yet put her things down on the floor. “He said he had long foreseen this, even that it was better this way.” I made as if to bow deeply. She looked at me even more seriously, more penetratingly, perhaps she was looking beyond me to some other day, and did not so much set down her traveling bag as simply relax her grip, so that everything fell to the floor with a thump. “Okhlamonov,” she said, “you live like a hermit, you live like Kolenka’s shadow. You need to become fully embodied.” And she shook her head. I was seized with shame at my apartment, the discolored wallpaper, the things lying where I had dropped them, the week’s worth of unwashed dishes on the writing table. Thank God the blinds were only raised a few inches—I rarely opened the windows, since I was always either developing or printing.
After standing in a daze for a second, with a ringing in my ears, I was just about to start rushing feverishly about snatching things up, cutting a wide swath through this moss of disorder, when Katenka, still strange, still alien, came right up to me so that her breasts poked into me and set me afire—for some reason I wasn’t yet dressed that morning, or rather all unbuttoned still—and said the last thing I expected: “You’ll take pictures of me naked, won’t you? Stark naked?” and not waiting for a reply she swung into the air, twisting and turning. “He taught me too, he’s such a genius! He said it would only be the two of us. Only you and I would be given the secret.” And somehow she did it quite differently—I’m afraid to say “like a woman,” because if you’ve never tried it yourself, you will laugh at me—she floated up to the clothes line, where yesterday’s rolls of film were hung up to dry.
1
Koktebeclass="underline" Traditional gathering place, on the Eastern shore of the Crimea, for Russian literati interested in occultism and the ideas of Rudolf Steiner. To some extent the tradition is still alive today. —Translator’s note