I’m suffocating, hot, and dusty. I’m depressed. My father died, and I loved him so much! Once, long, long ago, almost forty years back, he passed through Ravenna and sent me a postcard showing one of the famous mosaics. On the reverse side—in pencil for some reason, he must have been in a hurry—he wrote: “Sweetheart! I have never seen anything so sublime (see the other side) in my life! Makes you want to cry! Oh, if only you were here! Your Father!”
Each sentence ends with a silly exclamation mark—he was young, he was cheerful, maybe he’d had a glass of wine. I can see him with his felt hat cocked in the manner of the late fifties, a cigarette between white teeth—which were still his own then—beads of sweat on his forehead. Tall, slim, handsome: his eyes shine happily behind the glass circles of his spectacles… The postcard—which he dropped in a mailbox, lightheartedly entrusting it to two unreliable postal services, the Italian and the Russian—shows heaven. The Lord sits in the midst of a blindingly green paradise of eternal spring, white sheep grazing all around. The two unreliable postal services, Russian and Italian, crumpled the corners of the postcard, but it was all right, the message was received and everything could be seen.
If heaven exists, then my father is there. Where else would he be? But the only thing is, he died—he died and doesn’t write me postcards with exclamation marks anymore, he no longer sends tidings from all points of the globe: I’m here, I love you. Do you love me? Do you share my pleasure and joy? Do you see the beauty that I see? Greetings! Here’s a postcard! Here’s a cheap, glossy photograph—I was here! It’s wonderful! Oh, if only you could be here, too!
He traveled all over the world, and he liked the world.
Now, as much as I can, I follow his footsteps. I go to the same towns, try to see them with his eyes, try to imagine him young, turning that corner, climbing those steps, leaning on the railing of the embankment with a cigarette in his teeth. This time I’m in Ravenna, a dusty, stuffy, exhausting place like all tourist sites where crowds fill narrow streets. It’s a dead, trivial, hot town, with no place to sit down. The tomb of Dante, exiled from his native Florence. The tomb of Theodorich. The mausoleum of Galla Placidia, sister of Flavius Honorius, the very same one who made Ravenna the capital of the Western Empire. Fifteen centuries passed. Everything changed. Everything grew dusty, the mosaics crumbled. What had once been important—is unimportant; what once excited—has vanished in the sands. The sea itself receded, and where merry green waves once splashed, there are now wastelands, dust, silence, hot vineyards. Forty years ago—a whole lifetime ago—my father strolled and laughed here; his myopic eyes squinted; he sat at a street table, drank red wine, and tore off bites of pizza with his own strong teeth. The dark blue night fell. And on the edge of a table, in pencil, he scribbled a few hurried words to me scattering exclamation marks all over, expressing his delight and love for the world.
The overcast sky is stifling. It’s hot, but the sun can’t be seen. Dust is everywhere. Land that was once the bottom of the sea now lies around the town in wide, fertile fields; where crabs once crawled, donkeys now pick their way; in place of seaweed, roses grow rampant. Everything died and went to seed. Along the once splendid streets of the Western world’s capital, disappointed American tourists wander in pink sweatshirts, unhappy because the tourist agency has tricked them once again: everything in this Europe is so dinky, so small, and so old! Fifteen centuries. Dante’s grave. The tomb of Galla Placidia. My father’s grave. Some sort of naive green paradise on a wrinkled postcard.
What was it that amazed him here? I find the right church, I look up—yes, there’s something green there, high up under the vault. White sheep on a green meadow. The usual dim light. The discordant hum of tourists below. Their fingers point, they look for explanations in their guidebooks. Such-and-such a century, such-and-such a style. Everything’s the same everywhere, always. You can hardly see.
In every Italian church there’s a box on the wall for money—an added service for those interested. If you put in three hundred lira—a quarter of a dollar—then for several moments bright spotlights turn on near the ceiling, illuminating the stones of the mosaic in fresh white light. The colors brighten. You can see details. The crowd grows excited, its hum grows louder. Only a quarter of a dollar. You’ve already come so far, you paid for the plane ticket, for the train, for the hotel, the pizza, the cold drinks, the coffee. What is it now, you begrudge a few extra cents? But many do. They’re annoyed; they weren’t forewarned. They want to see heaven for free. A bunch of tourists waits for some generous, impatient person to deposit a coin in the slot of the swindling Italian apparatus—all Italians are swindlers, isn’t that right?—and then the spotlights will flare, and for a short moment, insufficient for the human eye, paradise will be greener, the sheep more innocent, the Lord— kinder. The crowd rumbles more loudly… but the light goes off, and the din of disappointed tourists collapses from a momentary grumble of protest to a greedy growl, to a whispered disappointment. And again everything is coated in gloom.
I wander from church to church along with the crowd. I listen to its muffled, multilingual murmur, like the rush of the sea; a slow human whirlpool spins me around, and tired, inane faces flash by—as inane as my own; eyeglasses glint, the pages of guidebooks rustle. I squeeze through the narrow doors of churches, trying to push past my neighbor, trying, like everyone else, to get a better spot, trying not to become irritated. After all, I think, if heaven truly exists, then it’s likely I’ll enter it with just such a flock of sheep, of people—old, not very smart, a bit greedy. Because if heaven isn’t for us, then who’s it for, I’d like to know? Are there really others, special people, people who are noticeably better than us ordinary, statistically average souls?
No, there aren’t any, so I may have to plod across those green meadows in a herd of American tourists, disgruntled because everything is so ancient and small-scale. And if that’s the case, then that means heaven is awful and boring—which by definition shouldn’t be true. Everything in heaven should be utterly sublime.
“I have never seen anything so sublime (see the other side) in my life!” my father wrote me. See the other side. An ordinary paradise. What did he see that I don’t see?
Along with the crowd I squeeze into a small building about which the early-twentieth-century Russian traveler Pavel Muratov once wrote in his famous book Images of Italy:
The blue of the ceiling of the mausoleum of Galla Placidia is unusually dark and deep—almost inscrutably so. Depending on the light penetrating through the small windows, it will shimmer, in a wonderful and unexpectedly marvelous manner with either a greenish, lilac, or crimson hue. It is against this background that the famous depiction of the youthful Good Shepherd, sitting among snow-white sheep, is placed. The half-circles near the windows are decorated with a large ornamental motif of deer drinking from a spring. Garlands of fruit and leaves wind along the lower arches. On viewing their magnificence one cannot help but think that never has mankind arrived at a more satisfactory solution to the problem of decorating a church wall. Owing to the small size of the mausoleum chapel, the mosaics do not create the impression of vain, cold pomp. The very air around the sarcophagus itself, which once contained the embalmed body of the Empress, appears to shine with blue fire; it is worthy of being the dream of an ardently religious imagination. Was this not what the stained-glass artists strove to achieve in the Gothic cathedrals, though in a different way?