When Coetzee found himself ‘sobbing uncontrollably’ on reading The Brothers Karamazov he asked himself why he found himself ‘more and more vulnerable’ to those pages. It had nothing to do with ethics or politics and everything to do with ‘the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world.’
Back in the Zone Stalker said he might move there with his wife and child; now he tells his wife he won’t even go there again. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face. Or maybe the unbearable horrors of this world have proved more bearable than the promise and refuge of the Zone. She says she’ll go there with him.49 After all, she reminds him, there are plenty of things she could wish for. Such as? That her husband wasn’t a Stalker for one. That he wasn’t so obsessed by this wretched Zone, that he would stop sleeping in his dirty sweater…you name it. There’s also the possibility that she has realized that the one thing worse than his sneaking off to the Zone every chance he gets is having him here, getting under her feet, moping around at home the whole time. But no, she can’t go there. Because she’s a woman? No. Because what if she went and it didn’t work for her either? A last straw, too terrible even to contemplate clutching. He turns his head to sleep.
THE TRAIN WHISTLES are blowing. Stalker’s wife walks towards the wall and then sits down, turns to the camera and takes a cigarette from her packet. A dreadful moment, this, for me. By lighting and smoking a cigarette she turns herself, instantly, into something hideous. That sheepskin coat, we realize now, must stink of cigarettes— and her hair. And it’s not just that: I hate all gestures associated with finding, lighting and smoking a cigarette.
Her family were against their marrying, she says. Everyone in the neighbourhood laughed at him. She has lit her cigarette and shakes the match to extinguish it. I hate that smell, the smell of an extinguished match, as much as I hate the smell of cigarette smoke and I also hate the sight — by the side of cookers without a self-ignition facility — of curled and blackened matches. Lots of creaking and groaning of timbers, and the usual drop and drip of a tap or a leak, all imparting a touch of the nautical to this homely scene. He was a Stalker, an eternal prisoner. She knew this about him, and about the kind of children Stalkers have. But still, when he said come with me she went, like an apostle, and she’s never regretted it, not even with the pain and shame and sorrow.
Tarkovsky thought the wife’s expression of love and devotion was the ‘final miracle’, the heart of the film, its ultimate lesson: ‘namely that human love alone is— miraculously — proof against the blunt assertion that there is no hope for the world. This is our common, and incontrovertibly positive possession.’ Well, as Philip Larkin said on discovering that he was ‘too selfish, withdrawn and easily bored to love’: ‘useful to get that learned.’ As a lesson this — like so much in Sculpting in Time—fails to do justice to the revealed complexity of what takes place onscreen, but it does correspond with Olga Surkova’s assessment of Tarkovsky’s second wife, Larissa, as ‘a Russian angel standing guard over the persecuted Russian artist.’50 At least that’s how things started out. Then Larissa came to believe she was ‘the fountain from which he drank’.
But of course in the film the wife is not married to a world-famous director, one of the most revered filmmakers ever to have shouted ‘Action’, she’s married to a Stalker whose pyjamas are his sweater.
Even with all the pain she has no regrets about the choice she made. In fact, it wouldn’t have been any better without the pain because then there would not have been any happiness. Without the pain there wouldn’t have been any hope. Hmm. Except happiness trumps hope, at least in the short term. It’s not just that if you’re happy you have no need of hope. When you’re happy, hope, like all the other big questions — as Solonitsyn’s character, Sartorius, says in Solaris—becomes meaningless. It is possible, in parts of California particularly, to live a life devoid of hope (in what’s to come) and brim full of happiness (for what is here now). Elsewhere, hope has persistence and endurance on its side, is happy to stand around and wait — for things to get bad again, for happiness to pass. In terms of the Zone, Stalker may have been right about his wife; maybe it wouldn’t have worked for her there. She clings to hope and the Zone, he suspects, lets through those who’ve lost all hope. Life is shit. You put up with it. You hope even though you don’t believe in hope. People who’ve got over terrible things say they never gave up hope, never stopped hoping. But hope is a source of torment as well as an inspiration. Didn’t the Buddha counsel against hope? Wasn’t hope one of the torments of Samsara from which we had to free ourselves? Besides, the Zone — on the evidence of this excursion at least — is not a place of hope so much as a place where hope turns in on itself, resigns itself to the way things are. To that extent she is there already, in the Zone.