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Sriram Ayer
9 hrs ·
“The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea.”
~ Vladimir Nabokov | Art by Hokusai
"That in Aleppo Once..."
By Vladimir Nabokov
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mazalek/projects/aleppo/nabokov.html
DEAR V. - Among other things, this is to tell you that at last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have led. One of the first persons I saw was our good old Gleb Alexandrovich Gekko gloomily crossing Columbus Avenue in quest of the petit cafe du coin which none of us three will ever visit again. He seemed to think that somehow or other you were betraying our national literature, and he gave me your address with a deprecatory shake of his gray head, as if you did not deserve the treat of hearing from me.
I have a story for you. Which reminds me - I mean putting it like this reminds me - of the days when we wrote our first udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a lighted window, cried out to us: "I'm a rhyme!" Yes, this is a most useful universe. We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept embankment. But just now I am not a poet. I come to you like that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described.
I married, let me see, about a month after you left France, and a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris. Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am positive now that my wife never existed. You may know her name from some other source, but that does not matter: it is the name of an illusion. Therefore, I am able to speak of her with as much detachment as I would of a character in a story (one of your stories, to be precise).
It was love at first touch rather than at first sight, for I had met her several times before without experiencing any special emotions; but one night as I was seeing her home, something quaint she had said made me stoop with a laugh and lightly kiss her on the hair - and of course we all know of that blinding blast which is caused by merely picking up a small doll from the floor of a carefully abandoned house: the soldier involved hears nothing; for him it is but an ecstatic soundless and boundless expansion of what had been during his life a pinpoint of light in the dark center of his being. And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
But I cannot discern her. She remains as nebulous as my best poem - the one you made such gruesome fun of in the Literaturnye Zapiski. When I want to imagine her I have to cling mentally to a tiny brown birthmark on her downy forearm, as one concentrates upon a punctuation mark in an illegible sentence. Perhaps, had she used a greater amount of make-up, or used it more constantly, I might have visualized her face today, or at least the delicate transverse furrows of dry, hot rouged lips; but I fail, I fail - although I still feel their elusive touch now and then in the blindman's buff of my senses, in that sobbing sort of dream when she and I clumsily dutch at each other through a heartbreaking mist, and I cannot see the color of her eyes for the blank luster of brimming tears drowning their irises.
She was much younger than I - not as much younger as was Nathalie of the lovely bare shoulders and long earrings in relation to swarthy Pushkin; but still there was a sufficient margin for that kind of retrospective romanticism which finds pleasure in imitating the destiny of a unique genius (down to the jealousy, down to the filth, down to the stab of seeing her almond-shaped eyes turn to her blond Cassio behind her peacock-feathered fan) even if one cannot imitate his verse. She liked mine, though, and would scarcely have yawned as the other was wont to do every time her husband's poem happened to exceed the length of a sonnet. If she has remained a phantom to me, I may have been one to her: I suppose she had been solely attracted by the obscurity of my poetry; then tore a hole through its veil and saw a stranger's unlovable face.
As you know, I had been for some time planning to follow the example of your fortunate flight. She described to me an uncle of hers who lived, she said, in New York: he had taught riding at a southern college, and had wound up by marrying a wealthy American woman; they had a little daughter born deaf. She said she had lost their address long ago, but a few days later it miraculously turned up, and we wrote a dramatic letter to which we never received any reply. This did not much matter, as I had already obtained a sound affidavit from Professor Lomchenko of Chicago; but little else had been done in the way of getting the necessary papers when the invasion began, whereas I foresaw that, if we stayed on in Paris, some helpful compatriot of mine would sooner or later point out to the interested party sundry passages in one of my books where I argued that, with all her many black sins, Germany was still bound to remain forever and ever the laughingstock of the world.
So we started upon our disastrous honeymoon. Crushed and jolted amid the apocalyptic exodus, waiting for unscheduled trains that were bound for unknown destinations, walking through the stale stage-setting of abstract towns, living in a permanent twilight of physical exhaustion, we fled; and the farther we fled, the clearer it became that what was driving us on was something more than a booted and buckled fool with his assortment of variously propelled junk - something of which he was a mere symbol, something monstrous and impalpable, a timeless and faceless mass of immemorial horror that still keeps coming at me from behind even here, in the green vacuum of Central Park.
Oh, she bore it gamely enough - with a kind of dazed cheerfulness. Once however, quite suddenly, she started to sob in a sympathetic railway carriage. "The dog" she said, "the dog we left. I cannot forget the poor dog." The honesty of her grief shocked me, as we had never had any dog. "I know," she said, "but I tried to imagine we had actually bought that setter. And just think, he would be now whining behind a locked door." There had never been any talk of buying a setter.
I should also not like to forget a certain stretch of highroad and the sight of a family of refugees (two women, a child) whose old father, or grandfather, had died on the way. The sky was a chaos of black and flesh-colored clouds with an ugly sunburst beyond a hooded hill, and the dead man was lying on his back under a dusty plane tree. With a stick and their hands the women had tried to dig a roadside grave, but the soil was too hard; they had given it up and were sitting side by side, among the anemic poppies, a little apart from the corpse and its up-turned beard. But the little boy was still scratching and scraping and tugging until he tumbled a flat stone and forgot the object of his solemn exertions as he crouched on his haunches, his thin, eloquent neck showing all its vertebrae to the headsman, and watched with surprise and delight thousands of minute brown ants seething, zigzagging, dispersing, heading for places of safety in the Gard, and the Aude, and the Drome, and the Var, and the Basses-Pyrenees - we two paused only in Pau.
Spain proved too difficult and we decided to move on to Nice. At a place called Faugeres (a ten-minute stop) I squeezed out of the train to buy some food. When a couple of minutes later I came back, the train was gone, and the muddled old man responsible for the atrocious void that faced me (coal dust glittering in the heat between naked indifferent rails, and a lone piece of orange peel) brutally told me that, anyway, I had had no right to get out.
In a better world I could have had my wife located and told what to do (I had both tickets and most of the money); as it was, my nightmare struggle with the telephone proved futile, so I dismissed the whole series of diminutive voices barking at me from afar, sent two or three telegrams which are probably on their way only now, and late in the evening took the next local to Montpellier, farther than which her train would not stumble. Not finding her there, I had to choose between two alternatives: going on because she might have boarded the Marseilles train which I had just missed, or going back because she might have returned to Faugeres. I forget now what tangle of reasoning led me to Marseilles and Nice.
Beyond such routine action as forwarding false data to a few unlikely places, the police did nothing to help: one man bellowed at me for being a nuisance; another sidetracked the question by doubting the authenticity of my marriage certificate because it was stamped on what he contended to be the wrong side; a third, a fat commissaire with liquid brown eyes, confessed that he wrote poetry in his spare time. I looked up various acquaintances among the numerous Russians domiciled or stranded in Nice. I heard those among them who chanced to have Jewish blood talk of their doomed kinsmen crammed into hell-bound trains; and my own plight, by contrast, acquired a commonplace air of irreality while I sat in some crowded cafe with the milky blue sea in front of me and a shell-hollow murmur behind telling and retelling the tale of massacre and misery, and the gray paradise beyond the ocean, and the ways and whims of harsh consuls.
A week after my arrival an indolent plain-clothes man called upon me and took me down a crooked and smelly street to a black-stained house with the word "hotel" almost erased by dirt and time; there, he said, my wife had been found. The girl he produced was an absolute stranger, of course, but my friend Holmes kept on trying for some time to make her and me confess we were married, while her taciturn and muscular bedfellow stood by and listened, his bare arms crossed on his striped chest.
When at length I got rid of those people and had wandered back to my neighborhood, I happened to pass by a compact queue waiting at the entrance of a food store, and there, at the very end, was my wife, straining on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of what exactly was being sold. I think the first thing she said to me was that she hoped it was oranges.
Her tale seemed a trifle hazy, but perfectly banal. She had returned to Faugeres and gone straight to the Commissariat instead of making inquiries at the station, where I had left a message for her. A party of refugees suggested that she join them; she spent the night in a bicycle shop with no bicycles, on the floor, together with three elderly women who lay, she said, like three logs in a row. Next day she realized that she had not enough money to reach Nice. Eventually she borrowed some from one of the log-women. She got into the wrong train, however, and traveled to a town the name of which she could not remember. She had arrived at Nice two days ago and had found some friends at the Russian church. They had told her I was somewhere around, looking for her, and would surely turn up soon.
Some time later, as I sat on the edge of the only chair in my garret and held her by her slender young hips (she was combing her soft hair and tossing her head back with every stroke), her dim smile changed all at once into an odd quiver and she placed one hand on my shoulder, staring down at me as if I were a reflection in a pool, which she had noticed for the first time. "I've been lying to you, dear," she said. " Ya lgunia. I stayed for several nights in Montpellier with a brute of a man I met on the train. I did not want it at all. He sold hair lotions."
The time, the place, the torture. Her fan, her gloves, her mask. I spent that night and many others getting it out of her bit by bit, but not getting it all. I was under the strange delusion that first I must find out every detail, reconstruct every minute, and only then decide whether I could bear it. But the limit of desired knowledge was unattainable, nor could I ever foretell the approximate point after which I might imagine myself satiated, because of course the denominator of every fraction of knowledge was potentially as infinite as the number of intervals between the fractions themselves.
Oh, the first time she had been too tired to mind, and the next had not minded because she was sure I had deserted her; and she apparently considered that such explanations ought to be a kind of consolation prize for me instead of the nonsense and agony they really were. It went on like that for eons, she breaking down every now and then, but soon rallying again, answering my unprintable questions in a breathless whisper or trying with a pitiful smile to wriggle into the semi-security of irrelevant commentaries, and I crushing and crushing the mad molar till my jaw almost burst with pain, a flaming pain which seemed somehow preferable to the dull, humming ache of humble endurance.
And mark, in between the periods of this inquest we were trying to get from reluctant authorities certain papers on the strength of which one might hope to obtain other papers which in their turn would make it lawful to apply for a third kind which would serve as a steppingstone towards a permit enabling the holder to apply for the other papers which might or might not give him the means of discovering how and why it had happened. For even if I could imagine the accursed recurrent scene, I raged to link up its sharp-angled grotesque shadows with the dim limbs of my wife as she shook and rattled and dissolved in my violent grasp.
So nothing remained but to torture each other, to wait for hours on end in the Prefecture, filling forms, conferring with friends who had already probed the innermost viscera of all visas, pleading with secretaries, and filling forms again, with the result that her lusty and versatile traveling salesman became blended in a ghastly mix-up with rat-whiskered snarling officials, rotting bundles of obsolete records, the reek of violet ink, bribes slipped under gangrenous blotting paper, fat flies tickling moist necks with their rapid cold padded feet, new-laid clumsy concave photographs of your six subhuman doubles, the tragic eyes and patient politeness of petitionaries born in Slutzk, Starodub, or Bobruisk, the funnels and pulleys of the Holy Inquisition, the awful smile of the bald man with the glasses, who had been told that his passport could not be found.
I confess that one evening, after a particularly abominable day, I sank down on a stone bench weeping and cursing a mock world where millions of lives were being juggled by the clammy hands of consuls and commissaires. I noticed she was crying too. and then I told her that nothing would really have mattered the way it mattered now, had she not gone and done what she did.
"You will think me crazy," she said with a vehemence that, for a second, almost made a real person of her, "but I didn't - I swear that I didn't. Perhaps I live several lives at once. Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps this bench is a dream and we are in Saratov or on some star."
It would be tedious to niggle the different stages through which I passed before accepting finally the first version of her delay. I did not talk to her and was a good deal alone. She would glimmer and fade, and reappear with some trifle she thought I would appreciate - a handful of cherries, three precious cigarettes, or the like - treating me with the unruffled mute sweetness of a nurse that trips from and to a gruff convalescent. I ceased visiting most of our mutual friends because they had lost all interest in my passport affairs and seemed to have turned vaguely inimical. I composed several poems. I drank all the wine I could get. I clasped her one day to my groaning breast, and we went for a week to Caboule and lay on the round pink pebbles of the narrow beach. Strange to say, the happier our new relations seemed, the stronger I felt an undercurrent of poignant sadness, but I kept telling myself that this was an intrinsic feature of all true bliss.
In the meantime, something had shifted in the moving pattern of our fates and at last I emerged from a dark and hot office with a couple of plump visas de sortie cupped in my trembling hands. Into these the U.S.A. serum was duly injected, and I dashed to Marseilles and managed to get tickets for the very next boat. I returned and tramped up the stairs. I saw a rose in a glass on the table - the sugar-pink of its obvious beauty, the parasitic air bubbles clinging to its stem. Her two spare dresses were gone, her comb was gone, her checkered coat was gone, and so was the mauve hair-band with a mauve bow that had been her hat. There was no note pinned to the pillow, nothing at all in the room to enlighten me, for of course the rose was merely what French rhymsters call une cheville.
I went to the Veretennikovs, who could tell me nothing; to the Hellmans, who refused to say anything; and to the Elaguins, who were not sure whether to tell me or not. Finally, the old lady - and you know what Anna Vladimirovna is like at crucial moments - asked for her rubber-tipped cane, heavily but energetically dislodged her bulk from her favorite armchair, and took me into the garden. There she informed me that, being twice my age, she had the right to say I was a bully and a cad.
You must imagine the scene: the tiny graveled garden with its blue Arabian Nights jar and solitary cypress; the cracked terrace where the old lady's father had dozed with a rug on his knees when he retired from his Novgorod governorship to spend a few last evenings in Nice; the pale-green sky; a whiff of vanilla in the deepening dusk; the crickets emitting their metallic trill pitched at two octaves above middle C; and Anna Vladimirovna, the folds of her cheeks jerkily dangling as she flung at me a motherly but quite undeserved insult.
During several preceding weeks, my dear V., every time she had visited by herself the three or four families we both knew, my ghostly wife had filled the eager ears of all those kind people with an extraordinary story. To wit: that she had madly fallen in love with a young Frenchman who could give her a turreted home and a crested name; that she had implored me for a divorce and I had refused; that, in fact, I had said I would rather shoot her and myself than sail to New York alone; that she had said her father in a similar case had acted like a gentleman; that I had answered I did not give a hoot for her cocu de pere.
There were loads of other preposterous details of that kind - but they all hung together in such a remarkable fashion that no wonder the old lady made me swear I would not seek to pursue the lovers with a cocked pistol. They had gone, she said, to a chateau in Lozere. I inquired whether she had ever set eyes upon the man. No, but she had been shown his picture. As I was about to leave, Anna Vladimirovna, who had slightly relaxed and had even given me her five fat fingers to kiss, suddenly flared up again, struck the gravel with her cane, and said in her deep strong voice: "But one thing I shall never forgive you - her dog, that poor beast which you hanged with your own hands before leaving Paris."
Whether the gentleman of leisure had changed into a traveling salesman, or whether the metamorphosis had been reversed, or whether again he was neither the one nor the other, but the nondescript Russian who had courted her before our marriage - all this was absolutely unessential. She had gone. That was the end. I should have been a fool had I begun the nightmare business of searching and waiting for her all over again.
On the fourth morning of a long and dismal sea voyage, I met on the deck a solemn but pleasant old doctor with whom I had pIayed chess in Paris. He asked me whether my wife was very much incommoded by the rough seas. I answered that I had sailed alone; whereupon he looked taken aback and then said he had seen her a couple of days before going on board, namely in Marseilles, walking, rather aimlessly he thought, along the embankment. She said that I would presently join her with bag and tickets.
This is, I gather, the point of the whole story - although if you write it, you had better not make him a doctor, as that kind of thing has been overdone. It was at that moment that I suddenly knew for certain that she had never existed at all. I shall tell you another thing. When I arrived I hastened to satisfy a certain morbid curiosity: I went to the address she had given me once; it proved to be an anonymous gap between two office buildings; I looked for her uncle's name in the directory; it was not there; I made some inquiries, and Gekko, who knows everything, informed me that the man and his horsy wife existed all right, but had moved to San Francisco after their deaf little girl had died.
Viewing the past graphically, I see our mangled romance engulfed in a deep valley of mist between the crags of two matter-of-fact mountains: life had been real before, life will be real from now on, I hope. Not tomorrow, though. Perhaps after tomorrow. You, happy mortal, with your lovely family (how is Ines? how are the twins?) and your diversified work (how are the lichens?), can hardly be expected to puzzle out my misfortune in terms of human communion, but you may clarify things for me through the prism of your art.
Yet the pity of it. Curse your art, I am hideously unhappy. She keeps on walking to and fro where the brown nets are spread to dry on the hot stone slabs and the dappled light of the water plays on the side of a moored fishing boat. Somewhere, somehow, I have made some fatal mistake. There are tiny pale bits of broken fish scales glistening here and there in the brown meshes. It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V.: you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for a title.
~ Vladimir Nabokov | Art by Hokusai
'That in Aleppo once' a *magical* short story by Nabakov http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mazalek/projects/aleppo/nabokov.html … Features refugees and, yes, harks back to Othello's crisis
By Vladimir Nabokov
http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~mazalek/projects/aleppo/nabokov.html
DEAR V. - Among other things, this is to tell you that at last I am here, in the country whither so many sunsets have led. One of the first persons I saw was our good old Gleb Alexandrovich Gekko gloomily crossing Columbus Avenue in quest of the petit cafe du coin which none of us three will ever visit again. He seemed to think that somehow or other you were betraying our national literature, and he gave me your address with a deprecatory shake of his gray head, as if you did not deserve the treat of hearing from me.
I have a story for you. Which reminds me - I mean putting it like this reminds me - of the days when we wrote our first udder-warm bubbling verse, and all things, a rose, a puddle, a lighted window, cried out to us: "I'm a rhyme!" Yes, this is a most useful universe. We play, we die: ig-rhyme, umi-rhyme. And the sonorous souls of Russian verbs lend a meaning to the wild gesticulation of trees or to some discarded newspaper sliding and pausing, and shuffling again, with abortive flaps and apterous jerks along an endless windswept embankment. But just now I am not a poet. I come to you like that gushing lady in Chekhov who was dying to be described.
I married, let me see, about a month after you left France, and a few weeks before the gentle Germans roared into Paris. Although I can produce documentary proofs of matrimony, I am positive now that my wife never existed. You may know her name from some other source, but that does not matter: it is the name of an illusion. Therefore, I am able to speak of her with as much detachment as I would of a character in a story (one of your stories, to be precise).
It was love at first touch rather than at first sight, for I had met her several times before without experiencing any special emotions; but one night as I was seeing her home, something quaint she had said made me stoop with a laugh and lightly kiss her on the hair - and of course we all know of that blinding blast which is caused by merely picking up a small doll from the floor of a carefully abandoned house: the soldier involved hears nothing; for him it is but an ecstatic soundless and boundless expansion of what had been during his life a pinpoint of light in the dark center of his being. And really, the reason we think of death in celestial terms is that the visible firmament, especially at night (above our blacked-out Paris with the gaunt arches of its Boulevard Exelmans and the ceaseless Alpine gurgle of desolate latrines), is the most adequate and ever-present symbol of that vast silent explosion.
But I cannot discern her. She remains as nebulous as my best poem - the one you made such gruesome fun of in the Literaturnye Zapiski. When I want to imagine her I have to cling mentally to a tiny brown birthmark on her downy forearm, as one concentrates upon a punctuation mark in an illegible sentence. Perhaps, had she used a greater amount of make-up, or used it more constantly, I might have visualized her face today, or at least the delicate transverse furrows of dry, hot rouged lips; but I fail, I fail - although I still feel their elusive touch now and then in the blindman's buff of my senses, in that sobbing sort of dream when she and I clumsily dutch at each other through a heartbreaking mist, and I cannot see the color of her eyes for the blank luster of brimming tears drowning their irises.
She was much younger than I - not as much younger as was Nathalie of the lovely bare shoulders and long earrings in relation to swarthy Pushkin; but still there was a sufficient margin for that kind of retrospective romanticism which finds pleasure in imitating the destiny of a unique genius (down to the jealousy, down to the filth, down to the stab of seeing her almond-shaped eyes turn to her blond Cassio behind her peacock-feathered fan) even if one cannot imitate his verse. She liked mine, though, and would scarcely have yawned as the other was wont to do every time her husband's poem happened to exceed the length of a sonnet. If she has remained a phantom to me, I may have been one to her: I suppose she had been solely attracted by the obscurity of my poetry; then tore a hole through its veil and saw a stranger's unlovable face.
As you know, I had been for some time planning to follow the example of your fortunate flight. She described to me an uncle of hers who lived, she said, in New York: he had taught riding at a southern college, and had wound up by marrying a wealthy American woman; they had a little daughter born deaf. She said she had lost their address long ago, but a few days later it miraculously turned up, and we wrote a dramatic letter to which we never received any reply. This did not much matter, as I had already obtained a sound affidavit from Professor Lomchenko of Chicago; but little else had been done in the way of getting the necessary papers when the invasion began, whereas I foresaw that, if we stayed on in Paris, some helpful compatriot of mine would sooner or later point out to the interested party sundry passages in one of my books where I argued that, with all her many black sins, Germany was still bound to remain forever and ever the laughingstock of the world.
So we started upon our disastrous honeymoon. Crushed and jolted amid the apocalyptic exodus, waiting for unscheduled trains that were bound for unknown destinations, walking through the stale stage-setting of abstract towns, living in a permanent twilight of physical exhaustion, we fled; and the farther we fled, the clearer it became that what was driving us on was something more than a booted and buckled fool with his assortment of variously propelled junk - something of which he was a mere symbol, something monstrous and impalpable, a timeless and faceless mass of immemorial horror that still keeps coming at me from behind even here, in the green vacuum of Central Park.
Oh, she bore it gamely enough - with a kind of dazed cheerfulness. Once however, quite suddenly, she started to sob in a sympathetic railway carriage. "The dog" she said, "the dog we left. I cannot forget the poor dog." The honesty of her grief shocked me, as we had never had any dog. "I know," she said, "but I tried to imagine we had actually bought that setter. And just think, he would be now whining behind a locked door." There had never been any talk of buying a setter.
I should also not like to forget a certain stretch of highroad and the sight of a family of refugees (two women, a child) whose old father, or grandfather, had died on the way. The sky was a chaos of black and flesh-colored clouds with an ugly sunburst beyond a hooded hill, and the dead man was lying on his back under a dusty plane tree. With a stick and their hands the women had tried to dig a roadside grave, but the soil was too hard; they had given it up and were sitting side by side, among the anemic poppies, a little apart from the corpse and its up-turned beard. But the little boy was still scratching and scraping and tugging until he tumbled a flat stone and forgot the object of his solemn exertions as he crouched on his haunches, his thin, eloquent neck showing all its vertebrae to the headsman, and watched with surprise and delight thousands of minute brown ants seething, zigzagging, dispersing, heading for places of safety in the Gard, and the Aude, and the Drome, and the Var, and the Basses-Pyrenees - we two paused only in Pau.
Spain proved too difficult and we decided to move on to Nice. At a place called Faugeres (a ten-minute stop) I squeezed out of the train to buy some food. When a couple of minutes later I came back, the train was gone, and the muddled old man responsible for the atrocious void that faced me (coal dust glittering in the heat between naked indifferent rails, and a lone piece of orange peel) brutally told me that, anyway, I had had no right to get out.
In a better world I could have had my wife located and told what to do (I had both tickets and most of the money); as it was, my nightmare struggle with the telephone proved futile, so I dismissed the whole series of diminutive voices barking at me from afar, sent two or three telegrams which are probably on their way only now, and late in the evening took the next local to Montpellier, farther than which her train would not stumble. Not finding her there, I had to choose between two alternatives: going on because she might have boarded the Marseilles train which I had just missed, or going back because she might have returned to Faugeres. I forget now what tangle of reasoning led me to Marseilles and Nice.
Beyond such routine action as forwarding false data to a few unlikely places, the police did nothing to help: one man bellowed at me for being a nuisance; another sidetracked the question by doubting the authenticity of my marriage certificate because it was stamped on what he contended to be the wrong side; a third, a fat commissaire with liquid brown eyes, confessed that he wrote poetry in his spare time. I looked up various acquaintances among the numerous Russians domiciled or stranded in Nice. I heard those among them who chanced to have Jewish blood talk of their doomed kinsmen crammed into hell-bound trains; and my own plight, by contrast, acquired a commonplace air of irreality while I sat in some crowded cafe with the milky blue sea in front of me and a shell-hollow murmur behind telling and retelling the tale of massacre and misery, and the gray paradise beyond the ocean, and the ways and whims of harsh consuls.
A week after my arrival an indolent plain-clothes man called upon me and took me down a crooked and smelly street to a black-stained house with the word "hotel" almost erased by dirt and time; there, he said, my wife had been found. The girl he produced was an absolute stranger, of course, but my friend Holmes kept on trying for some time to make her and me confess we were married, while her taciturn and muscular bedfellow stood by and listened, his bare arms crossed on his striped chest.
When at length I got rid of those people and had wandered back to my neighborhood, I happened to pass by a compact queue waiting at the entrance of a food store, and there, at the very end, was my wife, straining on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of what exactly was being sold. I think the first thing she said to me was that she hoped it was oranges.
Her tale seemed a trifle hazy, but perfectly banal. She had returned to Faugeres and gone straight to the Commissariat instead of making inquiries at the station, where I had left a message for her. A party of refugees suggested that she join them; she spent the night in a bicycle shop with no bicycles, on the floor, together with three elderly women who lay, she said, like three logs in a row. Next day she realized that she had not enough money to reach Nice. Eventually she borrowed some from one of the log-women. She got into the wrong train, however, and traveled to a town the name of which she could not remember. She had arrived at Nice two days ago and had found some friends at the Russian church. They had told her I was somewhere around, looking for her, and would surely turn up soon.
Some time later, as I sat on the edge of the only chair in my garret and held her by her slender young hips (she was combing her soft hair and tossing her head back with every stroke), her dim smile changed all at once into an odd quiver and she placed one hand on my shoulder, staring down at me as if I were a reflection in a pool, which she had noticed for the first time. "I've been lying to you, dear," she said. " Ya lgunia. I stayed for several nights in Montpellier with a brute of a man I met on the train. I did not want it at all. He sold hair lotions."
The time, the place, the torture. Her fan, her gloves, her mask. I spent that night and many others getting it out of her bit by bit, but not getting it all. I was under the strange delusion that first I must find out every detail, reconstruct every minute, and only then decide whether I could bear it. But the limit of desired knowledge was unattainable, nor could I ever foretell the approximate point after which I might imagine myself satiated, because of course the denominator of every fraction of knowledge was potentially as infinite as the number of intervals between the fractions themselves.
Oh, the first time she had been too tired to mind, and the next had not minded because she was sure I had deserted her; and she apparently considered that such explanations ought to be a kind of consolation prize for me instead of the nonsense and agony they really were. It went on like that for eons, she breaking down every now and then, but soon rallying again, answering my unprintable questions in a breathless whisper or trying with a pitiful smile to wriggle into the semi-security of irrelevant commentaries, and I crushing and crushing the mad molar till my jaw almost burst with pain, a flaming pain which seemed somehow preferable to the dull, humming ache of humble endurance.
And mark, in between the periods of this inquest we were trying to get from reluctant authorities certain papers on the strength of which one might hope to obtain other papers which in their turn would make it lawful to apply for a third kind which would serve as a steppingstone towards a permit enabling the holder to apply for the other papers which might or might not give him the means of discovering how and why it had happened. For even if I could imagine the accursed recurrent scene, I raged to link up its sharp-angled grotesque shadows with the dim limbs of my wife as she shook and rattled and dissolved in my violent grasp.
So nothing remained but to torture each other, to wait for hours on end in the Prefecture, filling forms, conferring with friends who had already probed the innermost viscera of all visas, pleading with secretaries, and filling forms again, with the result that her lusty and versatile traveling salesman became blended in a ghastly mix-up with rat-whiskered snarling officials, rotting bundles of obsolete records, the reek of violet ink, bribes slipped under gangrenous blotting paper, fat flies tickling moist necks with their rapid cold padded feet, new-laid clumsy concave photographs of your six subhuman doubles, the tragic eyes and patient politeness of petitionaries born in Slutzk, Starodub, or Bobruisk, the funnels and pulleys of the Holy Inquisition, the awful smile of the bald man with the glasses, who had been told that his passport could not be found.
I confess that one evening, after a particularly abominable day, I sank down on a stone bench weeping and cursing a mock world where millions of lives were being juggled by the clammy hands of consuls and commissaires. I noticed she was crying too. and then I told her that nothing would really have mattered the way it mattered now, had she not gone and done what she did.
"You will think me crazy," she said with a vehemence that, for a second, almost made a real person of her, "but I didn't - I swear that I didn't. Perhaps I live several lives at once. Perhaps I wanted to test you. Perhaps this bench is a dream and we are in Saratov or on some star."
It would be tedious to niggle the different stages through which I passed before accepting finally the first version of her delay. I did not talk to her and was a good deal alone. She would glimmer and fade, and reappear with some trifle she thought I would appreciate - a handful of cherries, three precious cigarettes, or the like - treating me with the unruffled mute sweetness of a nurse that trips from and to a gruff convalescent. I ceased visiting most of our mutual friends because they had lost all interest in my passport affairs and seemed to have turned vaguely inimical. I composed several poems. I drank all the wine I could get. I clasped her one day to my groaning breast, and we went for a week to Caboule and lay on the round pink pebbles of the narrow beach. Strange to say, the happier our new relations seemed, the stronger I felt an undercurrent of poignant sadness, but I kept telling myself that this was an intrinsic feature of all true bliss.
In the meantime, something had shifted in the moving pattern of our fates and at last I emerged from a dark and hot office with a couple of plump visas de sortie cupped in my trembling hands. Into these the U.S.A. serum was duly injected, and I dashed to Marseilles and managed to get tickets for the very next boat. I returned and tramped up the stairs. I saw a rose in a glass on the table - the sugar-pink of its obvious beauty, the parasitic air bubbles clinging to its stem. Her two spare dresses were gone, her comb was gone, her checkered coat was gone, and so was the mauve hair-band with a mauve bow that had been her hat. There was no note pinned to the pillow, nothing at all in the room to enlighten me, for of course the rose was merely what French rhymsters call une cheville.
I went to the Veretennikovs, who could tell me nothing; to the Hellmans, who refused to say anything; and to the Elaguins, who were not sure whether to tell me or not. Finally, the old lady - and you know what Anna Vladimirovna is like at crucial moments - asked for her rubber-tipped cane, heavily but energetically dislodged her bulk from her favorite armchair, and took me into the garden. There she informed me that, being twice my age, she had the right to say I was a bully and a cad.
You must imagine the scene: the tiny graveled garden with its blue Arabian Nights jar and solitary cypress; the cracked terrace where the old lady's father had dozed with a rug on his knees when he retired from his Novgorod governorship to spend a few last evenings in Nice; the pale-green sky; a whiff of vanilla in the deepening dusk; the crickets emitting their metallic trill pitched at two octaves above middle C; and Anna Vladimirovna, the folds of her cheeks jerkily dangling as she flung at me a motherly but quite undeserved insult.
During several preceding weeks, my dear V., every time she had visited by herself the three or four families we both knew, my ghostly wife had filled the eager ears of all those kind people with an extraordinary story. To wit: that she had madly fallen in love with a young Frenchman who could give her a turreted home and a crested name; that she had implored me for a divorce and I had refused; that, in fact, I had said I would rather shoot her and myself than sail to New York alone; that she had said her father in a similar case had acted like a gentleman; that I had answered I did not give a hoot for her cocu de pere.
There were loads of other preposterous details of that kind - but they all hung together in such a remarkable fashion that no wonder the old lady made me swear I would not seek to pursue the lovers with a cocked pistol. They had gone, she said, to a chateau in Lozere. I inquired whether she had ever set eyes upon the man. No, but she had been shown his picture. As I was about to leave, Anna Vladimirovna, who had slightly relaxed and had even given me her five fat fingers to kiss, suddenly flared up again, struck the gravel with her cane, and said in her deep strong voice: "But one thing I shall never forgive you - her dog, that poor beast which you hanged with your own hands before leaving Paris."
Whether the gentleman of leisure had changed into a traveling salesman, or whether the metamorphosis had been reversed, or whether again he was neither the one nor the other, but the nondescript Russian who had courted her before our marriage - all this was absolutely unessential. She had gone. That was the end. I should have been a fool had I begun the nightmare business of searching and waiting for her all over again.
On the fourth morning of a long and dismal sea voyage, I met on the deck a solemn but pleasant old doctor with whom I had pIayed chess in Paris. He asked me whether my wife was very much incommoded by the rough seas. I answered that I had sailed alone; whereupon he looked taken aback and then said he had seen her a couple of days before going on board, namely in Marseilles, walking, rather aimlessly he thought, along the embankment. She said that I would presently join her with bag and tickets.
This is, I gather, the point of the whole story - although if you write it, you had better not make him a doctor, as that kind of thing has been overdone. It was at that moment that I suddenly knew for certain that she had never existed at all. I shall tell you another thing. When I arrived I hastened to satisfy a certain morbid curiosity: I went to the address she had given me once; it proved to be an anonymous gap between two office buildings; I looked for her uncle's name in the directory; it was not there; I made some inquiries, and Gekko, who knows everything, informed me that the man and his horsy wife existed all right, but had moved to San Francisco after their deaf little girl had died.
Viewing the past graphically, I see our mangled romance engulfed in a deep valley of mist between the crags of two matter-of-fact mountains: life had been real before, life will be real from now on, I hope. Not tomorrow, though. Perhaps after tomorrow. You, happy mortal, with your lovely family (how is Ines? how are the twins?) and your diversified work (how are the lichens?), can hardly be expected to puzzle out my misfortune in terms of human communion, but you may clarify things for me through the prism of your art.
Yet the pity of it. Curse your art, I am hideously unhappy. She keeps on walking to and fro where the brown nets are spread to dry on the hot stone slabs and the dappled light of the water plays on the side of a moored fishing boat. Somewhere, somehow, I have made some fatal mistake. There are tiny pale bits of broken fish scales glistening here and there in the brown meshes. It may all end in Aleppo if I am not careful. Spare me, V.: you would load your dice with an unbearable implication if you took that for a title.
இனவரைவியலாளர் -
ஹோர்ஹே லூயி போர்ஹெஸ்
http://www.kapaadapuram.com/?ayal_ilakkiyam_shankar
தமிழில் : ஷங்கர்ராமசுப்ரமணியன்
http://www.kapaadapuram.com/?ayal_ilakkiyam_shankar
தமிழில் : ஷங்கர்ராமசுப்ரமணியன்
அது
டெக்சாசில் நடந்ததாக எனக்குச் சொல்லப்பட்டது. ஆனால் இன்னொரு மாநிலத்தில்
நடந்த சம்பவம் அது. அந்தச்சம்பவத்தில் ஒரேயொரு முதன்மைப் பாத்திரம்தான்
(ஒவ்வொரு கதையிலும் ஆயிரக்கணக்கான முதன்மைப் பாத்திரங்கள், தெரிந்தும்
தெரியாமலும் உயிருடனும் இறந்தும் இருக்கத்தானே செய்கிறார்கள்). அந்த
மனிதனின் பெயர், ப்ரெட் முர்டாக் என்று கருதுகிறேன். அவன் அமெரிக்கர்களைப்
போலவே உயரமானவன்; அவனது முடி பொன்னிறமும் அல்ல, கருப்பும் அல்ல, அவனது
தோற்றம் கூர்மையானது, அவன் மிகவும் குறைவாகவே பேசினான். குறிப்பிட்டுச்
சொல்லும்படி எந்த அம்சமும் அவனிடம் இல்லை. இளைஞர்கள் வெளிப்படுத்தும்
பாவனையான ஒரு தனித்தன்மைகூட அவனிடம் இல்லை. இயல்பாகவே அவன்
மரியாதையுடையவனாக இருந்தான். அத்துடன் அவன் புத்தகங்களையோ அவற்றை எழுதிய
ஆண்கள் மற்றும் பெண்கள் மீதோ அவநம்பிக்கை கொண்டவனாக இல்லாமல் இருந்தான்.
இன்னமும் தான் யார் என்பதை அறியாத வயதில் அவன் இருந்தான். எனவே, தன்
வழியில் என்ன வாய்ப்புகள் முன்வைக்கப்படுகின்றனவோ அதற்குள் தன்னைச்
செலுத்திக்கொள்வதற்குத் தயாராக இருந்தான் - பாரசீக மறைஞானம் அல்லது
ஹங்கேரியர்களின் அறியவராத பூர்விகங்கள், போரின் அல்லது அல்ஜீப்ராவின்
ஆபத்துக்கள், தூய்மைவாதம் அல்லது கூட்டுக் களியாட்டங்கள். அவன் படித்த
பல்கலைக்கழகத்தில், ஒரு ஆலோசகர் அவனிடம் அமெரிந்திய மொழிகள் குறித்த
விருப்பத்தை ஏற்படுத்தினார்.
மேற்கில்,
குறிப்பிட்ட சில ஆதிவாசிகளிடம் இன்னமும் சில குறிப்பிட்ட தாந்த்ரீகச்
சடங்குகள் இருந்துவந்தன. அவனது பேராசிரியர்களில் ஒருவர், வயதில் மூத்தவர்,
அங்கே சென்று தனியாகத் தங்கி, சடங்குகளை அவதானித்து, ஆதிவாசி மருத்துவர்கள்
தங்கள் சீடர்களுக்குச் சொல்லித்தரும் ரகசியத்தைக் கண்டுபிடித்துவரும்படி
யோசனை கூறினார். அப்படி அவன் திரும்பிவரும்போது, அவனுக்கு ஆய்வுப்பட்டம்
கிடைக்குமெனவும், அந்த ஆய்வைப் பல்கலைக்கழக அதிகாரிகள் பதிப்பிப்பார்கள்
என்றும் அவனிடம் கூறப்பட்டது. முர்டாக் அந்த ஆலோசனையால் உந்தப்பட்டான்.
அவனது மூதாதையர்களில் ஒருவர் எல்லையில் நடந்த போர் ஒன்றில் இறந்தவர். அவனது
இனத்தின் அந்தப் பூர்விக முரண்தான் தற்போதைய இணைப்பாயிற்று. தான்
எதிர்கொள்ளப்போகும் நெருக்கடிகளை அவன் முன்னுணர்ந்திருக்க வேண்டும்.
தங்களில் ஒருவனாகத் தன்னை அந்தச் சிவப்பு மனிதர்கள் ஏற்றுக்கொள்ளச்
சம்மதிக்கவைக்க வேண்டும். அவன் நீண்ட ஒரு சாகசப் பயணத்தைத் தொடங்கினான்.
அவன் இரண்டு ஆண்டுகளுக்கு மேலாக புல் சமவெளியில் வாழ்ந்தான். சில
சமயங்களில் களிமண் பாவிய சுவர்களின் பாதுகாப்பிலும் சில சமயங்கள்
வெட்டவெளியிலும். அவன் அதிகாலைக்கு முன்னர் எழுந்தான், அஸ்தமனத்தில்
படுக்கைக்குச் சென்றான். அவனது தந்தையர்களுடையதல்லாத மொழியில் கனவு காணத்
தொடங்கினான். பச்சையான உணவு ருசிகளுக்குத் தனது நாக்கைப் பழக்கப்படுத்திக்
கொண்டான். வினோதமான உடைகளால் தன்னை மறைத்துக்கொண்டான். தனது நண்பர்களையும்
நகரத்தையும் மறந்தான். அவனது மனதின் தர்க்கம் புறக்கணிக்கும் வகையில்
சிந்திக்கத் தொடங்கினான். அவன் கற்ற புதிய கல்வியின் தொடக்க சில மாதங்களில்
அவன் ரகசியமாகக் குறிப்புகளை எடுத்தான். பின்னர் அந்தக் குறிப்புகளைக்
கிழித்தெறிந்துவிட்டான். தன் மேல் சந்தேகம் வரக் கூடாது என்பதற்காகவோ, இனி
தேவைப்படாது என்பதற்காகவோ இருக்கலாம். அங்குள்ள குலகுரு, குறிப்பிட்ட
காலகட்டத்துக்கு (உடல்ரீதியாகவும் ஆன்மிக ரீதியாகவும் சில குறிப்பிட்ட
நடைமுறைகளால் தீர்மானிக்கப்படுவது) பின்னர் முர்டாக்கிடம், அவனது கனவுகளை
ஒவ்வொரு நாள் விடியலிலும் நினைவுகூர்வதற்கு உத்தரவிட்டார். முழுமதி
நாட்களின் இரவுகளில் அந்த இளைஞன் எருமையைக் கனவு கண்டான். தொடரும் எருமைக்
கனவுகளை தனது குருவிடம் அவன் தெரிவித்தான். அந்தக் குரு கடைசியில் தங்கள்
இனக் குழுவின் ரகசிய சித்தாந்தத்தை அவனிடம் வெளிப்படுத்தினார். ஒரு நாள்
காலையில், யாரிடமும் சொல்லாமல் முர்டாக் அங்கிருந்து வெளியேறினான்.
அவன்
சமவெளி வாழ்க்கையின் தொடக்க மாலைகளில் நகரத்தைப் பற்றிய ஞாபகங்களில்
இருந்ததைப் போலவே நகரத்தில் சமவெளி குறித்த நினைவுகளில் ஆழ்ந்திருந்தான்.
அவன் தனது பேராசிரியரின் அலுவலகத்துக்குச் சென்று, அந்த ரகசியத்தைத் தான்
அறிந்துகொண்டதாகவும், ஆனால் அதை வெளிப்படுத்த மாட்டேனென்றும் கூறினான்.
"ஏதாவது உறுதிமொழிக்குக் கட்டுப்பட்டிருக்கிறாயா" என்று கேட்டார் பேராசிரியர்.
"அது காரணம் அல்ல", என்று முர்டாக் பதில் கூறினான். "என்னால் வெளிப்படுத்த முடியாத ஒன்றை நான் கற்றேன்"
"அதை வெளியிடுவதற்கு ஆங்கில மொழியால் இயலாமல் இருக்கலாமல்லவா" என்று பேராசிரியர் கேட்டார்.
"அது
பிரச்சினை இல்லை ஐயா. என்னிடம் இருக்கும் ரகசியத்தை நூறு விதமாகவும்
முரண்பட்ட வழிகளிலும்கூட என்னால் சொல்ல முடியும். இதை எப்படிச் சொல்வதென்று
எனக்குத் தெரியவில்லை, ஆனால் அந்த ரகசியம் அழகானது. அத்துடன் அறிவியல்,
நமது அறிவியல், தற்போது எனக்கு தீவிரமற்றதாகத் / முக்கியத்துவமற்றதாகத்
தெரிகிறது".
சற்று
இடைவெளி விட்டு அவன் மேலும் கூறினான்: "என்னவாக இருந்தாலும், அந்த
ரகசியத்தை நோக்கி என்னை வழிநடத்திய பாதைகள் அளவுக்கு அந்த ரகசியம்
முக்கியமானதல்ல. ஒவ்வொரு நபரும் அந்தப் பாதைகள் வழியாக நடக்க வேண்டும்."
பேராசிரியர்
இறுக்கமாகப் பேசினார்: "நான் கமிட்டியிடம் உனது முடிவு பற்றி தகவல்
அளிக்கிறேன். செவ்விந்தியர்களுடன் வாழ்வதற்குத் திட்டமிட்டுள்ளாயா?"
"இல்லை"
என முர்டாக் பதிலளித்தான். "நான் சமவெளிக்குத் திரும்பப் போகாமலும்கூட
இருக்கலாம். சமவெளியின் மனிதர்கள் எனக்குக் கற்றுக்கொடுத்தது எல்லா
இடங்களுக்கும் எல்லாச் வழ்நிலைகளுக்கும் உகந்தது".
அவர்களுக்குள் நடந்த உரையாடலின் சாரம் இது தான்.
ப்ரெட் முர்டாக் திருமணம் செய்துகொண்டான். விவாகரத்தானது. தற்போது யேல் நூலகர்களில் ஒருவனாக இருக்கிறான்.
The Ethnographer - Jorge Luis Borges
Translated in English by Andrew Hurley