Letters to Another Room - Ravil Bukhraev

Скачать книгу

are many paths through the Dulwich woods to the more distant bus stop, but by taking three little tracks down from the crossroads, I could find my way along the sparsely grassed gravel bed of a disused narrow-gauge railway. Whenever I set foot on that long-abandoned track, I had a sense of my own long-forgotten narrow tracks from the past.

      One of these once led me and my father to the August hunt in Tatarstan – in the chilly white predawn mist on a high crest that rose, silvered with dew, above our Tatar meadows, with their knolls of knotted willows entwined with brambles, stubbornly blooming wild roses and hops with their clusters of pale-honey coloured cones. But all of this, you will see later, when the sun rises …

      You know how it happens: unbearably beautiful, it pours into the world fresh and newborn, pale gold and soft

      brilliance, and then, becoming hotter and shining with devout, intense clarity, it melts away the haze and greyness of the dawn smoking above the meadow glades and illuminates the dew on grasses and branches, and its joyful brightness washes all the intermingled colours of the invisible rainbow of life, knowing no boundaries in breadth or height, earthwards and skywards, and goes on forever, inextinguishable.

      But I recall that morning, just before dawn, on to the open meadow there darted the daftest rabbit, loopily sitting upright for a moment, staring straight at us, before bounding away into the pale mist.

      Another narrow track from the past, this one carpeted with wilting grass and yellowing pine needles, with my brother Almaz, in our first youth, when with limitless enthusiasm we vanished into the virgin forests of our homeland. Once we walked all day through the November taiga with heavy rucksacks to reach the sacred lake. At night, the frost was bitter, and in the tent, pitched on the shores, it was so utterly freezing that we spent the whole night huddled next to the fire. It was the first time I was ever awake to experience the gelification of the lake waters as it happened. The chill, exposed thickets by the lake basked palely in the light of a vast moon, which cast shifting, glittering spars on the surface of the lake as the water froze, later accompanied by a startling, starry crunch and crackle, like distant gunshot, as the ice formed out beyond the shallows. Long, lightning bolts and zigzags of moonlit crystals spread, like the brilliant cross-cuts on fine Moser crystal, yet continually changing direction. Enchanted flames of icefire sprang from the twigs of pine and birch and found their echo in the glowing embers flying vivid orange into the dark sky from our fire, with the resounding crack of the present.

      The Dulwich narrow-gauge track comes to an abrupt halt nowadays in front of the welded iron gates and thick rusty cage that bars the entrance to the old tunnel, from which padlocked and mysterious darkness always blows a scent of fungal dampness and desolation. The mighty arch which thus forbids entry rises in the wood’s twilight as a citadel, fortified like a Czech castle or the Pope’s Palace in Avignon. Up the steep brick slopes, creep and swarm besieging strands of dark and ancient ivy, marking the end of the line and the beginning of oblivion.

      In Victorian times, the ornate red-carriaged, copper-handled trains of the Express Electronic Service company whisked smartly dressed people from Victoria station in central London to the modern wonder of the world – the glass pavilion of the Crystal Palace, which dazzled the grey-bearded Camille Pissarro as he wandered among these trees with his easel. But the smoking chimneys of trains have long since diffused into the past and the carriages no longer jangle through the dark tunnel, even as ghosts. And the great transparent palace, constructed entirely of glass and cast-iron tracery by Joseph Paxton in Hyde Park to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, then dismantled and rebuilt near Sydenham, burned down entirely in a single night in 1936, and photos of those infamous flames decorate the walls of the local pub, the Dulwich Wood House, designed, like the palace, by Paxton.

      Besides the photos, the pub’s walls are hung with newspaper reports of the great fire, and a yellowed, framed bill, announcing, in letters of different sizes that after the royal family’s visit to the Festival of Empire in the glass colossus in June 1911, the Crystal Palace, together with the Concert Hall and central portal, and also the pavilions of the Chinese, Ancient Egypt and Rome, the Byzantine, the French Farmstead, the Chambers of the Moorish Alhambra and the Renaissance era, besides a Medieval English Court, and also the adjacent park with man-made lakes, with their humpback bridges and small islands – will be put at once up for auction. But even then, no-one was actually willing to stump up any cash for this onetime pride of the empire.

      It’s a short walk from the pub to the park, where you can still see amongst the weeds the wide flights of ruined stone staircases, imperial lions and statues that survived the flames. But the Palace itself has merged with history and become not merely transparent but invisible. And it comes to mind that those everyday worries that force us into alien schedules burn and crackle away to nought, and so do those imaginary palaces of the heart and chambers of the soul – those Chinese pagodas on Formosa lakes, those ancient stone-pines of Cyprus, those Byzantine churches and Roman temples, those luminous lagoons of Renaissance Venice, our own personal Alhambra, our Sinai deserts, our English Middle Ages – are all blown through the gaps of consciousness, through any imposed reality, like the Mistral sweeping down through the French valleys from the Alps, verifying that the past is not completed … that everything is being accomplished and everything happens outside time, outside the here and now, as in the human soul.

      And that’s quite enough justifications for these apparent confusions of thought before those who won’t welcome them anyway, just as they won’t welcome in spring the insane winds of autumn – like that furious mistral in ever-sunny Provence that recently and yet so infinitely long blew in our presence with such energy that it almost blew us and our love off the famous Avignon bridge into the chill font of the deep, plethoric Rhone …

      Oh Allah, what was I meant to realize at that moment, when it was so freshly and so terribly imprinted into my memory and consciousness, that moment which could so easily inspire, but even more easily bring grief:

      Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

      L’on y danse, l’on y danse

      Sur le Pont d’Avignon,

      L’on y danse tous en rond15

      Out on the remains of the medieval bridge stranded in the river: around us the penetrating, maddening mistral that knocked you off your feet, below the icy azure waters flowing as they had for tens of thousands of years, and behind, on a hill, the vast and imposing Palais des Papes – its thick walls faceted with cubes and rhomboids and corresponding spaces: a labyrinth, a charade, an enigma, a conundrum of history that stimulates the imagination perhaps more than it should.

      And so we wandered through the deserted stone halls, quietly pleased that the mistral had already blown away most of the idle-eyed tourists, leaving only a handful to shuffle around that palace where, like a repository in time, the papacy was exiled for a century when the light in Rome was dimmed. Through the empty palace, through its connecting echoing halls and galleries and through the wide open doors, gusted the mistral, the one visitor which had a right to visit freely, earned by long service.

      And who were we with our lonely earth love in this stone shell, this ancient masonry undefeated by time which we naively touched to sense immortality? The chill of the stone shot through the fingers and penetrated the heart, which so rarely obeys the mind. And again there was the question – what is in the world beyond the illusion of our historic existence? After all, if history itself is a mirage, an illusion of the mind, a delirium of the calendar, an unembraceable dream, then you cannot touch it, and you cannot just feel the truth. We can only reckon when we want to feel and be present, because only when we are present does this seem an action. But there was only the mistral, the sun-stirred wind and the Rhone, rolling its full, blue, icy waters past the Avignon bridge, which you can’t cross.

      Everyone has their own tongue. Everyone has their own truth. Everyone has their own history. And these variations of people’s sufferings interact only on dates, in the numbers that rule the world of people. The age of the Avignon retreat, the age of Babylon’s captivity, the age of purgatory before the brief deceptive paradise of the Renaissance – you can call them what you will, and all will be true and nothing will be true. Yes, these ages that overload us with knowledge and lure the mistral in the mind to murmur

Скачать книгу