LITMIR.BIZ

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id="ulink_a426b2e0-9778-5e34-9110-9dfbcba44dc8">Sometimes I allow myself to wake at dawn, like a little boy for whom, odd as it sounds, everything is yet to happen. But I see through my drowsiness how the streams and flows and flickers of light happened without me this morning, and I remember the light-lured pink of budding apple-blossoms, uncertain and moist, in those lost secluded gardens at Kuskovo³ where the light of our first mutual feelings budded and shone towards the foreign lands destined for both of us.

      If I could write this life like a novel, I could make up the beginnings of the story as if it was a prophesied meeting of two existences after years of separation, in such surroundings and scenery, a classic unity of time, place and action: amid the generously blooming apple and cherry trees of an orchard on the outskirts of Kuskovo, in the rented room of a shabby wooden house near the station, not far from the palace parks with their lakes and waterways, humpback bridges and well-proportioned marble statues, an ancient and steady harmony far from the mental strife, and far from the inevitable restless and rootless rage and remorse bought on by life’s desires.

      I loved – you didn’t believe and wanted to believe and didn’t believe again, just as you’re not believing now, when it can be sweet not to believe. But to all the shocks, dreams and true torments of the heart, there was a Witness, who was creating balance and proportionality; all that was needed was to look deeply, not with the eyes but with the heart.

      Why with such a lack of faith, and a woman’s eternal need for words, were both of us, once our wanders had begun, always drawn to the same places: to Kuskovo with its shiny sprinkles of leaves and silvery waters, its Dutch house dedicated to Peter the Great, its museum of Shuvalov porcelain, and the time-defying oak near the Orangery fenced off by a cast-iron chain from Kasli; to Archangelskoe, on our last few kopeks, with its palatial cascades of terraces, amid the russet and gold autumn forests to the west of Moscow; to Pavlovsk on the fringes of Saint Petersburg and its natural looking English park; and of course that first prophetic journey which precipitated our nomadic life.

      It was a quarter of a century ago when, golden-headed and warmed by the September sun, we stepped down from the train in Leningrad and I, remember, said to you – as a joke or consolation: ‘Welcome to Paris!’

      Then after many years, we did go to Paris for real, and although I didn’t repeat the phrase on the Gare du Nord, you joked about it. But perhaps how it appeared to me then rebelled against my many images of Paris before it became an effective memory of the heart.

      If you ask me, even now, what single memory of love I would choose, it may be that coloured vividly in red and gold on green, of leaf fall on grass on the Pavlov Hills near the arbour of the dowager empress, from where with a gasp of happiness and unguarded faith – yellowy shimmering birch, scarlet Russian maples, deep azure of mountain air, silvery shafts of sunlight, shining golden curls in your warm-wind-caressed hair – you ran into my open arms, and for the very first time we came together in that devout impulse to human unity which, Oh Lord My God, happens truly only once, to leave ever after its inescapable presence and a ­yearning for it to come back.

      I confess: my entire life I have been waiting for a return of that glorious moment of fulfilment and alignment, of that irresistible triumph of unselfish happiness. It is part of our shared past, and it beckons and teases me with its constant presence and its foretold uniqueness amid the normal strains of life. But of course you can never retrieve true unity; it has to be accomplished anew each time. It must happen afresh and not become a memory. It must appear to the soul as another new dawn, in which I must understand you and myself entirely, from the beginning.

      Yes, you were sleeping in the heavens above the garden in which things were happening and being achieved. My ten minutes have already departed, like the unified wholeness, and the silence has lifted, to return only as scattered moments in the happenstances of an ordinary day. Once more, I was leaving you for a day, to come back in the evening with a heart exhausted by the pressing vanity and powerlessness of the necessities of life, in the silence of tiredness which I can never share.

      Time has not stretched, and the urgency of our unmatched dreams, and our perceptions of visible realities, separates us far more often now. So forgive my manly silence, if you can – authenticity cannot be explained in spoken words, but may sometimes be written down.

      What was formed in the silence of the morning was a message to your inner life and your separate existence. What had concerned me for so long was to be written down like a letter to another room of our shared house, and it turned out to be a reflection on silence – a simple composition in four extended parts with a brief additional story that in my flush of honesty emulated a moral parable …

      For us humans even honesty is impulsive, but the open authenticity of the garden is mantled with marvellous nobility, and possesses, as if leading on perfectly from the past, a wonderful classic unity and balance of shapes, where every detail is distinguished and transformed to a centre of gravity.

      Whatever we verily love about the world, a lover or a homeland, we love about God – about the ancient Unity, partially reflected in the mirror of a troubled soul and in the muted secrecies of a mortal heart.

      Si tu n’existais pas, dis-moi, pourquoi j’existerai?

      (And if you didn’t exist …)

      Devoted people are the first to be betrayed. You can rely on people like this. They will always be there for you. But I can vouch that just over twenty years ago, one summer’s day, around Moscow’s Sokol metro station not a living soul had this sort of idle thought in their head. In one green quadrangle stood substantial apartment blocks which had only one, but I must say significant, drawback, which was the constant traffic on the nearby circular railway. Every night, heavy-goods trains without any apparent end seemed to slow down then pull away again right next to the apartments with a fearful fusillade of metallic clangs from the truck couplings. The residents, though, long ceased to pay any attention – can people get used to anything? In fact, this place wasn’t especially quiet even during the day.

On one side, the eight-story apartment block overlooked the Volokokamsky Highway, and on the other, the side on which Elizaveta Osipovna lived, the 23 tram regularly clattered by. For three kopeks you could ride the tram to Koptevsky market, where moustached Azerbaijanis royally traded scarlet persimmons, richly coloured apples and grapes as pale as teardrops – where did they get such ripe fruits in June? Piled high on their stalls, too, were lush bunches of coriander and sweet brown Georgian churchkhela⁴ – jumbled, for some reason with wonderful pickles, huge, waxy marinated garlic, and delicious crimson-stained Gurian cabbage bound in sheaf-like bundles with salty green ramson.

      Of course, there were also many other Moscow treats, especially rich, butterlike soured cream, the purest most trickling cottage cheese, village butter in golden millstones, freshly drawn meat ruddy and steaming, juicy vigourous radish, giant dense onions, plump washed carrots and lush green celery and parsley.

Yet Elizaveta Osipovna had long ceased going to the market. A butchers, a dairy, a baker and a fish shop were conveniently at hand, next to the tram stop. The greengrocer’s was a disappointment with last year’s spongey potatoes and straggly damp carrots covered with the soil that was smeared all over the floor. The soil was often dry and the smell of the dust filled the shop. Not far away, though, near the beer dispensers and a recently opened rumochnaya,⁵ there were almost always old women selling herbs such as dill and parsley much cheaper than in the market.

      True, the bunches the old women sold were sparse, but, lonely as a finger, Elizaveta Osipovna didn’t need much. She was terrified of anything not fresh, so every single day she went to the local shops to top up. She’d buy 50 g of butter, a couple of slices of doktorskaya smoked sausage or, on ­pension day, a few slices of ham, a morsel of soured grain, and a sliver of cheese – just a smattering of each. Strangely, her fear of stale food harmonized perfectly with her pension of 56 soviet roubles. She learned how to eke out that sum over the entire month, yet at the

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