LITMIR.BIZ

      MEMORIES ARE CRUCIAL when you’re craving to be reunited with life – when you long to be aware simultaneously of the present, past and future. The future, which is in any case filled with the past, is seen only dimly and slips away in vague guesses, while the present is by definition uneventful. But the past is with us always – without permission, pacing through any scene as unconditional reality.

      And so like this, memories came striding towards me that spring in the early 80s. With it came dejection as I, with pointless humility, punished myself for misdemeanours in some past setting where, for absence of proper achievement, I was brought by life and fate …

That setting was a concrete and asphalt and grey-brick world where the Gorky Railway is crossed by the ­Enthusiasts’ Highway, which long ago was called the Vladimirka⁷ and stretched away from the might of Moscow into the ­gloaming of a memory that once palely hurt me in the remote and beautiful woods and fields of the Vladimir region.

Here, in Vladimir, is the small white and blue Church of the Intercession on the Nerl.⁸ The square and ancient church with its central tower stands on a low mound above an oxbow lake formed by the snow melt. It looks entirely self-sufficient, and without need of anyone – or so it seemed to me, confused and empty at heart.

      Even this scene failed to wake any particular tender emotions in my soul, and yet it was deeply beautiful and even disturbing in its unique harmony, with its miniature white walls and the vast sky around in such perfect balance that in my imagination it became weightless, and seemed to float and shimmer like its reflection in the lake, the two images separated only by the band of limp reeds that grew between the floodlines. In those vague days of non-existence, there was nothing I wanted more than such freedom from gravity, but my earthweight dragged me down, and even in my dreams I had forgotten how to fly.

      At the time, thanks to my foolish extravagance, I had neither home nor wife, nor any significant money. I was spending every kopek I had on necessities and could not save at all. Lacking even a proper home, I was staying with a kind friend in a room from the tall windows of which could be seen, mirrored in glass on the opposite side of Enthusiasts’ Highway, the whole of the grey, apartment block with its groundfloor foodstore, its shelves entirely empty but for ranks of then ubiquitous ‘Siberian’ vodka. The room stuck in my memory because it was so hard to sleep in, even when very drunk, yet waking up in it was harder still and I never, never wanted to get up. I was in that foolish frame of mind where I was just existing, with nothing happening around me, and this fake existence, like everything devoid of a beginning and end, charged itself into the general guilt of life, meaningless and useless.

      Yet even this dark winter, long as it was, did pass, and I started to peer gingerly outside, each time looking further and further from my shelter – until once I managed to walk to Izmailovsky Park, where above the last vestiges of blackened snow the restorative pussy-willows were starting to bloom, and the muddy ditches were awash with the clear snow melt of Moscow’s foreign to me spring.

It was there in Izmailovsky that my eye was taken by a golden-yellow mother-and-stepmother flower,⁹ emerging from a bank of poor clay soil washed out by the spring rains. A zealous bee buzzed around this early source of nectar. I took the plant with me, dislodging its roots so easily from its native clay that it seemed almost accidental – the reddish-brown, tomentose roots led up the reedy stem to the heart of the floral corolla, shining like a miniature sun.

      When I reached my room again, I stowed the flower in a delft tea cup and soon forgot about it – because the reality of non-existence is actually rather self-obsessed. You suddenly want to do something, ignite your remaining powers, only for them to be snuffed straight out, since nothing in non-existence retains any meaning for long, even the express delight of a new spring. In this dimmed life, apart from such occasional flashes, there’s no engagement or connection because everything is dictated by only dismal ambition or boredom. No talent is ever engaged or else it is abused by the agony of self-love which artfully pretends to be a life.

      Even that first spring flower, captured in the white-inside brown cup sitting on the broad, paint-peeled sill between the piles of worn-out books, prompted no revelations to the soul about the future. It was merely a reminder of the past, implying that the past, and so all our life, is a matter of chance – in other words, even the living spring bloom was turning the unchanging recurrence of separate particles of time into yet another sweet lie, another seduction, turning everything towards the paltry self-deception of non-existence.

      Mother-and-stepmother, Tussilago farfara, the Gout Flower: if it weren't for the reductive power of non-existence, each word of this composite botanic name could and would encourage some kind of true fulfilment or action, or maybe even some true words. Yet these names awoke nothing in my soul, apart from dull sensations that became manifest only as a dying echo or wisps of dust from the ashes of burned out love. I somehow imagined these ashes being whisked away from my homeland to the rest of the world, because the pain of love for a woman, in all its inexplicability, is a kind of homeland, a soil of life – and the loss of this scarce soil leaves only a dreadful foreign land. All natural connections were torn from inside of me – apart from the single root that thrived without sunshine but still could not bring me joy – merely reverberating in the great void of shame and pain of loss, which I took simply as proof of my own worthlessness.

      Putting down yet another worn-out book in which I was trying to escape reality, my vacant gaze fell by chance upon the mother-and-stepmother flower and through the fog of my non-existence an image came to me from my recent past of the River Lopasnya on Moscow’s hem, a ribbon of blue and light-blue surrounded by spring forests in which snow was quickly melting, dripping down the pine trunks and liquefying in the glades – those bare places amid the trees where amber shafts of sun can needle in to bring life to the rare ant herbs of Russia’s middle band.

      I was staying in a sanatorium there for almost nothing on a family pass card I got by chance through a friend. But I wasn’t there for nervous exhaustion from work – rather because the continuation of our love, then an undiagnosable illness, had reached a crisis which must end in the death of my ‘I’, or a final cure, and this week-long stay was the last test, a natural break from the addictive pain of emotions, a respite imposed before the decisive and irretraceable step into a new homeland that still looked to me like, and actually was, a cloudy foreign land.

      For that whole week, languishing from unresolved love, I walked among these unfamiliar surroundings, wandering as far as I could into the still forests along muddy tracks. At dawn, the mud was hard from the tenacious frost, and the spongy, shallow spring snow was covered with a sparkling crust. There in the early morning calm, my ears filled with the soft chatter of woodpeckers and the light trill of blue tits, I saw a huge forest deer. It slowly observed me with its large, moist eyes and then retired with graceful dignity, and the image struck into my memory as if I was born to it – with the greedy force of one who can steal from another life, when their own

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