‘Hey there! No sleeping!’
Someone shook me carefully by the shoulder. I lifted my head, opened my eyes and saw a face I did not recognize, round and plump, framed in a painstakingly tended beard. Although it wore an affable smile, it did not arouse any desire to smile in return. I understood why immediately – it was the combination of the carefully trimmed beard with a smoothly shaven skull. The gentleman leaning over me reminded me of one of those speculators trading in anything they could lay their hands on who appeared in such abundance in St Petersburg immediately after the start of the war. As a rule they came from the Ukraine and had two distinguishing features – a monstrous amount of vitality and an interest in the latest occult trends in the capital.
‘Vladimir Volodin,’ the man introduced himself. ‘Just call me Volodin. Since you’ve decided to lose your memory one more time, we might as well introduce ourselves all over again.’
‘Pyotr,’ I said.
‘Better not make any sudden movements, Pyotr,’ said Volodin. ‘While you were still sleeping they gave you four cc’s of taurepam, so your morning’s going to be a bit on the gloomy side. Don’t be too surprised if you find the things or people around you depressing or repulsive.’
‘Oh, my friend,’ I said, ‘it is a long time now since I have been surprised by that kind of thing.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘what I mean is that the situation you find yourself in might seem quite unbearably loathsome. Inexpressibly, inhumanly monstrous and absurd. Entirely incompatible with life.’
‘And what should I do?’
‘Take no notice. It’s just the injection.’
‘I shall try.’
‘Splendid.’
I suddenly noticed that this Volodin was entirely naked. Moreover, he was wet and he was squatting on a tiled floor, on to which copious amounts of water were dripping from his body. But what was most intolerable in this entire spectacle was a certain relaxed freedom in his pose, an elusive monkey-like lack of constraint in the way he rested his long sinewy arm against the tiles. This lack of constraint somehow seemed to proclaim that the world around us is such that it is only natural and normal for large hairy men to sit on the floor in such a state – and that if anyone thinks otherwise, then he will certainly find life difficult.
What he had said about the injection seemed to be true. Something strange really was happening to my perception of the world. For several seconds Volodin had existed all alone, without any background, like a photograph in a residence permit. Having inspected his face and body in their full detail, I suddenly began to think about where all this was happening, and it was only after I had done so that the place actually came into being – at least, that was how I experienced it.
The space around us was a large room covered throughout with white tiles, with five cast-iron baths standing in a row on the floor. I was lying in one of the end baths and I suddenly realized with disgust that the water in it was rather cold. Offering a final smile of encouragement, Volodin turned round on the spot and from his squatting position leapt with revolting agility into the bath next to mine, scarcely even raising a splash in the process.
In addition to Volodin, I could see two other people in the room: a long-haired, blue-eyed blond with a sparse beard who looked like an ancient Slavic knight, and a dark-haired young man with a rather feminine, pale face and an excessively developed musculature. They were looking at me expectantly.
‘Seems like you really don’t remember us,’ the bearded blond said after several seconds of silence. ‘Semyon Serdyuk.’
‘Maria,’ said the young man in the far bath.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Maria, Maria,’ he repeated, obviously annoyed. ‘It’s a name. You know, there was a writer, Erich Maria Remarque? I was named after him.’
‘I have not come across him,’ I replied. ‘He must be one of the new wave.’
‘And then there was Rainer Maria Rilke. Haven’t you heard of him either?’
‘Why, certainly I have heard of him. We are even acquainted.’
‘Well then, he was Rainer Maria, and I’m just Maria.’
‘Pardon me,’ I said, ‘but I seem to recognize your voice. Was it not by any chance you who related that strange story with the aeroplane, about Russia’s alchemical wedlock with the West and so forth?’
‘Yes,’ replied Maria, ‘but what do you find so strange about it?’
‘Nothing in general terms,’ I said, ‘but for some reason I had the impression that you were a woman.’
‘Well, in a certain sense, that’s right,’ replied Maria. ‘According to the boss here, my false personality is definitely that of a woman. You wouldn’t by any chance be a heterosexual chauvinist would you?’
‘Certainly not,’ I said, ‘I am simply surprised at how easily you accept that this personality is false. Do you really believe that?’
‘I don’t believe anything at all,’ said Maria. ‘My concussion’s to blame for everything. And they keep me here because the boss is writing his dissertation.’
‘But who is this boss?’ I asked in bewilderment, hearing the word a second time.
‘Timur Timurovich,’ Maria replied. ‘The head of the department. False personalities are his line.’
‘That’s not exactly right,’ Volodin countered. ‘The title of the dissertation he is working on is “The Split False Personality”. Maria here is a fairly simple and uncomplicated case and you really have to strain the term a bit to talk about him having a split personality, but you, Pyotr, are a prize exhibit. Your false personality is developed in such fine detail that it outweighs the real one and almost entirely displaces it. And the way it’s split is simply magnificent.’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ objected Serdyuk, who had so far remained silent. ‘Pyotr’s case isn’t really very complicated. At a structural level it’s no different from Maria’s. Both of them have identified with names, only Maria’s identification is with the first name, and Pyotr’s is with the surname. But Pyotr’s displacement is stronger. He can’t even remember his surname. Sometimes he calls himself Fourply, sometimes something else.’
‘Then what is my surname?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Your surname is Voyd,’ Volodin replied, ‘and your madness is caused by your denying the existence of your own personality and replacing it with another, totally invented one.’
‘Although in structural terms, I repeat, it’s not a complicated case,’ added Serdyuk.
I was annoyed – I found the idea of some strange psychic deviant telling me that my case was not complicated rather offensive.
‘Gentlemen, you are reasoning like doctors,’ I said. ‘Does that not seem to you to represent a certain incongruity?’
‘What kind of incongruity?’
‘Everything would be perfectly fine,’ I said, ‘if you were standing here in white coats. But why are you lying here yourselves, if you understand everything so very clearly?’
Volodin looked at me for several seconds without speaking.
‘I am the victim of an unfortunate accident,’ he said.
Serdyuk and Maria burst into loud laughter.
‘And as for me,’ said Serdyuk, ‘I haven’t even got any false personalities. Just an ordinary suicide attempt due to chronic alcoholism. They’re keeping me here because you can’t build a dissertation around just three cases. Just to round out the statistics.’
‘Never mind all that,’ said Maria. ‘You’re next in line for the garrotte. Then we’ll hear all about your alcoholic suicide.’
By this time I felt thoroughly chilled; furthermore, I was unable to decide whether the explanation lay in the injection which, according to Volodin, ought to have made everything that was happening to me seem intolerable, or whether the water really was as cold as it seemed.
Thankfully, however, the door opened at this point and two men in white coats entered the room. I remembered that one of them was called Zherbunov, the other Barbolin. Zherbunov held a large hourglass in his hand, while Barbolin was carrying an immense heap of linen.
‘Out we get,’ said Zherbunov merrily, waving the timer in front of him.
They wiped down each of us in turn with huge fluffy sheets and helped us to put on identical pyjamas with horizontal stripes, which immediately lent events a certain naval flavour. Then they led us out through the door and down a long corridor, which also seemed somehow familiar – not the corridor itself, however, but the vaguely medical smell that hung in its air.
‘Tell me,’ I said quietly to Zherbunov, who was walking along just behind me, ‘why am I here?’
He opened his eyes wide in surprise.
‘As if you didn’t know,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I am prepared to admit that I am not well, but what was the cause? Have I been here for a long time? And what specific acts am I actually charged with?’
‘Ask Timur Timurovich all your questions,’ said Zherbunov. ‘We’ve no time for idle chatter.’
I felt extremely depressed. We stopped at a white door bearing the number ‘7’. Barbolin opened it with a key and they allowed us through into a rather large room with four beds standing along the wall. The beds were made, there was a table by the barred window and standing by the wall was something that looked like a combination of a couch and a low armchair, with elastic loops for the sitter’s hands and feet. Despite these loops, there was nothing at all menacing about the contrivance. Its appearance was emphatically medical, and the absurd phrase ‘urological chair’ even came into my mind.
‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, turning to Volodin, ‘but is this the garrotte of which you spoke?’
Volodin gave me a brief glance and nodded towards the door. I turned to look. Timur Timurovich was standing in the doorway.
‘Garrotte?’ he asked, raising one eyebrow. ‘The garrotte, if I am not mistaken, is a chair on which people were executed by strangulation in medieval Spain, is that not so? What a dark and depressive perception of surrounding reality! Of course you, Pyotr, had your injection this morning, so it’s nothing to be surprised at. But you, Vladimir? I am astonished, astonished.’
As he rattled off this speech, Timur Timurovich gestured for Zherbunov and Barbolin to leave and walked to the centre of the room.
‘It’s not a garrotte at all,’ he said. ‘It’s a perfectly ordinary couch for our group therapy sessions. You, Pyotr, have already attended one of these sessions, immediately after you returned to us from the isolation ward, but you were in rather poor condition, so it’s unlikely that you can remember anything.’
‘That is not the case,’ I said, ‘I do remember something.’
‘All the better. Then let me briefly remind you what takes place here. The method which I have developed and employ could be provisionally classified as turbo-Jungian. You are, of course, acquainted with the views of Jung…’
‘I beg your pardon, of whom?’
‘Karl Gustav Jung. Very well, I perceive that your mental activity is currently subject to powerful censorship from your false personality. And since your false personality is living in 1918 or 1919, we should hardly be surprised if you seem unable to remember who he is – or perhaps you really never have heard of Jung?’
I shrugged my shoulders in a dignified manner.
‘To put it simply, there was a psychologist by the name of Jung. His therapeutic methods were based on a very simple principle. He attempted to draw to the surface of his patient’s consciousness the symbols which he could use to form a diagnosis. By means of deciphering them, that is.’
At this point Timur Timurovich gave a cunning little smile.
‘But my method is a little different,’ he said, ‘although the fundamentals are the same. With Jung’s method we would have to take you off somewhere to Switzerland, to some sanatorium up in the mountains, sit you down on a chaise-longue, enter into long-drawn-out conversations and wait for God knows how long before the symbols began to surface. We can’t do that sort of thing. Instead of the chaise-longue we sit you down over there,’ – Timur Timurovich pointed to the couch – ‘we give you a little injection, and then we observe the symbols that start floating to the surface in simply va-a-ast quantities. After that it’s up to us to decipher them and cure you. Is that clear?’
‘More or less,’ I said. ‘How do you go about deciphering them?’
‘You’ll see that, Pyotr, for yourself. Our sessions take place on Fridays, which means that in three…no, in four weeks it will be your turn. I must say, I am really looking forward to it, working with you is so very interesting. But then, of course, the same applies to all of you, my friends.’
Timur Timurovich smiled, flooding the room with the warm radiance of his love, then he bowed and shook his own left hand with his right one.
‘And now it’s time for class to begin.’
‘What class?’ I asked.
‘Why,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘it’s already half past one. Practical aesthetics therapy.’
With the possible exception of the psycho-hydraulic procedures which had roused me from sleep, I have never experienced anything quite so distressing as that session of practical aesthetics therapy – but then, perhaps the injection was really to blame. The exercises were held in a room adjacent to our ward; it was large and dimly lit, with a long table in its corner heaped with lumps of Plasticine of various colours, ugly misshapen toy horses of the kind moulded by artistically gifted children, paper models of ships, broken dolls and balls. At the centre of the table was a large plaster bust of Aristotle, and we sat opposite him, on four chairs covered with brown oilcloth, with drawing-boards on our knees. The aesthetics therapy consisted in our drawing the bust with pencils which were attached to the board and had also been covered in soft black rubber.
Volodin and Serdyuk remained in their striped pyjamas, while Maria removed his jacket and put on instead an undershirt with a long slit reaching almost down to his navel. They all seemed quite accustomed to this procedure and sat there patiently pushing their pencils across the surface of the paper. Just to be on the safe side, I made a quick, rough sketch and then set the board aside and began inspecting my surroundings.
The injection was certainly still working – I was still suffering from the same effect that I had felt in the bathroom and was incapable of perceiving external reality in its totality. Elements of the surrounding world appeared at the moment when my gaze fell on them, and I was developing a giddy feeling that my gaze was actually creating them.
Suddenly I noticed that the walls of the room were hung with drawings on small sheets of paper, some of which appeared to be very curious indeed. Some of them obviously belonged to Maria. These were extremely clumsy, almost childish scribbles which all repeated in various forms the theme of an aeroplane adorned with a massive phallic projection. Sometimes the aeroplane was standing on its tail and the images acquired Christian overtones of a somewhat sacrilegious nature. In general though, Maria’s drawings were of no particular interest.
However, another set appeared curious in the extreme, and not merely because the artist possessed indisputable talent. These were drawings united by a Japanese theme, represented in a strange, uneven fashion. Most of the drawings, seven or eight in number, attempted to reproduce an image seen somewhere previously: a samurai with two swords and the lower half of his body indecently exposed, standing on the edge of an abyss with a stone hung round his neck. Another two or three drawings depicted horsemen at rest against a background of distant mountains, which were drawn with astonishing skill in the traditional Japanese style. The horses in these images were tethered to trees and their dismounted riders, clad in loose, colourful garments, were sitting near by on the grass and drinking from shallow bowls. The drawing which made the strongest impression on me had an erotic theme; it showed an other-worldly man in a tiny blue cap astride a woman with broad Slavic cheekbones who was giving herself to him. There was something horrifying about her face.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ I said, unable to restrain myself, ‘to whom do these drawings on Japanese themes belong?’
‘Semyon,’ said Volodin, ‘who do your drawings belong to? The hospital, I suppose?’
‘Are they yours, Mr Serdyuk?’
‘Yes,’ answered Serdyuk, glancing sideways at me with his bright blue eyes.
‘Quite exquisite,’ I said. ‘Only, perhaps, rather sombre.’
He gave no answer.
The third series of drawings, which I guessed must be those of Volodin, was very abstract and impressionistic in manner. Here also there was a leitmotif – three dark blurred silhouettes around a burst of flame, with a broad beam of light falling on them from above. In compositional terms it was reminiscent of a well-known Russian painting of three hunters sitting round a camp-fire, except that in this work it was a high-explosive shell that had exploded in the flames just a moment before.
I looked over at the other wall and started violently in surprise.
It was probably the most acute attack of déja vu I have ever suffered in my life. From my very first glance at the six-foot-long sheet of cardboard, covered with its tiny figures in various colours, I sensed a profound connection with the strange object. I rose from my chair and went across to it.
My gaze fell on the upper part of the sheet, which showed something like the plan of a battle, in the way they are usually drawn in history textbooks. At its centre was a solid blue oval, where the word ‘SCHIZOPHRENIA’ was written in large letters. Approaching it from above were three broad red arrows; one ran directly into the oval and the two others curved round to bite into its sides. Written on them were the words ‘insulin’, ‘aminazine’ and ‘sulphazine’, and running down from the oval in a broken line was a blue arrow, beneath which were the words ‘illness retreats’. I studied this plan and then turned my attention to the drawing below it.
With its numerous characters, abundant detail and crowded composition it reminded me of an illustration to Tolstoy’s War and Peace – one including all of the novel’s characters and the entire scope of its action. At the same time the drawing was very childish in nature, because it broke all of the rules of perspective and common sense, exactly like a child’s drawing. The right-hand section of the drawing was occupied by a representation of a big city. When I spotted the bright yellow dome of St Isaac’s, I realized that it must be St Petersburg. Its streets, in some places drawn in detail and in others merely represented by simple lines, as though on a map, were filled with arrows and dotted lines which clearly represented the trajectory of someone’s life. From St Petersburg a dotted line led to a similar image of Moscow which was close beside it. In Moscow only two places were represented in real detail – Tverskoi Boulevard and the Yaroslavl Station. Leading away from the station was the fine double cobweb-line of a railway track, which widened as it approached the centre of the sheet and acquired a third dimension, turning into a drawing rendered more or less according to the laws of perspective. The track ran off to a horizon overgrown with bright yellow wheat, where a train stood on its rails, wreathed in clouds of smoke and steam.
The train was drawn in detail. The locomotive had been badly damaged by several direct hits from shells; thick clouds of steam were pouring from the holes in the sides of the barrel-shaped boiler, and the driver’s dead body was hanging out of the cabin. Behind the locomotive there was an open goods truck with an armoured car standing on it – my heart began to race at this – with its machine-gun turret turned towards the yellow waves of wheat. The trapdoor of the turret was open and I saw Anna’s close-cropped head protruding from it. The ribbed barrel of the machine-gun was spitting fire in the direction of the wheatfield; Chapaev, wearing a tall astrakhan hat and a shaggy black cloak buttoned from his neck to his feet, stood on the platform beside the armoured car and waved his raised sabre in the direction of its fire. His pose seemed a little too theatrical.
The train in the picture had halted only a few yards short of a station, the greater part of which was invisible beyond the edge of the sheet of cardboard; all I could see was the platform barrier and a sign bearing the words ‘Lozovaya Junction’.
I tried to spot the enemies at whom Anna was firing from her turret, but all I could discover in the drawing were numerous vaguely sketched silhouettes largely hidden by the wheat. I was left with the impression that the artist responsible for the work did not have a very clear idea of why and against whom the military action shown was being conducted. But I had little doubt as to the identity of the author.
Written in large letters under the drawing were the words: ‘The Battle at Lozovaya Junction’. Close by, other words had been added in a different hand: ‘Chapaev’s waving, Petka’s raving’.
I whirled round to face the others.
‘Come now, gentlemen, does it not seem to you that this rather exceeds the bounds of what is acceptable among decent people, eh? What if I should start acting in the same way, eh? Then what would happen?’
Volodin and Serdyuk averted their gaze. Maria pretended that he had not heard. I carried on looking at them for some time, attempting to guess which of them was responsible for this vile act, but no one responded. Besides, I was not in all honesty particularly concerned and my annoyance was to a large extent feigned. I was far more interested in the drawing, which from my very first glance had given me the impression that it was somehow incomplete. Turning back to the cardboard, I struggled for some time to understand exactly what it was that was bothering me. It seemed to be the section between the plan of the battle and the train, where in principle the sky should have been – a large area of the cardboard was blank, which somehow produced the impression of a gaping void. I went over to the table and rummaged in its clutter until I found a stub of sanguine and an almost complete stick of charcoal.
I spent the next half-hour adding black blotches of shrapnel shell-bursts to the sky over the wheatfield. I drew them all identically – a small dense black cloud of solid charcoal, and fragments scattering like arrows in all directions, leaving long trails of dark red behind them.
The result was very similar to that well-known painting by Van Gogh, the name of which I cannot recall, where a black cloud of crows looking like thick, crudely drawn ‘V’s circles above a field of wheat. I thought of how hopelessly despairing the condition of the artist is in this world: at first the thought gave me a certain bitter satisfaction, but then I suddenly felt it to be unbearably false. It was not merely a question of its banality, but of its institutional meanness: everybody involved in art repeated it in one way or another, classifying themselves as members of some special existential caste, but why? Did the life of a machine-gunner or a medical orderly, for instance, lead to any other outcome? Or were they any less filled with the torment of the absurd? And was the unfathomable tragedy of existence really linked in any way with the pursuits in which a person was engaged in their lifetime?
I turned to look at my companions. Serdyuk and Maria were absorbed in the bust of Aristotle (Maria was concentrating so hard that he had even stuck the tip of his tongue out of his mouth), but Volodin was attentively following the changes in the drawing on my sheet of cardboard. Catching my gaze on him, he smiled inquiringly at me.
‘Volodin,’ I began, ‘may I ask you a question?’
‘By all means.’
‘What is your profession?’
‘I am an entrepreneur,’ said Volodin, ‘or a new Russian, as they say nowadays. At least, I was. But why do you ask?’
‘You know, I was just thinking…People go on and on about the tragedy of the artist, the tragedy of the artist. But why the artist in particular? It is really rather unfair. The fact is, you see, that artists are very visible individuals and therefore the troubles that they encounter in life are bandied about and exposed to the public eye…but does anyone ever think about…Well, no, they might well remember an entrepreneur…Let us say, an engine-driver? No matter how tragic his life might be?’
‘You’re coming at the question from the wrong side entirely, Pyotr,’ said Volodin.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re getting your concepts confused. The tragedy doesn’t happen to the artist or the engine-driver, it takes place in the mind of the artist or the engine-driver.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Granted, granted,’ Volodin purred and turned back to his drawing-board.
It was several seconds before Volodin’s words sank in and I realized what he meant. But the mental listlessness induced by the injection completely blocked out any response.
Turning back to my sheet of cardboard, I drew in several columns of thick black smoke above the field, using up all my charcoal. Together with the dark spots of the shrapnel-bursts, they lent the picture a certain air of menace and hopelessness. I suddenly felt unwell, and I dedicated myself to covering the horizon with small figures of horsemen galloping through the wheat to cut off the attackers.
‘You missed your vocation – you should have been a battle artist,’ observed Volodin. From time to time he would look up to glance at my sheet of cardboard.
‘A fine comment, coming from you,’ I replied. ‘After all, you are the one who keeps drawing an explosion in a camp-fire.’
‘An explosion in a camp-fire?’
I pointed to the wall where the drawings hung.
‘If you think that’s an explosion in a camp-fire, then I have nothing more to say to you,’ replied Volodin, ‘nothing whatsoever.’
He seemed to have taken offence.
‘What is it, then?’
‘It’s the descent of the light of heaven,’ he answered. ‘Can’t you see that it comes down from on high? It’s drawn like that deliberately.’
My mind raced through several consecutive conclusions.
‘Can I assume, then, that they’re keeping you here because of this heavenly light?’
‘You can,’ said Volodin.
‘That’s hardly surprising,’ I said politely. ‘I sensed immediately that you were no ordinary man. But what exactly have they charged you with? With having seen that light? Or with attempting to tell others about it?’
‘With being the light,’ said Volodin. ‘As is usual in such cases.’
‘I must assume that you are joking,’ I said. ‘But seriously?’
Volodin shrugged.
‘I had two assistants,’ he said, ‘about your age. You know, garbage men – they were very useful for cleaning up reality, you can’t do business without them these days. They’re in the drawing here, by the way – see, those two shadows. Well, to cut it short, I made it a rule to discuss such exalted subjects with them. And then one day we happened to go into the forest and I showed them – I don’t even know how to explain it – the way everything is. I didn’t even show them – they saw it all for themselves. That’s the moment shown in the drawings. And it had such an effect on them that a week later they ran off and turned me in. Stupid idiots, each of them had a dozen stiffs to answer for, but they still reckoned that was nothing compared with what they had to report. Modern man has the very basest of instincts, let me assure you.’
‘Indeed you are right,’ I replied, thinking of something else entirely.
For lunch Barbolin led us to a small dining-room rather like the room with the baths, except that the place of the baths was taken by plastic tables situated next to a serving-hatch. Only one of the tables was laid. We hardly spoke at all during the meal. When I had finished my soup and begun eating my gruel I suddenly noticed that Volodin had pushed away his plate and was staring hard at me. At first I tried not to pay any attention, but then I could stand it no longer, and I looked up and stared boldly into his eyes. He smiled peaceably – in the sense that there was nothing menacing in his expression, and said:
‘You know, Pyotr, I have the feeling that you and I have met in circumstances that were extremely important – for me, at least.’
I shrugged.
‘Do you by any chance have an acquaintance with a red face, three eyes and a necklace of skulls,’ he asked, ‘who dances between fires? Mm? Very tall, he was. And he waves these crooked swords around.’
‘Maybe I do,’ I said politely, ‘but I cannot quite tell just who it is you have in mind. The features you mention are very common, after all. It could be almost anybody.’
‘I see,’ said Volodin, and he went back to his plate.
I reached out for the teapot in order to pour some tea into my glass, but Maria shook his head.
‘Better not,’ he said. ‘Bromide. Takes away your natural sexuality.’
Volodin and Serdyuk, however, drank the tea without appearing in the slightest manner concerned.
After lunch we went back to the ward and Barbolin immediately disappeared off somewhere. My three companions were obviously accustomed to such a routine and fell asleep almost as soon as they had laid down on their beds. I stretched out on my back and stared at the ceiling for a long time, savouring the state, rare for me, of an entirely empty mind, which was possibly a consequence of the morning’s injection.
In fact, it would not be entirely correct to say that my mind was empty of all thoughts, for the simple reason that my consciousness, having entirely liberated itself of thought, continued nonetheless to react to external stimuli, but without reflecting upon them. And when I noticed the total absence of thoughts in my head, that in itself became already a thought about the absence of thoughts. Thus, I reasoned, a genuine absence of thoughts appeared impossible, because it cannot be recorded in any way – or one might say that it was equivalent to non-existence.
But this was still a marvellous state, as dissimilar as possible from the routine internal ticking of the everyday mind. Incidentally, I have always been astounded by one particular feature typical of people who are unaware of their own psychological processes. A person of that kind may be isolated for a long period from external stimuli, without experiencing any real needs, and then, for no apparent reason, a spontaneous psychological process suddenly arises within him which compels him to launch into a series of unpredictable actions in the external world. It must appear very strange to anyone who happens to observe it: there is the person lying on his back, he lies there for an hour, for two, for three, and then suddenly leaps up, thrusts his feet into his slippers and sets out for goodness knows where, simply because for some obscure reason – or perhaps without any reason at all – his train of thought has gone dashing off in some entirely arbitrary direction. The majority of people are actually like that, and it is these lunatics who determine the fate of our world.
The universe that extended in all directions around my bed was full of the most varied sounds. Some of them I recognized – the blows of a hammer on the floor below, the sound of a shutter banging in the wind somewhere in the distance, the cawing of the crows – but the origin of most of the sounds remained unclear. It is astonishing how many new things are immediately revealed to a man who can empty out the fossilized clutter of his conscious mind for a moment! It is not even clear where most of the sounds that we hear actually come from. What then can be said about everything else, what point is there in attempting to discover an explanation for our lives and our actions on the basis of the little that we believe we know! One might just as well attempt to explain the inner life-processes of another individual’s personality through the kinds of phantasmagorical social constructs employed by Timur Timurovich, I thought, and suddenly remembered the thick file on my case that I had seen on his desk. Then I remembered that when he left, Barbolin had forgotten to lock the door. And instantly, in a mere split second, an insane plan had taken shape in my mind.
I examined my surroundings. No more than twenty minutes had passed since the beginning of the rest hour, and my three companions were asleep. It seemed as though the entire building had fallen asleep together with them – in all that time not a single person had passed the door of our ward. Carefully pulling off my blanket, I thrust my feet into my slippers, stood up and stealthily made my way over to the door.
‘Where are you going?’ came a whisper from behind my back.
I turned round. Maria’s eyes were focused keenly on me from the corner of the room. I could just see him through the narrow gap in the blanket in which he had wrapped himself from head to toe.
‘To the toilet,’ I said in a similar whisper.
‘Don’t play the brave soldier,’ whispered Maria, ‘the pot’s over there. If they catch you it’s a day in the isolation ward.’
‘They won’t catch me,’ I whispered in reply and slipped out into the corridor.
It was empty.
I vaguely remembered that Timur Timurovich’s office was located beside a tall semi-circular window, which looked straight out on to the crown of a huge tree. Far ahead of me, at the point where the corridor in which I was standing turned to the right, I could see bright patches of daylight on the linoleum. Crouching down, I crept as far as the corner and saw the window. I immediately recognized the door of the office by its magnificent gilt handle.
For several seconds I stood there with my ear pressed to the keyhole. I could not hear a sound from inside the office, and finally I ventured to open the door slightly – the room was empty. Several files were lying on the desk, but mine, which was the thickest (I remembered its appearance very clearly) was no longer in its former place.
I glanced around in despair. The dismembered gentleman on the poster returned my gaze with inhuman optimism; I felt sick and terrified. For some reason I felt that the orderlies were sure to enter the office at any moment. I was on the point of turning and running out into the corridor when I suddenly noticed a file lying open beneath other papers which were set out on the table.
‘A course of taurepam injections prescribed to precede the hydraulic procedures. Purpose – to block speech and motor functions with simultaneous activation of the psycho-motor complex…’
There were a few more words in Latin. Pushing these papers to one side, I turned over the cardboard sheet of the file beneath and read the words on it:
‘Case: Pyotr Voyd.’
I sat in Timur Timurovich’s chair.
The very first entry, on a few bound sheets of paper placed in the file, was so very old that the purple ink in which it had been written had faded, acquiring the kind of historical colour that one finds in documents which speak of people long since dead and buried. I was soon absorbed in what I read.’
In early childhood no signs of psychological deviance were detected. He was a cheerful, affectionate, sociable child. Studied well at school, enjoyed writing verse which did not demonstrate any particular aesthetic merit. First pathological deviations recorded at about fourteen years of age. Tendency to withdrawal and irritability observed, unrelated to any external causes. According to parents he ‘abandoned the family’; moved into a state of emotional alienation. Stopped associating with his friends – which he explains by the fact that they teased him about his Estonian surname “Voyd”. Says that his teacher of geography used to do the same, repeatedly calling him an “empty shell”. Began to make much slower progress at school. At the same time began intensively reading philosophical literature – the works of Hume, Berkeley, Heidegger – everything which in one way or another deals with the philosophical aspects of emptiness and non-existence. As a result began to analyse the simplest events from a “metaphysical” point of view and declared that he is superior to his peers in “the heroic valour of life”. Began frequently skipping classes, following which his family were obliged to contact a doctor.
‘Willingly enters into contact with the psychologist. Trusting. Concerning his inner world declares as follows: he has “a special conception of the world”. The patient reflects “long and vividly” on all objects around him. In describing his psychological activity he declares that his thought “gnaws its way deeper and deeper into the essence of a particular phenomenon”. Due to this feature of his thinking he is able to “analyse any question asked, each word and each letter, laying them out like an anatomical specimen”, while in his mind he has a “ceremonial choir of numerous selves arguing with each other”. Has become extremely indecisive, which he explains, in the first instance, by the experience of “the ancient Chinese” and secondly by the fact that “it is difficult to make sense of the whirlwind of scales and colours of the contradictory inner life”. On the other hand, according to his own words, he is gifted with a “peculiar flight of free thought” which “elevates him above all other laymen”. In this connection complains of loneliness and lack of understanding from those around him. The patient says there is no one capable of thinking “on his wavelength”.
‘Believes he can see and feel things unattainable to “laymen”. For instance, in the folds of a curtain or tablecloth, the patterns of wallpaper etc. he distinguishes lines, shapes and forms which express “the beauty of life”. According to his words, this is his “golden joy”, that is, the reason for which he daily repeats the “involuntary heroism of existence”.
‘Regards himself as the only successor to the great philosophers of the past. Spends much time rehearsing “speeches to the people”. Does not find placement in a psychiatric hospital oppressive, since he is confident that his “self-development” will proceed by “the right path” no matter where he lives.’
Someone had crossed out several purple phrases with a thick blue pencil. I turned the page. The next text was titled ‘organoleptic indications’, and was obviously burdened with a superfluity of Latin terms. I began rapidly leafing through the pages. Those written in purple were not even bound into the file – they had most probably slipped in there by accident from some other file. A page had been inserted in front of the following set of papers, which was the thickest, and on it I read the words:
THE PETERSBURG PERIOD
(Provisional title taken from the most persistent feature of delusions. Repeated hospitalization.)
But I had no chance to read a single word from the second part. I heard Timur Timurovich’s voice in the corridor, exasperatedly explaining something to someone else. Rapidly returning the papers on the desk to approximately the same position in which they had been lying before my arrival, I dashed over to the window – the idea occurred to me of hiding behind the curtains, but they hung almost flush against the glass.
Timur Timurovich’s rumbling voice sounded very close to the door by this time. He seemed to be giving one of the orderlies a dressing-down. Stealing over to the door, I glanced through the keyhole. I could see no one – the owner of the office and his companion were apparently standing several yards away round the corner.
The action I took then was in large measure instinctive. I quickly left the office, tip-toed across to the door opposite and dived into the dark and dusty broom-cupboard behind it. I was only just in time. The conversation round the corner stopped abruptly and a second later Timur Timurovich appeared in the narrow space which I could observe through the crack of the door. Cursing quietly to himself, he disappeared into his office. I counted to thirty-five (I do not know why it was thirty-five – nothing in my life has ever been associated with that number), then darted out into the corridor and ran noiselessly back to my ward.
Nobody noticed my return – the corridor was empty, and my companions were asleep. A few minutes after I lay down on my bed the melodic chimes of reveille came drifting along the corridor; almost simultaneously Barbolin came in and said they were going to defumigate the ward, and so today we would be having a second session of practical aesthetics therapy.
The atmosphere of a madhouse obviously must instil submissiveness into a person. Nobody even thought of expressing indignation or saying that it was impossible to spend so many hours on end drawing Aristotle. Maria was the only one to mutter something dark and incomprehensible under his breath. I noticed that he had woken in a bad mood. Possibly he had had a dream, for immediately on waking he began to study his reflection in the mirror. He did not seem to like what he saw very much, and he spent several minutes massaging the skin under his eyes and running his fingers round them.
Arriving very late in the practical aesthetics room, he made not the slightest pretence of drawing Aristotle as everyone else, including myself, was doing. Taking a seat in the corner he wound a yellow ribbon round his head, evidently intended to protect his hair against the winds raging in his psychological space, and began looking us up and down as if he had never seen us before.
There may not have been any wind in the room, but dark clouds certainly seemed to have gathered there. Volodin and Serdyuk did not pay the slightest attention to Maria, and I decided that I had been mistaken to attach so much weight to minor details. But the silence oppressed me nonetheless, and I decided to break it.
‘I beg your pardon, Mr Serdyuk, but will you not be offended if I attempt to engage you in conversation?’ I inquired.
‘Certainly not, indeed,’ Serdyuk replied politely, ‘by all means, do so.’
‘I hope very much that you will not find my question tactless, but can you tell me what it was that brought you here?’
‘Otherworldliness,’ said Serdyuk.
‘Indeed? But can one really be hospitalized for otherworldliness?’
Serdyuk measured me up with a long glance.
‘They registered it as suicidal vagrancy syndrome arising from delirium tremens. Although no one has any idea what that is.’
‘Tell me more about it,’ I asked.
‘What is there to tell? I was just lying there in a basement out on the Nagornoe road – for entirely personal and highly important reasons. I was fully and agonizingly conscious. Then this copper with a torch and an automatic appeared. Wanted to see my documents, so I showed him. Then, of course, he asked for money. I gave him all I had – about twenty roubles. He took the money, but kept on hanging about, wouldn’t go away. I should have just turned to face the wall and forgotten about him, but I had to go and start up a conversation; what d’you mean poking your porkies out at me like that, are you short of bandits upstairs or something? This pig turns out to be fond of talking – I found out later he’d graduated from the philosophy faculty. No, he says, there’s more than enough of them up there, only they’re not disturbing the social order. What d’you mean by that, I asked him. Well, he says, your ordinary bandit, what is he? Sure, take a look at him and you can see that all he’s got on his mind is how he can find someone to kill and rob, but so what? And the guy who’s just been robbed, he’s not breaking any laws either. He just lies there with his fractured skull and thinks – so now I’ve gone and got robbed. And you’re lying down there – he’s talking to me now – and I can see you’re thinking about something…Like you don’t believe in anything around you. Or at least you have your doubts.’
‘So what did you say?’
‘What did I say?’ echoed Serdyuk. ‘I only went and told him that maybe I did have my doubts. The sages of the East all told us that this world is an illusion – I just mentioned the sages of the East in a way he’d be able to handle, on his own primitive level. Then he suddenly goes all red and says to me: “What the hell’s going on here? I wrote my diploma on Hegel, and here you’ve read something in Science and Religion and you think you can crawl into some basement and lie around doubting the reality of the world?” In short, first they dragged me round to the station, and then round here. I had a scratch on my belly – I cut myself on a broken bottle – so they registered that as attempted suicide.’
‘What I’d do with anyone who doubts the reality of the world,’ Maria unexpectedly interrupted, ‘is put them away for ever. They don’t belong in the madhouse, they should be in prison. Or worse.’
‘And why’s that?’ asked Serdyuk.
‘You want an explanation?’ Maria asked in an unfriendly voice. ‘Come over here and I’ll give you one.’
Getting up from his place beside the door, he went over to the window, waited for Serdyuk and then pointed outside with his muscular arm.
‘See that Mercedes-600 standing over there?’
‘Yes,’ said Serdyuk.
‘Are you telling me that’s an illusion too?’
‘Very probably.’
‘You know who drives around in that illusion? The commercial director of our madhouse. He’s called Vovchik Maloi, and his nickname’s “the Nietzschean”. Have you seen him around?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you think of him?’
‘It’s obvious. He’s a bandit.’
‘So think about it – that bandit could have killed a dozen people to buy himself a car like that. Are you telling me they all gave their lives for nothing, if it’s only an illusion? Why don’t you say something? Can’t you see where that leads?’
‘Yes, I can see,’ Serdyuk said gloomily and went back to his chair.
Maria apparently felt a sudden desire to draw. Picking up his drawing-board from the corner, he sat down beside the rest of us.
‘No,’ he said, peering through half-closed eyes at the bust of Aristotle, ‘if you want to get out of here some time, you have to read the newspapers and experience real feelings while you’re doing it. And not start doubting the reality of the world. Under Soviet power we were surrounded by illusions. But now the world has become real and knowable. Understand?’
Serdyuk went on drawing without speaking.
‘Well, don’t you agree?’
‘It’s hard to say,’ Serdyuk replied gloomily. ‘I don’t agree that it’s real. But as for it being knowable, I guessed that for myself a long time ago. From the smell.’
‘Gentlemen,’ I intervened, sensing that a quarrel was ripening and attempting to lead the conversation into neutral territory, ‘do you have any idea why it’s Aristotle we are drawing in particular?’
‘So it’s Aristotle, is it?’ said Maria. ‘I thought he looked pretty serious. God knows why. Probably the first thing they came across in the junk-room.’
‘Don’t be stupid, Maria,’ said Volodin. ‘Nothing happens by accident in here. Just a moment ago you were calling things by their real names. What are we all doing here in the madhouse? They want to bring us back to reality. And the reason we’re sitting here drawing this Aristotle is because he is that reality with the Mercedes-600s that you, Maria, wanted to be discharged into.’
‘So before him it didn’t exist?’ asked Maria.
‘No, it didn’t,’ snapped Volodin.
‘How so?’
‘You won’t understand,’ said Volodin.
‘You just try explaining,’ said Maria. ‘Maybe I will understand.’
‘Okay, you tell me why the Mercedes is real,’ said Volodin.
Maria struggled painfully with his thoughts for a few seconds.
‘Because it’s made of iron,’ he said, ‘that’s why. And you can go up to the iron and touch it.’
‘So you’re telling me that it’s rendered real by a certain substance of which it consists?’
Maria thought.
‘Yeah, more or less,’ he said.
‘Well, that’s why we’re drawing Aristotle. Because before him there was no substance,’ said Volodin.
‘What was there then?’
‘There was the number one heavenly automobile,’ said Volodin, ‘compared with which your Mercedes-600 is nothing but a heap of shit. This heavenly automobile was absolutely perfect. And every single concept and image relating to automobiles was contained in it and it alone. And the so-called real automobiles that drove around the roads in ancient Greece were no more than its imperfect shadows. Projections, so to speak. Understand?’
‘Yeah. So what came next?’
‘Next came Aristotle and he said that of course the number one heavenly automobile existed, and of course all the earthly automobiles were simply its distorted reflections in the dim and crooked mirror of existence. At that time there was no way you could argue with all that. But, said Aristotle, in addition to the prototype and the reflection, there is one other thing. The material that takes the form of the automobile. Substance, possessing an existence of its own. Iron, as you called it. And it was this substance that made the world real. This entire fucking market economy started up from it. Because before then all the things on earth were merely reflections, and what reality can a reflection have, I ask you? The only reality is what makes the reflections.’
‘You know,’ I said quietly, ‘that really is quite a big question.’
Volodin ignored what I had said.
‘Understand?’ he asked Maria.
‘Yeah,’ Maria answered.
‘I understand that you’re a psycho all right. How could they have automobiles in ancient Greece?’
‘Ugh,’ said Volodin, ‘how petty and precisely correct. They really will discharge you soon.’
‘God willing,’ said Maria.
Serdyuk raised his head and looked attentively at Maria.
‘You know, Maria,’ he said, ‘just recently you’ve turned real bitchy. In the spiritual sense.’
‘I’ve got to get out of here, don’t you understand? I don’t want to spend all my life stuck in here. Who’s going to want me ten years from now?’
‘You’re a fool, Maria,’ Serdyuk said scornfully. ‘Can’t you understand that the love you and Arnold have can only exist in here?’
‘You watch your mouth, stork-face! Or I’ll smash this bust over your stupid head.’
‘Go on, just you try it, you berk,’ said Serdyuk, rising from his chair with a face that had turned pale. ‘Just you try it!’
‘I won’t have to try,’ answered Maria, also rising to his feet. ‘I’ll just do it, that’s all. People get killed for saying things like that.’
He stepped towards the table and took hold of the bust.
What followed lasted no more than a few seconds. Volodin and I leapt up from our seats. Volodin wrapped his arms around Serdyuk, who was advancing on Maria. Maria’s face twisted in a grimace of fury; he raised the bust above his head, swung it back and stepped towards Serdyuk. I pushed Maria away and saw that Volodin had seized Serdyuk in such a way that his arms were pinned to his body, and if Maria were to strike him with the bust, he would not even be able to protect himself with his hands. I tried to pull Volodin’s hands apart where they were clasped on Serdyuk’s chest. Meanwhile Serdyuk had closed his eyes and was smiling blissfully. Suddenly I noticed that Volodin was staring aghast over my shoulder. I turned my head and saw a lifeless plaster face with dusty wall-eyes slowly descending out of a fly-spotted sky.