________________
Shuvalov was waiting for Lelia in the park. It was noon of a hot day. A lizard materialized on a boulder. Shuvalov reflected: on that boulder the lizard is defenseless, you see it immediately. “Mimicry,” he thought. The idea of mimicry led him to recall the chameleon.
“Just wonderful,” said Shuvalov. “A chameleon was all I needed.”
The lizard ran off.
Shuvalov stood up from the bench in a pique and set off briskly down the path. A fit of irritation had seized him, along with a desire to argue with someone. He came to a halt and observed, rather loudly:
“Well damn it all! Why should I be thinking about mimicry and chameleons? These thoughts are completely unnecessary to me.”
He came out into a clearing and sat down on a stump. Insects were flying around. Stems were trembling. The flight-path architecture of birds, flies and beetles was invisible, but one could still somehow make out dotted lines, the shapes of arches, of bridges, towers, terraces a kind of swiftly mutating and second-by-second-disintegrating city.
“Something’s taken me over,” thought Shuvalov. “My sphere of perception is getting cluttered. I’m becoming an eclectic. Who’s taken me over? I’m beginning to see things that aren’t there.”
Lelia was late. His stay in the garden stretched on. He kept strolling around. He was forced to concede the existence of many species of insect. A small bug was crawling up a plant stem. Shuvalov removed it and placed it on his open palm. Suddenly the bug’s thorax fluoresced brightly. Shuvalov lost his temper.
“Damn! Another half an hour and I’ll turn into a naturalist.”
The plant stems were of various shapes, the leaves, the stalks; he saw blades of grass that were ridged like bamboo; he was astonished at the myriad hues displayed by what is called the turf; the many hues of the soil itself came as a complete surprise.
“I don’t want to be a naturalist!” he implored. “I don’t need all these random observations.”
And Lelia was not yet in sight. He was already evolving some statistical conclusions, already establishing some classification categories. He could affirm that in this park trees with thick trunks and trilobate leaves predominated. He was becoming attuned to the chirr of the insects. His attention, against his own will, was being swamped by data that held no interest for him at all.
But Lelia still didn’t arrive. He grew despondent and irritated. In Lelia’s stead an unfamiliar man in a black hat showed up. The man took a seat next to Shuvalov on the green bench. The man sat there, a little downcast, having placed a pale hand on either knee. He was young and timid. Subsequently it became clear that the young man suffered from color-blindness. The two struck up a conversation.
“I envy you,” said the young man. “They say that leaves are green. I’ve never seen green leaves. I’m forced to eat dark-blue pears.”
“Blue is an inedible color,” asserted Shuvalov. “I’d be nauseated by blue pears.”
“I eat blue pears,” the young man repeated mournfully.
Shuvalov started.
“Tell me,” he began, “have you ever noticed that when birds are flying all around you that you get a city, imaginary lines? …”
“Never noticed,” answered the color-blind man.
“So you perceive the entire world accurately?”
“The entire world, except for certain details of color.” The color-blind man turned his pale face to Shuvalov.
“Are you in love?” he inquired.
“I’m in love,” Shuvalov admitted manfully.
“Merely a little color confusion, but the rest is all normal,” the color-blind man said happily. Whereupon he made a condescending gesture to his interlocutor.
“All the same, blue pears are no joke,” Shuvalov reflected.
Lelia appeared in the distance. Shuvalov leapt to his feet. The color-blind man rose and, tipping his black hat, began to walk on.
“You’re not a violinist, are you?” Shuvalov addressed the question to his retreating form.
“You’re seeing things that aren’t there,” the young man replied.
Shuvalov lost his temper and shouted:
“You look like a violinist!”
The color-blind man, continuing on his way, said something or other, and Shuvalov made out:
“It’s a dangerous path you’re on …”
Lelia was approaching rapidly. He rose to meet her, took a few steps. Branches with their trilobate leaves were swaying. Shuvalov was standing in the middle of the path. The branches were rustling. She came on, greeted by a leaf ovation. The color-blind man, keeping to the right, thought: “Well, the weather is breezy,” and glanced upwards, at the tree-tops. The leaves were behaving as all leaves do when agitated by a breeze. The color-blind man saw swaying blue tree-tops. Shuvalov saw green tree-tops. But Shuvalov drew an untenable inference. He thought: “The trees are greeting Lelia with an ovation.” The color-blind man was mistaken, but Shuvalov was even more grossly mistaken.
“I’m seeing things that aren’t there,” Shuvalov repeated.
Lelia came up to him, In one hand she carried a bag of apricots. The other hand she held out to him. The world became a different place with amazing speed.
“Why are you squinting?” she asked.
“I feel like I’m wearing glasses.”
Lelia took an apricot from the bag, parted its tiny buttocks and threw away the seed. The seed fell onto the grass. Shuvalov glanced over his shoulder in alarm. He glanced and saw: on the spot where the seed landed a tree had sprung up, a delicate, shimmery sapling, a miraculous parasol-shape.
“Something stupid is happening. I’m beginning to think in images. Laws no longer exist for me. In this spot five years from now an apricot tree will have grown up. Entirely possible. That would be completely scientific. But in defiance of all natural laws, I’ve seen that tree five years ahead of time. It’s stupid. I’m turning into an idealist.”
“It all comes from love,” she said, oozing apricot juice.
She was sitting on the pillows, waiting for him. The bed had been pushed up against the wall. Little golden wreaths shone on the wallpaper. He approached, she embraced him. She was so young and so light that undressed, in nothing but her camisole, she seemed preternaturally naked. Their first embrace was stormy. Her little medallion flew off her chest and became entangled in her hair, like a golden almond. Shuvalov sank down towards her face slowly, as towards the face of a dying girl, sinking into the pillow.
The light was on.
“I’ll turn it off,” said Lelia.
Shuvalov was lying next to the wall. The corner seemed to narrow. Shuvalov traced the wallpaper pattern with his finger. He understood: this part of the wallpaper pattern, this section of wall he was lying next to, it had a double existence: an ordinary daytime one, not remarkable in any way, simple little wreaths; the other was nocturnal, perceived five minutes before you fall asleep. Abruptly emerging from the background, bits of the pattern grew in size, became more detailed and changed form. On the borders of sleep, returned to the sensations of childhood, he did not protest the transformation of familiar and rational forms, all the more since the transformation was charming: in place of volutes and wheels he saw a goat, a chef….
“And here is a treble clef,” said Lelia, who understood him.
“And a cha-chameleon …,” he lisped, falling asleep.
He awoke early in the morning. Very early. He awoke, looked around him and exclaimed out loud. A blissful sound flew from his throat. During the night the change in the world begun on the first day of their acquaintance had become complete. Morning sunlight filled the room. He saw the windowsill and on the windowsill were pots with many-hued flowers. Lelia was asleep, her back to him. She was lying all curled up, her spine was curved and you could see her vertebrae beneath the skin, a delicate reed. “A fishing pole, thought Shuvalov, a bamboo one. “On this new earth everything was charming and funny. Voices wafted through the open window. People were talking about the colorful pots on the sill.
He got up, dressed, remaining attached to earth with difficulty. Terrestrial gravity no longer existed. He had not yet mastered the laws of this new world and therefore moved about cautiously, with trepidation, afraid any sort of incautious act might produce a deafening effect. Even simply to think, simply to perceive objects was risky. What if overnight he had acquired the ability to materialize his thoughts? He had reason to suspect this. Like, for instance, his buttons that had buttoned themselves. Like, for instance, when he needed to wet the comb to smooth his hair, suddenly he heard a dripping sound. He glanced around. On the wall, in the sun’s rays, an armful of Lelia’s dresses shone with the colors of Montgolfier balloons.
“I’m over here,” the voice of the tap emerged from the heap.
Under the heap of dresses he found the tap and the basin. A rose-colored sliver of soap was there as well. Now Shuvalov was afraid to think of anything frightening. “A tiger came into the room,” he almost thought against his will, but was able to tear himself away from the thought…. Still, he glanced at the door in fear. A materialization did take place, but since the thought had not been fully formed, the effect was displaced and approximate: a wasp flew in the window—it was striped and blood-thirsty.
“Lelia! A tiger!” Shuvalov shrieked.
Lelia woke up. The wasp settled on a saucer. The wasp buzzed gyroscopically. Lelia leapt from the bed, the wasp flew towards her. Lelia flapped at it frantically, the wasp and her medallion circled around her. Shuvalov caught the medallion on his palm. They plotted out a battue. Lelia trapped the wasp beneath her crackling straw hat.
Shuvalov went out. They said their farewells in a draft which in this world turned out to be extraordinarily active and many-voiced. The draft blew open the doors downstairs. It sang like a laundress. It twirled the flowers on the sill, tossed Lelia’s hat about, released the wasp and flung it into the lettuce. It made Lelia’s hair stand on end. It whistled.
It made Lelia’s camisole billow.
They parted, and, too happy to sense the stairs down and out into the courtyard…. Yes, he failed to sense the stairs. Then he failed to sense the stoop, the cobblestones; then he discovered it was no mirage but reality that his feet were suspended in the air, that he was flying.
“Flying on the wings of love,” someone said out of a near-by window.
He flew upwards, his shirt became a crinoline, a fever-blister appeared on his lip, he flew on, snapping his fingers.
At two o’clock he arrived at the park. Worn out by love and happiness, he dozed off on the green bench. He slept, his clavicle sticking out from the collar of his unbuttoned shirt.
Along the path, slowly, hands clasped behind his back, pacing with the gravitas of a bishop and in a soutane-like garb, wearing a black hat and large dark-blue spectacles, now gazing upwards, now downwards, there came a man.
He approached and sat down next to Shuvalov.
“I am Isaac Newton,” said the stranger, raising this black hat. Through the dark-blue glasses he surveyed his monochromatic world.
“How do you do,” Shuvalov stammered.
The great scientist was sitting upright, cautiously, on tenterhooks. He was listening intently, ears pricked, his left index finger hovered in the air as if summoning the attention of an invisible choir, which was waiting second by second to burst into thunderous song at a signal from that finger. All nature held its breath. Shuvalov quietly hid behind the bench. Once the gravel beneath his heel gave a squeak. The renowned physicist was listening to the silence of nature. In the distance, above the clumps of greenery, as if there were an eclipse, the stars came out, and it grew cool.
“There!” Newton suddenly cried. “Do you hear?”
Without looking around he stretched out his hand, seized Shuvalov by the shirt-tail and, arising, dragged him away. They set off over the grass. The immense shoes of the physicist trampled the turf, leaving pale tracks. Ahead of them, often glancing backwards, ran the lizard. They went through a thicket which ornamented the iron frames of the scholar’s spectacles with down and ladybugs. A clearing opened up. Shuvalov recognized yesterday’s sapling.
“Any apricots yet?” he inquired.
“No,” replied the scholar in irritation, “it’s an apple tree.”
The frame-work of the apple tree, its frame-work cage, airy and fragile like the frame-work of a Montgolfier dirigible, showed through a sparse covering of leaves. All was motionless and silent.
“There,” said the scholar, bending down. The compression made his voice come out in a roar. “There!” he held an apple in his hand. “What does this mean?”
It was obvious that he was not accustomed to bending over: straightening up, he several times flexed his spine to relieve his vertebrae, his aged vertebral bamboo. The apple rested on the tripod of his three fingers.
“What does this mean?” he repeated, spoiling the resonance of the phrase with his non-Russian pronunciation. “Can you tell me why the apple fell?”
Shuvalov gazed at the apple as William Tell must have done.
“It’s the law of gravity,” he whispered. Then, after a pause, the great physicist asked:
“You, I believe, were flying today—disciple?” thus the Teacher inquired. His eyebrows rose above his spectacles.
“You, I believe, were flying today, young Marxist?”
A ladybug crawled from his finger onto the surface of the apple. Newton shifted his gaze. To him the ladybug appeared dazzlingly blue. He squinted. The insect took off from the highest point of the apple and flew away using wings it had pulled out from somewhere on its back, as if extracting a handkerchief from the pocket of a frock coat.
“You, I believe, were flying today?”
Shuvalov was silent.
“Pig,” said Isaac Newton.
Shuvalov woke up.
“Pig,” said Lelia, standing over him. “You’re waiting for me and you go to sleep. Pig!”
She removed the ladybug from his forehead, marveling at its steel-blue thorax.
“Dammit!” He swore. “I hate you. I used to know that thing was a ladybug, and other than the fact that it was a “God’s little cow,” as the folk call it, I knew nothing about it. Well alright, I might also have come to the conclusion that its name was a bit anti-religious. But ever since we met something is happening to my eyes. I see blue pears and I see that that mushroom looks like a ladybug.”
She tried to hug him.
“Leave me alone! Alone!” he cried. “I’m tired of this! It’s embarrassing.”
Shouting this he ran off like a stag. Snorting, in wild leaps he ran, shying at his own shadow, rolling his eyes. Panting, he halted. Lelia had disappeared. He decided to forget about everything. The lost world must be brought back.
“Good-bye,” he sighed, “you and I will never see each other again.”
He came to sit down on a slope, on a ridge with an overview of wide open space dotted with dachas. He was sitting at the apex of a prism, his legs dangling down one of its facets. Below him was the round umbrella of an ice-cream vendor, the entire equipage recalling for some reason an African hut.
“I am living in paradise,” said the young Marxist in tones of utter defeat.
“Are you a Marxist?” the question came from nearby.
The young man in the black hat, the familiar color-blind man, was sitting right next to Shuvalov.
“Yes I am,” said Shuvalov.
“Then you can’t live in paradise.”
The young man began to play with a twig. Shuvalov sighed.
“What can I do? The earth has become paradise.”
The color-blind man whistled to himself and used the twig to scratch around inside his ear.
“Do you know,” Shuvalov continued, hiccupping, “do you know what I’ve come to? I was flying today.”
Up in the sky, at the angle of a postage stamp, a skate hovered like a dragon.
“Want me to demonstrate? Shall I fly right up there?” (He pointed to the skate.)
“No, thank you. I don’t want to witness your shame.”
“Yes, it’s awful,” Shuvalov said after a brief silence. “I do know it’s awful.”
“I envy you,” he went on.
“Really?”
“Word of honor. What a good thing, to perceive the whole world accurately and be wrong only on a few color details, the way it is with you. You’re not forced to live in paradise. For you the real world hasn’t vanished. Everything is in order. But me? Just think, I’m completely sane, a materialist … and suddenly these criminal, anti-scientific deformations of matter and substances start happening right in front of me….”
“Yes, that’s awful,” the color-blind man agreed. “And it’s all from being in love.”
Shuvalov seized his neighbor’s hand with unexpected fervor.
“Listen!” he exclaimed. “I agree. You give me your iris and take my love in exchange.”
The color-blind man slid down the slope and stood up.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m pressed for time. Good-bye. Enjoy your paradise.”
He found it difficult to make his way along the slope. He went bow-legged, losing any resemblance to a human being and acquiring a resemblance to a human being reflected in water. Finally he made it to level ground and strode off joyfully. Then, throwing down his twig, he called back one last time to Shuvalov:
“Give my best to Eve!”
The while, Lelia was asleep. A half an hour after the meeting with the color-blind man Shuvalov found her in the middle of the park, at its very heart. He was no naturalist, he could not classify what surrounded him: filbert, hawthorn, elder or dogrose. On all sides the branches and brush clung to him, he went on like a pedlar toting a delicate mesh of the branches that grew denser as he approached the heart of the grove. He shrugged off these nets, the leaves, petals, thorns, berries and birds that had besprinkled him.
Lelia was lying on her back, in a rose-colored dress with its bodice open. She was asleep. He could hear the membranes in her sleep-addled nose shiver. He sat down beside her.
Then he lay his head on her chest, his fingers grazed the cotton fabric, his head was resting on her damp chest, he saw her areola, rose-colored, with delicate crinkles like the foam on milk. He didn’t hear the rustling, the sighs, the snapping branches.
The color-blind man popped up in a thicket of brush. The thicket held him back.
“Listen a minute,” said the color-blind man. Shuvalov raised his head with its pleasure-flushed cheek.
“Don’t follow me around like a dog,” he said.
“Listen, I agree. Take my iris and give me your love.”
“Go and eat some blue pears,” was Shuvalov’s answer.
Translated by A. L. and M. K.
1.
I was ten years old.
How did I come by that leaflet? I don’t know.
A page from an English illustrated journal. On the glossy paper were printed small pictures of a uniform size. It seems to me now that they were tiny, the size of a postage stamp.
What did the pictures show?
Fantastic things.
I have remembered one of the illustrations my whole life. A kind of cul-de-sac in the ruins of a house. And metallic tentacles were creeping through a window, a doorsill, a break in a wall! Metallic tentacles! And a man hiding in the cul-de-sac stared at them wildly. What were the tentacles? No idea! They were sweeping the room, searching precisely for the man who was pressed to the wall and pale with terror.
How I taxed my imagination, trying to puzzle out the meaning of this spectacle!
I knew that these were not illustrations to a fairy-tale. The events in fairy-tales had all taken place in a far-off time. There were towers, or castles. Fairy-tale characters did not resemble the people around me. Princess in tiaras, kings with swords, peasants in striped stockings. But here everything was contemporary! These were the ruins of an ordinary house. Torn wallpaper. A dangling wire. A brick chimney. A pile of rubble in a corner. And the man was wearing an ordinary black suit.
This was no fairy-tale!
And I thought at the time that I was looking at a depiction of events that had really occurred. Yes, the pictures were like photographs. Small, clear, striking, with such everyday elements as a man in a suit coat and a white shirt with his tie askew.
A photograph of wonders!
If these were photographs it meant that somewhere and for some reason there had taken place a sequence of events during which a certain man had hidden in a ruined house and metallic tentacles searched for him.
What events could these be?
Everything fell into place a few years later. I read H. G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds. The pictures that had so amazed me had been illustrations to that novel.
2.
Wells’ true gift is his ability to describe fantastic events in a manner that makes them seem real.
He transforms the fantastic into the epic, which works only when the events depicted in it seem to represent actual happenings of recorded history. What? That once in a small English town there arrived an invisible man? I don’t know how it is with other readers, but when I read The Invisible Man it is difficult for me to stave off the feeling—though much in it seems out of the ordinary—that I am reading an account of actual occurrences.
How did Wells achieve this verisimilitude? He understood that if a plot had to involve the fantastic then the characters had to be as real as possible. In this way he could make his imaginative invention truly work. Consider a detail from The Invisible Man. The invisible man has attacked a representative of the law, Colonel Adye, and is ready to shoot him. But Wells—before getting to the action—records the following detail:
Adye moistened his lips again. He glanced away from the barrel of the revolver and saw the sea far off very blue and dark under the midday sun, the smooth green down, the white cliff of the Head and the multitudinous town, and suddenly he knew that life was very sweet.
A rich psychological profile of the colonel who is merely a secondary character in the novel, wouldn’t you say? Or how about the rendering of the invisible man himself:
I went to bury [my father]. My mind was still on this research, and I did not lift a finger to save his character. I remember the funeral, the cheap coffin, the scant ceremony, the windy frost-bitten hillside, and the old college friend of his who read the service over him, a shabby, bent, black old man with a sniveling cold.
I remember walking back to the empty home, through the place that had once been a village and was now patched and tinkered by the jerry builders into the ugly likeness of a town: I remember myself as a gaunt black figure, going along the slippery, shiny pavement.
Note: the cheap coffin, the scant ceremony, the university friend suffering from a cold, a gaunt black figure stepping along the slippery pavement. What details! They accumulate gradually. At first our attention is captured solely by the implausibility of the situation itself—an invisible man! But after a few pages this fascination begins to merge with the multitude of varied feelings we customarily experience when we are following the development of human fate, as is especially true of epic.
3.
In Wells’ novels there are many bicyclists. In most cases these are youths. They make their appearance just when the most curious sort of observer is needed to witness some surprising event or other. In The First Men in the Moon a boy-cyclist triggers the denouement.
Wells likes this image of the young cyclist a great deal. Is he perhaps recalling his youth? I don’t know his biography. I believe he was apprenticed to a pharmacist. One can picture the young pharmacist-in-training careening along the roads connecting those small English towns that he was to describe with such affection in the future. The landscape of his novels consists precisely of the roads between small towns, their cottages, taverns and gardens, the flowering hedgerows, the sea glimpsed beyond the hills. What sort of landscape is this? The landscape of the cyclist.
Here is an excerpt from the novel The Food of the Gods. This work features gigantically proportioned animals, plants and human beings.
The day after, a cyclist riding, feet up, down the hill between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, very narrowly missed running over a second of these giants [wasps] that was crawling across the roadway. His passage seemed to alarm it, and it rose with a noise like a sawmill. His bicycle jumped the footpath in the emotion of the moment, and when he could look back, the wasp was soaring away above the woods towards Westerham.
This passage is typical for Wells. All the novels and stories of Wells take place in a summer setting. Only in The Invisible Man is there much mention of mist and snow. The plot demanded it. Mist and snow rendered the invisible man visible.
In the most urgent situations Wells doesn’t forget to describe a bit of honeysuckle, two butterflies chasing each other, a wicket-gate.
One might assume that the cyclist peddling between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge was none other than Wells himself. He had been taking a rest beneath a bush and saw an ordinary wasp. And he began to weave a fantasy on the theme of what might happen if gigantic wasps were to appear. In this fantasy one can sense a certain intoxication with the world:
The most dramatic of the fifty appearances was certainly that of the wasp that visited the British Museum about midday, dropping out of the blue serene upon one of the innumerable pigeons that feed in the courtyard of that building, and flying up to the cornice to devour its victim at leisure. After that it crawled for a time over the museum roof, entered the dome of the reading-room by a skylight, buzzed about inside it for some little time—there was a stampede among the readers—and at last found another window and vanished again with a sudden silence from human observation.
What an enchanting play of imagination and with what skill is the fantasy worked out. Could one think of a more telling backdrop for the gigantic wasp up than the cupola around which it crawls? Narrative mastery is besides the point here. The point is that this fantasy is remarkably pure and born of an intoxicated view of the world.
Wells began writing at the end of the nineteenth century. The Time Machine appeared in 1895, The Invisible Man in 1897. On one re-reading of that novel I noticed a certain circumstance that had eluded me before, namely that the London depicted is still full of hansom cabs. This is still an old-world city. The automobile is not mentioned even once in this novel, in which daily life has not yet been altered by technology to the degree it would be within a decade.
Yet as soon as such changes begin to take shape Wells captures them at once. In the novel When the Sleeper Wakes he mentions the name of Otto Lilienthal, builder of the first glider. In essence Wells contemplates in this novel the rise of aviation. The pharmacist’s apprentice became a writer but his relationship to the world remained as it had been—one of intoxication. If earlier he had conceived the idea of gigantic wasps, he now imagines amazing machines. The essence is unchanged. Machines imbue life with the elements of a new fascination, a new attraction.
And Wells has imagined a rocket on which two men make a journey to the moon. How much humor there is in The First Men in the Moon! However, alarm emerges through the lightheartedness. Wells contemplates the fate of a humanity living with advanced technology. The War of the Worlds appears. This is a novel about man and machine. For Wells man is terribly alone and the machine has become the monstrous Martian tripods, they emerge ominously in the flowering world of summer. In horror a human figure presses itself to a wall, and metallic tentacles snake towards him through the ruins.
4
In one of his last works, The Shape of Things to Come, Wells depicts the destruction of capitalist technology. A world war has broken out and is dragging on endlessly. Certain armed bands have begun to seize power in various countries. Using their remaining weapons these bands make war on each other. Human civilization has been razed and only fragments remain of its advanced technology. But the war goes on. Wells gives a portrait of the leader of one of these bands (an unambiguous caricature of of a fascist fuehrer or duce) who is obsessed by the idea of war—constant, eternal. War! War!
And just as the reader is prepared to believe that everything is doomed to total extinction, a report comes of an unknown world. A report that intellectual power continues to exist on earth. It would appear that amid the general destruction an ark of culture has been preserved—Basra. The last mechanics, engineers and pilots have gathered there—people of the machine and technology. Representing some knightly order of the vanished culture, which has made itself the emblem of the rebirth of the world, they fly in on planes from this far off oasis and sedate the locus of warfare with a special gas.
So ends the capitalist world. A new culture is born—the world governed by enlightened scientists and engineers—which has achieved happiness. At this point Wells returns to a pernicious idea of technocracy, which has long served him as an exit from the tangle of the capitalist world and is represented as triumphant in The Shape of Things to Come. His ideas are questionable in this regard. But he has seen the horrors of capitalism. After all it was he who characterized capitalistic society as suffering from a plague of the soul!
Translated by A. L. and M. K.