From A SCHOOL FOR FOOLS

Somewhere in a glade a wind orchestra assumed position. The musicians sat down on the fresh stumps of pine trees, and put their sheet music in front of them not on music-stands but on the grass. The grass is tall and thick and strong, like lake rushes, and it supports the music without difficulty, and the musicians can make out all of the symbols without difficulty. You probably don’t know this, but it’s possible there is no orchestra in the glade, but you can hear music from beyond the forest and you feel good. You feel like taking off your shoes, socks, standing on tiptoe and dancing to this distant music, staring at the sky, you hope it will never end. Veta, my dear, do you dance? Of course, my sweet, I do so love to dance. Then allow me to ask you for a turn. With pleasure, with pleasure, with pleasure! But then mowers appear in the glade. Their instruments, their twelve-handled scythes, glitter in the sun too, not gold like the musicians‘, but silver, and the mowers begin to mow. The first mower approaches a trumpeter, and lifting his scythe in time to the playing music, with a quick swish he severs the grassy stems upon which the trumpeter’s music rests. The book falls and closes. The trumpeter chokes off in mid-bar and quietly goes away into a bower where there are many cool springs and all kinds of birds singing. The second mower advances to the French horn player and does the same thing—the music is still playing—that the first did: cuts. The French horn player’s book falls. He gets up and goes off after the trumpeter. The third mower strides expansively up to the bassoon: and his book—the music is still playing but it is getting softer—falls too. And then all three musicians, noiselessly, single-file, go to listen to the birds and drink the spring water. Soon—the music is playing piano—they are succeeded by the cornet, the percussion section, the second and third trumpets, and also the flutists, and they are all carrying their instruments—each carries his own, the entire orchestra disappears into the bower, and although no one touches his lips to the mouthpieces, the music continues playing. Now pianis-simo, it lingers in the glade, and the mowers, shamed by this miracle, weep and wipe their wet faces with the sleeves of their red Russian shirts. The mowers cannot work—their hands tremble, and their hearts are like the mournful swamp frogs—but the music continues to play. It lives independently, it is a waltz which only yesterday was one of us: a man disappeared, transposed into sounds, and we will never find out about it. Dear Leonardo, as for the incident with me and the boat, the river, the oars, and the cuckoo, obviously I too disappeared. I turned into a nymphea then, into a white river lily with a long golden-brown stem, or to be more precise put it this way: I partially disappeared into a white river lily. That way’s better, more precise. I remember well, I was sitting in the boat, the oars at rest. On one of the shores a cuckoo was counting the years of my life. I asked myself several questions and was all ready to answer, but I couldn’t and I was amazed. And then something happened to me, there, inside, in my heart and in my head, as if I were turned off. And then I felt that I had disappeared, but at first I decided not to believe it, I didn’t want to. And I said to myself: it’s not true, this is just an illusion, you are a bit tired, it’s very hot today, take the oars and row, row home. And I tried to take the oars, I stretched out my hands toward them, but nothing happened: I saw the grips, but my palms did not feel them, the wood of the oars flowed through my fingers, past the phalanges, like sand, like air. No, on the contrary, I, my former and now no longer existing palms, let the wood flow through like water. This was worse than if I had become a ghost, because a ghost can at least pass through a wall, but I couldn’t have, there would have been nothing to pass through, and there was nothing left of me. But that’s not right either: something was left. A desire for my former self was left, and even if I was incapable of remembering who I was before the disappearance, I felt that then, that is, before, my life had been fuller and more interesting, and I wanted to become the same unknown, forgotten what’s-his-name again. The waves beat the boat to shore in a deserted spot. After taking several steps along the beach I looked back: there was nothing resembling my tracks on the sand behind. And in spite of this I still did not want to believe. It could be a lot of things, one, it could turn out that all this was a dream, two, it’s possible that the sand here is extraordinarily firm and I, weighing a total of only so many kilograms, did not leave tracks in it because of my lightness, and, three, it is quite probable that I hadn’t even gotten out of the boat onto shore yet, but was still sitting in it and, naturally, I could not leave tracks where I had not yet been. But next, when I looked around and saw what a beautiful river we have, what wonderful old willows and flowers grow on this shore and the other, I said to myself: you are a miserable coward, and becoming an inveterate liar, you were afraid that you had disappeared and decided to fool yourself, you’re inventing absurdities and so on, it’s high time you became honest, like Pavel, who is also Savl. What happened to you is certainly no dream, that’s clear. Further: even if you didn’t weigh as much as you do, but a hundred times less, your tracks would still have been left in the sand. But from this day forth you do not weigh even a gram, for you no longer are, you simply disappeared, and if you want to be convinced of that turn around and look at the boat again: you will see that you are not in the boat either. But no, I replied to my other self (although Doctor Zauze tried to prove to me that supposedly no other me exists, I am not inclined to trust his totally unfounded assertions), true, I am not in the boat, but then there is a white river lily with golden-brown stem and yellow, faintly aromatic stamens lying in the boat. I picked it an hour ago at the western shores of the island in the backwater where such lilies, and also yellow water-lilies, are so numerous that one doesn’t want to touch them, it is better to just sit in the boat and look at them, at each individually or all at once. One can also see there the blue dragonflies called in Latin simpetrum, quick and nervous water-striding beetles resembling daddy-longlegs, and in the sedge swim ducks, honest-to-goodness wild ducks. Some mottled species with nacreous shadings. There are gulls there too: they have concealed their nests on the islands, amid the so-called weeping willows, weeping and silvery, and not once did we manage to find a single nest, we cannot even imagine what one of them looks like—the nest of a river gull. But then, we do know how a gull fishes. The bird flies rather high over the water and peers into the depths, where the fish are. The bird sees the fish well, but the fish does not see the bird, the fish sees only gnats and mosquitoes which like to fly right over the water (they drink the sweet sap of the water-lilies), the fish feed on them. From time to time a fish leaps from the water, swallowing one or two mosquitoes, and at that instant the bird, wings folded, falls from on high and catches the fish and bears it in its beak to its nest, the gull’s nest. True, the bird occasionally fails to catch the fish, and then the bird again achieves the necessary altitude and continues flying, peering into the water. There it sees the fish and its own reflection. That’s another bird, thinks the gull, very similar to me, but different, it lives on the other side of the river and always flies out hunting along with me, it goes fishing too, but that bird’s nest is somewhere on the reverse side of the island, right under our nest. It’s a good bird, muses the gull. Yes, gulls, dragonflies, water striders and the like—that’s what there is on the western shores of the island, in the backwater, where I picked the nymphea which is now lying in the bottom of the boat, withering.

 

But why did you pluck it, was there some necessity for that, you don’t even like to pick flowers—I know—you don’t even like to, you only like to stare at them or cautiously touch them with your hand. Of course, I shouldn’t have, I didn’t want to, believe me, at first I didn’t want to, I never wanted to, it seemed to me that if I ever picked it something unpleasant would happen—to me or to you, or to other people, or to our river, for example, it might evaporate. You just uttered a strange word, what did you say, what was that word—eshakurate? No, you’re imagining things, hearing things, there was no such word, something like that, but not that, I can’t remember now. But what was I just talking about in general, could you help me to recapture the thread of my discussion, it’s been broken. We were chatting about how one day Trachtenberg unscrewed a handle in the bathroom and hid it somewhere, and when the custodian came he stood in the bathroom for a long time just staring. He was silent for a long time, because none of it made sense. The water was running, making noise, and the bathtub was gradually filling, and then the custodian asked Trachtenberg: where’s the faucet handle? And the old woman answered him: I have a record player (that’s not true, I’m the only one who has a record player), but no faucet handle. But there’s no faucet handle in the bathtub, said the custodian. That’s your problem, citizen, I don’t answer to you—and she went into her room. And the custodian went up to the door and started knocking, but neither Trachtenberg nor Tinbergen opened to him. I was standing in the entrance hall and thinking, and when the custodian turned to me and asked what to do, I said: knock, and it shall be opened unto you. He started knocking again, and Trachtenberg soon opened to him, and he again expressed his curiosity: where’s the handle? I don’t know, objected old Tinbergen, ask the young man. And with her bony finger she pointed in my direction. The custodian observed: maybe that kid doesn’t have everything upstairs, but it strikes me that he’s not so stupid as to unscrew the faucet handle, you’re the one who did that, and I’ll complain to Building Superintendent Sorokin. Tinbergen burst out laughing in the custodian’s face. Ominously. And the custodian went off to lodge his complaint. I just stood there in the entrance hall meditating. Here, on the hat-rack, hung an overcoat and head-gear, here stood two containers used for moving furniture. These things belonged to the neighbors, i.e., Trachtenberg-Tinbergen and her excavator. At least, the greasy, eight-pointed cap was his definitely, because the old woman wore only hats. I often stand in the entrance hall examining all of the objects on the hat-rack. It seems to me they are benevolent and I feel at home with them, I’m not a bit afraid of them when no one is dressed in them. I also think about the containers, wondering what wood they are made of, how much they cost, and what train, on what branch, brought them to our town.

Dear student so-and-so, I, the author of this book, have a pretty clear picture of that train—a long freight. Its cars, for the most part brown, were covered with scrawls in chalk—letters, ciphers, words, whole sentences. Apparently workers wearing special railway uniforms and caps with tin cockades made their computations, notes, and estimates on some of the cars. Let’s suppose the train has been standing on a stub for several days and no one knows when it will start up again or where it will go. And then a commission comes to the stub, examines the seals, bangs hammers on wheels, peeps into the axle-boxes, checking for cracks in the metal and to see if anyone has mixed sand in the oil. The commission squabbles and swears, its monotonous work has long been a bore, and it would take pleasure in going on pension. But how many years is it to pension?—penses the commission. It takes a piece of chalk and writes on anything at hand, usually on one of the boxcars: year of birth—such—and—such, work seniority—such-and-such, therefore such-and-such a number of years to pension. Then the next commission comes to work, it is deep in debt to its colleagues on the first commission, which is why the second commission doesn’t squabble and swear, but tries to do everything quietly, without even using hammers. This commission is sad, it too takes chalk from its pocket (here I should note in parentheses that the station where this action takes place could never, even during two world wars, complain about a lack of chalk. It had been known to have shortages of: sleepers, handcars, matches, molybdenum ore, semaphores, wrenches, hoses, crossing barriers, flowers for decorating the embankments, red banners with the requisite slogans commemorating events of varying qualities, spare brakes, siphons and ashpits, steel and slag, book-keeping records, warehouse logs, ashes and diamonds, smokestacks, speed, cartridges and marijuana, levers and alarm-clocks, amusements and firewood, record players and porters, experienced scriveners, surrounding forests, rhythmical timetables, drowsy flies, cabbage soup, oatmeal, bread, and water. But there was always so much chalk at this station that, as indicated in the telegraph agency’s announcement, it would require such-and-such number of trains each with such-and-such payload capacity, to carry away from the station all of the potential chalk. More accurately, not from the station, but from the chalk quarries in the area around the station. The station itself was called Chalk, and the river—the misty white river with chalky banks—could have no other name than the Chalk. In short, everything here at the station and around was made out of this soft white stone: people worked in chalk quarries and mines, they received chalky rubles dusted with chalk, they made the houses and streets out of chalk, they whitewashed with chalk, in school the children were taught to write with chalk, chalk was used for washing hands, cooking pots and teeth were cleaned and scrubbed with chalk, and, finally, when dying, people willed that they be buried in the local cemetery where instead of earth there was chalk and every grave was decorated with a chalk headstone. One would have to think that the settlement of Chalk was singularly clean, all white and neat, and cirrus or cumulus clouds pregnant with chalky rains constantly hung over it, and when the rains fell the settlement got even whiter and cleaner, that is, absolutely white, like a fresh sheet in a good hospital. As for the hospital, it was here too, a good one and big. In it the miners suffered their illnesses and died, sick with a special disease which in conversations among themselves they called “the chalky.” Chalk dust settled in the workers’ lungs, penetrated their blood, their blood became weak and anemic. The people paled, their pellucid white faces glowed in the murk of the night-shift hours, they glowed against a background of astonishingly clean curtains in the windows of the hospital, they glowed in farewell against the background of pillows on which they would die, and after that the faces glowed only in the photographs of family albums. The snapshot would be pasted on a separate page and someone from the household would carefully draw a box around it with a black pencil. The frame came out solemn, if uneven. However, let us return to the second railroad commission which is getting chalk out of its pocket, and—let us close the parentheses) and writes on the car: so much for Petrov, so much for Ivanov, so much for Si-dorov, total—so many chalk rubles. The commission moves along, writing on some of the boxcars and flatcars the word checked, but on others—to be checked, for it is impossible to check them all at once, and there is after all a third commission: let it check the remaining cars. But besides the commissions there is noncommission at the station too, or to put it another way, people who are not members of commissions, they stand outside them, employed at other jobs, or they don’t work here at all. Nevertheless, they are among those who cannot resist the desire to take a piece of chalk and write something on the side of a boxcar—wooden and warm from the sun. Here comes a soldier wearing a forage cap, he heads for a boxcar: two months to demob. A miner appears, his white hand produces a laconic: scum. A D-student from fifth grade, whose life is perhaps harder than all of ours put together: Maria Stepanna’s a bitch. A woman station laborer in an orange sleeveless jacket, whose duty is to tighten the nuts and clean out the viaducts, throwing the waste onto the rails below, knows how to draw a sea. She draws a wavy line on the car, and truly, a sea is the result, and an old beggar who doesn’t know how to sing or play the accordion, and hasn’t yet managed to buy a hurdy-gurdy, writes two words: thank you. Some drunk and scraggly guy who has accidentally discovered that his girlfriend is being unfaithful, in despair: Three loved Valya. Finally the train leaves the stub and rolls along the railways of Russia. It is made up of cars checked by the commissions, of clean words and curse words, fragments of someone’s heartaches, memorial inscriptions, business notes, idle graphical exercises, of laughter and curses, howls and tears, blood and chalk, of white on black and brown, of fear of death, of pity for friends and strangers, of wracked nerves, of good impulses and rose-colored glasses, of boorishness, tenderness, dullness and servility. The train rolls along, Sheina Solomonovna Trachtenberg’s containers on it, and all Russia comes out onto windswept platforms to look it in the eye and read what has been written—the passing book of their own life, a senseless book, obtuse, boring, created by the hands of incompetent commissions and pitiful, misled people. After a certain number of days the train arrives in our town, at the freight station. The people who work at the railroad post office are worried: they have to inform Sheina Trachtenberg that the containers with her furniture have finally been received. It’s raining outside, the sky is full of storm clouds. In the special postal office at the so-called border of the station a one-hundred-watt bulb bums, dispelling the semidark-ness and creating comfort. In the post office there are several worried office workers wearing blue uniforms. They worriedly make tea on a hotplate, and worriedly they drink it. It smells of sealing wax, wrapping paper, and twine. The window opens onto the rusty reserve lines, where grass is sprouting up among the sleepers and some kind of small but beautiful flowers are growing. It is quite nice to look at them from the window. The vent in the window is open, therefore certain sounds which are characteristic of a junction station are quite audible: a lineman’s horn, the clank of air hoses and buffers, a hissing of pneumatic brakes, the dispatcher’s commands, and also various types of whistles. It is nice to hear all this too, especially if you are a professional and can explain the nature of each sound, its meaning and its symbolism. And of course the office workers of the railroad post office are professionals, they have many railway kilometers behind them, in their time they have all served as heads of postal cars or worked as conductors of those same cars, a few of them on international runs even, and as they are wont to say, they’ve seen the world and know what’s what. And if one were to show up and ask their supervisor, is it so ...

(1977)