UNDER THE SIGN OF ALPHA AND OMEGA
At the beginning of January, the city was plunged into total darkness and starvation, the air raids and artillery bombardments stopped, and all work came to a halt.
Only now, after four months of siege, did Gleb fully realize that he was not simply a witness to a battle fought against a pack of ravening wolves, whose reason had been clouded long before by a false sense of their own exclusivity and the “pure breeding” of their pack (which purity was entirely illusory). It turned out that what was taking place was a clash between two vital energies: one, having broken adrift from the foundations, was seeking a meaning, a secret code, in the workings of the incomprehensible and supposedly hostile world of the opposing force, those “others,” who thought and lived in close proximity to the primary source, in calm possession of knowledge. It was an attempt to burgle the sacred treasure chest of Russian life, a Faustian urge to push insatiable curiosity to its limit, a craving nourished by a strange desire that exceeded the bounds of everything essential to human nature, the desire to press—over and over again—the question of what lay beyond the ultimate boundary: a conquistadorial, cunning, serpentine craving that poisoned all under its sway, compelling them to annihilate those “others” in order to find out why they behaved as they did, why they “weren’t like everyone else,” and to repeat the terrible experiment over and over again; it was a craving that gave birth to monsters and cannibals. And Petersburg now appeared to Gleb as what it had always been, covertly, in secret—the focused potential of the energies of the whole of Russia, the embodiment of its indomitability and tranquil understanding of both past and future, its understanding of man as opposed to nature and of the inherent nature of the human being. Petersburg and Russia had no need to search for “keys”—those had been given from the outset. And Gleb suddenly remembered that he had heard similar thoughts expressed twenty years earlier by the Chetvertinskys. Fyodor, Sergei’s older brother, was fond of repeating: “It’s all in the language.” And this language has been given to us from birth; it only needs to be used correctly—that was what Gleb thought now. The Finns, adventitious fellow travelers of the rabid pack, have shown no sign of any real commitment. Although we have different roots, in their soul they are closer to us. But the pack does have its allies—investigators of Russian nature under the banner of a universal experiment, of “the worldwide Soviet Union” (as the words of their anthem have it). If Petersburg falls and Leningrad triumphs, it will be a joint victory for them—for these somber wolves, these Fausts and their hammer-and-sickle Wagners. Gleb realized that for the first time, in thinking of the Soviets, he had said—if only to himself—not “we,” but “they” and “them.” But experience had given him that right.
From Gleb’s notebook:
6 January 1942. Christmas (Old Style)
Impressions from an afternoon “stroll”:
by the Summer Garden,
an abandoned corpse, wrapped in sackcloth,
felt boots protruding, string untwined.
I see—from the figure—that it’s a woman.
Then another abandoned corpse,
another and another,
but that one’s barefoot,
and this one, in long-nosed shoes,
dropped right here on the bridge,
just as he walked, hands in pockets,
and fell on his back—that’s the way
they fall when they die
(yes, yes, heart failure).
Striding up, sheepskin-coated,
an officer of the law saw
the closed eyes and breathless mouth,
and went on his way.
Past a crowd of people—
some in overcoats
or padded work jackets,
others in fur coats,
dragging little sleds—mostly empty—
or carrying cans
or empty-handed,
with empty stomachs,
and empty, unfeeling hearts,
with gazes that have collapsed inward.
And there’s a blind man striding along,
feeling out the way with a cane.
He checked the lying man
with his fingers and moved on.
If I were Sologub-and-Hippius,
with their homegrown Nietzscheism,
I would write something like this:
Burn, you accursed books!
From Vera’s diary:
Starvation ages.
All the fat is burned out. There’s nothing left but skin, bones, and muscles—in men. It’s easier on us women, we have more deposits and folds of fat, and so the aging is not so catastrophic. Even so, I try not to look at my reflection.
All that dieting and dreaming of a slim figure—how absurd! What wouldn’t I give now for those pies and cakes, whipped cream, absolutely anything! But what’s most terrible is Gleb’s condition. He was thin enough before—all skin and muscles— and now he is covered in wrinkles, folds, hollows. The body can still be concealed under clothes, but the face! And the hands! It’s as if he has put on about twenty-five years. Only the eyes are like before, so alive, inflamed with blazing youthfulness. As long as they still gleam like that, everything is all right.
He says he doesn’t see that I have aged, but I can see him, and gazing into this “mirror,” I realize what has happened to us.
From Gleb’s notebook:
January 13. New Year’s Eve, 1942, Old Style.
-35° C, not snowing, but with a light breeze.
A chronicle of the battle with cold:
first I went to Krestovsky Island,
with everyone else, to dismantle
the wood-plank stands
of the snow-covered stadium,
reminiscent of a crater
pockmarked all over from the dancing
of elephants or rhinoceroses.
I took some on the sled to Vera’s place
(she helped as well),
and then, across Lieutenant Schmidt Bridge,
under shelling, I dragged some back to mine.
The planks are all burned up at last,
the stadium completely dismantled
by herds of hoar-frosted
human ants.
Back in the early winter,
before I acquired the planks—
which, alas, did not last long—
I started burning books for heat.
I burned: Soviet Music
then Goethe in German,
then Shakespeare in translation,
then originals,
then a cheap Pushkin
(the Marx edition, I know
it all by heart anyway)
then a multivolume,
commemorative Count Tolstoy—
All these I regretted,
but now life is dictating
a different War and Peace.
And then came Dostoevsky’s turn—
The Adolescent and Poor People.
I postponed for a while the burning
of The Karamazovs, The Devils, and At Tikhon’s
(the Grossman edition).
When I threw The Adolescent into the stove,
I thought: “There it goes,
the final Russian paean
to Europe’s ‘sacred stones,’”
up in flames and smoke.
Not even stones will be left.
The survivors are: a little poetry
(Blok, Arsenii Tatishchev),
Latin incunabula,
music scores, letters, a stack
of music paper,
heavy drawing paper
and empty, unlined notebooks—
they burn worst of all.
While I was writing, I’ve warmed up.
Let us call it “Vers la flamme.”
More and more often, standing for hours at a time, waiting for a delivery of food to arrive, Gleb witnessed a scene that recurred with unvarying regularity—women, mostly elderly, reveling in their own impunity and openly reviling the military and civil authorities, to the morose approval of the utterly exhausted queue, which eventually turned its eyes away (later they stopped even turning their eyes away), and the clear indifference of the forces of law and order, once so formidable. The militiamen, who usually kept sentry duty at the empty grocery stores, either pretended not to hear the bitter harangues or ostentatiously moved off to one side. Words that during the first months of the war were regarded as grounds for arrest and possible execution by firing squad no longer made any impression. Because every second person, if not two out of every three, was prepared to utter them, as they stood in line for the bread that was so hard to chew up and the almost inedible oilseed meal, or as they crowded around the shops in the impossible hope that perhaps today they would announce at least the distribution of some kind of grain or—as at New Year’s—even some sweet stuff. But, strangely enough, although Gleb acknowledged the subjective truth of what was being said about the appallingly, treacherously inadequate provisioning of the besieged city, about the complete lack of respect by the citizens and authorities for their own lives, about the excessive acquiescence and servility of those people who, by their mere presence in the city, bolstered the morale of our army and its determination to stand firm until victory, about the people’s trampled dignity, he did not sympathize with these outbursts. Those female orators were spewing out their hatred of the deliberate or unwitting brutality and bestial oppression that had become a commonplace, in an attack on those who were now responsible for redeeming the almost catastrophic situation. And had not these same female orators only recently demanded, with hate in their hearts, reprisals against the genuine or imaginary opponents of their oppressors—with that same unspoken but crushing approval from the crowd that turned its eyes away? The word that Gleb used to himself was precisely that, “oppressors”; he had been aware of his own total alienation from the authorities for a long time already. But more important now was a different hate—and a different love, not the one that moved the crowd. His thoughts were interrupted by the familiar invective . . .
“Filthy, barbarian way of doing things, a stinking, rotten life. And we still trust these skunks and gangsters. They force us to live in terror and starvation and die up to our necks in sewage. The toilets are boarded up, everyone craps in the hallways or in the broken trams, even out in the street. Tell me, citizen, where did you relieve yourself today?”
“I’ve got a pass to the Hermitage. One of the halls there, you know, where the Dutch masters used to hang, has been sprinkled with fine sand, so it was all quite civilized really,” the man accosted by the female orator answered imperturbably, even with a certain bravado.
“Wretched, lousy, stinking country, drowning in ignorance, hunger, and shit, living up to its knees in its blood and puke, breathing air saturated with the stink of corpses and believing that everyone else in the world envies it!”
A haggard militiaman, struggling to maintain at least some semblance of stern authority, walked over to the female orator.
“What’s the problem, little lady?” “Now what, do you think I’m crazy, traumatized? That people like me ought to be shot?” the woman carried on babbling, staring fiercely into the face of this representative of authority, whose mere appearance was enough to arouse sympathy: deeply sunken eyes, a hunger-furrowed face that could have belonged to a man of any age, a greatcoat dangling loosely on his massive frame, eyes glazing over from malnutrition.
“It’s the doctors’ job to decide who’s traumatized. Anyway now, you be on your way . . . There won’t be any bread today, citizens. And there won’t be any grain either. Nothing at all is being issued today. Go on home in peace . . .”
It was dark—and he had to get home before the curfew. Another mind-numbing night of aching hunger.
From Gleb’s notebook:
January 15:
The important thing is not to eat
dirty old paste from the wallpaper, nothing boils out of it;
belts—they’re treated with some kind of chemical—
it isn’t rawhide, like
the polar explorers used to boil up,
and not to eat the strange meat jelly sold on the black market.
God knows, what if it’s boiled out of corpses from the nearest
cemetery?
Or rather, the cemetery that is everywhere now.
Vera said fifty bodies have been left where they lie, littering
the freezing halls of the Hermitage.
Better diarrhea and vomit than losing one’s mind.
Better the aching hunger . . .
Although it’s not really any better.
It was precisely in one of these moments of ultimate bodily humiliation—for the hunger was, first and foremost, humiliating—and despair, nudging him toward the void of nonexistence, that Gleb suddenly sensed that within him, too, there was a certain power at variance with the forces acting all around him, and this power was pushing its way out of the former Gleb Alpha like a spring. Perhaps it is the voice of blood and race that has begun speaking in me, as they are so fond of repeating in their propaganda—those who condemn me to death, together with hundreds of thousands of my compatriots caught in the trap of the siege: the call of the sun and the south.
Everything I wrote, everything I said and did before was wrong, because my view of things was distorted. Now I see clearly through a glass that is no longer cloudy. Now my view is bright. It encompasses the ends and the beginnings of things—everything accommodated in the span from A to Z. “I” used to be the point of departure, the “alpha” of a meaning, granted to me in its fullness only during these terrible months. Now I, Gleb Alfani, know how to respond to the challenge thrown down to me.
His thoughts felt cramped—Gleb was thinking about everything at once, keying himself up internally to a point at which the transient became eternal. Exactly two hundred years earlier, Bach had tempered his own clavier well. But Gleb Alfani’s rebelliously free-spirited Russian and vibrantly mellifluous Italian soul resisted this global Germanic tempering. The world could not be tempered like that. No matter how liberal the constitution of intelligible space might be, and the bill of rights for sounds tied to a five-line stave, they left out of the picture everything that was tremulous, spontaneous, inexpressible in words. Vera, verissima—Gleb’s childhood Italian, used only for reading comments on scores, was surfacing into consciousness again—had fallen in love with precisely this nameless quality pulsating within him.
What I am composing in my mind will be an anthem of overcoming. Not triumphal, no, but tremulous: like the voice of an evening prayer, like the conversation of those who love, like a premonition of victories to come. But not yet the victories themselves.
Let the underlying beat be set by the rhythm of the E-flat minor prelude from the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier. We shall accept the obvious: no one has ever set pitches to rhythm as well as that sage of Leipzig. But in its genuine pulse, the corporeal vestment of sounds must elude its own temperament. And so we shall take three instruments—three violas, three stringed violets with swords of resonant flame carved into their wooden bodies. (Where can they be obtained in a besieged city? Never mind, we’ll ask the museum people.) The viola da gamba— the “knee violet”—with its body clasped between the knees. “I kiss your knees to stop the pain,” Vera had told him in an insane note placed in his pocket before a brief separation in the autumn following the first terrible air raids. The viola da braccio—the “arm violet”—blossoming into sound in the embrace of the arm: “I shall press my lips against your shoulder for luck.” The viola d’amore—the “violet of love”—the most tremulous and tender of the three, its neck, crowned by a carved wooden head with blindfolded eyes, lying in the palm of the hand. As a sign of love’s heedless impulse. “I kiss your hand on the palm.” Let their trio sing and pulse, like Gleb’s body, arranged for three voices.
Let us call it “In This You Shall Conquer”—ἐν τούτῳ νίκα—(in) hoc (signo) vince(s).
Then they will be joined by a countertenor. Not a man and not a woman, but a voice transcending the limits of human embarrassment, located beyond the bounds of the corporeal, in a space of purity and precision that is entirely disembodied. We Italians previously entrusted this sort of thing to a special breed of mutilated nightingales, impotent in the simple, direct, male sense, and yet acquiring plenitude of expression through their mutilation. These days, following the rejection of that operation on the organ that arouses—in me, as in others—so much darkness, the torment of jealous, egotistical desire unilluminated by the kind of love that Vera and I have, kept secret from others and truly boundless only for us—these days such a part is normally sung by a countertenor, the most difficult range of all, the most unmasculine and unfeminine. But only the countertenor can transform the tone of the underlying substance of what I am now composing—the ardor of desire—and manifest it as a stream of lambent, limpid rays of light.
“Verochka, I’ve begun writing an aria. It is suffused through and through with thoughts of you and our destiny. The piece will be in four voices—three violas and one countertenor. While I am working on it, I feel that nothing bad will happen to you or to us. That there is some invisible shield protecting us. But you must not stay on Vasilievsky any longer. Even though the place is never bombed or shelled. Why bother with these conventions?”
“I can’t move into your place. I don’t have just myself to think about.”
“I understand, I should have spoken to Georgii a long time ago.”
“It’s not about Georgii. I’m pregnant.”
“I told you, I should have spoken to your husband. A long time ago.”
“What for? I’m pregnant, Gleb. And what kind of husband is he to me?”
“Whose child is it?”
“Yours. Who else’s?”
“But why, why, why didn’t you leave the city when it was still possible, then?”
“I was pregnant. It’s four month now already. Four long months, Gleb.”
“I can’t leave you on Vasilievsky.”
“You’ll have to put up with it.”
“I’m taking you away.”
“Where to? Where you are, the shelling never stops. If not for the flak cannon by St. Isaac’s, they’d bomb you too. Better find some milk.”
“They keep cows in sheds on Ligovsky Prospect by Rastannaya Street. The dairymen aren’t interested in incunabula and rare manuscripts. But I’ve still got a small Persian carpet left, and a pair of Chinese vases made to order for the emperor. You remember the ones—funny potbellied things with a warrior on horseback spearing a tiger? I got them as faulty goods because of the tiger. The Chinese have too much respect for dragons.”
“Gleb, it’s not just for me that we need the milk.”
“I think they’ll take the carpet, although the path down to the sheds is strewn with the things. Or the vases. Tomorrow Mark and I will load them up on the sled and try our luck.”
“Just get some milk, please.”
As Gleb made his long way back along Nevsky Prospect with a huge, hermetically sealed churn of freezing milk from the Ligovka (Mark had got hold of the churn for him), the reddish sun, blurred by the deepening cold, hung in the giddy, vertiginous air without setting, as if refusing to accept that the frosty chill shackling the final remnants of consciousness and scrubbing the city and the faces of passersby completely white, had been augmented by a keen northeasterly that had sprung up again, intensifying the cold to the very limit of the bearable. “Even in the sun, with no wind, the thermometer shows minus thirty-four degrees. Today, January 24, the standard ration allowance has been increased . . .” Gleb started scraping out in his notebook with a pencil (the ink had frozen long ago), but then the will to write started to abandon him. In Gleb’s perception the dull redness of the midday sun acquired a mystical tinge. That was probably how the lamp of heaven ought to look as time finally froze and came to a halt. At the point where Alpha fuses with Omega. Sitting there in the safety of the minimal warmth given out by the little stove, he pictured himself still standing in the windy street with the container of milk and staring fixedly at the unfading celestial luminary above the Gulf of Finland.
“Φώς ιλαρόν αγίας δόξης αθανάτου Πατρός, ουρανίου, αγίου, μάκαρος, Ιησού Χριστέ” thought Gleb, starting to recall something he had once learned by heart almost as a joke; and then, switching to another sacred language, in which his forebears used to pray, he continued to himself, “Fulgor diei lucidus solisque lumen occidit, et nos ad horam vesperam te confitemur cantico.” The winged luminary that seemed to be flooding the space of his awareness with light was the point of separation from everything onerous and dispiriting, the point of transfiguration and the attainment of a final, clear state of knowing. In precisely this way “. . . having come to the setting of the sun and beheld the light of evening,” and rising above Calamity and Grief, rising above Valor, for this new sun was even greater than Valor, Victory, and Faith, we shall sing in praise of “God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For meet it is at all times to worship Thee with voices of praise. O Son of God and Giver of Life, therefore all the world doth glorify Thee.” That was precisely how the voice personifying all the living should proclaim its praise in the sacred tongues known to Gleb Alfani’s heart, in his final and most important composition, born under the sign of the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega. Now everything was falling into place.