6

LIVADIA

The lights were on in my room. Strange because I had left early, going to Massandra for the wine. I stood quietly in the soft glow through the lace curtains, which were drawn back: someone had been in my room.

The same light flowed under my door, spilling out to illuminate the whole passage. I advanced slowly, my wings trailing heavily, feeling them scrape against the parquet floor, until they began to grow smaller, diminishing my great feeling of euphoria, expelling the air that had swelled my lungs as I floated above the couples making love in the sand, hearing the cries of the women, seeing them clearly though they could not see me. Like an angel or an enormous night bird soaring over sea and shore.

Standing beneath my window, I had been stunned by my profound inspiration, a profound apnea, like when a baby opens its mouth to burst into tears and the cry takes forever to emerge. It was V.! A profound aspiration, a burst of joy, and I started running, because this time I was sure. It was her. Seven letters. The magic number, with its esoteric significance. Reading these seven letters had been my initiation, my baptism, not the three cauldrons I had expected, the water, tar, and sulfur (with brass trumpets). Her unnerving intelligence (I took the steps at a single bound) had reversed the process of seduction, ensnaring me in the net of her letters. A trap that she had woven patiently, like Lars and his socks, so that I would have to proceed through its narrow tube like an explorer in the Great Pyramid descending through the tunnel, past the writing on the walls, to arrive at the principal chamber, the very heart of the pyramid. She would have had a bath while she waited. I would say, “Congratulations on the bath,” like they do in Russia, or “I congratulate you on your bath!” What a crazy idea! Right? And when I got to the hallway I saw the white light, too white.

Which checked my flight. Had she lit my acetylene lamp? Why? She could explain everything. I rushed down the hall, past all the other doors until I reached my own at last, and pushed it open, imagining the way I’d be illuminated in the doorway, with darkness behind me, the tiny lights of the hall, a lighting effect right out of Georges de la Tour (I had thought of him before, nights hunting nocturnal butterflies in the Caspian Basin, and other nights, too, in clearings in the woods around here: the brilliant acetylene lamp shining on my hands and face, all the shades of light, the twinkling of the ether flasks on the ground, the shadows of the trees, the play of light and dark on the backs of the leaves, the quiet splendor of the starry sky above). I still had time to think about all this, to get in a thought about Georges de la Tour. But something terrible happened, I don’t know how to write it, my hand trembles. I left it for the end.

I saw—how can I explain this?—I saw someone who was not V. A broad and muscular back, not a woman’s back, which is narrow at the waist, nice and easy to clasp, no, it was the back of a man—attentively reading the draft of my letter! So absorbed he didn’t notice me come in. Bathed in that light, perfectly white and even, not varying but not blinding. Not like in a photography session, no, another type of light. Celestial? Yes! It makes me nervous and embarrassed. It is a word I haven’t used even once in this draft, but it is the right word.

My hand was still on the door, softly touching it. I remained on the threshold, staring at that man, an unknown man reading the draft of my letter, expecting him to say: “Come right in. We’ve been waiting for you.” Like a public prosecutor who already has a case against you, such overwhelming evidence (about poaching, smuggling, despoiling the endangered species listed in the Red Book of Russia) that he is in no hurry, his weary voice displaying no eagerness, just boredom.

But he was still unaware of my presence. Opening the door to the hall had not affected the light inside my room. I stepped forward ever more slowly, moving at a speed that allowed me to conduct a mental survey of my room, the closed wardrobe, the apparent order, shaking like a leaf (yes, a leaf), feeling like an immeasurable time was passing, as long as two, three books or manuscripts like this one, or three just as lengthy letters or inventories, while I approached the back of the man, who finished setting a leaf of paper to one side with the utmost care, and started reading another. As I moved closer, I had time, too, to look over his head (oddly familiar, yes, it’s true) out the window at the darkness of the night through which I had flown and to notice that the light, the celestial brilliance ceaselessly flowing, pouring like milk from an earthenware bowl, from the Milky Way, was radiating from him, from that man, passing smoothly through the fabric of his shirt and the pores of his skin and even through his hair, not maleficently but with infinite goodness.

I’m starting a new paragraph to convey the importance of this moment. I considered going beyond that “infinite goodness,” but then decided there should be a separation after this preliminary examination, a break at this point: I was going to touch his shoulder and then he must have seen my reflection in the mirror and his head came up and he raised his eyes and we exchanged a look—a glance, I would clearly have to call it, given its brevity—and I recognized him. I began to scream (It was me, V.! Do you understand? It was me!), I began to scream, took a deep breath, and lost consciousness, falling to the floor.

I woke at the end of the night. The sounds of dawn surged through the pension, flowing from one end to the other, swelling and splashing occasionally, and very softly, an almost inaudible sound, the waves of the Black Sea crashing over the pebbles on the beach, one after another, again and again in regular intervals, washing out and back in.

Now that it was over I realized my danger. I had gotten too close to the light, getting more and more intense as I approached him, so that if he had not looked up and seen me, if we had not seen ourselves reflected in the mirror, it would have killed me. If we had made contact, if I had touched him, it would have meant annihilation. As Paul Dirac explains, in a letter I’ve lost, describing what happens when matter contacts antimatter. The two of us were material in this case—both my astral double and myself—but we were out of phase. Two perfectly functional collections of waves, essentially on the same wavelength, but out of sync: when I arrived in Istanbul, he was boarding the ferry in Helsinki; when I landed on an island in the Caspian Basin, he was just arriving in Sweden; and it went on like that. And combining the two—their fusion—required extreme caution, painstakingly fitting the wave-packets together tooth by tooth, pulse by pulse, heartbeat by heartbeat, an especially delicate task if the entity in question was as complex as a man (a butterfly hunter and smuggler, besides). And when I walked toward him before I recognized him—it makes my hair stand on end—the light grew brighter and brighter like when two halves of uranium 235 join together in a nuclear charge. Zero hour, deep within Alamogordo or Semipalatinsk, the two halves slide smoothly along the rails, combine and reach critical mass, then a chain reaction and an explosion. And when they get very close, but do not quite meet, electrons start to flow, an enormous emission, producing a white light, ineffable and unutterably deadly. Only one man ever saw it—a physicist who accidentally turned on the device and stopped it just in time, putting a screwdriver (!!) between the two halves, in the very epicenter of the nuclear explosion—and he died. I had come close.

While I lay there unconscious I had a dream, a beautiful dream. And when I woke, I knew I was not the butterfly looking down at me lying across the wood squares of the parquet floor, flying closer and closer, confused, me within the tiny body of the butterfly. I did not dream that I was a butterfly (which would have been perfectly natural after so many months trying to trap one); it was not like that parable where a man dreams he is a butterfly and wakes up not sure whether he is a man who was dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly now dreaming it is a man. Another case of bilocation or disintegration, only between man and insect. Like Franz Kafka (in Prague, a city I have visited, as I mentioned earlier), who also dreamt he was an insect. But let me repeat, that was not what I dreamt. I dreamed that this tiny ethereal copy of me entered my body while I was lying on the floor—like in a Disney cartoon—and I got up, went to the table, and sat down to write a long letter, calamo curente, my pen flying all night long, page after page falling from the table. I felt like the happiest man in the world: at last I had found the key. I dreamed I was writing the perfect letter, overflowing with ideas. I saw this so clearly in my dream. And I was writing, I want you to know, not with a ballpoint pen, but with a marvelous gold-tipped fountain pen, beautiful strokes following in its wake, full orations, the pen sliding forward with a lovely low sigh.

When I woke up I could not remember a single word of that letter, but I felt perfectly happy, still on the ground, sure that through vigilance I could regain that hypnotic state, that the quest was over …