LIVADIA
The quest over—as well as all the possible variants, the digressions, the false starts as I picked my way along, which was my method in writing this manuscript, the only possible one: repeating myself, getting at the same idea from a thousand angles, circling around it, creating a pattern like a delicate construction of reeds, through which the story behind is revealed. A sort of monocle, or imagined opera glasses, which sometimes took the shape of V. or of a Lepidoptera fenestra (that is, with wings the same size and shape, only higher or lower) and which projects into space like a brand. A red-hot iron blazing through the circumlocutions in all letters, inescapably, like a tiger leaping through a hoop in the circus ring (a perfect example, picture this: before the tiger takes his fateful jump, the flaming hoop is held high by the trainer, and through it a terrible scene is visible, not the smiling public safe in the stands but a masked villain sneaking up on a sleeping girl, a treacherous crime) and landing on its soft paws, without singeing its striped fur (though we were not afraid of that), demonstrating the courage or else the sorrow of a trained tiger. I don’t know. The redundancy guaranteed the univocality of the message.
I finally found a letter—almost by chance, in the last shipment from Vladimir Vladimirovich, which I riffled through hurriedly since there was nothing from Mme. Blavatsky—a letter that I copied whole, eventually learning it by heart and reciting it out loud like a poem. This letter was the final proof that women write the most brilliant letters. It wasn’t as long as V.’s letters, but was more like them than anything else I’d read, and I immediately took it as a model, an inspiration, showing me what to do to correct this draft, stripping away all the convolutions and immaterial details, cutting to the quick, the innermost grain.
It would be quite enough to copy the letter here, but I will describe the circumstances in which it was written, which will add significance in the eyes of the reader and contribute to a richer understanding.
The story and the letter go back to 1811 (not my oldest source, far from it). In November 1811 Heinrich von Kleist, “the famous poet,” sent a letter to his fiancée and cousin Maria von Kleist, to whom he confessed: “I abandoned you for another woman while I was in Berlin, but if it is any consolation, I will tell you that this new friend does not desire to live, but to die with me.” Nothing too remarkable about this news except the last few words.
Henriette, his lover, also left a letter, to her husband (she was married, magnifying the tragedy), in which she asked that the bodies, hers and von Kleist’s, not be separated in death (just like Heloise and Abelard, it suddenly occurred to me). Kleist, her partner for life, was to be entrusted with her death, killing her and then himself. In crescendo.
They prepared to carry out this plan while staying at an inn halfway between Berlin and Potsdam: Henriette wrote a friend saying he would find ten silver talers in her leather case, asking him to use it for a porcelain cup with her name inscribed on it, to be sent to her husband after her death. Kleist wrote to the same friend (a man named Peguilhem), saying that he had forgotten to pay his barber, asking him to use some of the money to settle the debt. The innkeeper stated that the pair did not sleep that night, that they asked for a supply of candles, by which light, it appears, they sat down on the last night of their lives and wrote letters.
The innkeeper’s wife stated that the couple went on an excursion to a nearby lake, “and they seemed really happy, calling each other ‘my sweet boy,’ ‘my little girl,’ ‘my dear thing’ the whole time.” Until Kleist shot Henriette in the heart, reloaded the pistol, and blew his brains out.
A regrettable incident, certainly, a double suicide. But Henriette’s letter is by far the most sensitive and intelligent, the most perfect of all the letters that I read in Livadia. I will use hers to write mine (not that mine will be a suicide note, a farewell letter, heaven help me!; just for the tone, the intensity, the outpouring of emotion). I’ll copy out the whole thing:
Letter from Henriette Vogel to Heinrich von Kleist.
Berlin, November 1811
My Heinrich, my sweet music, my bed of hyacinths, my dawn and my nightfall, my ocean of delights, my aeolian harp, my morning dew, my rainbow, my dear babe in arms, my much-loved heart, my joy and my sorrow, my revival, my freedom, my slavery, my coven of witches, my holy grail, the air that I breathe, my warmth, my thoughts, my nearest and farthest desires, my adored sinner, solace of my eyes, my sweetest worry, my loveliest virtue, my pride, my protector, my conscience, my bosque, my brilliance, my sword and my helmet, my generosity, my right hand, my celestial ladder, my St. John, my knight, my sweet page, my pure poet, my glass, my fountain of life, my weeping willow, my lord and master, my hope and my firm purpose, my dear constellation, my delicate caress, my stronghold, my fortune, my death, my will-o’-the-wisp, my solitude, my splendid ship, my valley, my recompense, my Werther, my Lethe, my cradle, my frankincense and myrrh, my voice, my judge, my sweet dreamer, my longing, my soul, my mirror of gold, my ruby, my Pan pipe, my crown of thorns, my thousand marvels, my teacher and my pupil, I love you above all thought. My soul is yours.
Henriette
P.S. My shadow at midday, my spring in the desert, my dear mother, my religion, the music inside me, my poor sick Heinrich, my meek and white Paschal Lamb, my door to heaven.
V. would never come.
I went out into the cold dawn. I walked to the farthest end of the garden, picking up dried branches and dead leaves as I moved through the shadows between the double line of beech trees. A box of matches bulged in the back pocket of my pants. I fished it out and leaned forward, striking one with my index finger. Squatting down, I cupped my hands around the flame, and set the tiny pile of twigs, leaves, and old newspapers afire. I had brought my draft with me and also V.’s letters. I read one after another in the firelight. The first letter, which I received two weeks after I got to Livadia, so beautiful; the second, which I finished reading in the little restaurant with the bay window, and in which she told me the story of the long trip from her home-town in Siberia to Jerson and on to Istanbul; the third, an exhaustive account of our walk and visit to Hagia Sophia, which I received from Alfiá’s hands while on another walk; the fourth, which Petrovich stole and I recovered; the fifth, false and pathetic (“a confused woman,” “I’ve made a mistake”), which the letter carrier brought up to my room so that she could ask for foreign stamps for her nine-year-old son, who collected them; the sixth, which surprised me (I figured there would be five), and which started me writing on odd sheets of paper, whatever came to hand, about my decision to rescue her and the details of that rescue; and the seventh, in which she went on and on about the young Artyom, a prisoner, and how good he was and how vile and calculating I had been—an accusation that infuriated me enough to put a few accusations of my own in this draft, about her thanklessness and her treachery, her perfect perfidy—and also offered her explanation for our miraculous salvation, revealing herself splendidly prone to mystical experience, the mysticism I had taken aim at with science, until a few hours ago when I was witness to a supernatural event. I felt my face go red, not from the warmth of the fire but from shame for having wanted to write “the truth about Mme. Blavatsky.” How could I admit it: right here in Livadia, so far from Tibet, I had undergone an experience I could not explain scientifically, no matter how hard I tried. And after reading her letters, I threw them all into the fire. I read this draft too, from beginning to end, and all my notes, the quotes from other people’s letters—and then threw them all into the fire. Some of them rose up, borne along on the hot air, flames licking their edges, red as butterflies. Yes, butterflies—why not? They ascended quite high before falling, and then were gone in a second, consumed in the fire. Finally, I thought about Alfiá, who would cry when she found my scrawl (just “a few lines,” a quick note). I left the suitcase full of V.’s clothing on the table in my room with a note to Kuzmovna saying it was for Alfiá (they felt the same size, V. and Alfiá, in the dark). I went out to the road, empty at this hour, and walked toward Yalta, following the trembling trolley line.
With the shadowy trees for company, I recited the first words of that amazing letter: “my sweet music, my bed of hyacinths, my dawn and my nightfall, my ocean of delights, my aeolian harp, my morning dew, my rainbow, my dear babe in arms, my much-loved heart, my joy and my sorrow, my revival, my freedom, my slavery, my coven of witches, my holy grail, the air that I breathe …”
That is how I would begin my letter to V., free and full of feeling, and without a shadow of a doubt: My dearest Varia: