Authors: Andrei Bitov
“So what did you say was the name of the Quiet One?”
The Quiet One?
…
Ah! The name Tycho sounds like the Russian for “quiet.” It’s good to drink to the peoples!
“He was a courtier. His ancestors went on a crusade to the Tomb of the Lord, and one of them came home leading a beautiful woman, supposedly a Turk, whom he had rescued from slavery. Nothing is known about her, except that she smoked a pipe and was Tycho’s grandmother.”
“It’s very possible, if she smoked a pipe,” they agreed. “Do you think she was the one who trained him not to get up from the table?”
“It’s very possible,” I agreed in turn. “But his dying wish was for this inscription on his gravestone: ‘He lived a wise man, died a fool.’
”
And this proved correctly understood by all. We rose from the table at last. I could now be pleased, not only with myself but also with
HIM
: all except our hosts were so drunk that I could only admire the way
HE
easily, without staggering, glided down—in my jeans, which showed especially white in the pale dusk—onto the lawn, which had turned from emerald to dark green.
But if only that had been the end!
Here on the little meadow, now that the outlines of the yard were hidden by dusk and all these buildings didn’t look so solid and new, my patriotic introspection on the subject of someone else’s wealth was not so unnerving to me. Why bemoan lost traditions and spinelessly plunge myself into poverty?
…
Tradition is by no means our wealth, and wealth is indeed a tradition. So I concluded, as I measured the depth of the field to which the guests, preserving their masculine dignity, were disappearing one by one, as if for some other purpose. And when I had measured it precisely, when I found myself in the strictly Russian board shack, when I was chasing away the image of Tycho Brahe’s inglorious death—I suddenly remembered the heavenly northern village of Turlykovo, where all these things had once existed: the well, the pump, the untrampled meadow, the carved porches and lintels. The little village rose up like a temple on a hill, and when you climbed up to it you did indeed find yourself in a temple, from which you could pray to all of God’s world, which immediately came to you, immediately encircled you, not tightly but intimately, this world that was quite enough for you. The forest that hugged the field stood like a monastery wall, and on the lone pine rising above it you could make out an obvious cross. People had lived there! And—it had existed!
…
They did not live there now. The temple had been abandoned with a weird, shocking suddenness: spoons in the sideboard and a little frock hanging in the wardrobe
…
What a bombing that was! Come on out, crawl out, it’s all over!
…
That was how it seemed, that the handsome residents would suddenly emerge, making a joyful noise and exulting that nothing had been destroyed, everything was intact
…
Except
…
They would never return! That was the terrible thing. They would never again want to
…
As though collectivization were, indeed, Russia’s notorious primacy in the invention of the neutron bomb: everything is safe and sound, man alone is gone. We will yet return to Turlykovo! I had time to think, with a glad shiver down my spine,
and now the lawn began to shiver beneath me just as gladly, powerfully, and gently, and from somewhere
over there,
racing out from the dusk of the farm buildings, with a startled neigh, came a
Steed.
Oh, what an animal this was! A bird! A creature! The creature, the horse, not believing his own feet, shot toward us, right into the orchard. He didn’t know yet where to go, but his soul was already flying along. He seemed hobbled by the might of his own body, he must first disentangle himself, trample his way out, burst out of his own self, the next dungeon after the one just abandoned. His color was already indistinct, but his coat shone: now his croup, now his flank reflected the not-yet-risen moon. He was just on the point of fully believing in his freedom, he let out a triumphant neigh, he was about to dash away, but now he abruptly shied in fright, mistaking an apple branch for I don’t know what. The apple struck his muzzle, and he crunched it up with childish delight. And it was as though his heart could not bear three happinesses at once: freedom, motion, and an apple delivered right to his mouth. His flank heaved convulsively, as if from a race. He had been rushing around in this horse paradise, he had been flashing among the now white tree trunks like a zebra, and the apple had flung itself between his teeth; the moon-green juice streamed down his muzzle, and exulting over all this, startled and fearless, was his sidelong, neighing eye. If there are apples, there is also a paradise. If there is a paradise for us, it will have a horse. Otherwise, for whom are the apples and why is there a paradise? And if the horse is in paradise, we, too, are in paradise,
so we stood in a circle around the horse, and modesty simply streamed from our host, and my thoughts on the meaning of wealth struck me as pathetic, for this was a Steed. All those definitions of what was theirs and their own, created and acquired, turned out to be small-minded Marxist confessions. Yes, of course this horse had been bought, but not like a television or a carpet, and not even like an automobile. He was not for need. He was for racing. He wouldn’t win yet this year, but he would win in the future, no question, and
you don’t look at the woman you love, or your child by her, the way you look at a Steed;
there’s a normal, safe, everyday envy that is fun to excite in your neighbor, through your harvest, for example, or your wife, or your growing son, or your new car, but there’s an envy as huge as
a Steed, it prances inside you and tramples your soul, an envy with green apple foam on its lips, an envy you have to be a little more careful with.
and this is the moment when the host presents his guests with the farewell horn. That horn was the size of an elephant tusk.
It held exactly two bottles of wine.
I was still thinking the horn would start around the circle
…
But the host, the young one who looked devilishly like Pushkin, demonstrated how this was done—it was for one man—downing the contents of the horn in a single breath, without pausing. And as they refilled it and I tried to guess who was next, and as his father, who bore such a rare, such a fraternal resemblance to my father, except that he had lived a different, parallel life, secret from me, with its fresh air, toil, and health—as his father glanced at me in such a fatherly way, benevolent and encouraging, and chuckled as though covertly pleased with me,
most likely I was thinking inscrutable are Thy ways, O Lord, and I might, perfectly well might, be his son; a great hand had reached down from heaven with the little seed of me on its palm, and I had been conceived in Anapa
{49}
(
Ana-pa
in Abkhazian means “outstretched hand”)—so that was a fact. The Japanese count a man’s age from his conception, so why couldn’t Anapa be my homeland? But that chance event would be the only one, and doom you to your fate
…
The horn was held out to me, and even as I tried to beg off,
HE
was already struggling to get at it. I implored him, I grabbed his arms, I asserted with good reason that this would ruin him, he couldn’t handle it, he would disgrace himself, he would get smashed. In vain! He wrenched himself from my clutches and seized the horn. Feeling himself to be a horse, he all but neighed. He kicked off his sandals, apparently for greater resemblance, stamped his bare heels on the Abkhazian
agazon
, and declaimed: “Earth, help me!” And so, deciding that he stood on the soil at last, he applied himself. I could only watch with trepidation. He drank and drank, and the horn kept lifting him up. Even when sober, I can’t tip my head back too far, for fear of dizziness. How did he have the breath!
…
His head tipped back, the horn rose higher and higher. Standing, literally, on the earth, he saw the moon come up all of a sudden, as if jumping out from behind the horizon. There was something predatory in its curve, as in the leap of a snow leopard seizing its victim. And thus, not so much holding the horn up as holding on by it, he dangled from it between earth and moon, like the Young Pioneer bugler in the park, and simply froze, trumpeting his last, victorious drop. To the sound of a friendly, approving ovation, he remained standing. Well, well. I thought. Let’s see what you do now. But even now he didn’t immediately fall down, he was still able to hand the empty horn to the next man with a triumphant gesture and leave the arena without staggering.
Getting him into the car was harder. He crawled around the lawn on all fours and wept. “The tooth! I’ve lost Lucy’s tooth
…
” he wailed. No one but me understood him.
He calmed down at last and drooped his head on my bosom. Lulled by the jolting of the automobile, he hugged Lucy’s skull the way a child hugs a toy.
Before we reached Sukhum he woke up, suddenly clear and decisive, for he had heard a gentle neigh. He asked to stop. Everyone was glad to relieve himself slightly of the Abkhazian one-for-the-road, but this wasn’t even what he had on his mind. He asked whether the resort hotel gleaming beyond the railroad track wasn’t the one where
…
and they confirmed that it was. The very same, how had he guessed? A terrible thought flashed through my mind. Under no circumstances could this be allowed! But then and there he confirmed my misgivings, declaring that he would ride no farther, he would spend the night at the resort. How I hoped that our Abkhazian friends would not allow this! But, after deliberating briefly, they deemed him to be of sound mind. I was restraining him with my last strength, but he had always been stronger than I. “Fuck off!” he shouted angrily, and tore himself from my drunken arms. And ran.
He was running, he thought, like a horse. Straight across the railroad tracks and the asparilla thickets; there wasn’t much left of my jeans. And when he had finally crashed through the last reeds and sedges and thundered across the pebbled shore, he flopped into the sea without undressing and began to swim. “Fuck off!” he repeated with each stroke, in reply to my choked appeals. I didn’t have the strength, I faded and was left behind.
He swam quite far along the moonlight path, emitting epic snorts like a folklore steed and admiring himself in the phosphorescent bubbles, as if he were all of this, both sea and horse and moonlight path. He felt like mineral water poured into a goblet, although he looked more like a dropped-in Alka-Seltzer. He dissolved in the night and came up on shore with a faint neigh, as if born from the sea foam, right across from the resort hotel with all its windows shining. He was purposeful. He was aiming for the apple.
I implored him. This was the very thing he would never forgive himself. He must not do this under any circumstances. This was degradation. The Fall. Stop!
“Fuck you!”
And he was right. He had done it to me
…
It was I who was wet, dirty, and drunk, while
HE
, agile as James Bond, stealthy as a snow leopard, was instantly in a dinner jacket, with a rose in his buttonhole, and it was
HIM
she saw, not me, to judge by her ecstatic glance as she accepted the rose he had just barbarically plucked from the main flower bed; it was they who together, immediately, without even exchanging a word, ran to the beach holding hands, ran off into the night, into the darkness, into the sea, he with the neigh that befitted him, she with happy squeals; it was they who undressed as they ran, dropping their tunics and mantles, peeling off everything; it was they who splashed and played like Triton and a naiad,
{50}
phosphorescing for each other with their white behinds, kissing and hugging in the open sea, well aware that it was only they who saw the hotel with all its windows shining, while it, poor fool, did not see them—it squinted, peered, but did not see
…
and here, in the surf, in sight of everyone, he hit the bull’s-eye at last.
He overturned the night on himself. Fuck that night!
…
…
and the sea, and the hotel, and its shining windows, and all prose, and the horse, and the apples, and the horn, and the peoples, and the moonlight path, and the sky, and the stars, and Mother Damp-Earth herself, who in this instance consisted of already cooling pebbles, and the already invisible bushes that shielded them from the lighted promenade, and the promenade with the vacationers’ excited voices carrying from it, and those vacationers, and their voices, and the globes of the streetlamps above the voices, fuck those whispering lamps, fuck the border tower, fuck the searchlight strolling along the coastal strip but solicitously skirting them for the moment, and the cicadas still droning for the same reason, and the breeze gusting up, and the wave rushing in, and the wave rushing out, now the stars, now the pebbles, now the surf—and the sea, the sea, the sea!—to Greece, to Mediterrania, to Rome!
August 25,
{51}
1983. Six a.m. Mediterranean landscape. Very clear. Swept pink shadows. Morning flotsam on the beach. A body. Wearing something that was once a pair of white jeans. Barefoot. Sandals—one in his hand, the other just lying there.
Two men appear above him.
“Turned up his toes
…
”
“Do you mean to say he’s not alive??”
“I don’t mean to say he’s not dead, Doctor.”
“But he’s hanging on by one sandal.”
“Which means that he’s half dead.”
“But not that he’s more dead than alive!”
“All it means, Doctor, is that he’s dead drunk.”
“Really a very curious expression, you know
…
Does it mean
…
?”