FROM SPRING GAMES IN SUMMER GARDENS
selections
PROLOGUE
1
The dark waters of sleep spread so slowly and softly—the flow carries me to the surface rocking, and though my eyes are shut, even so, I see everything beautifully—I see the Arabian dance of the underwater plants and the silver glimmering of the tiny fish, the sorrowful twinkling of the water and the undulating beams of light that penetrate the water from above and below, stealthy shadows and the flashes of a shell—it seems I am so tiny in my mother’s cradle and it’s so warm and peaceful that a baby bird wouldn’t want to wake up, and I remain happy in this balmy water rocking on the waves, but some inexorable power pushes me out from the depths to the surface grabs me brutally by the hair and I don’t don’t don’t want to wake up—I don’t want to go to the surface I want to go back into the depth into the silence there into the half-shade into the balmy water into the soothing rocking . . .
2
The winter sun gnaws through squinting eyelids, the rays painfully bore your brain and open the damaged cupboards of memory, pull out the drawers, shake them out with a clamor, and then he begins to remember what had happened before now, with which thoughts he had fallen asleep, and why his head was buzzing like a tambourine . . . This kind of awakening is so horrible . . . as if it were a plunge into glacial water. Back, back into the balmy water of dreams, into a warm mirage, into a world without pain and sorrow, into meadows filled with flowers . . . But the eyes are incapable of closing, the brain has become fixed on the transition from dreams to wakefulness, there’s nowhere to retreat, the dream is disintegrating, like mortar on an old building, baring the surrounding world—your eyes glide along the room, filled to the brim with bookshelves, drooping lower to islands of papers, magazines, books, empty bottles, eyes wander, sinking in the thick pile of the rug, to the doors, beyond which dead silence lurked, for a certain amount of time your ears try to capture at least the hint of a sound, a strum, a clink, but the silence is dead—it is never more dead . . . Together with the consciousness of awakening from a dream, something else appears—painful and unpleasant, filled with despair and a sense of being lost, consciousness of complete ruin . . . All the fortresses crumble all at once and the towers have fallen to ruins, the smashed armies have fallen to their knees and lowered their banners, everything that surrounded him till now, everything behind which he continued to live in a cozy nook and in safety disappeared in a single instant.
3
In the middle of the night and into his dreams, the ringing of the telephone reverberated, it burst into his brain like a dashing train, rattling and giving off sparks, it seems his head would crack in another minute, split into two halves. What’s this? Who is it? In the middle of the night! He tears from his bed, stumbles on the books strewn all over the floor, slips on piles of manuscripts, nearly falls, but he manages to grab onto the table, finally blindly with a trembling hand groping for the receiver, and first before putting it to his ear, in which the warm sea of dreams still continues to splash, and not everything is still sufficiently distinguishable between mirage and reality, he shouts out: “HELLO!”—so loudly, as if he needed to be heard on the street.
The morning recollection of a telephone conversation is like reading a palimpsest. Did it really happen? Or did he dream it? But your gaze falls onto the table—there were two bottles of champagne, and both of them empty. They were drunk up during the night. Right after the phone conversation. And this is reality, which it is impossible to doubt. His memory retained several fragments of the conversation; all the rest is torn, shredded, and submerged in the wine.
The call was from the U.S. She suggested getting a divorce. And she added: “It’ll be better this way.” Better for whom? He couldn’t manage to ask her, he was so stunned that he was incapable of squeezing a single complete phrase out of himself. Eventually, this wasn’t all that strange, because he was asleep, and the phone call had awakened him. A phone call in the middle of the night has its peculiarities. It always forces you to shudder, it forces the heart to beat faster, it fills you with anxiety. The one making the call is in a better state because she knows what she wants, has had time to think out what she has to say, she knows what she wants, but the one picking up the receiver is absolutely unprepared for a conversation. What kind of conversation can there be when someone calls from the U.S. and to save money babbles hurriedly, chokes on her words, swallowing individual syllables without any pauses, that would allow anything to be grasped—the sleepy brain is unable to digest all this, to comprehend it, to counter it . . .
“. . . it’ll be better this way.”
These words stung my brain and will never be effaced, all others— will wither, will crumble, but these will remain and will prick for years and years, will shoot out in sprouts of couch-grass and wound.
The conversation lasted for a short amount of time, he mostly listened, and she quickly set out everything in its place, arranged everything onto shelves, numbered and sealed everything. And then she threw down the receiver: somewhere far, far away on Long Island in New York. And he heard her slam the receiver down. And he even dreamt that he had heard her words that were directed not at him, but at another man, who the entire time was next to him listening to their conversation. She said: “Well here . . . ,” and the man also said something hoarsely, it was hard to make out the words, maybe it was all said in English, in the dark room only the rustle of his voice wafted, and then silence came, and he stood next to the telephone and didn’t move away, as if he were continuing to listen to the receiver gone silent, waiting for another call, though he understood that the conversation had come to an end, no one would call, but all the same there was some kind of invisible thread that linked them across the ocean, it continued to vibrate, continued to link them, refused to be broken, and until he stopped hearing its vibration, he didn’t move from where he was standing.
And in a moment the vibration disappeared, and in his ears silence again dawned, but it was restless and dreadful, clenching his heart with a burning sadness. Back, back into sleep . . . gropingly, scraping his brow with his hands, diving and swimming, further, further from that place, further from that time, to return everything from the beginning, to fix it, to rewrite it, to save it . . . Actually, to save it—he needed to rush beyond the seas and oceans to foreign lands and to free the princess, whom a wicked sorcerer had imprisoned in a tower without windows, to snatch her onto a winged horse and, pressing her to himself ever so tightly, to fly home . . . In his head, a noisy carousel swirled and assorted colors twinkled. This lasted for several long wearisome minutes, until outside the window it began to drizzle, a fine, miserable, winter rain, but he sensed a certain strange gratitude to this rain that finally destroyed the silence, forced him to move from where he was standing and turn on a light. In his head, the carousel of words continued to swirl, separate sounds, pauses and breathing . . . He uncorked a bottle of champagne, fell into an armchair and drank glass after glass, and at that time around him the walls fell and a wasteland appeared. Time after time he replayed that conversation, trying hard to recreate it in its entirety, but the champagne set in all too quickly; for every new recollection, something was lost, words were confused, order was lost, he was annoyed mostly by the fact that just when he had immediately grasped something, he could answer this or that reproach. The words faded, were replaced by others, and the more he got drunk, the less and less memory of the conversation remained, and just one phrase refused to fade and continued to circle in his ears: “It will be better this way.”
Maybe it really will be better this way? Wine saves you from sorrow and covers everything with a semi-transparent film of paraffin. If not for the wine, he would have never fallen asleep after that conversation.
The man finally crawls out of bed and shuffles heavily to the bathroom. The cold water washes away dreams from his eyes. He squeezes out onto his toothbrush an entire mountain of toothpaste and, when he begins to brush his teeth, his gaze falls into the mirror. In the mirror he sees he sees the sullen, unshaven face of a forty-year-old man, he sees swollen bags under his eyes, he sees disheveled hair, he sees sadness in his eyes.
And at that moment with horror I suddenly become conscious of the fact that this man in the mirror is—me! And it was I who had had a conversation on the telephone with my wife who called from the U.S., and then —again it was me—who downed two bottles of champagne, and now it was my head aching, and not somebody else’s.
A mirror is always indifferent to whose kisser it is reflecting. My kisser half-awake had a sour taste. To somehow sweeten it, I brushed my teeth, combed my hair, washed my eyes, then I crawled under the shower, shaved, got dressed—but anyway I still looked like a squeezed-out lemon. It’s always this way. Waking up in the morning after a drinking bout, I always feel like a cat run over by a car. But my nighttime drinking bout was of a particular kind—I drank out of despair. When you drink out of despair, it’s a completely different feeling, because then you usually drink alone. You drink alone with yourself late into the evening, when all the sounds around you grow quiet, and when midnight passes, you’re finally the way you need to be, you’re drunk, your no one’s, and here right then, right in that state you can finally speak with yourself, openly and candidly, to cut out all your insides, all your intestines, hang them all up nicely and make a diagnosis. And, this is always the most interesting, to create plans for the future. Well, what can you say—plans at such moments simply bloat your head, and everything looks so courageous, so rosy, that despair disappears, hides itself in the deepest recesses of memory, so that it can rise to the surface tomorrow, but it will be tomorrow, not today, and today you just feel like swimming along the waves of daydreams.
Translated by Michael M. Naydan