Forty Rooms (5 page)

All at once I am chilled by the gap widening precipitously between the present moment and my experience of it. Has life somehow, without my noticing, become its own paling reflection in a self-conscious mirror, its own stilted paraphrase on a dry page? It may be only an inevitable symptom of maturity, this politely disappointing sense of distance, this perception of the world at second hand, through words alone—but if so, I do not wish to grow up.

Forcefully I stand up, brush the crumbs off my dress.

“Time to bring out the telescope,” I say. “It’s grown dark enough.”

The telescope is a small handheld model my father gave me on my fourteenth birthday; it remains my most treasured possession. I unscrew its plastic cap, gently rub the lens with a square of cloth, and lift it to my eye. The black fringe of leaves and the indistinct celestial shimmer beyond slide across my vision in a swift blur. As I lean over the balcony railing, training the telescope on this or that quadrant of the sky, Olga rattles off the names of stars and constellations.

“Vega, Deneb, Altair,” she pronounces as she sketches the Summer Triangle with deft movements of her wrist, one, two, three. “But to be honest, I don’t like looking at the sky, it makes me feel small. I imagine myself as a tiny dot in a sprawling landscape of a monstrous country on a spinning globe floating like a minuscule speck in a freezing ocean of stars . . . Brrr!”

She guides the telescope down, lower, lower, until it is level with the road; then she laughs. “Hey, look, they’re having a party over on that terrace. You know, this thing is more powerful than I thought. See your boy pouring wine into three, no, four glasses?”

I attempt to shift the telescope away. “He is
not
my boy.”

“Fine, your neighbor, then, if you prefer, Alesha, Serezha, whatever his name is, I thought you liked him.”

“It’s Tolya, as you well know. And I don’t like him, I hardly know him. We just went for a walk one time last summer, that’s all.”

I do my best to appear nonchalant, but, as so often, I am plunged into remembering that August darkness striped with denser shadows of lampposts, and the heaps of wild roses hanging over the
fences on both sides of the village dirt road, their sun-warmed smells drifting across our path like shy sweet ghosts, and our steps, in perfect, effortless harmony, and our awkward absence of words, for what one talked about with older boys—or any boys—I had no idea. As we turned into our street, his hand found mine, and its feel was big, dry, and nice, not in the least like those sweaty adolescent hands I imagined when overhearing the popular girls whisper to one another in the school hallways. But already we were approaching my gate, and there, in the cone of scanty light, under the soundless whirlwind of frantic moths, the stocky shadow of my father paced the road, three steps to the left, three steps to the right, waiting for me, though it was not yet ten o’clock, though I had never been late before. Anatoly’s hand let go of mine, and the next day the summer ended without warning, for my mother had fallen ill and we had to leave for the city; and I did not know Anatoly’s phone number or, indeed, his last name.

“I know!” Olga announces brightly. “Let’s go over there.”

I am shocked by the idea. “No, no, we shouldn’t. We aren’t invited.”

“That doesn’t matter, they’ll be glad to have us, you’ll see.”

“No, no, I’d rather stay here. But—you can go if you want to.”

And as I say it, I already feel a chill of dawning excitement at the thought that she is about to talk me into doing something so wild, so unexpected.

“Really? You wouldn’t mind?” She sets the telescope down at once and begins to hunt for the powder compact borrowed from my mother, then, coming upon it, inspects her lips for stray crumbs. “I’ll be back soon, I promise. You’re sure you don’t mind?”

Snapping the compact shut, she glances back at me.

“I don’t mind,” I say after the briefest of moments. “I’m . . . tired anyway.”

As her steps fade away into nothing on the wooden stairs, the night reverts to its transparent silence; and so sharp, so bitter, is the taste of solitude in my mouth that I find myself wishing for the comforting warmth of my receding childhood, for my parents’ habitual presence. Only after a time do I realize that being alone here and now, on this dizzying edge of the unknown, is to me a happiness deeper, a happiness more pure, than any companionship could ever be. I clear out the saucers, rub the fingerprints off the smudged cup, then, telescope in hand, return to the balcony. The night embraces me, cool and endless, and above me the stars are tiny holes in the darkness through which the light of eternity is pouring out. I can almost sense primordial stardust flowing through my veins. People are forever telling me that stars make them feel small, and I always nod noncommittally and wonder at the stuffy confinement of their minds.

Stars make me feel vast.

I think of the day at the dacha, three summers ago, when my father gave me the telescope. “We’ll try it right after nightfall,” he told me, “though the best time to look at the stars is at three in the morning.”

“So let’s do it at three in the morning,” I said.

“But how will you wake up?” he asked, smiling. “We have no alarm here.”

“If I wake up, do you promise not to send me back to bed? Will you teach me the constellations?”

“All right,” he said with a shrug; for of course he did not foresee the need to ever keep his promise.

That night, when I opened my eyes, my room lay quiet and gray, shifting with odd predawn shadows, creaking with mysterious half-sounds. Sitting up in bed, I groped for the light switch. The clock above the armchair read a few minutes to three. As I crept downstairs, pressing the gleaming new telescope to my pajama-clad chest, I felt thrilled by the unfamiliar sense of being awake while all the world slept. The front door was unlocked. My father was out on the veranda, staring into the garden, waiting for me—or so I thought until he turned, and I saw the look of surprise on his face.

“Ha!” he exclaimed, squinting at his watch. “
L’exactitude est la politesse des rois.
I must say, I’m impressed. Well, come here, come here!”

For the next hour we stood side by side, gazing upward until our necks ached. When the night grew chilly, he draped his old woolen cardigan over my shoulders. He spoke of ships rounding the Cape of Good Hope, and Andromeda chained to a cliff, and Babylonian stargazers. He quoted early Mayakovsky:

Listen!

If they light up the stars,

Does it mean someone must need it?

Does it mean someone wants them to exist,

Does it mean someone calls these little bits of spit “pearls” . . .

He taught me dozens of sonorous foreign names, which I repeated after him, enchanted. “Do you know, Shakespeare writes somewhere of the futility of astronomical knowledge,” he said at one point. “How does it go, let me see . . .” He riffled briefly
through the index cards of his prodigious memory; he knew entire volumes of poetry by heart. “Ah, yes!

“These earthly godfathers of heaven’s lights,

That give a name to every fixed star,

Have no more profit of their shining nights

Than those that walk and wot not what they are . . .”

His English was strongly accented but clear. “Magnificent, no? ‘
Their shining nights
 . . .’” He paused to let the aural afterimage of the words linger in the air. It was so quiet that I imagined I heard a slumbering wagtail ruffling feathers in my favorite apple tree and some nocturnal creature splashing through the forest pond beyond our fence—and involuntarily I strained to catch the sound of the stars circling above in their slow, majestic, infinite river, though I did not know what they should sound like. A remote tinkling of melodious crystals? An unearthly choir of angels? A maddeningly beautiful, maddeningly indistinct poem mumbled into his beard by the unknown, unknowable God? A dry clicking, as of many precise mechanical instruments? A frozen wind howling out of one icy abyss into another?

My father went on: “Personally, as a philosopher of gnosis, I can’t quite agree with the Bard’s sentiment. Our constant desire for deeper, ever more exact knowledge, our urge to find the right names for all the things around us and thus attempt to make the mystery of life accessible somehow—these are prerequisites to being fully human, a part of what makes us know ourselves.”

I had already entered my moody adolescence, the age at which
big,
bloated
words (as I once termed them in a fit of self-mockery)—“soul,” “God,” “truth,” “beauty”—had gotten hold of me with all the urgency of life-and-death questions demanding immediate answers. Ordinarily I would be too embarrassed to speak of these matters to anyone, of course, but that night seemed to belong to a separate, deeper place—a still, hidden pool on whose bottom weightier truths and fuller perceptions had come to settle.

“Papa, do you believe there is any meaning to life?” I blurted out.

“I do not believe,” he said sternly. “I know. The meaning of life—the meaning of a single, individual human life, since I assume that is what you are asking—consists of figuring out the one thing you are great at and then pushing mankind’s mastery of that one thing as far as you are able, be it an inch or a mile. If you are a carpenter, be a carpenter with every ounce of your being and invent a new type of saw. If you are an archaeologist, find the tomb of Alexander the Great. If you are Alexander the Great, conquer the world. And never do anything by half.”

His face, I noticed, was being released by the darkness; the sky was growing pale in the east. He too must have realized it at the same instant, for he stopped talking, and looked at his watch, and snorted into his beard.

“Four-thirty already! Off to bed with you, little sunshine. Oh, and—” His expression had turned somewhat sheepish. “It’s not absolutely necessary for your mother to hear about this, don’t you agree?”

Later I wondered: If he had not been expecting me that night, what
was
he doing on our veranda at three in the morning?

But mainly, I wondered about the meaning of my life.

For a while I stand on the balcony looking at the stars. A white fleet of corpulent angels passes above the village roofs in a mathematically precise formation; a bat cuts across the light of the closest streetlamp in the jagged movement of a knife slitting a throat. I go inside, hunt down a pen, a blank sheet of paper, and a sturdy volume to prop it on (Hegel’s lectures, as it turns out; books that gravitate to our dacha shelves tend to be of a thick, dry, sadly neglected bent). Returning to my armchair, I curl up in its plush nest and scribble without turning on the lamp—a useful skill I have perfected over countless school nights of pretending to be asleep. My soul feels swollen with my private certainty, immense with my private joy. For this, I know at last, is why I am here: to experience deeply, my senses a heartbeat away from exploding, then take everything I am feeling—the insignificance of being human, the enormity of being human, the intoxication of being young, the ache of being alone, the dizzy thrill of witnessing the steady rotation of the universe, the cozy warmth of a small wooden house teetering on the edge of a vast Russian forest, of an untamed Russian night—yes, take everything I am seeing and hearing and smelling, every dusty book by a forgotten writer on a shelf, every furtive mouse scurrying under the floorboards, every sneeze of the
domovoi
, our old brownie, sifting through my childhood clothes in the cluttered attic, every nocturnal flower unfurling in the grass, every sound, every color, every fleeting impression—and use the best words I have to convey it all, to pin it all down, to snatch one single moment from the oblivious flow of impersonal time and make it bright, make it personal, make it forever.

And as I sit in the dark, Hegel hurting my knee with his somber
heft, and wrestle with words in some relentless, sleepless delirium, I see that my earlier fear of a secondhand reality muffled and diluted by words was misplaced—for it is through the power of words alone that the world can be truly captured, truly understood. Not just any words, to be sure: words can be alive or they can be dead, and dead words will dull the sharpest feeling, will turn the rarest vision into a vulgarity. I do not yet know what makes some words live and others die, but I believe I can already sense the difference between the two. And so I write, struggling to stretch the language until it bursts the stale confinement of the rhymed “nights” and “lights” and becomes something else, weighty yet plain, stark yet beautiful; and later, when I imagine the creak of the gate, the stealthy rustling of steps, the hushed, treacherous giggling on our garden bench, and two shadows bending close together, and the soft wetness of a first kiss, I gather my new sense of desolation—for I like him, I do, of course I do, I always have—and cram it raw into my half-formed poem, which I can already feel opening sonorously in the dark, unfolding its many petals of sounds, its many layers of meaning—until I wake with a start and find the room caught in a net of shifting starlight, a nightingale trilling in the forest, and my enigmatic acquaintance perched on the arm of the chair, holding my scribbles before his eyes, tapping his bare foot against the floor in rhythm with my lines.

I draw in my breath and stay very still. He has visited me a handful of times since the fateful night of Akhmatova’s
Requiem
, but I have not gotten used to his presence. A full minute passes. It must be very late. On the cot across the room, Olga is breathing tranquilly in her sleep. He releases the page, and it drifts to the floor.

He looks down at me then, smiling his slow, cruel smile.

Light-headed with the exhausting labor of creation, I feel brave enough to ask.

“Do you like it?”