Venus and Mars, Botticelli (1445−1510)

 

Words and Music

When I find myself amid a happy crowd, I conform to the strange necessity to look at something by looking at things unconcerned, such as the sky, smoke, snow, while perfectly aware, however, that these things are not unconcerned; and that the happy crowd can stand my looking at it; and that it is I whom my efforts to avoid disturbing it protect. However, my sense of hearing is untramelled, and aural perceptions enter my mind in a spate of turbid water. Surrounded by happy people, I feel their happiness inundating me. There are no dusky, lacklustre sounds; every exclamation, every chuckle glimmers as a carmine eye, a yellow moon, a drop of absinthe at the bottom of the spate. I see the pale heavens coming to life, as if the stars with fabulous names show through on the background of the dead sky. I see the snow decked with lion's teeth and the smoky horizon erupting in sunset colours. All these pictures are shaken by a fearful dance (nunc est pulsanda tellus*).

The scarlet fluctuating drawl of a young man betrays his fondness of female company. Indeed, if one listens carefully, one can discern a trembling under his voice. But he is too loud: his speech quickly loses direction and his intonations become helplessly confused. A quiet whisper easily interrupts his monologue. My eyes, affecting to be tired of looking at one point, timidly scan the faces around me in order to find the possessor of the whispering lips. It is a girl, about 15 years old, with a very small body: she is sitting right in front of me, with her unnaturally thin knees apart. She is holding a little bottle of beer in her hands; her face is calm when I look at her. She addresses her friend, the girl that is sitting beside her, proposing a kind of conspiracy. Her friend is not so attractive and not so fond of conspiracies. I turn my eyes aside. Then I hear the little bottle being brought to a little mouth and made lighter by a little swallow. Immediately after that a twitter is heard, which terminates in a very simple, natural and rude "sure" ("yes") on the part of the girl sitting opposite to me. The colour of the liquid in the bottle is added to this "sure". All gradually fall silent; my joy evaporates in the fire of my own thoughts; everything softly passes into the realm of silence; it seems to be getting dark behind the window of the bus; and the burnished brazen bowl of human nearness is getting dim.
 

In the dark, I play table tennis with myself, and the ball burns like a star. I imagine the latter-day Englishmen (professors of poetry smoking pipes) feeling such a phenomenon as Shakespeare behind their native language; knowing that in them plays that very blood which nourished his brain; being happy to encounter in his plays the very locutions which they use in their everyday life. For me, Shakespeare, (version originale) is an occult science, and lines of his poetry are the brands on my chest that show I am one of the sect. The hissing of English sibilants, the rhythm and passion of his language act upon me like wine. This language lives its own, separate life within me, and demands food, as a tapeworm. I am afraid of its death as of madness or the death of my child. To one's native sounds one gets used as to the beat of one's heart (sometimes willing to stop its mindless drumming), but the real words, the real music is the accent of a man from the faraway land, the wondrous, inimitable utterance. And when one wakes at night, only to find oneself alone, how much more one loves the spontaneous word in a foreign tongue (viva voce) which mirrors the sea, a rock and a lonely figure thereon. The lights flicker, and the bus with the weary sizzle of the liner completing a round-the-world voyage opens the doors. I get off with an innocent intent to buy aspirin in the drugstore, for I have caught cold and shall have fever tonight again.

* - 'now earth is to be struck [by a free foot]' (Latin)

Sergey Karpukhin was born in Irkutsk (Eastern Siberia, Russia) in 1982 and still lives in the city, now studying Russian (and English) literature at Irkutsk State University (fifth year). Short stories have appeared in 3 AM Magazine (English translation), and Russian translations from Coleridge, Keats, and Baudelaire have been published in a local periodical. He is the co-editor of the electronic magazine, www.the-nr.irk.ru.


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