Europe Central (94 page)

Another quality of the Poem: a magic potion being poured into a vessel suddenly thickens and turns into my biography, as if seen by someone in a dream or in a row of mirrors . . . Sometimes it looks transparent and gives off an incomprehensible light (similar to light during the White Nights, when everything shines from within) . . .

—Anna Akhmatova (1961)

She once told that him he was lucky and he said yes, thinking: I am lucky because I sometimes get to see you, which was not what she had meant.

He once wanted to tell her that she was lucky, too, because two men loved her very very much, but he caught himself: His loving her wasn’t lucky for her at all, because she and the other man were so much better than he.

It was understood that he could never touch her.

Once in a letter he asked whether there was really no hope, and she wrote back promising him that there was absolutely none. So he asked again. She told him firmly, sadly and not without affection that there would never, ever, ever be any hope. She felt sorry for him. As for him, he continued right on hoping, firstly because she kept seeing him, sometimes without the other man’s knowledge, secondly because even though she used to murmur
don’t say that
when, unable to control himself, he repeated that he loved her, by the second month she no longer objected, merely looked at the restaurant table or into his face with an indecipherable expression which made him want to lay his life down at her feet since like a divinity she heard, even though she did not grant, his prayer; thirdly because when he glancingly mentioned that he’d written and destroyed a diary of the imaginary years they’d dwelled together in one of those houses like narrow white islands in the rectangular oceans of pear trees—a very particular house, the one with the windowed tower which gazed over the levee—she’d remarked that she wished she could have read that diary; fourthly because she told him of her own volition that had she not met the other man first they could have been very happy (although she subsequently began to wonder aloud whether she would in fact have been the right woman for him); and fifthly because it would have been too unbearable for him not to hope. Needless to say, he couldn’t divorce Nina.

She was always good to him. She smiled silently upon his worship. When he asked what she was feeling, she replied: I feel that you already understand everything.

His hope made him happy, and their meetings mostly made him very happy, although sometimes the fact that he could never marry her nor even take her in his arms stiffened his chest with such agony that he fell silent and only with the greatest effort could avoid tears. At those times he always remembered to smile at her, who truly wanted the best for him and whose goodness vastly overtowered the pain which he kept ridiculously inflicting on himself.

She said: There’s no point in waiting for me.

He said: Do you know, Elena, I, I think I’ll wait.

She said: Don’t wait.

He asked whether he would see her that afternoon.

About this matter of taking her in his arms I should explain that a few times they had embraced hello and that once she had embraced him goodbye for a long time, tightly and tremblingly, which had convinced him that she didn’t want to see him anymore, but that wasn’t the case, although it was true, or appeared to be, that from that day on, whenever he tried to embrace her she folded her arms and walked past him, so he, sickened at the thought of forcing himself on her in any way, stopped trying, not knowing for how long he could control himself in this respect and at the same time knowing proudly and ecstatically that he could in fact refrain from this for the rest of his life if that was what she desired or expected. Three or four days later, he got the courage to ask why he couldn’t embrace her anymore, and she, smoothing her dark hair, assured him that he could; it had all been a misunderstanding; she’d thought that he hadn’t wanted to. I can hardly describe to you how happy he became then. Moreover, that day he received the great fortune of meeting her twice; and on the second meeting he embraced her very tightly; for the rest of the day he was in ecstasy.

Once when he told her how much he loved her, she answered: I’m sorry.

(Usually she just half-smiled and said nothing. She listened to him as patiently and silently as God. But this time he had written to her, and so she replied in writing.)

His idea was that there was a one percent chance that she would leave the other man in ten or twenty years. As long as he could believe in that, he could frequently be happy.

The other man was by definition more loving, honest and decent than he. Had she ever exceeded the limits and given herself to him, how could he have lived up to the standard which the other man had set? Even if he devoted himself only to her, that wouldn’t have been sufficient, for the other man was already devoted to her, and the pain which he, the worshiper, would have caused the woman in making her cause pain to the other man would have been unforgivable. So all that remained was to devote himself to her as much as the circumstances allowed. And since those circumstances prescribed that his devotion be carried out more or less in her absence, what he prayed for was to go crazy so that he could live in a world where she would always be with him. Every day his love for her seared deeper into his chest and throat.

It was in writing, as I have said, that they truly communicated during this period, although that communication could not be anything but painful. After she and he were quits, he communicated only through music. In fact he was going to write her a symphony, but she explained that the difficulty was that he had already given her too much of everything except for the one thing that he really should have given her. He wrote her many, many letters, and she wrote him three in return, the last of which she requested that he destroy, and then she accepted but no longer replied to his letters, which after all said only the one thing. Their meetings, infused with her occasional stories and compassionate, half-acquiescent silences, gave him an opportunity to be simultaneously unrealistic and selfish. Sometimes he even forgot the war. When he wasn’t too sad or shy, he talked, too much, of course, but only so that he could say
I love you,
since she never would. He gazed into her face in ecstasy. Every time he saw her, the ecstasy increased. Then she looked at her watch and had to go away. He was in agony even though he was exalted to have been with her, and he wondered when he could see her again; oh, he was crazy about her.

He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.

But, again, this was not to say that she was not present, gazing steadily at him from across the table, speaking or listening. She cared for him (and once more I must emphasize that she was not at all remote; it was more than pity which she felt for him). He hoped and imagined that she loved him; if he only could be sure that she did, he could go on easily down the long path of dreams, despair and useless hopes.

Everything she’d ever given him he’d kept, of course. They’d given one another books. At some point he’d begun to lend her some of his own books; needless to say, he would gladly have given them to her to keep, but feared making her uncomfortable by doing that, for she might well have felt awkward about accepting the things he treasured, since that would have deprived him of them (he wouldn’t have cared) or perhaps unduly encouraged him (about which he would have cared only too much). Sometimes he could in fact in a politely quiet sort of way give her things he treasured, but this bordered on dishonesty and he didn’t want to tell her any untruths. Why then didn’t he buy her mint-new copies of those books and be done? Some were out of print, but the main reason was once again that he didn’t want to overwhelm her by always giving and giving. She knew how much he loved her. At first she’d disbelieved, but now she believed (so he thought; she said that she didn’t believe him but he supposed she had to say this in order to avoid encouraging him). Wasn’t that enough? So he lent her books. After all, one of life’s best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I’ve drunk.

Amidst the other grey, red, greenish, black and orange volumes of various heights, this white book with the black lettering was perfectly proportioned in every way, neither showy nor insignificant. It was one of his favorite books (we can’t say his favorite since his life wasn’t over yet). He mentioned it, and she was willing to accept it; she was that kind, to read the book which he loved.

At the moment that it actually passed from his hand to hers they were sitting across from each other in one of the three or four restaurants where they usually met; and she, having gazed into his face with her usual richly intelligent seriousness, studied the book she now held with the same air of happy possession which he would have hoped to find had she been looking over his body before making love with him, which she would never, ever do no matter how long they both lived, a fact which made him want to utter a sound much softer and more leaden than any scream; and then, sitting within touching distance of her beautiful hands which he could not touch, he watched her open the book to the title page with its half-calligraphic brush-rendering by an unknown artist of a Buddhist
pongmalai
garland, probably of jasmine flowers, which was draped across a woman’s naked thigh. This was the most intimate moment that he and she would ever have (unless of course his one percent became a hundred, and she accepted him forever). He would not be at her side when she began to actually read the book; but from their frequent conversations he thought he could keep abreast of where she’d arrived each day. She’d promised to begin it that very night, when she was home with the other man, which meant that she would at least cross the frontier of the half-title page, followed by the dramatic double plant-stalks (connected by a leaf ), of the initial letter E. And now she saw before her those wide white margins and those generous white lines-between-the-lines which encouraged every word to preen itself like the treasure that it truly was.

I should mention that this beautiful volume, which was such a pleasure to hold, began its tale with a dazzling abruptness, as if the reader had just emerged from a dark tunnel into another world, a perfect world whose ground was a hot white plain of salt upon which the words lived their eternal lives.

I need say nothing about the plot, whose involutions (it’s a tale of obsessive love) progressed like the nested terraces on a Buddha-studded tower which narrows perfectly into nothingness. Once I visited a certain
wat
in Bangkok where although the day was exhaustingly hot and bright I grew enthralled by the sensation of wandering on a high place somewhere in the mist, a plateau exploding with ornately weathered crags. There were many towers, just as in this world there are many perfect books.

This book, well, it would be wrong to say that it contained everything, but it did hold a white wall which was frescoed with masked figures, demons and bare-breasted dancing girls all wearing golden-scaled armor. These characters, who presumably represented the various types of being which flourished during the author’s epoch, journeyed through strange adventures, of course, and more commentaries have been written about their chapters than about any others in the book, for their encounters with bandit leaders in the jungle, their dialogues with the Prince of Heaven, and their dangerous dives beneath the sea to obtain the One Pearl do not lack in beauty and even philosophical significance, but these personages remained the two-dimensional inhabitants of parables—universal shadows, to be sure, but dependent, imprisoned on that white wall (which was really a double spread of white pages). They won love, power and treasure when they followed the Right Path, but the happiness available to them was founded on an ignorance, mercifully instilled in them by their author, of the fact that they were not real, and that in the realm of the real, where the true forms of love, power and treasure endure forever, their bright flat strivings (imagine the animated lives of Matisse’s cutouts) would never, ever, ever find any hope; for the dreams they lived in could be transcended by the book’s protagonist alone, whose supernatural perfection began to evince itself in the fifth chapter. For now, he could hardly wait for her to get to the second chapter, whose words, so he had read in one of the antique commentaries, had been syntactically and typographically arranged to replicate heart-shaped lilypads in a vast vase before a golden wall. Between the lilypads, in the complex interstices of the water-mirror, she’d be able to look directly into that pure zone upon which the lines of print had been so evenly superimposed. He comprehended very well that every sentence she read brought nearer that moment when she would have finished the book, that moment when the extremest final tendril of orgasm elongates, tapers and begins to become a memory; but even this he could accept; he passionately longed to follow her from chapter to chapter like a lover hastily stripping off his clothes, seeking laughingly to overtake the one he loves who has already almost finished taking off everything as she stands before him in that small white room.