"The dream of these pathetic renegades, seduced by cheap Western propaganda, is to uproot themselves from their native soil."
To all who were up to it—with love.
I dropped in on Nikolai Petrovich just like that, for no reason. It was a violet, vibrant evening. Spring already possessed Moscow utterly. At least the old back streets of Sretenka were tipsy with it. A girl with a spray of pussy willows ran into me right outside his house. And she herself was like the willow: her hair loose, shivering a little, peeping out from inside herself. I knocked on the dirty window—Nikolai Petrovich lived on Lukov Street, in a communal apartment, in a lop-sided little room at the end of a dull, yellow corridor. The little passage leaned sideways, the floorboards squeaked and tended to spring loose, a light bulb hung in dismal nakedness, and the place reeked of years of misery. A sour, depressing smell....
Nikolai Petrovich had a cat, an enormous coal-black monster of an animal. Lifting him down from some cupboard, Nikolai Petrovich—Kolenka, Nikusha—would say: “This cat weighs as much as an expensive black pudding.”
As I opened the door I already knew that the cat would rub his back against the bookstand, his fur crackling with Bengal lights, would wait, the rascal, to be scratched behind the ear: which was a mass of scar tissue—he was a real street fighter, this old torn.
Nikolai Petrtfvich was sitting in a pool of orange light. A dusty pre-revolutionary lampshade with tassels hung low over the table. To the uninitiated Nikolai Petrovich’s room was reminiscent of a book depository. Every square inch, except for a small island round the table and the perpetually unmade bed behind a tattered screen, was crammed with books. Of course, there was a clipboard, there were shelves, there was a broken-down and badly listing bookcase, but this was more or less normal. The trouble was, Nikolai Petrovich didn’t have enough room, and the entire floor was covered with sheaves, pyramids, towers of books. And it was through this obstacle course, stepping along a narrow path in the wake of my feline friend, that I made my way to the table. I don’t want to labor the point, but the table was a sort of scaled-down version of the room: little islands, footpaths, and all the rest taken up with papers, Babylons of letters, Bethlehems of gifts: and it was categorically forbidden to move anything. Nikolai Petrovich reached his pale thin hand to me across the table. “Hello, Okhlamonov,” he said, in his out‑of‑town accent, “would you like some tea?”
He moved with remarkable adroitness through his papyrus jungle, tucking in a shoulder so as not to displace a volume by the bootmaker Jakob Boehme that had been sticking out at an angle for the last six months, hopping over a sheaf of children’s stories by the window, and—now—plugging in an ancient hot plate, poking the element with a knife, measuring out a parsimonious mugful of water from a jug; he no longer set foot in the kitchen, he couldn’t stand it. I should say that Kolenka, Nikusha, was a melancholy or perhaps rather self-absorbed man of about thirty, a poet. Once he went into the communal kitchen for some trifle, matches, or salt, and unfortunately got into a scene—the most banal sort, where people wave their arms, trade insults, shove each other in the shoulder, and so forth. And Nikolai Petrovich, as he said later, lost an entire line. It went clean out of his head. He sat up all night over his bit of paper, but the fugitive line refused to be coaxed back. Ever since then he has made tea and boiled potatoes on the window sill in his room.
He was given the hardest time of all by women, especially women who just happened by. They would go into absolute ecstasies over his room, and invariably asked the same idiotic questions: “Where do I apply to join the library?” or words to that effect. And they would try to pull something out from right at the bottom, so that Nikolai Petrovich, turning green, would hurl himself across the room to shore up a leaning tower of oriental poetry which was just about not only to shower books on the footpath, but to topple a couple more neighboring edifices. “Ah, for God’s sake, don’t touch!” he would shout, whereupon the ladies usually desisted. They were astonished by his tone of voice: they realized then that he meant business. “I am very much afraid,” he would explain to them, “of having things moved around without my knowledge.” For Nikolai Petrovich, and this was the point, had read all these books. And knew exactly where each book was.
Raising my eyes from these lines, I see that I should perhaps apologize for a certain diffuseness, for going off the point, but the times themselves were confused, much had not yet revealed itself, and the very air was thick with “somehow or other,” with “sort of” and “as it were.” Moreover, workdays and holidays alike were riddled with machine-gun bursts of dots.... We lived in a state of not-quite-embodiment.
The water sang its brief song and was poured into the stained teapot. “Okhlamonov,” my host requested, “I beg you, do not move anything on the table.... “I was not offended. It was a ritual sentence. Only once did I pull out from under some heap of papers a small portrait of a woman with a complicated upswept coiffure and misty eyes. From her face I could tell she was not from these parts, you don’t see faces like that on our streets. I took a good long look, and that time we quarreled.
Nikolai Petrovich, lifting his feet high in the dangerous places, made his way back to the table and set the tray down in an island. Without looking he reached behind him and produced two small silver cups. The vodka was under the table. Warm, of course.... We saluted one another in silence and drank up. The cat, which knew perfectly well what was allowed and what wasn’t, sprang softly up on the table. With a sidelong glance at his master he tested the snowdrift of paper for firmness—this was allowed—showed his Turkish claws, stretched, and finally lay down. The other side of the wall somebody started strumming an out-of-tune guitar. An ambulance could be heard racing down the street. “You know, I’ve been having problems with Katenka,” said my host, “she really is too young for me. She’s out of her mind! Listen, Okhlamonov, last time she laughed so hard in bed she fell out! Right on top of Karamzin, of course! It was a nightmare, the whole history of the Russian empire came tumbling down. But that, Okhlamonov, that’s nothing.... She’s so hot-blooded! I got out of bed to put everything back in order, just as I was, of course, stark naked, and the dear crazy girl, I don’t quite know how to put it, just sort of flung herself on top of me, right on the books! Right on top of Russian history.... I thought she was fooling, but then I saw the look in her eyes, all misty and serious, biting her lip.... And then we, as it were, on top of Russian history, and she crying out the way she always does....”
Nikolai Petrovich poured some more vodka. I could not see his face. It was hidden somewhere behind the tasseled lampshade, fringed with the grey dust of many years. But the hand in its clean, threadbare cuff shook violently. “As it is I have problems with the neighbors,” my host went on, “and she knows it. How often have I asked her: ‘Katenka, couldn’t you somehow, at that last moment, restrain yourself?...’ She gets offended. Says rude words. Even weeps.... And goes right on crying out! I would try and stop her mouth, you know, with a pillow or something. But unfortunately I myself lose track completely—I get into something else altogether. And then I open my eyes and right away I know: “She did it again, she cried out!... What can you do?”—and Nikolai Petrovich began nervously tugging at his sparse beard. It was a thoroughly Chinese sort of beard, you could see right through it. Katenka I had seen a few times. The ladies who used to “happen by” had by then completely vanished. And I remember how the very first evening my heart turned over. At that time I did not yet know that she and Nikolai Petrovich shared an immortal love. What was it about her that struck me? I don’t know. One could say that everything did. She was barely sixteen, and perhaps I’ve put my finger on it: what was so striking was the combination of child-like purity and the most utter wantonness. Catching sight of me under the lampshade, I remember she said, right in front of Kolya, “Okhlamonov, do you know, I never” (that “n-e-e-ever” was her first gift, that lingering, floating “e”), “never wear anything underneath?” And like a ballet dancer she pirouetted in a clearing between Gogol and the medical encyclopedia, all brown under the flimsy little dress, no chaste strips of white to interrupt her tan.... Nikolai Petrovich sucked in his cheek as if he had a loose filling, and stared down at the table. I blushed to the eyebrows and went hot all over, so that my head spun just like that sweet little dress. “Katya,” said our host, “I ask you to desist.” And then he raised his eyes to me and added very quietly: “Okhlamonov, if she starts touching you, pay no attention. She and I share an immortal love.”
We drank up our vodka and set about the tea. Nikolai Petrovich used to buy tea on the black market. He was forever blending something, pouring it from one canister to another, sniffing it. “Tea,” he would say, “must be brewed with water brought to a fast boil. Remember that, my friend. But the thing, after letting it draw for five minutes, is to immediately ‘marry’ it.... “ And I watched how, without spilling a drop, Nikolai Petrovich went about “marrying” the tea. To do this, he poured from the teapot a cupful of the thick brick-red brew and then quickly, so as to save the steam that billowed up from under the lid, poured it back. The rite was concluded.
Sometimes he would ask: “Okhlamonov? Would you like some poetry?” And to refuse would have been criminal; besides, I always liked what he wrote. Katenka inhabited his most recent poems. But remember his poetry I never could. Only once did something stick—and stuck for good—something along the lines of:
Actually, I can’t guarantee that I have these lines exactly right.
“How’s life?” asked my host, “have you taken any new pictures?” I should mention that I am a photographer. Not the sort you find in some studio on Petrovka: “Lift your chin. Don’t blink. Click. Two roubles. Click. Three twenty at the cash register.” No. I take pictures of life. As it is. Not tidied up. This is theft, of course. But not voyeurism. Some sharp-tongued lady once said to me: “You’re a voyeur, Okhlamonov, you’re always peeping. There you are right now, looking at me and wondering what I’m like under my buttons.” She was quite wrong. In any case, I don’t agree. The voyeur slips through a hole in the fence, lifts a corner of the window shade. Whereas I take pictures of puddles after rain, drunks at the Tishinsky market, people on the escalator in the metro, fallen leaves in the park. And if among the leaves I should happen upon someone’s bare knee that’s just fate. How was I to know there was a couple there. What interested me was the look of the leaf-strewn alley. And what’s more, I most often work with a telephoto lense—it flattens space, displaces things, turns everyday banalities into dream. As for that lady, let someone else unfasten her. If it were up to me I would add even more buttons. Although that’s a bit harsh.
“What’s new?” I replied. “I really don’t know. Oh, I’ve been asked to give lessons.—Have you any sugar?”
Asking for sugar for tea, I mean for the sort of tea Nikolai Petrovich made, was something akin to a crime. But what could I do? I have a terribly sweet tooth. For example, when I am sad or out of sorts, I buy an Othello, a kind of chocolate cake they always have at our baker’s, and eat it all up, in one go, with a spoon, standing at the window, always gazing out at the same thing—the streetcar stop. An Othello, let me add, weighs 450 grams. “I don’t advise you to take pupils,” said Nikolai Petrovich, getting up for the sugar, “you’ll be worn out. I once had two beginner poets. And you know what? One put the worst words in the best possible order, the other just the opposite: the best words in the worst possible order. If they’d just been Siamese twins‑‑‑‑‑”
“I understand,” I said sadly. After all, a pupil means extra cash. “But just lately I’ve been feeling sort of vague, how can I put it—like in frosty weather when the lens suddenly fogs up and you can’t see a damn thing,...”
“Yes?” grunted Nikolai Petrovich. “Well, I too...,” and briefly rising from his chair he again reached up blindly to the top shelf for the sugar, and fixed me with a look. “Something peculiar is happening to me, Okhlamonov. At first I thought it was a trap set by my age, a dead end...” He was speaking more and more slowly, and then began quite visibly to rise in the air, where he hung, about 20 centimeters off the floor. I could see his old trunk under the bed! Nikolai Petrovich rocked—I’m afraid to say it—playfully back and forth, hanging securely in midair, and waved his arms apologetically. The strangest thing of all is that I took this without surprise. Only my heart skipped a beat and out of the corner of my eye I saw the cat jump off the table and rush to the window.
“It’s really not difficult, Okhlamonov,” said Nikolai Petrovich, letting himself down again. I took the sugar bowl from him. His eyes were smiling. “Would you like me to teach you?”
A month later, when the bird-cherry was in full bloom, Nikolai Petrovich and I took a trip out of town. The train was jammed and we stood packed like sardines on the platform. Some old codger had already stepped on my foot a couple of times. When even more people got on at Chistoprudnaya and I was rammed right up against a fat hulk, I looked round, rose very slightly above the bespattered floor, and hung there. Nikolai Petrovich, smoking an acrid cigaret, immediately grabbed me by the sleeve. “Don’t play the fool,” he said, “we agreed we wouldn’t.”
The first few lessons were absolutely dreamlike. I would listen carefully to Nikolai Petrovich, try to make some sense of his words, watch him inwardly prepare himself. Then a brief spasm would pass over his face and I would see him lift off, only a millimeter at first, then moving effortlessly upward. I listened to his patiently repeated explanations, while he reclined Chagallesque upon the air and told me about the relationship between the will and the body, about the inner (as distinct from the outer) fulcrum. I would grope about for something inside myself, absolutely blind, collapse, slide down, fetch up against some ragged sinister object, surface in the light of the red lampshade, under the searching gaze of my teacher.
He would change the subject, tell me about Gogol, about Bulgakov, he would stretch out upon the air, on the blue-grey layers of tobacco smoke with a copy of The Master and Margarita, the unbuttoned sides of his jacket hung down above me, crumbs of tobacco dribbled from a hole in his pocket, or small change rang down, while in his strange voice he read out the accounts of Margarita’s flights, lines that hurtled headlong, slanted under the angle of attack. “She was a witch, Okhlamonov,” Nikolai Petrovich would say. “But that’s a whole different kettle of fish. You might say that they fly in a different capacity. And it’s not that they have a different technique, they simply move in a different dimension. If one of these beauties should fly right through you, all you’d get as a rule is a headache, or a touch of rheumatism‑‑‑‑‑But there he is, Okhlamonov, the author, you hear? He knew far more about this than he let on in his book.... Not to mention Gogol, long before him.”
The first time I got off the ground, uttering a kind of groan, I didn’t so much raise myself as leap into the air—and hit my head so hard on the ceiling that I lay for half an hour in a faint among the scattered books. Nikolai Petrovich, pale and scared, stood over me with a damp towel, then squatted down, wiping the plaster dust from my face; there was dust on every surface. “My dear old chap,” said my teacher, when I began to come to myself and felt the big lump on my head, “I did warn you! One false move of the will and you’ll be off into the ether—not physically but psychically. Your astral chord won’t hold, and you’ll never get back into your body. You will not only grieve me, but embarrass me as well. What am I supposed to do with your remains? The neighbors, the police, the procurator with his well-fed mug—the whole shooting match. Try to understand: I’m not inviting you to go astral-wandering; let us try and get by without vulgar occultism, without Koktebel[1] numbers.... I’m teaching you a simple thing: How to fly!”
We got off at a little station overgrown with fresh verdure. The road wound on through one more deserted cluster of country cottages, ran out into the field, and stumbled into the woods. Pine needles formed a springy carpet beneath our feet. An empty jam jar squeaked underfoot and flipped off into the bushes, spilling old snow. The woods came to an end. A river lay before us, a pool of fire under the westering sun. If you looked closely, the water was swelling and swirling in eddies, running secretly away into the thickening distance. We made our way along the edge of a freshly ploughed field, the rich soil upturned; not far off, a village church was settling down for the night. The cross blazed crimson. There was not a soul about; it was the hour when nothing is left of reality but a tremulous question mark.
Nikolai Petrovich picked a restful glade, moist with dew and hidden by nut trees. “Now then, Okhlamonov,” he urged, “don’t get carried away, don’t fly too high. Remember what I told you. High voltage lines are especially dangerous. And large expanses of water. And don’t be afraid of anything. If you should be really and truly frightened, even for only a fraction of a second, you understand? That’ll be the end!” Nikolai Petrovich adjusted his spring hat, pulling it lower over his eyes. “Just don’t get excited, that’s all, lie down on the air. It’s always harder to fly standing. And it’s not good for the vascular system either. Lie down, and don’t be afraid of anything!”
I leaned forward. Between me and the new grass, with flowers of as-yet unknown color poking through, there was an elastic, living force. I lay down. I was simply lying very low above the richly fragrant earth and rocking. I could turn over on my back. I could swoop abruptly upward, amorphously, like a handkerchief. I could plummet, as if punching holes in the air, in any direction. Squinting down, I glimpsed Nikolai Petrovich still standing in the little clearing below. With an encouraging gesture he sketched a circle on the air. Breathing deeply to control a certain shortness of breath, I spiralled upward. My teacher’s hat tipped sideways and blew off. What I was experiencing could hardly be called joy. It was flight, liberation, tears that blurred the suddenly expanding horizon, it was my hair streaming, my mind streaming; it was a new life—in an instant I became older, I lost nothing but was infected then and forever with a kind of knowledge hitherto inaccessible to me.
Nikolai Petrovich flew a little below and behind me. His coattails flapped. His arms were spread wide. I understood that he was insuring my maiden flight. Church, copse, clearing, fields, river—all dwindled rapidly, fell away, canted sideways, stood on end. “Good, Okhlamonov,” shouted Nikolai Petrovich, “very good! I am satisfied with you....” And although dusk was quickly gathering and the lights began to twinkle sadly in the little village far below, the rim of the world was still wreathed in golden light. I drew some gloves from my pocket, turning a clumsy somersault. It was getting a bit cold up there. The summer was only just beginning.
We returned in full darkness. Nikolai Petrovich, winding my scarf round his arm, allowed us to fly all the way to the station. He had chosen this bit of country just outside Moscow for a simple reason: there was some kind of prohibited area close by, surrounded by barbed wired—watchtowers, rails, floodlights—and no aircraft flew this way.
Do you know what it’s like returning to earth? I stood, swaying, in the damp darkness; an enormous lead ball was fastened to my feet. A moment later we were seated on a bench in the station: my heart had turned into a kind of porridge. “You, my friend,” said Nikolai Petrovich, the glow of his crackling cigaret illuminating his absent face, “today you burned up enough adrenalin for the next five-year plan. Absolutely nothing until next Tuesday, not even domestic exercises.” And then we started talking trivialities: about keys, and how we would now have to pin them on; about tree branches at night and how they could put your eye out; about television antennae that would suddenly materialize out of the resilient dark, just when you least expected it.
Who will give me back those incredible months? If you were to pour champagne into the air, so that space itself became joyously tipsy and swarmed with pricking bubbles.... No, I can’t explain. There was a moment when it seemed that everything would come crashing down. Not that I would forget how, not at all, there could be no question of that. No, catastrophe was looming in our earthly life, hanging over us, mixing everything up; and suddenly it broke, like a storm in the night, turned into a joyous pealing of bells: Katenka defected to me! Oh yes! She appeared one morning after breakfast, with a cautious smile and an ancient leather traveling bag, stood in the doorway, and said: “Okhlamonov, I have come to live with you! Not to see you, to live with you.” I was shaving at the time and everything looked idiotic: half my face smothered in lather, one inflamed and staring eye fixed on Katenka’s image in the mirror (something I’m very much afraid of, incidentally) while the dangerous blade was posed over my outstretched throat. “But what about Kolenka?” I hastily wiped my face with a not altogether fresh towel. “He released me so I could come to you,” said Katenka. She was looking straight at me, and had not yet put her things down on the floor. “He said he had long foreseen this, even that it was better this way.” I made as if to bow deeply. She looked at me even more seriously, more penetratingly, perhaps she was looking beyond me to some other day, and did not so much set down her traveling bag as simply relax her grip, so that everything fell to the floor with a thump. “Okhlamonov,” she said, “you live like a hermit, you live like Kolenka’s shadow. You need to become fully embodied.” And she shook her head. I was seized with shame at my apartment, the discolored wallpaper, the things lying where I had dropped them, the week’s worth of unwashed dishes on the writing table. Thank God the blinds were only raised a few inches—I rarely opened the windows, since I was always either developing or printing.
After standing in a daze for a second, with a ringing in my ears, I was just about to start rushing feverishly about snatching things up, cutting a wide swath through this moss of disorder, when Katenka, still strange, still alien, came right up to me so that her breasts poked into me and set me afire—for some reason I wasn’t yet dressed that morning, or rather all unbuttoned still—and said the last thing I expected: “You’ll take pictures of me naked, won’t you? Stark naked?” and not waiting for a reply she swung into the air, twisting and turning. “He taught me too, he’s such a genius! He said it would only be the two of us. Only you and I would be given the secret.” And somehow she did it quite differently—I’m afraid to say “like a woman,” because if you’ve never tried it yourself, you will laugh at me—she floated up to the clothes line, where yesterday’s rolls of film were hung up to dry.
That evening distant thunder tossed and turned in its dry bed. Rolled its r’s. Played its skittles. Toward midnight the murk thickened ominously, writhing and swirling like milk. Shafts of lemon-yellow lightening struck at random. Windows banged. The poplar below our window shivered feverishly. Then the rain came down in torrents. It rained so hard it seemed the whole of life must be swept away. A generous, outlandish deluge.
I still have photographs from that period. One time, when I was already living in Paris, in an access of homesickness I showed one picture to a veteran of the art; he examined it at length, frowned, spilled cigar ash on the carpet, asked to see the negative. “I’ll give you half the Man Ray Prize,” he announced finally, “if you will explain to me how it was done.” I spread my hands. What explanation could I give him? In that sundrenched room, amid a disorder immortalized by my lens—books scattered about, portraits pinned up askew, the lines with her washing and my film hung up to dry; in that room, whose dresser still played host to silver sugar bowls that had somehow not yet found their way to the pawnbroker’s and icons that had escaped the depradations of the diplomatic corps—in that room, Katenka lay upon the air, her arms spread wide: wonderful, stark naked Katenka. Her hair—she had just tossed her head—whirled like a golden comet in the suspended air of that day that was happy almost beyond bearing. There was no gimmick.
On the table lay a big packet of our Moscow photographs: Katenka in the bathroom, lying flat, like at a fakir’s seance; one breast lolls to the side, nipple peeping at the lens; I stand beside her in a raincoat and hat (I had set the camera to auto-release) and hold the shower hose behind her neck—the sparkling cone of water fans down over her, time has not yet licked away the droplets on her skin. Katenka in the woods, in a little satin dress, diving head first in pursuit of a flower borne away on the wind; a bumblebee in his unseasonably luxurious fur coat provided her with a perfect bracelet, a buzzing woodland wristwatch. Or here is Katenka on a moonlit night (I was using time exposure): looking somehow already completely astral, as if drenched in the light of the full moon, in this picture she is resolved into a succession of translucent blue images—flowing turns, somersaults, silken glimmers of elbow and knee.
I cannot endure this, I don’t mean describing the photographs, but calling back the days cancelled by the calendar.... I would do better to burn the whole lot.
The master, honorary chairman of many contests and commissions, thinking it would be a nice way to bring me out of my trance—since I had already forgotten about my half of the photography prize—offered to buy this Moscow photo for the magazine The Eye. He even offered a sum several times larger than anything I could have dreamed. But I declined. I had to decline. The picture was now lying on the table on a pile of photography magazines. Black-and-white Katenka with her tear drop of a navel, with the transparent fuzz that edged her somehow always inflamed delta, Katenka, looking so real, so piercingly real, that I went weak all over—Katenka was, now and forever more, beyond reach.
But going back now in time and dropping down into that blooming summer I see the two of us, completely happy, not so much beautiful—although she was unquestionably a beauty—as bearing the marks of the half-swooning ecstasies we shared. Now I see that same nailbitten finger of destiny that was poked into those days as pointing the way (nowadays, with mockery in my heart for my own and everyone else’s absurdity, I often wonder when the index finger will be joined by its four brothers and the whole little family will turn into an avenging fist): because all the details of that life, the whole atmosphere of that time, have emerged as it were from mute obedience and cry aloud, mouth gaping wide.... Now it seems to me that if people in that society were made fools of, turned inside out to show their worst and coarsest side (hence the insane sensitivity of our life then!), that is, to reveal that on the inside they were lined with the drab fustian of the Party, now it seems to me that we were among the first to be demagnetized.
God, how mischievous she was! How many times did we do it in the air. The first time—the walls abandoned their right angles and rushed to intercept us, a lopsided picture broke from its cord and plunged into oblivion, a big bottle of cherries in brandy fell from the dresser with a crash (but didn’t break), a scratch on my back took a week to heal—that was the window catch which, seizing its chance, gouged me between the shoulder blades. We had to learn to respect the lamp, to be mindful of nails, we had to learn prudence enough not to go crashing into the window sill, crammed with jars, cups and coffee pot. One stifling night we fell asleep in each other’s arms and I awoke, after I don’t know how many minutes had rustled past, feeling her all tenderly wrapped around me, warm and moist—awoke with sudden alarm. For a moment I was completely disorientated; I knew only that somewhere close by deadly brilliant drops were flaring and dying, and near my neck something was scraping and scratching. At such moments the most difficult thing is to figure out which is up and which is down. Luckily for me a sliver of moon cut through the thick midnight clouds. Then from below came a harsh grinding sound, and I saw a shower of electric sparks. I got us out of there fast, holding her tight as she began to stir—we were in the street, we had floated out the window, we were lying almost on top of the streetcar power lines.
From that night on I put a net over the window, but we soon stopped sleeping in the air: autumn came on quickly, with prolonged bouts of icy rain; no matter how tightly we wrapped the blanket round us, it would slip off. And then, at the end of an Indian summer that blazed up in russet warmth, one day the accursed telephone rang, and we learned that Kolenka had been arrested.
Rumors that people who could fly had begun appearing in the land arose spontaneously. The first time I heard about people flying was in a queue. They were selling off a few scrawny superannuated chickens. Two old girls, complete primitives bundled up in quilted coats, were shaking their heads and sending up balloons with some pretty strange bits of dialogue. Hearing “... and he, God forgive us, just shoots up into the sky,” I moved closer. The narrator crossed herself, while her companion, a woman with permanently clenched features, nodded monotonously. “And Manya, he’s flying like an angel! Everybody comes running, of course. The militia draw their revolvers, take aim, but he’s already higher than the Pushkin monument. But one fellow, in civvies, shoots two-fisted—and gets him! We all run to look—but he’s already gone. They carted him off, of course ... to examine him. Maybe he wasn’t one of ours. But he looked ordinary enough, I tell you Manya. Flew over people’s umbrellas. Wearing trousers. Semeonovna, from the grocery, says she even saw a hole in his boot.”
I got excited. But the rumors were coming in from all over. Predictably, the talk around town vested the flyers with the virtues of old-styled heroes. Judging from the stories, one flew into the pawnshop opposite the Procurator’s Office and before the eyes of the dumbfounded crowd carried off a hat full of gold. Of another it was told how he carried away 25,000 rubles in cash through the open window of the House of Writers on Lavrushensky. The window, they said, was on the sixth floor. The fool of a maid, they said, had opened the windows to air the place and was gabbing on the phone.
The rumors multiplied, and once, in a boulevard cafe where I used to go to pick up the latest gossip, I struck luck. A couple of young people, whose alcoholic talk was punctuated with phrases like “sure, man,” “I’m not one of your suggestible types,” and, as I especially recall, “but they’ve had the Bermuda triangle in the family for ages ... ,” had fallen to discussing the reasons for the appearance of people who could fly. Now, of course, all this sounds like parody, like a mixture of night blindness and far-sightedness, but in those days I was still taking things at face value. “Man,” said the first, “this is no mass psychosis organized by the Lubianka to distract people from the realities of life. No. People, driven into the most colossal social cul-de-sac, without any possibility whatever of breaking out, are starting to dream of the surreal. If you like, the idea of levitation is being born. And it isn’t the first time. Think of India, the flying sphinxes of Egypt; think of the Bible. There have been similiar periods in history before. People have to have hopes, fantasies, they’ve been emasculated, man, by Karl Marx’s materialist knife.... They want to recover their divine nature. To be like angels. So begins the dream of flight!... Let’s have another.” His companion was gloomier. “What dreams? What are you blathering about? A geologist in the Urals is shot down by helicopter—that’s a dream? A party of drunks doesn’t feel like paying the bill at the restaurant on the Ostankinsk television tower and splits through the window—that’s a dream too? And the growing amount of information, the increasing number of cases—what is that? I tell you, it all sounds more than real to me.” “Forget it,” rejoined the first, “modern myths put on a veneer of modern details. Soviet man sublimates his longing into a handy image. Later on the image is fleshed out, down to the very buttons, to the most practical details.” “But man,” the second burst out, “what about the reaction of the authorities? It’s unambiguous! Do you think all these expert panels and research centers are dumber than we are?... Let’s have another.... I figure their information is a bit better than ours. I bet they’re taking the rumors more than seriously. Machine guns on the rooftops? Don’t be silly. And TV cameras aimed at the sky? I’m no soft-headed mystic, but just suppose we really are mutants. Man, we’ve just been dragged through an atrociously cruel period of history. It’s natural that life should see no way out of this ‘progressive’ blind alley. The world is really and truly at the end of its rope. And divine nature—there I absolutely agree with you—divine nature is coming up with something new to save us!... Let’s have another.... What is the greater wonder: that we walk, or ... fly? From a fish’s point of view there’s no difference. And there’s nothing supernatural about a fish—a fish, that’s reality!” and he noisily jabbed his aluminum fork into his plate: it was Thursday[2]. “Maybe the increasing incidence of levitation really is a higher form of social development which society is beginning to approach—another little drop—through the impenetrable thickets of Communism?” “Ah, shove it!” the first could suddenly stand it no longer, “you’re talking pure gibberish, like some halfwit member of the Institute of Marxist Maundering! If I agree with you at all about anything, it’s that people are absolutely fed up, and if they really are starting to fly, it is out of longing and despair.”
I listened to their tipsy conversation in a welter of perspiration. My eyes went completely out of focus and swam in a luminous mist. Many things began to be revealed to me. After all, I have never pondered the matter deeply. There was a second when it became my life, an everyday thing, a gift. I had never felt anything other than the simple possibility of moving resiliency through the air. It was my secret freedom—and Katenka’s too, of course. And that’s all!
They finally sensed my presence. Turning round at once, both somehow darkened, and the first—glasses and a crooked beard—said in a phoney voice: “And it was she herself who put it to him. In the doorway. She has a husband at home. Dead drunk, as usual....”
They had taken me for an informer.
On my way out of the cafe, feeling their eyes on my back, I rose up in the doorway, hung there for a bit, just long enough for them to get a good look, pushed the door to, and flew off. Well, what else could I have done to help them?
Along Sadovoye Koltso the wind chased dry, swirling leaves. The puddles were frozen over. The evening crowd flowed heavily along the street, swirled in grey eddies, spitting out individuals who had lost the rhythm. A moustached militiaman stood heavily, his big boots planted wide apart. A woman climbed heavily—though still young—onto a bus. A grey wino breathed heavily on the corner, as he rested with an enormous string bag bulging with empty bottles. Even a snot-nosed urchin, though one of nature’s sparrows, trudged along on elephantine feet. Oh, if only they would—just for a second—switch off the gravity generator at the center of our happy globe! If only everyone were allowed to become weightless every Friday! I envisioned the empty canyons of the streets, the sky speckled with flyers. Shame on you, I said to myself, shame on you, Okhlamonov, for this lapse into old-fashioned sentimentality. I turned off toward Nikitsky Gate. In a back alley near the School of Music, someone had scrawled in big black letters: “TO EACH HIS PLACE SOME LOW SOME HIGH.”