ECSTASY
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)…
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.