Overall, I’m certain that PA means more for Tanya than I do. He’s meant more for me than I have for myself. Even now when everything is so hopelessly ruined between us, fairness demands I admit that I have never met a more noble, more intelligent, or kinder person. And no one in God’s world can explain to me why this best-of-the-best person has for so many years served the greatest evil there is on this earth. How can these two things coexist in one person? In my heart I sensed it all, knew it all back then when we were in evacuation and he took the Romashkins’ kittens away. At first I couldn’t believe that he had drowned them. Now I believe everything. After all, with just one phrase he crossed out our love, all ten years of our happiness. Destroyed everything. Destroyed me. Cruelty? I don’t understand. But that’s exactly what I don’t want to remember now. For me right now it’s important to restore everything that’s slipping away from me, that always, before PA appeared in my life, played such a large role. My dreams and early memories.
What I see—what’s told to me and shown to me in my dreams—is much richer and more significant than what I can put to paper. I have a wonderful spatial imagination, professional in a certain sense. Probably I am particularly sensitive to space, and for that reason have found myself in its mysterious back alleys, like that “middle world.” On the other hand, nothing comforts me more than my dear mechanical drawing, where each structure is strictly and completely transparent.
The dreams I see exist in some sort of dependency on the everyday waking world, but I won’t even try to describe the nature of that dependency. There is doubtless logic to the transition, only it remains on the other side and never emerges into waking reality. It’s perfectly clear to me that even though my hyperphysical journeys to various strange places violate all possible laws, my presence in those places is no less real than everything that surrounds us here, where I write with a pen in a school notebook Tanya started and abandoned at the very beginning because the school year had ended. No less real than the houses, streets, trees, and teacups here.
But again, the key to it all is sealed in a room, in a room without doors. In general, a lot of different things in my dreams are connected with doors and windows. The first, probably most important, door I saw was a very long time ago, not as a child, but when I was a teenager. I can’t say for sure when, because this vision is always accompanied by a sense of having encountered something already seen before. As if it were possible first to commit something to memory and then to be born into the world with the memory.
This door was in a cliff, but at first I saw the cliff, which was of dazzling fresh limestone so totally and abundantly flooded with sunlight that all the details of its coarse texture, all its uneven surface—a memorial incarnate to a hardworking civilization of small shelled animals long ago extinct—were as visible as if under a magnifying glass. Then my gaze shifted, a screw turned, and a slight swell swept over the surface, and I saw a door with a bas-relief surface cut into the side of the cliff. The relief was very distinct but it didn’t add up to an intelligible image. The smooth lines intersected, weaved, and flowed into each other, until finally my eyes adapted, and then the meaning of the image revealed itself to me. I made out a high pallet containing a smoothly curved body that flowed downward from the top, delicate hands folded in meekness, Jewish heads with tall brows bent low, and, above them all, the lone figure of the Son with the Theotokos as child in his arms . . .
The door was ready to open; a shadow even seemed to flit across a crack in the aperture in the cliff, and I was invited to enter. But I took fright, and the door, sensing my fright, once again reverted into the bas-relief on the white cliff, becoming flatter and flatter as I watched, gradually being covered over by the white meat of the limestone until it disappeared entirely.
I was not ready to enter. But there was nothing irreversible or irrevocably lost in this. I simply wasn’t ready. I’m still not ready.
Then it was as if I were told: Leave. Let your fear expend itself in life’s travails. And when your pain, your longing, and your thirst for understanding exceed your fear, come back again.
That’s approximately what I heard at the door. It was said tenderly. By the way, people always speak tenderly to me.
There was another thing about the door. It led from one space to another. But there weren’t any walls or anything else resembling a barrier between these two spaces. Just a door. Not even a door, a doorway. But everything visible through that doorway was different: the air, the water, and the people inhabiting it. I desperately wanted to go inside, but the space of the doorway was hostile and would not let me through. Its hostility was so great that it wasn’t worth trying. I stepped away. And then it occurred to me: you should try, make an attempt . . . I turned around. But the doorway was no longer there. And the space wasn’t there. Only ripples in the air left by a vanished opportunity.
I also remember how Grandmother died. As happens with the righteous, she knew in advance of the day of her death. Not long before Grandmother’s death Vasilisa had left for who knows where—she suddenly got the urge, you know how even now that still happens with her. But on the eve of Grandmother’s death she returned. By that time Grandmother had not got out of bed for a week, had not taken any food, and had drunk only small amounts of water. She was not in pain, at least, so it seemed to me. Her whole life no one had ever heard her complain. She did not speak, answering questions only by shaking her head to say no. No to everything. Vasilisa sat alongside Grandmother and read something devout. I think now that it must have been the “Office of the Parting of the Soul from the Body.” But maybe something else. Grandmother was well over eighty years old and looked like antiquity itself, an Egyptian mummy. Despite her horrifying thinness, though, she was very beautiful. Those last days she did not open her eyes. But her face was not unconscious. Just the opposite, it was the attentive face of a person concentrating on some important and weighty question.
On the eve of her death her young neighbor dropped by to borrow wineglasses: it was her birthday. I opened the cupboard and took out several different wineglasses, among which there was one real beauty, an antique with a worn gold pattern. The neighbor started looking it over and began to gush. She spoke rather loudly, and her squeals of delight over this beautiful glass were very inappropriate: Grandmother lay dying in the same room.
“My, they knew how to make things then. They don’t make things that way now. It must cost . . .”
And just then, in a clear and rather sonorous voice, Grandmother—without opening her eyes—fully conscious, and even severely, made a pronouncement.
“My child, you’re disturbing me . . .”
FOR TWO WEEKS SHE HAD SAID NOTHING, AND THE LAST three days it had seemed to us that she was unconscious . . . I don’t know how we disturbed her, what important business we tore her from . . .
A day later, at sunset, when we—Anton Ivanovich, Vasilisa, and I—were sitting at the table, her clear, loud voice suddenly rang out from its weeklong oblivion.
“The doors! The doors!”
Vasilisa flew down the long corridor—clattering with her old shoes that fell from her heels—to open the front door. She switched the latch, and the door flung open. Just then a stream of air rushed through the open window leaf in the direction of the front door, the light, cold draft touching Vasilisa as it blew past . . .
I turned toward Grandmother. She exhaled, and never inhaled again. The draft seemed to dart back. The front door slammed shut of its own, and the window leaf jerked on its hinge. A sunbeam darted from Grandmother’s face to the shifting glass. The sunbeam, a little golden clot, was solid, and as it flashed on the scoured pane we heard the faint sound of shattering glass.