How to express, in this tangential language embroidered with arabesques around essential blanks, the anguish of thought? Present and absent, it was everywhere at once, and everywhere elusive. How to refine a set of contradictory yet blinding clarities into nuances of shadow? Daria believed she had done it. That first rendezvous with Sacha at the Jardin des Plantes, then in the back room of a Parisian bar on boulevard de l’Hôpital, translated into the play of light on the streets, a drab scent of autumnal decay floating among pruned shrubs, a blue sheen of greenhouses in the distance, an unease of footsteps on the path, a tan-upholstered interior in all its tense, hospitable, anonymous, shattering banality. Sacha himself was associated with images of tropical landscapes that she was wary of developing. (Because they knew she had never been to the tropics and might ask: Who do you know in those countries? They might even guess.) Instead she painted — in words — a little bamboo wood in an Adjari botanical garden near Tsikhes-Dziri, those names unspoken though, no names, no names! Thin green shoots after rainfall, the pungency of red earth, the graceful thrust of ferns… She also wrote a gloss on Lermontov’s classic poem “Three Palms,” in which the sensations of her childhood were ramified.
The worst questionings, the ones born of devastating bereavements, had her filling a notebook on the death of the musician, the death of the gold-seeker, the death of the inventor, the death of the great atheist believer, the death of the devout but limited believer, the death of the cynic, the surprise at death of the intelligent utopian, the indignation at death of the misled fighter, and how each of them faced up to the end with scruple, astonishment, courage, consciousness of the void, furious disappointment, desolate faith, quailing flesh… This was the most imprudent of the notebooks — and the one it would have been impossible not to write. She did not, however, write about the simple death of the militant, and most often when she talked about death, she was really only talking to herself about the higher life of the mind. Not good enough! The abyss, the plunge into the abyss were unequaled… Those pages she burned quickly, well before her departure, and none too soon, because when Major Ipatov of the Special Troops showed up on a tour of inspection, he was affable and comradely, left some quality cigarettes and a flask of Armenian cognac — “more aromatic than Hennessy, you know” — while inquiring in a familiar way about just what this deportee could possibly be writing through the long and lonely evenings in her hut. “I know how many copybooks you order, I know you write and write, I know everything!” Daria slapped her notebooks onto the table. “May I?” He thumbed through them, paying careful attention to some passages, and wanting to know the reason for certain crossings-out. “Good gracious, you’re turning into a regular prose stylist, Daria Nikiforovna! Are these the preparations for a book?” “Yes.” “I sincerely hope they’ll let you publish… You could make twenty thousand rubles out of it one day. Very fine, this paragraph on the rain. Of course, it might be a bit too disjointed for the average reader… But here, this piece about the hands, deeply moving I think…” It was too dark for Major Ipatov to see the exile’s face redden. “I see male and female hands, I sense a complexity of relation between them… In such a refined form, I wonder if it’s really publishable… You have talent!” Since he was not untalented himself as a lettered-bloodhound-reader, Daria congratulated herself for having destroyed the death notebook two days earlier. Major Ipatov might actually have understood it.
She burned all the books without a twinge of regret. (There was not one line in them about regret.)
The little village, made up of some fifty Kazak families, lay along the edge of a streambed blessed with a muddy trickle for a few weeks only, during the spring in the mountains. Its fifty-odd uneven shacks leaned at angles, like outcroppings of the earth, that is, of hardened sand; the tallest, reaching twelve feet to the top of its crumbling turret, was surely the most godforsaken of all the Prophet’s mosques, though an ardent faith still burned among its faithful. Flat roofs shone dustily red at this sunset hour. Timeless women seemed fixed motionless around the well, thick silhouettes becoming graceful as one drew near: the young ones had slender bodies, angular features, and eyes like fawns; the old ones, worn down at thirty by the privations of this lonely spot, had been drained to the bottom of their black gaze by the unvarying spectacle of the desert and relentless worrying about food and water — since the fitful stream of the Ak-Aul dried up even quicker than maternal breasts… Beside them crouched the freakish outline of a camel with flaccid humps.
The peaceful fire of the horizon set interiors ablaze with gold reflections. Daria had to visit almost every house in order to say goodbye to the schoolchildren. “I won’t be able to tell you any more stories about the Golden Cockerel and the Cat That Purred. Work hard on the alphabet and love our great country, which is destined for a happiness you’ll know when you’re grown up…” (Those of you who do grow up, if the enemy universe doesn’t slaughter us, if our own young egotism doesn’t drag us down to the abyss…) “Your elder brothers are fighting as bravely as the warriors of Timur-Lenk…” That at least was something they understood: Tamerlane! A historic figure who now seemed distinctly modern… The ironwork glinted on ancient chests; old people rose to receive her, tiny women hung with necklaces of antique silver coins and their bronzed, wizened menfolk, stern, morose, wearing robes of brightly striped cloth eaten away by filth. Grave, parchmenty faces inclined before her, thin dark lips shaped words of good wishes for the future in formulas prescribed by the Koran to attend the departure on a journey of a friendly traveler, be he an infidel…
Daria distributed her riches: a kilo of dried black bread, a pound of sugar, some boiled sweets, and a bar of perfumed soap which she cut into slices to go around to the new brides and young mothers, kindling sparks of delight in the glossy sable pupils, for “you’d think it was a cake of roses,” even if nobody here could have the least idea of what roses were. Daria left some borax to treat the children’s eyes, inflamed by the mineral dust and often eaten away by conjunctivitis resulting from venereal disease. She urged the Polish woman to take over the school, assuring her of official backing to come. “The intelligence of those children, it’s so alive! Their minds are as thirsty as the earth…” Then, a knapsack on her back, she walked away alone into the flat distance, the tragic, darkening horizon where the quenched fires of evening had left only violet dunes, a yellow-blue sky, the sense of a vast cicatrization covering vast mute sorrows…
“Congratulations,” said the chief of the region, “I’m going to drive you to the aerodrome myself.” He was smoking coarse seedy tobacco rolled in newspaper. Outside, the petrified sand sparkled. Seeing this officer in this abandoned office — scrawny, his right eye covered with a black patch, his hands dirty — Daria realized for the first time that his feeble persecution of the deportees was merely a way to escape the suffocation of total boredom. “What news from the front, Akim Akimich? The second front?” “Oh yes, the second front of those imperialist scum, you believe in that, do you?” sneered the one-eyed man. “They’re all in it together, they intend to wipe us out, you mark my words. We’re on our own.” And the fire went out of him; he seemed exhausted by this small fit of verve. Daria told him about the school, sixty-seven eager children, two hour-long lessons every day, reading, writing, arithmetic, I’d recommend the Polish woman, she’s very keen… The regional boss, Akim Akimich, whose eye had been put out by a Polish bullet, replied sharply, “She’s a landowner’s daughter, she’s the widow of an insurance company tycoon, a capitalist, and a Catholic to boot! How can you answer to me for her where the education of our children is at stake?”