Speak, Memory

Now that I come to think of it, how tawdry and tumid they looked, those jellylike pictures, projected upon the damp linen screen (moisture was supposed to make them blossom more richly), but, on the other hand, what loveliness the glass slides as such revealed when simply held between finger and thumb and raised to the light— translucent miniatures, pocket wonderlands, neat little worlds of hushed luminous hues! In later years, I rediscovered the same precise and silent beauty at the radiant bottom of a microscope’s magic shaft. In the glass of the slide, meant for projection, a landscape was reduced, and this fired one’s fancy; under the microscope, an insect’s organ was magnified for cool study. There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.

4

Considering how versatile Lenski appeared to be, how thoroughly he could explain anything related to our school studies, his constant tribulations at the university came as something of a surprise. Their cause, it transpired eventually, was his complete lack of aptitude for the financial and political problems he so stubbornly tackled. I recall the jitters he was in when he had to take one of his most important final examinations. I was as worried as he and, just before the pending event, could not resist eavesdropping at the door of the room where my father, upon Lenski’s urgent request, gave him a private rehearsal by testing his knowledge of Charles Gide’s Principles of Political Economy. Thumbing the leaves of the book, my father might inquire, for instance: “What is the cause of value?” or: “What are the differences between the banknote and paper money?” and Lenski would eagerly clear his throat—and then remain perfectly silent, as if he had expired. After a while, he ceased to produce even that brisk little cough of his, and the intervals of silence were punctuated only by my father’s drumming upon the table, except that once, in a spurt of rapid and hopeful remonstration, the sufferer suddenly exclaimed: “This question is not in the book, sir!”—but it was. Finally my father sighed, closed the textbook, gently but audibly, and remarked: “Golubchik [my dear fellow], you cannot but fail—you simply don’t know a thing.” “I disagree with you there,” retorted Lenski, not without dignity. Sitting as stiffly as if he were stuffed, he was driven in our car to the university, remained there till dusk, came back in a sleigh, in a heap, in a snowstorm, and in silent despair went up to his room.

Toward the end of his stay with us, he married and went away on a honeymoon to the Caucasus, to Lermontov’s mountains, and then came back to us for another winter. During his absence, in the summer of 1913, a Swiss tutor, Monsieur Noyer, took over. He was a sturdily built man, with a bristly mustache, and he read us Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, mouthing every line most lusciously and changing his voice from flute to bassoon, according to the characters he mimed. At tennis, when he was server, he would firmly stand on the back line, with his thick legs, in wrinkled nankeens, wide apart, and would abruptly bend them at the knees as he gave the ball a tremendous but singularly inefficient whack.

When Lenski, in the spring of 1914, left us for good, we had a young man from a Volgan province. He was a charming fellow of gentle birth, a fair tennis player, an excellent horseman; on such accomplishments he was greatly relieved to rely, since, at that late date, neither my brother nor I needed much the educational help that an optimistic patron of his had promised my parents the wretch could give us. In the course of our very first colloquy he casually informed me that Dickens had written Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which led to a pounce bet on my part, winning me his knuckle-duster. After that he was careful not to refer to any literary character or subject in my presence. He was very poor and a strange, dusty and etherish, not altogether unpleasant smell came from his faded university uniform. He had beautiful manners, a sweet temper, an unforgettable handwriting, all thorns and bristles (the like of which I have seen only in the letters from madmen, that, alas, I sometimes receive since the year of grace 1958), and an unlimited fund of obscene stories (which he fed me sub rosa in a dreamy, velvety voice, without using one gross expression) about his pals and poules, and also about various relations of ours, one of whom, a fashionable lady, almost twice his age, he soon married only to get rid of her—during his subsequent career in Lenin’s administration—by bundling her off to a labor camp, where she perished. The more I think of that man, the more I believe that he was completely insane.

I did not quite lose track of Lenski. On a loan from his father-in-law, he started, while still with us, some fantastic business that involved the buying up and exploiting of various inventions. It would be neither kind nor fair to say that he passed them off as his own; but he adopted them and talked about them with a warmth and tenderness which hinted at something like a natural fatherhood—an emotional attitude on his part with no facts in support and no fraud in view. One day, he proudly invited all of us to try out with our car a new type of pavement he was responsible for, composed of (so far as I can make out that strange gleam through the dimness of time) a weird weave of metallic strips. The outcome was a puncture. He was consoled, however, by the purchase of another hot thing: the blueprint of what he called an “electroplane,” which looked like an old Bleriot but had—and here I quote him again—a “voltaic” motor. It flew only in his dreams—and mine. During the war, he launched a miracle horse food in the form of galette-like flat cakes (he would nibble some himself and offer bites to friends), but most horses stuck to their oats. He trafficked in a number of other patents, all of them crazy, and was deep in debt when he inherited a small fortune through his father-in-law’s death. This must have been in the beginning of 1918 because, I remember, he wrote to us (we were stranded in the Yalta region) offering us money and every kind of assistance. The inheritance he promptly invested in an amusement park on the East Crimean coast, and took no end of trouble to get a good orchestra and build a roller-skating rink of some special wood, and set up fountains and cascades illumed by red and green bulbs. In 1919, the Bolsheviks came and turned off the lights, and Lenski fled to France; the last I heard of him was in the twenties, when he was said to be earning a precarious living on the Riviera by painting pictures on seashells and stones. I do not know—and would rather not imagine—what happened to him during the Nazi invasion of France. Notwithstanding some of his oddities, he was, really, a very pure, very decent human being, whose private principles were as strict as his grammar and whose bracing diktanti I recall with joy: kolokololiteyshchiki perekolotili vikarabkavshihsya vihuholey, “the church-bell casters slaughtered the desmans that had scrambled out.” Many years later, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, I happened to quote that tongue twister to a zoologist who had asked me if Russian was as difficult as commonly supposed. We met again several months later and he said: “You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about those Muscovite muskrats: why were they said to have scrambled out? Had they been hibernating or hiding, or what?”

5

In thinking of my successive tutors, I am concerned less with the queer dissonances they introduced into my young life than with the essential stability and completeness of that life. I witness with pleasure the supreme achievement of memory, which is the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past. I like to imagine, in consummation and resolution of those jangling chords, something as enduring, in retrospect, as the long table that on summer birthdays and namedays used to be laid for afternoon chocolate out of doors, in an alley of birches, limes and maples at its debouchment on the smooth-sanded space of the garden proper that separated the park and the house. I see the tablecloth and the faces of seated people sharing in the animation of light and shade beneath a moving, a fabulous foliage, exaggerated, no doubt, by the same faculty of impassioned commemoration, of ceaseless return, that makes me always approach that banquet table from the outside, from the depth of the park—not from the house—as if the mind, in order to go back thither, had to do so with the silent steps of a prodigal, faint with excitement. Through a tremulous prism, I distinguish the features of relatives and familiars, mute lips serenely moving in forgotten speech. I see the steam of the chocolate and the plates of blueberry tarts. I note the small helicopter of a revolving samara that gently descends upon the tablecloth, and, lying across the table, an adolescent girl’s bare arm indolently extended as far as it will go, with its turquoise-veined underside turned up to the flaky sunlight, the palm open in lazy expectancy of something—perhaps the nutcracker. In the place where my current tutor sits, there is a changeful image, a succession of fade-ins and fade-outs; the pulsation of my thought mingles with that of the leaf shadows and turns Ordo into Max and Max into Lenski and Lenski into the schoolmaster, and the whole array of trembling transformations is repeated. And then, suddenly, just when the colors and outlines settle at last to their various duties—smiling, frivolous duties—some knob is touched and a torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of a nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats; the sough and sigh of a thousand trees, the local concord of loud summer birds, and, beyond the river, behind the rhythmic trees, the confused and enthusiastic hullabaloo of bathing young villagers, like