PERSONA NON GRATA
[Trevozhnaia Kukolka]
Sasha Sokolov
Russian Translator:
Benjamin Sher
Translation Copyright ©1997 by Benjamin Sher
(Russian text published in Kontinent #49, 1986)
Dedicated by Sasha Sokolov to Irina Ratushinskaya
"Everything went
according to plan, didn't it, my Lord? Under a cloudy sky, he ranted and raved,
confounding the real with the unreal... Oh, my God, why, why have you done this
to us?"-- Irina
Ratushinskaya
What
a pitiful blunder! Instead of being born and raised in incomparable Buenos
Aires, where people greet each other not with "Como està Usted?" but
with the neighborly "How is the air?" to which a man replies:
"Gracias, gracias, muy bueno," and where the paper boy, hands free,
zooms on his bicycle through the streets, ostentatiously reading the latest
issue of Hoy without so much as a dictionary, and where the street car
conductor, an ordinary, everyday conductor, declaims passages from Octavio Paz
to his passengers; instead of making your earthly debut among these refined,
well-read people, a citizen in the name of Jorge Borges, but hold on--instead
of being born in Uppsala, in indescribable Uppsala, or anywhere nearby, in the
land of gloomy, Gothic wisdom, where you could have enjoyed the reputation of
Professor Lars Bakström, where you could, in fact, have become Professor
Bakström himself, where you would be casting hypnotic spells in the name of
delightful Aurora, she of the glorious family of Borealis, this enchantment
being nothing less than svensk poesior again, with all due respect for Athens
or Rome, --instead of being born in ineffable Jerusalem, where you could have
had a glorious childhood dodging ascetics weighted down with fetters and
legends on the Via Dolorosa, by God, never mind Jerusalem--we'll wait till next
year! Come to think of it, you could have made your appearance not far off, in
unsightly Bethlehem, reeking with the smell of those juicy falafels, or, then
again, in Afula, teeming with the mules and past glory of the Jordan Valley or
in merry old Sodom, where you could have chatted your life away in the language
of Ecclesiastes like a true master of Amos Oz's guild, in a word, instead of
coming into the world in any of the above-mentioned places or in any place
smacking of the sublime or the otherworldly, you were born and drew your breath
the Devil knows where, you babbled, muttered and complained, you spun nonsense,
hacked out potboilers, fell in love and ranted and raved in the most ordinary
Russian and, suddenly, in no time at all, you discovered that you were who
knows who, whoever you please, in other words, none other than yourself. The
horror of it! Confronted by this fact, you felt yourself a victim of fortuitous
circumstances, of times and doings, manipulated by others' egos. You were
caught, from head to toe, in a sticky web, in the tissues of fate woven by the
accursed Parcae! "Look down on me," you howled at them. "Look at
what you've turned me into! I am swaddled like a baby in your cocoon. Unbind me
here and now! How humiliating this is. Where is your much-vaunted nobility?
What do you think I am, a fly?! Do you hear me?" Apparently not. Looks
like they couldn't care less. Who would have believed it?! It was no picnic.
That's how you joked in your youth. That is, not you, but others. But you, who
understood the cocoon in all its ugliness, you were in no mood for rejoicing or
merrymaking. On the contrary, the noose of an a priori idiom pressed against
your neck, and you fell into a chronic sullenness. And if, at times, you
smiled, then only out of courtesy and sardonically at that. But life assailed
you on all fronts. To get out of your depression, you went after a job
advertised on a bulletin board, where the postscript solemnly warned:
"Abandon all hope, men with weak nerves!" And that is how you landed
a job in the morgue. From an orderly you worked your way up to laboratory
technician. Among other duties, you shaved your clients' heads and assisted at
post-mortems. To say that an autopsy is not pretty would be a cunning
understatement indeed. What humanist could even distinguish this ritual from
sheer mockery of the deceased but for the state's medical certificate?
Nonetheless, the ritual was sacred: no one who croaked on the hospital bed was
ever exempt from--in the language of cynics--this necrological procedure, that
is, no one but cadavers with political clout. This powerlessness of the dead
mirrored the powerlessness of the living. And both were in bondage: you were
the slave of an official idiom, your clients the slaves of a lethal speechlessness.
You haven't forgotten the nightingale gardens, have you, where, under the
canopy of a starlit Symbolist night, you regaled the beautiful ladies with your
plaint against the vulgarity, corruption and malignancy of all life. But even
in death there is no escape. For even death cannot give us free will. And you
set out to seduce the beautiful ladies with verses oozing with professional
grief: "Along the palace's smooth enamel/A midnight skeleton did stalk and whirl/From its height in a pale
orange dazzle/The moon shone indifferently like a pearl." These
self-lacerations of an overwrought genius brought our beauties to a state of
exaltation. Moved with compassion, you plied them with the customary
"sweets" and reaped a harvest of hearts. Oh, how much balm did these
beauties offer you in those youthful Russian nights for your sonorous 'open sesame.'
And how the lilacs raged along the shores of the sunrise! And how the tomcats,
implacable as the Fates, their ears turning pink in the rays of the sunrise, watched
over the iridescent fish in the aquariums. And still, you felt cheated of your
fair share. You longed for other shores, where other, different open sesame's
are the custom. "Ich liebe dich, s'agapo, te amo," the heroines of
your daydreams whispered in your ear. But then your dreams turned into
nightmares. "Come on now," you said then to a figure wearing a mask
and an inquisitorial cloak, "where is our free will?" You mouthed
your words feverishly, as if they were pouring out of your bowels, as if
Dostoevsky
were confessing on Freud's couch. "There is no free will," the dark
figure replies coldly and with a haughty mien. "But without free will
there is no freedom," you counter, "and without freedom there is no
happiness, don't you agree?" "You may be right," the Inquisitor
allows, "but whatever gave you the idea that you had a right to happiness
in the first place?" "A right to happiness? They say that no such
right is needed. If a moth is born for flight, then a person is most definitely
born for happiness." "But you are not a person," the grim
Inquisitor suggests, "you are nothing but a discarded persona fit for
maggots." "How dare you! How crude can you get? Et cetera." His
mask fell off. The willful figure of the usurper. The mournful, gray eyes of
the basilisk. The unsmiling mouth of the hangman. The palpitating tongue of the
iguana, cloven once, twice, thrice, ad infinitum. "For God's sake,"
you cried out, "who are you?" "I am the Inarticulate Word. I am
the word that has existed since the beginning of time, the primordial 'I am.' I
am your enemy. I am a whip. I am bondage, I am dispossessedness, I am the
forget-me-not of the valley: She loves me/She loves me not. 'I am'--you'll
learn to put up with this transcendental pain. You'll come to love it, and soon
you'll soar. And, flying over this vale of tears, you will begin to prepare
'being' as one would a corpse. You will disembowel it by stripping the fresh,
steaming, bleeding intestines of all their essence. May the bird of heaven that
forever feeds on the liver of the Fire-Thief never swoop down on it. No,
transform it, piece by piece, drop by drop, into tissues of living prose. Be
patient, persevere, and I shall arm you with wing and pen. For I am your
immemorial tongue." By virtue of the law of communicating vessels, of
substances and states, by virtue of a law dating from such and such, dream and
reality imperceptibly flowed into each other as if this were taking place in
the topsy-turvy Oblonsky household, where Oblomov, the wonderful, lazy nobleman-dreamer,
a regular boor, would drop in unannounced, without his cuff-links, without so
much as ringing the bell. Stamping his feet, he'd swagger into the room,
whistle, swear, drain one glass after another and proclaim: "Down with the
baroque, long live the rococo!" An example we should emulate with every
fiber in our bones. Still, you were never well received at the Oblonskys', and
so it was out of the question for you to follow in the footsteps of your idol.
Casting your ambitions to the wind, you followed the dictates of your native
idiom. You endured patiently. You worked hard. Your occupations embraced
everything under the sun. In fact, you might well have eclipsed the superstars
of this human farce, were it not for your predilection for minor roles. On the
other hand, you made yourself a most charming supernumerary, the virtuoso of
the single episode. No Olivier ever delivered a coat or stumbled or upset a
tray with such finesse as you have. And there was no dearth of such episodes.
Like a sentimental author nostalgically fondling the many volumes of his
complete works, you ran your fingers through your theatrical wardrobe in your
spare time. You could have dressed up every pauper in Rio's carnival with these costumes. How you loved them
all: the smock of a lab technician and the suit of a clerk and the uniform of a
circus janitor or of a theater fire marshal and the sleeveless shirt of a
stoker and the frock-coat of a chimney-sweeper and the dark coat of a jockey
and the apron of a street vendor and the field jacket of a huntsman and the
jacket of a dog trainer torn and tattered by the dogs themselves and the
overcoat of a private and, finally, the blessed strait-jacket. It was no
ordinary article of clothing. It was a relic. Paradoxically, this humble and
unassuming strait-jacket symbolized your gradual emancipation from the
prejudices of the sociopolitical order. Fitted out, you set out on a journey
that brought you eventually into the company of citizens and lords of the
earth. It was in this strait-jacket that you were hauled away on a gloomy,
Tolstoyan morning from the soldiers' loathsome barracks and dumped into that
most free of all state institutions, the psychiatric ward. Adorned with a red
cross, the ambulance car pushed on to the edge of the square, where the troops
were being drilled. And, led through the lines of the honor guard, you shouted
to the king's subjects, cheering them on and instilling in them pride for their
monarch: "Down with the rococo and the baroque! Long live surrealism!"
And it was in that same strait-jacket seven hundred and twenty nine injections
later that you appeared before the High Commission. "Well, then," the
Army's physicians inquired. "Are you aware of the fact that you are no
Dali?" "Yes, sir!" you replied, "for now I am a wondrous
cocoon that has arisen out of a simple midnight larva. What a splendid metamorphosis. Look at me: I have become a
chrysalis. Like Rodin's statue of Balzac. My profound gratitude to all of you.
I am comfortable. I don't need a damn thing anymore and in my heart of hearts,
where I once felt constricted, there is now an infinite expanse. Or, perhaps,
an infinite coziness. Still, the wings of alarm hover over my head. Has
Salvador Dali been informed of this transformation? I must send him a telegram:
'URGENT. STOP. IT IS AN HONOR TO INFORM YOU. STOP. I AM NO LONGER A MAGGOT.
STOP. I'VE METAMORPHOSED. STOP. YOURS TRULY. TERRIFIED CHRYSALIS.' Be so kind
as to send him this telegram. Only, I fear that Maestro Dali will be unable to
bear this loss. After all, Dali and I were such kindred spirits in the
past." He is sobbing even now. Your strait-jacket is turning darker by the
minute from your tears. Soon after your discharge, you marched in this garb
through the streets of your unloved city in protest against the conquistadorial
policy of late-Medieval Spain and against Amerigo Vespucci, in
particular. You purloined the strait-jacket from the madhouse and brandished it
triumphantly like a banner carried off by a scout from enemy headquarters. This
was the banner of the moral majority waging an undeclared war on the Artist. In
accomplishing this feat, you made a dent in the body of the Soviet Hydra. Of
course, there was another reason for rejoicing. I mean, of course, the
psychiatrists' prognosis, which read: "Good-for-nothing. Grounds for
prognosis: The ravings of a nonentity suffering from delusions of
grandeur." How you rejoiced! How you celebrated! In your strait-jacket you
rubbed elbows with the beaten but not quite finished-off geniuses of the fine
arts, with aesthetes daring to utter sedition in huddled public squares and
languorous salons. "Along the palace's smooth enamel/A midnight skeleton did stalk..." Oh, precious jacket! It
was in this strait-jacket that you consumed your youth as a cigarette that
burns a hole through and through. How careless you were! Isn't it obvious that
one must handle such things with care? After all, we are talking about a relic!
And so you distinguished yourself in it as a schlemiel, as a bouncer, as an
artist's model, as a perpetual student and as a very clever John. Toiling away
patiently, you became the representative of your extra-class, the class of the
superfluous in their own land. It was in this strait-jacket that you joined the
lowly ranks of the glorious Order of Drummers of Retired Goats, you attached
yourself to the rebellious, the restless and the idle, to truth-seekers and
holy fools with their idée fixe, all led by the master himself, Señor Quixote.
A drummer by God's favor, a drummer to the marrow of your bones, you proclaimed
yourself an eternal foe of whatever you didn't like. Never mind that in your
cocoon state you found it inconvenient to beat the drum. There was no need to
bother. You were now an outstanding theoretician of the drum, its courageous
ideologue. Fighting for the rightful cause of the Sacred Goat, you pounded
away, not by beating with drumsticks against its hide but with your heart
against your ribs, with your blood against your temples and the membranes of
your ears. You drummed your howl into the ears of others. On your deathbed you
will say: "Scouts' honor, I was a pretty good drummer before God. When I
die, bury me with honor. But, no need to go to the expense of making me a
shroud. Wrap me in my strait-jacket and that's that, a memorial to that fabled
period of my life when I lived and struggled and beat the drum, and, if you
like, when I would give myself over to thinking." You thought like a
chrysalis. You were an individual, all right. But even more, you spoke for a
whole generation, for a whole class. There were many like you, far more than
the costumes in your wardrobe or the roles you played on stage. Once, you
looked back and understood what the great American dreamer Walt Whitman knew a
century ago, namely, that you were not alone. You contained multitudes. You
were the mass. There were so many of you, enough for a battle scene in a movie.
But who cares about such a crowd scene when you could fill up a good hecatomb.
And you realized that, like you, nearly everyone is wrapped in a cocoon, in a
sackcloth very much like yours. And you were horrified for the sake of your
ill-fated people, born into its strait-jacket. And its language became bitter
to you. That which seemed during the delirium of your empty youth as the mantle
of the Grand Inquisitor was in fact the same red strait-jacket: the same as
yours or anybody else's. And that was fulfilled which was prophesied by him in
the terrible visions of your early years. You grieved for this people, you
shared their burden and, finally, you came to love them. They dissolved in your
blood and became pollen on your wings. For in those days you broke out of the
chrysalis, no longer a discarded persona but a lofty person, and you soared up.
Not like Nabokov's magic butterfly but as a sullen, gray nocturnal moth,
soaring on an endless wave of alarm. Is it not better to soar morose and gray
than not to soar at all? Acting thus, you became conscious of yourself as a
puny but free moth possessing the idiom of your native land. Beating your wings,
you soared higher and higher. Still, as before, your language trailed far below
in the dust of a vale of tears. Or else it lay like a corpse without rights,
the victim of a lethal speechlessness. And the obtuse, wingless lab technicians
in their red smocks poked fun mercilessly at this corpse. "Oh, you
hapless, impotent, stupid, cocooned Russian language," you said to
yourself, paraphrasing Turgenev. And you prayed: "Oh, Lord, preserve and
forgive this native idiom of ours, for we possess no other. Preserve and have
mercy on us, who are the anxious bearers of this idiom, as we make our way
feebly among the languages and peoples of this world. From Uppsala to Buenos Aires. Preserve us, sullen and gray, who bear upon our wings the
dust of our primers and chronicles, the ash of the Apocrypha, the soot of lamps
and candles. Have mercy on us and on those who seek to break out of their dire
straits and soar in our wake. And on those who do not seek to. And on those who
shall never soar. Look down on us and on them. Speak to us in your lofty
Esperanto. Give us a sign. Fortify us. Teach us. Confirm for us the primordial
'I am.' Reassure us that it is no longer a dream. And if it is a dream, awaken
me and reveal yourself, to me, a mere moth fashioned of dust and ashes. Whisper
to me, oh Lord, through a fallen leaf, a manuscript sheet or a bamboo
grove." And you wondered aloud: "Why have you done this to us, oh
Lord?"
END
Originally
published in The Journal of Literary Translation (Fall, 1989, vol. 22, pp.
226-232), this work has been thoroughly revised. My thanks to Columbia University for permission to reprint my translation of Sokolov's
work.
December 3, 1997