Élise
Is it possible to fall in love with an abstraction? I allowed myself to fall in love with only a single fragment of a distant whole, an insignificant fraction of a form who in her profound lucidity still continues to haunt me.
It was as if in that very moment, when I let my emotion be stifled by some sort of meek prudence, I had been permitted to briefly glimpse the incomparable flesh of Venus; Only to have shut my eyes and turned my wretched face away. For such is the effect of divinity upon my soul; humility. Or at least self consciousness. [Je veux te raconter, ô molle enchanteresse! Les diverses beautés qui parent ta jeunesse ... ]
Mnemosyne became my executioner; each time in recalling the elegance of that unknown seraph I felt the majestic blade of unavoidable fate, uncompromising in its power, come crashing down upon me. My obsession; a seemingly weightless encounter, bearing only the significance which a desperate mind might bind to it. One amongst a million others, and upon retrospection, it should have been no different. The delicate curve of her fragile throat [quelle beauté!] diminishing into graceful shoulders— embellished by patches of shy skin peeking out beneath silken blinds of night-black hair ; statuesque in her perfection.
And that was all I saw; she never turned, instead laying her head against the ageing glass, a little book of poetry forgotten on the floor beside her. I think it was Baudelaire, or Wilde perhaps. Ma pauvre muse, hèlas! — you are my illusion, the first of my pleasures.
That journey was a verse, my life a canto, but she was the poem. On that day I remember little else. The train rambled on into the vast expanse which is the East like a sentence gradually diminishing into silent ennui, screeching through the snow and cold, steadfast pistons beating an unvarying cadence. Briefly interrupting the world like a child dipping his feet into the distilled waters of a tidal pool, only to withdraw them—the train passed, the world resuming its lethargy.
It was all too often in those days that I found myself upon the trains with nowhere in particular to go. All too often there stepping off onto the landings with my collar turned up and my arms crossed, my hands pressed firmly under my coat, trying to savour the last moments of warmth before another night of waiting and of watching, staring at my breath as it rose up before me.
It was something that I’d made into a rather disconcerting habit; my disposition towards attaching significance to things and events and people who bore no relation to my life. It’s a romantic idea, catching someone in the moment. Looking at them as they were, knowing that reality will shatter them, and that they will take the place of your little souvenir in the manner of these things, their procession towards abyss. Fading away, rotting six feet under.
Only echoes can ever be put into writing, only memories saved. At the time I slept upon the cobblestones, watching as the last raucous engine was expelled into the night; not mine. Listening as the last of the footsteps of the attendant well-wishers and mothers and fathers and lonely hearts dwindled into nothing, softly enveloped by silence. Those few souls remaining beneath the arches and stained glass and skylights seemed like my only family, one whose faces changed with every passing day, and yet whose personalities somehow remained constant in my mind. Always the same people, just different bodies; different smiles, different tears. The soldiers with their cigarettes and clicking heels, the ancient, the infirm, the pure, the scum. In my time I gave each of them a story, each of them a life.
To the soldiers I lent the attributes of heroism, allowing myself to fall victim to the morass of colourful posters still clinging to the walls, with depictions of dashing men at arms, hands proudly clutching their rifles and eyes staring towards a new sun rising. A boot firmly planted upon the helmet of a dying Hun. No longer the Germans though, amongst their own they now found themselves arrayed.
I wonder how many of those met a fate similar to the ones I dreamed up for them, how many collapsed with their final breath gasping za rodinu, za tsarya! Or still more poetically the names of those frail sweethearts who they kept as memories in photographs; whom in St. Petersburg and Moscow had fallen under the relentless march of the Workers’ Paradise. Who in France and Germany as émigrés lived on only hope, or had forgotten altogether– On to new lives, new loves.
The ancient held my sympathy like no other. I cannot imagine the pain of witnessing yet another upheaval, the pain of lapsing still further from the state of things—the frustration inherent in lacking the strength to do anything about it. The fear and the helplessness. I would rather have died. I fear the passage of time like no other force, because decay is its lover, Memory its sadistic antidote.
The scum bore my envy, because they lived freely, too apathetic to matter. You notice things, as time passes and the days wear caustically by. Doing nothing brings about great feelings of comradeship at times, with your fellows who have lost themselves in the uselessness of a life without purpose. At others, loneliness takes sole possession of one’s heart and does not let go. Gripping it hard with nails that bite into the tender flesh and clutch harder and harder until the beating is restricted and you gasp for air, reaching out for whatever slips by. Or you give up.
I believe there was one man who was with me for at least a week. Catching sight of him first at rest upon a bed of pamphlets and discarded papers, his tattered greatcoat pulled tight around his body, feet wrapped in rags jutting out from beneath—I’d watch him, wondering what sardonic Fate had pulled him here, what whim, what need. I wondered if he was like me, not knowing where he was going, no longer caring from where he’d come. Nothing to go back to, only hope ahead.
He carried with him nothing but a meagre bag of what seemed like tinned food, and which served him as an awkward pillow. I’d catch him stepping off the train as it stopped, out to take a walk, breath the knife-sharp air. Look up at the stars, squint as snowflakes fell upon his eyelashes, collected in his beard. Shuffle through the snow, an inconspicuous ushanka tied down over his ears, obscuring his profile with the hazy lines of the fur. He would smoke, holding with calloused hands a second-hand cigarette to his lips, shaking slightly, though age had only hardened his features, the creases and folds present characteristic of hardships endured and of pain, rather than of the corrupting touch of age. I’d catch him with tears in his eyes, staring at the walls, staring out the windows, staring at the windows. I spoke to him once, taking my chance to venture a word and break the silence that surrounded the man. I offered him vodka.
“You’ve got to be bloody cold dressed like that” I had said, proffering my polished flask. He had looked at it for a moment with what I then realized to be disconcertingly bloodshot eyes, and looked away.
“I don’t drink”. An intentional riposte. My mind followed it with his own muffled voice whispering slyly; “not anymore.”
Her memory lay uncorrupted only because I had not deigned to break the silence. I wonder that if I had, would she have turned to me with a snobbish whine and declined any advance on my part, or worse yet, whispered a soft word in naïve acceptance of my obsession. The Muses wax stronger when strived for, wane to nothing once attained. That man was to me spoilt by that brief exchange, forever tainting the impression of something poetic, something which I might have held on to. It’s a wonder that I do not fear talking to others, when I know that my own creations will be a thousand times more pleasing that whomever I might come across.
He left me at a station whose name I can no longer remember, nor did I attempt to note it at the time, stepping off the train and into the night without hesitation, leaving me alone with a myriad of those alien faces who always seem to be staring from the corner of your eye, never brave enough to look fully into you. Sleep would take me, and of between those moments I have not much to say. Time surrounds them like a cloister, sectioning them off from the rest of their compatriot thoughts in a sort of pointless quarantine. Sometimes I cannot see why they alone stand out, sometimes it’s obvious. Her name was Élise, I found out afterward, speaking to a gendarme who’d been with them since their flight from Moscow. He deftly avoided further questions, eventually disregarding the conversation completely, taking his leave with haste, vanishing. Élise, pronouncing the name itself invoked the image; speak of the devil, and she shall appear. Conjure the ghosts with words, contain them, whip them into the shackles of consciousness. Maintain—return to.
~~
“Andreï!” my mother used to call from deep within our ancient home; my name echoing through the corridors, glancing off the gilt and mirrors, slipping over the polished floors to reach me in my obsessive silence. She would call again and again, progressing through the rooms in a vague attempt to corner me into a hall or chamber from which there was no easy route of escape—all the while cursing my father’s laissez-faire method of childcare. “A hundred different rooms” she would say, “and these rotten children have the luck to be in none of the ones I actually check”. We fled her as a game, knowing that she played along with almost as much relish as we did; sometimes walking past us, pretending not to see our toes sticking out from beneath the racks of fur coats and itchy scarves lining the entranceway, before turning to pounce upon us with a triumphant, motherly yell.
I cannot remember a specific reason for our little games, other than the pleasure we derived from them. We were not subject to a cruel upbringing; we lived accustomed to caviar and French wine. Our sole discomfort being the oddly disagreeable governess, with an accent so thick as to make her generally unintelligible. Lessons in la belle langue therefore becoming particularly painful.
My brother and I felt ourselves the shrewd masters of the house. Nearly equal in age, though of varied temperament, we fought bitterly, but lived in general agreement. Our diarchy stretching its borders into the fields and streams and including amongst its people our father’s serfs, as it’s army we had our painted tin soldiers—who met glory on the battlefields far too many times to count, accompanied by whatever impressions of ambient musket-shots and cannon fire that our mouths could then produce. Mimicking sometimes the screams and battle-cries. Our mother loved that. Placing her face in her hands and staring at the floor in exasperation. Our father cheered us on, sometimes joining in, showing us scenarios from battles he had read about, teaching us of Borodino, Maloyaroslavets. We were always the winners, as these things generally go.
To compare Mikhail and I is a study in contrasts. Only our looks and our devotion to success we shared, inherited gifts from our father; a dull sort of ordinariness, an incomparable drive. My inconsistency against his damning focus; my passions like a butterfly leaving me flitting flower to flower in a haste to capture each essence—he knew one, and this was music.
Sofia. Her surname has been swept away like each other detail we both at one point had kept firmly planted in our minds. A youthful romantic competition, one amongst many. Was this another game of ours? I’d ask myself at times, as it were, not a kind one. In the beginning it was because we looked to each other to gauge our fascination. Much more useful had it been if one had been older, much more explainable; we would look to him so that we might know who was beautiful, who wasn’t worth a second glance.
In his absence, we looked to each other, never sure who had noted the nymph primarily, and who had latched on in jealousy and in healthy sense of competition. I didn’t discover the concept of love until much later, infatuation was much more significant, much more powerful to me. When experience has not brought one to their knees and swept them through the highs and lows of life, the appreciation for the melancholia which is amour is unfortunately rather dim. Physicality takes precedence, when emotions have not yet been cultivated, and what need therefore is there to possess a fellow beating, passionate heart when in its place any substitute will do.
Desire is not so easily defined. Sofia was an object to us, I can say it bluntly. She was both the prize and the stage for the competitive bouts we fought, over which and through which we used every skill we had within our meagre repertoires to seduce her. My “repertoire” was larger, though more diffused. Like butter spread thinly upon a slice of bread. Mikhail as if somebody had plopped a spoonful of the stuff in the centre, forgetting about it, Leaving it on the counter in somewhat of an over-rich concentration.
My most significant memory of him is his figure bent over the keys on the grand piano in the corner of our home’s spacious living room, going over the same étude hundreds of times, each time attempting to attain some new level of perfection. He was already good, his long fingers well equipped even at that age to reach the octaves and twist and stretch in awkward ways which to me looked at times rather grotesque. Chopin rested amongst his favourites, echoing his delicacy, his nocturnes acting as an expression of his spirit, as if painting a portrait in the air, his shallow lines managing to achieve a grace that made me at once jealous, and simultaneously arrogant.
I would praise his skills as a pianist and quietly laugh at him behind his back, telling myself that having a monotonous skill such as that compared in no way to my polymathic prowess. Nevertheless, I very solemnly asked him one day to teach me his art. I stowed away my pride and told myself that I would submit myself to him only to surpass him at his own game. A boy of thirteen attempting to teach such a fine thing as that instrument to his brother of only a slightly younger age is not exactly a recipe for filial love and for contentment. I destroyed his beloved waltzes with the subtraction of tempo and a propensity for heavy-handedness and similar fallacies.
Advancing past the stage of butchery I began to annoy him with pencil marks upon the pleasingly arranged horizontal rows of the staff. Notes whose position spatially seemed incorrect in their general relation to things. I took pleasure in misplacing the blocks of the masters’ cathedrals, squaring them away into esoteric combinations which made no sense whatsoever, but fit to my ear. In growing frustration Mikhail very shortly refused to teach me further, I cannot but help to think that it was a premonition in the order of self defense which caused him to do such a thing. Sofia had no ear for music, so I don’t know why I put so much effort into it at the time. I remember at one point her mistaking Tchaikovsky with Beethoven, of all things. My entire family would cringe at the thought of it, and it became a running joke amongst us.
I imagine she must have been an especially attractive girl at the time. As I remember it, I lavished her with the sort of flattery that any decent man would have been completely and utterly ashamed of. My desire to impress was not dampened by the sudden refusal of my former teacher. More as an expression of defiance and of vainglory did I continue with the instrument. A shameful memory, this; in the weeks after our disagreement I stole a book of music from him. Playing with one of my father’s hunting dogs, I successfully demolished the three or four pieces whose construction appeared lopsided or coarse to me. Leaving only scraps of it strewn over the flowerbeds. A coarse snowfall. We blamed its disappearance on the dog, he suspected it was me. At least the pet was happy. I had my music then, and with a guilty heart I ceased to play in his presence. That piano become my clandestine partner, and the few hours we spent together increased my appreciation for it profoundly.
It was very soon that I had surpassed my brother in both technique and in expression, and at that time I realized Sofia was meaningless, and that I had won; and I then forgot about it entirely. I left him to believe naïvely that he remained the musical zenith within our household.
It was in the following years that my brother left to study music in France, a romantic ideal for him. His Sofia long since conquered, they spent their final weeks in each other’s’ constant presence, constant embrace as it seemed to me. It was on the day of his departure that we found ourselves without him for a moment, he having taken a trip into the city to attend to a set of new shirts to be tailored for him. I was reading, she tapping vaguely at the keys in an unintentional almost comic imitation of him.
The music lapsed into recognizable tidbits and struck me as almost unbearably painful. “You ought to ask him for lessons” I had said, breaking the silence in the room with what was both meant half as a joke and as a plea to take her inarticulate fingers away from the fragile music and busy themselves with something which would be in her case far more fruitful.
She took it as an invitation and attempted a run of arpeggios in a similar manner as someone running towards a cliff and instead of attaining the dignity of an intentional leap, stumbling off. “He has been teaching me, and I’m learning quite efficiently he says” beginning an all too funereal marche funebre—dirge like. I shuddered. Sitting down beside her, I finished the piece with as much grace and solemnity that it deserved. I went on, at her coaxing, to perform one of my stolen sonatas, reaching the climax synonymously as Mikhail stepped quietly into the room behind us.
Sofia noticed him at once, turning to greet him with what began as a joyous expression of welcome and bluntly disintegrated into a simple question. “Why…?” I continued to play for a moment, without realization, before turning on my own face to him.
I must emphasize the diligence with which I maintained my secrecy. I sensed that his discovery of my covert art would serve as a thoroughly unwelcome epiphany, one which might bear entirely catastrophic repercussions. I did not however have the courage to put this thought into words, and merely discarded both the thought and the idea. Recognizing my sentiment as one which bore significance but was not then worthy of further thought.
And thus it was that this singular moment struck me as one which represented both a breach in trust and an upheaval. Not only based upon the assumptions which a jealous sibling may draw from such a scenario, but upon the realization that a secret had been kept—a secret which was meant for his protection but shortly established itself as a caustic lash, driving straight into the spine of his over-bearing pride. He elicited this realization with the dramatism expected of the former, but masked his sudden vehemence with the simple injections of astonishment which have stayed with me like a thorn in the flesh of my regrets. `
“You can play…?” half whisper. I nod. “Oh” – awkward moment of silence, l’instant de vérité. He lets fall his suitcase, extending his arm to drop it upon the divan. Sofia looks confused, sensing the change. “Play then” he signals with his hand my continuance. Like a judge demanding the accused to read his testimony, an admittance of guilt. I played Rachmaninoff, attempting to banish from my fingers the virtuosity which had surrounded them only moments before, attempting to fumble their steps over the ivory like I used to. He saw through it, played along, screaming inwardly. I remember an account of an actor from the far east who had mastered the art of screaming silently, using the contortions and the spasms of the muscles in their face in order to create the perfect likeness. Mikhail echoed this, though he kept that scream in, his mouth firmly shut against it, holding it in. Sofia and him must have been close, and must have been fragile. In youth, the sting of a heart broken seems a thousand times more poignant, and is by that comparatively a thousand times easier to achieve. I do however believe that it was the circumstances then which bred a much darker form of despair in him.
My apology, however much I did not want to dispense it should have been enough. For him though, that wound was to remain a scar; it stayed with him into the last days of his life. By that, it stayed with me. He left a few days later, we hadn’t apologized.
As some of you may know, I’ve just recently started volunteering for the Vancouver Observer as an editorial intern and as a writer.
