Ivan Yefremov: The Land of Foam

Pandion and Thessa set off in the direction of the sea. For a long time they walked on in silence. Then Pandion spoke, he wanted his beloved to share his grief and disappointment. The girl tried to persuade Pandion not to give up trying, she told him how confident she was of him and of his ability to carry out his plans. Pandion, however, was implacable. For the first time that day he had realized how far he was from real virtuosity, that the road to real art lay through many years of dogged toil.

“No, Thessa, only now have I at last understood that I can’t embody you in a statue!’’’ he exclaimed passionately. “I’m too poor here and here,” he touched his heart and his eyes, “to be able to depict your beauty.”

“Is it not all yours, Pandion?” The girl threw her arms impetuously round the artist’s neck.

“Yes, Thessa, but how I sometimes suffer on account of it! I’ll never cease to adore you, Thessa, and at the same time I can’t make a statue of you. I must embody you in clay, in stone. I must understand why it’s so difficult to depict life; if I cannot understand this myself how can I ever hope to make my creations live?”

Thessa was all attention as she listened to the youth, feeling that now Pandion was opening up his heart to her in full although the realization that she was unable to help him made her sad. The artist’s grief was hers, too, and there arose in her heart a still unformed alarm.

Pandion suddenly smiled and before Thessa could realize what was happening his strong arms lifted her off her feet. Pandion ran lightly to the beach, sat the girl down on the sand and disappeared behind a round hill.

A second later the girl saw Pandion’s head rise above the crest of an incoming wave. Soon the youth returned to her. Muscles that played and flexed shook the drops of water from his skin and not a trace of his recent sorrow was left. It seemed to Thessa that nothing serious had happened in the grove. She laughed softly as she recalled her pitiful clay image and the woeful countenance of its creator.

Pandion also made fun of himself and boasted boyishly of his strength and prowess before the girl. Then slowly and with frequent halts on the way, they returned to the house. But deep down at the bottom of Thessa’s heart the faint alarm still made itself felt.

Agenor placed his hand on Pandion’s knee.

“Our people are still young and poor, my son. Hundreds of years must we live in plenty before a few hundred people will be able to devote themselves to the lofty calling of the artist, before hundreds of people will be able to devote themselves to the study of the beauty of man and of the world. The time is not long past when we depicted our gods by hewing them from a stone or a tree trunk. But I can tell you, who are striving to penetrate the laws of beauty, that our people will go further and will transcend all others in depicting the beautiful. Today, however, the artists of the older and richer lands are more skilled than ours…”

The old artist got up and brought from the corner of the room a box of yellow wood from which he took something wrapped in red cloth. He removed the wrapper and with great care placed before Pandion a statuette of ivory, about a cubit (Cubit — the length of the arm from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger — 18 inches.) in height. Time had given the ivory a pink tinge and its polished surface was covered with a network of tiny black cracks.

The carving depicted a woman holding snakes in her outstretched hands, with the reptiles coiled round her arms as far as the elbow joints. A tight belt with raised edges encircled her slender waist, supporting a long skirt that reached to her heels and was ornamented by five transverse stripes of gold. The back, shoulders, sides and upper parts of the arms were covered by a light veil leaving the breast undraped.

The heavy tresses of waving hair were not caught up in a knot on the nape of the neck as was the custom with the women of Hellas, but were gathered on the crown. From this knot heavy locks fell on the neck and back of the woman.

Pandion had never seen anything like it. He could feel that the statuette was the work of a great master. His attention was focussed on the strangely listless face; it was flat and broad, the cheek-bones very well defined with the lower jaw slightly protruding.

The straight, thick brows augmented the impression of listlessness on the woman’s face, but the bosom was heaving as though with a sigh of impatience.

Pandion was dumbfounded. If only he had the skill of the unknown artist! If only his chisel could depict with such precision and beauty the form that lived under the rosy-yellow surface of that old ivory!

Agenor was pleased with the impression he had produced; he watched the youth closely, stroking his cheek with the tips of his fingers.

At last Pandion broke off his silent meditation and placed the carving at some distance from him. He did not take his eyes off the dully gleaming work of the old master.

“Is that from the ancient eastern cities?” the youth asked his teacher in a low, sad voice.

(The eastern cities: Pandion is referring to the cities of Eastern Greece (Hellas) where the Mycenaean civilization flourished from 1600–1200 B.C. This civilization was the direct descendant of the Aegean or Cretan civilization, a pre-Hellenic culture that is still little known. Mycenae, Tirinthus and Orchomenus were the cultural centres of the Mycenaean period.)

“Oh, no,” answered Agenor. “That statuette is older than the ancient towns of Mycenae, Tirinthus and Orchomenus with all their gold. I took it from Chrisaor to show you. When his father was a young man he sailed to Crete with a raiding party and found this statuette amidst the remains of an ancient palace some twenty stadia from the ruins of Cnossus, the City of the Sea Kings that was destroyed by terrible earthquakes.”

“Father,” said the youth with suppressed excitement, touching the beard of his master as a sign of request, “you know so much. Could you not, if you wanted to, copy the art of the old masters, teach us and take us to those places where these wonderful creations are still stored? Is1 it possible that you have never seen these palaces that the legends tell of? When I listened to my grandfather’s songs I often thought of them!”

Agenor lowered his eyes and a dark shadow marred his calm and pleasant face.

“I can’t explain it to you,” he began after a moment’s thought, “but soon you’ll feel it yourself: that which is dead and gone cannot be brought back. It doesn’t belong to our world, to our souls… it is beautiful but hopeless… it charms but it — doesn’t live.”

“I understand, father!” the youth exclaimed passionately. “We should only be slaves to dead wisdom, even though we imitate it to perfection. We have to become the equals of the old masters or even better than they, and then… Oh, then…” Pandion stopped, unable to find words to express his thoughts.

Agenor’s eyes gleamed as he looked at his apprentice and his hard, old hand pressed the lad’s elbow in approbation.

“You said that well, Pandion, I could not express it so well myself. The art of the ancients must be a measure and an example for us but certainly nothing more. We must go our own way. To make that way shorter we must learn from the ancients and from life… you are clever, Pandion…”

Pandion suddenly dropped to the earthen floor and embraced the knees of the artist.

“My father and teacher, let me go to see the ancient cities… I must, by all the gods, I must see it all for myself. I feel that I have the power to achieve great things… I must learn to know the countries that gave birth to those rare things which are met with amongst our people and which astonish them so greatly. Perhaps I…” The youth stopped, he blushed to his very ears but still his bold, direct glance sought that of Agenor.