Mikhail Shishkin: Calligraphy Lesson

There’s a famous police photograph of Robert Walser, taken at the place of his death: winter, a white incline, tracks in deep snow, a man fallen supine, arms outstretched. His old man’s hat flung to the side. That’s how he was found by children on their Christmas walk.

He described his own death in a story published half a century before his final Christmas. The protagonist of this brief little tale is a lost soul, inconspicuous, needed by no one—and yet, to make things worse, also a genius and master of the world. He wearies of being unneeded and escapes from his troubles like this: he buries the world in a snowstorm and lays himself down in a drift.

Foreknowledge of one’s own death is not, however, the privilege of the writer. It’s just that it’s easy to catch him red-handed—in the literal sense: the hand records whatever is revealed to him at a particular juncture. Such breakthroughs happen in every person’s life. Holes in matter. Points of transmission. In such moments the composer comes by his melody, the poet his lines, the lover his love, the prophet his God.

In that instant you encounter what everyday existence holds asunder: the visible and the invisible, the worldly and the sacred.

You begin to breathe in time with a space in which all things occur simultaneously—those that have been and those yet to be.

Reality has been playing hide-and-seek with you, hiding behind the past and the future like a child who’s squeezed himself in under the fur coats hanging in the hallway, and now jumps out at you, sweaty, happy, bursting with laughter: here I am! How’d you manage that—went right past and didn’t see me! Now you’re it!

To see your own death in such a moment is nothing, for there arises in all its glorious patency the knowledge that I was never born, but have always been. Suddenly comes the realization that there’s no need to cling on to life, because I am life. And it is not I who can sense the smell of mulch exuding from the forest’s mouth, it is the universe sniffing its own scent with my nostrils.

If you can measure your life by anything at all, it’s probably by the number of such encounters allotted to you.

I remember very well how I experienced that for the first time. My twelfth year. The smell of peat bogs burning around Moscow. The hazy country mornings of seventy-two. A charred aftertaste to everything, even the hot strawberries from the garden-bed. Mum went on holiday to a rest home on the upper Volga, and took me with her. One of my first trips away.

It rained incessantly, we lived in a damp, mosquito-infested little house, and at first I was bored, nightly film screenings notwithstanding, but after a while the weather improved, we got a new canteen neighbour, Uncle Vitya, and our life took a turn for the better. We swam with him, took motorboat rides on the Volga, went on forest rambles. Sinewy and gold-toothed, Uncle Vitya made Mum laugh no end with his stories. I didn’t get half of his jokes, but the way he told them made it impossible not to laugh. I took a great liking to Mum’s new acquaintance. What’s more, I was bowled over by the fact that he worked in a recording van—a “Tonwagen.” No doubt I was already spellbound by words.

There I go, presumptuously calling that teenager myself, though I’m not at all sure whether he’d agree to acknowledge himself in me as I am now: grey-haired, advanced in life, a sickly bore with a brazenly protruding belly. He’d be very surprised: can that really be me? I don’t know that I could find anything to answer. Not likely. We may be namesakes—but so what?

Among Uncle Vitya’s stories I somehow remember one about how, skating on the river as a child, he and other boys would sometimes happen upon frogs frozen into the ice. If you peed on them they’d come to life and start moving. And another one about the war. He told us about the penals [1] I.e., the completely expendable members of penal battalions, which consisted primarily of convicted military personnel, Gulag inmates, and POWs. —Trans. whose only hope was to get wounded. Redeem your guilt with blood and you’d have your decorations and rank restored. And so they’d resort to self-infliction, shooting themselves in the arm or foot through a loaf of bread so there’d be no gunpowder traces in the wound.

It had never occurred to me that Mum liked to dance, but now she’d be out dancing with Uncle Vitya every evening.

One day Mum started speaking to me in a strange voice. If Uncle Vitya ever asked me about Dad, she implored, I should tell him that he was dead.

“But he’s not dead,” I said, surprised. “He just moved away.”

She pressed my head to her breast:

“But you’re my clever boy and you understand everything.”

I understood nothing, but nodded all the same.

And I began waiting for Uncle Vitya to ask me about Dad.

It was strange to see Mum rouging and powdering herself, making up her eyes, painting her lips, spraying perfume on her neck, and doing her nails—I’d be hit by the sharp smell of nail varnish. I had never known her like this before.

Mum was a teacher, she taught Russian language and literature, and by that time she’d already become head of School No. 59 on the Arbat. Ever since year one I’d commuted with her across the whole city—initially from Presnia, where we lived in a communal apartment, and later from Matveyevskaya, where we were given a two-room flat in a new housing development.

Naturally, she wanted to keep her child close by, at her school, but this made life much more complicated for me. Her role model was some retired maths teacher. His son had been in his class, and he knew the subject better than anyone else, but when his father called him up to the blackboard all he’d ever say was “Sit down, C”—even if his son had got the problem correct. I had to go through something similar when our class was being divided into English and German sets. I wanted to go in the English set—and with good reason, because German was a kind of punishment for those who weren’t doing well: do badly, went the threat, and it’ll be the German set for you. I was doing well, but Mum put me exactly where I didn’t want to be. So none of the other parents could reproach her for anything. School came first for her, things personal and domestic second.

Her generation had grown up under the slogan “The Motherland is Calling!”

Perhaps, if I hadn’t got into a university with a military chair after finishing school, [2] Enrolling in a higher-education institution with a military chair was (and remains) a way for young males to avoid otherwise compulsory military service. —Trans. she would equally have sent me off to Afghanistan not only with sorrow but also with a sense of having fulfilled her mother’s duty to the nation. I don’t know. Incidentally, it would seem that I am to this day a reserve officer of the nonexistent army of that nonexistent nation. I did, after all, once swear an oath in a military camp near Kovrov to defend the soon-to-disintegrate motherland till the last drop of my blood. We had to kiss the red standard, I remember, so I brought it to my lips—and got a great whiff of smoked fish. No doubt our commanders had been tucking into some beer and fish and wiping their hands on the velvet cloth.

While still at school I didn’t realize, of course, how hard it must have been for Mum and all our teachers: they were faced with the insoluble problem of teaching children to tell the truth whilst initiating them into a world of lies. The written law requires that truth be told, but the unwritten dictates that if you do, you’ll be facing the music later.