Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“Dorian likes you,” he said. “It’s a great compliment, he doesn’t like just anyone, I assure you. Did you know that a group of domestic cats is called a pounce, and a group of wild cats a destruction? Have a sip in the meantime… Now, the happy creature here is Sam-I-am, but we never get to learn the name of the grumpy one. It used to bother me quite a bit when I was a child… What do you think, by the way?”

“Interesting. Tastes like smoke, wood, and acute angles. I can’t say I’m fond of it.”

“Well, and now you know. Here, try this, this is sweeter, a coffee liqueur.”

“I don’t really drink,” I explained.

“Oh, but this isn’t drinking. This is sampling. Purely educational in spirit.”

And so I sat on the floor in the soft gray twilight of the strange room with the cat warming my thighs, listening to the light-eyed man read about eggs and ham, and thing one and thing two, and the clocks full of tocks, and the shoes full of feet, all the while sipping from an array of plump multicolored glasses that kept appearing before me out of nowhere—this one a golden-smooth honey of almonds, that one a sharp jolt of a plunge into a cold lake at sunrise, the last a dusty mouthful of vintage lace and genteel regrets.

He laughed at that.

“I knew it,” he said with satisfaction, and touched his glass to mine. His fingers were very long and thin, an aristocrat’s fingers. “I would recognize a fellow poet anywhere. Something about the way you hold the words in your mouth a fraction of a second longer, as if tasting them. Read me some of your poems.”

“No,” I said, though I felt secretly pleased. “I don’t read my poems at parties. Words are not to be bandied about like cheap coins.”

“But parties are precisely where one’s poems should be read. Where then would you read them? Poetry seminars? Libraries? I must say I’m shocked. Next you will tell me your poems do not rhyme.”

“Sometimes they do. Not always. And I don’t read them anywhere.”

“But this is heresy!” he cried. “Poems demand to be read, otherwise they are no better than solitary trees falling in the woods.” (Didn’t someone say something much like this to me before? I could not remember, but an odd feeling of recognition started inside me, and I felt myself growing flushed with an unfamiliar thrill.) “And of course they should always rhyme properly. Their very power derives from that anguished tension between the poet’s flights of fancy and the fetters of the form within which he labors. ‘The best words in their best order,’ as Coleridge noted, ‘order’ being the crucial idea here. Rhyme imposes order on dreaming, and the greatest poets rise to true greatness by transcending that order from within, by exploding preset boundaries and clichés with beauty and passion.”

He spoke with all the fervor of conviction, but the colorless eyes in his narrow, agile face were bright with mockery, and I could not tell whether he was being earnest or making fun of me. Someone had begun to knock on the door.

“Read me some of your poems,” he repeated.

“No. They are all in Russian anyway.” I was beginning to feel rather giddy, but pleasantly so. The light was very dim now, though I had not noticed him turning it down. “Shouldn’t you see what they want?”

“No, just ignore them and they’ll give up after a while. Why don’t I read you one of mine, then, to break the ice? Though I warn you, it has nothing on Dr. Seuss.”

The knocking on the door became a pounding and a rattling, gray Dorian purred in my lap, and his low voice wove in and out in a rhythm that would soothe for a line or two, then jar with an unexpectedly jagged, urgent word, and I knew it was brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Then the pounding went away and I thought I heard the distant slamming of a door. It occurred to me that much time had passed since I had entered the muted gray room—an hour perhaps, perhaps two—and now the music had stopped, the party seemed over, we were alone. He had finished reciting and was looking at me, as ever with that gently mocking smile on his lips; and though I wanted to praise it, I found that I could not recollect a single word of it, for it had been just like the pungent smoke drifting from the cigarette in his hand—melting wisps of mist refusing to shape into anything tangible.

“But wait a moment,” I said, realizing something. “There was no rhyme!”

“All rules exist to be broken,” he said, and shifted closer to me across the carpet, so I took a drag on his odd hand-rolled cigarette, and coughed, and talked. I talked because I was suddenly nervous, but also, mainly, because all at once I no longer wished to be a solitary tree falling in the forest. So I told him about rhymes not being the only way of ordering poetry, and of my grand ambition to catalogue the entire human experience in poetic cycles, of which I had already completed a few: The Cycle of Exhaustion (a modern take on Tsvetaeva’s Insomnia poems), The Cycle of Home, The Cycle of Memory, The Cycle of…

“The Cycle of Love?” he suggested, studying me with his penetrating pale eyes.

“No, no,” I said, moving away a little, “nothing so banal”—and I might have felt uneasy again, but I was genuinely curious to find out what he thought of various things. Take, for example, Proust’s haunting melody that had floated in the universe until discovered and set down by a composer—or, similarly, Michelangelo’s claim that he merely rescued the already existing statues from the marble blocks in which they had been trapped—did he think that this Platonic idea could likewise be applied to poetry? Was there perhaps a treasury of perfectly resonant, universal phrases somewhere out there, waiting for their Shakespeare or Pushkin to set them into harmonious words, and if so, how would one circumvent the problem of language, languages being particular and divisive? True, the most profound, most basic poetry crossed linguistic barriers with no effort—“To be or not to be” was just as powerful in Russian, though, to be fair, I could not vouch for Finnish or Chinese—but what about more nuanced sentiments? Or was that precisely what distinguished the monolithic universality of truth from the intricate embroidery of beauty: its meaning transcended its expression?

He splashed a bit of something into my glass and said that, speaking of Shakespeare, he himself dabbled in the theater now and then, as a matter of fact he had played Hamlet in a modest production last year, had I seen it perhaps, ah, a pity. Anyway, he had been working on an amusing little theory of his own, inspired by the Bard’s “All the world’s a stage,” namely, that the playwrights of genius had touched humanity so deeply because each of them had been able to distill the essence of a wholly unique worldview into their plays, and even centuries later, all of us mere mortals unconsciously molded our own lives into would-be plays penned by this or that giant, our very natures reshaped by someone’s words and plots. Some cheated and schemed through a Molière farce, others longed for a better existence in the dreary monotony of Chekhov’s uneventful drama, still others attempted to love in tragic Shakespearean terms, and the less one said about the hapless crowds stumbling through Ionesco’s and Beckett’s worlds, the better.

“And you, you definitely belong in Oscar Wilde,” I said, laughing.

“I will take it as a reference to my taste and wit only, not to any extracurricular activities,” he said, “as I hope to have a chance of proving to you shortly.”

I opened my mouth to form some clever reply, and could think of nothing, and then he was kissing me, and his kisses were not at all like the rubber kisses of my Moscow youth. And even as I was falling into some dark, hot, dizzying swirl, a small, clear-minded part of me stated coldly: This is rather predictable, a bit of a cliché in fact, for I believe I am being seduced, which is obviously what happens often in this soft, warm, gray room with low beige lights and the mirror on the ceiling and the cat with those unnatural white eyes slinking off to stare at us from the top of the dresser. But later, when the clear part of my mind had long fallen silent, another, deeper voice continued to speak—because it was all interesting, and frightening, and intoxicating, and I felt myself changing, becoming someone new, yet staying myself, always myself in some still, secret place reached only by words, a kernel of me at the very heart of this whirlwind, this chaos, and the voice continued to speak, imposing order on the chaos, and somewhere in that small, secret place, quite apart from the world, I found myself writing a poem, my first poem in English, a poem with proper rhymes.