This morning, you slept while I awoke alone – a morning of separation and farewell for the day. In the evening, past midnight, it was you awake alone, while I slept, embracing my illusions, illusions which any other woman might dismiss as pure balderdash and baloney. But you know, so well, that someone else’s present world is untangible and unimaginable, like a foreign country filled with great happiness and great sorrow. In our mutual love, we have caused each other so much anguish and unacknowledged misery, but it has finally become clear that in the unique love for either a woman, or a homeland, one learns the meaning and idea of the world – love for the One and Only Authentic Existence, which created us from one soul alone, the same for men and for women:
O mankind! Be careful of your duty to your Lord, who created you from a single soul and from it created its mate and from them has spread abroad a multitude of men and women, and fear Allah in whose name you appear to one another, and fear Him particularly respecting ties of relationship.
Al-Nisa 4–1
How little life we are given, Oh God, for learning and understanding!
The house, on the threshold of which these minutes were trifled away, our stone house on the hill, was girded on the northern side by the dormant buds of the woods scaling the slope, and on the south by a brick wall festooned with curls of ubiquitous ivy and by the small garden, a-brim with daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths, created by your own hard work. For all its sturdiness, it was not our last home, but an enduring shelter on the way to another shimmering place. Bestowed on us as a challenge at the crossroads of our wanderings, it grew on us, with its simple objects, which also bore memories of previous homes. Every object is an accumulator of memories and feelings, memories and feelings that can sometimes surge back with the odd glance or touch to remind us that we have shared experiences – that our two lives, though so different, are intimately entangled and, for some purpose, lastingly conjugated.
This house, so different from those other time-worn homes, does not bring our lives together by force, but is sympathetic to the natural separateness of human existence, with its two studies, its two disparate worlds where each can shelter to read and write, with a shared wall but opening to opposite points of the wind rose – my windows looking out south and east, yours to the north and west.
Our beliefs and ambitions are so different in many ways, but this makes the mutual connections that much clearer as they lodge within our home, bringing together both worlds. All their variegated differences mingle here in unity, allowing the grace of occasional mutual silences to penetrate commonplace reality, as the point of a young leaf penetrates the maple bud, or a tear disturbs an impassive countenance.
Now it’s happened, and there’s no time – and I didn’t even notice where the time went. In my heart, you see, there gathered so clear, so earnest a wish to explain, to explain myself with all the guilty prolixity and diversions of words – those words I never have enough of from day to day for your more substantial grievances. But even words are given to me in unmindful silence, like the radiance of familiar objects that brings back emotions from the past.
And the traces of the past are slipping ever further away – the start of our mutual destiny is receding – the time when we, two people, two differences, two lonelinesses, had neither a common home nor even common memories. When did those memories begin?
No, it wasn’t that secluded summer at Butharovo, under the roof of the rented cottage with the carved terrace, deep amidst the forest in a landscape alien to both of us. It wasn’t then that began our life of love, a love which then and for long after seemed a simple story of dark temptation and glorious but brief passion, a seduction by fate – a perishable romance that is born and dies in the pride of either man or woman.
‘She didn’t understand him.’ … ‘He didn’t understand her.’
However one begins such a humdrum tale, its humdrum end will loom all too plainly. Was this meant for us? Who knows? If it weren’t for the irresistible gravitational attraction of fate, and not another conjugation whose heavenly justice will only later be revealed, would we have been able to resist the centrifugal force of unrestrained egoism that at the time seemed for me and you the self-preservation of talent? We will only discover the answer in the many-layered joys and sorrows of life; the pain of mutual existence is the need for us to sacrifice even those things sweetest to our hearts, the strident ghosts of our unmutual past.
I think we chose to meet under the roof only rarely, but as the rains kept falling, so we were brought together – for where else could we go in that dull village? We walked together, yes, but somehow singly. We adapted to each other, but the arguments were terrible and the silences filled with tension, leading to new arguments. But in everything around us – in the ripening leaves of the alien forests, in the distant murmur of a brook, in the drizzle drops on burdock and nettles, in the unexpected birds of our foreign garden, in the maple reflections on the country ponds where I fished to be alone and waken to the real world – everything was filled with the inevitability of life, and shone with the possibility of unity.
In your words:
Here’s a soul’s garden neglected and dank
without love without care a desolate blank
dense jasmine and lilac grow over the bank
raspberries and blackberries thorny and rank
if some bold stranger ventures inside
in the green shadows where lost truths now hide
crunching like ice underfoot with each stride
on leaves and blooms fallen in piles deep and wide
the anguish is neither implied nor intended
but it’s magnified greatly by fear and doubt
so I’m unsure what’s broken can ever be mended:
if one entered here – would they ever get out?1
Why were we staying in Butharovo if not for your wish to test our feelings again? I have only understood at last – it takes a long time for plain but unpalatable truths to reach the liver. All the human bonds in your life were snapping then, and every attempt at unity left only blank emptiness, and despite that hard-won stubbornness which shone through the loss of your parent, your dreams of what your life should be were lost in a mist of uncertainty. The highest power endowed you with immense vitality. Yet the death of your young father in an aircraft fire deep in the Arctic circle then deprived you yet again of any strong shelter, and left you with the sense that even the ground could give way beneath your feet.
Could I then be your solid earth? Could I be not a charming prince, a Prince Yelisei2 whose fairy tale inevitably ends, but the one you needed all your life – your comforter, father and brother, your wall and shield from the evils of the world, the strong and disinterested patron of your golden talent?
No, I could not. I did not know how to. People learn to do it, giving their whole life to learning. Your striving to be brave in the face of despair drew me but I was terrified by it, because it was so overwhelmingly demanding – not only for me then, but for the future me, of which I had no inkling then.
So Butharovo, where my best poems were written, failed to become our joint shelter, and has sunk into your past like a painful coincidence, lacking the happy memories that might bind it into your life. We were not aware then that we should not stay in one place, locking ourselves for years into meaningless restrictions. For you and me, it turned out, it was ever better to be on the road.
The minutes of silence were running out. You slept on upstairs. And the light that augured spring cascaded into the mansard through the twin windows, beyond which the clouds and trees were flooding with dreams anticipating new shapes