Love

Shuvalov was waiting for Lelia in the park. It was a hot mid-day. A lizard appeared on a stone. Shuvalov thought: on that stone the lizard is defenseless it can be spotted immediately. “Mimicry,” he thought. The thought of mimicry brought to mind a chameleon.

“Congratulations,” said Shuvalov. “That’s all I needed, a chameleon.”

The lizard ran off.

Shuvalov got up from the bench in anger and started off quickly along the path. He was seized with vexation; the desire to oppose something rose up in him. He stopped and said rather loudly:

“To hell with it! Why am I thinking about mimicry and chameleons? I don’t need these thoughts at all.”

He came out into a little clearing and sat down on a stump. Insects were flying about. Stems quivered. The flight patterns of the birds, flies, beetles were imaginary, but one could perceive a sort of dotted line, the outline of arches, bridges, towers, terraces – a quickly-changing, constantly transformed city.

“They’re beginning to give me orders,” thought Shuvalov. “The sphere of my attention is being cluttered. I’m becoming an eclectic. Who’s controlling me? I’m beginning to see things that aren’t there.”

Lelia didn’t come. His stay in the garden dragged on. He strolled about. He found himself verifying the existence of many species of insects. A small insect was crawling along a stem; he picked it off and set it on his palm. Suddenly its abdomen glittered brightly. He lost his temper.

“Hell! Another half-hour and I’ll be a naturalist.”

There were various different stems, leaves, tree trunks; he noticed blades of grass, jointed, like bamboo; he was struck by the diversity of colors of what is called grass; the many colors of the earth itself seemed to him completely unexpected.

“I don’t want to be a naturalist!” he begged. “I don’t need these chance observations.”

But Lelia didn’t come. He had already made some statistical deductions, already done some classifying. He had already been able to confirm the fact that, in this park, trees with thick trunks and leaves having the shape of the ace of clubs were prevalent. He was learning the sounds of insects. Against his wishes, his attention was filled with matter in which he was completely uninterested.

And Lelia didn’t come. He was depressed and irritated. Instead of Lelia, there appeared an unfamiliar gentleman in a black hat. The gentleman sat down next to Shuvalov on the green bench. The gentleman sat there, rather downcast, a white hand on each knee. He was young and quiet. It subsequently came out that the young man suffered from color blindness. They began to talk.

“I envy you,” said the young man. “They say that leaves are green. I have never seen green leaves. I have to eat blue pears.”

“The color blue is inedible,” said Shuvalov. “I would throw up from eating blue pears. “

“I eat blue pears,” the color-blind man repeated sadly.

Shuvalov winced.

“Tell me,” he said, “haven’t you ever noticed that when birds fly around you, a city of imaginary lines appears?...”

“Never noticed,” answered the color-blind man.

“You mean, you perceive the whole world correctly?”

“The whole world, except for a few details of color.” The color-blind man turned a pale face toward Shuvalov.

“Are you in love?” he asked.

“Yes,” Shuvalov answered honestly.

“Just a little confusion with colors, but as for the rest it’s all correct,” the color-blind man said gaily. At this he made a condescending gesture toward his interlocutor.

“But blue pears – that’s no small thing,” Shuvalov smirked.

In the distance, Lelia appeared. Shuvalov jumped up. The color-blind man got up and, tipping his black hat, began to move off.

“Aren’t you a violinist?” Shuvalov called after him.

“You’re seeing what isn’t there,” answered the young man.

Shuvalov shouted angrily:

“You look like a violinist.”

Still moving off, the color-blind man said something, and Shuvalov heard:

“You’re on a dangerous path...”

Lelia was walking quickly. He got up to meet her, taking a few steps. The branches with the club-shaped leaves swayed. Shuvalov stood in the middle of the little path. The leaves were rustling. She was coming, greeted by an ovation from the leaves. The color-blind man, turning toward the right, thought: “The weather is certainly windy” – and looked up at the leaves. The leaves were behaving like any leaves which are disturbed by the wind. The color-blind man saw swaying blue tree-tops. Shuvalov saw green tree-tops. But Shuvalov came to an incorrect conclusion. He thought: “The trees are greeting Lelia with an ovation.” The color-blind man was mistaken, but Shuvalov was still more mistaken.

“I’m seeing what isn’t there,” Shuvalov repeated.

Lelia was approaching. In one hand she held a sack of apricots. She stretched out the other hand to him. The world underwent a swift change.

“Why are you frowning?” she asked.

“I feel like I’m wearing glasses.”

From the sack Lelia took an apricot, pulled apart its little buttocks and threw away the pit. The pit fell in the grass. He glanced back, startled. He glanced back and saw: on the place where the pit had fallen, a tree sprang up, a slender, shining tree, a wonderful umbrella. Then Shuvalov said to Lelia:

“Something funny is going on. I’m beginning to think in images. Laws are ceasing to exist for me. In five years, on that spot, an apricot tree will grow. That’s entirely possible. It will be in complete agreement with science. But I, in defiance of all of nature, have seen this tree five years early. It’s ridiculous. I’m becoming an idealist.”

“It’s from love,” she said, dripping apricot juice.

She sat on the pillows, waiting for him. The bed was pushed into the corner. The garlands on the wallpaper were golden. He approached her, she embraced him. She was so young and so slight that, dressed in a nightgown, she seemed exceptionally naked. The first embrace was stormy. A child’s locket flew from her breast and caught in her hair, like a golden almond. Shuvalov lowered himself above her face-slowly, like a dying face, sinking into the pillow.

The lamp was burning.

“I’ll put it out,” said Lelia.

Shuvalov lay near the wall. The corner drew closer. With his finger Shuvalov traced the design on the wallpaper. He understood: that part of the over-all pattern on the wallpaper, that little section of the wall, near which he was falling asleep, had a double existence: one was ordinary, everyday, completely insignificant – simple garlands; the other was a night-time existence, apparent for five minutes before plunging into sleep. Suddenly coming close, parts of the designs became larger and more detailed; they began to change. On the verge of sleep, close to childhood sensations, he did not protest the transformation of familiar and lawful forms, the more so as this change was touching: in place of tendrils and rings, he saw a goat, a cook...

“And there’s a treble clef sign,” said Lelia, having understood him.

“And a chameleon...” he lisped, falling asleep.

He woke up early in the morning. Very early. He woke up, looked around and cried out. A sound of bliss flew from his throat. During that night, the change which had begun in the world on the first day of their acquaintance had been completed. He woke up in a new world. The morning sunshine filled the room. He saw the window-sill and, on the window-sill, pots of many-colored flowers. Lelia was sleeping, her back to him. She lay curled up, her back rounded, under the skin her spine looked like a slender reed. “A fishing-rod,” thought Shuvalov, “bamboo.” In this new world everything was touching and funny. Voices flew through the open window. People were talking about the flower-pots sitting in her window.

He got up and dressed, staying on the ground with difficulty. The law of gravity no longer existed. He did not yet understand the laws of this new world, and therefore moved carefully, with caution, afraid of provoking, by means of some sort of careless action, a deafening effect. Even to simply think, to simply perceive objects was risky. What if suddenly during the night he had been imbued with the ability to make thoughts materialize? There was a basis for assuming this. For example, his buttons had buttoned themselves. For example, when he had needed to wet his brush to comb his hair, the sound of falling drops had suddenly resounded. He looked around. On the wall, beneath the rays of the sun, an armful of Lelia’s dresses burned with the colors of Montgolfier’s balloons.

“I’m here,” the voice of the faucet called from the pile.

Under the pile he found the faucet and the sink. A piece of pink soap lay there. Now Shuvalov was afraid to think of anything frightening. “A tiger came into the room,” he was ready to think against his own wishes, but managed to distract himself from this thought... However, he looked with terror at the door. The materialization took place, but since the thought had not been fully formed, the effect of the materialization was remote, approximate: a wasp flew in the window... it was striped and bloodthirsty.

“Lelia! A tiger!” Shuvalov cried.

Lelia woke up. The wasp hung above – a plate. The wasp was buzzing like a gyroscope. Lelia jumped from the bed. The wasp flew at her. Lelia brushed it away – the wasp and the locket flew around her. Shuvalov struck the locket with his palm. They cornered him. Lelia covered the wasp with her crackling straw hat.

Shuvalov left. They said good-bye in a draft, which in this world seemed unusually active and noisy. The draft opened the door downstairs. It sang like a laundress. It twirled the flowers on the window-sill, picked up Lelia’s hat, released the wasp and threw it in the greens. It stood Lelia’s hair on end. It whistled.

It lifted up Lelia’s nightgown.

They parted and Shuvalov went downstairs, so happy that he didn’t feel the steps beneath him, and out into the courtyard... Yes, he hadn’t felt the steps. Further on, he didn’t feel the porch or the stones; then he discovered that this was no mirage, but reality, that his feet were hanging in the air, that he was flying.

“Flying on the wings of love,” he heard from a nearby window.

He shot upwards, his shirt turned to crinoline, his lips felt feverish, he was flying, snapping his fingers.

At two o’clock he arrived at the park. Exhausted by love and happiness, he fell asleep on the green bench. He slept, his collar-bone protruding under his unbuttoned shirt.

Now lowering, now raising his head, an unknown man walked slowly along the path, hands behind his back, with the gait of a priest and a robe like a cassock, a black hat and strong blue glasses.

He came up and sat down next to Shuvalov.

“I am Isaac Newton,” said the stranger, lifting his black hat. Through the glasses he saw a blue, photographic world.

“Hello,” Shuvalov babbled.

The great scholar was sitting up straight, guardedly, on pins and needles. He was listening, his ears quivered, the index finger of his left hand stuck out in the air as if calling to attention an invisible choir, ready at any second to strike up a song at a sign from this finger. Everyone was hidden in nature. Shuvalov quietly hid behind the bench. Once the gravel squealed under his heel. The famous physicist listened to the great silence of nature. Far off, under clumps of greenery, as if in an eclipse, a star appeared, and it turned cool.

“There!” Newton cried suddenly. “Hear that?..”

Without looking back, he stretched out an arm, grabbed Shuvalov by the lapel and, getting up, dragged him from his hiding-place. They walked along the grass. The ample shoes of the scholar stepped softly; they left white footprints on the grass. Ahead of them, glancing back frequently, a lizard ran. They went on through a thicket which adorned with down and ladybugs the rims of the scholar’s glasses. A clearing opened up. Shuvalov recognized the tree that had appeared the day before.

“Apricots?” he asked.

“No,” the scholar said with irritation, “it’s an apple tree.”

The frame of the apple tree, the cage-like frame of its crown, light and delicate, like the frame of Montgolfier’s balloon, could be seen behind the scanty covering of leaves. Everything was motionless and quiet.

“There,” the scholar said, bending over. Bent like that, his voice was like a roar. “There!” He held an apple in his hand. “What does this mean?”

It was apparent that he didn’t often have to bend over: straightening up, he leaned back several times, indulging his spine, the old bamboo of his spine. The apple rested on a stand formed by three of his fingers.

“What does this mean?” he repeated, mixing the sounds of the sentence with a groan. “Can’t you tell me why the apple fell?”

Shuvalov looked at the apple like the former William Tell.

“It’s the law of gravity,” he lisped.

Then, after a pause, the great physicist asked:

“It seems you were flying today, student?” the master asked. His eyebrows moved high above his glasses.

“It seems you were flying today, you young Marxist?”

A ladybug crawled from his finger onto the apple. Newton squinted. The ladybug was dazzlingly blue to him. He wrinkled his brow. She took off from the very highest point of the apple and flew away with the help of wings which she pulled out from somewhere in the back, like you pull out a handkerchief from under a tall-coat.

“It seems you were flying today?”

Shuvalov was silent.

“Swine,” said Isaac Newton.

Shuvalov woke up.

“Swine,” said Lelia, standing over him. “You wait for me and fall asleep. Swine!”

She picked a ladybug off his forehead, smiling at the fact that the insect’s abdomen was iron.

“Hell!” he swore. “I hate you. I used to know that this was a ladybug–and I didn’t know anything else about it except that it was a ladybug. Well, let’s say I could still have come to the conclusion that its name was somehow anti-feminist. But since the time we met, something has happened to my eyes. I see blue pears and I see that a mushroom looks like a ladybug.”

She wanted to embrace him.

“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” he shouted. “I’m sick of it. I’m ashamed.”

Having shouted that, he ran off, like a deer. Puffing, galloping wildly, he ran, jumping back from his own shadow, his eyes squinting. Out of breath, he stopped. Lelia had disappeared. He decided to forget everything. The lost world must be returned.

“Good-bye,” he sighed. “I won’t see you anymore.”

He sat down on an incline, the crest of a hill, from which the view opened onto a very wide expanse studded with summer cottages. He sat on the top of the prism, his feet going down the slope. Beneath him, the umbrella of an ice-cream vendor spun around, the whole get-up of the vendor was somehow reminiscent of an African village.

“I’m living in paradise,” said the young Marxist in a broken voice.

“Are you a Marxist? “ said someone beside him.

The young man in the black hat, the familiar color-blind man, was sitting very close to Shuvalov.

“Yes, I’m a Marxist,” said Shuvalov.

“Then you can’t live in paradise.”

The color-blind man was playing with a twig. Shuvalov sighed.

“What can I do? The earth has turned into paradise.”

The color-blind man was whistling. He scratched his ear with the twig.

“Do you know,” continued Shuvalov, whining, “do you know how far I went? I flew today.”

Sideways in the sky, like a postage stamp, lay a kite.

“Want me to show you?... I’ll fly over there.” (He stretched out his arm.)

“No, thank you. I don’t want to be a witness to your disgrace.”

“Yes, it’s terrible,” Shuvalov said after a pause. “I know it’s terrible.”

“I envy you,” he continued.

“Really?”

“Honestly. How nice to perceive the whole world correctly and just get mixed up about a few details of color, like you do. You don’t have to live in paradise. The world hasn’t disappeared for you. Everything’s in order. And me? just think, I was a perfectly healthy person, a materialist... and suddenly a criminal, anti-scientific deformation of substance and matter begins to take place in front of me...”

“Yes, it’s terrible,” the color-blind man agreed. “And all because of love.”

Shuvalov seized his neighbor’s arm with unexpected fervor.

“Listen!” he exclaimed. “I agree. Give me your eyes and take my love.”

The color-blind man climbed down the slope.

“Sorry,” he said. “No time. Good-bye. Go on and live in paradise.”

It was hard for him to move along the incline. He crawled along bow-legged, losing his resemblance to a man and acquiring the resemblance to a man’s reflection in water. Finally he reached level ground and started off gaily. Then, tossing up the twig, he blew Shuvalov a kiss and shouted something.

“Give my regards to Eve! “ he cried.

But Lelia was sleeping. An hour after his meeting with the color-blind man, Shuvalov found her in the depths of the park, in its heart. He was not a naturalist; he couldn’t determine what surrounded him: hazel-nut trees, hawthorn, elders, or dog-rose. Branches, shrubs pressed on him from all sides; he walked on like a peddler burdened with a light interlacing of branches growing more dense towards the heart. He threw off this basket of leaves, petals, thorns, berries, and birds that had spilled onto him.

Lelia lay on her back, in a pink dress, her breast exposed. She was sleeping. He heard the membranes crackle in her nose, swollen with sleep. He sat down beside her.

Then he laid his head on her breast, his fingers felt the cotton, his head lay on her sweaty breast, he saw her nipple, pink, with delicate wrinkles, like the skin on milk. He didn’t hear the rustling, the sighs, the crackling of twigs.

The color-blind man sprang up behind a tangle of bushes. The bushes wouldn’t let him through.

“Listen,” said the color-blind man.

Shuvalov raised his head.

“Don’t follow me around like a dog,” Shuvalov said.

“Listen, I agree. Take my eyes and give me your love”

“Go eat your blue pears,” answered Shuvalov.

1929

Translation by Aimee Anderson.