about love (one)

Tender excitement; a taste upon my tongue. 

I seek you out everywhere. 

It was two in the morning, and Gurov could not sleep; he was watching the moon and her stillness through his window. He was in the province of L-, in the countryside. He had come here after his wife died, had abandoned his post as a governmental lawyer, his friends, his brother; had taken up farming, literature, God. But now it was late and quiet, and he could not sleep. 

Increasingly he was coming to believe that this peculiar state of silent reflection- the sort we fall into when we are not disturbed by our being awake at such an hour, when we have come to understand that there are things much worse than insomnia- was the most state for a man to exist in, neither transported by a multitude of meaningless tasks, nor by the promise of new love, the despair of a fractured one… yes, it seemed to him that a slight sadness was the best state to live in because it was unchanging, and it was honest. He heard the door open behind him; his servant, Mikhail, came in to the room, placed a pot tea on the small table in front of the gentle fire, and sat down, rubbing his hands together. 

‘Snow since October, sir,’ he smiled. Mikhail was a gentle man, and he could read Greek. He was not a servant in the ordinary sense of the word. Having been served by him at a literary soiree some twenty years ago, Gurov had fallen into a conversation about some or another work with him and had recruit this Mikhail as a biographer. He was the only person in the world Gurov felt comfortable with. He went over and they sat together warming their hands on the flame and loudly sipping the Chamomile tea. They began to speak about love. 

‘I was a young man,’ Mikhail began, ‘and I’d been with two women already, but neither of them had I loved, though perhaps I had used that word. It had been two years that I was living alone, and I was starting to believe that the married life was not my calling. I had no insatiable lust, no issues with the institution, but every woman I met I felt did not understand me, mocked me, looked down upon me, and though I met it all with smiles and laughter I was ashamed of myself. It seemed to me that there were beautiful women everywhere; in the street, at the school for Greek; my sister’s friends, my mother’s. It seemed to me that all around me were beautiful and happy couples holding hands and retreating beyond the noise and squalor of this world into each other’s love, into quietness. You know, sir, what that quietness means.
But for years I wandered around like this, my eyes always searching for a beautiful woman, for love. I know it sounds terribly naive, sir, but I wasn’t searching the way I’m told most young men search. No. I wanted to love somebody; I felt within myself this overwhelming energy which I wanted to share with another person. I’ve always liked making people smile, sir, and not from wit or flattery; I want to listen to them, and to understand them, and women especially. But it was as if every woman I tried to listen to could not see me; I even thought, in my youthful vanity, that I made them afraid because I reminded them of what they secretly longed for but did not have. 
It obsessed me; my life was very lonely. ‘When will she arrive?’ I used to ask myself. And yes, there were even women who were interested in me, sir, but they were lowly women, they were bored, and they mistook my kindness for weakness. After inevitably having to tell such a woman, after two months of us knowing each other, that she was not who I was looking for, I would feel more lonely than ever, and I now understand that that was because I did not know what love meant. I followed my loneliness, and I wanted someone to be lonely with. 
I was in my final year of school and I had to travel to Greece to complete my studies, but just before my classmates departed I became very unwell, and I missed the ship and was laid up in bed for a month. When I recovered I was told I could not graduate, but I went and pleaded with the Dean and he said if I could make it to Greece- to the school there- for three months alone, he would pass me. I packed my bags, kissed my crying mother, and left. 
I arrived to the school and discovered I was the only student. What’s more, no one spoke a word of Russian, and I could not speak English at the time. The teaching staff consisted of one Mr Christopher, an old and frustrated man with very poor hearing, and the young Mrs Stavikos, who was pretty, but sad and impossible to talk with, since even to my questions offered up in broken but intelligible Greek she would reply with a sigh or ‘no.’ 

Mikhail paused and lit a cigar. He looked to the fire, to Gurov, and resumed in a softer voice, with more sadness.

‘I fell quickly in love with Athens; I could spend hours walking the streets with all the fables and histories swirling in my mind like some childhood I never had. This love didn’t subside, but the novelty of my circumstance quickly did, and that loneliness returned to me, perhaps even more acutely. Yes; I remember now. Before it had been something very abstract and youthful, but when I was in Athens it began to mature and define itself not as mere unhappiness but as longing, though for what I did not know. That is… I wanted company, but I perceived that what I really wanted was the world to be in some different to the way it appeared to me; I believed there had been a mistake somewhere… What I did know, after some three weeks or so, was that I was not able to sustain myself under the impression of this longing, which at every waking moment demanded my full attention, my sorrow, my soul. I was losing weight, I was not sleeping….

Gurov was listening intensely. ‘Go on; how did you meet Martha?’

‘It was two weeks before I was to leave, but the thought of returning home and bringing this sadness with me… I couldn’t believe that was the right thing to do. To be sure my Greek had improved, but for the first time I perceived that after my graduation it was finally time for me to make up my own mind about things, and that scared me. No, it was more than fear… I refused; I knew that whatever life required of me- a normal life, one with hard work and a family and arguments- I did not yet possess. I had been offered a job as a clerk, but the thought of withering away for thirty years passing papers with a carrot dangled before my face was more terrifying than death itself… and it was a similar time of year, and as I sat there in my room in Athens smoking cigarette after cigarette I imagined the faces of my relatives at Christmas as they variously inquired about my future and that itself was enough to convince me that I could not go home. ‘I remember the day… all of it, that is; not in fragments, but continuously. It was grey, I had spent the morning walking the promenade and watching as fishing vessels or boats carrying tourists came and went. I felt especially wretched… in fact, sir, it’s the only time I’ve ever understood why people kill themselves. The realisation which I had not yet had, but which I suspected I was on the precipice of, was that beyond the torment was something much worse; nothingness. I knew, oh how I knew!  I knew that it would all go away if only I met a woman… I was a romantic, sir; I am. I believed in the kind of love that can save a man even from death, but I could not find it, and instead of my failure destroying my belief it only served to strengthen it, and the explanation became me… that is, I came to believe- as I sat there under the faint rain amidst the smoke and noise of holiday and merchandise- that it was either God or I that was to blame, and somehow blaming either one involved blaming both. 

Mikhail sighed and lowered his hand from his chest. The fire glittered in a tear in the corner of his eye. 

‘But yes, I was saying; my fear was that, having crossed this threshold of sadness, I would find a still more terrible silence and a silence, sir, which no one else could hear. What I mean to say is, in despair, sir, a man still hopes for redemption; in fact, it’s hope that torments him… but what after despair? Perhaps it is even possible to die from sadness and go on breathing, and how would such a man be brought back to life, sir? terrible, terrible…. The point I’m making, though, is that I believed despite everything that there was goodness and beauty and truth in our world, hiding somewhere or everywhere; it was just that it was, for some reason, hidden from me. My soul thirsted for something sweet and it knew sweetness only because it must have tasted it long ago, in childhood, or before… 
By evening nothing had improved, and though I was tired I knew I would not sleep. I looked around for somewhere to eat dinner, but it was a holiday weekend and every restaurant was full. I walked down an alleyway when I heard it, sir; the chapel. The noise was faint, soft, tremulous… it seemed to come down the alley like a body of water, and it all happened very quickly, this transformation. I followed the choir and came into the chapel and I saw Christ there. It was a glorious wooden cross… but, perhaps glorious isn’t the right word. It was old, faded, and His body was even somewhat decomposed… the wood that is… but I knelt before him, something I had never done before, and I closed my eyes and asked Him, ‘why do you want me to suffer like this?’ I must have said these words a hundred, two hundred times… I knelt, and the choir grew louder, and then it must have been the monks who came in to start the vigil. When I opened my eyes it was morning and I was soaked through. Really, to this day I don’t know what it was; water, rain, tears… I don’t remember crying, but it must have been tears. I went outside into the sun and I swear it to you, sir; lucid, alive, and happy I heard the Lord’s prayer, as if it decendeth from the clouds themselves, for the Word was all about me, and everything was singing. 
I was never sad after that. I knew what God had asked of me; I was to be a monk. I was to go somewhere remote, perhaps to the North of Russia, and to lock myself away with some other monks and to hear that music and those words and to stand or kneel for the rest of my days, for the monks are necessary, sir, they keep the fasts and they preserve what is true, because…. well, but that’s a topic for a different day.

‘And yet you didn’t become a monk?’ Gurov smiled, staring absently into his empty cup. 
‘That’s the last part of the story, sir. I didn’t become a monk, but nearly… I went home, sold everything I owned and I walked all the way north, it took me half a year. I had heard of a monastery in a small town where the song was taken particularly seriously. I arrived, and nothing had changed in my heart; I knew this was what was asked of me, and for the first time in my life I really believed I didn’t need anything else. The monks required a few days to finalise the paper work and to prepare my room, so I rented a room off a local widow and spent the days walking through the forest nearby. On the morning I was supposed to enter the order, I had the widow prepare some tea in a thermos, since the walk was long and it was very cold. I set off. After some 10 kilometres I realised I had forgotten the thermos, but it was too late to turn around. Then I saw her, sir; she came running up the track, her cheeks bride red in the cold air, the thermos held upright in her right hand…. well… 
‘Who was she?’
‘Carrying the thermos?’
‘Yes, her.’
‘It was Martha, sir, my wife.’
Gurov smiled. ‘A beautiful story.’
They sat for a few minutes without speaking. The fire coughed, the wind speculated.  
‘Well, I suppose it’s late,’ Gurov sighed, ‘I should sleep… but tomorrow… tomorrow I want to hear how you married.’
‘Very well, goodnight, sir,’ Mikhail said, taking with him the teapot.
Gurov lit a candle and paced the room. Despair, loneliness; these words had meant something to him a long time ago, after she had died. ‘Perhaps,’ he began to reflect, ‘there is something deathly about living here, the peace…’

He paced the room until the sun rose, kissed her portrait, and lowering himself into the chair where Mikhail had been sitting, made the cross over himself and fell asleep before the gentle fire. 

Виктор Васнецов. Ковёр Самолёт. 1880.