A reader followed up on my mention of “Gusev” and read the Richard Pevear/Larissa Volokhonsky translation in Stories. He writes:
“This line from the story caught my attention: `Life can't be repeated, it must be cherished.’ Don't do this enough.”
The honest among us would agree. A well-nursed gift for grievance makes cherishing anything difficult. My student has a gastrostomy, a surgical opening into her stomach. On her abdomen is a feeding button. Twice each school day I open the button and attach a feeding tube and syringe, and into it I pour the contents of a ten-ounce can of formula and four ounces of water. The procedure takes about fifteen minutes. Unlike some of the kids, my student, who cannot speak, sits quietly and doesn’t fidget. She plays with a button or zipper on her sweater, worrying it with thumbs and index fingers.
Three others kids in the room are also tube-fed but take no solid food. Most mornings my student eats a half-cup of yogurt or applesauce, which I feed her with a spoon. She doesn’t chew, and swallows with difficulty. She weighs eighty-three pounds and is almost nineteen years old.
In “Gusev,” the title character is an orderly returning aboard a ship to Russia after service in the Far East. Gusev, like Chekhov, is sick with consumption. Most of the story consists of his conversations in the ship’s infirmary with another soldier, Pavel Ivanych, and his increasingly hallucinatory visions of life at home. Pavel Ivanych angrily complains about everything. Gusev is good-natured, optimistic, big-hearted. When Pavel Ivanych dies, a soldier asks Gusev, “Will God rest his soul or not?” Gusev answers:
“He will…he suffered long. And another thing, he was from the clerical estate, and priests have big families. They’ll pray for him.”
When told he is soon to die Gusev feels “eerie” and suffers from “some sort of yearning.” He is not frightened but dismayed. Gusev likens his state of mind to “sitting in a dark forest.” Chekhov writes:
“He dreams that they have just taken the bread out of the oven in the barracks, and he gets into the oven and has a steambath, lashing himself with birch branches. He sleeps for two days, and on the third day two sailors come from topside and carry him out of the sick bay.”
Gusev’s body is sewn into a canvas sack weighted with iron bars, and slid overboard off a plank. A shark rips open the sack. Here is Chekhov’s final paragraph, one of the loveliest and most mysterious I know:
“And up above just then, on the side where the sun goes down, clouds are massing; one cloud resembles a triumphal arch, another a lion, a third a pair of scissors…A broad green shaft comes from behind the clouds and stretches to the very middle of the sky; shortly afterwards a violet shaft lies next to it, then a golden one, then a pink one…The sky turns a soft lilac. Seeing this magnificent, enchanting sky, the ocean frowns at first, but soon itself takes on such tender, joyful, passionate colors as human tongue can hardly name.”
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5 comments:
Patrick,
That final paragraph is lovely and mysterious indeed. It immediately called to mind this hauntingly similar paragraph of Nabokov's, from "Speak, Memory":
"I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle bell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form. It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that . . . occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a family of serene clouds in miniature, an accumulation of brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me."
I know it's not really the same but I tend to bracket Gusev in my mind with Tolstoy's Three Hermits--the one that begins with "A bishop was sailing from Archangel to the Solovétsk Monastery..." Something about the way each of them uses the ocean, I suppose.
Chekhov is fond of these cloud pictures. The final paragraph of Gusev reminds me of the following paragraph from his story The Beauties (Constance Garnett translation):
'I am ready to swear that Masha –or, as her father called her, Mashya- was a real beauty, but I don’t know how to prove it. It sometimes happens that clouds are huddled together in disorder on the horizon, and the sun hiding behind them colours them and the sky with tints of every possible shade – crimson, orange, lilac, muddy pink; one cloud is like a monk, another like a fish, a third like a Turk in a turban. The glow of sunset enveloping a third of the sky gleams on the cross on the church, flashes on the windows of the manor house, is reflected in the river and the puddles, quivers on the trees; far, far away against the background of the sunset, a flock of wild ducks is flying homewards… And the boy herding the cows, and the surveyor driving in his chaise over the dam, and the gentleman out for a walk, all gaze at the sunset, and every one of them thinks it terribly beautiful, but no one knows or can say in what its beauty lies.'
"Twice each school day I open the button and attach a feeding tube and syringe, and into it I pour the contents of a ten-ounce can of formula and four ounces of water."
You're a good man, Kurp.
breve et irreparabile
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