Asystole

SCENE TWO-1

SCENE TWO

The Garden of Delights

Two stray freaks, one male, one female, decided to mate. They seemed to have fused together, creating a mutant-like creature right there in the crowded Moscow street and unsettling the passers-by because it was clear almost immediately that they were suffering terribly. They were helpless and frightened, sensing how deadly their coupling had become, caught inside themselves in a way they could not understand, not completely immobilized, backing away from people in fear, writhing, beginning to bark hysterically, almost squealing, tearing their flesh, terrified by the pain. Exhausted, their legs splayed, unmoving, gasping, trembling, they were suddenly again free. They uncoupled but had not even the strength to run away. At the height of the commotion some in the street felt sympathy, but only for the moronic female; they had no time for the hapless male, which was clearly in pain, whimpering and licking a crimson thing that dangled like an umbilical cord or a protruding intestine.

He was to recall this revolting incident very soon, and with a rueful grin, while waiting to see the doctor. He associated another with it, embarrassing and then disgusting: gonorrhea at 20 years of age, and the fact that the woman he got it from was an infected b***h who gave herself and her suppurating love flower to him for one night. It was a night which bore fruit, if you saw the clap as a kind of fruit.

Now the moments stretched out long and brain-numbing. This was his second and final visit. Whatever is curable is less than eternal, ephemeral. He was swallowing antibiotics, benefiting from their steady, magical power which, day by day, was killing his sickness, this alien thing in him. He was recovering his composure after the almost animal fear that he might have syphilis. Syphilis. To feel even the word inside him by pronouncing it was frightening and extraordinary. Back then blood was not tested for a deadly virus, it was undiagnosed, and millions of these viruses were not dying, were thriving like cockroaches.

“Duchesse! Duchesse,” the girl exclaims. She seems to see nothing in her bliss, but her eyes sparkle mischievously, naughtily, and she sends the boy a glance. Her doll-like dress is backlit by the sun. It seems made of shining, sparkling light. She laughs, throwing back her little head covered in sun-kissed, golden curls, and looks high up into the clouds, as if twirling, happy, shouting “Duchesse! Duchesse!” again and again, already breathless. Her parents hold her tightly by the hand and pull her along after them. Suddenly, when they have only just met, she disappears, having been for an instant so tangible, so alive, having plunged him into a state of delight he has never known, having robbed him tauntingly of something else and left him empty. Something is beating so loudly, so emptily inside him. He longs to rush to wherever she is, with those eyes and that laughter, and to spin round and laugh with her, only with her, holding her hand and exclaiming, “Duchesse! Duchesse!”

Sexual Hygiene. The brochure has been hidden by his parents and long ago forgotten in the wall of heavy, clever books where one day he notices a kind of gap and peeps in, as if at someone’s command, and makes it his secret. Childish bedwetting? Wet dreams? Fantasies? Making them his secret. And then: naked bodies, silky white skin, vulnerable nakedness like a butterfly, a whole flock of butterflies, fluttering, throwing off their light summer dresses. With bated breath, you can peep through a gap between the planks which, like a fence, separate the girls’ changing room from the one in which they, the boys, are hiding.

A few years later, a dog-eared, blurred black-and-white photograph which, even while showing it, they hide like criminals: a naked woman. She has been clandestinely re-photographed from pornographic playing cards, easy to hide and copy on scraps of photographic paper. One of the bigger boys showed him it in the courtyard. He gave him a glimpse, then hid it away, laughing. She must have existed somewhere, that woman, probably a prostitute, at some time, in some country. She had no face, like death. One image from a deck of cards like that. She happened his way and became his first woman, because at that moment, glancing at her, he felt desire. It stayed with him, and he hid it away as something shameful among his most secret thoughts. That blurred mound of flesh teased his imagination. It was not shameful, it was frightening, as dying is frightening, except that this death was always sweet. He could not exist without its convulsions, even without knowing anything of feminine caresses or beauty.

Oh, beauty and lessons about beauty! Debauched by his own imagination, he had only to grow older to be seduced by beauty. The man who wanted to teach a schoolboy to fall in love with beauty, who gave his lessons the flowery title of “Lessons in Beauty”, who called drawing, “learning beauty”, seduced him into something else. How many beautiful women’s bodies taught him to admire their beauty! Aged fourteen, – feeling what if not the longing for love? – he read Flaubert, Balzac, Maupassant. Love beckoned, and he peeped, as if through a gap in the pages, but now he was learning and all of a sudden understood what it was he so wanted: to undress a woman. You undress a woman, you take off her clothes and, if she has let you get that far, it means she consents.

A girl in his class. He undressed her like pulling the wings off a butterfly but could do nothing, as if what he held in his hands was a log, or perhaps his hands were wooden and felt nothing, even in the places she allowed them to go. They thought love was when you take your clothes off and kiss. Can they really still have been that innocent? Were his teachers equally innocent, and all those great artists and writers who knew all about love, who tasted its fruits, but were paralysed in the face of their own knowledge?

It was not his fault, but he felt an aversion to the girl. Perhaps she too felt an aversion to him. He hated her seeing him bare, and even undressing her, touching her, and seeing her: her unfeeling, pale little corpse-like body, as if got ready for death. They put their clothes back on, bashfully, unspeaking, and ran off, pretending not to remember anything about each other. They felt they had lost, not modesty or anything like that, just that memory. Perhaps too they had lost any feeling for each other, perhaps that was what he lost in such an easy, ugly way with her, relieved by losing it of any sense of embarrassment or of his own inadequacy. And perhaps, without knowing it, he had relieved her, not physically, of course, because her body had remained intact, but spiritually, of the same thing?

At the VD clinic he found a sign which read, “Priority in this queue for WWII veterans”. His soul was maturing, swelling with tenderness, afraid, waiting, but right there in that queue an end was put to its agonies. He found it ludicrously funny, although he was still disturbed by the thought, also ludicrously funny and childish, about who and how he would have to show his shameful, diseased appendage. He was worried too that his misconduct might be reported to his college.

“Underpants down to your knees. Take hold of your penis.” Inspection of said p***s by the doctor, then questions: Who had he had s****l relations with? He did not, of course, tell them where he was studying or the woman’s name, but then, nobody tortured or even threatened him. He felt disgusted by her, but not sorry, any more than he felt sorry for those others she had infected before him or might infect after him. He was old enough to see that those who infect are more guilty than those infected, and that it was they who needed to be identified and traced. No, he had not had s*x with anybody since. Or, in fact, before. This voluntary confession put an end to further questioning from the doctor, and he escaped with only having to sign a statement which had no consequences. Under dictation he wrote, “I, so and so, had casual s****l relations by mutual consent with a woman unknown to me.”

Now everything was over, he could think back and see dispassionately what had happened. The last few weeks before his mother would be back. While she was away and he was living alone in the apartment. A different, short time to be spent. A women with whose body he fell in love.

He could have remained the invisible man, looking, studying every last mole on it. It could have been like that, or it might not have been her but someone else. But the invisible and the visible met. An elongated body, sexless, scrawny, as if it had extended but chosen not to mature. The almost child-like bones were not concealed in her round shoulders or hips which were already becoming heavier. The dress came off, leaving its pale shadow already outlined by suntan. Swarthy, pallid, flesh pink. Everything exposed, even a delicate, downy cleft on the back of her head, underneath thick black hair gathered up like a winding sheet. The body became motionless, fossilized, briefly re-animated only when, with a single swift gesture, she mopped glistening streams of sweat trickling, as if from a spring, down her forehead and abdomen.

The lessons were long over and exams were beginning. The studios were a devastated unoccupied lecture theatre in which even the linoleum had been ripped off the floor and everything removed in readiness for redecoration which had come to a halt. People came just out of interest. Anyone could pay and come in. They paid and took up their positions along the walls. The windows were wide open, but in these spacious premises there was no relief from the mugginess, and her skin became covered with sweat as they watched.

Drawing lessons. Nude models, male and female. He wandered into the college, saw the notice, and then this female being, or nude, which took its clothes off in front of an audience. He had been only too eager to pay, but could not stop feeling worried.

He would bring them home, but get nowhere. The ones he met on the street or anywhere they offered themselves, lonely, and also looking for someone, hoping.

She found him. She just turned up. The model noticed him only after several sessions, when he moved to sit directly opposite her, only pretending to be drawing. She noticed him because, if before he had hidden behind her back or off to one side, now he was staring straight at her. She stood without embarrassment on her platform in front of a class of fully dressed strangers and paid no attention to her surroundings, her eyes downcast. Even when the head of the studio unwaveringly demonstrated the mistakes and subtleties of their work on the model herself, running the blunt end of a pencil over her body, her face registered calm indifference, as if she was not even feeling the contact. She changed her pose, each session adopting whichever one the tutor wanted from her. After several hours of remaining motionless, at the end of the session she came to life, covered herself with her arms, and retreated behind a plywood partition. The group dispersed, and some who knew each other discussed their drawings, smoked and hung about because there was nothing to do when they got back to their floors in the hostel. She re-appeared, darted towards the stairs evidently in a hurry to get away, but suddenly came over, avidly asking someone for a cigarette. Someone who seemed to know her.

He heard her voice, rather coarse and sounding unwell. She glanced in his direction and said meaningfully, with a nod towards his drawings, “Want to let me see?” She puffed doggedly, greedily, at her cigarette, blowing the cigarette smoke away from his work, peering intently at the drawing before quickly exhaling. “Good.” Behind her someone laughed. Perhaps the solemnity of the pronouncement amused them, or they just found her comical.