Asystole

SCENE ONE-4

When he tried to remember what his mother was like, it was always the same incident came to mind. It was screened silently in front of his eyes for many years. The gas ring was burning in the kitchen. Unable or unwilling to save or store anything, whenever she found there were no matches in the house, she would light her cigarette from it, at the risk of setting her hair on fire. The only problem was, having used her last match to light it, she could not allow the life-saving blue flame to go out. It had to be left to burn eternally. It gave her a light, and meant the apartment stayed warm all through the winter. The burner had a steady, even hum, like a perpetual motion machine she had invented herself, after which she had no need to rely on other people. She would come home from work at the institute, where she tidied up the nonsense usual in research papers approved for publication. All that awaited her was an old sagging chair in the kitchen but, seating herself in it as if on a throne, forgetting time, she would kipper herself with her favourite Java, or the more manly Pegasus, cigarettes. She would puff away, reading some dog-eared novel which smelled of the local library. It looked, though, as if she was sitting there silently with the book in her hands, not looking up but listening by the hour to the hum of the gas ring.

He was a witness to this, and suffered. He was hoping his mother would speak to him, as if she had come back and was now the same person again. That was why he shared his secrets with her while she pointlessly reduced cigarette after cigarette to ash, waving them in her hand like so many conductor’s batons, commanding his soul, enveloping everything they talked about, sometimes until late into the night, in whirling smoke which eventually made his head spin.

Whether he became wiser or merely drugged, he suddenly saw dispassionately a beautiful, lonely woman who had forgotten everything except herself. In this state of abstraction, she continued to address spirited monologues about herself to an unknown audience, or retreated into equally pointless conjectures about the future, only not her own but of all mankind. She would talk about the universe, the cosmos, eternity, and more of the sort, purely in order not to be silent. The words she so lightly exhaled were her air. She seemed able to talk without pausing for breath. It brought her relief and intoxicated her. Simultaneously, she was intoxicating herself with Bulgarian Riesling, which she invariably bought on her way home from work. She would hide the bottle behind her chair and never let him see she was drunk, trying to behave nonchalantly. Something false came into her voice, though. Her bright, stern expression dimmed and sagged and she began to look stupid.

She decided she needed to feed her son, but he snapped at her that he was not hungry and went off to hide in his room, feeling the same gnawing hunger he had experienced at his father’s funeral when he had refused to touch the food. She called again and again from the kitchen that his dinner was ready, stubbornly, plaintively, with long, wordless pauses full of expectation. He made no reply, wanting to upset her, not knowing why, and feeling a burning sense of shame.

Perhaps no longer able to endure her loneliness, or trying to close her eyes to the fact that her son no longer needed her to care for him, she silently brought the plate of food to his room and stood there, imperturbably holding out her unwanted gift as if hypnotized. When this elicited no response, she came to life, leaned down, and suddenly brought the plate almost to his face, her silence eloquent, looking sweetly into his eyes as if coaxing a small child.

“Mum, why do you drink so much?”

“I like dry wine. It helps me relax.”

“I can do everything for you.”

“Don’t be silly.”

She straightened up and, with a haughty expression, left her son’s room. Victory would only come at a price. But how much more of this would he have to take? What was the point of it all? Now she was doing something, but not going to bed. The house was suddenly in the middle of some military-style activity. Floors were being washed. She had to feed her son. She had to clean the apartment. His heart was pounding in his chest and he could hear a deep, faraway echo, “Empty, Empty.”

He called out, “Mum!” No response. He could hear the mop rammed into the bucket, squelching over the floor, lifted, dunked in the bucket again.

“Mum, I love you!” Silence. “Mum, Mum!” Her voice completely calm, she returns herself to the world. “I love you too, my son!”

His heart dissolves in pity, for himself. He is hungry. His dinner is still warm, only there is that unbreachable silence, and later the avalanche of words is sent down from such a height, sweeping his pathetic little soul away, and in his ears there rings and makes him tremble as if in the presence of a deity: “I enjoy solitude! I ... I ... I ...”

This deity he, its human creation, once felt within himself and wanted jealously to share it with no one, even though it was not his to hoard. The idea that it could belong to anyone else, or give birth to anyone else and then take care of them the way it cared for him, and love them, instilled a great fear in him which came from some dark place.

His father returned, bringing with him a smell of strength, heavy, sour, and clinging. A smell of eau de Cologne, of tobacco and sweat. A strange, hostile smell, and a happy, smiling face with prickly bristles when he hugged him and kissed him awkwardly on the cheek. His home welcomed its master with tranquil fidelity. And then the room where his parents hid themselves away became in his mind dangerous, or at least out of bounds. A man was in a hurry to unwind. He luxuriated in the bathroom, delighted in the home cooking, was happy and content to get noisily back into everyday life, and his voice sounded very loud. He handed out gifts, caught up on his sleep, invited friends round because he felt like partying, and every time he returned from Murmansk or Vladivostok was celebrated as if he would never leave again, only he did, as if he had only dropped in on his family in transit. They did not talk about him. The place felt empty, but after a day had passed and then another, they got used to life without him, which meant that when the explorer of the ocean depths did return from his expeditions, they had an uneasy feeling that a stranger had moved in, and could not wait for him to leave again. If they did not think about him while he was away, that meant he was alive and well. Their silence developed into a sense of tranquillity, which immersed them again in sluggishly passing tedium. Even when his father was not away for long, the absence weighed on his mother and she had to force herself not to think about him. He himself lacked the patience to remember his father.

The father brought his son a gift of brittle, almost transparent, mummified ocean fish, set forever in their mysterious monstrousness; spidery skeletons of crabs; shells which sounded cavernous if you held them to your ear; sculpted corals; and stars brought up from the ocean depths. You might have thought he was trying to make amends by bringing these exotic offerings, but there was some reason why he wanted to pass them on so deliberately to his son, like a message. What surprised and scared him was that even those bug-eyed freaks which, his father told him, had poisonous needles in their fins, were biding their time, as if they might some day come back to life to tell him something important that his father was not mentioning. Something you could touch even after his death. Something taken from the bottom of the sea. All that remained of him.

She said, “Your father is no longer with us,” but when, only a few days later at the cemetery the boy was brought to the grave, he burst into tears, frightened by his new discovery. His father was still with them. He was right there, now. All that separated them was that he could not be seen or heard. It was not grief, but resentment that his father no longer loved him. He felt betrayed by this man who had deceived him, but also by his mother and everybody else: his Uncle Seva, the people still huddled in a close circle and whom he despised from that moment. Only a very few people gathered for the Wake, to see his father off on his journey to nowhere. He hid in the wardrobe which smelled of his father. The smell now was of a different, unfamiliar power which enveloped and sheltered him, although it seemed far away, barely discernible, and the clothes in the wardrobe were limp on their hangers.

No one came looking for him. He had been forgotten.

The guests departed until there was only Uncle Seva left. His mother was washing dishes, unsteady on her feet. Suddenly a plate shattered. It had slipped out of her hand, and his uncle laughed out loud. He peered out of the darkness as if through an echoing tube, at the end of which he saw a bright, motionless light and two dark, lonely, ugly figures. He got into his bed and was afraid to fall asleep on his own in the dark room, unable to hear anyone’s voices. People do not live forever, so the same thing would happen to him. Some day he would fall asleep and not wake up, and they would bury him in the ground. For him, this fear was always a fear of losing his mother, losing the physical contact with her, and it went back to an anxiety he had felt as a little child. Where was she? What had happened to her? But when he thought about his mother, when he saw her, or even when he did not see or think about her, she lived somewhere inside him, as physically as the beating of his heart. Everything that had happened to her before he was born did not exist for him, as if they had both been born on the same day. He felt that every second since he was born he had been sending out a pulse to her and receiving the echo back, reassuring, but only briefly, until the same pulse went out again: “Mum! ... Mum! ...”

As a child he would go to sleep clutching her hair, binding himself to her tightly. He would cry out to her if he did not fall asleep immediately, and then found he could not go out into the darkness of sleep without her. She had trained him to that, but suddenly either no longer wished to or had not the strength to hear him calling, get out of bed and come through to him. He called into the darkness louder and louder, and it became more and more frightening and unbearable. The walls of the room moved in closer, as if he was in the bottom of a well. Now he was wailing, howling, throwing back his head, shrieking to some place above him, into a void. Then the door was opened, and in the doorway the half-asleep boy saw a big, strong shadow. He believed he was seeing his father, because this was his home. A sense of peace, weakness, and warmth flowed over him and he was still, no longer calling, feeling he was in his father’s care. The figure uttered not a word but silently sat down beside the bed and took his small hand in its big one. The boy’s tear-filled eyes could not really see his face in the dark, but detected his calm breathing, and felt that his father was looking at him in the half-light in which you see only the outlines of things, as if they were under dust covers. He went to sleep, and in the morning his mother said it was a dream.

He should have remembered, not that strange dream but his father. When he was older, he realized he was the only one who had not said good-bye to him in his coffin. He could not even remember the day, as if someone had erased it from his memory. They had had to take him back to the dark apartment after the funeral, stuffy because of all the people in it. He would have believed them if they had told him his father had just gone on a very, very long expedition. Why did nobody lie to him? His mother had decided everything, and later could not explain why she had chosen to orphan him not a year, not even a month later. His father’s death became a secret, but a different kind of secret, and those meetings, always on the same day in summer at the place where the earth kept him hidden, not giving him back, became his expectation of a miracle, and then a doomed, senseless attempt to prolong that expectation. Death robbed her of a husband, but did it make it any easier for her to take away his father, leaving him without hope? Every year, on that same day, he was taken to the cemetery. This last place of refuge, which looked like a storehouse, only made the child’s misery more painful and bewildering. One day it was replaced by horror and dismay at the answer to a teenager’s question, when it was time for him to understand how this father had died.

He died in the Metro.

They had taken him straight from some station to the mortuary and, after establishing his identity, informed the next of kin. It was as if some insect had been crawling or buzzing around, then fallen down and lain still. Instantly. In Moscow. In the place where the city hides itself underground, and millions of people who inhabit it are transported in all directions through tunnels, and know nothing at all about each other, or about the fact that someone’s life has just been cut short.

This became so important because he went down there every day himself, into the Metro, making journeys, squeezing into carriages, getting in, getting out, changing from one line to another. A vast dead underworld. One day he was struck by the sight of a boy with a small white bread bun turning instantly into a confident adult through his impulse to help an elderly woman by giving up his seat to her. The sight of that white bun in the hands of a child made such an impression. It was like goodness itself, in a metro carriage. From that day onwards he could counter all the dark imaginings and nightmares in his mind with that boy and his bread bun. Because he had been so fearless?

The marble-clad stations proclaimed the period they belonged to. It had happened at a station, but which? He tried imagining, pretending. He believed he should be able to sense it. How could he not know? It was a torture to know nothing about the life or the death of his father. He tried so hard one time, but had eventually to accept that the woman who had given him life remembered nothing. She was capable of forgetting where her husband had been going, why he had been going anywhere that day. Sometimes he felt, to his horror, that his father’s death had liberated him. But liberated him to do what? Perhaps one day the phone would ring.

“Hello, how is life treating you?”

“Who is speaking?”

“Come off it! How’s your mother?”

“What do you mean? Who are you calling?”

The dialling tone. The call is over. A minute passes, and another. The phone is silent. Of course it is, because the whole thing is impossible.

Then he smiles that odd smile of his, when it suddenly occurs to him that anything is possible, even the impossible. He seems to hear himself say firmly,

“Maybe. May be.”