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© Copyright Mikhail Veller
© Copyright Translated by Eric Gillan (keeder()gmail.com)
1-15-2002
Origin: "Гуру"
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"Your ignorance is boundless, and not even amusing..."
This was the first sentence I heard from him - the slide-tackle to my
fate that forever changed its course.
But, to hell with the intimate details.
Everything I am, I owe to him. Everything.
It is too late now to know who he really was. He liked being mystical.
Very much.
I would come to his doghouse of an apartment with a bottle of port and
a hunk of salami, or a loaf of bread, or a package of dumplings, or a carton
of cigarettes. And, before my finger touched the doorbell, the confident,
successful, well-dressed educated young man turned into something I really
was - a young pup. He was a master who, from the mountain peaks of
enlightenment, had scorned the trades. He was a sage. I - a frantic and
arrogant brat.

He hated order, clothes, reputation and public opinion. He hated money,
but he hated conceited poverty even more. Good and evil didn't exist: he
belonged to the caste of hunters of the truth. He shunned the farce of
everyday news and sluiced for truth's precious grains; he panned for it like
a prospector.
Like a careless farmer, he scattered the golden sands of his truths by
the handfuls, paying with it for everything.
His currency had limited circulation and his life could be called a
history of struggle if it weren't a history of beatings. He was hardened and
scarred, like a saxaul tree in the desert.
Flinging open the door, he squinted his farsighted eyes with valor and
contempt for me and, through me, for the outside world. His scorn leveled
the scales of his view of life: in the other cup rested his love rejected by
the world. I understood it much later than expected.

He took my gifts like one would take groceries from the neighbor's boy
who was sent to the store while the housekeeper was sick. Every time I was
afraid that he would give me a tip - I wouldn't know how to behave if he
did.
Deliberate with his old man's squeamishness, he silently pointed his
finger at the coat rack and then, at the door to his room. That was my
invitation.
In his room, he pointed in the same way at the curio cabinet the age of
Noah's ark and a chair. I took out the wine glasses and sat down.
He tossed down the port, lit a cigarette and in the formless mass of an
old man's face appeared discrete features - hard and unhappy. He was one of
those who never quit and kept going until the end. But, since everything
alive is forever changing, he, with his unstoppable momentum, went too far
and ended up empty-handed. But in that emptiness, he possessed more than
those who perceptively followed every fluctuation of the living world. He
remained with nothing - but with the very essence of reality, gripped and
preserved by his caustic consciousness; and in his consciousness, it stayed
forever undistorted.

"My boy," he always started this way. "My boy", he would say, and the
air, vibrating with his voice, stretched like a membrane about to explode
under the unavoidable and powerful pressure of his internally concentrated
thoughts, rapidly expanding, turning into words, like gun powder turns into
gas and, expelling the projectile out the barrel, with one tight shockwave
explodes the air.
"My boy", he crowed angrily, now animated, with his two eyes stabbing
me like two fingers, "did you happen to read some of this American scribe
named Edgar Allen Poe? Accidentally, perhaps?"
I answered yes, not afraid of the ambush, but certain that I will end
up in the puddle of mud anyway, from which I will be lifted by the scruff of
my neck, only to be dipped into it again.
"So, then, my boy," he continued, and from a barely perceptible gesture
I knew to pour more into his glass. He drank, stood up and didn't look at me
again as he spoke. I was the outside world. He consulted the world. No more,
no less.
"All grief comes from ignorance," he said. "And ignorance - from lack
of respect for your mind. From happiness of being a sheep in a herd.
Ignorance. Dishonesty. Stupidity. Subservience. Cowardice. The five
things, each one able to destroy creativity. Honesty, intelligence,
knowledge, independence and courage - these are the things you must develop
to the greatest extent, if you want to write, my boy. Those honored by their
contemporaries are not writers. Edgar Allen Poe is a writer, my boy," and he
placed his hand on the spine of the book as if it were the shoulder of E.A.
Poe. He was acting, but when I replayed these talks in my head later, I
found nothing abnormal in his acting. Maybe, we act every time we stray from
the spontaneity of expression.
"About honesty," his voice lowered and turned hoarse, hissing like a
worn out stylus of a turntable, dulled by the unbearable energy of the
recording - the energy mixed with the aggregate of knowledge, suffering and
anger. "You must be completely aware of your own motives. Your true
feelings. Don't be afraid
to see a monster in yourself. Be afraid of being a monster, and not
knowing
it. And don't think that others are better than you. They're just like
you! Don't be deluded and don't be offended.
Then, you will understand that every man possesses everything. All the
feelings and motives, the sacred and the evil."
His finger was a barrel in a firing squad aiming for the bridge of my
nose. I pressed my back into the chair and sweated. "These are words from
the primer. You are ignorant, but I don't fault you for that. You should
have known this at seventeen, even if you couldn't understand it. But you
are twenty four! What were you doing in that college of yours, you
feeble-minded amateur?" Hot drops of perspiration left my armpits and rolled
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