In the Dim Room

So many bounds in the world; only our desires are bondless. As a mature human and an observant globe-trotter, I've had a chance more than once to learn of that.

After the good swim in the cold waters of the Lake Laas, in my room again and alone, I felt like getting under a blanket or two to get warm, which I did and presently fell asleep. After noon. Why not? The countryside air; the quietude; my current idleness; the substantial meal; in addition, my young partner in the quest with his bad leg and latest wound on his forehead was on bed rest, in his room, for several hours at least, safe but weak, because of his meds. Le repos -- c'est Dieu. Repose is God. So, I fell asleep.

My sleep was refreshing, with only one dream, rather short. In my sleep, in some extraordinary way, I knew the Paulovsk Palace getting covered by the Peterhof Palace (suburbs of St Petersburg), and I saw on some new squares, statues descend from their pedestals, and some humans get on the pedestals instead of the statues. Then, as the marble got more and more animated, the humans' bodies got whiter and whiter, and eventually, got frozen. Awakening, I remembered the dream, not taking it seriously. Merely, it looked strangely consonant to the ranting recently heard from the strange rich man of the name of Aboleo on the night when his name was unknown to me.

The old cuckoo-clock on the wall let me know that I had been sleeping for quarter at most; indeed, my sleep by day could not be long, in the room with curtains so thin that the light shone through, which was rather unusual, in Lesyinesmagi Manor Estate, this old wooden house full of old heavy furniture and things du temps du roi Dagobert. The sunshine seemed the reason why the dun tapestry, on the wall behind the bed's footboard, therefore before my eyes, was so faded. In the picture, Cleopatra with an asp on her breast dimly reminded of Mme Recamier. In a modern day shocker, this Cleopatra should visit me, every nigh, in my dreams first, then in reality. Why on earth?

The dining-room, with the heavy blue velvet curtains and white silk flounces seen underneath, was pleasantly shady. I told to serve tea for me, but remembering that the natives had coffee at any time of a day, I said that I meant coffee.

Like it was several hours before, I felt unfit to see the box with the topi sent by an unknown hand to Clem's address, though I realized that the hat box and the head-dress should be examined once again, more attentively. Detesting the very thought of doing that, I switched to thoughts of something more pleasant.

Hippolite was at home, in his nursery or class-room, alone or with his teacher; the youngest of my cousins could be anywhere in the big building of his home manor house, even in the kitchen. Kitchen. With hindsight, the kitchen in my home Kernstadt Castle Estate was like a theatre and auditory, sometimes, to me, little boy, and it was a place where one could have fun for one's benefit. I remember, a boy of 7, I heard distant rumours about sending me to school, a year later, and I got upset, ever so much, and my weeping was my first voiced attitude towards the systematic education. Offended by my misunderstanding the world, my mother dryly remarked that in case if I kept on weeping, she would apprentice me to our gardener Vaslav. Alas, the seed of her sermons fell into a wrong soil: hearing of the promised work in the garden, I got gladdened, and for the next two or three months I lived in a state of anticipation of the apprenticeship. I loved the manner our gardener Vaslav looked and talked. (It must be said that my attitude towards adults was rigorous. Their exterior alone was not enough for me. For instance, I didn't understand why people had portraits of Leo Tolstoy at home, the frowning man with the big fearsome beard, which one could see in one's sleep. Take another case, when my parent's guest told them about a machine, which he invented and which might be funny, because it was said lighter than the air. Who ever had a machine that could be blown away? Adult often sounded strange.) The middle-aged man Vaslav seemed an old man to me. Simple and tough, with his hoarse voice, he seemed a mage ruling lives of the plants. Although his suntan and dark curly hair made him look like a gipsy, but he was said to be native, and I really respecting him, putting him on an unattainable height for his manner of spitting through his teeth. The manner suggested him as a stager, distinguishing from a number of other servants. His young fan, I had been trying to spit through my teeth, for a week or so, but failed, and I asked Vaslav to teach me. The fee was a big kipper and French loaf, which I asked at our kitchen. At the same time, by the age 8, I had become an avid reader, with the books of choice sounding rather special. I despised fairytales because I scarcely could be convinced in the possibility that hares could talk of weather and a human could get out of boiling water, being sound in life and limb or getting yet prettier. I could see hares on the kitchen table, seasonably, twice a week, I knew that only a hare's forepart was eatable and its hinder part was good for a soup for dogs. The other kind of literature attracted my adolescent mind: the books which I could steal from the library. Favourite authors: Maupassant, Schopenhauer, Schiller. The more incomprehensible a book for my tender age, the more it attracted my imagination, twisting it, perhaps, subsequently, as some doctors could say. It looks like this peculiarity remains with me: sometimes, seeing thick old volumes about history of fine arts, memoires, histories of illnesses, and mathematic studies, I feel like binding them up and giving as a birthday gift to people who I detest. At the age, I had my first earnings in the way, which today seems so dubious, but I took it easier then. This is how it came about.

I slithered through the door, coming to my cousin, the girl two year older, at the hour when she was at her desk and doing a sum; I carefully subsided on the carpet and began playing so noisy that the good-tempered girl lost her temper, "Go away! You disturb me!"

"I won't go!"

"I'll tell your mama..."

"And I'll say that you beat me up when driving away!"

Her big blue eyes showed a helpless indignation.

She kept silence, and it was the right moment for my offer, "Give me 5 kopek, and then I shall go away."

She rummaged in her pockets, searched among her books, and eventually I got the required coin. The money I got from my male cousin in the form of compensation for my leaving him alone when he was going out to take the air, from my mother for giving my word to keep distance from the large copper preserving pan full of boiling jam, and from the kind old neighbour for my unconditional refusal to throw stones onto his bee-houses. It must be said that in the time of my childhood, 1 kopek could buy 3 big sugarplums or a pocket of sunflower seeds, and 2 kopeks could buy half-pound apples. If we take into consideration the fact that the shop-assistants were cheerful and talkative, little caring about the topfull bags of prunes, which fruits were so easy to be placed in one's bosom, the agitation of a boy who earned 2 or 5 kopeks was quite intelligible. (That night, in my sleep I saw a wolf, fearsome not in the least, and the wolf asked for a muffineer.) Oh childhood! The measure of our soul's deepness! But wait… this reminiscence or stream of consciousness sounds like a beginning of an autobiography. Alas, this writer is not an inventor of the electric light bulb or a special steam corkscrew or an auto-mobile presse-papiers and I never did any sensational archaeological discoveries. In each of the mentioned cases, the magazines' Miscellanies would have begun gossiping about me a long ago, my portraits would be generally known, and wherever I went I would be greeted by people unknown to me. It's fearsome to die with no biography, but nothing joyous is in death of a human with a complete biography as well; that's why there is a quantum of solace like in case of a man who forgot his suitcase at a boarding house and later when sitting in his compartment he remembered that he had forgotten to pay for 7 weeks of the full board and lodging. My reminiscence is not an opening of autobiography, since this writer's intention is not setting his own image in a light favourable so much that his archenemies feel like fading into nothingness and begin bemoaning their own unjust attitude towards him -- no, it's but reminiscence and digression, like that about the Borsky Estate and the time, when this writer was the youngest of the children on visit and in some extraordinary way, Eulampia Grimm, now Borsky, became my unvarying partner in play -- in other words, it's one of reminiscences when a writer narrates in the first person solely because telling about oneself in the third person is too boring and offensive.

Yet less this "reminiscence or stream of consciousness" is indented to sound apologetic or my attempt to make a psychological self-portrait or a confession of a homosexual man, since I have stopped regarding myself as a freak of nature long before my love affair with the young lawyer from St Petersburg of the name of Felix Allenstein-Braniewsky, who told me about the most interesting fact that the same sex relationship was a sort of tradition in the midst of students of the law department in St Petersburg. By the by, the information about the Russian law department students excludes the rumour about suicide as an explanation of the untimely death of our great composer Tchaikovsky in virtue of the fact that the man was surrounded by his people his entire adult life, if you know what I mean, and he never had a reason to feel inferior or misfit. No, the most ordinary and horrible case of cholera snatched the composer away from us, which conclusion cannot make our sorrow less, of course not.

So, when I was aged 6, I was first taken for visits, and since that time, the next period in my life began, worth telling about, but again, I've remembered that I'm not the electric light bulb's inventor and my biography cannot be so interesting… Oh human bondage!

Then, my wandering thoughts returned to Hippolite, and I remembered that I never had been in the boy's room. Staying in the house so long, I little knew of the boy, never seeing his class-room or his bookshelf. He's my young relative, after all. So, in the drawing-room, alone, I decided to visit the boy's room, right after taking a cup of coffee with cream.

I did it openly, asking a manservant to show me a way to the nursery.

"Young boy, you are a book among the books.

You are a scroll, sealed and uncovered.

Between and in the lines,

a human's mind is overfilled with meditations.

Each instant crazy in the stream of words

in the cascade of pages.

You are a boy, you are a poison

which burns, like flames on our lips and tongue.

But we, who drink the flame, constrain the cry

and praise the torment.

You are a boy and you are in the right.

Crown-bearing by birth, you are a godlike image

on our skin

that flies above the chasm.

For you, we carry on millstones, move mountains

and invent…" (This unfinished poem is dedicated to the other boy, my Julian, who's far away, in Oxford, as my observant reader remembers.)

As for my youngest cousin Hippolite, like I said on the day of my arrival, on the day of my visit his room, I could say that despite the fact that he's nice-looking, despite the fact that I made his brother Clement my boyfriend in the same tender age, the youngster scarcely could be my aim or... a subject for my playful thoughts… under the circumstances.

The boy was not at his. The four colour lithograph of the elephant Jumbo picturing children riding on Jumbo's back, in the zoo, on the wall of the nursery, could not tell much exciting to me. Some toys for boys. No no Jumeau dolls. Examining the boy's bookshelf, I learned that he was a fan of Sherlock Holmes. Perfectly natural for his age. "The Sea-Raiders" and several books more were bookended. "Pepper and Salt, or Seasoning for Young Folk" by Howard Pyle, "Otto of the Silver Hand"... nice.

The bookends of wood looked curious: about 6 inches in height and 6 inches in diameter, each bookend had a white ceramic cat in front of a wood framed mirror. Nice. Beside the slate and furniture, there was a looking-glass, which was a useful thing like all the rest, and it could be called usual but for the white bisque frame showing two winged cupids on top, and golden mussels and pink roses on sides. Looking at his mother's photo in the white bisque frame with the painted moulding in shape of pink roses and soft-green leaves, I thought that if all this was a display of the boy's taste, then yes, it's rather unusual. Although some males had effeminate tastes, but the frames beat everything and… it's so hoping for a hunter like me, in case if... in case if Hippolite were a boy and not a supernatural entity. Besides, there was a possibility that the frames displayed somebody else's taste and not his. Draw not your bow till your arrow is fixed. "It's to the puzzle complete," I thought to myself in conclusion, as a pendent ending.

I left a message, which said, by the way, "…I like your bookends. When I was a boy I had bookends in shape of… big old brass acorns."

In the drawing-room, again, I told to bring me more coffee, and I took a magazine from the top of a table.

A series of small pictures, an illustrated instruction entitled "Do You Know How to Kiss a Girl? Then Learn!" The captions for each of the pictures said --

Stand facing her.

Do not tell her your intentions.

Do not ask permission to kiss her.

Look dreamily into her eyes.

You may hold her right hand in your right hand, if you wish.

It is well to sigh a couple of times about this stage of the game.

Whisper softly that your rosebud lips remind you of cupid's bow.

She will probably drop her eyes and blush when you say that.

Place the fingers of your left hand under her chin and tilt back her head slightly.

Draw her gently towards you.

Do not hurry.

Gaze deeply at the love-light which slumber in her eyes.

Sigh once more.

Incline your head towards hers until your lips -- but wait!

Do not kiss her until you know that she uses Listerated Pepsin Gum, the only antiseptic gum in the world, the only chewing gum that makes it safe to kiss.

If she is a Listerated Pepsin Gum girl, kiss her.

Sic. The playful instruction proved to be a mere advertisement. Perhaps, my manner of organizing thoughts seems strange, but all I wanted when reading and doing all this was a little bit of distraction.

I reached for a plum oily fritter on the plate which the manservant brought. The mail was often late here, and today, on the top of the table, the most recent printed material was last day issues. In the Humour Section of Evening Brumburg, I saw the familiar pen-name "L'Endelel" --

"Knight-Errantry"

To the battle, he went bravely, with his helmet visor up, but in a week, his legs still were sticking out from the roadside ditch, frightening passersby.

(the end)

Only the small joke, today. Suggestive, as usual, but oddish. However, the warm fritters with honeysuckle jam were so tasty that I forgot of the opus from my favourite "brand". While having the coffee with cream and fritters, I thought of one woman, but someone came in the room.

It was Clem. And the woman in my mind was the ex-teacher, bride of Doctor Talvik of the name of Mlle Delamarche, who was said to look 25 younger for her age.

The need to see the woman was obvious. Not sure, but there could be some connection to the case of Clem's missing mother; that day, at fritters, it seemed to me that the mysterious beauty, who seemed to strike everyone's imagination, and Clem's mother Leticia could have something in common except for their mature age and sex. In the meantime, dishevelled and with the white bondage over his forehead, wearing his warm and warm-coloured dressing gown, Clem looked both sleepy and excited.

After the doctor's proper care about his wound, he was forbidden to take alcohol -- perhaps, it was a reason of his crazy look. Straddling in the middle of the room, he announced, "I've got an idea."

"All right. Shoot!" I said.

"I have to go to the monastery."

"Which one?"

"The Orthodox Monastery, which my father used to visit."

"But why?" I said.

"To see his confessor."

"Your late father used to go there to see his confessor. But why should you go there?"

"In my sleep I saw myself going there."

"Aha! Do you believe you share your younger brother's ability to see prophetic dreams? However, it's quite possible. Meaning the ability. It could be inherited."

He joined me on the sofa, where I was sitting at the small table with the coffeepot, cup and plate. He seemed to move rather lightly, which suggested that his sleep was as refreshing as mine and that he might not have concussion of the brain as a result of his latest fall. He said, "Not sure. It all looked so dim in my dream. Nothing distinct or clear. No matter. Oscar, we should go there to ask my father's confessor. Maybe, he could give a piece of advice. Or a piece of information. Maybe, he knows where there is my mother."

At that instant Clem's new thought seemed quite sane to me. To visit the monastery, where his late father used to go, and to see the confessor. What if Leticia left for the Monastery? Really, if she wanted to hide in a cloister, the Orthodox Monastery, where they happened to see her, could be a better choice than that of her own confessor, who we could visit first of all, in search of her, and whose place was the most probable shelter. Virtually, I thought to myself, we should begin our quest by visiting the two places, which could be called important in life of any human, even in our time of technological progress. But Leticia was not a religious woman, and she could rather ignore her native cleric, preferring the other, more remote shelter. I said, "Where is it?"

"In Pskovsk."

I whistled. A long distance from the Estate. To reach the Monastery, we should leave Nyomanland and not this civil parish alone. Clem began telling about his dream.

Before falling asleep he remembered of his mother's confessor. Remembering of the cleric, he fell asleep, and in his sleep he was told to go to find his late father's confessor. Having the second cup of black coffee and two sweet cakes more, I realized that we should go to the Monastery indeed. For inquiry, of course, and not for a change or for sport. "All right," I said to Clem, who sipped cranberry mors from his topfull glass, which was the old servant's care, "Remember me its name."

"The Monastery of St Sergius. "

"St Sergius. I never happened to be in the part of the world... We should visit her confessor, on our way. Just in case."

"All right!"

"And your dream gives a hint at our blunder. Meaning, we should go to ask her confessor, first of all."

"Indeed..."

"Blunderers."

"But you know, Oscar, how little our family cares for anything religious... And my mother was... she is a poet. In a way."

"I know." My aunt Leticia was Roman Catholic; her late husband, Clem's late father, was Orthodox Christian, and this religious confusion in their family used to be a subject for persiflage, at most. Nobody in the family took it seriously or felt concerned too much. "And yet, we shall do it. We'll visit her confessor, just in case."

"As far as he remembered, my father happened to visit the Monastery of St Sergius."

I said, "It's a sign. We are going to the Monastery."

"Oh yes... We should go there, even if my father's confessor won't tell anything important to us. Even if he knows much, he may not tell anything to us. He cannot. Not entitled."

"I know. Take your revolver with you, we shall place it to the confessor's forehead and demand to answer all questions."

"Rubbish!"

"Not exactly. Take your revolver with you, anyway. If not for the confessor, then for anybody else it will be of use, on our way."

Clem shrugged shoulders. "All right."

"Do you know what I think about? The hat box muts be placed somewhere. Do you remember?"

When Hippolite and I discussed the question, neither he nor I knew a proper place for the hat box, which I hated and which nobody in the household needed.

Clem said, "I'll tell to bring the hat box to Mother's room."

Clem hated the hat box and all about it as much as I did, and like me, he realized that it should not be simply taken away. Laying my hand on his shoulder, I said, "Are you sure, dear?" The search inside his mother's maggoty den was taxing for him, and his decision sounded brave.

"I'm, Oscar." He looked languishing. The languor of youth.

With all the much ado about Clem's recent misfortunes, I never visited the kitchen of the Manor House to talk about the cuisine. However, soup with dumplings was delicious today at table, as usual in my homeland. Another most interesting dish for dinner was cabbage rolls: cooked cabbage leaves wrapped around the filling traditionally based around meat and rice, beef or pork, seasoned with garlic, onion, and spices. I always believed that the filling of the cabbage rolls should be much spicier than in my homeland to make the dish truly delicious, that's why I felt compelled to visit the kitchen. From the drawing-room, the sound of the piano music was heard. The waltz which was called Chopsticks. The piano player violently bashed upon keys. It was Hippolite, vexed by us who didn't permit his presence at the previous event in the garret.

Later, in my room, alone, I opened the book of fiction which I stole from Hippolite's room -- not for ever, of course not, solely for taking a look and knowing more about the boy's literary tastes. The book of adventures "Horseback for Zebras" by Karl May began with description of an African land --

"Every time it appears in the sky above England, the July sun as though says hello to the earth gently and beneficially. Several hours later, the same sun mounts in the sky above the billowy waves of the Indian Ocean, the ruthless fiery red orb, little in common with the friendly golden luminary seen above England. In the southern part of the world, the orb burns down herbage, dries up streams, heating the cracky ground and instilling fearsome legends about retributive celestial chariot into minds of children of the land.

But there are some pieces of the land, like this uninhabited island in the remote African waters of the Indian Ocean, where the first morning sunrays are kind and careful. Parrots screech in the virgin forest; looking like flying bijoux, humming-birds fly in the clear spaces of the thicket; a fidgety groups of monkeys rush over the tree crowns, swinging on the lianas, frightening flyers, and tumbling and bringing fruits, leaves and branches down on the ground. Dark bodies of fearsome crocodiles stood stock-steel, like stoned, in the sandbank. Pink pelicans finish their night fishing on the lake. A family of wild boars make their way towards a watering place but turns rapidly and rushes away from the stream, towards the thorny thicket. For a scary roaring is heard, nearby. It's a hungry lion, who failed hunting last night, and now stealing up to the watering place in order to find a prey for his morning meal.

On his powerful noiseless paws, with his head low, the lion carefully walks through the forest. Mighty, he's not afraid of a rival, for he knows that all the rest animals of the island could be saved from his fangs only with the aid of their own fast legs or deepest holes in the ground..."

Closing the book, I opened one of my abandoned manuscripts, an opening to a mystery story. The manuscript might be burnt: in the light of the recent events, all I could read about or invent looked insipid and lacking in imagery. I could not know that a string of weirder events lied ahead of me.

The fan of beams from the hidden sun was spread out, when I looked out my room window.