Report to Grego (62 page)

When I reached the head of the stairs, I found myself in a warm alcove, a chapel all of gilt, with lighted tapers, kneeling people, and the sanctuary filled with deacons, priests, and prelates dressed in gold, dressed in silk.

I shall not forget that alcove's warmth and sweetness. The men
were for the most part old, with side whiskers; they seemed like former noblemen, or like doormen in noble houses. The women had their hair cowled with snow-white wimples. Christ glittered on the iconostasis, well fed and rubicund, his breast covered with decorations—human hands, eyes, and hearts of silver and gold.

I remained standing amid the kneeling crowd. I found it impossible to contain my emotion. All this assemblage seemed to me like a heart-rending farewell, as though some extremely beloved person were going away on a distant, dangerous journey, and his friends were seeing him off. . . . The last believers were taking bitter leave of their God's beloved form while the first believers in the terrible Mystery's new form were charging without mercy and smashing the old, infirm idols. . . . We live in a crucial, merciless moment in which an old religion is dying and a new one being engendered in the blood.

The times through which we are passing—and even more terrifying, those through which our children and grandchildren will pass—are difficult ones. Difficulty, however, has always been life's stimulant, awakening and goading all our impulses, both good and bad, in order to make us overleap the obstacle which has suddenly risen before us. Thus we sometimes reach a point much further than we had hoped: by mobilizing all our forces, which otherwise would have remained asleep or acted reluctantly and without concentration. For these mobilized forces are not merely our own personal ones, nor are they merely human. The forces released within us in the forward propulsion we develop in order to jump are a threefold unity: personal, panhuman, and prehuman. At the instant when man contracts like a spring in order to undertake the leap, inside us the entire life of the planet likewise contracts and develops its propulsion. This is when we clearly sense that simplest of truths which we so often forget in comfortable, barren moments of ease: that man is not immortal, but rather serves Something or Someone that is immortal.

When the liturgy terminated and the last believers began to go slowly down the marble staircase, I was approached by a pale, weakish young man. He had a short blond beard, tired blue eyes, and kept coughing. He engaged me in conversation.

“Are you one of us?” he asked excitedly. “You didn't betray Christ?”

“I don't betray Him if He doesn't betray me,” I answered.

“Christ never betrays,” said the youth, astonished at my words. “He never betrays; He is only betrayed. But come, it's cold out; let's go to my house and have some hot tea.”

His father was a former nobleman who owned a large mansion and had been crowded now into two rooms, the rest being filled with working-class families. He had been given the least sunny rooms because, unlike the workers, he did not have small children, and the workers' children needed to enjoy the sun. The young man worked in a factory in order to live, but he was a poet, and he wrote verses whenever he had a little time.

“Right now I am writing a long poem,” he said. “A dialogue-Christ talking with a worker. It is morning; the factory whistles are blowing; it's snowing out, very cold. The men and women are running to their factories, shivering, their bodies deformed by toil. My worker takes Christ by the hand and conducts Him on a tour of the factories, the coal mines, the harbors. Christ sighs.

“‘Why all these damned? What have they done?'

“‘I don't know,' the worker answers him. ‘You tell me.'

“He takes Him next to his damp shack with its fireless hearth and his hungry, crying children. The worker shuts the door, clutches Christ by the arm, and cries, ‘Rabbi, how should we behave toward Caesar? What is his, that we may give it him, and what is ours, that we may take it!'”

The young man stopped, out of breath. He kept moving his hands back and forth, vehemently, anxiously.

“Well?” I asked. “What was Christ's reply?”

“I don't know,” answered the last believer, looking around him fearfully. “I don't know yet; or more exactly, I don't know any more.”

The young man collapsed into a disemboweled armchair and hid his face behind his hands. “Why? Why?” he groaned.

He too asks, I reflected, asks and finds no answer. I wonder if Christ is capable of answering. Why doesn't he ask Lenin?

“Why don't you ask Lenin?” I demanded of him. Involuntarily I spoke with anger.

“I did.”

“And what was his reply?”

“‘Workers of the world, unite!' I jumped up in a rage: ‘But I'm
asking about the soul, Vladimir Ilich, about God, about eternity!'”

“And?”

“Lenin shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
‘Bourgeois
 . . . ' he murmured, and he crushed his cigarette butt beneath his heel.”

The forest is large, the wind is right.

Forward, Be-Kou, take up your bow!

This way, that way, this way, that way!

A boar! Who kills the boar,

O poor Be-Kou? Be-Kou!

But who eats it, O poor Be-Kou?

Forward, cut it in pieces. You shall eat the guts.

Bam! An elephant rolled to the ground!

Who killed it? Be-Kou.

Who shall get the precious tusks, O poor Be-Kou?

Patience, Be-Kou. They'll
give you
the tail.

(Pygmy song)

The more the days went by, the more I felt Russia's mysterious fascination penetrating deeper and deeper within me. It was not simply the exotic spectacle of the hyperborean winter which fascinated me, nor my first view of Slavic life—the people, palaces, churches, troikas, balalaikas, and dances everywhere around me. It was something else, something more mysterious and profound. Here in the Russian air I felt the two primordial world-generating forces openly, almost visibly, clashing. So much did the surrounding atmosphere of war penetrate to your very vitals that like it or not you threw yourself into the struggle with one of these world-generating forces or the other, and fought. What I myself had tasted so sharply in my own microscopic existence I saw merciless and terrible here in Russia's vast body. It was the same struggle, the precisely identical battle, with the same eternal adversaries: light and darkness. Thus my own struggle gradually became one with Russia's struggle. Russia's deliverance would be my deliverance as well, for light is one and indivisible, and wherever it triumphs or is defeated, it also triumphs or is defeated inside you.

From the instant I finally arrived inwardly at this identification, Russia's fate became my fate. I was struggling and agonizing at her side. Feeling too constricted in Moscow now, I set out to see the
entire vast arena at first hand—from Murmansk on the Arctic to Bokhara and Samarkand, from Leningrad to Vladivostok—everywhere the primeval enemies and allies were wrestling.

Each man bears his cross; so does each people. The majority carry it on their shoulders until they die; there is no one to crucify them. Happy the man who is crucified, for he alone shall enjoy a resurrection. Russia was being crucified. As I roamed her various republics and villages, I shuddered from sacred awe. Never had I seen such struggle, such agony upon the cross, never so many hopes. For the first time I realized how difficult it is for a man to decide to take a step forward in order to conquer his former love, former God, age-old habits. Although all these had once been spirit urging him to ascend, they had turned to leaden matter in the course of time and had collapsed halfway along in the journey. Now they kept the new creative breath from passing.

Millions of muzhiks were resisting. They did not understand, did not want to be saved. They held nails and nailed them into the Mother. Working the soil generation after generation, they had turned to soil, they hated the flame. The hungry, wounded workers—all flame, they—were pushing the crude masses to join the path of deliverance, sometimes by means of gentle coaxing, sometimes by violence.

And the peoples of the world stood, prudent and well fed, around the Russian arena where light and darkness were engaged in battle. “Finished! Russia is finished!” they guffawed, because the prudent and well-fed can never understand the invisible resurrectional forces of the Crucifixion. But as Christ said, in order for the grain of wheat to become an ear of wheat, it must descend to earth and die. Russia was suffering similarly—like a grain of wheat; like a great idea.

One of the apocryphal Gospels relates how the beloved disciple John had an astounding vision as he stood weeping before the Crucified. The cross was not of wood but of light, and crucified upon it was not a single man but rather thousands of men, women, and children, all groaning and dying. The beloved disciple trembled, unable to capture and immobilize any of the innumerable figures. All kept changing, running, disappearing; some returned a second time. Suddenly they all vanished, and nothing remained on the cross but a crucified Cry.

This vision writhes before us today. Today's savior, however, is not one man but an entire people. All of Russia, millions of men, women, and children, are being crucified and are suffering. They disappear, they flow, you cannot distinguish one definite figure; but out of these innumerable deaths surely the Cry will remain.

Nothing else is needed; this is how the world will be saved anew. What does “will be saved” mean? It means finding a new justification for life because the old one has vented its strength and can no longer support the human edifice. Happy the man who hears the Cry of his times (each epoch has its own Cry) and works in collaboration with it. He alone can be saved.

We live our epoch and consequently do not see it. But if in time the new idea which is being crucified today really does enkindle and renew the world, then we have already entered the first circle of fire. Centuries from now this epoch of ours will possibly be called a middle age, not a renaissance. Middle age—in other words an interregnum. One civilization becomes exhausted, loses its creative strength and crumbles; a new Breath carried by a new class of men toils with love, rigor, and faith to create a new civilization.

The creation of this new civilization is not assured; in no creative act is anything assured beforehand. The future may be a total catastrophe; it may be a pusillanimous compromise. But it may also be a triumph for the creative Breath. In that case our own transitional period is one in which we are experiencing the excruciating labor pains of a civilization in process of birth.

Nothing is certain. For that very reason every people, every individual, has a great responsibility in our amorphous, uncertain age, a greater responsibility than ever before. It is in such uncertain, possibility-filled times that the contribution of a people and of an individual can have incalculable value.

What, then, is our duty? It is to carefully distinguish the historic moment in which we live and to consciously assign our small energies to a specific battlefield. The more we are in phase with the current which leads the way, the more we aid man in his difficult, uncertain, danger-fraught ascent toward salvation.

W
hen I completed my full pilgrimage and remained in Bokhara a few days in order to rest, I felt the beloved sun finally striking me after Siberia's inhuman gelidity, warming my spine and my
soul. I had arrived a little before noon. Torrid heat, but the streets had been watered down and the air smelled of jasmine. Mohammedans with colorful turbans were sitting beneath canopies of straw matting drinking refreshing sherbets. Chubby youngsters with open shirt fronts were singing passionate oriental amanédhes, installed on high stools in the cafés. Feeling extremely hungry and thirsty, I bought a melon and sat down in the shade cast by the celebrated Kok-Kouba mosque. I placed the melon on my knees, cut it into slices, and began to eat. Its aroma, its sweetness, reached to my very bones. I was like the wilted rose of Jericho; I dove into this melon's coolness and was revived.

A little girl went by, about seven years old, her back covered by a multitude of tiny, tiny braids with a shell, turquoise, or bronze half-moon tied to each in order to ward off the evil eye. As she passed in front of me, her hips swung like those of a mature woman, and the air smelled of musk.

At noontime the green-turbaned, white-bearded muezzin climbed the minaret opposite me, placed his palms to his ears, gazed at the heavens, and began in a sweet, sonorous voice to call the faithful to prayer. While he was calling, a stork sailed through the burning air, came to the minaret's tip, and perched there on one leg.

I sat with open ears listening; with open eyes looking. I savored the sweeter-than-sweet, aromatic fruit. I was happy. I closed my eyes, but afraid that I might fall asleep and lose all this happiness, I opened them again. Bokhara's celebrated square, the Registan, stood deserted in front of me. Each spring, once upon a time, maniacal pilgrims descended upon this city from every Mohammedan land and bewailed Hasan and Hosain, Ali's two unjustly murdered sons. Caravans arrived laden with spices, apples, dates, and sacred prostitutes; young boys came mounted on white horses, with white doves in their fists, their shaven heads powdered with ashes and chaff; behind them the frenzied faithful in their brilliant white jelabs, striking their heads with their yataghans until the blood ran onto their twirled mustaches, their beards and white robes. They lamented forty days and forty nights, bellowing Hasan! Hosain! Hasan! Hosain! Afterwards, still lamenting, still covered with blood, they reclined beneath the blossoming trees and copulated with the sacred prostitutes.

But now Registan Square was deserted and the marvelous,
colorful mosque lay half in ruins. They were ghosts; the cock had crowed, and they had vanished.