Arkady Who Couldn't See and Artem Who Couldn't Hear

  ARKADY WHO COULDN'T SEE AND ARTEM WHO COULDN'T HEAR

  C.D. ROSE

  Ebook version published in 2015 by

  Galley Beggar Press Ltd

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  All rights reserved© C.D. ROSE, 2014

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  ARKADY WHO COULDN'T SEE AND ARTEM WHO COULDN'T HEAR

  Some years ago, attempting to collect material for a still-unwritten book, I was travelling through Russia by train. The trains were long and overheated and smelled of pickles and unwashed clothes. It was difficult to find a seat where I could read or sleep undisturbed, but on leaving a city whose name I no longer remember I found a compartment. There two men were spending the long journey building a wooden house from matchsticks.

  I didn’t introduce myself, but watched as they carefully placed one match on top of another, using the tiniest bit of paste to hold their model together. The train ride was far from smooth and I was amazed by the skill with which they kept their work standing. They spoke to each other in quiet, low voices and I struggled to overhear what they were saying. Despite my reasonable knowledge of Russian, I could understand nothing of their conversation and when I finally asked found they were not speaking Russian at all, but Komi. This language, they told me, still spoken by a few thousand people in central Russia, was the language they had been born into and the one used in the town to which they were now returning. They hadn’t been back for many years, they said, and were trying to remember their birthplace by constructing a model of it.

  As they spoke, each weighing the other’s words as carefully and intently while they placed the matchsticks alongside each other, I couldn’t help but notice the marked physical similarity between them. They were twins, they told me, the more talkative Arkady three minutes older than his quiet brother, Artem.

  They were thin men, curiously built, with long square bodies and short legs, but both moved with a careful grace, their slow and deliberate gestures reminding me of mime artists or expert craftsmen. When I asked how long they had been building their model, they looked at each other and smiled. All our lives, said Arkady, all our lives.

  The house we grew up in, he continued, was made of wood. So we build from wood, added his brother. They had a supply of matchsticks (still plentiful in an era in which smoking on trains was commonplace), but nevertheless worried they would one day run out before their work had been completed. Though the house was wood, it was a fine one, they insisted. Many of our neighbours looked down on us from the heights of their new tower blocks but our parents would have nothing of this living in the sky. They were not modern people, our parents, said Artem.

  Their skill with modelling was obvious. Each match could be bent or split and placed in such a position so that, once named, it became exactly the thing it represented. They used their long fingers to indicate completed parts of their work to me, and as they spoke each simple coupling of sticks became the well, the vegetable plot in the garden, an abandoned cart or rusting car.

  Arkady pointed at the model of a man holding a rifle. Our father, he said, was a hunter. It wasn’t a pastime, said Artem, it was his job. He caught animals for us to eat, and when he was lucky he would trap and kill enough to sell to the butcher or at the market. When we were small, there was always plenty, said Arkady. Once, though only once, he caught a bear, said Artem. The meat was tough, remembered Arkady. It tasted like beef, said Artem. As the city grew around us, there was less for him to catch, they told me. Some rabbits, but they went quickly. Arkady said a word in Komi, but Artem corrected him before I had a chance to ask what he had said. It’s not true, Artem insisted, there were never dogs. He never hunted dogs. We never never ate dog.

  The twins had the smell of Russia on them, as did the whole train, that particular odour of time-worn sadness, vegetable decay and vodka seeping from skin pores that used to be so typical of the country. After a few days travel, I myself had begun to acquire the smell, like an animal adapting to its surroundings. I wonder now if it was this gradual change that allowed me to see what should have been obvious from the start, namely, that Arkady was blind, and Artem was deaf.

  I had noticed that Arkady did not look directly at the person speaking to him, taking his evasion of eye contact for intent listening, but I could now see the milky cataracts which clouded his dark eyes. Artem, meanwhile, watched whoever spoke to him intently, not out of politeness, but hanging his gaze on the speaker’s lips in his efforts to read them.

  Artem remembered the wolf. It slunk around the tower blocks, he said, near the garbage bins and the scrap of land where other boys played football. I was the only one who saw it. It had come in from the forest after a hard winter, and kept coming for days. I fed it whenever I could steal some food from the kitchen.

  It was a dog, said Arkady. He never saw a wolf, it was a stray dog.

  I know what I saw, said Artem.

  They took two matchsticks, slit them with the sharp blade of Arkady’s penknife, then bent them like knuckles to fashion a small, four-legged animal, the burnt stub of the match its head. A dog, repeated Arkady. A wolf, muttered Artem, and each touched the figure, and it became as real as any wolf, or dog.

  I have not mentioned the fourth inhabitant of our compartment. A red-faced Russian had joined us at some unmarked stop deep in the night, clutching a bottle that remained a third full no matter how much he drank from it. He slept soundly for the first several hours, but later woke and unwrapped a crumpled copy of Pravda to find a dried, salted fish, which he set at with repulsive sucking noises. His repast finished, he produced a pack of cards and began to play all by himself. The cards had unfamiliar markings, and I could not discern the rules of the game he played so intently and alone. Over the next few days he became more gregarious, and started up conversations of which I understood little, though Arkady and Artem nodded and laughed politely. He cajoled us into playing a game which he called durak and consisted of trying to rid oneself of all one’s cards. I found the rules complex and confusing, though the others found it hilarious, especially when I became the durak, or fool. At a certain point the train slumped to a halt, and to my relief the game ended. The twins fell asleep, but the man remained half-awake, losing himself once again in his solitary game which he claimed he had to finish before he arrived.

  The twins remembered the time their mother had gone sledging one night and added a sled to their model, on a hill formed from a balled-up sheet of newspaper. She had crept out one winter night with her sister, the twins in bed but awake, listening to their young mother who had taken a tray from the kitchen to speed down the icy slope that rose behind their house. Her laughter that night, they remembered, was the most wonderful thing Arkady had ever heard, and the most beautiful thing Artem had ever been told about.

  Somewere in the middle of the vast emptiness the train g
round to a halt and did not move again. I looked out of the window to see nothing but endless birch forest, then looked again a few hours later, somehow hoping the view may have changed, but it hadn’t. A harried conductor pushed his way through the train telling us we had been blocked by a heavy snowfall, and that it was possible we wouldn’t move again for several days.

  Unseeing Arkady snapped the blackened head from a match and placed it at the foot of the newspaper hill and they remembered the time a meteorite had landed in their garden. It wasn’t a meteorite, said Artem with the deliberate speech of the deaf. It was part of a spacecraft. When we were young, continued Arkady, we wanted to be cosmonauts. Every boy did at the time. There was a street in our town, he said, one which ran between the new blocks, ulitsa Kosmonauta. One of the buildings had a huge mural on its side showing our brave pioneers of the future: the scientist, the soldier and the spaceman. It was red and gold, said Artem, and shone in the sun. When I was a boy I thought it the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. We learned about Gagarin at school, said Arkady, but our mother told us he wasn’t the first. There had been many more before Gagarin, concurred Artem. They died out there in space like the dogs, and nobody ever spoke of them. Sometimes parts of their craft would fall back to earth and land in the Siberian tundra or the endless forests of the Urals, and if anything was found what was left of them would be given a quiet burial in cities that were left unmarked on any map. This was what landed in our garden, said Artem, laying his finger on the tiny fragment of cosmic disiecta membra. Some though, he said, are still out there, endlessly circling the earth, their withered bodies still wearing their protective suits.

  The train stayed where it was, in the lee of the gigantic snow dune, and time slowed. The twins continued with their model, our companion drank, chewed at his piece of vobla and played cards. Sometimes we slept. When Artem was asleep, I asked Arkady how his brother had become deaf. Our father was not a violent man, he said, but he did have many troubles. Once he came home in a rage and beat Artem around the head. The bruises soon passed, but he was never able to hear again.

  In one part of the garden they had laid a small pile of completely burnt matchsticks, curled and blackened threads which threatened to disintegrate into ash. This is to remember the time the house nearly burned down, they said. When I asked how this had happened, the twins moved uneasily. We try not to remember the time Arkady began to drink, said Artem, and the time Artem got God, said Arkady.

  It was after he had gone blind, said Artem later while Arkady slept. He was angry, he said, and turned to the one-eyed devil of the bottle. I asked Artem why his twin had such rage in him. ‘Because he had been cursed with blindness,’ said Artem. My brother turned away from God, as I turned to him.

  I asked Artem how he had gone deaf.

  I was born like this, he replied, and rapidly continued his brother’s story. The Komi religion, he began, is very different to Christianity. For us the human soul, which we call the lov, has a double, its ort. The ort is born with each human being and gives a premonition of death to the soul. After our father had gone away and our mother had died, each of us began to believe that we were the other’s ort.

  With that, Artem took two matchsticks, broke one into uneven lengths and added it transversally to the other to fashion a simple patriarchal cross.

  I went to see the priest, he said. Our parents had never taken us to the church and once inside the waxy smoke of the candles mixed with that of the incense swinging in the censers, and the light which reflected from them onto the icons on the rood screen gave me the feeling I no longer lacked a sense. The paintings of the saints and angels up above on the inside of the dome reminded me of the cosmonauts mural, and through them God spoke to me.

  At that point in his story, his brother woke and heard us speaking. He slowly passed his fingers over the model until they rested on the cross Artem had placed in a corner of the garden and made to remove it, but then faltered. No, he said, it plays its part in the story, after all.

  I do not know if I began to drink when I first thought my brother was a sign of my own death, he told me later as deaf Artem slept, or if it was the drink that made me think so. For the Komi people, he said, the land of the dead is located far to the north of this world, beyond all the mountains, rivers and forests. After death, each Komi has to cross a river of tar. According to our sins in this world, we are given various means of doing this: for some there will be an iron bridge to walk across, for others perhaps only a wobbling broom handle, or, in the worst of instances, a mere cobweb. I drank until I could see the river, but never found how I would cross it.

  As he told his story, the train began to move again, in short urgent shunts at first, then gently gathering speed with a slow sigh. Up and down the carriages, the other passengers let out a muted cheer, waking Artem.

  When God found me, he said, I stopped believing in the tales we had been told. God made everything pure and clear for me.

  And so the drink for me, added Arkady.

  Our companion, the fourth man whom we had almost forgotten, lost as he was in drink, game and sleep, cried out, To the god of the bottle! He laughed and took an enormous draught before going back to his cards.

  I asked what happened after the soul had crossed the black river. Did it enter heaven?

  No, Arkady said, his blind eyes fixed on an uncertain point in the distance. Should the soul be successful in its crossing, it then has to climb a steep mountain made entirely of ice in order to reach heaven. This is only possible if the person has led a good life and has strong fingernails.

  In the old times people kept their fingernails, Artem said, like we keep matchsticks. They were buried with them, said Arkady, should they need them. I looked at the twins’ fingernails, which were clipped short but looked as thick and strong as horses’ hooves.

  The fire began after Artem had spoken to the priest, Arkady told me later that night as his brother slept. Artem asked why despair existed in the world and the priest told my brother that God had granted him just enough despair for him to marvel at the rest of creation. Without despair, the priest said, beauty would not exist. As Artem walked home he had an illumination: he realised that only God should exist in the world, and that he had to destroy everything that was not God.

  Either Arkady or myself fell asleep at that point, I remember with difficulty, lost as we were in the night and travel and the telling of tales. When I later awoke I found Artem looking at me, apparently taking it in turns with his brother to keep a vigil over their creation.

  The fire began, quiet Artem told me, when Arkady fell asleep in a stupor and dropped the end of his lit cigarette into a vodka bottle. He was lucky only his eyebrows were singed.

  They were both awake the next morning and smiled at me as I returned from splashing cold water on my face in the tiny washroom. Now we drink only tea, they said, and we do not pray. Despite their claims, I found something unconvincing in their breezy assertion and suspected that deaf Artem still felt the pull of the gleaming domes and thick incense, and that blind Arkady still dreamed of the pop of the bottle top, the peppery warmth as the spirit went down.

  Days passed in travel, the train being frequently held up or slowed by the weather conditions. The drunk finished his oblique game of patience and grew increasingly agitated, attempting to engage us in conversations, which were incomprehensible, or equally baffling card games. Some buildings on the twins’ model grew bigger yet others seemed no nearer completion than when I had begun my journey over a week ago. As I sat awake one night, reading a collection of Russian tales less fantastic than the one which was unfolding before me, I finally realised why. The brothers were indeed taking turns to keep a nightwatch over their work, but that was not all. As Artem slept and Arkady stayed awake, I saw him not adding to the model, but taking away from it. With a careful deliberateness he removed all but a few of the matchsticks his brother had put in place earlier that day, scraped the glue from them and put them back in th
eir bag. I said nothing, and pretended to read. Later, Arkady slept and Artem stayed awake, and again, through the corner of my eye I watched him adding a few pieces, yet at the same time subtracting the few his brother had added. In this way, I realised, their model would be ever-changing and never-growing. It was never meant to be completed.

  The next morning the snow clouds had lifted, the air was brighter and for the first time in days the train sped through the birch forests in the manner for which it had been designed. I watched the trees pass as quickly as the hours, keen to get on with my journey, to arrive somewhere.

  But then, just as I was thinking of what I would do when I arrived (a hot shower in a friendly hotel, the first proper meal in ages at a good but unassuming restaurant, a sleep on a firm mattress), a squeal of brakes ripped through the silence and the train slammed to a halt. Bags were thrown from the luggage racks onto our heads, we were launched into unlikely and improbable clinches, thumps and cries were heard from up and down the carriage, the card-player’s bottle slid and smashed on the floor. Yet as all this happened we each kept our eyes on one thing only: the model slid a few inches across the table until it teetered on the precipice, but it did not fall. When the train juddered back from its sudden stop we all looked upon this small miracle.

  Not even an earthquake could destroy our home, said Arkady, and everyone laughed. Then the drunk picked up the stub of his bottle, raised it above his head and smashed it down into the centre of the model.

  The train driver, it turned out, had braked so as not to hit a deer crossing the track. The deer had fled unharmed, but the train was compromised in such a way as to necessitate a termination at a dull industrial town, still many miles from our intended destination. We crawled on for a few hours before reaching an old station where a steam locomotive sat at the end of a siding, unmoved for many years, and were told to disembark.