Артур Новиков "В спичечном коробке Бога"
'In God's matchbox' by Artur Novikov
Short story
I
It's always uncanny in this space. No, 'uncanny' is not the right word – awe, dense and humming, from the invisible movements of which the reality that comes into view fluctuates.
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace…", something that took the form of words surfaced in an integral lump in the destroyed consciousness of Ahab.
"'Your' must certainly be written with a capital," Ahab thought blowing smoke into the gloom of the frosty evening, "so that everyone knows that it is He, who casts these shadows like his own footprints. But what is the internal rhythm here? I don't follow..."
Something stabbed in the heart and the space swung, sparks ran along the spine from the basis of the backbone to the occiput, concentrated somewhere in the head, and it became warm in the right frontal part of the brain.
"Someday," Ahab jumped to another topic, "a horse will be tortured before my eyes, and my soul, tired of the cruelty of Your world (Our world?) will fall out of this body, leaving it in care of the orderlies. It will live using the inertia of the neural connections I have created, but I will not be in it… And those who knew me will spend years unsuccessfully searching for the former Ahab. But one day they'll just get tired of it... why are you thinking about it?"
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace,
Dancing to the rhythms of blizzard
Scare the living,
Like shed tails by the lizards
At Your evening…"
With a rumble, the iron doors of the elevator closed, cutting off the first floor space like a guillotine blade. The cables cracked, the electric motor droned at the height of the eighth floor – the matchbox of the elevator crawled up the open shaft.
"A June bug," Ahab thought, "in God's matchbox, isn't that what I am? And why am I constantly being drawn to Him? Feel like He's watching. As if I know He's watching, observing... That's when I'm thrown into this hellish space, then I feel His gaze... But why do I think so? Special or something like that? What makes you think that, wretched man? Isn't your trembling, your fear, a nervous breakdown? Now, having climbed Mount Moriah, have you begun to doubt?"
As the elevator doors clanged open in opposite directions, clearing the space of the stairwell for the eye to see, Ahab noticed that the red-brown small tiles laid on the floor back in the Soviet era seemed to move, swirling in small funnels, which made reality lose its stability and unambiguity.
Ahab muttered with some degree of exasperation, "Props and decorations".
The door lock wouldn't budge: the key wouldn't go all the way into the lock cylinder, so it wouldn't turn. Ahab's peripheral vision dimly registered his own reflection in the window at the end of the corridor. Something seemed to be moving in the watery night mirror, formed by a double antediluvian frame and unwashed glass.
Finally, the lock cracked, the door peeled away from the life-worn door frame and Ahab stepped into the darkness of his abode.
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace,
Dancing to the rhythms of blizzard
Scare the living,
Like shed tails by the lizards
At Your evening…
At Your ashen meager granite
Of December,
It will vanish, You will grave it
As dissenter…"
The genius of memories reigned supreme in Ahab's room, and it was this genius that thinned consciousness into a state of ultramarine fog, through which images emerged and voices were heard. Sometimes the ancient gods came here, but they did not return to Earth to rule – they came to throw themselves into the arms of nostalgia: to recall a human being, to call to mind and recognize him, or, on the contrary, not to find any familiar human features.
"Fuit Ilium, [1]" Ahab said, without knowing why, and flipped the switch in the throbbing silence. The fluorescent lamp, flashing with the sound of a string two or three times, lit up,and the darkness receded somewhat.
Ahab's gaze inadvertently caught on the reflection of his own body in the room's single window. It seemed that something was swarming around the reflection drawn into the haze outside the window, as if it was a field of black grass into which the wind had plunged an invisible hand. The darkness surrounding the reflection in the window shimmered in waves, rippled, glittered and rustled like moving coral polyps with tiny tentacles. Almost imperceptibly, the reflection lowered its head, hiding a ferocious and completely unlike human gaze under its forehead. The unnatural whiteness of the sclera, the peaty blackness of the iris, the smoking wells of missing pupils – all this brought Ahab into stupefaction, but the reflection already opened its mouth, "For when Your judgments are fulfilled on earth, then those who live in the world will know the truth'.
Something hit the eardrums hard – and Ahab's head was filled with a sound comparable to the weight and color of molten lead filling a steel mold.
II
Smoke from industrial chimneys was white against the sky, which was falling lower and laying on the roofs of buildings. The wind, filled with icy shards of snowflakes, grabbed people by the faces and slightly stabbed them.
The space of fear retreated, replaced by the stillness of the monotonous December landscape. Woven from centuries-old rusty wire, the trees slept in the blurred unity of the incessant day.
"You know," the words fell awkwardly from Ahab's lower lip, as if waddling over a fence, 'I'm not afraid of Your voice anymore. There was a time when I was overcome by panic, despair, almost insanity, when the road of fear opened up, where every step echoed like a well, every word was filled with a helpless flutter of the spirit, every thought pierced my temples, and everything that fell within the range of my gaze radiated low, long-playing waves that tore through the fabric of what I thought was my consciousness. Did I doubt? Yes... and I think I paid for my moment of doubt. I believe and know that I have paid off in full. The brief moment of apostasy is paid for – now I am convinced in it".
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace,
Dancing to the rhythms of blizzard
Scare the living,
Like shed tails by the lizards
At Your evening…
At Your ashen meager granite
Of December,
It will vanish, You will grave it
As dissenter…
I am frozen as if cast from
Wax of Yours,
I am Nietzsche, job of custom,
And I rose…", wrote K and got up from the table.
He stared out the window for a long time. The streets slid into the snow, trees jutted out of the whiteness like the raised knuckles of bone fans, cars crawled, buildings vibrated with their own solidity, winds sang in a softened way, and the sky stretched out like a grey-shaded photograph.The reflection of K did not have a clear shape, did not stand out on the window pane, was not of interest – the space was closed.
[1] Fuit Ilium – there was Troy (and there is none)
It's always uncanny in this space. No, 'uncanny' is not the right word – awe, dense and humming, from the invisible movements of which the reality that comes into view fluctuates.
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace…", something that took the form of words surfaced in an integral lump in the destroyed consciousness of Ahab.
"'Your' must certainly be written with a capital," Ahab thought blowing smoke into the gloom of the frosty evening, "so that everyone knows that it is He, who casts these shadows like his own footprints. But what is the internal rhythm here? I don't follow..."
Something stabbed in the heart and the space swung, sparks ran along the spine from the basis of the backbone to the occiput, concentrated somewhere in the head, and it became warm in the right frontal part of the brain.
"Someday," Ahab jumped to another topic, "a horse will be tortured before my eyes, and my soul, tired of the cruelty of Your world (Our world?) will fall out of this body, leaving it in care of the orderlies. It will live using the inertia of the neural connections I have created, but I will not be in it… And those who knew me will spend years unsuccessfully searching for the former Ahab. But one day they'll just get tired of it... why are you thinking about it?"
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace,
Dancing to the rhythms of blizzard
Scare the living,
Like shed tails by the lizards
At Your evening…"
With a rumble, the iron doors of the elevator closed, cutting off the first floor space like a guillotine blade. The cables cracked, the electric motor droned at the height of the eighth floor – the matchbox of the elevator crawled up the open shaft.
"A June bug," Ahab thought, "in God's matchbox, isn't that what I am? And why am I constantly being drawn to Him? Feel like He's watching. As if I know He's watching, observing... That's when I'm thrown into this hellish space, then I feel His gaze... But why do I think so? Special or something like that? What makes you think that, wretched man? Isn't your trembling, your fear, a nervous breakdown? Now, having climbed Mount Moriah, have you begun to doubt?"
As the elevator doors clanged open in opposite directions, clearing the space of the stairwell for the eye to see, Ahab noticed that the red-brown small tiles laid on the floor back in the Soviet era seemed to move, swirling in small funnels, which made reality lose its stability and unambiguity.
Ahab muttered with some degree of exasperation, "Props and decorations".
The door lock wouldn't budge: the key wouldn't go all the way into the lock cylinder, so it wouldn't turn. Ahab's peripheral vision dimly registered his own reflection in the window at the end of the corridor. Something seemed to be moving in the watery night mirror, formed by a double antediluvian frame and unwashed glass.
Finally, the lock cracked, the door peeled away from the life-worn door frame and Ahab stepped into the darkness of his abode.
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace,
Dancing to the rhythms of blizzard
Scare the living,
Like shed tails by the lizards
At Your evening…
At Your ashen meager granite
Of December,
It will vanish, You will grave it
As dissenter…"
The genius of memories reigned supreme in Ahab's room, and it was this genius that thinned consciousness into a state of ultramarine fog, through which images emerged and voices were heard. Sometimes the ancient gods came here, but they did not return to Earth to rule – they came to throw themselves into the arms of nostalgia: to recall a human being, to call to mind and recognize him, or, on the contrary, not to find any familiar human features.
"Fuit Ilium, [1]" Ahab said, without knowing why, and flipped the switch in the throbbing silence. The fluorescent lamp, flashing with the sound of a string two or three times, lit up,and the darkness receded somewhat.
Ahab's gaze inadvertently caught on the reflection of his own body in the room's single window. It seemed that something was swarming around the reflection drawn into the haze outside the window, as if it was a field of black grass into which the wind had plunged an invisible hand. The darkness surrounding the reflection in the window shimmered in waves, rippled, glittered and rustled like moving coral polyps with tiny tentacles. Almost imperceptibly, the reflection lowered its head, hiding a ferocious and completely unlike human gaze under its forehead. The unnatural whiteness of the sclera, the peaty blackness of the iris, the smoking wells of missing pupils – all this brought Ahab into stupefaction, but the reflection already opened its mouth, "For when Your judgments are fulfilled on earth, then those who live in the world will know the truth'.
Something hit the eardrums hard – and Ahab's head was filled with a sound comparable to the weight and color of molten lead filling a steel mold.
II
Smoke from industrial chimneys was white against the sky, which was falling lower and laying on the roofs of buildings. The wind, filled with icy shards of snowflakes, grabbed people by the faces and slightly stabbed them.
The space of fear retreated, replaced by the stillness of the monotonous December landscape. Woven from centuries-old rusty wire, the trees slept in the blurred unity of the incessant day.
"You know," the words fell awkwardly from Ahab's lower lip, as if waddling over a fence, 'I'm not afraid of Your voice anymore. There was a time when I was overcome by panic, despair, almost insanity, when the road of fear opened up, where every step echoed like a well, every word was filled with a helpless flutter of the spirit, every thought pierced my temples, and everything that fell within the range of my gaze radiated low, long-playing waves that tore through the fabric of what I thought was my consciousness. Did I doubt? Yes... and I think I paid for my moment of doubt. I believe and know that I have paid off in full. The brief moment of apostasy is paid for – now I am convinced in it".
"The unsettling ancient shadows
Of Your trees
On the winter cover shallow,
Like Your trace,
Dancing to the rhythms of blizzard
Scare the living,
Like shed tails by the lizards
At Your evening…
At Your ashen meager granite
Of December,
It will vanish, You will grave it
As dissenter…
I am frozen as if cast from
Wax of Yours,
I am Nietzsche, job of custom,
And I rose…", wrote K and got up from the table.
He stared out the window for a long time. The streets slid into the snow, trees jutted out of the whiteness like the raised knuckles of bone fans, cars crawled, buildings vibrated with their own solidity, winds sang in a softened way, and the sky stretched out like a grey-shaded photograph.The reflection of K did not have a clear shape, did not stand out on the window pane, was not of interest – the space was closed.
[1] Fuit Ilium – there was Troy (and there is none)
