#5. A long-forgotten quotation

When freedom becomes a language, indifference is forbidden. ©

#4. Author's translation

“If ever I start again… thinking!”

That will deal with me faster than the cough that, having stopped to hide its vicious intentions, grabs all the air that is trying his best to enter the lungs, even by roundabout ways.

Wrapping up in chequered shawl (it’s so banal, indeed, but it’s actually chequered), Martha wanted to write a letter. In a few minutes a sheet of paper was cut by a pointed pencil till pitch-black, but none of the lines resembled a letter, it was an image, a face. But Martha wasn’t able to draw anyone except triangle ballerinas in profile. Three straight lines go away like the trefoil axes and then the two of them are joined together by a curved line to make brocade that adorns its tutu. A few touches – and a stony sculpture, a sphinx, conquers the space on the sheet forever. The sheet has nothing else to do but resign under the weight of dull drawing.

Between the cough attacks that now replaced the thinking process, Martha was recalling the last-year autumn. She was angry at this astonishing regularity: why on Earth it’s autumn that means so much to everyone? Or has it always been the beginning of the year?

But why the autumn needs so much effort? Its greediness exceeds all bounds, it is even ready to gulp the tears of tiredness and despair. And its favourite… or has it saved this specially for Martha? Its favourite torture was to trip so that, stumbling, Martha could face her helplessness. What else am I supposed to do to realise that there is nothing I can do to help?

Or was it easier last autumn? But then there were illusions!.. Martha smiled wryly, getting her breath after the usual cough attack. It’s so easy, to modify the universe, tailoring it to your own rainbow world. It’s a play of child to break down the barriers and smoothing things. But then the illusions – damn it, it always happens this way – cut these logically built lines and connections, collapse this fragile delicate imaginative world and throw back to the surface to stand firmly.

And Martha decided that it was high time she stopped writing and thinking. As if anybody wanted these heaps of letters, these lines, torn out of my conscience built like a pyramid out of small bricks – everything to be normal, but all in vain?

And Martha succeeded in forbidding herself to write. Almost. Sometimes she has vague ideas, but she tries not to pay attention to them, recalling last autumn, lit by the porcelain white and fragile stranger talent.

#3. Moscow in five contexts

#2. Fail to realise

And I’m divided between two doubtful pleasures, or, to be exact, the two evils, the lesser of which is usually recommended to be chosen. It turned out that I can’t help being late in big cities – and, strange as it may seem, lost in small ones. And if it can be somehow explained in the first case, the reasons for the second phenomenon are thoroughly hidden from me.

But it has some nuances even with this being constantly late. It is generally the lack if motivation, that is suspected to be at its heart: if you are never late for a plane or a train, it means that you can arrive in time, the problem is that just in most cases you – or your left heel, whatever, – needn’t do it. Your conscience stay daydreaming deep inside, never willing to wake up for such small “occasions”. But… he who is late is always wrong. And, what is more, it’s not that simple to give this bad habit up. No matter how much I try, I fail. Because even when I succeed in leaving early, there is always something wrong with traffic. Well, it’s always something up with it, but when I happen to be so foolishly proud of myself to have so much time left before the beginning of a-very-important-meeting, something extraordinary is for sure to occur and just spoil everything.

But it is to be changed; sooner or later I’ll do it. My every departure will be as if the one for a plane. “On time or die”, as a friend of mine suggested, - the way a samurai would say.

As for getting lost, it’s even more complicated. It’s above me. I’m practically always precise with guessing the right direction – it’s a sort of intuition, I think. But when it comes to small areas, the limits of which I can easily imagine, I lose my way in broad daylight at once.

Oh, what a bore I am today… Tired even of myself, but it’s just that the fifth season has begun for me. It’s difficult to be precise explaining this state, but it’s like finding yourself in a morass: being slowly sucked without any desire to decide whether you want to fight or you’re just too tired. It’s just like stress and apathy, insensibility and disgust at the same time. Even fall, my favourite season of the four surely existing, is useless. Or it’s just that I’m helpless.

Let’s start from the very beginning – a very good place to start. ©

The frames, mostly invisible, always exist. My frankness in this journal is limited to the level of my English, which always leaves much to be desired.