Alexander Ulanov. Near far

“The desire to return, but not only to some country, but to my home; and yet I wanted to stay and live in a foreign land, among those few people who were not too close . ” Village (Alaska or Canada); campus on the West Coast of the United States; streets of New York. And a man of Europe at the end of the twentieth century, landscape explorer Sorger, trying to find the line between involvement and loneliness, his personal measure.

A person understands that “a long time ago, no third party could no longer represent his interests ,” that life according to common clichés is impossible. But there is also a desire to give, to be dependent... “I need to be with my own people, I want to be with people like me. But who are they, these people like me?” Not a neighbor in the house - it seems like a friend - through whom, however, you carefully pass. “They had a lot in common, and it seemed self-evident... each did his own thing, and even inside the house each of them had their own paths . ” Not the Indian friend whose lovemaking doesn't stop the slipping. “Throughout the whole night, gradually filling with heaviness and turning into a shapeless lump, it began to be slowly and uncontrollably carried towards the horizon . ” And all around is alien space. The river is huge and silent, yellow from the sunset sky, blue in the whirlpools. A world of shifted scales, where a tin can thrown into the water takes on the size of a boat and bounces somewhere in the forest across the river, scaring away the crows. An Indian drowns and a dead salmon washes ashore. “Familiar unreality” , which can sweep away at any moment. The despair of isolation. Plunging into daytime darkness, motionless gaps of shadows between trees and bushes. “His skull weighs his own brain... And again the nerves soared above his head, and there was something in it from the flapping of wings under the skin . ” Anxiety is not guilt: there is nothing to repent of and nothing can be corrected. The desire to disappear; a feeling of postponing some important decision. All that remains is to draw the relief, living each of its lines, trying to regain the space. “He had to perceive the entire world around him in the smallest form - be it a crack on a stone, the changing color of silt, sand nailed to a plant - and take it seriously, as children take everything seriously, so that he, with no one and not connected with anything, not responsible for anything else, could at least somehow hold on . " This is what science and measured actions are for. Otherwise - horror, from which you cannot even die on the spot, because there is no place.

The area where leaves peek out from the swamp like frog heads, and the bodies of birds falling from trees turn out to be bark, draws you into the endless present, where everything is there - both the dead and the distant. Sorger tries on the village. “He would live here with his family... and, perhaps, with his work he could even bring some benefit to the community . ” He is happy about the freedom of movement in another language, the fact that the Indians at least do not perceive it intensely, do not notice it too much. But how to live in a world where nothing happens? How to combine the uniqueness of meetings in space with the repeatability of the seasons? And when the research period comes to an end and the time comes to leave, there is no protest. “He saw next to him a single yellow leaf on a dazzling red branch and realized that even after his death, after the death of all people, it would emerge from the depths of this landscape and to every object that his gaze now touched, it would give an outline " . The intertwining with the world is such that it is impossible to understand who is created by whom - man by landscape or landscape by man. The boats creak in the Indian language, and much is revealed that has eluded sight for the past months. But this is precisely because the gaze is sharpened by farewell.

The gaze is shifted, and in the midst of a farewell dinner in the house, a person feels himself in a hollow covered with a dense forest on one of the islands. “A dizzying feeling, as if right now he had been torn away from all his loved ones and dear ones and would never be able to return to them . ” Breakup, departure - joy. “Nobody knows where I am” is also a cry of joy, not despair. The inner peace is already different, the one that rushes outward, that “burned the palms with fire, arched the foot, made one feel one’s own teeth . ” An Indian friend easily moves on to the remaining friend - in a world of namelessness, people are replaceable. And returning is impossible. And when the plane turns due to a storm, Sorger’s short stay in the village is already a farce.

A man returns to his own house near the university, confronted with his past life and his accumulated letters. Feeling thrown onto an airless planet “as a heavy stone that does not fall, he was not alone in the world, but alone without light, and inside him - timelessness - the stars and the spiral of the sky froze, like eyes that did not look at him . ” He is immersed in work - and again he seems unreal to himself. He lets himself go; “Wherever he found himself, he got there without a preliminary decision, and often he only realized later: “So this is where I am.” But even there he is just a role, a man with a glass of wine, a concert goer. And all around is fog , in which cars rush by, where “almost always only the driver sat... an endless series of separately rolling, motionless straightened busts .” A confused man, trying to talk to passers-by, flies out, "as if placed in a glass cabin of silence, from a space that first distorted and then disappeared . " This is how spaces of memory are lost - a table under the eucalyptus trees near the university building, a polar river. "Your spaces no longer exist . " This means that “it’s really all over with you . ” And again it begins to attract someone else’s warmth, now - a family of neighbors, whose life is as organized as the landscape. And again the joy of participating in life: “sitting with them at the same table, raising children on outstretched arms ,” feeling for the first time the beauty of the woman from the neighboring house. “Darkened by shadows and in their pure darkness, eyes that already understand everything,” a sloping forehead, a vulnerable shimmering, as if left without bones, piercingly light bulge. However, suitcases are already packed in Sorger's house and real estate agents are walking around. It's time to go to Europe. This is again the sharpness of a farewell glance.

But when on the way, in New York, Sorger is asked for help and he responds, unity comes with the city, with the people around. And time “no longer meant abandonment and gradual dying, it meant unity and security... Time became the light that shone inside the glass body of a street lamp illuminated by the morning sun in the very center of the city . ” However, there will be no happy ending (like in "Sky over Berlin", the script of which was written by Handke). Having calmed the loser (who sees rats even in the shadows of snow flakes), full of the best feelings, Sorger calls home to Germany - but that life is not at all inclined to let him in. There are no enemies there, just strangers. “They never really fought, and therefore they never even had the opportunity to make peace . ”

And again the questions: “What do I want? What is real for me?” Children's drawing above the key shield; tired eyes of the telephone operator; patent leather boots of a Negro elevator operator. Own notebooks with landscape drawings. “Motionless, he stood bending over the multi-colored pattern, which in some places had faded with time, until he himself turned into a calm color . ” The ordinary steam from an underground pipe is enchanting: “the steam body, obeying the wind and rhythmic exhausts from below, either spread out, then, jumping up, narrowed, and with it the shadow of the tree increased and decreased . ”

This is again a look of farewell - now to New York. And what you see still seems “still too small . ” And in your pocket is a plane ticket to Europe - where no one is waiting. And Sorger is again “Nobody” - as at the beginning of the story, in the village. But, getting into another world, a person retains the strength from the previous one, seems “more noticeable than usual, when in a crowd of passers-by he was often mistaken for a bus driver, an electrician, a painter . ” And the flow of life is perceived only from the outside; only with a glance can one “participate in the peaceful beauty of this present, contributing to the dark paradise of this evening . ” And there are tasks for which a final solution is impossible - people just live with them. “And he was as he was, and the mirror, and nothingness, and regularity touched each other . ”