"Rings of Saturn" V.G. Zebalda

Excerpt from the novel "Underground Classic" of German literature

To the Non/Fiction 2016 exhibition, the New Publishing House releases the novel by Vinfrid Zebald “Saturn Ring” - before that, only one of his artistic book, the novel “Austerlitz”, was published in Russian. Gorky publishes an excerpt from the upcoming publication translated by Ella Wengerova.

In August 1992, when the summer heat disappeared, I went on a hiking trip through the county of the sufferer, hoping to get rid of a feeling of emptiness that swept me (after a rather great work). This hope was realized to some extent, all day I walked along the seashore of the sea past almost deserted villages, experiencing a strange feeling of emancipation. However, on the other hand, now it seems to me justified by an old superstition, according to which certain diseases of the soul and body are stuck under the sign of Sirius. In any case, then my memories languished - not only about the blissful freedom of movement, but also about the horror that suddenly paralyzed me even in this remote area in the east of England at the sight of traces of destruction, leading far into the past. Perhaps that is why exactly a year after the start of the trip I was in the state of almost complete immobility I was sent to Noridge’s hospital, the main city of the County of Norfolk, and there, at least mentally, began these notes. I still remember well how I woke up in the ward on the ninth floor of the hospital and when he suddenly imagined the spaces of the sufferer, where he wandered last summer, compressed into a single blind and deaf point. And in fact: with my hospital bed, the whole world appeared in the form of a colorless piece of heaven in the window frame.

All day in me there was a desire to look out of the hospital’s window, it is not clear why, covered with a black grid, I was so afraid that reality disappeared forever that I wanted to make sure of its existence; With the onset of dusk, this desire became so strong that I managed in some way, on my stomach, then sideways, overcoming the pain, to cross the edge of the bed to the floor, on all fours to reach the wall and, with difficulty grabbing the windowsill, pull up to the window glass. Then I stood by the window in the convulsive position of the creature, which first rose from the ground, and a scene with the poor Gregor arose in front of me. I directly saw him, clinging to the arming paws of the armchair, peering out of his office into a vague memory of, so to speak, the liberation, which had previously boiled for him to look out of the window. Looking with tearful eyes at the quiet Charlottenstrasse, where he lived with his loved ones for many years, Gregor did not recognize her, taking for a gray desert - just as I did not recognize the familiar city, he stretched from hospital yards to the horizon, but seemed completely alien to me. I could not imagine that somewhere there, among the pile of walls, something else moves; It seemed that I looked from a cliff at the Stone Sea or Breight Solder, from which, like huge boulders, the gloomy masses of garages are being spread below. In that faded evening hour, passers-by were not visible in the district, except for some nurse, who was just crossing the dull square in front of the gate, heading for night duty. The ambulance with a milek, slowly going around the numerous corners, moved from the center towards its station. I have not heard the sirens. I was at such a height that I was surrounded by almost complete, so to speak, artificial silence. There was only a weak sound of the air flow that spilled above the ground, and when this rustle calmed down, almost constant noise in his own ears came to life. Today more than a year has passed since I was discharged from the hospital, and I begin to rewrite my notes, against my will, thinking that a year ago, when I looked from the ninth floor at the city immersed at twilight, Michael Parkinson was still alive, was sitting in his narrow house on Portersfield Road and, in all likelihood, was preparing for the seminar or corpcracus over the monograph about Ramia, who has been his thoughts for many years.

Michael was fifty, he was an old bachelor and one of the most harmless people that I had to meet. He did not know self-interest, and nothing cared for him more than the fulfillment of the duty, although this was given to him more and more difficult for him because of the situation that had developed since some time. But more than everything else, he was distinguished by unpretentious, which some said that she borders on eccentricity. Nowadays, when most people are forced to make constant acquisitions to maintain their status, Michael almost never went shopping. From year to year, as far as I remember, he wore alone either a blue or rust-brown jacket, and when his sleeves were twisted or his elbows were wiped, he took a needle and a thread and put a leather patch. Even the collars on his shirts, he seemed to be facing himself. During the summer holidays, Michael regularly went on long travels associated with his research by Ramu: he crossed the Swiss cantons of Vale and Wa, sometimes Yura or Seleenna on foot. Often, returning from such a trip or hearing how I am enthusiastic about his serious attitude to work, he seemed to be proud and happy, for all his (in our time almost unimaginable) modesty. But in the past May, a rumor suddenly passed that Michael, whom no one had seen for several days, found the dead in bed. He lay on his side, already cooled, with a face covered with strange red spots. The court investigation came to the conclusion “That he had died of unknown causes”; I attributed to this resume myself: “In the Dark and Deep Part of the Night.” Each of us, having heard about the sudden death of Michael Parkinson, shuddered in horror, but, apparently, the worst of all, Janin Rosalind Dykinz, a lone old virgin, associate professor from the department of novelty; You can even say that the loss of Michael, with whom she was associated with something like a childhood friendship, was injured by her that after a few she herself, she herself fell asleep from the illness, which in the shortest time that destroyed her body. Dzhanin Deikins lived in a lane next to the hospital. Like Michael, she received an education in Oxford and was engaged in the French novel of the 19th century all her life, her research, even private, free from any intellectual vanity, always proceeded from some mysterious detail and never from well-known facts. This was especially true for the very highly valued Gustav Flaubert, from whose correspondence, which has thousands of pages, it quoted long passages, on occasion, which each time re -amazed. Expressing her thoughts, she sometimes fell into an enthusiastic state, which caused me almost concern; However, driven by great personal interest, she tried to understand the reason for the writing of Flaubert, his fear of falsehood, said that this fear had riveted him to the sofa for weeks: he was afraid that he could never even transfer himself half a hundred, without subjecting himself to the most painful compromise. At such moments, Dzhanin said, it seemed impossible to him any future writing, moreover, everything written before seemed to him a continuous lie, a series of most unforgivable mistakes, the consequences of which cannot be predicted. Dzhanin claimed that Flaubert’s torment is explained by noticeable for him, constantly progressing and, as he thought, already swept his brain with dullness. Somehow he said that it is like immersion in the sand. Probably, therefore, Dzhanin believed, in all the works of Flaubert, such a value is attached to the sand. The sand conquers everything. Again and again, Dzhanin said, sandstorms rage in the night and daytime dreams of Flaubert, they gather over the dry plains of the African continent, move north, cross the Mediterranean Sea and the Iberian Peninsula, settle in the form of ash over the Tyilery Garden, over the suburbs of Rouen or a town in Normandy, penetrate the smallest gaps and riot. In one grain of sandy on the hem of the winter cloak of Emma Bovari, Dzhanin said, Flobert saw a whole sugar, and every dust is not less for him than the Atlas mountains. Often in the evenings I talked with Dzhanin about the worldview of Flaubert, conversations took place in her office, littered with so many notes, letters and all kinds of printed publications that the paper flood threatened to scoop up you underneath. On the written table (either at the source, or at the central point of the mystical propagation of papers), over time, a real paper landscape arose with mountains and valleys, a landscape was broken down at the edges of the table, like a glacier reaching the sea, and formed layers on the floor, quietly moving to the middle of the room. Many years ago, the paper masses puzzled on the desk forced Dzhanin to retreat at other tables. These tables, where similar processes were going on, were, so to speak, of later periods in the development of the paper universe, Dzhanin. For a long time, under the numerous layers of paper, the carpet disappeared, and the paper accumulated on the floor spread and began to climb into the walls, covered to the door tribus with fragmented sheets and documents, sometimes it was a page pinned behind the corner of the only button, and sometimes whole packs of fastened sheets and documents. Yes, and on the book shelves where it was possible, the feet of paper lay, and all this paper at the twilight hour pulled the reflections of the sunset light to itself. Like snow in the fields, I once thought, under an ink night sky. The last workplace of Dzhanin was a chair extended more or less in the middle of her office. Passing by the always open door, I saw her leaning over the Buvar, which she kept on her knees, or a chair leaning back and immersed in thought. Once I told her that among her papers he reminds me of the Angel of the Melancholy, whom Dürer depicted motionlessly frozen under the guns of destruction, and she objected that the seeming disorder in her things was actually a perfect or still striving for perfection order. And in fact, she usually immediately found everything that she was looking for in her papers or in her memory.