Changes - Softcover

Molineux, Robin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1490736980 ISBN 13: 9781490736983

Publisher: Trafford, 2014

Synopsis

The stories in this book began as individuals. Some, 'Diocletian's Cabbages' had been in my mind as an intriguing idea for years while others, 'A Head Start' came complete, quite suddenly, often waking me in the early hours of the morning. Only after several had been written down did I realize that they all spoke of change. I arranged them, not in the order in which they had been written, but geographically. They started in Europe and moved through England to the west coast of Canada and the United States. Only when this was settled did I see that they began and ended in the same place.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Changes

By Robin Molineux

Trafford Publishing

Copyright © 2014 Robin Molineux
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4907-3698-3

CHAPTER 1

Animula Vagula Blandula

Animula vagula blandula
Hospes comesque corporis
Quae nunc abibis in loca
Pallidula rigida nudula
Nec ut soles dabis iocos
Hadrian
Ah, gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite,
Friend and associate of this clay!
To what unknown region borne,
Wilt thou, now, wing thy distant flight?
No more, with wonted humour gay,
But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn.
Byron

'I think I like it here' said Erich. None of us had spoken for some time and no one replied at first. Erich thought a long and heavy time before he said anything and this was a thought he had never uttered before, not even to Lev and Giovanni who knew him first. The fog slithered slowly and insidiously over the snow covered ice on the canal as we each considered Erich's statement. Under the connecting bridges where the Griboedov canal meets the Moyka there was little to distract us. What traffic there was made only soft and muffled protests about the conditions. Occasional voices drifted down, the words too tired to leave any meaning. We usually gathered here from the first days of November until the ice began to shift and stretch over on the Neva in the spring which comes late here. Since I had become the fifth and last member of the group we had never been disturbed here.

'I shall never be able to say that again'. It was Lev, the first, the oldest of us all whose deep, sad, slow singing voice always commanded attentive silence and would do so for long, long periods as he told how he came to be here and described a time and a place, a life and a love, long before any of us, even Giovanni, had been dreamed into existence. 'It saddens me to remain as I have since the first trees were cut, the first pilings driven and the first ditches dug; to know I cannot change these things or change myself. Before those things began was empty grief, the gnawing pain of loss and regret, the futile questions without answers; but it seemed as it ought to be. The winters came and the marshes lay still and rigid in the dark days. When the ice broke and pressed on our island, when the floods slackened and birds sang in the small green branches, when the mosquitoes and the mould told you it was summer as you fished in the reed channels, then it all seemed as it should be, always would be. The berries and the baskets of autumn, the slow dying acceptance of the season always suited my mind best, not that I had any cause to feel that my purpose had been fulfilled. All that was destroyed forever by one long man.' The silence that followed we had all heard before; a deep, rolling, long drawn out, immensely ancient thing from before there was speech; the first singing in the world.

We all heard it and remained still, absorbed in the depths of our being. Lev had told us, little bit by little bit, of his wife, the woman who shared the seasons and the uncertainties with him; the woman who had given birth to nine children. Three of those children had lived long enough to die of the fever that took them all: Lev, his wife and children: one Spring. They died in their mud, wood and reed house in the marshes. Their bodies and the house subsided into the mud, disintegrated and became a part of the marshland that had seemed to them eternal.

As I had grown older, like everyone else I knew, I'd listened to my friends repeat their stories, their jokes, their lies. My wife usually told them that she had heard it all many times before, that they were senile and that it never had been amusing anyway. I kept out of sight, stuck to the weather, the ball game and last night's TV, none of which interested me. People pitied me, thought me a wimp or a saint and invited us back for my sake only. I kind of agreed with them. Here none of us ever tell Lev that we had heard him say such things before. I think this is because it never was exactly as he had told things before. There were subtle complex changes; a different colour in the birch leaves of autumn, a different note as the first ducks returned to the lagoons, a different turn of the mouth when one of the children smiled. We were the listeners, the only listeners, to an infinite set of variations on the theme of living in and with a primaeval world, a world of slow deep movement, unchanging over centuries, that was at its end. The changes were incomprehensible to Lev even now. The world of words and ideas, the grandchild of Lev's world, had destroyed it.

Giovanni was the next to speak. 'Yes, Erich, I know that feeling but I had it the moment I and my master Domenico set foot in this place. All the new palaces, the new churches, the paved roads by the new cut canals, the energy of men creating new beauty; all this excited me. I felt that I could make things here, create my own new beauty and make money, enough money with which to return to Impruneta a wealthy and respected master of my trade. I saw mud and stinking ditches turning into golden domes, pillars and beautiful statues. I saw an empty place, inhabited only by otters and herons becoming the glittering centre of an aristocratic, wealthy, witty world stretching to Rome and beyond. That I was only a journeyman plasterer with few enough jobs to my credit in Florence, did not suppress my delight in this place. And so it remained until I finished my work.'

Giovanni was, in certain ways, the youngest of us all in spite of his years. It was he who showed us how to drift into that Georgian restaurant just off the Nevsky Prospekt. It was he who moved with the music there, gently, almost imperceptibly at first then with all his fragile being as we watched the dancing, heard the drum and the pipes and the wildness of the singing and knew that life was good for the dancers that night. It was Giovanni who pulled us out and made us watch the long legged girls with stiletto heels and miniskirts parade their bodies for all to see and enjoy. Giovanni has an erotic imagination that matches that of anyone I have ever known and he used it to the full while telling us exactly how he would reduce each girl to quivering, spent ecstasy. We enjoyed seeing the delight that Giovanni took in his meticulous professional descriptions far more than thinking of the pleasures he described.

Behind all he showed us was a very different place, a place of poverty and death where the sun shone on the graves of his brothers and sisters. His mother too had died and left him as the only survivor of the hopes and sweaty joy of his parents. His father had been killed by a French mercenary in a tavern brawl when Giovanni was ten, two years before his mother's death of a sudden fever in the early spring. His uncle only wanted him gone and arranged an apprenticeship to Domenico, a condition of which was that Giovanni moved to Florence to live with Domenico's family. Living with the family consisted of dirty straw to sleep on in the stable and just sufficient food to avoid starvation. He told us of the dark stone faces of the palaces with the smell of horse shit and open sewers. He told us of the first time he found a dead man whose dark gelatinous blood spread over his back from the narrow cut in his shirt where the knife had entered. Giovanni had turned and run, soundlessly, from the shadow and stench of that alley by the Bargello and told nobody what he had seen. That Florence was not a place to know anything, was a lesson that you learned early and well if you were to survive to an age when you might realize your dreams.

Domenico told him one morning of an offer that had been made by a master builder of work far to the north, in a new city being built in Russia by the czar who wanted the finest of Italian workers and would pay them well. Knowing no more than that, Domenico had accepted the offer and told Giovanni to be ready to leave in two days' time. Domenico's wife had become more and more arbitrary in her shrill demands and criticism. Domenico's reply was to spend more and more time and money drinking 'til late in the Oltrano. Russia seemed an excellent solution.

The journey was long and uncertain. Giovanni did not remember much beyond crossing the Alps then being a long time in lands where he understood nothing of their speech, which, he was told, was German. He remembered a city called Königsberg, then another language, then the first Russian speakers. The food was plentiful but tasted strange, very greasy. Beer was what they drank and he liked that. They slept in many places, none of which had been intended as a place of rest. Most of all he remembered getting colder and colder though it was only September. He began to wonder if he would ever be warm again. They arrived in the infant city only a little before winter set in. They were never warm again. The work was more than either man had ever attempted before. On the edge of a canal still being dug was a vast palace with very high ceilings, where one huge elongated room lead to another yet larger. Floors of many woods in intricate designs and high windows that looked out onto the snows were still unfinished. They worked long hours, tried to sleep in the cold, damp and stinking room in the poorly built wooden hut which was all that could be found with so many others, like themselves, trying to find shelter, but they never felt one moment's regret that they had made the decision to journey so far.

Giovanni talked of the several techniques involved in the art of stucco, of the moulds and laying layer on layer, of the perpetual dampness in this city and how difficult this made it for the painters of gods and heroes, nymphs and empresses. He recalled the frequent floods in the new city, the woman eaten by wolves right in the centre of the city and the babble of Dutch and Italian, French and German in the streets and always the presence of that driven man looking over everything and seeing everything from his immense height. It was clear to the rest of us that Giovanni looked on the city around us as his creation, the great purpose in his life, compared to which no woman, no amount of money nor the strongest of wines was of any account.

Giovanni, though, had seen a time when his contribution to the gleaming city would be completed; a time when he would leave the damp cold that had settled in his bones, with money in his purse, knowing his work had been done well. He was, after all, a village boy wanting only his piece of land, his olives and grapes and figs, his wife in his house, his house cool in the heat of summer.

The fever that came suddenly late in their second spring by the Neva had, within hours, laid him in the cold wet sheets with the bed bugs and smell of his sweat. He lay there watching himself, a bride at his side, coming out of the church into the square at Impruneta. He heard the bell's irregular ringing and then no more.

Domenico had died the day before, as rapidly as Giovanni was to die. No one knew to whom these two dead men belonged. Their bodies were taken to a common grave on one of the uninhabited islands. There was nothing to show where they had been buried and nobody came in search of them.

We allowed time to absorb each man's words and savour the well known and expected while considering the new and unexpected, a rarity for Lev but frequent enough for me.

It was dark before Hans Dieter spoke. His voice was as balanced and measured as the thoughts he expressed. Even with my Readers Digest view of language and literature I knew that this was the creation of many generations, loving the complexities of existence and loving even more to describe and measure, compare and record those complexities. Hans Dieter seemed far more delighted by the process of reaching a conclusion than by the conclusion itself. 'I was sent to destroy, not to build or create. I was sent to obliterate more than two centuries of the lives and creations of others and to impose in its place what I knew to be barbarism, the barbarism that knows no doubts.

'When we arrived and took up our positions to the south of the city we were told the name of the hotel where the victory celebrations would soon be held. It was our destiny, the destiny of the masters, a new and healthy order. The degenerate inefficiencies of these people would be swept aside. By then I had ceased to have an opinion. Discussion, even among friends, had stopped and, for some, it had stopped permanently. When I first entered the university in Munich I held, like so many others did at that age, that truth existed, was sacred and that there, in the holy ground of the university, a free and open pursuit of that truth would be my duty and, even more, a delight. It was no more so there at that time than it was later in Berlin. Only when I returned to my father's house and books in Weimar and walked by the little river under the great and abiding trees that Goethe knew, by his garden house, did I regain my faith. The books my father sold in his shop changed. Many were purged. We were expected to advise the authorities of those who asked for certain books. Our own library was undisturbed even when I was 'persuaded' to join the army. It was in that library that I travelled, there that I discussed, there that I found freedom again. All this was a solitary activity as my father had long since come to regard books as just another commodity, one by which he earned a comfortable living.

'And now I had come to this city to destroy, not to learn. Instead of delighting in learning of Dostoevsky and Pushkin, Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky my orders were to erase their world and their influence, to kill anybody, soldier or civilian, who attempted to stand in the way of that objective. I was told to do what was alien to my nature and my beliefs. Over the months I continually tried either to justify those orders to myself or to avoid or disobey them. I found no answers.'

Hans Dieter's voice was closer to the form of our existence than the voices of the rest of us. It was a quiet dry voice, a shrivelled voice. The words were clear and the thoughts equally so but the life was absent from his desiccated tones. It was he who explained our state as one known in ancient times. He gave us Hadrian's verse that described it. He showed us how it was that we five found ourselves joined as we were. Some things he could not explain. Why we all understood each other entirely, though we had no common language, is the one that I still cannot fathom. He speculated that our kind extended back before the Tower of Babel, an idea which we found no more than whimsical. The persistent awareness of beauty and desire in others, those still living: of the violence and the evil in yet others, was, perhaps, open to explanation of a sort. Free of such feelings and behaviour as we had become, it seemed all too easy to accept and dismiss them and the way that they had ruled our lives. It seems that we have retained a disinterested curiosity about the world which our bodies have left. In this middle air, without aim or expectation, we retain our individual existence through the act of observation. This and much more became clear through our time with Hans Dieter.

I found that the way in which he described his childhood and his growing up was fixed much more vividly in my mind than the descriptions the others gave. The precision of his words, his need to exactly describe each detail of his life, his feelings and his thoughts, left a picture as precise as any drawing he showed us in the Hermitage when we would drift in there on quiet days.

This is the story he told. 'I was born by a lake with mountains at the southern end and a monastery reflected in the still waters below those mountains. My father was then a teacher at the school in the monastery. My mother was the centre of our lives, the daughter of a wealthy farmer from the flatter land to the north. She created the peace and certain security that my father needed. To her children she gave the home to which they would always return no matter how wild and far their journey had been. That all ended; destroyed in a few days in 1922 by a cold, then meningitis, then the death of our mother. I was seven years old, the second of her four children and the one who brought the cold home from school. My older brother, Friedrich, was three years older and the twins, Hannah and Lieserl, two years younger than I. I remember the convulsions, the vomiting and incontinence. The mother, who had been the eternal unfailing centre of my world, disintegrated and left me. I had nowhere to go. I would wake sweating and terrified with the images of her dying vivid in my mind. They only stopped with my own death.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Changes by Robin Molineux. Copyright © 2014 Robin Molineux. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Trafford
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1490736980
• ISBN 13: 9781490736983
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 140