Chapter 32 - The fish

Occasionally I rested by myself in a little boat, bought from the money earned in Chorazin. Then I would take food and the books I could get my hands on, drop the anchor somewhere not far from shore, a round stone with a hole with a rope through it, and spend the whole day reading. That was the best diversion. From time to time someone appeared on the waterfront looking for me, but I paid no attention to that, and I told my students to tell everyone that the teacher had gone out to pray for our salvation.

The boat shelled on the waves, the wind rippled the linen cover that shielded me from the sun, the water sloshed, the birds squawked, and lying on a layer of straw I followed Virgil, Horace and Catullus to the worlds that only truly free and carefree men can create. And I was happy to read the meliamba of Kerkida Megapolis:

Once upon a time there lived in Syracuse

Two girls with two round buttocks.

I am sure that any verse that is devoid of didacticism and bombastic comparisons is a great achievement, for it requires a great deal of concentration of the mind. We must hand belong to the earth and bow to their author. Besides, to write unconstrained, a person did not have to belong to a distinguished lineage at all, for even the potter's son Rinfon could be poetically free:

I am no great nightingale of muses, yet from tragic jokes I was allowed to pluck a special ivy to wreath.

That day I lay lounging on the bottom of the little boat, and it occurred to me that the Sea of Galilee was a giant lens, like the curved emerald through which nearsighted Roman patricians watched what happened to me during gladiatorial fights in the arena, but I saw through it the poets of past and present who were trying to appeal to me and wanted to get their interrelationships clear, in their vying for my love and their attempts to attain perfection of thought and style. On one occasion Marcus Atilius began to read to me his comedy The Womanizer , but was interrupted by Apuleius, who said that it was more interesting for the teacher to hear from the golden ass. Probably he was making an allusion to the fact that I was as moreless and rampant as his protagonist Lucius. Marcus Atilius pushed Apuleius away, it became fighting, and both tumbled into the depths consisting of black "petroleum," lime and sulfur; suddenly sunlight streamed in through the lens, the matter flashed up and turned into halkolivan, a fiery mass of words whose secret had once been first revealed to me on a hill near Jericho.

It was a sparkling malleable space. I come to move freely in it, rising and rising several times into a dark red depth. For a while I amused myself with this, not feeling the weight of my own body, but then I noticed how around me human contours appeared, or rather, only the heads and torsos. They paid no attention to me and discussed something further from poetry. I did not know the language they spoke, but miraculously I understood it, even though the meaning of some expressions received me:

"The bishop was a good man, he never took anything too much," one of them said.

'Blessed memory,' replied a second.

'Probably Illarion will now be appointed in his place.'

'Probably not... As much as I esteem him, he's not that high-flying. Besides, he's spent half his life abroad, is as spoiled as a lapdog, while we need wolves here.'

"So Antony gets the chair.

'Or Ignati, the patriarch is fond of him.'

'The youthful hotheads are now thrust forward, the whole charismatic clergy of the old school have been worked out, all the dioceses have been purged so that everything goes quietly and smoothly... Don't you dare make a sound of your own!'

'We must not have that! You are too radical, Vasili Pavlovichi. There is a perfectly natural process going on. A new time has arrived, a fresh wind has risen, the dust has been blown away. His Holiness knows everything best, he sees things better... The Holy Church is reforming itself, to the hell of the fatherland.'

'But did you see what Father Andrej wrote on his timeline yesterday? Very vicious...'

'That you read that. Father Andrej is a deacon, and a deacon is only half human.'

They shot into laughter.

'I remember the bishop from the 1990s, he was a stately man. How he walked with it! Walking up a staircase... The infinite noblesse. An aristocrat, blue blood! The grass. Those people are leaving now...'

'And what do you have now with that court, Father Nikolaj? So you say they don't want to dispossess you? You filed a protest?'

'Yes.'

'I do want to help you. I'll get in touch. I'll call the colonel. Then we'll get rid of their horns soon.'

'Oh well, go ahead, go ahead! Ring the bell! I ask in all humility. I'm tired of fighting against the bully pulpit with that cultural community, I'm out of spunk. Some kind of enemies of the people. They must be made a head of, it's a shame I'm saying it.'

'They have now published a collective letter, that the church would supposedly be an assault on culture, of all things, they are destroying the historical heritage but what culture, when they rent out half the rooms, and sit in the other half themselves, with that damn museum of theirs, it's without me saying it... Sitting there with those stuffed animals...'

'Just recently, they exhibited the spine of a dinosaur. A real one, allegedly.'

'Bullshit! They never existed.'

'Natalia, put down some more of those appetizers,' the man, whom people had referred to as 'Father Nikolaj,' spoke authoritatively; apparently he was the big boss, a tall, lean man with a reddish-brown bart, like a kelt. 'Yes, and some more herring ... No, salad we still have plenty ... We're about to start.'

Suddenly I understood that I was lying on a platter, in the middle of a table with a green sheet on it and laden with delicacies. An amazingly bright and smokeless light emanated from the large chandelier on the ceiling. The people around me stopped being screens and I could distinguish their faces. Almost all of them wore biting black robes. Miraculously, some of them wore on their chests a small cross of gold and silver that looked like the ones there to put people to death. I thought the people sitting around the table were executioners, appointed by the sanhedrin, and it was obvious why their garments were black, that was the color of vain hope and you couldn't see the blood of the martyred on them very well either.

'So, my dear guests, let us pray and attack,' the host spoke.

Everyone stood up and turned to the wall with a large square board attached with the image of a woman with a Trump bowed head. On her arm she had an infant or something, I can't say for sure, I couldn't see it clearly from the table.

They sang a sad prayer and made a like gesture: each dated three fingers together as if for a pinch, one touched his forehead, belly and shoulders with it.

'Lord Jesus Christ, our God, bless our food and drink with the prayers of your immaculate mother and of all your saints, who are blessed for all eternity amen,' spoke the host, and everyone took their places again and plunged into the dis, already cooing: 'Let us remember the reverend.' 'Grant Thou to thy servant's soul rest with the saints, Christ...' 'I remember well, he used to joke: I say he, I shear the sheep, I do not skin them.' 'Just so!' 'Where there is no sickness, no sorrow, no lamentation, but eternal life...'

They poured wine in transparent, faceted cups and drank without haste. I was amazed at the refinement of those goblets, they seemed to be cut from a single piece of rock crystal.

'Pour you another red,' said the host. 'From the Crimea, a parishioner sent me, he has a wine company there now. In the province, as it is called, by the sea. Kirill Sergeyevich, the senator.'

'Ja-a, puffy wine...'

'Father Nikolaj, don't worry about that museum, everything will be fine. We'll get them!'

"God grant that.

'So, Natalya, come on with the appetizer,' the host told the woman who served them.

She arrived with a gleaming metal kettle and from it she sharpened hot soup with a ladle into the low meadow white bowl in front of each guest.

'May the angel sit at your desk,' she said, when she had finished, and she removed herself.

"Father Dmitri, I saw your television broadcast yesterday, that is simply a relief to the soul, may the Lord save you!" said a young man without a cross around his neck. 'But also try this fried fish, we have a new cook in the parish, a Ukrainian, simply a sorceress!'

The man who had been addressed as "Father Dmitri" was a gray-haired man with a meaty nose and the cautious gaze of a mild-mannered and self-absorbed man. He picked up his fork and reached for me.

I twitched my tail, swung forward and down a distance of several ells with great ease and was again in the blazing sea, out of reach of these riddle-like people at the table, whose voices now sounded choked, as if from behind a half-transparent curtain. I tried to accurately ascertain the meaning of some phrases, which they had used. I understood that they were holding a memorial meal in honor of the deceased bishop and fermenting who would be appointed in his place. What puzzled me was that they used a word similar to my name, but rehashed. And that was a deacon? And what were charismatic clergy? And days sent there? As always, I guess that balks the exiled elect of God whose foreheads were marked with His luminous seal. Further, I thought that these male disciples in their black garments were getting along well with Rome, if one of them quoted the words of Tiberius that the latter spoke when he refused to raise taxes in the provinces....

The people had suddenly disappeared. Their steely voices were hushed, like those of the Chaldeans. Around me was a fiery world, filled with millions of other sounds. I listened now to one voice, then another.

Someone argued with someone else until it made him hoarse, someone tore up a papyrus leaf filled with a small, and someone who could not find an argument picked up a knife that turned into a brightly shining letter. I witnessed a man reciting a great poem on the bank of a river by bird tracks, after hearing Homer is said to have torn his garments as a sign of sorrow. I come haphazardly picking out each resonance, concentrating on it, and then we play out the whole scene before me. I saw human lives. I suspected a find, and hymn to Isis Konk on under the vaults of her temple: 'O holy virgin, ruler of heaven and earth, thou art whore and saint, thou art barren, but numberless is thy offspring, thou art petite and grandmother, thou art the first and the last, go thou lighten the barrenness...'

I descended further, into the ruby darkness where many peoples flashed on from someone's revelation, and I saw how the righteous Job, surrounded by the dead, whose flesh was already falling off the bone, standing on a stone cried out, "Ye fighters of lies! Ye are all without use! What are ye wandering about in the darkness, like drunkards!'

The dead showed their teeth silently in response, moved in a dance on the dunes of steam, that was all they were capable of, and you saw me and spoke, with a threateningly raised finger, "And you are a useless doctor!

I wanted to say something in return, but changed my mind and swam on, past sacrifices, ziggurats, towers of silence, horned statues and porphyry altars, on which lay fragrant incense walls gifts: sheep's legs, barrels of bull's blood, myrtle berries and violets. I saw a huge golden gate from which slowly strode a cleric in costly costume toward the people, solemnly carrying a cup of wine before him. I swam past his face, he saw me, uttered a cry, and dropped his that cup, but instead of at, from it a tangle of earthworms crashed to the ground; seeing this, the people began to shriek, and I swam quickly upward, toward the solar disc which could be seen through the lymph fluid of existence.

Sometimes I saw fearful heads around me, but I was not afraid, I was a big fish.

I approached one of the windows of a castle tower surrounded by forest. Inside was a room with a vaulted ceiling that Bells topped off with various appliances and dishes. In the fireplace near the wall a fire was burning in which something in a dense cauldron was heated.

At the table sat an elderly man in a red hat with a tassel with a quill writing on a sheet of paper, "Did you heat the vermilion?" he asked the youngster who just stood the kettle next to him.

'Yes, master,' replied this one.

"Pour in vinegar, we'll boil it down!" the man in the red hat disposed.

I swam up to him and read what he had written down: Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem Veram Medicinam!

I felt that he sensed my presence. He sat the four in the inkwell, got up, walked up and down the room, and muttered, 'Dominus mecum! He is near...!

"What?" the youth asked, holding a slender, translucent vat of vinegar.

'God damn it! That I didn't realize that right away! The black dragon is near, and so the green lion must eat up the sun!" exclaimed the master, and it hurried to write something down again, and I swooped up along the wall of the tower some more.

When it was not far to the surface of this elastic pink being I stopped. The voices I heard merged into a rarefied screech that resembled the wail of the universe. I wanted to close my eyes, but could not because a fish has no eyelids. I was an eternal observer. I saw the sad dreams of sailors, around my ignited black stars, like the lights of the lighthouses of the underworld. A solemn circumambulation took place in honor of Osiris. A giant bearded serpent asked a man shipwrecked on the sea of words, "Who brought you, insignificant one, who brought you here? If you delay in answering who brought you to this island, I will turn you to ashes!'

The man was preparing to die, but the snake turned out to be benign and magnanimous, being one of the most unfortunate among snakes, he gave the fern guest many gifts, precious giraffe tails, and sent him home.

The cries of those condemned to death for disbelief dropped to the bottom, reminiscent of molten lead poured into water. I heard the songs of Raav. Swarms of evil underwater birds swam past me.

It turned out that I had hung like this between heaven and earth for thousands of years, gently moving my fins.

Then I saw a brilliant white fish in front of me, stroking me with tenderness, like a mother's birth.

'Follow me,' she said softly, without opening her mouth; I heard her voice in my head.

"Where to?" I asked wordlessly for a moment, noticing that she had little paws on her belly.

'If you stay in the past, they will eat you,' replied the fish, and she swam aside. I went after her with arrow-like speed.

Soon we were at the shore, had a sandy bank below us and the boundary between the sea and sky was very close.

On her feet, the white fish slowly walked out of the water. I tried to follow her example, but collided with the sand and was thrown back by a wave. I could neither walk nor breathe above the water. The white fish disappeared from sight, I searched vigorously with my tail and returned hastily to the depths, to home, to the element that was sweeter than any nectar to me.