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A LAND THE SIZE OF BINOCULARS

HE STEPPED ONTO THE COBBLESTONES OF THE STREET, ALONG WHICH the formerly nonmenacing Polish kings had entered the city. The Galician Gate, the Chapel of the Boims-the cortege stopped at Pidzamche, and later at one of the palazzi of Rynok Square-for two weeks the malmsey wine flowed, the delegations were relieved, the well-groomed patrician ladies slipped out into the night and appeared from out of that night in the illuminated palazzi, shadows glided in the windows.

During the day the market was crowded, near the traps with live fish servants were hired and infidel children were bought and sold, there were baskets with grapes and barrels with fermenting plums; berets, turbans, caps, and yarmulkes, tasting and haggling, disappearing in the illusion of rows of tradesmen beyond the city hall into the forest.

With the law of logic, besides Magdeburg Law, the free city of Lviv, the capital of Galician Rus, was invested by the king's power. And the merchants of all Europe gathered there, all manner of languages intermingled, interest was simmering, deals were struck-the froth of Babylon deprived of grandeur, Brueghel's spittle, the spirit of the onrushing temporal flesh of the Middle Ages.

The city had taken only its name from Leo, it scorned the secrets of Venetian glass, the madness of transmutations, the fiery debates of the Sorbonne, sending its sons to Bologna and Padua and receiving traders thence, lawyers and doctors, dispatching for architects from Italy, a master clockmaker from Peremyshlyany, executioners from Germany-a secondhand dealer of a city, the temporary nearsighted doorkeeper of Europe. Its power and rule were pellucid, it fell with the fall of Constantinople, Caffa, and Belgorod-the result of an external factor, the sweeping thrusts of the misty crescent moon-in the so thickly stirred cauldron of the city, by name bequeathed, culture had not boiled dry: all the generations of its inhabitants in the future were fed with this pig slop.

One day together with the Wallachian cattle traders, through the Galician Gate, Kallimakh Buonaccorsi, a poet, entered the city.

* * *

Kallimakh was cautiously returning to the Christian world after two years of roaming. After the arrest of the freethinkers in the papal scriptorium, when his friends had heaped guilt on the fleeing Kallimakh for his Catalinian oratories, for his being the first to have the idea come into his head about a conspiracy and an attempt on the life of the keeper of the first apostle's keys, His Holiness Paul II-for two years since then the flames released after him licked at his heels, the soles of his feet cracked all over from the heat of the earth that more than once seemed like it would buckle and swallow him, the papal spies and the legates who set off after him like arrows from a papal quiver persecuted him on the farthest islands of the Mediterranean, forcing him to repeat that flight of Odysseus, fraught with dangers, adventures, and literary reminiscences-only in reverse order, to finally reach his eastern Istanbul as though he were a genie from the Thousand and One Nights, in the wink of an eye, struck by the city's towers and minarets and a carpet thrown onto the empty, sacred spot of Great Constantinople-so that like the beggar Sinbad he could unrepentantly loiter about the bazaars and squares, avoiding the colony of kinsmen, and when relations between the Ottomans and Rome got better, to lose himself in the wild horizon of the Black Sea.

From Wallachia he exchanged letters with his cousin on his mother's side, Ainolfo Tedaldi, from Lviv, an influential merchant, the head of a trading house, who offered him sanctuary and protection-it was only then by a circuitous path on the periphery of the Catholic world that once again the flying figure of an insolent Italian reappeared in a dust-covered short cape, in slippers ready to crack apart like a dried-up streambed.

* * *

How many were there then when they didn't even have the common name of "humanists" in fifteenth-century Europe?

Five hundred? More? Hardly.

An informal union of tens, of hundreds of people-bankers of new knowledge and dead languages, torchbearers of language, carriers of a new faith-as though with a mysterious wafer beneath their tongues-and carriers of a fresh ethics beneath the joyful yet still-reverberating burden of them; in stiff Confucian clothes, in the armor of philological scholarliness, they sat long in the rulers' libraries working on manuscripts, with a fragile, composed voice they laid down the law from the cathedrals and stepped out into the gardens of the new Academies beneath new skies. Reverentially they grew numb, chilled, before the profiles of statues unloaded onto piers; before the first observed perfect male body, for the first time in a thousand years, deprived of covers and crates; they were astonished at the dignity of Athenian goddesses and the fortress of their breasts-with their puffy fingers touching cold veins, freeing the marble body from the earth, and feeling, the way an inner light fills up their own forgotten human bodies with warmth.

They loved: subtle wines, imported from far away, healing the spirit with conversation and daydreams of roaming, they loved disputes and glory, they loved women invested with an unfeminine woman's mentality, they loved one another-at a distance-by correspondence.

This brilliant Renaissance assemblage that had torn the Earth from its pillars with Archimedes' lever of Ratio, so that the caravels flew out of the ports and rocked on the waves-the powerful perching Earth, unaware of its own body, being still half flat, not emboldened either to open up or close like a globe, either to enter into an a cappella round dance of luminaries, either to follow after the setting sun, losing its shores.... The Titans Putti-the Wunderkinder of Quattrocento-invited the Earth to a dance, without realizing the immensity of their partner, without knowing her temperament, powerful, like an earthquake. And sleeping till now, having turned out to be a sphere, having been torn from the sacral tripod, she rolled swiftly up and down like Leonardo's wheel, with spokes of arms and legs, released downhill, gaining speed, because in this world the ENERGY OF FALLING expands the speed of bodies. Worlds moved from their spot and began to glimmer, unwinding with centrifugal youthful hurling power, so that in five centuries it can fuse in a single solid white glimmering shroud ...

* * *

A completely different text occupied his consciousness, seeking an exit, swirling in him and depriving him of his last peace, he lost his strength, it didn't stop making him feel sick to his stomach; a white sheet of paper swayed before his eyes. Trying hard to grab onto its nonexistent edges, to hold on to his lightheadedness, he again swallows the nausea moving up to his throat-a chunk of chewed papiermâché in which there was only bile, spittle, and bad blood mixed in with dreams and letters of the alphabet. He stirred his whitened lips, tightening-till his bones hurt-his unneeded fists and with difficulty disengaged his teeth.

Sensing that only direct speech can help him.

DIRECT SPEECH

(descending into the cellar of a bread store opposite the Latin church)

"Girls clutch their knees, and little boys flex their muscles."

And they clench their fists.

Here is an illness from which we all suffer. The covering of the mind (we write mind, fear is in the mind) has made us gloomy. Has thickly covered our faces, has wrapped us so that we cannot breathe or live; those who were nearby have already suffocated with their face in a pillow (he recalled a friend of his who from childhood was fearful of just such a death)-he's on the contrary- "... I'm just fearful of the guillotine. In a wondrous way I'm tied to the eccentricity of my head-a bony growth, a thinking fist with the whimsical hairy growth and the mass of the soft loathsome appendices of a human face, only the absence of imagination and conceit of a man force him to find beauty in the construction of his own head, and all the same I impetuously fear losing this appendix, this throwaway of the body, overgrown with the organs of feelings, with timid tiny bridges to the external world, which nurtured that brain in the bone of the head, I'm still afraid ... This is Avidia, the antonym of Nirvana, another name for Klyosha, my schoolboy nickname, the name of brain centrism, an illness, a thin, tiny chain, like a notation in a passport: Registered in Avidia."

"What are you clenching in your fist, fool? Let go-you'll see-it's not EMPTY!"

... In observing small mammals-dogs, hamsters, the neuroses of feline love, the parsimonious life of people, it's difficult to rid yourself of the thought that life is a quivering, the slight quivering of the rhythms of survival, torn away by birth from great energies and rhythms (how do wasps know what kind of winter it will be?)-splashes of life, which become obsolete in their own way, in crampedness and in the commotion of everyday life, in a droplet of a preparation beneath God's microscope.

A man wouldn't survive a summer-not even a week-in his limitations without the freshening emptiness and grounding, without the intervals of sleep, the gift of dissolution, depriving us of freedom to force our body, leaving our soul only a memory and a sum, and then kindly depriving us even of this last burden. What can you-a point-know about a line, like something as simple as eternity and infinity, what can you-flatness-know about a sphere, when it passes right through you: a point, an expanding circle, a contracting circle, a point, flatness ...

... Autumn. Flies are freezing, are clinging to a man's head just to warm up. White circles swim up in a bowl above peeled potatoes. Spiders close the affair and hang themselves on their own work, as though completely bankrupt, tired of eternally dying and resurrecting.

"How an extinguished cigarette suddenly becomes lighter! ..."

A woman-child, in white curls and wrinkles of antediluvian skin, smiling, took away his coffee cup, wiped off the table, leaving the wet traces of a snail. He followed her back, moving farther away with his gaze-at times the disappearing silhouette with a basin of filthy dishes ... a transparent blouse ... the double trail of her bodice on her shoulder blades.... Then he moved toward the exit, scrounging in his pockets for a cigarette lighter, then stopping, lit up a cigarette.

And already at the tight turn of the stairwell he suddenly remembered the dreams of last night: about the caves of death-about underground terraces that move away downward in wide steps into the blackness of passages-and about a talking dog-a shadow lay from it in the form of a short ladder. His head again began to spin.

* * *

Toward a green hillock on a plain the distant wasteland tracks rushed, the nearby paths from the farmsteads and farms were crawling like grass eels and intertwined around it, streams and rivers flowed away from here along the plain; in its depth among the diverging earthen ramparts, it was as if in a harbor above a mountain there stood at anchor a cumbersome flagship-a fortified city, in the masts of towers, in Gothic rigging, in scaffolding and pennants, encircled with a double belt of walls, earthen ramparts, and moats, closed by the declaiming rhythm of bastions and defending towers, each one erected and defended by one of the trade guilds of the city; this is a list of them, it is like a deafening load of hay, frozen forever in the Middle Ages, but the scent of which penetrates centuries and makes the head swirl to our prose:

1. above the Krakow Gate: the furriers;

2. sack makers, tinsmiths, and soap makers;

3. sword makers;

4. weavers;

5. hat makers and saddle makers;

6. brewers and mead makers;

7. harness makers;

8. masons;

9. rope makers and turners;

10. boot makers;

11. potters and cauldron makers;

12. above the Galician Gate: tailors;

13. coopers, carpenters, and wagon makers;

14. carvers;

15. blacksmiths, lock makers, and toolmakers;

16. shopkeepers;

17. bakers;

18. goldsmiths.

The entire flotilla of settlements, of fortified monasteries, churches, and water mills swayed around the flagship from both near and far.

On the oars of the counterforces an ark of poor people-the hospital floated up to the walls of the city-a Polish church and the monastery of St. Stanislav.

The helmets of the church of St. George the Dragonslayer were ablaze at dawn, who, with the narrow spear of an idea, was smiting a coiling serpent on a mountain.

Above the orphaned, princely Old Rus city of Pidzamche left outside the walls-above the city of Leo-Leopolis, Lemberg-and above the entire landscape to the horizon towered, occupying the peak of the cliff, a guardpost fort-Vysokyi Zamok, put together from rough stone blocks. A secret underground passageway linked it with Pidzamche. In the middle of the courtyard a deep well had been dug. In the year 410 in its dungeons the knights captured at Grünwald waited out their ransom. The garrison of the castle consisted of fifty soldiers. Leaving them for the defense of the city, the king didn't forget to set aside for them the right to free bathing in the city's bathhouse once a week. Attached to the wall of Pidzamche, the bathhouse was a crowded place.

The Klekhs used to bring their schoolchildren here to bathe, accompanied by the singing of "De profundis," merchants arranged for meetings here and concluded transactions-people came here to rest, to clean the pores of their skin, to trade news, to spend time, to copulate.

The city oozed with sewage, with the stink of bulls' intestines-the stink coming from the plank troughs of the sewage system-it reverberated with rat passageways made beneath it and in it, as though a parallel city-bone eater were built into it and rapidly expanded, an insertion, dissolving its bone and brain, threatening to change the main city into an empty set decoration, stone into papiermâché, into a shell ready to collapse into itself.

The city was cleaned up twice a year, at Easter and at Christmas, and for greater zeal among the population in this matter, the city executioner was installed to manage the cleaning. In another time on his squeaking heavy wagon, he used to cart off out of town and burn all kinds of junk and carrion, in expectation of his starry hour on the main crimson platform amid the spreading dead rippling of heads.

The heart of Leopolis was the stomach that occupied its center: the market, the square. The merchant bazaar element simmered and spattered around the eight-sided tower of the city council hall-casing for clock and power, with totems of stone lions at the entrance to the morose mechanism, with a tidal wave it pressed the clock, haggled on the steps of the scaffold, swelled with tents and the covered carts of rows of merchants, with entire streets of warehouses, shops, and workshops, as though in a seashell colony, it overgrew the stones of the pavement, the rear facade of the city council building. From the basements of the city council building wine was sold, from them the bars of the prison holds looked out. The lapping of subterranean lakes carried from the prison holds of the medieval republic. The ground was like a deck partly dried up above an abyss, and not even the archbishop could be assured in it.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from A LAND THE SIZE OF BINOCULARS by IGOR KLEKH
Copyright © 2004 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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