eMarkroman

A brief account of the novel "The Discrete Continuity of Love"

The Discrete Continuity of Love is a novel about love. A thirty-year-old woman sleeps and in a persistently repetitive dream she sees the events of another's life and another's love story which took place long before her birth, before the Revolution. At one point she returns home from work. She unlocks the door with her key and in the locked apartment she discovers the protagonist of her dreams seated at a table.

The Discrete Continuity of Love is a neo-novel, restoring the Russian novelistic subject to postmodern literature with all the consequences that issue from this restoration:

— a text combining refined metaphor with classically simple, sincere writing

— an historical space made up of mutually penetrating and correlating pre- and post-Revolutionary periods

— personal reality and life reproduced down to the sense of touch

— a world seen from within by characters located within themselves

— a scrupulous psychologism inherited from Tolstoy-Dostoevsky immersed in the most excruciating and obscene details of the human soul and physiology

— the discovery by one of the heroines that the reduction of life to a minimum, to a practically continuous dream, provides a no less vital presence in life than the most feverish activity

— the discovery by one of the characters that the Revolution in Russia came about not because of the Lenins and Trotskys, but because he parted with the woman he loved.

The Discrete Continuity of Love is a neo-novel because it is a novel about how each of us experiences ourselves when we are alone.

An excerpt from
"The Discrete Continuity of Love"

... in the morning the train came bowling out into the expanse of the heedless Motherland. A popular version of her native landscape as she knew it from trips to the dacha — Tolstoyan, passively resistant to evil — rolled past the window, an endless, doleful film reel. The railway, built much later than the unsuspecting villages, ran right through them without taking any notice. Piercing them wherever it chose, the railway turned their dirty laundry inside out, pitilessly displaying the unsightly panorama of provincial life. As if she were being taken by train on an excursion to meet the common people, who existed only as exhibitions. An abstract love for the people had been instilled in her from childhood, and still she loved them abstractly with all her might, doomed to this inevitable abstraction counterbalanced in turn by the monumental indifference of the people toward her feelings, including her innate feeling of guilt. The fleeting variegation of small towns and villages and the countless trees strewn between them facing the railroad tracks across kitchen-gardens left hapless by the arrival of autumn oppressed her with the spectacle of the unrealized abundance of all the unknown, nameless lives that had ended up along this line. The sight left her tormented by her innate feeling of guilt because the statistically incomprehensible number of people who settled in her native country, precisely on the strength of their failure to enter consciousness, automatically trivialized the value of each individual life. She could not grasp the justification for birth and death, or most importantly for the approximate, simplified existence in the gap between them of the absolute majority of people, dissolved without a trace on the boundless land. And if everyone is equal before God, does this mean that she, too, could be born and live out her days in some backwater, or even in that peasant cottage painted a wild, toxic green rolling past along with the lonely landscape? Should her resistant soul have submitted to a purely logical, direct dependence if proof based on numerical superiority and high mathematical probability alone had proven insufficiently coercive? And what was to be done with her own independent identity, which did not consent to merely mathematical equality although intellectually it was prepared to admit that it was silly to cling to a hierarchy of estates that was becoming all the more illusory the farther they traveled from the old capital. She came into contact with the leveling of rights at once, in the doorway of the common toilet. The exercise of natural needs in these tight, rocking premises, which instilled no faith in their cleanliness, became an obstacle for her that required additional spiritual effort each time to overcome. She had no doubt that few of the people whose lives she passed as the train moved ever farther in a southwesterly direction, and with whom she came into contact on remote station platforms during long stops when the hospital train, not part of the plan, made way for trains running according to schedule, and no one traveling with her on this train experienced a similar difficulty, visiting the toilet without attaching particular significance to the act. And if simple mathematical equality does not take its own course, and if all on your own you do not imperceptibly begin to go to the toilet with genuine spiritual simplicity like the overwhelming majority of people, then there is no point in acting as though you are in no way exceptional or in thinking that since you alone are so fastidious you are worse than everyone else.

She was diverted from her extensive reflections at the window by Vera, who had been the most forthcoming in talking with her that first day. They spoke frankly, encouraged by the unhurried idleness of the road. This was her style, to accept someone's favor while at first experiencing something close to indifference or even vexation at this attempt on her peaceful, self-sufficient solitude. Then she would get carried away, tripping over her tongue with a loyal, sincere emotionality but without getting into revelations about the other person's life or going into details and almost immediately forgetting their exact circumstances. Such that after Vera finished telling the story of her life, she recalled only that Vera was traveling as a nurse together with her husband, an army doctor, but that she had undertaken the journey on account of another person entirely. They sat in the lower bunk half-turned toward one another. Shadows played across Vera's laconic face, a face executed with limited means. The anemic autumn sun darted in and out of view behind the moving trees, chasing the train that sped along parallel to it. Vera's functional, clasped hands, coupled in a mutual handshake, lay on her practical, tidy skirt, and Vera as a whole gave off the impression of an expedient, energetic being not overburdened with useless details, free from doubts and insurmountable internal prejudices. But when she let Vera pass in the doorway of the compartment she got a whiff of the stuffy, stable, characteristic fustiness, ensconced in the severe pleats of her heavy clothing, that permeates fabric after prolonged wearing as it absorbs the microscopic bodily excretions that accompany the vital activities of the human organism. This smell accompanied Vera's further presence as a subtext, and as a result she began to think that in camp conditions Vera limited herself to regularly washing her face and hands. She forced herself to bring hot water from the kitchen before breakfast, locked herself in the shower-room and bathed, pouring the water over herself with the copper ladle newly given her by the quarter-master. The showers did not yet work, and the train looked largely uninhabited. The crew and the medical staff dispersed and went to their compartments through its narrow, attenuated, rocking and tenantless space. Somewhere up ahead in the immediate vicinity of the unimaginable and fearsome front line this space would be filled with those for whom it was intended. She had gone through the high school nursing course with the usual lack of concern, but now she faced something serious that instilled in her an instinctive, sucking fear. The experience and protective composure that emanated from Vera comforted her, however, and therefore she felt herself obliged not to focus overmuch on Vera's faults. The lunch bell sounded. And if at breakfast she had still maintained a relative sovereignty that saved her from the wearisome obligation of formal intercourse with the others, at lunch they categorically included her in their circle. Vera introduced her to everyone and because of the burdensome cordiality, with its implied reciprocity, of this now unavoidable company made up of doctors, soldiers and nurses, she, as always, immediately forgot all their names. This absurdly awkward absent-mindedness compelled her on several occasions to narrow her eyes unctuously and flash a disarming smile which stood in for a name and signified a personal liking for whomever she happened to be speaking with. But at times, intently applying herself to the moderately inedible army rations, she caught herself in the creeping self-recognition that she was trying to compensate with heightened politeness for the vague, unfounded indifference toward new acquaintances that she had experienced in the first minutes with Vera. They were so uninteresting to her that she was too lazy to render them concrete, linking together the freely varying collection of random external features — hairdos or bald spots, beards or shaven chins, the shape of noses and ears, the color of eyes, the style of dress, etc — available to any arbitrarily selected community of people. Only one handsome fellow stood out. He resembled a grenadier who never lost sight of his beauty, and who easily broke into a sweat from intensive attention to his appearance. The rest all looked alike to her, especially the women, and their existence passed her by. None of the variations of generally accepted manifestations that they exhibited touched her: their good-natured actions, imperturbable readiness to collide with the war that drew near to them all, or the many forms of social or national patriotism in which there seemed to her an unconscious desire to convince others, but themselves above all, that they were right at home here and knew what they were doing. She perceived everything that happened against the background of the constant sensation that she was not at home anywhere, and the definitive meaning of events was utterly unclear to her. Their shared, simple optimism wearied her more than anything as it implied an elated, business-like consciousness of entering the theatre of military operations that in itself invested the war with meaning and even justified it as a cause in which it was reasonable voluntarily to take part. This consciousness contradicted her seditious, apocryphal desire to steal a single, dear person from this beastly war which held not the slightest interest for her. She did not intend to prove anything to anyone, and amidst the general certainty in the correctness of the common endeavor and the authenticity of commonplaces she preferred to keep silent. She could conceal from all but herself that in the depths of her soul she was persistently indifferent to those around her. This unaggressive coldness, which nevertheless caused her pangs of conscience, was taken by everyone else — to her constant amazement — for a capacity to please and to produce a pleasant impression. No one guessed at the process of self-reflection that took place within her in the presence of others, nor did they see any disparity in her behavior. But she knew of all sorts of disparities within herself. They finished lunch, having arranged to get together after supper for a party. She lagged behind Vera now. At some point she would come to terms with her lack of common ground with the people with whom she had to spend the upcoming interval of her life, but at the moment she was exhausted by the feverish stream of heightened consciousness that had tormented her since the day before, when with impetuous haste she had planned and executed her departure, fleeing the possibility of changing her mind or talking herself out of leaving. She disconnected herself from her overloaded self-reflections, burst fully dressed on her assigned, unwelcoming bunk and fell asleep. Vera woke her up shortly, and along with everyone else they tidied up the dispensary and the examining room. She sorted through boxes of medicines and bandages and stacked piles of linen on the shelves, and amongst the other nurses she suddenly and easily lost sight of herself. The room smelt soothingly of sanded wood from the fresh shelf boards, and the work-therapy definitively dispersed her "I". Then the train screeched, jerked, scraped and stuck at the next godforsaken railway halt, and as one they dropped the unsorted boxes and the remaining packages of linen and poured out on to the platform. They ate their fill of hot pies in the station restaurant. As she bought a big nostalgic winter apple that seemed to have been especially grown for a still-life from an amorphous country woman who was phlegmatically hawking her wares on the empty platform, her head was filled with frivolous, consoling sayings: everything is in God's hands, and somehow it will turn out all right, there's always a chance.

... the party broke up on its own, but not before she had been persuaded to take a shot of pure spirits to commemorate her joining the medical profession. They filled her glass with a heart-rending liquid and set a tall glass of water beside it. This new situation of being face to face with herself, outside of the customary order of things left ever farther behind in Moscow, unexpectedly provoked a relapse of open-heartedness which had seemed completely subdued by refined skepticism. She wanted to be like the rest, and she tossed off the apocalyptic jigger and drained the glass of water. They applauded her, and the handsome grenadier struck up a stumbling march on the guitar. With childish satisfaction she verified that she had been needlessly afraid and nothing terrible had befallen her, only her scorched larynx burnt a little. Now she prepared to take herself seriously in hand and keep track lest she get drunk. But nothing extraordinary happened to her, and they convinced her to have another drink. She was persuaded by the Don Juan lieutenant who sat down beside her, a shortish, significantly unattractive tow-headed man. His deep, fleecy voice seemed to emanate from a wooden box within his chest lined with green velvet or the felt from a billiard table. He looked straight into her eyes with a hypnotic, merry impudence. The simplified interactions of the road pleased her all the more. She liked the way everyone, even the women, drank this dodgy thieves' brew. Vera's unabashed flirtation with the handsome grenadier, and the way her husband was boozing with a gloomy disinterest, methodically nodding assent to the skeptical observations of the hail, gray-haired surgeon. It was obvious that not only was her husband not annoyed by their flirting, but on the contrary it amused him, and he watched them with a cunning approval, almost encouraging and even loving them. This was what lulled her most of all: everyone here loved one another. They were well disposed to one another. They willingly laughed at old, well-worn anecdotes and oft repeated jokes. They were together, and no one was unhappy or lonely. She wanted to grow dull, and she did so. Their unanimous acceptance heartened her, how they all liked her straight off. The lieutenant was blathering in a velvet whisper, hovering above her right shoulder. She liked his attractive, intelligent hands, one of which peremptorily clasped her waist while the other insinuatingly covered her half-clenched hand as it rested on the edge of the table. Not idle hands in the slightest, their ennobled active outline bore the stamp of the physician's reasonable profession, and with a vague, remarkable sluggishness she suppressed her unhurried, minute impulse to kiss them. A moist, tickling warmth swelled in the lower portion of her abdomen, now heavy with the same pleasant and shameful warmth she had felt in her rosy-cheeked, allergy-plagued childhood when she wet herself. As if some tightly sealed, concealed anguish about the arbitrary life that had flowed through her fingers, a life for which she could find no justification, had come uncorked. She was overcome with repentance for her useless, wasted life. Without leaving her place she wanted to confess every painstaking trifle to this first soldier to come along who now embraced her. But she was distracted by the weak enthusiasm aroused by her illusion that perhaps now, among these people — made more simply, soundly and genuinely than herself — her life might change. And as a train changing directions at a switch leaves one set of rails, which flies off to the side, soon disappearing entirely from view, her former life flew away from her, leaving not even pangs of conscience behind but only the sarcastic observation that she had only to set out on a railway journey for her associations to acquire a railway hue. With a fresh outburst of her growing simple-mindedness she was carried away by the obvious truth she had discovered for herself: all these doctors and nurses, and the gray-haired surgeon painting a vivid picture for his fellow revelers of his campaign with Skobelev to Bulgaria to fight the Turks, and the whole zemstvo doctors' corps voluntarily dispersed throughout the country in out-of-the-way places, among the very towns and villages whose spectacle had so impressed her that morning — healing, curing, soothing, patching and tending to the needy, hearing confession, none of this compensated by salary or any other mercantile notion — they constituted the real content of the abstract concept "salt of the earth". And now that they had all been drawn into this war they did not judge whether it was conceivable to take part. They were en route to take part in it without experiencing a false and onerous innate feeling of guilt. And although the lieutenant was too impudent, and too boldly squeezed her knee such that beneath her skirt her legs felt as though they had been pinched at the scene of a crime, he listened to her attentively and understood everything appropriately. And he was clear and reliable. When Vera's husband crashed to the floor, stood up, reeled and collapsed on the gray-haired surgeon, raised himself once more and pushed away everyone that tried to help him, destroying the smooth flow of talk round the table, the lieutenant abducted her by the hand and having pressed her shoulder blades against the hard, chill wall of the carriage platform began without warning to suck on her lips, wetly kissing her eyebrows, cheeks and eyes. He rumpled her skirt, which rode up in unsightly fashion, bunched to one side and sticking out as on some circus monkey in one of Durov's costumed attractions. She did not like Durov's attractions or monkeys or even Charles Darwin. Monkeys were disgracefully caricatured specimens of his theory of evolution. And she herself was a disgraceful specimen. A shameful specimen, so shameful that the lieutenant laying siege to her could not have understood. Unless perhaps she just up and wet herself right here, in his presence, as she had in her serene childhood. Unsticking his importunate hands she said that she wanted to pee. He did not understand but let her go out of surprise. She set off down the long corridor inside the car and ran into Vera on the way, but Vera walked right past. To the lieutenant. They exchanged a couple loud, scarcely audible comments drowned out by the regular clacking of the train wheels. But from the opposite end of the corridor she could not make out what they were saying, and it was utterly unbearable to go find out.

... the young woman had a strange dream as she slept on the decrepit six-legged bed with a bulging spring in the middle. She dreamt she wore a respectable gray satin dress with an ample skirt, which she raised along with her slip and held up as she contorted in a humiliating pose over the soul-wrenching stool in the shaky toilet, her satin elbow propped against the thin wall in hopes of greater stability. She stood on the frail vibrating floor with a small round hole torn in it right in front of her for some unknown reason through which she could see how the dark earth covered with sleepers rushed along below. Having completed the task that had brought her there and pulled up her underwear, so old-fashioned that it astonished her to the depths of her soul, she washed her hands in the sink whose handles she was painfully obliged to touch and went out into the corridor where she experienced deliverance from this custom, so unacceptable it made her skin crawl. She walked back to her compartment through the swaying, unsteady corridor against the direction of the train which rushed through the night past green signal-posts, and she had hardly entered when the shortish, rather toy-like lieutenant who had been following her appeared from the platform. (She wondered in the dream how she recognized his distinguishing features, and had no answer). Lithe as a hungry cat he came after her, the two crosses on his chest knocking against one another and jingling slightly. In the closeness of her cramped compartment she pulled off her crackling dress, her elbows brushing against every possible protuberance, and hung the dress by the first buttonhole she found on the metal dress hook screwed into the paper-thin wall. The hook astounded her unaccountably, but at present she didn't have the strength to go into exactly why. The door opened as well, and there was no time to pluck up the courage to admit whether she had forgotten to close it or had intentionally left it open. She was waiting for something all the time, some kind of continuation, or a very specific continuation. And this continuation followed. The lieutenant came through the half-open door and closed it behind him without wavering. Once more his sure, capable hands devoted themselves to her, reducing her to a state of ecstatic weakness. They unlaced her bodice, from which her heavy breasts immediately tumbled out, and penetrated beneath her slip to her bare skin. The lieutenant remained dressed, but he stealthily, childishly unfastened the zipper on the riding-breeches that he wore tucked into his boots. This made her laugh. She had no desire to see the lieutenant in all his final and exposing nakedness. He threw her down on someone else's cramped bunk and pressed down on her, but nothing came of it. The bunk was impossibly narrow. The lieutenant's leg and then the lieutenant himself slid off the edge. Then he unceremoniously lifted her up, turned her back to him and, with one arm wrapped around her stomach he leapt forward. There was nothing she could do but lift her backside toward the lieutenant like an animal, her arms leaning on the folding table. She found herself face to face with her own reflection in the night-black window that appeared before her and began to scrutinise her humiliating pose with real voluptuous delight, her blazing, dishevelled and harrowed face, her breasts hanging down side by side and flapping to and fro in time with the synchronous swaying of the train car and the forward movements of the lieutenant, who resembled a jockey towering behind her from the waist up. She also saw in the window how the fiery points of villages flew by, intersecting her smoothly swaying breasts, villages filled with the same people for whom she had since childhood felt a useless, oppressive, innate feeling of love identical to a feeling of guilt. But now in an unforeseen manner, on account of her obvious animal humiliation — in full view of the villages flowing past beneath her nipples — this was balanced with a feeling of guilt toward herself, and these two guilts cancelled each other out, delivering love from the aggravating makeweight and allowing her to be ripe and freely flowing. An irrational, uncontrollable readiness to submit herself to commonplace shame made her even with all the rest of humanity, supplanting useless conceptions thrust upon her by her upbringing of an innate, one-sided obligation, of some sort of debt before whomever it might be. Her feelings became just what they should have been, simply feelings, summoning her to nothing and obligating her to no one. Freed by this desperate downfall she allowed herself to be glimpsed in the lower part of the window, in the space between the two short shades lowered on a thin horizontal metal bar, along with the distant nocturnal villages drifting by, along with nearby railway crossings, like models, ripped by the train's light from the black cotton wool of the night, along with the dark silhouettes of trees, the untidy blots of bushes and single disorderly poles. At this moment in a speculative stupor she discerned that a worm-like blue monogram ran at intervals in slanting lines across the white curtains, coiling into the simple bureaucratic abbreviation "MOC", for Ministry of Communications, the very one that had stuck in her mind from last year when she took the train to Leningrad on a business trip for her publishing house. And that the table she was leaning against was covered in light-blue plastic and bordered with aluminium trim. Suddenly the elusive source of her astonishment about the hook screwed into the compartment wall on which she had hung her satin dress became clear. Its design was from another time entirely. From the time in which she slept, in which there was no place for the ceremonious satin dress or the affected trousers or this lieutenant out of a musical comedy. And just then in her dream she found the explanation for this. She had simply never ridden in pre-revolutionary trains and hadn't the slightest idea what sort of tables, curtains and hooks they had. And the presentiment of some important discovery gripped her in her dream. Something to do with history. That there is no history. That the costumes and decorations change, but all historical events are a vain masquerade performed by their participants. That the most grandiose turning-points in history change nothing except fashion. And the pettiest individual life, utterly inconspicuous everyday events such as going to the toilet or the process of spreading butter on bread are the only truly vital events worthy of our attention. All the rest requires no personal participation. We are all interchangeable in mass spectacles, and the less you take part in them the more you remain yourself. And although in this she completely contradicted her ardently beloved poet Tyutchev, through her dream she experienced exultant liberation even from Tyutchev. The state of freedom that seized her in her dream was so strong that she had an unbearable urge to pee. Or she had wanted to for some time but could not wake up. It was true, she recalled, that she had already dreamt of going to the toilet and had even felt how naturally and authentically she had urinated. From the inarticulate, childish fear of wetting the bed in her sleep she awoke, but having examined herself she calmed down. The bed was absolutely dry. Then with a degree of psychological relief she threw on her robe, passed close by a mournful male shadow prudently blended in with the wall and made invisible, and set off through the corridor, peaceful now amidst the all-embracing night, to the real toilet, already mentioned many times and in great detail.

Translated by Patrick Henry

This translation first appeared in Glas: New Russian Writing, 1996, No.11.