The Voice Over

And here I woke up and, without opening my eyes (because I was in a stranger’s home, surrounded by disgraceful furniture, the little vases, the ugly velvet curtains), imagined the entire pitiful scene: my poor, my always poor Busya is busting his head trying to figure out what to get me. And I knew how he would sit at the edge of the horrible couch and say, “Forgive me, but you understand,” and how I would respond “Of course, we survived the war, you are alive and you love me, I don’t need anything else …” and how we would almost cry while embracing.

But it was all different. I opened my eyes and saw Boris squatting by the side of my bed. He was holding an English book, Alice in Wonderland, and it was open to the first page, my favorite picture from childhood. Busya’s eyes were kind, brown, like a setter’s, devoted, and they shone behind his glasses. “Oh you’ve given me such a lovely, lovely, wonderful present,” I said happily.

Almost all fragments in Poret’s noteboks are set up in a similar way; here we see all the characteristic traits—a defiant indifference to big history (and its circumstances, which are left unexplained, but are dropped into the story in passing, as if the author will not deign to pay attention to the war, to being poor and displaced), and the sharp, falcon-like or magpie-like, attention to details, which are invariably more important than circumstances—the disgraceful curtain is a gentle shield from the cold and gloom of the times that have come.⁴ But the main thing—the ever surprising thing—is the rising intonation of the storytelling, a keyboard heady with the mix of distrust and delight, on which the story runs ever higher, reaching the high C, the joyous resolution. Each story refuses to be a simple “tale of the past,” becoming instead a circus act; each plot does a backflip, whips around, takes a bow and waits for our applause and appreciation. It’s possible that these anecdotes were worn smooth like pebbles from years of being recounted orally (what Akhmatova called her records⁵) and once written down, they continue in the same vein. But Akhmatova’s records are an instrument, part of a larger project of exacting historical justice. What Poret’s writings do to the past can seem like unartful table-talk, a pile of ancient witticisms and yarn-spinning, where anecdotes along the lines of “a lover climbs the balcony,” the cute things someone’s children said, and endless stories about cats and dogs become entangled in a way that only makes sense to the storyteller. The tiny, pin-size accounts of people referred to by mere initials, collected, written down, illustrated—this is the yield of an entire life, its result, an amusement park ride of senseless generosity. And yet, as strange as it may seem, it has a distinct goal—and one not devoid of a kind of pragmatism.

3.

When Poret’s “Memories of Daniil Kharms” began to circulate (in the pre-Gutenbergian sense—they were only printed in 1980) in the late sixties or early seventies, they were not received well. The echo of this discontent still lingers (“free and apparently unreliable” is what Wikipedia has to say about Poret’s memoirs), which shouldn’t surprise us. Poret recounts the life of another person the same way she does her own: subjecting it to a strict editorial process. The editor’s logic is roughly as follows: events lose their scale and sometimes their meaning, details are comically enhanced, the main point is forced out of the frame, and thus the outside view of the events becomes sharper and more grotesque, clearly stylized following either the English (eccentric-Chestertonian) novel, or the silent films of Chaplin and Keaton. Maybe this was Poret’s intent: she tries to reinforce her perspective by means of montage. The finished reel has everything, facial expressions and gestures, stunts and phrases—and any one of the latter could become a caption or a title card that fills the entire screen—and behind the text, just as behind the frame, there is the invisible weight of what is implied, for those who are ready to notice.