When in the mornings I entered this world of the forest, whose image I had raised as it were by my own efforts above the level of those artless Sunday impressions (paper trash, a crowd of picnickers) out of which the Berliners’ conception of “Grunewald” was composed; when on these hot, summer weekdays I walked over to its southern side, into its depths, to wild secret spots, I felt as much delight as if this was a primeval paradise within two miles from Agamemnonstrasse.
Coming to a favorite nook of mine which magically combined a free flow of sunshine with protection by the shrubbery, I would strip to the skin and lie down supine on the rug, placing my unnecessary trunks beneath my head. Thanks to the suntan coating my entire body (so that only my heels, palms and the raylike lines around my eyes kept their natural tint), I felt myself an athlete, a Tarzan, an Adam, anything you like, only not a naked town-dweller.
The awkwardness with which nakedness is usually accompanied depends upon the awareness of our defenseless whiteness, which has long since lost all connection with the colors of the surrounding world and for that reason finds itself in artificial disharmony with it. But the sun’s impact restores the deficiency, makes us equal in our naked rights with nature, and the brazen body no longer experiences shame. All this sounds like a nudist brochure—but one’s own truth is not to blame if it coincides with the truth some poor fellow has borrowed.
The sun bore down. The sun licked me all over with its big, smooth tongue. I gradually felt that I was becoming moltenly transparent, that I was permeated with flame and existed only insofar as it did. As a book is translated into an exotic idiom, so was I translated into sun. The scrawny, chilly, hiemal Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev was now as remote from me as if I had exiled him to the Yakutsk province. He was a pallid copy of me, whereas this aestival one was his magnified bronze replica.
My personal I, the one that wrote books, the one that loved words, colors, mental fireworks, Russia, chocolate and Zina—had somehow disintegrated and dissolved; after being made transparent by the strength of the light, it was now assimilated to the shimmering of the summer forest with its satiny pine needles and heavenly-green leaves, with its ants running over the transfigured, most radiant-hued wool of the laprobe, with its birds, smells, hot breath of nettles and spermy odor of sun-warmed grass, with its blue sky where droned a highflying plane that seemed filmed over with blue dust, the blue essence of the firmament: the plane was bluish, as a fish is wet in water.
One might dissolve completely that way. Fyodor raised himself and sat up. A streamlet of sweat flowed down his clean-shaven chest and fell into the reservoir of his navel. His flat belly had a brown and mother-of-pearl sheen to it. Over the glistening black ringlets of his pubic hair a lost ant scrambled nervously. His shins shone glossily. Pine needles had got stuck between his toes. With his bathing trunks he wiped his short-cropped head, sticky nape and neck. A squirrel with an arched back loped across the turf, from tree to tree, in a wavy and almost clumsy course. The scrub oaks, elder shrubs, pine trunks—everything was dazzlingly spotted, and a small cloud, in no way defiling the face of the summer day, felt its way slowly past the sun.
He got up, took a step—and immediately the weightless paw of a leafy shadow descended upon his left shoulder; it slipped off again at the next step. Fyodor consulted the position of the sun and dragged his rug a yard or so aside to prevent the shade of the leaves from encroaching upon him. To move around naked was astonishing bliss—the freedom around his loins especially pleased him. He walked between the bushes, listening to the vibration of insects and the rustling of the birds.
A wren crept like a mouse through the foliage of a small oak; a sand wasp flew by low down, carrying a benumbed caterpillar. The squirrel he had just seen climbed up the bark of a tree with a spasmodic, scrabbly sound. Somewhere in the vicinity sounded girlish voices, and he stopped in a pattern of shadow, which stayed motionless along his arm but palpitated rythmically on his left side, between the ribs.
A golden, stumpy little butterfly, equipped with two black commas, alighted on an oak leaf, half opening its slanting wings, and suddenly shot away like a golden fly. And as often happened on these woodland days, especially when he glimpsed familiar butterflies, Fyodor imagined his father’s isolation in other forests—gigantic, infinitely distant, in comparison with which this one was but brushwood, a tree stump, rubbish. And yet he experienced something akin to that Asiatic freedom spreading wide on the maps, to the spirit of his father’s peregrinations—and here it was most difficult of all to believe that despite the freedom, despite the greenery and the happy, sun-shot dark shade, his father was nonetheless dead.
The voices sounded closer and then receded. A horsefly that had settled unnoticed on his thigh managed to jab him with its blunt proboscis. Moss, turf, sand, each in its own way communicated with the soles of his bare feet, and each in its own way the sun and the shade stroked the hot silk of his body. His senses sharpened by the unrestricted heat were tantalized by the possibility of sylvan encounters, mythical abductions. Le sanglot dont j’étais encore ivre. He would have given a year of his life, even a leap-year, for Zina to be here—or any of her corps de ballet.
He again lay flat, then again got up; with a beating heart he listened to sly, vague, vaguely promising noises; then, pulling on only his trunks and hiding laprobe and clothes under a bush, he went off to wander through the woods around the lake.
Here and there, thinly on weekdays, there occurred more or less orange bodies. He avoided looking closely for fear of switching from Pan to Punch. But sometimes, next to a school satchel and beside her shiny bicycle propped against a tree trunk, a lone nymph would sprawl, her legs bared to the crotch and suede-soft to the eye, and her elbows thrown back, with the hair of her armpits glistening in the sun; temptation’s arrow had hardly had time to sing out and pierce him before he noticed, a short distance away at three equidistant points, forming a magic triangle (around whose prize?) and strangers to one another, three motionless hunters visible in between the tree trunks: two young fellows (one lying prone, the other on his side) and an elderly man, coatless, with armbands on his shirt-sleeves, sitting solidly on the grass, motionless and eternal, with sad but patient eyes; and it seemed that these three pairs of eyes striking the same spot would finally, with the help of the sun, burn a hole in the black bathing tights of that poor little German girl, who never raised her ointment-smeared lids.
He descended to the sandy shore of the lake and here in the roar of voices the charmed fabric which he himself had so carefully spun completely fell to pieces, and he saw with revulsion the crumpled, twisted, deformed by life’s nor’easter, more or less naked or more or less clothed—the latter were the more terrible—bodies of bathers (petty bourgeois, idle workers) stirring on the dirty-gray sand. At the point where the shore road went along the lake’s narrow lip, the latter was fenced off by stakes supporting tortured-looking remnants of sagging wire, and the place by these stakes was particularly valued by the beach habitués—partly because trousers could be conveniently hung by their suspenders on them (while underwear was laid on the dusty nettles) and partly because of the vague feeling of security from having a fence at one’s back.
Old men’s gray legs covered with growths and swollen veins; flat feet; the tawny crust of corns; pink porcine paunches; wet, shivering, pale, hoarse-voiced adolescents; the globes of breasts; voluminous posteriors; flabby thighs; bluish varices; gooseflesh; the pimply shoulder blades of bandy-legged girls; the sturdy necks and buttocks of muscular hooligans; the hopeless, godless vacancy of satisfied faces; romps, guffaws, roisterous splashing—all this formed the apotheosis of that renowned German good-naturedness which can turn so easily at any moment into frenzied hooting.
And over all this, especially on Sundays when the crowding was vilest of all, there reigned an unforgettable smell, the smell of dust, of sweat, of aquatic slime, of unclean underwear, of aired and dried poverty, the smell of dried, smoked,
