Pushkin

Stephen Sangirardi   Bard715@aol.com
Pushkin
 
   It was not hard to figure out why he was dying: if you lived by the Byron, you died by the Byron. Being fatally wounded in the frigid St. Petersburg snow was the extra touch a poet needed to make the day complete. And a duel over an essentially worthless woman, fueled by the worldly wisdom—no wisdom at all—of the English bard surely made for a wonderful life. If he hadn’t spent the better part of his time grafting the French bon mot onto his speech and pen, then he had devoted too much of it pursuing with equal panache the inaccessible dame and rebuffing the one who threw herself at his feet. Many a good woman could have husbanded him and tamped his pipe as he versed. Would he at least be remembered for everything he wrote?
   If nothing else, he wanted people to know that if you lived by the Onegin, you died by the same. Any idiot could have told Pushkin that while he was huffing and puffing his way through the bourse of the proposition and wagering the foreskin of his life, except that he would not have listened. The tyranny of the unsanctioned orgasm was too strong in him, and he had lost.
   Now he was dying because a French rake had shot a bullet through his chest. Over Natalie Goncharova! She was # 113 on the bard’s infamous list. A beast wanting discourse of reason would have mourned longer before this wife of his jumped into D’Anthes’ canopied bed with intended permanence. But that was another tale.
   Sometimes an author took too much pride in his creation. When writers turned puppeteers, they were apt to impose humiliation on the characters they created. Poor Lensky. He had looked up to Onegin with the fervor of a younger brother seeking the approbation of an older man. And what did Pushkin decide? He had Onegin grope the shapely bottom of Lensky’s fiancée Olga for no other reason than to antagonize the younger man because he had invited Onegin to that stupid party…so that Pushkin and Olga’s dull sister Tanya could become an item! Lensky was only trying to be nice. He didn’t want Onegin to be lonely anymore; Lensky also knew that Tanya was infatuated with Onegin. Pushkin had become bored writing the novel and so he had to make Onegin equally bored. The antidote to such ennui? Have Onegin dance endlessly with the woman Lensky adored, have Onegin grope Olga’s bottom, and have the stupid and giggling Olga oblivious to the fact that Lensky, this good soul, was seething with jealousy. Pushkin pushed his live buttons. He made Lensky furious with Onegin and challenged the superior gunman to a duel. Onegin killed the only friend he ever had. He had shot the good Lensky, murdering what he loved the most at the time. Why? Why would Onegin purposely entice the stupid Olga when he knew that Lensky was overly sensitive about these matters? The answer was simple enough to its author. Onegin savored his superiority vis-à-vis both Olga and Lensky. Especially the latter. What surprised Pushkin, though, was that he didn’t have Onegin, following the duel, make insane love to the stupid, shapely Olga as an exclamation point of Onegin’s dominion over the fallen Lensky. No. Onegin was eventually consumed with guilt for murdering his friend, Olga married a Russian soldier, and Tanya pined away in unrequited love for Onegin.
   Even bastards occasionally felt the need to punish themselves for their misdeeds. At the end of the novel Onegin found himself at a Moscow ball and spotted a beautiful woman who seemed vaguely familiar. It was the entirely transformed Tanya! Married to a stolid Russian prince, Tanya was the gracious hostess with plentiful pearls encircling her neck. She received Onegin warmly and even invited him to her palatial home. But implore her as he did, Tanya had no intention of betraying her husband. Onegin besieged her with passionate letters, as passionate as the ones Tanya used to write Onegin when the glass slipper was on the other foot. She was now firm, however; she would not allow Onegin to seduce her. Her womanly intuition had gleaned the Byronic dimension of the scene: Onegin wanted her badly because she was inaccessible, married to someone else. He could have had Tanya once, but he had spurned her back in the day when she was naive. She also recalled the soiree when Onegin had fondled silly Olga and in the process killed his friend Lensky. She knew that if she permitted passage to Onegin’s importunity, he would have absconded into the night after the seduction and stalked more married flesh, like a wolf that makes its rounds from flock to flock. Finally, Onegin dropped to his knees in front of the metamorphosed Tanya, which was a gesture an English bard would have heartily approved, but to no avail. She would not make love to him. Onegin then made his way to the door and wound up a lonely man. It was all very suitable punishment for both Pushkin and Onegin.
   As he lay dying in the icy snow, he considered these things: the role of Lensky he found himself authorially emoting; his wife Natalie performing the femme fatale into which Pushkin had turned her; D’Anthes, although no poet, impersonating Pushkin himself. The French officer had tupped Natalie ad infinitum and was certain to tup her again with supernatural vengeance once Pushkin was consigned to Potter’s field. Where was Natalie at the moment? Didn’t she want to gloat over the supine man who in the past year had begun to sting her with accusations? If he had appeared weak and pathetic in the past, ineffectually pleading for her fidelity, how much more would Pushkin have appeared the weakling now in the waning fractions of his life? He gave her no more than a week to play the grieving widow before declaring her undying love for the brutal D’Anthes. She would make Gertrude look like Hecuba!
   Why did he ever marry her, when in his heart he saw the calligraphy on the wall as clearly as though he had written it himself?
   Men were drawn to her even before he and Natalie wed. Did he think that the frontal attraction would end after he deposited a ring on her finger?
   She reciprocated the gazes of other men even before they had wed. Did he think such reciprocity would cease after he planted a ring on her hand?
   Pious, monkish Zossimas on mountain crags masturbated in her honor. Did he think such reclusive men would chastise their peters after Pushkin put a ring on her cunt?
   What in the world was he thinking when friends urged him against marrying one of the most sensual women in the land? Everywhere they went men stared unabashedly at Natalie, and she bristled like a harnessed horse when they did. Was he stupid enough to think that he could alter the blueprint of her soul? He might have, had he used his wits better, but as soon as she discovered his stark insecurity the night in Czar’s Tavern, a fortnight before their wedding, he had lost the battle (and may have for all he knew launched her career as a full-fledged whore). When the very tall, dark and handsome officer kept gazing at Natalie from across the room, and she of course gazed back with ravenous eyes, as though Pushkin were not in her presence, and he had to wrench her arm to get her to leave because he was vastly afraid of challenging an officer like that to a duel and because good women simply did not act that way in public, he should have known that she would eventually be the death of him. The entire way home in the sledge he berated her for shamelessly flirting with a worthless Cossack. My God! If she flirted with this Cossack in her fiancé’s presence, what would she do if she were alone? On and on he whined, like an infantile coward—this man who at one time held the whip in all his relationships—while she casually yawned and denied what a blind man could have seen. He should have known it that night when they were on his rumpled bed, and he was about to make love to her. Out of nowhere, in a voice as cold and deadly as scimitar steel, she whispered of the way the tall, well-built officer was mentally undressing her in the tavern, and that there was something about his eyes, his brutal eyes that she couldn’t tear herself away from, and that she knew many women who would have found him quite irresistible. As for her, ho-hum, she hated a man like that, no matter how much of a muscular god he looked, and all she wanted now was the embrace of her safe, normal fiancé like Pushkin. There in the dark, he was compelled to gulp loudly enough for this woman to hear. His manhood wilted instantly, and he understood for the first time that in Hell cruelty was the national pastime. He understood that some men cultivated their conjugal Hell and were never able to leave it because they somehow enjoyed the place that they somehow deserved. Pausing strategically, his bride-to-be told him that she needed to be tupped right then and there, needed to be tupped savagely. What choice did Pushkin have but to employ his fecund brain? He imagined himself someone else, someone close by, someone he had recently seen, someone his wife would have found irresistible, and so he unspeakably tupped his bride-to-be who seemed to be in another room with another man. Three times Pushkin tupped her, in three different positions, while imagining he was that someone else, as his accommodating bride-to-be made sweet moan!
   The following morning Delilah could not have smiled more brazenly at Samson. How much saner his life would have been had he left her that morning! He could not leave her for the same reason that he could not look at himself in the mirror for the next few days. For the same reason he could not recognize the sound of his own voice, or remove from his mind what would have been the stern words and mortified glances of his mother and father for what he had allowed to happen in bed, or for inventing excuses as to why he never returned to the Czar’s Tavern after the incident with the officer. There was no need to go to the tavern. He had practically invited the scoundrel into his house once Natalie learned of the great poet’s flaw. He had exposed his artery, his weakness, and a vamp like Natalie was quick to suck on the inverse proportion. D’Anthes and the tall officer in the tavern—could they not have been the same man? Men died by the Byron because they deliberately chose to live by the Byron. But why did he choose to live by the Byron? Why did he marry a woman who had femme fatale etched across her forehead and carried him under her thumb ever since he pretended to be that someone else between lascivious sheets? Was there a need to punish himself for what he had done to Count Voronstov and countless others? Was his ennui so great that he needed to risk death by marrying an asp? Or was it simply the great satisfaction it gave him to wear the seductive Natalie on his lapel? Of all the men she could have married, she chose Pushkin, the famous poet, the ladies’ man whose neck she discovered she could crush…
   In a few minutes the doctor would be here, ‘the surgeon would be fetched.’ That was the curious thing about duels. Everyone knew they existed in Russia, but they were still illegal and so no doctor was allowed audience. This was why so many men died in them. Doctors arrived too late. There was D’Anthes hovering over him, sneering, very tall, very darkly handsome. Pushkin did not irrefutably hate him, having enough wherewithal of mind to know that if one lived by the Don Juan one had to die that way. It was more or less a conscious decision, and the antidote to Weltschmerz that never failed…and, besides, despite all the pain she had brought him there had been one or two or three wonderful days spent with Natalie far from the maddening crowd. She had sweet dispositions when the little girl inside her came out and played under Pushkin’s paternal auspices. Many were the afternoons they had spent swimming in some lake, and she clutched him tightly when the water grew too cold or deep, and with her purple lips she lisped the sound of strutting quails. There were even times when she would, with ineluctable charm, praise to the heavens his endless poems, though she scarcely understood half of what he meant. She enjoyed the rhyme and rhythm of his words, and wasn’t that after all what poetry was about? Soon the pendulum would swing, and he had to contend with her schizophrenic mood when she regarded his verse as little more than the enterprise of effete aristocrats and practically spat upon his page. She was too young and voluptuous, she would claim, to be cooped up under a tree reading stupid poems! Dancing! She wanted to go dancing, and for Pushkin that signified one thing: she wanted men to become transfixed by her undulating pose.
   He stared up at D’Anthes. Something about the man’s fur hat stoked Pushkin’s memories. Sights, sounds, objects were wont to do that. He had known a man in Paris years ago who found poignant memories of his mother coming back to him whenever he tasted Madeleine and tea, the cake and drink he shared so many times with his Mama when this acquaintance was a boy. The man particularly recalled how Mama used to kiss him goodnight years ago…each time he nibbled on Madeleine and sipped an herbal tea in the present. The Parisian had called it…a retentive cue. Now it was the sight of his rival’s fur hat blocking out the opaque sun and stirring Pushkin’s recollection as he neared death. Of what, though? What was he beginning to recall?
   Suddenly he knew.
   Count Voronstov, the Governor General of Odessa, had a hat like that. In fact, he was wearing it the evening he came to visit Pushkin to beg him to stay away from Maria, Count Voronstov’s wife.
   How gracious Pushkin was that night. So smug. He offered his visitor tea from the samovar and then Vodka. He offered the Count bread, cigars, anything that was available in his Odessa flat. The one thing Pushkin didn’t proffer the Count was the assurance that he would refrain from tupping the latter’s wife. No, Pushkin couldn’t grant the favor the Count had sought most. How small the Governor General seemed that night in Pushkin’s room which possessed the big bed. How puny his words. Another man would have run to the pistols. Not Count Voronstov. He was physically terrified of Pushkin’s prowess in the duel and did not desire a fight. Instead, he implored Pushkin to stay away from Maria…or he would have had no choice but to banish Pushkin from Odessa. The poet laughed in his face. Maria would have run away with him if such an order ensued. The Count would simply have to wait until Pushkin got bored with Maria and disposed of her of his own accord, in his own sweet time, as he eventually did with all the women he “borrowed” from other husbands. Clearly the Count was being too impatient. It wouldn’t be too much longer, Pushkin audaciously explained to him, before Maria’s buxom body exhausted him and cloyed his refined palate. And why should Pushkin have stopped tupping her a moment sooner. Eh? Could the Count tell him that? For one thing, Maria was mad about Pushkin, wanted to tup him day and night…whenever she could get away from…the Count. Secondly, Maria moaned like a she-demon in bed whenever Pushkin made love to her. O how she moaned! Thirdly, there was no one else in Odessa, at the time, as palatable as Maria. How in the world, he continued explaining to the squirming Count, could Pushkin stop ramming a woman, a beautiful woman, who craved the very thing he—Pushkin—could provide? The man in the fur hat listened carefully to everything his rival said. Pushkin recalled the unmistakable look in Voronstov’s eyes. If he were a poet worthy of his mettle and of necessity, prior to death, had to describe the Count’s look, the fading Pushkin would have said, reflecting upon the tête-à-tête long ago in his flat, that the Count was intoxicated with his own humiliation, like some paradigm of tormented zeal. Yes, that was the paradox for this eternal husband! Under that fur hat was a transparent brain, like a polished watch-piece, revealing to Pushkin how the ticking Voronstov wanted him to stop tupping his wife but at the same time wanted his wife’s lover to continue the affair. Even more: he wanted to be privy to what went on behind closed doors betwixt Pushkin and Maria, and that even if Count Voronstov were a consummate duelist he would have been loath to kill the man who brought such an ungodly, sensual pleasure in his gorgeous wife.
   The question was this: was Pushkin aware of the Count’s ambivalence that night in the flat years ago, or had he just grasped the duality that had been there all along, and only now understood it? Dying men remember things and anticipate things that they will never remember or anticipate again. After Voronstov had left the apartment, Maria arrived on cue. Within seconds, before Maria had barely doffed her clothes, Pushkin was on top of her, having skipped all foreplay and insanely ramming her so that the bed seemed on the brink of collapse. It was ever thus between Pushkin and Maria the entire season in Odessa. (And it was a routine Pushkin saw himself becoming bored with in due time.) There was something else strange about that night, though. Maria had known of the Count’s visit, and the knowledge excited her beyond measure so that she began moaning before Pushkin had even penetrated the poor girl! Pushkin himself was thrilled for he had been confronted by the beautiful woman’s husband—and such confrontations constantly thrilled Pushkin since they made life more interesting—and he had walked away the obvious victor, and to the victor belonged the spoils! Soon, outside his door—always kept locked during lovemaking circumstances—Pushkin heard noises, a presence of sorts. Ordinarily he would have thought nothing of this because in an apartment people came and went throughout the night noisily passing by doors, sometimes drunkenly brushing against knobs and handles, a thousand things. But there was something else that particular night, something unusual, a different noise. Pushkin had dismissed it at the time and in the morning forgot about it altogether, and as for the preoccupied Maria who would not have been deterred by an earthquake when in the midst of passion, well, she was of course oblivious to what lingered outside Pushkin’s room. Now it all came back to the fatally wounded poet. He needed to remember what it was he heard that night outside his door. Death would have meant something to him then. Life would have had a more difficult time consigning Pushkin to the dunghill of superfluous men if he could only recall this thing that knocked, along with Death, at his consciousness. It was a sinner’s grail, but a grail nonetheless full of purgatorial implications.
   As the blood left his body at an inevitable rate and made carmine the surrounding snow—snow that, under different circumstances, would have looked beautiful as it looked beautiful to Pushkin when he was a boy and the silent whiteness of wintry visitations upon lake and wood and hawthorn bush seemed a tableau worthy of God’s hiemal pen—clarity of mind replaced his blood. Perhaps delirium was sure to set in before the laggard doctor arrived, but for the present he possessed a certain lucidity of mind. The smell of musk the Count had splashed on his neck when he made his humiliating visit, the scent of lilac perfume that Maria doused all over her body and which commandeered the room each time she came to him, the chorus of nocturnal cats outside his window harmonious to feline ears alone, the way his landlady used the word ‘adorable’ in every other sentence and spoke out of the side of her mouth, the cut-glass water pitcher he kept on his dresser, the icon of the Byzantine Christ hanging above his bed and whose intercession he would seek any second though he had lived his life agnostically at best—these things from the Odessa years astonished his memory, as though they had occurred the day before, while he fixed his eye on D’Anthes’ hat and made its uneasy wearer gloat considerably less. The sound that night outside his door was indisputably the rustling of the Count’s fur hat. It was a fur hat that remained atop the head of a man whose ear and eye, eye and ear had positioned themselves at the keyhole of another man’s flat, anxious to watch those hearts of darkness. It was the cachet of spousal intoxication with its own shame, a Kreutzer sonata. It was the eternal husband’s voyeuristic fate that caused ghosts to haunt Elsinore castles and place irredeemable burdens upon their sons. It was everything Pushkin had imagined himself when Natalie spent her moon and star with D’Anthes, everything he had conjured up by proxy vis-à-vis the Czar’s Tavern, everything he had hoped to indite on paper for a world’s curious sake. A fur hat, imagine, in lieu of anything else, triggered the planets within, triggered greater things than a gun, triggered more knowledge at the point of his death than he had ever known in his life.