NIKOLSKY, THEOCTIST FATHER

(16th century)--Compiler of the original edition of The Khazar Dictionary. Assistant to Nikon Sevast, head calligrapher of the St. Nicholas Monastery, and scribe to Kyr Avram Brankovich. Father Theoctist Nikolsky penned his dying confession to Patriarch Arsen III Charnoyevich of Pec in the pitch dark, somewhere in Poland, using a mixture of gunpowder and saliva, and in a quick Cyrillic hand, while the innkeeper's wife scolded and cursed him through the bolted door.

"You know, Your Holiness," Theoctist wrote to the Patriarch, "that I am condemned to having a good memory, which my future constantly fills and my past never empties. I was born in 1641 in the village of the St. John Monastery on the day of St. Spiridon, the patron saint of potters, into a family which on its table always has two handed bowls and in them food for the soul and food for the heart. Just as my brother sleeps holding the wooden spoon in his hand, so in my memory I hold all the eyes that have ever seen me since I came into being. The moment I notices the clouds over Mt. Ovchar resumed the same position every five years and recognized clouds seen five autumns past now returning to the sky, I was gripped by fear and began to hide my affliction, for a memory such as mine is a punishment. In the meantime, I learned Turkish from the coins of Constantinople, Hebrew from the merchants of Dubrovnik, and how to read from Icons. I was driven to keep remembrances by something like thirst--not thirst for water for water cannot quench it, but a different , passing kind of thirst that is allayed only by hunger. Yet, not hunger for food, but a different kind of hunger, and in vain I searched, like a sheep for a salty wall, to discover what hunger is was that could save me from thirst. For I was afraid of memory; I knew that our memories and reminiscences are like icebergs. We see only the tips in passing, but the mass of land under water slips by unseen and inaccessible. We do not feel their immeasurable weight simply because they lie submerged in time, as in water. But, if we carelessly find ourselves in their way, we shall run aground against our own past and be shipwrecked. That is why I never even touched any of this profusion that fell on me like snow into the Morava River. And then to my astonishment, it happened that my memory betrayed me, albeit only for a second. At first I was ecstatic, but later I bitterly regretted it, for I saw where it was leading. It happened this way.

"In my eighteenth year, my father sent me to St. John Monastery and said to me in parting: 'When fasting, do not take a single word into your mouth, so that at least your mouth, if not your ears, may be cleansed of words. For words come not from the head or the soul but from the world, from sticky tongues and malodorous jaws; they have all long since been picked dry, spewed out, and become a pulp from constant chewing. They have not been whole in a long while and have been carried by countless mouths from tooth to tooth...' The monk's at St. John's took me in, said I had too tight a soul, and set me to work transcribing books. I sat in a cell full of books with black ribbons marking the last pages the monks had read before dying, and I worked. Then word reached us that a new calligrapher had arrived at the nearby Nicholas Monastery.

"The path to Nicholas runs along the Morava, between the steep banks and the water. Since it is the only road to the monastery, at least one boot or pair of hoofs is bound to get muddy. And it is from this muddy boot that the monks can tell where visitors have come from: from the sea or Mt. Rudnik, slashing the water from the west downstream along the Morava with their right foot, or from the east, upstream with their left. In the Sunday of St. Thomas in 1661, we heard that to the Nicholas Monastery had come a man whose left boot was muddy; he was robust and handsome, had eyes the shape of eggs, a beard so long it would take an evening to burn, and hair pulled down over his eyes like a tattered fur hat. The man was called Nikon Sevast, and he soon became the head calligrapher at Nicholas, for he had already developed a masterful skill somewhere. He was of the armory guild, but his job was harmless: he drew flags, archery targets, and shields, making pictures that were doomed to be destroyed by bullets, arrows, or swords. He said he was in Nicholas only temporarily, on his way to Constantinople.

"Three St. Michael's winds blew on the day of St. Cyricaus the recluse, each replete with its own birds--one with starlings, another with the last swallows, and the third with sparrow hawks. Cold smells intermingled with the warm, and word reached St. John's that the new calligrapher at the Nicholas Monastery had painted an icon that everyone in the gorge was rushing to see. I got up myself to see how the Lord of Universe holding the Baby Jesus on His knee had been painted on the monastery wall. I went in with the others and took a good look at what had been painted. Afterward, at supper, I saw Nikon Sevast for the first time, and his beautiful face reminded me of somebody I know well but couldn't find among the faces around me. There was no such face in my memories, although they suddenly lay spread out before me like open cards, or in my dreams, where they lay like a closed deck whose every card I could flip over at will. Nowhere was such a face to be found.

"The sound of an ax ricocheting off a beech tree rang out somewhere in the mountains; an ax ricochets one way off a beech tree and another off an elm, and this was the season for felling both beech and elm. I remembered perfectly those sounds from the first evening I heard them, in a blizzard a decade ago; I remembered the birds, now long dead, that had flown through that blizzard and dropped heavily into the wet snow; but for the life of me I could not remember what I had seen on that face just a few minutes ago. I could not remember a single feature of Nikon's face, not a single color, not even whether he had a beard. That was the first and the last time in my life that my memory had let me down. It was all so extraordinary and incredible that soon enough I easily found a reason for it. There could only be one: what is not of this world cannot be remembered; it is retained in the memory no more than the loach that is swallowed by the duck. Before leaving, I again scanned the faces and looked at Nikon strait in the mouth, and I was gripped by fear, as if my every look could be bitten off. Indeed, that is precisely what he did, his mouth snapping slightly as he took a bite. And so with nipped gaze I returned to St. John's.

"I went back to transcribing books, but at one moment I felt as if I had more words in my saliva than the man who had written the book. And so I began adding to the transcribed manuscript a word here, two there, sentence by sentence. It was Tuesday, and my words that first evening were sour and brittle under my teeth, but the following evenings I noticed that in autumn progressed my words ripened day by day, like a fruit, each time becoming juicier, fuller, and sweeter, filled with a core that was both pleasant and invigorating. On the seventh evening, it was if I were hurrying so that my fruit would not be overripe, would not drop or droop; to the life of St. Petka Paraskeva I added an entire page, one not to be found in any of the excerpt I was transcribing. Instead of discovering and investigating my misdeed, the monks began asking me to do more and more transcribing, preferring my books, with the insertions, to books by other scribes, of whom there were many in the Ovchar Gorge. I took courage and decided to see the thing through to the end. Not only did I add stories to the Lives, I began inventing new recluses, adding new miracles, and my transcriptions began selling at a higher price than the books from which they had been transcribed. Little by little I felt the tremendous power I held in my inkwell, and I let it flow at will. And then I reached a conclusion: Every writer can--with no trouble--kill his hero in just two lines. To kill a reader, someone of flesh and blood, it suffices to turn him for a moment into the hero of the book, into the protagonist of the biography. The rest is simple. . . .

"At the time, there lived in the Monastery of the Visitation a young monk by the name of Longin. He lived an ascetic life and felt like a swan with his wings spread open waiting for the wind to blow and take it sailing across the water. Not even Adam, who gave names to the days, could have had as perfect as ear as he. He had eyes like the wasps that transmit the holy fire: one eye masculine, the other feminine, and each with a sting. He aimed at goodness like a hawk at a chicken. And he was fond of saying: 'We can all easily choose for a model somebody better than ourselves; from the spirits could be made Jacob's ladder, climbing from earth to heaven; everything would be connected and arranged with ease and joy, because it is not difficult for man to follow and obey someone better than he. All evil comes from the fact that in this world we are constantly tempted to obey and take for our model those that are worse than we. . . . ' When he commissioned me to transcribe the Life of St. Peter of Corisha, who after five days of fasting saw unaging light, it was dusk and the birds streaked down into their nests in the bushes like black lightning. My thoughts soared up at the same speed, and I felt the strength was not in me to combat my burgeoning sense of power. I sat down to transcribe the Life of St. Peter of Corishia, and when I reached the part about the days of the fast, instead of 5 I wrote 50 and gave the transcription to the young monk. He took it, singing, and read it that same evening; the next day, word spread through the gorge that the monk Longin had embarked upon a major fast. . . .

"On the fifty-first day, when they buried Longin at the Annunciation in the foothills, I decided never to take pen in hand again. I looked with horror at the inkwell and thought: Too many bones and too tight a soul. And I decided to repent of my sin. In the morning I went to the prior and asked him to have me assigned to the Nicholas Monastery scriptorium as an assistant to the head calligrapher, Nikon Sevast. He did so, and Nikon lead me to the writing room, with its smell of pumpkin seeds and sage blossoms, which the monks believe know how to pray. From other monasteries or from traveling merchants from the Ukraine, the monks would borrow, for four or five days, the kinds of books Nicholas did not have, and would give them to me to learn by heart quickly. Then they would return the books to their owners, and for months, day after day, I would dictate memorized books to the head calligrapher, Nikon. And he would sharpen his pens and say that green is the only color that is not of plant origin--it alone is obtained from iron--all other colors he extracted from plants and decorated the books we wrote with various floral letters. Thus began my companionship with Nikon, like the masculine days of the week. He did everything with his left hand, hiding what it was doing from his right. We wrote by day. When there was no work, he would paint on the walls of the monastery, but he quickly abandoned icon painting and devoted himself entirely to writing books. Thus, we descended into our life slowly, night after night, for years.

"On the Day of St. Eustace of Serbia in 1683, the frost came out to sow its millet, the dogs were allowed in bed and boots and smiling teeth cracked from the cold. In the green sky, the jackdaws froze in mid-flight and dropped like stones, leaving only their cries in the air. The tongue felt the icy lips, which no longer felt the tongue. The winds howled from the other side of the Moravia River, which was stilled by ice, while along the banks the ice lay unmowed, full of icicled reeds, traveler's joy, and sedge, as though ice were growing a silver beard. The drooping willow branches were caught in the frozen river, encaging the trees. Out of the mist came the lonely crows that fly in place, painfully extracting their wings from the white skein of the salty damp. And flying high over the frost-divided hills and into the sky beyond, bidding farewell to the landscape, were Nikon's thoughts and mine, as fleeting as quick summer clouds, and in them our memories passed as slowly as a winter illness. And then in March, on the first Sunday of Lent, we heated a kettle of Brandy in the boiling beans; we drank, ate, and left Nicholas forever. We came upon Belgrade with the first and last snow of that year, and we stood through the Mass for the proto-martyrs of Belgrade--Stratonik, Donat, and Hermil--and started a new life.

"We became traveling scribes and began moving our pens and inkwells across the waters and boundaries of the empires. We worked less and less for the church as we had books to transcribe in more and more languages. We started transcribing books not only for men but for women as well, because masculine and feminine stores cannot have the same ending. We left behind rivers and plains (taking only their names with us), decaying gazes, iron rings with keys in the ear, paths strewn with straw knotted by the beaks of birds, wooden spoons that smoke, and forks made of spoons, and on Tuesday, All Saints Day, in 1684 we arrived in the imperial city of Vienna. The big bell on St. Stephen's Cathedral began striking the hours--the small ones hurriedly, as through dropping knives from the bell tower, and the big ones solemnly, as though laying eggs in the nights in the night around the temple. And when in the semidarkness we went in under that tower, over the echoing flagstones dropped chandeliers from long threads like illuminated spiders, and around them rose the smell of wax, filling the church to the stone walls, the way a body fills clothes. One could see nothing, but as one's gaze climbed up through the tower, the dark became thicker and thicker, and in the dense blackness up there one expected the thread holding the light down in the bottom of the church to snap at any minute . . . . Here we found new work and met our lord Avram of Brankovich . . . . who took us on as scribes and led us into his and his uncle Count George Brankovich's library. And we got lost amid the books as we would in a street of blind alleys and twisted stairs. We scoured Vienna's markets and cellars to buy for Kyr Avram manuscripts in Arabic, Hebrew, and Greek, and looking at Vienna's houses, I noticed that they stood next to the other like books on Brankovich's library shelves. I thought how houses are like books: so many of them around you, yet you only look at a few and visit or reside in fewer still. Usually you get sent to an inn, a lodging place, a tent rented for the night, or a cellar. Seldom, if at all, does it happen that a storm accidentally drives you back to the same house you used long ago, so that as you spend the night there you remember where you once slept and how everything, although still the same, was different then, how spring dawned through that window and autumn walked out of that door. . . .

"On the eve of St. Peter's and Paul's Day in 1685, the fourth Sunday after All Souls, our Master Avram of Brankovich hired his services as a diplomat to the English legation in Turkey, and we moved to Constantinople. We were received in a tower of the Bosporus, where our master had already settled in with his sabers, camel saddles, rugs, and cupboards as tall as a church, with his fasting eyes the color of damp sand. On Paternoster he had a temple built in that tower to St. Angelina the Despot, great-grandmother to himself and to his uncle Count George, and for a valet he brought in an Anatolian who used his long pigtail as a whip and kept buckshot in the tip of his plait. The new servant, named Yusef Masudi, taught our Master Avram Arabic and watched over his dreams. He brought with him some kind of feedbag full of penned pieces of paper, and he was rumored to be a reader of dreams or hunter of shadows, which is what some call those who flagellate one another with human dreams. Nikon and I spent the entire first year stocking the master's shelves and cases with books and manuscripts, which still smelled of the camels and horses that had brought them from Vienna. Once, when the valet Masudi was keeping his vigil in Kyr Avram's bedroom, I snatched Masudi's feedbag and read and memorized the entire manuscript letter by letter without understanding a word, because it was in Arabic. I know only it was in the form of a dictionary or glossary arranged according to the Arabic alphabet, that it zigzagged like a crab and read like a jaybird that flies backwards. . . .

"The actual city and its bridges over the water did not surprise me. As soon as we arrived in Constantinople, I had began recognizing in the street faces, hate, women and clouds, animals, love that I had fled long ago, eyes that I had met once and remembered forever. I decided that nothing happens in the flow of time, that the world does not change through the years but inside itself and through space simultaneously--it changes in countless forms, shuffling them like cards and assigning the past of some as lessons to the future or present of others. Here all of a person's recollections, remembrances, and overall present are lived in various places in various people at one and the same time. One should not consider all those nights around us, I thought, as being one and the same night, for they are not:

They are hundreds of thousand of nights, which, instead of traveling through time, one after the other, like birds, calendars, or clocks, evolve simultaneously. My night next to your night is not the same night even by the same calendar. For the papist in Rome and here, today is Assumption Day, but for Christians of the Eastern rite, for Greeks and those of the autonomous faith, it is the Day of the Translation of the Relics of the Archdeacon St. Steven the Beardless; for some this year of 1688 will end fifteen days earlier; for the Jews in the ghettos it is already the year 5447, while for the Arabs it is only the year 905. We the seven servants of Kyr Avram will use up a whole week of nights by dawn. We shall collect a whole September of nights from here to Topcisaray, but from Aya-Sofia to Vlaherna, October is already being spent. Somewhere our Kyr Avram's dreams are coming to life, while elsewhere somebody is dreaming Kyr Avram's reality, and who knows whether our Kyr Brankovich came here to Constantinople not to work as an interpreter for the English consul to the Porte, but to see the person whose real life he dreams of, the person who in his own dreams is spending Kyr Avram's life. For there is no man's reality around us that someone else is not dreaming about somewhere in this human ocean tonight, nor is there somebody's dream that is not becoming the reality of another. If one were to go from here to the Bosporus, from street to street, one would count all the seasons of the year from date to date, because autumn and spring and all the seasons of a human life are not the same for everyone, because nobody is old or young every day, and an entire life could be gathered like the fire of a candle's flames, and if you blow it out not even a breath remains between birth and death. If you knew exactly where to go, you would this very night find someone who was experiencing your waking days and nights, one who eats you next day's lunch, another who mourns your losses of eight years ago or kisses your future wife, and a fourth who is dying exactly the same death you will die. And if you were to move faster and delve deeper and wider, you would see that a whole infinity of nights is evolving over an immense expanse this evening. Time that has elapsed in one town is only just beginning in another, and one can travel between these two towns forward and backward through time. In a male town you can meet in life a woman who in a female town is already dead, or vise-versa. Not individual lives, but all future and past times, all the branches of eternity, are already here, broken up into tiny morsels and divided among people and their dreams. The immense body of Adam, the original man, stirs in its sleep and breathes. Humanity chews up time all at once, not waiting for tomorrow. Time, then, does not exist here. It comes and washes over this world somewhere from the other side. . . .

" 'From where?' Nikon asked me right then, as if he had heard my thoughts, but I kept silent. I kept silent because I knew from where. Time comes not from the ground but from the underground. Time belongs to Satan; he carries it like a skein in the pocket of the devil, unravels it when his mysterious economies so dictate, and it should be wrested away from him. For, if one can ask and receive eternity from God, then we can take the opposite of eternity--time--only from Satan. . . .

"On the Day of Jude the Apostle, the brother of the Lord, Kyr Avram assembled us and told us we would be leaving Constantinople. Everything had been said, the travel orders issued, when suddenly a brief but violent argument broke out between Nikon and that Anatolian Masudi, and Nikon began fluttering his lower lids upwards like a bird. Angry as he was, he grabbed Masudi's feedbag, already packed for the journey (the one with the Arabic glossary, which I already knew by heart), and hurled it into the fire. Masudi was not very upset; he simply turned to Kyr Avram and said, 'Look at him, Sire; that one fucks with his tail, and he does it from the rear, with his back turned, so he doesn't see the person he is impregnating. And he has no partition dividing his nostrils.'

"At that moment all eyes turned to Nikon. Kyr Avram took the mirror from the wall and shoved in under his nose as if he were a corpse. We all bent closer and, true enough, the mirror revealed that Nikon had no dividing wall between his nostrils. The others had now learned what I had long known--that my colleague and head calligrapher Nikon Sevast was one and the same with Satan. Indeed, he himself did not deny it now. But, unlike the others, I did not look at his nose. I looked at the mirror and discovered what must have been long known to everyone around be. Nikon Sevast's face, which had so reminded me of one I had seen before, was practically identical to mine. We roamed the world like twins, making God's bread with the devil's tear.

"That evening I thought, Now is the moment! When a man spends his life napping, nobody next to him ever figures that one day he will wake up. And so it was with Nikon. I am not like those who wake up in fright when their hand falls out of their sleep and onto the floor, but I was afraid of Sevast. His teeth held a perfect picture of my bones. All the same, I went. I knew that the devil always walks one step behind man, so I trod in his every step and he did not notice me. I had remarked long ago that, of all the papers in Kyr Avram Brankovich's enormous library, he devoted particular attention to the Khazar glossary, a kind of alphabetical book of material on the origin and collapse, customs and wars of an extinct nation, which we scribes had been instructed to put in order. Avram Brankovich took a special interest in this nation; he would buy up old documents with no thought of the cost and would bribe people to catch the 'tongues' of those who knew something about the Khazars, or would send people out to hunt the dream hunters, who derived their skills from the ancient Khazar sorcerers. This glossary caught my attention because, of all the thousands of volumes in Brankovich's library, it was this book that interested Nikon. I learned Brankovich's Khazar Dictionary by heart and began observing what Nikon did with it. Until that evening, Nikon had not dome anything unusual. But now, after the incident with the mirror, he went alone to the upper floor of the tower, took the parrot, placed it on a lamp, and sat down to listen to what the parrot had to say. Kyr Avram's parrot often recited poems believed by our master to be those of Princess Ateh, and we scribes were under orders to write down for Kyr Avram's glossary everything the bird said. That evening, however, Sevast did not write. He merely listened, and the bird said:

Sometimes bygone springs, full of warmth and scents, blossom yet again inside us. And we carry them through the winter, protecting them with our chests. Then, one day, those bygone springs begin protecting our chests from the frost when we find ourselves on the other side of the window, where winter is not just a picture. It is now the ninth winter that I have had such a spring inside me, and it is still keeping me warm. Imagine, in this winter, two such springs touching like the scents of two meadows. That is what we need instead of overcoats. . . .

"when the bird stopped its recital, I felt terrible alone, hidden as I was, without spring in my soul, and only the remembrance of a shared youth with Nikon Sevast remained as a kind of light in my memory. A lovely light, I thought, when Nikon took the bird and sliced off its tongue with a knife. Then he went to Avram Brankovich's Khazar Dictionary and started burning it in the fire, page by page. Including the last page, on which was written in Kyr Avram's hand a note on Adam, brother of Christ.

"Avram Brankovich's words rang in my ears all through the journey, which we undertook during a drought, when the Danube at the mouth of the Black Sea was like the Danube in Regensburg, and in Regensburg, it was like the Danube in Schwartzwald, at its source. His words sill rang when we reached the battle-field and when I saw how the wind drove the canon smoke swiftly and the mist slowly across the Danube. Then, on the thirteenth Sunday after All Souls in 1689, the drought stopped, and we saw the greatest rain in our lives. The Danube again flowed as deep as the sky above it, and the rain stood vertically in the river, like the railings of a high fence, separating our camp from the Turkish. And here, in camp, on the battlefield, it dawned on me that each of us had come to the Danube for a different reason, and that I could tell what each of us was lying in wait for. Nikon had become a different man ever since he had burned Masudi's and Brankovich's dictionary. Nothing interested him any more; he had the 'fifth Our Father' read out to him, the one read for suicides, and one by one he threw his writing tools into the water. HE and Masudi were shooting dice on a checkered scarf, with Nikon losing enormous amounts of money, like someone who had given up all thought of life. And I felt he was bidding farewell to life and hoping that death would befall him here more easily than somewhere else. Kyr Avram Brankovich had not come to the Danube to fight, although he was a past master at fighting and fought well again now. He obviously had an appointment with somebody here on the Danube. Masudi sat shooting dice, but he was waiting to see who Kyr Avram was going to meet here, at Djerdap, enduring the blood and the rain, and that fatal day on the Erection of the Holy Cross, when the Turkish cannons increased their number. As for Kyr Avram's saber instructor, the Copt by the name of Averkie Skila, he stayed by the Danube under Turkish fire because it gave him a chance, without risk of punishment, to try out on enemy solders or on our own (it was all the same to him) a new saber stroke he had been practicing for a long time but had not yet been able to test on live flesh and bones. And I, I sat there with them, because I was waiting for the third part of The Khazar Dictionary. I already knew the first two parts by heart--Masudi's, the Islamic, and Kyr Avram's, the Greek part--and now I was waiting to see whether someone would appear with the third, Hebrew part of the glossary, since it was evident from the first two parts that a third part followed. Nikon had burned the first two parts and was no longer afraid that the third would be added to them, so his job was done. But, knowing the first two parts by heart, I wanted to see the third, and I did not know how it would be. I put my faith in Kyr Avram, who, it seemed to me, was waiting for the same thing as I. But he did not live to see it. The Turks soon killed Brankovich and Nikon in battle, and captured Masudi. Appearing with the Turks at the scene of the battle was a red-haired young man with folded eyebrows like wings. One half of his mustache was gray and the other red. He ran, his brows dusty, his beard smeared with streaming snot. Who would think, I mused, watching him, that his time too deserves a watch! But I knew he was my man. Suddenly he collapsed as though felled, an out of the bag he had been holding spilled pages filled with minute handwriting. After the battle, when everybody had moved off, I left my shelter and picked up the strewn papers. I crossed the Danube and in Walachia, at the Delski Monastery, I read the Hebrew pages from the bag, trying not to comprehend or interpret anything written on them. Then I went to Poland to do what Nikon Sevast had so wanted to prevent. I sought out a printer and sold him all three Khazar dictionaries: the Hebrew, found in the battlefield; the Greek, assembled on the orders of Avram Brankovich; and the Arabic, brought by Masudi, the reader of dreams. The printers name was Daubmannus; he suffered from a disease that did not develop and bring death until the fifth generation, like a protracted game of cards. He paid me two month's rent, food, and buttons for my shirt, and I wrote down everything I had learned by heart. I was now again doing my job of narrator, and after the first time in so many years, also the other, long-abandoned job of Nikon Sevast, that of scribe. On Holy Innocents' Day in 1690, I finished the job, amid the kind of snow and frost that make your nails peel. Using Brankovich's alphabeticon, Masudi's glossary, and the Jewish encyclopedia from the red-eyed lad's bag, I composed something like The Khazar Dictionary and gave it to the printer. Daubmannus took all three books--the red, the green, and the yellow--and said that he would print them.

"Whether he did or not I do not know, nor do I rightly know, your Holiness, whether I did right to do what I did. But I now know that I am still hungry for writing and that from this hunger my thirst for remembering has passed. It is as though I were turning into the calligrapher Nikon Sevast. . . . "