Ice

I started this as an audiobook and 4 hours(?) in I decided I needed to read (electronically) because of a) Many Russian names with patronymics and b) many Russian early twentieth century political terms. But, otherwise, I am enjoying.

• The air inside the lodging house is dense and heavy, scarred by every bodily odour, human or animal; no one opens the windows, doors are instantly slammed shut and cracks above the doorsteps stuffed with rags, so that no warmth escapes from the building – firewood has to be paid for, after all, anyone able to afford coal wouldn’t normally be cooped up in such dark holes, where the air is dense and heavy, and you breathe it in as if you’d drunk the water spat out by your neighbor as well as by his dog, as if your every breath had previously passed a million times through the consumptive lungs of peasants, Jews, coachmen, butchers and whores; hawked up from black larynxes, it returns to you again and again, filtered through their saliva and sputum, processed through their mould-infested, louse-infected, pus-incrusted bodies, coughed up by them, blown out through their noses, spewed up straight into your mouth, but you have to swallow it, you have to breathe it in, so breathe, breathe!

• tsviker

• Better do we know the intentions behind our actions than those actions. Better do we know what we wanted to say than what we actually said. We know who we want to be – we do not know who we are.

• You can be certain only of your Now. Everything else – everything that clings to your Now but is not contained within its confines – is doubtful, exists only as speculation built upon Now, and only insofar as you are able to deduce it.’

• Mitschka weighed nearly two hundred kilos, and was also the right height for them. When he leaned on the tabletop, we heard the crack and snap of wood, the rattle of glass; when he stood upright again, the neon streetlights were eclipsed behind his back. ‘My respects, my respects, let me kiss my geniuses, Benedykt, damn you, well, well –’ ‘Mitschka, how goes it?’ He belched over me garlic and condensed euphoria.

• ‘There’ll be a winter ceasefire! A great amnesty! New ukases on the zemstvos! Taxes down, support for Ottepyelniks up!’ He pulled out a roll of flimsy agitational brochures and thrust a few at each of us. ‘Have some! Have some!’

• ‘There’ll be a winter ceasefire! A great amnesty! New ukases on the zemstvos! Taxes down, support for Ottepyelniks up!’ He pulled out a roll of flimsy agitational brochures and thrust a few at each of us. ‘Have some! Have some!’

• ‘You have to have a proletariat to make a proletarian revolution! Perhaps you believe in god-building or the pipe-dreams of Berdyaeff et consortes or those socialist Narodniks who’ve suddenly taken a shine to Herzen and Tchernyshevsky and still harp on today about Russia’s historical mission, and that we don’t have to chase after the West and repeat its mistakes; instead, without townsmen and bourgeoisie, thereby bypassing the intricacies of capitalism, they cultivate an autochthonic Russian socialism out of the unblemished, collective popular spirit, ugh. Rusky mysticism!

• He waited, arms folded behind back, erect, in his narrow-cut tout jour frock coat. He stood between two high windows against the backdrop of a gilt-framed mirror – a silhouette of a man, or dark reflection of a silhouette in the mirror, there was no telling them apart. The July winter light described a dark line around him from both left and right, as if he were a saintly figure depicted on a stained-glass pane. He waited in silence, capable of waiting like that for long minutes. I felt my lips part in a sickly ingratiating smile: caoutchouc, junket, lard melting on a piping hotplate.

• ‘And now you too are leaving – and it’s the same – the same – I know that light! – who will watch over you?’ With every word she shrank farther into her chair, more and more fragile, powerless, unhappy, more and more like a lost little girl – beneath her million wrinkles, in her black mourning. ‘I shall pray for you every day, Benek dear. Please go now.’

• I lived in this city, but the city lived outside of me. Our bloodstreams did not merge, nor did our thoughts intersect. In this way, victims and parasites live alongside one another, on top of one another. But who is living off whom? One pointer may be the behaviour of the gleissen: they nest amongst the greatest densities of population.

• Father. Because we saw him so infrequently, once every few months, I had to remember my image of him all the more vividly. Had he never appeared at all, deprived of body, face, voice and characteristic features, would he have been any less real? Existence is not a necessary attribute of a good father.

• people – no, not people, but human-objects – are subject to an infinitely superior being, whilst that being shapes their reality at will according to his whimsical caprices and fleeting desires, in no way explaining anything, because these things too are not for explaining.

• Those people who broke in… If they know not the key to the code – what are the chances they’ll break it whilst still on the Trans-Siberian Express? Had they brought a specialist with them for the purpose? Doubtful. Smack the lips under the moustache. And hence: who will be first? Mind against mind.

Dukaj, Jacek. Ice (pp. 125-126). (Function). Kindle Edition.

• ‘As God is my witness, Jelena, the day before yesterday, on Saturday, was the first time I set eyes on Prince Blutsky; of Russian politics I know nothing at all, and I’m about as suited to street brawls as Frau Blutfeld is to the ballet! Oh, my hands are still trembling. Some drunken brigands attacked us, Mr Fessar can testify to it, local hoodlums, it was a miracle that the prince’s men were nearby, otherwise I’d be riding in my coffin, well why are you making such eyes!’

Dukaj, Jacek. Ice (p. 225). (Function). Kindle Edition.

• Pure whiteness flapped in the background: wind had blown out the curtains in the Deluxe carriage windows. It would fit the Gallic painters, one of those impressionists of the Mediterranean sun who blurs the contours of limestone belfries, olive groves, sailing boats on the horizon. A small painting, a rectangle ten inches by seven, yellow, green, azure and black (black onyx to portray the coldiron of the steam engine). And its title: Summer in the Taiga. Or: The Taiga in Summer. Surrounded by a thick, unwieldy dark-wood frame. Vacationers, Asia and Engine. Engineer White-Gessling watched the passengers hiving off into the forest with unwholesome fascination. ‘But bears really do live here.’ ‘You don’t say?’ ‘And God knows what other wild beasts. They’ve all gone crazy!’

Dukaj, Jacek. Ice (pp. 524-525). (Function). Kindle Edition.

• ‘The experience of fatherhood, Benedykt, the experience of fatherhood – that a man becomes a father – cannot be compared to the experience of motherhood. A mother becomes a mother gradually, in a process lasting many months, a woman grows into the idea and role as the child grows inside her. A father, on the other hand, becomes a father all of a sudden, in the space of a day, an hour, a single moment. It drops on him like a sharp guillotine-blade separating the time of non-fatherhood from the time offatherhood. Only when he takes the child in his arms for the first time does he “believe” in its reality. Or, worse still, when he learns some day: “You have a son”, “You have a daughter”. Without the intermediary stages. For men, there is no state of blessedness. No male pregnancy. Men experience no fatherhood in their own bodies. It’s impossible to prepare oneself.’

• Japanese. Since for the time being no Siberian account had percolated to Europe and no one knew the real causes of the empyrean phenomena.

Dukaj, Jacek. Ice (p. 666). (Function). Kindle Edition.

• Everything else has caved in, been watered down, surrendered – yet here a single barb sticks out and stabs to the side. So, the world’s weight makes for that barb: to break it, rip it out, destroy it. There exist such human barbs – didn’t you know, Benedykt? That they stab. That they always stab everyone. Such toughguts may be sincerely admired and sincerely loved, but they cannot in any way be lived with.’

Dukaj, Jacek. Ice (p. 839). (Function). Kindle Edition.

• ‘You are who you are, think what you think, feel what you feel. But if you’re to go beyond, if you’re to conduct thought that no one has ever conducted before – like a pendulum nudged from its state of rest – you have to knock yourself out of yourself. Be at the same time both yourself and someone other than yourself.’

Dukaj, Jacek. Ice (p. 888). (Function). Kindle Edition.

• Drawn by eight reindeer, in a tall coldiron sleigh on spidery runners, in black fur coat and sable shapka, in frostoglaze goggles covering his eyes and half his face and brimming with sky and snow and Sun and every colour of the rainbow, in a flickering penumbra, leaving tarry afterimages in his wake, with his white hand on the handle of the murch battery, in a cloud of carbon vapour – Nikola Tesla rides over the congealed ice of the Angara to the site of gleissocide, to the foot of the three-storey teslectric machine.

• Is he really so naïve? Glance into the clear bright eyes under brows resembling clumps of thistle. He blinked not, staring candidly.

Dukaj, Jacek. Ice (p. 1074). (Function). Kindle Edition.

• ‘Au contraire. Can everything about the world outside of man really be explained in terms of simple Newtonian or clockmaker’s mechanics? Had you, Director, read anything of the works of Planck, Einstein and Gross, then you would know, sir, that it can’t. And yet this does not take morec-moclec-molecular physics out of the realm of number, does not take it into the realm of literature and poetry. Why should the human mind not be treated with similar rigour? Eh? You will see, sir, how someday a mathematics of the soul will arise in accordance with the electricity of the brain and of effects as yet unmeasurable by us, which will describe human character in a table system worthy of Mendeleyeff.’ Catch the breath. ‘Or you won’t see. If we live to see it.’ Pour another Scotch. ‘Or if we be resurrected.’