Collected Prose

patient’s gown and had no shoes on. He left the room, wandered for a long time through many corridors, and then walked out of the hospital. Soon afterwards, he was knocking on the door of his ex-wife’s house. “I have to die today,” he told her, “there’s nothing I can do about it.” She took this news calmly, acting much as the nurses had. But he was not there for her sympathy. He wanted to give her instructions about what to do with his manuscripts. He went through a long list of his writings and told her how and where to have each of them published. Then he said: “The Book of Memory isn’t finished yet. There’s nothing I can do about it. There won’t be time to finish. You finish it for me and then give it to Daniel. I trust you. You finish it for me.” She agreed to do this, but without much enthusiasm. And then he began to cry, just as he had before: “I’m too young to die. I don’t want to die now.” But she patiently explained to him that if it had to be, then he should accept it. Then he left her house and returned to the hospital. When he reached the parking lot, he woke up for the second time.
    After he went back to sleep, he was inside the hospital again, in a basement room next to the morgue. The room was large, bare, and white, a kind of old-fashioned kitchen. A group of his childhood friends, now grownups, were sitting around a table eating a large and sumptuous meal. They all turned and stared at him when he entered the room. He explained to them: “Look, they’ve shaved my head. I have to die today, and I don’t want to die.” His friends were moved by this. They invited him to sit down and eat with them. “No,” he said, “I can’t eat with you. I have to go into the next room and die.” He pointed to a white swinging door with a circular window in it. His friends stood up from their chairs and joined him by the door. For a little while they all reminisced about their childhood together. It soothed him to talk to them, but at the same time he found it all the more difficult to summon the courage to walk through the door. Finally, he announced: “I have to go now. I have to die now.” One by one, with tears pouring down his cheeks, he embraced his friends, squeezing them with all his strength, and said good-bye.
    Then he woke up for the last time.
    *

    Concluding sentences for The Book of Memory.
    From a letter by Nadezhda Mandelstam to Osip Mandelstam, dated 10/22/38, and never sent.
    “I have no words, my darling, to write this letter … I am writing it into empty space. Perhaps you will come back and not find me here. Then this will be all you have left to remember me by…. Life can last so long. How hard and long for each of us to die alone. Can this fate be for us who are inseparable? Puppies and children, did we deserve this? Did you deserve this, my angel? Everything goes on as before. I know nothing. Yet I know everything—each day and hour of your life are plain and clear to me as in a delirium—In my last dream I was buying food for you in a filthy hotel restaurant. The people with me were total strangers. When I had bought it, I realized I did not know where to take it, because I do not know where you are…. When I woke up, I said to Shura: ‘Osia is dead.’ I do not know whether you are still alive, but from the time of that dream, I have lost track of you. I do not know where you are. Will you hear me? Do you know how much I love you? I could never tell you how much I love you. I cannot tell you even now. I speak to you, only to you. You are with me always, and I who was such a wild and angry one and never learned to weep simple tears—now I weep and weep and weep … It’s me: Nadia. Where are you?”
    * * *

    He lays out a piece of blank paper on the table before him and writes these words with his pen.
    The sky is blue and black and gray and yellow. The sky is not there, and it is red. All this was yesterday. All this was a hundred years ago. The sky is white. It smells of the earth, and it is not there. The sky is white like the earth, and it smells of yesterday. All this was tomorrow. All this was a hundred years from now. The sky is lemon and rose and lavender. The sky is the earth. The sky is white, and it is not there.
    He wakes up. He walks back and forth between the table and the window. He sits down. He stands up. He walks back and forth between the bed and the chair. He lies down. He stares at the ceiling. He closes his eyes. He