In Darkness

Translated by Leo Shtutin; Published in Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology and Chewers by Masticadores

As you walk unlit nocturnal streets, your sense of time drains away by degrees. You cannot so much as say what o’clock it is. Is it late evening, or the dead of night? The city is dispeopled. Here and there windows glow dim, lone pedestrians scurry down back alleys. Navigation by the stars is not a skill you possess, and you are lost—utterly lost amid the fathomless wastes of this dead city. These mute houses, these towers pockmarked with blind windows loom over you from every side, akin to stone tombs wherein pharaohs have been interred together with their hats and their umbrellas, their hand fans and their attachés. You grow convinced morning will never arrive—such is the thickness of this murk. Its coming would, at any rate, be of little consequence to you: having survived the night, lost and defenceless, you could take no pleasure in the clamour of the day, and no pleasure, either, in its bright ringing sunlight, its bowler-hatted rushers-by, its hurtling motor cars, its big-head shout-mouth children, its crinolined wenches and deranged mothers and streetcorner policemen. You wander ever onward through the dark, dispeopled city. When at last you can bear this torture no more, you approach the nearest house. A scrape, a knock at the solid oak door; someone swings it open, and you’re momentarily blinded by the electric light pouring from the hall within. The hall is thronged with revellers, men and women making merry as if doing so were the most natural thing on earth. They whisper, chortle, gabble. They eat, they swish their skirts, they dance the paso doble, their revelry illumined by bright lamps. Why they’ve gathered here they themselves don’t know. But still they rollick, still they titter, still they wink. What goes on in the night, beyond the walls of their bright-lit apartment, is no concern of theirs. How’s that silence out there? No matter: inside, they’re laughing like drains. Perhaps, in fact, they have gathered here purely so as not be in the dark. You stand there, back pressed against an illumined wall. Sooner or later they must go their separate ways, must leave this safe haven behind. Unlikely that they’ll keep up their unbridled merrymaking until morning. Out they’ll hasten, hunched against the darkness, singly. Their smiles will slip from their painted faces, their laughter will wane, and their legs will hurry-scurry them into the murk. But before they manage to dart mouselike into their buildings, each of them will be devoured by the rapacious night.