The Youth and the Maiden: A Mystery Sublime...

I leaned myself against the palings. Perchance, I was awaiting someone...

And for the umpteenth time, I had been beseeched by a certain soul—a certain sort of man—to escort an eternally forlorn little boy to what he termed a "training,"... yea, to that ever-dreadful expanse, the cause of all this vastness: the municipal stadium. And the hour was the seventeenth of the afternoon; by the calendar and the sovereign right of winter, it was so. And a hand, gloved... prematurely offered to an early-November night—this hand, ever unrecognizable, yet undeniably infantile, clasped within my own—as I strode forth into the fires and the fog, clear to the very antipodes of the city.

Two ravished souls—even in the disparate natures of their vestments, each childlike in its own manner—journeyed through a suburb likewise pilfered from the townsfolk, yet never truly conquered. Bickering rhetoricians and unlettered praetors had never set a firm boundary against such... half-ruins, lingering since the Second World War. Thus it remained, a frontier left to slumber, where nature, long dormant, sat in judgment. As if guided by a forgotten Hand of God, she lazily, sleepily resisted the massive depots of haulers dragged from the remote northern reaches, and the storehouses of all that harsh energy (wood, coal, and manifold other things...). It yielded to many a conquered courtyard, to the unsworn dwellings, the ancient and half-abandoned markets and bazaars; yet it was proclaimed, by virtue of the children alone, as playgrounds. The left flank was surrendered to the sufficiently coerced bourgeois dwellings that had stagnated here, shrunk into themselves, and for decades drawn the lifeblood from their myriad tenants.

Yea, it was merely the fore-city of Pons (or the City of Poets), not yet Onyria (the City Built by Poets—for though they bear other names, I know them not otherwise this day). It was solely that which, from the genesis of the railway line, grew somewhat sweeter to the heart, more intoxicating, more consoling... beautiful, ma très exquisite, yet only as much as its strength allowed, insufficiently illuminated... more densely built and ramified... And we wandered like a troupe of vagrants along the Travunian rivulets (for thus these meadows recalled themselves), babbling... yet striving not to notice it, and so, much like unvigilant customs officers, we bartered our mundane philosophies one with the other.

But all that is scattered from Alpha shall dissipate its utterances unto Omega; and hearken! Somewhere there, as we rounded the bend... there resounded, sudden and stark, amidst that solitary invisible water, some mere dampness: ‘crunch,’ ‘crunch,’ and then again ‘crunch’—a sound growing frequent, akin to the noise whereby petty woodland brooks loosen the earth, the foliage, and that which many lives perceive as a bed... a thing only mice might dread. Verily, my inward science lacked the lexicon to name such a sound, yet I believed in its existence... But I was presently the master of all our silence, and I know 'twas for this reason I forgot. Thither... where the blood runs thickest, I banished all those phantoms of river gulls, wild geese, sundry wild ducks, and those great, ever-enigmatic, noble, and intrepid, ever-free swans that had, on that one distant day—yea, on that potent summer eve—settled here, upon this very spot. They tarried but a single night, lying so thickly asleep... 'twas the sole time before the snows that this trench, or yandek, or perchance merely a ditch... merely filled with abundant water, could boast of a dazzling whiteness.

But I was then solitary, and bereft of sleep... devoid of illusions or that ever-sweet phosphorus, even of those thoughts apt to launch one into labyrinths; and devoid of all hot and sour waters, or aught that is alcohol... And in that hour, my eyes were yet wide, yet capable of reaching; and that, however, was the single instance of their manifestation... I fear not reality, nor do I conceal the gifts of God’s stars, even after a full seven years to this day. And now I merely walked, whilst a certain child beside me, turned toward me, had but newly learned to love the pathway, and sought there its own private dreams; thus it posed a question... in my own name: ‘What is that (what is heard there)?’ For with my stride and my remoteness, I could never have reached it with my ear—though he knew it not, he felt it.

And the answer, soon enough, we both of course received—each according to his own eyes—the moment we reached the first pillar (though not for the soul, a candle) of the bourgeois illumination. A boy and a girl... He, in a jacket of dark blue, battered by the winds, a collar far from his mother’s gaze, rumpled trousers, and wondrous shoes... quiet, cautious, yet loose-limbed, akin to a solitary dandelion or, rather, some domesticated rose, oft-afflicted with colds, and through some life-giving, white, earthen-and-dreamlike coffee, possessed of a nose powdered by nature, merely faintly frightened... And she, devoid of jacket or any cloak, clad only in an unbuttoned red shirt with short sleeves, in hose that tightly embraced her legs, and soft slippers of tender plush, and all those dolls pilfered for her alone—warm, at times overly warm, yet without any heightened bodily fever, but composed entirely of future feminine skin, yet again, entirely of the traces of stone, nettles, and the crushed lips of mosquitoes. With the smile of a boatwoman, with that one sun the color of rebellion in every night, and with only those traces of madness suited to those years—brave, far more than reality itself...

They were casting thither... stones scattered by water and wind, and many shattered remnants of tiling, and sundry small fragments of neighboring roads... hither, before them, upon some forsaken meadow, overgrown with reeds, rushes, and cattails, and all manner of towering grass, yet still harboring a multitude of strewn refuse beneath the roots of the same... And a whole host of those many wild creatures sleeping under and within it, and many spoiled eggs of every kind... A meadow, or more oft a swamp, that shatters and tears the noses of the many passersby, arriving and departing travelers, or merely lost ramblers. And whilst those two—as yet (or perchance never) entirely frozen, unburned, insufficiently battered... and turned to stone—God hears and sees—future human beings, sought their far path through the air, here frequently cloven by streaks of sulfur, cyanide, and ammonia, by means of such a childish game; behind their eyes and ears, an Entire City still dreamed, not as some mere townlet upon an unfamiliar border.

Yea, they reminded me of... that which, amidst all the else I wish not to remember, I had forgotten... We had already passed them by, and somehow, for some reason, I then released the hand of the boy beside me... And I expected no answer from him to me, nor mine to him, nor his to himself... But my eyes and ears had remained behind all those distances, latitudes, and heights, toward which, in that same hour, a spared stallion, as if from the Lord's own hand, now bolted. And my strides began to outpace one another, whilst some fiery droshky gave chase behind me through that late-autumn air, even as he beside me stumbled, and from time to time ran wholly like a young colt, striving to catch up. I was soaring, nay, flying... above the heights of this city, and I recognized no longer a single street we had hitherto reached upon arriving at that great municipal field, ever illuminated by gigantic reflectors, by cold and by fog.

And then, when we had finally arrived thither... I then spake unto him, saying: Go, play with the children, chase the leather ball, laugh, jostle, kick it, and fight with your feet as though with swords! But I mu-u-ust, I am in a ha-a-aste (and as I spoke this unto him, I trembled... believing no one around me)... I must hasten home to sleep... for exceedingly do I crave sleep! And I forsook him then (for he had already learned all things, and understood such a manner of me as I led him), and I fled with a clatter, as though over concrete, amidst some sort of chiming, whilst uttering: Yea... nay—for I recognized not that deafening silence of that girl in the gloom, illuminated solely by the sparks within my eyes... my Beloved. And the courteous yet questioning words of some friend of hers, refined yet somehow frightened: ‘Are you his father?’—swallowed my disquiet, and the distances akin to her. What manner of tryst was this, when my Co-destined Soul, my Soulmate, took mercy upon me, so maddened and sleepy, with a gaze wholly of Love and of wonders known but to her, whilst I all that time was running to my bed... nay, racing toward the house.

Through a townlet plugged with light and hurried neighbors, whilst my fiery droshky behind me hissed with melted oxygen, moisture, and sugar beet; as the strips of all those self-propelled tin droshkies in all hues, and the bakeries, the many cafes, taverns, restaurants, urban city houses, disparate courtyards, and the state and street strips, mostly of orange lights—all yielded up their colors, as did much else, to permit the velocity of these newly-kindled Dreams. And only somewhere there, already before the Alpha of my street, was I suddenly brought to a halt... as if by ethereal brakes, merely before one window... I know not how, I know not why. And it was one of those... those (to geometricians) orphaned laborers'... and predominantly a bricklayer’s dwelling. Enchanted, and wholly ravished, I beheld it, not drawing it, but loving the image, as in some coffeeshop of a cosmic museum. All the light of this house, save the electric, was concealed by a canvas, plain yet soft, and sweet and pleasant to the soul—a sheet of expressively violet hue, and only where the sung shades of the rose bloomed... and precisely in the middle, atop it, there was but that single silhouette of a heated thread, in the glass and in the vacuum, akin to some... lunar shadow.

But again, and suddenly, I caught a scent, like one athirst and then saturated with water, and I ran... nay, I ran solely to reach my own pillow, across a distance measured by but a few neighboring courtyards yet remaining. And as I set foot upon the threshold of my house, or perhaps of my soul, the entrance doors remained ajar, the shoes flung asunder, and the pockets burst asunder, spilling mighty keys of diverse forms—like some lost confections—and everything was left open and permitted to every eye, and I fell into the bed... And all warmth, carefully, and only then, having measured it, I orchestrated... and I slept...

And I slept, and I slumbered, and I Rejoiced.