Paul Tucker

Vision is the artist’s goal.

—Viktor Shklovsky

Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step. If he could, Shklovsky would take the sun out of the sky and bury it in a yawning chasm. Sweat streams endlessly from the downturned ridge of his nose. One foot in front of the other, he thinks, that’s all it takes. But he also thinks: fuck your useless feet, Shklovsky, and your stupid pride. Three days of train travel, half a day in the back of a rickety old carriage and now this relentless climb in the heat of a summer that was supposed to have disappeared months ago—how can anywhere in Russia be this hot in late October? And all he has learned—confirmed, actually—is that he is the problem. 

This is not an opportune moment for Shklovsky to lose his footing, but slip he does, kicking up dust and cracking his left kneecap on a rock jutting out from the loose scree of the path. He rolls over and sits up, facing downhill. He lets out an animal yell, which only forces him to choke on the dust he has just kicked up into the air around him. The water in his flask already close to exhaustion, he allows himself a paltry amount, inadequate for the dryness settling on the back of his throat. Breathe, he thinks, even as it makes him cough again. He turns his head to follow the upward line of the path. Surely there can’t be much more of this, not another false peak, another relentless incline.

With his hand he smears dust across his sweat-soaked forehead and tries to admire the view. Trees. Rock. Sky. Nothing else. He stares harder, trying to transform the view into something more than a two-dimensional panorama of the most basic, dreary elements. Grass. Mud. Mountain. Sky. Trees. Rock. It’s useless, the featureless landscape of his imagination.

His mind is drawn back to the fire in his legs and the heavy, shirt-ripped strapping that he has had to improvise around his right calf, which he gashed on a branch an hour back downhill. Now here’s some reality, imagination not required. Let the information flow in, make sense of it.

Spindly, he thinks of his legs, even the heavily strapped one. Two spindles from the wheels of city carriages, cut out only for paved streets and not for this. Tbilisi is next on the itinerary, but fat chance, he thinks. He has had enough already. He will go back to Moscow, back to certainty, and coffee houses, and public transport and the reliable chill of November in the city. But he’ll climb to the top of this blasted peak first. Just because he has arrived here a failure doesn’t mean he needs to leave as one.

Step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step. Steppe, steppe, steppe, steppe, steppe, he smiles, satisfied at his little joke but then annoyed at realising it is geographically inaccurate, even if by as little as fifty versts.

Step, step, step, step, aaaagghhhhhhh! A muscle, same leg, yields. He collapses to the ground and clenches his fingers around his calf. The sharpness recedes to a warm throb. He lies back, the crocked leg up at an angle so that from the side he must look something like a P that has flopped onto its long edge. P for pain. For pummelled. For Pulverised like the dust that catches in his throat.

Pathetic.

He thinks back. It’s four nights since the party, where he, great literary mind, had stepped, simpering like a lapdog, onto the snow-cleared marble of a front step in the east of the city, and Elsa, like a sniper, had struck him down.

‘Shklovsky,’ she said, throwing a sideways glance in his direction. ‘Every time I step outside you follow me. Why?’

It was a velvet-gloved assassination to which he had no response, the open-and-shut conclusion of months of ham-fisted attempts to win her favour, or at least draw some semblance of romantic interest. He’d written nothing in those months but missives to Elsa—about love, and then (at her insistence) not about love, about anything but love.

(No more letters, he thinks, stop sending her letters. But every second thought is mangled into something that can be framed to hook her in.)

Afterwards, the city appeared to him as a relic, as Pompeii. The snow as choking billows of ash leaving a lifeless coating on everything in sight.

Later the same evening, searching, searching for something, he found booze. Sip, sip, sip, sip, sip, sip. More than sip. Slurp. Slop it down, Shklovsky, cheered on by the barman. What I need, he concluded, is a dose of reality. He shouted it, practically, earning another cheer from behind the bar. He fantasised: an escape from the suffocation of the city. The crystal clarity of nature. A snap, to snap his synapses back to life, to clear the ash from his eyes and from his lungs. What I need, he said, is a big fucking hill and more sky than I can lay my eyes on. The barman said Sochi, there are hills near Sochi, snow-less (ash-less) and conquerable.

Shklovsky woke up on what must have been the last train out of Moscow that night, greeted by a wearing off and a switching on to what had happened. He came to realise that he was fortunate in a way, despite the enduring fug, to have three days to realise and then rationalise. Carpe that diem for once, Shklovsky. Show yourself what you’re made of. During a stop off at Pridacha he committed, dispatching an order southwards to Sochi via telegram: a cabin in the hills, and a carriage to get him there from the station.

Back in the now, slumped on the hillside he craved when he left the city, he roots around in his satchel and lets out yet another curse. The realisation of a sandwich, his sandwich—tongue-thick slices of ham, pickles, pillowy slabs of bread—wrapped neatly in wax paper and left, even at this very moment, on the table back in his cabin. His stomach groans itself inside out, a good three hours unfed.

He resolves to carry on, now clutching a sturdy length of branch to help his climb, step, , step, , step, , step. There must be a stream at least, some water will do the job. But it’s no good—no dice, old man. He manages maybe ten more minutes, although time has become uncertain to him, another thing to trip him up or catch in his throat. He feels the sweat slopping around his wound.

He lowers himself to the ground, shaded thank god, and tears a handful of grass from the earth. He shoves it inside his mouth, and then he shoves in another, chewing ferociously. It is fibrous, tough, too tough, like he’s chewing twine. Soon his jaw aches like everything else does. He ends up sucking and swallowing, taking as much of the sweetness from the mouthful before spitting it back onto the ground and then spitting again for good measure.

He sits for several minutes. The thought grows that he is feeling better. And alert. Perhaps revitalised by the nutrients he has just ingested, he rethinks what he sees. No longer a path and vague surroundings. Now, wildflowers with petal formations and colours of all kinds. The grass beside the path is grasses now, the plural—wild barley, garlic, rye, he thinks, even if these are just names from books. The featureless sky is actually a spectrum of blues, running from almost white to almost black. He not only sees birds overhead, he sees certain wing shapes—slender arcs and pointed tips, or thick, outstretched fans with tips like fingers; rapid-fire flapping; slow drifting; large, wafting circles. The hillsides become a network of ravines and ridges, a felled tree here, a stream there.

A stream! He fills his bottle, empties it into his throat and fills it again. It’s a different walk now. Shklovsky is a powerful man, a man who overcomes. He gives names to a dozen types of tree, of winged insect, of shade of green. He walks, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step, step. Onward he walks. This. Is. The. Stuff.

Below him in the valley he spots a small wooden hut nestled among pine trees, its chimney smoking. Strange, having a fire in this heat, he thinks, but his mind is concentrated on the upwards and on the outwards, and so onwards he goes, until all that’s left of the path is a short, winding victory parade, so close—only a few moments now!—to the very top of the highest sunlit peak in the area.

He slows for this last section, luxuriates in the idea of a final, soft bed of grass and wildflower, a thousand million versts from the icy front step of a townhouse in the east of Moscow. Fantasy to reality, he finds it, a verdant, hilltop repose and a view of a valley, cloud-tipped ridges drawing down each side, overlaid like pieces of card where they meet at the bottom, guiding a river down and towards the Black Sea.

He pulls out a pocketbook to write or sketch, to capture somehow. But instead he opts, in sudden, welcome exhaustion, to lay on his back, his hands cushioning his head and his eyes lightly closed. Steep incline and insurmountable fury a distant memory, he absorbs the warmth of the day and the softness of the earth.

He sleeps, perhaps, but soon Shklovsky feels cool air on his skin, almost as if someone has turned a dial. The rocks around him take on a deeper grey and he notices the sun has disappeared, replaced by a bruised canopy of cloud that looms over the mountaintops. A deep and sustained rumble echoes from the far side of the valley.

Propping himself on his elbow, Shklovsky no longer senses a hundred varieties of wildflower or the vocalisations and wing-shapes of multiple, individual birds. Elements and concepts become flattened into a broad, indistinct panorama contained beneath the heft of a deep, murky sky. A document of fact. A tapestry, photographed.

And then thunder rumbles again, far louder this time, as if a bomb has gone off in the sky above the valley, and he is unable to ignore the specks of water that are beginning to spatter on the stones at his feet.

Soon, he is slipping and sliding the way he came. The dust has become slurry. Now, reality exists again only in the immediate surrounds, the next foothold or slip hazard, the all-sides-containing veil of rain. Every drop slaps against his skin, and he feels the crawling, sodden hold of his garments, first unsuitable for the heat and now unsuitable for this. He slips again and hits the floor – a different floor this time, the mud softer, which makes the rocks harder as they grind into his ribs and arm. He hears water trickling around him and the screaming leg-pain that roars in a furious blood-rush somewhere near his ears. Snap, snap, snap your synapses back to life alright.

He drags himself to his feet but slips to the floor again. Clutching a tree trunk, he pulls himself up and carries on. He thinks of the hut and the smoking chimney that makes more sense now than then, and that it can’t be far, can it? And he doesn’t have the time or the mental capacity to think the thought that reality is never what you want it to be.