CHAPTER 13. THE OLD RING.

February 13, 1951.

The boundless world, endlessly transitioning into completely exceptional and highly diverse, macroscopic or microscopic, spaces; continuously creating and destroying extremely complex structures of cells, molecules, atoms, and an incalculable number of all kinds of planets, stars, systems, galaxies; the boundless world, possessing no precisely defined boundaries and containing not the slightest limitations, having neither an end nor a beginning… and here, in this boundless world, a tiny grain of sand, an ephemeral and ethereal drop, whose life is a few barely perceptible, barely distinguishable moments—the young, of course, if we take into account the medieval division of life into strictly defined stages, twenty-five-year-old Flavien Chenier, that is, I, decided to unite my current life with that extraordinarily unique being whom I liked not so much for her form as for her content… I intended to marry Coralie Delille.

But why, for what reason did Coralie Delille love me? Perhaps because my flesh was once for some reason so generously gifted, like the flesh of the venerable Corso Donati, with a truly exquisitely crafted, albeit perishable, yet still, still most amazing quality of matter?! Or perhaps because I possessed a certain, special strangeness, not characteristic of her former surroundings?

Yes, I loved to perform truly unusual deeds and actions, and, what is more important, to be uncommonly idle: I liked to instantly freeze, plunging into a completely motionless state, while invariably listening to all sorts of sounds of nature and human infrastructure. I had a weakness for creating and destroying in my mind truly incredibly detailed, and also surprisingly ordinarily monotonous, artificial and natural objects; often I loved to lean against the substantially wrinkled trunk of an ancient tree, hug it, pay a certain tribute of respect to its truly venerable age, and also sincerely thank it for the great role that it, for some reason, plays within the bounds of our sublunary world. At that moment, feelings of all kinds moved in a chaotic whirlpool of my heart, as if track athletes in a race, and, quite predictably, the one that was the strongest and most resilient always won… how my being rejoices that it knows such feelings! that it is among the few people who are able to be aware of them!

I also liked not to observe the passage of time, for this allowed me to realize that time, as such, does not exist—I wonder if ants would be able to be aware of the feeling of time, to distinguish certain intervals, if I constantly shone a flashlight on their truly very skillfully crafted anthill? Does the mere fact that our planet constantly moves around the sun make our chronology true? All our, humanity's, memories, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance… what a unique perspective on these universal phenomena, when you don't just watch the little hand of a clock once created by man…

I was not alien to all that was sacred and occult—it was for this reason that the image of a certain mysterious fortune-teller appeared before my being many years ago: Madame de Saint-Arnaud. Being extremely inspired by a certain local, ephemeral, momentary, fleeting success, many years ago I managed to open that very curtain, behind which that same unknown, mysterious and sacred was hidden—Madame de Saint-Arnaud. At the very moment when my truly inexperienced foot crossed the threshold of her truly exceptional domain, she immediately said my unremarkable name aloud—Flavien Chenier: I was horrified, while she radiated the self-possession of a lion—could I have realized then that she had only read my name on the steel of the very dog tag that had for some time been an integral part of young Flavien Chenier’s being? From the moment her lips uttered my name, I had no reason not to trust her.

Madame de Saint-Arnaud! She loved to study the garments of the people who came to her just as much as she adored examining their characters—it must be admitted that she did both with great skill and genuine close attention: she was interested not only in the scenery of the play, but also in its content. Madame de Saint-Arnaud always wanted to look into the dark, unknown, indistinct surface of the lake of a human being: she knew how to penetrate not only into people’s minds, but also, what is much more important, into their hearts—in this way she tried to find the most important weakness of a person, in order to then very successfully influence the nature of it. Where I, Flavien Chenier, saw the extraordinarily intricate mechanisms of this life, that fortune-teller, Madame de Saint-Arnaud, discerned all sizes of mechanisms inside the aforementioned constructions.

So, it was Madame de Saint-Arnaud, who, having discerned a certain bouquet of flowers in the coffee grounds, and then having interpreted, with the help of the works of the well-known Frédéric de La Grange, that omen as my acquisition of truly colossal happiness in the near future, predicted my meeting with Coralie Delille…

A magnificent suit, a wonderful church, a future lovely wife, the people closest to me, loyal friends—what else could a twenty-five-year-old youth dream of? I was happy, sincerely happy—there was the same number of feelings in my heart as the number of schools located along Solomenny Lane in Paris.

“On a map in the world atlas you will never be able to see the potholes of country roads, my son—just as you will never be able to see in the word ‘marriage’ those small quarrels and misunderstandings of which this union is somehow composed: even in heaven, no matter how charming the trees there are, there are rotten apples, and therefore you must be ready for this and, if necessary, make only sensible and thoughtful decisions. I don't want to scare you, but I want to warn you that permanent harmony in marriage is impossible, just as an absolute balance of Hippocrates’ four fluids is impossible in the human body!... Be happy! You deserve it! Ah! What an exceptional event I will witness today! On the ever-green field of this life, a young cornflower will unite its destiny with an extraordinarily gentle chamomile!” My partly gray-haired father said very touchingly, barely leading me away from the guests who were impatiently awaiting the start of such a sacred ceremony: tears appeared in my eyes and he, noticing this, left me alone with my thoughts.