masterx, 48 - 12 марта 2009 04:57

Monday 30th August, 2004: -

As usual, I liked sitting in the same room as him; I liked the way he did the jigsaw puzzle, such quietness, attentiveness, deliberation in his manner: he would pick up each tiny piece, examine it carefully, then place it in some category that he had created on the outspread cardboard box. Seeing me watching him, he explained to me at one point how it was necessary to categorise the pieces first, and how this was a particularly hard puzzle, because it was on Old Master ['Pont d'amour' by Frith] and you had to reconstruct the brush strokes. He told me how once he had managed to do a puzzle without having had any sight of the finished picture. I was quite tired, and he would say to me, “Jane! Just sleep! Go to sleep!” - although once when I began to, he said, “Hey! What's this?”
“I'm not really going to sleep: I just want to close my eyes for a moment to feel what it's like...”

...I got up and made us both coffee, which I brought back to the bed, and he said, “I think I'll go out today”
“Go out where?”
“London”
“Oh, I see -that's the mood you're in this morning, is it”
And after drinking the coffee, we both just stayed in bed, reading, and somehow the moroseness just lifted, the way fog does, we just lay beside each other for ages and ages, not saying a word. Sometimes he would ask me the meaning of an English word he had just read in his book, and sometimes I wouldn't know either, and he said to me sarcastically, “Do you actually speak English?” or “Perhaps you'd better read Russian – I think you know more words in that language” - and in some indefinable way there was that sense of pure happiness, of perfect understanding, and togetherness. It is as if we have some means of communication, he and I, which is not only non-verbal, but isn't even in our body language: it is quite incorporeal, and not flowing from looks or smiles or touches – to an outside observer, we might have looked quite distant for much of the time: lying on the bed, not touching, facing away from each other – just reading. We are able to communicate everything through the medium of nothing...

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