Aetherial Worlds

See the Reverse

A hot day in May in Ravenna, a small Italian town where Dante is buried. Once upon a time—in the beginning of the fifth century AD—the emperor Honorius moved the capital of the Western Roman Empire here. There used to be a port in Ravenna, but the sea has since receded greatly, its place taken by swamps, roses, dust, and grapes. Ravenna is famous for its mosaics; crowds of tourists go from church to church examining them with eyes glued to the ceiling, the faint glimmer of small multicolored tesserae up there, high, under twilit ogival arches. You can make something out, but not much. Glossy postcards give a better view, but it’s too bright, too flat, too cheap-looking.

I’m feeling stuffy, dusty, and hot. There is upheaval in my soul. My father has died and I loved him so much! Way back, forty years ago, he passed this way, through Ravenna, and sent me a postcard of one of its famous mosaics. On the back there is a note, in pencil for some reason, maybe he was in a hurry: “My dear daughter! Never have I seen anything more beautiful (see the reverse)! Makes me want to cry! If only you were here! Your father!”

Every sentence is punctuated by these silly exclamation points—he was young, he was jolly, perhaps he’d had a bit of wine. I can picture him with his felt hat pushed back—1950s style—tall, lean, handsome, cigarette between his white (and, at that point, still natural) teeth, tiny beads of sweat on his forehead, eyes shining happily behind the round spectacles…. The postcard—which he tossed into the mailbox, carelessly entrusting it to two unreliable postal services, the Italian and the Russian—bore an illustration of heaven. God is seated in a blindingly green, ever-vernal paradise, white sheep grazing around him. The two unreliable postal services rumpled and ruffled the postcard’s edges, but no matter, it arrived, and you can still make out pretty much everything.

If heaven exists, then that’s where my father is. Where else could he be? Even so, he’s dead, dead and no longer writing me postcards with exclamation points, no longer sending me tidings from all corners of the earth: I’m here, I love you, do you love me? Are you feeling happiness alongside me? Seeing the beauty that I am seeing? Hello to you! Here is a postcard! Here is a cheap, glossy photo—I was just here! It’s beautiful! Oh, if only you could have joined me!

He traveled the globe, and he liked what he saw.

And now, whenever possible, I follow in his footsteps, to the same cities that he visited, and I try to see them with his eyes, try to imagine him there, young, making a turn, walking up a staircase, leaning against an esplanade parapet with a cigarette between his lips. And here I am now, in Ravenna, that dusty, stifling town, exhausting as all tourist attractions are, crowds filling its narrow streets. It’s a dead, stale, sweltering town with no place to sit. The Tomb of Dante, who was exiled from his native Florence. The Mausoleum of Theodoric. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, half sister of Honorius, the one who made Ravenna the capital of the Roman Empire. Fifteen centuries have passed. Everything has changed. It all got covered with dust; the mosaics crumbled. That which was important became unimportant; that which excited retreated into the sands. The sea itself retreated, and where happy green waves once splashed there is now a wasteland of dust, silence, and scorching-hot vineyards. Forty years back—a lifetime ago—my father walked here, laughing, squinting myopically, sitting down at street cafés, drinking wine, biting off a crust of pizza with his then-natural, strong teeth. A blue dimness would descend. At the edge of the table, in pencil, he’d write me hurried notes of his delight in and love of this world, punctuating indiscriminately with exclamation points.

A stifling, cloudy sky. It’s hot, but you can’t see the sun. It’s dusty. The former seabed now surrounds the town as wide fecund fields; where crabs once swarmed, now donkeys roam; where kelp once undulated, now roses slumber. It’s a graveyard, deserted; the streets of the once-magnificent capital are filled with disenchanted American ladies in pink T-shirts, dissatisfied that they have been lied to yet again by the tourist agency: everything in this Europe place is so tiny, so old! Fifteen centuries. Dante’s Tomb. The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. My father’s grave. A naive green Eden on a crumpled postcard.

What amazed him so? I find the church in question, I look up—sure, something green, way up there, under the vaulted ceiling. White sheep on a green lawn. Ordinary lighting. The discordant hum of the tourist throng below. They point, they consult their guidebooks. In the such-and-such century, such-and-such school of art. It’s the same everywhere. You can’t even make out the particulars.

All Italian churches have a little box mounted to the wall—an additional service for those who are interested. If you deposit a coin—worth a quarter of a dollar—projectors perched high up, just below the ceiling, illuminate it for a few moments, flooding the tesserae with fresh white light. The colors get brighter. You can make out the details. The crowd grows agitated, its murmur growing. All it takes is a quarter. After all, you did come from this far, you paid for the flight, for the train, the hotel, for the pizza and cold beverages, for the coffee. Are you really going to try to save a few cents now? But many do. They are displeased: they weren’t forewarned. They expected to see heaven for free. A group of tourists lies in wait until somebody, profligate and impatient, drops a coin into the slot of this Italian rip-off machine—all Italians are swindlers, right?—so the projectors can light up, and, for a brief moment, insufficient for the human eye to register, heaven will become greener, the sheep more innocent, God more kind. The crowd’s hum grows stronger… but the lights go out, and the murmur of disappointed tourists crescendos into rumbling protest, into greedy grumbles and frustrated whispers. And once again all is veiled in dusk.

I’m wandering from church to church with the crowds, listening to muffled multilingual voices that sound like breaking waves, swirling in the whirlpool of people; meaningless tired faces—just as meaningless as mine—flash by, eyeglasses glisten, guide pages rustle. I squeeze my way through the narrow doors of the churches, trying to push away those near me, trying, just as everyone else is, to find the best spot, trying not to get annoyed. If heaven exists, I say to myself, then I’ll be entering it with a crowd just like this one, a crowd of sheeple—old, dimwitted, and a little bit greedy. For if heaven is not for us, then for whom? pray tell. Who are those others, the more exceptional and the noticeably better than us statistically average folks?

There aren’t any; it’s entirely possible that I’ll have to wander the green pastures of heaven in a herd of American tourists unhappy about everything being so ancient and low. And if that is so, it means heaven is boring and awful—something that shouldn’t be true. Heaven can only be fantastically splendid.

“Never have I seen anything more beautiful (see the reverse)!” Father wrote to me. I flip to the other side. A garden-variety paradise. What did he see that I can’t see?

Together with the crowd I squeeze into a small building, about which the Russian traveler Pavel Muratov, living at the turn of the twentieth century, wrote this in his famous book Images of Italy:

What lovely words! But having made my way into the chapel, I can’t see a thing. Perhaps Muratov’s guide illuminated the church with a torch for him, but now it’s simply dark in here, and what little light can seep through the windows is seemingly blocked by a wall of sightseer backs. The masses are densely and stubbornly packed, elbow to elbow. Someone should put a coin in that lighting box, but no one seems to be in a rush, everyone is waiting for the other guy to pay. I’m not in a hurry, either. “I’ve done it many times before” is my excuse to myself. “Let others do it.” A minute passes in the stifling dark. And another. I won’t budge, each one of us is thinking. Darkness pushes down from above. It smells of mice, mold, and something else, quite ancient—as if time itself were emanating this odor. Then human smells begin to waft—aging flesh, perfume, mints, sweat, cigarettes. That’s how it will be immediately after death: darkness, someone’s breath and heaving in the dark, sweltering heat, expectation, a subtle dislike for fellow travelers, a polite decisiveness not to show it, bits of selfishness, stubbornness, hope, doubt. The waiting room halfway to paradise—where else? “Never have I seen anything more beautiful (see the reverse)! Makes me want to cry!” wrote father from heaven.

At last there is a recognizable pop—somebody finally ponied up, and, as before, for a few moments everything is illuminated. For the briefest of instants—the eye doesn’t have time to encircle the entire ceiling, it flits around—for the briefest of instants this dull and hot dimness overhead suddenly turns into a glittering sky, a dark-blue dome with giant, iridescent stars that descend into your immediate field of vision. “Aaaahh” comes the sound from below; but no sooner than it’s heard, the light goes out, and once again there is darkness, thicker than before. Another pop, and once again here are the fantastical, multicolored stars, as if spinning wheels, and that very “air blazing with a blue light”—a momentary vision—before darkness falls. And again the jingling of coins, yet another pop—beauteous vision, don’t leave, stay awhile!—before darkness falls anon. The crowd of sinners stands mesmerized, eyes to the sky. The way was shown in the dark, a promise was made, proof was offered, everyone will be saved, no explanations necessary—a magical blue void, hoisted above us by nameless artisans, speaks for itself, using a language without words. The blue streams down toward the baskets with berries and leaves… everything disappears, but then again and again the glow flashes back on, and the festivities become infinite; you can almost hear the angels singing. Let there be light!

I carefully squeeze through the crowd. I want to get a discreet look at the insatiable big spender who provided the fireworks, vanquishing the walls of the tomb with light. He’s sitting in a wheelchair, his face lowered. He has a box full of coins in his lap. He fumbles for one, drops it into the slot, and, for a brief moment, while the blueness glimmers with lilac and crimson fire, his female guide hurriedly whispers something into his ear, words that I cannot make out and wouldn’t understand if I heard them: I don’t know their language.

This man is blind. He has an inscrutable and patient face, like all those so afflicted; his eyelids are closed, head is lowered, ear inclined toward his companion. Who is she—his daughter, his wife, or simply a hired chaperone? He listens to her whispering, occasionally nods his head: yes. Yes. He wants to listen some more; he tosses in coin after coin. He casts those coins into the darkness, and from the darkness a voice comes; it tells him, best as it can, about the great comforts of beauty.

He listens to the end, nods, smiles, and the woman, skillfully navigating the wheelchair through the crowd, turns him around to roll him out of the mausoleum. People are gawking at them; it doesn’t matter to him, and she must be used to it. The chair bounces on the cobblestones of the square, causing the man minor additional torment. It starts to rain, but immediately stops.

“See the reverse!” But there is nothing on the other side, only darkness, stuffiness, silence, irritation, doubt, gloom. On the other side is a time-worn depiction of something that was important a long time ago, but not for me. “Makes me want to cry!” wrote Father forty years ago about beauty (or perhaps about something bigger) that astounded him then; and now I feel like crying because he is no longer here, and I don’t know where he went, all that’s left of him is a mountain of papers. And this postcard of a green paradise, which I moved from novel to novel as a bookmark.

But what if that’s not it at all, what if everything was predestined a long time ago, it all went according to plan, and came full circle only today? An unknown Byzantine artisan, inspired by his faith, imagined the beauty of God’s garden. He depicted it to the best of his ability using his language, perhaps annoyed that he couldn’t do it better. Centuries passed, my father came to Ravenna, looked up and saw that picture of Eden, bought a cheap replica, and sent it to me with love, fortifying it with exclamation marks—everyone chooses their own language. And had he never sent this to me, I would never have come here, would have never made my way to the dark chapel, would have never seen that blind man, never witnessed how, with a wave of his hand, wielding the blazing blue light on the reverse side of darkness, he illuminated the heavenly vestibule.

For we are just as blind—no, a thousand times blinder—as that old man in the wheelchair. The truth is whispered to us but we cover our ears, we are shown the truth but we turn away. We lack faith: we are afraid to believe because we are scared of being fooled. We are certain that we are in a crypt. We know for sure that there is nothing in the darkness. There couldn’t be anything in the darkness.

I can see them disappearing down the narrow streets of this small, dead town, the woman pushing the wheelchair and telling him something, bringing herself close to the blind man’s ear, faltering, probably, while trying to find the words that I’d never be able to find. He is laughing at something; she fixes his collar, pours some more coins into the box in his lap, and, walking into a café, she brings him a slice of pizza, which he consumes with gratitude, diligently and messily, fumbling in the dark for that invisible and magnificent sustenance.